7

Flora

‘Ssh. The story’s about to start.’ Flora presses play on the audio book. Raff glares reproachfully from the single bed she’s dragged closer to her own. She wants to hear Raff’s snuffling at night here, not just those waves rampaging on the rocks below. The bare boards creak underfoot as she pads across the room in her 50-deniers, trying to ignore the mouse droppings, the damp draught slurping at her ankles.

Outside the window, the sky shakes. Sea spume flicks against the glass. As a girl, she’d loved these Atlantic storms, always the first to run outside, spinning, arms wide, mouth wide open to catch the raindrops. Now she worries a slate will whip off the roof and smash into Scott’s new SUV.

Who the heck is that? A colossus of a man, with a dog. Just standing in the lane, hunched against the wind, hands in his pockets, hood up and brazenly staring at the house. Hating the thought of being mistaken for an unfriendly emmet, as the Cornish call tourists, Flora waves enthusiastically. But he ignores or doesn’t see her, turns his shoulders, and melts away into the turbulent night. The sting of disquiet is followed by a small frisson.

‘I don’t like it here, Mummy.’

Clenching her jaw, Flora stays facing the window, trying to channel the patient mother she constantly tries and fails to be. ‘Yet. Raff doesn’t like it yet.’ She grabs the curtains, habit making her rub the soft, nubbly linen between finger and thumb. Before Raff, she’d worked for an interior design company, a small, barely profitable outfit that she’d loved, earning far less than her childcare costs if she returned. Every day she thinks of that life rolling on without her, like a favourite series that’s recast its lead character. ‘You’re doing the most important job in the world now, Flo,’ reassures Scott, an insurance risk specialist, who nonetheless refuses to consider the post himself.

‘House is ghosty.’

‘Oh, Raff.’ She swishes shut the curtains, returns to her little boy, and brushes the curls off his forehead. Refusing to look at her, Raff clings to the grubby Tiny Tears doll he bought at the school fair and sleeps with every night, unsettling his father. ‘No ghosts here, I promise,’ she lies, tucking him up in a patchwork quilt snatched from her own childhood summers: she’d fall asleep counting the fabric hexagons, paisleys, checks and stripes, loving the way they all slotted perfectly together.

‘Don’t go, Mummy.’ He pulls on her hand, her gold wedding band, which doesn’t swivel. Is it possible to put weight on your fingers? Kat will be able to tell. Kat can see if you’ve put on a gram. It’s one of her superpowers. That’s it. Decided. Flora will wear her fun fake-pearl necklace. She’d worried it was too much. But she needs a decoy. Yes, and her sparkly bag.

‘Grown-up time now, Raff. I love you. Night, night, sweetheart.’ When she kisses his cheek, it’s hot with the resentment of being deserted in a strange bedroom. He sulkily turns away to face the wall. ‘I’ll leave your lamp on, okay?’ she says gently, trying to hide her impatience to get downstairs, and swiping at the clothes moth hovering above her dress.

On the landing, Granny’s antique Swedish tall-case clock – sky-blue, gilt accents – grabs at her heart, just as it always did. She runs a finger up its flank, which feels cold, sapless and dead. Its loud, musical chime used to punctuate the drift of languid summer days. But its hands are frozen in time now. Its song muted. Probably for the best. Sound is like smell, the way it chucks out memories. If Britney Spears’s ‘Baby One More Time’ ever comes on the radio, she leaps to turn it off. Bowie’s ‘Changes’ is another. ‘Changes’ kills her.

Cupping the newel post, Flora pauses, mentally preparing. She peers down the staircase, with its steep risers and wainscot panelling, and thinks how easy it’d be to trip. Especially in this fitted claret dress – has it shrunk? – and wedge heels, which demand an ungainly sideways crab-like descent. Gripping the banister, she vows to train her mind on the present: she’s no longer the girl who’d seek out sensation and drama and, finding none, would create it without thought of the consequences. Because life’s grown-up lesson – always, by its nature, learned too late – is about consequences, mostly the unforeseen ones.

The entrance hall is fogged with wood smoke. Trying not to fixate anxiously on when the chimney was last swept for nests, if there’s a working carbon-monoxide alarm, Flora arranges a big smile – her default setting – and advances from the hall into the firelight flicker of the front room. ‘Well, isn’t this just lovely?’

