2

Kat

As the small plane bucks towards Newquay airport, Kat wonders what the hell her father is playing at. She’s struggling to focus on work – Spring’s subscriber data marches across her laptop screen, awaiting analysis – her thoughts maddeningly, compulsively looping back to her father. Rock Point.

When she’d first read his email, her inner voice yelled, ‘Do. Not. Go.’ Instead, she’d listened to her mother as they were squashed together in a booth at the Carlyle, Manhattan. Kat’s treat every year, even though any sort of holiday makes her twitchy. Still. Anything to escape the minefield of Christmas. Dad had similarly slipped away to Paris, sparing Flora the agony of how to seat him and her mother at the same lavish table. And if Lauren’s mum – RIP, Dixie – hadn’t lost her battle in October, Lauren wouldn’t have volunteered at the hospice but hunkered down with Dixie in Oxford, eating nut loaf in a cloud of incense.

When there are three half-sisters and three rivalling mothers, with some overlap, it’s complicated.

‘So, the old wolf is inviting you all to Rock Point?’ Sipping her Virgin Mary, Blythe had brazenly read the email over Kat’s shoulder. ‘Oh, hello. “An announcement”? Charlie’s not getting any younger. Maybe he wants to hand over Rock Point. Don’t do that sceptical thing with your mouth. You’ll get marionette lines. Look! He says Flora and Lauren think a reunion is a marvellous idea! Frankly, if Lauren is brave enough to go back … And Flora’s probably camped outside already, that mother of hers crouched behind a rock, egging her on.’ Blythe’s hand gripped her glass tightly, historic grievances surfacing. ‘I’m not having my girl missing out. We deserve something from that man, Kat. We really do.’

We? Charlie Finch had been her mother’s lover. (And, at that point, married to Flora’s mother, Annabelle.) But he is Kat’s father, even if he doesn’t always behave like it. ‘For all we know, Dad’s going to announce what he ate for breakfast. And I really can’t take any more time off, Mum. I’ve got a shareholder meeting, a big eff-off one early the following week. Seriously, no bandwidth.’

‘Well, find it, honey.’ Blythe’s shellacs furiously tap-tapped on her phone and magnified an aerial view on Google Maps, making the hairs on Kat’s arms lift. ‘Rock Point. Prime real estate, Kat. You want to be the only daughter who’s too busy to show? Who pisses off her narcissist father and gets squeezed out?’ When Kat rolled her eyes, Blythe moved in for the kill. ‘This is not about a house. Or money. We all know you’ve made a stack of that. This …’ righteous pause ‘… is about fairness, my darling.’

And, just like that, Kat’s childhood insecurities were expertly detonated. Whatever it was – even if just her father’s attention for a freezing weekend in January – Kat needed to have her slice of it, ideally the biggest.

Only now she’s irreversibly on her way – the jaunt no longer theoretical, or some sort of inheritance TV drama, scripted by her actor mother – she feels like she’s shooting through time, not space. And that, by returning to Rock Point, there’s a possibility she’ll regress into her teenage self, she and Flora their old glorious savagery.

Also, the whole thing is just odd, even set against their father’s low bar, Kat thinks, stretching a long leg into the plane’s aisle. Until last month, the house was long-term tenanted by a retired couple. Charged a peppercorn rent, their role was to inhabit the place uncomplainingly. Dad never talks about Rock Point. None of them do. Well, they wouldn’t. And they haven’t slept under the same roof for years, let alone that roof. Flora will no doubt slap on a sepia filter and insist they’re all having A Lovely Time. But Lauren? Kat won’t blame her if she bails at the last minute and stays hiding in Whitechapel. Rail disruption, the perfect excuse.

What’s hers? Unlike Lauren, Kat doesn’t carry the weight of that summer. She’s not sure she even recalls what happened the day of the eclipse, not accurately. All anyone remembers from their teenage years is what they mythologize as adults, isn’t it? In a similar way to how a faked emotion starts to feel real if you keep the pretence going long enough. And it was a different millennium. Analogue: pre-smartphones, Twitter and smashed avocado. A time of her life that, set against the ever-scrolling present, seems hazy, discontinuous, and remarkably undocumented.

Ridiculous, then, that she’s been barely able to eat for days; her stomach fluttery, not with nerves but something else, an emotion she can’t identify. Then there’s this sweaty, caffeinated feeling. For the third time on the short flight, she dabs a skein of sweat off her nose with the scarf she keeps hidden, scrunched at the bottom of her handbag. Scarred with rips, wine stains, stiletto-heel punctures and cigarette burns, the Dior silk scarf belonged to her mother at her most chaotic in the late nineties. Kat always travels with it, a sort of discomfort blanket, the photographic negative of her hard-won success. A reminder of how far she has come.

‘Whoa!’ The plane takes an ear-popping dive. The woman spilling over their shared armrest squeals, dropping her tube of Pringles. Someone whispers a Hail Mary. The pilot broadcasts a brisk order to buckle seatbelts and prepare for landing.

Kat calmly puts away the laptop. As a kid, flying alone between her mother’s TV sets and disparate American and British relatives and schools, she taught her petrified self to enjoy turbulence. The cabin crew would fuss over her and offer extra dessert. When Kat told them who her parents were, they’d pretend to have heard of them, and say, ‘Wow, that’s so cool,’ and she’d crackle with pride and loneliness.

‘We’re all going to die!’ screams the Pringles woman, as the plane rolls.

‘Not today,’ Kat shouts into the woman’s ear, trying to reassure. ‘It’s just physics! Thrust, drag, and a severe-weather warning …’ Then through the porthole window, a wavy hem of malachite-green sea. Dark gold sand. A patchwork of fields.

Kat sucks in her breath, Cornwall’s rapid approach registering as one tiny shock, then another, until it’s like dozens of acupuncture needles bristling on her scalp. The rest of her life – her six a.m. runs through streets of glass and steel; the industrious murmur of the Spring office; all the likes and shares and tweets – fades away, unreal. And something small and scared inside Kat, normally bolted tightly down, loosens. As the plane bumps to the runway, tears blur her eyes. She wipes them fiercely on the ratty scarf, wondering what’s going on. She hasn’t cried for years – and no effing way is she about to start now.