The Shadow Year (51 page)

‘I want to. For Freya.’

But Kat shakes her head again. ‘No. She’s our blood, Mac. Simon’s daughter, my niece. She’s our responsibility. We should raise her.’

‘I can’t do it,’ says Simon, his head in his hands.

‘Yes you can,’ says Kat firmly. ‘I’ll help you. I’ll be right there beside you.’ She pats him on the shoulder. ‘You have to be strong. You’re her father.’ Mac clears his throat but Kat ignores him. ‘She needs her father. She needs a mother. You and I can do it together, Simon.’

‘Where would we go? We can’t stay here now – not after this.’ His questions are like the whines of a plaintive child, all of his decisiveness and grandeur gone.

‘To your parents,’ says Kat, and she holds up her hand when she sees his initial protest. ‘You wrote to them about the baby, didn’t you?’

He nods, ashamed.

‘Well they can’t exactly turn you away, not with a wife and child.’

‘Wife?’ asks Simon.

‘If we’re married . . . if they know she’s
our
baby . . . what would be so scandalous about that? We’d be returning to them with their first grandchild. It might take some time but they will grow to love her.’ She reaches across and squeezes his hand. ‘They’ll help us.’ She can feel Mac’s hard stare but she only has eyes for Simon. ‘I know they will.’

‘I really think—’ begins Mac.

‘No, Mac,’ snaps Kat, ‘this isn’t your problem. It has nothing to do with you now. Think of Lila. Think about what this little girl needs. Two parents. Security. A family. We can provide that for her. What do you have? What can
you
offer her?’

Mac shakes his head. ‘I want to help.’ He scuffs his shoes angrily across the ground.

‘I know,’ says Kat, more softly now, ‘but Freya is gone. We must think about the baby.’

As if on cue, Lila begins to stir. Kat rises smoothly and moves across to place her gently in Simon’s arms. He sniffs and then holds her close, buries his face in the baby’s warm skin. ‘When will we leave?’ he asks, after he has composed himself.

‘As soon as possible. There’s no reason to stay, not now.’

Silence surrounds them.

‘Take my car,’ says Mac.

Kat nods her thanks. ‘We’ll return it as soon as we can.’

Mac hangs his head. There is nothing left to say.

They don’t take much, just a few clothes, the bottles, nappies and formula that Mac bought with the last of their money. As Kat packs their meagre belongings into bags, Mac enters the bedroom and slides the honesty necklace across the window sill towards her. ‘For Lila,’ he says, when she’s old enough.’ Kat nods, and smiles at him, but when she’s checked around one last time and dragged her bags from the room, the necklace still lies there upon the sill, winking in the summer sunshine beneath the dried white stems of the honesty Freya picked only months before.

They carry the bags out across the meadow under a blazing sky and stow them in the boot of the car. Simon takes the wheel. ‘We forgot the Moses basket,’ he says suddenly, looking down at the baby in Kat’s arms, where she sits beside him in the passenger seat.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Kat, waving the loss away. ‘We’ll get her new things. This is a fresh start, for all of us.’

Simon puts the key into the ignition and starts up Mac’s car. The engine revs. Kat sees Mac standing by the gate; he watches them go, raises one hand in sad farewell as they pass by and bounce out onto the track. Kat hugs the baby tightly to her breast.

Halfway down the track Simon slams on the breaks. ‘Fuck,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘I told them.’ He turns to her, his eyes wide. ‘I told them about Freya. In my letter.’ He shakes his head, the misery written all over his face. ‘This is never going to work.’

Kat studies him for a moment, surprised to see how undone he is. She takes a breath and is equally surprised by her own contrasting sense of calm. ‘It’s simple,’ she says finally, ‘
I’ll
be Freya.’

Simon gapes at her. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel respectful.’

Kat holds the baby close, breathes in the scent of her sweet skin. ‘Think about it,’ she says quietly. ‘We could honour Freya by continuing her name in this way. It would be meaningful, don’t you think? For Lila.’

