Louise blinked, slowly, and her gaze finally came to rest on Lena, who held it for a second before looking down at the table.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Whittaker. I’m really sorry.”
Louise said nothing. Tears coursed down the lines of her face, in runnels carved from months of unrelenting grief.
“I’m so sorry,” Lena repeated. She was crying too now, letting her hair down again, twisting it through her fingers like a little girl.
“I wonder if you’ll ever know,” Louise said at last, “how it feels to realize that you didn’t know your own child.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I have all her things. Her clothes, her books, her music. The pictures she treasured. I know her friends and the people she admired, I know what she loved. But that wasn’t her. Because I didn’t know who she loved. She had a life—a whole life—that I didn’t know about. The most important part of her, I didn’t know.” Lena tried to speak, but Louise went on. “The thing is, Lena, that you could have helped me. You could have told me about it. You could have told me when you first found out. You could have come to me and told me that my daughter had got herself caught up in something, something she couldn’t control, something you knew, you must have known, would end up being harmful to her.”
“But I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .” Again Lena tried to say something, and again Louise wouldn’t let her.
“Even if you were blind enough or stupid enough or careless enough not to see how much trouble she was in, you could still have helped me. You could have come to me after she died and said, this isn’t something you did or didn’t do. This isn’t your fault, this isn’t your husband’s fault. You could have stopped us from driving ourselves mad. But you didn’t. You chose not to. All that time, you said nothing. All this time, you . . . And worse, even worse than that, you let him . . .” Her voice rose and then disappeared into the air, like smoke.
“Get away with it?” Lena finished the sentence. She was no longer crying, and although her voice rose, it was strong, not weak. “Yes. I did, and it made me sick. It made me fucking sick, but I did it for her. Everything I have done, I did for Katie.”
“Don’t you say her name to me,” Louise hissed. “Don’t you dare.”
“Katie, Katie, Katie!” Lena was half on her feet, leaning forward, her face inches from Louise’s nose. “Mrs. Whittaker”—she collapsed back into her seat—“I loved her. You know how much I loved her. I did what she wanted me to do. I did what she asked of me.”
“It wasn’t your decision, Lena, to keep something as important as that from me, her mother—”
“No, it wasn’t my decision, it was hers! I know you think you have the right to know everything, but you don’t. She wasn’t a child, she wasn’t a little girl.”
“She was my little girl!” Louise’s voice was a wail, a ululation. I realized I was gripping the counter, that I, too, was about to cry.
Lena spoke again, her voice softer now, supplicating. “Katie made a choice. She made a decision and I honoured it.” More gently still, as though knowing she was moving onto dangerous ground, “And I’m not the only one. Josh did, too.”
Louise drew back her hand and hit Lena once, very hard, across the face. The smack resounded, echoing off the walls. I leaped forward and grabbed Louise’s arm. “No!” I shouted. “That’s enough! That’s enough!” I tried to pull her to her feet. “You need to go.”
“Leave her!” Lena snapped. The left side of her face was an angry red, but her expression was calm. “Stay out of it, Julia. She can hit me if she wants. She can scratch my eyes out, pull my hair. She can do whatever she wants to me. What does it matter now?”
Louise’s mouth was open, I could smell her sour breath. I let go.
“Josh didn’t say anything because of you,” she said, wiping spittle from her lips. “Because you told him not to say anything.”
“No, Mrs. Whittaker.” Lena’s tone was perfectly even as she placed the back of her right hand against her cheek to soothe it. “That isn’t true. Josh kept his mouth shut because of Katie. Because she asked him to. And then later on, because he wanted to protect you and his dad. He thought that it would hurt you too much. To know that she’d been . . .” She shook her head. “He’s young, he thought—”
“Don’t tell me what my son thought,” Louise said. “What he was trying to do. Just don’t.” She raised her hand to her throat—a reflex. No, not a reflex: she was gripping the blue bird that hung on her chain between thumb and forefinger. “This,” she said, a hiss, not a word. “It wasn’t from you, was it?” Lena hesitated for a moment before shaking her head. “It was from him. Wasn’t it? He gave it to her.” Louise pushed her chair back, scraping its feet across the tiles. She pulled herself upright and with a vicious tug ripped the chain from her neck, slamming it down on the table in front of Lena. “He gave that thing to her, and you let me hang it around my neck.”
Lena closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head again. The meek, apologetic girl who’d crept into the kitchen a few minutes ago was gone and in her stead sat someone different, someone older, the adult to Louise’s desperate, intemperate child. All at once I had the clearest memory of you, a little younger than Lena is now, one of the few memories I have of you sticking up for me. There was a teacher at my school who had accused me of taking something that didn’t belong to me, and I remembered you admonishing her. You were clear-sighted and cool, and you didn’t raise your voice when you told her how wrong she was to make accusations without evidence, and she was cowed by you. I remembered how proud I was of you then, and I had the same feeling here, the same sensation of heat in my chest.
Louise began to speak again, her voice very low. “Explain this to me, then,” she said, sitting back down, “since you know so much. Since you understand so much. If Katie loved that man, and if he loved her back, then why? Why did she do what she did? What did he do to her? To drive her to that?”
