The Fire Child (23 page)
Authors: S. K. Tremayne
I had thought I was saved; that the doctor had hauled me from the freezing water. Now I am back in it, grasping in the blackness. Drowning.
Jamie’s eyes seek out mine. ‘Do you believe me, Rachel? She was there! Down at the mine. With the man engine. I told Daddy and he didn’t believe me and I told Cassie and she didn’t believe me.’
I have no conception of what to say. Perhaps I should admit I saw her too: tell the child his mother lives, or half lives, in our two deluded minds. But the stuff about the mines confuses further. When was he down there at Morvellan? Why did Cassie let him wander? Everything is confusion: as the stiff winds bully the woodlands outside, as the Christmas weather prepares to dump more snow on this haunted valley.
She really is mad. She’s having another baby. Stupid slut.
‘Stop,’ I say, to myself, to Jamie. To the voices in my head. ‘Please, please stop.’
Jamie looks at me, perplexed. ‘Rachel?’
‘Jamie …’
Need to batter my way through this. Shout down the madness. I also have to lie to Jamie. Pretend that I am the sane and stable grown-up, that he can rely on me.
‘Jamie, you didn’t see
anything
.’
‘But, Rachel, I did. It was her but it wasn’t. It really was Mummy, I know it, I think. But but. But it was so strange, like a dream? I saw her at the mine, I hugged her. It was windy and cold and she was there, she was, I smelled her, I hugged her, I touched her and she hugged me, she did, she did.’
I can see doubts in his eyes. I can see him questioning his own mind. Oh, I know that feeling.
And the image is stark. Nina Kerthen, pale and slender, beautiful and blonde, in her rich dark coat, coming from the mines, coming for her son. Hugging him close, cold tears in her eyes.
‘Where’s Cassie?’
Jamie shrugs, unhappily, his voice still tight, and anxious.
‘Yellow Drawing Room. Granny and her were talking. Someone came to drive Granny away. Don’t know don’t know.’
‘Juliet is here? I mean Granny?’
‘She wanted to see me, see me, before she left, we played a Christmas game, but then she went off and, and and and then I looked out of my window, and it was the right time.’
‘And you told her you saw your mummy at the mines. You told Granny?’
He gulps air, nods.
‘Yes. Yes I spoke to Granny. Cassie too. She was angry at me. She says ghosts are evil things. She says I shouldn’t talk like this. Rachel, why doesn’t anyone believe me?’
I can imagine Cassie: scolding the boy. Yet also frightened. Wearing her amulets against evil. I know she has been on the verge of quitting for weeks: the increasingly poisonous atmosphere of Carnhallow makes her unhappy. She has no direct loyalty to me. This might be the clincher, and make her quit. Leaving us isolated and alone.
Suicide.
Or infanticide.
‘Rachel?’
‘Jamie, I’m gonna – Jamie. Sorry. Look, let’s get you some supper, some sausage and mash, hey, how about that?’
He looks at me sorrowfully and sceptically. Those blue-violet eyes pierce me somewhere deep. I think of his mother’s eyes, the eyes that stared at me from the corridor that leads to the Old Hall.
No. Yes. No.
I flush with cold at the thought: that chilly, monastic chamber. Something
is
in there. I know it. That’s where she was, where she came from the darkness. Something is in the Old Hall.
Yes. Waiting for you.
Grasping Jamie’s hand I lead him to the kitchen, where I fry the sausage and pound the mash as Jamie sits at the kitchen counter, reading a football magazine. His beloved Chelsea.
The mash is spooned on to a plate, making a big steaming white dollop. Then I follow with the sausages, straight out of the pan, but I drop one on the floor.
Picking up the sausage, I put it in the pedal bin. There are plenty more sausages, nice and browned. Three should do it. Jamie is still absorbed in his magazine. He barely looks up as I put the plate in front of him. His neck is white and exposed as he bends over the book. Such a slender neck. Such a pretty child. Those beautiful eyes. The neck is so vulnerable. So white and slender.
Breakable.
‘Thanks.’
His voice is now level, his demeanour calmer, after that fierce outburst. Perhaps he is pretending everything is OK. The mention of the mines perplexes. When did he go down there?
