The Daughters of Foxcote Manor Page 6

  He called a couple of days after they had arrived, sounding rattled—Jeannie, Rita had said, was out having a stroll—and told her the Namibian mine had collapsed during a busy shift. It was a god-awful disaster. He needed to go out there immediately and wouldn’t be able to visit at the weekend, as he’d hoped. Rita tried to imagine the suffering taking place at that moment, those poor people buried alive. She thought about the children who’d lose parents, how their lives would be unrecognizable from what they’d been seconds earlier. It put the problems at Foxcote into perspective. And yet she still couldn’t help but be enormously relieved Walter was going abroad. She assured him everything was fine at Foxcote. Jeannie was perfectly cheerful. No need to worry.

  Her first lie. It had slipped out surprisingly easily. Even though her fingers left sweaty prints on the black Bakelite phone. But he would ring again: a man like Walter will always find a way to check up on his wife even from the other side of the world. And she’ll have to tell another.

  She also needs to hide Jeannie’s state of mind from Marge, who Jeannie is convinced is in Walter’s camp.

  Keeping Marge away is difficult. The more vigorously Rita politely refuses the housekeeper’s offers of help, the more determined she is to give it. She arrives without warning for spurious reasons, her rusting car coughing up the drive, trailing a boar’s tail of exhaust. Rather than knock, she lets herself in using her own keys, then stomps around, obstinate, unstoppable, flapping dusters, slopping mops, and snapping out sheets, armed with gristly sausages, homemade pork pies studded with globs of yellow fat, and enamel pitchers of creamy milk—“to build Mrs. Harrington up again”—and questions, endless questions. “Did you get a good look at the baby, Rita? Was there a funeral?” Rita explained the baby was taken away in an ambulance. No, she didn’t see her. No funeral: Jeannie was too sick, not coping, and Walter thought it better if they all pretended nothing had happened. Marge listened avidly, hugging a bottle of Ajax to her bosom. “All that maternal love.” She sighed, as if deriving a small shiver of pleasure from the drama. “Nowhere for it to go.”

  Rita wishes it would find its way to Teddy and Hera.

  But Jeannie doesn’t leave her bed, a four-poster with the age-pocked texture of the stocks in Hawkswell, the nearest village, and a swag of cobweb hanging off its upper rail. She doesn’t even gaze out the bedroom window, through the thick ivy, at the twitching, summery woods. The light hurts her eyes, Jeannie says. Rita leaves the windows ajar, but the dark red curtains stay closed, inflating in the breeze, like lungs.

  The trigger was the news of the phone calls. Rita’s sure of it. The migraine struck on their first night shortly after Marge appeared with those embarrassingly big boots and told them about the man who’d called three times. Who else would it be but Don?

  As long as she’s worked for the Harringtons, Don Armstrong has been around. First, it seemed, just as an old family friend, an irreverent raconteur, who arrived at the house with charm and boom. But then Don started to look at her in a way that made her feel odd and uncomfortable. And she’d dream of him, waking in a twist of sheets, slick with sweat and self-loathing. She began to notice he’d call during the week, when the kids were at school and Walter at the office, asking to speak to Jeannie. Phone cradled against her ear, Jeannie would talk to him in a hushed voice, with an intimate cadence, stroking her pregnant belly in small circles.

  After the baby died and Jeannie was “no longer herself,” as Walter put it, everything changed: no one came round at all. In the grocer’s, people would avert their eyes and clear their throats, even step away, as if Rita too were tainted with something so ghastly it might be catching. It made her wonder if the dead leave different-sized holes in inverse proportion to how much life they got to live.

  It’s only been in recent months—since Jeannie returned from The Lawns, and the upped dose of pills kicked in properly—that Don has started appearing again. Always when Walter is at work and the kids are at school. Rita would hear the throttle grunt of his silver sports car and know to make herself scarce on an errand. When she returned to the house, Don would be gone, although the scent of his cologne lingered, pungent and peppery. And Jeannie would be languid, wrapped in a white towel, fresh from the bath, steam rising off her pale skin like desire.

