THEY WALKED IN silence, all of them – at times – looking up to the extraordinary expanse of sky and all of them – at times – stumbling over the rocky ground, in muddy ditches, against the sharp gorse that encroached on the path leading to the tip of the peninsula.
Eva walked on the other side of the path to Piotr and Holly. She wanted the space around her, and she wanted the time to listen. She listened to the sounds she could hear in between her own steps, as her confidence built with every new beam from the lighthouse. There was the regular thud of Holly’s walking stick – usually a thump on rock but occasionally the gulp of it sinking into mud. She could hear the swish of Piotr’s jacket sleeves as he walked ahead of her – that was less regular as he strode forwards alone then caught himself and waited for Holly to catch up. She could hear him breathe, too, when he paused and waited, when he looked up at the constellations. Like he was breathing in the sky. And behind all of that there was the constant, distant, crash of the waves.
She’d read somewhere that the sound of water is soothing, for humans – that it makes us feel like we’re in a place where we could survive. She focused on the waves as she walked, the waves that were white and silver and loud, now, the loudest thing she could hear. Then the lighthouse appeared, its white stripes showing up in its beams of light, the contours of the land leading them out to where it stood, tall and thin, alone, the only thing stretching up from the flat featureless land.
They arrived at a gate.
Beyond the gate was an overgrown patch of grass and gorse that had once, as far as she could make out, been a garden. Through the garden was a low rectangular outbuilding, painted white and catching the starlight, the remnants of a small, broken window the brightest point on the structure. Beyond that, past a drystone wall, was the lighthouse.
Holly and Piotr were just standing, staring. Eva thought Holly was leaning on her walking stick, and wondered if she was out of breath. But Holly hadn’t complained, or slowed down, so it seemed patronising to ask if she was OK. Instead, Eva pushed on the gate – waist-high, wooden slats – and it opened easily, inwards. Almost too quickly, they were in front of the lighthouse itself. It towered over them.
Eva knocked first.
There was no answer.
She checked her phone – the night was dark but it wasn’t that late. If someone lived here, they wouldn’t be asleep yet.
Then Holly knocked. Called out: ‘Freida? It’s me. It’s Holly.’
Nothing.
Eva pushed on the door, gently. There was no handle – she couldn’t see how to get in. She pushed again, harder. Then Piotr leaned against it, gingerly at first, then using all his weight. He stepped back, took a short run at it.
‘Ouch,’ he said.
The door, of course, hadn’t budged.
‘I’ll need to take a longer run-up.’
‘Piotr,’ Eva said, touching him gently on the shoulder, ‘look.’
She pointed, and they all looked beyond the lighthouse to the low building nestling behind it in the shadows. The cottage of the lighthouse keeper.
‘That’s where someone would live,’ Eva said. She walked up to the door and pushed it. It opened.
She stepped into a tiled porch, through an inner door of dirty yellow glass and peeling woodwork, to find herself standing in a small, dark hallway. To her surprise, the light overhead came on as soon as she tried the switch. A door to the left was open, and inside it, on the wall facing them, was a large framed photograph that had been cut out from a newspaper article. It showed a young, happy Holly holding her newborn daughter. Eva knew what it said. The picture was familiar to everybody: The first couple to give birth using the new and still controversial baby pouch.
‘Good heavens, not here too,’ Holly pronounced, as she strode past Eva and knocked the frame off the wall with her walking stick. ‘What on earth is going on?’
Daphne opened the door to a room that had been many different rooms over the years. It had been her bedroom, when she was a child, painted bright purple and filled with picture books. Then her dad’s study, his white bookshelves double-stacked with biographies and novels. They were the readers of the family, Daphne and her dad. Everyone else liked to be out, doing, playing, but Daphne and her dad preferred to be inside reading. Then it became the empty room, for a while, after her dad died, after she and her mum had found the collective strength to go through everything on those bookshelves, save what they couldn’t let go and donate the rest to charity. But for the past nine months it had been the baby’s room, and she had decorated it herself, for the party, for the moment that never came.
The balloons had lost their lift, each of them by slightly different amounts, so now they were hanging around the floor or bobbing below the windowsill. One was lying on the small chest of drawers like a deflated skin. She would have to throw them away, but there was too much air in them to fit them in a black bag. They needed to be popped first. So, collecting a needle from her own room along the hall, that was what she did.
