Beneath the Surface (7 page)

‘Adam put Dr Richards on a pedestal,’ I later told Maggie. And you did, didn’t you? You were buzzing when we left his clinic that day. ‘It’s going to happen,’ you kept saying to me. ‘I can feel it, I really think he can do something for us.’ You leaned over and squeezed my arm. ‘Sharon at work was saying that as soon as she and her husband saw him he started them on this treatment and it took just three months before she fell pregnant.’

You were so wrapped up in the bubble of prospective parenthood you couldn’t see what was going on right in front of your eyes.

Hannah sat on the back seat of her mother’s car idly drumming her fingertips against the window. She could sense Lauren staring at her and knew she was irritating her sister, but she was bored and irritated herself. She wanted her mother to hurry up so they could get the day over with as quickly as possible.

‘Will you stop doing that?’ Lauren hissed. ‘It’s so annoying!’

Hannah tapped again, louder this time before stopping and turning to face her. ‘What’s that you’re reading anyway?’ she asked, nodding at the book Lauren held in her lap.

Lauren turned it over to show Hannah the cover. ‘It’s about a boy who’s deformed.’

‘Sounds uplifting.’

Lauren rolled her eyes. ‘It is actually, you should read more.’

‘Where is she?’ Hannah asked, looking past her sister and towards the house. ‘Why’s she taking so long to get out when she told us to be ready ten minutes ago?’

‘I’ve no idea, probably stressing about forgetting something.’

‘We’re only going for the day, it’s not like it matters if she does,’ Hannah sighed.

‘Well, you know that doesn’t make any difference,’ Lauren said, turning back to her book.

‘At last,’ Hannah muttered when Kathryn appeared in the doorway. She clicked her seat belt into place. ‘And can you imagine how slowly she’s going to drive with that bloody cake on the front seat? It’ll take us a lifetime to get there.’

Lauren stifled a giggle as their mother opened her door to the car and peered at her daughters in the back. ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked. ‘And have you both got everything? I don’t want to turn back at the end of the street because one of you needs to go home for something.’

‘Mum,’ Lauren interrupted, ‘we have everything. Please, let’s just go.’

Kathryn slid into the driver’s seat and looked at them in the rear-view mirror. ‘And have you got your presents for Grandma?’

‘Oh yes, indeed we do,’ Hannah smiled back, shaking the box of Quality Street she’d grabbed at the store that morning. The hint of sarcasm was lost on Kathryn, who had by then turned her attention to checking the lid of the cake box.

‘Maybe one of you should come and sit upfront and hold this instead,’ she suggested, fiddling with its catches. ‘If I brake suddenly the whole thing will go flying into the windscreen and be ruined.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ Lauren sighed. ‘Put the seat belt round it if you’re concerned.’

‘No, you’re right,’ Kathryn sighed, turning the ignition and jamming the gearstick into first gear. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

Hannah shook her head at her sister and mouthed, ‘Oh, my God!’

Lauren smiled, turning back to her book. It was going to be a long day.

Hannah always dreaded visiting her grandmother. Even when they were young, staying with their grandparents had not been the treasured experience it should have. As soon as her mum mentioned spending the school holidays at Grandma’s large, rambling house in Yorkshire, Hannah felt sick. She hated Lordavale House, where the days dragged and the nights lasted forever.

Lordavale was the type of place where you might expect to bump into the Famous Five: long corridors and hidden passageways, a multitude of rooms behind closed doors. It all gave the impression of being the perfect spot for childhood adventures, with lots of places to hide and things to explore. If anyone other than Charles and Eleanor had lived there, Hannah and Lauren would have loved it.

The house was a former boarding school, a notion that always seemed so apt to Hannah. She often wondered if they had left Grandma behind when it closed down. Eleanor perfectly fitted the bill for an old school mistress, pounding her cane on the stone floor for attention, sending the girls to bed without their supper if they spoke out of turn. Instead of being exciting, the house felt eerie. Many a night the sisters had huddled together in one of the single beds, imagining they could hear the voices of small children calling out to them from the eaves.

