Cuckoo Song (4 page)

Out in the sunshine, waiting while Father cranked the car, Triss kept her hands stuffed deep in her pockets so nobody would see them shaking.

She was surrounded by love on all sides, and she had never felt so utterly alone. She could tell nobody what had just happened. Indeed, the longer she stayed silent, the harder it was to speak.
And what could she have said anyway?

Angelina moved and spoke and screamed. And I killed her.

That didn’t happen that didn’t happen that didn’t happen . . .

But if it didn’t . . . then it was all in my head. Which means there’s something wrong with me. It means I’m really, badly ill.

Ordinary ill was fine, comforting even. But this was the wrong kind of ill. She didn’t want to be ill in her mind. Even thinking about it was like gazing down into dark water with no
bottom. If she ran to her parents with a sick brain, they would not react with kindness and comics and new pills and ‘don’t overstrain yourself till you’re stronger’. They
would be solemn and worried and let doctors tell them what to do.
I don’t want to be taken away and hypnotized or have holes drilled in my head . . .

So Triss stood in silence by the car, hunched in the golden light of the morning, and felt like a monster. Every time her parents went into the house to retrieve one last thing, she tensed.
Please don’t look in the log basket. Please let’s go, let’s just go . . .

She jumped out of her skin when a loud screaming became audible inside the house.

‘I’ve found her!’ It was her father’s voice, sounding strained and at his temper’s edge. Triss’s heart lurched. But it was not Angelina that her father
carried out into the daylight. It was Pen, sobbing, roaring and doing her best to stamp her heels into his kneecaps. ‘She tried to hide in the attic.’

‘I’m not coming!’ It was hard to make out Pen’s words. Her tantrums were seldom a matter of pouting and foot-stamping. Instead she screamed herself hoarse, a few
half-comprehensible words lost in the tornado of her rage. ‘. . . see she’s lying . . . can’t make me sit with her . . . hate you all!’

Triss slipped into the back seat through one door, and Pen was bundled in next to her through the opposite door. Once there, Pen curled herself into a tight, hostile ball, flinched up against
the door so as to be as far from Triss as possible.

She thinks I’m pretending to be ill
, thought Triss limply.
Pretending, so I can get everybody’s attention. The attention that
she
wants. I wish she was
right.
Triss’s father climbed into the driver’s seat, and pressed the starter motor button. There was a whine, then the main engine chuckled and purred. At last, at long last, they
were on their way.

The family car was a mint-green Sunbeam with a wet-leaf glossiness, a purr of an engine and headlights that looked like round, expectant eyes. The day was bright, so the hood was pulled down,
leaving the whole family exposed to sun and sky. With a relief almost painful, Triss saw the cottage recede behind them, and then they were buzzing down lane after lane at a giddy thirty miles an
hour. Triss’s hair whipped around her face, and as the scene of her crime receded behind her the knots in her stomach started to loosen. Perhaps illnesses could be left behind, just like
small, badly concealed china corpses.

Hills reared under them like bad-tempered beach donkeys, and the road twisted as if trying to throw them. Drystone walls wriggled, rose and fell on either side. Then a white-painted sign tore
past. Oxford that way, 85 miles, Ellchester this way, 20 miles.

Triss leaned her cheek against the cool wooden panelling inside the car door, clinging to the sense of familiarity.

I’m safe. I’m going home to Ellchester.

The first thing anybody noticed on the approach to Ellchester was the Three Maidens.

The most impressive of the trio of bridges spanned the width of the Ell estuary in one long elegant stride, its smooth arc and sandy-gold paint visible for miles against the glittering blue of
the water. The second bridge cut a lofty line across and over the city itself, supported by three of Ellchester’s eight hills, one of which was now capped with a pyramid-shaped building in
dull pink stone, the city’s soon-to-be-completed railway station. The last stretched out to join the rising slope of the valley on the other side. Between them, they held aloft the recently
constructed railway line.

Everyone agreed that before the Three Maidens were built, Ellchester had been ‘in a decline’, which seemed to mean a slow, sorry sort of collapse like a sandcastle in the rain.

