Dora had driven into town. She said she needed the supermarket and they could entertain themselves for a few hours, couldn’t they? It wasn’t a question, more a demand, and one the sisters mulled over as they watched their great-aunt reverse her Morris Traveller with its rotting mock-Tudor sides out into the lane and beetle away. They hadn’t minded being left behind, far preferring a day playing in the woods with Ellie Fry to crowds and pavements. And besides, they were used to fending for themselves with a mother too weighed down by her own misery to bother with them – things in leafy Witchwood under Dora’s care weren’t all that different.
The sisters slotted into a certain routine and soon forgot the troubles at home in London – the mother they loved and feared in equal measure, the nastier elements of school. It all dispersed like pollen from forgotten flowers. Even their Camden flat was like a distant memory. Fitted with a frugal mismatch of their landlord’s furniture, the mildewed tiles in the bathroom they needed to share with another family, their mother’s tights drip-drying above a sink of dirty dishes. Pillowell Cottage, with its opulence and abundant clutter, harboured a surprising amount of space for their fantasies and at least seemed to want them. Home, with its upset smiles and their mother’s hopelessness, was no place to return to.
Washed and dressed in record time, they flung what they could find for lunch into a pair of khaki knapsacks, fastened themselves into matching pink jelly sandals and headed off to find Ellie.
‘Your auntie home?’ Clean-shaven with an unnerving Plasticine sheen, Frank Petley at Dora’s gate blocked their egress. ‘I’ve come to collect paper money,’ he said, jingling coins in his trouser pocket.
‘Sorry, she had to go out,’ Caroline told him, then instantly regretted it – Mr Petley knowing she and Joanna were alone made her uneasy.
‘Mind you tell her she owes us in shop.’ Frank, devoid of smile. ‘Memory like a sieve, that woman. There’ll be no more deliveries of Telegraph till she settles bill,’ he warned in his ripe Yorkshire accent before striding away.
Sweltering already and it wasn’t even ten o’clock. Caroline, Joanna and Ellie grappled with ways to kill the time. Hidden in trees and cloaked in a relentless melancholy, Witchwood, with its tall, dark forest, had frightened the sisters to begin with, but left to their own devices they have become enchanted with its fairy-tale beauty.
Not that everything was as it should have been in this idyllic playground. There were maleficent forces at work. But chattering happily the girls were unaware of the eyes in the dense, dark shade, watching them.
The children left the main section of the village behind and ambled along the traffic-free lane, stopping when they reached the crossroads.
‘Dare you.’ Joanna pointed in the direction of Dead End Lane: a narrowing stretch of tarmac hooded in greenery that led to St Oswald’s church and its spooky, high-sided rectory.
‘I’m up for it.’ Caroline, inspecting her bitten nails, began to gnaw her middle finger.
‘We could look round the graveyard?’ Ellie suggested brightly, scissoring back and forth on her wheels.
‘Did that yesterday.’ Caroline scowled, her attention momentarily snatched by a red tractor inching its way along a farm track beyond the trees.
‘I don’t mind what we do,’ Joanna said.
At the end of the lane, the girls straddled the squat church wall, the stones hot against their bare thighs as they traced the tapestry of lichen with outspread fingers. Mindful of the repetitive coo-coo of a woodpigeon: a far sweeter sound, the Jameson sisters judged, than the fume-choked song of London pigeons that their mother called vermin. It was difficult to stoke up the spirit of sadness in the champagne sparkle of such a morning, but over the children’s backs was the most romantic necropolis for miles. An extraordinary nirvana flaunting gleaming sandstone monuments and pink gravelled paths that criss-crossed beneath the glamorous spread of oaks and sycamores.
‘Wanna try my roller skates?’ Ellie fiddled with her bunches and swung her feet high into the air to tempt them.
‘Me first.’ Caroline relinquished her nail-chewing and jumped down from the wall. ‘I’m the oldest.’ She unlaced the skates and slipped them free of Ellie’s feet.
‘Best sit down to put them on.’ It was clear to Ellie from Caroline’s huffing and puffing that she was about to lose her temper. ‘You tried them before?’
‘Course I have, stupid – I’ve been ice-skating; it can’t be any harder than that.’
‘You look like one of the ugly sisters in Cinderella .’ Ellie throttled a giggle.
