Page 22 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
“Well, I don’t know where it is, then,” Patrick’s mother was saying, with audible frustration. “What would Steve want with your dinner jacket?” I heard her ask a moment later.
They could not all be for me, these sandwiches. There were enough to feed a cricket team.
Eventually, Patrick reappeared with a jacket under his arm and announced we were leaving.
“It was nice to meet you, Caroline,” his mother said, as she was showing us out. “I’m sorry we didn’t get more of a chance to chat. Hopefully we’ll see each other again soon.”
Her smile was hesitant, tentative—she was evidently unsure if I was just a friend, or a girlfriend. To be honest, so was I. It was a week since the dinner party. He had slept over in my room twice. I had slept in his room three times. If we had not quite worked up the courage to put a name on what was happening, it was pretty clear something was. Without consulting me, when Harry had asked if we would want one bedroom or two at Longhurst, Patrick had said we would share.
Every time I had seen Athena recently, she had been smug about how things had turned out. It was okay, I reassured myself. Patrick was a nice guy. We were having fun. It was not when I was with Patrick but when I was not that my anxiety spiked.
“I hope you two have fun this weekend,” Patrick’s mum said. “Do you know Norfolk at all?”
I said not really. She asked me where I had grown up, a question I always dreaded. “Oh, all over the place,” I told her. “Bedford for a bit, then London, and then Cherry Hinton, near Cambridge.”
“Oh, lovely,” she said. “Is that where your parents live?”
“My grandmother does,” I said. “My parents aren’t actually around anymore.”
This was both technically true and a bit less stark than the full story.
Somehow, as we drove off, I found myself with three or four full sandwiches, elaborately wrapped in paper napkins, on my lap.
“Sorry about that,” said Patrick. “I mean about your parents. I didn’t know. I would have warned her. I hope she didn’t upset you.”
“It didn’t upset me,” I said, trying to reassure him.
Something in my tone must have warned him this was nevertheless not something I wanted to discuss further. Not here. Not now. Not yet. We drove in silence for a while.
“Oh, by the way,” said Patrick. “I dug out something that might interest you.”
He reached around and produced a book. Published by Usborne, one of those big illustrated kids’ books from the 1980s: The World of the Unknown: Unsolved Mysteries. On the cover there was a picture of a UFO and a cowled apparition. I gave Patrick a puzzled look.
“You remember me telling you about Longhurst’s Missing Maid? The story Freddie used to read to scare us, about that girl who vanished there in the 1930s? That’s the book. It’s all in there, photographs and everything. Of the house, the maid, the newspaper headlines.”
I flicked through until I landed on the pages. One of the headlines read: “Is the Missing Maid a Victim of the Willoughby Curse?”
Patrick glanced over, the car swerving slightly. “I think it was around then that the idea of a family curse started to circulate. Probably not a good idea to bring it all up this weekend, though. They can be a bit funny about that stuff.”
“I can imagine,” I said, knowing all too well what it felt like to have to come to terms with tragedy and sorrow in public.
HE FOUND US. MY father found us.
After all those months in hiding, in hostels, in different women’s refuges. Checking up and down the street for him every time we stepped out the front door. Being woken up in the middle of the night by a car outside and wondering if that was him. Unable even to tell my grandmother where we were, so as not to put her in danger of threats or violence.
I can still remember how it felt to finally have our own little flat. To know this was a place we could speak as loudly as we wanted, laugh as loudly as we wanted. Where we did not have to be always thinking three moves ahead to avoid upsetting my father. Where we were not always waiting for his mood to crack abruptly. Where I could spill a glass of water without expecting a sharp slap around the back of the head. Where the walls and the doors were not full of dents—foot-shaped, fist-shaped, head-shaped.
I think she thought he would give up looking for us eventually. That all his talk of tracking us down and making her pay if she ever left him was just performative, like so many of his promises. It turned out she was wrong.
A friend of his gave us away, it emerged at the trial. Someone who had spotted my mother and me, coming out of the library, and had casually mentioned it at the pub. That is something I will never understand. That decision. In a world in which to take no action would incur no consequences, where keeping your mouth shut would cost you nothing, why speak?
Another question I will never have an answer to is what would have happened to me if I’d been there when he came knocking. Would he have killed me too? I expect so. At the trial, he said a red mist descended. His actual words. A red mist. He had just come for a conversation, he said. He had been drinking, he admitted.
She had embarrassed him. That is the only explanation I can come up with. I was sure that if he had thought about it for just five minutes he would have seen he did not want us back. God knows having a kid around the house had driven him up the wall. The problem, the burr under the saddle, was the loss of face. Going from being the man with the pretty wife to the man whose wife had left him.
If I seem awkward, if I freeze a bit, when people ask where I grew up, or about my parents, that’s why. Because, like Juliette, I know there are some things it is impossible to describe.
Because when I was thirteen years old, my father strangled my mother to death with enough force to fracture multiple vertebrae in her neck, and then left her there for me to find on the kitchen floor. And then gathered up her sketchbooks and put them on the barbecue in the garden and burned the lot, so I have not one single thing my mother ever wrote or drew to remember her by.
