A Trick of the Mind (29 page)
Read A Trick of the Mind Online
Authors: Penny Hancock
‘Still can’t believe he died,’ Dad said as the lovely piano riff for ‘Perfect Day’ came on.
We sat without speaking for a while, listening.
‘Your mum’s still cut up about Aunty May,’ he said then.
‘I know, she won’t talk about her, or the house. I asked her about things I found there but she just avoided talking about it.’
‘What things did you find?’
‘A lock of hair in a box. Some milk teeth. A note saying “A piece of you”. And I found a gravestone in the churchyard saying the same thing. And Dad, there was a photo of me
and Ben and Daisy with me cut out!’
‘You’re putting me in an awkward position here,’ he said. ‘Mum and I agreed we’d never talk about this, let it pass out of family history.’
‘But surely, now I’m an adult, and May left me her house, I have the right to know about her life, her past. I know May looked after a girl called Daisy who died. But what I
don’t understand is why May went into hospital. Was she accused of neglect? Was she in fact
guilty
of neglect? Were there other children she treated badly?’
I didn’t want my memories of Aunty May sullied, but I had to know whether what Patrick had insinuated was true. Or was everything he had told me strategic? I had even begun to wonder if he
had some kind of vendetta against May and my family. Patrick seemed to be everywhere. A shadow cast over my whole life.
Dad sighed. Stood up, ran his hand through his hair.
Then he turned and looked at me, his brow furrowed.
‘Mum asked me to burn those pages from her diary, so you wouldn’t stumble upon them by accident,’ he said. ‘As it happens, I kept them – in case. Now you’ve
found other things so you might as well know the whole truth.’
He went out of the room and came back a few moments later with an envelope with some crumpled pieces of lined paper inside. I could see they had been torn out of May’s diary I had found at
the cottage.
‘Perhaps I was wrong. I should have shown you, so you knew the whole story. Mum didn’t want me to, but I can see now that half-truths are worse.’
I read May’s handwriting quietly, sitting on my dad’s sofa, the mug of weak tea he’d made me in one hand.
You asked me, Doctor Lipski, to write everything, to try and tell the truth and so I am doing.
Daisy’s accident continues to haunt me. And my fury with my niece. That she disobeyed me. I told her to check on Daisy, and she chose to ignore me, to go with her little brother
instead. Ellie is the reason Daisy drowned.
‘Dad!’
I looked up. My heart was thumping hard. The picture of Ben and Daisy with me cut out was making sense, but the explanation was worse than anything I could have imagined.
I had been hated by my lovely aunty!
‘I know,’ Dad said, frowning. ‘It’s absurd that she wrote that. Do you think your mother and I believed you were responsible, Ellie? Of course you weren’t! You were
told to keep an eye on Ben, and then May asked you to watch Daisy. How could you be in two places at once? You did as we asked, stayed with your little brother. Daisy drowned.’
‘So it was my fault?’
‘Of course it wasn’t!’
‘But she’s written that it was!’
‘Ellie, listen, sweetie. May should never have left you all there unsupervised. It was outrageous of her to blame a six-year-old! But she was so traumatised by what happened, it was easier
for her to explain it this way. A child should never be forced to choose between one responsibility and another. We never wanted you to know how May blamed you. You were six years old, Ellie! It
was May’s responsibility.’
‘But I sort of half-remember the shame of it.’ And I did. I remembered my face growing hot as it turned deep scarlet, the shame as she shouted at me.
‘Yes, and we thought you must have picked something up, because you became obsessed with checking behind you – exactly what she’d accused you of failing to do.’
‘But you never thought it was me, who drowned the child?’
‘No. There were, in fact, witnesses, Ellie. You did nothing wrong. That’s why, as the years went by, May became haunted by what she began to admit was her own guilt, and ended up in
a psychiatric unit.’
‘That’s terribly harrowing. For her, for me, for all of us.’
‘Yes. It is. Was.’ He gazed at me then he said, ‘Look. Read the rest. It might help to get it all out in the open.’
I began to read.
That September afternoon felt like another time of year. The wind off the sea was mild, the light pink and deceitful. It felt more like spring than the tail end of
summer. The cotton grass sounded like a million people with fingers to their lips, hushing, lulling me into a false sense of security.
