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Chapter 30
Wednesday 3rd March
Let me introduce myself. My name is Amanda Archer. It feels strange to say that now, because I’ve been Mary Ellis for so long that sometimes I forget who I really am. Who I reallywas.I was born in Bristol, only child of a violent heroin-addict mother and a father I never met. One of the other druggies my mum hung around with, I always assume, although she never told me which one, and with a choice like that, I didn’t really want to know anyway. My childhood years are ones I’ve tried, mostly successfully, to forget: a blur of coldness and bruises, of being left alone for hours in a filthy bedsit, of being ostracised at school because of my tatty clothes and greasy hair, of sitting alone in the playground at break times despite the teachers’ best efforts to get the other kids to include me in their games. Maybe it was because, back then, schools weren’t as hot on child safeguarding as they are nowadays, or maybe it was just because I was so good at pretending that everything was OK, just like I am now; but whatever the reason, my plight wasn’t really recognised until I was nine, when Mrs Lottes, my new form teacher, crouched down beside me one September afternoon when I was, yet again, the last child to be collected after class had finished.
‘Are you OK, Amanda? Is everything all right at home?’ she asked.
Until then, I’d held the horrors of my home life so tightly inside me that some days it physically hurt, an ache deep in the pit of my stomach that wasn’t just down to the gnawing hunger I’d learned to live with thanks to my mother’s preference for visiting her dealer rather than the supermarket. But that day, something happened. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the dam finally broke, and as Mrs Lottes wrapped her arms around me and tried to calm my hysterical sobs, she told me that from then on, everything was going to change.
‘I’m going to make sure of that,’ she whispered fiercely in my ear.
I can still remember how soft her jumper was against my wet cheek, the mingled sweet, floral scents of fabric conditioner and perfume, the gentleness of her hands as they stroked my back. And she was right. Everythingdidchange. I never went home – if you could call it a home – again. First, emergency foster care: two weeks with a middle-aged couple called Josie and Eric, in whose cosy Redland home I had my own bedroom for the first time in my life and snuggled under a pink Barbie duvet with a white cat called Snowy to keep me company. If I could have stayed with Josie and Eric I might have been all right; I mightevenstill be Amanda Archer. But unfortunately, I had to move on to a more permanent placement and, well, let’s just say that I didn’t find it easy – any of it.
It was quickly realised that rules and routines were alien to me; sharing a home with other children was too, and I was soon labelled as ‘difficult’, and the so-called ‘permanent’ placements never actually were. When my mother finally overdosed and died when I was twelve, I retreated further into myself, and my behaviour became even more challenging for those charged with looking after me. And so I bounced along in the care system, from home to home, family to family, and even from school to school – five, in total – never really bonding with anyone, trying to play a game I didn’t understand. Remarkably though, academically I slowly began to flourish. Maybe it was my massively improved diet, or the fact that I could actually sleep properly instead of being woken in the early hours on an almost nightly basis by a drugged-up mother and her cronies partying at the end of my bed. Maybe it was that, with my mother’s death, I finally felt free of the fear that one day she’d come for me, and take me back to the nightmare that had been my life before. Or maybe it was just that books became a refuge, an alternative world I could lose myself in. Whatever the reason, flourish I did. I loved history and English the most, and by fourteen I was top of the class in both; still an object of curiosity to most of my fellow pupils, still largely friendless, but at least by then with, finally, some self-esteem, and the grudging respect of some of my classmates for my academic achievements.
It was after I enrolled at St George’s College in the city centre to do my A Levels that I met Mary Ellis. She’d arrived for the final year as a boarder; the college offered both day and boarding options, and Mary had recently arrived in the UK with, to the great excitement of many of the students and teachers, her father, a famous author. They were renting a big house in the Cotswolds, and Gregor had, according to Mary, wanted her out of the way during the week so he could concentrate on writing his next novel, although he insisted that she came home every single weekend.
When she first sat down beside me in English class, heads turned and grins spread over faces; we stared at each other for a few moments and then simultaneously grinned too. I was wearing a red polo-neck jumper that day, my long, dark hair falling loose over my shoulders; she was wearing an almost identical red jumper, and her hair, almost exactly the same shade and length as mine, fell in soft waves around her face. She was prettier than me, there was no doubt about that, but otherwise we looked … well, not liketwinsexactly, but we could definitely have passed for sisters. The hair, the build, the dark-brown eyes; even our noses were similar.
And so, just like that, I finally had a friend. The story I now tell about myself, now thatI’mMary Ellis, the story of my upbringing, my past is, of course,herstory. But our lives had so many parallels that it never really felt as if I was lying, not after a while anyway. I had lost my mother at a young age, and never known my father; Mary had never known her mother, dying as she had when her little girl was just three years old. And although Mary’s life since could not have been more different to mine, a whirl of money and privilege, of mansions and private jets, we still found so much common ground. Gregor Ellis, consumed by grief after the death of his wife, had spent the previous fourteen years moving himself and his young daughter from country to country, unable to settle anywhere for more than a few months, throwing himself into his writing before declaring that Germany or Spain or Brazil or wherever they happened to be no longer inspired him, whereupon the bags would be packed and flights would be booked once more. On a far more palatial scale, it was an upbringing reminiscent of my own; Mary, like me, was nomadic, friendless, solitary. And then, in our matching red jumpers, we met in a Bristol classroom, and suddenly we had each other, and within weeks were spending every possible minute together.
The first time she invited me to their rented house, Furnbury Hall, for the weekend I was awestruck. I’d never set foot inside such a grand home before, and the fifteenth-century manor house was, to me, like something out of a film.
