Chapter 23
Verity at the Door
She came at eleven, without phoning. He knew it was her before he opened the door, by the way she stood on the landing. She didn't stand at all. She leaned her whole weight forward against the bell, like a person bracing a door against a flood.
"Open it," said Verity. "I know you're in."
He drew the bolt.
She stood on the mat in a long belted raincoat with the collar up and her hair wet, hatless, her feet in a pair of city shoes soaked through. She had no makeup on. In the stair light her face was a stranger's: sharp, white, drawn, the skin under the eyes the color of a bruise. She carried no briefcase. Her hands were jammed into her pockets, and he saw that they were shaking, and that she knew he saw.
"Can I come in?"
"Of course."
She walked past him into the hall without taking off her coat. She went down the passage to the living room and stood in the middle of it under the high ceiling, looking about with an air of slight, helpless distaste, like someone looking around a room in which a death has happened. The cards were gone from the picture rail. He had taken them down on Friday and put them in a shoebox. The table was bare. On the sill the jar of buttons stood in the lamplight with the photograph beside it, face up.
"You've tidied," she said.
"I had a visit from the police."
"I know. I rang her. I rang the Inspector." She turned. Her mouth was set, but her chin trembled. "I thought, if she's going to take an interest in my family, I'd better know what she's like. I can tell you she's very thorough. I didn't like her at all."
"Verity."
"I'm not here to quarrel."
"Then sit down."
"I'll stand." She took a long breath and let it out. "I'll stand, because if I sit I'll never get up, and I've got to say this in one go, and then I've got to go home and be a mother. Gareth thinks I'm at chambers." Her voice cracked. "He doesn't know I'm here. Nobody does. I came on foot."
"It's raining."
"I noticed."
He went into the kitchen. He put the kettle on, because it was something to do, and took two mugs from the shelf. He stood with his back to her while it boiled and heard her breathing in the room behind him: quick, shallow, uneven, like a wounded animal's. When he came back with the tea she hadn't moved. She took the mug in both hands and looked into it.
"Esme told you something," she said.
"Yes."
"On the stairs. She said it to you before I could stop her." She didn't look up. "I heard the end of it. I've been hearing it for a week. A friend who looked exactly like her. Do you know what I felt when she said that?"
"No."
"Relief." The word dropped like a stone. "I felt relief, Callum. Because for one moment I thought it was going to be that. A friend. A ghost. A shopgirl in Carrow. I thought, he can have that. Let him chase that woman to the end of the earth." She laughed shortly, painfully. "I thought I'd got away with it."
"With what?"
She raised her eyes.
They were Isabel's. They had always been Isabel's, the same wide-set level gray. For the whole of the first year he had been unable to look at Verity directly, and had learned to look at her mouth. They looked at him now with a naked tiredness and a kind of dreadful courage. He understood that she was going to say it, that she had walked three miles in the rain to say it, and that nothing he could do would help her.
"She's not my daughter," said Verity.
The kettle clicked off in the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed.
"She's not," Verity said again, quite steadily. "I mean, she is. She's mine in every way that counts. I've had her since she was nine days old. I got up with her at night. I took her to school. I've sat on the end of her bed through every fever she's ever had. I am her mother." The mug shook in her hands; a little tea slopped over the rim. "But I didn't bear her. I couldn't. I tried for six years, and we lost four, and there was a doctor who said at the end, in a very kind voice, that it wasn't going to be possible."
He stood still.
"There was a girl in the family," she said. "In the summer of 2011. She was twenty-one. She had just graduated with a first, and she'd been going about for months looking ill and eating nothing and wearing the same enormous coat, and no one noticed." Her mouth twisted. "I didn't. I was too busy being barren. I was thirty and sitting in my father's kitchen with my hands on my stomach feeling sorry for myself, and she was upstairs for four months with a secret under a coat."
"Isabel."
"She told Mummy in the seventh month. And Mummy, of course, took charge." A faint dry bitter laugh. "I've never known a woman who could take charge of anything so completely. She had the whole plan laid out in a day. A discreet little clinic in the north. A story about Isa going to study in Vienna. A doctor who owed my father something. And a solution, which she gave me one afternoon in the garden, over tea, the way you hand someone a cake."
"Esme."
"A child needed a home. I needed a child. And Isabel, who was twenty-one and frightened and had no money of her own, and was going to be a speech therapist, with a first-class degree and a future, would be spared." Her voice was quite flat. "She'd have a life. She'd forget. That was how Mummy put it. 'She'll forget, Verity. They do.'"
"And did she?"
"What do you think?"
He didn't answer.
