When I get back from Cheltenham, I am still wearing the sticky running clothes I put on at dawn. I hurry into my basement flat to shower and brush my teeth. I pull on a pair of faded jeans and a chunky cream jumper, both of which I bought from a charity shop. My hair is wet and there is no time to dry it, so I tie it in a low knot at the nape of my neck and stick a few pins in to hold it there.
I log into an email account Maxine set up for emergency contact when I first moved to Bath. It will alert her as soon as I sign in. I find the Twitter post the stallholder showed me, and copy and paste the link into the body of an email.
But I can’t resist looking at it myself. The photograph is bigger on my laptop than the phone, so my baby bump seems more prominent. I close my eyes like a child frightened by a scary film. My breathing is fast and jagged, and I am crying. Quickly, trying to focus on the x in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, I close the window.
I write two short sentences to Maxine. Make this go away. Zac took the pic. Then I save the email to the drafts folder where Maxine will find it.
I plug Frederick Veliko’s name into every Internet search engine I can think of, as well as a variety of US government websites, as I did soon after Maxine first told me about him. My searches garnered so little, then. Now, there is nothing at all.
By the time I pull on to the tarmacked parking area in front of my grandmother’s nursing home, it is dark. Katarina is on night duty. She is my very favourite of everyone who works here, and my grandmother’s favourite, too – as far as my grandmother feels such things.
‘You look tired.’ Katarina hands me a pen and opens the visitors’ book.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’ I squiggle an illegible Helen Graham. ‘I promised her I’d come.’
‘No problem, Helen.’ Katarina leads me from the reception area to the day room. ‘She’s refused to go to bed. A part of her remembered …’
‘That’s good.’
My grandmother pretends not to notice when I come in. She is in her wheelchair, and alone. I drag across one of the straight-backed wing chairs, which match the blue carpet. Before I sit, I kiss her powdery cheek. ‘It’s great to see you out of bed today, Grandma.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Holly.’
‘You’re late.’
‘It is so sweet, the way she calls you that,’ Katarina says.
‘It is.’ I don’t want to dwell on this. ‘Have you been waiting, Grandma?’ I’m filled with hope that she is tracking time.
‘Have you brought Princess Anne?’ my grandmother says.
‘Not today.’
‘I want to go home. Why have you forced me upcountry?’ My grandmother classes anything above Truro as upcountry.
‘To keep you near me. It wasn’t safe for you any more in the place you were before.’ I touch my grandmother’s hand, then toss a smile at Katarina as she slips from the room. ‘I miss home, too. I miss the sea.’ My grandmother was forever shutting windows and curtains, but maybe it was important to her simply to know the sea was there.
I close my eyes for an instant and I see splodges of indigo and aqua, the view from my bedroom window, high in the attic where my grandmother hardly ever climbed. And the small islands of rock that Milly and I used to imagine invading, living there as two princesses, and Queen Peggy sailing out in a magnificent boat to bring us cakes. And the white torch of the lighthouse, always there to give me my bearings.
But the sea colours change, and I see the livid white around Jane’s nose and mouth, the congealing blood, the blue tint to her skin. I can taste sick again. I take a large gulp and it goes down as if I am swallowing a rock.
My grandmother’s ankles are extra swollen today, seeming to spill over the openings of the velvet house slippers I bought her. I crouch in front of her to loosen the Velcro, perplexed that somebody who was once so tall and bony could become so puffy.
‘Why bother,’ she says. ‘It’s not as if they’ll let me walk.’
‘But they’ve got you out of bed. They’ve even got you taking a few steps with assistance. That’s wonderful.’
She throws her head back and moves it from side to side with her eyes closed. ‘I am ready to go.’ This is a grand announcement, made with such theatricality I am worried she will injure her neck.
‘Go where, Grandma?’ She and I play out this exchange every time I visit.
‘You know where.’ She drags out each word, in a sort of dirge. ‘Take me now and bury me. Don’t let my coffin touch your mother’s. I refuse to lie near her for eternity. I will be next to your father when I rot. He was a hero, you know.’
