فصل 50

CHAPTER 50

“Ooh, aren’t we lucky,” the nurse said, whipping aside Hal’s curtains.

“Lucky?” Hal croaked. Her head ached and her throat was still almost too painful to talk.

“Visitors. And a lovely bunch of flowers. Do you want a hand putting on your dressing gown?”

Hal shook her head, wondering who the visitors might possibly be. It was probably the police again, although she felt as if she had run through the events at Trepassen more times than she could count, certainly more times than her aching throat had been able to take. Though would the police really be carrying flowers?

The nurse had gone, bustling away up the corridor to another patient, so Hal sat up in bed, pulled her T-shirt straight, raked her fingers through her hair, and tried to prepare herself for whoever might come through the curtains of her cubical.

Even so, she was not prepared for the two people who came nervously down the hallway. Abel and Mitzi, Abel carrying a bunch of flowers almost bigger than himself, and Mitzi bearing what looked like a homemade cake.

“Hello, Harriet,” Abel said, rather tentatively, and Hal saw his throat move as he swallowed awkwardly. “I hope—I hope this is okay, I could understand . . .” He trailed off, and Mitzi stepped forwards, her pink face even pinker than usual.

“Frankly, Harriet, we can both quite understand if you don’t feel up to seeing anyone from Trepassen, so please don’t hesitate to say if you’d rather we went away. This is pure selfishness on my part—I was so anxious when I heard the news. Harding is at home with the children, and Abel kindly agreed to give me a lift—oh, no, Harriet, please don’t get up.” Hal was struggling out of bed, putting her shaky legs to the floor, and then she was in Mitzi’s arms, enveloped in a hug so hard and close she felt breathless with the force of it.

“Oh, my darling,” Mitzi was saying over and over. “Oh, my darling, what an ordeal, I can’t tell you—that vile, horrible man—I can’t even—” She broke off and sat back, wiping fiercely at her eyes with a corner of her Hermès scarf, and Abel stepped forwards.

He did not embrace her, or not exactly; he simply put a hand on either side of her shoulders, holding her gently, almost as if he feared she would break, looking at her with such sadness in his gray eyes that Hal felt a lump rise in her own throat.

“Oh, Harriet,” he said. “Can you forgive us?”

“Forgive you?” Hal tried to say, but the hoarseness in her throat broke up the words, and she had to swallow and try again before they understood her. “What should I forgive?” “Everything,” Abel said heavily. He sat opposite the head of Hal’s bed on the hard little chair, and Mitzi perched on the foot of the bed. “For letting you sleepwalk into this. For turning a blind eye for twenty years. I knew in my heart of hearts that something was wrong, we all did. But he was so charming, so funny when he wanted to be.” “None of you knew the truth, though?” Hal managed. It was a question, not a statement, and Abel shook his head.

“Mother knew. And . . . and I think so did Mrs. Warren, almost certainly.”

“Mrs. Warren?” Mitzi’s face was horrified. “She knew, and she said nothing?”

“She loved him,” Abel said simply. “And so did Mother, I think, in her own way. I suppose they felt . . .” He spread his hands. “What was done was done, after all. They couldn’t bring Maggie back. And they thought, perhaps—forgive me, Hal.” He took a breath. “I think perhaps they thought he had been . . . provoked. Beyond bearing. A crime of passion, in some way.” “Mrs. Warren knew,” Hal said. Her throat hurt and she took a sip of the water beside her bed. “It’s why he killed her. She tried to warn me. But I didn’t understand. I thought it was a threat. I thought she tried to trip me up down the stairs and frighten me away, but it was—” She stopped. What to say? It was Ezra? It was my father who did that, who set an opportunistic trap to stop me digging up my own past?

“And now she’s gone,” she finished. She felt numb with the futility of it. Maud, Maggie, even herself, she could understand. She could not forgive Ezra for what he had done, but she could understand it. He had killed out of rage and a kind of twisted love, and later to protect himself, to stop the truth from coming out. But Mrs. Warren . . . She thought of all the questions she still had—questions only Mrs. Warren could have answered—and she wanted to cry. Mrs. Warren’s face, that first day, came back to her—the image she had had of a child watching a cat stalk towards a group of unsuspecting pigeons, watching with a kind of horrified glee for the carnage that was to come. At the time she had thought the cat was Hal herself. Now she understood—the cat was Ezra. And Mrs. Warren had perhaps not expected what was to come—if she had, surely even she would have said something. But she saw the danger, and did nothing to stop it. The only person she had tried to warn was Hal herself.