  Rita tried hard not to think about what they might have been doing. (Picturing the Queen helped. Or Nan’s fossil-like toenails that Rita used to help buff.) But then a rude image would slide through her: a finger tracing an inner thigh, the fleshy swell of a buttock. It was hugely confusing. And it made her feel dirty, complicit. She didn’t approve. Mothers were meant to be perfect! And yet . . . Rita’s heart couldn’t help but warm to see Jeannie happy again, the woman she’d once been.

  If only Walter’s attentions had had the same effect. He did try. Bought Jeannie bunches of carnations she’d let wilt in vases. Cookbooks she never opened. A new carpet sweeper. It was painful to witness: Jeannie’s strained thanks, Walter’s look of bewildered defeat. She’d overheard enough rows to know he was refusing to grant Jeannie a divorce, doggedly viewing their “estrangement” as a temporary madness that would be cured. He rarely mentioned the baby—“that thing,” she’d once overheard him say—and he kept threatening to take custody of the children. Rita despised him for that. But he was also a man who’d been rejected. And she knew how that felt.

  She was pretty sure Walter knew about Don, and suspected he was banking on it burning itself out. After all, the “Don Cure,” as Rita came to think of it, never lasted. It was fleeting, a lustful fever dream, a way for Jeannie to escape her corrosive sadness. Don walked into a room and blew everything else out of it, and that was what Jeannie needed. Just to forget.

  After Don’s visit, the clouds would part for a few days; then a new mood would close in. Rita could feel it coming, a distinct cooling under the ornately molded ceilings. Like an animal before an electric storm, Jeannie would grow restless, as if she couldn’t settle back into the house or her life. She would keep changing her outfit. Stare at the phone. Pick fights with Walter. Snap at the kids, particularly Hera. She’d be back where she started before Don’s visit. Only worse.

  Realizing she’s been staring at the William Morris wallpaper bubbling on her damp bedroom wall for ages, ruminating about someone else’s love life, Rita pushes in the desk chair and walks to the window. She splays her hands on the glass for a cool kiss and flexes her finger joints.

  Each rectangular pane is the size of a book, the glass distorted with age, like skin, giving the forest beyond a strange, wavering life. She has the sensation that her mind is stretching, adjusting alongside her eyes, trying to see what’s beyond that tree, then the next, unsure if the smoky blue smudge in the distance is composed of sky or glaucous leaf. London is a galaxy away. And this means Don is too. Even if he phones again, they are safe here, hidden like fugitives. So she must waste no more time worrying. She has a job to do. Laundry. Lunch. Keeping the children away from Marge’s long list of deadly forest menaces.

  10

  Sylvie

  Definitely beats a bunch of chrysanths.” I peer inside the sealed glass bell jar that has mysteriously appeared at the nurses’ station. Inside, malachite-green ferns. Moss. A rock. White roots wiggle through the gravelly soil. What’s it called? A terrarium, yes, that’s it. Very hip. I’m not sure why it makes me feel unsettled.

  What would Caroline think? My sister flew back to America almost a week ago now. We talk at least once a day, trying to keep our spirits up. The way forward, we’ve decided, is hope, not grief. But everything feels tougher without her around. “Did you see who brought this in, Kerry?”

  “Not my shift, sorry,” the nurse says.

  “Bit odd not to leave a note.” It strikes me as a generous yet random thing to give.

  “Maybe our Rita’s got a secret admirer,” another nurse suggests, tapping away at a keyboard, gaze glued to a screen.
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  “Maybe,” I say doubtfully. Mum’s not so much looked at another man since Dad died. (“I’d sooner get a dog, love.”)

  I rotate the terrarium to admire it from a different angle. And that’s when I see it: a miniature house, the size of a matchbox, rendered in resin, tucked inside a mossy hollow. It changes the scale of everything: the ferns become trees, the stone a boulder. And my unease solidifies into something else. Once I see the forest, I can’t unsee it.

  * * *

  Back at the apartment, I dump my bag and kick my strappy sandals from hot, sore feet. Something catches my eye and I startle, not expecting to see Annie on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket. I smile, delighted she’s making herself at home. “Nice surprise!”

  “Hi, Mum,” Annie mumbles, checking her phone with that blink-and-you’d-miss-it teenage flick of the eye, fast as a texting thumb. I wonder if she’s expecting something from the elusive new boyfriend. Is he decades older? Married? I daren’t ask.

