In Her Shadow (37 page)

Except it wasn’t Ellen.

It couldn’t have been Ellen; Ellen was dead.

But she looked so like Ellen.

She was still a girl; her eyes were a little greener than Ellen’s, and there was an auburn tinge to her hair. She was wearing make-up, red lipstick, but still I could see speckles of acne around her jawline. I didn’t understand. I looked at Karla, who was beaming and clasping her hands to her chest with a mixture of pride and delight, at John who was watching me, and back to the young woman.

The girl stepped forward, holding out her hand towards me. She uncurled her fingers and there, crumpled in her palm, was the gold necklace with the treble clef charm.

‘I’m so happy to meet you, Hannah,’ she said. ‘I’m Kirsten. I’m Ellen’s daughter.’

CHAPTER SIXTY

IRAN AWAY FROM
Thornfield House and the marquee and Mr Brecht and his gun. I ran all the way home, down the darkening lane. I threw back the gate to our cottage so hard that it slammed against the wall behind, and ran to the door.

Jago came round the side of the house, Trixie trotting after him, wagging her tail.

‘What are you doing back here?’ he asked. ‘You’re supposed to be at the party. Did you forget something?’

Then he looked at me more closely.

‘Hannah? Are you all right?’

I shook my head and tried to catch my breath, leaning over to clutch a stitch in my side.

‘You can’t go,’ I panted.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can’t go to Thornfield House tonight. You can’t take Ellen away. You can’t do anything now.’

‘Hannah …’

‘Her father knows about you and Ellen,’ I gasped. ‘He knows and he’s ready for you. He’s got his gun. He’s going to kill you.’

‘No, he’s not.’ Jago pulled a face. ‘Don’t be such a drama queen.’

That was what I used to call Ellen. I used to think she was making things up, that she was exaggerating. Shame and anger rattled through me.

I grabbed hold of Jago’s arm. ‘You mustn’t go there, Jago. Not tonight. Do you hear me? You mustn’t!’

I started to sob with frustration. Trixie sloped off with her ears flat against her head and her tail between her legs.

‘Hannah, stop this,’ Jago said. ‘Stop being so weird. We have to leave tonight. The tickets are booked.’

‘You’re not listening to me!’

‘Because you’re not making any sense.’

‘Ellen doesn’t want you to go!’ I cried.

Jago grabbed me by the shoulders. My arms were bare and his fingers hurt. ‘What do you mean? What’s wrong? What’s he done to her?’

‘Nothing, he hasn’t done anything. But there’s no party. It’s just them – just the two of them. Just Ellen and her father, and she doesn’t want you there.’

‘Fuck him,’ said Jago. ‘Fuck the bastard. I’m going anyway. I’ll walk in and take her out from under his nose if I have to. He can’t stop us!’

‘He’ll shoot you and then he’ll say it was self-defence! The police know you were there the other night. Oh Jago, please …’

Jago kicked open the front door to our house, sat down on the step and began to lace up his boots. I was crying properly now, great sobs. I was frantic; desperate.

‘Jago, you can’t go,’ I said. ‘Listen to me! Ellen doesn’t want to see you.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m not.’ I calmed myself a little. I wiped the snot from my nose on my arm. My body was still shaking. ‘She told me to tell you she doesn’t want to see you.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Jago frowned but he
dropped his laces. I saw a tiny window of hope. There was a chance I could stop him if I used the right words. ‘You mean because she’s scared of her father?’

‘No. I mean she doesn’t want to see you any more,’ I said. ‘It’s over between you. It’s finished.’

Jago laughed. ‘Why would she tell you something important like that and not me, heh? She
loves
me, Hannah. She loves me! She tells me everything.’

I don’t know what happened then. I can’t explain it but my fear changed into a huge anger. All the jealousy I’d been containing for years, all the hurt, all the frustration came to the surface. In the beginning it had been Jago and me and then it had been Jago and Ellen and me, but for years now it had been Jago and Ellen with me on the outside looking in. I’d been their messenger, their helper, their confidante. I’d looked after them both, covered their tracks, lied for them and listened to them talking and agonizing for interminable hours. Ellen and Jago had hijacked my teenage years, they had consumed the best years of my life – and after all that sacrifice, my own brother thought I was so irrelevant that Ellen would never have told me anything without telling him first.