"She came to see her in the hospital," Verity said. "She was in the bed, still bleeding, with her gown open at the front, and I came in with Gareth and we stood at the door. And Isabel looked up and held out the baby and said, 'Here.' Just that. 'Here.' As if she were handing me a parcel." Her face worked. "And I took her. Callum, I took her out of my sister's arms. I can feel it now. The weight of her. She was so small, and so hot, and she smelled of milk and something else, I don't know, of life. And I looked at Isabel, and Isabel was looking at the ceiling. She wasn't crying. She had that face. The one she had when she was deciding whether something was worth the effort of saying. And I knew."
"Knew what?"
"That I'd bought my child with her whole heart." Verity drew a ragged breath. "And she let me. And I let her let me. And for twelve years we never said a word of it, not once, not at Christmas, not at the christening, where Isabel stood in the church in a hat and held the candle."
She had sat down by then, on the arm of the sofa, the cold tea beside her, her coat hanging open, her hair drying into a fine dark frizz about her face. She looked younger. She looked, he thought, exactly as she must have looked at nine, sitting on a bed with her knees drawn up, confessing to a crime she hadn't committed.
"She didn't tell you."
"No."
"I'm not surprised. She didn't tell anyone. She married you, and she was so happy. I saw that. I was jealous. I thought, she's going to be allowed to have it all, the love and the husband and the clean slate, and I'm going to have to pretend every day that I haven't taken it from her." Her shoulders shook. "And then you lost the baby, in 2020, and I saw her face, and I thought: she's going to tell him. She's going to tell him now. And she didn't. She came to Rookhill that Sunday and sat in the garden with Esme and watched her play and didn't say one word."
"She was visiting her."
"For two years. Secretly. In the summer, when you were at the museum." The words came fast. "I found out in the autumn. I came home from court early and there was a picnic rug on the lawn by the lake, and the two of them on it with their heads together and Esme laughing. Tap, tap, tap, with a spoon on the flask, and Isabel laughing back. I stood at the top of the field with my briefcase. I couldn't breathe."
"What did you do?"
"I said nothing. What was there to say?" She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "She asked me that night on the telephone. She said, 'Vee, I can't go on pretending. I want her to know me. I want to tell Callum. I want to tell her.' I said she'd destroy us. I said Esme would never forgive either of us. I said Mummy would, I don't know what I said." A shudder. "I said terrible things."
"When?"
"On the Friday."
The room was quite silent.
"She rang me at twelve past five," said Verity. "From the car. I know the minute. I've replayed it every night since. She said, 'It's Sunday, Vee. I'm telling Callum on Sunday. And then I'm telling Esme, with you or without you.' She was quite calm. She said it like a statement about the weather." She stopped and put her fist against her mouth and took it away. "I said that if she did, I'd never speak to her again. I said she was selfish. I said she'd had her chance and thrown it away, and that she'd never loved the child, she'd only loved being loved by her. I said," and her voice cracked and went on, "I said, 'You were always the one who could walk out of a room and be someone else.'"
"Verity."
"And she said, 'Yes. I know.' And rang off."
She wept then. She did it with her whole body, rocking, her face in her hands, the sound coming out of her in short stifled hiccuping gasps like a child's. He stood in the middle of the room with the mug in his hand and didn't know what to do. He'd never seen her cry. He hadn't known she could. At last he crossed the room and sat on the sofa beside her and put an arm round her shoulders, awkwardly, the way you handle something that has never been held.
She turned her face into his chest.
They stayed like that for some time in the high echoing room, with the rain on the window and the clock ticking.
"I've been so afraid," she whispered. "I thought if you found out, you'd tell her. I thought you'd hate us. I thought you'd go to her at school and say, 'Esme, your mother isn't your mother.' And I couldn't bear it."
"I won't."
"You can't promise."
"I can."
"You've been chasing a ghost for a week. You don't know what you'll do."
"I do," said Callum. "I won't hurt her."
She was silent.
"Why did you hate me?" he said. "In November. At the police station. You said, if you said something."
"Because I thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
"What she was going to say. On the Sunday. I thought she'd told you at six o'clock, in the kitchen, before she left, and that you'd been cruel, and she'd gone out and—" She stopped. "I thought it was me. I thought I'd said it, and you'd said it, and between us we'd pushed her over the rail. I needed it to be you. Do you understand? I needed it to be your fault, so that it wasn't mine."
He held her.
Above them the high ceiling gave the sound back, quietly, a moment late, in a voice that might have been her sister's.
"She said one more thing," said Verity, into his coat. "On the phone. At the end. After I said that." She raised her head and looked at him, red-eyed, with a strange dazed look. "She said, 'Don't worry. I've got Nonie.'"
His arm tightened.
"I didn't know what she meant," said Verity. "I still don't. But she said it the way you'd say, I've got an umbrella. As if it were something you could carry." A pause. "Callum. Who is Nonie?"