The Daughter (26 page)

His expression softens and he cups my face in his hands.

“Of course, Jenny. Tell him soon, though. As her father, he needs to know now.”

“Thank you,” I remember to say. “For coming to tell me. Be careful of . . . her.”

“I'll let you know. Jenny, don't—­”

“What?”

“Don't do anything.”

I sit looking at my hands as the sound of his car gets fainter down the lane. I haven't done anything for a long time. I won't tell Ted yet. I'll wait till she's safely here. Michael will bring her back with him. I open the window to let the fresh air inside the hot room. She will run toward me. The tears start again, cold on my cheeks as the wind washes over me. I will hold her. My face will be against hers and her skin will smell the same. Her hair may be longer. She will be taller. She will bring me her little girl.

I have waited fourteen months; I can wait a few more days.

BUT IT ISN'T
a few days. It's just a few hours.

I wake gradually to insistent knocking, confused by the cold and dark, my neck aching from where I have been lying awkwardly on the sofa. The flames have gone, the grate is ashy. The porch light has switched itself on outside and I see Michael through the glass. He must have left something behind and has had to come all the way back. I open the door. He looks down at me, and though I always thought I would know immediately, I don't. He looks exhausted. His mouth moves and I watch it closely because he is saying words that don't make sense. He is saying the same thing over and over, and the words come closer and closer until I understand.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

He catches me as the room tilts and he puts me down carefully on the edge of the stairs.

“. . . months ago,” he is saying.

If I don't listen she might still be there in the dark beyond the open door. She might be standing outside, uncertain of her welcome, waiting with her baby in her arms. I stand up and try to push past him, but he stops me and holds me still.

“It was after the baby.” He is dark against the light, and I can't see his face. “She had an infection.”

“But you said she was there.” I am screaming the words in his face. “A girl with fair hair, you said . . .”

“I shouldn't have told you that. It turned out to be a mother of two in her twenties. I spoke to her. I'm sorry, Jenny.”

“Get him. He will have run away. You must find him.” It was Yoska's fault. He let her die.

“Yoska's dead, Jenny. He was shot. He died just after midnight.”

Michael holds me and he starts to talk. The words fly about my head like black crows.

“He came out of a van, shooting. We don't know why; he may have thought the camp was being attacked by a drug gang. There have been gunfights over drugs at the site before. He didn't give us a chance to negotiate. He kept firing at us; we gave him warnings.” He shakes his head. “He just walked toward us, firing. It was as though he was asking to be shot. We had no choice.” He pauses. “He was hit in the chest and died instantly.”

Yoska killed. Naomi dead months before.

Michael lifts me as my legs weaken, and carries me through to the sofa in the sitting room. It's dark, but it doesn't matter.

“The baby, Michael.” I grip his jacket. “Where's the baby?”

He holds me tightly so I am crushed into his chest. I feel his words through the bones of my face.

“The baby died with Naomi. They had the same infection.”

The words have lost their power; they don't even make much sense. His voice reminds me of the way he used to talk to us in the kitchen in Bristol when we first met him. Slow and careful, he pauses often.

“Yoska's sister, Saskia, told us what happened. His parents are in police custody now.”

The buttons on his jacket are hurting my cheek, but I stay completely still.

“The baby was born in the trailer. You were right; the women in the family helped.”

Naomi would have gathered up the slimy little body in her slim child's hands and held her, the pain fading already, love sluicing through her. Would she have thought of me? Would she have understood in that moment how I must have felt about her?

“It was a girl, wasn't it?”

“Yes.” He sounds surprised. “Yes. It was.”

Naomi's world would have become the small sleeping face, the little sucking mouth, the tiny perfect toes curling and uncurling in her hands.

Michael is still talking. “. . . and after five days she felt unwell, restless and tearful. They thought it was emotional.”

“She never cries.” It sounds like an echo from a long time ago.

“The baby got hot,” he carries on. “That's when they realized Naomi was also burning hot.”

I always knew when she had a raised temperature, laying my lips on her forehead, I knew to within half a degree. It could have been postpuerperal fever. Streptococcal, deadly without rapid treatment.

Michael shifts on the sofa. “Do you want me to tell you all this now?”

Outside there are streaks of light already. I stand and hold the arm of the chair.

“Of course.”

“When she began vomiting, Yoska called the doctor. They waited for three hours and in that time she became unconscious.”

