Chapter 1
I will always remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard that my father had died.
I was sitting in the pretty garden of my old schoolfriend’s townhouse in London, a copy of The Penelopiad open but unread in my lap, enjoying the June sun while Jenny collected her little boy from nursery.
I felt calm and appreciated what a good idea it had been to get away. I was studying the burgeoning clematis, encouraged by its sunny midwife to give birth to a riot of colour, when my mobile phone rang. I glanced at the screen and saw it was Marina.
‘Hello, Ma, how are you?’ I said, hoping she could hear the warmth in my voice too.
‘Maia, I . . .’
Marina paused, and in that instant I knew something was dreadfully wrong. ‘What is it?’
‘Maia, there’s no easy way to tell you this, but your father had a heart attack here at home yesterday afternoon, and in the early hours of this morning, he . . . passed away.’
I remained silent, as a million different and ridiculous thoughts raced through my mind. The first one being that Marina, for some unknown reason, had decided to play some form of tasteless joke on me.
‘You’re the first of the sisters I’ve told, Maia, as you’re the eldest. And I wanted to ask you whether you would prefer to tell the rest of your sisters yourself, or leave it to me.’
‘I . . .’
Still no words would form coherently on my lips, as I began to realise that Marina, dear, beloved Marina, the woman who had been the closest thing to a mother I’d ever known, would never tell me this if it wasn’t true. So it had to be. And at that moment, my entire world shifted on its axis.
‘Maia, please, tell me you’re all right. This really is the most dreadful call I’ve ever had to make, but what else could I do? God only knows how the other girls are going to take it.’
It was then that I heard the suffering in her voice and understood she’d needed to tell me as much for her own sake as mine. So I switched into my normal comfort zone, which was to comfort others.
‘Of course I’ll tell my sisters if you’d prefer, Ma, although I’m not positive where they all are. Isn’t Ally away training for a regatta?’
And as we continued to discuss where each of my younger sisters was, as though we needed to get them together for a birthday party rather than to mourn the death of our father, the entire conversation took on a sense of the surreal.
‘When should we plan on having the funeral, do you think? What with Electra being in Los Angeles and Ally somewhere on the high seas, surely we can’t think about it until next week at the earliest?’ I said.
‘Well . . .’ I heard the hesitation in Marina’s voice.
‘Perhaps the best thing is for you and I to discuss it when you arrive back home. There really is no rush now, Maia, so if you’d prefer to continue the last couple of days of your holiday in London, that would be fine.
There’s nothing more to be done for him here . . .’ Her voice trailed off miserably.
‘Ma, of course I’ll be on the next flight to Geneva I can get! I’ll call the airline immediately, and then I’ll do my best to get in touch with everyone.’
‘I’m so terribly sorry, chérie,’ Marina said sadly. ‘I know how you adored him.’
‘Yes,’ I said, the strange calm that I had felt while we discussed arrangements suddenly deserting me like the stillness before a violent thunderstorm. ‘I’ll call you later, when I know what time I’ll be arriving.’
‘Please take care of yourself, Maia. You’ve had a terrible shock.’
I pressed the button to end the call, and before the storm clouds in my heart opened up and drowned me, I went upstairs to my bedroom to retrieve my flight documents and contact the airline.
As I waited in the calling queue, I glanced at the bed where I’d woken up this morning to Simply Another Day.
And I thanked God that human beings don’t have the power to see into the future.
The officious woman who eventually answered wasn’t helpful and I knew, as she spoke of full flights, financial penalties and credit card details, that my emotional dam was ready to burst. Finally, once I’d grudgingly been granted a seat on the four o’clock flight to Geneva, which would mean throwing everything into my holdall immediately and taking a taxi to Heathrow, I sat down on the bed and stared for so long at the sprigged wallpaper that the pattern began to dance in front of my eyes.
‘He’s gone,’ I whispered, ‘gone for ever. I’ll never see him again.’
Expecting the spoken words to provoke a raging torrent of tears, I was surprised that nothing actually happened.
Instead, I sat there numbly, my head still full of practicalities.
