Weyward — Chapter 30: Kate

30

KATE

Time passes more quickly, now that Kate’s days are filled by her shifts at the bookshop.

She finds the work soothing – sorting through the boxes of donations, stamping them with the label gun. Mostly, the shop sells Mills & Boon novels (‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ Emily says); though occasionally Kate will unearth a first edition Austen or Alcott. These are displayed in the window, so that their gilt-embossed covers spark in the sun.

She and her boss settle into a comfortable routine, the older woman often bringing her cups of tea and plates of biscuits, chattering easily about her husband Mike, about growing up in Crows Beck. Emily is impressed by Kate’s affinity with her ginger tomcat, Toffee, who – she swears – despises all humans (Emily’s own hands are often patterned with scratches from his eager ministrations).

She is due in December. Kate hopes for snow for the birth. Often, alone in the cottage, she tests names out loud, tasting them on her tongue. Holly, perhaps – a nod to the season. Or maybe Robyn. Though nothing feels quite right, yet.

It is early autumn when she feels the first kick. She is out in the garden, pulling up clumps of tansy from beneath the sycamore – quite a poisonous plant, she’s learned, despite its bright yellow flowers – and listening to the trees murmur in the wind. She gasps at a sudden fluttering movement inside her womb – a liquid feeling that makes her think of quicksilver, or the pale

minnows darting in the beck.

Her daughter.

By November, her skin is stretched tight as a drum over her stomach.

None of her old clothes fit – she raids Aunt Violet’s wardrobe for loose smocks and tunics; draping herself in pashmina shawls and a battered mackintosh. As it has grown, her hair has become unruly – she’d forgotten its tendency to curl, in all those years of expensive hair treatments. The back is a sort of mullet, now, but Kate doesn’t care. She doesn’t even brush it, these days – just lets it fall in dark waves to her ears.

Simon wouldn’t recognise her. ‘Are you in touch with him?’ asks Emily. ‘The baby’s father, I mean.’ Kate has invited her over for Bonfire Night; they have built a small pyre in the centre of the garden and sit in front of it on camp chairs, gripping mugs of hot chocolate. Kate breathes deeply, savouring the scent of woodsmoke. Above them, the sky is thick with stars. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I haven’t spoken to him for months. It’s … better that way. For the baby. He … isn’t a good person.’ Emily nods. She reaches over, squeezes Kate’s hand. ‘I’m here, you know,’ she says, taking her hand away. ‘If you ever want to talk about anything, you just say the word.’ ‘Thank you.’ Kate’s throat narrows. She stares into the fire, watching sparks dance gold into the night. For a while, neither of the women speak. The only sounds are the hiss and crack of the flames and, somewhere, an owl.

She wonders if Emily has guessed the truth. It could be obvious, she supposes, from the way that she flinches when her phone rings, her refusal to talk about her old life in London. About why she left.

But she can’t bring herself to say the words. Not yet. She doesn’t want to risk the delicate threads of their friendship. It’s been so long since she’s spent time with another woman. She hasn’t seen her university friends for years.

The last time was the wedding she and Simon went to, in Oxfordshire.

Five years ago now, not long after she’d left her job. Her friend Becky was getting married. She remembers the dress she wore – that Simon picked out for her – pink, the colour of broken flesh, the colour of the scar on her arm.

Gold heels she couldn’t walk in. She’d sat across from Simon at the reception, laughed too loudly at the feeble jokes of the man next to her. It was an open bar; Simon was drunk. But he was watching. He was always watching. One of her friends saw him push her into the taxi before the

speeches, the practised way his hand gripped the back of her neck. He wouldn’t let her take their calls, afterwards. In the end, her friends had stopped trying. ‘I wish Violet were still here,’ Emily says eventually. ‘She’d be gutted to

be missing this. To be missing you.’ ‘What was she like?’ ‘Sorry,’ Emily shuffles her chair closer to the fire. ‘I always forget you didn’t really know her, you remind me of her so much. She was … odd. In the best way. I used to think that she had no fear – the things she did when she was younger! She climbed to Mount Everest base camp once, she told me. To make a study of the Himalayan jumping spider. Crazy woman.’ She shakes her head, laughing. ‘You have her spirit.’ ‘I wish,’ Kate grins. ‘You do. It takes strength what you’ve done, starting again. She had to do

the same.’ They fall into silence. ‘She never told you what happened? My mum said she was disinherited, that there was some sort of scandal.’ ‘No. Like I said … I think it was too painful for her. So your mum had no idea what it was? This scandal?’ ‘No. My dad might have known, but he died when I was a kid.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ ‘It’s OK.’ She has been thinking of the accident more and more lately, her perception of it shifting now that she carries a child of her own. A child she would do anything to protect. Even if that meant sacrificing herself, the way her father had done.

