Eva was different. Even as a baby. He loved the passion in her, though it led to fights and arguments. Eva storming out of rooms, slamming doors. ‘Why can’t I stay out till twelve?’ she’d demand. ‘Other people do. This is the 1980s, Dad!’ He fought her because he knew he was right. He remembered Suky, her childish face above her bloated body. Her folded hands had looked helpless, resigned, placed neatly across the top of her pregnant belly, like someone already dead.

  It strikes him that he has no idea what Suky was really like. Since Clara’s refusal to tell Eva that she was adopted, it had seemed crucial to push thoughts of Eva’s birth parents from his mind. Max frowns into the wind, recalling the short time that he spent in the dormitory. He understands now how brave Suky was to give up her baby, to endure time in the ‘home’ that had seemed more like a prison. He remembers her certainty that she was having a girl. The pearls lying in his hand, warm from her neck.

  ‘Love her for me,’ she’d said, looking up at him from her bed, weighed down by her swollen legs and heavy belly. So much trust. And he has squandered it. He closes his eyes, tipping his face to the sky, feeling the lick of the wind on his skin, the tongue of the rain. The sounds, smells and textures of this place will always be home. Despite everything.

  Eva loved the sea as much as he did; she’d been brought up by it, knew the sounds and habits of it. Max had taught her how to sail and the skill of listening to the ocean, watching the sky, understanding the movement of a boat on water. But perhaps there were sailors somewhere in her bloodline. Eva was made up of fragments of strangers. He wonders if cutting her away from all that had been a kind of criminal act. He shakes his head. It wasn’t until they’d had Faith that he had understood the importance of inheritance, the way a child holds elements of other people inside them. Every day he sees the contours of his mother rising in Faith’s narrow face. He turns his back on the river and the island, walks away from the sea, inland, back to the house. The rain has stopped.

  At the edge of the marsh, he notices knots of green blackberries inside a hedge of brambles and ragged nettles; they shine with moisture. On closer inspection, he sees that there are clusters of ripe ones too. He picks a large, dark clot of fruit. Brushing away a tendril of cobweb, he bites into it, letting the succulent sweetness burst on his tongue. Almost immediately a bitter taste makes him grimace; he spits it out into his palm and looks at the splattered mess of purple. There’s a maggot at the centre, pale and twisting. His stomach churns, bile rising in his throat as he wipes his hands on some dock leaves, and then on his trousers.

  As he enters the hall, kicking off his muddy shoes, shaking the wet out of his hair like a dog, he can taste the horror of the maggot, its gritty flesh between his teeth. Sophie appears from the living room.

  ‘Have you seen my wife?’

  ‘She’s in her bedroom.’ Sophie comes closer to him. She looks concerned. ‘You are sad. No?’

  Max leans back, forcing a smile. ‘A little. Maybe.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she takes another step towards him, ‘is there anything you would like?’

  ‘No.’ He clears his throat. ‘No. Thank you, Sophie.’

  ‘You are always alone.’

  Of course she would notice the atmosphere in the house, hear the arguments. Max is embarrassed. It’s not fair on her. He takes a deep breath, ‘Things are a little difficult at the moment. It’s nothing for you to worry about.’

  She shakes her head. ‘I want to make you happy.’

  Max shuffles backwards and finds that he’s up against the banisters, wooden spindles pressing into his spine. He’s not sure what she means. It must be the difficulties of another language. He trips over his discarded boots. She puts a hand on his chest. ‘Wet,’ she murmurs, ‘you are wet.’

  She moves close enough to lean against him, her heart suddenly beating over his ribs; he is momentarily winded by the shock of her breasts squashed against him. He can see the sweep of her lashes, the pores on her nose. A strand of hair has caught in the moisture of her lips and without thinking he pulls it free. Sophie looks up at him and something in her expression, some need or expectation, makes him push her away. She stumbles a little and he clears his throat, makes a show of bending to pick up his muddy boots, loud, hearty words spilling from his mouth: ‘Terrible summer I’m afraid. Rain drives you mad, doesn’t it?’ He puts his boots in the cupboard, talking over his shoulder. ‘It doesn’t usually rain like this. It must be the wettest summer we’ve had for years.’

