KATE, THEA AND Fatima are seated around the scrub-top table as I burst back into the Mill, hot and footsore, and my throat dry as dust.
Shadow barks a short sharp warning as the door crashes back against the wall, making the cups on the dresser rattle, and the picture frames bang against the wall in sympathy.
‘Isa!’ Fatima says, her face surprised as she looks up from her plate. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
‘I have. Why didn’t you tell us, Kate?’
The words were a question in my head. Spoken, they sound like an accusation.
‘Tell you what?’ Kate stands, full of bewildered concern. ‘Isa, did you just walk all the way to Salten and back in three hours? You must be exhausted. Did you take a bottle of water?’
‘Fuck the water,’ I say angrily, but when she brings me a glass from the tap and sets it gently down on the table, I have to swallow against the pain in my throat before I can drink.
I take a sip and then a gulp, and then slump on the sofa. Fatima has loaded up a plate with salad for me, and now she brings it over.
‘What happened?’ She sits down beside me on the sofa, holding the plate, and her face is worried. ‘Did you say you saw a ghost?’
‘Yes, I saw a ghost.’ I look over Fatima’s head, straight at Kate. ‘I saw Luc Rochefort in the village.’
Kate’s face crumples, before I’ve even finished the sentence, and she sits abruptly on the edge of the sofa as if she doesn’t completely trust her legs.
‘Shit.’
‘Luc?’ Fatima looks from me to Kate. ‘But I thought he went back to France after …’
Kate makes an unhappy movement with her head, but it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a nod or a shake, or a combination of both.
‘What’s happened to him, Kate?’ I hug Freya closer, thinking of his closed, impassive face, the fury I felt radiating out of him in the small post office. ‘He was …’
‘Angry,’ she finishes. Her face is pale, but her hands, as she reaches in her pocket for her tobacco, are steady. ‘Right?’
‘That’s an understatement. What happened?’
She begins to roll up, very slowly and deliberately, and I remember this from school, how Kate would always take her time, she would never be hurried into an answer. The more difficult the question, the longer she would pause, before replying.
Thea puts down her fork, picks up her wine and cigarette case, and comes over too.
‘Come on, Kate.’ She sits on the bare boards at our feet, and I have a sudden, painful memory of all the nights we spent like this, curled together on the sofa, watching the river, the flames, smoking, laughing, talking …
There is no laughter now, only the rustle of Rizlas as Kate rolls back and forth on her knee, biting her lip. When the cigarette is done, she licks the paper, and then she speaks.
‘He did go back to France. But not … willingly.’
‘What do you mean?’ Thea demands. She taps her cigarette case against the floorboard, and looks at Freya, and I know she wants to smoke, but is waiting until Freya is out of the room.
Kate sighs, and puts her bare feet up onto the sofa, beside Fatima’s hip, and she pushes the loose strands of hair off her face.
‘I don’t know how much you knew about Luc’s background … you know Dad and Luc’s mother, Mireille, were together, years back, right? And they lived with us here.’
I nod, we knew all this. Luc and Kate were toddlers – almost too small to remember, Kate said, although she had faint recollections of parties by the river, Luc falling in once when he was too little to swim.
‘When Dad and Mireille broke up, Mireille took Luc back to France, and we didn’t see him for several years, and then Dad got a call from Mireille – she couldn’t cope with Luc, he was running wild, social services were involved – could he come and spend the summer holidays here, give her a break? You know Dad, he said yes of course. Well, when Luc got here, it turned out that there was maybe a bit more to the story than Mireille had said. Luc was acting out, but there were … reasons. Mireille had her own problems … she’d started shooting up again, and, well, she maybe hadn’t been the best parent to Luc.’
‘What about Luc’s dad?’ Fatima asks. ‘Didn’t he have anything to say about his son disappearing off to England to stay with a strange man?’
Kate shrugs.
‘I don’t know if there was a dad. From what Luc said, Mireille was pretty fucked up when she had him. I’m not sure if she ever knew …’
She trails off and then takes a breath, and starts again.
‘Anyway, he came back to live with us when we were maybe thirteen, fourteen? And the holidays turned into a term … and the term turned into a year … and then another … and then somehow Luc was enrolled at the secondary school in Hampton’s Lee and living with us full-time, and you know … he was doing well. He was happy, I guess.’
We know this too, but no one interrupts.
‘But after Dad …’ Kate swallows, and I know the bad part is coming, the time none of us can bear to think about. ‘After Dad … disappeared, Luc – he couldn’t stay here any more. He was only fifteen, I turned sixteen that summer, but Luc was still several months off and a minor, and in any case once social services got involved …’ She swallows again, and I can see the emotions passing across her face, cloud shadows flitting across a valley.
‘He got sent back,’ she says abruptly. ‘He wanted to stay here with me, but I had no choice.’ She spreads her hands out pleadingly. ‘You realise that, right? I was sixteen, there was no way they were going to let me act as legal guardian to a stray French boy with no parents in the country. I did what I had to do!’ she repeats, her voice desperate.
‘Kate.’ Fatima puts a hand on her arm, her voice gentle. ‘This is us, you don’t have to justify yourself. Of course you had no choice. Ambrose wasn’t Luc’s dad – what could you have done?’
‘They sent him back,’ Kate says, almost as if she hasn’t heard. Her face is blank, remembering. ‘And he wrote and wrote, pleading with me, saying that Dad had promised he’d take care of him, and accusing me of betraying him, accusing me –’
Her eyes well up with tears, and she blinks them away, her expression suddenly bleak and raw. Shadow, sensing her unhappiness without understanding it, comes to lie at her feet, with a little whine, and Kate puts her hand down, ruffling his white fur.
‘A few years ago he came back, got a job at Salten House as a gardener. I thought all the years would have given him perspective, that he’d have realised that I had no choice. I could barely keep myself out of a children’s home, let alone him. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t forgiven me at all. He cornered me one night coming back along the river, and oh God –’ she buries her face in her hands – ‘Fatima, the stories! You must hear them all the time as a GP, but I’d never – the beatings, the abuse, God, what he –’ her voice cracks – ‘what he suffered – I couldn’t bear to listen, but he kept on and on, telling me, like he wanted to punish me – what his mother’s boyfriends had done to him when he was little, and later when he went back to France and got taken into care, the man at the children’s home who used to – who used to –’
But she can’t finish. Her voice dissolves into tears, and she covers her face.
I look at Fatima’s and Thea’s shocked faces, and then back to Kate. I want to say something. I want to comfort her, but all I can think is how they used to be, the two of them, their laughing faces as they splashed in the Reach, their companionable silence as they bent their heads over a board game … They were so close – closer than my brother and I ever were. And now this.
In the end it’s Fatima who sets down the plate of food very carefully, and stands. She puts her arms around Kate, rocking her, wordlessly, back and forth, back and forth.
She’s saying something, very low, but I think I can make out the words.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she’s saying, over and over. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’