Chapter Nineteen #2
So, partly because she’s asked me to, but mainly because I need to know, I do try.
And my feet do know the way.
They take me the length of the graveyard, around the church, to an overgrown patch of grass where two simple headstones stand crookedly side by side, nestled beneath the latticed branches of an apple tree. The stones are weathered, coated in moss, but their simple inscriptions are still visible.
Catherine Winterton, reads one. b. 1900 d. 1933
Bernadette Winterton, reads the other. b.1860 d. 1933
I’ve seen pictures of both headstones before.
Just as with Bramble Lane, they’ve featured in their fair share of social media posts.
I’ve never really felt much, looking at those posts.
Not like I feel now, shivering in this cemetery on this cold, frozen day, certain, right in the core of my pounding heart, that I do know this place.
I have been here before.
Mum’s turned unnaturally still beside me, staring at the headstones too.
‘Did you have any idea?’ I ask her, the words sticking in my throat. ‘Suspect … ?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘No. I was worried you were using Iris to run away again, but no more than that.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m certain. My god … I never, ever, for a moment, entertained the possibility that anything you’ve told me about this morning might be waiting for you here.
Not in my wildest dreams.’ She shakes her head.
‘I didn’t want you to come back because this was such an unhappy place for you, and you’ve been unhappy enough.
But I was hoping you’d get through it, be too busy to remember too much … ’
‘But I don’t remember anything about me. Only Iris.’
‘Oh, Claude … ’
‘Do you believe me?’ I ask, discovering as I do how much I need her to.
For it to not only be me who does.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘This is well above my pay grade. But … oh … god … ’ Tipping her head back, she stares at the sky. ‘I actually don’t know if I can say this … ’
‘Say what?’
Silence.
‘Mum, come on … ’
‘All right.’ She scrunches her hands into balls. ‘All right.’ She pulls in a quick breath, obviously bracing herself.
I’m still trying to work out what she could possibly be finding so hard to get out, when …
‘I think you need to talk to Eleanor Norland,’ she says.
I frown.
The name means nothing to me.
‘Who’s Eleanor Norland?’ I ask.
‘She lives over there,’ says Mum, gesturing at the Georgian houses on the green. ‘She’s retired now, has been for years, but she was a psychiatrist. Your nan took you to her.’
‘I don’t remember … ’
‘Yes,’ she says, nodding grimly. ‘You do. She used to give you those Rich Tea Biscuits. You couldn’t manage her name, so you called her Ellen. Mrs Ellen.’
I could be angry.
I could be bloody furious.
I am, at first.
‘Have you heard of the term gaslighting?’ I demand of Mum, who my whole life through has sworn blind to me that Mrs Ellen never existed.
‘I haven’t been gaslighting you,’ she insists. ‘I’ve been trying to protect you.’
‘From what?’
‘Too much … ’
‘What, though?’
‘If you’ll let me speak, I’ll tell you.’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Fine. Go ahead, please.’
And she does go ahead.
Not in the cemetery.
‘I don’t want to do this here,’ she says. ‘Let’s head back to the house.’
So, we head back to the house, crossing the green, then the fields, and as we walk, she explains herself, and gradually my anger seeps from me.
Because although I still hate that she’s lied to me, I do understand her reasons.
They’re good reasons.
Devastating, but borne of love.
And to my disbelief, they’re all to do with my father.
She has talked to me about him before. Not much. She’s always claimed she didn’t know enough about him herself.
‘He wasn’t the type who could allow anyone to know him well,’ she once told me. ‘That was his shield. His superpower. He needed it, the way he grew up.’
His mother had died not long after having him, and his father was disinterested, so he spent all of his childhood in care. He started at UCL the same year Mum did, studying philosophy too. The two of them met at a party, and Mum was apparently like a moth to a flame when he singled her out.
‘He was an extremely troubled, extremely beautiful young man,’ she said. ‘I wanted to fix him, of course. But he didn’t want to be fixed. I doubt he believed he could be.’
She fell pregnant with me quickly, he panicked, dropped out of his course, packed his bags and left London without a word to Mum of where he was going, only to show up at Nan and Grandad’s house the afternoon I was born, with a teddy bear that I’ve still got, and pictured myself one day giving to a child of mine.
‘I have no idea how he knew you’d come,’ Mum’s said. ‘I was stunned. And really just so angry. But I let him hold you, and he was … spellbound. He thought you were absolutely perfect.’
Not so perfect however that he stuck around.
Instead, he vanished again, that same day, after my grandad came home from work and tore a strip off him.