Sometimes, lately, she can almost believe that maybe – just maybe – it wasn’t her fault. That she isn’t a monster after all. But then she’ll remember – the blood, slick and glossy on the road. The bee brooch, forever tarnished, in her hand. ‘I had a baby, once, you know,’ Emily says softly, in a strange echo of her thoughts. Looking over at her, Kate sees tears shine in her eyes. ‘Stillborn. She’d be about your age, if she’d lived.’ ‘I’m so sorry.’ ‘It’s all right. We all have our cross to bear.’

After Emily leaves, Kate sits for a while, watching the fire.

As she stares into the leaping orange flames, resolve hardens in her. She won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. Things will be different, this time. She is different. And she is never going back to him.

She fetches her hold-all from the bedroom, struggling slightly under its weight.

In the garden, she unzips it, pulling out clothes – the clothes she used to wear, for Simon. The skin-tight jeans, the clingy tops. Even the lingerie she’d been wearing when she left: red lace, a diamante heart quivering between the cups of the bra. She throws the lumpy shape of them onto the fire, watching as the flames burn brighter. An effigy of the past, melting away. Shreds of lace float into the air, like petals.

She stands for a while, watching. One hand resting on her belly, where her daughter swims safe inside.

December.

The days begin white and glittering with snow – on the roof, the branches of the sycamore, where a robin has taken up residence. It reminds Kate of Robin Redbreast from The Secret Garden – for so many years, her only safe portal to the natural world. Only now does she truly understand her favourite passage, memorised since childhood: ‘Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.’ Often, before she leaves for work, she stands outside to watch the sun catch on the white-frosted plants, searching for the robin’s red breast. A spot of colour against the stark morning. Sometimes, while she watches it flutter, she feels a tugging inside her womb; as if her daughter is responding to its song, anxious to breach the membrane between her mother’s body and the outside world.

The robin is not alone in the garden. Starlings skip over the snow, the winter sun varnishing their necks. At the front of the cottage, fieldfares – distinctive with their tawny feathers – chatter in the hedgerows. And of course, crows. So many that they form their own dark canopy of the sycamore, hooded figures watching. One bears the same white markings on its feathers as the crow that startled her in the fireplace when she arrived at the cottage. She is growing braver – testing herself each day by moving closer and closer to the tree. This morning, she presses her palm against its ice-crusted bark, and warmth swells in her chest.

Later, Kate is at the bookshop, thinking about this and smiling. She sips coffee from a leopard-print mug of Emily’s. It’s a little after ten, and she wants to get through five boxes by lunchtime.

It’s been seven months since she left. Sometimes she feels as if she’s always lived in Weyward Cottage; always had this routine of waking with the sun, then either spending time in the garden or walking leisurely into the village for her shifts at the bookshop. Even some of the locals seem to be starting to accept her. According to Emily, they treat her with the same slightly baffled acceptance they reserved for Aunt Violet.

Other times, it’s harder to forget what happened.

Her phone rang last night at 2 a.m., its blue flare jolting her gut. A number she didn’t recognise. She knows it wasn’t him calling. It’s impossible: he doesn’t know about the Motorola; doesn’t have the number for it. But it doesn’t stop her from running through scenarios in her mind as she sorts through boxes of books, worry ticking inside her.

Thank God he doesn’t know about the baby. ‘Oh, Kate?’ Emily walks into the storeroom, a welcome interruption. She crouches next to a stack of weathered-looking boxes under the window. ‘Someone dropped this off yesterday … I think you might find it interesting.’ She grunts as she lifts a box from the top of the pile and plonks

it down in front of Kate. ‘What is it?’ ‘Take a look,’ says Emily, beaming at her. ‘You can keep what’s inside, of course. Yours by right, really.’ At first, Kate thinks she has misread the label, scrawled hastily over the top of the box in pen. She checks again, but there is no mistaking it.

Orton Hall.

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