There were no toys at Lordavale except for an old doll’s house. Three storeys high with nine rooms, each one was as meticulously furnished as the next. ‘This was mine when I was a little girl,’ their mum once told them, as she peered into one of the miniature bedrooms, brushing trembling fingers gently over a tiny bed. At that moment Hannah had thrust Barbie onto the roof and Kathryn let out a yelp, pulling it away.

‘No, just be careful, this isn’t a—’

Hannah could still remember how her mother had stopped herself from finishing the sentence.

‘Isn’t a what, Mummy?’ Lauren asked repeatedly. ‘Isn’t a
what
?’

‘Isn’t a toy,’ Kathryn murmured, staring at the house. Then, when their grandma’s voice boomed that lunch was served, she had ushered them out of the room, closing the door behind them. They never saw the doll’s house again.

Lordavale boasted a drawing room. Eleanor took great pride in declaring they would have tea in the
draaawing room
whenever guests appeared, elongating the word to sound more impressive. It always made them giggle. Once the guests had seen them and admired their pretty dresses, the girls were shooed to another part of the house and they would run off laughing and whispering
draaawing room
to one another.

In hindsight Hannah could appreciate the room’s beauty. Mahogany panelled walls surrounded a wide open fireplace, big enough for Hannah and Lauren to hide inside when they were younger. It had a stone wall at the back and all the trimmings you would expect to see: the iron guard and pokers sticking out of a pot to the side. Leaded windows hung almost floor to ceiling, overlooking the large Koi pond in the garden. But the room was spoiled. When Hannah closed her eyes she could still see the oversized oil painting of Eleanor sat regally in a deep blue velvet chair, hanging above the fireplace. From that painting Eleanor’s eyes watched her, burning into her, her gaze following her every move; ready to pounce if she did something wrong. As a child the painting had freaked her out and she couldn’t understand why no one else seemed as bothered by it as she was.

But Eleanor didn’t only dominate the drawing room: paintings and photographs of her adorned many of the walls and side tables around the house. They were mostly portraits of a younger Eleanor in the days before she had that hideous scar running down her left cheek, which must have been before the girls were born because they always remembered it, her face so layered in powder trying to conceal it.

‘She needs to be able to see everything we do,’ Hannah once whispered to Lauren as they edged past her pictures and up the staircase. ‘Like she’s omnipotent.’

‘Omni
present
,’ Lauren had murmured back. ‘Omnipotent means she is all-powerful.’

‘Exactly,’ Hannah sighed. ‘That’s exactly what she thinks she is.’

Eleanor certainly seemed to exert a power over their mum. Hannah could remember clearly how, during their visits to Lordavale, Kathryn seemed to become someone else, almost as if she wasn’t their mother at all. Even to a child the difference was apparent. When they were on the beach and it was just the three of them, Kathryn would laugh and hug them and play games. She only told them off if they went out of her sight, telling them never to go where she couldn’t see them. But at Lordavale she was different: she didn’t smile, she didn’t laugh, she just drifted around the house like a ghost. It always used to take her a couple of days to settle once they had returned to the Bay, and then she was back to her normal self again. Or at least as normal as Kathryn ever was, Hannah thought now.

Nowadays Kathryn didn’t smile as much. More and more she was morphing into a ghost mother, one whose face was plastered into an uptight expression, always looking as if she expected something to jump out and bite her. On the days when they visited Grandma now, she would apply a jolly appearance, almost in contrast to the way she used to be on visits when Hannah and Lauren were children. But the act didn’t fool Hannah. She could see that beneath the fake smile and shrill laugh the nurses would see later, her mum wasn’t comfortable visiting Eleanor any more than she herself had ever been.

If her grandmother was once all-powerful, she should see herself now for she was a far cry from being lady of the manor anymore. And she was far from present in her own mind, let alone anywhere else.

Once upon a time Eleanor had been a glamorous woman. She was tall and held herself so upright the girls used to imagine there was a pole attached to her back. They rarely saw her without make-up, her eyelids coated in a steely grey powder and a thick layer of red painted onto her lips. Her hair was always set into a position that never moved and a string of pearls hung around her neck, sticking out where they caught the sharp points of her collarbone. Eleanor had never looked like a grandma, or even an old woman. Always she was immaculately presented to the outside world. But since she had been in the home they had watched everything that had ever made her elegant rapidly ebb away.

