23

1976

LYDIA WAITED FOR SARA TO send her back up to the attic. She slept each night in Philip’s bed, his old pyjama jacket tucked under the pillow where she could reach it any time she woke. The room smelled of him, of the very specific scent of his hair and childish sweat. She thought about those last few days in this room with him, how precious he had felt between her arms, with his head on her breastbone. Light and thin with fever, so full of love for her. Sometimes, when she woke in the black, she heard him breathing by the bed. Long, whistling breaths – ragged around the edges with the fluid that filled his lungs. She knew it wasn’t real, of course, but she never turned on the lamp; she would never banish him with the light.

Throughout the long nights, Lydia listened to Sara going in and out, in and out to Owen’s nursery through the passageway, obsessing over her remaining son. Lydia listened to the doors open and close, first one, then the other, at regular intervals well into the morning. Sometimes, Owen would wake and cry, and Sara sang to him then. Over and over, Sara returned to her child, as though to sleep would be to relinquish him to a danger kept at bay by her watchful, waking eyes. The sound of the nursery doors opening and closing grated on Lydia’s nerves – the metallic twist of the handle, the click of the lock, the scrape of the wood against the frame. Lydia took to putting her head under the pillow.

Sara had either forgotten that Lydia slept in Philip’s room, or she didn’t care. Lydia didn’t bring down any of her own things – the room still belonged to Philip, as far as she was concerned, and she wouldn’t sully it with underwear and magazines and pots of face cream. Philip wouldn’t like it, she thought, if he visited and saw that his animals and books had been moved and his things packed away.

After the funeral, before everyone arrived for tea at the house, she went up to her old attic bedroom and, for the first time since he died, Lydia cried. She lay on the dusty floorboards in her good black shift dress, far too hot in this suffocating June weather, and let the tears slide down her temples to trickle into her ears, tears that stung her sunburned cheeks and coated her hair with salt. Soundless; an uncomplicated grief that needed no enticing.

At Doug’s funeral, Lydia had wept a little, and mostly because she felt she ought to. It saddened her to think of the children without a father, of the baby that Sara carried growing up with only one parent. Her throat hurt with the effort of her tears.

But, for Philip – for Philip, she could not cry at all at first. At the funeral, Sara howled and clung to the twins, and Lydia wanted to shake her. It was indecent, the way she’d carried on at the church, after all those days of utterly ignoring all of them and weeping alone in her bedroom. Selfish. Couldn’t she see how her three living children needed her? Leave Philip to Lydia, he belonged to her anyway. Tend to your flock, Sara.

Philip was four when Lydia had arrived. Four years old and solemn and curious and ever so slightly officious. Philip was the child of his father, the heir apparent, and Sara left them to it, run ragged by the twins. He shook Lydia’s hand when she came to the house for her interview – so pompous – and she’d laughed and laughed until Philip laughed too. He amused her, this old little boy. If she ever had a child, she thought, she would like them to be like Philip.

It seemed inexplicable that he could be gone. The weight of the absurdity of it, the impossibility of this reality, stifled her. Lydia felt bound in grief, claustrophobic. Her own inability to alter what had happened was shocking.

The coffin was larger than she thought it would be; perhaps she still thought of him as four, and not nearly eight and almost out of short trousers. He would remain this way to her, always: small and serious and beloved.

Dot’s head appeared at the connecting door, she tapped softly on the plywood. ‘You all right, Lids? Sara sent me to find you. People are arriving; she needs a hand with Owen.’

‘Right. Thanks.’

‘How’s it been? You seen anything else?’

Lydia shrugged. ‘No. Owen seems fine, the girls are a handful, but that’s nothing new. Haven’t heard anything.’

‘That’s good then, isn’t it? Maybe it’s fine, now. Are the scissors still there?’

‘Yes. I make sure, every day. I don’t think Sara’s even seen them.’

‘She wouldn’t notice if you came down to breakfast naked, Lids, not the way she is.’

Lydia sat up and brushed off the skirt of her dress. She smoothed her hair. ‘Tell her I’m coming.’

Dot had held Lydia’s hand all the way through the church service, on the third pew back from the front. The first two rows were reserved for family, full of Sara and Doug’s relatives. When Lydia tried to sit next to Clover, Sara shook her head and pointed behind.

Doug’s parents had telephoned a couple of times, tried to persuade Sara to come back to London for the funeral and have Philip interred next to his father. But Sara held firm and the service took place in the church outside the village. A suitable plot was found under a spreading yew tree. At least Lydia could remain close to him – she didn’t like to think of him in a cold cemetery in London, so far away from her.

