Windfallen (39 page)

Seventy-two hours later Lottie thought she would never be taken aback by anything again in her life.

Now she lay in her bed, dimly aware of the heat, the mosquitoes attracted by the animal scents of blood and pain still lingering in the room, her eyes fixed on the tiny, perfectly formed face in front of her. Her daughter looked like she was sleeping—her eyes were closed—but her mouth shaped small secrets into the night air.

Lottie had never known anything like this: the wrenching joy that came from indescribable pain, the disbelief that she, plain old Lottie Swift, a girl who no longer even existed, could have created anything this perfect, this beautiful. A reason, far greater than anything she could have imagined, to live.

She looked like Guy.

She looked like Guy.

Lottie bent her head to her daughter’s and spoke so quietly that only she could hear. “I will be everything to you,” she said. “You will miss nothing. You will feel the lack of nothing. I promise I will make sure I am enough for you.”

“She has skin the color of camellias,” Adeline had said, her eyes filled with tears. And Lottie, who had never fancied Jane or Mary or any of the other names suggested by Adeline’s magazines, had named her daughter.

Adeline didn’t go to bed. Mme Migot had left only after midnight, George was coming in the morning, perhaps with Frances, and she would not be able to sleep. They sat together through that first long night, Lottie wide-eyed and wondrous, Adeline napping gently in the chair beside her, occasionally waking to stroke either the baby’s impossibly soft head or Lottie’s arm, in congratulation.

At sunrise Adeline raised herself stiffly from the armchair and announced that she would make tea. Lottie, still holding her baby in her arms and craving a hot, sweet drink, was grateful; every time she moved, her body ached and bled, new, obscene pains shooting through her, cramps an echo of the terrifying hours before. Bleary and blissful despite everything, she thought she might as well stay in this bed forever.

Adeline opened the shutters, letting in the luminous blue glow of the dawn and stretching in front of it, both arms raised in salute. The room was subtly filled with the gentle lights and sounds of their surroundings, cattle making their way slowly up a hillside, a cockerel crowing, and, underlying them all, the crickets whirring like tiny clockwork toys.

“It is cooler, Lottie. Can you feel the breeze?”

Lottie closed her eyes and felt it caress her face. It felt, briefly, like Merham.

“Things will be better now, you’ll see.”

Adeline turned to her, and for a moment, perhaps weakened by childbirth and exhaustion, Lottie thought her the most exquisite thing she had ever seen. Adeline’s face was bathed in a phosphorescent glow, her sharp green eyes softened and made uncharacteristically vulnerable by what she had just witnessed. Lottie’s own eyes filled with tears; unable to express the love she suddenly felt, she could only reach out a trembling hand.

Adeline took it and kissed it, holding it to her cool, smooth cheek. “You are lucky, dearest Lottie. You have not had to wait your lifetime.”

Lottie glanced down at her sleeping daughter and nodded, allowing the tears of grief and gratitude to drop heavily onto the pale silk shawl.

They were interrupted by the sound of an approaching car, their heads rising like startled, feral animals. As the door slammed, Adeline was already upright and alert.

“Frances!” she said, and, Lottie temporarily forgotten, she abruptly stood and made a brief attempt to straighten her crumpled silk dress, to smooth her unruffled hair. “Oh, my goodness, we have no food, Lottie! What will we give them for breakfast?”

“I . . . I’m sure she won’t mind waiting a bit . . . once she knows. . . .” Lottie couldn’t have cared less about breakfast. Her baby stirred, a tiny hand briefly curling around the air.

“No, no, of course you are right. We have coffee and some fruit from yesterday. And the boulangerie will be open soon—I can walk down once they are settled. Perhaps they will want to sleep, if they have traveled all night. . . .”

Lottie watched Adeline whirling around the room, her customary stillness abandoned for a kind of childish nervousness, an inability either to sit or to focus on any task at hand.

“Do you think I am fair to ask this of her?” said Adeline, suddenly turning to Lottie. “Do you think I am selfish to make her come back to me?”

Lottie, dumbstruck, could only shake her head.

“Adeline?” George’s loud voice broke through the silence of the house like a gunshot. Lottie found herself involuntarily flinching, fearful already of waking her baby. “Are you there?”

