‘I know.’ Tash held her tighter. ‘He knows.’
‘But that’s all lies.’
‘No. Beccy, don’t say—’
Beccy buried her face again. ‘Do you know how he died?’
‘He fell from a bridge,’ Tash replied cautiously.
She felt Beccy’s facial muscles tighten against her shoulder.
‘He killed himself.’
Tash took in a sharp breath, not knowing how to react. ‘It was an accident, surely?’
‘I saw him jump.’
‘You were so little—’
‘I saw him jump, Tash. And I still have his suicide note.’
‘But …’
She pulled away. ‘He fucking abandoned us!’ Her eyes were luminous in the half light. ‘I hate him.’
‘Beccy, you don’t know—’
‘I saw him. I was there that day,’ she sobbed. ‘Tash, nobody knows this.
Nobody
.’
‘Tell me.’
There was a long pause. Beccy sniffed and hiccupped, fighting back another rush of tears. Then she said in a small voice, ‘If I tell you, will you
swear
not to tell anybody else?’ She sounded terribly young and frightened.
‘I swear.’
‘On your life?’
‘On my life.’
The story, as it came out in stops and starts, in coughs and gulps, told Tash so much about the Beccy she had never understood, about this secretive, manipulative, childlike woman whom nobody in the family could ever get close to. It was no wonder she’d run away to the other side of the world and had never wanted to come back.
She knew much of the background already. Married young to dashing and talented Andrew, Henrietta had followed her civil engineer husband around the world as he designed and built bridges. The couple had two adorable blonde daughters, enjoyed expat life
and seemed to have an enviable marriage until, ten years into marriage and thirty-five years into his life, Andrew Sergeant had fallen from a semi-constructed suspension bridge in Singapore.
Grief-stricken, Henrietta had returned to England with the children and struggled to rebuild her life, supported at first by his company’s life insurance, but that had soon run out. She got her rusty typing back up to speed, signed on with an agency and got a job as secretary to venture capitalist James French. Andrew was rarely mentioned, but when he was, he was portrayed as a noble, heroic figure and his death seen as the untimely loss of a great husband and father with everything to live for.
Outside the horsebox, the storm moved in overhead, buffeting their little tin confessional so that it groaned and rocked like a ship at sea, but Beccy didn’t seem to notice.
‘Mum has no idea what really happened, but she knows a lot she never lets on about. Dad was bipolar – manic depressive. It took me a long time to get that out of her, but it made a lot of sense. He was the best father in the world one month – just such fun. Then the next he flipped a switch, turned off and withdrew himself. He didn’t want to know us. It was so confusing. Em remembers more, but she edits it like Mum. Keeps the best bits and remember his death as heartbreakingly valiant.
‘They weren’t even at home that day; they were away checking out a new international school. It was just me. Dad had been off work for days in one of his moods, sitting alone on the veranda just staring into space. I was being looked after by our nanny, but I kept going to find him because I wanted him to read to me. He told me to go away. When he said he had to go out I begged him and begged him to take me with him.
‘I don’t think he knew where he was going or what he was going to do. He’d never have taken me with him if he had. We sat on the banks of Singapore River near the bridge he’d been designing and he cried a lot. I had a book with me – a pony book from England. He made me give it to him and he wrote all over it. I was so angry. Then he handed it back to me and cried again. I said I wanted to go home, but he wouldn’t take me. He said he was going to climb his bridge and asked me if I wanted to come up with him. I was afraid of heights even then and I was still angry about the book, so I said no, I’d wait for him there. I think that saved my life.’
She started to cry again – not the all-consuming sobs of earlier, but the quiet, desperate gasps of truth escaping after decades bottled up.
‘I didn’t really watch him climbing, to be honest. I was trying to read what he’d written in my book, but his handwriting was all spidery and I wasn’t very good at reading then.
‘Then I looked up and he was at the top, waving at me. At least I thought he was waving at me. The sun was so bright in my eyes. I remember shading them. And I waved back. But the next moment he was falling. My dad. Just falling …’
Tash held her as tight as she could as the tears shuddered through her.
It was a long time before she could speak again.
‘Somebody from the site took me home. I don’t remember anything about that. Mum said it was an accident and I believed her. For years I believed her, even though I had the writing in my book, which I was too frightened to read.
