The Stepmother (32 page)

“Do you think
I
might be trusted with the fire?” I asked.

“Are you cold too?”

“Shivering slightly,” I replied. Though I was aware that wasn't the same thing.

“A fire is a good idea. I love the sound of it.”

I left my chair and walked on aching legs to the hearth.

“Everything should be in the basket.” I knelt down. “My husband's a very good fire captain,” said Liz.

“Where is he?”

“Fishing in Scotland. Isle of Skye.”

“That's where my father-in-law goes.”

“Yes,” said Liz. “They're together, on their way back now. I tried to tell them to stay until the end of the weekend, but they wouldn't hear of it.”

I closed my eyes. Peter, who had always been so nice to me, was fishing with Tessa's dad now and leaving his beloved river to come to
her
mother's aid.

“The circles are overlapping,” said Liz, above me. “It would be nice if you were part of the cross-hatching.”

I scrunched up some old pages of the
Independent
and tucked them between the iron bars in the grate. I didn't want to just be part of the cross-hatching. I wanted to be part of the whole. Like I'd been before Tessa King showed up and stole my family. I'd screwed the paper into a tight ball. My hands were smeared with black ink. I wiped them on my trousers, but the stain stayed. Out, out, damn spot.

“Anything I can help with?” asked Mrs. King. The blanket over her knees looked so inviting. I wanted to put my head on her lap and be told it would all be all right. I felt drained.

“My daughter is very angry with me,” I said, surrendering to the exhaustion.

“And my daughter's furious with you too.”

“Why on earth is Tessa cross with me? I would have thought she'd be dancing on my grave.”

“Becoming a stepmother is hard enough without this,” she said simply. “Amber has been putting her through hell. Why do you think that is?”

“Amber and James have always been very close,” I said, breaking off a fire lighter.

“That's not it, though, is it?” I busied myself with kindling. “Amber's a very bright girl, sensitive too, aware. Something's happened to make her believe that your newfound
un
happiness is directly attributable to Tessa's newfound happiness. I'm sure she's a little jealous too, she's only human, and I'm sure she doesn't like the idea of Tessa sweeping her daddy off his feet, and I'm sure she's worried about where that leaves her. That's normal. This isn't. Let's stop pretending it is.”

I chose the logs meticulously. Not so small that they wouldn't create a good base heat, not so big that they'd take too long to burn and fill the room with smoke. My rural beginnings came back to me. I struck a match, lit the corners of the fire lighters, and watched with delight as the blue flames raced around the kindling. The edge of some paper caught alight, and heat flared across my face. I felt a strong urge to bury my head in the fire. Liz was right. This was not normal. It had to stop.

“Not newfound,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“My unhappiness. It's not newfound. The drinking is recent. I can stop that. It's been barely weeks.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I only wanted to lose a bit of weight.” The kindling was cracking and spitting now. I laid on a few more pieces, then set the logs to burn.

“Isn't drink the most fattening of all?”

“Not when it's drunk in place of food.” I stoked the fire absently. “A couple of glasses of wine and I didn't want supper. Then I discovered that with a few more than a couple I could be sick. I'd never been able to be sick before, though I'd tried. Once I nearly drank bleach to get the damned food out of my belly.”

Liz reached out her hand. It hovered in midair. I stared at it, afraid of human contact. “You're bulimic?”

“Worse,” I said. Why was I telling her all of this? But now that I'd started I couldn't stop. “A failed bulimic. I'd eat. Stick my fingers down my throat until it ached, retch, but nothing ever came up.”

Liz's hand was still held out to me.

My own fingers were swollen. There was a graze I couldn't account for on three knuckles. My wedding ring was not there, but the indentation at the base of my finger still marked the place it had encircled for sixteen years. My nails were cracked and flaky. Too much cleaning without gloves. Half-moons frowned their disappointment at me. I held up my hand until it touched Liz's. I half-crawled, half-shuffled across the rug to her feet and laid my head on her lap.

“I think you've been taking care of everyone for a very long time, Bea. You've forgotten how to care for yourself.”

