He staggers to his feet and out of the corner of my eye I see him curl his hand into a fist; he starts to slam clenched knuckles into the wall, but then pulls back sharply. He rakes his hand through his hair instead. Now he’s looking around him wildly, grabbing at the Primus stove, dragging the containers of water into a group, bundling up his blankets. He spins on his heels, staring at me. ‘They know we’re here.’ His left eye twitches and flutters. There’s sweat on his forehead. He stares at the locked door, taking out his knife. ‘They’re coming for us.’

  ‘No,’ I whisper. ‘No. It wasn’t… them.’

  ‘What?’ He glares at me, distracted, hair flopping into his eyes.

  ‘It was me,’ I say quietly. ‘It was me that read the letters. I didn’t mean to tear it. I’m sorry.’

  He tightens his fingers around the knife. ‘You?’ He shakes his head.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I pull my knees to my chest, shrinking as he strides over.

  He stands over me, clutching the tin in one hand and the knife in the other. Abruptly, he drops to my level, pushing his face into mine, his mouth opening wide. ‘Tell me!’ He’s shouting, spit flying, and the knife is at my cheek. He looks frightened and angry and blank all at the same time.

  I flinch away from the blade, closing my eyes. ‘What?’ My voice is a squeak. The sharp edge presses against me, a rim of cold steel. I imagine it slicing me open, how easy it would be for him, like skinning a rabbit. My heart is thundering.

  He hisses, ‘Are you a spy?’

  ‘No.’ I push the word out, afraid to move.

  And then the bite of the blade is gone. I open my eyes.

  ‘Tell me why then.’ He’s kneeling before me, rubbing his face with quick agitated movements.

  ‘I wanted to know more about you…’ Tentatively, I touch my skin where the steel pushed against it. ‘I didn’t mean any harm.’ I swallow. ‘I just wanted to know something about your life. You never tell me.’

  He looks puzzled; slowly he straightens up, sliding the knife back into the sheath on his belt. ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘That you have a grandfather. Someone who loves you.’

  He presses scabby, broken knuckles to his lips and turns away from me. We are both silent, breathing heavily. I’m trembling all over, and I clasp my fingers tightly to stop them shaking.

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ he says quietly. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘I’m sorry…’

  ‘He lived in the village.’ His voice is rough. ‘It was the thought of him that kept me going. Sleeping in ditches, stealing from bins. Gramps would know what to do, I thought. If I could just get to him. He’d explain everything.’ Billy gasps. ‘I knocked on the door. Nothing. Looked through the window. Rooms were empty.’

  Billy gets up and walks to the other side of the pagoda, his arm slung across his face. ‘He didn’t leave a message for me. I couldn’t ask the neighbours. I couldn’t draw attention. I just had to go. Keep running.’

  ‘He lived in the village?’ A sudden sense of urgency makes me lean towards him. ‘What was his name, your grandfather?’

  ‘Jack Train,’ he says quietly. He leans against the wall, his forehead against concrete.

  My hand flies to my mouth. ‘But I knew him.’ I blink at Billy through the gloom of the pagoda, remembering the white-haired man stepping out of Granny’s garden shed, how he’d taken my hand in his. ‘He was a friend of my Granny’s. More than a friend…’ I see his palm on the small of her back, her smile over his shoulder.

  ‘Gramps?’ He’s staring at me, his mouth gaping.

  ‘That makes us, I don’t know, almost related or something.’ I shake my head. The connection between us is tangible. His grandfather loved my granny. It seems incredible and yet I realise now that he’d told me several times that his grandfather was a local. For some reason it had never occurred to me to find out if I knew him. And now that I do know who he is, I can see echoes of Jack in Billy: the jut of his nose, his height. And in Billy’s voice the fainter trace of Jack’s accent.

  ‘Where is he?’ His eyes shine.

  ‘Billy,’ I say gently. ‘He had a stroke. He died just a few weeks after my granny.’

  Billy looks as though I’ve struck him. He drops his head in his hands and shuffles away. I want to pull him to me, hold his thin shoulders, feeling the knots of his spine under my cheek. I stay where I am on the ground. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. ‘They made each other happy.’

