To:Garden Club Committee
Subject:Re: Open Garden on the 20th at our place
Judy, honey is not vegan.
And I agree with Mum. Rupert is a lecherous fuck-knuckle who should be banned.
Lottie x
I press send. Miriam is right. Sometimes you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted. I walk down the driveway, squaring myself for whatever confrontation my mother wants to have this time, but also feeling oddly proud of her.
She looks up, then turns away and points the hose at her lavender beds. I stare at the startling prominence of her skeletal back; the crepey gathering of skin below her scapula; the quiet, soft fall of her buttocks below the line of the bikini, where once they had been taut and shapely.
My mother remained devoted to the memory of David. She had plenty of lovers over the years, but nobody she would allow into the stifled world she created for the two of us. I was David’s precious daughter; the only thing he left on this Earth. Miriam still kisses his photo at night before she gets into bed.
The delicacy of my mother; the fragile sagging of her beautiful, tanned buttocks makes me ache with sadness for all the joy she has missed. The privations. David, food,life.The efforts of keeping herself beautiful—the image of the person she was when she was loved by him. I have an urge to place my fingers under those soft beautiful flaps of atrophied muscle; to return Miriam’s buttocks back to the shape they once were. To make her happy, the way she only ever was with David, when she and he were a perfect pair.
I close my eyes and think of my grandmother taking the pills, knowing she would be leaving me alone with Miriam, who has always struggled with motherhood. My mother’s own childhood was spent in boarding school while her bohemian parents travelled the world. They had parties, she once told me, never caring where she was, what she was drinking, who of the forty- and fifty-year-old men in their crowd was ogling her. My heart broke when she told me of being cornered by one of their artist friends one night when she was fifteen; him telling her she should be a model, that he’d help her if she helped him back. I want to go back to that teenage Miriam and say, ‘You never needed him. You should have slapped him. Your parents should have cared!’ When I once voiced a version of this, she gave a brittle laugh and raised her wine glass.
I decide it is good, Miriam wearing her bikini in public again. Completely fine. I just wish she could be happy and let go of whatever resentment she seems to have towards me. It’s almost as if she blames me for the death of David; because although he left part of himself with her, she sees nothing of David in me. Sometimes I wonder who he even really was.
I walk inside, knowing I am unlikely to get answers from my mother. It’s as if she gave up when David died, and all the rest, including me, is a poor consolation prize.
16
DOROTHEA
1975, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, ENGLAND
A crow, screeching, screeching. A feathered harbinger of death. The noise is piercing, clawing at her. Dorothea pulled herself out of the black fug of sleep and found herself in the armchair. From his crib, across the room, the baby wailed. The screams built. During this endless night she had tried everything. Rocked, fed, changed, burped, walked, rocked, patted. Still, he screamed.Pat-pat-pat. Sleep, little one,please sleep. Then somehow, on giving up and placing him back in the crib, his wailing had petered out and she had fallen into her own tortured slumber, a dark nothingness.How long had it been?It felt like minutes and years at the same time.
She brushed hair from her face, cheek damp, arm heavy. She pushed herself up, clawed blindly at the crib rails. She watched the shape of her torturer; the violent energy of him as his cries escalated and the tiny body jerked with malevolent noise. Shepushed the dark thought aside, picked him up, put him to her shoulder and rocked back and forth. After some interminable time, his cries subsided. A small miracle as he juddered and succumbed to another troubled slumber.
Dorothea’s bedroom and the nursery were away from the others, but she wondered if it was far enough; if by some miracle the baby was disturbing Edward below in his hallowed chamber, or Cricket, in the room next to him.
The baby’s arrival had been stressful for Cricket but Edward was thrilled. Cricket took advantage of his good mood to suggest he let her focus more on her approaching eventing competitions instead of constantly being at his beck and call, and he had agreed without seeming to give it much thought. As long as she reported in for lunch, she was free to spend her time with the horses. He had the thing he wanted most—a new son to focus on.
Again, the baby’s screams pierced the air. The building, an imposing triple-storey facade with a gabled roof and the Fitzhenry family crest above the door, was almost four centuries old. The walls were as thick as tree trunks but, still, the sound must carry quite far. Dorothea looked down at the angry face of darling little Louis and prayed he would stop. Her mouth was dry and she longed for a sip of water, but she dared not stop this rocking. As much as her body craved the bed, the horizontal stillness, she could not chance him waking. The rhythm of her body was automatic; the patting finding its own beat. Her mind gliding numb and free.
But then, a flash of memory. The scenes she had tried to block. The fear on Francis’s face. The boy’s eyes pleading with her. She chastised herself. It was not for her to make Edward stop.It was nothing for a father to punish his son. Her mind was fracturing, and she must bring it back. She imagined the gardens. When she carried the baby among the trees and the flowerbeds, the earth and colours restored her. The sweet, heady scent of the hyacinths and daphne; the golden orbs of tulip heads and foxgloves with their regal, beautiful spires. It was all hands on deck now as she helped Stan and Len to ready the gardens to be open to the public again.
But she cannot escape the blackness, or the pleading eyes of Francis. She buried her nose in the soft folds of the baby’s neck, sniffed the innocence of him, wondered if she was going mad.
Edward was constantly displeased by his elder son, but in this tiny child, he saw possibility. Dorothea was surprised at her intensity of feeling for his child. It was extraordinary. To be charged with the love and care of a whole new human. She must protect him from Edward. She must protect Francis too, but what could she do? Her presence here was as precarious as the trilling of a robin when the rain arrives. During the long school break in July and August, her job was to watch over Francis, as well as his baby brother. From school, Francis wrote letters, told of his inventions, of the terrible food, his chess club. The masters handed out punishments with their canes there too, some to Francis, who was too sensitive for their liking, she guessed. An excellent scholar at just nine years old, but he was not born in the image of his father. With his mother gone—so tragically, so inexplicably—Dorothea felt a mother bear’s protective instinct. She must stay for Francis, which meant she was bound to a man who was capable of terrible things. Edward’s face was so full of disappointment when he looked at Francis, so dismissive.But when he peered down at the baby, his face held hope. And it filled Dorothea with fear.
She tried to tell herself it was lack of sleep, that it was her mind playing tricks, but she had that creeping sense of dread that came sometimes. A portent to a darker place. She hadthe knowing, had it since she was just a slip of a girl. She saw things,knewthem. And Dorothea knew it now.
Something malevolent was coming.
17
DOROTHEA
1954, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND
‘Come, little one.’ Dorothea’s grandmother disappeared into the dark mouth of the garden shed.
Dorothea dropped her skipping rope and hesitated. She ran her hands down the thin cotton of her dress and frowned. There was no reason to enter the shed; the day was warm, the sky a sparkling blue, which was an unusual break from the dirty smoke of the factories five miles away that blew smog across her grandmother’s village when the wind was in the mood to smother. Dorothea could have stayed under the warm beam of sunshine, climbed the oak or pulled weeds as her father had instructed. But he would be gone for a while, watching the horses run round and round the track. He wouldn’t see. A shiver of excitement ran through her as she scuttled to the door and peered into the darkness.
