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The world outside the window is cold and dark now. The sea looks black at night, like a liquid sky reflecting the moon and stars. I can still make out the shape of my mother, alone in her garden, even though it must be freezing out there. She appears to be picking something, small flowers perhaps—I can’t tell from here. She looks up at the window then, as though sensing she is being watched, and I hurry back to my bedroom, unsure why I am so afraid of being seen.
5
October 30, 2004, 8 p.m.
Once the bags and grudges are unpacked, the whole family settles into a familiar rhythm. Whenever I see my sisters, no matter how long it has been or how old they get, we always seem to regress to the versions of us we were as children. I suspect everybody time travels when reunited with their family. We think we are old when we are still young, and we think we are still young when we have grown old. None of us are acting the way we normally do. Even my parents are doing their best version of best behavior. Nobody wants to upset Nana on her birthday.
Trixie and I are playing Scrabble alone in the lounge when Lily comes to fetch us for dinner.
“Stop that and let’s eat,” my sister barks from the doorway.
“But we haven’t finished playing,” Trixie argues.
Lily crosses the room in three strides, then tips all the letters off the board and onto the floor.
“You have now,” she says, before briefly checking her reflection in the mirror above the fireplace, then leaving the room.
I spend a lot of time with Trixie. Being a parent did not come naturally to my sister, but becoming an aunt was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Lily was eighteen when her daughter was born. She likes gadgets and gizmos more than babies, and soon discovered that motherhood did not come with a manual, and children don’t come with an off switch. As a result, I spend a couple of nights at their house every week looking after Trixie to give Lily a break, though I’m not sure what from, and she never thanks me for my time. Lily and I don’t really talk at all anymore. My sister still thinks of me as a child. She thinks I never grew up. I find that ironic given the wayshebehaves. Some people can’t see things how they are; they only see how they used to be. I don’t mind; I love spending time with my niece, and I find it rewarding. Watching her grow up to become such a wonderful human being has brought me more joy than anything else I have known.
Trixie and I find the rest of the family already in the large eclectic kitchen at the back of the house. The cupboards are all pale blue, and some of the white wall tiles have been hand-painted with animals or flowers. Nana always liked to illustrate her life as well as her children’s books. The entire back wall is a giant chalkboard, which she scribbles ideas and sketches on. Sometimes, if the thoughts inside her own head are not forthcoming, she’ll scribble an inspirational quote from a dead author on there. The dead often seem to know more about living than those still alive. Today, all I can spot is a recipe for chocolate brownies, a poem about falling, and an intricately drawn chalk bird. It looks like a robin. Nana has decorated the room for Halloween just like she does every year. There are black and orange paper chains hanging from the ceiling, a lot of candles and jack-o’-lanterns, and what looks like a witch’s broom in the corner, but I think that might be here all the time.
The space doubles as a dining room, with a long, sturdy woodentable. It’s made of a single enormous piece of beech that is over five hundred years old and a real thing of beauty. The table is surrounded by eight different chairs, which Nana chose for each of us. My mother’s is white, tall and thin. It looks good, but makes people feel uncomfortable, not unlike the woman it was chosen for. Dad’s chair is older, wider, rounder, and black. Rose’s is elegant and red, while Lily’s is green and, I think, looks rather unpleasant. Mine is quite plain at first glance, but has daisies painted on the seat. Nana’s is pink and purple—her favorite colors—while Trixie’s seat is the newest, and smallest, and covered in silver stars. There is one spare chair painted sky blue with little white clouds. Nana said she painted the chairs so that we would all know that we always had a home here. My mother said she did it so that we would all remember our place.
Dinner is a feast—roast chicken, potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, and lashings of gravy. But the gravy is hot chocolate sauce, because Nana thinks everything should be a sweet treat at Halloween. The carrots are coated in sugar; the puddings are really marshmallows; there are Smarties mixed in with the peas, and popping candy on the potatoes. What looks like bread sauce is actually melted vanilla ice cream. The food is both surprising and surprisingly good.
There are pumpkins with scary carved faces, as well as pine cones, seashells, and sweets scattered on the tablecloth. With the whole room bathed in candlelight, it looks beautiful but fun, just like our host. I feel guilty about my lack of appetite, but everyone else tucks in, until the last of the crispy roast popping potatoes have been eaten. Even Lily—who complains about everything and has never cooked anyone in this family a meal—seems satisfied. If my sister ever did invite us all for food, I suspect we’d be served a Pot Noodle for dinner and a Pop-Tart for dessert.