I’d never felt a fury like it. It blazed in me. It was cathartic. It was so powerful it was almost beautiful. And after that, it was easy. My fury made me calm and I knew what to say.

‘She’s changed her mind about going away with you,’ I said. ‘She got her inheritance this morning and that’s changed everything. She doesn’t want to live in some dump in New York with you when she can do whatever she wants without you. That’s what she said.’

I enjoyed it. I enjoyed hurting him. Even as the words were coming out, I knew they were terrible, but they made me feel strong and clean, they purged that festering resentment. I reasoned, inasmuch as I could reason anything in the state
I was in, that I would recant the lies in the morning, when everything had calmed down and the immediate danger to Jago had passed.

Jago looked at me. He paused just long enough for me to see that my words were having an effect. He’d been abandoned before. He’d been rejected. His mother had died and his father had dumped him, and his uncle and aunt had treated him with cruelty. Deep down, I realized, Jago had always believed he was unlovable, not good enough. Despite what he said, he did not believe that Ellen loved him as he loved her. I took advantage of his vulnerability. I revelled in it.

‘She could have anyone she wanted,’ I said. ‘Why would she want you?’

‘No.’ Jago shook his head. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Jago, for fuck’s sake!’ I shouted. ‘She doesn’t love you! She’s had an abortion!’

We both went still then. We stared at one another in mutual horror.

‘No,’ Jago said. ‘
No!
’

‘She did! I was with her!’

He pushed me, hard. I stumbled backwards towards the garden gate, and fell.

‘You’re lying!’

‘How can I be lying?’ I asked, crawling towards him again. My voice was rising – ugly, mean. ‘You told her not to tell anyone about the baby – not even me. But she did tell me, and she said she didn’t want your bastard baby, and I was there when she had the abortion.’

‘No.’

‘She’s changed her mind, Jago!’ I shouted, grabbing hold of his knees and shaking them. ‘She doesn’t want you any more.’ I pulled myself up until I was standing, and stood on tiptoe to put my face up close to his as I screamed: ‘She
doesn’t care about you! She says you’re boring and stupid! She says she can do better than you! That’s why she’s not going anywhere with you! That’s why she doesn’t want to see you again! That’s why she killed your baby!’

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

KIRSTEN’S FINGERS WERE
slender and long, like Ellen’s, her feet narrow. She had a tattoo around her left ankle, a Thai blessing rising up her leg, a pierced tongue and a bright pink streak under her hair – so, she explained, she could clip it to one side when she wasn’t at work and transform herself into a wild child. She had straight white teeth and an easy smile and beautiful eyes. She had all Ellen’s charm, and none of her angst. She seemed to have inherited or absorbed Karla’s sunny disposition.

My mind was reeling, thoughts swirling around like fog. I couldn’t hold onto anything, nothing made sense.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How can you be Ellen’s daughter? She couldn’t have had a child. There wasn’t time.’

A young woman came out of the Schloss with a tray of refreshments. John, who was perched on the side of the fountain, took it from her. There was iced coffee and more cake. The girl sat down with us. Her hair was very short and her ears and face glittered with body jewellery. She was dressed in punk clothes. She introduced herself as Dora and said she was Kirsten’s friend. The girls had met at language school, where they were studying English.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said again. I couldn’t take my eyes off Kirsten. I felt as if I knew her, as if I had always known her, but at the same time she was a stranger to me. ‘It’s impossible.’

Kirsten took a deep breath. She glanced at her aunt.

‘When did you last see Ellen?’ Karla asked me gently.

‘The last time …’ I paused. It had been almost two decades ago and I had never once spoken to anyone about the encounter. I could not bear to go back to it, not even in my own mind. The last time I saw Ellen had been two days after her birthday. The morning before I left Trethene with Ricky to fly to South America.

I tried again. ‘The last time I saw her …’ but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t speak. John came and sat next to me. He put his arm around me, his hand on my shoulder. The weight of it was a comfort to me. I could feel his thumb resting against the base of my neck. My pulse beat against it. He was all that was holding me together.

‘It was just after her eighteenth birthday,’ I managed.

‘You didn’t know she was pregnant?’

‘She wasn’t pregnant,’ I said in a low voice. ‘She had been, but she’d had an abortion.’

