Kind of Cruel (51 page)

‘When?’ Simon asks me.

This is the same chair I was sitting in on Boxing Day 2003, when Jo said that there was nothing she wasn’t telling us, nothing at all. The woman called Liv hands me a drink I don’t remember asking for. I take a sip. Brandy. ‘Last Wednesday,’ I say. A week and two days ago. Simon can work out the date.

‘Talk me through it,’ he says.

‘I was at Jo’s. We go every Wednesday, me and the girls.’ I may have said this already, or I might only have thought about saying it. ‘I’d decided that morning that I had to do something about my not sleeping. Enough people had recommended hypnosis, I thought I’d give it a go. Jo agreed it was a good idea. I used her laptop to do a search.’

‘A search for . . . ?’ Simon’s pen hovers over his open notebook.

‘Hypnotherapists in the Culver Valley. Ginny was the only one with a Great Holling address. The others were all in worse places. I thought I’d give myself the incentive of going somewhere nice.’

‘Did you mention this aspect of your thinking to Jo?’ asks Simon.

‘She asked me how I could choose when I knew nothing about any of them, and I said, “The one with the best address is bound to be the best.” I didn’t really think that . . .’

‘Then why say it?’

Answering isn’t a problem. Or it shouldn’t be. I know the answer. The problem is that I know it too well; it’s so woven into my consciousness that I’ve never needed to put it into words. I am playing a strange parlour game in this room where everyone congregated seven years ago for Luke’s Christmas quiz. Everyone but me and William, who were looking for the key to the study.

Do William and Barney know their parents own this house? Have Jo and Neil trained their sons to lie, or are William and Barney lied to like the rest of us? Is the study kept locked against them too? Have they seen the family photographs on the bookshelves?

‘Amber,’ Simon says. ‘Why lie to Jo about your reason for choosing Ginny?’

‘I suppose I was nervous. About the prospect of going to any kind of therapist for the first time, being hypnotised. I hoped I could make it a slightly more pleasant experience by making sure I went to a nice place. It was probably silly of me to think I could make any kind of treat out of it . . .’

‘The sort of hope Jo would trample all over,’ Simon guesses correctly.

I nod. ‘I still got the ticking-off: ridiculous, irresponsible basis for choosing a therapist, all that.’

‘But you were protected. She was attacking a false opinion you’d offered up as a shield.’

Liv opens her mouth to say something; Charlie, sitting beside her on the sofa, taps her with the back of her hand. I recognise this way of telling someone you take entirely for granted to shut up, even though I don’t have a sister.

What is Charlie’s sister doing here? What are any of us doing here?

‘I pretended to let Jo persuade me,’ I tell Simon. ‘I showed her the list of hypnotherapists, asked her which I should choose. She picked one in Rawndesley, near her. She lost interest as soon as she thought she’d got her way, went back to cooking. There was . . .’ My throat closes on my words. I try again. ‘There was a piece of paper next to me, next to the computer. A blank sheet of lined paper, or so I thought. It was creased, it just looked like scrap. It didn’t occur to me that there might be something written on the other side. I wrote Ginny’s details on it, put it in my handbag. Next day I rang Ginny from work, made an appointment. I don’t remember noticing the words written on the back, but I suppose I must have.’

‘We don’t register what we see if we don’t think it’s important,’ says Charlie. ‘Ginny’s address has been lying in my car’s footwell since Tuesday evening. It kept catching my eye without catching my attention. It didn’t occur to me until just now that I never actually wrote it down. Or that it was written on blue-lined paper.’

‘You were right,’ Simon tells me. ‘There was a link between Little Orchard and that piece of paper. Jo was the link. The page came from Jo’s house. This place
is
Jo’s house, her other house. If Ginny’s right, if you knew on some subliminal level . . .’

‘Kirsty.’ As I hear myself say it, I know on every level that what I’m about to say is true.

‘What about her?’ Simon asks.

‘She isn’t in any of the photographs. In the study. Everybody else is in more than one. Even me.’

‘Are you sure?’