There must have been a lot of ­people in that trailer; it would have been stuffy. The fan they kept for summer nights would thump around and around like the beat of a nightmare. Naomi would be lying motionless in a sodden bed, the mottled baby sticking to her skin.

“Yoska was beside himself. He decided to take them to the hospital himself. When his uncle said someone would recognize her in the emergency room, Yoska smashed his nose. Just as he picked her up, Naomi stopped breathing. The baby died minutes afterward; they'd left it too late.”

Too late
. The words hang between us like the click of a door shutting.

Michael gets up to stand next to me, puts his arm around me. “Saskia said Yoska wrapped them in the sheet and very carefully laid them in the backseat of the car.”

He pauses. “Then he took everything out of the trailer, all her stuff, all the baby's things, the bed, the table, everything. He piled it up outside, doused it in gasoline and left.”

A funeral pyre. The roaring flames would have leaped high into the air. No one could have gone near. There would be nothing left. No hairbrush with long golden hairs tangled in it, no bracelets or scrunchies. There could have been a diary or the start of a letter to me. She might have gathered autumn leaves again, and put them behind a mirror. There will be no photos of the baby, no baby clothes.

“Where did he take them?” I ask Michael.

“It's a tradition among Travelers to bury their ­people secretly. No one admits to knowing where he took them.”

Their ­people? Naomi was mine.

It's still quite dark in the room, but as I watch the streaks of light getting wider, a little flare of hope hisses into the silence in my head. “How do you know this is true? Why do you believe everything his sister said? Maybe she wasn't even there . . .”

He doesn't reply but reaches into his jacket and pulls something from a pocket; he puts it into my hand, cupping my fingers around its curved surface.

“Saskia said you should have this.”

I feel the handles and though I can't see it in the dark, I know there is a pattern of leaping frogs around the rim. At the very bottom, on the inside of the cup, there is a raised, painted, smiling frog.

“Drink up, sweetheart.”
Naomi's eyes were so blue as she watched me over the rim of the cup. “The little frog is waiting . . .”

Her baby cup for her own baby. I didn't even notice it was gone. I wonder what she did with all the buttons I kept in it.

Michael has his arm tight around me now; his breath moves my hair as he speaks.

“Even the children could tell us how she had died. Everyone said the same thing. They showed us the scorched grass and the empty trailer . . .”

His voice continues. I hear him more faintly, talking about fingerprints and swabs, keeping a high level of suspicion, digging at the site to start tomorrow. The trailers have been searched already. Some of the key Travelers are in custody; others can go, providing they stay in the locality. They will have to keep investigating.

“We need to find her body. Sooner or later someone will let slip the burial site.”

I tune his words out.

So that was her home. Theirs. Just an empty box now. The moonlight will slant through the windows onto a bare floor. Perhaps it's shining on a little toy that has rolled away into a corner.

Michael's voice gets louder. “Yoska was away for two weeks and silent when he came back. He sat in his sister's trailer for hours every day staring into space—­”

I interrupt him quickly. “I want to go to the camp, Michael.”

Yoska's sister told the police she wasn't sure where he had buried them; but she might tell me.

“I'll take you over there soon, Jenny, when we've finished our investigation. I promise. We need to cross-­examine all witnesses, dig up the site, and search every vehicle again.”

Michael goes into the kitchen, pulling a flask from his pocket. I hear the kettle bubble, the clink and clash of cutlery. He comes back and watches me while I drink the coffee laced with whiskey. This morning, when he made me hot chocolate, she was still alive. Or was that yesterday? No, how stupid. She died months ago.

In the growing light, Michael's face is white with fatigue, and after a while he goes upstairs to sleep. I hear his shoes drop to the floor, the little noises of effort as he pulls off his clothes and then the bed creaking. After that there is quiet. The silence is so deep it's as though a faint tune that had been playing in the background has now stopped.

Ed said I didn't have a bloody clue.

But I did. I had a lot of clues. They had been all around me for a long time. I close my eyes and remember the last time I was in her room. It was the day Ted left me, the day I left the house. Even then I could have seen the clues.

BRISTOL, 2010

EIGHT MONTHS AFTER

Ted went for a long walk in the morning. He told me he didn't want to be there when I left for the final time. It was a Sunday. I remember that, because for years I had been used to him leaving every day of the week except for Sundays. When he had gone, I went upstairs to Naomi's room. The moving men were coming at noon. I had packed up what I needed to take to the cottage. The rest would stay in the house for Ted.