‘No.’ Kirsten shook her head. ‘She didn’t. She just made you believe that she had.’

Karla came closer to me. She sat in front of me and took hold of my hands. Hers were cool and dry. She reached up and stroked the side of my face.

‘Convincing you and Mrs Todd that she’d had the abortion was the best way to protect Ellen’s baby from her father. If there was any danger of the secret coming out, she knew the baby, and the baby’s father, would be in danger. But if you all believed there was no baby, no problem.’

She smiled. ‘She must have loved the baby’s father very much to go so far to protect him.’

Kirsten hunched her shoulders. ‘It’s a shame he didn’t feel
the same way about her.’ She looked at me. ‘He abandoned her, you know.’

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I whispered. The memory of what I had done, how I had driven Jago away, flooded back through me. Some of the words I had said, the cruel things I’d told him, crashed into me. I remembered Jago’s face, his twenty-year-old face, his eyes, the conflict in them as he struggled not to believe me when I told him Ellen did not love him, did not want him, and had destroyed his child. I had stood and watched as his trust in her – in them, in their future – fractured and disintegrated, drained away. I had destroyed him. I had sent him away. It was my fault. It had been me, not him.

Oh dear God, I thought now. What have I done?

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

JAGO WENT AWAY
that same night.

He drove off in the Escort and nobody knew where he had gone.

My mum and dad were beside themselves with worry. None of us slept that night, or the next. Trixie cowered beneath my bed. Mum and Dad did not know that he had chosen to leave, but I knew. The crib was gone from the shed and the baby clothes from his bedroom, but there was a pile of fresh, white-grey ash behind the hedge at the edge of the fields that backed onto Cross Hands Lane. In my mind’s eye, I could see Jago lighting the fire, throwing the things he’d made so carefully, and chosen with so much love, into the flames. I could see him wiping the smuts from his eyes with the back of his arm as everything that reminded him of Ellen, or his hopes for the future, crackled and curled and charred. I could see the red glow of the fire reflected in the tears streaked across his face. Jago thought he was useless and he believed that’s what Ellen thought too. He told himself he was shit, a waste of space: a loser.

Jago hadn’t left a note. My parents were bewildered. They thought he must have had an accident, fallen from a cliff, or been swept out to sea. I said as little as possible. I made tea
for my mother and covered my hands with my ears so I couldn’t hear her frantic whispering to my father, or her prayers. Dad said little but I heard him too. The evening after Jago left, he went out with 10p in his pocket to call the coastguard from the phone box on the green. After that, he came back for his keys and drove off in the van without saying anything to us. Mum and I sat together in the living room, holding one another’s hands, white-faced and silent while the clock ticked and the dawn gradually stained the night sky from black to grey. And then Dad came back and he sat in his chair, and for the first time in my whole life, I saw him cry, his big bear-body shaking with sobs he could not control.

A body had been washed up further along the coast, Dad told us; a young man’s body. He shook his head and tried to stem the flow of his tears with a handkerchief.

Dad went into the mortuary.

The body wasn’t Jago’s.

I thought I couldn’t leave my parents. I couldn’t fly to Chile while all this was happening, but they wanted me to go. They didn’t want Jago to ruin my future, they said. Dad almost pleaded with me and I realized that it would be easier for them, without me. They wouldn’t have to take me into consideration, whatever happened. They could be less stoic. They could say what they really wanted to say to one another. They could voice their fears.

They were the innocent ones, my mum and dad. They knew nothing. They speculated and guessed. I knew.

I went to the beach, by myself, and sat and stared out to sea. In my mind I begged Jago to come home. I stood at the water’s edge and I stretched out my arms and I screamed his name over and over into the wind, and I hoped the wind would carry my screams to Jago. It didn’t.

And as the minutes turned into hours and the hours turned
into days, I tried not to think about Ellen, stuck up at Thornfield House with her father. I didn’t want to have to worry about what she was thinking. She’d be all right, I thought. She’d be relieved that Jago had stayed away. She was probably occupied with sorting through those legal papers. And anyway, I was too busy to see her. I had so much to do, and my priority now was my own life. I packed my rucksack. I sorted out my bedroom. And soon enough, only a few hours were left before Ricky’s father would pick me up to take the two of us to London to catch the plane to South America.