In Her Shadow (38 page)

I didn’t want to see Ellen, I didn’t want to face her. I didn’t want to have to tell her what I had done. She knew I was leaving. She knew which plane I was catching. She would understand if I didn’t turn up.

I left my rucksack by the front door, went into the kitchen and put some bread into the toaster.

Mum looked up from her ironing. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m hungry.’

Mum glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘Aren’t you going to pop up to Thornfield House to say goodbye to Ellen?’

I turned my back to Mum and took a plate from the drainer.

‘There’s still time,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll come with you if you like. I never gave her her birthday card and I—’

‘No!’ I cried. ‘No, don’t come. I’d like to have a bit of time on my own with Ellen.’ I put the plate on the counter. ‘I’ll take the card. You can have the toast,’ I said.

I heard the music before I reached the gates to Thornfield House. I followed the sound, dawdling across the drive to the front door. I was hoping something would happen to change the course of events, so that I would not have to go inside and face Ellen and confess what I had done. I
closed my eyes and prayed for an earthquake, or a plane crash. But nothing happened. I opened my eyes and the day was still dreary grey, muggy with summer heat, the midges were still swarming and the music was still playing. Mrs Todd was at the door wearing her summer coat and her horseshoe headscarf, carrying her handbag and a wicker shopping basket with an umbrella tucked under her arm.

I smiled at her half-heartedly. She smiled back.

‘I’m glad you’re here, Hannah,’ she said. ‘Ellen’s been very low. You can keep her company while I go to the supermarket.’

‘Is Mr Brecht in?’

‘He’s upstairs,’ said Mrs Todd, indicating with her eyes that Mr Brecht was above us, in the room where his wife died. ‘Try not to disturb him.’

I went through the hall, and stood for a moment at the door to the front room, which was slightly ajar. I didn’t like going into the room, knowing about the bloodstains that lay beneath the rug. My heart was beating fast, too fast. I touched the door with my fingertips and it swung open and I stepped inside. Ellen must have felt the draught, because she stopped playing at once and turned to me.

Her face was wan, her eyes dark, shadowed by circles of tiredness and stress, but she smiled when she saw me and slipped off the stool and came towards me, holding her arms out. She was wearing her shorts and a huge hooded sweatshirt that I recognized as one that had once belonged to Jago. I stepped back as she came towards me. I wouldn’t let her touch me.

‘Oh Hannah,’ she said, dropping her arms by her side. ‘Thank goodness you’re here!’

I retracted a little, moved away, and she felt this and let me go. She smiled – her wide smile. She rubbed her nose with the back of her fingers, and scratched behind her knee with her toes.

‘Here,’ I said, holding out the birthday present I had never had a chance to give her. When Ellen reached out and took the small parcel, I noticed that her fingernails were bitten down to the quick and her cuticles were bloodied. She unwrapped the present. It was a photograph of the two of us on the beach in a small, heart-shaped frame that I’d made myself and decorated with drift-glass.

‘It’s so you don’t forget me,’ I said, ‘when I’m in Chile.’

‘I think it’s more likely to be the other way round,’ Ellen said. She was still smiling. She held the present to her heart. ‘This is the best thing to come out of the shittest eighteenth birthday ever,’ she said. I smiled a feeble smile.

Ellen put the photograph on top of the piano.

She was waiting for something. She was waiting for me to give her news.

‘I … I’m leaving this afternoon,’ I said. ‘Ricky’s father is driving us to the airport.’

Ellen bit her bottom lip. If she was envious of my freedom, my new start, my widening horizons, she did not show it.

‘You’re going to have an amazing time,’ she said. ‘I’m so proud of you. I knew you’d find a way to get out of here, somehow.’

‘Ellen …’

She held a finger to her lips then pointed to the ceiling. ‘I’ll put some music on,’ she said, ‘then we can talk without
him
hearing us.’

She went over to the stereo, squatted, chose an album, slipped the disc from its sleeve and put it on the turntable. I watched as she set the record spinning, lifted the arm, blew dust from the needle, and dropped it onto the record. It was a Rolling Stones compilation. The first track was: ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby’. Ellen turned the sound up loud. At first she just nodded her head in time to the music, then she began to dance. She danced around the room in her bare
feet, twirling like a dervish, her hair flying in all directons. I stood still, looking at my hands, still clutching Mum’s card. Ellen grabbed hold of me and tried to make me dance with her, but I didn’t; I couldn’t.

‘Come on,’ she cried. ‘Spoilsport! Who’m I going to dance with when you’re in America?’