Despite the absurd dark comedy of my Sarah Bernhardt-esque grandmother, the word rot makes me feel as if my heart is throwing in extra beats. Once more I picture Jane’s mottled face, the features unrecognisable, and her birthmark like a black star sapphire. Her body will be changing still more in death. I can feel myself shaking with pure fury and absolute hate. I want to destroy Zac for doing this to her.
I pull myself back into the place I am now, into this poor imitation of an elegant room that smells of cabbage and body odour and old people, however many windows they open, however much disinfectant they drench it in.
I can deal with my grandmother by rote. I have heard her graveyard instructions so many times they no longer shock me. By my mid-teens, I got to the point where I could parody them for Milly, and have her laughing so hysterically she would beg me to stop before she wet herself. The silver lining – and it is a vital one – is that Zac found my grandmother so horrible he was never around her enough to hear these instructions too. He met her once, and that was enough.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know he was a hero. And I’ll be sure to keep him in the middle.’
‘In the family vault.’
‘Yes, Grandma.’
‘The graveyard’s closed to new burials, you know, but not to us.’
‘We’re lucky to know so many of the dead.’
‘It needn’t have happened. He’d still be alive. They’d both be alive if your mother hadn’t pushed and pushed for them to go that day. She made friends with some other RAF wife, got them invited to that lunch party. Your father didn’t want to go. He hated that sort of thing …’
‘What’s so wrong with her making a friend and who was the friend and why didn’t my father want to go?’ How many times in my life have I asked these questions? But my grandmother merely shakes her head and makes a motion of sealing her lips.
Time and again during my childhood, I searched the house for clues and found nothing. I set up a recorder by the one landline my grandmother had, and monitored her conversations. All I discovered was a litany of complaints about the woes of raising a child in old age, gossip about geriatric infidelity, blackmailing threats to leave her electricity and gas provider for a better deal, and her endless pestering of saintly, patient James about her many prescriptions.
She is beyond any ability to answer these questions now. ‘Never mind.’ I kiss my grandmother’s papery cheek. I put a box on her lap. She attempts to peel off the plastic but gets nowhere, so I do it for her, then lift the lid. ‘Peppermint chocolates. Your favourite soft ones. No hard centres, so you won’t struggle with your teeth.’
She puts one in her mouth and starts to chew. Zac said that watching her eat had put him off his food for several days – that was probably the thing that helped most to keep him away from her. And the fact that he said she was a cross between a dragon and Cruella de Vil. I take out a tissue to wipe her lips and chin, but she bats away my wrist.
She uses her special whisper for what she says next. It is a whisper so loud I imagine the dolphins can hear. ‘You are evil,’ she whispers. ‘Just like your mother.’
‘Please, Grandma—’
‘Your mother pushed me out of the way at her wedding. When the photographer was going to take the family portrait, and I was getting up to join them, she pushed me down into a chair by the top of my head. She said, “Not this one. We don’t want this one.” I cried to your father. He should have put his foot down with her from the start. But you are always on her side. Your father was too. No matter what horrible things she did.’
Nobody as sour as my grandmother can be trusted to impart a fair version of history. I found the wedding photo between the pages of my father’s copy of A Tale of Two Cities, on a shelf in his study. My grandmother is in it, in her full brown-velvet glory, standing to my father’s right. He is in his uniform. My mother is on his left, wearing a halter-neck gown. It is simply cut of ivory silk and falls like water. Her amber hair is sprinkled with tiny white flowers, and drops in a sheet to several centimetres below her shoulders. We are so alike, she could be my twin. My father’s arm is around her, and the two of them are smiling on the church steps and leaning into each other. There is a small bump, interrupting the perfect column of my mother’s gown, so I am there too.
Perhaps my grandmother is thinking of that photo, not imagining I discovered it and have kept it near ever since, and that is why she comes out with her equivalent of an unexpected left hook. ‘What did you do with your baby?’ she says.
‘There is no baby.’ My voice cracks.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’ But a part of me is not sure at all. It is as if a ghost baby follows me, not as she is in the one photograph I have from the day she was born, but seeming to go through every milestone, so that she is the age she would be now.
Zac’s child exactly matches the little girl I keep so close. Madly, I wonder if it was all a mistake, and Alice is mine. These are the thoughts I don’t confess to anybody, for fear they will lock me away, and I will have escaped one prison only to find myself in another.
