The Death of Mrs. Westaway Page 10

  “There aren’t any, Mit, you know that perfectly well. But I expect there’s a fire in the drawing room,” Hal heard.

  As she rounded the corner of the stairs she saw them all: Harding struggling out of a Barbour jacket; Abel tapping on his phone in the corner of the room, still in his raincoat; Mitzi pulling layers off the children.

  Not one of them looked up as she began to make her way down the final flight, until she stepped on a loose board, and Ezra’s head came up.

  “Hellooo . . .” he drawled, and Hal felt her face flush as all the heads turned towards her, their expressions ranging from curiosity to frank surprise. “I saw you at the funeral, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Hal said. She swallowed. Her throat felt dry and sore, almost as if a thorn were stuck there, digging in. “Yes, my—my name is Hal, short for Harriet. Harriet Westaway.”

  Their faces didn’t change until a little dry cough came from behind Harding’s shoulder.

  “Harriet is . . . Maud’s daughter.”

  It was Mr. Treswick who had spoken, and his quiet voice cut through the chatter in the hallway like a knife through cheese.

  The name plainly meant nothing to younger members of the group, nor to Mitzi, who carried on as if he hadn’t spoken, shooing her children towards a room up the corridor, complaining audibly as she departed about the smell of damp.

  But to the three brothers, it was as if he had sworn, or smashed the empty china vase standing at the foot of the stairs. Harding felt for the chair behind him and sat down abruptly, as if he no longer trusted his legs. Abel gave an audible gasp, and his hand went to his collar. Only Ezra didn’t move. He went quite still, and his face turned pale.

  “She had—she had a child?” It was Harding who spoke first, the words clotted and thick as though he had to force them out. “Why didn’t we know?”

  “No one knew,” Mr. Treswick said. “Except, evidently, your late mother. Perhaps your sister told her, I am not certain.”

  But Abel was shaking his head.

  “She had a child,” he said, repeating his brother’s words, but with an entirely different emphasis, as if he could not believe the words, or the reality behind them. “She had a child? But—but it makes no sense.”

  Hal felt her stomach shift, and she gripped the banister tightly, feeling her sweaty palm slide against the polished wood.

  “It makes no sense!” Abel repeated. “She wasn’t—she didn’t—”

  “Nevertheless,” Mr. Treswick said, “here is Harriet.”

  Hal took a step down into the hallway, feeling her heart beating fast and hard inside her chest, thinking of the part she had to play. It’s natural for you to be nervous, she told herself. You’re meeting your family for the first time. You can use this fear—make it your own.

  “I didn’t know I had an uncle,” she said, not trying to hide the tremor in her voice, as she held out her hand towards Harding. “L-let alone three.”

  And he took it, his fingers warm and thick around her cold ones, and shook it, hard, in both of his, as if that handshake could somehow seal a bond between them.

  “Well, well, well,” he was saying. “Very pleased to meet you, Harriet.”

  But it was Abel who pulled her into a hug, crushing her glasses into his damp raincoat, so hard that she could feel his heart beating beneath her cheek.

  “Welcome home,” was all he said, his voice shaking with a kind of painful sincerity. “Oh, Harriet. Welcome home.”

  5th December, 1994

  Maud knows. She came to my room last night after I had gone to bed, but I knew before that—I knew from her expression as she watched me over the dinner table, pushing the congealing cod and limp broccoli around my plate with my fork, feeling the nausea rise at the back of my throat.

  I knew then, from the look she gave me, and the way she shoved her plate away and stood up, that she had guessed.

  “Sit down,” her mother snapped. “You do not leave this table without asking permission.”

  Maud gave her a look close to hate, but she sat back down.

  “May I leave the table?” she said, spitting each word out as if it were one of the stray bones from the cod, arrayed around the edge of her plate.

  Her mother looked at her, and I saw a flicker of something pass over her face—a desire to thwart, mixed with the knowledge that one day she is going to push Maud too far, and that if Maud defied her, there would be nothing she could do in the end.