‘It was only when Mum married James that I read it. I was so unhappy I figured it couldn’t make me feel any worse. I wanted to be close to him, to my own dad, not yours.’
‘Oh Beccy.’ Tash pressed her face to Beccy’s hair. ‘My poor Beccy.’
‘There it was. My father admitting he couldn’t go on. Saying he was a bad person. And, forgive me, Tash, but I blamed you all at the time. I blamed all the fucking Frenches for killing my dad, because I knew it was my fault really, and I j-just couldn’t admit it. As soon as Mum married into your family all my memories turned bad. I didn’t want James, I wanted my own father back. The father I’d allowed to die. The father I could have stopped d-doing that t-to himself.’
Tash kissed her head and stroked her arms. ‘I can’t believe you never told anybody this. That’s such a weight to bear.’
‘I’ve told you now.’ She carefully removed Tash’s hand from her arm and made to push it away, but then she felt the battered little hoop on her third finger and gripped on.
‘Why d’you wear your wedding ring to compete?’
Tash was so thrown by the sudden change of subject, it took a moment to realise what she was asking. ‘I always have done.’
‘Most riders take them off to stop them getting damaged, don’t they?’
‘Well I’ve never bothered. Beccy, about your father—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it any more.’
‘You should tell your mother.’
She gripped Tash’s hand like a vice. ‘You swore you wouldn’t say anything!’
‘And I won’t, Beccy, but you must please think about sharing this, maybe getting some professional help, there are bereavement counsellors or—’
‘No way!’
‘Okay,’ Tash sighed. ‘We’ll put it aside for now. But I cannot forget about it, Beccy. You’ve shared this with me, and that can’t be forgotten.’
‘I just figured I owed you an explanation. Why I fuck up. Maybe you’re right – I’m just like my dad. You have to be pretty fearless to jump off a bridge, after all.’ She let go of Tash’s hand and pushed it aside.
Rubbing her sore fingers to restore the circulation, Tash guessed how much talking about this must have taken out of Beccy.
‘I’ve always known that there had to be something you weren’t telling us. Something very big. Nobody disappears for almost a decade without a lot of demons at their heels.’
‘Oh, I’m not that unique. I met a lot of lost souls on my travels.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I still do. Look at Lough. He’s run half way around the world and I don’t think he’ll be going back to New Zealand for a long time yet, do you?’
Tash looked up at her, surprised by Beccy’s insight.
‘Perhaps not,’ she said quietly, not wanting to think about Lough.
But Beccy wouldn’t let it go that easily. There was more she needed to confess that night. ‘I met him on my travels.’
‘Lough?’
She nodded. ‘Small world, huh? We met in Melbourne six years ago. In June.’
‘I was in Melbourne then,’ Tash realised in astonishment.
‘I know. You met Lough there too.’
Tash shook her head, bewildered.
‘When I left Britain to go travelling you’d just announced your engagement. I hoped I’d never see you again.’ Beccy’s voice shook as she stared down at Tash’s wedding ring, a simple gold band
battered and misshaped from so much riding. It must still have been quite shiny in Melbourne, she guessed.
‘But then a couple of years later I ended up in Melbourne. I was in a really bad place then. I didn’t know what I’d hoped to change by travelling – to find something of Dad, I guess. I planned to visit the place he died in Singapore but I kept flunking it. I was so scared I’d find just bad spirits there to haunt me. Turns out I did, and got arrested for it, but that’s another story. In Melbourne, I was crazy miserable. I started to think I must be like him, you know, bipolar? I still wonder sometimes.’
Tash nodded, appalled that she might have been struggling with the disorder for years without treatment. ‘We can find you help, Beccy.’
Beccy didn’t appear to be listening. ‘I’ve never been as low as I was in Melbourne. I just wanted to die. When I picked up a newspaper in a coffee shop and read that you were there with Hugo, luxuriating in an all-expenses-paid hotel, something just clicked in my mind.’
‘It wasn’t that glamorous,’ Tash assured her. ‘We stayed in a motel near the racecourse and I was in hospital for the last few days.’
‘I know you lost a baby out there.’ Beccy stared at the window, dry-eyed now. The storm had passed and dawn was beginning to break. ‘It made me want to die too.’
‘Oh Beccy. I wish I’d known you were there, seen you.’
