‘Who doesn’t?’ replied Maggie, and she and Romany exchanged a look.
‘Well, I think you’re both mad,’ replied Angie, but secretly a warm rush of pride ran through her. ‘Right, let’s go and see what this is all about.’
They wandered along the path, past the church and the graveyard towards the visitor centre, only to discover that there was an entrance fee to get in. Angie eyed Maggie.
‘How much do we want to go inside?’ Angie asked.
Maggie shrugged. ‘I’m happy to go in if you want to,’ she said. ‘Or not . . . Whatever you think.’
An indecisive Maggie was a new and unfamiliar beast, and Angie couldn’t tell whether it was being fed by a lack of confidence or a lack of funds. She was prepared to pay the entrance fee, for all three of them if necessary, but she was also happy enough not to.
‘Let’s not bother,’ she said and watched Maggie nod quickly, apparently relieved that the decision had been made for her.
So, they wandered back the way they’d come. At the steps, rather than heading back down to the town, they turned left towards the grassy bank and admired the view out across Whitby and to the open sea. The sun was climbing high and the air felt warm for May, the breeze playful rather than spiteful. The turquoise water in the harbour lay as flat as a millpond with barely a ripple.
Romany flopped down on to the grass, stripped her jacket off and rolled it up to make a pillow for her head. Then she lay back and stared up at the heavens, blue in the main but with slabs of heavy sooty cloud here and there, just to remind you that you were still in Yorkshire. Angie, seeing the benefit of staying put, at least for a while, sat down too. She pulled the towels out of her bag and offered one to Maggie, but Maggie had what must have been the neatest towel known to man in a little pouch in her handbag. She flicked it out and sat down.
‘This was a lovely idea, Ange,’ she said. ‘Thank you for asking me. It’s just what I needed, a trip out of York and some sea air.’
Angie took a deep breath, filling her lungs to the very bottom, held it for a count of five and then let it out slowly. She repeated the exercise several more times, feeling her heartbeat slow and her body release some of its stress. Her mind, though, felt strangely unsettled. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, but something was making her feel out of kilter. It felt as if there was something that needed to be spoken, to be released so that it could stop troubling her. She just wasn’t sure what it was. Something to do with Maggie’s future, probably. There were so many unanswered questions there and she hadn’t delved, waiting instead for Maggie to want to talk to her. Something was definitely nagging at Angie, though, blocking her chakras and leading to this disconcerting feeling of imbalance.
And then she realised what was wrong. The unsettled feeling wasn’t anything to do with Maggie, although that issue would need to be resolved in due course. No, the cause of her disquietude was the photographer’s shop window: all those pictures of family groups.
Things like that didn’t generally bother her. She had been without a family since she’d first been taken into care and so didn’t think in terms of neat little nuclei. There was her and there was Romany, and that was that.
But what if that wasn’t really that? Could it be that what worked well for her was failing to work for her daughter? It wasn’t a discussion that they had had, not recently anyway, and suddenly, it felt vitally important to discuss it. Right there, right now.
‘Romany?’ she began.
Romany was chewing on a stalk of grass, pulling it between her teeth to extract the sweet innards.
‘Mmm,’ she replied lazily.
‘Do you mind that you don’t know who your father is? I mean, does it bother you?’
There. It was out. She had said it. She saw Maggie’s expression change, grey eyes roaming across Angie’s face curiously, trying to establish where this question had come from and whether she should be there to hear the reply, but Romany didn’t move. She continued to stare up at the clouds as they scudded across the blue.
Nobody spoke. The birds sang, children shouted to each other as they ran up the 199 steps, in the distance you could just make out the chimes of an ice cream van, but not one of them said a word. Angie began to wonder whether she had failed to say the words out loud. Maybe the sentence, so clearly spoken, had only been in her head. She looked over at Romany to check for some outward indication that she had heard her. Romany was still lying on her back and staring at the sky, her legs crossed, the upper one swinging idly back and forth.