As the summer reached its peak, the garden awoke from its green slumber. The delicate scent of soft pink roses and the stronger, fresher fragrance of the buddleia mingled over the moat, drifting up to my bedroom window, their combined smell at once sickly and comforting, reminding me of Stacey’s parma violet candies.
A group of people had started camping out on the common land that bordered our garden, and during the day I took to lying out on the beech tree, hidden from sight by the high hedges, listening to their treasure hunt discussions. Stretched out on the tree’s sun-warmed surface, watching the armies of ants scaling its smooth trunk, I spent much of the summer dozing, half listening to their far-fetched theories.
The beech was getting soft in places, the wood eaten away by insects until here and there it had begun to look like lace. I listened halfheartedly to someone singing tunelessly round the campfire, and pushed my thumb into the soft wood, making holes across its once beautiful trunk. How I would love to be out there, swigging from bottles of cider and discussing the mysterious Kemp Treasure, not trapped in here with no one—not even Stacey—to keep me company.
Dad didn’t like me staying outside after dark. As soon as the light began to dim, and the flicker of the campfire was visible through the trees, I climbed down from the tree trunk and slipped into the soft hollow at the base of the tree, where the roots had tipped over in the hurricane years ago. It was soft and mossy, and I could lie there, warm and dry, the roots curving round me like the arms of a chair, completely hidden from view. When Dad came out to find me, he did a quick scan of the garden, then went back inside to continue his search. If it rained, I would crawl right inside the hollowed-out trunk, watching with a bored sort of pleasure the hypnotic splash of water as it hit the bramble leaves and nettles outside.
This hideout worked for weeks until one evening, when Dad was calling my name (much to the excitement of the people on the common), and Monty found me, meowing so loudly that Dad was soon on his tail, escorting me angrily back indoors.
Eventually, Dad decided it was best if I didn’t spend any time outside on my own at all. The summer holidays were in full swing, and with them had come the hordes of treasure hunters we were used to. I took to sitting each day, curled up on the window seat, gazing out at the forbidden garden. I wrote to Beatrice, demanding to know why she had pretended to send presents from my mother, but she didn’t reply. When a month had gone by and I still hadn’t heard from her, I tried telephoning her house, but the ringtone rang on for minutes before I finally put the phone down with a feeling of unease. I asked Dad if there was any way of reaching her, and he shut himself in his study and made some calls.
When he came out, his usually animated face was still and waxen, and I knew what he was going to say.
I ran to my bedroom and shut the door, throwing myself on my bed and soaking the duvet with my tears. I refused to come down to eat, going through her letters one by one, remembering our conversations as if she were perched on the bed with me, chattering away.
Late that evening there was a quiet knock on my door, and Dad climbed in through the little space. He had an envelope in his hands.
“I was just going through the fan mail from the last month. I found this. It must have got caught up in it.”
He handed me the envelope, the familiar writing even more loose and wavy than I remembered.
Inside was a photograph. It was old and cracked, as if it had been looked at repeatedly. It was a picture of Mum and me. I looked about four years old—around the time we went our separate ways—and I was sitting on her lap, clutching a toy hare, gazing up at her with rapt attention. She was pressing her lips into my hair, her eyes closed, and while she didn’t look happy, she looked content, as if she was in the exact place she needed to be, right at that moment.
“She may be ill,” Beatrice had written, “but she is your mother. She loves you, Romilly, and that love will go on, long after I’m gone, long after we are all gone. Never forget that.”
When Dad came up later to say good-night, he sat on my bed and brushed away my tears.
“She was very old,” he said. “You met her at the end of a long and interesting life. She was so pleased to have got to know you again. There’s a lot of her in you, you know.”
I remembered when I had first met her two years before, how I had envisaged her as part of the late summer garden; a flower that had already bloomed. I had known she wouldn’t live forever, but still it was hard to take in.
