This Summer's Secrets, page 25
‘I’ll drive you to Penzance,’ said Alex. ‘It’ll take too long to walk. Too many people will see you.’
‘Where will you go?’ said Felicity.
Rachel shrugged. ‘London? Bristol maybe? I’ll work until I’ve got the money to disappear properly. Work out how to change my name. All that. I won’t come back. This is it for me. I’m leaving here for good. I promise I won’t tell anyone, Lissy. I never will.’
Felicity knew she meant it. She knew she would never see Rachel again.
‘Take whatever you need,’ she said. She looked at Alex. ‘We can give you some money, right?’
‘Take my bank card,’ said Alex. ‘There’s a few hundred pounds in there. Take it all out and throw the card in the sea. I’ll say I lost it.’
Rachel went upstairs to gather her stuff. Felicity knew she had to go after her, and that Alex would go and find Jenna. For a few seconds, though, it was just the two of them.
‘I feel like I can do this,’ said Felicity. ‘I don’t know about Jenna, but she has to keep it together. We need to look after her. What about dumping him in the sea?’
‘We’d have to do it when it’s dark,’ he said. ‘Grandma’s not back until tomorrow lunchtime. We can do it tonight. In darkness. For the moment I guess we have to hide the … hide the …’
Alex couldn’t say the word. Even Alex crumbled.
28
I went to my bedroom. Mum followed, and we sat side by side on my bed. Mum put her arm round my shoulder, but she didn’t speak. She was trembling.
I could rely on Mum for everything: she was fierce. She had defended me my whole life. So why, now, was she shaking violently and then tensing to try to stop it? Why had she thrown up? She gripped me so hard that it hurt, and I tried to pull away.
‘You have no idea,’ she said, ‘what you’ve done.’
‘No, I don’t! What are you on about? How could I have any idea?’ I paused. ‘Is this to do with Rachel Thomas?’
‘No! Why on earth do you think you know anything about Rachel?’ She took a jerky breath. ‘Have they got hold of Felicity?’
‘Clem says she’s going mad. And flying back.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Good. Yes. We need Felicity. And Alex too. Is Alex coming?’
This was the first time I’d ever heard her mention Clem’s uncle.
We sat in silence. Mum was rocking back and forth, and her breathing was ragged. I didn’t know what to say. I walked over to the window and looked towards the camellia bushes. I couldn’t see them from here, but I could see police tape strung up between two trees, shutting off the whole of that side of the garden. It was early on Sunday morning, and I guessed they were waiting for reinforcements.
‘Why, though? Why did you have to say that about Rachel?’ said Mum in a tight voice. ‘Now they’re going to dig it all up and do forensic testing, aren’t they?’
‘Isn’t that good?’ I didn’t understand.
‘We could go away,’ she said, standing up. ‘But we couldn’t, could we? You can’t just disappear these days. They find you. You could live with your dad.’
‘Mum?’
‘Oh, don’t worry. Just …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Mum.’ I said it louder this time. I heard an authority in my voice that I’d never had before. ‘Mum, what’s happening? Why are you being like this? Why are you saying mad things? You’re really, really scaring me.’
She didn’t react. I had no idea why she was being so scary. After a while, I wanted to talk because I hated this spiky silence.
‘Did you know Martha came here as an evacuee?’ Mum nodded, but she didn’t look at me.
I’d only known Martha as an old lady. She had been seventy-six when I was born. I knew she’d lived an unimaginably difficult life, but at the same time I had no idea about the details of it; I just remembered all the things she had shared with me. Chicory coffee, the first sight of a cow, Aubrey and his ‘shell shock’. Her little coat and gas mask.
It was light outside, the sky pale blue, everything new and beautiful, washed clean by the rain, but the room was stuffy. There wasn’t enough air. I still felt drunk. It was morning, and I hadn’t slept. I sat on the bed. I was scared Mum was going to run away, but she sat down too.