It was already hot. The sun was bright in a high cloudless sky, one of those perfect summer days children are supposed to remember all their lives. The room was empty apart from the bed and the curtains, which were closed. The air felt stifling. I opened the window and pulled the curtain back a little. Below me, the street was empty. The journalists had long gone, drifting away to other tragedies where the pickings were richer. As I watched, the air warm on my skin, a woman in a summer dress came around the corner, leaning forward with one hand on a stroller. She held a cell phone clamped against her ear and her head was moving. From here she looked like the little nodding doll that I'd loved when I was small but lost years ago. The stroller was deeply padded and I couldn't see the child at all. I watched until the woman disappeared from sight, her head still moving up and down.

The curtain beneath my hand felt edged with dust, heavy and soft. The material was striped gold and scarlet. Naomi and I had chosen it together, at John Lewis three or four years before. But we hadn't been together, not really. I had picked out a roll of leaf-­patterned cotton in gray, white, and lemon yellow, imagining how the diffusing light would paint the room in fresh colors. There was another I liked with tiny flowers. I had turned to ask Naomi to decide, but she was already walking to the cashier carrying this exotic-­looking cloth in a roll that was taller than she was. It was richly colored with shiny bands of yellow and red. It looked so gaudy with its big stripes. I told her it would stop the light coming in and how different her room would feel from the other rooms in our house. It would be dark and enclosed. Like a hidden cave, with no light, full of secrets. She had smiled. A forerunner of the little half smile. “That's exactly what I want,” she had said.

 

Chapter 31

DORSET, 2011

FOURTEEN MONTHS LATER

I
nto the silence of the kitchen at daybreak comes a sudden noise of tearing or burning; in a second the sound resolves itself as rain falling fast and hard on the thatch. The water against the window is the color of the gray sky. I must hurry with my letters. I want to start the journey and it will take longer in the rain. As I rip out the blank pages in my sketchbook for paper to write on, the flimsy binding comes apart in my hands and the pictures fall, fanning out as they hit the floor: the drawing of her shoes, a toy giraffe, the little hooded top, Michael's hands. Other pages flutter down on top of them and I leave them where they have fallen.

Ted,

As I write this you are sleeping, but by the time you get it I will have spoken to you and you will have told the boys. I thought if I sent letters as well, it might help. I used to wonder whether knowing would be better than hoping. I can't tell. It doesn't feel real yet.

It wasn't your fault or, if it was, it was mine as well. I should have been more careful when Yoska came to see me. He might have forgiven us. He must have been unsure even then; he belonged to a family so would have known how we would suffer. In the end, I think he took her because they were in love; we couldn't have changed that.

I'm leaving for Wales. I'm hoping someone at the camp may tell me where he buried them.

Please tell Anya,

I'll come to Bristol as soon as I can.

Jenny

The scrape of my nib is tiny against the relentless rain. The kitchen feels warm and enclosed, but where will he be when he reads this? The boys will be with him; maybe Anya quietly moving in the background. I see her face, streaming with tears.

Darling Ed,

By now Dad will have told you what happened to our dearest Naomi.

At least she found what she wanted; lots of ­people never do.

If she hadn't gotten ill, she would have brought her baby to see us, sooner or later.

I'm so glad you have Sophie.

I'll see you later today or tomorrow. I'm thinking about you all the time.

Mum

I hope Sophie's arms are around him. I hope she is wearing her bright colors. She'll listen to him, make it easier for him.

I flick the kettle on. Bertie shifts a little at the noise, then sleeps. The coffee is black and scalding hot.

Theo's is difficult to write; it feels as though I am brushing his brightness with thick dark paint.

Theo darling,

You will be on your way home so I will send this to Bristol. I hope Sam is there, sitting next to you.

You said she didn't talk to you much before she left. It was the same for me. I think she was saying good-­bye.

She took the baby cup, the one with the frog at the bottom. I've got it now.

When we find her and the baby, I'm going to bring them home. They will be buried here in the churchyard, so we'll know where she is.

Mum

The rain is softer, the light stronger. Last two letters.

Nikita,

I am going to phone your mum today, so she will have told you by now what has happened.

Michael told me that you knew she was pregnant. She would be pleased you kept her secret safely. She had a little daughter, I don't know her name.

I think the corals were her good-­bye present to you, even if you didn't know she was going. I'm glad you have them.