  “You . . . may,” she said at last, though the last word was dragged out. But then as Maud stood, she added, “when you have finished your fish.”

  “I can’t eat it,” Maud said. She threw her napkin on the table. “Nor can Maggie. Look at it—it’s disgusting. Nothing but bones and tasteless white shit.”

  I saw the tip of my aunt’s nose go white, as it always does when she is furious.

  “You will not speak about the food in this house that way,” she said.

  “I won’t lie about it either—God knows there are enough lies in this house already!”

  “What does that mean?”

  Her mother stood now too, and they faced each other, so alike, and yet so different—Maud is hot where her mother is cold, passionate where her mother is contained, but the bitterness and anger in each face made them look more alike than I ever realised before.

  “You know what it means.”

  With that, Maud picked up the flaccid piece of cod with her fingers and crammed it into her mouth. I thought I heard the bones crunch as she chewed, and I felt the nausea rise up in my throat, making me sweat with the effort of containing it.

  “Happy?” Maud said, though the word was barely comprehensible through the suffocating mouthful.

  Then, without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel and left, slamming the dining room door behind her so that the china rattled on the table.

  I bent my head over my plate, and trying not to let my shaking hands show, I speared a potato on my fork and put it into my mouth, my eyes blurring.

  Don’t look at me, I thought desperately, knowing how my aunt’s white-cold anger could redirect onto whoever was unlucky enough to catch her attention. Don’t look at me.

  But she didn’t. Instead I heard the screech of her chair legs on the parquet, and the slam of the door on the other side of the room, and when I looked up I was blessedly, entirely alone.

  • • •

  It was much later that Maud came to my room. I was sitting in bed in my dressing gown, a hot-water bottle at my feet, sorting my cards. I heard feet on the stairs, and at first my stomach clenched, not sure who it was, but then there came a tap on the wooden door, and I knew.

  “Maud?”

  “Yes, it’s me.” Her voice was low, and I could tell she didn’t want anyone to hear. “Can I come in?”

  “Yes,” I whispered back, and the handle turned, and she came into the room, ducking her head beneath the low attic doorway. She was wrapped in a huge cardigan, and her feet were bare. “God, aren’t you freezing?” I asked, and she nodded, her teeth chattering. Without speaking I pushed over in the narrow bed and patted the pillow beside me, and she climbed in, her feet like ice as she slid them down past my legs.

  “I hate her,” was all she said. “I hate her so much. How can you stand to be here?”

  I have no other choice, was what I thought, but I knew that I had as many choices as Maud, maybe more.

  “She acts like it’s the 1950s,” Maud said bitterly. “No TV, you and me shut up here like fucking nuns, Mrs Warren toiling away in the kitchen—does she realise people don’t live like this any more? Other people our age are out there going to gigs, getting drunk, screwing each other—don’t you care that we’re shut up here in Mother’s post-war fantasyland?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell her that I had never wanted to get drunk or go to gigs. That I never had—even when I had the chance.

  “Maybe I fit in with it better than you,” I said at last. “
Mum always said I was an old-fashioned little thing.”

  “Tell me about your mum,” she said quietly, and I felt a lump rise in my throat—thinking of Mum as she always is in my mind’s eye—digging in the garden, with Dad alongside her, humming along to Paul Simon, hoeing the onions or planting bulbs. I tried not to think of those last nightmare months—Mum gasping her last on a ventilator, and Dad’s heart attack a few weeks later.

  “What’s to tell?” I said, trying not to sound as bitter as I felt. “She’s dead. They’re both dead. End of.”

  The unfairness of it still makes me gasp—but there’s a kind of rightness in it too, that’s what I’ve realised. I was the child of two people completely in love. They were meant to be together—in life, and in death. I just wish that that death hadn’t come so soon.

  “I want to understand . . .” Maud said, her voice very low. “I want to understand what it must be like not . . . not to hate your mother.”

  This time, it wasn’t the chill of her feet, but the venom in her voice that made me shiver.

