a sob she hadn’t acknowledged threatened to break.
Your mother’s a brave woman.
Laurel nodded.
She’s a survivor, and so are you. You did well with those policemen.
She mumbled, fresh tears stinging, Thank you, Daddy.
The police say it’s probably that man from the papers, the one that’s been causing trouble by the stream. The description matches, and there’s no one else who’d come bothering your mother.
It was as she’d thought. When she’d first seen the man, hadn’t she wondered if it might not be the menace from the papers? Laurel felt suddenly lighter.
Now listen, Lol. Her father drove his hands into his pockets, jiggling them about a moment before continuing. Your mother and I, we’ve had a word and we reckon it’s a good idea not to tell the younger ones all that went on. There’s no need, and it’s far too much for them to understand. Give me the choice, I’d rather you’d been a hundred miles away yourself, but you weren’t and that’s as it is.
I’m sorry.
Nothing to be sorry for. Not your fault. You’ve helped out the police, your mother too, and it’s over. A bad man came to the house but everything’s all right now. Everything’s going to be all right.
It wasn’t a question, not exactly, but it sounded like it and so Laurel answered, Yes, Daddy. Everything’s going to be all right.
He smiled a one-sided smile. You’re a good girl, Laurel. I’m going to fetch your sisters now. We’ll keep what happened to ourselves, eh? There’s my girl.
And they had. It became the great unspoken event in their family’s history. The sisters weren’t to be told and Gerry was certainly too young to remember, though they’d been wrong about that as things turned out.
The others realised, of course, that something unusual had oc- curred—they’d been bundled unceremoniously from the birthday party and deposited in front of their neighbour’s brand-new Decca television set; their parents were oddly sombre for weeks; and a pair of policemen started paying regular visits that involved closed doors and low serious voices—but everything made sense when Daddy told them about the poor homeless man who’d died in the meadow on Gerry’s birthday. It was sad but, as he said, these things happened sometimes.
Laurel, meanwhile, took to nail-biting in earnest. The police investigation was concluded in a matter of weeks: the man’s age and appearance matched descriptions of the picnic stalker, the police said it wasn’t unusual in these cases for violence to escalate over time, and Laurel’s eyewitness report made it clear her mother had acted in selfdefence. A burglary gone wrong; a lucky escape; nothing to be gained from splashing the details across the newspapers. Happily it was a time when discretion was the norm and a gentleman’s agreement could shift a head-line to page three. The curtain dropped, the story ended.
And yet. While her family’s lives had returned to regular programming, Laurel’s remained in a fuzz of static. The sense that she was separate from the others deepened and she became unaccountably restless. The event itself played over in her mind, and the role she’d taken in the police investigation, the things she’d told them—worse, the thing she hadn’t—made the panic so bad sometimes, she could hardly breathe. No matter where she went at Greenacres—inside the house, or out in the garden—she felt trapped by what she’d seen and done. The memories were everywhere; they were inescapable; made worse for the event that caused them being utterly inexplicable.
When she auditioned for the Central School and won a place, Laurel ignored her parents’ pleas to stay at home, to put it off a year and finish her A levels, to think of her sisters, the baby brother who loved her most of all. She packed instead, as little as she could, and she left them all behind. Her life’s direction changed, just as surely as a weather vane spun circles in an unexpected storm.
Laurel drained the last of her wine and watched a pair of rooks fly low over Daddy’s meadow. Someone had turned the giant dimmer switch and the world was casting towards darkness. All actresses have favourite words, and ‘gloaming’ was one of Laurel’s. It was a pleasure to articulate, the sense of falling gloom and helpless encompassment inherent within the word’s sound, and yet it was so close to ‘glowing’ that some of the latter’s shine rubbed off on it.
It was the time of day she associated especially with child-hood, with her life before she left for London: her father’s