Red-faced from the effort, Caroline balanced on one leg. ‘It won’t go on,’ she snapped at Joanna as if this was her fault, and flung the skate at her.
Joanna took it and spun the plastic wheels, making them rattle and whirl. The sound reminded Caroline of the windmill teaspoon she’d pinched from Dora. Not that the teaspoon was the only thing she’d stolen, and it made her quiver with unease to think of the brass table bell, the snuff box and the little beaded drawstring bag she found in her great-aunt’s jewellery box. Trinkets, that along with other things pilfered from the pub and Mrs Hooper’s, she’d squirrelled away by the reed-edged lake. But observing Ellie and Joanna’s togetherness, their easiness, sensing they were deliberately shutting her out, Caroline understood exactly why she stole things. Things could be relied upon, it was people who let her down. Her thoughts were gloomy ones as she listened to Ellie encouraging her sister to ‘Have a go, it’s easy when you get the hang of it.’ Then watching her kneel down to lace them up, the pair of them laughing, indifferent to her.
The roller skates were a perfect fit. Upright and trundling over the apron of lawn that skirted the churchyard, Joanna, blind to her sister’s seething disapproval, appeared to be enjoying herself.
‘You can have them if you want – I’m getting a new pair for my birthday.’ Ellie beamed. ‘Hey,’ she added. ‘You two have gotta come to my party next Saturday. It’s gonna be brilliant. Daddy’s doing me a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and everything.’
‘You’re lucky to have a daddy,’ Caroline said, dampening the mood. ‘We haven’t got a daddy, have we, Jo?’
Joanna shook her head, the baby-blue of her eyes downcast.
‘He drowned in the sea. Five years ago. We were on holiday in Wales, he saved me from the waves.’ Caroline, her voice proud, wholeheartedly believed it was necessary to share this painful history to make herself sound more interesting.
‘Oh, that’s horrible.’ Ellie looked shocked.
‘It’s why we’re here. Mum’s been so sad about it she tried to kill herself. Dora’s the only family we’ve got to stay with while she recovers in the loony bin.’ Caroline shared the cruel taunt she suffered in the playground as if it meant nothing.
Ellie reached for Caroline’s arm. ‘Later, if you want,’ she said, squeezing it, ‘you can play in the Wendy house Daddy made me?’
‘No, thanks, I’ll manage.’ Uncomfortable with being touched, Caroline stepped away, pretended the Judas tree propped against the churchyard wall was of interest. ‘But we’ll definitely come to your party,’ she said stiffly, kicking through what remained of the pink blossom embedded at its roots.
‘I love birthday parties.’ Joanna spread her arms to balance as she skated round and round.
‘Like you’ve ever been to any,’ Caroline sneered.
‘I love these too.’ Joanna ignored her sister and looked at her feet. ‘You sure I can have them?’
‘Course you can – I won’t need them, will I?’
‘Ellie! You’re brilliant.’ Joanna laughed her thanks to her new best friend, but clocking her sister’s annoyance added, ‘I’d better give them back to you for now. We should go and do something else.’
‘Yeah, come on.’ Caroline lifted her hands, scooped her damp hair from the back of her neck. ‘Dead boring watching you on them – I wanna go down Drake’s Pike.’
‘We could take the boat out,’ Ellie said as she re-laced her skates.
The sisters, contemplating the miserable supplies scraped together from Pillowell’s kitchen, hoped Liz had thought to pack extras for them.
‘Can we go through the tunnel?’ Joanna asked.
‘Yeah, be cool in there.’
‘If you go down to the woods today … ’ one of them piped, and within seconds all three were singing their version of the vaguely sinister tune, ‘ … you’d better not go alone … beneath the trees where nobody sees … ’
One rolling, two skipping – the children were still being watched as they pushed open the five-bar gate and dissolved into the dark-throated woods. Not only by the menace hiding among the gravestones, or the quizzical-eyed buzzard fixed to a telegraph pole, but a woman doomed to look out on a world she could no longer move within. And had any of them stopped to look up at the imposing rectory – a Georgian manor rising incongruously from the regal layering of blue-green cedars – they’d have seen the Reverend Mortmain’s wife, Cecilia, trapped by her multiple sclerosis inside its wisteria-smothered façade. Spectral and seated at a lofty window with only her Rapunzel-long hair for company, even if she had been aware someone was watching the children, she’d have been powerless to rescue them had they found themselves in trouble.