Twenty minutes later, Zannah and I are sitting in the Tillotsons’ long, narrow, bay-windowed lounge. The four of us are drinking tea from blue and white pottery mugs. I was in the car, ready to give up and drive back home, when Flora’s father tapped on the window and inclined his head to indicate that I should come back to the house. Since he had seen Zannah, I decided it would be strange if I didn’t bring her in with me.
‘I’d better tell you, and I hope you don’t take it personally, that your visit comes as rather a shock to us,’ he says now. ‘Foolishly, selfishly, quite reprehensibly, I decided that my wife would be better able to cope with the shock and to deal with you than I would be myself.’
Rosemary Tillotson hasn’t said a word to me since she had her crying fit. She’s sitting by her husband’s side on the sofa, red-eyed and mute. He has apologised four times so far for her distress, and I’ve apologised for causing it.
Something is very wrong here, and I wish I knew what it was – whether it’s the same something-wrong as at Newnham House. Are Gerard and Rosemary Tillotson, at this moment, gearing up to lie to me as thoroughly as Kevin Cater and Fake Jeanette did?
So far, I’ve seen this lounge, the hall and bottom of the stairs, the loo under the stairs and the kitchen. That’s the entire ground floor of the house. There are no photographs of Flora, Lewis or their children anywhere to be seen. Unusual for grandparents. My mum has photos of Zannah and Ben at every age plastered all over her house.
‘Perhaps you could tell us why you’re here?’ Gerard Tillotson asks.
I’d intended to tell them the whole story. That was before I knew that a visit from their daughter’s former best friend would prove so traumatic for them. With Rosemary’s blotchy face in front of me, I can’t bring myself to say that I saw two of her grandchildren last Saturday and they didn’t seem to have aged in twelve years. Before I reveal too much, I need to know why my turning up has made the Tillotsons so distraught.
‘I wouldn’t have come if I’d known it’d upset you,’ I say. ‘It’s just that … when Flora and Lewis moved to Florida, they sold their house in Hemingford Abbots to a family called the Caters. I happened to drive past the house the other day, on my way to take my son to his football match, and I saw … well, I thought I saw Flora there, outside the house. And then I saw her again in Huntingdon and … the way she behaved made me worry that something was really wrong. I spoke to her briefly on the phone, and to Lewis, and they both said she wasn’t in England. According to them, she’s in Florida – which makes sense, because that’s where they live now, but I know what I saw and I can’t think—’
‘Do they?’ says Gerard. There’s a sharp edge to his voice. ‘Does Flora live in America?’
‘Are you saying she doesn’t? Have she and Lewis split up? Is he in Florida, but she’s still in England?’
Zannah coughs and fires a harsh look in my direction. She thinks I need to shut up and give the Tillotsons a chance to answer.
Gerard takes a sip of his tea. He looks at Rosemary, who doesn’t notice. She seems unaware of her surroundings and of the conversation.
‘We’ve had no contact with Flora since May 2007,’ he says. ‘Nor with Lewis or the children. We know nothing about a move to Florida, I’m afraid, nor about the condition of our daughter’s marriage.’
My head and heart start to spin. How can that be true? Flora was closer to her parents than anyone I’ve ever known. At university, she would ring them every night to say goodnight and tell them she loved them. She kept this up even after she married Lewis. He used to tease her about it.
‘We don’t Google, and we don’t enquire,’ says her father. ‘No doubt Lewis is taking the world by storm in one way or another – he always was destined for great things – but we prefer not to know anything about it. It would be too painful for us to have to contend with regular snippets of information. All our friends and acquaintances know that, if they happen to hear anything, we don’t wish to be informed.’
‘Did you say May 2007?’ I ask.
‘That’s right,’ says Gerard. ‘Lewis and Flora sat where you and your daughter are sitting now, and Lewis explained that we wouldn’t be seeing or hearing from them, or from our grandchildren, again. He meant it, too. Oh, we were in no doubt that he meant it.’
My instincts are telling me that I need to get out of here and away, fast, so that I can think this through. I force myself to stay seated. Until last Saturday, the last time I saw Flora was in February 2007. Shortly before that, in December 2006, I felt betrayed by her for the first time in our long friendship. But what if …?
I push the thought from my mind. If I get caught up in thinking it through now, I won’t be able to concentrate on the Tillotsons.
‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean … I understand why you don’t want to hear any news and how upsetting that would be, but why aren’t you in touch with Flora? The Flora I knew—’
‘Might as well have died,’ says Rosemary Tillotson suddenly. ‘Afterwards, she wasn’t the same person. She wasn’t our lovely, happy daughter. She was a stranger.’
‘Afterwards?’
Rosemary nods.
‘She means after Georgina died,’ says Gerard.
Oh, God, please, no. No, no, no. The room spins around me. For a few seconds, I can’t breathe. All the air is stopped solid in my lungs.
‘Mum, are you okay?’ Zannah asks.
‘Georgina died?’ I say, once I’m able to speak. ‘How? When?’
‘April the twenty-seventh, 2007. She was six months old. She just … stopped breathing.’
‘Cot death?’ I say.
‘Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, I believe they call it. Georgina wasn’t the strongest baby to begin with. There were various complications. She was born six weeks premature, and there was something wrong with her right eye. She would have needed surgery to correct it at some point, or perhaps an eye-patch would have done the trick. She wasn’t as robust as both Thomas and Emily were as babies.’
‘Flora didn’t …’ Of course she didn’t tell you, idiot. She didn’t tell you any of it. Don’t you remember the sequence of events?
‘She stopped being Flora,’ says Rosemary. ‘The old Flora – the real Flora – would never have cut us off. Never. We’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all.’
‘Which of course is what parents who deserve to be ostracised would say,’ her husband adds. ‘But we didn’t deserve it. Not a bit.’
Then why? Why did it happen?
I can’t bring myself to ask them if, before she died, Georgina’s nickname was Chimpy. It probably makes no sense that I still have the urge to ask this question. If Georgina is dead, how could Flora have been talking to her on the phone last Saturday?
‘Would you like a hanky or a tissue?’ Rosemary asks me.
‘No, thank you.’ I sniff and wipe my eyes quickly with the back of my hand.
She says, ‘When Flora and Lewis told us that Georgina had died, I looked at Flora and I knew straight away: she was gone. As gone as Georgina was. Somebody else was there instead. A different woman.’