Silver Bay (35 page)

By the time I realised what I had to do I was a shadowy creature, a woman who had learnt it was best not to offer an opinion, answer back or draw attention to myself, that scars fade quickly, even if their memory lingers. But then I looked at my daughter’s face on the day he hit her, hard, for failing to take her shoes off before she reached the pale green hall carpet, and my resolve began to return.

I began to stash money. I would ask for an amount to buy a coat for Letty – knowing he could refuse his daughter nothing – then would show off something immaculate I had bought from the charity shop, pocketing the difference. I squirrelled away money from the supermarket shopping. I was good at living on little, having done it for years. And they suspected nothing, because I had become such a downtrodden thing.

By then I hated him. The fog of my depression lifted, and I saw clearly what had happened to me. I saw his coldness, his arrogance, his blind ambition. I saw his determination to ensure my elder daughter knew she was a second-class citizen in his house, even at the tender age of six. I saw that other families did not live like we did and, finally, that his class, his background and financial position did not prevent what he was doing from being abuse. I saw, with relief, that my daughters loved each other regardless, that their tenderness, games and bickering were those of every other set of siblings. I saw Letty’s plump brown arms linked casually round her sister’s neck, heard her high, lisping voice telling Hannah stories about what she had done at playschool, begging her to ‘pretty up’ her hair; I saw Hannah, at night, snuggled in with Letty as she read her a story, their blonde hair entwined, their nighties a pastel tangle. He had not poisoned them yet.

But seeing the truth of my situation did not help me – I could leave with Hannah, I thought, and they would barely care. (Half the time he told me I was a waste of space anyway.) But they would never hand over Letty. In one argument, when I had threatened to leave with them both, he had laughed at me. ‘What kind of judge is going to let you look after my daughter?’ he said. ‘Look at what you have to offer, Elizabeth. Look at your history – squats and goodness knows what – your lack of education or prospects, and then look at what she’ll get with me. You wouldn’t have a bloody hope.’

I suspect he was sleeping with someone else by then. His physical demands on me were far fewer – a source of relief. He had a schizophrenic attitude towards me. If I dressed nicely he told me I was ugly, if I approached him with affection, that I was a turn-off. If another man looked at me, even if I was dressed simply in jeans and a loose shirt, he held my face tightly between his hands and told me that no other man would ever lay a hand on me. On the night when his work colleague made an admiring comment about my legs he forced himself on me so that I could barely walk the next day.

What kept me going was the money mounting up in the lining of my green coat. The hours in which they thought I spent mindlessly ironing or washing up or sitting with the girls in the park, but in which I sat, the peaceful expression on my face belying my burning intent, plotting escape.

They were creatures of habit. Every Tuesday and Thursday she would play bridge. For years, on Thursday and Friday evenings he ‘went to his club’ – a euphemism for the other woman – and on Saturdays he played golf. I cherished those Thursday evenings, when I knew I had a few precious hours alone with the girls to laugh, run around, be silly and remember who I was before the sound of a key in the door could leave me silent and cowed.

Then, one Thursday, Steven came back early and found the letter I was writing to Kathleen, telling her the truth about what he had done to me. After his initial rage was spent, I suspect he told his mother I was not to be left alone: after that, whenever I was in the house, so was one of them. And whenever I went out, they would find a reason to take Letty to the park, or keep her at home. From that point I was never alone with my two girls. I think he knew by then he was losing control; that letter to Kathleen (thank goodness I hadn’t addressed it) had shocked him, not only because it showed I might have the courage to tell someone what he had done, but because it laid his actions bare, in print, and they were not pretty. Until then I think he had convinced himself that his behaviour was reasonable, that his beatings were an inevitable consequence of my failures. To see the cruel words, the split lips and broken fingers in print, to see his actions for what they were – the behaviour of a bully – must have been unconscionable for him.

I bided my time. I had become patient. I just needed to get to Kathleen. I could work out everything else from there. Her home was a mirage I hugged to myself on the nights when the darkness of my life was overwhelming. He knew only that I had a distant aunt. He had no idea where she lived.

