The Summer of Secrets (31 page)

‘So what happened?’

‘This guy offered us a house and some land up in Scotland, and we had this huge conflict about whether to go.’ She gives that shake of her head. ‘And most of us did, but he turned out to have a hidden agenda.’

She pauses, her face far away.

‘And?’ I want her back.

‘And, well, Piet came up one day and kidnapped me. It would be called an intervention these days. And then he gave me enough money to go and travel around India. He said if I was going to do mystic, I ought to try out the real thing.’

The sides of the bubble begin to thin.

‘So when did you change your name back?’

‘Well, you know how it is.’ She gives her hair a rub with the flat of her hand. ‘When I got married, I had to think about names again. I wasn’t, you know, going to take
his
name. Once a feminist … So I decided to take my own name back.’

‘You got married?’

‘No need to sound so surprised. People do, you know.’ She smiles as she leans sideways to get her hand into her coat pocket before holding out her phone to me. ‘Three kids as well.’

Two boys and a girl. They are beautiful.

She turns the phone to examine the screen herself and then puts it down on the table.

I want to stay in this place, this neutral space where we can talk about normal things, but it’s like when you have a scab and it makes you go back. I have to pick. The normality is only a temporary plaster.

‘You said a foster home. When everyone was in hospital, I mean?’

Victoria’s face makes a visible shift as she goes back through the intervening years.

‘We went to a foster home. Will and me.’ She puts her head between her hands and laces her fingers into her hair. ‘Those poor people. We hated them so much.’ She sighs, sits up, and rubs her eyes. ‘Can you imagine, Will without Pippa, me being sent off to school in uniform, rules, deadlines?’

‘But surely they understood? I mean, what you were going through?’

‘Not so you’d notice.’ Her mouth twists in a reluctant smile. ‘I have to say, I’m not sure that I’d have liked us much. We were … resistant to being helped.’

‘It shouldn’t be a question of liking.’

‘We ran away once, back to the cottage.’ Her voice is so calm. ‘I’m not sure what we thought we’d find.’

I think about my own visit to the burned cottage. What should have happened is that we should have arrived at the same time, joined forces, gone to the house and insisted Dad let us all stay.

‘It was awful, just so … empty.’ She is looking through me, back to a cold afternoon filled with the stench of abandoned ash, and I know what she is seeing. ‘Will was screaming and trying to get in, I was holding him back. We didn’t have a plan. If your dad hadn’t turned up, I don’t know what we’d have done.’

‘Dad?’ The word hits me in the pit of my stomach. ‘What—’ My voice wavers. I clear my throat before I can carry on. ‘What did he do?’

‘He was amazing. He took us back to your house and made us sandwiches. Total lifesaver.’ She shakes her head. ‘He was so good to us.’

I concentrate on the chronology. ‘What—’

Victoria has picked up a spoon and is sliding her fingers down it, turning it over, sliding them down again, turning it over. ‘We stayed with him for a few days, I don’t know, couple of weeks. Then Piet came and got us.’

I am overtaken by involuntary spasm, a deep, inner shaking which rattles my body from its central core. All that time, when he didn’t come to see me, while I was being kept away, he was there.

Victoria has a hand on my arm, and from a distance, I am aware that her mouth is forming words. It takes a time for the meaning to surface.

‘Helen, what is it? What’s wrong?’

I cannot speak.

‘Helen?’

I don’t want to open my mouth because, as soon as I do, I’m going to start crying. And then I start crying anyway, so it doesn’t matter. With a tiny, lucid part of my brain, I watch a lady at another table with absolute clarity. She is sitting there with a scone on the plate in front of her, giving up all pretence of eating. I can’t blame her: I would be doing the same.

The walls are too close. I stand, sending my chair down on its back. I have to get outside.

I don’t stop until I am by the water’s edge, where I crouch down, holding on to my stomach. I am retching as if I’m going to be sick, but what comes up is a howl with roots in the base of my being, torn out by forces beyond my control. I am the person curled in a ball by the side of the canal, and the noise that is twisting out and spiralling up towards the sky is from me. I keen for all that is lost: for Pippa, for my dad. For the world of the summer, for myself and for all that might have been. I have been holding it inside for a very long time.

