Chapter Ten:
The Biscuit Tin
They left at five forty, before the house was up. Grant carried the garment bag and she carried nothing, and on the stairs the third step from the bottom groaned so loud they both froze like burglars. Nothing. Only the clock. He looked at her and mouthed sorry and she nearly laughed, which was mad, she had not slept and somebody had walked down that hallway in socks.
Bernadette was in the kitchen already, in the dark, with one lamp on and a pot going. She turned round with a wooden spoon and took them in, the coats, the bag, Elishs face, and said nothing at all. Just handed Grant a flask and two paper bags that smelled of butter.
“Tell your mother the girl got sick in the night,” Bernadette said. “Ill say I saw her being sick.”
“Bernie.”
“Go on. I am too old to be lied to at this hour.” She looked Elish. Long. Not unkind. “Youve got a good face. Don’t let this house eat it.”
Then they were outside in the cold with the frost cracking under their shoes and the sky the colour of dishwater.
The drive was quiet. He kept both hands on the wheel and she held the flask between her knees, coffee, black again, and this time she drank it and did not mind. Around Hartford she said, “Do you think it was Pierce? In the hall?”
“I don’t know.” His jaw moved. “That’s the problem. I want it to be, because then it’s simple. But he was so relaxed in that library, and Pierce isn’t relaxed. Pierce plans his relaxing.”
“So somebody else.”
“Somebody with a key or a window or a whole lot of time.” He glanced across. “Or my mother.”
“Your mother told me about the question. Why would she tell me then.” She stopped. “No. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“Welcome to my life.”
She turned her head to the window so he would not see her smile.
Old Saybrook at half past eight. The cottage was dark except for the kitchen, and when Elish let herself in with the key under the flowerpot her mother was sitting at the table in her dressing gown, both hands round a mug, like she’d been sitting there all night.
“I knew you would come back,” Helen said.
“Mum.”
“I dreamed it.” She looked past Elish to the door, to the tall man standing in it with his hands in his coat pockets and his face carefully blank. “Youre him.”
“Grant Lancaster, Mrs. Vance.” He did not move from the mat. “I can wait in the car if you want.”
Helen studied him for a long moment. Elish felt her heartbeat in her ears.
“No,” her mother said at last. “Come in. Shut the door. You are letting the cold in.”
That was all. He came in. Sat down where she pointed. It was so absurd, a Lancaster at that kitchen table with the cracked blue teapot and the plastic tablecloth, that Elish almost could not look at it.
“Mum. I need to see the back bedroom.”
“What for?”
“The tin.”
Her mother did not flinch. That was the terrible thing, she did not even blink, just set the mug down very gently.
“I wondered when you would ask,” Helen said. “You were twelve last time. I shouted at you.”
“You did.”
“I was wrong too.” She got up, one hand on the table. “I have been wrong about a lot of things, Elish. Come on.”
The back bedroom was cold and smelled of dust and camphor. Her mother reached up into the wardrobe without needing to look and brought the tin down in both arms, that same dented Danish butter cookie tin, the windmill faded to a ghost. She set it on the bed and stood back with her arms crossed over her chest.
Elish lifted the lid.
Tissue paper. Old, yellowed. Under it a man’s white shirt cuff, cut off at the wrist, the fabric gone soft as skin. Two buttons on it. Pale green. Black rimmed.
“He cut it off the last shirt,” Helen said. “The week before. He said keep it, Helly, put it away, and I said why, and he said just in case. Just in case, always just in case.” She laughed, a thin dry sound. “I never knew in case of what.”
Grant took the little button from his pocket, the one from the study, sealed in Dominic’s plastic bag. He held it beside the cuff. They were identical.
Nobody spoke.
Underneath the cuff was a photograph. Small, square, edges scalloped. Three young men in front of a plain brick building, arms round each other’s necks, squinting into the sun. Elish knew the one on the left at once, her father, so young, so alive it hurt to look. The one in the middle she knew too, from the will, from the frame in Grant’s living room. Richard Lancaster. Broad and fair and laughing.