In the bathroom mirror as I got ready for bed, my eyes were shrouded in dark circles. The whispered voice had become louder recently, keeping me awake. Each night it began around midnight, pulling me from my dreams, whispering to me deliciously, almost as if it were there beside me. Sometimes I felt a small, soft hand in mine and heard the soft drip-drip of water, but when I turned on the light, there was nothing there. When the voice left early each morning, whispering away like smoke, I felt it like a physical thing, tearing at my chest, pulling me in two, and I lay awake, not daring to sleep, desperate to hear the voice again.
That night as I lay there, waiting for the voice to visit me, I stared at the ceiling and wondered if Beatrice knew she was dying when she wrote me that final letter. I wondered if she was alone when she died, how long it was before anyone realized she was gone.
The child’s voice didn’t visit me that night.
The weeks after Beatrice’s death shimmered by in a blur shrouded by lack of sleep. I no longer minded that I wasn’t allowed outside. I was content just to sit in my bedroom. I didn’t even have the energy to look at the Treasure Hunt books any longer. I sat at my window, gazing out at the reeds in the distance, thinking of the escaped panther. Sometimes I thought I imagined him stalking sleekly across our garden, bending his noble head to drink at the moat. More and more I preferred to live in the world of stories in my head, where nobody dies, but nobody is really alive either. I think things would have continued in this way, but for something that happened one evening toward the end of summer.
I could hear Dad downstairs, tinkering with the telephone. Someone had leaked our number a few days before, and we’d had a constant flurry of phone calls since. After one particularly vicious caller, I was no longer allowed to answer the phone.
With both Stacey and Beatrice gone, I felt like my whole world had shrunk down to the size of my bedroom. I lay, looking up at the little painting Dad had given me five years ago, for my ninth birthday. It felt like a lifetime ago: before Mum had come to stay; before Stacey left. Back then, Dad had been full of color and vibrancy, just like his paintings. Now he was more like a spectrum of gray.
Dappled moonlight streamed into the room, muting the colors so that it looked like a negative of a photograph. The moonlight was so crisp that even from here I could see three or four versions of myself holding on to Monty, stretching back into the painting, getting smaller and smaller as if I was in a hall of mirrors.
The clouds outside shifted, and the moonlight trickled brighter over the painting. I sat up. A pair of eyes had appeared in it, hovering on the blank wall as if they belonged to a disembodied ghost. Quickly, I stood up and went to the painting, but as I got closer, the eyes disappeared. Instead, where there was usually just a blank stretch of bedroom wall, a shadow had appeared on the canvas. It looked almost like damp, creeping across the picture. I took the frame down and laid the picture on my bed to look at it better. The dark patch was indistinct, but it mirrored the posture of Romilly in the painting so exactly that I thought it might be her shadow. I flicked my bedside light on. The dark patch disappeared, as if it had never been there at all. I turned the light off, and it appeared again, skulking next to the smiling nine-year-old as if it were about to envelop her and her cat completely. With a shiver I thought of the faceless woman in Dad’s books: the same shapeless form, the same lack of features. A feeling of dread overwhelmed me. I turned the light back on and quickly hung the painting back on the wall.
I ran down the stairs, not daring to look back in case the shadow had peeled itself from the painting and was sliding across the floor, following me.
I found Dad muttering to himself in the small bathroom, the telephone in pieces in the empty bath. He was tapping the bell on it, an insistent ping ringing out each time.
“What are you doing?”
“Hmm?” He looked up. “Ah, Romilly. Just the girl. Come here and hold this.”
I edged into the tiny space and knelt beside him, replacing his finger with my own to hold a wire in place. I looked back into the hallway, my eyes searching for shadows that shouldn’t be there.
“What did you girls get up to today? Anything nice?”
I bristled, stung that Dad had already forgotten Stacey didn’t come around anymore.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said caustically.
But Dad was humming under his breath, concentrating on what he was doing, not listening to me.
“Is a bathroom the best place to do this?” I eyed the leaky tap sending droplets of water over the telephone’s components.
“Yes, yes, it’s fine.” Dad’s voice was muffled, a fat screwdriver in his mouth. He was still tapping the bell, cocking his head to listen as if tuning a piano.
