Chapter 18 #2
Stop running. What happens when your daughter needs to be in school? When she needs consistency? When she has friends she won’t leave and exams to take?
Isobel’s questions rode so close to my own thoughts last night about the wisdom of taking us away from our support network that a sudden flush of guilt made me heat up. ‘She has me,’ I said tightly.
She will need others. Everyone needs friends. We all need somebody at some point in our lives to help us see what we are becoming.
The kettle began to whistle.
‘You don’t,’ I said, my tone confrontational. ‘If you can hide yourself away in a shabby old house in the woods and expect to stay undisturbed, then why can’t I?’
She blinked, seemingly surprised, then turned to the business of pouring the boiling water onto teabags, fetching a carton of juice and some biscuits out of the rattling tin box on the floor and generally bustling. I got the feeling that she was doing some very fast thinking.
When she’d handed me a mug of tea and passed juice and a handful of crumbly oaty biscuits that looked expensively fragile over to Tilly, Isobel sat back and looked at me steadily.
It was a very direct and almost unfriendly look and I noticed her right hand had grasped her pen and was making small movements as though she wanted to write something but hadn’t framed the words yet.
I stayed quiet. I’d been rude and confrontational but I didn’t want to apologise.
Her hands came up in front of her mouth in what was almost a gesture of prayer, palms together and the pen jutting from between her fingers like an unsmoked cigarette.
It looked as though she was trying to stop words from coming out but, as she didn’t speak anyway, it must have been a gesture of habit.
Her eyes flicked to Tilly, now sprawled on her stomach on the floor, Brass waggling in one hand and the other absorbed in rolling diamonds like marbles across the silver tray.
‘Are they real?’ I asked suddenly. ‘The diamonds, I mean. Or are they jet or glass or something?’ I had to know whether the assumptions that Ross and I had made could be true and these might be cosmetic replacements so she could convince herself that she had keepsakes from her past.
Isobel hesitated and then wrote:
They are real.
The words looked shaky as though her hand had been trembling as she wrote them.
We stared at each other. Below us, on the floor, Tilly was chuntering the words of a song from one of her favourite Disney films. It felt incongruous, her bright unconcern in this room which seemed filled with dark threat.
Every line of Isobel’s body seemed to have aged under the weight of that darkness and she bent forward, hunched beneath it.
Eventually Isobel wrote, her pen barely making contact with the paper so the words were faint and scrawled.
The diamonds bought my silence.
‘You said your father gave them to you,’ I said, almost accusatory, and then the implications slotted in behind the words. ‘Oh.’
Isobel wrote, slightly more assuredly this time.
It was in another life. But I know all about running from your past.
I looked at the diamonds that Tilly was rolling under her hand, mumbling misunderstood half-words and lying with her chin on her felt dragon. Innocent and happy. I wanted to snatch them away from her and throw them into the wood. ‘They bought my silence’. Urgh.
Isobel was still looking at me; it seemed that she wanted me to understand without her having to write anything else, but she needn’t have worried. The power of imagination was filling in the gaps in the unsaid. ‘Oh, Isobel,’ was all I could manage.
If I had turned and fought, I might have had my freedom.
But I could not. My childhood and my words were stolen from me and yet I stayed on in the silence.
I left when I could and I have run ever since.
So in some ways I envy you your liberty, and in others I know that you will never be free until you turn and fight.
She had to turn the paper over to finish, it was the longest passage I’d ever seen her write.
‘You couldn’t have fought,’ I said softly. ‘You were a child. It wasn’t your fault, Isobel. None of it was your fault.’
Those hooded eyes were suspiciously bright when they met mine again.
Thank you.
A tear overflowed her obvious attempts to restrain it and plopped onto the written page making the ink run.
But I stayed silent when I should have spoken. Now I find I have lost the power to speak. The effects stay with you, Libby.
I was almost crying myself now. I was transposing the young Isobel on to the shape of my daughter, imagining the unimaginable. The urge to keep Tilly safe made me want to snatch her up from the floor and hide her under my coat forever.
‘I am so, so sorry.’ I forced the words through the tunnel my throat had become.
