Chapter 17 Zoe Spring 2025
Zoe
‘Were you never tempted to tell me?’
Zoe stops abruptly outside the half-closed kitchen door, her heart thudding so loudly she wonders if she’s missed Steph’s reply.
‘So many times,’ Steph says eventually. ‘I couldn’t believe that you couldn’t see it. It seemed so obvious to me . . .’
‘I’m so sorry, Steph, I feel like I’ve massively let you down.’ Fiona’s voice drifts through the gap. ‘All these years, I had no idea.’
‘It’s not your fault, Fi,’ Steph says gently. ‘It was just what happened. What was decided.’
‘I remember you coming back, after you’d gone missing, really clearly. Just being there when we were about to have supper. I was so excited.’ She laughs. ‘But I don’t really remember much after that.’
‘I was only home for a couple of weeks before I went to boarding school.’
There’s a long pause before Fiona speaks. ‘That seems so barbaric, to send you away like that.’
‘Yes,’ says Steph.
‘I can’t quite believe it all,’ says Fiona. ‘Why would Mum do that? Take your baby and say she was her own? And then send you away.’
‘I guess she thought it was best for me,’ Steph says.
‘I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.’ Fiona again. ‘Watching Zoe grow up and not being able to have a proper relationship with her.’
Zoe bites her lip. Poor Steph. This is as bad for Steph – worse probably – as it is for her.
Somehow becoming closer to her over the past two weeks has made this news easier.
Before this, she always thought of Steph as being difficult, reclusive.
Now she’s begun to see why she was like that, and how similar she and Steph both are.
Steph says nothing for a while. ‘It was awful,’ she says eventually. ‘I couldn’t deal with it. I wanted to be close to her but when I was it was painful. So in the end I kept away.’
‘Secrets are like splinters, aren’t they, buried deep in your skin, which eventually work their way to the surface,’ says Fiona.
‘I thought this secret would be buried forever,’ says Steph. ‘Until Zoe read the will, and then I knew it would come out. It had to come out then.’
Fiona sighs. ‘And yet, if it wasn’t for Alice, I would be on a plane back to Singapore right now. And it might have come out later when we were all apart. Alice did the right thing, I think. She made sure it happened while we’re all together. So we can support one another.’
Steph’s voice is quiet. ‘I’m glad that we’re all here together.’
‘It’s a lot for Zoe to deal with,’ says Fiona. ‘And just after losing Mum. I know she’s in her thirties, but Mum always babied her. She’s never even lived on her own.’
Trust Fiona to comment on that, thinks Zoe. Has Fiona ever lived on her own? She married Charles almost as soon as she left Highdown Hall.
‘I think there was a reason for that – she wanted to keep her close,’ says Steph. ‘After we’d all gone away, Zoe was the one who had to stay.’
Yes, because everyone else abandoned Mum and Dad, thinks Zoe.
She could have travelled, had her own children, married Ben.
But even as she thinks it, she knows it’s not true.
Until now, until all these revelations, she was happy with her life.
She felt she was making a small difference to the world. One person at a time.
There’s the clatter of mugs being put into the sink and Zoe readies herself to walk into the room.
‘When you first started to tell us, I think I realised before you said it what you were going to say.’ Fiona’s voice is quiet and Zoe has to concentrate to hear her.
‘It’s like the conversation had been floating in my mind for years, something I overheard as a child but didn’t understand at the time.
But I get what they were talking about now. ’
There’s a moment of silence, then the scrape and flare of a match.
‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ says Sara. Zoe hadn’t realised she was there too. The three of them cosy inside the kitchen, she separate. She pushes away the sting of jealousy. She wants to be in there with them. But she can’t make herself push open the door.
‘Only very occasionally. Do you want one?’
Sara must have nodded, because there’s the sound of another match strike and then a slight cough, which must be Sara. Mum would have a fit if she could see them smoking inside.
‘I remember I’d been sitting in the scullery, playing with my farm animals,’ starts Fiona.
‘Mum and Dad were in the kitchen. They’d been silent and I hadn’t realised they were there really until Mum said something like, “No one will ever guess. Why should they? They probably think it’s about time we had another anyway.
That we would try again for a boy.” Dad said that was true.
But then he said something along the lines of, “Is it the right thing to do? For both of them?”
