Sworn Secret (3 page)

‘That’s her,’ the strangers whispered.

‘Who?’

‘That girl’s sister.’

‘Which girl?’

‘
You know
. . .’

Those whispers drove her mad, poisonous hushed tones that groaned beneath the weight of suspicion, judgement and aspersion. They made her want to turn and yell at the strangers, tell them
that girl
, her sister, had a name. Her name was Anna, and they had no right to whisper. No right to wonder. No right at all. Because she knew what most of them thought. That Anna didn’t fall. It was Lizzie’s worst nightmare, a dark, skulking thought that she banished to the back of her mind where it prowled night and day.

Lizzie breathed deeply, moved Anna firmly out of her head, and made a concerted effort to concentrate on her mum and headteacher. They were finalizing arrangements for Tuesday. Her mum’s voice cracked a couple of times, the words too heavy for her to carry. She looked so drained, and it yanked at Lizzie’s heart. Her lips were drawn tight over her teeth and recurring tear tracks trailed her sallow cheeks, but even so, pale and unmade-up, with delicate features, blanched skin and fine dark hair tied loosely back, her mother possessed an almost consumptive beauty. If it were possible, Lizzie would have spirited her away to convalesce somewhere remote and safe where Dr Howe and Tuesday and that noisy fourth chair weren’t.

‘We’ve chosen a tree,’ Dr Howe said, a note of triumph in his voice. ‘An apple tree. I hope that’s OK.’ He stopped talking and looked at her mum, who was doodling on the empty sheet of paper in front of her.

‘Kate?’ he asked. He laid a hand on hers, the one that was drawing, and Lizzie saw her land in the here-and-now with a heavy thud.

‘Sorry?’ Her voice was vague and faraway, and mirrored her eyes. She moved her hand from beneath his.

‘The tree we’ve bought,’ he said. ‘It’s an apple. We thought it might be nice to grow some fruit. Maybe the home economics club can make some chutney. There’ll be a plaque on it, engraved with Anna’s name.’

Her mum didn’t say anything. She just kept on with her doodles. Even without looking Lizzie knew what she was doodling. Straight lines. Lots of them. She’d Googled doodles and found a site called
Doodling and the Inner You
. Apparently, straight lines show a suffocated doodler and shading shows an anxious doodler. Lizzie used to shade, but when she read that shading meant she was anxious she decided it was better to doodle stars. Stars show an optimistic doodler. When Lizzie told her mum about the doodling website, though, she said in no uncertain terms that you doodle what you doodle, and doodling lines and shading doesn’t mean anything more than that you doodle lines and shading. But Lizzie felt she’d missed her point about the Inner You.

‘And you’ve thought about music,’ said Dr Howe.

Her mum didn’t reply and he stared hard at her, making Lizzie’s heart beat a fraction faster, nervous in case he decided to say something sarcastic about the importance of paying attention, which he did all the time in assembly.

‘Why don’t we let Mrs Goldman handle it? I know she’s prepared something.’

No reply.

Anxiety spiked again and Lizzie stood to go to her mother’s side, but as she did her mum suddenly jammed the biro into the paper and turned her doodling face down.

‘I think we’re done, Stephen,’ she said.

Lizzie looked nervously from her mum to Dr Howe and back again.

‘Ah. I see. Well . . .’ Dr Howe looked down at his red file, flicked forward a couple of pages, and then shut it.

Lizzie caught sight of her sister’s name in bold black capitals across the front of it.

ANNA
.

She still loved the look and sound of it. She always had. It was fabulous, simple and feminine, and . . . a palindrome! Anna had teased her and called her a geek when she pointed this out.

‘It’s not just that it’s a palindrome,’ she’d said to her sister, smarting a little. ‘Elizabeth is so blinking dull. Just queens and stamps and some fancy cruise ship. Anna is romantic. Anna floats. Anna twirls. Anna gets kissed by Prince Charmings. Elizabeth chops people’s heads off and pays for postage.’

‘I don’t float and twirl!’

‘You get kissed by Prince Charmings.’

Anna smiled at her. ‘Most of those need their heads chopping off.’

Then they laughed.

Lizzie missed her terribly, and seeing her name on Dr Howe’s folder, yet another black reminder, was a punch in the stomach.

‘Yes,’ Dr Howe said, roughly interrupting Lizzie’s sadness. ‘I think we can leave it there. If there’s anything else,’ he continued. ‘I’ll telephone.’

