Chapter 12 Zoe Spring 2025
Zoe
They finish packing up the clothes and carry them down to Sara’s car.
‘I’ll take them into town tomorrow,’ she says, slamming the boot.
Mum’s entire wardrobe reduced to black bin bags, thinks Zoe.
All those clothes she collected over the years, wrapped with mothballs and tissue paper; the cotton sachets she refilled every year with lavender cut from the garden so that when you opened her armoire, the scent filled your nostrils.
Now all there is left is a few showy dresses and a small pile of clothes each.
Zoe wonders if Steph will wear the Fair Isle jumper. She seemed keen to have it.
The whole house is a mess again. The boxes of paperwork and letters overflowing in the kitchen.
‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ Zoe says to Sara, who’s just come off a video-call with her twins.
There are a couple of dilapidated buildings on the other side of the woods.
She wants to check the size of the keyholes, just to see if the key might fit.
When she finds it. Out of habit, she checks the old potpourri bowl, now full of pine cones, and looks under the hall table, but it’s not there.
‘You still can’t find that key?’ says Sara, coming out of the kitchen.
Zoe shakes her head. ‘It’s driving me crazy. It was here. In the old potpourri.’
‘It definitely wasn’t there when I cleared that all out before the funeral,’ says Sara, glancing underneath the table. ‘I’d have seen it.’
‘You sure you couldn’t have thrown it away by mistake?’
Sara shakes her head. ‘It was a huge key, Zoe. Not something you could miss.’
The thought of the key and the names makes Zoe feel strange, but she can’t work out whether it’s to do with the key itself or with it going missing.
She takes a deep breath and sets off past the formal garden towards the woods.
The early spring has held, the sun still high in the sky, buds tricked into opening.
If there’s a frost, they’ll die, Zoe thinks.
Mum used to worry about an early spring followed by sudden frosts.
She’d cover the buds in muslin to protect them.
Now if the cold comes back, the buds will wither and die, no one to protect them.
She skirts the overgrown kitchen garden, promising she’ll tackle it another day. There’s just so much to do.
Out of sight of the house, she stops by the algae-green pond and lies on the warm grass, the sun red behind her closed eyes.
It feels decadent to just lie down and do nothing.
Years ago, she’d come here with her books when she was supposed to be revising for exams, spread them all out on the grass and then plug in her Walkman and go to sleep.
That same sense of well-being seeps into her now, but she guiltily pushes it away.
Mum has only been gone just over a week.
After a while she gets up and continues into the woods.
The hairs prick up on her arms and she wishes she’d brought a jumper.
That’s the trouble with an early spring, you get lulled into a false sense of security.
She walks for a while, the sweet delicate scent of bluebells almost hallucinogenic in its intensity.
She hears Steph before she sees her – a strange keening, echoing through the trees. Zoe stops to listen and then sees her stumbling in the distance. Zoe steps behind an old oak and waits for several minutes. Steph almost walks past her.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Zoe, making Steph jump. Her face is blotchy, her mouth trembling.
‘I’m fine,’ says Steph, blinking at her. ‘Just wanted to get away from things. It’s been an intense few days.’
‘It has. I’m sorry again. For slapping you. And the things I said.’
Steph smiles. ‘I’m sorry for hitting you back.’
‘We sound like a couple of kids making up after a playground fight.’ Zoe laughs.
‘I don’t usually drink at all,’ says Steph, biting her lip. ‘It just has a really bad effect on me, makes me too impulsive.’
‘I haven’t really drunk much since Mum’s been ill, there hasn’t been the opportunity. And there was a lot of booze at the wake.’
‘Too much!’
In many ways, Steph looks exactly like their mother.
Bobbed grey hair, the same springy gait.
Or rather Mum before she got ill and the weight slipped away.
It all started after Dad died. Even though she’d obviously been the one who was in charge in the relationship, she seemed to shrivel after he went.
Zoe saw her whole on the outside, but like an apple left too long in the fruit bowl which wrinkles slowly and then dries up.
She was tired all the time. Zoe had put it down to the general exhaustion of Dad being ill and dying.
But the grief pulled at her, pinning her to her bed and then, when Zoe insisted she get up, to the armchair.
Even the smallest thing was beyond her. Her eating became erratic.