The Happy Birth Day sign was peeled down from the wall. The toys she placed in the cot – there had been colourful toys all around the room – because Rosie might want to keep some of them. But the decorations, the gold and silver and purple ribbons, she collected up so that the pain of removing them would be hers and no one else’s.
She wished Rosie and Kaz would talk to each other. It was strange, particularly for her, that she took comfort in knowing that her child had a partner – the sense of peace she’d felt during their wedding had taken her completely by surprise. Daphne herself had never wanted a partner, and certainly never believed that anybody needed one. She’d always felt like she was most complete, living as the best possible version of herself, when she was single. She’d tried a few people out, of course, boys and girls while she was at school, men and women during her twenties, but she’d always felt relief when the relationships ended, as though she could return to being herself again. So when she decided she wanted to have a child, she did that on her own, as well. Though she had her family. Her mum drove her mad, but her gratitude ran deep.
It had always surprised her that FullLife focused so much on traditional families in their publicity. Given that they wanted the support of the majority of the population, though, it made a certain kind of sense to advertise the pouch as the way to create an ideal version of the existing family unit. It was how they got mainstream popular opinion behind them so fast: the pouch gave women equality and allowed men to experience complete parenthood. It fitted with society’s image of happiness, of success. Even now, many parents were still heterosexual couples and lots of conceptions happened naturally – by choice – people opting for the embryo to be implanted in the pouch a few days later. But the real value was what the pouch offered to the non-traditional family. Single women and men empowered to become parents. Gay couples able to carry their own child. Trans people. Older couples. Women with health difficulties. People who wanted to live in groups. The possibilities for moving society away from its narrow view of family were beautiful. Though, apparently, it was going to take more than fifty years. Whether through biological or sociological change, human progress wasn’t linear; there would inevitably be problems along the way.
As for worrying about the selection during IVF, you could drive yourself mad thinking about all the potential lives that never were, from the eggs never fertilised, the embryos that did not survive. You could drive yourself mad worrying about choosing one over the other, but they were just cells. She believed that. After all, for every child that was born there could be another, potential child that would never be conceived the night after. It was the child that was born that mattered. The life that was lived.
Picking up the basket she kept by the back door, she headed out into the garden despite the dark. Light from the house lit the grass, and the glow of London was reflected in the winter colours as she selected stems of rich green leaves and red berries. Indoors, she arranged two vases and took the first quietly to Rosie’s room. She was lying on the bed now, the walls bare, the curtains drawn, but she sat up as Daphne placed the flowers by the window. They would catch the sun in the morning.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Rosie said, her voice weak and quiet, but genuine.
‘You’re welcome, sweetheart.’ Daphne kissed her on the forehead. ‘Any word from Kaz?’
Rosie shook her head.
‘He’ll come home when he’s ready. And so will Nana.’ Daphne didn’t know if that was true, but she’d always thought it best to deal with one problem at a time, and right now Rosie was exhausted. ‘Try to get some sleep, love.’ She went to pull the door over as she left the room, but Rosie called her back.
‘Leave it open, Mum?’
Daphne smiled and nodded. ‘I love you very much, sweetheart.’
Downstairs again, Daphne looked at the second vase she had arranged, added one more sprig from the spare cuttings in the sink and some extra plant food. Then she carried it up to the attic, to her mum’s room, and arranged it on the dressing table between the family photos that Holly kept either side of the mirror she used when curling her hair. It felt wrong, this room being empty. Like a vital part of her was missing. But her mum would come home soon too, Daphne reasoned, and when she did, she’d quite like her to see that she’d brought her some red berries, some prickly holly, and some of the unexpected winter flowers from their new purple daphne.
Holly stood in the middle of Freida’s room – part office, part lounge, part dining room – with the framed newspaper article celebrating her past at her feet. Eva and Piotr were looking decidedly scared of her now. Ha!
She wasn’t amused, though. She was cold, deep in her bones cold, and the damp of the ground and the mud had seeped through her trainers hours ago – she could feel it, congealing around her toes. What in all of heaven’s name was Freida doing, moving to a place like this? No, she wasn’t amused, she was angry.
‘Freida?’ she called. ‘Freida!’
‘I think this house has been empty for a while,’ Eva said gently.
The dust, it was true, was in such a thick layer that no one could have lived here without feeling the urge to wipe it up, surely. But then there were still books on the shelves, glasses and vases in that old-looking cabinet by the sofa – it reminded Holly of the furniture her parents used to have. It looked like an old woman had lived here. No, it looked like an old woman had died here.
‘Do we think she’s dead, then?’ Holly said.