Her mum nodded and then, without even a mumbled goodbye, she walked out of the room, leaving Lizzie and Dr Howe in an awkward, sticky silence.

‘Um . . . she’s . . . um . . . pretty tired,’ Lizzie mumbled. ‘You know . . . not been sleeping well . . .’

She turned towards the front door, praying he wouldn’t try and talk to her. They almost made it, but then she heard him clear his throat to speak. Her stomach clenched.

‘So, Lizzie, tell me,’ he said, sounding a lot like the kind but useless bereavement lady she was sent to after Anna fell. ‘How are you
feeling
about Tuesday?’

Lizzie reached to open the latch. ‘Er . . . fine,’ she mumbled.

This seemed to be the wrong answer, as he didn’t smile but gave her one of those teachery looks that said there was a far better answer floating about in the ether somewhere. Lizzie stared at the empty patch of space above his head and searched for it.

‘I mean, well, I’m sure it’ll be hard.’

She shot him a look to see if this was closer to what he’d wanted. It appeared so. His frown softened, and the corners of his mouth curled into a smile.

‘Yes, it will be hard. But, I think, once it’s over we’ll all feel so much . . . better.’

Then he nodded.

Lizzie nodded too, even though she knew full well that planting an apple tree for the home economics group and singing some songs chosen by her unstable music teacher wouldn’t make losing Anna any better at all.

They stood in silence for a moment or two. He stared at her so hard she felt as if she were standing on a metal sheet heated up as hot as it could go. She avoided his eyes and shifted her weight from foot to foot like one of those dancing desert lizards.

‘You know you can always talk to me if you need to,’ he said. ‘My door at school is always open.’

Lizzie breathed a massive sigh when she was finally able to close the door behind him. She wandered back to the living room and sat in the armchair to pick her knee and wait for her mum to come back down.

With the scab finally gone, flicked in tiny bits onto the carpet and her knee all pink and bloody, there was still no sign of her mum. She went to the bottom of the stairs and leant against the banister and waited a few minutes. Twice she nearly called her, but didn’t. If she was in her studio, the room in the loft with dusty Velux windows and cork tiles that lay unglued across ply, she wouldn’t disturb her, because, even though her mum never said so aloud, Lizzie knew that this was where she was happiest.

The Wrong Type of Tree

An apple tree
?

Kate closed the door of her bedroom and rested her forehead against it. Why on earth didn’t she tell him they couldn’t possibly plant Anna an apple tree? Anna didn’t eat apples. Not unless Kate peeled and cored them and cut them into eighths, and she’d stopped doing that for her when she turned twelve.

‘You can peel your own apples,’ she’d said to her. ‘Honestly, you’re the fussiest child I’ve ever met. Lizzie doesn’t need them peeled and she’s younger than you.’

Kate hadn’t said this nicely.

She’d been tired. It was one of those days when nothing had gone right. She was hormonal. She and Jon had argued about who should have remembered to put the bins out. She got a parking ticket because she stopped to help a frazzled new mum whose carrier bag split on a zebra crossing. The warden was writing it out as she ran back to the car, and while she tried to explain he pretended she wasn’t there. When she got home and unpacked the shopping she realized she’d forgotten the milk. Then Anna had asked for an apple and Kate had told her to get one herself.

‘Can you peel it for me?’

You can peel your own apples.

The words tumbled out, hard, unbending, exhausted. Just a peeled apple. What would it have taken to peel that apple for Anna? Thirty seconds, tops. Instead she spoke unkindly. And then a little over three years later, maybe, what, a thousand days at the most, Anna was snatched away from her. A thousand days. It sounds a lot. It’s not; not if that paltry number of days is all a mother has left with her child. If only she had known. If she had, she never would have snapped. Or told her to peel her own. She would have smiled and kissed her. Taken the apple and peeled it, careful to take off every bit of skin. Then she would have cut it into the neatest eighths and arranged them on a plate to look like a flower. And she would have given her the plate and smiled and maybe kissed her forehead gently.

If only she had known.

If only she had known, Kate would have peeled and sliced her an apple every day they had left together. Every one of those thousand days. One thousand apples. Just for Anna.

The Tortoiseshell Comb: Part One

‘Is everything OK?’ asked Jon, as soon as his mother opened her door. Her eyes were puffed and reddened, and he guessed she’d been crying for quite some hours.

