And she knows that she doesn’t have the strength to keep going the way she has been, any longer. She’s fallen too far to get back on her own. She’s too alone. She has to finish what she started with Jayne and tell everything to someone she can trust.
She watches her mother lock her car, with Toby’s books piled on the back seat, and walk up the path to the house. Flora’s face is blotted with worry. She looks softer than usual.
Alfie touches Ruth’s cheek, and examines his fingertip. It’s wet. She’s crying.
Flora will judge Ruth, and chalk up more failures for her daughter, and it will be painful but at least Flora will help. That’s what she does. She might not hug, but she’s effortlessly capable.
Flora pushes open the front door and pauses in the hallway, gathering strength for what she knows she must say. Her arms feel empty and strangely light after twenty-four hours of lugging the baby around. He’s such a sweet soul; she’s quite fallen for him. It’s the first chance she’s had to bond with him without her daughter hovering between them. “Helicopter parenting,” isn’t that what they call it nowadays? It’s an apt description for her daughter, she believes.
But Ruth’s problems are far more entrenched. Her daughter is drunk. Again. She looks unwell, mentally as well as physically. There’s a gray tinge to her skin that speaks of alcohol abuse and deep unhappiness. And there’s clearly been a terrible row between her and Toby.
Ruth sits down with Alfie on her lap. Flora settles beside her and watches as Ruth struggles to divert her attention from thebaby and say what she means to say. Her daughter has always been like this: unable or unwilling to open up.
Ruth’s childhood face, as Flora remembers it, was a portrait of tension. Ruth was her father’s daughter, unable to relax, wanting to be the best at everything, piling pressure on herself relentlessly, a perfectionist in every area of life. She’s Flora’s greatest professional and personal failure.
Flora was delighted when Ruth met Toby, hopeful that his somewhat charming laissez-faire approach to life and his good humor would temper her daughter’s terrible seriousness.
Has their relationship failed?
“Where’s Toby?” she asks.
“He’s gone.”
“Has he left you?”
“Why would you make that assumption? No, he hasn’t left me. I kicked him out.”
Ruth’s right to pick her up on this. Flora had always imagined it would be the other way around. “I’m sorry,” she says. “What happened?”
Tears spill from Ruth’s eyes. The baby picks up on her distress, but she can’t contain it.
“What is it?” Flora says. Ruth’s silent crying has always bothered her. It’s so unnatural. She puts her arm around Ruth’s shoulders. Her daughter’s body is humming with tension.
Alfie touches Ruth’s face, her tears. He’s getting upset. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Ruth says and summons a smile for him. Flora finds it moving.
“Ruth,” she says. “Please talk to me.”
She is, she realizes, afraid for her daughter’s mental health. Very afraid. Again.
Ruth talks. She spills the whole story. About the letter, the night at the barn, John Elliott’s suicide, her drinking until she blacked out, her suspicions about Toby and his students.
Flora doesn’t interrupt. She notes that Ruth won’t make eye contact. It’s painful to witness her daughter’s shame when Flora believes that Ruth has nothing to be ashamed of because we’re all weak in some way, often in many ways.
But she is also relieved. She’s been waiting for so many years for Ruth to open up to her. All of Ruth’s life.
But what she’s hearing is profoundly worrying.
This is my fault, she thinks. Mine and Toby’s. They’ve hidden something from Ruth that they shouldn’t have, and Ruth has become untethered. She’s picking up clues to Toby’s behavior which are innocent and twisting them to fit a paranoid narrative she’s fabricating. Flora and Toby should have been truthful with Ruth and insisted she got help earlier. Flora needs to talk to Toby urgently.
“Ruthie,” she says. She hasn’t used the diminutive for years but resorts to it now without thinking. Ruth has to be reeled in from the dark place she’s descended into.
“Listen to me. What happened at the barn is awful, truly, but the rest of it, it isn’t what you think. Toby hasn’t done anything wrong. I can explain it all.”
Imogen leaves her home by the back door, just as she did earlier, but she’s afraid to return to the railway track. Mark found her there too easily before. And now he has Toby to help him.
She doesn’t know what’s going on in her driveway and doesn’t want to. She just wants to get away from them both.
Her dad’s workshop is located to the side of the house, tucked into a sheltered spot in the garden. It has a lock on it. She needs a key to get in but it’s in the house.
