Cuckoo Song (2 page)

‘Mummy . . .’ Triss’s voice came out very small. She stared at the pile of fabric pieces now lying on the bed. They looked wounded, limp and helpless. ‘I . . . I am all
right, aren’t I? It isn’t . . . bad that . . . that I can’t remember bits of our holiday, is it?’

Her mother examined her face carefully, and Triss was startled by how blue her eyes were, like the glass beads around her neck. Clear and fragile too, just like the beads. It was a kind, bright
look that needed only the slightest change to become a frightened look.

‘Oh, sweetheart, I’m sure it’ll all come back to you. The doctor said so, didn’t he?’ Her mother finished pinning a seam, smiled and stood. ‘Listen, I have an
idea. Why don’t you have a look through your diary? Maybe that will help you remember.’ From under the bed, Triss’s mother pulled a small, faded red leather travelling case with
the letters ‘TC’ marked on one corner, and placed it on Triss’s lap.

Birthday present. I know I love this case and take it everywhere. But I can’t remember how the catch works.
A little fiddling, however, and it clicked open.

Inside were more things that stung her memories to life, more of the pieces of being Triss. Clothes. Gloves. Other gloves in case of even colder days. A copy of the poem collection
Peacock
Pie
. A compact, like her mother’s but smaller, with a mirror in the lid but no face powder. And there, beneath them, a book bound in blue leather.

Triss pulled out her diary, opened it and gave a small croak of shock. Half the pages in the diary had been filled with her cramped, careful scrawl. She knew that. But those pages had been torn
out, leaving a fringe of frayed paper, still marked by the occasional whorl or squiggle from the lost words. After them, blank pages confronted her. Her mother came over, summoned by her cry, and
simply stared for a few seconds.

‘I don’t
believe
it,’ Triss’s mother whispered at last. ‘Of all the stupid, spiteful pranks . . . Oh, that really is the
limit
.’ She marched
from the room. ‘Pen? PEN!’ Triss heard her feet rattle up the stairs and then the sound of a handle being shaken and a door shuddering in its frame.

‘What is it?’ enquired her father’s voice at the top of the stairs.

‘It’s Pen
again
. This time she has ripped out half of Triss’s diary. And her door won’t open – I think she has moved some furniture against it.’

‘If she wants to imprison herself, let her,’ came her father’s answer. ‘She’ll have to come out and face the music sooner or later. And she knows it.’ All of
this was said clearly and loudly, presumably so that the besieged party could overhear.

Triss’s mother entered the sickroom once more. ‘Oh, froglet, I’m so sorry. Well . . . perhaps she has just hidden the pages, and we can stick them back in when we find
them.’ She sat down on the bed next to Triss, sighed and peered into the case. ‘Oh dear – we had better make sure that nothing else is missing.’

Other things were missing, as it turned out. Triss’s hairbrush was gone, as was a photograph of her riding a donkey on the beach, and a handkerchief into which she had proudly stitched her
name.

‘I know you had some of them yesterday afternoon, before the accident,’ muttered Triss’s mother. ‘You were filling in your diary. I helped brush your hair. Oh,
Pen
! I don’t know why she plagues you, love.’

The sight of the ripped diary had filled Triss with the same cold, squirming feeling in the pit of her stomach that the mention of the Grimmer had given her. It had frightened her, and she did
not know why, or want to think about it.
But it’s OK
, she told herself.
It’s just Pen being stupid and cruel.

Triss guessed that perhaps she should feel angry about it, but in truth there was something comforting and familiar about her parents being angry on her behalf. It felt like being coddled inside
a horse-chestnut shell, protected by its inward downy softness, while all the spikes pointed outwards. It was, her recollections whispered to her, the natural way of things.

Now, if she let her mouth droop as if she was going to cry, the whole household would spin around her to try to make things up to her . . . and without even quite intending it, she felt her face
start to pout sorrowfully.

‘Oh, Triss!’ Her mother hugged her. ‘How about something to eat? There’s some mushroom soup, the sort you like, or steak-and-kidney pie if you can manage a little. Or
what about jelly? And tinned pears?’ The sick puckering feeling in her stomach intensified at the thought, and Triss realized that she was ravenously hungry.

