“What about Mother? How could you— ”
“Your mother never knew, Manette.”
“But Mignon knows, doesn’t she?”
Fairclough looked away. A moment passed during which a V of ducks flew overhead, swooped down towards the lake, rose above them again. He finally said, “She does. I don’t know how she found out, but how does Mignon find out anything?”
“So that’s why she’s been able to— ”
“Yes.”
“But what about Ian? These payments he was making to Vivienne?”
Fairclough shook his head, then looked back at her. He said, “As God is my witness, I don’t know, Manette. If Ian was paying Vivienne, it can only be that he was doing it to protect me from something. She had to have contacted him, threatened something…? I just don’t know.”
“Perhaps she threatened to tell Mother. Like Mignon. And that’s what she’s doing, isn’t it? Mignon’s threatening to tell Mother if you don’t continue to give her what she wants? What would Mother do if she knew?”
Fairclough turned to her then and it came to Manette that for the first time her father looked old. Indeed, he looked fragile, capable of breaking within someone’s hands. “Your mother would be completely devastated, my dear,” he said. “After all these years, I’d like to spare her that.”
BRYANBARROW
CUMBRIA
Tim could see Gracie from the window. She was on her trampoline. She’d been out there for a good hour now, jumping and jumping, with her face a picture of concentration. Sometimes, she fell on her bum and rolled round on the matting. But she always got back up and resumed her jumping.
Earlier, Tim had seen her out in the garden, at the back of the house. She was digging, and he noted next to her on the ground a small cardboard box tied up with a red ribbon. When the hole she was digging got deep enough and wide enough, she put the box inside and buried it. She used a pail for the excess earth, which she spread around neatly throughout the garden, although at this time of year the garden was such a wreck that this nicety was entirely unnecessary. Before she did that spreading, though, she knelt and crossed her arms over her chest: right fist to left shoulder, left fist to right shoulder, her head tilted to one side. It came to Tim that she looked a bit like one of those angels one saw in old Victorian cemeteries, which clued him in to what she was doing. She was burying Bella, giving the doll a proper funeral.
Bella could have been repaired. Tim had done a fairly good job of destroying her, but her arms and legs might have been reattached and where she’d been scratched up from his attack upon her, the scratches might have been smoothed away. But Gracie would have none of that, just as she would have none of Tim once he’d returned from the soaking he’d given himself in Bryan Beck. When he’d changed his clothes, he went to Gracie and he’d offered to brush her hair and French-braid it, but she didn’t want him near her. “Don’t touch me and don’t touch Bella, Timmy,” was how she put it. She didn’t sound sad, merely resigned.
After the doll’s funeral, she went to the trampoline. There she’d been ever since. Tim wanted to stop her, but he didn’t know how. He thought about ringing their mother, but he dismissed that notion as soon as it came into his head. He knew what she’d say: “She’ll stop jumping when she gets tired. I’m not going to drive all the way to Bryanbarrow to pull your sister off that trampoline. If you’re so bothered by it, ask Kaveh to get her off. He should enjoy the opportunity to be paternal.” She’d say that last bit with a snarl in her voice. Then off she’d go to that wanker Wilcox to get herself seen to by a proper man. And that was how she’d think of it. Charlie Wilcox wanted to do her, so he was the real goods. While anyone not wanting to do her— like Tim’s father, for example— was shite on oatmeal. Well, that was the truth anyway, wasn’t it? Tim asked himself. His dad was shite and so was Kaveh and Tim was learning that everyone else was shite as well.
He’d come back to the house after going after the ducks in the beck. Kaveh had followed and tried to talk to him, but Tim wasn’t having anything off that bloke. Bad enough that the wanker had put his greasy mitts on Tim. To have to talk to him on top of that …It just wasn’t on.
Tim thought, though, that Kaveh might be able to get Gracie off the trampoline. He might also get Gracie to let Tim dig up the doll and take her off to Windermere to be repaired. Gracie liked Kaveh because that was Gracie. She liked everyone. So she’d listen to him, wouldn’t she? Besides, Kaveh hadn’t done anything to hurt her, aside from wrecking her entire family, of course.
Tim himself would have to talk to Kaveh, though. He’d have to go downstairs and find him and tell him that Gracie was outside jumping. But if he did that, Kaveh would probably just point out that there was nothing wrong with jumping on a trampoline, that’s what trampolines were for, weren’t they, and wasn’t that why they’d got one for Gracie in the first place, because she liked to jump? Then Tim would have to explain that when she jumped for an hour as she’d done so far, it was because she was hurting inside. Then Kaveh would say the obvious thing: Well, we both know why she’s hurting, Tim, don’t we?
Tim hadn’t intended. That was the problem. He hadn’t intended to make Gracie cry. Gracie was the only person who actually mattered to him, and the truth was she’d just been there, in his way. He hadn’t thought of what came after the moment when he snatched Bella up and pulled her arms and legs off. He’d only wanted to do something to make the boiling inside of him go away. But how could Gracie understand that when she had no boiling inside of her? She could only see the meanness within him that had snatched up Bella and dismembered her.
Gracie stopped for a moment outside. Tim saw that she was breathing hard. He also noticed something new about Gracie, which brought him up short. She was growing breasts and he could see the buds of them poking at the jersey that she was wearing.
This brought a searing sadness upon him. It clouded his vision, and when the cloud passed, Gracie had gone back to jumping again. And this time, he watched her little breasts as she jumped. Something, he knew, had to be done about her.
How useless would it be to pick up the phone and ring their mother? he asked himself a second time. Gracie growing breasts meant Gracie needing her mum to do something like take her to town and purchase her a baby brassiere or whatever it was that little girls wore when they started growing breasts. This went beyond just getting Gracie off the bloody trampoline, didn’t it? Yes, it did, but wasn’t the truth that Niamh would see this the same way she saw everything? Tell Kaveh about it, she would say. Kaveh can handle this little problem.
That was everything tied up with a bow: Whatever Gracie was going to face in her growing-up years, she was going to have to face without a mum to help her, because the one thing in life that was an absolute certainty was that Niamh Cresswell had plans for herself that didn’t include the children she’d had with her louse of a husband. Thus Tim knew it was down to him or it was down to Kaveh to help Gracie as she grew up. Or it was down to them both.
Tim left his room. Kaveh was somewhere in the house, and Tim supposed now was as good a time as any to tell him that they needed to take Gracie into Windermere to get whatever she needed. If they didn’t do it, the boys in her school would start to tease her. Ultimately the girls would tease her as well. Teasing her would turn into bullying her soon enough, and Tim wasn’t about to have his sister bullied.