Angus has the deeds in his rucksack. They are finished; it is completed. I am looking at an altered world; my mood lifts commensurately.
Big red buses roll down Gower Street, two stories of blank faces staring out.
Angus puts a hand on my arm. “Well done.”
“For what?”
“That intervention. Nice timing. I was worried I was going to deck him.”
“So was I.” We look at each other. Knowing, and sad. “But we did it. Right?”
Angus smiles. “We did, darling: we totally did it.” He turns the collar of his coat against the rain. “But Sarah… I’ve got to ask, just one more time—you are absolutely sure?”
I grimace; he hurries on: “I know, I know. Yes. But you still think this is the right thing? You really want”—he gestures at the queued yellow lights of London taxis, glowing in the drizzle—“you really, truly want to leave all this? Give it up? Skye is so quiet.”
“When a man is tired of London,” I say, “he is tired of rain.”
Angus laughs. And leans closer. His brown eyes are searching mine, maybe his lips are seeking my mouth. I gently caress one side of his jaw, and kiss him on his stubbled cheek, and I breathe him in—he doesn’t smell of whiskey. He smells of Angus. Soap and masculinity. Clean and capable, the man I loved. Love. Will always love.
Maybe we will have sex tonight, for the first time in too many weeks. Maybe we are getting through this. Can you ever get through this?
We walk hand in hand down the street. Angus squeezes my hand tight. He’s done a lot of hand-holding this last year: holding my hand when I lay in bed crying, endlessly and wordlessly, night after night; holding my hand from the beginning to the end of Lydia’s appalling funeral, from I am the resurrection and the life all the way through to Be with us all evermore.
Amen.
“Tube or bus?”
“Tube,” I say. “Quicker. I want to tell Kirstie the good news.”
“I hope she sees it like that.”
I look at him. No.
I can’t begin to entertain any uncertainty. If I stop and wonder, then the misgivings will surge and we will be stuck forever.
My words come in a rush. “Surely she will, Angus, she must do? We’ll have our own lighthouse, all that fresh air, red deer, dolphins…”
“Aye, but remember, you’ve mainly seen pictures of it in summer. In the sun. Not always like that. Winters are dark.”
“So in winter we will—what’s the word?—we’ll hunker down and defend ourselves. It’ll be an adventure.”
We are nearly at the Tube. A black flash flood of commuters is disappearing down the steps: a torrent being swallowed by London Underground. I turn, momentarily, and look at the mistiness of New Oxford Street. The autumn fogs of Bloomsbury are a kind of ghost—or a visible memory—of Bloomsbury’s medieval marshes. I read that somewhere.
I read a lot.
“Come on.”
This time I grasp Angus’s hand, and linked by our fingers we descend into the Tube, and we endure three stops in the rush-hour crowds, jammed together; then we squeeze into the rattling lifts at Mornington Crescent—and when we hit the surface, we are practically running.
“Hey,” Angus says, laughing. “Is this an Olympic event?”
“I want to tell our daughter!”
And I do, I do. I want to give my surviving daughter some good news, for once, some nice news: something happy and hopeful. Her twin Lydia died fourteen months ago today—I hate the way I can still measure the date so exactly, so easily—and she has had more than a year of anguish that I cannot comprehend: losing her identical twin, her second soul. She has been locked in an abyssal isolation of her own—for fourteen months. But now I can release her.
Fresh air, mountains, sea lochs. And a view across the water to Knoydart.
I am hurrying to the door of the big white house we should never have bought; the house in which we can no longer afford to live.
Imogen is at the door. The house smells of kids’ food, new laundry and fresh coffee; it is bright. I am going to miss it. Maybe.
“Immy, thanks for looking after her.”
“Oh, please. Come on. Just tell me? Has it all gone through?”
“Yes, we’ve got it, we’re moving!”
Imogen claps her hands in delight: my clever, dark-haired, elegant friend who’s stuck with me all the way from college; she leans and hugs me, but I push her away, smiling.
“I have to tell her, she knows nothing.”
Imogen grins. “She’s in her room with the Wimpy Kid.”
“Sorry?”
“Reading that book!”
Pacing down the hall I climb the stairs and pause at the door that says Kirstie Lives Here and Knock First spelled out in clumsily scissored letters made from glittery paper. I knock, as instructed.
Then I hear a faint mmm-mmm. My daughter’s version of Come in.
I push the door, and there is my seven-year-old girl, cross-legged on the floor in her school uniform—black trousers, white polo shirt—her little freckled nose close to a book: a picture of innocence but also of loneliness. The love and the sadness throb inside me. I want to make her life better, so much, make her whole again, as best I can.
“Kirstie…”
She does not respond. Still reading. She sometimes does this. Playing a game, mmmNOT going to talk. It has become more frequent, this last year.
“Kirstie. Moomin. Kirstie-koo.”
Now she looks up, with those blue eyes she got from me, but bluer. Hebridean blue. Her blonde hair is almost white.
“Mummy.”
“I’ve got some news, Kirstie. Good news. Wonderful news.”
Sitting myself on the floor, beside her, surrounded by little toys—by her penguins, and Leopardy the cuddly leopard, and the Doll With One Arm—I tell Kirstie everything. In a rush. How we are moving somewhere special, somewhere new, somewhere we can start again, somewhere beautiful and fresh and sparkling: our own island.
Through it all Kirstie looks at me. Her eyes barely blinking. Taking it all in. Saying nothing, passive, as if entranced, returning my own silences to me. She nods, and half smiles. Puzzled, maybe. The room is quiet. I have run out of words.
“So,” I say. “What do you think? Moving to our own island? Won’t that be exciting?”
Kirstie nods, gently. She looks down at her book, and closes it, and then she looks up at me again, and says:
“Mummy, why do you keep calling me Kirstie?”
I say nothing. The silence is ringing. I speak:
“Sorry, sweetheart. What?”
“Why do you keep calling me Kirstie, Mummy? Kirstie is dead. It was Kirstie that died. I’m Lydia.”
Chapter 2
I stare at Kirstie. Trying to smile. Trying not to show my deep anxiety.
There is surely some latent grief resurfacing here, in Kirstie’s developing mind; some confusion unique to twins who lose a co-twin, and I am used to this—to my daughters—to my daughter—being different.
From the first time my own mother drove from Devon, in the depths of winter, to our little flat in Holloway—from the moment my mum looked at the twins paired in their cot, the two identical tiny babies sucking each other’s thumbs—from the moment my mother burst into a dazzled, amazed, giddy smile, her eyes wide with sincere wonder—I knew then that having twins was something even more impressive than the standard miracle of becoming a parent. With twins—especially identicals—you give birth to genetic celebrities. People who are impressive simply for existing.
Impressive, and very different.
My dad even gave them a nickname: the Ice Twins. Because they were born on the coldest, frostiest day of the year, with ice-blue eyes and snowy-blonde hair. The nickname felt a little melancholy, so I never properly adopted it. Yet I couldn’t deny that, in some ways, the name fit. It caught their uncanniness.