She nodded.

Triss’s mother went upstairs and knocked on Pen’s door in an attempt to lure her down for lunch. Even from her sickroom, Triss could hear Pen’s shrill, incoherent cries of
refusal.

‘. . . not coming out . . . not
real
. . . you’re all
stupid
. . .’

Triss’s mother came down with a slight crinkle of exasperation on her brow.

‘Now, that is wilful, even for Pen. I have never known her turn down food before.’ She looked at Triss and gave a weary little smile. ‘Well, at least
you
don’t
have her stubborn streak.’

It turned out that Triss could more than ‘manage a little’. As soon as she saw the first bowl of soup arrive, great crusty rolls on the side of the tray, her hands started to shake.
The room around her ceased to matter. Once the tray was on her lap, she could not control herself but tore open the rolls, scattering crumbs, and pushing them into her mouth where the wad of bread
rolled drily against her tongue and champing teeth. The soup was gone as quickly as she could scoop it up, and she barely noticed it scalding her mouth. Pie, potatoes and carrots were demolished in
a frenzy, closely followed by jelly, pears and a thick slice of almond cake. Only when she was reaching for the rest of the cake did her mother catch her wrist.

‘Triss, Triss! Love, I’m so glad you have your appetite back so soon, but you’ll make yourself sick!’

Triss stared back at her with bright, bewildered eyes, and gradually the room around her came back into focus. She did not feel sick. She felt as if she could have eaten a hippopotamus-sized
slice of cake. Her crumb-covered hands were still shaking, but she made herself wipe them on her napkin and clasped them in her lap to stop them snatching at anything more. As she was doing so, her
father put his head around the door and caught her mother’s eye.

‘Celeste.’ His voice deliberately calm and soft. ‘Can I speak to you a moment?’ He flicked a glance towards Triss and gave her a small, tender smile.

Mother tucked Triss into bed, took up the tray and left the room to follow Father, taking her warmth, reassurance and smell of face powder with her. Within seconds of the door closing, Triss
felt twinges of creeping panic return. Something in her father’s tone had stirred her instincts.

Can I speak to you a moment? Outside the room where Triss can’t hear you?

Triss swallowed and pulled the covers aside, then slid herself out of bed. Her legs felt stiff but not as weak as she had expected, and she crept as quietly as she could to her bedroom door and
eased it open. From there she could just about make out voices in the parlour.

‘. . . and the inspector promised to ask some questions in the village, in case anybody saw how she came to fall into the water.’ Her father had a deep and pleasant voice, with a
touch of hoarseness that made Triss think of rough animal fur. ‘He dropped by just now to speak to me. Apparently a couple of the local hands were passing near the village green at sunset
last night. They didn’t see any sign of Triss near the Grimmer, but they did catch sight of two men down at the water’s edge. A short man in a bowler, and a taller man in a grey coat.
And on the road near the green there was a car parked, Celeste.’

‘What kind of a car?’ Her mother spoke with the hushed tone of one who already knows the answer.

‘A big black Daimler.’

There was a long pause.

‘It can’t be him.’ Her mother’s voice was high and rapid now, as if her cloth scissors had clipped her words until they were short and frightened. ‘Perhaps
it’s just a coincidence – there’s more than one Daimler in the world—’

‘Out here? There are barely two cars in the village. Who could afford a Daimler?’

‘You said it was all over!’ There were warning sounds in the rising pitch of Mother’s voice, like a the whistle of a kettle coming to the boil. ‘You said you were
severing all ties with him—’

‘I said that
I
was finished with
him
, and he’ll know that by now if he’s read this week’s paper. But perhaps he is not finished with me.’

Chapter 2

Hearing motion in the parlour, Triss carefully closed the door and scampered back to her bed, mind whirling like a propeller.

They think somebody attacked me. Is that what happened?
Again she tried to force her memory back to the Grimmer, and again there was nothing, just an inner shuddering and flinching.

Who was this ‘he’ her parents had mentioned, the one that Father was ‘finished with’? If ‘he’ was so terrible, why would Father have had ‘ties’
with him anyway?

