“I’ll wait outside,” I say.
I march through the glass doors and down the steps, turning left, restraining my gait to a fast walk until I’m confident I’m out of their sight. Then I cross the road and loop back, pulling my hair loose from its bun and shielding my face as I duck through the slow traffic to dive into the back of my car. I scoot across to peer through the window.
The elevator doors open, but it’s a gray-haired man in a shirt and tie coming out, calling something to the receptionist. My dress sticks to my skin. I wait.
The elevator doors open again, and this time it’s a woman.Tall. Broad shouldered. Easily mid-forties. Her dark hair is tied back at the nape of her neck, and she wears black trousers and a shapeless cream blouse, flat black shoes. Her gait as she walks toward the desk seems heavy, although she’s barely overweight. I can’t be certain she’s the same person as the fresh-faced au pair in our family photo album, but it’s possible.
The receptionist says something to her, and she turns and looks sharply through the glass toward the casual shoppers strolling along the pavement, and the row of parked cars within which I’m hidden. I shrink down in my seat behind my tinted glass, half closing my eyes. She steps closer, and the doors slide back, and now she’s standing two meters away, scanning left and right, frowning. There are no vans in sight. Behind her, the receptionist says something to her lanky companion, and he smirks. My nostrils flare.
I study the woman through the brush of my eyelashes. No visible makeup. Strands of gray along her parting. Two vertical frown lines between her eyes. A silver locket hangs around her neck, but there are no rings on her fingers.
She ventures down the steps to look as far as she can along the street in each direction, and her scowl gives way to something more wary. Before I have had enough of scrutinizing her, she whips round and stalks back into the building, back to the elevator without even glancing toward the pair at the desk. I uncurl and rub the fingernail crescents from my palms.
I have found Laura.
Now that I know what she looks like, when she comes out again, I’ll be able to catch her and introduce myself. I tie my hair back up, keeping my gaze fixed on the building. As one o’clock approaches, employees emerge from the elevator and spill out onto the street, peeling off cardigans and jackets as they squint up at the sky, pulling phones from bags and pockets.Laura doesn’t reappear. Eventually I clamber into the driver’s seat and turn on the air-conditioning. I can wait.
If I were in Edwin’s car now, I would find a spare bottle of water and emergency cereal bars in the glove compartment. If Danny were here, there’s no way he’d be able to sit and wait without nipping off to buy some chips. I watch a woman saunter along the pavement, sipping from a take-out coffee cup, and my stomach shrivels. I ease my shoes off and angle my feet into the sluggish drafts from the air vents.
She’ll have to come out eventually.
I think of my own colleagues in Norwich—eating their sandwiches in the cathedral grounds under this same cloudless sky, sharing the usual jokes after a steady morning managing the recruitment company accounts. I miss the soothing routine of my accounting job: the reliability of the numbers, the clear-cut answers. I don’t suppose my boss imagines this is how I’m spending my compassionate leave.
I tug the family photo from my bag and peer at the baby again. I know I was the bigger twin when we were born—amusing, since Danny now towers over me—but I can’t judge the size of this cocooned infant. Edwin’s grin makes my throat tighten: four years old and oblivious to the fact that this was the last day he would ever spend with his mother. Our mother. When I think about her, I picture my heart sending out tentacles, like wriggling strawberry laces, straining to latch on to an emotion. They don’t succeed. Her absence left a hollow space inside me.
Laura’s reappearance jolts me from my thoughts.
She strides from the elevator, and within seconds is out on the pavement, sweeping past me, marching toward the park. I slip my shoes back on and ease out of the car to follow her. She glances back over her shoulder once, just before she turns intothe park, but by the time I reach the gate half a minute later, she’s vanished.
A path bisects the expanse of grass, and people lounge around, finishing picnics on either side, but Laura is nowhere in sight. There’s a second gate farther along the boundary with the street. I set off toward it, keeping to the narrow band of shade by the hedge as my eyes seek out potential hiding places: Behind the bandstand? Among those trees?
Back out in the fume-filled street I still can’t see her. I rub the back of my neck. Across the road is a small newsagent, and while I queue to pay for a bottle of water, I continue to scan the pavement outside. A hand on my bare arm makes me flinch.
“You dropped this,” a woman in a head scarf says to me, holding out a coin and ducking away from my expression.
The photo, the one with my mother in it, still lies on the passenger seat of my car when I return, and I drop into the driver’s seat and turn the picture facedown. I thought I was being so clever, but I’ve messed it all up. I start the engine and sit for a moment, gripping the steering wheel, an uneasy thought prickling underneath my frustration. If I contact Laura properly now—ring her, ask to meet her—will she guess it was me who called her down for a nonexistent delivery today? Did she spot me trying to follow her? Will she ever agree to talk to me now?
Twenty-one days since my father’s accident; nine days since his funeral. I can’t make any decisions sitting in my roasting car on this tired, dusty street. I wipe my palms on my dress and tapSummerbourneinto the GPS. I’ll be able to think about it all more clearly when I get home.
2
Laura
August 1991
GREENGAGES. I ALWAYSassociated my first visit to Summerbourne with those shy green plums, whose ordinary-looking skins hide such astonishing sweetness. In my eighteen years as a city girl, I had never even seen a greengage, but they grew abundantly in the woodland at the back of the Summerbourne garden, and I devoured several that day. They tasted of honey and sunshine and new beginnings.
The full English breakfast at King’s Cross station earlier that morning had settled my nerves for a while, but as midday drew near and the train rumbled deeper into the Norfolk countryside, the fluttering under my rib cage increased. I pressed my forehead against the window. Broad, flat fields stretched to the horizon, punctuated by eerily motionless villages and odd isolated houses topped with thatch. Somewhere in the depths of my handbag lurked a cheese sandwich intended for this section of the journey, but the upcoming interview had chased away my appetite.
At King’s Lynn, I clutched the letter from Mrs. Mayes in front of me as I approached the taxi rank, even though the address for Summerbourne House was already fixed in my memory in its spiky letters. The taxi driver’s vowels rolled and stretched in his mouth, leaving a heartbeat’s delay before they settled into words I could understand. I fumbled the letter across to him.
“Oh, Summerbourne, is it?” he said. I climbed into the back.
Despite the roads having only one lane in either direction, we hurtled along between high hedges as if he had a sixth sense for hazards around bends.
“That’s just down the drift here,” he said eventually, his tone encouraging, as we left yet another village behind us and swung into a narrow lane. I wound my window down, unsure whether my churning stomach was a reaction to the twisting roads, the looming interview, or the sudden fear that I didn’t have enough money in my wallet to pay him. A heavy, sweet smell filled the car as we passed a field of cows, and the lane curved to reveal a row of small cottages with low front doors, their walls studded with irregular gray stones. Just as I became convinced the lane was narrowing into a dead end, we reached a sign for “Summerbourne” inviting us to turn right. The driveway widened into an oval of golden gravel in front of the most entrancing house I had ever seen.
From the buttery glow of its weathered bricks to the rounded edges of its broad stone doorstep, every detail of Summerbourne radiated a warm welcome. Lush greenery stretched along the front of the house on either side of the central front door, glossy leaves stroking the ground-floor windowsills. The front door knocker was a large brass ring, solid and plain. There was none of the adornment I had seen on grand London houses, but thisonly enhanced the impression that Summerbourne sat contentedly in its own bricks and mortar.
