The room stood empty, silent, the only sound Hal’s pounding heart. No feet came running. Nevertheless, she didn’t put down her phone until she had checked every nook and cranny, from the bathroom, to her wardrobe, right down to the alcove behind the living room door where she kept the hoover.
Then, and only then, did her heart begin to slow, and she shut the front door, drawing the chain and bolt across, and let herself sink down on the sofa to rub her shaking hands over her face.
She could not stay here, that much was obvious.
Hal rarely cried, but as she sat there on the worn old sofa that she had jumped on as a child, in front of the cold gas fire her mother had lit so many afternoons after school, she felt her throat close with unshed tears, and a few self-pitying drops traced down her nose. But then she took a deep breath and scrubbed them away. This wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t help. She had to move on.
But before she did, she needed to find the truth, the answers to the questions she had been asking herself ever since Mr. Treswick’s letter had come through. She was sick of lies and lying. It was time for the truth.
Hal’s stomach was rumbling, so she made herself a piece of toast, and took it through into her bedroom. Then she pulled the box out from under the bed, tipped the contents upside down onto the rug, and began to sift through.
Upended like this, the first pieces of paper were the oldest—expired passports, exam certificates, old letters, photographs—though the dates were jumbled, the contents moved from drawer to drawer too many times to be strictly chronologically ordered. Hal opened an envelope at random, but it was nothing very interesting, just some of her mother’s old bank statements.
Beneath it there was a sheaf of baby photographs—herself, presumably, about six months old, smiling up at an unseen photographer. Another envelope contained the original rent contract for the flat, the ink faded, the staple in the corner beginning to rust. It was dated January 1995, a few months before Hal’s birth. Sixty pounds a week, her mother had agreed. It seemed impossibly low, even back then, and Hal thought she might almost have laughed, had she not been so close to tears.
She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t give way to self-pity. Tomorrow she would make a plan—find somewhere to go—but in the meantime she had to focus on the task at hand. She could not take all this with her, she’d have enough to do with packing her clothes and other essentials. So then—a pile for stuff that could be recycled. And for the stuff that she needed to keep, she could make one pile for personal papers relating to her mother, a pile for the flat, a pile of essentials—passports, birth certificates, anything that she might need to start her new life. And then finally on the bed she would put anything relating to Cornwall and Trepassen House, however tangentially. Perhaps there would be something there, some connection to the Westaways that would give her the foothold she needed to get out of this mess.
The first thing to go on the bed was a postcard. The writing side was blank, but the picture, when she turned it over, made Hal sit up. It featured Penzance. She recognized the harbor. The postcard was divided into four quarters, with Penzance on the bottom left, St. Michael’s Mount on the top right, and two photographs of unidentified headlands that Hal didn’t recognize on the other sections. The link might be a slim one, but it was evidence, however thin.
But what made Hal’s heart really miss a beat were letters—a sheaf of them, tied up with string. They were addressed to Margarida Westaway, at an address in Brighton Hal didn’t recognize, and the postmark was Penzance. Hal peered inside the first one, but there was no return address, and the ink was so faded she had trouble making out the words.
I am sending this to you via Lizzie . . . something Hal couldn’t make out . . . please don’t worry about the deposit—I have a little money left from my parents and beyond that I’ll—oh, God, I don’t know. I’ll tell fortunes on Brighton Pier, or read palms on the seafront. Anything to get away. There were more, several more. But it would take her hours to go through them and decipher the crabbed, faded writing. Resolutely she put them on the bed and carried on sifting.
She was only halfway down the box when she came across something wrapped in an old tea towel. It felt like a book. Hal frowned and picked it up, but the thing unraveled, and into her lap fell—yes, a book. But not a printed book. A diary.
Gently, Hal picked it up and began to leaf through the pages. Great chunks had been ripped out—frayed stubs of paper all that was left of their existence—and the pages that were left were hanging by a thread, unanchored by the loss of their neighbors. The first whole entry was one towards the end of November, but judging by where it came in the book, Hal thought that the diary itself must have been started in October or September, perhaps even earlier. Only fragments of those months remained, though. The rest of the pages—less than half, by Hal’s estimate—were thickly covered with writing, but even there, sections were scrawled over, names erased, whole paragraphs scratched out.
The entries came to an end on December 13, and after that the pages were whole, but blank. Only one single page, right at the end of the diary, had been removed. It was as if the diarist had simply stopped.
Hal leafed slowly back to the beginning, past fragments of text, running her fingers over the thickly scored-out sections. Who had done this? Was it the writer of the diary? Or someone else, scared of what evidence might be found within its pages?
And more to the point, whose diary was it? The writing looked a little like her mother’s—but an immature, unformed version—and there was no name inside the front cover.
At last she came to the first whole section, and began to read.
29th November, 1994, Hal read, frowning to make out the faint, discolored letters, the scrawling hand. The magpies are back. . . .
CHAPTER 29
* * *
It was almost dark when Hal finally looked up from the papers, and she realized, blinking, how the light had faded, so that she had been squinting to make out the letters on the torn and butchered pages.
But at last she knew—she had the answers she had been looking for—or some of them, at least.
The writer of the diary was Hal’s mother. And she was pregnant—with Hal herself. It must be. The dates matched exactly—Hal had been born just five months after the final entry.
But as she walked through to the living room, switching the light on as she went, Hal was thinking back over what she had read. She turned on the kettle, and while it came to the boil she leafed back through the fragile pages until she came to the entry she was looking for, the one dated December 6. And as she reread it, a cold certainty hardened in Hal’s stomach.
Her mother had known who her father was. And not just that, Hal had been conceived there, at Trepassen.
Everything her mother had told her—the story about the Spanish student, the one-night stand—it had all been lies.
In so many ways, the diary explained everything. The mix-up with the names. The reason Mrs. Westaway had never told Mr. Treswick about a black sheep cousin with the same name as her own daughter. She had cut off her niece, a disgrace to the family, and no one had spoken of her again.
But in other ways, it explained nothing.
Why had her mother lied?
And who was her father?
If only, Hal found herself thinking, as she flicked through the torn, disintegrating pages, if only you hadn’t destroyed his name, everything about him. Why?
So often she had heard her mother’s voice inside her head—lecturing, admonishing, encouraging—but now, when she needed her most, her voice was silent.
“Why?” Hal said aloud, hearing the despair in her own voice, the way the single word echoed in the silent flat. “Why? Why did you do it?” It was a cry for help, but there was no answer, only the imperceptible ticking of the clock, and the crackle as her fingers tightened on the diary in her hand.
The symbolism was painfully obvious—if there is an answer, Hal, it’s in your hands. She could almost hear her mother’s voice, a little mocking. And she felt rage flood her, at having the truth dangled in front of her and then snatched away, just as the legacy had shimmered there like a beautiful mirage for a moment before disappearing into nothingness.
But the answer was not there. If it was, it lay in the torn-out sections. Even in the passages that remained, her mother had blacked out names and paragraphs.