‘Mum’s not keen, for some reason, but I think she’s coming round.’
‘Oh, you’ve got to be allowed to spread your wings,’ Beattie said. ‘I learned that when Jessie took off for three months in South East Asia. I didn’t want her to go at all – I’d heard all these horror stories about what happened to young American girls out there. But of course she was fine. And she says that she would have gone even if I’d have stood in front of her and physically barred her way. Believe me, honey,’ she turned to Kate, her bearing matronly, ‘you can’t stop your young ones flying the nest.’
‘It’s a little different for Mum, though,’ Tilly said. ‘With Martha and all that.’
‘Of course. Your poor little sister. Your Mom told me about her,’ Beattie said.
‘Wine?’ Kate said. Even though she was so close to Beattie and Tilly, she felt she needed to declare her presence, to stop them talking about her in the third person.
‘Yes please,’ Tilly said.
‘Yes please, Kate,’ Beattie said. ‘So where are you planning on going in Greece?’ she asked Tilly.
‘Oh, Athens, Delphi, Thessaloniki, Sparta. Then I’m going to hit the islands, see if I can find a perfect beach with not too many tourists.’
‘Ah, the authentic Greece. I know just the spot,’ Beattie said.
No, no,
Kate’s heartbeat fluttered up into her throat as she drew the cork from the bottle,
please don’t
.
But it was too late.
‘You’ve been to Greece, then?’ Tilly asked, handing the pistachios to Beattie.
‘Oh yes. I’m what you might call a Grecophile, honey.’
‘Where do you suggest, then?’
‘Well. There’s this lovely little island called Ikaria.’
Kate couldn’t believe what she was hearing. As she poured the drinks, the neck of the bottle slipped from the rim of the glass, spilling red wine all over the expensive white rug.
‘Mum!’ Tilly said, jumping up.
Beattie might simply have been trying to be helpful, but it was so dangerous to mix up fact and fiction like that.
‘I’m sorry, I—’ Kate said. Perhaps she wasn’t as acquainted as she was with the rules of living a lie. Although hadn’t she said that her own family knew nothing of her past?
‘Ha!’ Tilly smiled at Beattie. ‘Mum spilled the wine because she doesn’t like us talking about Greece.’
‘Oh?’ Beattie said, looking at Kate.
Kate tried to laugh, although she felt like being sick. ‘It’s hard to say goodbye to my girl.’
‘I’m not going for ever, Mum.’ Tilly rolled her eyes and headed off towards the kitchen area. ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Mum’s spilled wine all over the rug!’
‘Why the hell did you tell her about Ikaria?’ Kate whispered sharply to Beattie. ‘It’s the last place on earth I want her to be.’
‘Sorry,’ Beattie said. ‘I didn’t think.’
‘Clearly.’
‘I’m so sorry, Emma.’
‘It’s Kate!’
‘God, I’m sorry. Kate. I’m just a little shook up right now.’ Beattie looked devastated.
Kate’s knuckle rubbed at her nose. She thought she’d come round to Tilly’s departure, but Beattie’s stupidity had made her superstitious dread rear its ugly head all over again.
Mark and Tilly marched into the living area. He brandished a tub of salt, while she waved a roll of paper towels above her head.
‘Salt’s the thing,’ Mark was saying.
‘Listen, Dad, I spend my life clearing up after pissed actors knocking over their wine. Believe me, this is the method that works.’ Tilly wadded up a great long piece of kitchen roll and placed it over the wine stain. ‘Claire was telling me about some island she knows in Greece. What was it called?’
‘I – um – the name’s slipped my mind,’ Beattie said, frowning.
‘But you just said it!’
‘I—’
‘Claire’s had a bit of a shock, Tilly,’ Mark said.
‘Wasn’t it something like diarrhoea?’ Tilly said. ‘Icky—’
‘Wasn’t it Ikaria?’ Kate said, stepping in. Beattie’s clumsy attempts to backtrack, while well intentioned, were only making things worse.
