The Godmother (38 page)

I looked at my watch: 7:53. Far too early to call anyone without kids. I dialed Francesca's number.

“Hello?”

It was Nick. “You're back. It's me, Tessa.”

“Oh my God, Tessa, are you OK?”

“Not really. Do you know—”

“About Neil, yes.”

“Oh Nick, there's worse, more…”

“We know. Ben called everyone. He said you were off to get the twins, is that true?” I imagined the jungle drums had been beating fairly loudly between my friends. Did they feel, as Marguerite felt, that I was off to claim my instant family? Just add death.

“It's not like that. Helen didn't want her mum to have the kids. I don't know what's going to happen.”

“It's a big responsibility.”

“I haven't even spoken to the solicitor yet. I'm just trying to do what Helen asked me to do.”

There was a pause from Nick.

“You still there?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. Just, oh, I don't know, be careful.”

“I know how to handle Marguerite,” I said, full of bravado I didn't feel.

“Just, well, be careful you don't get so involved you can't get uninvolved.”

I didn't like where this conversation was going. “Is Fran there?”

“Just getting everyone up. Caspar's home.”

I didn't have the energy to think about Caspar right then.

“I think I see a glimmer of improvement,” said Nick.

“Well, he's always loved your mum and dad,” I said, forcing a response.

“True. Maybe seeing things through the eyes of someone he respects so much has helped.” Meaning he didn't respect me? Now I definitely didn't like where this conversation was going.

“Well, anyway—”

“Sorry, now's not the time to talk about that. Is there anything we can do for you?”

Lay off me?

“No, thanks. And don't worry about getting Fran, I'll call her later.”

“It's no problem.”

“Actually, the twins need—”

“I understand. I'll tell her to call you.”

I put the phone down and stared out across the empty kitchen. The twins didn't need anything, the nanny had everything beautifully under control. I really hadn't charged over to Helen's house to claim her children as my own. I really, really hadn't. Who wanted that kind of responsibility suddenly foisted on them? It wasn't going to improve my chances of finding a pod partner and, anyway, I didn't have the room. I was doing this for Helen. Surely my friends knew that.

I paced the house, feeling at odds with myself until I could call Helen's solicitor. It was nice to talk to someone who had clearly cared for Helen, and was in as much shock as I was. We could have talked for hours, but I needed some vital information. So he went over the rules of guardianship with me. He had taken care of Helen's legal affairs since her father had died and had power of attorney over Helen's affairs. More importantly than that, I quickly learned that he did not care for Marguerite. If this did turn into all-out war, I was fairly sure this man would be my ally. Ally? The word triggered a memory. A recent conversation:
You remember my solicitor, he makes a pretty good ally. He's good at dealing with Marguerite too
. It sent a shiver through me.

“For now, the twins are in your hands,” said the solicitor, rounding up. “The money is in the control of the trustees; whatever is decided should be by mutual consent, and then the courts won't have to get involved. Are you thinking of taking them?”

I sat at Helen's desk and stared out of the bay window on the raised ground floor. “I don't know what to think yet,” I said truthfully. “Helen wanted me to find them a happy home and I don't really have a home as such to offer them.”

“Well, they sort of come with their own home, so that shouldn't matter.”

I didn't think Helen was thinking bricks and mortar, but I took his words on board anyway. My mobile phone started vibrating on the leather desk. I glanced at it. It was Billy's number. I swore silently. “Do you mind hanging on for one second?” I said to the solicitor.

“Not at all.”

I held the phone in one hand and picked up my mobile with the other.

“Billy, hi, everything all right?”

“Fine, I just wanted to say…God, I'm so sorry about Helen and—”

“I know, I know.” I felt my voice cracking. It hurt my throat. “I'd really like to talk to you, but…I'm so sorry about—”

“Shh, doesn't matter.”

“I'm just on the other line so can I—”

“Course, any time. And Tessa, you know I—”

“I know. Me too. Thanks for calling.”

“Don't worry about us. You and me, I mean. We're fine. Call me later.” I clutched the phone before placing it back on the desk. With monumental effort I brought the other phone back up to my ear.

“Sorry about that,” I said. “Where were we?”

“Marguerite.”

I sighed. “All I know is what Helen told me, and that was if anything ever happened to her, she didn't want her mother bringing up her children.” I thought about what Marguerite had said to me. About the different sides of Helen. About the fact that she was one person to me, another to her mother. That she'd only been trying to impress me. Was that true, or was Marguerite just trying to manipulate me? “I believed her when she said it, but, oh, I don't know, maybe she was being overdramatic?”

“Possibly. But that was my understanding of the situation when we last spoke.”

“It was?”

“She made it very clear.”

