The Death of Mrs. Westaway(57)

“So he could be out there, somewhere?” Ezra asked.

Hal shrugged.

“I suppose so. But I can’t see any prospect of finding him, even if I wanted to.”

“You don’t want to, then?”

“Not really. You don’t miss what you never had.”

It was true, in a way. But even as she said it, Hal thought of Harding at lunch, his arm around Kitty, holding her tightly against the breeze from the door. And she knew . . . it was only half true.

8th December, 1994

Abel came home from Oxford today. Term ended last weekend, but he came home the long way, via a friend’s house in Wales, trailing his feet. I don’t blame him for his reluctance. Harding, who I still haven’t met, sent a brisk message saying the accountancy firm he works for in London couldn’t spare him, and that he would not be returning for Christmas. And Ezra’s school doesn’t break up for another week.

The first I knew of his arrival was Maud pricking up her head, like a collie that has caught a noise. We were sitting in the drawing room, the only warm room in the whole house apart from my aunt’s sitting room. We were huddled close to the fire, me playing patience, Maud reading and listening to something on her Walkman. I was frowning over a particularly knotty spread, when suddenly she pulled off her headphones.

“Jesus,” she said. “We must look like something out of Little Fucking Women. What—”

She broke off abruptly, and listened for a moment. Then, before I could ask what she had heard, she was running out of the drawing room, down the corridor towards the front door.

“Al!” I heard, and his answering shout, and I followed, in time to see her rush into his arms. He picked her up, spinning her around in a giant bear hug while she screeched out laughing protests.

“Hi, Abel,” I said, suddenly shy, and he nodded at me over the top of Maud’s head as he deposited her down on the hallway rug.

“Hi, Maggie.”

And then that was it. The kind of greeting you’d give a stranger, or a passing acquaintance. He picked up his case, slung one arm around Maud’s shoulders, and went back to talking to her about his term, about some girl he was seeing, and I felt . . . I don’t know what. A kind of furious grief, I suppose. Disappointment that after all that happened over the summer, he couldn’t bring himself to ask how I was, or what was happening in my life. It had felt like we were so close, all of us, in those lazy summer days. And over the weeks and months that followed, Maud and I had become even closer—closer than sisters. But now it was very plain, to Abel at least, I am an outsider in this family. Perhaps I always will be.

The thought was unsettling, and I turned away, back down the chilly corridor to the comparative warmth of the drawing room, turning over possibilities in my mind.

Soon the truth will come out whether I want it to or not. The question is, when it does, will they close ranks against me?

I thought, when I came here, that I was finding a second family, a replacement for the one I had lost. But now . . . now I’m no longer sure. Seeing Maud in Abel’s arms like that, laughing together, excluding me even without meaning to . . . well, it was a reminder of a truth I should never have forgotten: whatever else we have shared, blood is thicker than water. And if they close ranks against me, I have nowhere else to go.

CHAPTER 23


* * *

It was awkward getting out of Ezra’s car, and Hal stumbled, and as she did, she felt the tin slide from her back pocket and land with a thud on the gravel, spilling open.

“Damn!”

She bent, scrabbling up the feathered old cards before they were caught by the wind and whipped away.

Ezra slammed his door and came round her side of the car to help.

“Dropped something?” he asked, and then leaned down and picked up one of the cards, looking at it curiously. As he did, his face changed, almost as if he had seen a ghost, and then he seemed to catch hold of himself, and gave a laugh.

“Tarot!”

“It’s what I do,” Hal said shortly. There was a card slipped under the wheel of the Saab, and she tried to tease it out without ripping the edge on the gravel. “I’m a tarot reader on the pier in Brighton.”

“No way!” He was laughing properly now. “Really? You kept that quiet.”

“Not really.” She bent and peered under the chassis of the car. There were two more cards beneath, and she grabbed the first, but could not reach the second. “Could you—can you reach that card right in the middle there? Between the wheels?”

Ezra bent and looked, and then stretched a long arm beneath the body of the car, scrabbling with his fingers.

“Got it.”

But when he stood, brushing himself off, and looked at the object he was holding, Hal saw that it wasn’t a card. It was the photograph that Abel had given her.

“Huh.” He held it in his hands for a moment, brushing a fragment of gravel off the fragile folds. “Where did you get this?”

“Abel gave it to me.” Hal bit her lip. “He—he thought . . . he thought I might want it. Because I don’t have many photos of my mother.”

“I see.” Ezra said nothing more, just stared down at the photograph, and Hal saw his thumb very gently brush the face of his sister, sitting beside him, laughing at him. “You—” He swallowed painfully. “You must miss her.”