‘Yes,’ Beattie said, frowning slightly. ‘That was it.’
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Mark said.
‘Not many foreigners have,’ Beattie said. ‘It’s why it’s so special.’
‘When did you go?’ Tilly asked, stamping on the kitchen roll.
‘Oh, a long time back. When I was, what, twenty or so,’ Beattie said. ‘Just a little older than you are now. I had a great time. It’s the most beautiful place.’
‘Named after Icarus?’
‘Yep. He fell into the sea just nearby, and his poor old Pop Daedalus buried him on the island.’
‘I’m going to go there,’ Tilly said.
Kate knocked back a big slug of wine.
‘You just make sure you keep in touch with your Mom now,’ Beattie said. ‘Let her know what you’re getting up to, where you’re going and all that. Be a good daughter.’
‘Of course,’ Tilly said. She peeled the paper from the carpet with a flourish. Almost all the wine had been absorbed.
‘Oh, she’s a good daughter,’ Kate said, as Mark knelt to sprinkle salt over what remained of the stain. ‘The best.’
Better than she had ever been herself.
How it must have been for her parents never to see her again, never to know what happened to her. When she was pregnant with Tilly and facing her own impending parenthood she had hired a private detective to see how they were doing. She had thought perhaps that she could somehow make some sort of amends, possibly funnel some money their way or something. The short investigation revealed that they had, in fact, died within six months of each other, less than five years after she had staged her disappearance. The official line was that her father had been taken by a coronary and her mother a stroke. But Kate had added their deaths to her list of culpabilities. It had been hearts that had killed them, hadn’t it? Broken hearts.
Mark stood, brushing lint from his knees where he had knelt on the rug. ‘Grub’s nearly up. Are you all right to sit at the table, Claire?’
‘Of course,’ Beattie said, putting out a hand. ‘Help me up, will you, dear?’ she asked Tilly, who handed her father the wad of wine-stained kitchen towel and stepped in instantly.
During the meal, Kate felt observed in every way. For one thing, everyone else at the table was watching how much she was eating. She knew, too, that Mark and Tilly would also be trying to picture her as a schoolgirl, friends with this strange American woman. She could also feel Beattie looking at how she, Kate, interacted with her family. She felt like she was a bad actor in the wrong play: utterly unconvincing on every level.
The only way to survive was by taking control and driving the conversation around the safer routes. So she asked Beattie about her life: what her children were up to (Jessie was a dentist and Saira was nearly a lawyer), how she was coping after the death of her husband (it was taking her a while to adjust), and what it was like living in San Francisco (it was really cool). Even so, after all this expense of energy, she still encountered some difficult moments. At one point, Beattie went to push up the sleeves of her polo neck jumper, which would have revealed her Triskelion. Kate, who was sitting opposite, managed to tap her leg under the table just in time and point out her own tattoo. Mercifully Beattie took the hint.
‘Would you like some more, Claire?’ Mark asked, holding the plate of lamb kebabs up for her.
‘Oh no thank you, Mark. It was delicious, but I really need to watch what I eat.’
She smiled over at Kate, who had just hidden a lump of meat under a lettuce leaf.
‘So what did you think when you bumped into each other in Starbucks, then?’ Mark said, as he and Tilly cleared the plates at the end of the meal.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Kate said. ‘Claire was sitting across the room. I thought I recognised something about her, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then she came up and asked me if my name was Kate and I recognised her voice instantly. It hasn’t changed one bit.’
‘Whereas you even look exactly as you did when you were at school,’ Beattie said, resting her chin on her hands and smiling warmly at Kate.
‘What were you doing in the West End, though, Mum?’ Tilly said. ‘You never go there.’
‘Oh, I was on my way to Heals, to find some new cushions.’
‘We should get you to A & E, Claire,’ Mark said, shutting the dishwasher.
‘Can I get my iPad before we go, please, Dad?’ Tilly said. ‘I want Claire to show me something.’
‘I don’t think—’ Kate said.
‘Of course,’ Mark said.
