His jaw slackened. He stared at her as though she were a monster. She felt like a monster. He retreated. His eyes began blinking at double-speed behind his darkened glasses. The back of his legs came up against the fireplace tools, jangling the shovel, the poker, the tongs, the brush, unbalancing the stand until it crashed down, letting the tools splay onto the carpet. Carefully, carefully, she moved towards him. If she approached too fast, he might run.
‘Step back,’ he thundered. His arm shot out towards the fireplace mantel to grab the box of matches. With an unsteady hand, he lit a long match and pulled the letter from his back pocket.
Cowed, Mira shrank back. ‘Oh God. Don’t, please don’t,’ she whined. ‘Please Barry. You don’t understand. He’s everything to me, please don’t.’
‘He’s everything to you, is he? Everything, you say?’ Barry retorted, high and mighty.
Mira wailed, ‘Why can’t you understand that? Why can’t you understand that I need him?’
‘I understand more than you think. Just you watch!’ he cried petulantly, holding the match to the corner of the letter.
‘NO!’ Mira screamed, flying at him. ‘NO!’
But it was too late, the flames licked at Oliver Ivory’s letter, greedily eating the paper, consuming his words. Weightless, acrid remnants floated to the ground. She fell to her knees, picking at the fragments. They dissolved like silky dust in her fingers.
She wept into her skirt. Barry had performed a barbarous, needless sacrifice. Her baby had been snatched from her, once again. The echo of loss was too much to bear. Her heart seized, and then it began to beat a dark and merciless rhythm, as black as the burnt remains at their feet. Nobody had the right to take her son away from her. She reached for the iron poker and she rose up, lifting the weapon over her head like a Celtic hero, before bringing it down heavily onto the balding, pitiful crown of Barry’s skull.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Rosie and I sat facing each other on the sofa, both of us in a cross-legged position and blowing on our mugs of hot chicken soup.
The fire’s warmth had heated up half of Rosie’s face, so that she had one red circle on one cheek.
I reached out to feel her forehead for the hundredth time that day. The fever had definitely come down.
‘I promise I’m better, Mum,’ she said, taking a sip of soup as though proving it.
‘Eating is a good sign.’
‘The doctor said chocolate was good for me too, remember,’ she grinned.
‘Yes,’ I laughed. ‘After your soup.’
She began sipping her soup in a good-natured hurry. I waited, nervously, part of me wishing we could sit like this forever, suspended in time.
‘Rosie, I want to tell you a story,’ I began. My stomach lurched.
‘What story?’
‘It’s a true story.’
‘Who’s it about?’
‘You.’
She stopped sipping her soup and looked directly at me. Her big blue eyes blinking rapidly, her one rosy cheek paling with worry.
‘Does it have a happy ending?’ she asked.
‘I hope you’ll think so.’
‘Go on,’ she said, gulping the last dregs of her soup and lying down on my lap.
I stroked her hair as I told her about how Peter and I had searched high and low all over the world for the perfect mummy to bring her to life.
As I unravelled her story, she curled her knees to her chest and plugged her mouth with her thumb, just as she had in my womb. I felt the wetness of her tears through my clothes. She then asked many questions about Kaarina Doubek’s eggs and about ‘Daddy’s wiggling sperms’ and the science behind the process, showing real intelligence and thoroughness, too much almost, until I worried she was getting herself bogged down in the detail.
‘But you and I are more than just science,’ I said.
There was a long pause as she thought about this.
‘I’m not sure it’s a happy ending, Mummy,’ she sniffed.
I pulled her up to sitting, held her under the arms, just like I had when she was small. I wanted to look her straight in the eye.
‘The best happy endings promise the happiest of new beginnings. Nothing is neat enough for a bow, Rosie, although I wish with all of my heart that it could be for you.’
‘But you’re still my real mummy, aren’t you?’
I placed my hand on her heart, and her hand on mine. ‘We will be mother and daughter for ever and ever after.’
‘The end,’ Rosie said, throwing her arms around me.
‘The end, my beautiful girl,’ I whispered in her ear.
* * *
I pulled a blanket over her as she slept. She looked at peace.
Silently, I rose from the sofa and took our two bowls to the sink.
Over the running water and the clatter of porcelain, I could hear shouting. I turned the tap off to listen.
It was coming from next-door. I could make out Mira’s raised voice. At first, I smiled to myself. After all of Mira’s judgements, she, too, seemed capable of breathing fire.
I thought back to her ramblings on my doorstep earlier. They were obviously heartfelt, and part of me had wanted to put my arms around her. I thought of the traumas that were passed down through the generations, and how unconsciously we acted those out again and again. Mira and I had brought our own miseries into Rosie’s life, in strange echoes of our childhoods. I wondered whether Mira’s judgemental finger-pointing had, perversely, been her way of staying in her comfort zone, in a familiar childhood place, too terrifying to question, too horrible to confront, and more easily deflected onto someone else. My anger was her anger, dressed up in someone else’s life, at a safe distance. And I wondered whether my need to control Rosie, to control the truth – and the binding straightjacket that the lie became – had been my own comfort zone. My parents’ divorce and my mother’s cold-comfort control and impossible expectations had taught me those same bad habits.
I might never know what Mira’s past had thrown at her, but I could only imagine that she was a survivor of hers in the way that I was of mine.
As I dried the bowls, and thought about how difficult it was going to be to live next-door to Mira, I heard Barry’s voice crescendo. The rumble of rage reverberated through the walls and sent shivers across my skin. Surely the mild-mannered Barry Entwistle, with such a nervous disposition, could not shout with such force. Maybe someone else was there? I began to worry.
I opened the window to try to hear more. The argument was heated and volatile, and it was definitely between Mira and Barry. There was something dangerous in it. Not simply because of how unusual it was to hear them argue, but because it directly followed Rosie’s rescue. Having believed Mira’s story, having been taken in by her distress, I began to wonder whether there was more to it.
Mira had been a gibbering wreck at my door, full of humble apologies and meek smiles, but now I was hearing a savage row. I began pacing the kitchen, deliberating, torn. The wrongness of what I was hearing throbbed in my bones. My gut instinct was to race over there, to check on them. Or to call the police. The irony of that was not lost on me. For a split second, I empathised with Mira. I was in her place, listening to Rosie’s screams from the other side, worrying about her welfare, feeling a sense of community responsibility.
I snapped back to reality. Her interference in our lives had almost broken my family apart. Every family was entitled to shout and scream at one another in the privacy of their own home. Abuse should not be the first assumption. Most families were not violent and cruel to one another. Mira’s marital argument was none of my business. I was not going to be a curtain-twitching busy-body who would pry into their lives, just as she had done in mine. I was not that person. I would stay out of it.
* * *
That night, I slept curled against Peter’s body, feeling his warmth for the first time in weeks, and I wanted to feel safe, but I was repeatedly woken by noises outside. Had they been in my dreams or were they from next door? Each time I thought I heard something, I tip-toed to our bedroom window to listen out. There was rustling in the undergrowth, scratching of the earth, twitching of the leaves, a high-pitched yelp. The noises must be cats or foxes fighting or deer eating the fallen apples or field mice scurrying through the leaves, I thought. I climbed back into bed.