  “How’s Granny?”

  “Not worse,” I say brightly. Not dead! “Hey. Check this out.” I carefully lift the terrarium out of my straw shopper and slide it onto the kitchen work top, where the glass winks in the canal-watery light. Still, I see a forest.

  “What’s that?” Annie sits up.

  “A terrarium. Someone left it for Granny. Amazing, isn’t it? But plants aren’t allowed in the ward. You can have it in your bedroom, if you like.”

  “Cool.” Her eyes are pink-rimmed. She’s been crying.

  “Granny would still want you to enjoy yourself, you know,” I call over my shoulder, reaching for the teapot on the shelf. We need tea. A nice cup of tea, as Mum would say. I think of the joy she’s always taken in Annie, her willingness to step in whenever work meant I needed emergency childcare, which was often. “This is the woman who gave you and your mates a lift to Glastonbury Festival, remember? And who pressed thirty quid into your hands at the gate. She’d strictly forbid you to feel maudlin on her account.” I open the balcony windows, and the smell of turmeric and frying garlic wafts in. “She’s beyond proud of you, Annie. Everything you’ve achieved. Math at Cambridge? Hello?”

  Annie says nothing.

  I barely scraped a pass in math. A restless student—“easily distracted, won’t take her studies seriously,” teachers would say—I was in a hurry to move to London, earn my own money, fall in love, and acquire the sort of frenetic, glamorous life that would steal me away from myself. Where I came from. Who I was. Annie’s an evolutionary leap of a girl.

  Steve and I must have done something right. After I’d had four miscarriages, we’d decided to quit further baby-making attempts and put all our resources into our one wonder of a child. Unlike Caroline and me, who were left to our own devices growing up, with a parental shrug of “What will be, will be”—it was the seventies—Annie got violin lessons, tennis teachers, Kumon, and tutors to boost her state education. We always said to her, “Work hard and you can do anything you want, Annie, anything you put your mind to. Don’t let anything hold you back.” And she hasn’t. I flick on the kettle. “Cambridge will be lucky to have you, Annie.”

  “Can you please stop going on about stupid Cambridge?” she says, with a bite that takes me aback. I turn to face her, frowning. Where did that come from?

  “I may not make the grades.” She nibbles her bottom lip and her gaze skates away. “I may not even want to go.”

  I almost squeal, “You have to go!” (I’ve already started to fantasize about Annie’s high-flying future career with its pensions and security, not subject to the capricious feast and famine of the self-employed, as well as the nice undergraduate she’ll meet at Cambridge and go on to marry.) Instead, sensing I’m on shaky ground, I hold my tongue.

  The kettle clicks. But something in Annie’s expression makes me feel like the day has abruptly pulled away from tea drinking. Something else has shifted too, although I’m not sure exactly what. There’s a filter between us, something obfuscating, moving, and delicate, like the fog that wisps across the canal early in the morning. I open the fridge. “Let’s have an early lunch. Haven’t we got those posh stripy tomatoes from the farmer’s market?”

  Annie walks over, and leans against the kitchen work top, staring down into the terrarium. “Mum . . .”

  “And hummus?” I nudge aside a sticky mustard pot. “Where is it? We have some lurking somewhere.”

  “We don’t.” She slides a finger over the terrarium glass, not meeting my gaze. “I ate it.”

  “Salami, then.”

  “Ate that too.”

  I say nothing and reach for a chopping board. “Oh, crap. We’re out of bread.” The gravelly sound of a boat’s engine on the canal below. Someone’s on the move. I wonder if it’s the attractive boatman. “I’ll run to the deli. One minute.” I pick up my purse. Maybe I’ll walk past him before he goes.

  “Mum . . .”

  I become aware of something tangible in the confines of the kitchen. A congestion. Even the terrarium has started to shimmer oddly, as if fireflies are trapped inside it.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Oh.” My heart plummets. I’ve been dreading this conversation, half expecting it: Annie saying she wants to live full time with Steve. All the hope I’ve tried so hard to manufacture this last week starts to ebb away. I miss my mother with a painful pang: she’d know what to say to Annie. “Look, I know it’s not been easy, me and Dad . . .” I bluster. “And yes, you’re right, I should have been much more honest with you earlier on.”

