THE TRYSTING TREE (29 page)

PHOEBE

Someone was banging at the back door. Phoebe had just closed her eyes for a few moments while she waited for Ann to return and the loud noise had startled her. Annoyed her too. Why was Ann knocking on the door when it wasn’t even locked?

Groaning, she hauled herself out of her armchair and reached for her stick. ‘All, right, all right! I’m coming,’ she grumbled as she shuffled into the kitchen. Yanking the door open, she protested, ‘Why on earth didn’t you—’ but the question died on her lips as Connor almost fell into the kitchen carrying Ann, who was whimpering, her eyes wild. ‘For God’s sake, Connor, what happened! Is she all right?’

His face almost as pale as Ann’s, Connor gasped, ‘She knows! Her memory’s come back. She
knows
, Phoebe! And you know too, don’t you?’

She blinked at him, unsure whether he was angry or just afraid. ‘Yes. I know,’ she admitted. ‘I hoped Ann never would.’

Connor staggered into the kitchen and shut the door behind him with a vicious kick. ‘Call a doctor. She’s in shock. I’m putting her to bed and I’m going to sit with her until a doctor’s seen her. Make a hot water bottle. And some tea. But ring for a doctor first.’ He didn’t wait for a reply, but pushed past Phoebe and mounted the stairs, carrying Ann.

Phoebe fetched the phone from the hall and sat at the kitchen table to make the call. Someone took her message and said a doctor would ring back shortly. She laid the phone down, went over to the sink and filled the kettle. As she leaned against the worktop, waiting for the water to boil, her eyes fell on the fish pie Ann had made.

Phoebe turned the oven off and buried her face in her hands.

~

By the time the doctor came, Ann was calmer, but still unable to speak, so Connor described what had happened. Phoebe explained that she thought her daughter had probably experienced a flashback to the time she found her father’s body hanging in the wood.

The doctor administered a sedative and said Ann would need rest and, when she was ready, she might benefit from counselling. He assured them that she had suffered no physical harm, but her mind would need time to recover. Registering Phoebe’s infirmity, he asked if she would be able to cope on her own. She scoffed at his concern until Connor intervened to say he would ensure both women had all the help they needed.

He saw the doctor out and when he returned to Ann’s room, he found Phoebe sitting slumped by the bed, gazing at her daughter’s face. As he arranged a chair on the other side of the bed, Phoebe whispered, ‘This will be the first decent night’s sleep she’s had in ages. Poor thing.’ She lifted a hand towards Ann’s head, but appeared to change her mind. ‘Better not disturb her,’ Phoebe whispered. ‘The doc said she needs to rest.’

‘I’m going to sit up with her all night, so if you want to get some sleep, that’s fine by me. I can call you if she wakes.’

‘I’m not tired. I want to be here if she wakes up. That’s the least I can do,’ Phoebe added ruefully. ‘There’s a fish pie downstairs. Are you hungry?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘No. I feel like I’ll never be hungry again.’ She shook her head. ‘But Ann went to such a lot of trouble to make it. All for you. She’s very fond of you, you know.’

‘Yes. And I’m very fond of her.’

Phoebe studied the sleeping face. ‘She was a beautiful little girl. Exquisite. And so intense. That’s the Madeiran blood. She was her father’s daughter.’

‘Why did he do it, Phoebe? I’d like to understand. I think I might be more use to Ann if I knew what actually happened.’

She sat in silence for some moments, staring into space, her face blank. Eventually she said, ‘I suppose I might as well tell you. I haven’t spoken of it in… forty years.’ She sat back and folded her arms. Fixing her eyes on a point in the middle of the floor, Phoebe said, ‘The marriage was already over by then. There had been a stupid row... I might have been a bit drunk. I went to bed and took a sleeping pill, so I knew nothing till Ann woke me up the following morning, pulling at the bedclothes, hysterical.’

‘Did she see him
die
?’

‘No, thank God. The post-mortem established the time of death. He’d been dead for hours when she found him.’

