The Letter, page 1
THE LETTER
Josephine Cox
with Gilly Middleton
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2023
Copyright © The Estate of Josephine Cox 2023
Jacket design by Caroline Young © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Jacket photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (landscape); Natasza Fiedotjew/Trevillion Images (woman and letters); Shutterstock.com (sky)
Josephine Cox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Gilly Middleton is acknowledged as the co-author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008128258
Ebook Edition © March 2023 ISBN: 9780008128630
Version: 2023-01-31
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Josephine Cox
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
‘MUM, CAN I go—’
Nanette seemed not to hear her daughter but carried on talking. ‘… And then, Harry, I thought we could stop at St Ives on the way back. The light is so special there, even at this time of year.’
‘Good idea,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll put my gear in the back of the car.’
‘Mum, Dad, can I—’
‘Yes, but let’s keep it simple. No easels or half a ton of paints.’
‘When did I ever take half a ton of anything?’ Harry pretended to look indignant, but his eyes were twinkling.
‘When did you ever not? Sometimes with you, preparing for a day out is more like packing for a three-week expedition. Like a trip to … to the Alps.’
‘Such drama, my love! And not true!’
‘The honest truth,’ laughed Nanette. ‘If you have the backseat for your stuff, I’ll take the boot, but if any of your things get in my space, I swear I shall chuck them into the road! Now, give me half an hour to do my face and put on a nice frock, and we’ll be on our way.’
‘A whole half-hour, when you already look ravishing?’
Nanette, rising from the table, beamed at her husband and grabbed his hand, giving it an affectionate squeeze. ‘I’m right excited about our day out.’
‘Right excited, eh?’
‘Dad, Mum! Please! Can I come, too?’
‘What?’ Nanette, now halfway to the door, stopped and turned as if surprised to see her daughter sitting at the breakfast table. ‘Oh, Millie …’ she said vaguely. ‘I thought you said summat about going to Sarah’s.’
‘No, Mum. It was you who said about Sarah’s. I want to come with you. Please let me. You know I love St Ives.’
‘But, Millie,’ said Harry, ‘we’re not going straight there. We’re off to see Jane and Donald, talk about Mum painting some flowers on their living-room walls, have something nice to eat … Probably something nice to drink, too.’ He turned to look up at Nanette with a wink. ‘Grown-ups’ day out. No children allowed. You’d only be bored, anyway.’
‘I wouldn’t, Dad. I like Jane and Donald, and they never make me feel like a little child … like a leftover … like I’m not wanted.’ Millie could feel the familiar heat of resentment gathering and taking control of her.
‘Leftover? Not wanted?’ said Nanette, giving Millie a hug. ‘Really, Millie, you don’t half talk soft sometimes. Jane and Donald are always very kind, but they’ve invited just your dad and me today.’
‘But why didn’t they ask me, too?’
‘Because I told them you would be seeing your friend Sarah.’
‘No, Mum, it was you who said—’
‘Millie, please, stop being a baby,’ said Harry, mildly. ‘Mum and I are going to see our friends, and you are going to see your friend. Makes perfect sense to me.’
Millie flung her head down on her folded arms at the table. Her parents knew just how to twist situations to suit themselves, often leaving her to kick her heels alone or offloading her on their friends and neighbours while they had all the fun together, just the two of them.
‘But I don’t want to,’ she insisted. ‘I want to go with you. Sarah’s all right, but her mum talks to me as if … as if she feels sorry for me. And she keeps on about me going to school. I’d rather go to Jane and Donald’s and see what you’re going to paint, Mum.’ She felt angry tears threatening. ‘It’s not fair! I want to go to St Ives!’
‘Millie, love, you sound just like a toddler, not a child of fourteen,’ said Nanette, reaching for her cigarettes on the dresser. ‘Life isn’t fair – it’s tough. I know that as much as anyone.’ As she stretched up for her matches, as if to emphasise her words, her sleeve fell back, showing an old, deep scar on the pale skin of her forearm. ‘If you don’t want to go to Sarah’s, you can stay here and amuse yourself. Just so me and Dad can have a precious day together.’
‘But you have lots of days together. Are they more precious if I’m not there? It’s as if you don’t want me. As if you’d prefer me not to be here. I bet you wish I’d never been born!’
‘And now you’re being silly,’ said Harry. ‘And where did you learn to put on the drama? From your mother, I bet.’ He turned to wink at Nanette to show he was trying to jolly Millie out of her mood.
‘Don’t be mean,’ said Nanette, giving his arm a gentle slap as she passed him. ‘Right, I’m going to get ready.’ She left, trailing cigarette smoke and leaving the kitchen door open.