Get out—if you know what’s good for you. While you still can . . .

“She was the only person left who knew the truth,” Hal said slowly. “And he knew . . . he knew that she was going to warn me. . . .” She thought back through the years, counting the bodies, falling like dominoes from that first moment of anger in the boathouse. And the last domino, Hal herself. Except . . . she hadn’t fallen. He had.

“Abel . . . Mitzi . . .” She stopped, groping for what to say, and in the end the only phrase that came was the clichéd perennial response to the unbearable: “I’m so sorry for your loss.” “And I for yours,” Mitzi said, and there was a kind of wisdom in her round, pink, horsey face that Hal would never have expected to find there, when they first met. An infinite compassion, beneath the self-satisfied façade. “He was your father.” It was not Hal who flinched at the word, but Abel, putting his face in his hands as though he could not bear it, so that Hal wanted to reach out, and tell him that it was okay, that it would all be okay. Whoever, whatever her father was—had been—she’d had not one but two remarkable mothers, women who had fought for her and protected her, and she was lucky in that.

But she could not find the words.

“When you’re better”—Mitzi patted the sheet over her knees—“we’ll have to get Mr. Treswick to come and see you again, Harriet.” “Mr. Treswick?”

“It seems . . . well, it seems as if Mrs. Westaway did know what she was doing when she drafted that will.” “Mr. Treswick has looked into it,” Abel said. “In view of what we know now, the wording is quite clear and unambiguous. That legacy is meant for you, Hal. It always was. The house is yours.” “What?”

The shock was so unexpected that the word slipped out, like an accusation, and then Hal could not think of anything more to say.

Abel was nodding.

“Mother knew you were her granddaughter. I think that’s very clear. And with the will . . . well, I think she wanted all of us to ask questions, start digging into the past. It’s what she meant, I think, by that line to Harding in her letter.” “Après moi, le déluge,” Hal said softly. And she finally understood what Mrs. Westaway had set in motion with her will. There had been malice, yes, but also cowardice. The truth had been a horror that she could not bear to face while she was alive. Instead her grandmother had waited until she herself was beyond pain—and unleashed this catastrophe on the living.

For a moment Hal imagined her lying there, bed-bound, waited on hand and foot by Mrs. Warren, and planning the cataclysm that was to come. Had she rubbed her hands as she signed that will, full of a bitter glee? Or had it been done with a weary resignation and pity for the living?

They would never know.

“What puzzles me,” Abel was saying slowly, “is why the hell Ezra wouldn’t agree to that deed of variation you suggested. It was the perfect get-out for him—an acceptance that you weren’t Mother’s granddaughter. I think Mother must have counted on you being as voracious and bloody-minded as the rest of us, and forcing the truth to come out in court. She never expected you to renounce your legacy without a fight. You were more noble than she could have imagined, Hal.” “I wasn’t noble,” Hal said. Her throat was sore, as if trying to stop her from saying the words, but she swallowed hard and forced them out, huskily. “I—I knew, when I got Mr. Treswick’s letter, that there had been a mistake. I let you think that I was as confused as the rest of you, but the truth was, I wasn’t. I came down here—” She stopped. Could she bear to do this? “I came down here to deceive you all. You don’t know—you can’t understand what it’s like, any of you, to struggle so much, to never know where the next month’s rent is coming from. You were rich, to me, and it felt like . . .” She stopped again, twisting the bedsheets with her fingers. “I felt like this was fate’s way of righting the scales, and a few thousand here or there would mean nothing to you—and everything to me. I was on the run from a loan shark.” How small and unimportant it seemed now, Mr. Smith and his small threats, in comparison with what she had survived. “And I only needed a few hundred pounds to make it all okay. I hoped—I hoped I could walk away with a little bit of money, and start again. It was only when I met you I realized I was wrong, and when I found out the legacy wasn’t something small, but the whole estate, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. But I think I know why Ezra wouldn’t agree to the deed of variation.” “Why is that?” Abel asked, and there was a kind of wariness in his tone, as if he couldn’t bear to be ambushed with more revelations. He looked, Hal thought, years older than when she had waved hello to him beneath the clock at Penzance station, but the pain and lines on his face somehow made the kindness in his eyes more apparent, and she felt ashamed of her suspicions, and that she could ever have thought poor Edward was behind all this.

