Cuckoo (43 page)
Lying in her rose-scented bath, she squirmed at the memory. But then, she had to remind herself that, to put it bluntly, Gareth was being an absolute pig at that time. So she could probably absolve herself from anything that went on, that night in the pub and afterwards.
It had seemed to her, as she sat there with her velvety half-pint, that Andy had all the great qualities of Gareth without any of the downsides. Like his brother, he was tall and handsome, to be sure. He was creative and intelligent. He had an enormous sense of play. Yet he lacked what Rose was beginning to see as the dark side, the distaff to all this sun. Gareth must have been handed that particular gift by his birth mother – the one who had killed herself before he had a chance to meet her. It was, no doubt, all her fault.
And then, Andy was reaching across the barley-twist pub table and taking her by her hand.
‘You see, I don’t think I can bear to see my brother hurting you like this,’ he said. He was explaining why he was thinking of leaving. ‘I want to kill him when he is like this. The fact it affects you so much makes it even more acute. I’m scared, Rose,’ he went on, his voice lowered. ‘I’m scared of what I will do to him if he goes on like this.’
Rose drew her hand away and put it to her mouth. But he reached across and clasped it back.
‘Come outside with me,’ he said, and she found herself getting up and following him across the crowded pub room, waving goodbye to the few people she knew in there, as if to say out loud that there was nothing going on, that she wasn’t just about to carry out a secret assignation with this man she was with, while she was carrying the second child of his adoptive brother.
But she was. She knew it. He was offering her closeness, comfort. And, since declaring her pregnancy to Gareth, she had had scant little of that. Carried along by the butterflies in her stomach, she followed Andy across the stile that led up the allotments at the top of the hill on the other side of the village to The Lodge.
And there, on the cool hard ground, in amongst the prosaic latewinter kale, leeks and parsnips, she and Andy fucked like hungry dogs. It ended with her collapsed in a muddy heap on top of him, sobbing partly with relief, partly with the shock of what they had just done. There, in amongst the brassicas, they had built an atom bomb. The fallout potential was stultifying.
‘I’d better leave this place,’ Andy said, as they crept back to the house.
‘Don’t.’ She turned to him. ‘Don’t leave. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘I need to think,’ he said.
They went back to the Annexe, tiptoeing in so as not to wake Gareth or Anna. It was one o’clock in the morning, long after they would have returned from the pub if they hadn’t taken their little diversion. Rose stripped off in the shower room and washed herself thoroughly, removing all traces of Andy. She bundled up her muddied clothes and put them at the bottom of the laundry basket.
She slipped into bed beside Gareth, who turned over onto his side, facing away from her. She remembered lying there on her back, going over all the possibilities in her mind until she decided on the only viable path, given all of their circumstances. Gareth must never find out. Andy must stay as if nothing had ever happened. They would finish the house, she would have the baby, and everything would be all right again. She had practised this sort of strategy before, and it would work, she knew it.
And was it all all right? Rose thought as she got out of the bath and dried herself off. Was everything all all right again? She reached down the body cream she had bought with the bath oil and began to rub it into her legs and belly – which, she noticed, hung a little loose after her illness.
In the morning after the allotment episode, she had looked Gareth in the eyes. That was where she had seen that look before, the one he had given her during supper today. After breakfast, she had got Andy on his own and spelled out her plan to him. His decision had been different from hers. He wanted to leave, to go back to his house in Brittany, to give them all some space, as he put it. It took a lot of persuasion, but Rose knew she had a little leverage with him, and in the end he stayed with them as long as he would have, had he and Rose not connected like that. They continued to be confidants for each other, but they never allowed themselves to touch again. It was conceivable, Rose thought, that she found this easier than him. If she were honest with herself – and she had proved to herself that this was sometimes something of a difficulty – sex with Andy had been like lifting the weight off a pressure cooker. She had let go of a lot of steam, and it had, ultimately and not without some inconvenience, made her feel a whole lot better.
After he left, Andy did write to her a couple of times. He knew it was safe, because he knew it was Rose’s job to stroll up the garden to get the post out of the US-style mailbox that he had installed with Gareth. But she had simply put the letters unopened in the fire. She wanted done with all that.
Rose pulled on a clean nightdress, a lovely Victorian thing of thick soft cotton. She tiptoed through into her bedroom and crept gently in between her daughters. She lay, looking through the skylight at the pinpoints of stars above her.
All this
, she thought. It has been worth holding onto. Hasn’t it?
, she thought. It has been worth holding onto. Hasn’t it?
Forty
The gunshot wrenched Rose from a troubling dream of textures first dull and heavy then shiny and bright. The scream that followed, Anna’s scream, coming from downstairs, made her realise that she was alone in the bed. Again, someone had come in and taken her daughters from her.
Ice shot through her body. She leaped from the bed and pelted down the stairs. She wasn’t yet fully awake when she took in the scene. Polly stood alone in the kitchen, her back to Rose, looking out of the open garden door. She had her arms clasped around her body in the way silly children do when pretending to snog. Because of her posture, her stained peach silk nightdress gaped at the back, revealing her tattoos, her keyboard of rib bones and the semibreves of her spinal column. The morning chill had given her goosebumps, each one pricked out by the pale morning sun that filtered in from the front of the room.
It was a strange, still scene. It stopped Rose in her tracks on the stairs, one foot in the air, not quite landed on the step in front of her, her mouth wide open, as if she were some comic cartoon. Everything was held for a beat, while she took in what else was going on. She followed the trajectory of Polly’s gaze and saw Gareth, outside on the back lawn, kneeling over a small, heaped body. By his side lay a gun.