She tried to smile but her skin seemed too taut to allow it. She didn’t say anything, just turned and walked down the hallway, her shoes tapping on the chequerboard tiles on which he and Dan used to play toy soldiers – Jon’s small regimented army always on the lookout for Dan’s renegade snipers. He hovered, unsure, on the doorstep. He had no idea of what waited, and worry dripped steadily into the pit of his stomach as he willed himself over the threshold. He wiped his feet on the sisal mat and shook the water off his jacket. Just running the short distance from the car to the front door had been enough to soak him.

In the kitchen his mother leant against the sink. She wore immaculate black slacks and a pink cashmere sweater, her white hair put up, as it always was, in a neat bun held in place by her tortoiseshell comb. Her back faced him. Both hands gripped the stainless steel, but there was a slump in her body, a looseness to her limbs; she looked beaten. It was the first time he’d seen her anything other than stoically composed, with the starched upper lip that defined that certain sector of her generation. But now she was shattered like a mirror, broken and tear-stained, barely recognizable. It unnerved him. He looked around for hints of what was wrong, but nothing seemed amiss; the kitchen looked exactly the same as it always had. Of course it would do; as far as he could remember, nothing in the house had changed in forty years. The upright Bechstein in the corner topped with books and papers. The copper saucepans hanging above the antique butcher’s block. The collection of china jugs lined up in height order on the window sill. All unchanged for as long as Jon could remember. The oak farmhouse table – so out of place in their detached townhouse in the smarter part of Chiswick – still held his father’s disorder (piles and piles of papers, a collection of obscure works by eminent French economists here, dog-eared paperbacks of unknown Russian literary geniuses there) organized by his mother as best she could. Every room in the house, including the kitchen, was essentially overflow from the room his father called a study and his mother called the library. He smiled to himself. How had two such contrasting personalities spent so many years living in such apparent harmony? It never ceased to amaze him. Everything about her screamed order, cleanliness and aspiration; everything about his father was bookish, distractable chaos.

Jon rested a gentle hand on his mother’s. She was so warm, just as he remembered her as a child. Always warm. Like a splendid hot-water bottle, his father used to say with a grin.

‘Is it my father?’ Jon asked her.

Even as the words came out of his mouth he wished he could haul them back in. What if she nodded? What if his father was dead and he had to deal with the aftermath? He wasn’t sure he had sufficient energy for that today.

She turned to face him; her eyes were soft beneath a film of tears.

‘He’s fine. It’s just . . .’ She hesitated. ‘I’m just so tired.’

Then she shook her head.

The shake dislodged her tortoiseshell comb, and as it slipped her snow-queen hair came loose. She closed her eyes and pulled the comb fully out and placed it between her lips. She began to smooth her hair back into its proper place, but then she seemed to run out of steam, and her trembling hands fell to her sides. Without a word, Jon stepped towards her and took the comb from her mouth, then rested it beside the sink. He turned her around. She moved without resistance. He stroked her hair, which had aged to the finest strands of bleached silk, and gathered a new ponytail with the experienced hand of a father of daughters. He twisted the ponytail up against her head and pushed the comb into place. Then he lightly touched his fingers to the tortoiseshell. He had always loved the comb. His mother told him often how it had been passed down to her by her grandmother, and to her from an allegedly wild and unknown great-great-grandmother.

‘How this comb could tell stories,’ his mother used to say. ‘Palaces, castles, even a prince’s bedchamber.’ And Jon would beg her to tell him. He would sit next to her, gazing at the comb, listening to those tales of passion and daring, fascinated by the way the light caught the milky mother-of-pearl inlays, setting their green and purple glinting. He stared at the comb now; all those decades and barely a scratch.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

She turned back and he stepped closer and tentatively put his arms around her. The last time they’d held each other was the morning after the night Anna fell. Standing there, trying to give her comfort, he was suddenly overcome with memories of that morning. Breaking the news to his parents, his mother’s stoicism, his father’s lack of comprehension. Jon gripped her harder, not for her but for himself – he felt weak, as if he might crumple and bring them both to the floor. He tried to stand tall, but even as he did, he felt the strength in his backbone seep out of him into the ground. Her body stiffened and she pulled away from him, a cool mask set over her face. She pressed the corners of her eyes with the neatly pressed handkerchief that nestled in the sleeve of her cardigan.