I’m already ahead of him, too far ahead to answer. Jo wouldn’t exclude her sister from the display by accident. She’ll have chosen those pictures carefully.

‘I was going to ask about Kirsty,’ Charlie says. ‘The mother, Jo’s and Kirsty’s mother, what’s her name?’

‘Hilary,’ Simon tells her.

‘You mentioned Jo and Ritchie when you were talking about Hilary’s will, but not Kirsty. Doesn’t she get left anything?’

‘I don’t know,’ Simon says impatiently. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, but does nothing with it. ‘She’s as helpless as a baby. She doesn’t care about money, doesn’t even know what it is.’

Charlie laughed. ‘Simon, she might not be hankering after a Ferrari, but she’s going to need a lot spending on her care, isn’t she? Full-time carers, residential homes – I don’t know exactly what, but I’m pretty sure that the more disabled you are, the more expensive it gets. Hilary must have thought of that and made some provision for Kirsty in her will.’

I didn’t think of it.

Simon stares at her. Keeps on staring, as if he’s in a trance.

Charlie tries again. ‘Wasn’t Kirsty mentioned
at all
in the discussion about Hilary’s will?’

‘Breast cancer,’ Simon says quietly.

‘That can’t be the answer to my question. Have another go.’

Liv and I might as well not be here. The two of them have sealed themselves into their own private universe.

‘Amber was right, what she said to Ginny.’

Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here.

‘Kirsty can’t speak, can’t think properly. People treat her like she doesn’t exist. They forget about her. Me included. I’ve been thinking only about Jo and Ritchie: are they going to sell Hilary’s house and split the proceeds? Is Jo going to donate her half to Ritchie once Hilary’s gone? Will she try again to persuade Hilary to leave it all to Ritchie, and why would she
want
to? No one’s that generous. Kirsty didn’t even cross my mind.’ Simon shakes his head, angry at his own stupidity. ‘But she was there too, on Christmas Eve.’

‘Christmas Eve?’ Liv asks.

‘Kirsty is Hilary’s child too,’ Simon continues. I can hear meaning in his voice that isn’t coming through to the rest of us. There’s a transmission failure, one he seems unaware of. Even Charlie looks confused. We watch him in silence, the three of us, none of us daring to speak. He reminds me of a computer trying to process too much data, one that might crash if we add another command to the queue.

When he next speaks, it’s to me. ‘What about what Ginny said? About you thinking Kirsty might know something. She can’t know anything. What, you think she’s faking her brain damage?’

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

‘I just . . .’ Is there any thought or feeling that I’m allowed to keep to myself?

‘I don’t care if you’ve thought things about a disabled woman that you’re not supposed to think. Why did you think Kirsty might know something?’

If I tell him everything, he can act as my brain and I can switch off. That would be a relief. I could sleep. The snow could pile up outside, over the roof of the house, and I could sleep on and on, for days. ‘That Christmas, when Jo, Neil and the boys went missing . . . Kirsty went missing too.’

‘What?’

‘Only for a few minutes, but at first it looked as if there were five people missing, not four, until Luke found Kirsty.’

‘Go on,’ says Simon.

‘She was lying in Jo and Neil’s bed. She hadn’t been there when I first looked, for Jo and Neil. She must have wandered in there while we were all searching the house and the grounds. Hilary was relieved. At least one of her children had turned up.’ I shrug. ‘That’s it, really. Not much of a story, and no reason for me to think anything, but . . . it had never happened before, far as I knew. I don’t think it’s happened since. I see Kirsty a lot. It’s not something she does, climb into other people’s beds and just lie there. And then later that day, twice, she kind of broke free of Hilary and went into the kitchen and stood next to the cooker, exactly where Jo would have been standing if she’d been making Christmas dinner. The noises she made when Hilary tried to move her . . .’

‘You thought she might have been trying to tell you something?’ Simon asks.

I think she believed Jo was never coming back. I think it was her way of saying she missed her sister
.

‘Not really, no,’ I say. ‘I have a Sod’s Law mindset, maybe that’s what it was: you assume the one person who’s physically incapable of telling you what they know is the only person who knows anything.’

