The Lying Game
Authors: Tess Stimson
For my husband,
Erik.
You’re still the one I run to.
1
Harriet
If my mother could see me now,
Harriet thought wryly as she reached the top of the hillside and bent to cup her knees, panting. For the first twenty-six years of her
life she had, like her parents and three younger sisters, been a sophisticated London urbanite: taxi-hailers and latte drinkers all, they’d had the shortcuts of the city inscribed on their
hearts and considered the world beyond the M25 as alien and impenetrable as the Amazon jungle.
And then she’d met Oliver Lockwood and her life had been transformed in a way she never could have anticipated.
She straightened now and shaded her eyes to take in the spectacular view. The spring foliage hadn’t yet started to come in, so she could see right through the bare trees to the valley
below. On a distant slope opposite, ski trails poured down from the mountain summit like rivers of white paint. She couldn’t believe how quiet it was, even for rural Vermont, a state
one-fifth the size of England with a population of barely six hundred and fifty thousand. Up here, there was no thrum of traffic, no sirens, no planes passing overhead; just the faint whisper of
the wind in the trees. Ironic that she’d moved four thousand miles across the ocean to New England and discovered an old England that hadn’t existed since before she was born.
Tugging off her thick sheepskin gloves, she pulled out her phone and checked the time. No reception here, she noticed, slightly anxiously; not even one bar. Well, she wasn’t going to be
long. She’d seen what she needed to see. She’d be home soon, no harm done.
Nonetheless, she picked up her pace as she turned east along the ridgeline. She really shouldn’t have come this far from home, not with Oliver a hundred miles away in Connecticut, where he
was scouting out a possible location for their latest restaurant, leaving Harriet the parent on call. This wasn’t just a nominal responsibility in the Lockwood household, given that their
fifteen-year-old daughter Florence had had juvenile diabetes since she was six, and Charlie, at five the youngest of their three boys, had chronic asthma. Either she or Oliver found themselves
being called out to one of their expensive private schools to deal with a medical crisis at least twice a month.
She turned at an orange flag marking the boundary of the eleven-acre property for sale and headed back downhill, picking her way carefully through a spider’s web of transparent tubing that
snaked from one sugar maple to another: there were miles of it – literally two or three miles – weaving back and forth from tree to tree like a giant cat’s cradle. It was March,
so the tubes were full of maple sap. The clear liquid flowed down the mountain to the holding vats she’d seen earlier behind the small wooden sugar house at the foot of the hill, where it
would be boiled off and turned into the familiar amber syrup.
Sugar house.
How could Florence not be tempted by that? Even thinking the word made her mouth water. The first time she’d stood in a hot, steaming sugar shack twelve years ago, at
the end of their first long, bitter Vermont winter, inhaling the mist of maple syrup as it rose from the evaporators, she thought she’d died and gone to heaven. There was nothing quite as
sinfully delicious as the treat Vermonters called sugar-on-snow: hot maple syrup drizzled like lace onto a cup of fresh snow.
She ducked under a maple tube, careful not to dislodge it from the tree. Was it too much to hope that the sugar house would – she smiled inwardly at the pun – sweeten the pill for
Florence? Maple syrup was her daughter’s one weakness; perhaps the only preference the two of them shared. And lately they’d managed to get her diabetes under control, more or less.
Enough for the odd cup of sugar-on-snow, anyway.
She sighed as she zipped her fleece higher against the chill wind coming off the mountain. Florence remained adamantly opposed to the idea of a weekend cabin – ‘It’s bad
enough,’ she’d said furiously, ‘having to live in Hicksville when I could be in London, without being dragged off to some stupid cabin in the middle of nowhere with three
disgusting brothers every weekend’ – and Harriet knew that no amount of maple syrup was going to change her daughter’s mind.
Sometimes she couldn’t help feeling a little cheated. Four children and only one girl, a daughter so unlike herself it was hard to believe they were related. ‘I know the
feeling,’ her mother Sophie had told her briskly when she’d ventured to raise the topic during her visit home to London the previous summer. ‘If you hadn’t been born at
home, I’d have thought they’d switched you at the hospital. Look at your sisters – two in fashion and one in broadcasting, not a car between them, not one of them further away
from us than SW6. And then there’s you. Half a world away, only happy when you’re sorting out somebody’s crisis. I swear the only time I ever saw you smile as a child was when we
took you to Glastonbury and the tent collapsed and we all had to sleep out in the open in the middle of a muddy field.’