By the time I had worked out a plan and a date for its execution, I was so nervous that I was surprised they couldn’t see it. I hadn’t been able to eat properly for weeks. The knot in my stomach made me clumsy, the endless reworking of plans in my head made me forgetful so they both tutted about my general uselessness and warned Hannah that if she didn’t buck her ideas up she’d end up like me. If the girls knew something was up, they didn’t show it. Thankfully, children tend to live in the moment. I watched their games, their private conversations, the absent way they ate their fish-fingers, and imagined them in Australia, running down Whale Jetty. Then I offered silent prayers to God that He would grant them that freedom. I wanted them to be free, strong, independent, happy. I wanted that for myself – but by then I had hardly any idea who I actually was.

‘Your daughter needs a haircut,’ he said, that morning. ‘We’re having a family photograph taken for my council election leaflet on Saturday. Please try to make sure that you and she are half-way presentable. Make sure your blue dress is clean.’ He kissed my cheek – a cold, formal peck, for his mother’s benefit, I guessed. As much as she disliked me, she would have disliked his affair even more.

‘Will you be back for supper?’ I said, trying to keep my voice light and unconcerned.

He looked irritated to be asked. ‘I’ve got a meeting tonight,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be home before Mother goes out.’

I barely remember that day now, except that it rained heavily, and that the girls, stuck indoors, squabbled. It was the school holidays and having Hannah at home all the time had irritated my mother-in-law so much that she’d got one of her ‘headaches’. She warned me that if I couldn’t keep the noise down I’d have Steven to answer to. I remember smiling my apology and hoping the headache heralded a tumour.

I must have checked the passports every half-hour. They and the tickets were safe in the lining of my coat. While that woman slept, I packed two holdalls with the bare essentials so that a cursory glance in the children’s drawers would not suggest we had gone. At one point Hannah came up to ask what I was doing – when she opened the bedroom door my heart beat so fast I thought it would bounce clean out of my chest. I placed my finger to my lips, trying to keep my face free of anxiety, and told her to go downstairs, that I had a surprise planned, but it would only work if she kept it a secret.

‘Are we going on holiday?’ she said, and I fought the urge to clap my hand over her mouth.

‘Something like that. A little adventure,’ I whispered. ‘Go downstairs now, Hannah, and don’t say anything to Letty. It’s very important.’

She opened her mouth to speak, but I almost shoved her out of the door. ‘Go on now, Hannah. We mustn’t wake Granny Villiers or Daddy will be cross.’ It was a cheap shot, but I was desperate.

Hannah didn’t need telling twice: she left my room and, as silently as I could, I put the bags under the bed in the spare room.

He was late that evening, as I’d suspected he would be. Thursday evening was his night for seeing ‘her’, I had guessed, and my mother-in-law grew increasingly agitated after he missed the time he had agreed to come home.

‘He’s going to make me late for bridge,’ she said bad-temperedly, for the eighteenth time, staring out at the wet driveway. I said nothing. I had long learnt that that was the safest way.

Then, miraculously, she stood up. ‘I can’t wait any longer,’ she said. ‘Tell Steven I had to go. And make sure that casserole doesn’t burn. You’ve got it on too high a heat.’

I think the casserole reassured her: in some perverse way she reasoned that I wasn’t likely to go anywhere if food was cooking.

‘Have a nice time,’ I said, keeping my features as bland as possible. She looked at me a little sharply, so I busied myself with plates, as if I was laying the table.

‘Don’t forget there’s bread to warm in the oven,’ she said. And then, with a swish of her coat, she was gone. I stood in the kitchen with the girls chatting at my feet about some game they were playing and freedom was so close it tasted metallic in my mouth.

As her car left the drive, I ran upstairs and grabbed the pills from their hiding-place in the wardrobe. I came down, and while the girls watched a video, I broke several capsules into a glass, then added some wine, stirred and tasted it. The drug was undetectable. I poured some more, then broke in four more capsules, just to be sure. I tasted it again – with luck, if I made the casserole spicy enough, he would taste nothing. It was almost half past seven.

He would eat, fall into a deep sleep, and I would have several hours before she came home. Several hours in which to get to nearby Heathrow in his car. To board a plane. Her Thursday sessions could go on as late as eleven thirty or even midnight. With luck, by the time she got home, he would still be asleep and we might already be in the air. It was a good plan. A near-perfect plan.

