‘Better?’ he asked.
‘Better.’
‘Do you know what,’ he said. ‘I think a walk could be just the ticket. Take the edge off the shock. What do you say? I’ll protect you from the midges.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Just the ticket.’
She rose unsteadily, as if she were on the sloping deck of a ship. Frederick offered her his arm. She looked at Father and Graham, both of whom continued to snore. Graham would be disturbed to learn how much he looked like Father when he slept.
‘We’ll let these two catch up on their beauty sleep,’ said Frederick, steering her away.
24
KATE
Kate was right.
She is having a girl. The female GP, Dr Collins, confirmed it today, at her twenty-week scan. She gave Kate a printout of the sonogram: her daughter, cocooned safe inside her womb, iridescent fingers curled into fists.
‘She looks like a fighter, this one,’ Dr Collins said.
Now, Kate sits on Aunt Violet’s bed, caressing the photograph. The window is open and outside, a wood pigeon coos, the gentle notes carrying on the breeze. There’s something she needs to do.
Her mother answers on the second ring.
‘Kate?’
Her voice is muffled, concern driving away traces of sleep. What time is it there? The early hours of the morning. She should have checked. She is forgetting things, these days – lying down for a nap after putting on the kettle, waking with a start to its anguished whine. The tiredness makes her feel as if her bones have been sucked of their marrow.
‘Are you OK? You haven’t been returning my calls.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Sorry – I’ve been a bit distracted. Settling in, you know.’
Her mother sighs into the phone.
‘I’ve been so worried about you. I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.’
The saliva leaves her mouth.
‘I need to …’
‘Need to what?’
Her pulse beats a frenzied rhythm in her ears. She can’t do it.
‘I need to ask you something. About Dad’s family.’
‘What is it?’
‘Do you know who lives in Orton Hall now? Someone in the village said something about a viscount, but I don’t know if he’s related to us.’
‘Hmm. I think your father said he was a distant relative. There was that scandal, the disinheritance – but I don’t really remember the details.’
‘So you don’t know why they were disinherited? What the scandal actually was?’
‘No, love. I’m sorry. I’m not even sure your father knew.’
‘That’s OK. Um – one more thing …’ She pauses, licks her lips. ‘Did Dad ever say anything about one of his ancestors being accused of witchcraft?’
‘Witchcraft? No. Who told you that?’
‘Just something I overheard,’ she says. ‘They seem to have had some funny ideas about Aunt Violet around here.’
‘Well, she was a bit of a strange woman,’ her mother says, but Kate can hear the smile in her voice.
Kate looks around her, at Violet’s things. The shelves of books, the framed centipede glimmering on the wall. She thinks of the cape in the wardrobe, the dark glitter of its beads. Violet wouldn’t be afraid, the way Kate is now.
She would tell the truth.
‘Actually, Mum, I do have to tell you something.’ She takes a breath. The next words, when they leave her mouth, sound as if they’ve been spoken by someone else. ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Oh my God.’ For a moment there is silence. ‘Does Simon know?’
‘No.’
‘OK, that’s good. And have you … decided what you’re going to do?’
She knows about Simon, Kate realises. She’s always known.
The pain in her mother’s voice sends a jolt of nausea to her gut. Sun flares bright through the window, blinding her.
She knows.
For a moment, she thinks she might be sick. Her eyes sting.
But she won’t cry. Not today. She looks down at the sonogram, grips it tighter in her hand.
‘I’m having it. Her. It’s a girl, I found out today.’
‘A girl! Kate!’
She can hear her mother crying into the phone.
‘Mum? Are you OK?’
‘Sorry,’ her mother says. ‘I just – I wish we hadn’t left, Kate. I should have stayed. And then maybe you wouldn’t have met him … I should have been there.’
‘Mum. It’s OK. It’s not your fault.’
But it’s too late, the words are tumbling from her mother’s mouth, as if she can undo the years of silence between them. ‘No, I knew something wasn’t right. Quitting your job, losing touch with your friends … it was like you were becoming someone else. But he was always in the room, whenever we spoke on the phone … and then I didn’t know if he was reading your messages, your emails … I didn’t know what to do.’
Kate can’t bear this, her mother’s guilt. It burns, like acid on her skin. She remembers the night she met Simon. The way she’d been pulled towards him, a moth kissing a flame.
Can’t her mother see? It is no one’s fault but her own.
‘There was nothing you could have done, Mum.’
‘I’m your mother,’ she says. ‘I sensed it. I should have found a way.’
For a moment, neither of them speak. The line crackles with distance.
‘But I am happy,’ her mother says eventually, in a soft voice. ‘About the baby. As long as it’s what you want.’
Kate touches the photograph, tracing the bright bulb of her daughter’s shape.
‘It’s what I want.’
After they say goodbye, Kate takes her wallet out of her handbag. She wants to put the sonogram picture inside it, to keep it safe.
Now, it holds a Polaroid of her and Simon. Taken on holiday, in Venice. They are holding ice cream cones on the Ponte di Rialto. It had been a hot day: she remembers the fetid stink of the canal, the blisters that had formed on her feet from hours of walking. She looks happy in the picture – they both do. He has a smudge of ice cream on his lip.
The following day, he had yelled at her in the middle of St Mark’s Square. She can’t remember why. Probably he didn’t like something she’d said, or a particular way that she had looked at him. Later, in the hotel, he had hit her during sex, so hard that blood blisters formed on her thigh.
She crumples the Polaroid in her hand, then rips it to tiny shreds. They float to the floor, like snow.
The next day, Kate frowns as she walks. She zips up her rain-jacket: the day is muggy but overcast, the clouds swollen purple. It begins to spit. Already, the hedgerows glisten with water, tiny drops quivering like crystals on the wildflowers. Some she recognises: frothy white pignut; the golden bells of cow wheat. She has been learning the names from a great botanical tome of Aunt Violet’s.
She has to cross the fells to get to Orton Hall. The ground becomes steeper as she leaves the familiar comfort of the hedged paths for open fields. The grey sky suddenly seems both enormous and far too close.
Her calves burn, her trainers slipping on the rocky trail. Her heart beats dizzyingly fast and her mouth feels dry. She’s never much liked heights, or wide open spaces. She touches the bee brooch for reassurance, and then, on impulse, takes it from the pocket of her jeans and pins it to her lapel like an amulet.