The first one to arrive at Jane’s party on Saturday afternoon is Dexter. He’s wearing a dark blue T-shirt from Ralph Lauren that—of course—used to be hers. Jane had left tons of stuff in her walk-in wardrobe when she and Tony had split up five years ago; she’d been heading off to Spain to help run a dog-rescue center and couldn’t at that point in her life have imagined ever again wanting to wear anything nice, she was so over it all back then, the whole lifestyle. It makes her happy now to see Dexter making use of the lovely things she left behind.
The next to arrive is Jane’s oldest stepchild, forty-one-year-old Wilf, with his wife, Carlotta, and their small daughter, followed by Wilf’s younger brother, Charlie, and baby sister, Isabella, plus partners, and then lastly Dexter’s sister, Romy, and her boyfriend Fred, and soon the roof terrace is jam-packed with people considerably younger than Jane and as she pours drinks and answers questions and moves from soul to soul, taking in their faces, their foibles—the way Wilf still holds his hand flat against his chest whenever he laughs, just like he did when she first met him as an eight-year-old boy with dark, suspicious eyes; Romy’s fat curls that Jane used to tie into sensible plaits every morningbefore school; Charlie and Isla, still a little distant, still a little unknowable, just as they’d been as six- and five-year-olds, but now with a manufactured sparkle plastered on over the top—Jane feels her heart swell and blaze. She knows these people so well: she knows where they came from, what hurt them, what made them; she knows their eccentricities, their inter-sibling dynamics, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their quirks. She loves them all so much. And here they are, all together in one place. She raises a glass of champagne into the chaos and taps it with a fork handle.
“Thank you for coming out to play!” she says. “I know how busy you all are and the fact that you are all in the country at the same time as each other is a miracle. So here’s to miracles, and I love you all.”
Everyone raises their glasses back at Jane and the sun beats down and the champagne softens her corners, and she feels it like a punch in the gut, this, here now, this is another fork in the road. There have been many in her life, so many, all dramatic, bells and whistles, deafening Klaxon moments when she knew everything was about to change again—she has reinvented herself so many times, and now it’s happening again, right here, right now. She knows suddenly and without a doubt that she cannot have Rosebery Hall and this, that she cannot grow old without giving herself another chance at something, and that the only way she can have a chance at something is to cut herself free finally from the tattered ropes that bind her to her blighted family home. Then and only then can she be the woman she knows she needs to be for the next chapter of her life: socially available to her stepchildren, financially stable and independent, free of the hold that her traumatic childhood still has on her.
Wilf comes to her while she sits with these thoughts. He is a thin man, straggly haired, prematurely aged but still as pretty as he was as a child to Jane’s eye. “I hear you’ve been doing of bit of amateur detectiving,” he says, topping up her champagne glass.
“Dexter told you, I presume?”
“Yup. Some missing girl you’re looking for? So, who is she? Someone you know?”
“Ha!” Jane responds. “No. Gosh. No. Not at all. Just a stranger.”
“Right.” Wilf tips his beer bottle to his lips and takes a sip. “So, what’s the deal then? Why are you so involved? Dex says you’ve been knocking on doors, snooping in gardens.”
“Gosh,” she says. “That makes it sound very grubby.”
Wilf tips his head and looks at her as if to say: “Explain.”
“It’s just…” she begins haltingly. “There’s something about the way it unfurled, on my land, at Rosebery, just minutes after an estate agent left, when I was feeling so emotional, so aware of needing something to focus on instead of my bloody house, and thenthis dogappears, and…” She pauses. “Did Dex tell you about the man? The man I met when I was twenty-nine who almost kidnapped me?”
Wilf shakes his head, and Jane tells him the story yet again.
“And then there was this old boy,” she continues. “Bill Newsome, he lives near Rosebery, and he said he’d seen the missing girl, Daisy, seen her walking down the path in front of his house in the days before she disappeared, and he said how he used to see me walking down that same path when I was the same age as Daisy and it hit me in the gut, you know? That echoing through time, two young women, walking the same path, at different times, but, maybe, just maybe, with the same…”
“Trauma?”
All five of her stepchildren are aware of the mess of her upbringing. They know that her parents were both raging alcoholics who neglected her and her brother, that she was feral, that she was malnourished, and as children, they’d seen her tragic backstory as if it was just another dark fairy tale. But now, as adults, they are aware that it was any-thing but.
Jane exhales and nods. “Exactly. Yes. That. It felt like… maybe if I could save her, I could possibly, you know, save myself.”
She throws Wilf a small, tight smile and he nods, just once, to acknowledge the rawness of what she has just shared with him.
Then he raises his beer bottle and clinks it gently against her glass and says, “Well, if anyone can save a lost soul, Jane Trevally, it’s you. After all”—he gestures around the roof terrace at her many stepchildren—“you saved all of us.”
The following morning, with a slight headache, Jane packs up most of her stuff from Tony’s house, sets the dishwasher to run, checks that everything is locked up and switched off, and heads out into the suddenly fresh weather of the May morning. The heat wave is done, and this city sojourn is over for now. It is time for Jane to return home to her broken, crumbling house and her smelly dogs and enforced solitude.
Her conversation with Wilf the afternoon before repeats on a loop through her consciousness, the gentle thrill of it, his understanding of what she is trying to do, the beautiful gut punch of his closing words, that she is not a loser, that she is a saver of souls. She is possessed even more strongly now by a need to find Daisy Black.
She exits the station at Little Belmont two and a half hours later and messages Shannon as she walks toward the parking lot:Just getting into my car, see you in fifteen!
Shannon replies immediately:We’re all ready for you!with four dog-face emojis at the end.
It suddenly occurs to Jane that she needs cash to pay Shannon and she doesn’t have enough on her, so she takes a detour toward the high street on the other side of the station and heads toward the convenience store that has a machine inside. As she walks along the slightly down-at-heel high street her eye is caught unexpectedly by a shut-up retail unit—she’s not sure what it used to be: a key-cutting place, she thinks, or maybe a dry cleaner; it closed ages ago. But it’s not the building that catches her eye, it’s the thick layer of posters that have been pasted onto its neglected front windows, the sort of thing that Jane has walked past a million times before and would never normally have given a second thought to, butthat jumps out at her now. She moves closer to the shop front to read the fine print.
Martello’s Circus
Waterfowl Meadow
Bank Holiday Weekend
Thursday, April 30, to Tuesday, May 5
The poster is a standard circus poster: brightly colored, with a montage of trapeze artists, elephants, burning circles of fire, and there, just at the farthest edge of the artwork, a clown, a painted-on face, a head of blue nylon curls, a ruffed collar, a harlequin-checkered overcoat, and a lurid plastic flower held grimly between two white-gloved hands.
chapter forty-three
