Black Rabbit Hall (33 page)

The sweetness of the comment makes her eyes fill with tears. ‘I don’t feel extraordinary.’

He pulls her closer. ‘Well, you are.’

She reaches out, prods a glowing log with the iron poker, showering sparks into the blue dark. ‘All this stuff. It’s bad, bad stuff. I don’t know what to do with it.’

‘It’s not your stuff. It’s not you.’

‘But it made me. It’s
in
me, Jon.’

‘And that’s why I’m grateful for it, every death, every screwed-up lie, all of it, Lorna.’

She turns from the fire to look at him. ‘You can’t mean that.’

‘Lorna, I love the woman you are, the woman you will become, the mother you will surely be. All I ever wanted was to know every bit of you, not to be shut out.’

She casts her eyes down. ‘I didn’t want that bit to – to be part of us. I wanted it to go away.’

‘It didn’t.’

‘No.’

‘But I shouldn’t have pushed for it. I’m sorry. It wasn’t my place to do that.’

She leans her head on his shoulder. ‘The funny thing is, in the end it was this house that pushed me into my past, released it. Not me. Not you.’

He gives the smoky room a respectful nod. ‘Quite some house.’

‘Better with you in it.’ She skims his knuckles lightly with her fingers, brings his hand to her lips. ‘I can’t believe you drove all the way down here.’

‘Raced like a nutter, done by a speed camera at least twice.’ He pauses. ‘Not very sensible, Jon.’

She smiles. ‘Not at all.’

He nuzzles her neck. ‘Secretly I quite enjoyed it.’

She laughs, and in the release of her laugh, she can hear other laughs, superimposed on one another, tiny echoes. She turns to glance quizzically at Jon, wondering if he has heard them too. But his expression hasn’t changed: his attention all on her. And yet it is as if the Alton children – Toby, Amber, Kitty, Barney – are in the room, a playful shimmer in the grey woodsmoke, a leap of blue in a golden flame, just for a strange, beautiful moment or two. Then they’re gone.

Eight days later, New York City

The diner is dark and caffeinated. Outside on the street, it is bright, windy, the city glittering beneath an absurdly blue sky. Lorna’s eyes cannot adjust. Neither can she.

New York. Greenwich Avenue. The centre of that inked circle on Black Rabbit Hall’s globe.

Jet lag mixed with a sleepless night – her mind turning over itself, wired by the distinctive sounds of a strange city – has given the morning a surreal blur. She knows it’s a cliché, but it’s hard not to believe she’s in a movie. That someone’s not going to run up and bark, ‘Cut!’ and send them home to Bethnal Green.

‘Sure you’re okay?’ Jon asks, shoving the laminated folded map into the back pocket of his jeans.

‘I don’t know.’ She’s unsure whether she’s about to start crying or laughing hysterically. Maybe she’ll just hail a cab back to JFK. ‘My hands are shaking. Actually, I’m a bit of a mess, Jon.’

‘You don’t look it,’ he says softly. His speckled hazel eyes are filled with light.

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘You look beautiful.’

She smiles then, nervously twisting her hair off her neck – how can it still be so hot in September? – and
letting it drop, satisfyingly heavy and glassy, thanks to the scalp-scorching blow-dry off Broadway. On Louise’s orders she has also treated herself to a mani and pedi (having natural nails in New York is the equivalent of walking Bond Street with hairy wildebeest legs apparently) and an expensive blue dress from a shop in the Meatpacking District. Her red heels – while admittedly not too great for walking – are her lucky shoes, the ones she was wearing when she first met Jon. Her red Dorothy shoes. Click your heels three times. ‘Ready,’ she says.

‘Okay. Just need to get my bearings.’ Jon flicks down his Ray-Bans, looks up the street, frowns. ‘About three blocks this way, I think.’

‘Perhaps we could use the map?’

‘I don’t need the map. New York is a logical city.’

What is it with men and maps?

He grins. ‘We’re not in Cornwall now. Don’t worry.’

