to be him. Plus, they had been his own introduction to literature and he thought it would be nice if she turned out to be a reader too.
He had had a conversation with the dangerous Miss Dangerfield about fairy stories and she said they were ‘primers’ for girls so that they would know how to survive in a world of ‘male predators’. (‘Or wolves, as we might call them.’) A handbook of what to do, she said, when a girl found herself alone in the dark wood. Harry supposed the dark wood was a metaphor. Not many dark woods around these days, but nonetheless he liked to think that Candace might grow up knowing how to avoid the wolves.
No matter how hard he tried to conjure her up, his own mother was no longer much more than a smudge of memory and it was becoming more and more difficult to re-create her. Occasionally something would break through this miasma, a sudden sharp fragment – a recollection of sitting beside her in a car or being handed an ice-cream – although the ‘context’, as Miss Dangerfield would have called it, was entirely missing. His mother had never lived at High Haven, so he had no sense of her here either. She had been a smoker, he remembered that. He remembered, too, a hoarse laugh, dark hair. And her dancing round the kitchen once, not like waltzing, more like poor cursed Karen in The Red Shoes. (Too horrible a tale for telling to Candace, Harry had judged.)
Emily seemed to have more of a connection to his mother than Harry did and she was always saying things like, ‘Remember that fire-engine cake that your mother made for your birthday?’ or ‘That was good when your mother took us on the Christmas steam train, wasn’t it?’ and so on. Was it? He didn’t know, it was as if most of his memories had been erased along with his mother. Like a book that no longer possessed a narrative, just a few words scattered here and there throughout its pages. ‘Sometimes it’s best to forget, Harry,’ Crystal said.
Harry sometimes wondered if she would have died of cancer eventually, given the smoking, instead of falling off a cliff, which was what actually happened to her.
No one had seen her fall, she had been out walking the dog. Tipsy – a sweet little Yorkshire terrier that Harry could recall more clearly than he could his mother. A prescient name given what happened to the dog. (‘Prescient’ was another of Miss Dangerfield’s words.) Tipsy was found on a ledge below the cliff and it was presumed that the dog had gone over and his mother had tried to get her back and had slipped and fallen.
Tipsy was found alive, but his mother’s body had to be rescued from the sea by the inshore lifeboat. Harry had recently come across his mother’s death certificate when he had been looking for his own birth certificate – to prove his age for his under-eighteen bus pass – and it said her cause of death was ‘drowning’. Which was a surprise as he had always imagined that the tide had been out and she had dashed her head on the rocks, which would have been awful but better somehow because it would surely have been quicker. Sometimes he wondered if Tipsy had seen her when she plummeted past, if they had exchanged a look of surprise.
His dad got rid of the dog, gave it to one of his drivers. ‘Can’t look at it, Harry, without thinking about Les.’ Two years later and he was married to Crystal. Harry wished he hadn’t given Tipsy away.
His mother had been replaced, but not the dog. There was just a Rottweiler now called Brutus that his dad had bought to be a guard dog for the Holroyd yard, and at first they weren’t allowed near him. It was Candy his father was concerned about, he seemed less bothered about Crystal or Harry being mauled to death by the dog. Actually Brutus turned out to be not quite the savage that his dad had hoped he would be, he was a big softie and seemed especially fond of Harry, although Crystal remained suspicious of him. She had never had a pet when she was growing up, she said. ‘Not even a hamster?’ Harry asked, feeling sorry for her. ‘Not even a hamster,’ she confirmed. ‘Lot of rats around, though.’
Crystal wasn’t a wicked stepmother. She didn’t nag (‘Live