The Silk Factory (12 page)

May said, ‘I took their house on but they didn’t come back, not even for Christmas. They didn’t want to face it, kept it all under the carpet, didn’t want you … I mean Rose, to know …’ She looked from Rosie to Cara as if suddenly confused and stopped short.

‘How did the accident happen, Aunty?’ Rosie tried to keep the urgency she felt from her voice. ‘You can tell me now, can’t you? I’m all grown up.’

May made her mouth a firm, straight line.

‘May, please! I really need to know!’

May put her hand over her eyes. ‘Swept away,’ she murmured, ‘just swept away.’ She began to weep.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, May. I didn’t mean to upset you.’ She felt her own throat tighten and squeezed May’s hand. ‘We won’t talk about it any more.’ She gave her a tissue but May just held it in her hand, so she took it back and dabbed her cheeks and then, as she would for one of the children, held it to May’s nose and said, ‘Blow.’

From the corner of her eye she saw Sam kick the croquet ball into the border. He mooched over to the summerhouse. ‘You said you would clap, Mummy,’ he said. ‘You said you were going to watch.’

Her heart still thumping, she said, as cheerily as she could manage, ‘I’m sorry, love. I can watch you now.’

Sam glanced uncertainly at May with her weepy-looking eyes and back to his mother. Make everything as normal as you can, Rosie told herself in an effort to steer through the current of emotion that her scraps of memory had brought whirling behind them. ‘Can you find the ball and have another go?’ She longed to get away on her own to have a chance to think, but first she must calm everything down for the others. She nodded encouragingly to Sam and he trailed off to retrieve the ball. She touched May’s hand and said, ‘Look, May; let’s see if Sam can get a hole-in-one. Remember when you and Helena used to play golf on the links course at Clifftops? Why don’t you tell me about those days?’

That evening, despite all her efforts, the children seemed to pick up on her disturbed state and were difficult to settle. It was nine o’clock by the time she had read to Sam from his current favourite,
The Little Prince
, and no sooner had she got him down than Cara woke with a wail. She knelt by the lobster-pot cot and put a hand on Cara’s tummy while she soothed her and sang her back to sleep. The evening was humid, sticky and uncomfortable; she smoothed Cara’s hair away from her face and folded back the blanket. She turned on the Cinderella nightlight that stood on a stool beside the cot and from the windows of the blue and silver pumpkin coach a faint, cool light glowed.

Rosie tiptoed from the room with the strains of ‘Lullaby and Goodnight’ still echoing in her head. She went slowly downstairs, thinking that all the songs she sang to Cara were ones her mother had sung to her. It made her feel sad. Even though there was continuity about it, tonight it felt too poignant. She started picking up toys in the living room and returning them to the wicker toy box. Suddenly she stopped, a ragdoll dangling from her hand. Something was moving in her brain … something to do with songs and the leggy, sprawling shape of the doll … suddenly, it was there, fully formed, a voice singing that was not her mother’s:

La araña chiquitita trepó por la pared,

Vino la lluvia y al suelo la tiró ¡plof!

Chiquitita spider climbed up the wall,

Down came the rain and threw it down, plop!

Maria’s incey-wincey spider song. She groped for more: brown fingers walking up the pale inside of her arm and then tickling, laughter … it faded away.

She tried to picture Maria’s face as she sang but nothing would come. May had said that Lily’s death had been an accident and that it was Maria’s fault. Rosie’s mind flicked over myriad possibilities: Lily pulling away and running into the road; or climbing up to a window left open, or a lake, a river, a slip, a fall, a moment’s inattention; all nightmare scenarios that she and probably all mothers had hovering at the back of their minds. Maria had been young, just a girl really, too young to have had experience bringing up kids of her own.

She tipped the last of the toys into the box. There had been other games, she was sure. Lions and tigers – that had involved crawling around under the furniture, Lily and her being chased on all fours, and hide-and-seek,
one elephant, two elephants … ten elephants … COMING!
Who was it coming to find them? Mum or Dad? There was a big tree you could hide behind. You could get right in amongst the branches. It had smelt strange – musty – and there was something squashy underfoot. She shut down the lid of the toy box and went out into the garden to carry on tidying away the debris of the day.

