I Do Not Sleep (2 page)

That was then.

Way back then, when Danny’s silly little accident had seemed so dramatic. Before the clouds collapsed and obscured the ocean, shrouding it in fog; before the seas swelled into the monstrous wall that engulfed my youngest child, swallowed him down into the oh-so-familiar story of Cornish tragedy, the accident from which there was no way back. Ever. No plaster, no sling could cure this. There was no body, even. Nothing left to mourn except an absence, a space; a gap that would never be filled.

Adam looked in his mirror. ‘They’re right behind us,’ he told me with a reassuring grin. This time, I gave my husband a look of genuine relief, because in the black Peugeot which followed our Volvo Estate was all that remained of our little family: Danny, Lola, and, most precious of all, Edie, my shining light, the only purely good and wonderful thing that had happened to me since Joey’s disappearance. I still used that word because I found it almost impossible to think of him as dead. Adam and I had had a blazing row about it two months ago when he told me he’d booked our old cottage for the summer.

‘How could you?’ I’d asked. ‘How could you try to make me go to Cornwall on HOLIDAY, for Christ’s sake? I can’t believe you’ve done this. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me down there, ever again.’

Adam had put his hands on my shoulders and looked me steadily in the eyes. ‘I’ve done it for us, Molly – and for Danny. He wants to come with us; he says it’s unhealthy for us all to pretend that Cornwall doesn’t exist. Before Joey died…’ I flinched. Adam felt the tremor, but his voice stayed firm. ‘Before Joey died, we went to Cornwall as a family every single summer. Danny misses it, and he wants to take Edie there, let her play on the beach.’

‘There’s nothing to stop Danny going back. Without us.’

‘Yes there is. You.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Danny won’t go back to Cornwall without you. Don’t you see? He needs your permission. He told me he was terrified of hurting you by taking Lola and the baby down by themselves. And so I thought about it. Believe me, Molly, I thought about it for a long time. I was frightened of telling you, I knew you’d be upset, but in the end I made a decision. And that was to risk your anger and book it anyway. It’s not as if it’s in Polperro, where Joey… died. You don’t have to get up and look at the harbour every day. We’ll be at Coombe, which is sheltered and which we always loved so much. Where the boys were happy.’ His voice softened. ‘Do you remember how they used to try and round up the sheep? The farmer got furious, and we had to buy him a beer to placate him. And remember how Joey used to ride the family pig? And how they both adored the horses?’

Of course I remembered. Didn’t Adam understand how agonising those memories were? I started crying, the happy memories blending with my ache for Joey. Adam folded me into his arms. ‘Don’t, darling. Don’t. Look, I think Danny’s right. We have to do this for him. Danny misses him desperately too. But now he’s married, he has a baby. He needs to move on, live his life. And, Molly, so do we. We have a grandchild now, hopefully the first of several.’ I smiled at this. ‘We have a future; we have a long life to look forward to. And this is the first step. If it doesn’t work, if you really are terribly unhappy there, we’ll come back home and I promise you I won’t ever ask you to go back to Cornwall again. But never going back there won’t bring Joey back. And we’ll be sacrificing so many happy memories if we don’t ever go there again; it’s special, you know that. Cornwall is part of our family history, a precious place for us. It will always be in our hearts. We have to reclaim that happiness, because it’s real, it’s what happened. Molly, you simply have to accept what’s happened to Joey. For all our sakes, you can’t be in denial any longer.’

In denial
. He was right. I was. And I still wasn’t ready to let Joey go. But Adam was persuasive; he’d convinced me, and against my better judgement I found myself speeding down the A38.

Chapter Two

As Adam drove, I remembered the night a year ago, when my granddaughter Edie was born. How Danny wept in my arms. ‘God knows I’m happy, Mum, I’m so happy, but I just wish Joe were here to see the baby. My little brother… he would have loved her so much.’ I had comforted him, had tried to tell him not to feel guilty and accept that this new life was a miracle, her birth an occasion of great joy, that she was sent to heal us. And I truly meant it; I did feel deeply delighted, as if life had given us, our family, another chance.

Adam swung left into the driveway at Coombe at the last minute. The lovely old greystone house is hidden from the lane, and after so many years – thirteen now – since we were last there he had forgotten its exact location. But when he saw the open gate with the handwritten sign reading
Mr and Mrs Gabriel and Family
, he swung the car, followed by Danny and Lola, into the picturesque courtyard in front of the house – where we were immediately astonished, as always, by the perennial lushness of the white climbing roses encircling the porch.

I took a deep breath.
This is going to be hard
, I thought, my mind immediately enslaved by pictures of Danny and Joey as toddlers, feeding the ducks in the pond behind the house, squabbling outside in the embers of evening about who should have the first bath before bed.

But then Danny opened the Peugeot’s door and lifted Edie out of her car seat. Lola followed with a huge smile. ‘Molly, this is so perfect,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen such a pretty house.’

And I looked again at Coombe, and saw it as I had that first year we all came down on impulse, when Joey was only two and Danny five. I remembered my motherly misgivings, my fear that the longed-for perfect seaside holiday with our little sons would be spoiled by domestic glitches. No view, perhaps, or a shabby house and garden.