Simon puts down his notebook and pen and walks over to the window. He opens it; snow blows in.

‘What are you doing?’ Charlie yells at him. ‘Close it!’

‘I can’t think without fresh air. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.’

Less than a minute later, he and I are alone in the room. It’s cold, but I don’t mind. It helps me to think too, jolts me out of numbness. Is this what he wanted, the two of us alone?

‘So Jo knew Dinah and Nonie were coming to you and Luke if Sharon died,’ he says. ‘That was your big secret?’

‘Luke was the one who didn’t know,’ I say. ‘And Sharon didn’t know I hadn’t told him. I lied to both of them. That was what Jo knew. That was what I was terrified she’d decide to tell Luke one day – if I said the wrong thing, if she thought I’d let her down or disobeyed her.’ This feels like a dummy run. It will be harder to tell Luke. ‘I knew how Sharon felt about her mum. She hated her, always said she was dangerous, and she was right. I’ve seen enough of Marianne first-hand to know Sharon was right about her. You probably don’t know anyone like that, a parent who thrives on crushing the spirit of their own child and calls it love.’

‘I probably do,’ Simon says.

‘Most people don’t think about wills when they’re young, but Sharon did, before she was even pregnant. She always planned everything way in advance. She wanted a baby, but she wasn’t prepared to have one knowing that if something happened to her, the child would end up with Marianne. So she asked me if I’d agree to be guardian. And . . . I had to say yes. She had no one else to ask. I was her best friend.’

‘She put pressure on you?’

‘The opposite,’ I say. ‘She told me I should only agree if I felt totally okay about it. She knew how much she was asking. If I’d said no, she wouldn’t have had a baby. Ever. She didn’t say that, but we both knew it. How could she think it was fair to ask me? She should have known I wouldn’t be able to say no!’ I stare at Simon, astonished. Where did that surge of rage come from? ‘I was single at the time. It was before I met Luke. Sharon told me to think carefully about what I was taking on. She was so . . . heavy about it. I tried to make light of it and tell her that she wasn’t going to have a child and then die and leave it motherless, but she wouldn’t let me say that. She said I had no idea what might happen, all kinds of unexpected bad things happen. If I agreed to what she was asking, she said, I’d have to tell any man I was ever serious about. I’d have to tell him about the promise I’d made to her.’

I see Dinah and Nonie’s beautiful faces in my mind. ‘The girls weren’t even born,’ I say, knowing logically that I didn’t let them down but feeling as if I did. ‘For them, I’d have been willing to tell any man to get lost if he didn’t want them, but . . .’

‘I understand,’ says Simon. ‘And then you met Luke.’

I nod. ‘Sharon was pregnant with Dinah by then. Luke and I – it all happened so fast. I kept expecting Sharon to ask me if I’d talked to him about our . . . arrangement, but she didn’t, not at first. Probably didn’t think she needed to. We’d discussed it enough before she made the will and she always got upset, thinking about having children and dying before they grew up. By the time she got round to asking me, Luke and I were engaged. We’d set a date for the wedding.’

‘And you hadn’t told him about Sharon’s will?’

‘I couldn’t make myself do it. I was afraid he’d . . .’ I stop, try to remember exactly what I was scared of. ‘I don’t know why I dreaded it so much. I never allowed myself to think about it. Sharon was young, she was healthy. I told myself there was no point worrying about something that wasn’t going to happen. But I did worry, I couldn’t help it. And because I didn’t want to feel guilty, I blamed Sharon. Why was she stupid enough to
trust
me?’ I start to cry. ‘I didn’t
want
her baby. I wanted me and Luke to have our own children and
only
our children.’ Strange: I can still tap into that feeling, even though it doesn’t belong to me any more.

‘When Dinah was born, she was so lovely. I loved her instantly, and I panicked. I knew I had to tell Luke now that there was a real baby, but . . . our wedding was coming up. I just couldn’t do it. What if he says no? I kept thinking. Why would he be willing to take on my best friend’s baby? What if this leads to me losing him, or losing Sharon?’