‘No rush.’ Beattie beamed at Tilly.
Tilly ran upstairs while Kate sat tight-lipped at the table.
‘I don’t think you should come with us, Kate,’ Mark said. ‘You look awfully worn out. You need to go to bed.’
‘You did very well at supper, though,’ Beattie said, leaning over the table and putting her hand on Kate’s. Kate knew this was rubbish. Beattie had either not been watching her cut her food into tiny pieces and hide it around her plate, or she was just being kind.
‘Can you show me the island you were talking about?’ Tilly said, bounding back into the kitchen, her iPad in her hands. ‘Ikaria?’
Beattie took the screen from Kate’s daughter’s hands and moved her finger around it. ‘Just there,’ she said, pointing. ‘Tucked down to the left of Samos.’
Kate watched as Tilly zoomed in on the island. Her eyes shone with an excitement that she remembered only too well in herself at that age.
‘There are so few buildings,’ Tilly said.
‘A lot of the island is mountainous and uninhabitable,’ Beattie said, ‘but look along the south coast – see those beaches? Some of them you can only get to by scrabbling down a mountainside. Completely deserted.’
Kate could barely mask her exasperation. Didn’t this woman know when to stop?
‘Wow,’ Tilly said.
‘But what about food and water?’ Kate said. ‘You couldn’t stay somewhere like that for long.’
‘Oh, but you find ways around that sort of thing,’ Beattie said. ‘You have to be a little together, but nothing’s impossible.’
‘Where did you stay?’ Tilly said, and again Kate found the word NO circling her brain as Beattie scrolled along the screen. She was sitting opposite the two of them, so she couldn’t see exactly where Beattie was pointing, but she had a pretty good idea.
‘Just there. See?’ Beattie said. ‘There’s a great cave to sleep in on the beach. And, if I remember rightly, there’s a village about a half-hour walk up the mountain. Look.’
‘I’m so going there!’ Tilly said, taking the iPad and bookmarking the map. ‘Thank you so much, Claire!’
‘No problem, sweetie.’ But as Tilly gazed at the screen, Beattie glanced apologetically at Kate.
‘Time to go,’ Mark said.
‘Can I come?’ Tilly said.
‘Best not,’ Kate said. ‘It could take hours and you need to be fresh for tomorrow.’
‘Have a great time in Greece, honey,’ Beattie said, kissing Tilly on the cheeks.
Kate walked Mark and Beattie to the front door and stood and watched as he helped her to his car. Despite her bulk, Beattie looked tiny as she limped along beside him.
Beaten down Beattie.
She had to be careful that the same thing didn’t happen to her.
As she cleared away the last things from the dinner table, she noticed that on top of the champagne, two and a half bottles of red wine had been drunk. Tilly and Mark had taken only one glass each. So she and Beattie must have shared the rest. So high were her nerves, though, that, even taking the high tolerance she had built up over the years into account, she didn’t really feel as drunk as she deserved.
She called in on Tilly’s room on her way upstairs to propose a special goodbye breakfast the following morning, just the two of them.
‘That’d be great, Mum.’ Tilly was sitting at her dressing table and brushing her hair. ‘But I’m going into work early to say goodbye to the morning shift.’
Kate forced a smile and restrained herself from asking why the morning shift was more important to Tilly than her mother. She knew, of course: it was all part of the process of withdrawal that a child had to go through. Soon she would only see her every few weeks, and later, perhaps, when Tilly had her own family, she would come home for one or two days once or twice a year.
She knew she should be grateful even for that. It was more, after all, than she had permitted her own parents.
‘I love you, Tills.’
‘Love you too, Mum.’
Kate leaned forward and kissed her on the head. Her daughter’s hair smelled of argan oil and apples. She filed this sense-memory away, to be retrieved should she need it.
Just in case . . .
Just if . . .
Blocking the horrors from her mind, she climbed the stairs to her own floor, where she crept into her bathroom, bent over the toilet and made herself throw up the small amount of food she had eaten that night.
At least that was one thing she could keep a grip on.