Such a beautiful day, such perfect weather. Fine and clear and warm, full of sweet air and the music of pretty waves breaking on a summer-holiday beach. The funeral-goers threaded through the town, dark blemishes among the bright tourists in their linen shorts.

The hall and drawing room were full of people sweating in black suits and under black hats, bathed in June sunlight beneath the dome and the tall windows. Dot’s mum, Sheila, had come to help, and rows of cups and saucers were lined up on the dining table for the mourners. Sheila stood behind the table and handed out the tea, made gritty by the limescale built up inside the large steel urn loaned from the village hall.

‘Lids.’ Dot touched her elbow and handed her a glass of water.

‘Thanks.’

They stood together under the stairs. A large photograph of Philip was set on the mahogany occasional table next to a ceramic vase crammed full of fat cream stocks, already drooping in the heat. They smelled too strong indoors, dying in their vase of clouded water.

‘Where’s Sara?’

Dot pulled at the neck of her black blouse. ‘Outside, I think. Christ, it’s hot in here.’

‘Lydia?’ Tabitha and Clover appeared in matching black worsted pinafores, hair pulled tight into stern French braids and secured with black ribbons. The same dresses they had worn to Doug’s funeral, brought out again much too soon.

‘Hello, my loves.’ Lydia put a hand on Tabitha’s head and felt the damp heat retained by the thick hair. A small black fly crawled along Tabitha’s forehead.

‘What is there to eat?’

Dot motioned towards the drawing room. ‘There’s sandwiches, in there. I should help Mum. Come on, I’ll show you.’

Sara sat in the orangery with the vicar. He had a hand on her knee; Owen writhed on her lap.

‘Can I get you anything, Sara?’ It was cooler in here, the patio doors open to the garden and the lavender-scented air.

Sara sighed. ‘Take Owen?’ She said it very slowly, as if she was tasting the words in her mouth, like a boiled sweet, or a pebble. Trying out the sounds, unsure what to do next. ‘Thanks, Lydia.’

Lydia left the room with the baby and heard the vicar say, ‘We must be grateful for the time we did have,’ and the dry noise that came from Sara’s throat.

Four days, and the house was silent again. Doug’s parents stayed for one night in a bed and breakfast in the village and caught the first train back to London the morning after the funeral. Lydia gathered up the shards of a broken teacup from underneath the drawing-room windowsill, left there by a careless guest to topple and smash on the floorboards.

Lydia rose later and later, left the girls to eat breakfast if they liked and to go hungry if they didn’t. Sara stayed in her bedroom despite the heat. The house choked them all.

Lydia kept to the patio with Owen; sometimes they played on the lawn once the sun had moved and the high garden walls cast a benevolent shadow on to the browning grass.

Dot came on her usual days and made half-hearted meals and tried to keep the house clean, but fine sand crept in at all points, strewn across the hall tiles and settling on windowsills. The house seemed to catch all the wind, all the debris flung up from the cliff path and the woods. Flies abounded, breeding among the soft brown bananas in the fruit bowl. Everything had come loose.

‘We want to go in the pond, Lydia.’

Lydia looked up from her magazine, wildly out of date, and yawned. She was very tired, all the time. The twins threw a double shadow across her legs. ‘The pond?’

Tabitha pulled a dandelion from the lawn. The milk ran down the stem on to her wrist and she licked at it with a cat’s tongue, pointed and crimson. ‘Yes. Mummy said we aren’t allowed to go to the beach. It’s dangerous.’

‘Right.’ Sara had taken Lydia to task for their trip to the beach with Dot – the trip she had previously thanked them for – and all Lydia could do was nod and think, I have no idea what is happening any more.

‘But we want to swim.’ Clover held out her hands. ‘Because we are too hot.’

Lydia stood up. Owen slept on the blanket, pink with heat. ‘Okay. But I’ll come with you. And you have to be quick.’

The girls undressed down at the edge of the pond, among the long grass that smelled of rotting vegetables and shivered with insects. The water was mirror-smooth, utterly flat save for the tiny pockmarks made by beetles landing and taking off. The cherub turned its stone face towards Heaven.

Tabitha went first, in her old vest and knickers that sagged at the bum. ‘Oh, oh! It’s muddy, Lydia, it’s horrible!’

Lydia laughed. ‘It’s only muddy at the edge, it’ll be all right when you’re swimming.’