“I think . . . I think he was worried that Harding would sell the house, and what they might find if he did. In the lake.” “What do you mean, Harriet?” Mitzi said. She leaned forwards, put her hand on Hal’s. “Did Ezra tell you something, before he died?” “I think my”—the word hurt, digging into her bruised throat—“my m-mother is still there, I think she’s buried in the boathouse, in the lake. Can you ask—” She swallowed again, and coughed, her throat raw with too much speaking. “Can you ask the police to dredge inside the boathouse?” “Oh God,” Abel whispered. “Oh my God. And Mother lived with that for twenty years.”

Silence fell on the little room, each of them bound up in their own thoughts, their own memories, their own horror.

Just then, there was the rattle of curtain rings, and a slanting ray of almost eye-hurtingly bright sunshine fell across the bed. In the opening of the curtains stood the brisk nurse from before.

“Visiting hours are over, I’m afraid, Mummy and Daddy,” she said, rather archly. “Bye-bye until tomorrow, if you please. And our young lady needs to rest her voice.” “Just—just one minute,” Abel said. There was a catch in his voice as he stood up, smoothing down his trousers, and Hal saw him blink as he smiled at her. “I’m sorry, Hal, it’s unconscionable of us keeping you talking for so long, I know it must be painful for you. But there’s one more thing I must give you before we go.” A pained look passed over his face, and he rummaged in his pocket, and pulled out a photocopied piece of paper. “I was of two minds about whether to show this to you, Harriet, but . . .” He held out the photocopied sheet.

“I gave the original to the police, but we found this in Mrs. Warren’s belongings. It’s . . . it’s a letter. There’s no need to read it now, but . . . well . . .” Hal took it, puzzled.

“Well, isn’t that lovely,” said the nurse. “But now it’s time for our patient to rest.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow, darling,” Mitzi said, and she bent and kissed Hal’s cheek. “And in the meantime, I know what hospital food is like.” She patted the tin she had set down on Hal’s bedside table. “Homemade coffee and walnut, help fatten you up a bit.” “Well, Mummy,” the nurse said. “Off we pop, for now. Oh, and if you could bring her day clothes when you come back tomorrow, Doctor has said she’s ready to be discharged, so you can take her straight home.” “Oh,” Hal said. She felt her heart sink, thinking of the long train journey back to Brighton, the cold little flat. . . . “I’m—Mitzi’s not my mother. I can’t, I mean, I don’t—I live alone.” “Don’t you have a friend who could come and stay?” the nurse said, looking a little shocked.

“I’m her aunt,” Mitzi said, drawing herself up to her not-terribly-full height, “and we would be delighted to take Harriet home to ours until she’s ready to return to her own flat. No!” She turned to Hal, silencing her openmouthed objections with a single look. “I don’t want to hear another word about it, Harriet. Good-bye, darling, we’ll come back with some clothes tomorrow. And in the meantime, I want every scrap of that cake eaten, or you will have me to deal with.” Hal watched them as they walked down the corridor, arm in arm, and she smiled at the companionable little wave Abel gave her as they turned the corner to the main ward; but in truth, when she lay back on her pillows, it was with relief, at being alone with her thoughts. She closed her eyes, feeling a great tiredness wash over her. The pain in her throat was a lot greater than she had let on to Mitzi and Abel, even without the horrifying range of possible outcomes the doctor had listed yesterday.

They ranged from the mild but worrying—like permanent harm to her vocal cords—through to the most serious of all: invisible damage to her brain from the lack of oxygen, or dislodged clots from broken blood vessels, which could cause strokes or even death weeks down the line. But that was very rare, the doctor had reassured her. Something to be aware of, but not to worry about, and in truth Hal was not worried—not anymore.

She was about to lie back on her pillow and close her eyes, when something crackled beneath her fingers, and she realized she was still holding the piece of paper Abel had passed to her. Slowly, she unfolded it.

