‘Ah. It’s instinctual.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t give away the ending now.’
‘That’s not part of the story.’
He stares at her, not caring that she sees him doing it. Her eyes glisten even in the dark, her lips so plump and soft he wants to kiss them more than anything. He’s disturbed by how powerful the instinct is, sure he’s never felt this way before. He looks away, clears his throat.
‘Do you want to sleep here tonight?’ he asks.
‘Are you going to?’
‘No,’ he says quietly. ‘I can’t, Laura.’
‘Oh, I know.’ She gets flustered, but he can’t really read her eyes in the darkness. ‘I meant all of you. You’re all welcome.’
‘All of us in there?’ he asks, looking around the cottage.
‘No, you’re right, we’ll go to the hotel,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to be here on my own.’
And to herself she adds, any more.
The following morning, they visit Laura’s grandmother’s house where she and her mother were raised. Far from the main road, twenty minutes from town, it is a remote bungalow away from prying eyes. Like so many homes in the rural area, you wouldn’t see the small track leading to the house if you didn’t know it was there. Even if you did happen upon it, it lacked enticement, and belied the warmth and love that lay within its boundaries. It hasn’t been inhabited since Hattie’s passing nine years previously and it shows. Despite not having been there for ten years, Laura guides them as though she were there yesterday, Bo talking to her delicately as they make their way, aware how fragile this moment is.
Bo parked on the main road, she wanted to capture Laura’s reaction as she walked home for the first time in ten years. Just inside the entrance to the trail there is a gate, which Laura tells them her grandmother added shortly after her grandfather died, for protection.
‘Do you know if your mother or grandmother wrote a will?’ Bo asks, as they walk the long driveway through tall trees to the house.
Laura shakes her head. ‘How would I know?’
‘By asking your grandmother’s solicitor, or the executor of her will.’
‘Gaga didn’t have showers, I doubt she had an executor.’
Rachel and Solomon look away from one another to avoid laughing aloud.
‘If there was no executor, then an administrator would be appointed. An administrator would be next of kin. The reason I’m saying all of this is because you could be entitled to this land and property, Laura. If there’s money in a bank somewhere, or investments or a pension, then that could be yours too. I can help you look into it, if you like.’
‘Thank you.’ She leaves a long silence. She stops and bends to pick a freesia, she twirls it around in her fingers. Rachel moves to capture Laura’s shadowed silhouette in the path of the sunlight, the sun’s harshness dims and then burns behind the trees as they move, like the light on a lighthouse.
Laura moves again, faster this time. ‘Gaga didn’t have anybody else. She was an only child. Her parents long gone. She was born in Leeds, she left school at fourteen, worked in a factory, sewing. She moved to Ireland to mind children for a family nearby, but she didn’t stay with them for long. The summer she arrived, she met Granddad …’ She looks up at the house as it comes into view. She catches her breath.
Solomon gets ready to steady her. At any moment he will reach out, dive forward to catch her.
Silence.
Rachel moves behind her. Dips the camera low. Laura’s view of the house.
Solomon wants to see her face, but he must stay behind the camera. He studies her, takes in everything about her. How her shoulders have risen, frozen, stiff. Her fingers have stopped twirling the freesia. It falls to the ground, lands beside her boot. He listens to her breathing in his headphones. Quick shallow breaths.
Solomon drags his eyes away from Laura to take in the view. The grass has grown so tall it reaches the windows of the bungalow. It’s far from a fairytale: brown bricks, flat roof, front door and two windows either side. Nothing enchanting about it and yet, for Laura, it’s a treasure trove of precious moments.
He expects her words to be as predictable as Bo’s words when she lifted her first award: ‘Gosh, it’s heavy,’ words he teased her about as soon as she’d returned with the first piece of crystal in her hand. She never said it after that, more eloquent, more trained, less surprised. He imagines Laura’s gentle wonderment – ‘It’s shrunk, it’s smaller than I imagined,’ the usual words of an adult returned to a childhood place – but the sight of it brings her somewhere else, a surprising comment.
‘Gaga wouldn’t have left this for me,’ Laura says firmly, ‘because there is no record of me. The only people who ever knew that I existed are dead.’ She speeds up away from them and wanders through the long grasses towards the house. Rachel looks at Solomon in alarm.
‘Did she just say nobody knew she was alive?’ Rachel asks in a low voice, as they cut for a moment.
Bo nods, not at all surprised, but her pupils are large and dilated with excitement. ‘I’ve been asking around the town and not one person I spoke to knew that Isabel Murphy or Isabel Button, as she preferred to be called, had a baby. In fact they all found it laughable.’
Rachel frowns. ‘So is she lying?’
Solomon looks at Rachel, at first angry at her disloyalty but then remembers Rachel is always rational and her question was a sensible one. He panics a little, at the thought that this woman he has grown so attached to, in his mind at least, could be concocting this entire story. He was completely sucked in. While everything spirals away from him, Bo rescues him, reins him in and says something to make him love her all the more.
‘I’ve listened to everything that everyone has had to say about this family, which believe me is a lot of crazy shit, and it’s not that I don’t believe them but I do believe every single word Laura’s saying,’ Bo says firmly. She hurries away to keep up with Laura.
Laura tries the handle on the front door but it’s locked. She looks in the windows of the bungalow, every single one, pushing her face up to the dirty glass, hands blocking out the sunlight. The glass is so grimy you can barely see inside. She walks around the back of the house.
‘Which was your bedroom?’ Bo asks, appearing.
‘This one.’
Inside is an iron bed, no mattress, a wardrobe stripped of its doors. The rest is empty, no trace of Laura’s life. Solomon tries to read her face, tries to get the best angles, but Rachel looks at him annoyed, he’s blocking the light, getting in her way, straying off course.
Finally, he places his equipment down. He unties his sweater from around his waist and wraps it around his arm and elbow.
The glass smashes. Bo, Rachel and Laura turn to him in surprise.
‘Now it’s open,’ he says.
Laura grins at him.
‘Tell us about living here, in whatever way you like,’ Bo says as they settle down outside, after their walk around the mostly rat-infested bungalow. Bo finds a beautiful setting in the long grass, the house and forest behind them. It’s a warm summer day, it’s heavy, as though a thunderstorm looms, and the sky is filled with fast-moving clouds that disappear quickly into the next parish, as if they know something that everything that’s still doesn’t. It looks great on camera. Laura sits on a stool, Bo before her, but off camera. And with the usual prompts to tell the interviewee to try to put the question in their answer for the ease and flow of the documentary, they begin.
‘It