The Summer of Secrets (30 page)

As the droplets increase I cross over the road. The bridge on my left is the same, at least. The path on the other side lapses into gravel, and soon there are fields again. The breeze is more demanding now, and more rain dots the top of the cardboard box. I keep walking even when the gravel peters out. This time, there are no brambles stopping my progress. My feet step on and on. They go over the tussocks, round the molehills and past the dog mess. The canal stays in my peripheral vision and it seems as if it’s the tow path that’s rolling along in step with the water and I’m walking to stay in the same place. It comes as a surprise when I reach the lock.

The lock gates are straight now, and freshly painted. The black arms end with a section of white, the line between dark and light ruler-straight. A laminated board shows the route of the canal in either direction, but I’m not ready to see that yet. The lock itself is in its empty phase, green slime coating the walls and a steady trickle of water running over from the higher side of the canal and splashing into the water at the bottom of the pound. An elderly couple, wearing full walking gear and swinging fancy aluminium sticks in pace with their stride, come up the short slope where the towpath climbs to keep up with the rise of the water. The man tips his cap at me and they both smile. A swallow darts past and makes a tight turn. Where the canal stretches away, I can make out a pair of swans. Life has carried on.

When my dad took his boat out on what I don’t want to think of as his final voyage, he wouldn’t have come this way because of the state of the lock at the time. If I want to find him, I’m going to have to follow the water on the far side of the cottages. I stop in front of the board now, and see where the canal loops around the alluvial plain. I can put my finger on the big lock which lets canal boats through to the river, and therefore the sea. He went this way. There are witnesses who remember his passage. I set off, this time keeping my head up. As I approach the cottages and the new marina, I see a figure standing at the bottom of the new footbridge. I don’t immediately process what my eyes are telling me. It is Victoria.

Her face is turned in the opposite direction, but I recognize the way she stands, the tilt of her head. Even if I’d not seen her at the gallery, I would know.

‘How did you know I’d be here?’ My hand reaches out by itself to touch her sleeve, as if it wants to check, independent of me, on her reality. My fingers stop short, though: she might as well have a glass wall around her.

‘I’m sorry?’ She steps away from me, one hand grasping the handrail as she casts a glance down the towpath.

‘I’ve not been back here since—’ I turn my head towards the cottage. ‘I thought, you know, at the gallery …’ She still isn’t getting it. ‘After I saw you at the gallery. That’s why I’m here.’

‘I’m sorry—’ she repeats, and then it’s as if a curtain opens. ‘Helen?’

Rain starts to come down in earnest, huge drops bouncing up from the canal’s surface as they hit, spreading the water out into urgent, overlapping circles. Victoria turns and half runs across the bridge. I follow her.

My arm is pressing against her now, as we squeeze into the doorway of the café. Rain catches me on my left side, the fabric of my blouse sticking with cold heaviness to my arm. A girl in jeans with a white apron folded down and tied around her waist opens the door behind us. It catches Victoria by surprise, and I’m aware that the girl is making apologies, taking us to a table.

The air is warm and slightly humid. We sit by a window, and I forget about my hair until I pull off my hat. Victoria gapes at me.

‘Helen – that was you yesterday?’ She might as well have seen a ghost. ‘At the gallery. But you had a plait.’

The elderly couple sitting a row or so away are staring at me, but I don’t care any more, and the hat falls to the ground. I’m trying to put myself back in the gallery, to re-classify the expression I saw in Victoria’s eyes. She didn’t know who I was. How much else have I got wrong?

The waitress comes over and puts a menu on the table in front of me, as if this is a normal day. I pick it up as a reflex action, but the print moves around as if it’s underwater. The waitress comes back. I shake my head. Victoria asks for coffee.

‘You didn’t recognize me, did you?’ I say. It’s all I can focus on.

Victoria weaves her fingers together. If I didn’t know her, I’d say she was embarrassed.. Her face wavers, a pale shape beneath her short, dark hair.
I did a good job with that haircut.
As if in response to my thought, my hand reaches up and touches the prickly ends covering my scalp. Victoria’s hair has grown out many times since I cut it for her. I think of replenished skin cells, nails clipped away in millimetre increments. We are not the people we were.

‘I thought you’d come because you saw me at the gallery.’ My voice is small.

