And then Ambrose had died. And everything fell apart.
I can’t let it go on. Thea’s voice, echoing Ambrose, rings in my head as I walk back from the Tube station, hardly feeling the hot afternoon sun on the back of my head, I’m so preoccupied with my own thoughts.
It’s all wrong. What did he mean? I try to imagine what Kate could have done that would be bad enough for him to consider sending her away – but my imagination fails. He had watched Kate, all of us, stumble through that year making mistakes and questionable decisions, exploring drink and drugs and our sexuality. And he had said nothing. In a way it was no wonder, with his own past he had few stones left to cast. He only watched with love and tried to tell Kate and the rest of us when we were putting ourselves in danger, without judgement. The only time I can remember him getting really angry was over the pill Kate took at the disco.
Are you mad? he shouted, his hands in his wiry hair, making it stand up on end like a rats’ nest. Do you know what those things do to your body? What’s wrong with some nice healthy weed for crying out loud?!
But even then, he never grounded her, there was no punishment – just his disappointment and concern. He cared for her, for us. He wanted us to be OK. He shook his head when we smoked, looked on with sadness when Thea turned up with plasters and bandages over strange cuts and burns. When we asked him, he counselled, offered advice. But that was it. There was no condemnation, no moral outrage. He never made us feel wrong, or ashamed.
He loved us all. But more than anything, he loved Kate – loved her with an affection so fierce that it took my breath away sometimes. Perhaps it was the fact that it had been just the two of them for so long, after Kate’s mother died – but sometimes, there was something about the way he looked at her, the way he tucked her hair behind her ear, even the way he evoked her in sketches, as though he was trying … not to trap her exactly, but to pinpoint that quintessence that would enable him to preserve something of her forever on a page where it could never be taken away from him. It sang of an adoration that I glimpsed sometimes in my own parents, but dimly, as if through misted glass or far away. In Ambrose. though, it was a flame that burned fierce and bright.
He loved us, but Kate was him. It was impossible to think of him sending her away.
So what could be so bad that he felt he had no choice but to part with her?
‘Are you sure?’ I asked Thea, feeling as if my whole life had been shaken like a snow globe and left to resettle. ‘Is that really what he said?’
And she only nodded, and when I pressed said, ‘Do you think I’d get something like that wrong?’
I can’t let it go on …
What happened, Ambrose? Was it something Kate did? Or … the thought twists in my stomach … was it something else? Something Ambrose was protecting Kate from? Or something he himself had done?
I don’t know. I can’t answer the questions, but my head is spinning with them as my feet eat up the distance between the Tube station and home.
Our road is coming closer, and soon I will have to push these thoughts aside and become Owen’s partner and Freya’s mother.
But the questions beat at me, things with wings and claws, battering against me so that I flinch as I walk, turning my face as if I can avoid them, but I can’t.
What did she do? What did she do, to deserve being sent away? And what might she have done to stop it?
ACCESSORY TO MURDER.
Accessory to murder.
No matter how many times the phrase repeats inside my head, I can’t seem to understand it. Accessory to murder. An offence which carries a prison sentence. In the darkness of my bedroom, the blackout blinds drawn against the evening sun, Freya in my arms, the repeated phrase washes over me in a wave of cold terror. Accessory to murder.
And then it comes to me like a chink in the darkness. The suicide note. That’s what I have to hold on to.
I am feeding Freya down to sleep, and she is almost unconscious, but when I try to take her off she grips me, monkey-like, with her strong little fingers, and begins sucking again with renewed determination, burrowing her face into my breast as if she can return to the safety of my body.
After a minute of this, I realise she is not going to let go without a struggle and I sigh, and let my weight fall back in the nursing chair, and my thoughts return to their round-and-round, their back-and-forth.
Ambrose’s note. A suicide note. How could he have written a note, if he were murdered?
I read it, though all I can remember now are short phrases and snatches and the way the writing seemed to disintegrate into straggling letters at the end. I am at peace with my decision … please know, darling Kate, that I do this with love – the last thing I can do to protect you … I love you, so please go on: live, love, be happy. And above all, don’t let this all be in vain.
Love. Protection. Sacrifice. Those were the words that had stayed with me over the years. And it made sense, in the context of what I’d always believed. If Ambrose lived, the whole scandal with the drawings would have come out – he would have been sacked, and his name, along with Kate’s, would have been dragged through the mud.
Back then, when we got that call into Miss Weatherby’s office, I had had a sense of pieces falling into place. Ambrose had seen the storm coming, and had done the only thing he could do to protect Kate – taken his own life.
But now … now I am not so sure.
I look down at the baby in my arms and I cannot imagine ever leaving her willingly. It’s not that I can’t imagine a parent killing themselves – I know that they do. Being a parent doesn’t grant you immunity from unbearable depression or stress, quite the opposite.
But Ambrose was not depressed. I am as certain of that as I can be. And more than that, he was the last person I could imagine giving a shit about his reputation. He had means. He had friends abroad, many friends. And above all he loved his children, both of them. I cannot imagine him leaving them to face music he was too frightened to face himself. The Ambrose I knew, he would have scooped his children up and taken them to Prague, to Thailand, to Kenya – and he would not have given the smallest of shits about the scandal left behind, because he would have had his art and his family with him, and they were all that mattered to him.
I always knew that, I think. It’s just that it took having a child of my own to realise it.
At last Freya is properly asleep, her mouth slack, her head lolling back, and I lower her gently to the white sheet and tiptoe out of the room, downstairs to where Owen is sitting watching something soothingly mind-numbing on Netflix.
He looks up as I come into the room.
‘Is she down?’