A Trick of the Mind (12 page)

I nodded.

‘No other women?’ I asked.

He grinned, winked. ‘Don’t worry! No one else. It’s you he’s been asking for. You’re his number one. And if you’re going to be caring for him we’ll have
to get the physio to run through some exercises with you, things he’ll need to do once he’s been discharged,’ he said. ‘But you’ll no doubt be in again
soon?’

‘Yes, of course.’

I wondered if he watched me sympathetically as I walked back down the corridor.

I would help Patrick recover. It was absolution of a sort. All I had to do was make amends by helping him in the way he’d asked me to. I couldn’t do more than this
if he didn’t want the police to pursue the investigation.

‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I, Pepper?’ I said as I opened the car door and he looked up at me, his tail wagging ferociously, his tongue hanging out, panting.

I glanced up at the hospital as I got into the car, wondering which window was Patrick’s.

There was a figure at the window of a third floor ward. Silhouetted against the lights that had gone on, stretching up. Probably a nurse, releasing the blind which slithered down and hid the
room from view.

I woke up early, in May’s bedroom. I should get back to London, work on my painting, but I had promised to visit Patrick again, and visiting hours weren’t until
midday. At least now I had a role to play.

Patrick’s girlfriend’s role!

It was obvious the woman he thought I was, was having no more to do with him. Then I would – should – take her place until I could explain the weird truth about how I’d come to
visit him.

I leant on the window and watched a brisk wind send compact clouds racing across a pale blue sky. The sea glittered over the sand dunes in the distance, blond sea grasses against a bleached
backdrop of sand. I did my salute to the sun, a yoga ritual that woke me up and put me in a good mood for the day. I had a sudden violent urge to see Patrick again. I’d take him fruit as
he’d asked, soothe him, be the woman he believed I was, the one who cared. I could barely wait.

I pulled on jeans, boots, a jumper and my parka, called Pepper and walked out onto the shore, restraining myself from tapping the gatepost. The horizon was a dark line, the sea softened by the
white cotton grass leaning away from the wind. I walked briskly, throwing pieces of driftwood for Pepper, licking the salt spray from my lips, the wind stinging my cheeks. People were out already,
walking their dogs and stopping to ask me about Pepper – what breed was he? How old? And I trotted out my answers – a Norfolk terrier, at least fourteen, quite old for a dog, yes, at
least ninety in people years.

As I walked, feeling the wind blow away all the anxiety of the last few days, I gave rein to the feeling that I’d been trying to fight since I’d visited Patrick last night. A
yearning to have his blue eyes looking into mine again. A longing to feel his lips. I thought of the way they had rested against mine. His almondy smell. His strong hands. In my fantasy I
obliterated the fact he might never walk again, ignored the fact it might all be because of me. He was fully recovered, tall and strong. When he was better he would come and stay with me here, in
May’s cottage. Or, as seemed likely, in his own flashier place somewhere along this coast.

I let the fantasy develop. We would drive down here in a convertible – he was bound to have a nice car – and he would take me out on his yacht – he’d said he’d been
on his way to a weekend of sailing – and we would make delicious meals of fresh seafood and drink the best wine. I would paint, and he would sell my paintings to up-market businesses all over
the world. New York was just the start of it!

In this fantasy, everything
was
changing. Not in the way I had planned as I drove down to the seaside the night before my Private View. But an even more exciting and unexpected phase
was unfolding. I was going to change more dramatically than anyone had ever expected.

Patrick was probably richer than anyone I’d ever met! I thought of the pictures of him on yachts on his phone. He had mentioned he had contacts who bought art, expensive art. I craved a
new life, new experiences. And he had the capacity to provide them. I thought of the green dress I’d bought for the Private View, knowing Finn would never have wanted me to wear such a thing.
Well I was going further than that – putting on new clothes wasn’t the half of it! I was peeling off an old self and on the brink of putting on a new one.

