The Death of Mrs. Westaway(36)

But now, in this intimate circle of light cast from the lamp, marooned on the couch, pinned there by the blanket, now there was no escape. Clearly, whatever the truth was, Abel at least didn’t know what had happened to his sister. She would have to tell her own truth—and if it didn’t chime with what Mr. Treswick had found out, then that would be that, and the game would be over.

What she was about to do was crossing a line—not just in terms of the risk she was taking, but also in the way she was about to use her own small tragedy in the service of something mean and dishonest. But there was no way around it.

Once, a long time ago, a teacher at school had called Hal “a little mouse,” and the description had offended her, though she hadn’t really known why. But now she knew why. Whatever she looked like on the surface, inside, deep in the core of her, she was not a mouse, but something quite different: a rat—small, dark, tenacious, and dogged. And now she felt like a cornered rat, fighting to survive.

She took the thermometer out of her mouth, holding it in her hand, and drew a breath.

“She died,” she said quietly. “Just over three years ago, a few days before my eighteenth birthday. There was a car crash. She was killed instantly—a hit-and-run. I was at school. I got a call—”

She stopped, unable to finish, but it was done.

“Oh God,” Abel said. His voice was a whisper, and he put his hand up to his face. It was the first time that Hal had seen real grief since she had come here—in spite of Mrs. Westaway’s funeral—and she felt her stomach turn at the sudden realization of what she had just done. Abel’s pain was real and palpable. It wasn’t just the exploitation of her mother’s death that sickened her, for with that she was hurting no one but herself. But how casually she had just inflicted her own small tragedy on Abel.

These are real people. She watched Abel’s face in the lamplight, with a kind of numbness. These aren’t the imaginary rich yahoos you created on the train. These are real people. This is real grief. These are lives you are playing with here.

But she could not think like that. She had started this now, and she had no choice but to see it through. She could not go back, to Mr. Smith and his waiting enforcers, and beyond that, to the desperate daily struggle to eat, survive, keep her head above water. . . .

“Oh, Abel, darling,” Mitzi said, and her voice was a little throaty.

“I’m sorry,” Abel said. He dashed at his eyes again, blinking hard. “I thought—I really thought I’d come to terms with the idea of her death, I mean we hadn’t heard from her for so long, obviously we had all assumed . . . but to think that all that time, and she was alive and well . . . and we never knew. Dear God. Poor Ezra.”

Poor Ezra? But Hal did not have time to disentangle Abel’s remark, for Mitzi was speaking.

“Do you think, Abel,” she began, and then stopped. When she carried on, it was hesitantly, as if uncertain of what she was about to say. “Do you think that’s . . . why?”

“Why what?”

“Why . . . the will. Do you think your mother realized how she behaved, perhaps . . . ? That she had driven your sister away, and perhaps felt . . . I don’t know . . . guilty in some way?”

“A kind of atonement?” Abel asked, and then he shrugged again. “Honestly? I don’t think so. God knows, I’ve never understood Mother’s motives, and in spite of living with her for nearly twenty years, I have precious little insight into her thought processes, but I don’t think guilt was an emotion she even registered, let alone understood. I would like to think it was something as positive as atonement, but the truth is . . .”

He stopped, glanced at Hal, and then gave a kind of shaky laugh, as if trying to shrug off the conversation.

“But listen to me, rambling on. Poor Harriet’s still clutching that thermometer like grim death. Let’s see what it says.”

Hal held it out.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and she meant it now. “For all this. I’ll be going tomorrow.”

But as Abel held the thermometer up to the light, he whistled and shook his head.

“101.5. No question of you going anywhere, young lady.”

“A hundred and one!” Mitzi gave a little shriek. “Good Lord. You definitely cannot go home tomorrow, Harriet, I won’t hear of it. Anyway”—she glanced at Abel, a quick little look, almost of trepidation—“anyway, you will need to stay around. There’s so much to discuss. After all—this is your house now.”

CHAPTER 15


* * *

Your house now.

Your house now.

The words turned sickly in Hal’s gut as she lay in the darkness of the attic room, listening to the wind in the trees outside, the crackle of the fire in the grate, and the far-off crash of the sea, trying to come to terms with what had just happened.

She had not had the courage to face Harding, and fortunately Abel and Mitzi had fallen in with her plea for an early bedtime. Abel had helped her up the stairs, lit the fire, and then tactfully withdrawn while she got into her nightclothes, her limbs trembling with a mix of tiredness and fever. Then, after Hal was sitting up in bed, Mitzi had appeared with a bowl of soup on a tray.

“It’s only Heinz, I’m afraid,” she said as she placed the tray on Hal’s bedside table and straightened the contents. “Oh, bother. It’s cold already. It was boiling when I left the kitchen, I swear!”