Trixie shakes her head and stares wide-eyed at both of us.
Someone has spelled out our names.
Rose starts pacing again. ‘I don’t understand the connection to Nana’s agent, or the link with Scrabble letters . . . someone has been sticking them to the covers of our old home movies. But why would he be involved in any of this? Nana loved her agent.’
‘Because she couldn’t write any more new books after what happened in 1988?’ Conor says, staring at the floor. ‘She didn’t publish anything ever again after that. What if he trashed her studio last night, looking for her latest work? If an author can’t write, that’s got to be bad for their agent too, right? I mean, she was his biggest client.’
‘His first and only client for a while,’ I say, remembering how much I liked the man.
Rose shakes her head. ‘We must be missing something.’
She turns to Lily, as though hoping she might have the answer. But Lily continues to face away from us all, staring at the TV screen, as if hypnotized by what she sees. For now, all it shows is an image of a bonfire on a beach at night. The fire in the room crackles and spits again, and I see what looks like a chair leg burning on top of the logs. It’s painted blue with white clouds. I turn to Conor, and there is a scribble of a smile drawn on his face for no more than a second, before a frown erases it as though it were never there. But that doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes our faces don’t know what to do with themselves when we are scared.
When I look back at the TV, I know that a lot of what happened after Nana’s birthday meal and before the bonfire on the beach is missing – moments that definitely weren’t captured on camera because Lily wasn’t filming at the time. Unfortunately, my mind remembers that night well enough to fill in the gaps.
Thirty-seven
SEAGLASS – 1988
‘Why do they get to go to a Halloween party and I have to stay here? I always have to stay behind. You never let me do anything,’ I said to my mother, hoping that the vast amount of alcohol she had consumed that night might have made her change her mind. Saving an alcoholic seemed to turn her into one. Albeit the functioning variety who people aren’t as quick to condemn.
‘Because you’re only thirteen,’ Nancy said, pouring another glass of wine.
‘So? You let Rose and Lily go to parties when they were my age.’
‘You know as well as I do that your sisters aren’t as—’
‘What? Unhappy? Lonely? Bored?’
Nancy tutted, and it made me so angry. It was the bad habit she was always so good at. The sound of people tutting still makes me cross. Sometimes my mother would tut for the benefit of nobody but herself, when she thought she was alone and no one could hear her. Tut. Tut. Tut. It was her response to everything that irritated her, including me. Nancy steered me out of the room, as though I were an embarrassment that Nana’s agent shouldn’t have to see.
‘Your sisters aren’t as delicate as you are,’ she said, with a level of satisfaction that made me want to tut.
‘I’m not—’
‘Daisy, I have spent my life protecting you from the world and looking after you . . .’ That sounded like a joke to me. By then, my mother was a woman who could barely look after herself. After the break-up with Conor’s father, she seemed smaller and had become a bit introverted. London was too loud for her, and our tiny town house was too claustrophobic with no real outdoor space. So we spent more time at Seaglass than ever before. Nancy sat alone in the garden for hours with her precious flowers, because they were all she had left of Conor’s dad, and her only friends came in bottles. My mother had less time than ever for me, and she resented the pity and guilt I seemed to cause her to feel. ‘I am never going to let anything happen to you,’ she said, holding my shoulders a little too tight. Sometimes it felt like she wanted me to stay sick and vulnerable forever.
A lifetime of my mother ‘protecting’ me meant that I didn’t have much of a life or any friends of my own, not real ones. I didn’t go to school, or Brownies or swimming lessons like my sisters. I didn’t get to hang out with any other children my own age. Even now, I find it hard to make friends, and sometimes I think it’s because I never got taught how to do it. That was something neither Nancy nor Nana knew how to teach, because they didn’t have any either. My childhood friends were Agatha Christie and Stephen King.
When I look back, I think being home-schooled deprived me of so much more than anyone realized. I can understand why my mother didn’t see the point in me learning algebra – that was something we did agree on – but there were plenty of things I couldn’t teach myself by reading books. I didn’t just miss out on the lessons most children learn in a classroom. There were life lessons I never knew about.