He had a familiar twist of concentration to his face. I had seen it a few times recently, usually when he was so absorbed in doing something that he didn’t notice I was there. It made him look different, not like my dad at all. I had seen it for the first time a few weeks ago. He often forgot to shut the study door properly now, and I had taken to looking through the crack in the door, checking up on him. On that particular day he had been quiet for some time and, like a mother searching for a naughty toddler, I went and spied at the crack in the door.
Dad was leaning over his desk, counting out some money. But the sheer amount of it made me catch my breath. Tens, twenties, even fifty-pound notes. Piles and piles of crisp, clean banknotes. I knew he must have earned some money from the books, but I had assumed it was frittered away on expensive feasts back when the first book came out. I thought about Stacey stealing the sanitary towels for me a few weeks ago; about measuring out sugar for my cereal so that I didn’t use too much, and anger rushed through me. Why wasn’t the money safely in a bank, for goodness sake? I watched him put it away in a desk drawer, making a mental note to explore further when the opportunity revealed itself.
The sound of Dad tinkering with the phone brought me back to the bathroom, and I watched as the same expression of concentration trickled over his face. “What are you doing?” I asked again.
“Fixing the phone.”
“Was it broken?” It had certainly been ringing enough earlier.
Dad stayed silent, trying to screw the shell of the phone back together. When it was done, he lifted the telephone ceremoniously out of the bath and took it, dripping, to the hall, where a phone cable lay waiting. Plugging it in, he lifted the receiver and a smile spread across his face.
“Fixed,” he said, walking off, lifting the screwdriver to his mouth like a victory cigar.
I knelt down and picked up the handset. Silence.
“Fixed,” I agreed, a creeping feeling of dread filtering out of the handset and into my ear as I listened to nothing where a dial tone had once been.
The incident with the telephone awoke me from the malaise that Bea’s death had brought. Dad felt like a mystery I needed to unravel, and I tried to connect these strange little incidents together, attempting to solve the puzzle that was Tobias Kemp.
As August gave way to September, and the people camping out on the common drifted back to their lives, my curfew lifted at last, and I was allowed to roam free again.
Sometimes I thought I glimpsed Stacey in the distance when I was out walking, but when I called her name she never turned. It was more likely just one of the village kids, people I didn’t know anymore and didn’t want to befriend. I hadn’t seen Stacey since our argument at the quarry almost two months ago, and in her absence, the books had become my closest friends. I quite liked being on my own. There was more room in my head to think without Stacey’s constant chatter. But occasionally, when the space around me was so quiet that it hurt, I missed her dreadfully. It reminded me of when we’d been younger and she’d disappear for weeks, even months. Back then I’d always known it was only a matter of time until she came back, but this time I wasn’t so sure.
Downstairs, Dad was in one of his moods, racketing around Braër like a bear with a sore head. I locked myself in the bathroom with my books and my carved box, trying to block out his roars.
I opened up the latest book, Romilly and the Picnic. I raked my eyes over the picture of the picnic laid out on the rug, trying to see what other people saw, trying to find clues to something, anything. The illustrations were colorful and bold, yet a second look revealed tiny details: brown mice climbing the reeds by the lake; half-eaten cakes sitting on crumby plates; a pair of chattering false teeth biting into an apple. On one corner of the rug sat two hares, their noses twitching at the smell of cake. I began to appreciate Dad’s talent in a way I hadn’t when I was younger, and yet, as I turned the pages, I found myself looking, not at the beautiful paintings, but at the tiny silhouettes of me being chased by various animals at the top of every page. It still hurt to think that Dad saw me as someone who would run away from a challenge rather than turn and face it head-on. With just a few drops of ink, he had turned me into a slapstick comic strip for everyone to laugh at, and it stung.
I looked away from the little drawings, my eyes settling instead on a strange-looking brass contraption standing on the rug in the main picture. It was emitting little puffs of steam, and it had a handle and a spout, like an overlarge, ornate kettle. I wondered where Dad got his ideas from, which objects were important and which were just there to put you off the scent. I so desperately wanted to believe there was a treasure hunt hidden in the pages.