Then she dropped my hands. The record crackled for a moment and the next track began. ‘Paint It Black’.

Ellen was panting. Her cheeks were flushed now and the hair closest to her scalp was damp with sweat. She smelled dirty, as if she had not bathed for days. This made me feel sad.

‘How’s Jago?’ she asked. ‘Is he OK? Was he devastated about us not leaving on my birthday? Does he have another plan? Because I don’t think we should wait any longer. I think …’ she reached behind her to turn up the music ‘… we should just go. We don’t have to go to America. I don’t care where we are. I don’t care if we have to live in a barn! I’ll climb out of the window one night. Or I’ll sneak out when Papa’s upstairs. I’ll hide in the churchyard until the coast is clear. Will you tell Jago?’

‘Ellen …’ I said, as through the speakers the singer sang about how he wanted to escape his darkness. ‘Ellen – Jago’s gone.’

‘Gone where?’ she asked. She didn’t get it. She had no inkling. She could no more conceive of Jago leaving without her than of the sun losing its fire and fading to nothing.

‘He’s gone away.’

She frowned. ‘Gone away where? Why?’

I looked up at the ceiling, where the chandelier hung from a fancy plaster rose. The glass pieces had yellowed, and a broken spiderweb was collecting dust. I toed the edge of the rug that hid Adam Tremlett’s bloodstains. Ellen came closer to me. She stood in front of me. Too close. She was taking
the oxygen from me. Her breath was sour, it had a metallic tang.

‘Hannah? Tell me! Where’s Jago?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He went away the night of your birthday and we haven’t heard from him since. We don’t know where he is.’ I paused. I said, very quietly, ‘I don’t think he’s coming back.’

Ellen looked at me intently. She tucked her hair behind her ears. Then she shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Jago wouldn’t have left without me. He just wouldn’t.’

‘He has,’ I said. ‘Ellen, I’m sorry but he has.’

She laughed, but now there was a nervous edge to her laughter. ‘Why? Why would he do that?’

The record moved on to the next track.

Ellen’s face looked so innocent, so blameless that I almost broke apart inside – but I reminded myself that it was her fault. If she had only told Jago the truth about the abortion, then I wouldn’t have had to hurt him like I did. She’d been stringing him along for weeks, being Little Miss Perfect, acting all sweet and innocent and
pregnant
. If she’d been honest then I wouldn’t have had to say those things to keep him away from Thornfield House. She couldn’t blame me for what I’d done. What choice had I had?

‘I told him about the abortion,’ I said.

Horror crept into Ellen’s eyes. It served her right, I told myself. She was the one who got rid of Jago’s baby without so much as a word to him. She was the one who made me lie to him. It was her fault that Jago had gone.

Ellen stared at me as if she couldn’t believe what I had said.

‘But you promised you wouldn’t tell him, Hannah! You swore you wouldn’t.’

‘And you promised me that you would!’ I replied. ‘You
should have told him, Ellen – you should have told him the truth.
You
might have been prepared to keep lying to Jago, but I wasn’t. Did you know he’d been out buying baby clothes? Did you know he’d made a crib? He believed in a baby that didn’t exist – he loved a ghost baby
because of you
!’

Ellen put her two hands over her mouth, the fingers splayed.

‘Oh God,’ she whispered.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, more gently.

‘Oh God,’ Ellen repeated.

She was silent. Then she collapsed like a puppet. She fell down onto her heels and hid her head in her arms, grabbing fistfuls of hair. I watched her for a moment. I was wishing she’d stop being so dramatic, but then I realized that she wasn’t putting it on. She wasn’t acting. Ellen was disintegrating in front of me.

I didn’t know what to do. I looked around helplessly as if I would find the answer in the fireplace, or the window – but before I could think of anything, Ellen uncurled herself and she started to scream.

I tried to stop her. I tried to hold her, to touch her, to console her, but she was beyond comfort. She was beyond anything I could do.

I had destroyed Ellen as comprehensively as I’d destroyed Jago.

It was something I would have to live with for the rest of my life.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

I TALKED TO
Kirsten and Karla and Dora for a while and then I was exhausted, so Karla took me upstairs and showed me to a room where I could lie down. She drew the heavy curtains, and settled me on a bed that was big and soft as a cloud. Karla sat with me, saying nothing, but her presence was calming and for a while I slept.

When I woke I was alone, and the evening was beginning to draw in. I washed my face and went downstairs, out into the gardens, and followed a path down to the River Elbe. The meadow grass was long – it brushed my knees – and the air was full of soft sunlight and little moths and insects.

