Hal was just opening up another tab, when a notification flashed up—Richard had accepted her request. She clicked through to his profile and liked the first photograph that came up—Richard’s muddy face brandishing some kind of cup. Thrashed St Barnabus at rugger AGAIN. Pretty sure their fly half was a girl with facial hair , read the caption. Hal rolled her eyes, and returned to Google search.
There was nothing for Trepassen House on the land registry, and there were no businesses registered there. It wasn’t listed under care homes, or inspected as a food premises. There seemed to be no indication that it was anything other than a private home. Google maps brought it up, though, and Hal switched the view first to satellite and then to street view. Street view was unhelpful, showing nothing but a country lane flanked by a long brick wall with yews and rhododendrons shrouding anything behind it. Hal clicked along the road for a few miles in either direction, until finally she came to a wrought-iron gate across a driveway, but the photo was taken from the wrong angle to provide any view of the house, and she switched back to satellite.
The blurry image was too small to show anything apart from a gabled roof and a gated expanse of green punctuated by trees, but if nothing else, Hal could see that the place was big. Very big. This looked like a stately home, almost. These people had money. Serious money.
“Tickets, please,” said a voice over her shoulder, breaking into her thoughts, and Hal looked up to see a uniformed conductor standing in the aisle next to her. She rummaged in her wallet for a moment and held out the ticket. “Home for the weekend, are we?” he said as he punched a hole in it, and Hal was just about to shake her head, when something stopped her.
She had to step into this part sometime, after all.
“No, I . . . I’m going back for a funeral.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” The conductor handed her back her ticket. “Anyone close?”
Hal swallowed. She felt the cliff yawning beneath her feet. It’s just a role, she told herself. No different from what you do every day.
The words seemed to stick in her throat, but she forced herself on.
“My grandmother.”
For a moment the statement felt like what it was—a lie. But then she rearranged her face into an expression . . . not of grief, for that would be too much, for this woman she could not possibly be close to. But a kind of solemn regret. And she felt a shiver of something run through her—the same shiver she felt when she switched on the light outside her booth and stepped into her role.
“Very sorry for your loss,” the conductor said, and he nodded gravely, and passed on up the corridor and into the next carriage.
Hal was putting the ticket back into her near-empty wallet when the train dipped into a tunnel, causing the lights to flicker out, so that for a second the only illumination was the glow of her laptop, and the sparks of the wheels on the track, like lightning flashes against the blackened brick of the tunnel.
The screen of her laptop glowed emerald bright, the huge expanse of grass, the narrow snaking road, and suddenly Hal felt a kind of anger wash over her.
How could one family, one person, have so much? The grounds of Trepassen House could fit not just Hal’s apartment block, but her entire road and most of the next one. Just the cost of mowing those lawns was probably more than she made in a month. But it wasn’t just that—it was everything. The ponies. The holidays. The casual acceptance of it all.
How could it be right that some people had so much, while others had so little?
The lights came back on with a strobing flicker, and another Facebook notification popped up. Another update from Richard. Hal clicked on it, and a picture filled the screen—Richard and his family against a backdrop of paneled wood, all of them beaming proudly. Harding had his arm clasped so hard around his son that the boy was staggering slightly.
Richard has shared a Facebook memory, said the caption, and peering closer Hal read, Prize-giving day at St A’s. Ma doing the ol maternal pride thing so hard i thought she might rupture something. Just gotta make sure Dad makes good on our deal—500 squids for not flunking maths—and then HELLOOOO Ibiza!
As the train swooped out of the tunnel into daylight, Hal felt again that fluttering sickness in the pit of her stomach—but she knew in that instant that she would not turn back.
For the flutter wasn’t only nerves. It wasn’t even just envy. It was also a kind of excitement.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
It was almost three when the train drew up at Penzance. Hal paused for a moment beneath the big clock hanging above the platform, the sounds of the station echoing around her, trying to decide what to do.
TAXIS, read a sign above her head, and she shouldered her bag and followed the direction arrow to a rank at the front of the station. But a few feet away from the QUEUE HERE sign, she paused, and checked in her wallet.
After a sandwich on the train—egg and cress, the cheapest on offer at ￡1.37—she had ￡37.54 left. But would that be enough to get her as far as St. Piran? And if it was, how would she get back?
“You waiting, sonny?” said a voice from behind her, making her jump. Hal turned, but there was no one in sight. It was only when a face leaned out of the taxicab window that she realized it was a taxi driver who had spoken.
“Oh, sorry.” She shoved her wallet back in her bag and walked across to the taxi. “Yes, I am.”
“Sorry, my love.” The man’s face was red as she approached. “I didn’t realize—it was the short hair, see.”
“It’s fine,” Hal said honestly. It happened too often for it to bother her anymore. “Listen, can you tell me how much to get to St. Piran’s Church? I’ve not got very much cash on me.”
Or off me, she thought, but didn’t say. The taxi driver looked away, and began tapping something into a screen on the dashboard—a satnav, or a phone, Hal thought, though she wasn’t sure.
“?’Bout twenty-five quid, my darlin’,” he said at last. Hal drew a breath. This was it, then. If she got in this cab, she was stranded—no way back without relying on the goodwill of whoever she found at the other end. Was she really going to do this?
“The train now departing from platform three is the delayed 14:49 to London Paddington,” said the tinny voice of the station announcer—breaking into her thoughts like the universe reminding her once again that she didn’t have to follow this through, that she could simply turn around and catch the train straight back home.
Where Mr. Smith would be waiting for her in six days’ time . . .
If anyone can pull this off, it’s you.
“D’you ’ear me?” the taxi driver asked. His Cornish burr made the words sound less abrupt than they would have coming from a Brighton cabbie. “Twenty-five pound, I said, is that all right?”
Hal took another deep breath, and looked back at the train station. The pictures from Facebook and Google rose up in front of her eyes—the sprawling expanse of land, the holidays, the cars, the clothes, like stills from a Jack Wills brochure. . . .
She thought of the heel grinding into her mother’s photograph. Of the smashed ornaments in her kiosk, and the fear she had felt when that lamp clicked on. She thought of what she would give for just a couple of thousand pounds of that money—not even enough to buy one of those cars, a tenth of it maybe.
They have everything already. They don’t need more money.
She felt again that sensation of something sharp and hard crystallizing inside her, a kind of hot pain cooling into brittle resolve.
If she failed, she would be stranded. So she would just have to ensure that she didn’t fail.
“All right.”
The driver reached back and the rear door of the taxi swung open, and with a feeling like she was about to step off a cliff, Hal pushed her mother’s suitcase inside, and climbed in after.
? ? ?
“LOOKS LIKE A FUNERAL,” SAID the voice from the front seat of the car, and Hal jumped and looked up.
“Sorry, what did you say?”