The Death of Mrs. Westaway(78)
Dear Maud, I am sending this to you via Lizzie, as I don’t dare to put this in with the rest of the post. I am so glad you’ve found us a flat. Please don’t worry about the deposit—I have a little money left from my parents and beyond that I’ll—oh, God, I don’t know. I’ll tell fortunes on Brighton Pier, or read palms on the seafront. Anything to get away. I never thought I would write this, but I am afraid—really afraid.
Write back via Lizzie, her address is at the bottom. She’ll bring it up when she comes to clean—but if it comes to the house YOU KNOW WHO will open it, and all hell will break loose.
I love you. And please hurry. I can’t cope with it here much longer.
Mxx
There was an address on the bottom: 4 Cliff Cottages, St. Piran, Cornwall. The address now in Hal’s phone.
The paper fluttered in the wind as Hal folded it up, but the words stayed with her. I am afraid—really afraid.
She had held them inside her all of that long train journey, rattling in her head in time with the wheels of the train.
When she had first read the letter, curled up on the sofa with her phone in her lap, it was her great-aunt she had imagined, standing in the door of the little room, drawing the bolts. Or maybe Mrs. Warren, with her hissed invective and her hatred. But now, Hal wondered. For her mother had been . . . not fearless, perhaps, but full of courage. Hal could not remember a time when she’d turned away from something because she was frightened. Because it was stupid—yes. Because it was risky, and she had a child to protect and bring up, certainly. But just because she was afraid—no, that never. If something was difficult but necessary, Hal’s mother faced it.
What had made her so afraid that she had run far away from Cornwall to the other side of the country, and never spoken of that time again?
Hal wondered. And as the sky darkened with snow clouds and the chill deepened, she realized something. She was afraid too. Not just of what she was about to do. But of what she might find at the end of it.
CHAPTER 35
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St. Piran turned out to be not so much a village as a collection of buildings blown together like driftwood along the roads and lanes that wound down to the sea. Here was a farm, hardy little sheep crouched low against hedgerows, shielding themselves from the wind. There was a petrol station, shuttered up and closed with a cardboard sign in the window: RING BILL NANCARROW OR KNOCK ON COTTAGE FOR KEY TO PUMP.
The church where the funeral had been held was nowhere to be seen, but as she traipsed down the main road Hal heard a far-off church bell tolling the hour—ten slow strikes, rather mournful.
At last, Hal saw a red pillar-box and beside it a solitary phone box, sticking out into the road, and as she rounded the bend she saw the post office Abel had described. Inside the pocket of Abel’s coat, her phone buzzed, indicating a turning; pulling out her phone, she checked the route again and saw that she was supposed to turn left down a little unmade road, past a modest row of brick-built council houses, with sensible gardens, low roofs, and storm porches closed against the sea winds. CLIFF COTTAGES, read the sign at the corner as she turned into the road, and Hal felt her heart speed up.
Number four had a neat square of frosty grass in front of it, and a crazy-paving path up to the front door, and Hal found her hands were trembling, not just with cold, as she licked her lips and tucked her hair behind her ear, and walked up the garden path to ring the bell.
Somewhere inside the house a novelty chime sounded, and Hal waited, her heart beating hard as she heard the sound of shuffling footsteps and saw a shape appearing through the glass patterned door.
“Hello?” The woman who stepped into the storm porch was in her forties or fifties, very plump, with rolls of curly hair dyed a slightly improbable shade of yellow that almost matched the wet rubber gloves she was still wearing. But there was something kind about her face, and Hal found herself relaxing a little in spite of her nerves. She swallowed, wishing she had rehearsed what she was about to say.
“Hello . . . I . . . um . . . so sorry to disturb you, but do you know someone called Lizzie?”
“I’m Lizzie, yes,” the woman said. She folded her arms. “What can I do for you, my love?”
Hal felt her heart quicken, hopefully.
“I . . .” She licked her lips again, tasting the salt that seemed to permeate everything around here. “I—I think you knew my mother.”
? ? ?
ON THE WAY DOWN TO Cornwall, Hal had gone back and forth over the problem of what to say, and how to phrase her questions. She had thought of imaginary cousins . . . fake names . . . even of resurrecting Lil Smith as an alias.
But when the door opened, and Lizzie had been there in person, with her plump kindly face, and her Cornish accent soft and rich as clotted cream, somehow all of that had fled, and she had found herself saying the last thing she had intended. The truth.
Now she was sitting in Lizzie’s living room, and the story was tumbling out, so fast that Hal barely had time to consider it.
Her mother’s death, the lack of money. The letter from Mr. Treswick, and the improbable hope that this mistake might actually be real—followed by the growing conviction that it was not. The disquieting discovery of the photograph, and the bolts on the attic door, and the midnight flight back to Brighton. And then, finally, the diary in her mother’s papers, and the letters, and the care-of address that had led her here.