It was a single page, covered in a long, looping handwriting so familiar that it made her breath catch in her throat. It was her mother’s writing. Not the rounded, unformed characters of the diary—but the writing she had grown up seeing on Christmas and birthday cards, on shopping lists and letters. Seeing it now, she wondered how she could ever have thought that the same hand had written the diary entries. There were similarities, certain peculiarities, a kind of superficial resemblance, but there was an energy and a determination in the handwriting of the letter that made her heart clench in her chest, with a painful recognition.

Mum.

As she tried to focus on the page, Hal realized that her eyes were swimming with tears. It was like hearing her mother’s voice unexpectedly—a shock in a way that the diary never had been.

She blinked furiously, and the letters swam into focus.

8th May, 2013

Dear Mother,

Thank you for your letter. And thank you too for the cheque you enclosed—I have put it towards a laptop for Harriet’s birthday—she’s hoping to go to university next year, so she badly needs one of her own.

However, this letter is not only to thank you. It’s also to warn you of something.

I am writing to let you know that I have decided to tell Hal the truth. She turns eighteen next week, and she deserves to know her own story, and I cannot hide behind my own cowardice any longer.

The fact is, I have been frightened of him for too long—frightened of what he might do to Maggie when we were at Trepassen, frightened of how he might stop us from escaping, frightened of him tracking us down, and frightened of what he had done to her when she didn’t return that last time. For I knew, Mother. I always knew. There is no way in the world Maggie would have left her newborn baby without a word. She went back there to face him, to fight for the future Hal deserved—and she didn’t return.

I have blamed you bitterly for your silence—and yet I’ve committed the same crimes myself. I could have told the police my suspicions. I could have asked them to dig in the grounds, or dredge the lake, or search the cellars. But if I had done that, I would have lost custody of Hal to Ezra, if they found nothing. And I could not do that, Mother. I couldn’t take the risk. I was too late to save Maggie with the truth—but I could save her child with my lies.

But Hal is about to become an adult now, and I can’t hide behind excuses anymore. The only way I can lose her now is if SHE chooses to cut herself off from me. I would not blame her if she did—God knows, I’ve lied to her for so long, though I told myself my motives were good. I have deceived her unforgivably—I just hope that she can, in fact, forgive.

There is much that I will never forgive you for, Mother. But in spite of that, you have kept my secret faithfully these past few years, and I felt that you deserved to know the reasons for my decision. I don’t know what Hal will do with the information—it’s hers to decide. But it’s possible she will come and seek you out. Be kind to her, if she does.

Yours,

Maud

Hal let the letter fall to the sheets, feeling her eyes well with tears, wishing that she could reach out and hug her mother, back through the years.

How had Mrs. Warren come by this letter? Had it ever reached Mrs. Westaway? Or had Mrs. Warren intercepted it? Either way, someone had told Ezra. And for the second time in his life, but not the last, her father had killed an innocent person to protect himself.

If only, if only her mother had not sent the letter. It seemed unbelievably naïve—to give up such hard-fought-for anonymity, to warn her mother of what she was about to do.

Had Maud underestimated Ezra? Or had she simply trusted Mrs. Westaway too much? They had been corresponding for a while, that much was plain from the letter. Perhaps she had slowly trusted more and more—thinking that if her mother had kept her secret safe thus far, she could trust her a little further, until at last she had entrusted Mrs. Westaway with a secret she could not keep.

But Hal wasn’t sure. There had been something about Mrs. Warren’s attempts to warn her . . . a kind of long-held guilt. She thought of that sitting room, the framed photographs of the cherubic little boy Mrs. Warren had loved for so long, and the man he had turned into.

Perhaps, for the sake of that little boy, she had written a letter—warning Ezra to be careful, to keep away.

And only afterwards realized what she had done.

Hal would never know the true chain of events. All she knew was that this letter was the first piece in a swift chain of betrayals that led to a hot summer’s day, and the screech of a car’s brakes, and her mother’s crumpled body on the road outside her own house.

She closed her eyes, feeling the tears squeeze from between the lids and run down the sides of her nose, and she wished, more passionately than she had ever wished anything before, that she could go back and tell her mother, It’s okay. There is nothing to forgive. I trust you. I love you. There is nothing you could do to change that. Whatever angry things I might have said or thought or done, I would have come back to you, in the end.

“Are you awake, my darling?” A Cornish accent broke into her thoughts, and Hal opened her eyes to see an orderly standing there beside a tea trolley, a white china cup in one hand and a metal pot in the other. “Tea?” “Yes please,” Hal said. She swiped surreptitiously at the trickle beside her nose, and blinked away the rest of the tears as the woman poured her a cup.

