25
Sylvie
My mother is falling. Spinning. Skirt parachute-puffed. In a whirl of shredded newspaper cuttings, like a deranged Mary Poppins. My stomach lurches. I step back on the cliff path and rapidly blink away the image until I can just see blue sky again. So far this walk with Annie—to stretch our legs before the drive back to London—has done little to soothe my rattled mind.
When I glance back at Annie, she’s a couple of steps behind, resting her hands on her knees to catch her breath, a symptom I suddenly remember from my own pregnancy, that altitude-like thinning of the air. “Shall we sit, sweetheart?” I suggest, walking back to her and putting an arm over her shoulders. “Rather than hoof farther over these cliff tops?” She smiles and nods gratefully.
The bench, facing the sea, is an old favorite of Mum’s, rickety, lichen-spangled, and dedicated to a long-dead village couple “who loved this spot.” I think, if Mum dies, I’ll get her an inscribed bench too, then push away the painful thought. She won’t die. It’s not her time.
I concentrate on the light. Beautiful. That’s what I miss most about this place when I’m in London. There’s no city haze here. Colors sing. Like on an old masterpiece after its dark varnish is removed.
My phone beeps in my bag. My fingers twitch. But I guess it’s another panicking text from Steve, and I don’t have any desire to speak to him or to interrupt things. It feels like Annie’s finally opening up to me this morning, revealing her summer love affair, petal by petal, a bud unfolding. “So you were saying how you met Elliot . . .” I nudge, careful not to appear too ravenous for information.
“I was . . .” she says teasingly.
I bang her knee with mine. “Well, go on, then!”
“At the beginning of the summer, Granny let slip the name of the Harringtons’ company.” She raises one eyebrow, pauses dramatically. “Harrington Glass.”
“Interesting. I didn’t know that.” Unable to see how this might relate to Elliot, I wonder if she’s going off on a tangent.
“Thing is, I wouldn’t have thought much of it if she hadn’t looked so totally weird, Mum,” she continues, twisting a strand of hair around one finger. “Like she’d said something she hadn’t meant to say. It felt like brushing against something underwater and not knowing what it was. Do you know what I mean?”
My childhood was peppered with such febrile tiny moments: a certain inflection in my mother’s voice if I ever asked about her work as a nanny, a swift change of subject. Or unexpectedly charged reactions disproportionate to the event. Like the time I set fire to my bedroom curtains, having a sneaky cig, and she yelled, really yelled—she rarely raised her voice—and accused me of almost burning down the house.
“Yep, know what you mean, Annie.”
“So, obviously, I googled the company.” She lifts her face to the sunshine and shoots me a sidelong glance under her long lashes. “It’s still going, Mum.”
“Is it?” I shelter my eyes with my hand and scan the sea for a sighting of seals or dolphins, those childlike shadows slipping beneath the surface, much as in this conversation.
“And that was where I first saw Elliot’s profile. On the Harrington Glass website.”
“What?” I turn to her with a small crack of a laugh and immediately see she’s not joking. So this is why she’s been cagey about how they met and not told me anything about him. Not married. Not an ex-con. I should be relieved. I’m not.
“He kind of stood out.” She animates when she talks about him. Her eyes shine. “Didn’t look like the rest of the headshots, all the old suits. On the staff list, it said ‘digital brand ambassador’ or something, and linked to a Twitter page that made me laugh. And then, well, I ended up going down this wormhole online. Don’t look at me like that, Mum! It was just a distraction from what was going on with you.” A wave smashes onto the rocks below: my guilt, with sound effects. “Okay. And Dad,” she adds, as a sweet, conciliatory afterthought.
“And what did you find?” My mouth is dry. “In this . . . this wormhole.”
“Dark web opiate-delivery service.”
“Christ.”
She smiles affectionately, and I realize she’s winding me up. “He was ’gramming Devon beaches, Mum. Look.” She points to a distant bay, a wedge of golden sand. “Turns out he was staying there with a friend at weekends. Surfing. I started liking his photos and we got, you know, chatting.”
No, I don’t know. Annie makes it sound so easy.
She’s silent for a moment. She blushes. There’s more, I think. Oh, crap.
“He was working at Harrington Glass for a few weeks because his mother had an ‘in’ at the company.” She makes quote marks with her fingers. “Some contact. No big deal, is it?” She’s seeking reassurance. “I mean, he doesn’t work there anymore.”
“No biggie.” One of those unpleasant surprises tossed up by a digital world that connects people who wouldn’t ever normally cross paths. “But, Annie, it does concern me that he was just a random stranger off the internet.”
She frowns. “Er, how else are you meant to meet anyone?”
“At a party? On a train?” A boat. A canal boat. What’s wrong with me? I’ve left my husband. My teenage daughter is pregnant. My mother’s hovering in a nightmarish no-man’s-land between life and death. I haven’t worked in ages. I’ve not even buffed my nails. Or had my roots done. And I’m having disrupting thoughts about a bloke ten years my junior. Tragic.
“A train?” She giggles.
