The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells (15 page)

No, Norah hadn't wanted to be found, or that's what she'd told herself.

‘It was Ella who gave me the idea,' Fay says. ‘I hired someone myself.'

‘You had me traced?'

‘I had to make sure you were okay.'

‘And you found me?'

Fay nods.

God.

‘Why didn't you contact me?'

‘I didn't want to interfere – not with what was going on —'

‘What was going on?'

Fay looks out of the window. ‘Your new life. In Germany.'

And maybe, by then, you didn't want me to come back. Maybe by then you'd already done a makeover on the house and told Willa that you were her mother. Oh, and got into bed with Adam.

‘Did you tell anyone?'

Fay shakes her head.

‘So you lied to Adam?'

‘I didn't lie to him.'

‘Same thing. You kept it from him – from all of them.'

‘Yes. I kept it from them.' Fay's phone buzzes. She looks at the screen. ‘Adam's waiting outside.'

The exchange of texts, the making of plans, the life of a couple. He really had replaced her with Fay.

 

Norah follows Fay out into the damp, spring day. The sun's come out; after the rain everything shines, like the world's been scrubbed clean. Adam leans against the bonnet of the car. He looks the part, Norah thinks. A father. A husband.

Adam goes up to Fay and kisses her cheek.

Norah feels a jolt.

‘You okay?' he asks Fay.

She nods.

Norah opens the car door. ‘Ella will be disappointed they haven't locked me up for the night.'

Adam smiles, but he looks tired. She wonders what he's been doing with the girls all this time. How he's managed Ella and how he's kept up the pretense with Willa. But he's a good dad now, isn't he? Fay's made sure of that.

Norah climbs into the back seat. She smells smoke, the one habit he hasn't kicked.

Adam gets in behind the steering wheel.

Fay doesn't move from the pavement.

‘Are you getting in?' Adam nods at the passenger seat.

Fay shakes her head. ‘I'm going to stay at mine tonight. I'll walk.'

‘Fay, please —' starts Adam. ‘Come home with us.'

‘I need to give you all some space.
I
need some space.'

Adam's shoulders fall. Norah wants to yell at him: don't you see what she's doing? She's making you feel guilty. She's making you go after her. By walking out on you like this, she's hitting you where you're weakest.

‘What will I tell the girls? What will I tell Willa?' Adam asks, his eyes fixed on Fay.

Norah hears the panic in Adam's voice. Was this how it all began? Unable to cope on his own, he'd found himself begging her to stay?

‘I'm sure you'll think of something,' says Fay.

Adam reaches his hand out of the window. ‘You're really not coming?' The vein on his forehead pushes up under his skin.

Norah feels a thud in her chest. If Fay's loved Adam this whole time, if she thinks that
he's
loved
her
this whole time, they've been in competition, haven't they? All those years when she'd trusted Fay, when Fay was the one person she knew she could go to, who she could be sure would understand. All those conversations they'd had about Adam, how Fay had agreed, told her she was right to be upset, that Adam should be doing more for the kids, that his love for her didn't count if it didn't translate into concrete actions. God, Fay was probably paving the way for Norah's departure.

He needs to start acting like a proper husband, a proper dad
. Fay had said.
You need to do something to make Adam wake up
– grow up.
And then the words come back to her, clear as day:
You should threaten to leave him.
She'd actually said those words.

She'd thought she'd left on impulse, when it suddenly dawned on her that things were never going to get any better. But maybe her mind had been planning her departure long before then. And maybe it was Fay who'd first planted the idea in Norah's head.

Norah opens her mouth to say something. She thought she wanted Fay to be out of the way, but if she's going to move forward she needs her to come with them: she's the mum, the wife, the one who stayed. And leaving Adam like this is just going to make him want her more. Fay's the only one who can help Norah get through to Adam and the girls.

‘Fay —' Norah says. But then she stalls.
Please come home with us?
She can't bring herself to say it.

‘I'll be back tomorrow, for Willa's birthday.' She steps away from the kerb and waits for Adam to start the engine.

