He gave this door a single, authoritative knock.
I stood back, increasingly alarmed and uncomfortable, and waited. The smell of burning bracken was in the air. What would Martin want out of me to keep silent about all of this? I was at his mercy too.
I was in real trouble.
After a minute or so, just as the silence between us grew unbearable, someone approached slowly through the diamond-shaped spyglass set in the door, moving with the tell-tale carefulness of old age.
Martin raised an eyebrow at me, just before the door opened, revealing a tiny old woman with a perfectly white bun of hair balanced on top of her head. She was gently fat and a pair of cat’s eye glasses perched above her forehead, as if just pushed back rather than removed before she returned to whatever task had been absorbing her. Her hands were white with flour and she was rubbing at them with a tea towel.
‘Hello?’ she asked.
Martin’s expression had changed almost magically into that of polite puzzlement and just a hint of embarrassment, but I saw too that it wasn’t real – as though he were an actor, waiting until now to play his part.
‘I am so sorry to bother you. My wife and I are looking for Kettle Lane, and we’ve been driving around forever. She suggested I stop someone and ask, and frankly the village is deserted…’
Strangers at the door would trouble many old people, but not this spry little bird with her blue apron and flour-dusted fingers. Her bright eyes alighted on us both, examining us with fearless curiosity. ‘Oh, that’s fine, most people get lost. You need to go back out, and straight ahead until you come to the main road, past the Green, keeping it on your right, and then turn left down a very narrow little road – it looks like a private drive, but that’s Kettle Lane. You’ll know you’re there when you see the graveyard just before it.’
Her accent was as beautifully polished and precise as cut glass.
‘Thanks so much,’ said Martin.
‘My pleasure,’ she said, with a grin full of even but yellowing teeth. ‘If you run into trouble, just ask in the post office. They’re practically next door. They’ll point you straight.’
They exchanged polite goodbyes and the door closed, leaving me absolutely bewildered but relieved. I don’t know what I had been expecting.
‘So,’ said Martin, guiding me back to the Range Rover. ‘Remember anything?’
‘No, of course not. I’ve never seen this place before. Who was that?’
His eyes narrowed, and a faintly cruel smile played around his face, though whatever the joke was, he didn’t seem to find it that funny.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’re really Margot Lewis, then this is your childhood home.’ He spared a glance over his shoulder at the cottage. ‘And that was your mother.’
I don’t really remember what happened next. I felt faint, and suddenly Martin caught me under my arm and helped me back into the Range Rover, his face stricken with concern.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said roughly as he closed my side of the car. I could tell I was alarming him, that he felt he’d overreached himself.
He climbed in next to me, and the door thumped shut on us both, sealing us into the silent cell of the interior.
I wanted to say something, but couldn’t. To deny it all. To ask where the hell we were, what all of this was about. My mouth felt loose, my skin numb.
He sat next to me, his fingers tapping the steering wheel.
‘I…’ I swallowed. All the saliva had dried up in my mouth. ‘Who is she?’
‘She’s Flora Bellamy.’ He did not turn to me, instead glancing back towards the house. Behind one of the leaded windows, a curtain twitched. ‘Her daughter, Margot Bellamy, left home in 1997, when she was sixteen. Took up with an older boy who got her into some unpleasant scenes. Got into some unsavoury scrapes with the law. Turned up high as a kite for Christmas dinner that year and was told by her angry father never to return.’
I breathed in, breathed out.
‘She never did. Police showed up a few times, looking for bail, statements, asking questions. Then nothing. Nothing that lasted for years. The father, Bob, was ex-army and something of a martinet by all accounts; he never forgave her…’
‘He ran the village gardening committee,’ I said softly, this nugget reappearing to me like a flickering spark falling through darkness – but where from? I know this because I know it, surely, however much I’ve tried to block it out.
‘Did he?’
‘Yes,’ I say with certainty. ‘Because it was good for discipline. It was all good for discipline…’ I trailed off.
Why was that all I could remember? I couldn’t even see his face. I couldn’t see hers – the woman in the cottage. She had been an utter stranger to me.
Martin waited in silence.
‘Anyway, the daughter’s name wasn’t even to be uttered out loud in the house,’ he continued, ‘but after he died ten years ago Flora contacted the Salvation Army looking for Margot. She was their only child.’
A kind of burning shame was falling over me, like a veil of fire.
‘And the Sally Army found her. Living in London. Didn’t take long. Didn’t do any good. Margot refused contact and refused to say why.’
A silence fell again. I realized, in my shocked condition, that this statement was actually a question, and an answer was expected.
You know, he made me get up at six every morning of my life. He stood there and watched me wash and brush my teeth until I was fourteen. To make sure I did it properly, he said. Stood and stared, with his arms crossed. What father does that?
And then laughter, a peal of bitter laughter, and that too had a jangling note within it, like cut glass.
‘What do we do with women that let their children be abused?’ I asked. ‘Women who live in fear, who daren’t rock the boat? Should we forgive them? Should we, shall we say, cut them a little slack? Blame their parlous mental state? Pardon all in the great wailing cry, “But I love him…”’ I looked out of the window and shook my head. ‘If you can’t be strong for your children – if you can’t get it together for your children – then what purpose do you serve? Why are you even alive at all? What possible comfort could you be to them?’
I said this last dully, staring out of the window, and out of the corner of my perception he shifted uncomfortably.
‘That’s very harsh.’
‘It’s a viewpoint refined by experience.’
He tapped the steering wheel gently for a moment, as though considering this.
‘So,’ he asked quietly, ‘whose experience? Is this Margot or Bethan that’s talking now?’
What an excellent question, but I could barely compass what it meant, never mind answer it. I am not Margot Bellamy. I am not Margot.
Dear God, if I’m not her, then who the hell am I? What’s going on? How is any of this even possible?
I shut my eyes. They’re wet. Something was coming. A sea change. I felt it in my quaking heart, my sinking stomach.
Perhaps I don’t know who I am, but there is somebody, somebody I remember.
I could see her in my mind’s eye, cigarette in hand, tracing airy figures in smoke as she talked and gestured, as though she was summoning the spirits of the demi-monde. Her short, peroxide hair stuck up in spiky angles, and that scent of hairspray went everywhere with her, like a following ghost.
And that sharp, cut-glass accent – soaked in indifference and noblesse oblige, as though she was a grand duchess in exile. Everyone we met in those squats and communal hostel rooms remarked upon it. As I had come to know her better, I had dismissed it as an obvious affectation, like her alias.