Christ on a stick. Everywhere she looks, the past! Like one of those trick birthday-cake candles you blow out only for them to flare again. It’s a dusty, sun-bleached diorama of their childhood. Same chintz sofas they’d curl up in after a swim. The fireplace fender, its brown leather cracked and shiny, like a saddle. Wooden shutters: folded back, exposing the gash of night. The window seat where Lauren loved to sit, arms wrapped around her bony knees, waiting for Gemma. On the shelves: small antique birdcages, books, binoculars, Scrabble, Monopoly, and VHS tapes of the classic movies – Grease, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Sound of Music – they’d watch over and over. Her grandfather’s brass telescope. Above the fireplace, the big glass jar of seashells they’d empty in a sandy, salty heap, and rank according to prettiness, just as they’d secretly rank themselves. And the same distinct Rock Point smell – sea, damp plaster, and, oddly, self-raising flour. Sweet nostalgia sweeps into Flora … then something more disquieting. Collecting herself, she throws open her arms as wide as the dress’s tailoring will allow. ‘Woo-hoo! You made it, Lauren.’ She envelops her sister in an over-compensatory embrace. ‘You look so well.’

Lauren looks dreadful. Much too thin. Dark shadows under those extraordinary eyes. ‘It’s been far too long,’ she says truthfully, rubbing Lauren’s arms. A memory sparks like static. Lauren’s first summer at Rock Point: Daddy, walking into this same room, holding Lauren’s little-girl hand – tiny, sticky with nerves – and slipping it into her own, saying, ‘Flora, look after your new sister.’ The conflict she’d felt, torn between pleasing her father and begging him to send this scrappy little girl away again. She’d just escaped three new half-siblings at home – toddler twins, and a baby, who stole all her mother’s attention – and didn’t want another. Especially not the child of a woman who’d trapped her dad and got pregnant on purpose to fund her New Age traveller lifestyle: the gospel according to her mother (and Kat’s). A few years before that, Flora had asked her mother, ‘Is it true I have another half-sister, like Dad says?’ and she’d stiffened and replied, ‘Technically.’

Flora grows aware of Kat and Dad watching tensely from the sofa, and that her hands are still gripping Lauren’s arms, as if trying to hold her safe – or push her into the fire. She whips them away.

‘Can I read Raff a story?’ Lauren’s smile is hopeful, warm.

‘Oh, no, thank you. I’ve just settled him,’ Flora replies, far too quickly. Still, she’s right to be cautious. Until she gets the measure of things, where Lauren’s head is at. ‘His aunts are still a bit of a novelty,’ she adds, making it worse. She feels bad. Lauren may have snubbed her invitation to Christmas – the first, since Flora hadn’t been able to mix her mother with Dixie; it should have heralded a new chapter – but she did drop off a rucksack of presents for Raff (many homemade). It’s Kat who just dumps into Raff’s savings account every year, as if her nephew were some sort of sponsor-a-white-tiger scheme. Kat never comes for Christmas either; oddly, she’s always away. Her father the same. Although Flora’s festive table is always rammed with her other half-siblings – much younger, they grew up with a reserved banker as a dad, secure childhoods bereft of notable traumatic events – and Scott’s relatives, it’s the absent, troubled Finches she misses with an ache, year after year.

‘Right …’ Her father tugs up his shirt sleeve, checks his watch. Oh, the announcement, Flora remembers uneasily. She’s not keen on surprises. Sucking in her belly, feeling a dress seam strain, she lowers to an elderly chintz armchair next to the footstool where Lauren’s perched, elbows on her knees, grasshopper light.

Not wanting to sink too far into the musty chill of the seat – or the house itself – Flora sits upright, keeping her wits about her, clutch on her knee, legs crossed. Her tights catch. She glances around with a bright smile, trying not to mind that no one has complimented her outfit.

‘Right, drinks.’ Lazily tucking his shirt into the back of his jeans, Charlie walks to the small round table by the window – she remembers that too, the chip on its mahogany edge after Kat sent it flying during a ferociously competitive game of Twister. He pours a glass of champagne. ‘Bubbles, Flo?’

Flora inwardly tussles, forces her lips around the words, ‘Not for me, Daddy.’

A moment’s confusion then: ‘Aha!’ A delighted smile. He tilts the glass to her belly. ‘How many months?’

‘I knew you were pregnant!’ Kat grins. ‘From the moment I saw you, Flora.’

‘Congrat …’ Lauren stops, her smile fading, mirroring Flora’s own.

‘I’m not pregnant.’ A wave of humiliating heat. ‘I’m doing Dry January.’

A deadlocked hush. Don’t cry, don’t cry.

‘Abstinence in Cornwall?’ Her father laughs: she knows he’s clumsily trying to make her feel better. ‘You’ll get booted back over the Tamar. Anyway, you rather look like you could do with a glass.’

