Until now.
IX.
Cosima
IT’S CLOSE, BUT SHE MAKESit back in time for the funeral. As soon as she arrives, she goes upstairs to change, rifling through the chest of drawers in her room at Denby until she fishes out a black skirt that she last wore as a twelve-year-old. It has an elasticated waist and still just about fits. Her phone beeps. It’s from Meadow.
‘He’s alive. Conscious, stable. Some broken bones but he’ll be fine. Mx’
Cosima shudders with relief, then starts to cry and sits on the edge of the bed, the mattress springing and creaking as the tears stream down. She hadn’t felt the chokehold of her panic until Meadow’s text had released its grip. Thank fuck for that, she thinks. She will get to see him again. The realisation comes to her with surprising force: she is in love with River and there’s nothing to be done about it.
A knock on the door. Without waiting for a response, her father walks in.
‘Cozzie – oh my darling. Oh goodness. Don’t be upset.’
He rushes to her, putting an arm around her shoulders. She flips her phone over so he can’t see the screen and allows herself to be comforted.
‘It’s very sad, I know, but there was nothing any of us could have done. Fliss was on her own journey. Not made for this world.’
Cosima allows him to think this is the cause of her tears. It’s rare to have her father’s attention. She misses it.
‘It’s been hard on all of us.’
Anyway, she is sad about Aunt Fliss, the only member of her family who seemed to understand her. When Cosima and her siblings were growing up, none of them knew Fliss very well because she travelled a lot, but whenever they did see each other, Fliss would remember things. She’d remember Cosima’s friends’ names or the plot of a film they had talked about. And now, she’d got drunk or high or possibly both and washed up dead on a beach in Bali, which was a pretty miserable way to go. The media reports had called her ‘troubled’ and ‘a noted socialite’. TheMailhad interviewed several of her ex-boyfriends and splashed details of her supposedly voracious sexual appetite and predilection for cocaine across the inside pages. The reporter speculated that ‘although an undoubted tragedy, one can’t help but think it wasn’t surprising that the life of the tortured Rt Hon Felicity Fitzmaurice should have ended in this way.’
Cosima’s father had been enraged by the piece, but he hadn’t complained or got his lawyers involved, which surprised her. She began to wonder if all the press coverage was helpful to him in some way; if, in fact, he’d had a hand in how it was all written up. It’s not as if he couldn’t pull on certain strings if he needed to. The last time Cosima had been back home from school for exeat, she’d gone to get a packet of biscuits from the kitchen and found her father sharing a pot of coffee on the window seat with Charlotte Arundel, the terrifyingly powerful female editor of Britain’s biggest-circulation national tabloid.
‘Hi, Cozzie,’ he had said when she walked in. ‘This is my friend Lottie.’
Her dad’s lawyers could surely have kept the story out of the papers altogether. Maybe, she thinks as she sits next to him on the side of the bed, he had wanted the story to run in the way it did for his own reasons. When it came to her father, she knew to put nothing past him.
She rests her head on his shoulder as he pats her back and then he makes a movement behind her head that she knows, without seeing it, is him checking his watch.
She draws away.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Don’t want to delay you.’
Ben doesn’t pick up on the sarcasm. He stands without protest. Always so quick to leave, she thinks.
‘No, you’re quite right. We need to stick to your mother’s military timetable.’
He winks at her.
‘What’s that?’ he says, pointing to her phone, lying on the duvet where she left it.
Too late, Cosima remembers she has put an Oblivion Oil sticker on the back. The orange devil horns are clearly visible.
‘Those people are a fucking thorn in my side,’ he says. ‘Why would you have their logo on your phone?’
‘You know I believe in doing everything we can to end human-made climate change,’ she says stiffly.
Her father sighs.
‘These things are extremely complex and nuanced.’
‘Not really. Global average surface temperature has risen by one degree Celsius since 1850.’
‘Please, Cozzie, spare me the lecture. Obviously I know all of this. I’m the Energy Secretary.’