He shakes his head. ‘I – I . . .’

She eyes him. ‘Do this one thing for me, Simon. Is it too much to ask? Is it too much to pretend that it’s Kat that we buried under the alder trees, not Freya? Give me this one thing. Give Lila back her mother. Give her the family she was meant to have.’

Simon shakes his head. She can see he doesn’t like it, but she knows he will give her this.

After they are gone, Mac walks back to the empty cottage and enters through the front door. His footsteps echo loudly on the floorboards and the dust spins as flecks of gold in the shafts of light falling through the windows. He studies the empty beer bottles and the overflowing ashtray on the upturned crate, Simon’s paperback still splayed on the arm of a chair, the empty log basket standing beside the fire. In the kitchen the mugs from their last cup of tea remain on the table alongside the empty milk powder tin. Upstairs he traces the faded outline of Carla’s funny mural with his finger, six stick figures dancing with joy across the blank canvas of the wall. In the second bedroom, the one Kat shared with Freya, he discovers the silver necklace lying in a pool of sunlight beneath the whispering stems of the honesty seed heads. He reaches for it and slips it deep into his pocket, his fingers tracing the raised surface of the pendant, with its three seeds safely stowed inside their fragile, papery case. Three seeds. He’d asked his mother to make it with three: Mac, Freya and Lila, the family he’d secretly hoped they might be.

Downstairs he finds the Moses basket Kat and Simon have forgotten. The sight of it cold and empty is enough to bring tears to his eyes. He holds the purple blanket close to his face for a moment, thinks about Freya, her slender fingers knitting the wool, holding the warm body of her baby tight, and can’t look at it a moment longer. He places the blanket inside the basket and stows them both out of sight, in the dusty cupboard beneath the stairs.

Outside, he unlatches the chicken coop door and coaxes the disgruntled birds, pecking and scratching, into an empty wooden crate. For one lonely moment he hesitates at the doorway to the cottage, looking out across the flat, mirrored surface of the lake. It is still, silent, unchanged by any of the events it has witnessed over the past year. Nothing about the lake, the surrounding landscape gives away the secrets of the year they have spent there. The lake has closed up behind them. The trees continue to sway in the summer breeze. The only evidence of the tragedy is the one, freshly dug mound of earth lying in the shade of the alder trees. Mac stands in the doorway, the sun on his face and his shadow falling in a dark triangle into the emptiness of the cottage, then he pulls the door closed behind him, lifts the crate with the chickens, and begins to make his way back towards the meadow and the long, winding path that will carry him home.

25

LILA

July

‘I still can’t get my head round it.’ Tom reaches for the wine bottle and pours himself another glass. They are sitting in the cottage kitchen, their empty dinner plates and a flickering white candle on the table between them. ‘So your mother’s real name is
Kat
. But she’s not your mother, she’s your aunt?’

Lila nods. ‘I know it sounds crazy. I’d have thought she’d completely lost it if William hadn’t been there with us, listening and corroborating it all.’

Tom shakes his head. ‘So they were a group of friends who dropped out and lived up here for a year? They didn’t realise that this place – an old shepherds’ cottage, did you say . . . ?’ Lila nods. ‘. . . belonged to William’s family? He never told them?’

Lila nods again.

‘Wily old dog.’ He looks around at the cottage. ‘It’s hard to remember now the state this place was in, but it must have been a tough existence.’ Tom takes another sip of his wine. ‘So has William explained why he gave the cottage to you – the key and the map – in such strange circumstances? Why do it anonymously like that?’ He shakes his head. ‘Why wasn’t he up front with you?’

Lila reaches out to catch a stream of wax running down the side of the candle onto the scrubbed wooden table. She watches as it cools and turns opaque on the tip of her finger. ‘He said he wanted me to have it. He felt that the place belonged to me, in some way, but that he didn’t think I’d accept it if he just gave it to me – him a total stranger and all. And he worried if he revealed too much of himself that I would talk to Mum – you know, Kat – and that she would persuade me, somehow, not to come. He wanted me to visit the cottage and see it for myself, to see if I liked it up here. I think he was hoping I would fall in love with the place and want to discover its history for myself. I believe he thought I deserved to know the truth about Freya, but he had no idea who I would be after all these years . . . if I would even want the cottage . . . or want to look below the surface of the life Kat and Simon had created for me.’