‘I guess they’ll be able to check how old they are,’ said Mum. ‘Don’t you think? The bones.’
‘I guess.’
‘Would they even have Rachel’s DNA?’
‘They’d have Lucy’s.’
Mum nodded. ‘You’re right. Of course.’
‘Mum? Were you friends with Rachel too? I mean, I know she was friends with Felicity.’
Mum gave a tiny nod. She looked grey. ‘Do you have a number for Alex?’
‘Of course I don’t. Get his number from Clem maybe? Mum, were you friends with Felicity and Alex and Rachel? What happened?’
She stood up. ‘I used to be,’ she said. ‘Darling, sorry. You need to get some sleep. I’m going to go and find Clem, to get that phone number. You have a rest.’
I didn’t want to let her go, but all the same I felt sleep pulling me down. She sat next to me and stroked my hair. I had meant to change out of this dress, but I hadn’t done it. Her hand was comforting on my head. I felt myself sinking. The skull. Rachel. Martha. The police. It swirled round my head.
1946
Martha never thought about the first ten years of her life because she knew she would unravel if she let it in. Even when she longed for comfort and felt the ghosts of her family calling to her, she didn’t let her mind go there.
As time went by, she found she could tell people her story in a controlled way: ‘I came here as an evacuee and never went home.’ But she didn’t go deeply into it. She never, ever described her parents and sister or her East End life. She asked Violet whether she could take her surname, and Violet cried and hugged her and said of course, so she stopped being Martha Driscoll and became Martha Roberts, because Martha Roberts had a life and a home and a family, and Martha Driscoll had lost everything.
Violet treated her as a daughter, and she came to believe that she was, indeed, Martha Roberts of Cliff House. A Cornish girl from the big house on the cliffs. A girl who lived in a huge, faded house that had the last remnants of a staff. She stayed in the yellow room with the two windows, even though Violet offered her a bigger room if she wanted it. She kept the drawings she had done of her parents and Daphne in a drawer beside her bed because she couldn’t bear to see them every day, but she felt that this was what they had looked like and was glad to have them. Sometimes, at night, she would take them out and talk to them.
She missed Betty, and she liked having her bed right there, as if she might come back one day. Both of them kept their promises and wrote to each other.
Everything, apart from Aubrey, got better after the war. They carried on growing vegetables in the garden, but they put flowers in some of the vegetable beds and grass seeds in some of the others, and it started to look more like a garden and less like a farm.
Aubrey, though, got worse. He watched Martha slowly learning to live with her loss, and he became angry at her because he couldn’t do it. They couldn’t talk and draw any more. Martha tried hard to stay out of his way because sometimes just looking at her made him spit with rage. They only had May now to help them, having run out of money for the other staff years ago, so with only four of them in the house it was harder for Martha to avoid Aubrey. He walked round and round, stamping and muttering.
Even when she was sixteen, Martha followed Violet wherever she went. If Violet was going out, Martha asked if she could accompany her. Violet was patient and always said yes. Martha copied Violet’s way of talking. ‘Gracious heavens,’ she would say. ‘Praise the Lord.’
Aubrey carried on dressing in his old clothes, even when Violet bought him new ones. He didn’t eat much. He never stopped shouting in the night, and Martha would put her fingers in her ears and try not to think about her daddy, about how he had been sent to fight and had never come home. Aubrey was the one who stopped her being able to forget. She and Aubrey were bad for each other.
It was the middle of summer, but that night the rain was crashing on her bedroom windows. Martha was sixteen, and she was in her nightdress getting ready for bed. She pulled the curtain aside, as she always did, to look out at the sea, but the warm rain was too heavy, and she couldn’t see it. She opened the window and leaned out, wanting to feel the rain on her face, to get her hair wet, to be in the elements, to anchor herself. She did this all the time, tethering herself to this place at every opportunity. I am here, she told herself. I am at home. I am in Cornwall. I’m lucky. Violet loves me, and I love her.