Clover followed, up to her knees, and shouted, ‘There’s seaweed in here, Lydia! It’s stuck to me!’

‘It’s not seaweed, it’s just pond plants. Honestly, I didn’t think you girls were such scaredy cats!’

Tabitha pulled a face and ducked her head under. They swam out to the middle, touched the cherub, bobbed in the emerald water.

Lydia tugged off her shorts and blouse and stepped in after them. It was cold, shockingly so – she thought it would be like a bath, but the mud between her toes was icy. A few strides out and she was up to her chest, feet no longer touched the bottom. So deep, she’d never realised. No wonder Sara didn’t want them down here.

The girls splashed beside her, two otters with slick hair and glittering faces.

‘This is good, isn’t it!’ Tabitha trod water and her pale legs flashed in the murk.

Wind caught the oaks and shook a few green leaves over the pond, rippled the surface. Lydia was very cold. ‘Okay, I think that’s enough.’ Something slid against her leg.

‘But we’ve barely been in – we haven’t even had a swimming race,’ Clover complained.

‘I don’t think this is a good idea. Your mum won’t like it.’

‘She won’t care.’

Tabitha nodded. ‘She doesn’t care about anything.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ But Lydia knew they were right. She still heard Sara going in to Owen during the night – her endless, restless vigils – but she hardly spoke to Lydia or the twins.

Sara’s grief for Doug had been manic, energised. She threw out all his clothes the same night he finally died, whisked away in black plastic sacks. The house sale was another impulsive choice that crackled with a wicked kind of electricity. Change, movement, erasure – Sara grieved her husband with action.

But Philip turned her to treacle. She flowed through the days thick and gasping and so, so slow. When she ate, her jaw moved exactly once per second. She swallowed as an afterthought. Each word she spoke came at the end of a terrible, weighted pause. She didn’t cry any more, not after those first days of raucous wailing. The only thing she’d said to the girls since the funeral was, I am trying to sleep. The girls couldn’t bear her, and neither could Lydia.

And now, here she came, walking towards them across the lawn in her awful stop-motion way.

Lydia kicked towards the lawn and called out, ‘Girls. Get out. Get out now, please.’ They stood on the bank in the hazy afternoon, feet covered in mud and weeds, dripping pond water on to the grass. The twins took Lydia’s hands as their mother approached.

Sara bore down upon them, wild-eyed, stinking of cigarettes and unwashed hair. She opened her mouth and it sounded like a siren, an incomprehensible stream of noise, hands flapping, throat working. ‘I told you, I told you, how many times, not down here, this is dangerous, anything could happen, Lydia, Lydia, how could you, my girls, my girls.’

Tabitha and Clover looked at one another and then up at Lydia.

‘Sara, please,’ Lydia tried. ‘It’s fine, I’ve been with them the whole time. It was just a little paddle, it’s so hot today –’

‘Stop it – stopitstopit I said, why did no one listen? It’s a rule.’ She was white with rage.

‘Sara, calm down, it’s fine. We’re all fine, see?’ Lydia smiled, seasick.

Sara’s mouth twisted, a snail-shell spiral. ‘I don’t give a fuck about you.’

Tabitha began to cry, then Clover. Sara turned and walked away from them across the lawn towards the house. She passed by Owen, awake now and wriggling on the blanket, and never even noticed him.

*

Lydia went back up to the attic room that night. She took Philip’s pyjama jacket and made the bed, nice and neat, just how he would have liked. When she closed the sash window, the room was very quiet.

She didn’t want to be near Sara any more. They hadn’t seen her again, not after the pond, and Lydia let the girls eat supper on the sofa, curled up next to her; like new kittens, they sought the comfort of her body and she folded them in.

‘Is Mummy still cross with us, Lydia?’

‘No, loves, she wasn’t cross with you at all. She was cross with me. There’s nothing to worry about.’

Tabitha tucked her knees under her chin and picked at her socks, pulling at seed-heads stuck to the cotton. ‘What about the other lady?’

‘What lady?’

‘The sad lady. Clover saw her in the garden once.’

‘Clover?’

The child nodded. ‘She was just sitting on the grass. She was crying.’

Tabitha interjected, ‘She’s always crying.’

Lydia wanted to be sick. ‘Where else do you see her?’

The girls looked at one another. ‘Just, around. Sometimes on the landing. Just walking. Then she goes away. Is she a ghost?’ Tabitha sounded interested rather than disturbed.