‘And I’m going to gather my painting things. Do you want to help me, Millie?’
‘No.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘If I suited myself, I’d be coming with you.’
‘Darling, it’s not all about you all the time,’ said Harry, and he headed off to look out some paints and canvases from the big, light room where he and Nanette worked. It was very large and could accommodate both without any cause for them to argue about their own spaces, even though they frequently did.
Millie got up only to slam the kitchen door as hard as she could behind her father. She listened, but there was no reaction to this. It was as if her parents were already mentally on their way and unbothered by her anger at being left behind.
‘I hate you!’ she yelled as loudly as she could. ‘I wish you were dead!’
The sound of the car engine faded. They were gone, with hugs and kisses – as if they minded that she was not going, too; as if they hadn’t excluded her on purpose.
‘Millie, love, you have a lovely day. Mebbe go and see Mags if you don’t want to go to Sarah’s,’ Nanette had said with a big smile as she’d arranged her coat around her in the passenger seat. Her dark curls were tied back with a jolly red and white spotted scarf, the red the exact same shade as her lipstick. She looked gorgeous. ‘We’ll see you later.’
‘Yes, yes, off you go,’ Millie had snapped. ‘And don’t hurry back,’ she’d added viciously.
Now she put on her coat and went to let the half-dozen pert little hens out into the garden, then, shoulders hunched, mooched over to see if there were any eggs in the nesting boxes. There weren’t. She knew there were things to eat in the pantry, but she was in the mood to feel she had been left to starve now there were no eggs. Then she wandered around the garden in the wet grass, kicking the decayed remains of fallen apples and stoking the fire of her resentment at being left behind – again.
Eventually she went down the lane to see Mags, an old lady who was a potter. But Mags’s cottage was silent, and there was a pencilled note stuck with a drawing pin to the door, easy enough for Millie to read: Daisy, I’ll be back by four. Who was Daisy? Millie felt excluded again.
Perhaps she should go to Sarah’s after all, but by now she was too fed up to want company. She would stay here, by herself. She would go and occupy her parents’ studio, and paint a really big picture on one of their canvases, using a lot of their paint, and making a huge mess. That would serve them right for abandoning her.
In the studio, she lavishly squeezed paint from several tubes onto a palette, then set a large blank canvas on her father’s easel, first removing a half-finished painting of her mother that he was working on and propping it against the wall. She’d start with images of her parents – Mum all pretty with a lipsticky smile, and Dad looking handsome and smart with one of his brightly coloured scarves, which he liked to wear instead of a conventional tie.
Colourful clothes, cigarettes, smiling faces – soon, there they were, looking as they had when they had set off a few hours before. The resemblance was striking.
Millie knew she had a gift for painting, even now, at fourteen, and she had learned many of her parents’ techniques, sitting quietly here, just looking, then copying. When the mood took them, Nanette and Harry were happy to share their knowledge, and these rare times were very precious to their daughter.
It was just a shame that they so seldom wanted to be bothered about her at all! Like now! Setting out so smiley and happy, and leaving her behind and not caring. It was all right doing exactly what you wanted some of the time, but sometimes it would be nice if Mum and Dad organised her days, showed they minded even a little bit about what she did.
The trouble was, there was little room in her parents’ lives for anyone except themselves and each other. Millie thought it significant that she was an only child: they’d given child-rearing a try and decided that it was not for them. They were not like other parents, so far as she could see: they didn’t insist on her going to school, or wearing particular clothes at certain times or brushing her hair. They didn’t mind what she did so long as she didn’t bother them, except on their own terms. If their friends came here, she joined in the fun: the gossip, the dancing to gramophone records, or playing casual games of tennis in the garden. But if Mum and Dad went out and left her, she just went for walks in the woods or on the beach, observing the colours and the changes in the sky, picking the wild flowers. Sometimes she made dens in the garden, where she ate picnics – usually just bars of chocolate – either alone or with Sarah, if Sarah wasn’t at school. Sometimes she went to see Mags, who liked Millie to help her decorate her pots and who fed her soup made out of home-grown vegetables.
Millie felt another dark wave of ill-temper rising. If only Mum and Dad were as caring as Mags. But they didn’t care at all. They really didn’t!
As rage rose and took possession of Millie, she made a violent sweep across the canvas, a broad gash of vivid red seeming to scar the surface over the neat depictions of Nanette and Harry. Scarlet rivulets ran down from it, partially obliterating the figures. Millie’s anger increased, and she flung her arm towards the canvas, the paintbrush like a wand, emitting not sparks but a violent spatter of paint, which flicked out and stained wildly all around the figures.
Good! I hate them, I hate them.