‘Mum said there was no alternative, that two lives would be ruined. She said they needed to act now – I remember very clearly that she said “this will be the best for her”, presumably meaning you, Steph, and that you were Dad’s favourite and that you were so bright, and could go on to do anything.
Then you couldn’t do that in the situation you were in, and something about giving you a clean slate.
‘At the time, I thought at first they were talking about me.’ Fiona laughs.
‘I thought I was Dad’s favourite. But the rest of it didn’t make sense.
Then I think I knew it was you because Mum said she’d been so worried about you and now the worst had happened and they could protect you.
They were worried about people finding out later.
And I remember sitting there while they sat quietly and then I remember Mum saying she’d “make the arrangements”.
‘And then they went upstairs. I sat in the scullery knowing I’d heard something important but not understanding what it was about.
I guess my brain just filed it away with all the other useless information.
I went into the kitchen after they’d gone.
Both chairs were pushed back. The olive stones in the ramekin in the centre of the table were sprinkled with ash.
Two cigarette stubs in the bottom. Dad had left the rest of the cigarettes and the lighter on the side.
I remember picking them up and keeping them for you, Steph.
There was a part of me that perhaps always knew.
That had interpreted their conversation correctly but had denied it to myself for years without ever consciously thinking about it. But it all makes sense now.’
‘That’s where it was all decided then, I suppose,’ says Steph. ‘My whole life changed – Zoe’s whole life changed – by that one conversation. In this room, around this table. It doesn’t feel real.’
There’s a long silence. Zoe is about to go in, when Fiona starts speaking again. ‘I remember so many happy times, though, before everything. D’you remember all the times we sat on your roof smoking?’
Steph laughs. ‘God, yeah. I thought about that afterwards, when I was at boarding school. How bad I’d been getting you to smoke.’
‘I was ten when I had my first cigarette with you.’
‘Bloody hell,’ says Sara.
‘I remember the first time I found you smoking,’ says Fiona, ‘do you?’
‘When you almost locked me out on the roof?’
‘Yeah, I’d gone into your room and it was freezing, so I went to shut your window and then you shouted at me and then told me to join you.’ Fiona laughs. ‘I remember being terrified climbing out of the window, and creeping along the ledge to the side of the turret. We could see for miles.’
‘The views up there are still amazing. I went out on the roof the first night we came back two weeks ago. The night Mum died. The stars are so clear. Orion, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia. There was an old packet of tobacco in a plastic bag, stuffed under one of the tiles. It must have been there for more than thirty years.’
The three women laugh.
‘When you went missing, I used to go out there, y’know,’ says Fiona. ‘Sit in the same place and think about you and where you were. You’d left some cigarettes and some vodka up there. I drank it over the first few weeks after you left.’
‘Is that where you went?’ says Sara. ‘I knew you had a hiding place that I didn’t know about.’
They lapse into silence again. Zoe takes a step towards the door.
‘Look, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you and Zoe need some time alone, to talk things through. This has been massive news for me and Sara but it’s far more significant for you both,’ says Fiona.
There’s no response from Steph and Zoe’s heart contracts. Does she not want to talk to her?
But then Steph’s voice cuts across her thoughts.
‘I’d like that, but it has to come from Zoe.
I knocked on her door earlier and I know she was in there but she didn’t answer.
I don’t want her to think I’m trying to impose something on her, that I’m going to try to be her mother now.
I know that Mum will always be her mum.’
‘I don’t think she’ll think that. But you two need to start talking sooner rather than later. The longer you leave it, the more difficult it will be.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I was thinking that you should get out of here to talk. Give yourself some space. This place has too many memories for all of us. Maybe go into the village and go to the pub or the Indian or something.’ Fiona again. ‘Get away from Highdown.’
‘Yes, you’re right. Sometimes this house feels too much, like it’s crowding in on us,’ says Steph. ‘I’ll try again now.’
There’s a scrape of a chair against the brick.
Zoe steps back and runs into the drawing room, hiding behind the door as she hears Steph’s purposeful stride come out of the kitchen, cross the hall and go up the stairs.
Zoe lets herself out of the French doors and half runs down the path towards the woods.
She doesn’t feel ready to talk to Steph. Not yet.
Steph
1990
‘It’s for the best,’ said Mum, steepling her fingers together over her dress.