fingers through the hair of that one, the one at her hip. They all breathed on her. It was overwhelming. This happened every afternoon, at the end of their trek home from school—’ Good God, that’s unpleasant.”
I tensed. “Please don’t comment.” It wrenched me out of the story.
He sighed.
This is exactly why I’d had to hire a student to work with the photographs.
He read on. A later scene put the protagonist on her front steps, while her neighbour, Gloria, was out.
“‘Lily, the smallest one, came to me when her mother didn’t answer the door. She wanted a drink. I denied having water, which made her laugh. The sound was frail and breathy and high; her fragility terrified me. Where was Gloria? Lily ran off; she grabbed a branch and swung herself up onto it. Where was her mother? I didn’t want to be responsible for this. These small creatures, so fast and so needy. So empty all the time. They consume the adults around them. That’s how they become adults themselves. They eat their parents up.’”
He stopped. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “For God’s sake, get on with it!” But I had gripped the duvet tightly in my fists. I let it go and smoothed it out.
I’d already listened to others of her books that were more current. This one was her first. It was the only one of them that had a mother in it, any mother at all.
I suddenly remembered myself as a child, lying half-asleep on a kind of sofa bed, pressed against a warm female body: leftover perfume, a brushed cotton nightgown over free breasts. We were asleep together, and suddenly the light flashed on. It woke me; I can still see very bright light even today. Clicking heels against the wood floor, a vaporous smell of drink. I clambered out from under the smooth sheet and itchy blanket to fling myself at the woman who’d just walked in the door. I reached up as high as I could, so high I felt the beads in her necklace. I was between her and a man. The purse hanging off her wrist was at just the height to bounce hard into my head.
Behind me, the cotton sleeves pulled me back. That’s all I remember, being sucked into a suffocation of warm brushed cotton, under a cool sheet and itchy blanket. The woman in beads with the handbag walked through to the bedroom. I don’t know what happened to the man.
That was Linda Paul, my mother. The woman in the nightgown was my nanny. She raised me. She raised me when she was with Linda, and then she raised me without her.
Nick had discovered that my recently deceased mother wasn’t Linda Paul, and assumed that Linda Paul had never been my mother at all. But I knew, from research, that she had two relatives blind in the same way that I am. I was certain that Linda Paul had given birth to me.
Then she had given me away.
Nick hadn’t realised that’s what he’d shown me. I’d had to make him stop before he got that far himself. There’s a difference between a noise downstairs in the night and someone suddenly standing over your bed. They may amount to the same thing, they may both be the same intruder, but the moment it might be and the moment it undeniably is are different.
I didn’t notice that Nick had gone, truly gone, until the police came to talk to me. I was angry. This wasn’t my fault. What had he done to himself? I told the Inspector that he’d informally assisted with a research project; that was all. That he seemed to be a generally untroubled person. The Inspector asked me if I was worried about him. What kind of question is that? What would my answer matter in the investigation? I didn’t know if I was. Polly and her mother disturbed me more.
Most distracting of all, I knew who S. M. Madison must be. After Linda Paul abandoned me, where did she go? She wouldn’t stop writing, would she? She wouldn’t. That fantasy of sacrifice came from the nanny, a woman who’d never written anything. S. M. Madison had written a book every two years since 1963.
So I’ve known since the day Nick was gone.
I didn’t tell anyone, not even Harry. I didn’t know what he’d do if I did. He might try to protect me. He might close the book permanently. I couldn’t