I was relieved, for a moment. Until another thought struck me. “When was that?”

“A couple of months ago when she came in to amend her will—”

“What for?”

“Nothing sinister, the twins had been born, her will needed to reflect that. While we were at it, she made a few changes. I suggest we all meet up after the funeral and then we can decide what we are going to do.”

“The funeral,” I said, aghast. “I hadn't thought about that.”

“I'm afraid Marguerite does have jurisdiction over that. My understanding is that Marguerite wants to arrange a burial at St. John's, followed by a wake at her house.”

“Helen wanted to be cremated,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

I'd like my ashes to be scattered on China Beach
. What had I told her? That China Beach would probably resemble the Gold Coast by the time she and I popped our clogs, so she'd said any beach would do.

“Yes, I've told Marguerite already,” I replied.

“Well, you'd better tell her again. She is already making plans for when the police release the body. You've got a bit of time because of the coroner's report.”

“Coroner's report?”

“It's normal practice.”

“She won't have to be—” I couldn't finish the sentence.

“They will take a toxicity reading of the blood, just to rule out drunk-driving. It's all for insurance purposes. Nothing sinister.”

“She didn't drink,” I said. “Neil, Neil was the boozer.”

“I know, but they have to be able to rule the cause of death as accidental.”

“Of course, it was accidental! You think a woman drives herself and her husband into a tree at ninety miles an hour without braking on purpose?”

As soon as the words were out there, Helen's voice came ringing in my ears. And then they kept coming, more and more of Helen's well-chosen words.

Whatever you do, don't let my mother get her hands on my boys…

All you'd have to do was find them a happy home…

I have a very understanding doctor…

I can't afford to get divorced…

Neil has to be dealt with and I am going to deal with him…

Deal with him…

Deal with him…

I ran upstairs to Helen's bedroom and retrieved the bag of pills from the bin. I pulled each one out, searching for dates. They had been represcribed over and over and over again. Long after the scar had healed and the pain had gone, Helen had been mixing what looked to me like a terrifying amount of medication. I sat down on the bed and stared through the open doors of her wardrobe. The jumper had sat proudly in the middle of the shelf.
Consider it yours
. Consider it yours? Why had she left me these to find? Why? I looked back at the empty boxes of pills. This? This was the universe unfolding as it should?

It is the strangest things that get you in the end. For me, it was an innocent-looking yellow plastic nappy bin. The nanny had taken the boys out for an afternoon walk and I was left alone in Helen's great big house with nothing to do but think about what was happening to her broken shell a hundred miles away down the M4. I was mute. I was on standby. I had gone into sleep mode. Everything felt very removed. So I went upstairs to the nursery to find something to do. That was when I saw the nappy bin. I knew it was full because I'd struggled with it earlier. The nanny had tried to teach me how to work it. You had to twist something and push something else and hopefully the bin swallowed the nappy whole with all its odorous outpourings. How difficult could emptying a nappy bin be? I prised the yellow plastic lid off and was hit by the smell. It was supposed to work like a manual compressor, so why could I see the stained, wet nappies bursting out of the top? I tried to do the twist thing, but I just managed to loosen the bag, so I gave it a good yank instead. It held steadfast for a second then ripped. I stumbled backwards, spilling filthy old, throat-clenching sodden nappies all over the floor. It wasn't the stinking mess that made me cry. It was the two empty miniature vodka bottles buried in among it.

I turned the cute-looking bottles around in my hand and experienced a very vivid memory. I was a few days off being sixteen when my parents and I went on a rare family holiday. On the plane the air hostess had offered me a drink. Boldly I'd asked for a vodka and tonic. Dad didn't bat an eyelid. I felt like such a grown-up. She passed me this beautiful miniature of Smirnoff and a small can. In the end I drank the tonic alone. I couldn't bring myself to ruin such a perfect-looking object. It is still at my parents' house with an
assortment of oddities from my life that I keep in a box; I never felt desperate enough to crack open its tiny red-foil lid. I'd been pretending to be a grown-up then, and I was still doing it now.

Stepping over the nappies, I pulled open the wardrobe doors. Everything was folded and ironed in stacks. Bibs. Muslins. Babygros. T-shirts. I ran my hand under and over all the piles, trying to find a hard object in among all this fairy-smelling softness. Once I felt something and retreated my hand rapidly. It took a few moments to find the courage to look again. Here I was, standing in a nursery, asking questions that I didn't want to know the answers to. Wasn't that the story of my life? I pulled out a clear plastic box. There were two pacifiers inside. I doubted I'd be so lucky again. I knew what two empty bottles of vodka meant. It meant there were more. Sure enough, inside a box holding an unused baby bath, I found several others. I started pulling out the contents of the cupboard and throwing them on the floor. In among all the baby paraphernalia, more and more vodka bottles were hidden. I threw them on to the Beatrix Potter characters until I was surrounded by dirty nappies and dirty secrets.

