Fran. He rang her number and prayed for her to be there. Voicemail. ‘Hattie’s run away. She might have come to you.’ He didn’t know what else to say and finished the call. He rang back. ‘She’s run away because Steph’s hit her. She can’t cope with things not going her way. No … she
can’t cope with being a mother for any length of time … she loses interest or loses it completely.’
He had to stop and get his breathing under control because he wanted to tell her everything. He gabbled it all out. ‘She’s always been volatile, but it got worse when Hattie came along. And then we were both working long days, travelling. I tried to cope with it, but I couldn’t be there all the time, the nanny couldn’t be there all the time … And although I could never be sure, I think she might have done it before. Lashed out. I didn’t know definitely, but things got worse and in the end I left with Hattie.’
He had to stop to get things in the right order. ‘Steph will never accept that’s what she’s like and I … I’ve kept it to myself because I didn’t want Hattie ever to know. Tell one person, they tell another and then she’d find out and think it was her fault. That’s what happens – kids keep on loving the person who hurts them. And I was ashamed too … that I’d agreed to start a family, even though I knew Steph was …’
He didn’t know if the voicemail was still running. Had it finished? He rang off and rang back again. ‘Oh, Fran, I thought I could keep all the plates spinning – let Hattie still have a relationship with Steph as long as I was always there to keep an eye on her. But Steph’s got more and more twisty. She contested the divorce because she won’t accept
she’s ever been at fault. And … and she still wants that control over me. If I wanted to move it along, I’d have had to go to court and spill out everything.’
He paused and then sprinted to the end. ‘But you’re right, I should have told my family, friends, let them help me through this. It’s come back to bite me because I’ve kept quiet and given Steph the upper hand. And now I’ve failed at keeping Hattie safe. I was wrong, Fran, and I love you and I’m so bloody scared.’
He couldn’t remember ending the call that time, only that he was looking at his watch and thinking where else Hattie could be. Natalie? No, she had no idea where Natalie lived now.
Josh, but they were miles away. He still rang. Josh’s mum didn’t waste any time. ‘I’ll get the car out and we’ll look. It’ll be all right, Tom. I’ll ring you.’
It would not have taken much to make him sob. More cars passed, some slowing. ‘A little girl,’ he said if they asked who he was looking for. ‘Blue top, pink skirt, red sandals. Five years old.’ He didn’t look to see what their faces did when he told them.
He just kept walking and looking and telling himself this was his fault, for being on the phone, for not telling Steph to go, for not telling everyone what she was like, for not telling Hattie.
He saw the police car coming. Two young constables got out, one a woman with her blonde hair back in a neat bun; the man carrying too much weight. ‘All right, sir, let’s go over some things,’ the woman said. ‘You’ve searched your house thoroughly? The garden? Anywhere you can think she might have gone? Has she done it before? Was she upset?’
Tom said she’d had a disagreement with her mother – he didn’t mention anything about hitting, not because he gave a damn about defending Steph, he just didn’t want them sidetracked.
Shouldn’t they stop talking and start looking?
His mobile rang and he grabbed at it. ‘Any luck?’ his mother said and he told her there hadn’t been and rang off.
‘Shouldn’t we be looking?’ he said and the woman constable asked a few more questions and then her colleague got back in the car. ‘Spreading the word,’ she said. ‘Come on, we’ll go this way. When Darren’s finished, he’ll go the other. Lucky it’s summer, plenty of daylight left.’
They walked. How long? Calling. Looking.
She was out there somewhere on her own and everything that had looked so familiar now seemed sinister. The woods and fields, outhouses. Lanes that were overgrown.
He was living his worst nightmare.
How long now? Nearly an hour.
He wanted to grab back that time. It was getting too long since she’d disappeared. Missing for hours was so different from barely been gone fifteen minutes.
His mobile rang again. Please God, please God.
It was Fran and the whole evening stopped – the birds, the cars, the policewoman next to him.
‘She’s here, Tom,’ Fran said. ‘I’d just set off for Newcastle when I got your message, so I came straight back and there she was, sitting under the garden table. She’s fine, Tom, very, very distressed, but fine. Take a breath, Tom. She’s safe.’