Then Piers Crescent had come forward with his plans for the Three Maidens, and shown that, in spite of the intervening estuary and awkward hills, the railway could be brought to Ellchester.
Everybody called the bridges ‘a miracle of engineering’. They had changed everything and brought money to the city, and now his was one of the best-known and most popular names in
Ellchester.

Triss never saw the Three Maidens hove into view without feeling a surge of pride. As the Sunbeam turned on to the broad highway that ran alongside the gleaming expanse of the Ell towards the
hunchbacked, grey-tiled mass of Ellchester, she craned forward until she could see the river-bridge’s arch. Today, however, the surge of warmth was followed by a bitter aftertaste, as she
remembered the overheard conversation and the newspaper article. If somebody
was
trying to frighten her father, did it have anything to do with his work?

Triss’s father did not steer into the busy, hillocky heart of Ellchester, with its maze of bridges and zigzag steps. Instead he drove into the quieter districts, where grand three-storey
houses were arranged in squares, each with a little park in the centre. The Sunbeam pulled up in one such square in front of one such house, and on the back seat Triss let out her breath slowly.
Home.

As she followed the rest of her family through the front door Triss felt her heart sink. She had expected everything to click back into place once she was home. The crowded hatstand, the waxed
parquet floor and the twilight-yellow Chinese-style wallpaper were familiar, or felt as if they should be, but the click did not come.

‘Oh, now, who did that?’ Triss’s mother pointed at at some little flakes of earth on the smooth, clean floor. ‘Which one of you forgot to brush their feet?
Pen?’

‘Why are you looking at me?’ exploded Pen. Her glance of incandescent rage, however, was darted at Triss, not her mother. ‘Why does everybody always think it’s me?’
She thundered away up the stairs and a door could be heard slamming with shattering force.

Their mother sighed. ‘Because it always is, Pen,’ she muttered wearily, pinching at the bridge of her nose.

‘Margaret will take care of the floors when she comes in tomorrow,’ said her husband, placing a reassuring hand on his wife’s shoulder. Margaret was the ‘woman who
did’ for the Crescents, coming in to clean for a few hours each morning.

‘Oh – I must warn Margaret that we have returned early,’ their mother said with an exhausted air. ‘And find Cook and tell her that we are home after all and will need
her. I had told her that she could take a few days off while we were away – if she has gone to see her sister in Chesterfield, I do not know
what
we will do. I must make sure that
Donovan girl has moved out, and send letters to the recruitment agency, asking them for another governess. And if I do not send word to the butcher and baker, there will be no deliveries
tomorrow.’

Triss’s recollections stirred. The ‘Donovan girl’ was Miss Donovan, the Crescent daughters’ last governess, who had just been turned away for being ‘flighty’.
Triss’s mother had given previous governesses notice for ‘dumb insolence’, for being ‘too confident’ or for taking the girls out to museums or parks where Triss might
catch a chill. Triss no longer bothered much with the governesses. If she let herself like them, or care about their lessons, it was a wrench when they left.

‘Celeste,’ Triss’s father murmured in a quiet and deliberately even voice, ‘perhaps first of all you could look to see whether any new letters arrived for us while we
were away.’

Triss’s mother cast a puzzled look towards the empty basket where the family’s post was always kept, and then realization seemed to dawn in her spring-blue eyes. She wet her lips,
then turned to Triss with a warm, soft smile.

‘Darling, why don’t you run upstairs, unpack your things and then lie down for a while?’

The very picture of meekness, Triss nodded and headed up the stairs. As she stepped out into the landing and passed out of her parents’ view, however, she halted. It was happening again. A
conversation was waiting to be had behind her back.

Chewing her lip, she opened the nearest door and then closed it again, so that it would sound as if she had withdrawn into her room. Leaning against the wall she waited, and sure enough was soon
rewarded with the sound of voices.

‘Piers, do you mean
those
letters? I thought we agreed not to read anything else sent by that man—’

‘I know, but right now we need to understand whether he was the one that attacked Triss. If he
is
trying to bully me, then perhaps there will be a letter from the man himself,
instead of the usual. If he has written to us with demands or threats, at least then we will know.’

