DECLAN ROSS WAS concerned about his rhubarb. True, it was December, but it was a mild winter, it had barely dropped below freezing, and back in November he’d been walking along the beach in no more than his shirtsleeves. So he had expected, reasonably, he felt, to get another crop of rhubarb before Christmas.
He was down on his hands and knees, in his garden trousers, in his wellies, inspecting the rhubarb patch when Bea came out with the phone. Why he’d ever let her persuade him to go cordless was a mystery – a phone wasn’t supposed to reach you in the garden. It was wrong, all wrong.
‘Is it a bit dark for gardening, Dec?’
Bea, it seemed, was wielding his torch as well as the cordless landline.
‘Not at all,’ he said, peering at the ground and pretending not to have seen the phone.
‘You can have the torch,’ she said. ‘If you take the call.’
She was swinging the torch back and forth by its strap, looped over her little finger.
‘Or you can come in for tea,’ she said.
‘You drive a hard—’
‘If you take the call.’
Something in her tone made him look up and forget about his rhubarb.
‘I think you’ll want to speak to them,’ she said, offering him an arm so he could pull himself up. ‘They’re asking for Freida.’
‘Good lord.’
Declan stood up, stretched his back. Thought about what she’d just said.
‘Are you sure, love?’
She nodded.
‘Good lord.’
He took the phone and held it to his ear. Bea waited, her arm looped through his.
‘Good lord,’ he said, into the phone. And then, as if realising he was now speaking on the phone for the first time, ‘Hello?’
Five minutes later he was driving to collect the crazy Londoners from the lighthouse in his muddy 4x4. He hadn’t yet made up his mind whether to be impressed or amused by their walk from the station to the edge of the peninsula, but it showed some determination, he would give them that. It was a short enough drive, he’d be there in fifteen minutes, but by the same token it was a miserable enough walk, at night, with the wind up as it was and the rain all of last week. Boggy, that was the word. He dipped his headlights and turned in towards the gate, where he saw the huddle of them emerging from Freida’s old bungalow round the back. He wound down a window.
‘Evening all,’ he called.
‘Good evening,’ shouted the man, a little louder than he needed to, despite the wind. Big chap. He got in the front seat and held out his hand. ‘Piotr Filipek,’ he said. ‘Thank you for this.’
‘No bother,’ Declan said with a nod and a shake of his hand.
‘I’m Eva,’ the younger woman said, climbing into the back seat. ‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Awful night,’ said the older woman, slamming the door with some force.
Eva had short bright red hair, kind of spiky, and piercing eyes – Bea was going to like her. The older one was dressed like Humphrey Bogart. Declan reversed out the way he had come, and put the radio on for a bit of company as he turned back towards the main road.
‘I live on the coast, near Edderton,’ he said. ‘Which you’ll not have heard of, I imagine,’ he chuckled.
None of them seemed to know what to say.
‘But we’ve got a good view,’ he said. ‘Me and Bea. We can see right across to the lighthouse. Beautiful at night, you know?’
None of them seemed to know.
‘And in the day,’ he said.
Thank God the A9 was empty, he thought to himself, putting his foot down and accelerating past seventy. He could have told them about Freida in the car, or before they even set off from the lighthouse, but every time he caught the old woman’s eyes in the mirror he knew this wasn’t the time. And he was finding it difficult to broach the subject. He didn’t like to upset folk, didn’t want to be the one to deliver the news. He might never have heard of these people, Freida might never have spoken of them, but they knew her. He was sure of that. And judging by the tense silence in the back of the car, there seemed to be a lot riding on their finding her, even if it was seven years too late.
Julianne Quentin arrived home after dark to find a police car parked outside her front door. Her steps slowed. She hoped, as she approached, that they’d start the engine and drive away. But she saw them notice her, the way they sat up straighter as she walked towards them – they were here to see her. She’d knock on their window, ask if they needed her help with something. But before she could the door opened and two uniformed officers stepped out. It had been such a long time since she’d seen the police that they almost looked like they were in fancy dress. But at the same time she knew that they wouldn’t be here unless there was a reason.
‘Would you like to come in?’ she said, keeping her voice calm and authoritative, as she did in every situation she found herself in.
They nodded and thanked her – although they didn’t smile – and followed her into the house where she sat them down on the sofa, and took the single chair opposite.
‘There’s been an accident,’ they began. ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Quentin. There’s been an accident on the Tube …’ And somehow it felt like she’d known what they were going to say, as though this had been coming, and she’d been waiting, rehearsing her side of the script. Except that she didn’t have any words.
As a young woman, Julianne had spent a long time thinking about what she wanted her life to be. There were ideas there years before she understood the practical realities of them. She loved flying – ever since she was too young to remember, according to her parents – and so she studied the subjects that could bring her closer to flight. She always knew she would work with aeroplanes, and she did.
She always knew she would have a family, too. Though, just as running down a hillside didn’t teach her much about the equations of motion, the idea of having a family and the way it was achieved seemed very far apart, when she was little. Perhaps it was the shock that made her determined to understand how everything worked as an adult. She got her PhD in eighteen months, a record for her department. She knew that knowledge meant power.
So although her instinct told her that she never wanted to be pregnant, she spent a long time considering the options. James working at FullLife didn’t make it inevitable – she always made up her own mind. She wasn’t afraid of childbirth the way some women were; in fact she would have relished the challenge. But the idea of carrying a growing life inside her for nine months just felt wrong. It felt unfair. She wanted to take the best possible care of her baby but she also wanted to work fifty per cent of the time, equally with James. She didn’t want to be the only one worrying during pregnancy – she wanted the worry to be equally shared. So it seemed far more sensible for the baby to be safely cocooned outside their bodies, where they could take joint responsibility for its care.