  My aunt isn’t an easy woman—I know that—I knew that before I even came to live here. The fact that she had managed to fight with my father told me everything I needed to know. He was the most mild-mannered man you can imagine. But nothing had prepared me for the reality of what I found here.

  “I wish I could get away,” she spoke with quiet venom, into her knees. “She let him go.”

  She didn’t say who—she didn’t have to say. We both knew who she was talking about. Ezra, away at boarding school. He had escaped.

  “Is it the boy thing, do you think?” I asked.

  Maud shrugged, trying to look unconcerned, but I wasn’t fooled. Her cheeks were wet where she had cried after supper.

  “Girls aren’t worth educating,” she said, with a bitter little laugh. “Or not worth paying to educate, anyway. But whatever she thinks, I’ve got twice his brains. I’ll be at Oxford while he’s still sitting retakes at some shitty crammer in Surrey. I’m going to show her, this summer. Those exams are my ticket out of here.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking. Which was—what about me? If Maud leaves, what will I do? Will I be imprisoned here, alone, with her?

  “I used to hate this room,” Maud said softly. “She used to lock us in here as children, for punishment. But now . . . I don’t know. It feels like an escape from the rest of the house.”

  There was a long silence. I tried to imagine it—tried to imagine having a mother who would do that—and what it would do to you as a child to suffer through that—and my imagination failed.

  “Can I sleep here tonight?” she asked, and I nodded.

  She rolled over, and I switched out the light and turned on my side, my back to her, and we lay in the darkness, feeling the warmth of each other at our spines, and the shift and creak of the mattress whenever the other moved.

  I was almost asleep when she spoke, her voice a whisper so soft I wasn’t sure at first if she was speaking, or sighing in her sleep.

  “Maggie, what are you going to do?”

  I didn’t answer. I just lay there, staring into the blackness, feeling my heart beating hard in my chest at her words.

  She knows.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  The next half hour was a blur of questions and evasions, harder than Hal had ever imagined, but strangely exhilarating at the same time.

  As she stumbled through the conversation, desperately trying to remember what she had said to whom, she found herself abandoning the chess analogy and returning to the image of herself as a boxer, strapping up her knuckles before clambering into the ring to dodge punches, sidestep questions, and turn awkward inquiries back onto the person opposite her.

  And yet, this was no one-to-one sparring match. A single opponent would have been a setup much more within her comfort zone. She was used to that—although this was very far from the controlled environment of her little kiosk. But this confused melee was something entirely different: jumbled voices, cutting across each other, prodding her for answers before she had finished responding to another speaker, butting in with anecdotes and reminiscences. It was so unlike what she was accustomed to that she felt almost punch-drunk, pummeled by the sound.

  All her life family had meant one thing—her and her mother. The two of them, bound together, self-sufficient. Growing up, Hal had never felt that there was anything missing, but she had sometimes yearned for the big family holidays of other children at school, the endless ranks of brothers and sisters and cousins to play with, and piles of presents at Christmas and birthdays that came from a large tribe of relatives.

  Now—as they crowded around her, talking over each other in jangling voices, asking her about her upbringing, her schooling, her current situation—she found herself wondering how she could ever have envied the other children their uncles and aunts.

  Harding was the most difficult—direct question after direct question, barked in that rather sergeant-major voice, like an interrogation. Abel’s style was very different, lighter, friendlier; time and again when Hal ran up against something she couldn’t answer, he broke in with a chuckle and an anecdote of his own. Ezra said nothing, but Hal felt his eyes upon her, watching.

  It was Mitzi who interrupted at last with a laugh that Hal would have found grating under other circumstances.

  “Good heavens, boys!” She pushed into the circle of dark suits, swatting Abel on the shoulder and taking Hal’s hand. “Leave the poor girl alone for a few minutes! Look at her—she’s quite overwhelmed. Can I offer you some tea, Hal?”

  “Y-yes,” Hal said. “Yes p-please.”

