Читать книгу Coming Home - Melanie Rose - Страница 10

I slept badly in the unfamiliar surroundings, tossing and turning and having dreams where I found myself wandering through the house like a lost spirit. Vincent’s bedroom must have left an impression on my subconscious, because I dreamed of that room, with its plush furnishings, and every creak of a floorboard, every groan of an unknown pipe disturbed me yet again.

When I eventually opened my eyes in the cold light of morning I felt a moment of panic. Where was I? My eyes raked the ceiling, darting from side to side. Then the events of the previous evening came back to me and I groaned, realising that I still couldn’t recall who I was or how I had come to be here. I trembled with fear of the unknown and tried to quell the sick feeling that had risen to my stomach. Rubbing my hands over my upper arms and shoulders I was relieved to feel the living warmth of my own skin and I snuggled further under the bedclothes, unwilling to face the day. I also felt anxious about the cat in its box, though Vincent had said he would find out what he could.

After a while I relaxed enough to uncurl and I lay for a few moments, gazing round the room. It was comfortably furnished in pale greens, with chintzy curtains with a matching armchair squeezed into one corner. The floor didn’t seem to be quite flat and the walls were sloping more at one end of the room than the other, making me wonder how old this house was. There was a dressing table standing against one wall and the wash basin along another, which I’d used in preference to the family bathroom the previous night, afraid I’d run into Tara or Vincent. The cupboard was full of clothes, but these were more everyday and in larger sizes than those in Vincent’s room, and I assumed they belonged to Jadie’s grandmother. The only thing I’d found of real interest was a half-empty bottle of gin, neatly hidden in a drawer full of underwear.

Eventually, lured by the strange silvery blue light filtering between the cracks in the curtains, I slid out from beneath the covers, pulled on the borrowed dressing gown and tiptoed across the cold carpet to the window. I peered out through the frosted glass to find a snowy fairyland of white mounds, white-tipped trees and soft stillness stretching away into the distance.

All thoughts of being stranded in a strange house vanished as the beauty of the landscape enveloped me. I felt a childish thrill at seeing the first settled snows of the year and despite the cold creeping round my bare feet and ankles, a warmth rushed through me as I stood, silently entranced by the scene.

A timid knock on the door had me spinning round. It was only Jadie, already dressed and grinning.

‘Have you seen the snow?’ she breathed, her eyes round with awe.

Her excitement matched my own and I nodded, my eyes shining. ‘It’s like a fairy wonderland, isn’t it?’

She nodded enthusiastically, her eyes wide, blonde curls bobbing. ‘Can we go outside and make a snowman?’

‘I don’t see why not. Give me a minute to get dressed and I’ll be right along.’

Jadie left and I threw on the clothes Tara had returned to me the night before, wiped some of the toothpaste I’d found on the washstand round my teeth with my finger and followed her. The house seemed quiet as I walked along the landing and stuck my head into Jadie’s room. She was waiting by the window, looking out onto the landscape where the sun was beginning to glisten on the snow like the glitter on a Christmas card.

Any lingering thought I had about being a stranger in an unknown household slipped away, and together we crept through the sleeping house like a couple of co-conspirators, stopping in the boot room to slip on coats and boots. Jadie found me a quilted gardening jacket and an old woollen scarf, which I tied round my neck as she tugged a woollen hat over her golden hair and rummaged in her coat pocket for a pair of mittens. Then she unlocked the heavy oak door and we stepped out into the glorious silence of her back garden.

Directly outside the back door was a courtyard area and the mirror image of the adjoining cottage next door. I assumed the two homes had originally been one big house. There was a low hedge dividing the two properties, topped with snow. I was about to scoop up a handful of the fluffy frosting when Jadie put her finger to her lips and led me round the side of the ancient Cotswold-stone house to where a smooth white lawn stretched away towards a snow-covered boundary hedge.

