17

Lauren, 2019

Scrambling back from the deserted moor cottage in the mizzle, her head thick with Jonah, Lauren nearly misses the flapping scrap of paper, impaled on the wrought-iron spikes of the gate. She pulls it off and shelters in the alley to read it: LEAVE. Leave us in peace.

Oh. Okay. Nothing ambiguous about that. Same handwriting as last night’s note only more manic, the letters slanting in different directions. A sign of a troubled soul: it takes one to know one. Her handwriting was almost illegible in the weeks after Mum died, and her letters to Gemma became rambling, smudged scrawls of ink. Because of this Lauren feels an unexpected connection – and a rush of compassion – to whoever wrote it. But she also knows she must take it seriously. The others will.

One note can be brushed off as a tasteless prank. Almost. Two is more sinister. Likely to achieve its aim: Leave. But it’s too soon to go. It’d taken so much to return in the first place – and she hasn’t fulfilled the reason she came, her promise to Mum. Will she, Kat and Flora get a chance to be together like this again? She doubts it, not for years anyway. Instead, they’ll slot back into their normal lives, at a safe distance from one another. The process of them turning into strangers will continue, time shunting them further and further from the girls in the portrait. Maybe a part of her isn’t ready to say goodbye to Rock Point either.

Unlike her sisters, Lauren sees why their father drew them here. He must have known that once at Rock Point it’d be hard to wriggle away with a ‘Something’s come up.’ It’s different in winter too. They can’t easily leave, given the storms causing chaos on road and rail in the rest of the country. Instead, they’re trapped in their own weather and forced to look one another – and Angie – in the eye. Or not. Flora often seems to smile brightly at a point between Lauren’s brows, as if she’s wary of directly meeting her gaze. She senses Kat’s sidelong glances too. And it feels like she’s being assessed as much as Angie.

So, no, probably not a good idea to mention the Heaps’ cottage just yet, or that oddly charged meeting with Jonah. ‘I thought you were someone else,’ he’d said, standing in the doorway, and she hadn’t known whether to believe him. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’ Startled, embarrassed, she assured him he hadn’t. But beneath their almost comically polite exchange, she’d felt another conversation lay between them waiting, forming, like the dot-dot-dot ellipsis of a typed message when someone is writing on a phone. Did he feel it too?

Bang. The slam of a door in the wind knocks Lauren out of her thoughts. It’s followed by the waft of cigarette smoke. Angie. Unable to face her, Lauren slips into the garden where the air is sweetly scented with pine needles and something warm and tomatoey – lunch, hopefully – that’s fluting out of the house’s air vents. Trying to work out what to do next, whom to tell first, if anyone, Lauren leans against the cold stone of the wall and reads the note again. Her thoughts slide back to Jonah.

Is it his work? He doesn’t seem the type but it’s possible. People are never quite who they want you to believe they are; she knows a bit about showing one’s most acceptable face to the world, the curation of self. Also, and this shouldn’t be a factor, it really shouldn’t, but he’s disarmingly attractive in an elemental way, his presence as tangible and physical as a hand on the plane of skin between her hipbones. Which is going to cloud her judgement. And he could have stuck the note on the gate before she set off, then trailed her down to the cove – ‘Take care, won’t you?’ – and the cottage. Gouged into this exposed landscape are shortcuts and hiding spaces only a local would know, and Jonah looks like he’s been carved out of a slab of its rock. He’s steeped in the place.

Enough. Stuffing the note into the thigh pocket of her cargo trousers, she weighs up the unappealing choice of entering the house via either Angie or the parrot. Having survived one night in a house with a resident bird, albeit caged, it’s dawning on her that she doesn’t hate Bertha. She hates her fear of Bertha, the phobia that crouches inside. Earlier, when she noticed the small bald patch on Bertha’s chest – stress plucking, probably missing her foster carer – and the feathers on the conservatory’s brick floor, it was like seeing her grief in feathered form. Not just for Dixie, but for her own younger self, the Lauren who’d trust Bertha to nuzzle her earlobe. The Lauren who would have sat by Bertha, settled and consoled her, fed her chopped fruit and bits of newspaper to shred with her beak. Even the grown-up Lauren who keeps one of Bertha’s red tail feathers, shed that last summer, a memento she cannot bear to either touch or throw away.

The conservatory. She will be brave. Before her resolve can waver, she walks around the corner of the house, stopping by the dilapidated swing seat when she hears Flora’s telephone voice.

‘I miss you too, Scott,’ her sister is cooing. ‘So, so much.’

Lauren allows herself, just for a second or two, to imagine how it’d feel to be Flora: settled and loved. The sheer relief of it. Dixie brought her up to be independent, but occasionally, especially since her mother’s death, when existence seems both unbearably beautiful and painfully fragile, her roots hacked to stringy tendrils, she’s ached to be held by someone familiar, known, safe. Someone who will reliably be there in the morning, and the morning after that.

‘Scott, you know I’m doing Dry January,’ Flora says, with a taut laugh. ‘No, not drinking! Absolutely not.’

Lauren sucks in her breath: Flora put away more booze than all of them last night. Then Lauren wonders if she’s too puritanical and idealistic, if it’s the little white lies that keep a marriage alive. Flora’s not adulting, she’s fully nested, with a child, a husband and a mortgage, a grown-up life of which Lauren – and most of her friends – can only dream.

‘Yes, I know I promised. Of course I love you,’ Flora is saying. ‘I couldn’t love you more.’

Lauren cannot stop listening, transfixed by this glimpse into Flora’s charmed world. And yet there’s strain in her sister’s voice that gives her pause.

‘It’s just one month we’re missing.’ Flora’s voice grows increasingly wrought, almost tearful. ‘It doesn’t mean … Of course I’m keeping an eye on Raff! No, I’m not not telling you anything. It’s just lovely family time. All good! Yes, I know you’re looking out for me … Please, Scott.’

Lauren is torn now, wanting to check Flora is okay, not wanting to admit she’s listened in on a private call. The longer she stands there, the more she hears, the more damning it’ll be. She chews on a nail.

Flora is unlikely to appreciate Lauren sticking her nose into her private business. And what does she know about marriage anyway? Her longest relationship – Franciszek – lasted six months, ending when he moved back to Poland a year ago. And she’s always largely judged men on whether her mother would like them, if she can imagine them sitting with a bowl of Dixie’s spicy tagine on their lap in her Jericho courtyard, their kindness to manky rescue cats and stamina for circling art galleries. It’s no wonder she’s single.

The note has made her hyper-sensitive. That’s it. The empty husk of a cottage has unsettled her too, especially the absence squatting inside it, like a question: where’s Viv? She’s projecting, interpreting Flora’s phone conversation through her own anxious prism. Van Gogh painted the demented-blue night sky twisting through his own troubled mind, she reminds herself, slinking through the moon gate and out into the wind-whisked drive. Unfortunately, Angie’s still there, an unavoidable obstacle, hand on one hip, frowning at Lauren then back at her car. ‘I was meant to be leaving for London after our walk. But look. Just look at that, Lauren.’ She points at the car’s front wheel, its flat tyre. ‘Puncture marks too.’

A chill sweeps through Lauren.

Angie stamps out her cigarette. ‘Seriously, who’d do a thing like that?’

Lauren glances around for any sign of the guilty party. But all she can see are obfuscating rocks and distorting, ballooning sprays of water, the optical tricks of air, sky and sea. A fine veil of rain. A landscape hiding its own.