Piotr and Eva just looked at one another, and she had to fight the urge to bang their heads together.
She pushed past them and checked every room of the cottage – bungalow, in fact, with a kitchen at the front, and that hideous dark hall with its ugly yellow glass doors. She passed a bathroom on her way to the final room, presumably that would be the bedroom, but she wasn’t expecting what she saw inside. There was no one there, of course – but the windows! The whole far end of the room was composed entirely of windows looking out, uninterrupted, over a black expanse that led to the violent sea that was thrashing against the coast. As she looked out into the darkness, the wilderness of it, Holly was hit by a sudden wave of homesickness.
She missed her beautiful, comfortable home, her Rosie, with her morning cookies and wide eyes, she missed the Thames, the reflections of the bridges’ lights, the cathedrals on the skyline, the domes and glass arcs that nestled beside Elizabethan theatres. Was there any city in the world so old and new, so full of contradiction? But there was no contradiction here, in this lighthouse bungalow, in this uncompromising view that had been left unchallenged for millennia – it was single-minded. It was awful. The other two seemed to like it here. Acting like they were on an adventure, but that wasn’t what this was for Holly, despite her trench coat and her trusty walking stick. This was no adventure for her. She wanted everything to be OK again, and she wanted to go home. Hearing Eva’s footsteps behind her, she turned.
‘We’ve found something,’ Eva was saying. ‘Piotr’s trying to play it.’
‘What?’
But the silence that followed was soon broken by a voice, too loud – far too loud – filling the low-ceilinged room.
‘Sorry,’ Piotr called, as the voice disappeared, then started up again, quieter but still audible. Eva held her arm out, offering Holly the chance to walk ahead of her, but Holly shook her head. She waited until Eva had reached the office door and then, slowly, started making her own way down the hall. About halfway along, opposite the vile avocado-green bathroom, she stopped and leaned against the wall, listening.
It was Freida’s voice.
Freida’s voice was talking about how she had written a letter but no one had answered. She sounded frail. She sounded disappointed … But there had been no letters to Holly for decades. Freida had said not to contact her at all. Holly didn’t even have her address! If there was a problem, Freida should have stayed to face it – she should have told Holly what was going on. She’d written a letter? So what! It had never arrived! But where had she been all these years? They were supposed to be on the same side.
But her voice, even so much older, was familiar. Holly could remember the sparkle in her words as she described the pouch – so unlike anything the men would have come up with, she’d said, laughing. I’ll make it soft and warm. No sterile containers and coloured fluids, no uniform pods – I’ll make it personal, she’d said. And she had. Everyone experienced the pouch individually, everyone knew how personal it was – the love saw to that. The love you felt for your baby in the pouch was acutely intimate.
And here was Freida’s voice, saying she thought the foundation of FullLife was a mistake – the whole company – implying she regretted giving away her patent, the patent that she had left to Holly, for the family. Freida had never wanted money, Holly knew that, and Holly had needed it then. She’d thought it was an act of generosity. But now Freida’s voice was complaining that Holly cared more about her family than her.
And then there was Freida’s voice, going on about those tropical fish again, and Freida’s voice, describing a collection of burned gorse – is that what she did now, Holly thought, had she given up one of the most important careers in a century, walked away leaving a technology that she knew was flawed, that had hurt Rosie, so she could collect useless scraps of wood and obsess about sea bass and supermarket deliveries?
There is no greater patriarchy than London.
‘It was Jean Rhys,’ said Eva, replying to Freida’s question as though she were right there.
‘What?’ said Holly, annoyed that her thoughts had been interrupted. But now, there was Freida’s voice again, shaky, describing a room at King’s. Describing a choice that she made, that she wished she could remake. There it was, recorded. Undeniable. She regretted what she’d created. They’d found her hiding place but she had disappeared, again, leaving no answer, only this record of the fact that she thought FullLife was wrong; she thought Holly was wrong. Her whole life. Holly’s whole life.
Holly wanted to be sick. But Eva was there again.
‘There’s something else,’ she said.
Piotr had followed her out to the hall now – was looking at Eva again with that admiration that was starting to make Holly want to scream.
‘There’s a note,’ she was saying, and then she was handing it to Holly, who read:
I have left my lighthouse and gone to live with Declan Ross. If you want me, you can phone me, and I might even answer. 01862 4365117.
Holly looked at Piotr, who looked at Eva, who looked at Holly.
‘Who in heaven’s name is Declan Ross?’