Sitting on the bathroom floor, my back to the bath, I picked up Romilly and the Kitten and turned to the picture of Monty as a kitten in my father’s hand, the bell hanging round his neck. I was sure now it was the same bell that Dad had given to me, hidden in the box: the real bell had a shred of blue velvet attached to it, just like Monty’s collar in the pictures. I picked it up, letting it roll around my palm.
I studied the box. What other objects were in there, hidden deep inside? I imagined myself small enough to climb in, and I crept through its carved walls into countless tiny rooms, worming my way through Dad’s mind. Inside the box, all was ornate and glowing. Minute paintings hung on walls and rich red rugs kept my feet silent as I padded through. It was like a museum of my father, a memorial to a man I didn’t understand anymore, and I didn’t want to leave.
Dad’s bawling roar brought me back to the damp bathroom and the cold metal of the bath against my back. I picked up Picnic again and turned the pages, searching for the person I was now in the paintings before me. I stopped briefly on the shadowy woman. She was on her knees by the lake in this book, as if she had fallen, her hands still over her face. I wondered if she was meant to be me. I turned the page quickly.
There was no summer potion in this lake story, no skinny-dipping or staring at naked breasts. No Stacey whatsoever. The place between my legs trembled at the memory of her.
Downstairs, Dad continued to remonstrate noisily with the air. I got up, pins and needles in my feet, and stood in front of the mirror. I so rarely looked at my reflection nowadays that I hardly recognized the girl that looked back at me. There was something of my mother in my pinched face, and something of my father in my bushy eyebrows. I could even sense something Monty-like in my eyes, a sort of wistful almond slant, and for a second I thought I saw another set of eyelids slide across my pupils. I blinked, and they had gone.
I remembered when I was small, and had just met Stacey, I had tried to conjure her to me. I screwed up my eyes and counted to ten, trying to summon her into the mirror.
“Romilly?” Dad’s voice, cheerful now, drifted up the stairs to me.
I opened my eyes. My dull reflection looked back at me, brow furrowed, as if it were trying to work out what I was doing.
“Girls?” His voice was more insistent now, shouting almost. “Some help?”
Girls? His memory was so poor at the moment. He had forgotten again that Stacey no longer came around. I frowned at myself in the mirror. It felt like he was deliberately rubbing it in, taunting me for my loneliness. I left the bathroom, shutting the door on my reflection, and stomped angrily downstairs, ready to give him a piece of my mind.
Halfway down I stopped. “Where on earth did you find that?” I asked, staring at the apparition in the hallway, a sort of bushy Christmas tree with Dad’s arms and legs sprouting from it.
“Ah, Lidiya, it was in the churchyard. They won’t miss it. I’ll put it back.”
“Lidiya?” I said, stopping on the last step.
“Who? Grab the end, Roe. Go on, there’s a good girl. It’s not too earthy.”
I took hold of the rooty base, looking at Dad warily, and together we heaved the tree into the snug, where Dad righted it and stood back to admire its gently shaking branches.
“It’s for the new book.”
“What book?”
“The next Treasure Hunt book. The grand finale. It’s a Christmas book.”
“But it’s September.”
“Yes, and the book will be out in a month. Time waits for no man.”
“You’ve already finished it?” I had known he was working on something. He had been spending so much time in his shed, despite the rot that had set in around its base, but I thought it was due next year, not now.
“Keep up, Romilly, goodness me. The publishers have asked for a painting to auction off for charity, but I’ll be damned if I give them an original from the book. I thought I’d make a copy—a little extra something to keep my richest treasure hunters happy. Imagine what they’ll pay for an original Kemp!”
I sat down on the sofa, trying to digest all that he had told me. The final book was already finished, the last piece of the puzzle, and the last ever Romilly story. I had had no idea.
“When will we get the proof?” I said.
“They sent it a while back. It’s lying around here somewhere.” He looked around the snug as if expecting to see it propped up by his feet.