The downpour soaked her long hair. She stayed where she was, letting the sky fling water at her. The wind was wild, and she turned her face into it, exhilarated.
That was why she didn’t hear Aubrey coming into the room behind her.
When she felt his hands on her shoulders, giving her a sharp shove, she screamed. Her scream was picked up by the wind and carried out to sea. She fought back, and at first she thought she had no chance because he was stronger.
‘You!’ he kept saying. ‘You!’
His eyes were burning. She didn’t know what she had done, except having tried to find a way to live her life in spite of everything.
Then she saw that he wasn’t strong at all. He had been fighting his demons for decades, and he hadn’t left the grounds in years. Martha, on the other hand, helped in the garden and on the farmland. She walked for miles every day. She ran up and down stairs and swam in the sea.
She spun round and pushed him away.
He fell on to Betty’s bed. She looked at his face. His skin was blotchy, red in places and white in others. He was over fifty now. Old.
Time stood still. She had lived with this man for six years, and for a while he had helped her more than anyone. Those hours when he had just listened – that was what had helped Martha start to cope with it all. She loved Aubrey, and she felt sorry for him too, but nobody had ever scared her as much as he did. He hated her now; it felt as if he had hated her from the moment she’d started to heal.
He pulled himself up and walked back towards her.
She screamed: ‘Vi!’
She screamed: ‘May!’
She remembered that May had gone home. She screamed, ‘Violet!’ at the top of her voice.
His eyes were glazed, and she wasn’t sure what he was seeing.
‘Help! Vi! Help me!’
By the time Violet arrived, however, running in her nightdress, Aubrey had shouted something incoherent and left the room. They heard his footsteps going up the stairs, to the top floor.
They heard his footsteps running across the attic floor, above their heads.
They didn’t hear anything.
And then they saw him falling past the window.
They knew he was dead before they got to his body. He had jumped head first from the attic window and had made sure he landed on the stone paving slabs. It was clear that he couldn’t have survived. He had left Violet a long and incoherent letter that was, all the same, easy to understand.
He just couldn’t do it any more. He didn’t want to live. He said he wasn’t strong enough. He’d never been able to get his head out of the Great War. He asked her to say sorry to Martha because he’d so wanted to heal like her but couldn’t. He was sorry it had made him angry.
Violet was devastated, even though a part of her had been expecting this for years, even though she knew he hadn’t been able to live a full life since 1916.
They stood by his body, broken on the paving slabs, in their nightdresses. It was a hot and stormy night, and the rain crashed all around them.
‘Don’t,’ Violet said when Martha said she’d better call someone. She put a hand on Martha’s arm. ‘Please, darling. Don’t. I’ve lived this in my head so many times over the years. I know what we have to do. We can’t tell anyone.’
They stood and stared at Aubrey’s shattered body. Martha edged closer to Violet for comfort. Her hair was wet, and she was sweating and trembling.
‘Why?’
Her teeth were chattering in spite of the heat. She was working so hard not to think of her parents and her sister that she had no space for anything else. She knew she would do whatever Violet wanted.
‘It’s felo de se,’ said Violet.
Martha had never heard those words before. She made Violet say them again, spell them out. Felo de se. A felony against yourself. A crime, said Violet. Illegal.
‘But they can’t do anything.’ The wind was getting up, and it was raining harder, but they could hardly go inside and leave him here. ‘I mean …’
They both looked at him. Nothing was going to hurt him now.
‘This is what he’s wanted for years,’ said Violet. ‘Oh God, Marth. I wish I’d made him go to that place in Scotland, but he just wouldn’t. He came home from the war, and he was all right. I thought it was over. I was so happy that he’d survived. And then it started. I always thought it would stop one day, but it never did. He couldn’t get that war out of his head. I mean, you know all that. I know you do. Sorry. I’m just talking.’
Martha didn’t know what to say, so she put an arm round Violet and tried to comfort her, the way Violet had always comforted everyone else.