“Ooh, homemade cake. Aren’t you the lucky one? I’ll give you another saucer,” the woman said, and she helped Hal to a generous chunk, and put it on her bedside tray.

After she had gone, moving on to the next person, Hal broke off a piece and put it between her lips, the buttercream melting on her tongue, soothing her sore throat, and taking away some of the bitterness of her thoughts.

She could not dwell in might-have-beens, she could only move forwards, to a different future.

The letter was still on her lap, and she folded it up carefully and laid it on the locker beside her bed. As she did, her hand knocked against the Golden Virginia tin, lying there, and on a sudden impulse she opened it up, closed her eyes, and shuffled the cards.

With her eyes closed, she might almost have been at home, in her little booth on the pier, feeling the soft frayed edges of the cards between her fingers, feeling their polished backs slide over each other, every movement changing the possibilities life dealt out, asking different questions, revealing different truths.

At last she stopped, holding the cards between her cupped palms, and then she cut the deck and opened her eyes.

A single card stared back at her, upright—and she found herself smiling, in spite of the tears that still clung to her lashes.

It was the World.

In Hal’s deck the World was a woman of middle age with long dark hair, looking directly out at the querent. She was standing tall, her legs planted firmly apart, in the center of a garland of flowers. At the corners of the card were the four symbols from the Wheel of Fortune—showing that, like the wheel, the world was always turning, and the way that however much one might journey, in some sense one would always end up where one began.

The woman was smiling, though with a hint of sadness. And in her arms she held, almost as if cradling a child, a globe of the world.

Hal had had no question in her mind when she cut the deck, and yet here was her answer.

She knew what she would have said, had she turned up this card for someone in her booth.

She would have said: This card shows that you have come to the end of a journey, that you have completed something important, that you have accomplished what you set out to do. The world has turned—the cycle is complete—your quest is at an end. You have endured hardship and suffering along the way, but these have made you stronger—they have shown you something, revealed a truth about yourself and your place in everything.

Because the way that we see the world from above in this card, cradled in the arms of the woman, shows that at last you can see the full picture. Up until now you have been traveling, seeing only a part of what you wished to see—now you can see the whole system, the world, and its place in the universe, your part of the whole scheme.

Now you understand.

And it was true. It was all true. But it was not what Hal saw when she looked at the card—or not only what she saw. As a child, Hal had called that card by a different name. She had called it the Mother.

There was no mother card in tarot—the nearest thing was the Empress, her golden, abundant locks symbolizing femininity and fertility. But when Hal looked at this card, at the fearless dark-haired woman cradling the world in her arms, Hal saw her mother’s face. She saw her dark eyes, full of wisdom and a little cynical; she saw her capable hands, and the sadness in her smile, as well as the compassion.

She had seen her mother in the World because her mother had been her world.

But the truth was, the world was stranger and more complicated than she had ever imagined as a child—and so was she.

She felt suddenly tired, immensely, unbelievably tired, and she pushed the cake away, packed the tarot cards back into their tin—all but the one she held in her hand—and then lay down on her side, her cheek against the cool white pillow, with Maggie’s tarot card propped beside the locker, looking into Maud’s face.

Her eyes drifted shut, and sleep began slowly to claim her.

As she lay there, she seemed to see patterns against her closed eyes—fiery shapes that changed from drifting sparks into spiraling leaves, and then into a flock of birds, bright against the red-black darkness, and she thought of the magpies at Trepassen House, wheeling and calling against the sky, and of the rhyme that Mr. Treswick had quoted that first day, as they drove up towards the house.

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a girl

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret

Never to be told

And she thought of all the secrets down the years—of Maggie, tearing pages from a diary; of Maud, lying to protect her, in order to keep her safe from her own father. She thought of the secrets her father had kept, hugging his guilt to himself, until it had grown into a poison that had shaped his whole life.

She thought of Mrs. Westaway, and Mrs. Warren, living year after year with the terrible truth of what their darling boy had done, and the ugliness that lay in the leaf-strewn darkness of the boathouse.

And she heard the voice in her ear, her own voice now, firm, uncracked, unchanged by all that had happened. No more. No more secrets, Hal.

She had the truth. And that was all that mattered.