*
The house is full of people supporting each other, and every surface seems to have a photograph of Elise displayed on it.
Finn is with Neil and Neil’s parents, wrestling a canapé into his mouth, and I find myself alone with Julia.
Despite her apology, I’m still uneasy around her, though I’m not sure why. She’s giving me no reason to be.
We’re sitting by the window in two armchairs. And however hard I try to avoid it, my eyes are drawn to the oak coffee table in the centre, surrounded by sofas where yet more guests sit. Was that where Rosamund fell? Where she lost her precious baby?
‘I feel a bit intrusive being here,’ Julia says, and I turn to face her. ‘I never met Elise, and barely know Neil. I’m here to support Finn really.’
‘I didn’t know Elise very well myself,’ I say. ‘But I’m sure Neil appreciates our support.’
She nods, and pulls her plait over her shoulder, runs a finger over the intertwined strands. ‘You like Finn, don’t you?’ she says.
I instinctively glance towards him, and he catches my eye and smiles. ‘Yes,’ I say, looking back at Julia. ‘He’s a good man. But you know that.’
She smiles. ‘He is. I guess we’re kindred spirits.’
‘Did you play together when you were little?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, Finn is older than me. But we have Kyla in common; she’s the reason we bonded.’
I recall how she told me Kyla was her half-sister too.
‘Kyla cast a shadow over both our lives when she died. We spent our childhoods in different decades, but both suffered the same gloomy darkness.’
I take a sip of my wine, hoping if I stay silent, she’ll go on.
‘My father, Michael Collis, fell in love with Ruth when they were seventeen. I guess their relationship was a bit like Romeo and Juliet – rivalling families. Ruth’s father had won part of the Drummondale estate in a poker game with my grandfather. My grandmother, an awful woman by all accounts, bore a grudge against Ruth’s parents. She certainly didn’t think Ruth was good enough for my father.
‘My dad got Ruth pregnant, but by the time Ruth realised, Dad had gone off to university.’
‘And Ruth’s baby was Kyla?’ I ask, swallowing down more wine.
She nods. ‘My grandmother found out Ruth was having Dad’s baby, and told Ruth that my dad had got engaged to someone else while at university, that he didn’t love her and didn’t want a child.’
‘That’s so cruel. Ruth must have been broken-hearted.’
Julia nods. ‘She was. As I say, my gran was cruel. Anyway, Ruth’s mother forced her to marry a man who’d been giving Ruth the eye. She didn’t care too much who he was, just that Ruth was married.
‘The truth was, my father wasn’t engaged, but when he discovered Ruth was married with a child, he married my mother.
‘It was some years later that Finn was born. And then Ruth’s husband left her.’
‘And then Kyla died?’
Julia tosses her plait back over her shoulder, and nods. ‘That was three years later on Vine Hill. It was after her death that Ruth told my father that Kyla was his daughter. Dad went to pieces. Mourning a child he didn’t know he had. He couldn’t believe Ruth had never told him.
‘He put the bench in the grounds, and spent most of his time there. Even when I was born, his mind was always on Kyla, and what might have been. In the end my mother left him … and me.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Neither Finn nor I could escape our lost half-sister – though the irony is, I would have loved an older sister. In fact, I often spend time just sitting on the bench, just like my dad and Finn do. It’s as though I can reach her there. It’s as though I almost know her. I wish I had.’
You were sitting on Kyla’s bench the night of the ghost walk.
She turns and meets my eye. ‘Do you believe there’s something else?’ She looks about her, then upwards, and it’s as though she can see right through the ceiling and into the heavens. ‘You know, after this?’
‘I hope so,’ I say, and I take hold of her hand and squeeze.
*
We’ve been at Neil’s house for over an hour, and now, as often happens at funerals, family and friends are sharing memories, laughing, their tongues loosened by alcohol. I’ve overstayed.
‘I’m going to make a move for home,’ I say, and Finn and Julia nod enthusiastically, seeming desperate to leave themselves. In fact, they leave before me as I need the loo, and as I watch them go, Julia calls out that we must stay in touch. ‘No reason not to,’ she says, with a flourish. ‘We live so close, and now Finn’s feeling so much better he can travel down anytime.’
*
As I leave the bathroom, and head onto the landing, I hear voices. One of them is Neil, and it’s coming from the master bedroom.
‘Perhaps it was all my fault,’ he’s saying through tears, his voice sounding broken.
I move across the landing, and peer through the gap in the door. The white-haired man who stepped up when Neil crumbled at the funeral, who I now know is his father, sits with him on the edge of a king-sized bed.
‘No, Neil,’ he says. ‘You mustn’t think like that.’
‘But if I’d been here more, done more to prevent the brewing anger in Elise about me replacing her mum, maybe Rosamund would never have lost the baby, and Elise would still be here.’
The man puts his hand over Neil’s. ‘I’m so sorry about the baby, son. But I can’t see how you being here would have changed that.’
‘But it might have.’ A beat. ‘I knew my Elise hated Rosamund. How full of anger she was, and I did nothing.’ He breaks off sobbing, his head in his hands, and I cover my mouth, tears springing to my eyes.
It’s a while before Neil