John was sitting on a huge old log stripping the bark from a twig, his legs stretched out in front of him. A few yards beyond, the river ran by, wide and calm, reflecting the sunlight. Insects danced on its surface and every now and then a fish leaped. I perched beside John, resting my bottom on the sun-warmed bark.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi.’

‘Did you manage to sleep?’

‘A bit.’

A trout jumped out of the water and, for a brief moment,
light glistened on its pirouetting arc before it fell back into the river, ripples spreading wide.

I wrapped my arms about myself.

‘This is a lovely spot,’ John said. ‘I saw a grey heron just now. A beautiful big bugger. That’s supposed to be a portent of good luck.’

‘I didn’t have you down as the superstitious kind.’

‘I’m not, as a rule.’

I looked out across the countryside. The leaves were beginning to turn in the trees, only a little, but the change was there. In the distance, the sounds of the city drifted across: cars and sirens and alarms.

‘It’s nice to think of Ellen being here,’ I said. ‘I bet she used to climb on this log when she was a child.’

‘What was she like?’ asked John.

‘She was the most alive person I’ve ever known.’

We exchanged smiles.

‘Karla told me they have some videos of her,’ John said. ‘Her grandparents took some cine-film when she was a child.’

‘I don’t think I could bear to watch the videos,’ I said.

‘No,’ said John. ‘That’s perfectly understandable.’

For a while we sat on the fallen tree, looking out across the river. Two kingfishers chased one another across the surface of the water, flashing brilliant blue. I rubbed my eyes.

‘Are you ready to let go of Ellen now?’ John asked.

‘Almost,’ I said. ‘There’s one more thing I have to do.’

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

THIS IS WHAT
I knew.

After I left Ellen that day, the day I told her Jago was gone, I went back down the hill to number 8 Cross Hands Lane. I felt ill. Mum could see I was upset, but she put it down to the fact that I was worried about flying.

‘Look at you,’ she said, ‘you’re shaking like a leaf. Go and sit down and I’ll make tea.’

I paced the front room, chewing my hair, telling myself over and over that it wasn’t my fault, that if Ellen had only told the truth, none of this would have happened. She was to blame, not me. Mum came in with a tray and made me sit down. She told me about a conversation she’d had with someone from church who told her you were more likely to be kicked to death by a donkey than die in a plane crash.

‘Are there many donkeys in Chile?’ she asked. Normally I’d have felt irritated by her naivety, but that day I could hardly even bear to listen to her.

I thought that probably everything would be all right. Jago would come back and he and Ellen would just have to sort things out themselves, without me running around between them, keeping their secrets for them. It was up to them now. It was nothing to do with me any more.

But in my heart, I knew Jago wouldn’t return.

I told my heart to shut up. I refused to hear it. I closed it down for good, packed it away and stitched it up tight so I wouldn’t have to listen to it any more.

Each time we heard a car engine on the lane outside, which was not often, I leaped to my feet. I couldn’t wait to be in Ricky’s father’s car powering out of Cornwall, I couldn’t wait to be off. I wanted to be as far away from Trethene as I could be. While my mother fussed on about snakes and scorpions, I stared at the clock, oblivious to her. Every minute seemed to drag on. The big hand took an age to complete each circuit of the clockface, and the ticking was like torture to me.

While we waited in the cottage, Ellen picked up the fire poker, the same poker with which her father had tried to kill Adam Tremlett, and she smashed up the piano.

Nothing salvageable was left.

But I didn’t know about that. I watched the clock and listened to my mother, and at last, at long last, the Land Rover arrived. Mum invited Ricky and Mr Wendon in for a cup of tea, but I think we were all relieved when he said we’d better be getting straight off. Dad came in from the garden, stiff and embarrassed in front of the senior officer. I kissed my parents goodbye quickly, and Ricky and his father shook their hands, then I sat in the back and watched as we drove out of Cross Hands Lane, waving to Mum and Dad through the rear window until they were out of sight. Then I slumped in the seat clutching the foil-wrapped sandwiches Mum had thrust into my lap at the last moment, and watched the Lizard peninsula go past. I was so relieved to be leaving, so glad that every second, the distance between Ellen and me was growing greater. Ricky and his father were talking, making conversation. I answered questions directed at me politely, but most of the time I was silent. When we finally crossed the Cornwall county boundary line, heading through
Devon towards the M5 motorway, I fell asleep, my head cushioned by my jumper.