There was no need to worry. The place was impeccably kept back then, and it looked exactly the same now. And despite my reluctance about returning, my anxiety about my missing son, the fear that Joey’s memory would haunt my days here in our old family paradise, I sighed with pleasure. Coombe was after all unsullied, a peaceful, lovely house, awaiting our return with quiet welcoming warmth. There was nothing strange about it – nothing dark, threatening or spooky.

I breathed again, and went to take Edie from my son. ‘Look, Edie,’ I whispered. ‘It’s fine. We’re home. You’ll come to love this place so much.’

Adam took the keys from the plant pot in which they were always left, opened the porch door, stepped across the grey slate floor leading to the hall, and, hesitantly, we all followed him.

We quickly settled in. There was a cosy wood fire in the sitting room, all set and ready to light, which we immediately did. Best of all, the owners had left a home-cooked three-course meal in the fridge. Chicken-liver pâté, freshly baked brown bread rolls, a delicious fish pie and apple crumble with cream. All we had to do was heat it up. It was so welcome, so unexpected, and so appreciated after our seven-hour drive down from Manchester, although now I remembered it had always been one of the great selling points of these lovely cottages at Treworgey: a daily delivery service of wholesome good food. All you had to do was call the farm kitchen in the morning. The owners of this little village of picturesquely restored holiday cottages were that thoughtful.

We ate the delicious supper, Edie barely awake but still cheerful in her high chair. She loved mealtimes; loved the sociability of eating with adults, playing with her food, offering it to us with grave infant generosity, teasing us by snatching it away again, chuckling with pleasure when she eventually gave in and let us chomp on her mashed potato and toast fingers.

She was in her tiny element, surrounded by grown-ups who obviously adored her; and so, suddenly, was I, briefly transported to a place where I actually forgot my grief. It was extraordinary, the hold Edie’s presence had on me. I was entranced by her gummy smile, now punctuated with two tiny white teeth at the bottom. During that first evening at Coombe, I was completely focused on this miraculous baby, so much so that when I occasionally drifted back up to the surface to face who I actually was, a bereaved mother who had never even seen her missing son’s body, I felt quite shocked. What was happening to me? Had I stopped being a mother, and become so besotted with my granddaughter that my pleasure in her had almost wiped out the grief of my terrible loss?

No. That was ridiculous. I was still locked in a fight to find Joey. His body was missing. The little boat he had been piloting had washed up ashore, with no clues about my boy’s fate, how he could have vanished off the face of this earth, even given the treacherous seas of Cornwall. So five years on I was still bleeding. God knows I’d tried to carry on living. I was still working at a girls’ school in Manchester, still trying to take pride in the pupils’ achievements. I suppose some of our friends thought I had recovered. But I hadn’t. I’d just been putting it off. Surviving, trying to keep my marriage intact.

But I always knew there would be a reckoning. I always knew I would have to come back and find him. And now Adam had forced my hand by bringing us all down here. He had meant it to heal me. But as I sat surrounded by my family, I knew this was my chance. I needed to know. I would find Joey; I would discover what had happened to my son. And I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that somehow Edie would help me.

Chapter Three

I had taken a punt on this pretty little hamlet many years ago after seeing an enticing ad in
The Sunday Times
. We and our boys had loved it, cocooned as it was in the gentle Looe Valley, close to beautiful beaches and also to Polperro and the Land of Legend, a small but enchanting attraction depicting ancient Cornish myths, which had fascinated and terrified our sons in equal measure.

Although we were always happy at Coombe, as the boys grew older we began to rent cottages in Polperro instead. They were mad about boats and wanted to stay closer to the harbour. Adam had taken them on a sailing proficiency course, and in their teenage years we hardly saw them as they spent whole days at sea with friends who, like them, came back to Cornwall summer after summer. Their reunions were joyful, and while they often spent their evenings illicitly drinking ‘smuggled’ beer and cider on the little beach, we whiled away our time with the other parents, thoroughly enjoying wine and barbecues at each other’s holiday cottages. We were a group of like-minded people from all over the country, mostly professionals, teachers like Adam and me, lawyers and doctors, all liberal enough to ignore the fact that our kids, who although well into their teens were still technically underage, were getting slightly tipsy with beer we had bought for them and left casually in the kitchen for them to ‘sneak’ out to their harbourside camp fires. The children never let us down, though. None of them ever got thoroughly sloshed. Our kids knew we were watching beady-eyed from our warren-like houses, clustered closely together round the harbour.

We were all devoted to Polperro. Other couples, our contemporaries, may have preferred to get together in the Algarve, Spain or Brittany, but we and our little summer circle stayed loyal to Cornwall.

Then, I had loved the place so much. I had felt our family history, small as it was, belonged here. I’d believed our lives would gain meaning here, and – ridiculous as it sounds, since none of us was Cornish-born – that somehow, our destiny would unfold in this mystical place. And of course that had proved all too true for my Joey. His destiny was here, all right. Vanished in our little paradise. And here I was again, so many years on, without the slightest clue about what had happened to my darling boy.

Chapter Four