I closed my eyes against the jaunty pattern of Liz's rug. I had killed a baby. I didn't deserve looking after. When would the pain go away? When would this hole be filled? The first fat tear fell into the nook between the corner of my eye and the bridge of my nose. Liz didn't say a word. She stroked my hair, gently, soothingly, and I cried.

Later, worn out, I ventured into the garden and picked fresh mint, which I brewed into strong tea. We were drinking it when I heard the car. My heart burst to life. My children. I couldn't face them.

“You don't have to see them now,” said Liz. “I can tell them you went to bed. The little ones don't know anything anyway.”

“What about the fire?” I said. “No. I have to face them eventually. Better now, don't you think?”

“I do, as it happens. But I'd understand if you weren't ready.”

“It's not fair on them.”

“Bea, a long time ago I learned to my detriment that putting your family first, putting others first, regardless of the pain you are in, was not always the healthiest thing to do.”

I didn't understand. I could hear their voices now. Doors slamming. Laughter.

“You need time to heal properly. Patch-up jobs won't do.”

“Heal?”

“From whatever it is that's causing all this.”

“Are you a witch?” I asked.

Liz smiled. “No. A woman. Who needs a wand when we have intuition? And Bea, please try and remember that very little of this is Tessa's fault.”

“A mother protecting her child?” I said ruefully.

“Isn't that what we're supposed to do?”

I returned to the sofa and picked up a book. The words bounced around on the page. I was too nervous to go to greet them.

When Maddy and Lulu saw us in the sitting room, they ran straight in. Amber stood in the doorway. Tessa glanced at us, then at the embers in the fireplace, and went into the kitchen.

“Mummy!”

I stood up and hugged them.

“Are you better?”

“Has your headache gone?”

“Tummyache,” said Lulu. “She was sick. Like I was after Dan's party and I ate all of Bob's head.”

“Bob the Builder cake,” I explained to Liz. “That was years ago, Lulu. How do you remember these things?”

“I remember everything,” she said, which frightened me slightly.

“Hello, Lizzie,” said Maddy. “Can I sit on your knee?”

“Of course you can,” said Liz.

“How are your eyeballs?”

“Maddy!” I exclaimed.

Liz held up a hand. “Still misbehaving,” she said.

“Can I see?”

“Maddy!” I said, again.

“It's okay, Bea. Maddy tells me I look just like the funny pirate in
Pirates of the Caribbean
.”

My eight-year-old turned to me. “He has a wooden eyeball that pops out all the time. We're going to play it tomorrow. I'm Elizabeth,” said Maddy, taking Liz's cheeks in her two small hands and peering under the glasses.

“
I
want to be Elizabeth Swan,” said Lulu.

Maddy's head moved as she tried to follow one of Liz's wandering eyes. I found it quite disturbing, but Maddy was giggling, which made Liz smile. I couldn't watch.

“What about you, Amber?” I asked. “You'd make a fine Captain Jack Sparrow.”

She didn't reply. I looked back at the doorway. Amber had gone.

 

I
MANAGED TO PUT TOGETHER
some supper for the children. Tessa went upstairs with her mother while we ate in the kitchen. On the way up to give the girls a bath, I saw her come out of a room. She caught sight of me, then retreated into it until we'd passed.

I wondered whether Jimmy was coming back. If she had told him. I wondered many things as I tucked the girls into bed.

Tessa wasn't the only one avoiding me. Amber seemed to have disappeared too. From the bathroom window I saw her on a seat in the garden, talking into her phone. I wondered, too, if I was the cause célèbre of her gossip. Fourteen-year-olds love a drama. But that was unkind. If what Tessa had said was true about Amber thinking I was dead, I mean really dead, not just getting off on the attention, she wouldn't shout that from the rafters.

