It wasn’t the same chaplain who had spoken to my mother, up there on the cliff top. This man was older, wiser, than the young chaplain who had come to the police station six days before, shaking in his slip-on loafers as he described my mother’s rucksack, heavy with rocks; the way her handbag and mobile phone were placed neatly on the grass, just as my father’s wallet and phone had been seven months previously.
That chaplain had been close to tears. ‘She … she said she’d changed her mind.’ He kept his eyes resolutely turned from mine. ‘She let me walk her back to the car.’
But my mother was a stubborn woman. An hour later she’d returned to the cliffs, set her bag and phone once again to one side, and – so the coroner ruled – killed herself.
The chaplain who spoke to me on Beachy Head last Christmas Eve wasn’t taking any chances. He called the police, waiting until they took me gently away; until he could finish his shift knowing no one had died on his watch. I was grateful for his intervention. It scared me to realise we were all a single step from the unthinkable.
I wasn’t going to jump, I’d told him. But the truth was I couldn’t be sure of that.
When I got back home there was a leaflet stuffed through the letterbox: Psychotherapy services. Smoking cessation, phobias, confidence. Divorce mediation. Grief counselling. No doubt the whole street had been leafleted, but it felt like a sign, nonetheless. I phoned before I could change my mind.
I liked Mark instantly. Felt comforted before he’d even spoken. He is tall without being towering, broad-shouldered without being intimidating. His dark eyes have crow’s feet that hint at wisdom, and when he listens, he is thoughtful, interested; taking off his glasses as though it will help him hear better. I couldn’t have predicted, that first time, that we’d have ended up together. That we’d have a child together. All I knew was that Mark made me feel safe. And he’s made me feel safe ever since.
Laura finishes her tea and takes her mug to the sink, where she rinses it and puts it upside down on the draining board. ‘How’s Mark taken to being a dad?’
I straighten. ‘He’s obsessed with her. Doesn’t even stop to take his coat off when he gets in from work – he goes straight to Ella and takes over. It’s just as well men can’t breastfeed, or I’d never get a look-in.’ I roll my eyes, but of course I’m not complaining. It’s great Mark’s so hands-on. You don’t know what kind of father someone will be, do you? They say we instinctively search out the characteristics we need in a mate: honesty, strength, love. But you don’t know whether they’ll go out at 3 a.m. for the blackcurrant jelly you crave, or do their fair share of the night-feeds, and by the time you do it’s too late to back out. I’m lucky to have Mark. Grateful he stuck by us.
My father never changed a nappy in his life, and as far as I know, Mum never asked him to. It was just the way things were, back then. I imagine Dad looking on as Mark burps Ella, or expertly switches a dirty babygro for a clean one, and I know he’d have made some quip about ‘new men’. I push away the image. If I’m honest, I don’t know if Dad would have liked Mark at all.
It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Mark’s a great dad to Ella, and that’s all that counts.
I drank too much, that first date. It took the edge off my nerves and went some way to assuaging the guilt I felt at going out and enjoying myself, less than two months after Mum had died.
‘I’m not normally like this,’ I said, when we were back at Mark’s flat in Putney, and the promised cup of coffee had been abandoned in favour of another glass of wine, the tour of the flat ending abruptly in the bedroom. It sounded like a line, but it wasn’t. I’d never slept with anyone on a first date. Or a second or a third. But that night, I felt impetuous. Life was too short not to grab it by the horns.
In reality I was drunk, not empowered. Reckless, not spontaneous. Mark – perhaps a little less drunk, perhaps still conscious of the fine ethical line we were crossing – attempted to slow things down, but I wouldn’t be swayed.
The guilt came the following morning. A burning shame that tore through my self-respect and pushed me out of Mark’s bed before he woke.
He found me by the front door, putting on my boots.
‘You’re leaving? I thought we could go out for breakfast.’
I hesitated. He didn’t look like a man who’d lost all respect for me, but memories of the night before made me wince. I had a sudden recollection of peeling off my knickers, in a low-grade striptease that ended when I lost my balance and toppled onto the bed.
‘I have to go.’
‘I know a great place around the corner. It’s early, still.’ The unspoken question – where did I have to be so urgently at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning? – made me say yes.
By nine my hangover had abated, along with my awkwardness. If Mark wasn’t embarrassed, why should I be? We agreed on one thing, though: it had happened a little faster than either of us had expected.
‘Shall we start again?’ Mark suggested. ‘Last night was fantastic, but … maybe we could have another first date. Get to know each other.’
It was another five weeks before we went to bed again. I didn’t know it then, but I was already pregnant.
‘Should I take it to the papers?’ I ask Laura now.
‘You might be jumping ahead a bit.’ She winces at her poor turn of phrase. ‘Sorry.’
‘They wrote an article when Mum died. They might do a follow-up. Appeal for information.’ I picture the card.
Suicide? Think again.
‘No one came forward at the time, but if Mum was with someone that day – someone who pushed her off the cliff – they must have come across other people.’
‘Anna, the chaplain saw your mum.’
I fall silent.
‘He talked her back from the edge. She said she wanted to kill herself.’
I want to put my fingers in my ears. La la la la la. ‘He wasn’t there when she actually went over, though, was he? He didn’t see if she was alone when she came back.’
There’s a pause before Laura speaks. ‘So, Caroline’s on Beachy Head. She’s ready to jump. The chaplain talks her down, then, an hour later, someone murders her?’
She doesn’t have to point out how absurd it sounds.
‘She could have been trying to get away from someone. Thought that killing herself was better than being killed. Only she couldn’t go through with it, and when the chaplain thought he was taking her to safety he was actually delivering her to …’ I tail off, the pity in Laura’s eyes too much to take.
‘To who?’
Ella’s awake. She’s making tiny mewing sounds and pushing her bunched fist into her mouth.
‘Who killed her, Anna? Who would have wanted Caroline dead?’
I chew my bottom lip. ‘I don’t know – one of those idiots who blame everyone else when their car breaks down?’
‘Like the idiots who sent the anonymous letters after your dad died?’
‘Exactly!’ I’m triumphant, thinking she’s proved my point, then I see her face and somehow, it’s me who’s proved hers. The mews become full-blown wails. I take Ella from her bouncy chair and start to feed her.
‘Look at you – quite the pro now.’ Laura smiles.
In the early days, I could only breastfeed in one particular chair, with a precise arrangement of cushions around me, and no one else in the room to distract Ella from latching on. Nowadays I feed one-handed. Standing up, if I need to.
I don’t let Laura change the subject. Her question is an important one. Who would have wanted Mum dead? Some of the car dealers my parents and Billy crossed paths with made no attempts to hide their shady practices. Could Mum and Dad’s deaths have been the result of a bad business deal?
‘Will you help me go through Mum and Dad’s study?’
‘Now?’
‘Is it a problem? Do you need to go?’ If Laura can’t help, I’ll do it on my own. I’m wondering if Mum’s campaigning is the key. When I was in my teens she got involved in protests against animal testing at the University of Brighton, earning herself a smattering of hate mail from employees and their families as a result. I don’t recall her campaigning against anything more contentious than planning applications and cycle lanes in recent years, but maybe I’ll find something in the study that suggests otherwise.