How to Fall (7 page)

‘There’s nothing to tell you.’

‘Really?’ Mum picked up her teacup and paused to ask, ‘How is Dan these days?’ before she buried her face in it. It was a useful way to hide what she was feeling.

‘Working hard.’ Tilly looked down the table. ‘Jack, can you put more water in the teapot? It’s nearly empty.’

‘Is he still a policeman?’ Mum asked, sounding ultra-casual and not convincing in the slightest.

‘He’s an inspector,’ Hugo said. ‘The most senior officer around here.’

Mum put her cup down again. ‘He’s done well.’

‘And you’ve been gone a long time,’ Tilly snapped. I stared at her, then at my mother. It had seemed like such a neutral remark. I was, of course, too curious to let it go at that. More curious than wise, as usual.

‘Who is Dan?’

‘Will’s dad,’ Petra said.

‘Did you know him, Mum? Before?’

She smiled at me vaguely and gave a little shrug. ‘I knew everyone in Port Sentinel, Jess. It was that
sort
of place. It’s probably not like that any more.’

‘Changed a lot,’ Jack said from his position by the kettle. ‘Too many blow-ins.’

I wasn’t going to be diverted. ‘So why are you asking about him in particular?’

‘I’m not. Just catching up on other people’s news.’ She met Tilly’s eyes across the table. ‘As your aunt said, I’ve been away a long time.’

I’d have thought that was a safe bet for most awkward conversational moment of the day, but Petra managed to surpass it about ten minutes later.

‘Jess, do you want to see Freya’s bedroom?’

I choked on my cake, spewing crumbs.

‘Why would you ask her that?’ Tilly was regarding her younger daughter with interest rather than outrage.

‘Jess wanted to know about Freya – what she was like. I thought she might like to see her room.’ To me, she said, ‘It hasn’t changed at all. It’s just as she left it.’

It was my turn to go red. ‘I’m sorry, Tilly. I wasn’t prying. I was just curious about Freya, that’s all.’

‘Of course you were curious. It’s only natural.’ She sighed. ‘Such a shame you never got a chance to meet her. But having a look at her room will give you some idea of how she was. I hadn’t the heart to change anything.’

‘I’d have done the same – left it all as she had it.’ Mum reached across the table and took her hand, their previous spat forgotten.

Tilly looked sheepish. ‘Well, I say I left everything. I did tidy up a bit.’

‘Mouldy cereal bowls under the bed didn’t go with her image as perfect dead daughter.’ Hugo took a huge bite of cake, ignoring the glare from his mother and Mum’s gasp of shock.

I grinned at him, knowing he was pleased to have got a reaction.

‘Shall we go?’ Petra pushed her chair back, suddenly keen to leave.

I nodded. ‘Absolutely.’

‘Don’t make a mess of the place.’ It was a knee-jerk maternal nag but I gave it the eye-roll it deserved. What she thought I was going to do, I didn’t know. Jump on the bed, maybe. Draw on the walls. It seemed to me parents’ perception of their children froze at about two or three years old, and they never grew out of the ‘put your coat on it’s cold’ warnings after that. Mum probably couldn’t help it, but that didn’t mean I had to be gracious about it.

Freya’s room was on the top floor, in the attic, and Petra took the stairs three at a time. I panted behind her, not even attempting to keep up. She kept up a
running
commentary on the rooms we were passing (‘. . . and that’s Tom’s but I wouldn’t go in because it always stinks of feet and farts. He really is filthy. This is Hugo’s room but I’m not allowed to open the door so you’ll have to get him to show you. It’s very boring. All books. Mum and Dad are in that one. They’ve got the biggest room but it’s the coldest too, so no one minds.’)

We stopped off at Petra’s own room on the floor below Freya’s and I toured it solemnly, admiring the collection of dolls that she’d had for years. She was too old for them now, she admitted, and had customized most of them with new haircuts, different outfits and some fairly savage make-up. It was a Leonard habit, I was starting to realize. Why settle for the default option when you can make a thing your own?

Another flight of stairs, this time complete with dust, as if to prove no one came up here any more. Freya’s quest for originality had led her to paint her door dark blue and stencil stars in gold leaf all over it.