‘Was there ever a baby?’ my grandmother asks.
I pause, feeling as if I have killed her all over again. ‘No.’
‘You sent that man again,’ my grandmother says. ‘He pretended to be nice but he wants to murder me.’
‘Nobody wants to murder you, Grandma.’
‘He does. The bad man from before. The one who scared me.’
I put my hand on her knee.
‘Ouch.’ She smacks my hand, hard.
‘Sorry.’ I loosen my grip. ‘What do you mean, the bad man from before?’
‘The one with the evil eye, who you brought to see me.’ Despite having only paid a single visit to the previous nursing home, Zac clearly made a lasting impression. All the more remarkable when you consider how faulty her memory is. ‘I detested him. I told him so. When you went away to talk to the waitress, he said terrible things to me.’
On a better day I might smile at my grandmother’s persistent insistence on referring to the director of the previous care home as the waitress.
‘Grandma, I think you must be talking about the old place, not this one. You can’t have had a visitor. No one knows where you are, and the people who work here won’t let anyone in to see you unless I’ve given permission.’
Katarina returns. She puts a light hand on my grandmother’s shoulder. ‘Are you having a wonderful time with your lovely granddaughter, Mrs Lawrence?’
‘No,’ my grandmother says.
‘My grandmother hasn’t had any visitors today, other than me, has she?’
‘No. Of course not. You know that cannot happen. Not with our procedures.’
‘Has she been alone at all today? I mean, is there any way someone could have slipped in?’
‘No.’ Katarina shakes her head to emphasise it. ‘That is not possible.’
‘In the garden this morning,’ my grandmother says. ‘You are all so stupid. You are always insisting on pushing me out there for air like some big baby put out to nap in a pram. It rained on me. I got wet. I will probably catch pneumonia and die. You are trying to murder me.’
‘Can you describe the man, Grandma?’
‘I don’t need to. I know who he was. That boyfriend of yours. The bald one with the strange eye. I still detest him.’
I manage a nod to acknowledge that she has spoken. I have a new thought, and I cannot decide if it is liberating or suicidal. Perhaps it is both. The thought is that I am too tired to run any more, and I am losing the will to hide. Doing these things didn’t save Jane. Doing these things takes every last drop of energy and concentration. Doing these things has taken over my very being. Zac is here, and I need to face that fact.
But there are more mundane things I need to face, too. ‘Can you please do something for me, Katarina?’
‘Of course.’ Katarina slips a black scrunchy from her curly brown hair and re-does the knot at the top of her head, tightening and neatening before fastening it once more.
‘Can you get them to dipstick my grandmother’s urine? It wouldn’t hurt to check …’ I break off. My grandmother finds it mortifying for such a thing to be discussed, but she gets bladder infections all the time, and they make her memory and general befuddlement even worse.
I don’t need to be any more explicit for Katarina to understand. ‘That is an excellent idea.’ She makes a note in the book she keeps in her pocket.
I am struck by the fact that my grandmother’s skin has a faint blue tinge, like Jane’s this morning. I know that the living can get this too, when their hearts aren’t at full function, so their blood isn’t properly oxygenated. Another piece of knowledge gifted to me by Zac.
‘And I think a GP appointment, too, please, Katarina. So that he can have a listen to her heart, and take her blood pressure.’
‘I’ll arrange it tomorrow.’ Katarina makes another note. ‘You’ve been more tired than usual, haven’t you, Mrs Lawrence.’
‘Nonsense, you silly girl!’ my grandmother charmingly says, despite having spent a good deal of time complaining to me of this very thing.
Katarina motions me to the other side of the room, where I rest my head against the chalk-pink wall, tastefully decorated in washable, wipe-able paint.
‘Don’t talk about me behind my back,’ my grandmother says to us, in her whisper.
‘Sorry to ask this, but can you please make sure she isn’t on her own outside again? And the usual vigilance about no visitors other than me?’
‘Of course. It was just for a few minutes. No need to worry. Have you had a hard day?’
I glance across at my grandmother, who is wearing the expression of someone sucking on a sour lemon. ‘It can’t have been as hard as yours.’
‘You do know,’ Katarina says, ‘it is the condition that makes them act this way. It can make them mean.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘But she’s always been like this.’