I would later feel that the landscape was out to fool me, to fool Daisy, that what happened was as inevitable as the grass growing in the spring, as the crabs coming out in the summer to
be hooked onto bacon rinds and drawn out of the water and popped into buckets by excited children.
Daisy ran through the reeds towards Blackshore and the huts. Eleanor and Ben came slowly behind me. Ben was so small and couldn’t walk fast in his
wellingtons.
‘Wait, won’t you?’ I shouted to Daisy. ‘Wait for me when you get to the water’s edge. She did wait. She was such a sensible little girl.
I can see her now, her hair finer than the cotton on the grasses, blown horizontal in the sea wind, her bucket in one hand, her crabbing line in the other. She’s wearing yellow
wellies.
I was going to paint while the children caught crabs.
The trouble was the colour. To get the exact shade of the water that afternoon was virtually impossible. How would Turner have done it? The water was all light, all surface, an
indefinable shade between silver and bronze and transparent and pure sunlight. I needed my tube of burnt umber, or my saffron yellow and my ochre.
The paints were in the beach hut.
Daisy was perched on the jetty, squatting, her crabbing line in one hand, her bucket in the other. I called Ellie, my big girl, to me, and told her to check on Daisy as well watch
Ben.
‘You must sit here, not lean, OK?’ I instructed Daisy, fastening the bacon rind to the end of the string, letting Daisy lower it into the water. I told Eleanor to watch her.
She was old enough to do this.
‘Sit tight. And if you feel a tug on the string, just draw it in gently, and if there’s a crab on the end you can drop it in the bucket. But you’re not to lean over the
edge. Sit tight. I’m running to get my paint.’
And I ran.
And I was only gone five minutes. And while I was gone, Ellie told me later, a crab took the bait and Daisy pulled. And the crab came up, an enormous one with three smaller ones hanging
onto it at the same time. All greedy for that piece of bacon, and Daisy put them all in the bucket. A magnificent catch!
If she caught like that at the crab-catching contest she would win!
She watched the crabs crawling over one another in the bucket. All desperate for the meat, prepared to scramble over one another to get to it first. So desperate, the little blue bucket
tipped and all the crabs went running out, all in different directions, so naturally Daisy went for the largest. The largest made for the edge of the jetty and over the edge and Daisy went
after it.
Eleanor was watching all this, but she had strict instructions from me, and of course from her mother, never to let go of Ben’s hand when they were near the water. So she held onto
Ben, who was busy poking the mud under a boat with a stick, and she watched Daisy tip over the side of the jetty.
And when I came back, Daisy wasn’t there any more.
I looked over the edge of the jetty, I could see nothing.
And Eleanor, I realised now, terrified she would be in trouble, shook her head when I screamed, ‘Where is she? Where is Daisy? Did she go into the water?’
‘No,’ said Ellie, her little face frozen into a mask of terror.
I turned. Surveyed the quay, it was deserted, but Larry was there, watching, staring, with his bike.
I went back to the end of the jetty.
The blue bucket lay, dribbling seawater through the boards of the jetty. One small solitary crab, that hadn’t had the temerity to move, sat there, motionless.
I folded the pages of the diary back up and looked at my dad.
And although I couldn’t recollect the scene, the feeling swept back. The shame, the inability to defend myself. Screams and weeping and an angry face that was the one I had always
associated with smiles and comfort and friendliness – May’s – shouting into mine, shouting and blaming and then dragging me by the hand across shingle so my knees were all
scraped, and Ben running sobbing behind me.
Then people in uniforms, and nurses, or people I thought were nurses, kneeling in front of me and asking me to tell them what happened.
And May’s words, shrieking at me over and over again: ‘You should have checked on her, like I told you to. You should have checked.’
Words that had got stuck on a perpetual loop in my mind, ever since, that carried with them the desperate knowledge that if I ignored them, I would make something truly horrible happen.
I had been a tiny child, trying to do my best, to look out for Ben. Trying to do the right thing.
My dad came over to me then and put his arms around me and I buried my face in his woolly jumper and smelt this Dad smell of wool and beer, and I wished I could stay there, protected by him
forever.
