Chapter 18
‘No.’ Tilly gripped onto the sides of her car seat. ‘No. Scary house.’
I sighed. Reasoning with her was all very well and sometimes worked, but expecting a two-year-old to get to grips with my mixed emotions of guilt, fear, desperate need to escape and obligation was a step too far.
‘We have to go and see Isobel.’ I reached in again and tried to pull what felt like an octopus away from its mooring. ‘She might let you play with her diamonds again, if you’re sensible.’
‘No.’ Tilly stuck her lip out, mutinously. ‘Scary house.’
I sighed again. I didn’t suppose my perpetual fleeing from the place had really given her the best impressions of Elm Cottage, and, to be fair, it was quite a scary place, especially with the half-collapsed nature of the roof and some of the walls.
‘I’m sorry, Tils,’ I said, pulling her free from her seat, which I could swear made a noise like a drain being unblocked. ‘We really do have to do this and I don’t have time to be rational about it.’
Actually today the place didn’t look quite so dreadful.
The sun was shining in a brief imitation of the lost summer and it highlighted the colours in the mixed swirl of leaves at our feet.
High above, the sky was empty and blue, stretched with streaks of pale cloud, like the most delicate of lacework.
No birds circled, the only avian life that was evident was cheeping at us from the surrounding bushes in a covert kind of way.
I wondered where the big black birds that haunted this wood were, and hoped that they weren’t all keeping Isobel company.
‘Come on, Tilly.’ I tried to sound jaunty and upbeat, but Tilly wasn’t having any of it and stood sullenly beside the car, kicking one of her wellingtons off again.
‘No.’ The thumb went into her mouth and she stood, rebellious as a teenager.
Beyond my car I saw the cycling man pedal furiously into view, head down as though racing, and I wondered why anyone would want to cycle through these woods.
The possibility of some large animal leaping out and knocking you sideways must be high, surely, and the birds…
I shuddered as the cyclist passed by, unmolested by mammalian life forms.
‘Come on, Tils. Isobel might have some biscuits and juice,’ I cajoled, hating myself for using food as a bribe.
Was I setting my daughter up for a lifetime of disordered eating?
Should I admit that she really didn’t want to go into the house and let her have the freedom of choice?
I hovered uncertainly, wishing yet again that motherhood had come with a manual.
Then the thought of the five thousand pounds loomed large again, the knowledge that money would buy us freedom.
I could change my phone and David would never again be able to ruffle me with impromptu messages; we could move away from the hostel to somewhere more remote and unreachable. We’d be safe.
I picked Tilly up, ignoring the kicking legs and the wailing, and carried her like a bag of bad-tempered shopping down the muddy track through the undergrowth to the front door.
As I twisted my head to avoid her cracking me on the nose as she threw herself about in my arms, I noticed that the cycling man had stopped his furious racing further along the road and seemed to be on his phone.
I wondered if he was calling social services to report a bad mother forcing, as he would no doubt see it, her child to do something it clearly didn’t want to.
And Tilly was ‘clearly not wanting to’ at some volume now, thrashing about in my arms like a suitcase in a washing machine.
I held her close, remembering those days of pregnancy, when my entire abdomen had undulated and writhed with her movements.
Remembering how David and I had lain entranced, watching lumps appear and vanish as though swimmers did breast stroke under my skin, fascinated and anticipatory with the desire to meet our daughter.
‘We did not… know the half of it,’ I muttered to myself, as the eagerly awaited baby, now converted into a cross between a violent boulder and a heavyweight boxer, writhed in my arms and kicked at my middle.
The cries of ‘Scary house! Scary house!’ trailed through the undergrowth, trumpeting our arrival as unsubtly as if we’d arrived with a fanfare and banners flying.
So I wasn’t altogether surprised to find Isobel standing at the door to her room, hands on hips and her ever-present tweedy jacket seeming to have been hastily put on.
The child is distressed?
I didn’t know why she’d written it as a question; Tilly’s distress was audible to most of the postcode.
‘She wanted to stay at home today and watch The Secret Garden,’ I explained over the top of the wailing. ‘But it’s a nice day and we’ve been home for ages, so I thought…’ I hadn’t yet quite framed my need to persuade Isobel into immediate ejection in words, even to myself.