I started as I heard Steven’s car pull up in the drive, and tried to quell the butterflies in my stomach. I had never before prayed for him to come home sooner rather than later. The smile I had on my face as his key turned in the lock was as close to genuine as I had worn in years.

‘Elizabeth,’ he said—

Mike was holding my hands. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, his eyes kind. ‘It’s all right.’

My breath was coming in deep jags, tears streaming down my face. ‘I can’t—’ I shook my head at him. ‘I can’t—’ My chest was so tight I could barely breathe. I gulped air, and my lungs inflated with a painful gasp.

I felt his arms surround me. ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ he murmured, into my ear. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything.’

‘Letty – I—’

He held me then. He held me without saying anything and let me fall apart. And he never moved. He just sat, his face pressed to mine so tightly that his skin must have absorbed my tears. His arms stayed locked round me. Tight enough to comfort. Loose enough to reassure me of my freedom.

‘Mum?’

Hannah stood in the doorway, still in her nightdress. She looked from me to Mike and back again. Her hair was still matted from sleep.

Her presence brought me back from the brink. I pulled away from Mike and wiped my eyes. My beautiful daughter, my beautiful, frightened, brave, living daughter.

‘Why are you crying?’ she whispered.

I wanted to tell her, but I wanted to protect her too. For years I haven’t spoken about Letty in front of her. For years, not knowing how much she remembered, I’ve tried to shield her from the memory of that awful night, the night on which, because of what I did, our lives imploded.

‘Hannah—’ I reached out to touch her, and my voice stopped in my throat.

Mike’s voice cut across the room, quiet and firm: ‘Letty,’ he said gently. ‘We’re talking about Letty, Hannah.’ And as she stepped forward to take his outstretched fingers, my heart broke, overwhelmed not by the pain, or the memory of my poor lost daughter, but by the presence of so much love. Then, my hand pressed to my mouth, I had to run from the room.

Twenty

Hannah

My mother didn’t talk for almost two weeks after we came here. She just lay in her bed, like someone dead. Then for ages she drifted around, there but not quite there, as if she was a hole in a room. Aunt Kathleen looked after me, feeding me up, getting me to explain a bit about what had happened, holding me when I couldn’t stop crying. When she decided I shouldn’t be on my own, she got Lara round, and helped us bake cakes together, as if we were cooking up a friendship. As if she was trying to find me a substitute for Letty. And when I asked her what was going on with my mum, why she wouldn’t come down and be with me, Auntie K just said: ‘You and your mum have suffered something unimaginable, Hannah, and she’s not coping with it quite as well as you are. We have to give her a bit of time.’

So she gave her some time, and a bit more, and then I think she decided she’d had enough. ‘Your mum and I are going to have a little chat,’ she told me. ‘You and Lara stay here with Yoshi and mind the dog.’ I don’t know what was said, but they went out on Auntie K’s boat, and when they got back Mum looked less shadowy than she had done. She climbed out on to Whale Jetty, walked down to me and held me. I felt like it was the first time she’d actually seen me for ages. ‘I’m really sorry, Mum,’ I said, as the tears started. I could feel her bones through her shirt.

Her voice didn’t sound the same. ‘Nothing to be sorry for, lovey. You did everything right. It was me who got it all wrong.’

But I knew that if Letty and I hadn’t had that argument in front of Steven . . . if Letty hadn’t said that thing about not wanting to go on holiday . . . Suddenly I missed Letty so badly. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t alive any more. ‘I want her to be here,’ I cried.

I felt a big sob catch in Mum’s chest. She squeezed me tight. ‘Me too, lovey,’ she said softly. ‘Me too.’

Mum had told me not to say anything. She had stood there in her room and said it was very important. But I’d been so excited at the thought of me, Mum and Letty going somewhere, the thought that we might have whole weeks of giggling and doing the things Granny Villiers didn’t like. ‘I didn’t mean to tell her,’ I whispered. Then my mother took my shoulders, and her eyes, when they met mine, were bright, bright blue, like the sky, her eyelashes all pointy, like stars, from her tears. ‘Your sister’s death was not your fault, okay?’ Her voice was fierce, almost like she was telling me off. But her eyes were kind. ‘Not one iota of this was your fault, Hannah. Not one. And now you need to forget that any of it ever happened.’