At some point I would have to tell Patrick that we had never actually met before I came to the hospital. That I now believed I
was
the one to have bumped into him on the road that
night. How I had meant to tell him, but that it was too much to dump on him while he was coming to terms with his atrocious injury. That since he didn’t want the police to pursue it, I had
realised the best thing I could do to atone for the appalling thing I had done was to help him recover.

He would see how hard it had been for me to carry this burden of guilt, but seeing how willing I was to stand by him when no one else would, he would forgive me.

I wondered about the woman he thought I was, the one who had decided to get out before the relationship had even begun.

How hard-hearted of her, to abandon Patrick when she realised he’d lost a leg. But then it was also understandable. They had by all accounts only met recently, there had been a fight in
the pub, he had suffered this life-changing trauma. How many women would be prepared to stick around to deal with the repercussions of such a dramatic turn of events, unless they were as entangled
in them as I was?

And then I was racing ahead, imagining what people would say when they saw me with this handsome new man, so different from Finn. Finn had been stopping me from moving forward, but Patrick, with
his positive philosophy, would enable me to face the fears that had held me back over the years. I’d become ambitious and successful.

I would no longer be controlled by the compulsions that made me touch things or look back, to prevent something dreadful happening to someone I was responsible for – Timothy, Ben, Aunty
May.

Pepper ran up to me then, jolting me out of my daydream. One or two hardy people were making their way over the shingle to the sea for an early morning swim, their flesh glowing white in the
sunlight, their costumes drooping off their shrinking elderly bodies.

Perhaps – and the idea was like a whirlwind rushing through my mind – perhaps this was
meant.
You did hear of such things, elderly couples describing the extraordinary way
they met, all those years ago, as if fate decreed they should be together. Perhaps the hit-and-run had happened that night for a reason.

Patrick and I were meant to be together!

I got to the beach café – a hut on the promenade, with windmills and buckets and spades piled outside. I ordered a fried egg and bacon bun from the girl serving up tea from an urn,
and asked for a dish to put some water in for Pepper. Then I sat at a white plastic table sheltered from the wind between the café and the beach huts and drank my tea and shut my eyes and
let the sun beat down on my eyelids, listening to the gentle sigh and sizzle of the waves on the shore.

Bliss.

When I’d drained my tea I got up and walked up the steps to the town past the brewery and the lighthouse, the Sailor’s reading room, and the pub. I bought oranges,
a punnet of early strawberries, and kiwis at the greengrocer’s on the square.

As a student when I’d come to visit Aunty May, I had often walked about the little town, peering in windows and dreaming that this place, this kitchen, this courtyard was mine. Now having
my own place here had come true! I let myself spin up on a high again, breathing the sea air; the headiness of knowing I was going to see Patrick again today, the thrill of owning a house by the
sea, it all gathered until I thought I might explode.

I found myself crossing the grassy playground behind the church, where I used to come to as a child. The old swings I remembered but the tall metal slide had been replaced by an assortment of
coloured plastic climbing equipment, in grotesque shapes. A woman sat texting on her phone while her child in a pink quilted coat swung to and fro on the swing, calling for her mother, who ignored
her.

A memory nudged the corner of my mind, of me and Ben and someone else? And May calling, ‘I’m leaving you in charge.’ Pushing two younger children on the swing. Being pulled in
two different directions, as the vague child I couldn’t put a name or a face to vanished across the park to climb the steps of the tall slide. Knowing I couldn’t just abandon my little
brother to tell her to come down at once. Pulling him out of his seat – he was so small he still went in the ones with the safety harness – and carrying him across the park to the
slide. Feeling like an adult, not the six-year-old I must have been. Then looking up to see May coming back, hurrying, treading a cigarette out underfoot.

I pushed through the swing gate into the graveyard. Wandered about looking at the graves. Reading the epitaphs and wondering about the people whose names were engraved. Then I stopped. It was a
small, blackened grave in the corner but it was the words that caught my eye and made me stand stock-still.

‘A piece of you.’

The very same words that appeared on the box containing a lock of hair in Aunty May’s kitchen.