  I watch him walk to the other side of the pagoda. Night is falling outside. Long fingers of darkness fold him inside them. The wind catches at the edge of the concrete sills, hissing. There is the rustle of Billy sitting in his corner. I curl up on my blanket like a foetus. My lip is bleeding. I must have bitten it. I can still feel the edge of the knife–the bright sting of it. The smallest extra pressure and it would have sliced through my skin. I think of Granny and Jack in the allotment, wonder at their shock if they could see their grandchildren now, see us here in this place together. But something else edges into my thoughts, a blossoming of hope. Because now Billy knows that I’m connected to his grandfather, perhaps that knowledge, and the memory of Jack, will be the key to my freedom. Perhaps now he will let me go.

  29

  Max gives Sophie a lift into town once a week on his way to work, so that she can attend college. Sophie sits beside him in the passenger seat. She smells of a perfume that he’s not accustomed to, can’t seem to get used to: musky, powdery, with heavy floral undertones. Lilies, he realised the first time he’d smelt it, recognising the deep, lush aroma. He’s used to the light lemony fragrance that Clara uses. This is overpowering–heady, sensuous. He rolls down his window, smiles at her briefly, apologetically.

  ‘How are you getting on, Sophie?’ Max addresses his question to the windscreen. Country lanes are dangerous at this time of year, the banks so overgrown with tangled brambles and weeds that it’s impossible to see what’s around the corner. ‘College OK?’

  He catches her Gallic shrug from the corner of his eyes. ‘It is OK,’ she says in her smooth voice. Since she’s been with them, the hot days have turned her skin bronze. Eva became darker in the summer, the reflective glare from the water intensifying her tan.

  Max slows down and pulls over onto a verge to let a lorry pass. Huge wheels turn a foot from the car. The farmers are harvesting and the air is dense with gritty dust, the nights full of the growl of machinery in the fields. He rolls the window back up quickly to prevent the car being filled with fumes and bits of straw.

  ‘Your older daughter,’ Sophie says. ‘How many years had she?’

  He starts, a flush flooding his face. ‘Eva?’ He swallows. ‘She was seventeen.’

  ‘A big difference then,’ she mused, ‘between her and her sister, no?’

  ‘Yes.’ Max’s fingers grip the gear stick as he changes down into third. ‘I suppose so.’

  He remembers the moment Clara told him that she was pregnant with Faith. The joy that surged through him. ‘Maybe the fact that we didn’t plan this, didn’t try, maybe that will make it different.’ Clara had been shaking. ‘But I’m so frightened,’ she’d whispered.

  His job had been to soothe her, reassure her. Max was frightened too, but he couldn’t let her know. His instinct was to wrap her up in cotton wool and banish her to bed for nine months. Instead, his mother had stepped in. She was living in the garden by then, in her caravan. So she was there every day to walk Eva to and from the village primary school, to cook and look after them all. It helped keep him sane when he was stuck in the office, to know that Clara wasn’t alone.

  ‘Was she beautiful?’ Sophie’s insisting voice brings him back to the moment and he finds himself imagining his daughter’s face, her dark eyes blazing at the slightest provocation, her large mouth opening when she smiled to show the gap between her front teeth.

  He nods. It’s been a long time since anyone talked to him about Eva. And nobody has asked him questions like this since the accident. After the initial shock, he is glad to have this self-contained French girl talk to him about his daughter, grateful that she doesn’t tighten with embarrassment and change the subject.

  ‘I am an only child,’ she sighs. ‘In my apartment, it is only me and my mother. And sometimes her… men friends.’

  Max clears his throat, uncertain of how to respond. They’re on a bigger road now, and there are other cars to negotiate. They’ve reached the outskirts of Ipswich and there are roundabouts and junctions. In his peripheral vision, he sees her sweep her hair behind her ears.

  ‘Faith misses her sister,’ he says. ‘They were close, despite the age gap.’

  ‘She has you.’ Sophie sits up straighter. ‘Faith is lucky to have a good father.’

  Max slows the car, halting at a set of red traffic lights. Uninspiring rows of uniform houses line the road. He remembers Faith after her escapade in the boat. She’d been quietly defiant, completely unrepentant, and yet she must have been shaken up badly by the incident. He’d been too hard on her. She’d frightened him. She couldn’t even swim properly, damn it. He turns to Sophie and she holds his look. He glances away.