Isobel shrugged and then looked up at the window. Outside, the unseen birds were making a racket.
Someone is outside.
I was torn. This was dreadful. On the one hand I needed her to go, to free the house for Ross and his building plans.
On the other… on the other, how could I ask her to move on?
‘Look, Isobel, this place is rotting while you sit in it. Let Ross help you, let me help you. He’ll build you that little house he showed you the plans for and I’ll make sure you can stay there as long as you want.
The birds can stay in their wood and we will keep away.
You can live the same as you are here, only there will be water and electricity – Ross told me what he wants to do and it’s going to be lovely.
But you need to get out of here before the rest of the place comes down, there are more storms on the way. ’
Isobel turned her eyes to the window again. The sun shone calmly from a cloudless azure sky laced by branches which hung on to the last leaves as though these were the receipts for an autumn that they wanted to return for a refund.
And also you get paid if I leave.
I felt the censure was unwarranted, given the conversation we’d just been having.
‘I need the money, yes,’ I said, one eye on Tilly, who was getting bored with her ‘balls’ and had started to poke around the floorboards. ‘And it will help me get us a proper life. But you truly can’t stay here – don’t you want comfort? Some heating and hot water and a secure place to sleep?’
I prefer to be uncomfortable. I think it’s probably psychological – making myself suffer.
‘If you’re self-aware enough to know that, then you know how daft it is,’ I said, rather snippily, and Isobel smiled.
Beyond the window I could see the cloud of birds turning slowly in the sky, still giving their harsh warning cries.
I wondered if Ross was prowling around out there, and was filled with a desire to talk to him.
I wanted to discuss Isobel’s revelations and what it meant for her future, and it dawned on me that I could talk to Ross.
I’d spent so long running and hiding that I hadn’t had anyone to truly confide in since…
well, since the days when David had been normal.
I am sure he will be as keen to see you as you are to see him.
Isobel was still smiling.
He seems to be a very nice man. Trustworthy.
‘So you’ll move into the…’ I stopped myself before I said shed. ‘Into the site office? Temporarily, until he can get the little house built?’
I will move.
I let out a breath and some of the tension flowed out with it. ‘Thank you,’ I said and thought I had better stop there. Asking when she would go seemed a little tactless.
But come and see me again before I go.
‘I will!’ I looked down at Tilly again. Now she was sliding along the floor, pushing herself on her stomach with her toes so that the fluff, fallen leaves and feathers swept along in front of her as though she were a very effective mop.
‘Come on, Tils. We ought to go and tell Ross so that he can ready his team.’ I spoke without looking at Isobel, but wanting her to hear and know that her leaving had better be swift.
‘And he can sort the site office out ready for moving in,’ I added.
The tray of crow diamonds lay discarded. I looked at it as I gathered Tilly up and brushed her coat free from the floor detritus; the shiny black stones looked innocent, even pretty against the reflecting silver surface, like someone had drilled holes in mercury. They made me shiver now.
They aren’t exceptionally valuable.
Isobel appeared to see me looking as she wrote.
A few thousand pounds each, perhaps? My father had them professionally cut and polished for me.
Our eyes met now. Hers gave nothing away while I was sure mine were full of calculation – there were at least ten, maybe twenty diamonds lying there.
Not quite a fortune, now I knew black diamonds were less valuable than the usual sort, but enough to buy Isobel a future.
Yet she was hanging on to them when they must be a daily reminder of an evil dark time.
I wanted to ask her why, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.
‘We’ll come over tomorrow,’ I said, lifting Tilly onto my hip. ‘I might get Ross to help – we can move all your things between us.’
Isobel nodded curtly. Outside the birds were rasping their calls, sounding urgent and upset. I wondered if Ross was standing by the front door. He’d know I was here – my car was parked in the usual place – but he hadn’t come in.
I turned from the dim little room to face the brighter light of the hallway, and took half a step back in shock when I saw a figure approaching from the direction of the front door.
It was a woman, tall and slender in jeans and a jacket, her hair tied back in a scarf.
She held her arms out to me as she came.
‘Libby? And Matilda?’
It was my mother.