A gun
?
A gun
?
Then she heard Anna’s second scream, ‘Nooo!!!’ as she pelted across the grass towards her father.
Rose gasped and put her fist to her mouth. ‘Flossie!’
She launched herself across the room at Polly, swinging her round by pulling her long, dark straggle of hair.
‘What has he done?’ she demanded, forcing her face up towards that of her friend. Polly had an almost beatific air of calm to her, a hovering sense of victory.
‘What has he done? Where’s Flossie?’ Rose grasped her by the shoulders, feeling the little handfuls of loose skin and muscle. The way Polly’s flesh moved along her bones suddenly reminded Rose of the brace of partridges she had plucked and drawn the previous autumn. If Polly were a bird, how easy it would be to remove her feathers, taking them and snapping them out of her gooseflesh, throwing them up in the air, watching them float down like a fistful of fifty-pound notes.
Holding Rose’s gaze, Polly gently slipped herself out of her grasp. ‘She’s sleeping. Behind you,’ she said, and lifted her hand to point.
Rose wheeled round and there, flat out on the lambskin, was Flossie, arms thrown to either side. Rose held her breath and watched her daughter’s chest. Sure enough, there was a little shift up and down in the front of Flossie’s clean, fresh Babygro. As if to confirm her sentience, she gave a little sigh that was almost a gasp, shook her arms a little, then relaxed back down into the depth of her sleep.
Rose turned wildly to the scene on the back lawn. Brushing past Polly, she burst out of the back door. The sharp gravel outside dug into her bare feet, but she scarcely noticed. Gareth now had something in one hand while he hacked at it with the other, with what looked like a knife. Anna was on his back, not playing like she had all those centuries ago back at the castle, but trying to stop him. There was a lot of red, made even more vivid by the sparkling emerald of the lawn.
Rose hurried onto the dewy grass, feeling the damp chill work up the edge of her nightdress, sticking it to her stinging shin. It seemed to take an age – like the dream running that takes a person nowhere – but eventually she closed in on them.
She turned to look back at the house. Polly had resumed her position in the doorway. Rose almost stumbled when she saw the look on her face. It was beyond pleasure. It was a sort of proprietorial ecstasy.
‘There!’ she heard Gareth cry as he stood up holding the fox’s brush aloft in his bloody hand. Anna had slipped off his back and had turned away, holding her head in her hands, sobbing. The look on his face was almost the same as Polly’s, and, to Rose’s horror, she realised it was directed past her, towards the back door. It was as if she were invisible, had dissolved to nothing. Suddenly the grass began to tilt and melt into the sky and Rose fell, gratefully offering her face to the wet lawn. The last thing she remembered was Anna leaning over her and looking into her eyes with her one good eye.
‘Mum?’ she asked. Then she dissolved into a haze.
Rose woke up, yet again back in her bed. Anna, Nico and Yannis were sitting crosslegged on the floor, playing a game of cards. Flossie was in her car seat beside Anna, impassively watching the other children, a small dribble of drool on her chin.
‘Hi,’ Rose said.
‘Mum!’ Anna crawled over to the bed, surveying her with her one eye. ‘Everyone’s ill. We don’t know what to do.’
‘What?’
‘Mum and Gareth,’ Nico said. ‘They’ve got some kind of stomach thing. They’ve both gone to bed.’
Rose swallowed. Her mouth felt dry, her throat rasped.
‘Dad’s in my bed, and Polly’s in the Annexe. They’ve both been really, really sick, and we don’t know what to do.’ Anna got up and sat on the bed, hoisting Flossie up on to her knee. ‘We’ve been waiting here for ages for you to come round.’
The coffee, Rose thought. There’s the proof, then. Then she remembered that look between Polly and Gareth and she shuddered. She supposed she should feel flattered that the children should choose to wait at her bedside for some sort of guidance.
‘What was Dad doing out there?’ she asked Anna.
‘He shot Foxy, Mum.’
‘Shot him? Why?’
‘Polly saw Foxy trying to catch Monkey. Monkey scrambled up a tree.’
‘Where did he get the gun from?’
‘Mum bought it,’ Nico said. Rose noticed that his voice had got deeper. Was he changing already? Was all this turning him, far too early, into a man? He climbed on to the bed too, on the other side of Rose.
‘I thought you knew?’ Anna said. ‘Weren’t you there when she gave it to him?’ Her voice had risen to a higher pitch.
‘No,’ Rose croaked, pulling herself up to sitting.
Anna got her a pillow and propped it up behind her. ‘He’d been talking at supper – oh yes, that was when you were poorly – about how he and Andy used to go hunting back in America. He made it all sound so much fun.’
‘He said how they’d track a deer for a whole day through the woods, about how to recognise the marks it made as it passed through,’ Nico added.
‘So Mama said, “Why don’t you hunt here?” ’ Yannis chipped in, clearing up the cards.
‘And Dad said that you’d never let him,’ Anna added.
‘So the next day, Mum walked up to the hunting shop – you know, the one by the garage on the big road?’ Nico said. ‘And came back with a shotgun.’
‘She looked like the girl in
Pirates of the Caribbean
,’ Yannis giggled, slipping himself in between Rose and Nico.
Pirates of the Caribbean
,’ Yannis giggled, slipping himself in between Rose and Nico.
‘He never said anything about the killing bit, though,’ Anna said. ‘Why didn’t he say anything about the blood?’
Rose closed her eyes.
‘I need to talk to your father,’ she said, getting once more out of bed.
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