Now my mobile phone rings, buzzing and spinning on the granite worktop. Thank God. It occurs to me that it might be David. I find myself wishing it was. I feel a need to talk to my husband. I miss him. And I miss us. I miss what we were and what we had a few weeks back.
And as soon as I think this, my self-hatred surges. This is the voice of the abused child, inside me, forgiving the abuser. David is violent. He beat me. He does not deserve any love.
The phone screen says
Juliet
.
‘Hello? Juliet?’
‘Rachel. We need to talk.’
She sounds relatively calm. Possibly saner than me.
‘Juliet, what is it?’
‘Are you in the kitchen? Do you have Jamie there?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Um. Fine. Yes.’ I don’t want to upset Jamie so I walk to the furthest end of the kitchen, by the advent calendar. That way Jamie can’t hear me.
The calendar window is open and shows a cheery red Santa on a sleigh. Only three days till Christmas. The snow falls thickly on us all.
‘Juliet, he’s having supper. He’s fine.’
‘But he wasn’t fine, was he?’
‘Sorry?’
The little red Santa in the advent calendar is raising a cup of something. Mead. Or barley wine. His reindeers have big fat red noses, like cherries. Christmas is coming!
The goose is getting fat.
‘Rachel, I am at the Penmarricks’ – Lanihorne Abbey. I’m here for Christmas. They collected me earlier. I had to get away, for a few days, you know, I’m sorry, but my health isn’t so good of late, all these worries … and I need to be nearer a hospital—’
The blackness tightens. Juliet has gone? It’s down to me, Cassie and Jamie.
‘OK—’
‘But, Rachel.’ Her voice quivers. Self-conscious and uncertain. ‘I have to tell you. I cannot lie, um um. Rachel, before Andrew Penmarrick drove me here I was with Jamie.’
The cold wind knocks at the kitchen door.
‘And?’
‘It was terrible.’ Her voice begins to crack. ‘I saw little Jamie, in the kitchen. And my God. My God. I walked in and he was laughing the way he used to, he was happy as I have never seen him since Nina had the accident. It was as if he had actually seen her. And then I asked him why he was laughing, and he got angry with me, angry and frightened, and said, “She is here, she is here already.” He was utterly convincing. He believes his mother is back. In Carnhallow.’
‘But this is ridiculous—’
‘I know. I know. And yet, I believe him, because as he said it I really watched him, very closely. And you know the way he turns his head sometimes and gazes at you rather sadly, when he is
really
telling the truth? It was like that.’
I can’t deny it. I know what she means. I know how Jamie behaves when he is being really truthful. He does exactly what she says.
But this is impossible. I struggle to understand, and to speak.
‘So he’s seeing a ghost?’
‘Yes. I don’t know, oh oh.’
‘Juliet?’
She is quiet for a moment, then returns. ‘What are we going to do? I have no idea. No idea. I would come back but, oh, now it’s snowing so heavily, I haven’t seen snow like this in many years you know, it happens very rarely. But when it happens, my goodness.’ She coughs, deeply, then adds, ‘Carnhallow can get entirely snowed in – the roads are so deep and the valley even deeper, you should take care, you should buy food. There are power cuts. Quite immoderate. We had to walk to Zennor one year, we were snowed in for half a week and all we had left were satsumas and walnuts, and eggnog.’
I let her ramble for a moment.
The advent calendar is six inches away. Its windows show penguins and sleighs, Christmas trees and polar bears. Not a single Christian image, which is fitting. Out here in West Penwith, so near to Land’s End, this feels very much the pagan Yule. The time of fear and hearth-fires, one last feast to keep out the cold before the monsters prowl.
And maybe I am that monster.
Taking a hold of myself, I intrude on Juliet’s fading and tangled memories. She’s all I have left. The only source, however unreliable. ‘Juliet, please, please – let’s get back. Is it possible Nina survived the accident?’
‘Ahh. I don’t think so.’
‘And it was definitely her who fell in the shaft at Morvellan?’
A pause. ‘Yes.’
‘So that makes a circle, Juliet, a stupid circle. Nina drowned two years ago. Yet you say Jamie is seeing his mother. It’s not possible.’