Hearing steps on the stairs, Triss turned to flee, and felt panic creeping into her soul like cold water into her socks.

Which room is mine?

There was no time to lose, however. The steps were reaching the head of the stairs. Triss jerked open the nearest door and slipped within, closing it quickly but quietly behind her.

The room beyond was dim, illuminated only by the little sunlight soaking through the thick amber curtains. The air smelt tired, like old clothes packed away for a special occasion that had never
come.

Triss held her breath and pressed her ear to the door. Outside she could hear footsteps striding along the landing, heavy steps that she easily identified as belonging to her father. Soon she
could hear the muffled sounds of him talking in the study, using his loud, careful telephone voice. The telephone was a relatively recent addition to the house, and still jarred with its newness
and brashly insistent bell. Sometimes it seemed that Triss’s father felt he had to overbear it with force of personality, in case it had a mind to take over the house.

Triss felt a slow wash of relief.
He didn’t hear me. But where am I? This isn’t my room. This is too big to be my room.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, and with a wash of alarm she realized how badly she had mistaken her way.

Oh no – not here! I’m not supposed to be here!

She knew the room now, of course. Nothing had changed since she had last seen it. Nothing had been moved.

The bed was made, with clean sheets. The dinted surface of the desk had been dusted and polished. A telescope moped in a corner, its tripod folded in like the legs of a dead crane fly. The top
shelf held books on Arctic exploration, astronomy and fighter planes, with a cluster of peeling green-and-yellow detective novels at the end. On the bottom shelf a series of photographs had been
carefully arranged edge to edge. As her eye glided across, boy became youth became man, the last photo showing him in a military uniform, his face wearing the slightly tense expression of one who
is waiting his moment to ask something very important.

Sebastian.

Occasionally Triss had been brought in to see this room, as if it was a sick relative. Entering without permission, on the other hand, would be the worst kind of trespass, almost a
blasphemy.

Triss knew she should leave at once, but found herself overwhelmed by a guilty fascination. She moved further into the room.

The bedroom had a churchy feel. You could tell that this was a sacred place full of rules you might break. Sebastian was a lot like church, with everyone solemnly knowing what they were meant to
feel and when.

We will now consider mercy. We will now pity the poor. We will now forgive our enemies.

We all loved Sebastian very much. We are all very sad he has gone. We all remember him daily.

But do I?
Triss ran a curious fingertip over the glass of the uniformed photo. It left no smudge of dust on her finger.
Do I love him? Am I sad? Do I remember him?

Triss did have a strong but unfocused sense that everything had once been better, and that everyone had once been happier. Sebastian was tied in her mind to that betterness and happiness.

She remembered laughing. Sebastian had said the sort of things nobody else dared say, and it had made her laugh.

Now, however, Sebastian was their other, special sibling, the one who needed his possessions carried for him even more than she did. The one that said nothing during family discussions, but
whose absence left eddies and whorls in what other people said.

If Triss were found here, even
she
would be in trouble. She might have special privileges for loitering near death’s door, but Sebastian had passed through it and so outranked
her.

The atmosphere was so overpowering that it took Triss a second to realize that she could now hear her mother’s distinctive, rapid step climbing the stairs. The landing outside creaked, and
then to her horror Triss saw the doorknob turn.

Mother’s coming in here!

There was only one place to hide. Triss dropped to the floor and scrambled under the bed even as the door opened.

I don’t do things like this
, Triss thought helplessly as she watched her mother’s silk-stockinged ankles and buckled shoes come into view.
I don’t sneak into
places and hide and spy.
And yet she stayed still as a mouse and watched as her mother lit the gas, seated herself at the desk and unlocked the drawer.

Peering from under the tasselled counterpane, Triss could see her mother carefully pull the desk drawer open a mere half an inch. Immediately the crack bristled with paper corners, as if a host
of envelopes had been crammed in by force and were in a hurry to burst out. Her mother’s mouth tightened, and her hand made a nervous motion as if the envelopes were hot and she was afraid to
touch them. Then she clenched her jaw, tweaked out one envelope and ripped it open.