  On the pier she tried to hide her occasional stammer, and she deliberately kept her voice low and slow, to seem older than her years and emphasize the fact that she was in control, and the querent was on her territory. Here, she realized, as Mitzi led her away from the group, her discomfort was her alibi, and she could use it to her own ends. She shouldn’t try to hide her confusion, or her youth—far from it. As she followed Mitzi across the drawing room, she hunched her shoulders to make her already slight frame seem even smaller, let her hair fall over her face like a shy teenager. People tended to underestimate Hal. Sometimes, that could be an advantage.

  She let Mitzi usher her to a sofa by the fire, where one of the Westaway grandsons was sitting, jabbing at his phone in a way that made Hal think he must be playing some kind of game. It wasn’t Richard. Who was the other one . . . Freddie?

  “There you go,” Mitzi said comfortingly, as Hal sat down. “Now, can I get you something? Are you old enough for a glass of wine?”

  Yes, and have been for several years, Hal thought, but she didn’t say that. Drinking here would not be a good idea. Instead she gave a deliberately uncertain laugh.

  “I’d prefer that tea you mentioned, thank you.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Mitzi said, and tapped her son sharply on the head. “Freddie, turn that off.”

  Freddie didn’t even pretend to put his phone down as his mother left, but he glanced sideways at Hal.

  “Hi,” Hal said. “I’m Harriet.”

  “Hi, Harriet. What’s your tattoo?”

  “My tattoo?” Hal was momentarily surprised, and then realized that the cotton dress had slipped a little, showing one shoulder, and the tip of a wing. “Oh, this one?” She pointed to her back, and he nodded.

  “Looks like a bird.”

  “It’s a magpie.”

  “Cool.” He spoke without looking up, apparently negotiating a tricky bit of the game. Then he added, “I want to get a tattoo, but Mum says over her dead body.”

  “It’s illegal before you’re eighteen,” Hal said briefly. Here at least she was on safe ground. “No reputable tattooist would agree to it, and you don’t want to be going to the ones who would. How old are you?”

  “Twelve,” he said sadly. He shut down his phone and looked up at her for the first time. “Can I see it?”

  “U
m . . .” She felt an instant sense of intrusion, but she didn’t know what else to say. “I—yes. I guess.”

  She turned, and felt him pull down the cotton of the neckline, exposing the bird, its head cocked to one side. His fingers were cold against her skin, and she tried not to shiver.

  “Cool,” he said again, enviously this time. “Did you pick it because of this place? You know—all of them.” He waved a hand at the trees outside the window, and Hal turned. It was too dark to make out much more than the light from the window glittering on wet boughs, but in her mind’s eye she saw again the line of magpies perched on the dripping branches of the yew. She shook her head, pulling the neckline of her dress back up to cover the bird.

  “No. My—my mum’s n—”

  Too late she realized she had let her guard down and had been on the verge of making a horrifying mistake. The truth was that she had got the tattoo in memory of her mother. Margarida. One for sorrow. It had seemed apt at the time. But cold horror washed over her at the realization that she had been about to admit her mother’s real name. Stupid, stupid.

  “Her—her nickname for me was Magpie,” she said, after a pause long enough to feel like a chasm opening beneath her feet. As cover stories went, it was beyond lame, but it was the best she could manage on the hop. Regardless, the boy didn’t seem to have noticed the yawning pause.

  “Is she Dad’s sister?” he asked.

  Hal nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well, I guess I should say was Dad’s sister. She’s dead, right?”

  “Freddie!” Mitzi came up with a cup of tea, and when she set it down on the table she lightly slapped her son’s knee. “That is not—I’m so sorry, Harriet. He’s a teenage boy—what can I say.”

  “It’s okay,” Hal said, truthfully. It wasn’t just the nugget of fact he had held out to her, confirming what she had already guessed. It was the fact that she was suddenly on safe ground here. There was no shock in hearing the words from other people—in fact, she preferred the boy’s bluntness, rather than the delicate passed away, or fell asleep that some people used. It wasn’t true. Her mother was not asleep, or in the next room. She was dead. No amount of euphemism would soften that fact. And this, at least, was true.