  Sophie gives him a cool look, arching her eyebrows. She walks up the stairs without looking back.

  Max groans; he feels like a fool. He searches for memories of things he’d inadvertently done to encourage Sophie, things he’d said that might have created the situation. Or did he imagine it? Was she really inviting him to kiss her? Now he’s not so sure. He’s never been good at establishing distances between himself and people; he’s always been uncomfortable with formality. He has the same problem at work. His clients are more friends than clients. They feel that they can pop in without appointments. Many of them don’t pay his bills. He knows that he’s good at the legal side of his job. He’s not so good at maintaining boundaries. He must be more careful.

  36

  I put the lid down on the lavatory as quietly as I can and climb onto it. Squatting on the slippery plastic with my back against the cistern, I prepare to wait. Outside the cubicle, I can hear another pupil washing their hands. There’s a splatter of water and then a shuffle of footsteps and a door closing. It stinks in here. I wrinkle my nose, trying not to inhale. I look at the scribbles of graffiti: Becky loves John. Mrs How is a Big Fat Cow.

  Beyond the girls’ loos is the noise of break-time. It washes through the little frosted window high up in the wall: a chatter of voices, the shouts and screams of the playground. When the bell goes and everyone is banging down their desk lids and scrambling to leave the room I drag my feet, stopping to do up my shoelaces, pausing to blow my nose, trying to take as long as possible to leave the safety of the classroom. ‘Come along, Faith,’ Mr Barlow said today, ‘if you don’t hurry up you’ll miss playtime.’ He’d stood by the door, holding it open for me.

  I’ve tried hanging around with the quiet kids, Emily and Lou, but they look at me with sad faces and whisper that I’m bad luck and they’re sorry but they don’t want to play with me. I don’t blame them. It doesn’t matter where I go, Joanna and Ellie always find me. In some gritty corner, or behind the bike-shed, they’ll start: ‘Where’s your boyfriend then?’

  ‘Oh, she put him in hospital,’ Ellie smirks, ‘didn’t you know? She’s dangerous.’

  ‘And careless,’ Joanna laughs. ‘Got rid of her only friends by nearly drowning them. And that’s after she already went and lost her sister.’ Joanna puts out a finger and pokes me. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’ She comes close enough for me to smell what she had for breakfast. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  Some more people came to look around the house yesterday. They walked into all the rooms. I trailed after them, spying. ‘Lovely light in here.’ ‘But we’ll need to change the carpets of course.’ ‘What would we do with the garden?’ I crouched behind the doors hating them. If we move I won’t have to see Joanna or Ellie ever again. If we move I’ll never find Eva. The two thoughts smash together in my head. Nothing makes sense. I grip my wrist, pushing two fingers inside the tiny dip where my pulse ticks and suddenly I’m listening to the beat of my blood, thinking how the artery twists around tendons and muscles like tree roots. And I feel a bit better.

  I hear the sound of the door swinging open, more footsteps. I let go of my pulse. The cubicle door rattles; someone is trying the handle. I watch the silver bolt moving up and down in the lock. Go away, I’m whispering, go away, go away.

  ‘Faith Gale, are you in there?’

  It’s Joanna’s voice. I draw my feet in closer, wrap my arms around my knees tightly and close my eyes. The cistern is cold against my back.

  ‘She’s here.’ Ellie’s triumphant voice. ‘Sat on the toilet.’

  I open my eyes to see Ellie’s face; she’s pressed herself sideways under the cubicle door, smirking up at me, her eyes bright. ‘What you doing? Got the runs or something?’

  I look down at her. She looks odd. Her face only just fits sideways in the gap between the cubicle door and the floor. She seems to be missing the rest of her body. Her head is a detached, freckled football. In one quick movement, I’m off the seat. My knee flexes, leg kicking out. My toe makes contact with Ellie’s nose: it feels soft and then hard.

  She screams, her mouth opening so wide that I see her tonsils, red in the back of her throat. The face disappears. Now there is angry pounding on the door, the sound of Ellie making gurgling noises. There will be blood. Noses bleed a lot. There are so many blood vessels. I stand with my hand clamped over my mouth, half-laughing and half-crying. ‘You’re dead!’ Their voices shout. ‘You’re dead. After school. We’re gonna get you.’ The whole cubicle rattles. A loo roll from the next cubicle flies over, unravelling in a white streamer. There is the sound of the bell and after a few moments their footsteps on the floor and the swing of the door closing.