‘Rachel, I do not begin to understand. These people here …’ Her confusion devolves into illogic, I can picture her struggling for words that make sense, sitting by the phone in Lanihorne Abbey. ‘Sometimes I think I can sense her, smell her perfume. But of course I’m not right, you shouldn’t listen to me. Jamie is the important one. He says he hugged her at the mine.’
‘Yes, I know. He told me.’
But I need to know
more
. I am grasping at hope here. If I
did
see Nina on the bus, maybe I am not having a breakdown, not tipping once again into psychosis, maybe Doctor Conner is right, in a way he would not expect.
‘Juliet, tell me again what happened the night Nina died. If she’s not dead – then something very strange happened, maybe we, maybe I can work it out.’
A penguin regards me from a calendar. I wait for my own voices. Silence. Good. Please go away and leave me alone.
Juliet replies, ‘But you know it already, the chain of events. So awful, so awful. You know David lied and said Jamie wasn’t there, at the accident. When really he
was
there. And you know that David asked us all to stay quiet, for Jamie’s sake.’
Turning from the windows of the advent calendar, I look to the windows of the kitchen. Snow is inches deep on the windowsill. Like a shop window faking it.
‘So you know all that, so you know as much as me.’
‘But you were
the
crucial eyewitness, Juliet. That night, apart from Cassie. It’s only you. What really happened?’
‘I wanted to tell the truth!’ She sounds affronted. ‘I did. I truly did. I was in my room. We’d all been drinking, there’d been some Christmas guests, but they’d long gone, it was very late and I was going to sleep, but I was woken – there were voices. Raised voices. Arguing. David and Nina, shouting. Most of it was muffled, but then I heard him scream
How could you say that How could you say it
, screaming, at Nina.’ She hesitates: but it is a hesitance born of reluctance, not bewilderment. Juliet clearly knows something, and she is on the cusp of revealing it.
I ask, gently as I can, ‘You heard something else, didn’t you?’ I picture this kind, intelligent old lady at the other end of the line, in a large lordly room, Christmas tree in the background, real candles guttering in the gloom. A log fire in a marble hearth.
Juliet’s voice is hung with guilt. ‘Nina said something remarkable, something David could not tolerate.’
The pause is enormous. I swear I can hear the icicles forming on the eaves of Carnhallow.
Her answer is sad and quiet. ‘I’ve never told anyone this, but: I did hear one other thing that night. Nina screamed it so loud you could have heard it at Land’s End.’
I hold my breath. The snow falls. On Manaccan and Killivose. On Boskenna and Redruth.
‘She shouted,
Why don’t you tell him, tell your son our big fucking secret, about his real parents
– And then she laughed as if it was actually some awful joke, some terrible sarcastic joke. But true.’
‘Nina implied David wasn’t his real dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t tell the police this? Why, Juliet?’ There is no answer. The anger boils inside me, like the waves crashing on the cliffs at Levant. I rush on, ‘I know why you kept quiet! I know. I know. Because it implicated David? Right? Because it implied he had a motive to kill her?’ I am nearly shouting.
Juliet is crying now. Her voice catches in her throat. Dusty and tragic. ‘Oh, Rachel. There were so many lies that night, so many. I did what my son told me to do, afterwards, to keep things quiet. To protect Jamie. Shield him from the inquest. Did I do a bad thing?’
I have to restrain myself. ‘Yes, I think you did.’
‘Ahh.’ I can hear the stammer of intaken breaths. ‘Oh God. It’s awful. I’ve felt guilty for so long. Perhaps that is why I cannot think straight any more, maybe I imagined so much. Maybe I want her to be alive, because that means David didn’t kill her, his own wife, kill Jamie’s mother, and she didn’t say that terrible thing, and Jamie really is my grandson. I have to believe that, he is all I have. Beautiful Jamie. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’ She sobs, openly. ‘And now the snow.’
Morning
We only just make it to the Tesco in St Ives, before it closes for the festivities. I buy everything we need in a frenzy, with Jamie at my side, looking at me, distantly, puzzled yet compliant. We couldn’t shop yesterday because it was snowing so heavily, but today there’s a break in the weather. The sky is the white of hospital sheets, but the snow has called a Christmas truce.
‘Is that it?’ Jamie gawps at our trolley as we head for the checkout. ‘Rachel. Is that all there is?’