And James was such a gentle kind of man. He loved carrying the pouches. He practically glowed with pleasure when he felt a kick, when the warmth of the pouch was pressed against him and he’d lean down to whisper about how miraculous our understanding of life was. And it had been wonderful, once the children were born, to see how close they were. She wasn’t sure if they’d have been so close, had he not carried them in the pouch. FullLife understood, of course, they’d built their company on it.
So they’d both had the careers they’d wanted, and been the kind of parents they’d wanted. After the twins were born she’d been appointed to the board of directors at the airport. James had been offered more supervisory roles, but he turned them down. He just loved working in that lab. He was even more inspired once he was a dad – he used to talk about finding ways for the babies in the pouches to experience all the beauty of the world. Sensory inputs became his main focus. Well, until he was moved into a new lab to study what was going wrong. And he’d lied to her about it. Why did he do that?
Was it because he’d become ashamed?
There was always an uncertainty in him, she thought. He had never been one hundred per cent certain about anything. Well, except their family. But even there, it seemed, he’d had his doubts. She used to find it irritating, the way he would say one thing and then qualify it with the possibility of the opposite also being true. And all those nervous habits, really, for such an intelligent man, what did he have to be so nervous about? But then, she would overhear someone who wasn’t nervous, someone who talked without acknowledging the possibility that they could be wrong, and she would feel this sort of … what was it, that she was proud of him? That she recognised it was better to doubt yourself than to never doubt at all?
The police officers had stopped talking now and it was strange that although they were in her house, and sitting on her sofa in her living room, she felt like she had to be the one to stand up and leave. She still hadn’t spoken, and she didn’t want to speak. But there had to be something in life that was certain, and for her it had been James and so she stood up and turned away from the police officers and took a single step away from the table they were seated around, and that was when it hit her. As her right foot landed on the carpeted floor and she felt a splintering inside her chest, even though she kept walking away, her head high and she didn’t stop and didn’t break down, that was the moment when Julianne Quentin realised that she had loved her husband.
A woman with long, curly grey hair and large tortoiseshell-framed glasses opened the door. She looked at Holly. Holly looked back.
‘This is Bea,’ said Declan, touching her hand. Eva and Piotr walked down the hallway first, and as Holly followed them Bea was by her side.
‘You’re Holly Bhattacharyya,’ she said.
Declan paused, turned to look at Holly, the recognition warming his expression.
‘She used to tell us stories about you,’ Bea smiled.
Holly knew, from the way Bea spoke, that Freida was dead. She was gone. And it seemed that before she died she had found a place where she could belong, after all.
In the warm living room, with the wood-burning stove crackling in the corner, Holly sat quietly, her knee aching again, as Declan stumbled his way through the bad news. He was doing his best, and he must have been caught off guard by their arrival, after all this time. Seven years ago, did he say? Had she really died seven years ago?
And no one even knew, Holly thought.
But of course, that was wrong. These people knew. The people she had chosen to know. Had Holly done anything so bad, for her best friend to cut her out of her life, so completely? Bea said Freida had told her stories. Holly wasn’t sure she wanted to know what they were.
‘She did leave some things for you,’ he said. ‘Well, for anyone who came, I think.’
Holly breathed in, then out.
‘So I guess they’re for you.’
He was looking at her, not at those other two. Piotr and Eva had been minding their own business. They’d said early on that they had never even met Freida. Piotr had said that. It was good of him. Otherwise they could have been the ones holding this file, and sitting in front of this computer screen. Perhaps, in some way, she wished they were.
‘I recorded the video for her,’ Declan said. ‘She asked me to. And she asked me to keep it here until someone came looking. She didn’t say who that would be.’
Then he leaned over Holly’s shoulder and selected the final recorded message that Freida had left behind.
Freida’s face filled the screen, close up and distorted, a massive nose taking up the bulk of the picture. Her eyes – which appeared very small in comparison to the nose – seemed to be searching left and right, and then what was presumably a hand waved in front of the camera and blocked everything.
‘Oh, good heavens!’ said Holly as Eva stifled a laugh. She and Piotr had gathered round behind her, to watch.
‘Where’s the camera?’ a voice, now familiar in the way it seemed to boom from electronic devices, asked the room. ‘Hello? hello? Is this thing working?’
Declan’s voice could be heard, off camera, saying it was right in front of her face.
‘Not on top of it,’ he said. ‘There, there.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Freida. ‘Why didn’t you just say so?’
At last, she sat back and realised there was a small square showing her what was being recorded.
‘That’s me there, is it?’ she said.
Off camera, Declan replied that it was.
‘Right. Edit that first bit out for me, will you?’
‘I can start the recording again?’
‘No, no, don’t do that. We’re here now, let’s get on with it. Just edit it out later.’
Holly glanced at Declan, who was standing beside her, watching the video like it was a home recording of a happy family holiday. Smiling, he caught her eye and shrugged to tell her he had no idea how to edit a video.
When Holly turned back to the screen, she finally saw her friend. She saw Freida, and recognised her as the woman she had once been. Older, yes. Much older. Her skin was red and patchy, from the wind out here. But those dark eyes, staring defiantly into the camera, were the same. Holly nodded, in greeting, and almost reached out a hand to touch her face.