The thought of telling my sisters – all five of them – was horrendous, and I searched through my emotional filing system for the one I would call first. Inevitably, it was Tiggy, the second youngest of the six of us girls and the sibling to whom I’d always felt closest.
With trembling fingers, I scrolled down to find her number and dialled it.
When her voicemail answered, I didn’t know what to say, other than a few garbled words asking her to call me back urgently.
She was currently somewhere in the Scottish Highlands working at a centre for orphaned and sick wild deer.
As for the other sisters . . . I knew their reactions would vary, outwardly at least, from indifference to a dramatic outpouring of emotion.
Given that I wasn’t currently sure quite which way I would go on the scale of grief when I did speak to any of them, I decided to take the coward’s way out and texted them all, asking them to call me as soon as they could.
Then I hurriedly packed my holdall and walked down the narrow stairs to the kitchen to write a note for Jenny explaining why I’d had to leave in such a hurry.
Deciding to take my chances hailing a black cab on the London streets, I left the house, walking briskly around the leafy Chelsea crescent just as any normal person would do on any normal day.
I believe I actually said hello to someone walking a dog when I passed him in the street and managed a smile.
No one would know what had just happened to me, I thought, as I managed to find a taxi on the busy King’s Road and climbed inside, directing the driver to Heathrow.
No one would know.
Five hours later, just as the sun was making its leisurely descent over Lake Geneva, I arrived at our private pontoon on the shore, from where I would make the last leg of my journey home.
Christian was already waiting for me in our sleek Riva motor launch. And from the look on his face, I could see he’d heard the news.
‘How are you, Mademoiselle Maia?’ he asked, sympathy in his blue eyes as he helped me aboard.
‘I’m . . . glad I’m here,’ I answered neutrally as I walked to the back of the boat and sat down on the cushioned cream leather bench that curved around the stern.
Usually, I would sit with Christian in the passenger seat at the front as we sped across the calm waters on the twenty-minute journey home.
But today, I felt a need for privacy. As Christian started the powerful engine, the sun glinted off the windows of the fabulous houses that lined Lake Geneva’s shores.
I’d often felt when I made this journey that it was the entrance to an ethereal world disconnected from reality.
The world of Pa Salt.
I noticed the first vague evidence of tears pricking at my eyes as I thought of my father’s pet name, which I’d coined when I was young.
He’d always loved sailing and often when he returned to me at our lakeside home, he had smelt of fresh air and of the sea.
Somehow, the name had stuck, and as my younger siblings had joined me, they’d called him that too.
As the launch picked up speed, the warm wind streaming through my hair, I thought of the hundreds of previous journeys I’d made to Atlantis, Pa Salt’s fairy-tale castle.
Inaccessible by land, due to its position on a private promontory with a crescent of mountainous terrain rising up steeply behind it, the only method of reaching it was by boat.
The nearest neighbours were miles away along the lake, so Atlantis was our own private kingdom, set apart from the rest of the world.
Everything it contained was magical . . .
as if Pa Salt and we – his daughters – had lived there under an enchantment.
Each one of us had been chosen by Pa Salt as a baby, adopted from the four corners of the globe and brought home to live under his protection.
And each one of us, as Pa always liked to say, was special, different .
. . we were his girls. He’d named us all after The Seven Sisters, his favourite star cluster. Maia being the first and eldest.
When I was young, he’d take me up to his glass-domed observatory perched on top of the house, lift me up with his big, strong hands and have me look through his telescope at the night sky.
‘There it is,’ he’d say as he aligned the lens. ‘Look, Maia, that’s the beautiful shining star you’re named after.’
And I would see. As he explained the legends that were the source of my own and my sisters’ names, I’d hardly listen, but simply enjoy his arms tight around me, fully aware of this rare, special moment when I had him all to myself.
I’d realised eventually that Marina, who I’d presumed as I grew up was my mother – I’d even shortened her name to ‘Ma’ – was a glorified nursemaid, employed by Pa to take care of me because he was away such a lot.
But of course, Marina was so much more than that to all of us girls.
She was the one who had wiped our tears, berated us for sloppy table manners and steered us calmly through the difficult transition from childhood to womanhood.
She had always been there, and I could not have loved Ma any more if she had given birth to me.