Jenny

Michael's letter is the hardest. I know him so well and yet so little—­it's like writing to a stranger. I try out sentences in my head as I pace the kitchen, but they look artificial on the page. There is so much to say that I can't find the words and I end up writing almost nothing.

Dear Michael,

I'm leaving now and I'm not sure when I'll be back.

Bertie will be happier here. Can you let him out and feed him before you go? There's half a tin in the fridge. Mary will take him in until I get back. I'll phone her; she'll come and fetch him.

I need to be with my family. I know you'll understand.

Jenny

I leave Michael's envelope propped against the coffee jar on the table and address the others to the Bristol house, even Nikita's. I can't remember her address. No stamps, but I can stop somewhere.

Michael's fingers are curved loosely on the duvet cover. When I slip my hand inside his, his grip tightens but his eyes stay closed. I ask him in a whisper where Yoska's parents have been taken, so I'll know where to start from. He sleepily murmurs the name, then his hand relaxes again and his breathing becomes deep and regular.

Newtown. A market town on the banks of the River Severn in Powys, Mid Wales. The tourist website gives me the postal code and I put it into the GPS. I must drive slowly; I haven't slept. It's been four hours since Michael woke me and the time has fallen away, vanished. The shock is echoing in my head; I'm still waiting for the pain.

I let the car roll down the little slope into the road quietly and start the engine out of earshot of the cottage.

THE FOLDED DORSET
landscape flattens into Somerset. I drive past Bristol, just a sign on the motorway that disappears behind me. I stop in a garage in Newport, the letters skidding off the dashboard to the floor. I phone Mary briefly; without asking questions she agrees immediately to look after Bertie. Then I phone Ted. When he answers, I hear the radio in the background. I picture him at the window in the bedroom, tightening the knot of his tie, planning his day.

I warn him it's bad news and I hear him turn off the radio and sit down. Then I tell him what happened. In the silence that follows I hear myself say she had been part of a different family. She had given birth to a daughter. She hadn't been raped or maimed, she'd been loved. He starts crying and I try to talk to him some more. I tell him I am going to post him a letter, but there is silence. After a while he puts the phone down.

I buy a cup of coffee, but it tastes bitter and I tip it on the ground and start off again. The roads are filling with cars and trucks. I drive faster. Michael said they had been biding their time; they might be packing up to go now.

At Cardiff I turn off and take the road to Pontypridd and Merthyr Tydfil. The Black Mountains. It starts to rain, and I drive carefully as the road dips and curls around the Brecon Beacons. Theo must have brought her somewhere here; her eyes were so alive in his photos. We came here once too, just Naomi and I. She would have been nine, maybe ten. Her blonde pigtails pushed under a pink woollen hat, her legs in waterproof pants climbing up the brown slopes, ahead of me, always. She stood on high ridges, too high; leaning into the wind. I couldn't look.

I get to Newtown at midday and find a small pub on the road with parking space. The journey so far has taken four hours. It's warm inside the pub and the smell of stale beer and old dog is overwhelming. Music is playing from the jukebox by the wall, and a few men sitting near the window are reading newspapers and drinking. An old collie lies under the table, eyeing me sleepily. The woman, drying glasses behind the bar, rolls her eyes when I ask if there is a Travelers' camp nearby but stays silent.

Behind me, male voices chip in. The gentle singsong lilt at odds with their speech.

“There's been a camp near Llanidloes for months.”

They are watching me, talking around ends of cigarettes, eyes narrowed against the smoke. I thought smoking had been banned in pubs, but I keep quiet.

“They've been nicking stuff. Coming into town causing trouble.”

“The police don't do anything.”

“Gypos. Did you see that in the papers about the drugs?”

“Pikeys.”

I leave quickly without saying good-­bye.

LLANIDLOES IS A
pretty place with an old timbered market hall. In a Budgens at the crossroads a man in a brown apron is stacking shelves with jars of peanut butter. He straightens and looks down at me.

“You don't want to go there,” he says. When I persist, he shrugs, takes my map, and rests it against the empty shelf.

“It's beyond Bwlch y sarnau,” he says, pointing with an orange-­stained finger. “Take the B4518 out of town. When you see the mailbox by the gray bungalow on your right, take the next left and then left again. It's in a dip. You'll see a stony track leading into their field. There's dogs, mind.”

He wants to say something else. Perhaps he wants to tell me there was trouble last night. The police got involved. High time, he might say. He watches me closely as I leave.