She’s fiddling with a napkin now, folding it and ripping tiny crescents of paper with her thumbnail. She glances up, giving a short laugh and shakes her head. ‘It’s not all about you, Helen.’

She has gone all blurry, so I close my eyes as she carries on talking. ‘I come here every year. To remember. This time it happened to be today.’

Under the edge of the table, I push at the wet fabric of my sleeve so that I can drag my nails along my arm, from the crease of my elbow down to my wrist. It’s an emergency action, the best I can do in the situation. I don’t want to draw attention to myself.

The waitress brings Victoria’s coffee. She waits for the waitress to leave, picks up the spoon and stirs.

‘I owe you an apology, actually.’

My voice doesn’t come out at first, and I clear my throat and try again. ‘About what?’

‘The fire, after the fire.’ She finally meets my eyes ‘You do remember the fire?’

I swallow and try and tuck hair behind my ear. There is no hair there, of course, but the gesture is an instinctive way of gaining time. Already the silence has gone on too long.

‘Yes. Well, sort of.’ I catch the waitress’s eye and ask for a glass of water. ‘But it was—’ I pause. I don’t know how to put it. ‘I lost some days. Afterwards.’ My mouth is dry. I want to know, but I’m afraid. ‘I saw the house. Later on. I went back to see it. But no one would ever say what happened.’

Victoria lifts her mug, but doesn’t drink.

‘I can’t believe nobody told you, I mean, what about your dad?’

‘My dad …’ I can’t manage it. I can’t say that he walked out, left, that he didn’t say anything about that, either.

‘You genuinely don’t know anything about it?’

I shake my head.

There is another silence, and this time Victoria takes a mouthful of her coffee. When she starts to talk again, she’s changed tack.

‘We all come, most years.’ She puts the mug down, fidgets with a sachet of sugar. ‘Piet. You remember Piet?’

How can she think I have forgotten him?

I nod.

‘He’s had some health issues. I knew he couldn’t make it this time.’ She puts the sugar down. ‘But the boys were here. If you’d been ten minutes earlier.’ She looks at her watch. ‘They’ll be on the train by now.’

I close my eyes. Ten minutes.

‘Seth,’ I say, the sound barely squeezing past the lump in my throat. ‘And Will. What about Pippa?’

‘Pippa died, Helen. In the fire.’

There’s part of me that’s known this ever since the film installation at the exhibition, perhaps on some level for the last thirty years, but hearing the words out loud is too much. The world contracts to enclose us in a bright square, and then expands out with nauseating speed. The force of it should knock the tables and windows and the blackboard sign with the specials written on it out through the window and scatter everything, ourselves included, down howling streets that have no end. I hear the sound of flames bursting out. The girl in red shoes skips away from me, her plaits swinging in the heated breeze.

Victoria reaches forwards with a napkin. Her mouth is opening and closing but I can’t hear any words.

‘Helen!’ Victoria’s voice is sharp. I catch my breath in a gasp. A hand grabs on to my shoulder. ‘Helen, look at me.’

I look. Victoria is half-standing. She keeps hold of me for a second longer, then backs into her chair. I see her turn to catch the waitress’s attention. A mug of coffee appears on the table in front of me, and Victoria spoons sugar in, puts my hand around the hot china.

‘Will was OK. He had minor burns and smoke inhalation.’ Victoria’s voice is matter-of-fact now. She tilts her mug as if she is trying to read the leaves. Coffee doesn’t have leaves. But she is not gazing into the future, of course; she is staring back into the past. ‘Alice went crazy.’ She looks up at me. ‘Sectioned. In the loony bin for months.’ She gives a sort of a smile, but not the kind with humour. ‘Seth and Piet were both in hospital for a while, too.’

She pauses, takes a deep, shaking breath, and reaches for another napkin.

‘Helen, what
do
you remember about that night?’

‘There’s nothing. I don’t remember anything.’
Don’t, or won’t?
I press my knuckles into my eyes. Bright speckles invade the dark space behind my eyelids, then join and turn in patterns like a child’s kaleidoscope.

‘I drank so much—’ I remember what she said earlier. I have to know. ‘What did you mean, you had something to apologize for?’

It has stopped raining now. A bright beam of sunlight slants on to the table, making Victoria hold up a hand to shade her eyes. I can’t tell where she is looking.