But she can’t help it. The idea of being late, of anything going wrong …

That nothing has yet gone wrong is miraculous. She hasn’t been felled by food poisoning. She hasn’t erupted into terrible acne. The plane didn’t even fall out of the sky. She is here, in New York, standing improbably on a ‘sidewalk’, minutes away from the woman who gave birth to her. The thought makes her feel sick with fear and elation, and squeeze closer to Jon. Oh, how she loves this man. She thinks again of the long, magical night they spent in the inky drawing room of Black Rabbit Hall, time suspended in the drifting woodsmoke until dawn kissed the room awake and they stumbled up the stairs to bed.

On their return to London, the rushing city streets ruled
by the clang of Big Ben, everything immediately speeded up. Jon wanted to help Lorna. If she’d let him. What did Lorna want to do? She wanted, yes, she wanted to try to find her birth mother. No, she absolutely wouldn’t go to pieces. Jon at her side, she felt strong enough to take the risk, newly grounded, deep-rooted in her own life. Also, she didn’t think there was any real chance of finding Amber Alton.

It took a few clicks of a mouse. Lorna went to pieces. Jon had to send the email, make the call she was far too nervous to make, ask the question that Lorna didn’t dare voice, would she like to meet?, and when the answer was ‘Oh, my God, yes, yes! When?’ and the cup of tea slid from Lorna’s hand, Jon was the one who pulled it all together, squeezing the trip into these young September days before the new term started, blowing out his zillionaire clients in Bow, booking tickets in Business – she’d be better rested, it had been a hell of a week – and a room in a cramped but charming hotel on Washington Square, lightly kicking away what had always felt like immovable barriers. Life hadn’t set so hard in concrete, after all.

Don’t Walk.

Walk
.

A taxi honks. They’re taking too long to cross. It’s the red shoes. They turn into a side-street. She pulls on Jon’s hand. Stop. She wants to take it all in, just for a moment: the movie strips of New York lives through the blinds of the brownstone houses; the hot wind splicing through the subway gratings; the way the sheer, soaring scale of this city makes Black Rabbit Hall shrink to such a teeny point of insignificance.

Three blocks. Two. One. ‘Jon, I can’t do it. I really don’t think I can do this.’

Jon has already prepared for this. He has contingency plans. ‘Okay. No problem. Let’s go back to the hotel.’

‘But I can’t do that either!’

‘We’ll just stand here, then.’ Jon wraps an arm around her shoulders, hugs her to him. ‘Until you’re ready.’

‘The doll! Bugger. I’ve forgotten Kitty’s doll.’ Lorna scrabbles in her handbag.

As soon as Mrs Alton heard from Dill that Lorna was visiting New York – Lorna and Dill having stayed in regular contact – she dispatched her with the doll to London on the train. At Paddington station, Dill’s tiny hands pressed it furtively into Lorna’s, as if it were some rare smuggled jewel or stolen child, muttering something about Mrs Alton confiscating it many years before.

‘No. Yes. I’ve got it!’ She yanks the doll out of her bag, kisses it with relief. No passer-by raises so much as an eyebrow. She likes this city.

Jon holds her face in his hands. The sun is hot on their backs. ‘You see? You have everything you need.’

Does she? If it all falls apart – and it well might, she’s not silly – what is she left with? Jon, her family, some hard-won self-knowledge. This, she decides, is enough. ‘I know.’

‘Good. Because we’re here.’

‘You’re joking? Oh. My. God. You’re not joking, are you?’

Six steps. A smart black door. A row of three bells on a dulled brass plate. The second bell. Apartment two: ‘Amber and Lucian Shawcross.’

Amber, the day of Lorna’s wedding

It’s the clink of a pipe beneath the dressing-room floor that makes me physically jolt, a sound buried so deep inside I’d forgotten it was there, the acoustic version of looking at myself in the mirror and seeing not myself but, for a brief, startling moment that makes me burst out laughing, my mother.

Momma feels so extraordinarily close today, closer than she has in many years. I can’t help but picture her stepping in and out of different dresses, asking me over her freckled shoulder to zip her up. Barney, too, under her feet, laughing, Peter Pan, forever six. Toby watching us, slouched against the doorframe. Bonfire head. Left hand to my right.

I sit down on the dressing-room stool, overwhelmed with yearning for the rules of physics to be overturned, just for a few seconds – if it could happen anywhere it could surely happen here – and to see those deeply loved faces reflected back in the mirror, pink, full of life, as they were.

