The Death of Mrs. Westaway

“Self-employed?” Harding raised his eyebrows as he buttoned his coat. “I realize I’ve never asked, Harriet, what do you do?”

“I’m—I work on a pier,” Hal said awkwardly. She disliked this question. Her profession came up sometimes with new acquaintances, and invariably it made her into the center of attention in a way that she did not enjoy. The responses varied depending on the social situation. In passing conversation, it could be anything from polite interest to veiled amusement. At parties and in pubs, it was more often guffawing skepticism, or clamorous requests for a reading. She had quickly learned not to say “psychic” because of the aggressive demands to produce an instant prediction there and then. “Tell me what I’m thinking,” Hal remembered one man in a pub saying, almost shoving his face into hers. “Go on. Tell me what I’m thinking if you’re a bloody Mystic Mog.”

He’d looked down at her small breasts, and Hal had thought, I know what you’re thinking. But she didn’t say it.

Now, if pressed for details, she simply said she did tarot readings, and then when people asked for one she was able to laugh and say that she didn’t have her cards.

For a moment she thought that Harding might be about to ask questions, but fortunately at that second his phone buzzed, and when he pulled it out of his pocket, his face brightened.

“Ah, it’s Mit. She’s found a café. Well, Harriet. Shall we?”

• • •

IN THE CAR BACK TO Trepassen, Hal was silent. Ezra had not joined them for lunch, pleading the meeting with his bank, and she had waited for a good hour at the prearranged spot in the car park, long after Mitzi and Harding had driven away. When Ezra had finally turned up, there was a smell of whiskey on his breath. His driving seemed unaffected, however, though Hal had not been able to stop herself from wincing when he pulled out in front of a fast-moving Land Rover.

They were almost back to Trepassen House when Ezra spoke.

“Are you okay? You’re very quiet.”

“Sorry,” Hal said. She forced herself to sit up straighter, paint a slightly nervous smile on her lips. Remember—you’re a mouse, not a rat. Little mousy Harriet. “I was just . . . thinking.”

“About . . . ?”

“It’s . . .” She paused, trying to think of something that would be the truth, but not the truth, but the words came out almost in spite of herself. “It’s just . . . Harding, and his family. I don’t think they realize how lucky they are . . . in some ways.”

Ezra said nothing, but he cocked another glance at her, and then shifted down a gear for a tight bend.

“They are lucky,” he said at last. “And you’re right, they don’t know it. Maybe that’s what made me lash out at poor Freddie.” He rubbed his hand over his face and sighed, and Hal smelled again the faint scent of whiskey. “Whatever Harding’s faults—and God knows he’s got them—he’s a better parent than most.”

“My mother was a wonderful parent,” Hal said. Her voice shook despite herself, and she clenched her jaw, thinking, I will not cry. Not now. Not here. I will not use her death to get his sympathy. But she could not stop a single tear tracing its way down her nose. She scrubbed it away fiercely. “At least, whatever I’ve lost, I had her for eighteen years. I wouldn’t have changed a thing, in all that time.”

Ezra changed gear again and then said, with a perceptible effort, “Harriet, Abel told me about—” He swallowed hard. “About what, what happened to Maud, the car accident. He said that—”

He stopped, and Hal saw that his face was twisted with grief.

“I never knew.” His voice was hoarse, and Hal had the sense that here at last was someone whose grief was as real and encompassing and raw as her own. “I searched for her for years, and I never knew that all that time she was alive and well and living just across the Channel, and it—God, it kills me. I’m so, so angry with her. How could she?”

“I don’t know,” Hal whispered. And she felt again the tearing sense of betrayal at the lie she was perpetuating here. She had not understood, when she set foot on that train, what she was setting in motion. The lies about herself, about her own background, the game with Mr. Treswick—all that felt like a game. But this playing with people’s past tragedies, none of this was what she had signed up for.

What must it be like to lose your twin, your other half?

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice husky with the strain of holding back tears. “I shouldn’t have brought her up—I didn’t mean—”

She stopped, and Ezra shook his head, but not admonishingly. Instead the gesture seemed to express something neither of them could say.

“What about your father?” he asked at last, and then cleared his throat.

They had come out of the sunken lane and were onto the cliff road that wound inland to Trepassen. Hal found herself staring out of the window at the dark expanse of sea, flint-colored and strange, so different from Brighton’s chalk-milky waters.

“I never knew him,” she said. Her voice was steady now. This part wasn’t painful, at least. There were no betrayals in telling this story, and it was a question she’d answered many times before. “He was a one-night stand. My mother never knew his name.”

“So he could be out there, somewhere?” Ezra asked.

Hal shrugged.

“I suppose so. But I can’t see any prospect of finding him, even if I wanted to.”

“You don’t want to, then?”

“Not really. You don’t miss what you never had.”

It was true, in a way. But even as she said it, Hal thought of Harding at lunch, his arm around Kitty, holding her tightly against the breeze from the door. And she knew . . . it was only half true.

8th December, 1994

Abel came home from Oxford today. Term ended last weekend, but he came home the long way, via a friend’s house in Wales, trailing his feet. I don’t blame him for his reluctance. Harding, who I still haven’t met, sent a brisk message saying the accountancy firm he works for in London couldn’t spare him, and that he would not be returning for Christmas. And Ezra’s school doesn’t break up for another week.

The first I knew of his arrival was Maud pricking up her head, like a collie that has caught a noise. We were sitting in the drawing room, the only warm room in the whole house apart from my aunt’s sitting room. We were huddled close to the fire, me playing patience, Maud reading and listening to something on her Walkman. I was frowning over a particularly knotty spread, when suddenly she pulled off her headphones.

“Jesus,” she said. “We must look like something out of Little Fucking Women. What—”

She broke off abruptly, and listened for a moment. Then, before I could ask what she had heard, she was running out of the drawing room, down the corridor towards the front door.

“Al!” I heard, and his answering shout, and I followed, in time to see her rush into his arms. He picked her up, spinning her around in a giant bear hug while she screeched out laughing protests.

“Hi, Abel,” I said, suddenly shy, and he nodded at me over the top of Maud’s head as he deposited her down on the hallway rug.

“Hi, Maggie.”

And then that was it. The kind of greeting you’d give a stranger, or a passing acquaintance. He picked up his case, slung one arm around Maud’s shoulders, and went back to talking to her about his term, about some girl he was seeing, and I felt . . . I don’t know what. A kind of furious grief, I suppose. Disappointment that after all that happened over the summer, he couldn’t bring himself to ask how I was, or what was happening in my life. It had felt like we were so close, all of us, in those lazy summer days. And over the weeks and months that followed, Maud and I had become even closer—closer than sisters. But now it was very plain, to Abel at least, I am an outsider in this family. Perhaps I always will be.

The thought was unsettling, and I turned away, back down the chilly corridor to the comparative warmth of the drawing room, turning over possibilities in my mind.

Soon the truth will come out whether I want it to or not. The question is, when it does, will they close ranks against me?