“They’ve already printed it? Why didn’t you show it to me?” Dad had always given me the proof as soon as it was delivered so that I would have the chance to pore over it before anyone else did.
“Stop whining, Romilly, and grab some decos. There’s work to be done.”
I got up grumpily and reached for the old cardboard box. Even the sight of the glittering decorations didn’t fill me with cheer.
Christmas carols boomed out of the little room as we sweated in the stifling heat of the crackling fire, lifting our treasured decorations out and hanging them carefully on the tree. There were lopsided snowmen made out of cotton wool, and hand-painted angels, both of my own and my dad’s making. His were made of thin pieces of tin, and so intricately painted they seemed almost real. Mine were made from little cones of paper. They had round, red-cheeked faces and yellow wool for hair. I was embarrassed to remember how pleased I had been when I made them, and I crumpled one up and threw it on the fire when Dad wasn’t looking.
As the box became emptier and the tree more laden with glittering memories, I began to get that feeling of restive waiting that only comes on the nights before Christmas.
At the bottom of the box, on a soft bed of pine needles and the shimmering dust of baubles long since broken, lay one of my favorite decorations: a little gilt bird cage. Perched inside was a tiny bird, covered in fragments of real feathers. When you twisted the base of the cage, the bird’s minute beak opened and began to sing “The Holly and the Ivy.” I hung the cage on a prominent bough halfway up the tree and wound it up, sitting down on the sofa, humming to its tinny tune.
“Why does the fire have to be lit?” I asked, peeling off my sweater and wiping damp hair out of my eyes.
“It has to be authentic,” Dad said, a manic glint in his eye as he reached up and placed the star on top of the tree.
“Hey! That’s my job!” I had been looking forward to doing it for the first time without the need of a chair or a pair of grown-up arms to lift me. I looked at the star as it wobbled. It wasn’t even on straight. Dad just sighed huffily, leaning over to stoke the fire.
He set up his easel and blockaded himself in the snug with the whiskey decanter and his paints, perfecting the shine of the tinsel and the glow of the embers with quick flicks of his brush. Christmas carols were replaced by cheesy Christmas pop as he worked, eventually overtaken by overtures of “Auld Lang Syne.” The house smelled faintly of pine and linseed oil, and I thought idly of last year’s crackers and if there might be some left over to pull.
We spent our evening in the snug, taking secret delight in its Christmas camouflage. With the window open we were able to have the fire crackling away merrily without getting too warm.
“When’s lunch?” Dad said on the evening he finished the painting, smacking his lips together, a glass of port in his hand.
“About five hours ago,” I said.
“How odd—I don’t remember. Did we have brussels sprouts? Pigs in blankets?”
I eyed him warily. “No, we had jam sandwiches and a packet of crisps.”
“What a terrible Christmas dinner.”
“Well, it’s not really Christmas, is it, Dad? It’s September.”
He was looking down at his hands, his huge eyebrows furrowed so that I couldn’t see his eyes. “But I wanted presents,” he said quietly.
He picked up a fallen plastic decoration and dangled it in front of Monty, who immediately pricked his ears up and batted at it. Dad twitched it some more, chuckling gruffly, and then with sudden enthusiasm he launched it into the fire. Monty charged after it. I shot off the sofa, grabbing the cat just in time. The decoration hit the flames and collapsed immediately like a dying star, melting into a puddle on the grate.
“Dad! What on earth were you doing?” I stroked Monty furiously, checking his ears and whiskers in case he was singed.
“I was just playing,” he said. “I didn’t think.”
I finally found the proof copy of Romilly’s Christmas the next day, wedged under a leg of the coffee table in the drawing room. I turned the pages slowly, mesmerized by the glow of the paintings within.
Perhaps it was just because I was getting older, but this book felt significantly different to the rest: the colors were richer, like paintings from the golden age of the Dutch masters. There was a depth to the artwork that I hadn’t noticed in the previous books. Each picture was lit with a warm, syrupy light, like diffused candlelight, or the dim flicker of an open fire.