  ‘I don’t know that I’m such a good father.’ He is aware that his tone is bluff, but he needs to keep his voice steady. ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘Oh, I think, yes.’ She has a slight lisp. ‘You are a kind man.’ And he feels the touch of her fingers on his forearm. She presses down, a small pressure. Skin against skin. Clara and Max have not touched for so long. At the shock of someone else’s fingers, all the hairs on his arm rise.

  There is a polite beep from behind. The lights have changed to green. His feet work the pedals, hands clumsy on the wheel.

  He drops her outside the civic college. He sees it through her eyes: an ugly building, a square block of concrete, clumsy and tatty. Kids in dull clothes drift past. He notices several of them dressed as if for a Halloween party in flowing black with white-painted faces. He feels sure that Paris has nothing as hideous as this. In the months before she drowned, Eva had also taken to wearing dreary layers of black clothing: skirts that dragged at her ankles, strange fingerless gloves and jumpers with trailing threads. She’d stomped around in a pair of big, heavy-soled boots. He couldn’t understand it. She’d laughed and called him old-fashioned when he’d told her they looked as though they belonged to a construction worker on a building-site.

  He’s about to say goodbye, give Sophie a brisk wave of his hand, to take back some formality, a notion that he is the employer and she the au pair. But she’s already leaning forwards, enveloping him in the heady scent of lilies. She brushes both his cheeks with her own. He hadn’t shaved that morning and her fine hair slides across, catching in his bristles.

  ‘Thank you,’ she smiles. She has very small, white teeth, he notices, like a child’s.

  Max watches her walk away, her bag slung over her shoulder. She is less than two years older than Eva. But she seems much older. There is something knowing about her; you’d almost call it an inscrutability, a control at any rate that Eva had not had time to acquire. And he reminds himself that Sophie has grown up in Paris, a capital city, whereas his daughters are country children. He and Clara had wanted that innocence for them. They’d wanted to keep the girls safe, protected from city life.

  Max drives to the office feeling unsettled. He winds down the window fully to try and cool the hot car, clear the heavy air. He’s stuck behind a bus and it pumps diesel fumes. The smell makes him nauseous. Sophie’s perfume remains around him; he can taste it on his tongue, sour and cloying. It occurs to him that Sophie is the same age as Suky was. He struggles to remember Suky’s face and instead he sees the embroidery in her hands, delicate stitches threading through folds of fabric, the work held on her lap under the bulge of her stomach.

  His legs are sticking uncomfortably to the wool of his suit trousers. His collar feels too tight around his neck, as if it’s strangling him. Clara hadn’t thought much of the clothes he had to wear to the office. ‘My clients expect me to wear a suit,’ he’d protested, as she’d giggled at the sight of him done up in a pinstripe suit in a heatwave.

  She’d shaken her head. ‘Men are such impractical creatures.’

  She’d been looking cool and sexy in a mini-dress. It was years ago, when mini-skirts were causing newspaper headlines. She’d even worn one to get married in. A white smock with big fabric daisies around the hem, and her hair cut like a pixie’s around her ears. ‘If you bend over, you’ll flash your knickers to the world,’ he’d whispered to her at the registry office.

  ‘Who says I’m wearing any?’ she’d replied, dipping her head demurely into the bouquet of real daisies that she was carrying.

  They’d begun their marriage thinking that love was all they needed to carry them through a life together. Those bleak years of having one miscarriage after another had almost destroyed them, yet they’d survived it, the love holding on. But the grief of Eva’s drowning hasn’t brought them together; it’s pushed them apart, forced them into separate places. He is determined that this isn’t the end. Moving house is the only answer, he thinks. It will give them a chance to begin again. It has to.

  30

  Mum and I stand at Joe’s bedside. He looks very small in the hospital bed, tucked in under a fold of white sheet and a blue blanket. His legs make straight, neat lines under the blue. The bed is raised, supporting him at a reclining angle. It has metal bars, a bit like a cot. There’s a heavy plaster cast on his left arm. Sandra and Fred are sitting on chairs on the other side of the bed. Sandra looks at us with a stern face.