He appeared in the doorway, dark and unshaven, his customary linen trousers crumpled like old cabbage leaves. His very appearance shot Lottie through with a sense of foreboding, the sweetness and silence of the new dawn already swept away by his presence.

Adeline, oblivious, ran to him.

“George, how marvelous. How
marvelous
. Have you brought her? Is she with you?” She raised herself on tiptoe to look over his shoulder, finally stilled as she strained for the sound of further footfall.

She stepped back, examined his face. “George?”

Lottie, looking at the blackness of George’s eyes, found herself suddenly chilled.

“George?” Adeline’s voice was quieter now, almost tremulous.

“She’s not coming, Adeline.”

“But I wrote . . . you said . . .”

George, apparently oblivious to Lottie and the new baby, placed his arm around Adeline’s waist, took her hand with the other. “You need to sit down, dearest.”

“But why? You said you would find her. I knew that after this letter she couldn’t—”

“She’s not coming, Adeline.”

George sat her on the chair next to Lottie.

Knelt down. Held both her hands.

Adeline, wide-eyed, searched George’s face and slowly saw what Lottie, unencumbered by her own desperate needs, had already seen. “What is it?”

George closed his eyes, swallowed. “There’s been an accident, darling girl.”

“Is it driving? She is such a terrible driver, George. You know you should not let her behind a wheel.”

Lottie heard the growing terror behind Adeline’s gabbling and silently began to tremble, unnoticed by the two people beside her.

“Whose car is it this time? You will sort it out, George, won’t you? You always sort it out. I will get Julian to pay you back again. Is she hurt? Does she need anything?”

George lowered his head onto Adeline’s knees.

“You shouldn’t have come, George! You shouldn’t have left her! Not by herself. You know she is no good by herself—that is why I sent you to get her.”

His voice, when it came, was gruff, broken. “She . . . she’s dead.”

There was a lengthy pause.

“No,” said Adeline firmly.

George’s face was hidden, buried in her lap. But his hands clutched hers tighter, as if preventing her from movement.

“No,” she said again.

Lottie struggled to hold her tears. Clamped her hand across her mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” George croaked into her skirts.

“No,” Adeline said, and then, louder, “No. No. No.” And then her hands had broken out of George’s own, and she was batting at his head, swatting at him in a frenzy, her gaze unseeing, her face contorted. “NO, NO, NO, NO,” in an endless, determined shouting. And George was weeping and apologizing and clutching her legs, and Lottie, now lost in her own tears, her eyes blurred and stinging so that she could barely see, finally found the energy to drag herself and her baby out of the bed, heedless of the pain that was only physical, and, leaving a silent trail of blood and tears, she made her way slowly across the room and finally closed the door.

I
T WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT
. T
HE COASTGUARD KNEW THIS
because he was among those who had seen her, shouted to her. Sometime later he was one of the three men it took to pull her out. But mainly they knew because of Mrs. Colquhoun, who had been present for the whole thing and who was still suffering attacks of the vapors, almost a week later.

George told Adeline several hours after his arrival, when both had been fortified by cognac and Adeline, wearily, said she wanted to hear everything, every detail that he knew. She asked Lottie to sit with her, and even though Lottie would have much rather hidden upstairs with her baby, she sat rigid-faced and tense with apprehension as Adeline clutched her hand and periodically, violently, shook.

Unlike in life, in death Frances had been rather orderly. She had left Arcadia so uncharacteristically tidy that it had been easy for Marnie, who identified her, to tell she had been staying there. She had put on her awkward long skirt, the one with the willow pattern, pulled her dark hair into a neat bun, her elongated face set and resigned as she walked down the path toward the sea front.
I am so sorry
, she wrote in a letter.
But there is an emptiness just too great to be borne. I am so sorry
. Then, head held high, as if she were looking upon some distant point on the horizon, she had begun to walk, fully clothed, into the sea.

Mrs. Colquhoun, realizing that this was no ordinary early-morning swim, had shouted—she knew that Frances had heard her, as she very briefly glanced up and over at the cliff path—but then she simply increased her pace, as if aware that it might lead to an attempt to stop her. Mrs. Colquhoun had begun to run, had run all the way to the harbormaster’s house, trying to keep an eye on her all the time, watching Frances as she waded in up to her waist, her chest.