‘Did Sylvester suffer from depression?’

‘Oh, yes. He’d always had a tendency to mood swings. He was mercurial. Unbearable in the winter. You’d think we were living in Siberia, the fuss he used to make about the weather! So I encouraged him to spend time abroad, for the good of his health and the business. He imported wine and he was away a lot. Well, I’m not faithful by nature and I’m easily bored. Opportunities presented themselves… I’m not proud of what I did, but they were just flings, not relationships. They meant very little to me. Sylvester was the only man I ever loved, but he found that hard to believe. He couldn’t understand
hurting
people you loved… But just look at what
he
did! What he did to Ann and me! Yet I know he really loved us. He was ill, you see. Very ill. And I had no idea… It took me a long time to forgive him, but in the end I did. I’m still working on forgiving myself.’

‘He found out you’d been unfaithful?’

‘No, he didn’t suspect a thing! He was a trusting soul. No, it was more complicated than that and I didn’t handle it well… I had an abortion, you see. Sylvester was furious. Heartbroken. He’d wanted another child for years and I’d refused. This one was an accident, but he’d guessed I was pregnant. I was throwing up and couldn’t work. So I got rid of it. In Sylvester’s eyes that was murder. I’d murdered a child,
his
child. I should have left it at that, said no more, but I thought the truth might make things easier for him.’

‘I’m guessing it didn’t.’

Phoebe looked at Ann and murmured, ‘When does the truth ever make anything easier?’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him the truth, which was that the baby wasn’t even his.’ Connor winced. ‘What else could I say? I didn’t want him thinking
he’d
lost a child. He hadn’t.’

‘But he took it badly?’

‘The marriage didn’t recover. Nor did Sylvester. He moved into the spare room and started putting things in order. Filing. Accounts. I assumed he was preparing to leave me, which was what I deserved, so I didn’t say anything. Nor did he. We both suffered in silence.’

‘You didn’t realise he was cracking up?

‘No, I was used to his black moods They’d always passed. Eventually.’

‘And Ann knew nothing of all this?’

‘She was only five. If she’d overheard anything, she wouldn’t have understood. But I should have seen it coming. It was all too much for him. The abortion. The infidelity. I think he even began to doubt whether Ann was his child. But he said nothing, just went quietly mad. Towards the end he was very tender with Ann. Spent a lot of time with her. I thought he was trying to compensate for landing her with a monster for a mother, but he was saying goodbye. He wanted her to have good memories of him. And he succeeded. She didn’t remember any of what came afterwards. Until today.’

‘Why didn’t you ever tell her what had happened to him?’

‘I couldn’t explain because she’d forgotten! How do you tell a five-year-old her Dad has hanged himself, if her brain is telling her it didn’t happen? Everyone said her memory would come back eventually, so I just played along. What else could I do? I was beside myself. Don’t you see, I loved Sylvester and I’d
killed
him!’

‘No, Phoebe.’

‘As good as! I drove him to suicide.’

‘That tendency must have been there already. Plenty of men have survived unfaithful wives. You might have contributed to his depression, but you weren’t responsible for his death.’

‘It’s very kind of you to say so, Connor, but I haven’t changed my mind in forty years. I’m guilty as hell.’

He regarded Phoebe’s ravaged face and said gently, ‘How did you cope with Ann – after she found him?’

‘She had hysterics, then she went to sleep. Out like a light. She slept for a very long time, then when she woke up, she seemed all right. Normal, almost. I remember she was very hungry, but she said nothing about Sylvester. So I rang Dagmar – she’s my agent – and asked her to come and take Ann back to London for a few days. She’d been to Dagmar’s flat before and knew her well, so I made out this was a special treat and told Dagmar to spoil her rotten. The minute Ann was gone, I took the damn swing down.’ Phoebe looked up, her eyes filling with tears. ‘He must have stood on it… before he jumped.’

‘That’s why Ann had the flashback. She saw me standing on a swing.’ Phoebe looked perplexed. ‘I made one for her. As a present.’

