I moved down the stairs and into the hallway. The adults remained engrossed in their conversation but the girl looked up and stared. I tried to place the sharp features and the searching, amber eyes from among our neighbours or the children at Freya’s school but nothing came. She showed no sign of recognising me. I could see she was tired – though not so much from too little sleep as from a lifetime of watchfulness. It was an expression familiar to me from the kids I worked with at the clinic. I’d probably had it too, at her age. An angry, cornered look. She was clasping what looked like a white rabbit’s foot in her right hand. The cut end emerged from her fist, bound crudely with electrical wire which was attached to a key. It looked home-made and this lent it – and her – an air that was both outdated and macabre, as if she’d been beamed in from some other time and had found herself stranded here, in south London, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, in the middle of the night, with nothing but a rabbit’s foot and a key to remind her of her origins.
‘What’s up?’ I said, more out of curiosity than alarm. I smiled and waited for an answer.
The two women glanced awkwardly at Tom and from the way he was standing, stiffly with one hand slung on his hip in an attempt at relaxed cool, I understood they were waiting for him to respond and I instinctively knew that everything I’d been thinking was wrong. A dark firework burst inside my chest. The girl in the doorway was neither a neighbour’s kid nor a friend of our daughter.
She was trouble.
I took a step back. ‘Will someone tell me what’s going on?’
When no one spoke I crouched to the girl’s level and, summoning as much friendliness as I could, said, ‘What’s your name? Why are you here?’
The girl’s eyes flickered to Tom, then, giving a tiny, contemptuous shake of the head, as if by her presence all my questions had already been answered and I was being obstructive or just plain dumb, she said, ‘I’m Ruby Winter.’
I felt Tom’s hands on my shoulder. They were no longer trembling so much as hot and spasmic.
‘Cat, please go and make some tea. I’ll come in a second.’
There was turmoil in his eyes. ‘Please,’ he repeated. And so, not knowing what else to do, I turned on my heels and made for the kitchen.
While the kettle wheezed into life, I sat at the table in a kind of stupor; too shocked to gather my thoughts, I stared at the clock as the red second hand stuttered towards the upright. Tock, tock, tock. There were voices in the hallway, then I heard the living room door shut. Time trudged on. I began to feel agitated. What was taking all this time? Why hadn’t Tom come? Part of me felt I had left the room already but here I was still. Eventually, footsteps echoed in the hallway. The door moved and Tom appeared. I stood up and went over to the counter where, what now seemed like an age ago, I had laid out a tray with the teapot and some mugs.
‘Sit down, darling, we need to talk.’ Darling. When was the last time he’d called me that?
I heard myself saying, idiotically, ‘But I made tea!’
‘It’ll wait.’ He pulled up a chair directly opposite me.
When he spoke, his voice came to me like the distant crackle of a broken radio in another room. ‘I’m so sorry, Cat, but however I say this it’s going to come as a terrible shock, so I’m just going to say what needs to be said, then we can talk. There’s no way round this. The girl, Ruby Winter, she’s my daughter.’
‘We already have a daughter.’
Tom glanced at me then looked away. It was as though I was viewing him through an early morning fog. He seemed at once both real and spectral. Cold suddenly, I pulled my cover-up more tightly around my body. Words fizzed and flared without my being able to catch hold of them. Stupid thoughts flooded in: This can’t be happening because it’s a Monday and Monday is clinic day.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, don’t do this to us.’
Tom reached out for my hand and I let him take it. His face was a strange mottled colour, barely recognisable.
‘I’m so, so sorry, Caitlin. I don’t know what to say. I swear I didn’t know anything about her until a few minutes ago. This is as much of a shock to me as it is to you.’
Something rose up in me like a thundercloud, raw and fearsome. I yanked my hand away. This was the worst kind of dream, the one you can’t wake up from, the one that turns out to be real.
‘I doubt that,’ I said.
Tom bit his lip.
I needed the facts, the data. ‘How did this happen? When?’
‘Not long before Freya was born.’
‘When I was in hospital?’ My mind zoomed back to the madness of my pregnancy, how helpless I had been, out of my mind and afraid. ‘Jesus, don’t tell me you had sex with someone in the psych ward?’
Tom shot me a wounded look. ‘Of course not. Please, Cat, just don’t say anything and I’ll try to explain and then you can ask me whatever you want.’
It was quite some explanation. Strung out after one of his visits to the hospital to see me, my husband had gone to a nearby pub with the intention of having a quick drink before getting on the bus home. One turned into two, turned into plenty. A woman appeared, apparently from nowhere – ha ha – and sat next to him at the bar. They’d got chatting and what followed – the whole tired suburban cliché – happened in some shabby B&B around the back of Denmark Hill station. He left for home sometime after dawn and that was that. He’d never seen or heard from the woman again. A moment of madness, the result of overwhelming stress. It hadn’t meant anything then and he begged me to believe how much he regretted it now. I couldn’t know how much, he said. More than anything.
As Tom spoke I couldn’t help thinking just how bloody old and worn and unoriginal the story sounded, a clapped-out tale of a faithless husband led on by some mysterious femme fatale. If you saw it on TV, you’d reach for the remote. This wasn’t us. This wasn’t who we were meant to be. So how was it that it was what we had become? I felt myself reaching for words that had already fled. Odd swoops of energy were tearing up my legs and escaping out into the room through my arms. I made to stand up, got halfway, and then sat down again, defeated by legs that no longer held any weight.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Ruby.’
‘I know that! I mean the woman. Your fuck buddy.’ I twisted my head and glared at him but he averted his gaze.
For a moment there was silence, then Tom said, ‘Her name is Lilly, Lilly Winter.’
I felt as if someone had opened my skull and unloaded a skip of building waste inside. Images of lilies crossed my mind. When had they become junk flowers, the carnations or chrysanthemums of their time, the sweet, cloying gesture you made when you’d run out of more meaningful ones? One thought morphed into another and I remembered what happened with the lilies that time just after Freya was born when we’d thought everything was back to normal and then discovered it wasn’t. Oh God, don’t let this bring the madness back. Please, God, not that. Then my thoughts were broken by the faint murmur of female voices in the living room and I was reminded of the policewoman and the time and the fact that there was still so much to know.
The girl’s name was jammed inside my throat but I couldn’t say it. ‘Why is she here? What’s the policewoman doing?’
Tom folded his arms. ‘There was an accident. Ruby found her mother dead in bed sometime around midnight when she got up to have a pee. The police… I don’t know, Lilly must have told Ruby my name and the police looked