Hannah’s first pregnancy had been an accident. She and Danny had only been together a year and were still in that magical period of finding things out about each other. It had been a shock, but Danny had said he’d go along with whatever Hannah wanted. And once she’d decided to go ahead, they’d both thrown themselves into it. ‘I know I’m supposed to be feeling sick and tired and ill, but I bloody love being pregnant,’ Hannah had told Corinne after her twelve-week scan. Less than a fortnight later, she started bleeding heavily and another scan revealed the baby had been dead for several days.
It had hit everyone hard, including Corinne. Though it wasn’t something she’d planned for so soon, for a few weeks she’d imagined herself as a grandmother, glimpsing a future of babysitting weekends and finger-painting, her kitchen table splattered with colour, her little cottage alive with noise. After the miscarriage, she’d folded that new self away and crammed her into the very back of a drawer.
Her focus had been on Hannah, who seemed shrunken following her return from hospital, as if the machine that had sucked out what that doctor referred to as the ‘aftermath of pregnancy’ had removed some essential part of her as well.
Corinne had assumed that Hannah would dust herself off after a period of grieving and conceive again. It was common enough, she knew, for first pregnancies to end suddenly. She herself had suffered a miscarriage before Hannah came along, so she understood all too well that particular agony, the grief over the little being that no longer was. But Hannah’s relatively late miscarriage, which involved delivering the tiny foetus herself, left her bludgeoned by grief. Doctors had failed to offer a satisfactory explanation, telling her only that there was no reason for her not to go on to have a healthy child.
Having stumbled into her first pregnancy by accident, Hannah became fixated upon a second. But the much longed for second baby had never arrived. And over the following three years Hannah’s wild grief had transmuted into a quiet, persistent sorrow which an unsuccessful attempt at IVF had served only to deepen.
‘You know, I’ve never really failed at anything, Mum,’ Hannah told Corinne. ‘I did well in my exams, passed my driving test first time. Do you remember? I ended up with Danny, even though people thought he was out of my league. And now to fail at something most women do without even thinking about it … It feels like some kind of cosmic practical joke.’
Comments like these broke Corinne’s heart, so she was both encouraged and relieved when Hannah finally stopped talking about babies and gradually became once more the outgoing young woman she’d been before. Their regular phone calls were again full of parties she’d been at, book signings she’d organized, movies she’d seen.
As she parked her Fiat in the car park of The Meadows two days after her previous visit with Danny, Corinne found herself hoping her son-in-law wouldn’t be there. They had always got on in the past, Corinne refusing to take sides during his and Hannah’s frequent rows. Just as well, given what had happened the one time Megs spoke out.
But since Hannah’s breakdown she’d found Danny’s presence intimidating. He rarely volunteered any conversation and she couldn’t help noticing that his visits to his wife were becoming increasingly sporadic. On one hand, she was relieved to be spared his taciturn awkwardness but, on the other, she felt worried his absence might set back Hannah’s progress.
You can’t hold what happened against her, she wanted to say to him. She wasn’t well. Think of it like a fever.
Except it wasn’t a fever.
As she signed the visitors’ book, Corinne scanned the other signatures. No Danny Lovell. Hannah would be upset that he hadn’t come.
Corinne frowned when she saw the names Justin Carter and Drew Abbott. When Hannah had first told her the clinic was being filmed for a documentary, Corinne had been horrified and tried to insist that her daughter be left out of the filming, but she had reckoned without Dr Roberts’ persuasiveness and Hannah’s boredom. ‘At least it’s something to do,’ Hannah had snapped, as if it were Corinne’s fault that she was there in the first place. ‘And we can always say no afterwards if we don’t like it.’ Even Duncan had overcome his initial misgivings once he found out Roberts was offering a discount in the fees to cover the ‘inconvenience’.
The young woman on reception told Corinne that Hannah was outside, and she made her way around the back of the building, stopping to admire the velvet lawn leading down to the vast lake, which, legend had it, contained the rusting wreck of a motor car driven into it by a drunken party guest back in the days when it was still a private house.
Though it was a chilly day, with pewter clouds gathering ominously in the sky, Corinne found Hannah sitting beside Stella on the bench just inside the rose garden. Corinne frowned when she saw the cigarette in her daughter’s hand. Hannah hadn’t been a smoker before she came here, but now she spent hours outside, shoulders hunched against the cold, sharing cigarettes with the others.
‘Everyone does it here, Mum,’ she’d said the first time Corinne brought it up. ‘It’s the one vice we’re allowed. I’d be a fool not to make use of it.’
‘Hi, Hannah! Hi, Stella!’ she called out as she made her way towards them.
Hannah got up to give her a kiss, but Stella, who’d been sitting with her back to the arm of the bench, drew her knees up and hugged them tightly to her chest.
‘Hello, Corinne,’ she said, in that strange, breathy voice of hers.