Twilight was falling, the grass felt cool and damp beneath her feet and the honeyed scent of buddleia hung in the air. Automatically, she began filling a plastic crate with balls and bubble bottles, Cara’s stacking cups and Sam’s dumper truck. She bent to pick up Sam’s cars from his diggings: a big patch now with beaten mud racetracks lined with little pale stones gleaned from the soil. Flashes of sandy colour in amongst them caught her eye and she picked one out between her finger and thumb: a shard of biscuit-ware pottery. She found others and laid them out on the slab path, turning them over and over.

Surely it couldn’t be … May had said that Rosie had lived at this house as a child but she had no recollection of it. She picked up Sam’s red metal spade and scraped a long furrow in the soil until she hit something hard; then she dug around it to loosen the earth’s grasp on it. She lifted out a rounded object to see the sketched eyes and the unmistakable shape of the long ear of the hare she’d broken long ago. Her body prickled with sweat as if she were again the child full of fear at what she’d done …

Slowly, she straightened up and turned towards the overgrown part of the garden. As if in a dream, she walked towards the mulberry tree and stood at the edge of the nettle bed surrounding it, peering between its drooping, twisted branches, some bent to the ground creating a shady hiding place within, deep and cavernous to a tiny child. A sharp, musty smell caught her nostrils and she leant forward to look in under the branches where the undergrowth was spattered with mouldering fallen fruits, dark juice staining the broad bramble leaves and serrated nettle leaves beneath.

In here, Rosie! Quick! Get under!

Coming … ready or not …

She backed away and subsided on to one of the patio chairs. With a sharp sense of loss, the memory of being gathered in under the tree suddenly became clearer in her mind, Maria’s arms around her and Lily, staying very still and not making a sound.

She closed her eyes.What else? What else did they do together? She remembered sitting on a hard bench seat, being strapped into some kind of square truck with Maria between her and Lily. Maria had put her arms around them both then too, and Rosie had felt both happy and sick with excitement at the same time. Then the cart had sped along a track, up and down, mountains and dips, at the apex of each slope a glimpse of something sparkling; there had been a rattle and a clatter and the smell of sweat and patchouli … she felt uneasy. There was something here, something important. She remembered that her legs had felt wobbly when they got off the little rollercoaster. Had they been at a fairground? The wind had been blowing; she remembered her hair in her face and the noise of its buffeting. There had been fish and chips and, later, ice cream. She shook her head. Perhaps that had been on a different day.

Where could they have been when they went on the rollercoaster? She thought again of the way the horizon seemed to glitter from the top of the peaks – the seaside. They had been at the seaside. But why did she feel dread grip her when she thought of the way the wind blew and blew?

She squeezed her eyes tight shut in concentration … Collecting pebbles and long, blue razor shells. Damp sand gritty between her toes, a wet swimming costume that rolled into a tight band and stuck to her when she tried to get it off, her mother’s voice saying ‘skin a rabbit’; all of these could have been from any number of holidays, she thought; there was no memory of Lily beside her. Then, suddenly, the sound of the wind again, boisterous, blustery, windbreaks flapping somewhere down below her, something yellow in front of her, flicking round and round, flickering with the sun so bright behind it she could hardly see. Then a horrible sound, someone gripping her hand so tight it hurt – that sound – someone screaming …

Rosie sat bolt upright in the chair, gasping for breath.
Tick-tick-tick
, the sound of the whirring yellow object was still in her ears, although the pictures had gone. She put her hand to her throat, feeling sick and exhausted, her pulse beating fast in her neck. The garden had grown dim and she had the strangest impression that the darkness was spreading out from her, a miasma of fear and sadness. She stared at the grass at her feet where dew had formed, unwilling to raise her eyes. She dared not look towards the mulberry tree where she sensed that the darkness concentrated and thickened as though in answer to her own black thoughts. She felt, rather than saw, a girl’s shadowy shape beneath the branches, a pale face peeping between them, its expression pleading, calling for her.
Come and find me … come and find me . .
.

Keeping her eyes downcast, she stumbled across the uneven slabs of the patio and hurried indoors, shutting and locking the door behind her. As she turned on the kitchen light it seemed to her that the darkness leapt at the glass pane of the door, pressing up against it, a flat square of impenetrable blackness. She turned her back on it and made her way upstairs. Undressing in the dim glow from Cara’s nightlight, she let her clothes lie where they fell, and crawled into bed.