As they pull away Norah looks through the rear-view mirror at her best friend standing alone on the pavement.

Ella's followers have gone crazy. @onmymind keeps tweeting:
be patient
…
wait
…
see what happens
…
your mum loves you
…
But Ella's never stopped waiting. Her life froze on the day Mum left her at the school gates and disappeared. It's time to move on now.

@liliesandroses have been at it too.
We knew she'd come home
…
Ella wishes that this time, when the Miss Peggs had their psychic premonition, they'd called on their angels or spirit guides or whatever and told them that it would be best if Mum
didn't
come home. It would have been better if Ella had spent the rest of her life believing in an imaginary mum rather than having to face the woman who showed up yesterday.

And then @hisloveishome, the Jesus freak, harping on about forgiveness:
Don't give up on her. Give her a chance.

It's easy for you to say, Ella thinks. She's not your mum. Plus you're religious. You believe there's a God who's got this big plan for the world and that
everything's meant to be
. Ella doesn't believe that anyone's in charge – if there were, He should be fired for incompetence.

Give her a chance? Mum's had her chance. She's had years and years to come back and explain and make good. It's too late. Whatever Dad said, things aren't going to be okay, not until she leaves.

Ella switches off her phone, then eases Willa's sleepy head from her lap and covers her with a blanket. She hopes that Willa didn't read the messages. Willa has a sneaky way of working things out.

There was a time when Ella hated Fay, how she walked into their lives trying to take Mum's place, how she let Willa call her Mummy and how Dad went along with it. But now Ella would do anything to protect Willa from the truth. Mum doesn't deserve to be in Willa's life.

With the theme tune of
Fantastic Mr Fox
still playing in the background, Ella goes over and sits on the camp bed Mum slept on last night. She flips open the lid of the wheelie suitcase and looks down at Mum's things: her wash bag, her clothes – leggings and T-shirts and baggy jumpers. She notices a CD and pulls it out. There's a picture of Mum on the front, holding her trumpet to her lips. Ella's cheeks burn. While Dad and Fay have been juggling their jobs, looking after Willa and Ella, Mum's been jamming in cool music studios producing CDs. The things Ella had wished she could share with her.

Ella takes the CD and slips it under her sweatshirt.

Then she notices that Mum's left her wallet behind. She zips open the coin compartment and finds German euros among pound coins and pennies. There are photos under the see-through plastic bits inside. The crow starts flapping again, its wings spread like dark shadows inside her body. The top photo is of Ella on her seventh birthday; Dad took it. A beaming smile, her eyes staring straight into the camera, so sure that life was good. The next picture is of Willa as a baby, her eyes still blue like Dad's; they went brown a few weeks after Mum left. Ella expects the third picture to be of Dad, but it's of a little boy.

The crow stamps its feet; its claws dig into Ella's stomach.

So Mum's got another kid. God, she's probably got a whole new family, people she loves more than Dad and Willa. More than Ella. That's why she stayed away. Well, she should go back to them and forget that she was ever meant to be part of their lives.

Ella takes out the picture of the little boy and shoves it in her pocket.

Then she closes the case, checks that Willa's still asleep and steps out into the hall.

She remembers how, on the day Mum disappeared, Fay had stood on the doorstep cradling Willa in her arms.

Norah hasn't come to collect her
, Fay said to Dad, not realising Ella was there, hearing it all.

That's when Ella knew something was really wrong – though, it turned out, she hadn't thought far enough. She hadn't thought of the worst scenario of all: that Mum hadn't been kidnapped. That she'd just walked out on them.

Ella climbs the stairs to the attic landing and grabs the bin bags she's filled with Mum's old things. She stops in the bathroom to empty the pedal bin so that, if someone snoops in the bag, they'll think it's rubbish; no one will save the pictures of Mum and her clothes and books and CDs, the things that have decorated Ella's room since she was a little girl. Ella tips the plastic lining into her black bag, and as the cotton buds and dried-out contact lenses and an old tube of toothpaste tumble out she notices a white plastic stick wrapped up in toilet paper. Using her fingertips in case it turns out to be something gross, she unravels the toilet paper. And that's when she realises what it is. It's a pee stick. A stick that tells you if you're pregnant.