It was making sense. Everything Patrick had hinted at.
If the little boy my aunt had referred to in her diary was Patrick, if he had been rejected by my aunt, of course he had a vested interest in sullying my aunt’s name!
‘Dad, who was the little boy May mentions in her diary? I read that she had taken a boy on who had frightened Daisy.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘It’s important, Dad. I need to know.’
‘There were one or two children she had on a trial basis. Sometimes she would realise it wasn’t going to work out and she’d have to send them away again, which was painful for
her, of course. And for them. But you’d better ask Mum, she went down there far more often than I did. She was May’s sister, after all.’ He turned from me, his head down.
‘How much do I owe you for the shopping?’ And I knew it was time to go.
I wanted my dad to unravel everything that had happened to me in the past. And protect me from everything that was happening with Patrick. But he had reached that point of withdrawal that I knew
so well.
It was time for me to get in my car and to drive back to the Wapping apartment. Instead of the excitement and joy this had brought me at first, it now filled me with a dull sense of dread. I had
no choice. Patrick would be waiting for me, and if I didn’t go straight back he would find me. I was sure of it.
I kissed my dad goodbye and went through from his sitting room to his hallway.
There was somebody outside the front door. A shadowy figure made indistinct through the wiggly glass.
My heart sank as I realised Patrick hadn’t even given me time to get home. He had found out where I was again and he had come for me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
‘We’re going to Southwold for the weekend,’ he said.
‘Hey, hang on. You can’t just decide without asking me.’
‘I’m asking you now. Oh, sorry, no, I’m telling you.’
‘But . . . I haven’t got my things.’
‘I’ve put a few bits in my bag for you.’
We reached my car and Pepper leapt up with joy as I opened the door.
‘Come on,’ Patrick said. ‘Let’s get moving. I need to get out of town.’
‘Supposing I said I don’t want to go to Southwold this weekend?’ I said. His assumption was beginning to piss me off. There was an odd kind of anger rising in me at the
knowledge my aunt had tried to blame me for Daisy’s death. As if some kind of lava that had been bubbling beneath the surface, squished down, was about to erupt.
He shrugged. ‘You won’t refuse me though, will you? You want to spend the weekend with me, don’t you?’
‘What if I said no?’
‘You won’t. I want to spend the weekend in your house by the sea. So that’s what we’re doing.’ His face had gone hard. I felt the fear again, the threat that if I
disobeyed him anything might happen to me. For a second I wondered if he might already have set some kind of trap, arranged for something to happen to me in Southwold. I swallowed back my
indignation. Revealing it would only put me in greater danger.
‘Anyway, we can’t go back to the flat. So drive, Ellie.’
‘What do you mean we can’t go back to the flat?’
‘Craig’s back,’ he said. ‘With a woman. So there’s no room. He’s only staying tonight, so we can go back tomorrow.’
‘
What?
Who’s Craig?’
I was turning off Greenwich High Street towards the Blackwall Tunnel.
‘I told you about Craig?’
‘I don’t think you did, no, I don’t remember anything about a Craig.’
He was silent for a few minutes. We came out of the tunnel and were heading up the motorway towards the M11.
‘It must be that damned amnesia,’ he said at last. ‘Craig’s the guy I’ve been apartment-sitting for, babes. In Wapping. While he was on business in Dubai. I must
have told you.’
‘The Wapping apartment’s yours!’
‘I never said it was mine. Did I?’
‘You never told me it wasn’t.’
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘But, Patrick! I gave up my flat to move in with you! You own it.’
‘Nope. I don’t own a flat anywhere.’
I looked at him, but he was staring straight ahead. I must keep calm, I mustn’t let him see how unsettling all these revelations were to me. The amnesia I knew, now, was a lie. He had
deliberately kept these facts from me. But his mood swings were more real than ever.
‘And Craig’s coming back permanently at the end of next month,’ he went on, ‘so we’ll have to get out of there. But it’s OK, we’ve got your house by the
sea. Luckily.’ He began to hum ‘Our house is a very very very fine house’, a song I recognised from my dad’s vinyl collection by Crosby Stills Nash and Young.