My heart leaped when I first saw the little silhouette of me running across the top of each page, for, finally, Dad had got it right. In this book I was chasing the animals, not the other way round. At first it was rabbits and frogs, but further on in the book the animals got bigger, and I was tearing after tigers and frightening off rhinos, until, on the last page, a wily old crocodile scuttled away from me as I charged toward him.
This new book was special in many ways. It was a winter book, and although every page felt warm and Christmassy, Dad had painted a small window into every scene, reminding us that outside, the bleak, snow-filled skies loomed on the horizon.
There was a sadness to the pictures. One page showed the kitchen, our little table covered in the trappings of a Christmas dinner. At first glance, it was wonderfully festive, but as I looked closer, I saw that the Christmas pudding, instead of being lit by a halo of blue brandy, was smoking as if it had been left to go out. The crackers had been pulled and the hats lay torn on the table. The turkey had been stripped of meat, its skeleton lying upended on a plate, and the cranberry sauce had been spilled, leaking red across the table. This was a Christmas meal where an argument had ensued. It reminded me of a story Dad had once told me about the Mary Celeste, a ship that had been found deserted and drifting in the sea, the crew nowhere in sight. This meal was the Mary Celeste of feasts, the players having left a moment before, never to return.
The more I looked, the more I felt as if the pages were loaded with symbolism. Vases of flowers were arranged with random objects—a skull here, a dead pheasant there—like Victorian still life paintings, the light playing over them thick and caramelized. It felt like Braër House of a hundred years ago. And always, on every page, there was a jug of dusky pink roses, their petals turning, changing, beginning their descent into decay. There was a finality about every picture, a reminder that life does not carry on forever, that there always must be an ending.
The shadowy woman was on the final page. This was the only painting not set inside Braër. It depicted Monty and me laughing and grinning as we made a snowman in the frosty garden. But even here the snow was beginning to melt. There were dark pools of slush on the edges of the picture, ice dripping from the end of the snowman’s nose.
I didn’t see the shadowy woman at first. She was lying on the ground, half-hidden by the silhouettes of old logs and creeping brambles, but once I had found her, my eyes locked onto her, unable to stop looking. Her hands were over her face still, and she looked so desolate and sad. Something about her pose brought to mind a memory. I got up and found the other books, looking at her in each of them. The memory began to crystallize, and quickly I found some of Dad’s tracing paper and a pencil.
I set to work, tracing each version of her onto a separate sheet, starting with the first book, where she was standing upright, and working through to the last, where she lay, her hands over her face. I stapled the pages together and lifted the edges with my thumb, letting them fall back slowly. I did it again and again, faster and faster, watching as she began to move under my hand, flickering into life at my touch. She stood serenely, her long hair flowing, then she raised her hands to her face, and her knees crumpled until finally she lay, defeated on the ground.
Again and again I flicked through the little book I had created, and again and again she put her hands to her face and collapsed to the ground. I could almost hear the sob emanating from her, the long, guttural cry of despair, and I knew I had heard it before.
It was the keening cry of my mother, the awful wail as she sank to the floor, her hands to her face, while I looked on, helpless, locked in the pantry.
When Dad had finished the painting in the snug, I helped pack it all away, feeling the anticlimax of a Christmas that had never been. The melted decoration clung to the grate, and I prized it off with a knife without saying anything.
Dad was humming “Good King Wenceslas” cheerfully.
“It’s Mum, isn’t it?” I said, scraping at the grate with the knife.
“What is?”
“The shadowy woman in your books.” Dad stopped trying to untie the star and looked at me. “She’s sad about something, isn’t she?” I said. “She’s crying.”
“How did you work it out?” he said.
“When she locked me in the pantry the first time she came back, I watched her through the keyhole. She fell to her knees and cried, just like in your pictures. And when she came for my birthday tea a few weeks ago, she put her hands to her face as if she couldn’t cope with what was going on. It’s something she does, isn’t it? You’ve seen her do it too.”
Dad sat down on the sofa, narrowly missing a bauble.
“Why is she so sad?” I said.
