I glanced back from the window, blinked: Dad was watching me reproachfully over the top of his reading glasses. ‘I’ve been outlining a very sensible theory, Edie, and you haven’t heard a word.’
‘Yes, I have. Moats, babies…’ I winced, took a crack. ‘Boats?’
He huffed indignantly. ‘You’re as bad as your mother. The two of you are downright distracted these days.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad. Here.’ I leaned my elbows on my knees and waited. ‘Look, I’m all ears. Lay the theory on me.’
His chagrin was no match for his enthusiasm and he proceeded to do so at a skip. ‘It’s this report here that’s got me thinking. An unsolved kidnapping of a young lad from his bedroom in a manor house near Milderhurst. The window was left wide open, even though the nurse insisted she checked it when the children went to sleep, and there were marks on the ground that seemed to indicate a stepladder. It was 1872 so Raymond would’ve been six years old. Old enough for the whole event to have left quite an impression, don’t you think?’
It was possible, I supposed. It wasn’t
‘The real clincher is that the boy’s body was found after an extensive search – ’ he grinned, proud of himself and stretching the suspense – ‘at the bottom of the muddy estate lake.’ His eyes scanned mine, his smile faltered. ‘What is it? Why do you look like that?’
‘I… because it’s rather awful. That poor little boy. His poor family.’
‘Well yes, of course, but it was a hundred years ago and they’re all long gone now, and that’s just what I’m saying. It must’ve been an awful thing for a little boy living in a nearby castle to hear his parents talking about.’
I remembered the locks on the nursery window, Percy Blythe telling me that Raymond was funny about security because of something in his childhood. Dad actually had a point. ‘That’s true.’
He frowned. ‘But I’m still not sure what it all has to do with the moat at Milderhurst. Or how the boy’s muddy body turned into a man who lives at the bottom of a mudded moat. Or why the description of the man emerging would be so vivid-’
A soft knock at the door and we both looked up to see Mum. ‘I don’t mean to interrupt. I’m just checking whether you’ve finished with your teacup.’
‘Thank you, dear.’ He held it out and she hesitated before coming to collect it.
‘You’re very busy in here,’ she said, pretending great interest in a tea drop on the cup’s outer curve. Blotting it with her finger and making every effort not to look in my direction.
‘We’re working on our theory.’ Dad winked at me, blissfully unaware that a cold front had cut his room in two.
‘I expect you’ll be a while then. I’ll say my goodnights and turn in. It’s been a rather tiring day.’ She kissed Dad on the cheek then nodded my way without actually making eye contact. ‘Good night, Edie.’
‘Night, Mum.’
Oh Lord, but it was so stiff between us! I didn’t watch her leave, pretending great interest instead in the printout on my lap. It happened to be the stapled set of pages Miss Yeats had sourced on the Pembroke Farm Institute. I glanced through the introduction which gave the group’s history: started in 1907 by a guy called Oliver Sykes – the name was familiar and I racked my brain before remembering it was the architect fellow who’d designed the circular pool at Milderhurst. It figured; if Raymond Blythe was going to leave money to a group of conservationists, they must’ve been people he had reason to admire. Ergo, he’d have employed the same people to work on his prized estate… Mum’s bedroom door closed and I breathed a sigh of something like relief. I laid down the papers and tried to act normally for Dad’s sake.
‘You know, Dad,’ I said, my throat gritty, ‘I think you might be on to something; that thing about the lake and the little boy.’
‘That’s what I’m talking about, Edie.’
‘I know. And I definitely think it could’ve been the inspiration for the novel.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Not that, Edie; forget about the book. I’m referring to your mother.’
‘To Mum?’
He pointed at the closed door. ‘She’s unhappy and I don’t like to see her that way.’
‘You’re imagining things.’
‘I’m not daft. She’s been moping about the house for weeks, then today she mentioned that she’d found the letting pages in your room and she started to cry.’
Mum had been in my room? ‘Mum cried?’
‘She feels things deeply, she always has. Wears her heart on her sleeve. You’re similar that way, the two of you.’
And I’m not sure whether the comment was calculated to knock me off guard, but the very notion of Mum wearing her heart on her sleeve was so confounding that I lost all ability to insist that he was totally and utterly incorrect about us being similar. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It was one of the things I most liked about her. She was different from all the stiff upper lips I’d come across before. The first time I laid eyes on her she was having a good old cry.’
‘Really?’
‘We were at the pictures. By chance we were the only ones there. It wasn’t a particularly sad film, not that I could see, but your mum spent the whole time weeping in the dark. She tried to hide it, but when we got out into the foyer her eyes were as red as your T-shirt. I felt so sorry for her I took her out for cake.’
‘What was she crying about?’
‘I was never sure exactly. She cried rather easily in those days.’
‘No… really?’
‘Oh yes. She was very sensitive – funny, too; clever and unpredictable. She had a way of describing things that made you see them as if for the first time.’
I wanted to ask, ‘What happened?’ but the insinuation that she was no longer any of those things seemed cruel. I was glad when Dad continued anyway.
‘Things changed,’ he said, ‘after your brother. After Daniel. Things were different then.’
I couldn’t be certain I’d ever heard my dad say Daniel’s name and the effect was to freeze me. There were so many things I wanted to say, to ask, that they swamped one another and I managed only, ‘Oh.’
‘It was a terrible thing.’ His voice was slow and even, but his bottom lip betrayed him, a strange, involuntary mobility that made my heart constrict. ‘A terrible thing.’
I touched his arm lightly, but he didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were fixed on a patch of carpet by the door; he smiled wistfully at something that wasn’t there, before saying, ‘He used to jump. He loved it. “I jump!” he’d say. “Look, Daddy, I jump!”’
I could picture him then, my little-big brother, beaming with pride while he took clumsy frog leaps around the house. ‘I would have liked to know him.’
Dad planted his hand on top of mine. ‘I’d have liked that, too.’
The night breeze toyed with the curtain by my shoulder and I shivered. ‘I used to think we had a ghost. When I was little. I sometimes heard you and Mum talking; I heard you say his name, but whenever I came into the room you stopped. I asked Mum about him once.’
He looked up and his eyes searched mine. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said I was imagining things.’
Dad lifted one of his hands and frowned at it, spidered his fingers into a loose fist, scrunching an invisible piece of paper as he gave a rumpled sigh. ‘We thought we were doing the right thing. We did the best we could.’
‘I know you did.’
‘Your mum…’ He tightened his lips against his sorrow and a part of me wanted to put him out of his misery. But I couldn’t. I’d waited such a long time to hear this story – it described my absence, after all – and I was greedy for any crumb he might share. He chose his next words with a care that was painful to watch. ‘Your mother took it especially badly. She blamed herself. She couldn’t accept that what happened – ’ he swallowed – ‘what happened to Daniel was an accident. She got it into her head that she’d brought it on herself somehow, that she deserved to lose a child.’
I was speechless, and not just because what he described was so horrid, so sad, but because he was telling