CHAPTER 56
The world turns, Tom thought as he lay on the floor in Hattie’s room. It turns and you can go from happiness to despair and back to happiness again in the space of twenty-four hours. You can have a job and lose it. Lose a daughter and find her. Have a lover, lose her and get her back again. Welcome a nephew (Hello, Patrick Tom George Howard) and wave off a wife (Goodbye, Stephanie Bartlett).
You can also gain a vicar. Retired.
If Tom turned his head and put his ear to the floor, he might be able to hear George downstairs talking to Joan and Rob. Whisky made people very talkative even at – Tom slowly lifted his arm and looked at his watch – 3 a.m. Well, George could talk till the cows came home, whenever that might be, because he had played a blinder.
Like some ecclesiastical Superman, he’d hared to Newcastle Station where he had stopped Rob before he could board the train to Penzance. There were many other trains Rob could have caught before that particular one, but he
had decided he needed to go somewhere a very long way away.
Tom had asked George how he had managed to get through the ticket barriers without a ticket and he had just winked and said being a vicar gave you special privileges. Tom didn’t know if he believed that, but he did know that somewhere between Newcastle Station and the maternity unit, George had put steel in Rob’s backbone.
‘You were right, Tom. He’s done a lot of counselling over the years,’ Joan said. ‘Bereavement, post-traumatic stress, divorce. I should have taken your suggestion and got him to talk to Rob weeks ago.’
The result was that Rob made it into the operating theatre in time to see his son born by Caesarean section. He did faint later and spent some time in A&E, but by then he’d held his son and counted all his fingers and toes and everything in between and pronounced him perfect. And Kath, wise Kath, had not mentioned the two hours it had taken him to go to the toilet, but had included ‘George’ among her son’s names.
Tom liked the idea of George as Superman and hoped that image would supplant the one that had lodged in his brain since Joan’s fuck bunny revelation – that of him pleasuring Joan doggy-collar style.
Suddenly George seemed part of the family – Joan was
calling him ‘dear’ and doing hand-holding in public. Or had Tom imagined that? He’d had a couple of drams himself to wet the baby’s head.
And was the Steph problem finally solved? He dared to hope it was.
He and Hattie had been brought back to the house in a police car, along with Fran, and although Hattie had not told the police her mother had hit her, they had come in to satisfy themselves that they weren’t delivering her back to a place that she’d want to run away from again. They hadn’t stayed long, but Steph had gone to pieces afterwards. That was partly due to the fact she’d been genuinely scared that Hattie had gone missing, and partly because of Hattie’s reaction when she’d tried to say sorry.
Tom had expected his daughter to take all the blame on herself for the incident, or make excuses for her mother, but while she had mumbled, ‘It’s all right,’ she had kept on clinging to Tom and would not let Steph touch her.
Fran had already told him that Hattie’s first words to her had been a wailed, ‘But I only said I didn’t like orange juice,’ and he guessed that alongside being upset, she was also outraged.
When Fran finally managed to persuade Hattie to go upstairs and sit in a hot bath, Tom had watched Steph cry herself out. As she cried, he suddenly thought of all her
phone checking and how she had not answered his question about whether Alessandro would move with her.
‘He’s dumped you, hasn’t he?’ Tom said and Steph nodded and many things about her visit became clear.
‘I didn’t mean to hit her, Tom. Honestly I didn’t,’ she said, over and over again.
He believed her and told her that, but it was the only comfort he was prepared to give her. And then he rang Geoffrey and Caroline to come and collect her – he gave them directions to the Tap & Badger. She could stay there until they arrived, he wanted her out of his house.
On the journey to the hotel, he spelled out to her that now Hattie knew the worst, there was nothing preventing him from going to court to get a divorce. She said, straight out, that it wouldn’t be necessary.
‘And I’m not taking any crap with Hattie any more either,’ he said. ‘The first time you break a promise …’ He didn’t go on. Steph had a keen understanding of manipulation and knew that Tom no longer had any reason to keep her sweet.
‘I did try, you know, Tom,’ she said, before he left her in the pub lounge. ‘I tried hard to be a perfect mother.’