She had on a tight red knee-length dress that emphasized her tiny waist, and high red platformed shoes which glittered as she rocked back and forth. Her long blonde hair was tied up in a high ponytail.
Looking at her beautiful face, with the skin stretched tight over exaggerated cheekbones, that rosebud mouth, that tiny, pointed chin, those outsized blue eyes, Corinne felt the usual conflicting sensations Stella induced: appalled fascination coupled with a fierce desire to protect her.
The first time they had come to the clinic, that awful first week when Hannah sat and wept and repeated, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ over and over, until Danny had got up and left, Corinne later finding him in the car with his forehead resting on the steering wheel, she hadn’t been able to stop staring at Stella. So pretty, but something not quite right. The eyes just a little too wide. The features just a little too symmetrical.
Later, Corinne risked asking about the disturbing blonde girl and had been taken aback by the offhand way in which Hannah replied: ‘Oh, Stella. She’s addicted to plastic surgery.’ As though it was nothing unusual, just another interest, like training for a marathon or studying Mandarin. Still later on, she learned that Stella’s wealthy mother in America had had her referred to The Meadows after medical experts warned that additional surgery could kill her.
Corinne had felt suddenly totally out of her depth. This kind of thing didn’t happen to people like her. Or families like theirs.
Or women like Hannah.
‘She didn’t do it.’
Corinne could understand why Hannah didn’t want to believe that Charlie had killed herself. Death is always brutal, but some deaths startle more than others. Charlie’s had been one of those.
‘I know it seems impossible to take in. But Charlie had her demons, just like the rest of us.’
‘You.’
Corinne didn’t understand.
‘That’s what you really want to say. She had her demons, like the rest of you.’
Corinne hated it when Hannah got like this. Playing the mental-illness card. Making it us against them.
‘I don’t think your mama meant anything by that,’ said Stella mildly, and Corinne felt a warm rush of gratitude towards her. As far as she could tell, Stella’s family was as remote emotionally as they were geographically, preferring to shower her with money rather than affection.
Corinne tried to make her tone conciliatory. ‘Why?’ she asked her daughter. ‘Why would anyone want to hurt Charlie?’
She couldn’t say kill. The preposterousness of it made the word stick in her throat.
Hannah shrugged. ‘Maybe she upset someone. People in here take offence easily. We’re all hiding things. Every one of us. Charlie told me that.’
Hannah was sounding paranoid and Corinne felt a tug of nausea. Every time she convinced herself her daughter was getting better, something would happen to make her realize just how far there still was to go.
‘Look.’ Hannah reached into her jeans pocket and pressed a piece of paper into Corinne’s hand.
Corinne gazed at it blankly.
1. Switch phone provider
2. Write up journal notes for Dr Chakraborty
3. Google WK
4. Book flights for Croatia(!)
‘I don’t understand. It looks like someone’s to-do list.’
‘Exactly. It’s Charlie’s to-do list. From the day she died. I found it in her room.’
Now Corinne got it.
‘But sweetheart, this doesn’t prove anything. Maybe she wrote this in an attempt to force herself to look ahead. Maybe she was trying to convince herself that if she kept things normal she could make herself feel normal. What’s that phrase – “fake it to make it”?’
Corinne watched the skin on the bridge of her daughter’s nose concertina like a paper fan and knew she’d said the wrong thing.
‘Croatia, Mum!’ Hannah exclaimed. ‘Next summer. Why would she spend hundreds of pounds on flights if she knew she wouldn’t be going?’
Corinne knew she should back down now. But old habits are hard to break.
‘If she was feeling desperate, she might have booked flights as a way of tethering herself to life. Surely you can see that, Hannah?’
But Hannah had closed herself off, drawing a curtain across her face.
‘The day I first tried to kill myself, I ordered a new dress from ASOS,’ said Stella in her dreamy way, as if she were spinning a story from the ether, rather than relating something that actually happened.
‘I was looking for a sign, I think,’ she went on. ‘If they have my exact size, or if they offer free next-day delivery, then I won’t do it. But, you know, I still went ahead. Now I think the only sign that would have made a difference is if I’d been able to unzip my skin and find a whole new different person underneath. And that didn’t happen.’
Stella said things like that all the time. As if it were normal to talk about unzipping your own skin.
‘You see?’ Corinne turned to Hannah, over-eager to make her point. ‘Charlie was testing herself. Looking for signs. You can’t read too much into this note.’
Hannah gazed back at her, blank-faced, and Corinne saw that she had lost her. Regret flooded through her.
After Hannah was first admitted to The Meadows and Corinne was having to face up to the awful truth about what her daughter had done, she’d almost snapped under the weight of her own self-reproach. What kind of mother was she, not to notice what was going on? If only she could have another chance, she’d do everything differently.
Yet here she was, and Hannah was once again slipping through her fingers and she had learned nothing.