‘She used the wrong kind of paint,’ Petra said dismissively, sliding a nail under a loose flake and flicking it away. ‘It looked OK just after she did it, but I told her it wouldn’t last. And the gold leaf started to come off about a day later, even though she sprayed it.’

‘
Nothing gold can stay
.’

‘Huh?’

‘It’s from a poem by Robert Frost.’ I was aware that I sounded a touch too intellectual for my own good. ‘I think the point of it is that perfection never lasts.’

‘I don’t know anything about poetry.’ Petra was regarding me with something approaching awe.

I grinned. ‘Nor do I. I got it from a novel. It just always stayed in my head, for some reason.’

‘I like it.’ She turned the handle and flung open the door. ‘Here you go. Let’s play
Through the Keyhole
. Who would live in a room like this?’

The short answer was: someone very lucky indeed. It was a big space, with windows on two sides overlooking different aspects of the garden. There was a window-seat at one of them and I would have loved to curl up there with a book for an hour or two. A fat velvet hippo sat there now, a much-rubbed toy. Petra went over and picked it up, cuddling it against her.

‘Was that Freya’s favourite?’

‘Mm.’ She pressed her nose against the top of its head. ‘Mr Bobo. He used to smell of her but it’s worn off now.’

‘Where did the name come from?’

‘She couldn’t say hippo when she got him.’

‘I should have worked that out, really.’ The room
was
tidy, the small bookcase arranged alphabetically and packed with children’s classics.
The Secret Garden. A Little Princess. Little House on the Prairie
. There were art books too, and biographies of female painters like Gwen John and Mainie Jellett. Her school books were stacked on the bottom shelf, probably where she’d left them. There was nothing on the desk at all, but the notice board above it was covered – last year’s calendar featuring maybe-ironic pictures of kittens, flyers for events that had long since taken place, scraps of material, glow-in-the-dark stars and a handful of art postcards that ranged from Degas to Renoir via the Pre-Raphaelites. There was one on its own in the corner, half obscured by a leaflet for a band night, and I recognized the heavy gold leaf of Klimt’s
The Kiss
. I unpinned it and looked at the other side. A scrawl I could barely read, in black ink:
Thinking of you
. I pulled a face.

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘The painting?’ I turned it over again and looked at it. ‘Not really. It just looks awkward. He’s kissing her but she’s turning away. It should be romantic, but it isn’t.’

‘Freya didn’t like it either,’ Petra said. So that was one thing we had in common. I stood for a moment looking at the postcard. She hadn’t liked it and she’d
pinned
it up.
Thinking of you
 . . . Was it from the boy who was better-than-Ryan? And if so, why hadn’t he signed it?

Whatever about paintings, a quick peek in the wardrobe confirmed that Freya and I had had very different taste in clothes.

‘She liked vintage stuff.’ Petra pulled out a hanger and showed me a gauzy seventies dress with tiny buttons all the way up to the neck, patterned in maroon and gold. ‘She made this sort of thing look fabulous.’

‘I bet.’ I took it from her to look at it, then hung it back on the rail, not remotely tempted to try it on. It would not have looked fabulous on me – of that I was quite sure.

The wall behind the bed was the most interesting thing in the room. It was essentially a gallery. ‘Did she do all this?’

‘Yeah.’ Petra came to stand beside me, appraising the pictures with a critical eye. ‘They’re not bad.’

‘They’re amazing.’ Freya had worked in different media, equally competently in each as far as I could see, and I was taken with a series of self-portraits in pencil. It was a style that could easily have been moodily self-indulgent, but there was something about the eyes that suggested a sense of humour, an
irony
that wouldn’t allow her to go completely over the top. She had done watercolours too – landscapes and still-life paintings rather than portraits. I lingered over three of the landscapes – windblown bushes riding a Dartmoor hillside, the sea whipping around some rocks at the foot of a headland, a lovely woodland scene that glowed with light. I thought they were remarkable.

The photographs were black and white for the most part. Hugo scowling over the top of a book, and Tilly painting, her face tense with concentration. A close-up of hands grimy with something like engine grease was pin-sharp, technically excellent, and somehow tender. So much talent. So much life to live.

‘What a waste.’

‘I know.’ Petra sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘These aren’t sad paintings, are they? These aren’t the sort of thing you’d do if you were depressed.’