A man with a spaniel walks by on the opposite bank. He turns his head as he passes. The dog runs ahead, spotting something in the undergrowth and jumping on it with all four feet at once. I watch the dog as if, by not letting him into my field of vision, the man will cease to exist. Somehow Victoria is next to me.

‘My dad disappeared.’ I turn to Victoria. ‘Did you know?’

Victoria plucks at some grass.

‘I didn’t, no.’ She sprinkles the grass stems over the water and we watch as they bob and separate. ‘That must have been hard.’

‘He said something about negligence.’ I close my eyes, trying to recall his words. I hear the sound of the ice cubes rattling in my drink, of Dad’s voice coming out of the darkness, and I start to cry again. ‘I thought he was talking about me …’ My voice cracks as the memory continues to unroll.

Victoria is a stillness beside me.

‘And before, when you said about him taking you in, it made me remember how he didn’t want me around. I never understood why.’ The words come out in jagged clumps, as painful to produce as they must be to listen to. ‘But he meant the petrol bombs, didn’t he? That he was responsible for not getting them out of the way?’

I am rocking, my knees pulled in to my chest so that I won’t fly apart. ‘I always knew it was my fault he left.’ This is the abyss. This is the knowledge I have been avoiding for the whole of my adult life. I say the words for the first time. ‘He killed himself. And the very last thing I said to him was that I never wanted to see him again.’

‘Helen, you were sixteen.’ Victoria speaks with absolute conviction. ‘You were hurt and confused and nobody was telling you what was going on.’

I feel the weight of her hand on my shoulder.

‘He was the one who rescued Will, you know.’ Victoria draws up her legs and wraps her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees. ‘They all went in – your dad and Piet and Seth. The firemen said it was a miracle anyone got out.’ She is staring out across the water, across to where the trees hide the end wall of the cottages. ‘The smoke was so thick that they couldn’t find the stairs. He’s never got over it.’ Victoria’s voice continues as if from a great distance. I think she is talking about my dad, but it doesn’t make sense after the first words. ‘Losing his twin, his mother. He’s only ever been half a person.’ Will. Victoria is talking about Will. ‘The fact he’s the one who’s alive. He can’t forgive himself.’

Everything around is quiet, the distant barking of the spaniel the only sound. I fill in the silent half of my mother’s sentence. My dad. He never forgave himself for not rescuing Pippa.

‘I can’t imagine him going anywhere. Your dad, I mean.’ Victoria tilts her head so that she can see me. ‘This place, he loved it so much.’

He did. I think of him, watching me go past on the bus, then walking home, untying the boat.

‘I didn’t believe it. Not for years. I kept expecting him to come back.’

Victoria reaches for my hand. ‘I kept expecting Alice to come back too.’ She’s turned back to the canal. ‘You wait for ever, and then realize it’s not going to happen.’

We sit there together. After a while, the waitress comes out from the door of the coffee shop. She is bringing me the box.

It’s sealed with thick brown parcel tape that goes over and over and covers every gap; I can’t find an end, and my fingernails aren’t sharp enough to get through. Eventually, Victoria produces a small penknife from her shoulder bag, and I dig through with that.

The first thing I notice is the smell of home. It is out and around me and gone almost before I have realized it is there, air that has been sitting in this box since the time my father disappeared.

The contents are not a surprise, in some strange, equally inexplicable sense. I have been carrying the box since I left my mother’s flat, have felt the weight, computed the empty space and picked up the tremors of how the contents shifted as I walked. My subconscious has been busy.

They are items from another age, dusty and small, with no explanation, no letter. I wonder who collected them all. Not my dad.

‘She emptied the house straight away, you know.’ I hold my hands over the open top of the box, so that nothing blows away. ‘I used to listen to her telling people how it was best to accept the situation.’ I dredge up a laugh. ‘I suppose it helped her.’

‘Did you never come back, after he’d disappeared?’ There is almost more sympathy in Victoria’s voice than I can bear.

‘No.’ I squeeze my eyes shut so tightly that red speckles dance behind the lids.

Victoria nods with understanding. ‘Did you find out anything about how he left?’

‘Some people saw him heading down the canal.’ I nod my head to the right, downstream, away from the cottages. ‘And the lock keeper said he seemed normal when he went through.’