But only my own lived-in face appears in the mottled glass. I stare at it curiously, angling my chin up and down, obsessed with searching for her in my features. And, yes, there she is – in the upper lip, the cut of the jaw – my daughter. My. Daughter. Such words!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been less than two months: endless phone calls, two visits, one in New York, one in London, each one bulging, over-spilling, the retelling of entire lifetimes squeezed into the brace of days and differing time zones. We are mindful of overloading her. We have tried to be sensitive to our son Barney too, who is thrilled to have a sister but has been used to the kingship of being an only child. Easy does it, Lucian says, batting everyone else off: Aunt Bay, Kitty and her family, Matilda, our stunned friends, the artists at my gallery, Lucian’s dumbfounded colleagues at Columbia.

Every morning since Jon first called, I’ve shaken Lucian awake. Am I dreaming? Are you sure it’s real? Has she forgiven me for giving her away? My old fear – that the people I love will vanish or die – bubbling up again. He rubs his eyes, scrabbling for his glasses on the bedside table, and reassures me in the way only Lucian can.

After that little ritual I can allow myself the sweet agony of counting down the days, hours, minutes until I can see or speak to Lorna again, besotted by this wonderful young woman, of me, yet not me, the baby wholly loved, wholly lost, who has forged ahead bravely with her own life, sought out the answers she needed, survived Black Rabbit Hall, her spirit and humour undimmed. Oh dear, I’ve become quite silly with love.

Lorna. Not the name I’d have chosen. But it suits her, the down-to-earth honesty of it. I was too terrified to call her anything but ‘Baby’ in case this made me love her too much – futile, I did anyway – because I always knew that I couldn’t keep her. After she was taken away – tugged from my arms as I screamed, Caroline, mouth like a paper cut,
telling me not to be selfish, do what was best for the child, the hurried flight of the doctor’s feet down the stairs – I returned to London, a raw, skinned thing. I told only Matilda – no one else knew, my incarceration explained by illness – and on those precious nights I slept top to tail in Matilda’s bed, we’d spend hours talking about Baby, where she was, who she’d become, red-haired like me or dark like Lucian. A few months later, my father, desperate to lift me out of my listless, tearful gloom, finally agreed to let me live with Aunt Bay and go to school in New York for a while, neither of us realizing it would turn into forever. I remember standing at the airport, brown leather suitcase at my feet, Matilda leaning over, glasses askew, whispering in my ear, ‘One day, Baby will come and find you, Amber. She will. Swear.’ I didn’t believe her.

I decided on the plane, staring down at the roof of white clouds, that I would pretend the baby had died, along with the others. That this was the only way I’d ever survive.

Of course, I could never stop wondering, looking at the calendar, thinking, She’s three, or First grade, or Sixteen, today. And I did survive. Life is full and busy. New York is crammed with shrinks, work, yoga and art. There were wounds I didn’t want to heal – to recover was to forget, and I wanted never to forget – but I had a duty to our Barney not to be a basket case.

A knock on the door. ‘Party’s starting, honey.’ Lucian’s voice breaks my thoughts. ‘Do you think you might be ready before dawn?’

‘Almost done.’ I lean towards the mirror, tongue scouting my front teeth for rogue bits of Chanel lipstick, twisting around to check the lines of the dress, feeling a wave of
insecurity. Is the long green dress too much? Too green? Will Lorna like it? It’s not very mother-of-the-bride. But what is the dress code for long-lost birth mother at a wedding in Cornwall during an unseasonably warm autumn? I have absolutely no idea.

‘Barney’s already gone down, attached himself to the prettiest girl in the room as usual.’ Lucian moves from the left-angled wing of the mirror to the flat centre. He slings his arms around my waist, kisses my bare shoulder, smiling at our reflection from beneath his mop of salt and pepper hair.

I wonder what he sees. The middle-aged married couple we are? Or the teenagers we once were? All I know is that when I look at him, I don’t see grey hairs or a softening jaw but Lucian as he was the day we were reunited: snake-hipped, floppy-haired, every inch the bright young scholar pacing nervously beneath the Bridge of Sighs in the honeyed Oxford sunshine, unaware I was watching him a few feet away, too scared to leave the shadows of a narrow cobbled alleyway. It was almost two years since I’d seen Lucian, but he still sucked the breath right out of me.