I was still in tears, sitting amid the detritus of Helen's miserable secret life, when the door to the nursery opened.

“Get out!” I screamed, leaping towards the door and slamming it back in the nanny's face. I would not have this information spreading like wildfire through her chattering community. I would protect Helen now, since I'd so palpably failed to do so while she'd been alive.

“Please, just leave me alone. Take the twins downstairs…”

“Tessa?” It was a woman's voice. “It's Rose. I've come back.”

I was leaning against the door, trying to barricade myself in with the evidence. “Rose?” I turned and reached for the door handle. She stood there in her hat and coat, with the same suitcase still in her hand. “Rose,” I lamented. She dropped the case and held open her arms. I fell into them and together we sobbed. The tears kept coming and coming.

Just as suddenly I stopped crying because somewhere part of me couldn't accept what was happening. It was too far-fetched. Too surreal. Other people died in car crashes. Other children got ill, became drug addicts, forced their parents apart. Other people fell in love with the wrong man and wasted their
lives endlessly drawn like a moth to a flame. Not me. I was a lawyer. I wore sensible shoes from Monday to Friday. I had dark-colored suits in my wardrobe. I thought I was in control. I thought I had my say in the future. Wrong, Tessa. The future toyed with us, it was up to us to try to enjoy the game. But not everyone liked the game, or they weren't given the tools to play. I held out my palm to Rose and showed her the perfect little bottle I had been squeezing. It looked so sweet, so harmless. Drink me, it said. If it had been full, I would have.

I registered no surprise on Rose's face as she reached down to pick up the scattered remnants of Helen's hidden existence.

“You knew about the drinking?”

Rose glanced at me before placing the empties in a sickly sweet scented nappy sack.

“I suspected. She always denied.”

“And the pills?”

“They were for pain at first. After the Caesarean. But she became dependent on them quickly.”

“But she was feeding the boys herself?” It was this that had quieted my suspicious heart. Helen was obsessed with breastfeeding her babies. She had fed them for five months. I didn't believe she'd ingest all those pills and carry on feeding her children. But I had only learnt about the vodka habit.

“She wasn't,” said Rose.

“But I saw her…” Hadn't I? I thought about this for a minute. No, I hadn't. I'd seen her try to. I'd seen the babies fuss. I'd heard her talk about it. About the need to feed them alone, in the quiet, because they were easily distracted. I thought she was just being a weirdo new mother. There were plenty of them about.

I wiped a streak of snot down my sleeve. “What about all the milk in the freezer?”

“She put formula in bags.”

That definitely sounded bonkers.

“If they ever went out as a family, she would take the bags with her, pretending she'd expressed it. She said she didn't like feeding in public. Neil didn't like it either. He said it was common.”

I remembered my disastrous attempts in Starbucks with the curdled milk and the way the boys had happily sucked away at formula. I remembered too
the way she'd latched herself on to that spooky little machine that had tugged at her breasts until they'd bled. Why would she do such a thing when she'd known there was no milk? I told Rose.

“She did a lot of strange things when she'd eaten too many pills.”

I couldn't quite absorb what Rose was telling me. “She was pretending to breastfeed the whole time?”

Rose nodded sadly.

“Did she know you knew?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn't tell her she was being mad?”

“She was afraid of Neil. I believed her fear.”

I recalled the deranged conversation I'd had with Helen that same Sunday. “Did he hit her?”

“I never saw, if he did. No bruises.”

This was getting more and more complicated as the hours went by.

“But he was a bully,” said Rose. “I'm afraid I never liked him, God rest his soul.”

“Nor me, Rose. Nor me.”

“I suppose Marguerite will get the children.”

I took Rose's arm. “Not if I have anything to do with it.”

“But, Tessa, she is their grandmother.”

“I know. Do you remember what she was like when Helen was little?”

Rose lowered her eyes to the floor. I don't know what slide show went through her mind, but she looked pained.

“Helen didn't want her to have the boys,” I stated.

“I understand,” said Rose, “but she is so”—Rose searched for a word that didn't cross the boundary—“strong.”

“Let me worry about that. But I'd like your help with the boys.”

“Of course. Where are they?”

“Out with a temporary nanny, but I'll send her home if you'll stay. They don't really know her, they don't know me…” I knew it wasn't a question of money. “Will you stay?”

“I should have stayed with Helen.” She looked pained again. “There were a lot of things I should have done.” Finally she looked me in the eye. “I will stay with the boys.”

“Thank you, Rose. And please, don't feel bad, you didn't know this was going to happen.”