  I stand with my back against the cubicle door, humming: if I didn’t care more than words can say, if I didn’t care would I feel this way?

  Jack and Granny are sitting on the bench outside Granny’s garden shed in her allotment. It is dusk. They sit very close, their shoulders touching. The Ink Spots are playing on the radio. The sound crackles into the evening air, a harmony of gentle voices, and there is the smell of mint and lavender.

  37

  Max has never worked harder. He ends up taking paperwork home every evening. And yet each case seems so utterly meaningless, so pointless. As a small-town solicitor, all his clients are known personally to him. He passes them in the street daily, waits behind them at the bank and at the checkout queue at the supermarket. They tell him things about their personal lives. Like a doctor or a priest, he is considered safe and neutral. The fact that he sits in an office with his framed law certificates behind him is mortifying. It’s him that feels like a criminal.

  But at last, after months of lethargy, things are changing. He spoke to his lawyer friend, John, at the Cambridge firm and John was delighted by the idea that Max was at last considering joining them. Max has yet to tell his clients that he’s abandoning them and shutting up the business.

  The estate agents have brought a few prospective buyers around to look at the house. There is no offer yet, but apparently someone is coming back for a second view. Max can’t let himself think too hard about leaving. Holt House has a sense of stoic kindness, a weather-beaten grace that Max loves. Sometimes he finds himself touching the walls, stroking doorframes as if the wood and stone have absorbed a pulse, as if memories breathe voices into the air: the lives of his children, their childhoods imprinted into the fabric of the place. He can see Eva flouncing away up the stairs, her angry tread echoing through the floorboards, Faith staggering around the kitchen, clutching at the table legs as she learned to walk. He will always be grateful to Clara for putting her inheritance into it.

  At some point, he and Clara will need to drive over to Cambridge and look at property, consider schools for Faith. Perhaps they should rent first, take their time to find the right home. He and Clara must sit down and talk it through.

  They haven’t talked for a long time. The way she is now reminds him of how she was when she was going through the miscarriages. Except she won’t take the drugs she’d been treated with then, says she’d rather feel the pain properly this time.

  He drives home through country lanes, seeing that some of the fields have been ploughed already, turning them into dark squares. The trees overhanging the road are peppered with yellow leaves. Soon the sides of the road will be covered in the slime of rotten leaves and there will be drifts of them in the garden; he will have to start to sweep them up at weekends, raking piles to make into a bonfire. It was a job that Faith and Eva had loved to do with him, the task degenerating into a battle with leaves flying everywhere and Eva chasing a screaming Faith around the garden.

  At home, Clara is in the kitchen unpacking bags of shopping. She’s got her head in the fridge. She peers around the white door when she hears him come in and looks at him with a neutral expression. ‘Haven’t started supper yet.’ She picks up a packet of meat and puts it onto a shelf. ‘Not sure where Sophie is. I said she could have the evening off because she’s been cleaning to get the house ready for the second view. They’re coming tomorrow.’

  Max is relieved that Sophie is out. He’s found it awkward being around her since that odd, disconcerting moment between them in the hall. Sophie maintains a hurt and dignified silence around him. He has tried to reassure her with his manner and friendly tone that whatever happened, it’s all forgotten and put behind them.

  Silver gets up off the floor to greet him. The dog pushes his nose into Max’s hand, wagging his long tail so that it bangs against the table, whips across Max’s knees. He leans down to pat Silver’s lean side, pulls his silky ears.

  ‘Where’s Faith?’

  ‘In her room. Doing homework.’ Clara bends down and picks up a tin of tomatoes. ‘Year five seems to mean she has something to do most nights.’