People actually live in such places?Realpeople?I remember thinking, as Mary, smiling widely at the incredulous look on my face and my gasps of amazement, took me on a grand tour of the eight-bedroomed pile, which sat in two acres of manicured grounds with a tennis court and a sweeping lawn with an Italianate fountain centrepiece.
‘The original house was built in around 1410,’ she told me, as we walked through the Great Hall, with its deep oak-framed leaded windows and flagstone flooring, now used as an elegant lounge. ‘But the east wing was added in the late 1500s and the west wing is actually eighteenth century.’
‘You have …wings?’ I spluttered, and she snorted with laughter. Coming as she did from a relatively modern, though no less magnificent, home in New England, she had been as thrilled by living in such a historical building as I was to visit it.
‘Dad quite likes it too,’ she confided on that first night, as we sat together after dinner in the wood-panelled room she called the ‘snug’, Gregor having retired to his study for his usual late-night writing session. The housekeeper and chef – yes, they had staff too, although they didn’t live in, leaving each night after the evening meal was cleared away – had gone home, and it was just the two of us, sipping hot chocolate, cosy and relaxed on a big squishy sofa in front of the inglenook fireplace.
‘I think we might actually stay here for a while, for a change, Amanda. Great, eh?’ she said, and clinked her mug against mine.
I loved that she wanted to stay. I loved her accent too – vaguely American but …softer, I suppose, her years of global travel making it impossible to pin down. I liked to copy it, to try to pronounce my words like she did, and she did the same to me, giggling as she told me that my Bristolian ‘r’s made me sound like a pirate.
And then, less than a year after we’d met, not long after we’d both turned eighteen within days of each other – another strange synchronicity – and just weeks before our final exams, we decided to spend the weekend studying together at Furnbury Hall. By then I had finally left care; I was living independently, in a small, neat little bedsit in Bristol, Mary occasionally crashing there with me after a Friday night out, but still very much expected to spend most of her weekends in Gloucestershire with her father.
That night, he had, unusually, popped his head into the snug before eleven, telling us he was going to bed early. He’d been suffering with a head cold, and said he was tired.
‘Can’t keep my eyes open,’ he’d muttered. ‘Don’t stay up too long, you two. You have another long day of study ahead tomorrow, remember.’
We’d followed not long afterwards, whispering goodnight on the landing before heading to our respective rooms. It wasn’t until I got into bed in the guest room that I realised I was still wearing Mary’s bracelet. We’d taken a break from our books mid-afternoon, and had ended up in her bedroom, sifting through her mother’s old jewellery box. She’d had it for years, but had only recently started to take an interest in some of the pieces in it: an Art Deco opal ring in white gold, with diamonds set into the shoulders; a pendant in the shape of a fox’s head with emeralds for eyes; a sapphire and amethyst tennis bracelet. Mary had slipped her own bracelet off to try on the latter; I’d never seen her without hers, the silver identity bracelet from Tiffany always encircling her right wrist. It had been a gift from Gregor for her sixteenth birthday, and hadMaryengraved on it in a swirly font. I picked it up to study it more closely as she admired the tennis bracelet now on her arm in its place, and asked her if I could try it on.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll wear this one to dinner for a change anyway.’
And so I’d slipped the silver bracelet onto my own right wrist and then forgotten about it. Noticing it as I slipped under the blankets, I’d shrugged and decided to keep it on for safekeeping. Mary knew where it was, after all – it wasn’t as if she’d be worrying about its whereabouts. I’d fallen asleep quickly; when I’d woken, not long after midnight, it was to the crackle of flames, the choking smoke, a nightmare made real.
I can’t, even now, so many years later, spend too long thinking about the night of the fire. The fear, the pain. And then, the aftermath. When, by some miracle, I woke up in the bleach-scented, stiff white sheets of a hospital bed, it was to be told by a softly-spoken, auburn-haired police officer that I was the only survivor, the house reduced to smouldering ashes.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ she said. ‘But your father didn’t make it, Mary. Your friend too. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘But … I’m not … That’s wrong …’
I remember swallowing hard, my throat still raw from the acrid smoke, and starting to cough, unable to get any more words out, but desperately wanting to explain to her that she’d got it wrong, that Iwasn’tMary. Until then, a day after I’d regained consciousness, it hadn’t even occurred to me thatanyone would think thatIwas Mary Ellis; if any of the doctors or nurses had used that name as they’d been treating me, I must have been too out of it for the error to register. But I’d been wearing her bracelet, after all, the nameMaryemblazoned across it, hadn’t I? And so when the police officer called me by that name, and told me how sorry she was about the loss of my father and my friend, my mind began to race.
‘Don’t try to speak too much,’ she said gently. Her hand was resting on my right forearm, her touch cool against my skin. Below it, where the bracelet had been, my wrist was tightly bandaged, the pain a dull throbbing ache, the burn a deep second-degree one. My head was swathed in bandages too, half of my hair gone, and more serious third-degree burns on the left side of my face; I’d been told too that my left ear had been partially destroyed, that I would need some form of reconstructive surgery.
‘And I’m so sorry, but we haven’t got it wrong,’ she continued. ‘You were so lucky, Mary. I know it won’t feel like that now, and I’m so, so sorry that you’ve lost your dad. That fire was so fierce; it’s a miracle anyone got out alive. I know this is very distressing, but can you confirm your friend’s name? Your housekeeper, Mrs Daly, told us that your college friend Amanda was the third person in the house, but she wasn’t sure of her surname, and we need to inform her family …’