A while later, when the younger two were asleep, I found her stoking the fire. I handed her a log and some extra kindling to get the flames going again. I was desperate for a drink, just to steady my nerves, but there was none in the house and, short of stealing a car, no way of getting any. Which was just as well. The temptation to obliterate the thoughts that spun in my head was enormous. I'd even opened the fridge a few times, looking for something else to cram inside me, but managed to close it each time empty-handed. I didn't know how long my resilience would last.

The fire burning steadily now, I poured more mint tea and handed Amber a cup. “I owe you an apology,” I said.

Amber sat with her back to me, still prodding the fire. She looked over her shoulder, her wide hazel eyes sizing me up, taking me in. I had apologized before. Until now, however, I hadn't known exactly what I was apologizing for. About a month ago, I had come downstairs and found Amber cleaning red wine off the kitchen walls. I had no idea how it had got there but knew that Amber was not responsible. I told her I'd slipped and been too tired to tidy it up. Since I had no memory of the truth, I told myself it wasn't exactly a lie. I had apologized for
leaving the mess, not creating it. She had given me a quiet smile, which I had chosen to take as acceptance. Didn't I know what rot was caused by things left unsaid? I'd spent my entire life having conversations with my mother. But only ever in my head.

“A real one,” I said. “I'm sorry you found me in that state. I'm sorry about all the times before that too. I've said things to you that I didn't mean.”

Poke, poke, poke. Amber would have wanted to make this easier for me, but she didn't know how. There wasn't an easy way out of this.

“I've put a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. I'm going to try very hard not to do that anymore.”

Amber put the poker back on its hook. She turned her back to the fire and brought her knees up to her chest.

“What do the girls know?” I asked.

“I told them you had a bug.”

“Anything else?”

She put her cheek on her knees. “I told them not to talk about the wedding and Tessa because it upset you.”

“It must have seemed that way.”

“Wasn't it that?”

“Yes and no, I suppose. Daddy and I split up because he was very busy with work and I felt like I was doing everything on my own. We weren't a team. To manage, I started living, thinking, acting as if I was on my own and I guess that wasn't very good either. He's different now. He's brilliant with you three, and you see him all the time. He's very caring and loves us all. I guess, oh, I don't know, Amber, it's tricky…”

“I don't get it, Mum.”

And why should she, she was only fourteen. “I guess I wished he'd been a bit more like that before. For me.”

Amber didn't speak for a while. Then she said, “Keira's dad died falling down the stairs. He hit his head on a radiator and never woke up.”

God, I'd forgotten about that. It had happened some time ago. He was a real alcoholic. A drinker for years. You could smell the booze on him at drop-off.

“I thought that's what—” Amber's voice choked.

I pushed myself off the sofa and got down on the floor. “I'm so sorry, Amber. It won't ever, ever happen again. I'll get help if I have to.” I held her and she cried. She'd been brave for a long time.

When the fire had burned down, we went into the kitchen and re-heated some soup Tessa had left out for me. Amber told me about the recording studio and I did my best to squash the bile that rose in my stomach. And she told me she'd started her periods, which made me cry. I'd spent all these years striving to be the sort of mother a child could talk to, then fallen at the last. Instead, Amber had told Tessa. It hurt like hell, and made me hate Tessa more.

“There's something else I need to tell you, Mum,” said Amber.

“Anything.”

“I told Daddy that Caspar ripped my dress. I don't know why. I was scared and—”

“It's okay.”

“Now Daddy hates him. So I've been sneaking over to Caspar's house. I was only trying to—”

“Protect me, I know. I'm sorry. Amber, I can't remember what happened. Can you tell me?”

Amber shook her head.

“Please?”

“I came home to get the words to the best-man song. I didn't tell anyone, because it was a surprise. You were”—she closed her eyes—“you were leaning on the kitchen table. I think you'd been crying. I tried to give you a hug and…” Her chin wobbled.

“I ripped your dress.”

She nodded.

“Why?”

She shrugged.

“What did you do?”

“I ran away. I didn't do my song. I hid on the fire escape and drank a bottle of champagne and then I felt really, really ill. Caspar put his fingers down my throat to make me sick so I didn't get alcohol poisoning. I was horrible to him, Mummy.”