Next she stabbed the brush into black and white and blue, then swirled it over the surface, creating threatening clouds that resembled a strangely low-lying thunderstorm, or billowing smoke.
She stood back, panting. There was paint on the floor, on her clothes; red paint, like blood, on her hands.
Millie’s heart was hammering, and she tried to be calm, to gather herself. She looked at the canvas. The image was terrible, chaotic and bloody, burning with rage. It was no longer a picture of her parents, but a depiction of her own fury, horrible and frightening.
It had grown dark, and Millie’s parents had not returned. It had been a long day, alone. She’d locked up the hens for the night, and now she was waiting. She had returned her father’s portrait of her mother to the easel – Mum looked so beautiful, her slim figure half turned away, but smiling over one shoulder – and propped her own depiction of anger with its face to the wall. It betrayed the violence of her jealousy, her momentary hatred, and she was ashamed. She didn’t know how she would explain it to her parents. Even so, it was getting late, and she wished they would hurry up and come home.
She cut herself a doorstep sandwich of cheese and Branston Pickle, and was just wondering whether a tiny measure of cider, a bottle of which was open on the shelf in the pantry, would help it down and blunt her worries, when there was a knock at the door.
There was Mags, crying. Millie had never seen her cry before, and for a moment she was so distracted by this that she didn’t notice the other figure: a policeman.
‘Oh, my pet lamb,’ crooned the old lady, enveloping Millie in her arms. ‘Such a terrible thing ’as ’appened to your poor ma and pa. Oh, my darlin’, I don’t quite know how to tell you …’
CHAPTER ONE
‘MILLIE BOYD, JUST do as I tell you, for once in your life,’ Mona Marchant snapped. ‘Go and change out of those school clothes, wash your hands and then come down and help me.’
Millie gave an exaggerated sigh and got up heavily, as if her legs would hardly hold her. ‘I will do. In a minute … when I’m ready.’
‘Do it now. Why do you always have to be so difficult?’
‘Because I know you’ll have me peeling potatoes or sweeping out the hearth or some other horrible job. It’s like slavery, living here. First having to go to school – work, work, work – and then chores when I come back. I never get a moment to myself without you nagging me to help with stupid tasks: do this, do that. Mum and Dad never treated me like a slave. They never asked me to do anything.’
‘Slavery, indeed! Don’t be ridiculous. I reckon your parents spoiling you is the root of your whole problem. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is what I always say. If Frank and I had known that you’d been so badly brought up, well, we would have thought twice about offering you a home with us, that’s for sure.’
‘And maybe that would have suited me as well.’
‘Enough of your backchat, you ungrateful hussy. It’s little enough I ask of you in return for your board and lodging.’
‘Yes, Aunt, board and lodging. That’s what this house is like: a soulless boarding house. A comfortless place of nothing but bricks and …’ Millie cast her eyes around the sitting room, at the overstuffed armchairs with shiny antimacassars, the plump cushions that she was forbidden to sit on, a row of fussy ornaments along the mantelpiece. ‘… bricks and bric-a-brac.’
With a sudden rise of temper, she snatched up a little pottery donkey wearing a sombrero with, inexplicably, A Present from Morecambe painted on the side of its Spanish-style pannier, and hurled it into the hearth, where it shattered beyond repair.
‘Ooh, you little witch! How dare you break my lovely things?’
‘I dare because I hate you,’ lashed out Millie.
‘Well, just think how I must feel about you,’ snarled Mona, grabbing Millie tightly by the arm, deliberately pinching her hard. ‘I offer you a home out of the goodness of my heart, and look how you repay me.’ She turned a woebegone face to gaze at the sorry fragments of the donkey. ‘It isn’t as if you’re even related to me at all.’ She pulled Millie roughly towards her and hissed into her face. ‘I wish now I’d hardened my heart when your parents were killed and I’d insisted your uncle Frank put you in an orphanage. You’ve been nowt but trouble since that dreadful day we went down to London to meet you off the train with that potter woman—’
‘Mags was Mum’s dearest friend. If she’d known she was delivering me into the hands of someone like you, she’d have taken me straight back to Cornwall with her. At least she loved my mother and father; you didn’t even like them.’
‘Someone like me?’ Mona let go of Millie and fluttered her hands around her face as if she were about to swoon. ‘I can’t imagine what you mean by that. And as for your parents, I hardly knew them. Nanette was your uncle Frank’s sister, not mine, and we saw nowt of her. Not only did she choose to live in remote parts, but she never got on with Frank. But I’d learned enough about her and your dad to know that they weren’t my kind of folk – artistic types, not steady like your uncle … bohemians, I think they call that sort – and how I wish I’d followed my instincts. You will never fit in here. I can see that now.’