I peered more closely. The engravings had faded and were covered in some kind of lichen. I scraped the lichen away and brushed my finger along the stone, clearing the lettering.

Daisy 1985–90

Much loved and cherished and never forgotten.

I shuddered. So a child
had
died! And that old sense of darkness underlying the happy memories of this place washed over me.

The sun had gone in and it looked like rain, so I pulled my parka tighter around me. I’d quiz Mum next time I saw her. Make her tell me everything she knew about Aunty May’s past.
Now I was inheriting my aunt’s house I was entitled to be party to the truth.

The sky was growing darker now. I’d take Pepper back to the house the other way, over the marshes. The wind buffeted us as we went across the exposed flatland where the circular water
tower was silhouetted against the lowering sky. It was a desolate landscape, me and Pepper the only figures for miles around. Up to our right, the creek was a slate-grey expanse of water.

We reached the humpback bridge over the stream and went past the fishing huts. These ramshackle buildings hadn’t changed for years, with their heaps of rope and netting coiled underneath
and their smell of salt and fish and weed. Boats were moored along the quay. There was the clanking sound of metal ropes against masts, and the slap of the water against the makeshift jetties and
landing stages. The other way, the sea sparkled, still lit up by glimpses of sun between the gathering clouds.

I was almost back at the house, when a voice startled me out of my reverie.

‘Hey there! You!’

I looked up. A shock passed through me when I realised it was Larry, waving a hand up and down, his bike dropped at an angle between his knees.

I don’t know why it made me shudder seeing him, why I wanted to run.

I controlled this impulse, however – the poor man was harmless. Instead, I waved back, hoping he’d move on.

‘Larry! Anything I can do for you?’

‘Where May gone?’ he said, puckering his face up childishly.

‘May doesn’t live here any more.’

‘May dead,’ he said. ‘May not coming back no more.’

‘That’s right. I’m here now. I’m Ellie.’

‘You killed May.’

I laughed. ‘No I didn’t, Larry. May died. But you’re right, she’s not coming back. I’m sorry.’

He turned his back and was gone without saying any more.

Why did I get the impression he hadn’t forgiven me?

I put the key in the lock, trying not to let his accusation take hold. I had to fight the compulsion to let his words germinate, begin to haunt me. May had died. She was
depressed. Her suicide was carefully planned. There was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it. ‘
You killed May
.’ I thought again, with a jolt of guilt, how I
hadn’t come down to see her that weekend. How I hadn’t tapped the gatepost three times. It wouldn’t have been tapping the gatepost that would have saved her, my rational mind told
me. But perhaps I could have cajoled her out of the depths of a despair that had convinced her she couldn’t face another day?

Inside the house, I pulled out the kitchen drawer. There was a notebook in which May had listed the children she had fostered, but I put this aside for now and held up the bib. It contained a
memory, I wasn’t sure what of, more a series of impressions, a vague troop of images that I could barely put a name to. Childhood in all its fleeting intensity. The Crooked House had been the
name of a shop on the high street, as well as featuring in the nursery rhyme. I remembered loving that house with its Aladdin’s cave of beautiful trinkets, of jewellery and fridge magnets, of
incense and bead sets and things to hang above your bed that swirled and caught the light.

I opened the tin next and again felt myself shudder looking at the lock of hair and the note ‘A piece of you’. The very words that were engraved on the stone in the churchyard? As if
she wanted to keep part of the child who had died. Then I noticed the matchbox, and opened that. The passport-size photo of a girl, not me, blonde, the name Daisy scrawled on the back.

Inside were six milk teeth, tiny and with little pointy ends and stippled with dry blood.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I left May’s house as soon as I could after this. The physical mementoes of Daisy were making me feel nauseous. Anyway I couldn’t bear to wait any longer to see
Patrick. If I left now I should arrive just in time for visiting hours.

Patrick was sitting up, watching some film on the screen hooked up on an arm over his bed.

He held out his hand as I approached, took mine in his and kissed my palm, and I felt my insides collapse.