  “It’s not that.” She covers her eyes with the palm of her hand. “Mum, it’s much worse.”

  The pink room seems to tip in the passing boat’s wake, rolling the silence one way, then the other. And even as I say, “Annie, my lovely, whatever’s the matter?” I suddenly know, deep in my belly, that this is going to be one of those conversations with a before and an after—and that nothing will ever be the same again.

  11

  Rita

  Hera and Teddy fly in through the kitchen door, breathless, their hair fluffed, their cheeks glowing cochineal pink. A sort of manic savage glee intoxicates the children in the woods, Rita has noticed. (An outing to Regent’s Park never had quite the same effect.) It worries her, since she’s unable to follow them around every second of the day. They hop in and out of the holes in the wall, like hares. When she opens the garden gate and yells, “Lunch!” her breath’s held, and what was a vague anxiety edges toward panic until the moment they tear out from the trees and the gate’s rusty catch clicks shut behind them.

  She can’t mentally map where they’ve been in those missing minutes, the mossy gullies they’ve skidded down—snagging their clothes and fingernails—or their winding routes back to the house. Neither can she gauge how dangerous the forest actually is, if she’s worrying unnecessarily. She stops smearing the sulfur-yellow piccalilli into the sandwiches. “You didn’t climb the log stack, did you?” She sees it in her mind’s eye, the logs precariously balanced, ready to roll like huge, spine-crushing ninepins.

  “Don’t worry, Big Rita, I pulled him away from certain death just in time. Stayed close to the house, as ordered.” Hera gives a mocking Girl Guides salute, drops her knapsack to the floor, and prowls the kitchen for something to eat. “Although those funny-colored mushrooms were tasty, weren’t they, Teddy?”

  “What?” Her stomach goes pitchy.

  Teddy and Hera snort with laughter, delighting in teasing her.

  “You shouldn’t joke about such things,” Rita says sharply through her relief. But she’s pleased to see the camaraderie, the sort of sibling solidarity that comes from idling away the hours together, blocking out worries about their mother, who’s lying in the soupy silent gloom upstairs. It’s just as well the children have to amuse themselves much of the time here. And there’s a lot of time to be had, the days at Foxcote loose and baggy
, bookended between the din of the dawn chorus and the sunset whorl of the bats, since Rita doesn’t like to leave Jeannie alone for long.

  If they’d stayed in London this summer, it would have been different. Even if Jeannie had been struck low, she’d have been able to roam her London house, with all its comforts, the reassurance of routine. And Rita would have been able to do her job properly, get out and about, give the children the summer they deserved, with visits to the British Museum, the magical Palm House at Kew, or an afternoon mudlarking on the Thames’s sticky shore. All the excursions that Jeannie was more than happy to delegate and Rita loved. She could never believe she was actually being paid to do them. Remembering these things now—the warm, sweet smell of a cocoa tree at Kew, a silt-furred chip of a Victorian vase in her palm—makes her ache for London.

  “And you shouldn’t be so scared of the forest,” Hera says, interrupting the tug of Rita’s thoughts.

  “I’m not!” Rita fibs, trying to inject an as-if scoff into her voice.

  “If I was as tall as you I wouldn’t be scared of anything.” Teddy’s heavy sigh lifts the curls from his forehead. “I want to grow faster.”

  “Patience. You’ll be taller than me one day.” Rita smiles even though it’s almost painful to imagine Teddy as a grown man, his boyhood lost in time, like a message in a bottle thrown into a vast, rolling ocean. She untangles a burr from his curls. Then she sniffs, uneasy. “What’s that cindery smell?”

  “Only a small bonfire,” says Teddy cheerfully.

  Hera shoots him a silencing look and folds a slice of cheese into her mouth. “It’s fine, Big Rita. Out now.”

  Something in Rita runs cold. She pictures the London house as she last saw it, standing out on the lovely crescent, like a rotten tooth in an otherwise perfect row, its stucco blackened, the wisteria withered. “You can’t light fires willy-nilly!” she flashes. “Okay, matches. Who’s got them?” She spreads her palm and glances from Hera to Teddy, who looks the guiltiest of the pair.