Roger’s car wasn’t on the drive so he must still be at work. Though she preferred it when he wasn’t home, the thought of stepping into that oppressive little house, alone once again, made a sick feeling balloon in her stomach. Today of all days, she couldn’t bear to be out among the crowds – couldn’t trust herself to be in enclosed spaces with families, bracing herself against the sound of children’s voices rolling in from down the street, or from another aisle in the supermarket. But now that she was alone, with no external stimuli to distract her, her mind was flooding with memories, pictures so vivid that she felt faint, knocked sideways with the pain.
Unbidden, an image from her visit to the beach that morning rose in her mind: the little girl in a pastel pink bathing costume. Where would she be now? With her parents and sisters, eating Nutella pancakes at the surf café? Tucked up on a sofa in a rented holiday home watching cartoons? Playing board games in a hotel lounge? Normal rainy-day holiday activities that she would never again do with a child of her own. Her goal when building her family had been to have pretty, bright, well-mannered children, to want to spend quality time in each other’s company, to relish every single, simple moment. The thought of that dimpled little girl on the beach hurt like a weeping sore.
It wasn’t my fault, she screamed inside. You need to believe that it wasn’t my fault.
Grocery bags knocking around her bare ankles, she staggered into the kitchen and laid them on the clay-tiled floor. On a dull early evening like this, even with all the ceiling spots on, the kitchen was unbearably claustrophobic. Dirty cream walls and dark wood kitchen cabinets topped with black laminate work surfaces shrunk it to half the size it actually was, making her feel as if she’d squeezed herself into a cardboard box.
The house was a rental. A small white house jammed between the gate of a static caravan park on one side and a boarded-up, crumbling bungalow on the other. It was right by the sea, but you wouldn’t know it, except for the stream of tourists wandering past in the summer, shouldering beach bags and clutching ice creams, and the brutal weather that rattled the window panes in winter. From the kitchen window, she could see the road and beyond that the concrete sea wall that wouldn’t have looked out of place bordering a military bunker. It had been built head high and a metre thick to prevent the sea from eating up more land, but she couldn’t see the point of being by the sea if you couldn’t appreciate its beauty. And she did love the sea. Cheap and faceless, this was a running-away-to house, a hiding-away-in house. They had only planned to be here a couple of months until the furore surrounding the court case had died down and they’d decided how and where to rebuild their lives. But their London house hadn’t sold – prospective buyers put off by having seen it on television for all the wrong reasons – so their hands were tied.
Hauling the fridge door open, Carolynn listlessly filled it with the shopping, every bend and straighten a gargantuan effort. She felt physically and mentally exhausted, wrung out like a damp dishcloth. She had eaten nothing all day and yet she wasn’t hungry, was rarely hungry these days. She had to force herself to eat enough to keep her body grinding along.
As she flicked the kettle on to make herself a cup of tea, the cat jumped on to the island, leaving a trail of dusty paw marks from its litter tray across the black laminate surface. Revolted, Carolynn fought the urge to swing the full kettle from its stand and knock the bloody animal to the floor with it. The cat had been Zoe’s, a Burmese, bought for her by Roger’s mother because ‘every child needs a pet’. Carolynn hadn’t needed to ask the subtext. Every child needs someone or something they can love unconditionally, that loves them back without reserve or judgement.
Didn’t your husband become so alarmed about your ambivalence towards your daughter that he asked his mother to move into your house to look after her?
No.
And did his mother not live with you for a full eighteen months, from when Zoe was a year old until she was two and a half, until her husband, your father-in-law, became ill and she had to move back to her home to look after him?
No. It wasn’t like that.
She’d tried hard to put her struggle with motherhood, all those negative feelings she’d had, behind her by the time Pamela bought Zoe that repulsive cat. She was four then. Pamela had used her fourth birthday as an excuse for the purchase, but Carolynn knew the real reason. Why were people – her own mother-in-law, for Christ’s sake – still treating her as if she couldn’t manage, couldn’t be a proper mother, even then? And why did Roger let Pamela behave like that? Shouldn’t he have supported her, his own wife?
Thereafter, did your husband not employ a full-time live-in au pair, even though you were not employed yourself? I put it to you that it was because he was worried about his daughter’s safety if he left her with you alone. With her own mother.
That’s not true.
You had severe depression, didn’t you, Mrs Reynolds?
No. No, I didn’t.
The prosecuting solicitor had kept interrupting her. Arrogant. He was so arrogant, he wouldn’t let her speak.
Absentmindedly,