‘I don’t know any perfect mothers, who wants that?’ he told her. ‘If you just keep your promises, that would be a start.’ He had no idea whether that went in or whether,
when her parents arrived, she would bemoan how unfair he had been. It was only while driving back home, that he realised he hadn’t had it out with her about her visit to Fran.
*
Tom sat up slowly, shuffled over to the bed and watched Hattie. Exhaustion had carried her off eventually, rather than a wish to sleep. Tomorrow she might wake up and want Steph back. Who knew? But at least tomorrow she had a baby cousin, a pair of dungarees and a day off school to sweeten the pill a little. He bent and kissed her on the cheek, taking in the smell of the bubble bath and toothpaste and Hattie.
He couldn’t bear to run her route back in his head and think how easily she could have dashed out into the path of a car.
He lay back down and heard the bathroom door open, the light go off and footsteps coming towards the room.
‘Budge over,’ Fran said and lay down beside him under the duvet. She reached for his hand and squeezed it and said, ‘Sweet dreams.’ She must have understood that the emotions of the day had flattened him and he felt unable to cope with anything other than tenderness and sleep.
But it wouldn’t come.
‘You’re only twenty-four,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t have to deal with all this. You should be out partying.’
There was a snort. ‘Who are you to tell me what I want, Tom Howard? What I want is right here in this room – these one and a half people. A different family than I came to find, but my goodness, you’ve grown on me.’ Another squeeze of her hand. ‘When Hattie looked at me from under that table and said it was her “bolty hole”, I tell you, Tom, I had to go and have a discreet howl in the kitchen.’
Now it was him doing the squeezing. ‘Only twenty-four,’ he mumbled, ‘and you put the stake through the vampire’s heart.’
‘It was a scalpel actually, Tom, and I do wish I hadn’t done it. I ruined a perfectly good piece out of petulance. Did it the moment Steph left my doorstep.’
‘What a bloody day, all round. But those people tonight – neighbours, drivers, the police, all of them just wanting to help …’
‘Uh-huh. But you have to ask for it first, the help. Confide in people.’
‘Point taken,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll tell you the whole Steph story. And something else, about my job.’
‘You got the sack?’
That did make him open his eyes.
‘Liz phoned me,’ she said. ‘And Natalie had warned me that my lovely relations would do that to you, eventually.’ She laughed, a most un-Fran-like laugh. ‘But don’t worry, Tom. Close your eyes. Clever, tough Natalie has a plan.’
CHAPTER 57
‘I could have beaten him,’ Hattie said.
Tom eyed up the large teenager punching his fist into the palm of his other hand, and his opponent who was lying on his back and trying, unsuccessfully, to get up.
‘He’s got a weak leg,’ Hattie said with a dip of her chin. ‘I’d have gone for that.’
Hattie had taken the news that there was a lower age limit for the Cumberland & Westmorland wrestling well. Eventually. She had told Tom that she would spend the years before she was allowed to enter studying the opposition. He did not point out that by the time she was twelve, the opposition would not be the opposition. Still, if it made her happy, he was OK discussing blind sides and weak legs.
She was also, Tom suspected, not as bothered as she might have been, because her schedule for show day was already hectic. There was the karate display in the main ring in the afternoon and they’d been up early getting Alfie the rabbit ready for judging in the fur and feather category.
Plus she had a major entry in the Home Crafts marquee. They were going there next to see how she’d done.
They already knew how Alfie had done. He had not covered himself in glory, but he had covered his back legs in something else and Tom had returned him home already. He was thankful there had not been any competitions that Hattie’s rat or terrapins could be entered for.
‘Seen enough?’ he asked and she nodded and they were off. He remembered last year’s heat and preferred today’s weaker sunshine and lively breeze.
It wasn’t only the weather that was more to his liking. Every other single thing was too. He was no longer like a sad hamster going round and round on his wheel. Everything felt familiar but fresh.
He remembered too how last year he had to keep up with Hattie dashing ahead and taking an impromptu part in the wrestling. She still skipped along with enthusiasm, but there was no straying. He didn’t think that was due to the many lectures he’d delivered about the dangers of running away, more to do with how he had grabbed her on arrival at Fran’s and sobbed that he’d been so, so scared.
She had diverted to a jewellery stall and was poking around among the earrings.