As she got deeper, some of the waves had got larger, one almost knocking her off her feet, half knocking her bun into long, sodden strands. But she kept walking. Even as Mrs. Colquhoun, her heel broken and her voice hoarse from shouting, banged upon the front door, she kept walking, a distant figure on some invisible course through the water.

The noise alerted two lobstermen, who had pitched out after her in a boat. By this time a small crowd of people, drawn by the noise, had assembled and were shouting at Frances to stop. There was some concern afterward that she might have thought they were angry and hastened her journey, but the coastguard said no, she was determined to do it. He had seen them like that before. You could pull them out, but you’d only find them hanging from a beam two days later.

George had wept at this point, and Lottie had watched as Adeline held his face, as if offering absolution.

Frances hadn’t even flinched as her head went under. She just kept walking, and then one wave came, two waves, and suddenly you couldn’t see her anymore. By the time the boat was far enough out in the harbor, she had been caught by the current. They found her body two days later in the estuary at Wrabness, her willow-patterned skirt wound around with entrails of weed.

“I was to meet her for dinner, you see? But I had to stay up at Oxford. I rang her to say I’d been invited out by this fellow, and she said I should go, Adeline. She said I should go.” His chest heaved, great snotty sobs wetting his clenched hands. “But I should have gone down, Adeline, I should have been there.”

“No,” said Adeline, her voice distant.
“I
should have been there. Oh, George, what have I done?”

I
T WAS ONLY IN RETROSPECT THAT
L
OTTIE REALIZED THAT
Adeline’s accent had changed during the telling of George’s story. Afterward, when she thought back, she realized that Adeline had stopped sounding French. In fact, she seemed to have no accent at all. Perhaps it was shock. Mrs. Holden used to say it could get you like that. She’d known a woman whose brother had been killed in the war and she had woken up with every hair on her head turned gray. (And not just her head, she’d added, blushing at her own audacity.)

L
OTTIE BARELY HAD TIME TO RECOVER FROM THE BIRTH
before she found that she had, in effect, become a mother of two. For in the first weeks of her child’s life, Adeline seemed to die a little. At first she refused to eat, wouldn’t rest, walked the gardens of the house weeping at all hours of the day or night. Once she walked the entire dusty road to the top of the mountain and was brought down, dazed and sun-scorched, by the old man who ran the refreshment stall at the summit. She cried out in her sleep, on the few occasions that she slept, and had begun to look frighteningly unlike herself: her sleek hair, her porcelain complexion muddied and spoiled by grief. “Why didn’t I trust her?” she would cry. “Why didn’t I listen? She always understood me better than anyone.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t to know,” Lottie would murmur, conscious as she did that her words were inadequate, mere platitudes that didn’t touch the surface of what Adeline was feeling. Adeline’s pain made her uncomfortable; it was too close to her own, a raw wound of emotion that she had almost managed to cover.

“But why did she have to prove it to me this way?” Adeline would wail. “I didn’t want to love her. I didn’t want to love anyone. She should have known it was unfair to ask.”

Or perhaps Lottie was just too emotionally exhausted by the demands of her baby. Camille was a “good baby,” as they were called. But then she had to be. Holding a desperate Adeline in her arms, Lottie could not always get up in time to comfort a crying newborn; when Lottie was trying to cook and clean around her grieving friend, Camille simply had to fit in with her tasks, button-eyed within her improvised sling, or sleep through the noise of rugs being beaten and kettles whistling.

As the weeks went past, Lottie became increasingly exhausted and despairing. Julian came but couldn’t quite cope with the emotional mess of it all. He signed some more money over to his wife, gave Lottie the keys to his car, and left for an art fair in Toulouse, taking the pale and silent Stephen with him. The other visitors dried up. George, having stayed the first two days and drunk himself into a coma, left with promises to return. Which he failed to keep.

“Look after her, Lottie,” he said, his eyes bloodshot and a half-established beard covering his chin. “Don’t let her do anything stupid.” She didn’t know whether his evident fear was for her welfare or his own.