The one on the right had no face.
Someone had gone at it with a pin. Carefully, deliberately, scratching the emulsion till there was only a grey bald smudge above a dark suit and a hand, a hand resting on her fathers shoulder, and on that wrist, catching the light, a cuff. Green.
“Mum.”
“I did that.”
“Why?”
“Turn it over.”
On the back, in her fathers slanting hand, faded blue ink. R, E, and ___, Meridian site, the day we broke ground. And after the blank, a gap where a word had been torn off, ragged, like someone ripped away a corner with her fingernail.
Helen was crying without any sound. Just tears, running straight down. She wiped them with the heel of her hand like she was cross with them.
“He wrote a name. I tore it off. The night he died.” A breath. “I sat on this floor with this photograph and I was so angry I could not see. I thought if I never read it, it was not true. I thought, that man is the reason. And I was too much of a coward to find out.”
“You tore it?” Elish said.
“I burned the piece. In the kitchen sink.”
“Mum, you burned the name.”
“I know what I did!” It cracked out of her, and then her whole face gave, folded, and Elish was across the room with her arms round her before she thought. Small, so small, all bones. “I know. I know. I am sorry. I was frightened and I did it and I cannot undo it and you spent twenty years hating the wrong.”
She stopped. Elish felt her go rigid.
“The wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Mum.”
“He came to the funeral.” Helen pulled back, and her eyes were somewhere else entirely, far off. “Richard Lancaster. Stood at the back, by the door. Nobody knew who he was except me. He looked like a man who’d been hit by a car and was still standing. He did not say a word. He put something in the collection tray, an envelope, and he left.”
“What was in it?”
“I never opened it. I put it in the drawer. I was not going to take that man’s money.” She glanced at Grant, and her mouth twisted. “Im sorry. That was cruel.”
“Its all right.” Grant’s voice was rough. “It’s fair.”
“Is it still in the drawer?” Elish asked.
“Kitchen. Under the tea towels.”
She did not remember running there. She was just suddenly in the kitchen yanking at a stuck drawer with both hands, tea towels flying, and at the very back beneath a wrapped-up roll of birthday candles, a plain white envelope, brown at the edges, no name on the front. Sealed. Never opened, twenty years.
She turned it over. Grant was beside her without a sound. She held it out to him and he shook his head.
“It’s yours. It is your fathers funeral.”
Her thumbnail slid under the flap and it gave with a dry little tear.
A single sheet inside, folded twice. Typed. A short letter with no date and no name, just five lines, and she read them out loud because her voice was the only thing she trusted to hold.
Mrs. Calloway. I cannot say this to your face. Edmund did nothing wrong. He never did. I know who did, and I have not been brave enough. If I am ever brave enough I will find you. If I am not, please believe that the boy at the funeral, the one who looks like me, is the only good thing I ever made. R.L.
The kitchen was so quiet she could hear the fridge.
“The boy,” Grant said, and his voice was barely there. “The boy who looks like me.”
The Elish looked up. His face had gone slack, wiped of everything, the way a face goes when the floor drops out.
“I was fourteen,” he said. “He took me to that funeral. Made me wait in the car. I asked whose it was and he said just a business acquaintance. He did not speak for the whole drive home.”
Helen had come to the doorway, one hand at her throat. “I wanted to hate that man for twenty years,” she said. “And he was sitting in a car outside my husband’s funeral, with his son, not brave enough.”
Nobody moved. Nobody knew how.
Then the front doorbell rang. Two long presses, then a third, short.
Helen went white to the lips. “Nobody comes here,” she said. “Nobody ever comes here.”
Elish put the letter in her pocket, and through the frosted glass of the front door, blurred and dark, she watched a tall figure in a long coat raise a gloved hand to ring again.
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