‘Oh God, you didn’t!’ Phoebe exclaimed.

Ann stirred and they watched her sleeping figure anxiously until she settled again.

Connor sighed. ‘I had no idea what a swing would mean to Ann.’

‘No, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry, that was stupid of me.’

‘I’d hung it in the wood and I was testing it for weight. I wanted to make sure it was safe.’ He bowed his head and looked at his hands. ‘If I hadn’t made that swing—’

‘No, don’t blame yourself! It’s probably better she knows what happened. It was a brain bomb waiting to go off at any time.’

‘When she came back from London, did she ask about the swing?’

‘No, that’s what was so very odd. She didn’t mention the disappearance of the swing, but if she’d wiped the incident
completely
, she would have asked what happened to it, wouldn’t she?’

‘Did she ever mention it?’

‘No, never. Then after she’d been home for a few days, she asked me when Daddy was coming home. That’s when I realised. She didn’t remember anything. I didn’t know what to say, so I just played for time. I concocted some story about Sylvester going away for a long time. Abroad, for work. She asked me again and I stuck to my story, then after a few weeks, I told her Daddy wouldn’t be coming home any more. She asked if we were getting divorced. God knows where she’d heard the word. School, I suppose. I didn’t even know if she knew what it meant, but I said, yes, we were. I told her Daddy had decided he didn’t want to live with us any more – which was true. I said he’d gone away and I didn’t know even where he was – which was also true, in a way. It seemed the kindest thing to say. She was so very young and her brain seemed to be protecting her from the horror, so I thought I should too. I knew I’d have to come clean one day, but I thought it could wait until she was older, until she had a chance of understanding why Sylvester did what he did. Somehow the opportunity never arose. Then once she was an adult, I didn’t want to tell her because…’ Phoebe hesitated.

‘Because of the abortion.’

‘Yes. She and Jack went through so much trying to conceive a child. How could I tell Ann I got rid of a baby with scarcely a second thought? It just became impossible to talk about it,
any
of it. There were so many lies! Eventually the lies were so old, they seemed like the truth.’

Ann stirred again, tossing her head back and forth on the pillow.

‘I think she’s surfacing,’ Phoebe hissed.

‘Maybe she’s thirsty.’

‘Hungry more likely. It’s been hours since she ate anything and she only grabbed a bite at lunchtime.’

They continued to watch as she rolled over in bed, mumbling. Connor thought he caught his name, then decided he’d imagined it. As Ann’s eyelids began to flicker, he said in an urgent undertone, ‘You have to tell her, Phoebe. All of it. She has to understand what happened. She
will
understand, if you tell her.’

She stared at him, dull-eyed and exhausted. ‘You really think so?’

‘You treated Sylvester badly, but not Ann. You never did anything other than try to protect her from the trauma of what she’d witnessed, but couldn’t possibly understand.’

‘She might not see it like that.’

‘Maybe she won’t, but you still have to tell her.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve always known… I think perhaps you’d better leave us now, Connor. Would you mind? I’d like to be alone with my daughter.’

‘Of course.’

‘You might bring me a whisky. In a while. Not yet. And pour one for yourself. It’s been a long day.’

He got to his feet, still watching Ann. ‘I’ll put that pie in the oven. She’d want us to eat it, wouldn’t she?’

‘Oh, yes! She made it with such loving care. She had to make an extra trip to the supermarket because she’d run out of nutmegs. I said you wouldn’t have noticed.’

‘Damn right I wouldn’t.’

‘Ann said that wasn’t the point. She wanted to do it
properly
.’ Phoebe shook her head. ‘I love that in her. Her
thoroughness
. The attention to detail. It’s beautiful.’

‘You should tell her.’

‘I will when she wakes up. I’ll tell her everything… You won’t forget to bring me that whisky, will you? I’m going to need it. Gin for the good times, whisky for the bad times, eh?’

Connor was almost out of the room when he heard a sharp intake of breath and the rustle of bedclothes. He spun round to see Ann sitting up in bed, staring at Phoebe.