‘Look, Brass doesn’t like all this noise, give him a cuddle,’ I suggested to Tilly, handing her the felt dragon, who gave me an embroidered look of resigned hopelessness.
‘No!’ Tilly yelled and flung Brass off into the depths of darkness that made up the room behind Isobel. Then she started to cry because she didn’t have Brass to cuddle, and nearly gave me a black eye with her forehead.
Oh dear. This looks like a difficult situation.
She turned around and led the way into the room, where I was stopped on the threshold by one of the big birds which had perched on the windows support and was glaring at me out of one coal-black eye.
‘Oh.’
He won’t harm you. Give the child the diamonds to count.
Torn between the tantrumming Tilly, my need to talk to Isobel and the awful spectre of the silent bird, I rotated in the doorway, not sure which way to go.
Tilly, however, decided everything for me by yelling, ‘Balls!’ and going rigid in my arms so that she slithered down my body and arrived on the floor in a socked rush. ‘Brass!’
The little velvet bag of diamonds was on a table, underneath which Brass resided, covered in dust and with an insouciant feather protruding from between his scales.
I half stepped towards Tilly, caught the eye of the bird, stepped back into the doorway again, saw Isobel watching me and took a micro stride inside the room. I couldn’t leave Tilly, who was now plunging under the table to retrieve her dragon with the diamond bag in her other hand.
You look a little worn. Would you like to sit down and have a cup of tea? I assume you’ve come to ask me for my decision about moving out?
Without waiting for an answer, Isobel began filling the kettle from a jug of water and fiddling with the gas ring.
Over at the window the bird made a clucking sound, then a noise like a table being rapped.
Isobel turned and lifted a hand, at which the bird shuffled around to face the other way and took off out of the window with what looked like an immense amount of effort.
The two actions seemed so interlinked and sequential that I could only assume that she had sent the bird away.
On the other hand at least Tilly had gone quiet, tucking Brass under her arm and rolling the velvet bag around on the tabletop like the world’s most exclusive duster.
Without really looking, Isobel slid the silver tray along the floor with her foot in Tilly’s direction.
Tilly grabbed it and began plunging her fingers into the bag and pulling the diamonds out one at a time, to plink them down on to the tray with a look of total absorption on her face and no trace of the tantrum remaining. I felt my shoulders relax.
‘You’re right. I’ve come to find out if you’ve decided anything about moving,’ I said, still hovering uncertainly in the doorway with my gaze fixed on that open window.
‘Only it’s getting a little bit imperative now.
Ross has to knock this place down, although it looks as though it’s having a good go at knocking itself down.
One more storm and there’s not going to be much left. ’
Come in and sit down.
‘I… can’t.’
Jack Dawe has gone. I’ve sent him back into the wood.
‘I know. I just… the window…’ I couldn’t take my eye off that threateningly half-open sash where, at any minute my brain told me, a whole flock of birds might appear and start popping through, one by one.
Isobel gave me a tolerant look, got up and closed the window.
‘Balls,’ said Tilly, from the floor.
‘Yes, darling. Beads,’ I corrected almost unthinking. ‘Look, Isobel, I’ve really come to throw myself on your mercy.’
Isobel straightened away from the complicated business of lighting the gas ring, picked up her paper and wrote:
It may not be a soft landing.
‘I know, I know. It’s just – I think Tilly’s dad might be close to finding out where we are and I can’t let him into our lives again. I’m scared and I need to get away and the money that Ross is going to pay me once you’re out will help us start a new life.’
The words came out in a stapled-together rush, lubricated by fear.
Isobel’s dark eyes regarded me steadily.
Why are you scared?
‘Because if he finds me then I’m in danger and he might hurt me and take Tilly.
’ Again, the words sped out. They’d been dammed up in my subconscious for the whole of the last eighteen months; they were what lay behind everything I did.
The image of David standing beside the bed in the night holding Tilly and telling her she would be safe with him, looking down on me as I surfaced from bleary, drugged sleep.
That was the day I’d decided I had to run.
The fear that he might kill me and take my daughter ran beneath my entire life.
When do you stop?
I stared at the paper. The words stood as stark and black as the crow had stood on the window and felt nearly as threatening. ‘Stop? Stop what?’
Behind me the diamonds thudded onto the silver tray and rolled with a noise like doom.