24

Now it is me and Foxlowe alone for the first time ever. I used to wish it like this, when I couldn’t find an empty room, when I wanted to sit and be still but the party was raging and spilt upstairs, and my eyes itched for sleep.

Hunger builds, and I welcome it like an old friend, it helps me recall things. So I go back to the rubbish in the studios, and find a jumper I know, with thick knitted crosses, that I wore sometimes, sharing with Libby. I find a blue bowl that I drank goats’ milk from. In the corner, near the foxes’ den, there’s a pile of Freya’s paintings. There is one small sketch of a female shape, standing squat and fat, her bare arse flabby and wide. Underneath, in pencil, she’s written Self Portrait, Pregnant? It’s the same size as my photograph of her, and I take it back to my bag, still in the front hall, and slide it next to its sister.

As I’m leaning down I catch them in the mirror. He’s brought her, holding her arms around herself, wrinkling her nose. She sees me before I can speak and gathers me up, her fingers pulling my hair. Richard stands to one side, looking at the floor.

—Love, my love, Mel says. —I’m so sorry. I made him drive us up.

She holds me at arms’ length. —You look awful, you’re all wet, you’re hungry, are you hungry? Urgh, she says, —It stinks in here. She strokes my hair. —Let’s forgive each other, she says.

I watch Richard over her shoulder. He’s lifted his head and is drinking it in, slow and steady. He takes a few steps on the staircase. His hands in his pockets, so he doesn’t have to touch anything.

—Thought you’d kicked me out, I say.

—No, no, just a row, says Mel. —Just a silly row. I was thinking, she says, as she puts her arm around me, —we could get another dog, if you like, company for Jimmy, maybe a puppy, we can go by Battersea on the way home —

—No, I say. —I’m staying, for a while. Until the funeral, anyway. The others might come.

—Okay. Come back to our hotel.

—No.

Mel reaches for my hair, to smooth it down, but I step back.

—Come and look around, I say.

—Oh, it’s awful, she says. —It smells.

—Right here on the stairs, the middle landing, is my favourite place, I say. —And Freya’s kitchen is down there. The gardens and the moor are that way. Let me show you.

Mel calls up the stairs to Richard. —Let’s take her back. I can see she’s struggling. Your pills are in the car, she says to me. Let’s go back to the hotel, have a bath, watch a DVD.

—No.

—Okay, then we’ll just go home, Jess.

She’s steering me out of the door, where the ivy still clings. I’m twisting, but it’s my words that untangle me.

—Don’t call me that, I say. —Don’t, it’s not my name.

Later, we sit in the kitchen. Mel is wrapped in one of Freya’s shawls, in the same chair Toby slept in. She rubs her hands together and blows into them.

—How can you stand it? she says. —It’s freezing, you must’ve all caught your death.

—Yeah, god, it was always cold, Richard says.

Mel sniffs. We’ve both been crying, during our long, circling conversation about how I will move out.

Richard begins wandering around, touching Freya’s things, opening cupboards and old boxes, just as Toby and I did. He calls out to Mel when he finds a shattered vase, blue and gold, taped up with sellotape, broken seams running like rain on glass, but she’s dozing now, curled up by the aga. He holds the vase out to me.

—Do you remember? he asks, softly, to let Mel sleep.

I shake my head.

—I wanted you to have it, he says. —It’s a … Well, it was my mother’s, a beautiful piece. I gave it to Freya to give to you and she smashed it. She was angry about something — can’t remember what — and I taped it all back up for you, took me ages. Do you remember?

I shake my head again, bored. Instead I remember the last time we were together in this kitchen, so I risk a Do you remember of my own.

—When was the last time we were both here? I ask.

He stands up, puts the vase carefully on the windowsill. —Maybe a specialist could fix it properly, he says.

—Must have been before you left, to go after Libby?

—No, he says.

He’d looked terrible, that last time. An outsider sat beside him at the oak kitchen table, yellowing papers spread out. I’d come from the back of an unfamiliar car, been given tea that burned my mouth, and I probed the flabby wound behind my teeth all night. So even though it was Richard and not one of my closer ones, it was still one of the Family and he was back and the only thing not completely strange that day, so I went to him when he held out his arms. His whole face was swollen, red and sore, but his body looked shrunken, suddenly old. He knelt beside me, said my name, said Blue’s name, pressed my head to his shoulder. I’d never been so close to him before, smelled the soap and mint and the must of the old clothes he liked to wear, the tweed. —Sorry, I’m so sorry, he’d said, getting stuck and stuttering on the word.

—Where’s Freya? the ungrown me had asked.

—Gone, he said.

I couldn’t reply to this.

He nodded at the outsider sitting at our kitchen table.

—We’re going to leave too, he said. —All of us.

—Come and look around with me, I say to Richard now, remembering the arms of the younger him encircling the broken and frightened ungrown me.

So we go wandering through the rooms. He touches things like I did, and when he finds a bracelet in the yellow room, left on the floor, he picks it up and puts it on.

—Was it hers? I ask. —I don’t remember it.

—Libby’s, I think, he says, and he kisses it.

Then in the studios he stands for a long time and I poke around in the alcoves until he turns and his eyes are wet.

—Toby was here, I say quickly.

—Yeah? Good man. How is he?

—He’s called Lucas now. He’s great. He wears a suit. He’s married, he talks to someone about everything, he writes it down, he’s fine. He wasn’t alone afterwards, I press. —He had a family to go to, and he’s fine now.

Richard looks so small, so sad and so cold in the stinking room.

—I hate you, I say.

His eyes flick about in panic, but eventually come to rest on mine.

—I thought it would be, this wonderful thing, this wonderful childhood, we thought you would be so happy, I thought it was the best thing I could do, he says.

—I was happy, I say. —I really was.

—It was a disaster, he says.

—I don’t remember it like that, I say, and this time he doesn’t argue with me or make me try to remember differently. He just swallows and wipes his cheeks dry and says, —Good. I’m glad you remember it that way, then.

—You should never have kept me away from Freya, I say. —I would have been all right, if you’d just let me see her.

—Look, she agreed not to see you, Richard says. —But you can have Foxlowe now. It’s yours.

—Freya agreed … to never see me?

—She agreed, as long as she could live in this house until she died.

—But she wrote to me, I say.

Richard takes Libby’s bracelet off, places it gently on the windowsill.

—Well, that’s … He struggles. —She did love you, in her way.

A thousand questions come: Where are they, Where is my family, Why did you leave, Why did you come back, Did you realise I didn’t have a fucking clue what was happening, and that I was all alone? But in the end I summon up the courage to ask something else.

—Where was Freya when they found her?

—I don’t know, he says, surprised.

But he looks out of the studio windows, across the gardens to the henhouse.

Finally I go to the attic. It is changed and empty. The bed is different; no, it’s the same bed, different covers, the red and blue blankets are gone. Wait, the Cancer box is here, restored and refilled, on the shelf as it should be; the books we couldn’t read are stacked on the bottom shelf. The light is old light, I smell burnt bread and unwashed hair and sweet damp and I’m home at last, and I find Blue, her leg tethered to the bedpost like a rotting balloon, and Freya beside me, something in my hand, and then there is a long moment of something peeling away, a page of the book turning, slipping into place.

—I won’t take the house, I tell Blue.

—That’s good, she replies. —We can all be Leavers.