The Death of Mrs. Westaway(77)

“Unfortunately, not until tomorrow,” Harding said. He cut his toast in half, a little more forcefully than the action required, and his knife screeched on the plate, making Hal wince. “It seems he is a busy man. So you are free to do whatever you wish today. But it’s not a very nice walk, I warn you. The fields are being plowed at this time of year, so walking across them is rather hard work and distinctly muddy. You’d do better along the main road, but it means dodging the traffic.”

“I don’t mind,” Hal said. “I just—I feel like I need some fresh air. Is it . . . is it hard to find?”

“Not especially,” Abel said. “But I’m not sure if you’re dressed for it.” He looked at her a little doubtfully. The snappy chill of the night before was gone and he was back to his usual solicitous manner, but Hal couldn’t help wondering if the cold irritation was still there beneath the caring veneer. Which face was the real Abel Westaway? “It’s very nippy out there. We don’t get snow in this part of Cornwall very much, but we had a frost last night.”

“I’ll be fine,” Hal said. She put her hands in the pocket of her hoodie and hunched her neck into the collar. “I’m very tough.”

“Well, you don’t look it,” Abel said, and he flashed a little avuncular wink. “Listen, if you’re really going to go, take my walking jacket. It’s the red one on the peg by the front door. It’ll be too big for you, but at least it’s windproof, and if it comes on to rain you won’t get drenched. There’s rain forecast for this afternoon. But if you get to St. Piran and it starts tipping it down, or if your legs are giving out, give me a ring, and I’ll come and collect you from outside the post office.”

“All right,” Hal said. She stood up. “I might go now—get started while it’s dry. Is that okay?”

“Fine by me,” Abel said. He put up his hands, and gave her a quick, wry smile that crinkled the skin at the corners of his eyes. In the morning light, they looked suddenly rather blue. “I’m not your father.”

? ? ?

OUTSIDE THE FRONT DOOR, HAL got out her phone and opened up maps, and into it she put an address: 4 Cliff Cottages, St. Piran, Cornwall.

The dial whirled as her phone calculated the distance and walking time, and then a route flashed up—down the drive and onto the main road.

She turned into the frosty wind, and pushed the phone deep into the pocket of Abel’s walking coat, and then set out, the wind in her face, the phone warm in her grip.

I’m not your father.

Why had he said that? It was so uncomfortably close to her own speculations that she had not been able to find a reply—and had only gaped, and then left the room hurriedly, hiding her shock. Did he know something? Had he and Ezra been talking? Hal had not thought much of Ezra’s casual inquiry in the car on the way back from Penzance, but now his words came back to her, and she found herself wondering about how much the brothers really knew.

Abel’s comment had been a perfectly reasonable remark, on the face of it, just as Ezra’s question was a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. People wanted to know where you came from, who you were. It was something Hal had dealt with her whole life: “Where’s your dad?” “What does he do?” Questions that every child in the playground asked, trying to size you up. Even, most vexatiously, “Why don’t you have a father?”

Grown-ups tended to phrase the inquiry more tentatively—“Do you have family near?” or “Are your parents around?”—but it came down to the same thing.

Who are you? Why don’t you know?

The questions had never seemed to matter much when Hal’s mother was alive. Back then, she had known who she was—or so she thought. But now they chimed so closely with her own thoughts, she wanted to scream.

For that was the worst of it. Not the lack of a father. Not even the not knowing.

But the lies.

How could you lie to me? she thought as she tramped down the long, winding drive, past the twisted yews with the magpies watching her as she went beneath, through the forbidding iron gates.

You did know and you lied to me, and you stopped me from asking the questions I had a right to have answered.

She had never hated her mother—never. Not when there was no money, and the other children had heelies and Pokémon cards, and she had sensible shoes and drawings she’d done herself on little scraps of paper. Not when the electricity money ran out and they sat by candlelight for a week, cooking on a gas canister borrowed from a friend. Not when her shoes ran into holes, and her mother was late home from the pier and missed parents’ evenings and class plays because she could not afford to turn down a client.

She had understood—this was not of her mother’s choosing either. And what little they had, they shared—good times and bad. When there was money, there were treats. When there was hardship, they endured it together. She was doing her best. She was doing it for Hal.

But this—this revelation . . . this was not something she had done for Hal. This was something she had kept to herself—knowledge she could have shared, but had instead hugged to herself, guarding it.

And why? What could be so bad about the man who had held the camera that day, the man whose eyes her mother held so steadily, the man she had loved?

In her jeans pocket was the sheaf of letters—the letters, postmarked from Penzance, that she had found beneath the bed. It had taken her a long time to decipher them, but at last she had read them all. They were letters between Maud and Maggie, and they were planning to run away. They were not dated, but from the sequence of events Hal thought that the last one was the one on top—the one she had read part of when she first opened the packet. Now she got it out of her back pocket as she walked steadily along the coast road, the wind in her face, chapping at her lips, and she bit her lip, and tasted salt.