It Could Have Been Her(52)
Wilf tips his head and looks at her as if to say: “Explain.”
“It’s just…” she begins haltingly. “There’s something about the way it unfurled, on my land, at Rosebery, just minutes after an estate agent left, when I was feeling so emotional, so aware of needing something to focus on instead of my bloody house, and then this dog appears, and…” She pauses. “Did Dex tell you about the man? The man I met when I was twenty-nine who almost kidnapped me?”
Wilf shakes his head, and Jane tells him the story yet again.
“And then there was this old boy,” she continues. “Bill Newsome, he lives near Rosebery, and he said he’d seen the missing girl, Daisy, seen her walking down the path in front of his house in the days before she disappeared, and he said how he used to see me walking down that same path when I was the same age as Daisy and it hit me in the gut, you know? That echoing through time, two young women, walking the same path, at different times, but, maybe, just maybe, with the same…”
“Trauma?”
All five of her stepchildren are aware of the mess of her upbringing. They know that her parents were both raging alcoholics who neglected her and her brother, that she was feral, that she was malnourished, and as children, they’d seen her tragic backstory as if it was just another dark fairy tale. But now, as adults, they are aware that it was anything but.
Jane exhales and nods. “Exactly. Yes. That. It felt like… maybe if I could save her, I could possibly, you know, save myself.”
She throws Wilf a small, tight smile and he nods, just once, to acknowledge the rawness of what she has just shared with him.
Then he raises his beer bottle and clinks it gently against her glass and says, “Well, if anyone can save a lost soul, Jane Trevally, it’s you. After all”—he gestures around the roof terrace at her many stepchildren—“you saved all of us.”
The following morning, with a slight headache, Jane packs up most of her stuff from Tony’s house, sets the dishwasher to run, checks that everything is locked up and switched off, and heads out into the suddenly fresh weather of the May morning. The heat wave is done, and this city sojourn is over for now. It is time for Jane to return home to her broken, crumbling house and her smelly dogs and enforced solitude.
Her conversation with Wilf the afternoon before repeats on a loop through her consciousness, the gentle thrill of it, his understanding of what she is trying to do, the beautiful gut punch of his closing words, that she is not a loser, that she is a saver of souls. She is possessed even more strongly now by a need to find Daisy Black.
She exits the station at Little Belmont two and a half hours later and messages Shannon as she walks toward the parking lot: Just getting into my car, see you in fifteen!
Shannon replies immediately: We’re all ready for you! with four dog-face emojis at the end.
It suddenly occurs to Jane that she needs cash to pay Shannon and she doesn’t have enough on her, so she takes a detour toward the high street on the other side of the station and heads toward the convenience store that has a machine inside. As she walks along the slightly down-at-heel high street her eye is caught unexpectedly by a shut-up retail unit—she’s not sure what it used to be: a key-cutting place, she thinks, or maybe a dry cleaner; it closed ages ago. But it’s not the building that catches her eye, it’s the thick layer of posters that have been pasted onto its neglected front windows, the sort of thing that Jane has walked past a million times before and would never normally have given a second thought to, but that jumps out at her now. She moves closer to the shop front to read the fine print.
Martello’s Circus
Waterfowl Meadow
Bank Holiday Weekend
Thursday, April 30, to Tuesday, May 5
The poster is a standard circus poster: brightly colored, with a montage of trapeze artists, elephants, burning circles of fire, and there, just at the farthest edge of the artwork, a clown, a painted-on face, a head of blue nylon curls, a ruffed collar, a harlequin-checkered overcoat, and a lurid plastic flower held grimly between two white-gloved hands.
chapter forty-three
STUART, SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
It’s a bright February morning, and I should be feeling that swell of hope and anticipation that this time of year can sometimes bring, those little pinpoints of light when the sun feels warm for a moment against your skin, when the daffodils push through. I’ve always loved the changing seasons, the cyclical rhythm of things happening in the same order, at the same time; it keeps me grounded, but it also inspires me, makes me feel as if anything is possible.
But I am feeling none of these things today, two years after I first moved into this house. As the sun tentatively touches the bare branches of the trees in the back garden, I feel the weight of every recent decision I have made bearing down on me, like a cartoon anvil, casting me in shadow.
Jessamine is in bed, sleeping off the night before. I have given up trying to guide her toward sobriety, and I have given up trying to guide myself toward sobriety; drink, it seems, is all we have left.
I call up the stairs to her. “Tea or coffee?”
“Tea,” comes the reply in a pained, reedy voice. “And toast.”
I make the tea and toast and bring them slowly up the stairs, my breath caught in my chest. The smell in the room is metabolized rum, garlic burps, stale sheets. Jessamine drags herself up to sitting and stares at me wanly. She looks horrible. Her skin is sallow and drawn, she has gray circles beneath her eyes, and her hair is tangled and greasy. She’s been wearing the same nightdress for weeks. I’ve put a fresh one out for her but she refuses to wear it, as though it’s a matter of principle.