Lena turned her gaze to me. She looked afraid, I think, or maybe just resigned—I couldn’t quite read her expression. She watched me for a second before closing her eyes, squeezing tears out of them. When she spoke again, her voice was higher, tighter than before.
“He didn’t drive her to that. It wasn’t him.” She sighed. “Katie and I argued,” she said. “I wanted her to stop it, to stop seeing him. I didn’t think it was right. I thought she was going to get into trouble. I thought . . .” She shook her head. “I just didn’t want her to see him anymore.”
A flash of understanding crossed Louise’s face; she understood, in that moment, as did I.
“You threatened her,” I said. “With exposure.”
“Yes,” Lena said, barely audible. “I did.”
• • •
LOUISE LEFT WITHOUT A WORD. Lena sat motionless, staring at the river outside the window, not crying and not speaking. I had nothing to say to her, no way of reaching her. I recognized in her something I know I used to have, too, something maybe everyone has at that age, some essential unknowability. I thought how odd it was that parents believe they know their children, understand their children. Do they not remember what it was like to be eighteen, or fifteen, or twelve? Perhaps having children makes you forget being one. I remember you at seventeen and me at thirteen, and I’m certain that our parents had no idea who we were.
“I lied to her.” Lena’s voice broke my train of thought. She hadn’t moved, she was still watching the water.
“Lied to who? To Katie?” She shook her head. “To Louise? What did you lie about?”
“There’s no point telling her the truth,” Lena said. “Not now. She may as well blame me. At least I’m around. She needs somewhere to put all that hate.”
“What do you mean, Lena? What are you talking about?”
She turned her cold green eyes on mine, and she looked older than before. She looked the way you did the morning after you
’d pulled me from the water. Changed, weary. “I didn’t threaten to tell anyone. I would never have done that to her. I loved her. None of you seem to get what that means. It’s like you don’t know what love is at all. I would have done anything for her.”
“So, if you didn’t threaten her . . .”
I think I knew the answer before she said it. “It was Mum,” she said.
JULES
The room felt colder; if I believed in spirits I would have said that you’d joined us.
“We did argue, like I said. I didn’t want her to see him anymore. She said she didn’t care what I thought, that it didn’t matter. She said that I was immature, that I didn’t understand what it was like to be in a real relationship. I called her a slut, she called me a virgin. It was that sort of fight. Stupid, horrible. When Katie left, I realized that Mum was in her room right next door—I’d thought she was out. She’d overheard the whole thing. She told me she had to speak to Louise about it. I begged her not to, I told her it would ruin Katie’s whole life. So then she said maybe the best thing was to talk to Helen Townsend, because after all Mark was the one doing something wrong, and Helen is his boss. She said maybe they could get him fired but keep Katie’s name out of it. I told her that was stupid, and she knew it was. They wouldn’t just be able to fire him, it would have to be done officially. The police would get involved. It would go to court. It would be made public. And even if Katie’s name wasn’t in the papers, her parents would find out, everyone at school would know . . . That stuff doesn’t stay private.” She took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “I told Mum at the time, I said Katie would rather die than go through that.”
Lena leaned forward and opened the kitchen window, then fished around in the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke out into the air. “I begged her. I mean it, I actually begged, and Mum told me that she’d have to think about it. She said that I had to convince Katie to stop seeing him, that it was an abuse of power and that it was totally wrong. She promised me that she wouldn’t do anything without giving me time to persuade Katie.” She crushed her barely smoked cigarette on the windowsill and flicked it towards the water.
“I believed her. I trusted her.” She turned to face me again. “But then a couple of days later I saw Mum in the car park at school, talking to Mr. Henderson. I don’t know what they were talking about, but it didn’t look friendly, and I knew I had to say something to Katie, just in case, because she needed to know, she needed to be prepared . . .” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed. “She died three days later.”
Lena sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “The thing is, when we talked about it afterwards, Mum swore she never even mentioned Katie to Mark Henderson. She said they were arguing about me, about problems I was having in class.”
“So . . . Lena, hang on, I don’t understand. You’re saying your mum didn’t threaten them with exposure?”
“I couldn’t understand it either. She swore she hadn’t said anything, but she felt so guilty, I could see it. I knew that it was my fault, but she kept acting like it was hers. She stopped swimming in the river, and she became obsessed with telling the truth, she kept going on and on about it, how it was wrong to be afraid of facing the truth, of letting people know the truth, she just went on and on.”
(I wasn’t sure if that was odd or perfectly consistent: you didn’t tell the truth, you never did—the stories you’d been telling weren’t the truth, they were your truth, your agenda. I should know. I’ve been on the dirty side of your truth most of my life.)
“But she didn’t, did she? She never told anyone or wrote about Mark Henderson. In her . . . story about Katie, there’s no mention of him.”