  It’s a children’s ward, so the walls are painted in primary yellow and green. Plastic sheep dangle from the ceiling and there are cardboard Disney characters on the walls. Scrawly pictures drawn by kids are tacked up on a notice board behind the nurse’s desk among the thank-you cards. Pluto’s long face grins down at me from behind Joe’s bed. Mum reaches into her bag and pulls out the presents we bought on our way to the hospital. She offers Joe a foil-wrapped box of chocolates and a paper bag full of dusty purple grapes. He reaches for the chocolates with his good hand.

  ‘You can’t open ’em, you narna. Give ’em to me.’ Fred stretches across to take the box, ripping off the outer cellophane with loud crackling noises.

  ‘How are you, Joe?’ Mum asks. Her hand trembles against mine.

  ‘Lucky to be alive in the circumstances.’ Sandra’s voice is hard. She blinks and raises her chin. ‘He’s as you find him. It’s a complicated fracture, the doctor says.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mum’s voice is quiet. ‘Faith has something to say, don’t you, Faith?’

  Sandra looks at me, her mouth pushing out, as if her tongue presses at the inside of her lips. Her red nails tap on her handbag making a cross clicking noise. Joe stares up at the ceiling. He’s pretending we’re not here. I swallow and blink and turn my feet inwards, standing on the edges of my shoes. Fred has his head down, rustling inside the chocolate box, and Sandra turns to him and snaps, ‘Not now, Fred.’ She takes the box away and puts it on Joe’s bedside cabinet, shaking her head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say in a whispering voice.

  Hunched low in his chair, Fred winks at me. I remember his surprised face surfacing through the waves, grey water closing over his head, his hand opening and closing. And I am sorry. Sorry that I took them with me. Sorry that I hadn’t thought about lifejackets. Sorry that the boat was rotten. Most of all, I’m sorry that I never managed to get to the island to find Eva.

  Sandra gives a small toss of her head. She takes a tissue out of her bag and blows her nose loudly. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, let’s all have a chocolate and forget all about it.’ She gives Fred a light push on his shoulder. ‘Get up treasure, and let Mrs Gale have your chair.’

  Mum and Sandra sit together on the plastic chairs and begin to talk in low voices, their heads together. Mum touches Sandra’s hand gently. Sandra crosses one leg over the other and says she wishes she could have a fag.

  Fred leans over and puts a chocolate straight into Joe’s mouth. ‘Butterscotch,’ he tells him, ‘your favourite.’

  He offers me the box, but I shake my head, pulling my cardigan down over my hands. He looks at me. ‘Don’t worry. Sandra’s just mad cos Les has gone back to work, so she’s left here on her own.’

  ‘How long till he gets out of hospital?’

  ‘Couple of days, they said.’

  ‘It was an adventure though,’ Joe says, sucking the sticky sweetness off his teeth. ‘Best bit of the holidays.’

  In the car on the way home Mum is quiet, frowning through the windscreen. ‘Dad and I have been talking,’ she says, slowing down at a junction, looking left and right but not at me. ‘We’ve been talking about selling the house. We think it’s time to move.’

  My heart starts to beat very fast. ‘We can’t—’

  ‘Hear me out, love,’ she cuts across me. ‘We think that it would be best for all of us, for us as a family, to move away from the area. A clean start.’

  ‘But Eva—’

  ‘We’ll never forget Eva–she’s in our hearts, she’s part of us–but she’s not coming back, Faith.’

  I try to stay calm. ‘No. That’s what you think. You don’t know that.’

  Mum takes her hand off the steering wheel and squeezes my knee. ‘I wish she was on the island, Faith. I wish there were such things as miracles and magical creatures.’ Her voice tightens. ‘More than anything in the world, I want Eva to be alive. But you have to understand that it’s not real.’

  Through the muddle of her words, music starts up in my head: Ella’s voice insisting, But it wouldn’t be make believe, if you believed in me. Or is it Granny that’s singing to me? I hum the next line.

  ‘What?’ Mum shoots me a glance.

  ‘Nothing.’ I fold my arms tightly. ‘I won’t leave.’ I imagine, for a second, camping out under the oak tree, under a tarpaulin, homeless.