My trolley has one box of crackers. A turkey roll. A few potatoes and Brussels sprouts. A miniature Christmas pudding. Jamie is used to opulent Christmases. Lots of adults laughing, elegant Nina gathering elegant friends. Rumtopf. Single malt whiskies. Galettes and roast geese. And his father paying for it all – generous and charming, dashing and witty. This time it will be me, and Jamie, and Cassie. A small and tragic Christmas. I am used to tragic Christmases. And the sadness that comes after.
‘It’s not going to be a big dinner, Jamie, just us. But we will have fun, I promise. Lots of presents by the tree.’
‘Oh. Oh OK, OK. That’s OK.’
His smile is brave. His shoulders look so slender in his favourite red shirt. But all his clothes have a tender and terrible poignancy. His jeans for an eight-year-old, his boyish and innocent blue football tops, his woollen bobble hat for cold winter school runs: no child this small should have experienced so much, should be at the centre of all this.
If only I could think of something reassuring to tell him. Something happy, or cheerful, a joke or diversion. But it is difficult to find a subject that doesn’t steer us on to the besieging rocks where we will founder, as a family, the fact of his father’s exclusion, my own incipient breakdown, the mystery of his mother’s death. And the looming fearfulness of Christmas Day itself.
All around us is danger; even here in the supermarket we are surrounded by Christmas, with all that means – like a boat embayed, like a little skiff approaching the great dark rocks that protect the Cornish headlands: the Manacles, Wolf’s Rock, the Main Cages. So many died on this wrecking coast.
‘Rachel?’
I shake the daydream away. At least I’m not hearing voices, again. ‘Yes?’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Yes.’ I nearly say
please
. I am that desperate for a conversation. Heading for the tills.
‘Might it be OK if one day I called you Mummy?’
Jamie’s sweet face is turned to mine. To hide my confusion and angst I pluck a tin of beans from a shelf.
He wants me to be his mummy.
This is what I have wanted for ages. But not in these circumstances, amid these Christmas terrors. Maybe I could steal him away, rescue him from all of this. My beautiful stepson. My beloved stepson.
‘Um. Yes. Yes. Of course you can,’ I say, dropping the beans in the trolley. ‘Of course you can call me Mummy if you want to, that’s nice, I want us to be a family.’
Want? Want
ed.
‘When Daddy comes back, I can call you Mummy and everything will be OK then, won’t it, Rachel? Please?’
I start to speak but he runs on, interrupting. ‘It’s like Mummy isn’t like what she used to be, you know, the mummy down there, or the mines, the mummy in Morvellan? Her face is different now but when I hug her and feel her and smell her I know it is Mummy but how can that be … she is dead.’ As he tails off, his expression of anguish is unbearable.
‘Jamie, darling.’ I stoop, and face him, sweep dark hair from his eyes. ‘Jamie, you have to be brave. We have to get through Christmas. I’m going to cook this food, some nice turkey and chipolatas, you like chipolatas? And maybe bacon, or a sausage roll, I’ll get some nice sausage rolls, and then we’ll have a nice little Christmas—’
‘Not Daddy? Daddy won’t be back on Christmas Day? Won’t be with us tomorrow?’
I knew this question was coming. Now I have to deal with it. ‘Not to Carnhallow, not for Christmas morning, Jamie – not Carnhallow with you, me and Cassie. No. But in the afternoon, if the weather is OK, Cassie will take you to see him, so you will be with him on Christmas Day, just not at home.’
The pain in his face needs no words. I stand and push the trolley. Have to get out of here, now. The drive here was bad enough: it was all I could do to skid the car along the coastal road, nearly thumping into stone hedges twice, as the wheels whined and slipped. Now the winter light out there is yellowing, and dying.
At the checkout the staff are obviously clock-watching, waiting to knock off at 3 p.m., in their red Santa miniskirts and elf-helper hats, so they can head to the pub. I would love to be going with them: to some happy boozer in pretty St Ives, the Sloop on the harbour perhaps. I am only thirty, young enough to enjoy raucous pubs and Christmas Eve kisses under the mistletoe. But not this year. Instead we must negotiate our painful way along the cliffs to Carnhallow, for a much lonelier scene.