We stood side by side on the white path and gazed at the virgin snow; a temptingly blank canvas awaiting the first brushstrokes of our boots. The thought flicked through my mind that that was how my life felt at present: every movement, every word a first, untainted by a past, just the clean slate of my existence stretching enticingly ahead of me.

‘You first,’ I whispered, suddenly unnerved by the enormity of my thoughts. Jadie didn’t need telling twice: she danced across the lawn, making tracks with her boots. She turned, giggling, and I followed her, planting my feet in the squeaky coldness, following her tiny prints with my own size fives.

‘Do you know how to make a snow angel?’ Jadie asked when we had circumnavigated the lawn twice over.

I shook my head, wondering if my eyes were as bright as hers; cheeks pink and glowing.

Throwing herself down on her back in an area of untouched snow, Jadie stretched out her limbs and made a waving motion with her arms, opening and closing her pink leggings-clad legs so that when she got up she left the outline of an angel.

‘I saw it on TV,’ she beamed. ‘But I’ve never made one before. You do it now!’

Jadie squealed with glee as I threw myself into the snow next to her, waving my arms and legs before jumping up to admire our handiwork.

‘We made angels,’ she whispered, her face aglow. ‘That’s what Amber looks like…she’s an angel too.’

I hesitated only a moment. ‘Shall we build Amber that snowman?’ I asked, unsure whether I should encourage her to talk about her dead sister as if she was still here, but feeling that it was what Jadie wanted. ‘A big snowman with a hat and scarf?’

‘Ooh, yes!’

But Jadie was already rolling a snowball round the lawn and as the fluffy snow stuck to it like a magnet it grew bigger and bigger, leaving a trail of ice-speckled grass in its wake. The ball grew even larger and Jadie giggled as I hurried over to help push it. We rolled it to a halt and scooped up more snow from around the base, patting it down with icy fingers to make a nice smooth coat of white. Jadie made a second, smaller ball for the snowman’s head and then I took off my scarf and wound it round his neck.

Laughing, Jadie took her own hat from her head and reached up to place it on the snowman’s head. The sun bounced off her blonde hair, burnishing it with a sheen of gold, giving the impression of a golden halo surrounding her head. As she laughed, I glanced up at the house to see a figure watching us from one of the upstairs windows. It was Vincent and I could have sworn he was smiling wistfully down on his daughter. I smiled up at him and then Jadie tilted her head to see where I was looking. Her face fell and her eyes grew round and fearful. In the same instant I heard the sound of the back door being flung open with a crash and Tara came hurrying round the corner of the house, clutching a flapping cardigan to her chest.

‘What do you think you are doing?’ she shouted at me, grabbing Jadie by her arm and dragging her back towards the house. ‘Are you trying to kill her?’

‘We were just…making a snowman,’ I called to her retreating back. ‘She’s fine.’ I jogged after Tara, who was towing a silent Jadie in her wake. ‘She’s well wrapped up. We were just having fun.’

Tara almost threw the child in through the back door before pulling off her wet coat and gloves. Jadie began to cry, big silent tears coursing down her cheeks and dripping off the end of her chin.

Tara looked up at me, her face contorted with anger. ‘Jadie can’t go in the snow. She’s sick.’

‘Sick?’ I echoed.

As if to prove a point, Jadie began to cough: deep bubbling coughs, which escalated into heaving gasps until they threatened to tear her body apart. Tara whisked her into the living room and lay her face down on the couch, handing her a pile of tissues. And then she began to beat the child firmly up and down her back, hammering and pounding until Jadie was spitting great gobs of mucus into the tissues.

I watched, horrified, wondering what terrible harm I had done to this innocent child. Vincent had come to stand at the bottom of the stairs. He was resting one hand on the banister, watching his young daughter with a resigned stare. Then, as if realising someone was observing him, he tore his gaze away from Jadie and our eyes met in a moment of shared helplessness.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked him.

Before he could answer, Tara whipped her head round. ‘You’ve done quite enough,’ she snapped.