“Okay, I’m a dinosaur.” I put my hands up, catching her giggle, realizing how much I’ve missed these confidences. “What happened when you actually met in real life? Did you like him straightaway?”
She nods. “There was this attraction, this thing.” Her voice is soaked with longing. “It felt like . . . like it was . . . right.”
That feeling. I felt it once too. But a lifetime ago. The weekend I met Steve we sat up talking all night at a festival in the rain. I remember the soft glow inside the leaking orange tent that smelled of spilled beer and sleeping bags. Lying side by side on the boggy ground sheet. Midges whirling around our heads. Falling asleep at dawn, holding hands. Waking to the dazzle of sun, fat and gold with promise. We were so young. We were different people.
“I know it sounds corny.”
I smile. “It sounds like you fell in love.”
Annie doesn’t deny it. But she picks a lichen flake off the bench, self-conscious, as if I’ve caught her off guard. Waves boom beneath us. The tide is turning.
“Granny met him, right?”
Annie stretches out her long legs, polished and tanned nut brown after a summer spent surfing and not wearing nearly as much sunscreen as I’d have liked. “A couple of times.”
“Did she know where he worked?” I ask curiously, warily. Mum would dread the wrecking ball of the past colliding with her beloved grandchild in any way, I know that.
Annie nods. She bites her lower lip. “I told her that on the walk.” A cloud covers the sun, tipping the sea from turquoise to a bottomless navy. “Just before she fell,” she whispers, rasping with the horror of it still.
“Oh, Annie.” I take her hand, remembering what she told me and Caroline: Granny fell because of me. “It doesn’t make her fall your fault.”
“I don’t know why I even said it.” Annie starts to cry. The tears stick her hair to her cheek. I pick the strand off gently, wanting to take the weight from her shoulders too—and her place on the cliff path that day. “So stupid,” she whispers, shaking her head. “It just spilled out of me and made her start, like I’d plugged her into the national grid or something.” She closes her eyes, screwing them up, the memory flickering across the minute muscles in her face. “Then she . . . she stepped backward. And Granny was gone.”
Half an hour later, Annie comes down the cottage stairs with her bag slung over one shoulder and my old childhood mobile, the little wooden trees on strings, bouncing off one finger. “Can I have this? For my baby.”
My baby. The overwhelming sense is of loss, and powerlessness. I have to remind myself of how, when Annie was growing up, each stage seemed set and unsolvable. I’d felt like I’d always be leashed to a pram I couldn’t figure out how to fold, nap times and feed times, worries about meningitis, vaccines, choking on raisins, never sleeping properly again. But then a new Annie would emerge: toddler, preschooler, tween . . . I’d loved each one with such passion, mourned and marveled when she morphed again, never quite finished off, never quite ready. This too is a stage, I tell myself. A point of transformation. I just need to hold my nerve. “Of course, Annie. You have it.”
She grins. “It’ll go nicely with the terrarium, I reckon.” The mobile starts to turn and twist. “Babies love to stare at things like that, don’t they?”
The little forest under glass left at the hospital for Mum. In the whirlwind of the last two days, I’d forgotten all about it. “Oh, yes, they do,” I say absently, distracted, niggled by a half-formed thought.
“Mum . . .” She fiddles with the car key in her hand. “I never told Elliot about Granny working for the Harringtons.”
“You didn’t?” I can’t hide my surprise. The way Annie talks about Elliot—and the look in her eyes as she does so—suggests the union was a meeting of minds as well as bodies.
“Or me first seeing him on their company website.”
“But I thought you’d got close.”
“We did. I mean, it was perfect. That was the problem. I . . . I didn’t want to ruin things. And it sounded, I don’t know, stalkery. Complicated. It still does.” She winces. “Please don’t say anything either. Not to him or Helen or anyone. Promise? Please.”
I hesitate, thinking of the photo of the Harrington family standing outside the lovely stucco house. That there’s a link, however gossamer delicate, between them and Annie’s situation is like a stitch in the brain. “Not if you don’t want me to, of course not, Annie. But—”
“He doesn’t want me to have this baby,” she interrupts, jiggling the mobile from her finger. “His mother thinks I’m a gold digger. Why make things worse?”
“He did drive all the way down from London yesterday,” I point out. “I bet he’s phoned.”
She presses her lips together, which means he has. And she probably hasn’t taken his call.
“He seemed genuinely concerned about you.”
“No. His monster mother dispatched him from London to make me change my mind, that’s all.” She blows the mobile, one puff, two, harder, and it starts to spin. “I’m doing this on my own,” she adds vehemently.
A shadow forest flickers against the pale wall. As the tiny trees slow to a stop, I feel something still in me too, a dawning realization. Annie’s body is not mine: I can no more alter its inner workings than change the course of a satellite circling the moon. And if it weren’t for my inability to confront my own past, she’d never have felt the need to start probing into it . . . So this is my mess. My responsibility.
I bend down and blow the mobile, so it dances on her fingers once more. “You’re not on your own, Annie. We’ve got this, okay? You and me.”