*****

The sound of her mother’s fingers tapping against the steering wheel in a monotonous drum was beginning to grate. Since the start of the journey, when Kathryn was fretting about everything, she hadn’t spoken a word. Her eyes remained focused on the road ahead, her rigid body arched forward as if prepared for an animal to spring out in front of the car. Occasionally she glanced towards the cake but then her head would snap back into position. Refocused. It was hard to imagine what she was thinking about. Aside from the obvious – worrying about her own mother’s ailing health, worrying the girls might do something outrageous like want to go on a date, or come home past ten at night. Aside from all that, it was almost impossible for Hannah to guess what went on inside Kathryn’s head.

Only that morning Lauren had asked her if she was OK and how she felt about visiting Grandma. Kathryn had swung around, a U-shaped smile glued to her face, and said, ‘I’m fine, why wouldn’t I be?’

‘But Mum, you must be wondering how she’s going to be today or—’

‘Oh, nonsense! Of course not, I’m looking forward to seeing her,’ she murmured cheerfully. ‘Now, where is your present for her, Lauren?’

‘It’s right here,’ Lauren muttered.

Hannah wanted to shake some sense into her. Anyone with half a brain could see she wasn’t looking forward to it. If only she would tell them how she really felt about Eleanor maybe they would get somewhere close towards knowing what made her tick. Was Kathryn scared Eleanor was ill and might die? Was she angry that she was no longer the mother she used to be? Did she even like her? Hannah wished she would stop wasting time trying to shield them from everything and be honest. She was so busy building up barriers, she wasn’t letting the girls get close to her.

But denial was a happy place where their mother lived. The day she told the girls their grandma was moving into a home, she wrapped the news up in shiny paper and added a bow to the top – ‘It will be lovely for her, lots of other people her age to befriend and play Scrabble with.’ They had never seen their grandma play Scrabble in her life. Why she would want to take it up in a nursing home was anyone’s guess. At first the girls thought their mother was acting that way for their sake, to protect them from knowing the truth, but now Hannah considered it was more likely she simply hadn’t accepted it.

Kathryn could be so childlike in her ways, and the way she idolised Grandma was odd. On nights when they were staying at her house, the girls would sit on the marble landing where the double stairways met and listen. Hanging their legs through the balustrade they could hear Eleanor chipping away at their mum below. ‘I would never allow those girls to do half the things they do if they were my children,’ she once said. ‘Running around the halls, screeching. And they have no manners.’

‘They do have manners, Mother. It’s just children these days aren’t the same as when I was younger.’

‘Nonsense! It’s you, you’re too weak with them. You let them run all over you. If you aren’t careful, you know what will happen.’

The girls had looked at each other and shrugged. They had no idea what might happen but they didn’t like the threat in Eleanor’s voice. Hannah reached over and squeezed Lauren’s hand and they tiptoed back to their beds, desperate to hide beneath the covers and shield themselves from her. She sent fear running through them, and Hannah hated that their mum allowed it.

Shuddering at the memory she put her headphones on. Grandma wasn’t a threat to them anymore. In an attempt to zone out for the rest of the journey to Elms Home, Hannah focused instead on what she wanted out of the summer, mentally listing: Leave the Bay; Look for my dad.

She glanced at Lauren, who was still engrossed in her book, and wondered how her sister appeared to switch off. Lauren didn’t like Eleanor any more than Hannah, but she never wound herself up to the same extent. ‘Lauren is much more placid,’ she once heard her grandmother remark to an afternoon guest at Lordavale. ‘Hannah is the fiery one.’ She preferred the notion of having fire running through her veins – it meant she was likely to do something with her life. She wouldn’t settle for Mull Bay for the rest of her days, as her mother hoped she would.

*****

‘Here we are, girls!’ Kathryn sang out as they turned into the sweeping driveway.

Elms Home was a beautiful house, too good for Grandma, Hannah always thought whenever they drove slowly through the gated entrance and over the speed bumps. They got out of the car and waited for their mum to carefully lift the birthday cake from the passenger seat. It wasn’t a homemade cake but purchased from a bakery the day before. Hannah was grateful they hadn’t been made to invest an afternoon up to their elbows in flour but she wouldn’t have been surprised if the cake was passed off to the nurses as one of their own: little things like that showed more love and care. Apparently.