Chapter 3 Zoe Spring 2025
Zoe
She wants to climb into her mother’s bed and curl up.
She’s done that quite a bit over the past year.
Not just when Mum has been really poorly, but earlier when she didn’t feel like going out into the world.
They’d spend Sundays with the papers spread across the duvet, putting the world to rights, good coffee on the bedside table.
More recently, Zoe had lain next to her when she was in pain and the tablets didn’t seem to work, just to hold her and talk to her, read her stories as if she were a small child who’d had a nightmare. Happy memories.
Zoe looks around the room she’s come to know so intimately over the past year.
The mantelpiece crammed with family photos above the fireplace which she lit every day this winter as her mother struggled to keep warm, dragging up logs and coal they could barely afford from the coalhouse.
The huge armoire in the corner, where Mum’s silk dresses and cashmere cardigans are losing the battle with the moths, despite the bunches of lavender Zoe cut from the garden and strung up.
The dressing table, which Mum sat in front of every day looking into the ornate mirror, now cloudy with age, as she massaged thick cream into her face.
Her powder pot, with its faded gold trim, still sits in the centre.
When was the last time she was well enough to put powder on her nose?
To lift up her lipstick brush and outline her lips?
Yesterday afternoon, Mum raised her arm from the covers and drew two fingers to her mouth, loudly breathing in and out, before laying her hand back on the blanket.
Over the next few hours, she repeated the gesture occasionally, her face relaxing into a smile each time.
It took Zoe a while to realise that she was pretending to smoke – or thought she was smoking.
Who knows what she was thinking? She hardly spoke for the last week.
Zoe doesn’t remember her mum ever smoking, but clearly she did once.
Are there other things from Mum’s past that she doesn’t know about?
Suddenly it feels like the woman she nursed for the past year, and lived with for the past thirty-five, was a stranger.
How could she not leave Highdown Hall to Zoe?
Or at least part of it? Zoe could have taken it on, looked after it.
She thought she was the closest to her mother – the much-wanted youngest child.
She thinks back to the conversation a few months ago, perhaps their last proper conversation, when her mother hinted that difficult things were to come.
Zoe thought it was about her deteriorating health, the process of dying, the funeral itself, the difficulty of arranging everything with her three sisters who are strangers in all but name.
But perhaps all along it was about the will?
The fact that Zoe wasn’t going to receive a share of their childhood home.
It is inexplicable. She always thought she was the favourite.
And she believed that because she’d lived here so long, she’d be given Highdown, she’d be the one to take it on for the next generation.
Zoe had even started having some thoughts about how she could do that – letting out the barns and the oast house to fund repairs on the main house and then, once it was back to its former glory, renting it out for weddings and parties.
She’d read about loads of similar families who’d done that with their country houses.
She thought that her sisters would get the art or the jewellery or the books or whatever else of value. The things her mother refused to sell to fund the most basic of the much-needed repairs because they were family heirlooms. She bites her lip.
There’s a gentle knock on the door and Sara comes in. Zoe sits back on her heels and wipes her wet cheeks.
‘Are you okay?’ Sara says, crouching down next to her. ‘Silly question, I know. Of course you’re not okay.’ She rests her arm on Zoe’s shoulder and it feels good to be in human contact, to feel someone. ‘What a shock.’
Zoe nods, her head bowed.
‘Fiona’s read through the rest of the will and you are in it. You have what they’ve called a lifetime interest in Highdown. Basically, you have the right to remain in the house until you die, or choose to move out. Nothing will change.’
Zoe looks at Sara through her tears. ‘Really? I can stay?’
Sara smiles at her. ‘Yes, this is your home. You can live here for as long as you want, or the oast house, whatever. That doesn’t change.
And Mum’s left you most of her jewellery – with only the proviso that we can have one thing each as a memento and that they be passed down to the next generation. ’ She’s stroking Zoe’s back.
Zoe rests her head on Sara’s shoulder. ‘It’s such a shock. First Mum going and now this.’
‘It’s horrible for you,’ Sara says. Zoe wonders if this is what she does with her children. It feels comforting. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.