‘Were they the last things she did?’

‘Some of them. She changed this wall around all the time.’ Petra lay back and stared at the ceiling. ‘There are some paintings in the studio that she was planning to put up, and there’s a sketchpad somewhere with more drawings in it that would have been from right before it happened. She never got a chance to sort them.’

‘That’s sad.’

‘That’s what makes me sure it was an accident.’ She was still looking at the ceiling, not at me. Almost to herself, she said, ‘You’d want your best work to be on display. Your legacy. You wouldn’t want to be judged on old material.’

I had seen a sketchpad on the bookcase. I went over and pulled it out. ‘Is this it?’

‘Let me see?’ Petra sat up, leaning on one elbow as she flipped through the pages, treating me to a quick slideshow of the contents. Half-finished drawings, lists, scribbles, a fragment of poetry . . . it flashed past too quickly for me to examine each page closely, but I got the idea. Freya’s sketchbook had been like a diary, and if anything was going to give me an insight into how she’d been feeling before she died, the sketchbook would.

Petra was shaking her head. ‘Not this one. This is an old one. It’s from three years ago.’ She showed me the date on the cover, neatly inscribed in pencil. Freya had been methodical about her work, I thought.

‘Where would the last one be?’

‘I don’t know. The studio, maybe.’

‘I’d like to see it.’

‘So would I.’ She flopped back on the bed. ‘I think Freya would have wanted us to see it too. She would
have
wanted people to look at it. She’d never have just thrown herself off the cliff without thinking about that kind of thing.’

‘So you think she’d have prepared better?’

‘Definitely. She’d have dressed for it as well. She was wearing a summer dress, pretty but not dramatic. I know she’d have wanted something spectacular if she was going to kill herself.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t planned. Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment decision.’

‘Maybe.’ Petra still didn’t look at me.

I went over to the window and knelt on the seat. The back garden stretched away behind the house, lush with summer growth and pleasantly disorganized. At the bottom of the garden there was a long wooden building with big skylights let into the roof.

‘What’s the super-shed for?’

‘Mum’s studio. That’s probably where you’d find the last things Freya was working on. She used to go down there and paint while Mum was doing other stuff.’

‘Is your mum working much at the moment?’

‘She’s not taking on any new commissions. She finished off the ones she was working on, though, when it happened. She can paint – she just says she doesn’t want to.’ Petra looked tired, all of a sudden,
and
too old for her years. Worry would do that to you.

‘So she’s not doing her own things, either?’

‘Bits and pieces, I think. How do you know about her work?’

‘Darcy said it was amazing.’

That
did
get her attention. ‘When did you meet Darcy?’

‘Yesterday afternoon. She came to the cottage to see me in person. I think she was just curious.’

‘That would fit.’ Petra looked oddly disapproving. ‘Did she say anything about Freya?’

‘Lots. I only asked what she was like.’

She managed a weak smile. ‘Darcy likes to talk.’

I couldn’t work out why Petra sounded so unenthusiastic about her sister’s best friend. I had thought she was on the ditzy side, but basically well intentioned. ‘She didn’t say anything mean, you know. She was a big fan of Freya’s.’

Petra bit her lip. ‘Did she say anything about why they argued?’

I had the uneasy sensation of standing on what you think is solid ground and feeling it start to slip away beneath you. ‘No. She didn’t mention an argument.’

‘It was the week before Freya died. I’m not sure what it was about, but I know they hadn’t made up.’

‘It must have been a bad one if you knew about it.’

‘It was. Freya and Darcy were really close. They used to see each other every day. Freya didn’t have a mobile – well, she did, but she lost it so often Mum wouldn’t replace it. Darcy phoned the house instead, first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Dad hated her tying up the phone for hours on end. He couldn’t understand how they could spend the day together and still have anything left to talk about.’

‘I got that from my dad when he still lived with us.’ One major reason why I hadn’t minded too much about him moving out.

‘They were proper friends. And then, nothing. From one day to the next.’

‘Freya didn’t tell you anything about it?’

Petra shook her head. ‘I didn’t dare to ask.’

‘And you haven’t asked Darcy about it since Freya fell?’

‘I don’t know her that well. I’m just Freya’s annoying little sister. She never bothered with me. But she seems interested in you.
You
could find out.’