‘What does she look like?’

Clover shrugged and held out her hand for the seeds Tabitha had gathered. ‘Oh, like a grown-up, I suppose. You know, Lydia. Like a lady. She’s always got a jumper on, and jeans a bit like Daddy used to wear.’

Lydia took hold of Clover’s shoulders and knelt. ‘If you see her again, you must tell me, all right?’ She worried that her fear might show in her voice, but the twins nodded, turned inwards towards one another and closed Lydia out again.

The attic was stifling; she left the door to the steps open to allow for a little cool air, then sat on her quilt and listened to the house settle, to the clicks of bird feet on the roof, so close to her head. How to continue? There was no map for where she was. She thought of Philip, demanding breakfast, backlit by a kinder sun.

She was frightened – very frightened – by what the girls had told her. Ought she to tell Sara? Yes. But Lydia knew Sara wouldn’t listen. Sara didn’t hear anything any more.

Lydia knelt on the warm floorboards with the camping lamp and found the steel nail file in her make-up bag. She faced the chimney breast that rose through her bedroom and leaned back on her heels. Careful, not wanting to disturb too much of the crumbling plaster, she etched a small, dainty cross, followed by the letters P R into the soft surface – low down, just above the floorboards. Such a small thing, but she wanted to leave something of him behind, here in this room. Even if no one else ever saw it, there would be a memory of him here.

The sounds from below reached Lydia even in the depths of her dreams. Grief exhausted her, she slept harder than usual and struggled to wake. For a moment or two, she lay and simply listened, expecting to be reassured by a familiar toilet flush or murmurs from the twins. But when she couldn’t place the noise, she slipped out of the attic and towards the rhythmic disturbance that echoed through the night house.

The door to the drawing room stood open, but no lights were on. The sky above was black and flat, as if the glass dome had disappeared altogether and left Lydia exposed and cold in the vast space of the hall.

In the grey shadows of the drawing room, the sound was louder still, and, with her face only an inch past the door, Lydia saw the crouched shape of a person on all fours, moving back and forth across the floor very quickly. Long hair swept the floor. The table and chairs had been pushed, jumbled, in front of the enormous fireplace and the rug was folded over on itself to expose the floorboards.

‘Hello?’

The shape whipped round, two wide eyes in a pale face.

‘Sara?’

As if she couldn’t hear, Sara turned away and bent again to the floor. Lydia saw that she was passing a soft brush back and forth across the wood, working at the boards. A tin of beeswax, lidless, sat just out of reach. Her elbows jerked sharply, too fast, and it made her look like an insect, like a panicked cricket.

‘Sara – are you all right? Sara, look at me.’ Lydia knelt next to a woman she didn’t recognise and put her hands over Sara’s to take the brush. ‘What are you doing?’

Sara stared at the floor between her arms. ‘I’m taking care of it.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of the house. It needs me.’

‘What?’

Sara smiled. ‘The floor, we’re so rough with it! The children, they don’t take care. It needed help.’ She touched a fingertip to the board beneath her knees.

‘It’s very late, Sara; won’t you come back to bed?’ Lydia took her hand.

Sara looked down at their clasped hands. ‘All right. Yes. All right.’

‘How long have you been at this, Sara?’ Lydia rose to her feet and brought Sara up with her.

‘Hours, I think. Or perhaps only a few minutes. I’m not sure. I woke up in the night and I heard it. It asked me to help, it told me to come and love it.’

‘Who did?’

‘The house.’

Lydia held Sara’s cold hands and felt the tendons of the other woman’s fingers, the hard bones at the joints.

‘He’s here, still.’ Sara looked past Lydia, through the open doorway to the shadowed hall.

‘What?’

‘I saw him. Afterwards. Only once, but I know it was him. I know. I know my own child.’

Lydia gripped Sara’s wrists. ‘Philip isn’t here, Sara, you know that.’

‘I followed him. All the way outside.’ Sara’s eyes closed, as if she were remembering a dream. ‘I called his name. I looked for him. I tried, I tried –’ Sara pressed her forehead to Lydia’s hands and began to cry. ‘I tried to find him, to look for him, but he was gone. Under the water. I wanted to follow, but she – she was there and I couldn’t see –’

Sobbing, bent in half, Sara wept her grief on to Lydia’s skin. She put her face to Lydia’s hands; Lydia cupped her palms and held Sara’s wet cheeks and saw the bone-white curve of Sara’s spine between her bare shoulder blades, disappearing into her nightdress.