Rose sat down in the blue gingham nursing chair. As she rocked gently back and forth, I was reminded of her age and all she'd given up to care for a child that was not her own. She stared out of the window. “I didn't know what was going to happen. But I knew something.” She turned back to me, a look of steel in her eyes. Did Rose suspect what I suspected? Did she, like me, think Helen had masterminded this fatal solution?

“Something like a car crash?”

“No, not that.”

So it was just me, then.

“I feared she would hurt herself.”

I stared at her hard, trying to understand her. Trying to understand. I had to know. “But not Neil as well…”

Rose did not answer at once. Then she shook her head. “I couldn't see how.”

“But now you can?”

Rose handed the miniature bottle back to me. “I think we both can now, can't we?”

Yes, we could, but the clarity was hurting my eyes.

“No one must know,” I said to Rose, firmly.

“No one will.”

We cleared up the rest of the mess together, lost in our own private thoughts. I heard the nanny call up from the hallway to let me know she'd safely returned. I liked the woman, I thought she was good with the boys. Clear and uncomplicated. In other circumstances I would have hired her permanently, but now I wanted her out of the house, and fast. It wasn't that Rose was back. It wasn't even that her services came at a considerable price. It was because I feared there were more secrets lurking within the house, and I didn't want anyone but myself or Rose to find them.

Two days passed. I meant to go home and change, but the house was like a hotel, it had everything I needed, so I stayed with Rose and waited for news. I knew what the coroner's report was going to say: Helen was driving while under the influence of alcohol and medication. I'd caught one story on Sky
News. Neil and Helen had been at some party in Bristol. There was footage of Neil leaving the party, clearly inebriated. Rumors of a marital argument were circulating. Oddly, Helen looked completely composed, but her composure no longer convinced me. There was an almighty chemical balancing act taking place in her blood stream. The newsreaders talked about the twins; how they were only six months old. They were talking tragic accident.

I hadn't heard another allegation of drunk-driving since that first odd phone call in the hospital and what Marguerite had told me. That would all change when the coroner's report came out. It wouldn't take long before something was leaked to the press. Marguerite was right, she wasn't powerful enough to prevent that. Helen hadn't been famous, but she was too beautiful to ignore. Who better to make an example of for those silent, long-suffering mothers than Helen? If a rich, well-married mother of two can crack, then maybe they weren't doing so badly after all.

On the third morning, while I toyed with breakfast, my mobile rang. It was Ben. He asked whether I wanted him to come over as he had every day since Helen had died. This time I said yes. After Helen, the person I'd been thinking about most was Ben. Life had to be grabbed. Things had to change. And if I didn't grab and change things now, then maybe I never would and losing Helen would have taught me nothing. I had been warned, but Cora hadn't been enough. It had taken a death to shake me out of my stupor; I was going to make damn sure I didn't betray her memory by pissing away whatever time I had left. The girl in the hammock was not going to die, I would take her with me, wherever I went and in whatever I did. I had emailed Al and Claudia, but they were on an elephant somewhere in the jungle, rediscovering the bare necessities of life—each other. It had taken a death for them, too, I should have seen it sooner. How foolish I had been to think that I lacked love in my life. My life was full of it, with all the risks involved. The pain I'd been feeling since Helen's death was proof of one thing: I was alive. I was alive.

Half an hour later, Ben was on Helen's door step. I had the twins ready. He helped me lift the enormous and now very heavy pram down the steps. Then he hugged me tightly.

“Everyone is in shock,” he said.

“It's unbelievable, isn't it?”

“Completely…”

We stared at each other. I looked away first. “I thought we could take them to the park, if that's OK with you. I could do with some fresh air.”

“Whatever you want. I've managed to sneak a couple of hours, told work I was pitching a new account,” he said. “But I can come back after work too. Sasha will understand.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

He put his arm around me and kissed my head. “Got hold of Claudia and Al?” he asked.

“Not yet. I can't bear the thought of a funeral without them.”

“You'll have me. Don't you worry about that.”

“I can't believe she's dead,” I said, more to myself than to Ben.

“I know.”

He stroked my hair.

“I keep expecting her to walk through the door.”

“It's such a shock. One minute we're all at a party together, the next…” Ben sighed. “They had the twins, Neil's career was just beginning to take off; it's too unbearably tragic.”

Neil had his career. And all the added perks. I could not bring myself to mourn his death. I leaned my head against Ben's chest. I wanted to tell him about the real tragedy that this “accident” had exposed, but I couldn't.

“It doesn't make sense,” he said. “These things never do.”

It made horrible sense to me.

“When I first heard, I thought the twins were with them, you said she never left them.”

I'd been thinking about that too. “I told her it was time to get out of the baby bubble.”