His letter had dropped into Aunt Bay’s mailbox only days before, thrillingly Queen-stamped, faintly scented with the familiar inky smell of his fingers. He wrote of how his mother had confessed her lie (proving to me what I had always felt to be true), the baby he was never told about, all I’d suffered alone. Could I ever, ever forgive him? Could we meet? That he knew about the baby and still wanted to see me –- Caroline had said I’d ruin his life if I ever told him, that he’d hate me for ever – was such a relief, such a shock, that I sank to the floor and wept. Aunt Bay
sprang into action, throwing my prettiest, shortest dresses into a bag, bundling me into a cab for the airport, instructing me to yell, ‘Oxford, please!’ at the other end.

Stepping from the shadows of that narrow alleyway, I had no idea what would happen next. So much time had passed. I felt weary and battle-scarred, no longer the fresh-faced girl he’d loved. But when Lucian looked up a shaft of sunlight hit the jet glitter-longing in his eyes, and I knew. I just knew that nothing would part us again. Of course, I didn’t know how difficult it would be to stay together either, to move from that sweet, sweet kiss to a marriage of twenty-odd years. I’m not sure anyone does.

‘Great dress.’

I smile at him in the mirror, glad to be pulled out of my thoughts. ‘Not too much?’

‘In a good way.’

‘Well, too late to change now. Also, I’ve lost my bag. Have you seen my gold one?’

He puts on his black-framed glasses, looks around the room.

We both spot it at the same time hanging from … the wardrobe door.

‘Oh, my goodness.’ The wooden paws. The fur-muffled cries. The joy. The horror. All that came after. It is here still.

Lucian reaches for my hand.

Another moment passes. Two. We bow our heads, remember those we’ve lost. Then Lucian picks the handbag off the door and, holding hands a little tighter now, we head downstairs to the party.

After a couple of hours, I take refuge at the edge of the woods close to the rabbit holes – still busy, I see. The effusive greetings and hugs of strangers – ‘Wow, you look just like Lorna!’; ‘Here, Lil, meet Amber Shawcross, yes,
that
Amber Shawcross, all the way from New York’ – are touching but exhausting.

Also, I want to spend some time in the company of my own memories. They are in vibrant form this evening. Sitting on this mossy log – just the feel of the velvety green moss peels back decades – my childhood seems more vivid than New York last week. And I can still see them all so clearly. Us, as we were: Momma and Daddy, giggling on the terrace at some unknowable grown-up joke; Kitty determinedly bouncing her toy pram down the stone steps; Barney running across the lawn, slowworm cupped in his hands; Toby beckoning at the edge of the woods, ‘Amber, come, look …’

But I cannot keep any of my dear ghosts with me long: the past is soon beaten back by the giddy vitality of the present. Black Rabbit Hall has never looked cheerier or more alive, bathed in the warmth of this wonderful Indian summer, festooned with Chinese lanterns, fairy lights, bunting and balloons, the low autumn light winking in its freshly polished windows. Children roll down its sloped lawns. Beautiful young people dance on the terrace, long-legged girls circling my delighted son, taking turns to twirl from his hand. Trays of tiny triangular crab sandwiches and pasties wobble on the palms of teenage locals, shoulder-height through the crowds. (‘Too much booze, too little food,’ Lucian whispered in my ear approvingly. ‘Like all the best weddings.’)

I take it all in and marvel at the passing figure of Dill, who has grown into such a facsimile of Peggy that I quite forgot myself and rushed up to hug her on first sighting. Last time I saw her she was the size of a kitten: in those bittersweet days after Lorna was born, Peggy would steal into my room with a tin of cake and we’d sit on my bed trying to suckle our babies.

Lorna says it was her lovely sister Louise and Dill who made this wedding happen, brought it miraculously together at the very last minute. They have both been rushing about for hours, it seems, good-naturedly rescuing old aunts lost in the towers, drunk teenagers from the woods, all the while trailed by a flume of excitable children and the one-boy carnival that is Alf, who keeps making Lucian play the
Toy Story
tune on the grand piano.