I am on a twisting downhill road when a Toyota Land Cruiser comes toward me. I back into a gateway. It's followed by a car pulling a horse trailer. I wait as it moves slowly by. As I inch out, a minibus comes by, so I back in again. It passes, children at the window staring. Bags and packages and suitcases press against the glass; it's then that I realize that some of the Travelers are moving out, as Michael had said that they would, at least the ones who haven't been taken into custody.

If I drive on farther I can turn in the track the man in the shop told me about. I can catch up with them if I'm quick. Around the corner the track and a field come into sight. There's a group of trailers toward the edge of the field, near some trees a hundred yards away from where I park. Most of the trailers are behind a striped tape attached to poles, which sections off that part of the site. In the middistance, toward the back of the field, there are about ten policemen and men in yellow oilskins, bent over in a line, digging.

There is a trailer in front of the tape, and a man is fixing its towing hook to the back of a muddy Land Rover. This must be the last family the police are allowing to leave. The rain has stopped, and a dark-­haired little boy of about six, with a thumb in his mouth, leans against the trailer in a patch of sun, watching the man at work. When I get out of the car and push the gate open, the movement snags the child's attention, though the police in the distance don't notice; if they did, they would probably stop me. The boy turns to stare and the man beside him straightens. His face, edged with gray stubble and reddened with effort, appears older than his body. Sixty? Seventy? He looks at me briefly, nods, then bends again to his task. In a moment he calls something I can't catch. A middle-­aged woman comes stiffly down the steps of the trailer; she is dressed in black, with a black scarf tied around her long dark hair. She carries a large canvas bag over one shoulder and takes the free hand of the little boy. Without glancing at me, she opens the door of the Land Rover. The little boy is ushered in ahead of her. As she is stepping in after him, she turns her head toward the open door of the trailer.

“Carys,” she calls, singing the word in her Welsh accent.

I look around the site. Besides the trailers, there are pale squares in the green grass where other vans must have stood. There are no dogs on chains; several garbage bags tied neatly lean together in a heap. There is a patch of deeply charred grass in the middle. One of the policemen in the distance calls something and waves me back. I step back outside the gate.

“Carys,” the woman calls again, then ducks out of sight into the Land Rover.

The trailer door is pushed wider open and a young woman comes out. As I glance at her, I stop breathing and hold the gate tightly. She has shaved her head so it seems small. The stubble has been dyed red, which matches her long skirt. Her skin is very pale. A tattoo wraps around her neck, and from here it looks like leaves. She is carrying a little girl of about six months in her arms and the child has red hair too; I can see her bright curls from here. The child has been wrapped in a red-­and-­yellow-­striped blanket and it looks as if she is asleep. At the bottom of the steps the young woman half turns so she is facing the gate, the baby held across her like a shield.

The fingers holding the carrier are long, though from here it's impossible to tell if there are still freckles, like grains of Demerara sugar, reaching to the second knuckle. It's too far to see the little mole beneath her left eyebrow. Her gaze meets mine; her eyes are calm, though there are red marks underneath them as though she has been crying. We look at each other. I will think about this forever, but there are things in her glance that I will never know how to name. Recognition. Yes. Vengeance, shuttered. She made Maria vengeful when Tony died. Was that a warning? Something else, something softer . . . Sorrow or forgiveness? She is there. That's all. She is there. The world disappears around her. The lies they told the police fall away. I don't cry or laugh or even smile. There isn't room. There isn't time.

“Carys. We're leaving.”

I start running toward her then, but my feet slip in the wet mud by the gate. As I fall clumsily on my side she turns away and the baby's soft face is squashed tightly against her thin neck. She bends into the car, with the child, vanishing from sight.

I get to my feet, coated in mud, and stumble into a run. By now the car has started and the wheels are spinning. It jumps forward, engine roaring. I keep running toward it and for a moment it seems I'll reach it in time, but it's moving faster all the time, speeding toward the gate. If I run in front it will surely stop. As I change direction it comes so close that the bumper brushes my leg, and despite myself I swerve. The side of her face, half hidden by the child, is so near that if the window was open I could reach out and touch her. Then, suddenly, she lifts her hand to the glass, her fingers spread wide. In that fragment of time I see the clear red lifeline on her palm, curving like a line on a map. Then the car has gone by; it doesn't stop as it turns onto the road but it accelerates up the hill and quickly goes out of sight.