Shunting the trolley into the chilly car park, I start loading our meagre haul into the boot. Seagulls shiver on the fence, knocking their down-curved yellow beaks together; their cackles are stifled, with a hint of panic. And now the snow is tumbling, yet again, threatening to trap us in St Ives.
Why not drive off the cliff?
I force the thought away. Concentrate. This endless and repetitive snowfall was pretty enough three days ago, now it is menacing.
We could be snowed in
– that’s what Juliet warned. We might be imprisoned by the drifts and cut off from the grid. I cannot bear to contemplate that other warning implicit in her words: David is, in the end, possibly a murderer.
And if he is a murderer? Could he do such a thing again? He is already excluded from his own house: he is staring at a divorce. I am in the way. We are trapped in Carnhallow.
Kelly Smith, the PCSO, told me, weeks ago:
I’ve seen it too many times … when they do it once, they will do it again.
I shall call her when we get home. I will, I will, I will.
Or maybe I will not. Slamming the boot and strapping Jamie in the back seat I start the car, working the logic.
‘OK?’
‘OK, Rachel. OK.’
‘Let’s go, soldier. This is Team Kerthen, heading for the North Pole.’
Jamie laughs. Faintly.
I am only faintly joking. We need to get home before the roads are impassable.
The dilemma is excruciating. If the police reopen the case and Juliet’s suspicions are correct, then David will go to prison. For twenty years or more.
If he is convicted and jailed, David’s income ends. We are left with the house, which will have to be sold.
And Jamie will lose a father for twenty years, essentially for ever, when he has already lost a mother. And my baby will grow up without a dad. The conclusion is inescapable: it is better to leave the past where it is: to leave the corpse of Nina floating in the tunnels.
If she is down there.
Flinging dirty snow with my whirring wheels, I pull out of our parking space. The car slides on to the main road, the windscreen wipers are crushing the snowflakes with a special relish.
Turning sharp left, we take the Zennor road. The last of the St Ives suburbs, with their shivering palm trees, quickly yield to the craggy vaults of snowbound moorland, made glitteringly pretty and eerily immobile.
All is wrapped in ice and white. The landscape is thwarted, autistic, mute. Icicles hang from granite carns like armouries of glass. The only movement is the sea, which waltzes endlessly, a dance of death. It will never stop. The sea looks hysterical compared to the frozen and motionless earth.
The car tyres skid on the muddy drifts, as more snow falls, turning the mud-stained snow immaculate white, once again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. We are the only people driving the moors, the only people mad enough to be out and about in this freezing-point whiteout.
‘Christingle!’
‘Sorry?’
From the back seat, Jamie is shouting, and pointing. There is a weathered metal sign saying Zennor Church. And beneath that sign is a temporary placard, which says,
Christingle, Christmas Eve 2 p.m.
‘Can we go? Rachel? Please.’
‘Jamie, it’s getting dark already, we have to get back, if this snow gets any worse—’
‘It was Mummy’s favourite! We always went to it. She didn’t like Christmas. But she loved the candles. Please please please. Please?’
There is no way I can refuse.
His mother’s favourite.
Reluctantly steering the car right, I drive down the silent, snow-paved lane into Zennor. The little pub, the Tinners’ Arms, is decked with kiddy-colours of straggled Christmas lights. I can see people drinking inside, enjoying a roaring fire, good cheer, mulled wine, hot punch, dogs snoozing in the warmth. There are more cars parked outside the church, as well, some of them already sporting polar-bear-skins of snow on their roofs. So others are as mad as us, other people have braved this brutal weather.
I slide the car to a stop: almost hitting the churchyard wall. The medieval door of Zennor church is open; a vicar stands there, smiling and benign, greeting arrivers as they shake snow from umbrellas and hats.
Somehow I know what will happen when we scrunch the path to the door: Jamie will pull me left. The gravitational attraction, the black hole of grief, will prove too much. Sure enough, he glances across, and his hand tightens on mine. And now he is tugging me, off the icy, gritted path, towards the softly desolate spot that is his mother’s empty grave. The perfectly incised mermaid. The fearful epitaph.