There are a lot of empty bottles as well as plates by the end of the bizarre banquet, and my divorced parents have definitely drunkmore than their fair share of alcohol. My mother has always tried to dissolve my father’s words with wine. At one end of the table, Nancy looks like she can barely keep her eyes open, while at the other end, Dad is struggling to takehiseyes off of her. He treated her so badly when they were married, but I believe he loves her now just as much as he did then, possibly more. He collected regrets while she gathered resentment. Sometimes people don’t know they’re in love until they’re not.
The calm and quiet aura of Seaglass has been substituted with loud laughter, and the sort of repetitive storytelling that always occurs when tongues have been lubricated with nostalgia and wine. We’ve heard one another’s stories too many times before, but for the sake of getting along, we act as though we haven’t. The wall of clocks in the hall start to chime nine p.m. All eighty of them—including one grandfather and five cuckoo clocks—so it’s impossible to hear a thing at the top of the hour. As soon as the din stops, Trixie speaks.
“Nana, why did you only put Aunty Daisy in your books? Why not Mum or Aunty Rose?”
Children always ask the most awkward of questions, but Trixie is old enough to know better. I feel as though the whole table turns to stare at me. My sisters and I haven’t really spoken for years because of what happened. Rose has refused to see me or speak to me at all for a very long time, but now isn’t the right moment to drag up the past. This is supposed to be a celebration. Unwanted thoughts clot inside my head and I can’t shift them. Thankfully, Nana answers so that I don’t have to.
“Well, the story isn’t really about Aunty Daisy, I just borrowed her name is all. Why? Would you like me to use your name in a book one day?”
“No thank you, Nana. I’m too old to be in a children’s book. I’d rather be in a murder mystery. I wish you wrote those instead.”
Nana was an artist for years, illustrating other people’s books for very modest sums of money in return. The year my heart defect was diagnosed, a well-known author was rude about her drawings. Nana was deeply hurt by the resulting upset and unkindness, and refused to work with the author ever again. Taking the moral high ground can be an expensive route, and private hospitals and second opinions do not come cheap. So Nana wrote her own children’s novel for the first time, filled with poems written while she was sitting in waiting rooms worrying about me. She illustrated the book with her own paintings, wrote her own words, got herself an agent, and found her own publisher, all to make a point. But after the success ofDaisy Darker’s Little Secret,there was no going back.
“I think most murder mysteries are overrated,” Nana says. “There are much cleverer ways to end a person than killing them.”
Her words seem to make everyone around the table uncomfortable, except Rose, who has always been more at ease with death than the rest of us. Perhaps because she sees so much of it. Rose often works for free, which might be why her veterinary practice is in a spot of financial bother. She saves and rehomes as many animals as she can, working day and night to do so, but even she can’t save them all. It’s crazy and so very sad how many broken animals get dumped on a vet’s doorstep—pets that were once loved, now past their best-before dates. Rose even persuaded Nana to adopt a couple of abandoned hens years ago, and Amy and Ada have lived in a brightly painted coop at the back of Seaglass ever since.
“There are also clever ways to kill someone without getting caught,” Rose says, taking such a tiny sip of red wine, the effort required to lift the glass to her lips seems barely worth it.
“Like how?” Trixie asks.
Rose—who has never had a child-friendly filter—stares at our niece. “Well, my first choice would be insulin, injected between thetoes, where people are unlikely to look. I have plenty of it at the practice and it’s simple enough to explain missing batches away—things get lost or broken all the time. It would be almost too easy and I doubt I’d get caught.”
Trixie stares at her. We all do.
“I’d poison them with plants,” says Nancy. “A bit of spotted hemlock or deadly nightshade. Morphine or cyanide if I was feeling fancy and had the time, both of which are derived from flowers and trees. It’s easy enough to find at least one deadly plant in most gardens, if you know what to look for. And it takes less than a second to slip a little something into someone’s drink.”
Dad shakes his head. I sometimes think there is nothing my parents wouldn’t disagree on. “I’d have thought a good sharp blow to the skull would be a simpler way to do someone in,” he says.
“Or push them down the stairs,” Lily suggests with a wicked smile.