Vincent approached and for a moment I thought he was coming to offer comfort to Jadie, but he gave Tara and his spluttering daughter a wide berth. He circumnavigated the couch and kneeled instead at the fireplace, where he piled kindling on the fire, lit it and sat back on his heels to watch as the first small flames licked upwards. I went and crouched down near Jadie’s pale tear-streaked face with my back to the fire, and reached out to push a tendril of damp hair behind her ear. When I looked up, Vincent had slipped away.

I took several more tissues from the box and handed them to Jadie. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I wouldn’t have hurt you for anything.’ I looked up at Tara, who was still slapping and kneading. ‘What is it?’

‘Cystic fibrosis,’ Tara replied through gritted teeth. ‘It’s what her sister had as well. Jadie could get pneumonia as easily as you or I could get a slight sniffle, just like Amber did, and then, well…’

Suddenly everything became clear. Everyone Jadie loved, including the child herself, was living in fear that she was going to die, just as her sister had before her. I remembered Jadie’s anxious face when I’d coughed on waking from my hypothermic state and the earnest question that must already have been forming in her mind when she had broken her self-imposed almost two-year silence: Are you going to die?

I thought perhaps my honest answer had been the first time anyone had spoken about such things aloud. If Amber’s name hadn’t been mentioned since her death, then the natural grieving process must have been severely hampered. I was no psychiatrist but it seemed to me that if the adults surrounding Jadie hadn’t been willing to talk about their loss, she might not have felt able to talk about it herself, and had squirrelled away all her questions, doubts and fears into her secret silent world. It occurred to me that she was a child trapped not so much by the physical constraints of her body, but the anxieties and poor expectations of everyone who made up her world. I wondered who was more broken, Vincent or his child. My heart went out to them.

As I stroked Jadie’s face, I let my mind wander. Maybe the worm-hole that had tossed me out into this small universe had not been quite so haphazard after all. I didn’t know why, but still I couldn’t shift the thought that I had arrived exactly where I was supposed to be.

After a while Jadie stopped coughing and spitting, and Tara paused in her back-slapping. She pulled Jadie upright and gave her a hug.

‘All right now?’ she asked gently.

Jadie nodded, wiping her mouth on a tissue and Tara planted a kiss on the child’s sweaty forehead.

‘I’ll go and fetch your thick pink cardigan and your slippers.’ Tara rose to her feet with a chilly look in my direction. ‘You stay right here in front of the fire and keep warm, Jadie.’

As soon as she had gone upstairs, Jadie turned to me and offered a hesitant smile, but there was a reticence in her expression now that hadn’t been there before. I wondered if it was because now I knew the truth about her condition she was adding me to her list of adults who lived in a state of fear.

‘You should have told me you weren’t allowed to go out in the snow,’ I chided gently, perching on the couch next to her.

‘Then we wouldn’t have made the snowman or the snow angels,’ she said. ‘I never get to do anything fun.’

‘It was fun, wasn’t it?’ I acknowledged with a smile. ‘Did you used to play a lot with Amber?’

Jadie’s eyes became round at my easy mention of her sister’s name. She studied my face for a while and then nodded. ‘We still talk a lot, but she can’t play now.’

‘How did she know I was coming?’ I asked softly.

‘She knows everything. I used to cry every night because I wanted Mummy to come home, but Amber says she won’t come back. She promised we’d have a new mummy soon, and then you came. Are you going to be my mummy?’

My mind lingered momentarily on the extraordinary feelings I’d experienced when her father had carried me back here. I shivered involuntarily with pleasure at the memory. I had to admit Jadie’s suggestion wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard, but I knew I was being fanciful in entertaining the concept even for a millisecond.

I could hear a telephone ringing somewhere in the house, jolting me back to reality, such as it was. I ignored it and shook my head. ‘I don’t think so, sweetie,’ I replied. ‘Would you settle for me just being your friend?’

‘If you’re going to be my friend, maybe we could play some more.’ She looked at me hopefully. ‘Can we make more angels?’