‘So.’ Violet was trying to be brisk, raising her voice so Martha would hear her over the wind. ‘Felo de se. It’s a crime, Marth. It wasn’t so long ago that the Crown would confiscate the estate of anyone who did this. I don’t think they do that any more, but they might. It’s possible. And I’m not going to take that risk, darling. I’m not going to risk our house, and I absolutely cannot bear everyone knowing. The inquest. The talk. The scandal at the big house. I decided a long time ago that if this happened, no one else could know.’
The rain had stopped. Mist surrounded them.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ said Violet, ‘that we give Aubrey his own burial. Here, in the garden, where he’ll be at peace. We tell people he’s gone away. No one but May has seen him for years anyway. We’ll need to tell her that he’s gone to visit a friend in the north. After that, we’ll say he’s stayed in Scotland. Will you do this for me, Marth? Would you? I just couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear to have them convicting him in his absence. Knowing that everyone was judging my poor brother. Knowing they could take our house. The law still exists, even if it’s not applied any more. We’d have nothing.’
Martha’s teeth were chattering. Sweat was dripping down her forehead.
‘I’ll do whatever you need.’
They dug up the flower bed in the corner of the garden, out of the way. It took much longer than Martha would have expected, even though the soil was wet and the earth was soft. They buried him in the suit he’d been wearing at the time, and Martha fetched his watch, which he had left in the library, because Violet said it had been a long-ago birthday gift from their parents, and he would want to keep it with him. Violet lost her mind for a while and started throwing Aubrey’s things in with him, burying them; she was putting in the old cutlery when Martha stopped her.
They went in and cleaned the mud off themselves, and put their clothes in a bag under Betty’s bed ready to launder on May’s day off.
‘If she finds them and asks,’ said Violet, ‘we’ll have to think of something.’
‘We’ll just say we were caught out in the rainstorm. We fell over. She won’t ask more than that.’
When May arrived in the morning, everything looked normal, though the energy in the house was different, and Martha was sure May would notice.
‘Aubrey went away,’ Violet said, her voice casual. ‘He’s visiting friends in the north. Army friends. For a break, you know.’
Martha saw the relief on May’s face. ‘Right you are,’ she said. ‘I hope it helps him.’
‘It will,’ said Violet. ‘I’m sure of it.’
Violet planted a camellia in that flower bed and told the gardeners that they were never to touch it. They called it the memory garden, and sometimes Martha went there to talk to her London family as well as Aubrey, when she felt strong enough. Violet would spend hours at a time just sitting and talking quietly.
It came to be a magical place, a healing space.
29
Josie was looking out to sea, with Meg leaning on her, half asleep, when Clem grabbed her by the wrist and tried to pull her up. She resisted, and fought Clem off, but everything felt so confusing without sleep that she wasn’t sure what was happening.
Clem’s face was strange. She was blocking out the sun, filling Josie’s field of vision. She didn’t look like normal Clem. She wasn’t happy Clem, don’t-care Clem, hedonistic, sunny Clem. Her face was twisted so she was almost snarling.
Josie wrenched her arm away and fell back down. She saw Meg waking up.
‘What?’
‘What’s going on?’ said Meg.
‘You have to come with me. I need to show you something. You too, Meg.’
They looked at each other, but Clem was on a mission. Martha had drowned; the police were digging up bones – no wonder Clem’s façade had shattered. No wonder she needed them.
‘You OK, Clemmie?’ said Meg as the two of them stood up and followed.
The end corner of the garden where they’d found everything was shut off with tape, and the birds were singing. It was weird and other-worldly, like the Garden of Eden just after the apple or something. They walked over the wet grass towards the house, and Josie had the strangest feeling that she was out of all time and space, the way she’d felt when she’d snuck in on her own, except that now she had Meg. She reached for Meg’s hand. She loved the way it was smaller than hers; she held it tightly to warm Meg up. Meg squeezed back.