I wouldn’t listen at the time. The sight of my mother with her head next to the liaison officer used to make me want to scream. And if I didn’t believe it, then he would come back. It was simple.

‘Which lock was that?’

‘It’s about five miles down.’ I nod in the direction I mean. ‘Not the one we found, the broken one. He only had one way to go.’

The lock he went through led into the river, and from there, eventually, to the sea. I found the bare details years ago on a microfiche in the library of the local newspaper. There was a high tide on the night of the last sighting, followed by several weeks of calm and unseasonably warm weather.

‘Nobody ever saw the boat again. In the end, Mum told me she’d throw everything away if I wasn’t prepared to help. So I told her to go ahead, and I didn’t speak to her again for about a month.’

‘I can see why.’ Victoria’s hand closes around one of mine, and I grasp it tightly.

‘I was never going to talk to her again, but, you know …’ My voice trails off. ‘And then I ran away. I never wanted to see her again.’

‘And here you are, she kept all this for you.’

I lift my hands away and we bend our heads to see inside. There is a diary, letters, the box I kept my earrings in. One sheet of paper is a faded purple, and I know before I unfold it that there will be a printed cartoon rabbit decorating one corner. I hold it out. It is our book list.

Victoria snorts. ‘Bloody
Ulysses
. I don’t think I read any of them properly, you know.’ She shakes her head.

‘I read them all.’ I fold the paper up and drop it on the ground. I doubt I’ll be reading them again now.

In amongst the scatter of papers are some pencil sketches, and I pick them up with the delicacy of a bomb disposal expert. Most are Piet’s. He spent an afternoon trying to teach me, and his drawings hold so much life that my heart aches: Seth bending over his guitar, Pippa on her tummy, reading a comic, Alice sitting. One or two are my attempts. Mine are crude, cack-handed, but, even so, there is the odd line that makes the moment recognizable.

Victoria leans across my arm to look. ‘I forgot about you doing these.’ She takes one from me. ‘You always said that Piet was a cowboy.’

Piet is standing with his back turned, slouched with one shoulder against a wall as if he’s thrown his Stetson down on the ground.

‘You lost all of your photographs.’ I have the briefest sensation of smoke passing in front of my nose. ‘When I went back to the cottage, that’s all I could think about. The photos and the records …’ A sob rises in my throat as I remember how much else was lost. ‘You should have these.’ I hold the papers out. ‘Take them.’

‘I’ll be seeing them tomorrow.’ She has tears in her eyes. ‘Piet hasn’t changed at all.’

I have a flicker of a thought, the briefest image. I could go with her, be part of it. It’s what I’ve always wanted.

‘What does Seth do now?’ I study my hands, aware of the old feeling of giving myself away.

‘He’s a psychiatrist, would you believe.’

‘What really happened to your dad?’ After all this time, the question feels simple but somehow unimportant.

‘Which version did I tell you?’ Victoria is shaking her head. ‘He died, there were drugs, a fight. All a bit sordid.’

‘I heard Piet talking to Seth once.’ I remember the heat, the roughness of the apple tree beneath my fingers. ‘They didn’t know I was there, but I imagined all sorts. Murder. Intrigue.’

‘And you never said.’ Victoria’s voice holds a ghost of a laugh.

‘I thought Piet might be the twins’ dad as well.’

‘Nah.’ She examines at the sketch. ‘There wasn’t ever much of that between them, if you ask me. Piet’s pretty good at stories as well.’

There is one more sheet of paper in the box, folded into four, and I pick it up and open it out. It is Seth’s sketch of me, my hair tumbling down from a loosely knotted bun. I fold it up again and hold it tight between both hands. I don’t think I can manage any more memory. But Victoria is reaching into the box. Half hidden under the flap in the base of the box are two photographs. She eases them out, and I take them from her despite myself.

In the first, I am a small girl in a blue cotton dress, and I am holding my father’s hand as we crouch on the bank of the canal while he points to something on the other side. The other is upside down, but I don’t need to turn it around to know what it is. It’s the square white of a Polaroid snap, and on it, Pippa and I are smiling for the camera, and in the background is the boat.

‘You should have this as well.’ I hold it out to her, keeping the snapshot of my father and me in my other hand.