Lorna’s got a great family: loving, close, blessedly normal, everything I hoped. If Sheila were alive I’d thank her. Lorna says their relationship was never a particularly easy one, but Sheila clearly did something right and for this I must be eternally grateful. And Doug is great. I like Doug a lot. So does Lucian. The two of them – unlikely pair that they are, Doug in a baby blue suit and pink tie, Lucian in his crumpled black Prada – have been sitting on a hay bale for the last hour, laughing, drinking cider and smoking cigarettes, even though they had both given up years ago. Lorna, I can see, is discreetly watching them too, checking how they’re getting on.

All the while, Jon’s extended family – glamour! noise! sequins! – move through the estate like a shoal of exotic fish. They talk at a million miles an hour in an accent that, after all my years abroad, I struggle to pin down. At the
helm of it all is Lorna’s mother-in-law, Lorraine, a woman who is somehow always in the field of vision, wearing a leopard-print hat the size of a satellite dish. But even that is dwarfed by Aunt Bay’s headpiece, a giant plume of peacock feathers, their fluffy petrol tips shaking above the heads of the crowd as she totters along on Kitty’s arm, telling anyone who will listen about her dear late sister, Nancy, who adored a party and cut such a dash in green. Kitty laughs, happy to let Bay take centre stage. Her joy comes from showing her own four children – all Americans, Kitty having joined me in New York aged sixteen, marrying a dear friend of mine and settling in Momma’s Maine – that the wild old house she’s told them stories about actually exists. And, no, seriously, their cell phones won’t work.

I cannot help but wonder what Caroline would make of it all. Would she be happy? Or was she incapable of joy? I don’t think we’ll ever know. Thankfully, she died in a hospice in Truro last month, gripping Lucian’s hand. He somehow found it in his heart to forgive her at the very end. I never will. Like the rest of the universe, I heaved a sigh of relief when she died and asked God what had taken Him so damn long.

‘Anything I can get you?’ I look up and see Jon, tall and handsome in a navy suit, smiling shyly. ‘Another drink?’

‘No, I’m good, thank you.’ I pat the space on the log next to me. ‘I’m being looked after exceptionally well. It’s a lovely wedding, Jon.’

He sits down beside me, big boxy knees pulling at the fabric of his trousers. ‘A bit weird to be back?’

I laugh. ‘A little.’

‘Lorna was worried it might stir too much stuff up.’

‘Ah, don’t worry. Black Rabbit Hall lives up here anyway.’ I tap my head. ‘And, you know, I’m pleased it does, I really am.’

He stares down at his huge feet, radiating the sweet, slightly baffled air that grooms have on their wedding day, that Lucian had in City Hall all those years ago. Nice shoes, I notice. Conker-brown Italian brogues, slightly old-fashioned. Lorna’s influence, I suspect. I wish my teachers at school had been half so stylish.

His knee starts to jiggle. ‘Mrs –’

‘Amber, please!’

‘Sorry.’ He laughs nervously, knee jiggling faster, before blurting out, ‘I spoke to Toby.’

I freeze. ‘What? What did you just say?’

‘Your brother Toby called me,’ he says, more softly now, letting the words sink in.

The ground really does fly from my feet. I steady myself with a hand on the log. ‘You
spoke
to Toby on the phone? How … Shit. I’m sorry. Forgive me … How on earth …’

‘I sent him a wedding invitation, along with a letter explaining who we were, my details if he wanted to get in touch. I didn’t hear back from him, didn’t think I ever would, to be honest, but as I was getting out of the shower this morning, mind on other things, obviously, a man called, husky voice, saying it was Toby Alton and he had to know, was this really an invitation to the wedding of Amber’s long-lost daughter? He just couldn’t believe it. But he sounded so happy when I said that it most definitely was.’

My eyes fill. And I’m flung right back to that feverish
night in London when I couldn’t sleep. I’d sat up in bed and scribbled a letter to Toby at his remote boarding school – ‘The Prison’, he called it – confiding in him about the baby. I’d kept the secret from him for more than a year and could simply hold it in no longer. A week later I got a simple note right back, one I’ve always treasured: ‘I know. I dreamed about her. Be strong, sis. Love, T.’