Lena shook her head. “No, because I wouldn’t let her. We fought and fought and I kept telling her I would have loved to see that piece of shit go to prison, but it would have broken Katie’s heart. And it would have meant that she did what she did for nothing.” She gulped. “I mean, I know. I know what Katie did was stupid, fucking pointless, but she died to protect him. And if we went to the police, that would mean her death meant nothing. But Mum just kept going on about the truth, how it was irresponsible to just let things go. She was . . . I don’t know.” She looked up at me, her gaze as cool as the one with which she’d fixed Louise, and said, “You would know all this, Julia, if you’d only spoken to her.”
“Lena, I’m sorry, I am sorry about that, but I still don’t see why—”
“Do you know how I know my mother killed herself? Do you know how I know for sure?” I shook my head. “Because on the day she died, we had a fight. It started over nothing, but it ended up being about Katie, like everything did. I was yelling at her and calling her a bad mother and saying that if she’d been a good parent she could have helped us, helped Katie, and then none of this would have happened. And she told me she had tried to help Katie, that she’d seen her walking home late one day and had stopped to offer her a ride. She said Katie was all upset and wouldn’t say why, and Mum said, You don’t have to go through this by yourself. She said, I can help you. And, Your mum and dad can help you, too. When I asked her why she’d never told me about that before, she wouldn’t say. I asked her when it happened and she said, Midsummer, June the twenty-first. Katie went to the pool that night. Without meaning to, it was Mum who tipped her over the edge. And so, like that, Katie tipped Mum over the edge, too.”
A wave of sadness hit me, a swell so forceful I thought it might knock me from my chair. Was that it, Nel? After all this, you did jump, and you did it because you felt guilty and you despaired. You despaired because you had no one to turn to—not your angry, grieving daughter and certainly not me, because you knew that if you called, I wouldn’t answer. Did you despair, Nel? Did you jump?
I could feel Lena watching me, and I knew that she could see my shame, could see that finally I got it, I understood that I, too, was to blame. But she didn’t look triumphant or satisfied, she just looked tired.
“I didn’t tell the police any of this, because I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want anyone to blame her—more than they already do, in any case. She didn’t do it out of hate. And she suffered enough, didn’t she? She suffered things she shouldn’t have, because it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t hers or mine.” She gave me a small, sad smile. “It wasn’t yours. It wasn’t Louise’s or Josh’s. It wasn’t our fault.”
I tried to embrace her, but she pushed me away. “Don’t,” she said. “Please, I just . . .” She tailed off. Her chin lifted. “I need to be by myself. Just for a bit. I’m going to go for a walk.”
I let her leave.
NICKIE
Nickie did as Jeannie told her to, she went to talk to Lena Abbott. The weather had cooled, a hint of autumn coming early, so she wrapped herself up in her black coat, stuffed the pages into the inside pocket and walked across to the Mill House. But when she got there, she found that there were other people around, and she was in no mood for a crowd. Especially not after what the Whittaker woman said, about how all she cared about was money and exploiting people’s grief, which wasn’t fair at all. That was never what she intended—if only people would listen. She stood outside the house a while, watching, but her legs ached and her head was full of noise and so she turned around and walked all the way back home again. Some days she felt her age, and some days she felt her mother’s.
She had no stomach for the day, for the fight ahead. Back in her room, she dozed in her chair, then woke and thought that maybe she had seen Lena heading for the pool, but it might have been a dream or a premonition. Later, though, much later, in the dark, she was certain that she saw the girl, moving like a ghost through the square, a ghost with purpose, fairly whipping along. Nickie could feel the split of the air as she passed, the energy buzzing off her, she could feel it all the way up there in her dark little room and it lifted her, stripped the years back. That was
a girl on a mission. That girl had fire in her belly, she was a dangerous girl. The sort you don’t mess with.
Seeing Lena like that reminded Nickie of herself way back when; it made her want to get up and dance, made her want to howl at the moon. Well, her dancing days might be over, but, pain or no pain, she decided she would make it to the river that night. She wanted to feel them up close, all those troublesome women, those troublesome girls, dangerous and vital. She wanted to feel their spirit, to bathe in it.
She took four aspirin and got hold of her cane, then made her way slowly and carefully down the stairs, out the back door and into the alley behind the shops. She hobbled across the square towards the bridge.
It seemed to take a very long time; everything took so long these days. No one warned you about that when you were younger, no one told you how slow you would become, and how bored you would be by your slowness. She should have foreseen it, she supposed, and she laughed to herself in the dark.
Nickie could remember a time when she was fleet of foot, a whippet. Back then, when she was young, she and her sister ran races by the river, way upstream. They tore along, skirts tucked into their knickers, feeling every rock, every crevice in the hard ground through the soles of their flimsy plimsolls. Unstoppable, they were. Later, much later, older and a bit slower, they met in the same spot, upriver, and they walked together, sometimes for miles, often in silence.
It was on one of those walks that they spotted Lauren, sitting on the steps at Anne Ward’s place, a cigarette in her hand and her head leaning back against the door. Jeannie called out to her, and when Lauren looked up, they saw that the side of her face had all the colours of the sunset. “He’s a devil, her old man,” Jeannie had said.