It Could Have Been Her(51)
My friends texted me to tell me they were meeting up for drinks in Hampstead. I replied that I would join them there later. I wasn’t in a hurry. I wanted the day to sweep me along in its perfect arc. I’ve always been what I call spontaneous but what my friends and family might refer to as “Claire doing a no-show.” I like to keep my options open, my phone at home—sometimes I like to disappear.
I made my bed so that it would be all nice and fresh for me when I returned, and I lifted the window just a crack, enough to keep it aired during the day, but not enough to allow some murderous monster to get in and hide under my bed awaiting my return.
And then I walked to Hampstead.
The Heath fascinated me. How, I always wondered, did this exist? In the middle of a city? How could I feel that I was cut off from the world, miles from anywhere, nothing around but rustling treetops and dusty paths, when I was a ten-minute walk from a tube station? I stopped that day at the point on the Heath where the shiny silver towers and spires of the City suddenly loom into view on the horizon and I caught my breath. It’s miraculous, I thought. London is miraculous.
And then as I passed the edges of the Vale of Health, I heard the sound of a cat crying.
I followed the pathetic noise to the fence at the back of someone’s property. I crouched down in the tangled undergrowth to pull away some weeds, and there was a beautiful gray cat, its collar caught on a spiny branch, its body contorted into an uncomfortable position. I put down my bag and tried to free the cat, but it fought and struggled. And then I heard voices floating dreamily over the top of the fence. It sounded like a group of people conversing sociably; a party maybe? I called out: “Excuse me? Hello? Excuse me?”
A man’s voice responded.
chapter forty-two
The first one to arrive at Jane’s party on Saturday afternoon is Dexter. He’s wearing a dark blue T-shirt from Ralph Lauren that—of course—used to be hers. Jane had left tons of stuff in her walk-in wardrobe when she and Tony had split up five years ago; she’d been heading off to Spain to help run a dog-rescue center and couldn’t at that point in her life have imagined ever again wanting to wear anything nice, she was so over it all back then, the whole lifestyle. It makes her happy now to see Dexter making use of the lovely things she left behind.
The next to arrive is Jane’s oldest stepchild, forty-one-year-old Wilf, with his wife, Carlotta, and their small daughter, followed by Wilf’s younger brother, Charlie, and baby sister, Isabella, plus partners, and then lastly Dexter’s sister, Romy, and her boyfriend Fred, and soon the roof terrace is jam-packed with people considerably younger than Jane and as she pours drinks and answers questions and moves from soul to soul, taking in their faces, their foibles—the way Wilf still holds his hand flat against his chest whenever he laughs, just like he did when she first met him as an eight-year-old boy with dark, suspicious eyes; Romy’s fat curls that Jane used to tie into sensible plaits every morning before school; Charlie and Isla, still a little distant, still a little unknowable, just as they’d been as six-and five-year-olds, but now with a manufactured sparkle plastered on over the top—Jane feels her heart swell and blaze. She knows these people so well: she knows where they came from, what hurt them, what made them; she knows their eccentricities, their inter-sibling dynamics, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their quirks. She loves them all so much. And here they are, all together in one place. She raises a glass of champagne into the chaos and taps it with a fork handle.
“Thank you for coming out to play!” she says. “I know how busy you all are and the fact that you are all in the country at the same time as each other is a miracle. So here’s to miracles, and I love you all.”
Everyone raises their glasses back at Jane and the sun beats down and the champagne softens her corners, and she feels it like a punch in the gut, this, here now, this is another fork in the road. There have been many in her life, so many, all dramatic, bells and whistles, deafening Klaxon moments when she knew everything was about to change again—she has reinvented herself so many times, and now it’s happening again, right here, right now. She knows suddenly and without a doubt that she cannot have Rosebery Hall and this, that she cannot grow old without giving herself another chance at something, and that the only way she can have a chance at something is to cut herself free finally from the tattered ropes that bind her to her blighted family home. Then and only then can she be the woman she knows she needs to be for the next chapter of her life: socially available to her stepchildren, financially stable and independent, free of the hold that her traumatic childhood still has on her.
Wilf comes to her while she sits with these thoughts. He is a thin man, straggly haired, prematurely aged but still as pretty as he was as a child to Jane’s eye. “I hear you’ve been doing of bit of amateur detectiving,” he says, topping up her champagne glass.
“Dexter told you, I presume?”
“Yup. Some missing girl you’re looking for? So, who is she? Someone you know?”
“Ha!” Jane responds. “No. Gosh. No. Not at all. Just a stranger.”
“Right.” Wilf tips his beer bottle to his lips and takes a sip. “So, what’s the deal then? Why are you so involved? Dex says you’ve been knocking on doors, snooping in gardens.”
“Gosh,” she says. “That makes it sound very grubby.”