Some hours later, she was woken not by a sound but by a sensation. Something light, like hair or feathers, had touched her cheek. She lay still on her back with her eyes closed. There it was again, this time on her forehead and then her lips. She passed her hand over her face and blearily opened her eyes. In the dim glow of the nightlight, between her and the ceiling was a haze of falling whiteness, which, as her eyes found their focus, resolved itself into its constituent parts: hundreds … thousands of tiny threads. The air was thick with them. Half dreaming, half waking, she watched for a moment, as one might watch snow through a window, coming down thick and silent, mesmerised by its steady, continuous falling.

The room was cold and she shivered, rising to awareness through the muzziness of sleep. What was this …
stuff
? She felt it on her eyelashes as she blinked, dusting her bare arms and shoulders, slippery under her fingers on the surface of the duvet – strands of silk.

At the foot of her bed, beside Cara’s cot, a figure was standing, looking down at the sleeping child. Through the thick air, Rosie saw her shape silhouetted against the blue-white light of the nightlight: a small figure wrapped in a shawl and with a long plait hanging down her back. A scream formed in Rosie’s throat but couldn’t issue from her mouth; her body felt heavy; she was pinned to the bed like a butterfly to a card. She saw the girl’s serious face, intent on her daughter; in frozen immobility she saw her white hands reaching over the rail as the child bent towards her …

With a huge, trembling effort, as if pushing her way through quicksand, Rosie raised one hand, groped through the thickening mist of filaments for the bedside lamp and snapped on the light.

Nothing. Yellow light flooded the room, returning the pastel colours of the floral duvet and curtains, the clumsy shape of the lobster-pot cot, the air as clear as glass. Rosie leapt out of bed and in two strides was lifting Cara, warm and heavy with sleep, and clutching her to her breast. Cara, rudely awakened, let out a long bewildered wail. ‘There now, there now; it’s all right.’ Cara began to cry in earnest. Rosie rocked her to and fro, comforting herself as much as Cara. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right,’ she said.

There was a thump from Sam’s room as his feet hit the board floor and then running footsteps. He appeared in the doorway in just his pyjama bottoms, his hair all tousled, and stood there blinking. ‘Cara woke me up,’ he said grumpily. ‘Why’s she crying?’

‘I … Silly Mummy woke her up,’ Rosie said. ‘I must’ve been having a nightmare.’ She looked around at the room: its ordinary debris of clothes and books, hairbrushes and cosmetics. No intruders. No floating silk or dusty film of threads. But it had seemed so real! The ticking noise and the flashing yellow brightness came to her again like a sickness. What was happening to her? She sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed and Cara’s subsiding sobs gained strength again. ‘Shh, shh,’ she said, rocking and rubbing Cara’s back. ‘Come on,’ she said to Sam, ‘Let’s get in all together.’ She didn’t want either of them out of her sight. Rosie got in and sat up in bed with Cara snuggled down beside her.

Sam climbed in on the other side, burrowing down under the duvet. ‘Can we have the light off?’

‘Not just yet. Mummy’s going to read for a bit,’ Rosie said. She picked up her novel and made a show of finding her place.

Once the children were asleep, she put the book down and simply sat, watching the room. The clock on the bedside table ticked away the minutes as if nothing whatsoever had happened; the children’s breathing grew regular and light; far away a train rattled through the night and then the ordinary, everyday quiet returned.

Rosie woke with a start; someone was hammering on the door and leaning on the doorbell at the same time. The noise stopped, as if whoever was down there was listening to see if anyone was coming to open up. Bright light edged the curtains; she must have slept in. Cara was still asleep beside her but the duvet was pushed back on Sam’s side and the bed was empty. Her heart turned over as she remembered the night’s events but then subsided as she heard the familiar strains of loud cartoon music from the TV downstairs. Of course, it was all right; Sam had got himself up, that was all.

She struggled from the bed as the row downstairs started again. ‘OK, OK, I’m coming!’ she called out as she hurried down, barefoot and in her pyjamas. She opened the door a crack, thinking that it would be some deliveryman with the wrong address. Instead, Josh was standing on the doorstep. Behind him, his car was parked nose-to-tail with hers. Scowling, he slowly took his finger from the doorbell. ‘Are you up at last? Can I come in?’