‘After the fire,’ she begins, ‘everyone blamed Piet, for not, I don’t know, taking enough care. But I saw you with the petrol bomb.’

I’m shaking. I see my arm go back, smell heat and petrol. But I’m in a field, and the sky above me is full of sunshine. I hear the echo of a laugh. The coldness in my stomach grows heavy.
It was me.
I struggle to follow what she says next.

‘… and Piet were in hospital, I went a bit mental. I was so sure you’d done it, but I couldn’t tell anyone.’

I catch the most important words. Was sure. Isn’t any more.

‘… screaming at your mum.’ The pile of shredded paper in front of her is growing. ‘She was pretty cool, actually. She talked me down, got me in her car.’ Is she talking about my mother? Did I ever hear about this? ‘I was in an emergency foster home, she took me back, talked to the woman.’

The point she is making finally hits me.

‘You came to my house?’

‘Well, you know, where you lived with your mum.’

I strain to remember, to recall any hint from my mother. She must have believed it was me. I hear her voice,
anything I did, I was protecting you.

Victoria picks up the thought, as if she is reading my mind.

‘They were around for ages, these men, investigators.’

I feel even more sick, as if the top of my head is coming off with the pressure.

‘I picked things up, bits and pieces. First that petrol was involved.’ She rubs a hand around the back of her neck. ‘I was sure it was you, then. I knew I’d made you angry.’

I don’t remember.

‘But you threw the bottle down the side path, the one that went along by the road.’ I remember the path. But I don’t remember throwing anything there. I don’t. ‘And the fire started in the kitchen.’

I squeeze my eyelids together again. I try so hard to see it.

Victoria’s voice carries on. It is heavy, the words burdens to be laid down. ‘I’ve gone over it so many times. I mean.’ Her voice wavers. ‘Alice didn’t even know about the stupid bloody petrol bombs.’ She grabs at one of the serviettes and drags it across her eyes. ‘I’ve always wondered … Alice didn’t ever
say
.’ She bangs at the table with the palm of her hand. ‘She wasn’t ever that coherent. They had to write it off as a probability.’ I feel her frustration, her desperation. ‘Can you imagine what it’s like? Not knowing?’

We sit in silence again.

‘I used to search for you, you know.’ My words come out of nowhere, taking me by surprise. ‘When the Internet came along, every so often I’d search for you.’ I pick up a serviette of my own and blow my nose. ‘There’s a Victoria Dover who lives in Oregon and practices crystal therapy. I sent her a message once, in case.’ I laugh, and the sound is too loud.

‘Did you get anything back?’

‘I was on her mailing list for a while.’ I smile. ‘I kept being offered exclusive opportunities to be healed with amethysts.’

The conversation is building a temporary skin, as if by sharing this trivia, the worst of the pain will subside.

‘It could have been worse, I suppose.’ Victoria gives a tiny laugh of her own. ‘I could have been confused with Victoria Dover, Kipper Importer.’

‘Never came across her.’

We pause. I have a picture of us in a parallel universe, one where we sit and swap stories and make ourselves sick with laughter.

‘I never found anything about you being a photographer.’

Victoria rubs at a spot on the cloth. She almost seems embarrassed.

‘You know how it is, nothing for years and then you get to be talk of the month.’ She shakes her head. ‘And I had this thing about being underground and non-commercial. It’s more difficult than you’d think.’

‘I’ve never thought about it much.’ I’ve never thought about it at all.

‘And I wasn’t Victoria Dover for years.’ She gives a sort of laugh with her mouth closed, a sound like a reverse sniff. ‘I was so pissed off with the world by the time I was, what, seventeen? Eighteen? I changed my name by deed poll, became somebody else.’

‘What did you change it to?’

‘Something pretentious.’ She shakes her head. ‘I had a serious Indo-mystic thing going on.’

‘Dreadlocks?’ I had given these to my imaginary Victoria, twisted with rags and ribbons, and I feel an obscure pleasure in getting something right.

‘Yep. And vegan.’

‘How long for?’

‘The hair or the diet?’ She leans back in her chair, her eyes fixed on the ceiling while she calculates. ‘I spent a couple of years living in a sort of commune.’ She flicks me a glance. ‘Kind of inevitable. We made paper and ground our own wheat. I planned on spending the rest of my life there.’