  As he mounts the stairs, he slides his tie out of his collar, pulls his shirt undone at the neck, snapping off a button by mistake with fumbling fingers. It rolls away down the steps behind him, a tiny white wheel. In the bathroom, he splashes his face with cold water, dabbing his eyes dry with a towel. He looks at himself in the mirror. He hopes that this second view will lead to an offer on the house. He’ll take almost any price they care to name. The three of them must make a new start. It’s the only way that they’ll have any chance of moving forwards.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he says quietly, seeing Eva’s face shining back at him out of the mirror. ‘Forgive me my love, but we have to try, we have to try and go on living without you.’ He sees that Eva’s mouth is dark with plum lipstick and reaches out his thumb to smudge it away. The mirror is a cold shock on his skin. God, he misses her so much. The pain of it is physical. He breathes deeply, steadying himself, and turns away from the glass.

  38

  Fingers move at my neck. Cold air creeps over my skin. I think of ice-cubes, snow in the garden, the white crunch of it under my feet. Only I’m not out in the snow, I’m burning up on a beach, baking under a fiery sun. Huge birds swoop across the sun, their wings casting shadows over me, making me shiver. I look up into the curve of beaks, the glitter of yellow eyes. Vultures. They are waiting for me to die, waiting to rip into my flesh, pull me apart. They will toss my bones into the sand. I put my arms across my face and cry out.

  Someone untangles my arms. Fingers push the hair back from my forehead. There is water at my mouth. It drips into my parched throat. I’m so thirsty. ‘Mum?’ My lips move but there’s no sound in the desert.

  ‘You look like her, you see,’ a voice says, ‘same hair, same lips. Different colouring. That’s all.’

  Marco stroked my skin with slender fingers, giving me goose pimples. He told me that I was beautiful. He said he noticed me the minute that he walked into the club. He had to have a drink to pluck up the courage to come over and talk to me. Imagine that. He looked so cool. I never thought that he’d be interested in me: a boy like him.

  Marco is holding my cheeks in his hands; he places his lips over mine. I open my eyes and I’m looking into the face of a stranger. A man with a beard stares back, his open mouth wet inside a tangle of hair. No, I’m shouting. No. But he’s kissing me again. And it’s strange because I like it. Billy. His name comes back to me and I want to laugh. This is all wrong, I want to say. I love Marco, not you. But I can’t speak because his mouth is on mine, soft, insisting. He’s holding me tightly, as tightly as I want to be held, and now his mouth is pressed at my ear. It’s all right, Eva, he murmurs, I’ll look after you. I’ll always look after you.

  I’m floating above the pagoda, looking down on the island and the ring of sea, the waves blinking white and dark against the pebbles. There are stars all around me. Enormous and bright. I am free, light as air, and I know I’ve been here before, inside this flight, this letting-go. A man’s voice is speaking again. It sounds as if someone is fiddling with the volume control. The words rush towards me and then fade away, pulling me back to the heaviness of earth.

  There is a floor under me, hard and cold. ‘I saved you like she told me to…’ the man’s voice says, ‘only thing is, I think now it’s you that’s saving me.’ I recognise the voice. I find a name. Billy. I whimper, my fingers clutching at something rough across my chest. I hold onto it. It’s a lifeline. I think Dad has thrown me a lifeline and now he will pull me to safety. The boat rocks wildly above me, the bow rearing up high on the crest of a gigantic wave. I hold my breath, knowing that it must crash back down into the trough, and that it will smash me under it, drowning me.

  39

  Clara puts the receiver down in the cradle with a click. It was the estate agent. His client has made an offer. It’s not far off the asking price and Clara has told them that they’ll take it. Max will agree of course. She feels out of balance; it’s happened quicker than she thought it would. The house is so remote; she couldn’t imagine anyone else wanting to live here. But apparently the new owners intend to use it as a country retreat, a weekend house. She wonders how Max will feel now that the move is really happening. Max has loved this house since childhood, walking past it as a boy on the way to the river with a fishing rod in his hand.

  Clara goes into Eva’s bedroom. She sits on the bed and picks up Eva’s old teddy, holding its lopsided, balding head to her chin. She smells dry sawdust through the patchy fur. All of this will have to be packed away. She imagines the boxes stacked up and ready to be loaded into the removal lorry. But she can’t imagine living anywhere else. What will they do with Eva’s things? They can’t throw them away. She supposes that she’ll ask Faith what she would like to keep–the water pearls, of course. Clara will choose some things for herself, and give the rest of it to charity. It hurts to think of giving away clothes that hold the fading smell of Eva.