We all knew, of course. Everyone knows, but no one looks. We don’t look because if we look it makes us evil because we aren’t doing something about it, or it makes us sad because we can’t do anything about it, or it proves that we’re monsters when we always thought we were righteous because we won’t do anything about it. Either way, safer not to look.
I couldn’t stop myself; it was my son. I needed to know, to see. I spent so long trying to find a way in which he was doing right. Trying to find something which said that this was good. Of course it’s so hard to prove anything now, it’s so hard to find anyone who doesn’t just look at the facts and say that she who wrote this is a liar, there is no room for reason there is only…
Family is the only thing that matters.
My children are having grandchildren now. There will be more to carry the family name. Family is safety. It is love. It is a thing that you defend because it is the one thing which matters more than anything else, it is love in adversity, it is giving, it is that which lifts us up. It is the trust that spans the generations. It is the young who look to you to do them right. It is the old who look to the young to make a newer, faithful world. We carry humanity it is…
I bugged my son.
He’s got security teams, of course, but in Danesmoor they left us alone, didn’t bother to do any real checks inside the house, not when the threat was clearly going to come from elsewhere.
I stole documents, copied them, made a file.
Filmed his meetings.
No one suspected me—I am the lady of the house. I recorded everything. For three years I recorded everything, and didn’t know what I could do with it. That’s not true. I knew what I could do with it. I just never had the courage to do it. Maybe that’s love. Maybe that’s what it was.
They caught me, in the end. A man called Markse found one of the cameras I used, started a manhunt. I knew that he was going to fingerprint it and I hadn’t used gloves because the idea was ridiculous.
All of it was just so ridiculous.
This was… a month ago, perhaps?
There was a do scheduled, all of Philip’s Company friends, Simon fucking Fardell and his battered wife, all the best people, the mass murderers, out for a bit of a laugh, the shooting, the sport, Pimm’s on the lawn. I knew they were going to catch me, and that would be it. I felt like such a stupid old woman. I had all the proof in the world, and I hadn’t had the guts to do anything with it. Even with them closing in I couldn’t decide, couldn’t act.
Then I found my miracle.
Not a miracle, in fact. Not at all. There was a woman indentured to the catering company. I caught her trying to break into my son’s study and I was angry, instinctively, my house, I was the lady, I was furious and then…
Then I thought for a little moment longer, even in my panic, and I realised—she was trying to break into my son’s study.
And perhaps there was a reason.
I told her to come upstairs with me. Informed her, in my most imperious way, that if she didn’t obey I would report her instantly and she’d go back to the patty line. She came with me, she was so angry and scared. I sat her down and made her tell me why she was trying to break into my son’s study. I was trembling with excitement, but maybe she thought it was rage.
She refused to answer at first, but I could see it in her, the desperation, I saw the mirror of myself in her and finally she said, ‘I think your son fucked the fucking country.’
I was relieved. To hear her say those words, I was desperately relieved, and I think she saw that. ‘Your son fucked us,’ she repeated. ‘He’s gotta pay.’
She’d found something, working at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. Some sort of documents, she’d been stealing for months. Someone had asked a question, spotted that there were figures not adding up, that the number of patties going to a sewage treatment facility in Cambridgeshire was greater than the number being released, and wondered where the discrepancy lay.
She’d been on the patty line. She’d seen friends vanish, and when the patties asked they were always told ‘reassigned’ and no one questioned it because if you asked questions, you might get reassigned too.
But she’d begun to question. To suspect. That’s why she’d come to Danesmoor. Blackmailed her own supervisor to do it. I was impressed, I liked her at that moment, I thought her supervisor sounded just like Fish.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You’re nobody. If you find proof of anything, what do you think you can do?’
‘I can get my daughter back,’ she replied. ‘I can make them give her back to me.’
My heart fell.
I didn’t need an amateur blackmailer. I needed a firebrand, someone who would save my family name, protect it, go out into the world and do right, right as the family should have done, right as is the right that is the responsibility of this place of…
But she had lost her daughter.
Family is everything.
Family is everything.
To lose a child, it is…
When my daughter died I spent so long trying to make it my fault, because if it was my fault it wasn’t just luck. It was the action of man, it was fate, it was God, it wasn’t just a faulty car brake on a rainy day it wasn’t just that it wasn’t
and she isn’t
sometimes I still think maybe it was a trick, and she’ll be there
and sometimes in my dreams she is a presence who sits by me and is warm and kind and says that she loves me and I cry when I wake
and sometimes I spend days and weeks without thinking about her, and I am simply a woman without children.
That is who I am now.
I knew they would come for me, so I gave this stranger, this woman in prison clothes, a copy of everything I had.
I gave her everything and told her to run away.
The next day, after the party was over, Philip had breakfast with me. He hadn’t had breakfast with me for months, maybe even a year. He was so important, always so busy, but that day he made time to have breakfast and I thought… this is nice. This is nice. He loves me. Maybe it’ll be all right, maybe there’s something I don’t know. And he was charming, the brightest and kindest I’d seen him for years, he really seemed to want to know how I was, said we should go walking together by the lake, like we had when he was young, that it’d been too long since we’d just talked.
There were sedatives in the tea, of course. I thought I was having a funny turn, but the turn never stopped. Next thing I knew Philip was nowhere to be seen, and Fish was at my door telling me I had to take my medicine, and I said that’s stupid that’s absurd I don’t need any medicine
and he said yes, yes, your medicine your medicine
They put it in my food, in my water. I could taste it, occasionally, the bitterness of the powders masked by too much chilli.
They weren’t poisoning to kill.
They just took away my mind, my intelligence, my freedom and my will.
I haven’t seen my son since that morning. It was a beautiful morning. We ate in the eastern rooms, where the sun comes in. It was the perfect day I’d always thought my days were meant to be when I was a girl.
Sometimes friends would come over—Kirsty came a lot. They told her I’d had a stroke.
They told her that.
And they kept me alive.
I suppose that’s Philip’s thing. He stopped short of having his own mother killed when he found out what I did. I never found out what the woman did with the file. I assume she got her daughter back. But if she did, why would you be here?