Flora bristles. She wants to rush upstairs and grab Raff. Exhibit one: this is why I look fried. He still wakes in the night. Screams at the school gate. Has anyone else in the room scrubbed vomit off a sisal carpet? Or have any understanding of the sheer overwhelm of a mother’s love? No. Especially not Kat, who ditched the best thing to happen to her – Kofi – simply because he loved her back. Flora never asked to be the only functional member of the Finch family. The only one to work at a relationship. To carry the weight of happiness for all of them.

‘Here.’ Charlie presses a glass into her hand. ‘Blame me.’

‘We do,’ says Kat.

‘I suppose one glass won’t hurt.’ The drink works. It always does. Flushing her darker thoughts into the recesses of her mind where they live, dormant, like the tubers over-wintering in her Tuscan pots at home. Her mind skips to her father’s ultraviolet teeth – are artists meant to care about the shade of their enamel? Is this some sort of cry for help? – and then her sisters’ outfits. Lauren’s buried under a man’s baggy plaid shirt – hip or hideous, Flora honestly couldn’t say – boyfriend jeans and heavy boots, while Kat’s wearing velvet trainers and a black boiler suit, which Scott, a frock-and-heels man, would loathe, and Flora suddenly desperately wishes she owned. In comparison to her sisters, her dress is too neighbourhood drinks party. She hates it. And the stupid pearl necklace.

‘Ah, a full set of daughters at last. Do we have a collective noun? A jury of daughters?’ Charlie raises his glass. Behind him, the storm glitters, a whirl of wind and rain and stars. For a moment, Flora’s not sure if someone’s out there in the slick liquid shadows or if it’s just the thrashing of the hawthorn branches. ‘Anyway, I’ve herded you down here for a few reasons,’ he continues, thumbing his red specs up his nose. ‘Apart from the most obvious one, which is, well, why not?’

There are plenty of reasons why not. Flora pulls at a loose thread on the armchair’s brocade, imagines tugging and tugging, the house unravelling around them. The birdcages bobbing out to sea, like lobster pots.

‘First things first. This is not my announcement, by the way, don’t you worry. It gets better. I’ll warm up. But …’ Charlie sighs ‘… I’ve had a few physical issues. A bit of heart trouble. Minor. Survivable. Nothing to worry about.’

Flora skims a puzzled, frightened glance at Kat. Lauren starts to gnaw her thumbnail, and Flora has a ridiculous urge to slap her fingers down, tell her she’ll ruin her polish.

‘Then there’s this.’ He gestures at his head.

Flora grips the chair’s arms. Aneurysm. Brain tumour. Daddy cannot die: she simply won’t let him.

‘My hair,’ he says solemnly.

‘Your hair?’ Even by her father’s standards, Flora’s astonished by his vanity: his frizzy silver Neptune’s curls were once wavy and flaxen, like Jude Law’s in The Talented Mr Ripley.

‘Because of the messing around with paint I’ve done over the years, my doctor insisted on having a strand tested while I still have a thatch,’ he goes on.

‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ A quiet devastation creeps over Flora. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Kat’s knee start to bounce: Kat’s legs always betray her, escaping her steely control. Only Lauren sits still, rooted, listening carefully.

‘Fascinatingly, it transpires I’ve got so many heavy metals in my body I should be a corpse!’ He laughs, rests his interlaced hands on his mound of belly and waggles a foot gleefully, revealing jaunty striped socks. They are not ill-person socks. ‘Cadmium. Lead. Polyester resin. I’m a walking chemistry lab, girls. Med students will fist-fight for my autopsy.’ His brio falters. ‘And it may have fed into the heart thingamajig. The doctors aren’t sure.’

‘Jesus, Daddy.’ Flora squeezes shut her eyes.

‘You should have painted wearing gloves,’ Lauren says, exasperated, gutted.

‘You know I like to feel my materials, Lauren.’ Charlie shrugs, a non-believer in self-preservation or self-pity.

Their silence ripples outwards, a physical thing. Flora can’t work out how bad this news is, or what else is to come.

‘Well, nothing more boring than an old fart’s medical condition, is there?’ he says, brushing it aside. ‘And we all know you can smoke twenty fags a day and still live to a hundred, do everything right and …’ He stops, caught in a twist of private pain, and Flora knows he’s thinking of Dixie. ‘Anyway …’ Flipping the mood, he smiles warmly again. ‘Looking on the bright side, at least I didn’t let you girls finger paint with the Lead White, eh? Poison you all too.’

The word ‘poison’ lands like a hard slap to the cheek. Flora startles. Upstairs, the tall-case clock rings out a random chime – like the past, not so dead after all. She shakily drains her glass. It. Will. Be. Lovely.