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chapter 45
alex
My phone vibrates. ‘Hey, there,’ I say.
Harriet sounds a little out of breath. I imagine her listening to my message and panicking at the thought of having me turn up on her doorstep. I doubt I’m on speed dial. She’ll have had to look up my number and type it in old-school. No wonder she’s breathless.
‘This really isn’t a good time to come up here,’ my sister says. ‘The weather’s been abysmal and Mungo only just got back from the rigs two days ago. You know what he’s like when he’s decompressing. I’d love to see you but—’
‘Relax,’ I say. ‘I’m not coming up to bloody Shetland. I just said that so you’d ring me back.’
‘Oh.’
‘Although a more sensitive person might be a little offended by your eagerness to talk me out of it.’
I mean it as a joke, but it comes out as an accusation.
I know my sister loves me, just as I love her, but when I think of the closeness Zealy shares with Marc or the friendship many of my friends have with their siblings, I feel a sense of loss. Harriet and I have a strange disconnect, which I’ve never really understood. She isolated herself from me emotionally long before she put such literal distance between us.
‘Mum OK?’ my sister says, finally.
‘She seemed fine at the weekend,’ I say. ‘A bit tired, maybe.’
Actually, now that I think about it, Mum wasn’t quite herself. Dad said she hadn’t been sleeping well, but I should check back in with her, make sure she’s OK.
‘I heard about what happened,’ Harriet says, abruptly. ‘In London, I mean.’
It’s as if she’s embarrassed to mention Lottie’s name.I heard about what happened. You know. When you saw your missing daughter on a train four thousand miles from where she disappeared.
I get it a lot: the embarrassment. No one knows how to deal with grief any more. There’s no template for anyone to follow and so, when catastrophe strikes, we hold candlelight vigils and put up roadside shrines and launch GoFundMe campaigns and then quickly move on, before we have to deal with any of the messiness of actual emotions.
The Victorians knew what they were doing with their widows’ weeds and black armbands. Their etiquette for grieving a loved one was strict, and it may seem laughable now that the width of a black hatband was dictated by your relationship to the deceased, but everyone knew where they were. They knew what was expected of them. And when a widow cast off her mourning, her black bombazine and crepe, it was a signal to the world she was ready to engage with it again.
People cross the street to avoid me because they don’t know what to say. It’s extraordinary how many of them don’t even mention Lottie ‘because I didn’t want to bring it up again’, as if the loss of my baby is something I mightforget.
I’ll miss my daughter with every breath I take for the rest of my life, but I’m still human. Sometimes I crave normality so much it hurts: for someone to make a joke and not glance apologetically at me, as if they’ve just farted in church.
I know Harriet cares about Lottie almost as much as I doand she’s suffering too. But if I can endure my loss and still get up in the morning, she owes it to me to acknowledge my grief and use my daughter’s name.
‘Harry, I need to ask you something,’ I say, abruptly. ‘Do you remember that place in Devon we used to stay when we were kids? South Weald House?’
‘Of course,’ she says, sounding surprised. ‘Why?’
‘You used to be good friends with the housekeeper’s daughter, didn’t you?’
‘Cathy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Years ago,’ Harriet says. ‘I haven’t seen her since I left London. She was at UCL, you know, same as you.’
‘I saw an old photo of her the other day when I was going through the albums with Mum,’ I say. ‘Eating ice-cream with us on the lawn. I really need to speak to her. Are you two still in touch?’
‘Why don’t you ask Marc for her number?’ Harriet says.
‘Why wouldMarchave it?’
The dead air between us is suddenly freighted with tension. In the silence, I can hear the wind whipping around her tiny croft hundreds of miles away.
‘You really don’t know?’ Harriet says, at last.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I’m not superstitious. I don’t believe in women’s intuition and sixth senses.
I grip the phone a little more tightly. ‘What are you talking about, Harriet?’
‘Marc Chapman coached Cathy, when she was on the UCL football team, that’s how she and Sian became friends. Alex, I thought you knew.’
‘Knewwhat?’
‘Catherine Lord,’ she says. ‘Cathy. She was Sian’s maid of honour.’