‘It’s horrible for all of us,’ Zoe says.
‘But particularly you, because you spent so much time with Mum.’
Zoe draws back and looks at Sara. Her face is soft, wobbly. ‘Thank you for coming up here, to check on me.’
‘I’m your big sister, Zoe, that’s what I’m here for. And I’m also a mum.’ Sara tries to smile but Zoe can see the tears behind her eyes.
Zoe sits on her heels. ‘I’m relieved I can stay.
This is my home. I was born here, I’ve never lived anywhere else.
I’ve barely left the house for the past six months while I was looking after Mum.
But it feels odd that now it doesn’t even belong to me.
’ She gets up and moves to the mantelpiece, looking at the photo of Mum and Dad, their arms around Steph and Fiona, a toddler Sara in a pram against a seaside vista.
‘The twins now look so like Fiona in that picture,’ says Sara, standing beside her. ‘We all look so sweet.’
The twins. She really should remember their names.
What are they? She turns back to the photo.
If Sara was two or three, then Zoe was not even a thought at that point.
She rarely considered the life the five of them had before Zoe came along.
But of course they had years before she arrived on the scene.
Had those times meant more to Mum than the ones she shared with her?
Years ago, when she was about eight, Zoe overheard a conversation between Mum and another woman at a parish fete.
The woman was commiserating over what she called Mum’s happy accident.
‘I bet you wish you’d been more careful,’ she said.
‘You’d be out the woods by now. As it is, you’ve still got years of mothering to go.
’ She saw her mother glance at her and smile slightly, and realised the woman was referring to her.
A happy accident. She thought it was because she’d arrived early – her mother had always said she wasn’t due for ages and the labour had come on suddenly overnight with no chance to get to hospital.
Now she sees it in a different light. Happy accident.
Or not-so-happy accident. Was she ever wanted at all?
Had her mother been done with having babies and got pregnant accidentally?
Was she just the millstone around her mother’s neck who happened to have made herself useful as a nursemaid to an old lady in her last few years? Was she just not loved like the others?
Milly
1988
‘I think we should call the police now,’ I say, as the grandfather clock finishes its midnight chiming. ‘The buses have stopped running, there’s no way she’s going to be able to get home.’ It’s pitch-black outside, those few hours of summer night. At least it’s warm.
‘We can’t call them every time she doesn’t come home. We’re wasting their time,’ says Paul.
‘But the bowling alley closed three hours ago. She wasn’t there when you drove by earlier so she must have already left to come home. Something’s happened on the way home.’
‘Was she even at the bowling alley?’
‘What do you mean?’ My skin goes cold. All evening I’ve been picturing her bowling. It felt like a wholesome, safe thing to do. And for once she’s with friends. I’ve always worried that she doesn’t have many friends.
‘I think that was a lie to get out of the house,’ he says with a sigh. ‘She’s never gone bowling before.’
My legs feel weak and I sink into a chair. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘We should have punished her when she came home late last week,’ Paul says.
I know he’s still annoyed with me about that.
He thinks that if we punish her, then she won’t do it again.
Mum thinks the same. She’s always writing to me saying we need to come down hard on her and then things will be easier.
I stand up. ‘I know you think punishment is the way to go, but I don’t think it’ll make a difference.
She doesn’t care what the punishment is.
She’ll just take it and then do whatever it is again.
’ There’s something odd about Steph when you tell her off.
She’ll stand there and look at you. Even slightly smile sometimes.
Which can be infuriating. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I have to work tomorrow, I’m going to bed.’
‘Bed? But Steph isn’t home. She’s fourteen, for God’s sake. We need to wait.’
‘Milly, she’ll be fine,’ he says from the doorway. ‘She always is. Come to bed with me. You can’t stay up like this. It’s not good for you. Remember what the doctor said. Relax and you’ll get pregnant. There’s nothing physically stopping us now you’ve had that op.’
I shake my head and stand looking out of the window into the darkness. Where is she? I know something’s happened. I can feel it. She’s in danger.
He sighs and walks out of the room. I’ll just sit down and wait.