Kathleen placed the glass on the lace doily spread out on the bedside table, where it looked just right. She would give it to Chris as a welcome present. She knew that Chris would treasure it. She would tell Chris that it would bring her luck.
As she unsteadily descended the stairs it occurred to Kathleen she had kept very little to remind herself of Alice; no school reports, no books, no toys. All that Alice had owned was bagged up on the landing or shoved in the rubbish bin; except for her pink cardigan and some photographs. Kathleen had been ruthless. This made her pause on the last stair. Steve was standing by the barometer, tapping the glass with indirect admonishment. If Alice had stayed, Kathleen wouldn’t have kept all her things. Now Alice would be grown up and living in a house of her own. She would have other possessions, more fitting for a forty-year-old. The room would have been a guestroom for when Alice and her family came to stay. Alice was beside Kathleen, always approving; urging her lovely old Mum onwards.
Once Kathleen was by the front door her feet refused to move. She could hear the tweeting of her tablet timer by the cooker, but she was stuck fast to the floor. At last, only by steadying herself on Alice’s arm, she was able to make big strides and reach the kitchen. As she shakily placed a yellow tablet on her tongue and swallowed water with drainpipe imprecision, Kathleen told Alice she had been thinking about what Chris liked to eat. Alice agreed that Kathleen would have to ask Chris to help her cook, for these days she found it harder to prepare food.
They both wanted Chris to feel entirely at home.
Twenty-Eight
At the end of November, Kathleen told Chris that Eleanor had asked to see her. So far Chris had refused to have anything to do with her mother; but this time Kathleen asked her to meet her. Eleanor turned up on the doorstep in a new fancy wax jacket and swathed in a huge wool scarf, and announced she was taking Chris to the Tide Mills.
They hadn’t seen each other since Chris had gone to live with Kathleen. Eleanor had been shocked by Chris’s hostility. She had hoped that her acquiescence would herald a change of heart. Over the years she had become so used to her Alice-self, that the enormity of her deception was reduced in her mind to mere dressing up. She was Alice, and being Alice hurt no one. Or so she had believed. But Chris refused to link arms or look at Eleanor and stomped up the lane a pace behind her.
Eleanor had been staggered when Chris went to live with Kathleen Howland. It was a terrible punishment. She endured it because she decided it was the punishment. Being Alice was the rehearsal. To atone fully she must lose her own daughter. It was tempting to see it as Kathleen’s revenge, but she knew that Kathleen had not looked for someone to blame. Like Eleanor, she blamed only herself. Kathleen had respected Eleanor’s wishes and said nothing to Chris, so in return Eleanor had to take her advice – give it time – and leave Chris alone.
Eleanor was confounded: Chris had changed completely. She was taller, quieter; a steadfastly separate being who vigorously resisted Eleanor’s feeble attempts to draw her into the Ramsay family. She was prepared, however, to go with her to the Tide Mills.
Trotting and skipping like a young girl, Eleanor led Chris out of the village, scrambling through a hedge when there was a perfectly good gate and running helter-skelter across a stubbly field. Chris was imperturbable as Eleanor leapt over a stile; she followed with deliberate reluctance, determined to provide a sober contrast to her mother’s strangely skittish state. Soon she had no choice but to caper beside her, for Eleanor grasped her hand and Chris was pulled and tugged along over a pot-holed lane that ended at a six-foot-high wall, topped by rounded bricks coated in yellow and white lichen. There were holes where the wall had crumbled, creating windows with a vista of gnarled fruit trees. Assuming the authority of a tour guide, Eleanor explained that the trees were the remains of a pear orchard. This was the garden of the Mill Owner who had run the thriving mill, its hours dictated by the tides, in the mid-nineteenth century. Over a hundred people had once lived here, at one point making flour for the British army during the Napoleonic wars. Most of the houses were demolished during the Second World War to stop the Germans using them for cover, but a whole section of the big house had survived until the late sixties.
‘You must remember me telling you about the crane with the massive metal ball that swung back and forth, smashing into the walls? Like the one we saw from my bedroom when they knocked down the Bricklayer’s Arms station? I saw it here first. The noise was deafening. It was a fantastic sight, but I was devastated when I came back straight after breakfast the next morning and found everything reduced to rubble. I hadn’t stopped to think what would happen in the end.’
‘What’s new?’
Chris snatched away her hand.
Eleanor leaned on the makeshift sill of a hole in the wall, talking fast as she described the row of workers’ cottages beyond the orchard; the blacksmith’s, the carpenter’s shop. In a minute she would show Chris the last remaining millpond and then the railway track that carried the grain away from the Granary to the halt on the main line. They had passed it on their way down, now reduced to a stranded platform, marooned in a thick tangle of nettles and hawthorn. They had waited by the crossing on the branch line. Eleanor had made Chris listen out to be sure there was no train, although the line was grown over and there hadn’t been a train since the 1930s. She had got very excited by an ancient signboard covered in graffiti, and had insisted on spending ages working out the word Bongville behind the staccato scrawl. She said the name had been painted on the sign in the sixties, and that Alice had said it was rude, but Eleanor couldn’t see why. Nor could she now. Chris couldn’t either, but said nothing. So far, she thought coming down here was a waste of time, but Kathleen had pleaded with her to make an effort to get to know her real mother. For once, Chris decided, Kathleen was wrong. Eleanor Ramsay was an embarrassing and pathetic middle-aged woman.
They came across a narrow path overshadowed by the high wall, and had to pick their way over the uneven ground, moving branches out of the way to avoid being slashed across the face. They tripped up on the remains of a fire glittering with bent and crushed drinks cans. Later, as they had to avoid twists of shit-stained tissue, Chris could see nothing secret about this place. Despite her intransigence she was disappointed. They emerged into a clearing that Eleanor told her had been the back garden of the Mill Owner’s house and was where she had once planted a secret flowerbed. There was no sign of Eleanor’s garden. All her nasturtiums had gone.
Then the flinty path gave way to a two-foot square section of terracotta tiles surrounded by a tide of coarse grass and moss. Suddenly Eleanor was on the ground scrabbling at the soil, tearing up clumps of turf, ripping away long tresses of ivy to reveal more tiles.
‘This was the kitchen in the big house. I once dissected a dead cat near here. You would’ve been in your element. It was a great place to find dead animals. The entrance hall had these brilliant diamond shaped tiles in a really complicated black and white pattern, oh in fact, like the ones on the ground floor at the White House. I’ll show you.’