The snowflakes are tumbling on to the churchyard yews, on to the speartips of the cast-iron fence, on to the fine polished granite of his mother’s grave, and Jamie kneels directly in front of the tombstone. I cannot bear to watch him kneeling in the icy grit, hugging the gravestone, holding it tight, as if it is his mother, returned. His boyish arms, in his little raincoat, trying to embrace the entire stone, tears rolling down his face as he whispers, ‘Happy Christmas, Mummy. I love you, Mummy.’
The crow-dark dusk-light gathers in the west, as the snow falls with exquisite gentility on to his blue Chelsea bobble hat.
‘Happy Christmas, Mummy. I’m sorry for making you sad. Happy Christmas. Happy Christmas.’
This is enough. Kneeling down next to him, I try to comfort him. But Jamie’s grief is an aquifer, an underground river, unseen until it bursts on to the surface – tidal, swollen, flooding, capable of sweeping everything away.
‘Jamie.’
In the corner of my gaze I can see the vicar, observing from the door. A grimace of pity has replaced his beatific Christmas smile. He surely knows who we are, and what is happening. He knows Jamie Kerthen’s tragic story.
‘Jamie—’ I hug my stepson. ‘It’s OK. It’s OK.’
The tears still come in their dozens. Jamie’s cold little shoulders are shaking, from the bitter chill and the agony of grief. The Christmas Eve snow falls on Zennor carn. And yet, this is good, I think. Let it out. Let it come. Let it fall.
For three, four, five minutes I hug my stepson. There is no way I can take his father from him as well. I cannot ring the police.
‘Goodbye, Mummy.’
He kisses the gravestone once more, then he wipes the snot from his face with his raincoat sleeve. Snowflakes melt on his long expressive eyelashes. We are quiet, together. Plucking a pebble from the grave he turns it in his hand, as if it is a jewel, and then he stares at me. ‘You know, you know Mummy said horrible things?’
‘Jamie?’
His words come in a thawing rush. ‘They were arguing all the time. I don’t know, Rachel, Mummy, they were arguing so much, I don’t know why. It must have been important because it made Daddy angry. That night, at Christmas, she said Mummy and Daddy aren’t who – who – who you think they are but she said it like she didn’t mean it, and then she turned and said – Let me tell you about Mummy, the truth about Mummy – and then I screamed and said No and I said I hated her and I ran to the mine and she tried to reach out to me, to touch me, to say sorry, she slipped.’ His face is pink and white with cold. ‘So maybe it was something she did or something I did? She said I would understand one day, about Christmas, why it happened. Why she hated it. And—’ He looks at me. Desperate. As if he wants to tell me a deeper truth, to go further, but he can’t. Not allowed. ‘Maybe it was my fault, the things she said in the mine before she fell. Was it my fault?’
I hold his hand. ‘Jamie, please. Calm down. Calm down. You know your mummy is in heaven and she loves you, she is looking over you.’
‘But if she is in heaven why do you think you are going to die tomorrow, why is she back, taking your place? Who is she?’
I shrug, and look at the ice that rimes the antique and rusting sundial.
The glory of the world quickly passeth.
His face is red-eyed. ‘I don’t want you to die tomorrow, Rachel. I don’t want you to die, I don’t want the other Mummy back any more – she scares me. I don’t understand. I don’t want you to go, don’t leave me alone here with Daddy and a ghost. Don’t die at Christmas.’
‘I’m not going anywhere. I promise.’
I feel an urgent need to protect the boy, almost as much as the daughter inside me. But I am also trying to stay calm, to work this through. I now know what Nina said: Mummy and Daddy aren’t who you think they are. I need to know why she could make such a terrible remark, even as a joke. Who could do that to their own child?
I yearn to know more, clear my clouding mind – but I also want to go home. I must leave this be, for now. Christingle awaits, and Jamie needs it.
Standing up, we brush the grit and snowflakes from our clothes, and pursue the frosted path to the church and the waiting vicar, who takes my hand and wishes me a very Merry Christmas, and as he does, stares me in the face, meaningfully, surely trying to express his sympathy. Then he takes Jamie’s hand and says, ‘Well hello, little Jamie. It’s been a while since we saw you.’
We step inside, taking a pew towards the back. The service begins immediately afterwards, as if God has been waiting for us.