There are two windows. And two blue lines.

She hears Dad's car pull up outside.

Ella shoves the stick in her pocket along with the photo, tips everything back into the pedal bin, places it back under the basin and goes up to her bedroom, taking the bin bag with her.

When she gets to her room, she empties her pockets into the top drawer of her desk.

‘What are you doing?'

Ella jumps. She didn't hear Willa come up the stairs.

‘You shouldn't spy on people, Willa.'

‘I wasn't. I just came up to see you.'

Willa stands at the door, a crease mark across her cheek, Louis beside her like a guard.

‘So what's in the drawer?'

‘Nothing.'

‘It didn't look like nothing.'

‘Just tidying up.'

Willa walks over to the window. Louis doesn't leave her side. ‘Daddy's back!' Willa says.

Ella joins her and the three of them look down through the scaffolding.

Mum and Dad step out of the car. Dad takes a cigarette stub from Mum and flicks it into a bush at the side of the road.

Cherry blossom drifts across the street and swirls around Mum and Dad's heads.

‘It looks like confetti,' says Willa. ‘Like they're getting married.'

‘It's just blossom, Willa.' But Ella had the same thought.

Ella had imagined the reunion between her parents a thousand times: how they'd hug and cry and kiss and stare into each other's eyes and promise nothing would separate them ever again.

Willa gets up on tiptoe and looks out of the window. She turns to look at Ella and scratches at the scar under her eye.

‘Ella?'

‘What is it, Willa?'

‘Where's Mummy?'

Adam bangs on the door and presses the doorbell and looks through the kitchen window and bangs on the door again.

‘Fay!' He bangs again. ‘Fay, it's me!”

He left Norah at home with the girls. Probably a stupid idea, but he had to come after Fay. He'd told Fay a million times that she didn't need to keep her house, that it was a waste to leave it standing empty, that she had a home with them now, but she'd always found excuses for keeping it.

‘Fay!'

Six years of living together and he never got a key to her place. Just when he thinks he might be a halfway-decent human being, something like this reminds him that he's way off the mark. And that if there's anything even the slightest bit okay about his messed-up self, it's down to Fay.

He grabs the brass doorknocker and hammers it down yet again.

As he steps back, he looks up. The cottage is dark. Maybe she went to her Mum's. Or maybe she went back to work. That would be Fay all over – to go out of her way to honour her word to Willa.

Damn.

He pulls his bike away from the wall. Then he notices a light flick on behind the curtains. He drops his bike and goes round the side of the cottage, through the gate to the back garden.

The grass is feathered through with weeds. Dry, spindly plants reach out like spears from terracotta pots. The fountain is dried up, its stones slick with moss.

He and Fay went to see a romantic comedy once. Following a blazing row, the woman had stormed off down the street.

He has to go after her,
Fay had said.
He has to show her he cares.

But she told him to leave her alone,
Adam had insisted, confused and frustrated, as he'd always been, by what seemed to him like the contrary behaviour of women.

Yes, but she wants him to go after her.
 

He remembers the pause that followed Fay's words. Their conversation, as so often in those early days, had skated too close to Norah.

Adam yanks at the frame of the lounge window.

Fay had gone on:
If you have to overcome some obstacles, that's even better
…
It shows perseverance. It shows you really care.

He looks up at her window. He's meant to climb up, isn't he? But, unlike in films, there are no conveniently placed footholds. And it's getting dark. He wouldn't be able to see what he was doing.

‘Fay!' he yells up again.

He picks up a stone from the fountain and throws it up to her window, but it bounces off the brick. He grabs a rock and hurls it at the downstairs window. It's the only way he can think of getting inside the house.

He's shocked by the noise of the smash and the spray of splintered glass. He waits for her face to appear at the upstairs window, but the curtains stay closed.

Reaching his hand through the jagged gash in the glass, Adam unlocks the window and climbs into the house.