I thought about it for a few minutes then asked her if she had some paper and scissors to hand. I had the most curious feeling that someone—an old lady perhaps—had taught me how to make a string of angels from paper. Jadie nodded happily and scrambled off the couch, going into the kitchen and returning with some scissors. ‘Daddy’s got paper in his office,’ she said after handing me the scissors. ‘I’ll see if we can have some.’

I sat musing about this family for a while and then belatedly remembered Tara’s instruction to Jadie to stay near the warmth of the fire. I was about to hurry after her when she returned with her father in tow. He was holding a pile of computer paper and seemed a lot more relaxed now.

‘Jadie’s been trying to steal my paper.’ He eyed me over the stack in his hands. ‘Is she bringing it for you?’

‘Well, yes.’ I took a couple of sheets of the paper from him. ‘I’m trying to see if I can remember how to make paper angels.’

To my surprise, Vincent perched on his armchair and studied me with a look of delighted anticipation. ‘Do you think you remember how to do it?’

‘Let’s see,’ I replied, determined to rise to the challenge.

I folded the paper over, back and forth as if I was making a fan and then began to snip little bits of it away. I noticed as I was cutting that Jadie had crept closer to her father and was resting her hand on his knee. They were both watching me expectantly.

Snipping the last tiny piece away, I opened out the folded paper and held up the row of little hand-holding angels with a flourish. ‘Ta-dah!’

‘Angels!’ squealed Jadie, clapping her hands in glee.

‘Good grief.’ Vincent’s mouth had dropped open. He was looking not at my masterpiece but at his daughter, in total astonishment. I suddenly realised it must have been the first time he’d heard her speak in almost two years. He looked as if he was about to exclaim further, but I shook my head slightly, afraid that if he made too much fuss, Jadie would fall silent again. He gave me a questioning glance then took a deep breath, taking the hint.

‘We used to make snowflakes with paper and scissors at school when I was little.’ His voice cracked slightly and I saw him swallow. ‘The teacher hung them on the classroom ceiling and stuck them on the windows at Christmas.’

‘Here.’ I handed him the scissors. ‘I’ll bet you can remember how to do it.’

He picked a piece of paper from the pile he’d brought and folded it carefully, then set about cutting bits off it. I watched as he snipped away, his eyes moving every so often to his intently watching daughter. She looked so like him, with her golden hair and slightly pointed chin. I wondered if she was aware that she’d spoken in front of him. I also wondered when had been the last time he had played with her. Tara had intimated that Vincent was something of a workaholic and that she was Jadie’s main carer. Watching father and daughter with their heads bent together made a heart-warming picture.

‘What’s going on?’

We looked up to see Tara approaching with Jadie’s cardigan and slippers in her hand.

‘We’re making angels and snowflakes,’ Vincent answered—more calmly now, as if he were trying to pretend this was an everyday occurrence. ‘Watch this…’

He unfolded the paper to show a beautifully made snowflake with symmetrical points and delicate filigree arms.

‘Ooh!’ said Jadie. ‘Let me try.’

‘I’ll show you how.’ Vincent’s voice was once again heavy with emotion at hearing his daughter’s excited voice. Tara clapped her hand to her mouth and watched as he showed Jadie how to fold the paper, then handed her the scissors.

Jadie snipped happily away, seemingly unaware of the consternation she had caused. Now the floodgates were open, and although her voice was still weak and whispery, Jadie was evidently finding it easier to speak with her father and Tara present.

She unfolded her snowflake and Vincent reached out and clasped her to him. ‘It’s beautiful, princess. Just like you.’

Tara had fallen silent and was standing stock-still, looking from her employer to her charge and then back to me. I was about to smile when I realised that behind Tara’s aquamarine gaze was an emotion I couldn’t quite discern. Was it anger? Confusion? Or jealousy?

I shivered and looked quickly away. I was at this family’s mercy and it didn’t seem like a good time to start making enemies.

Tara drew in a deep breath and appeared to make an effort to pull herself together. She plastered a thin smile on her face. ‘Well, time for some breakfast, I think.’