He couldn’t cope with hostility, Mum says.
He’d grown up around too much of it. None of us ever saw him again, this damaged, troubled, untouchable father of mine.
He died not long after. Mum’s never been able to find out how.
Or so I thought.
But, as Mum and I return to Doverley, she confesses that there are things she hasn’t told me about my father.
And the last time I saw him was not the day I was born.
‘He used to telephone the house on your birthdays,’ she says, as we reach the fields. ‘He was always desperate to hear how you were.’
‘What did you tell him?’ I ask, squinting at the horizon. For the first time in days, there are clouds there. The rain everyone’s relying on for Emma’s final scene looks to be on its way, and it sends a rivulet of foreboding trickling through me. ‘That I wasn’t straightforward?’
‘Not just that,’ she says. ‘I told him everything about you. And that he should come and see you for himself. But he wouldn’t. I think he was afraid to let you know him. I suspect he … well … felt, somehow, that his time was running out.’
I frown. ‘Was he sick?’
‘Not so far as I was aware, no.’
I stop, confused. ‘Then … ?’
‘He was like you, Claude.’ She turns to me, her face pained.
‘Not the same. He never spoke of having anyone else’s memories.
Not to me, anyway. But he believed, utterly, that these lives of ours keep rolling around on constant repeat.
Layers of existence that have just the slightest variations. ’ She eyes me. ‘Sound familiar?’
Slowly, I nod, my mind filling and spinning with the dreams I had when I arrived at Doverley, of Nick and me acting out Iris and Robbie’s reunion all those different ways.
Also, what Imogen told me of Tim’s own confusion over where it happened.
He was completely convinced by whatever account he was giving me, she said, even if he’d told me something totally different the week before.
And Tim’s unforgettable words about the war.
It’s always happening. Always.
Mum talks on, describing how my father pictured this life we’re in as one of infinite others playing out in a boundless theatre of time: stages upon stages of existence, stacked in a dimensionless tower.
‘Your dad’s theory was that most of us never experience anything beyond the limits of our own stage,’ she says.
‘Some might get glimpses. A strange dream maybe, or murmuring of déjà vu, but no more than that.’ She sighs.
‘He believed he was different, of course. That his other stages helped him. Guided him.’
‘And did you believe him?’ I ask, looking up and around us, the hairs on the back of my neck rising as I picture it, this theatre of time: all our pasts, and presents, and tomorrows sharing this space, our earth and air, unfolding over and over and over.
The idea makes such perfect, instant sense to me.
It really is like I’ve had it all explained to me before.
‘I was captivated by him,’ says Mum. ‘At first. Then I got scared. He never seemed to be entirely here, was always at least half somewhere else.’ Briefly, she closes her eyes.
‘It absolutely petrified me when you seemed to be starting down the same track. Your nan was straight on it, took you off to Eleanor. God knows how she and Dad afforded the fees, but you went every fortnight. Ate your biscuits. Chatted away. You loved going.’ She gives a forlorn shrug.
‘I think it was because she was so calm with you, where the rest of us just panicked. God –’ she expels a choked sound – ‘it’s so damn easy to deal with other people’s children, and so bloody hard when it’s your own. ’
‘What about my dad?’ I ask. ‘Did he ever get help?’
‘I doubt it. He really did view it all as a gift. He never claimed to be able to predict the future, certainly not in any precise way, but he depended on the instincts he said came to him, for where he should be, what he should do. He said that was how he knew to come to the house the day you were born, and I didn’t believe him.
Who would believe a thing like that? But …
Oh … ’ Her eyes brim. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this.
’ Wretchedly, she stares at me. ‘I never wanted to tell you … ’
‘Tell me what?’ I ask, although I don’t know why.
I don’t think I want to know.
‘That he was with you,’ Mum says. ‘In the car.’
‘What car?’ I ask, and again, I’m not sure why I do.
Because I really don’t want to know.
But I’ve already realised.
My plummeting heart has too.
‘You mean the crash,’ I say, and my voice no longer sounds like mine.
Miserably, she nods.
‘Was that when he died?’ I ask.
‘It was. I’m … beyond … sorry. I don’t know why he was there, it’s taunted me for twenty-nine years, and it will taunt me until the day I die. But he was lying across you when that tractor driver got to you. A branch had come through the windscreen.’ Her tears spill free. ‘He stopped it … ’
Mutely, I stare.
I open my mouth to speak.
Then I close it again.
I can’t speak.
Can’t absorb this.