How long has it been since he's stood in her lounge? Not since before Norah left. And even before that, only a few times: the occasional awkward dinner. Picking Ella up after a weekend with her godmother. This was where Norah had left Willa on the day she walked away. Had Norah ever wondered whether the favour she asked of her best friend might have consequences that reached further than she could ever imagine?

Adam climbs the dark stairs. He's never been up here.

The bathroom door is open. And the door to the spare room. The third must be her bedroom.

‘Fay…' He knocks lightly. ‘Fay…'

Still no answer.

He opens the door.

She's sitting on the side of the bed, staring down at a photo frame on her lap.

‘Fay? I've been calling for ages. Why didn't you answer?'

She doesn't look up.

He comes and sits beside her, and looks down at the photograph.

Adam in the second-hand suit Fay had found for him in a charity shop. Norah, eight months pregnant, in the dress Fay had adjusted over and over again as the day drew close.

‘I took the photo,' she says.

‘I know.'

She shakes her head. ‘God I'm an idiot.'

He puts his arm around her shoulders. ‘You're the most amazing human being I've ever met,' he says.

She shakes her head. ‘An idiot, Adam. Remember how I helped you on the day of the wedding? God.'

They hadn't spoken of this, not once.

‘I was a mess, Fay. If it hadn't been for you…'

Fay laughs. ‘Exactly.' She traces the outline of Adam and Norah's figures on the photograph.

‘You did the right thing,' he says. ‘A good, kind thing. You always do.'

He'd had his first proper panic attack. Standing in a tiny room at the town hall, waiting for Norah to come through the doors – and then his breath had got stuck somewhere in his chest, had refused to come out no matter how hard he strained.

The registrar had tried to calm him down, and when his breathing got worse she'd gone out into the hallway to get Fay.

He'd heard the registrar speaking to Norah, loud and official, used to dealing with these dramas.

He's fine
…
he just wants a word with Ms Bridges
…
 

And he'd heard Norah laugh.
He's probably forgotten the ring
.
You'd better go and sort him out, Fay.

By the time Fay had got to him his chest hurt so much he thought he was going to have a heart attack.

Adam lifts one of Fay's hands off the photo frame and laces his fingers with hers.

‘You helped me breathe that day,' he says. ‘Like you've helped me breathe ever since Norah left.'

She keeps staring at the photograph.

Once she'd got him breathing steadily she'd grabbed his shoulders and looked him in the eye and given him a pep talk:
You're going to go out there and you're going to tell her how much you love her and
you're going to say ‘I do', and it's going to be fine. It's going to be just fine.

And that's what he'd done.

Fay had gone back out to get Norah. Adam had taken his place again at the front of the room. The registrar, used to these dramas, had smiled, clicked play on the stereo and ‘What a Wonderful World'
had filled the room.

Afterwards, on the steps of the town hall, Fay took the photo she was staring at now.

But something had happened before that, hadn't it? Something they'd never mentioned. Something they'd tried to forget.

Just before Fay went back to get Norah, he'd fallen into Fay's arms. And she'd held him. And they'd stood there, in silence, holding on for a little longer than was allowed.

They wouldn't hold each other like that again until years later.

Fay puts the photograph back on her bedside table. ‘You shouldn't be here,' she says.

‘This is the only place I should be.'

‘You know that's not true.'

‘I can't do this without you.'

‘You have to. For the girls.'

‘Come with me.'

‘I told you, I need some time.'

‘Sitting here on your own in the dark staring at our wedding photo? Christ, Fay, how's that going to help?' He stands up and holds out his hand. ‘Come home with me. We'll deal with it, all together.' When she doesn't move he kneels in front of her. ‘It's going to be okay.'

‘Don't say that.' She pulls her fingers out of his, her cheeks flushed.

He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

‘I'll make it okay,' he whispers. He leans forward and kisses her, and then he kisses her harder and pulls her off the bed and onto the carpet and lifts her jumper over her head and kisses her shoulder and her neck and then he feels the weight of her falling into him.