It all sounded like something from one of the crime films Pen loved so much, the sort where good honest men became entangled with hoodlums and gangsters. But surely Father could not be involved
in anything like that! Triss felt her chest grow tight at the very thought. More than anything else, she was proud of her father. She loved the impressed way everybody’s eyebrows rose when
they were introduced to him.

Mr Piers Crescent? The civil engineer who designed the Three Maidens and Station Mount? It’s an honour to meet you, sir – you’ve done wonderful things for our
city.

Having a great civil engineer as a father meant seeing maps of planned roads at the breakfast table. It meant watching her father open letters from the mayor’s office about bridge
construction and locations for new public buildings. Her father’s designs were changing the face of Ellchester.

Triss jumped slightly when the door opened, and her mother entered the room. There was a touch more powder on her cheeks, a sure sign that she had stepped aside to calm herself and set her
appearance straight.

‘I’ve just been talking to your father,’ her mother declared with calm nonchalance, ‘and we think we should cut the holiday short and go home first thing tomorrow.
Familiar surroundings – that’s what you need to sort you out.’

‘Mummy . . .’ Triss hesitated, unwilling to admit to eavesdropping, then went for a compromise. ‘You left the door open, and it was draughty so I went to shut it, and when I
was there I . . . overheard Daddy telling you that there was somebody else down at the Grimmer yesterday evening.’ Triss caught at her mother’s sleeve. ‘Who was it?’

Her mother’s hands halted for a second, then continued calming the creases out of the pillow.

‘Oh, nobody, darling! Just some gypsies. Nothing for you to worry about.’

Gypsies? In a bowler hat and a Daimler?

Perhaps some of her distress showed in Triss’s face, for her mother sat down on the edge of her bed, took her by both hands and met her eye at last.

‘Nobody could want to harm you, froglet,’ she said very seriously, ‘and even if somebody did, your father and I would never,
never
let anything bad happen to
you.’

And this would have been reassuring if the crystal-blue eyes were not a little too bright. Every time she saw that fragile intensity in her mother’s face, Triss knew she was thinking of
Sebastian.

He had been called up in February of 1918, not long after Triss’s sixth birthday. When the War ended later that year, Triss remembered all the celebrations with the flags and big hats, and
not really knowing how it would change everything, except that it meant Sebastian would be coming back home. Then the news had come that Sebastian would not be coming back, and she had thought for
a while, in a foggy, confused way, that the first news had been wrong, that the War was not over.

In a way she had been right. The War had ended, but it was not gone. Somehow it was still everywhere. Sebastian was the same. He had ended but he was not gone. His death had left invisible
wreckage. His absence was a great hole tugging at everything. Even Pen, who barely remembered him, walked carefully round the edge of that hole.

Triss had started getting ill not long after the War ended, and in a hazy way she understood that this was something to do with Sebastian. It was her job to be ill. It was her job to be
protected. And right now it was her job to nod.

She nodded.

‘There’s my girl,’ said her mother, stroking Triss’s cheek.

Triss tried to smile. The conversation she had overheard still had its hooks in her mind.

‘Mummy? I . . . I’ve read all my comics and books, hundreds of times. Can I . . . Can I read Daddy’s paper?’

Mother went to ask Father’s permission, and then returned with a copy of the
Ellchester Watchman
. She lit the lamps, each glass globe giving a small, comforting
‘whump’ as it started to glow, then left Triss to herself.

Triss carefully unfolded the paper, feeling treacherous for her small deception. What was it she had overheard her father say?

I said that
I
was finished with
him
, and he’ll know that by now if he’s read this week’s paper.

In the paper, therefore, there was something from which the mysterious ‘he’ might learn that her father no longer wanted dealings with him. If so, perhaps she could find it too.

The paper had already been read and handled enough to smudge the ink here and there, and her fever-wearied mind felt a bit smudged too. Her mind slid over headline after headline, taking in so
little that sometimes she had to read things several times to make sense of them. Most of them were just dull. Articles on the new omnibuses to be introduced in Ellchester after the London model. A
photograph of a long line of unemployed men, flat caps pulled down over their grainy, sullen faces. A whist drive and dance to collect money for the local hospital. And on the fifth page, a mention
of Piers Crescent, Triss’s father.