“Some people are born to be sad,” he said, “and sometimes things happen to make them even sadder.” He picked the bauble up and held it in his hand, looking at his reflection in its shiny surface.
“What happened?” I said.
Dad breathed a deep sigh. “You’ll understand one day, I promise,” he said.
“You always say that,” I said crossly. “I want to understand now.”
Dad had taken some more baubles off the tree. He was putting them in a line on the rug by his feet.
I watched him, waiting for his reply. Behind me, the fire crackled, hissing into the quiet room.
“Dad,” I said angrily.
“Help me, Romilly. I can’t seem to count them.” He was staring at the baubles, his eyebrows furrowed.
“Why do you need to count them?”
“I...I don’t know.” He began hurriedly collecting them up, his huge fists manhandling them so fiercely I thought their delicate glass might dissolve into powder in his hands.
“Here, Dad, let me.” I crouched down to help.
“No!” His voice was loud. Far too loud for the little room, and it pushed me to the floor with its force. Dad was looming over me, looking at the baubles in his hands as if they were something alien. I stood up warily.
“It’s my job,” he said quietly. “It’s always been my job.” Then he looked up and saw me standing there and his face changed. A look of fear came over his eyes and he mouthed something, like an exhalation of breath.
“Ff...” he said. “Fff...”
And then his skin seemed to warp and change as if poison gas was siphoning over his features, and he shouted, “Get out. Get out!” Throwing the words at me like grenades, their force pushing me back into the door. I scrabbled for the doorknob behind me. He was twisting around now, like a trapped giant. He took a step forward and his huge body knocked the tree over. It crashed down in the tiny room, the remaining decorations smashing to the ground.
A lone red bauble rolled toward me, and I ducked and grabbed it, before turning and pulling the door open and running.
Out of the snug, along the hallway, down through the garden and the meadow and into the mobiles. Forgetting they were dangerous. Forgetting about past accidents. Forgetting. Forgetting. Forgetting.
Dad found me hours later, sitting under the inky sky, the bauble cradled in my palm.
“Come,” he said, offering a hand. “We need to talk.”
We sat in the snug, the tree still upended between us. Dad was Dad again, but a paler version. A cowed, fragile Dad, shrunken with shame.
“There’s no easy way to say this, Romilly, so I’m just going to come out with it—your old dad’s not well.” I looked at him. He looked scared, as if he’d never spoken the words out loud before.
“What do you mean?”
“I have an illness called dementia. It’s affecting my memory, my...” He shook his head, trailing off. His voice was infused with sadness. Where was my great bear, I thought, in this broken being before me? The edges of my heart began to curl inside my chest.
“Is it serious?”
He nodded.
“Will you get better?” I asked, dreading the answer. He lifted his eyes to meet mine and shook his head.
“No,” I said, standing up abruptly. Dad grabbed my hand, his huge fingers desperately stroking my own small ones as if this small gesture could make everything all right. My whole body trembled, the room a blur of color as tears coated my eyes.
“I’ve...I’ve known about it for a few years,” he said, speaking faster now, as if now he had started, he couldn’t stop until he had said it all. “But it’s never really impacted on our lives...never really been important, until now.”
The outpouring stopped abruptly. I stood over him, looking down at this man, my father. He watched me silently, his pale face a moon, orbiting me in the hot room. I could feel the cloying scent of terpene and pine resin coating the back of my throat. I felt sick. I turned to the fallen fir tree and plucked a pine needle from its branches, unable to look at Dad.
“It may not get any worse for a long time,” he said. “And there’ll be good days among the bad, I promise. Whatever happens, I’m still here. I’m still me, inside.”
The sound of his hand thudding against his chest made me glance up. He was covering his heart with his huge fist. The gesture made him look like he was clutching at his heart, as if it too had started to fail.
“Will you die?” I whispered. I could hear his inhalation of breath. I forced myself to keep looking at him.
Dad opened his mouth to speak, but only a quiet moan came from his throat. He lifted his arms to me and I ran to him, melting into him, enveloped by his warm grown-up smell, ignoring the sour tang clinging to his skin that I had never noticed before.