‘You did.’
Before Tash could react, Beccy swung back from the window to stare at her. ‘Were you terribly upset about the baby?’
Tash sighed, thinking back to those awful weeks that had followed the Australian tour. ‘For a while, yes. I blamed myself. I’d only just found out I was pregnant before the trip. Hugo wanted to cancel it but I insisted I’d be fine. There was no medical reason not to go, but perhaps I shouldn’t have carried working so hard. I didn’t feel pregnant, you see. I now know that I never do, apart from morning sickness, but back then it was my first experience so I had no idea what I should feel like, and any nausea I put down to jet lag and competition nerves. When I miscarried I thought it was my fault for not taking it a bit easier, but the doctors assured me that it could have happened at any time.’
‘But the accident caused it, surely?’
‘What accident?’
‘In the cross-country at the three day event, someone ran in front of you.’
‘God, that.’ It was a memory she had kept packed away for many years now, along with everything else about that terrible day. ‘I don’t think that made—’
‘I didn’t plan it!’ Beccy blurted.
Tash stared at her for a long time.
‘It was
you
?’
Beccy nodded. ‘It happened so quickly. One minute this image formed in my head of showing you how much you’d ruined my life. The next, there were hooves and metal shoes everywhere. Then somebody was dragging me away and you’d gone, galloping away without a backward glance.’
Tash looked at her, unable to speak. She’d received a lot of criticism for riding away from the incident that day, the sense knocked from her head. Now that she knew it had been Beccy, she couldn’t bear to think what might have happened.
‘You think I abandoned you too?’ she whispered eventually.
Beccy shook her head. ‘You’ve always ridden all over me Tash, but I am entirely responsible for ruining my own life, I know that.’
‘You’re only twenty-eight,’ Tash protested. ‘There’s a lot more life to lead out there.’
Beccy chewed at her lower lip, staring at the window again. A bright, low sun was fighting through early morning mist. Occasional figures were moving about outside as fellow competitors started to emerge from horseboxes.
‘What happened on the course had nothing to do with my losing the baby,’ Tash assured her quietly. ‘It was just a horrible coincidence. And I had no idea it was you. Like you say, it all happened so fast. A girl then a man – I didn’t see the faces at all, just—’
‘It was Lough.’
‘Lough?’
‘He was the one who grabbed me.’
Tash lapsed into silence again, staring at Beccy’s profile by the window, searching her face for signs of make-believe, but that innocent china doll expression gave nothing away. She looked almost serene.
‘Are you sure it was Lough?’
She nodded.
Tash rubbed her eyes tiredly, the lack of sleep and too much high emotion making her increasingly lightheaded. ‘Why has he never said anything about it?’
‘It’s the day he fell in love with you.’
‘That’s rubbish.’
‘I’ve been trying to figure it out,’ Beccy went on, almost cheerfully. ‘I guess it’s like the Florence Nightingale effect, only instead of a carer forming a slow, romantic attachment to his patient, this was a hero forming an instant fixation with his damsel in distress. What’s that, d’you suppose? Fireman complex?’
‘Stop this, Beccy,’ Tash pleaded, ‘it doesn’t help.’
‘He came to see you afterwards, to reveal himself as your valiant knight.’
‘He didn’t.’ She shook her head, again wondering how much of all this was some sort of fantasy Beccy had invented.
‘But you were really ill and he couldn’t save you a second time. He’s never got over that. Lancelot trapped in a crowd at court, watching Guinevere suffer.’
‘That’s enough!’ Tash held up her hands, the pain all too tangible again.
Beccy slumped back in her bench bed and turned to the wall.
‘We have to set aside this conversation for now,’ Tash said, pulling herself together. ‘We must check on the horses.’
‘Forgotten but not forgiven,’ Beccy muttered.
‘Not forgotten.’ Tash reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘And there’s nothing to forgive.’
‘You can’t mean that?’
‘I will never abandon you again, Beccy, I promise.’
Slowly and tentatively, Beccy’s hand closed over hers.
They held hands for a long time, two women in a tatty horsebox in a field, sharing family secrets that had lain buried for years.
Then they got dressed, mucked out four horses in temporary wooden stables and rode so incredibly badly they both retired after the show-jumping and went back to the horsebox to get some sleep before the long drive home.