Then the grief manifested into physical forms. She started to feel constantly nauseated, and was often sick, which meant she stopped eating much at all.
She complained of pain going to the loo, until eventually she was diagnosed with bowel cancer.
Before Zoe realised what was happening, she’d become her mother’s carer, helping her to dress, bathe and eat.
And then even that was taken away once the diagnosis became terminal and the nurses stepped in.
‘I know how private Mum was. She’d have hated me doing that, creating gossip for the whole village again.
’ Again. Steph seems full of sadness, thinking about her childhood.
Perhaps being back here for these weeks can help her start to heal and move forward.
She said in the note that this was her happiest time at Highdown.
They walk back to the house together, not saying anything.
Zoe likes that about Steph – she’s good at being quiet, whereas the other two always feel the need to colour in the silence with noise.
Even though they’re in a wide-open space, Steph veers into her.
She can’t seem to walk in a straight line.
She waves her arms in front of her in that weird apologetic way she has.
It’s a bit odd and perhaps a bit funny too.
Sometimes Mum painted Steph as a thoughtless, wilfully difficult person.
But she’s been quite different these past few days.
Quiet and thoughtful. It’s Fiona who can be annoying – a bit too chatty and bossy.
In comparison Steph is quiet, thoughtful, and respectful of how Zoe feels.
Or at least she seems to be. Maybe she’s changed since Mum knew her properly.
Suddenly Steph stops walking and turns to Zoe. ‘I like your mermaid tattoo. It’s really cool.’
Zoe rolls up the arm on her t-shirt so Steph can see it better. ‘Thanks. I call her Sylvie.’
Steph seems to stare at Zoe’s arm for a long time. She traces the mermaid’s tail, which curves around her forearm, and Zoe shivers with the strangely intimate gesture.
‘You’ve got some tattoos too, right? I saw the one on your wrist.’
Steph turns her wrist over and looks at the four entwined hearts. ‘It’s just a stick and poke I did as a teenager. I didn’t think it would last this long.’
‘What do the hearts mean?’
Steph’s eyes flicker and she shakes her head. ‘Just a teenage thing.’
She closes down so quickly, thinks Zoe. One minute she’s friendly and open, and the next clamped tight shut.
‘Good timing. Supper will be fifteen minutes,’ says Sara as they walk through the kitchen door.
Whatever’s in the oven makes Zoe’s stomach rumble. How lovely that someone else is doing the cooking. ‘I’ll just pop upstairs, wash my hands and then I’ll help.’
Zoe sees something glinting on the hall table as soon as she comes down the stairs.
The missing key. She looks again at the bowl.
It definitely wasn’t there before, she thinks, or she or Sara would have seen it.
They emptied it out, she looked underneath the table.
It couldn’t have been there. She picks up the key and puts it carefully in her pocket.
No one else has been in the house today.
One of her sisters must have put it there.
Her three sisters look up from the table as she walks into the kitchen.
Which one of them had the key? Maybe they’re all in on it, some sort of conspiracy about selling the house under her nose.
She slips into her chair, the key digging into her thigh.
One thing’s for sure, she’s not going to mention the key again and she’s not going to let it out of her pocket.
‘What are your children like?’ Zoe asks Sara, as they all sit around the table for supper. She realises she knows so little about Sara’s family and hardly spoke to them at the funeral. She should have made more of an effort, they are her nieces after all.
Sara looks up from her bowl and her face brightens.
‘Well, Katy is two now and the twins are five. Charlotte and Izzie. Here. I’ll show you some photos.
’ She brings out her phone and starts scrolling.
‘This is the five of us last summer in Spain. And this is the twins’ first day at school.
Look how sweet they are in their uniforms.’
‘They are. Which one is which?’ Zoe says, a flush creeping across her cheeks.
Strange to think that these girls are her flesh and blood and she barely knows them.
As soon as life gets back to normal, she’ll arrange to get the train over there.
‘It was sweet seeing them with you at the funeral. You seem such a natural mum. Did you always want kids?’
‘Always,’ says Sara. ‘You remember we struggled to get pregnant for a long time and the twins are IVF babies. I was told I probably wouldn’t be able to have children, so we didn’t use any contraception and then I fell pregnant with Katy a couple of years later. Quite the surprise.’
‘I bet,’ says Zoe. ‘I can’t imagine having a child.’