Florence didn’t even look like Harriet. She took after Oliver, all glowing caramel skin and blonde health and vitality with the same vivid blue eyes, whereas Harriet and the boys were pale
and dark and slender. Harriet found it impossible to hold a meaningful conversation with her daughter; they simply didn’t know what to say to each other. And it had nothing to do with her
being a teenager, despite what Oliver said. Of course she took it personally! What mother wouldn’t? The truth was, Harriet had
never
known what to say to her.
In the beginning, when Florence, her first child, was born and she’d struggled with the shock of motherhood and this tiny, screaming, red-faced package of demands, she’d thought her
discomfort was just a question of it all being so
new,
so different, so completely unlike anything she’d done before. Even though Oliver had been just as new to it all and yet seemed
able to tell the difference between a hungry cry and a tired one as easily as separating apples from oranges.
Then she’d got the hang of things and developed an efficient routine, telling herself anxiously that it was just as commendable to be a good mother as a natural one, whatever
that
was – but Florence had still looked at her with the distant, quizzical blue gaze of a stranger, clearly waiting for something Harriet simply hadn’t known how to give.
She loved her daughter; there was no question of
that.
She’d have walked over hot coals for Florence from the second she heard her first cry. But there was never any real
connection between them. Right from the beginning, they were almost painfully polite with one another. Harriet would crouch down on the floor to play with the blocks Florence was building, and the
little girl would simply stop what she was doing and wait patiently for her mother to finish before resuming on her own.
But when Florence played with her father, she giggled and knocked over his tower and handed him bricks. Which meant that the problem must be
her
fault. She obviously lacked some crucial
maternal instinct. She’d failed at the most important thing she’d ever attempted, and she’d had no idea what to do to put it right.
So she’d retreated into what she
did
know how to do. While Oliver had stayed at home and brainstormed ideas for Play-Doh and finger foods, she’d thrown herself back into
work, using her PR skills to take their fledgling sandwich business so far so fast that America had quickly become their logical next step.
And then she’d found herself pregnant again. It hadn’t been planned, of course; Oliver had been very keen to have a second child, but privately she’d been terrified of the
idea, thinking it akin to throwing good money after bad. However, things couldn’t have been more different this time around. The bond between her and baby Samuel had been instant and
profound, and for the first time she’d realized exactly what she and Florence were missing. It had been the same with George four years later, and Charlie three years after that. She’d
found mothering her sons as easy as breathing. It was only with her daughter that she’d failed.
Slipping slightly in the slushy snow, Harriet reached the bottom of the hill and took a few more photos on her phone for Oliver. She already knew this piece of land was perfect: just an hour
away from Burlington, it was rural enough to feed into his rose-tinted need for the full New England experience, but sufficiently proximate to town-maintained roads and electricity pylons to make
building a cabin financially viable. It was Oliver’s dream, really, the cabin, not hers, but over the years she’d learned that if she left things to him, they would never happen. He
specialized in dreams; she was the one who made them reality.
In some ways, it made them the perfect team. She didn’t have an ounce of flair or vision herself, but she’d always known exactly how to make the most of his, turning his off-the-grid
idea for a green fast-food chain into a successful international business. She could forgive him a little hopeless dreaminess; these days, it was even part of why she loved him.
She knew how lucky she was to have such a good marriage, such a
happy
marriage. Among her half-dozen closest girlfriends, she was the only one without a divorce under her belt. She
trusted Oliver implicitly. Even after sixteen years together and four children, he was still her lover, her rock and her best friend – the person she turned to first thing in the morning and
last thing at night. With him, she knew what it was to be cherished. He brought her tea in bed in the morning, he rubbed her feet when she was tired, he got up in the night to look after Charlie if
he had one of his asthma attacks because he knew how much she needed her sleep. These were the things that mattered, not flowers on their anniversary or expensive jewellery at Christmas –
though Oliver gave her those things too. Her mother reminded her frequently that she was blessed, but really Harriet didn’t need to be told.
She was just climbing into her ancient Land Cruiser when her phone rang. With a slight sigh, Harriet tugged off her gloves again and answered it.