I love this new stretch of the island, so far away from the tourist trail and tricky to reach unless you’re familiar with the hidden coastal paths. The tide is way out, the sun low in the sky, casting long shadows of the smallest shells and lugworm trails, dappling the glistening sand like a soft oil colour. I live for these moments alone, these hours of calm contemplation and movement, when I can make sense of all that has happened and be thankful for all that I have.
In the hours that followed Daisy’s return, so much altered for all of us that, looking back now, it takes on a dreamlike quality, like a film, or a story belonging to someone else altogether. That night, when Avril was apprehended, she brought with her the strangest revelation, in the form of James’s mother. It emerged that, after James had left his old life behind, his mother had remained steadfastly loyal to her daughter-in-law, visiting her at the psychiatric hospital until she was finally approved as recovered, and released into the community. I liked James’s mother, Alicia – or Lily, as she prefers – from the moment I met her. I love her quietly efficient little ways, and I love the wisdom with which she leads her life. James sobbed when she reached out to embrace him at the quayside, she so tiny and steadfast, he, in contrast, vast and needful.
Lily told us she had been searching for Avril since her release a year ago, and about how shocked she was on arriving home late at night from a long holiday abroad to find a message on her answerphone. In the message, Avril was almost incoherent, but Lily was able to make out that she wanted to meet her the next afternoon before she travelled to the island – and thank God, Lily decided it sounded important enough to drop everything and go. When she turned up to meet Avril at the ferry terminal in Lymington, she had no idea about James and his missing daughter – or that Avril was wanted by the police – until she picked up a newspaper in the waiting room and saw their faces on the front page. When she spotted Avril approaching with Daisy, she quickly alerted the security staff, and, on their instruction, held back to allow Avril to board before her while they organised backup.
It seems that lying runs in the family; Lily had convinced the nurses at Avril’s hospital that she was someone else altogether, but her deception came from a good place, a place of compassion after James had himself suffered a breakdown and taken Chloe with no forwarding address. Amazingly, Lily had been funding Avril’s private care at Buddleia Hill for the five years before she left, paying out a small fortune every month for the care of her beloved daughter-in-law. All these things we withhold from each other; so many secrets we tie ourselves up with in the keeping.
Avril is in a secure unit now, just across the water where Chloe can visit her, and often Chloe will take the hovercraft with Grandma Lily, who now lives on the island, just a few miles along the coast from the new family home. For years Lily had waited in hope that James or Chloe would find her again, invite her back into their lives, and now here they are, together, as close as a family could be. Chloe’s visits to Avril are going well, and slowly she is filling in the history that her mother has missed out on, taking bundles of photographs and scrapbooks with her each time, excitedly returning home with the excavated tales of her parents’ old lives. A few times, I’ve visited with her; they’re so alike, Chloe and Avril, it’s uncanny. Avril’s doing just fine. She feels safe where she is, she’s well cared for and monitored, and she has Chloe in her world. ‘That’s all I ever wanted,’ she told me the last time I went along.
And Emily – well, she’s gone. When James discovered that it was Emily who had made contact with Avril, encouraged her to come, any traces of love he still had for her vanished entirely. She tried to tell him about finding the letter he’d hidden, the letter signed ‘A’, to tell him that she hadn’t known, couldn’t have known who she was writing to – who she was inviting into their lives. ‘I just wanted to see her – this other woman,’ she pleaded. She tried to tell him that she’d thought he was having an affair, that she was only trying to put a stop to it, but James wouldn’t hear another word. She was the one who made this happen; she was to blame for the agony of Daisy’s disappearance; she was the one who had put them through the nightmare that no parent should ever face. And, almost worse still, she had tried to implicate Chloe in order to deflect suspicion from herself. That, he said, was unforgivable.
Of course, James doesn’t know that it was me who moved the letter from his coat pocket to his desk drawer so that Emily was likely to find it, and I’m sure he would never have detected the hint of uncertainty I allowed to slip into my tone as I reassured my sister that her husband couldn’t possibly be having an affair. Such subtle shifts in tenor are barely audible to most; perhaps it’s the kind of nuance only a sister would pick up on.
After much soul-searching, Emily agreed that she’d rather take some time out than have her involvement exposed to the police, and I gave her the details of my ashram in North Wales. It’s been more than seven months now, and we haven’t heard from her at all. It must be doing her good, some valuable time to reflect and heal. We all need that, don’t we? Time to think things over.
Now as I ascend the sandy path towards my sun-bathed little cottage, I pause a moment to catch my breath, to cradle the tightening corset of my growing belly. I must slow down, I remind myself; it’s only a matter of days until my due date. My thoughts are drawn back to that faraway night in December, when we were not much more than strangers, James and I, just the two of us together beneath the newly strung Christmas lights, sharing a bottle of wine as the rest of the house slept overhead. I’d never meant that to happen, but there you are. Life is full of surprises. From here I can just make them out, gathered in the evening light of the wildflower garden: James, his head tilted in concentration as he tends the smoking barbecue with Max; Chloe, tall and willowy as a flower herself, pushing little Daisy on her new wooden swing, causing her to laugh in high breathless squeals. I inhale the smoky warmth that catches on the air and marvel at my family. If Emily were here now I’d tell her how right she was all those years ago, how wise her words.
Life really does have a way of working itself out.