‘But you did, didn’t you?’

Lila nods. It had been strange, that afternoon at the lake with Kat and William, Kat explaining in her cool, calm way about Freya, about the mother Lila had never known. It had been a shock, of course, but as Kat had unravelled the tale and pulled the threads of the past together, Lila had felt a strange relief dawning with the truth. It somehow made sense – all her odd dreams, her strange feelings of déjà vu, her immediate sense of connection to the place.

Poor Freya, a woman of delicate beauty, too young and too fragile to handle the pressures of motherhood. Post-natal depression, that’s what Kat and William had put her suicide down to – and it certainly seemed to make sense – but Lila doesn’t know how she feels about it all now. It’s hard to grieve for something – or someone – you never knew. And yet in some small way she feels connected to Freya, to the memory of her biological mother, perhaps through her grief for Milly. Freya must have been terribly ill to see no other way out and Lila knows she has wrestled with her own dark impulses since her daughter’s death.

She’d asked William and Kat to show her where they’d buried Freya and they’d stood solemnly in the shadows of the trees as Lila had tried to conjure words and emotions for a mother she had never known. She wanted words that felt meaningful and real, but nothing Kat had told her felt real yet and standing there in the sun-dappled light, staring at a patch of earth, she’d just felt weary and sad and when she’d finally turned away from the glade, away from Kat and William, she’d realised there was only one person she wanted to be with at that moment. She’d walked to her car and phoned her husband that afternoon.

Tom wakes her early the next morning. ‘Lila,’ he says, shaking her gently, ‘Lila, wake up. It’s time.’

She shifts and stirs in the antique bed, then opens her eyes and remembers.

‘Are you ready?’ he asks.

She pushes herself up and looks to the window where a thin grey light breaks through the curtains. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’m ready.’

They paddle out in the rowing boat to the centre of the lake just as the sun begins to crest the tops of the hills. The sky is scattered with slow-moving cloud lit amber from beneath by the breaking dawn. The boat moves easily through the water, gliding between the fiery clouds reflected onto the still surface of the lake. It is painfully beautiful and Lila hugs her knees close to her chest and swallows down the ache at the back of her throat. She knows this is the right thing to do but now that the time has come she is a little overwhelmed.

When they reach the centre of the lake, where the water lies dark and still, Tom slows the boat and pulls the oars in. He leans across and lifts the small white box they have brought with them onto his lap.

‘Do you want to do it?’ he asks.

‘Let’s both.’

Tom nods and opens the box. He reaches inside and pulls out a handful of ash, scattering it across the water, both of them watching as it drifts in the light breeze then settles like pollen on the surface of the lake. He hands the box to Lila and she reaches in and does the same. Together, beneath the blazing clouds, they scatter the ashes of their daughter.

When they have finished, Lila looks across and sees the tears sliding down her husband’s face. She can’t help it; she rises from the opposite end of the boat and tentatively moves across the hull until she is nestled in his arms. ‘She’ll always be with us,’ she says.

Tom nods and moves his hands to Lila’s belly. ‘The first thing I’m going to tell this baby all about is their brave, big sister Milly and how special she was.’

Lila smiles and they sit entwined together a while longer, just floating and watching the patterns of the clouds shifting upon the mirrored lake.

It’s the perfect afternoon for a barbecue – the air still and warm, the sun beating down on the lake making it shimmer and gleam like a sheet of silver. They have caught fish, picked herbs from the garden and William and Evelyn have arrived with lamb skewers and a salad to add to the feast. Lila wanders down from the cottage with a bowl of wild strawberries, her feet bare and her summer dress billowing out behind her as she goes.