‘Yes, I’m telling you exactly that.’ I’m thirty-two, I’m not asking for your permission, Marnie added to herself before continuing. ‘Look, I know what you’re thinking but I’m a big girl now and I—’
‘HUH.’ Judith’s single hard note of acerbic laughter held a library’s-worth of words.
Marnie sighed. She wouldn’t get through to her mother. She never had and probably never would. She might not have needed her permission but, however much she tried not to, she really, really would have liked her approval. If this had been Gabrielle, she might have been praised for her derring-do and enterprise (despite embarking on a sinful relationship with sugar and fats), but this was Marnie and the old adage of blood being thicker than water always held true in the Salt family.
‘Well, it’s your own life, I suppose,’ supposed Judith Salt yet again. ‘Yours to make a hash of if that’s what you want to do. As you say, you’re a very big girl now.’
Marnie wanted to point out that the ‘very’ hadn’t been there when she said it. But she knew that was another sly dig. A size fourteen wasn’t big, but it was when you came from a family of willowy saplings. Her BMI wasn’t pulsing out danger lights, she was healthy, could put her socks on without turning a dark shade of aubergine and went in and out in all the right places. She certainly looked healthier than her mother did at the moment: pale and brittle, more so than usual.
Her mother was talking under her breath now, quiet words that weren’t meant to be overheard, apart from one that was: disappointment.
Tears rushed to Marnie’s eyes. Despite all those years of hearing that word levelled at her, she had never quite hardened herself to it. It hit the bullseye of her heart every time. And though she had always swallowed it in the past, this time she couldn’t.
‘Yes, Mum, I know I am,’ she said, struggling to keep the wobble out of her voice. ‘You’ve always made that perfectly clear.’
‘Can you blame me? After all the trouble you’ve caused.’ Judith Salt flew back at her sharply, eyes narrowed and glittering with anger.
‘All the trouble I . . .’
But Judith hadn’t finished.
‘I wonder about your sanity sometimes, Marnie. I really do.’
‘What?’ That was one she hadn’t heard before and made her mouth curve with disbelief, a smile with no humour in it that further infuriated Judith.
‘Yes, you would find it funny. Who throws away a career to go and make . . . buns?’
‘I’m not exact—’
But Judith was on a rant now.
‘You were awkward from the off. You wouldn’t sleep, such high maintenance.’ She shook her head disapprovingly. It took Marnie a few seconds to realise her mother was talking about her as a baby.
‘You mean when you adopted me? When I was one?’
‘You were manipulative even at that age.’
Marnie did laugh then. A high-pitched bark of incredulity.
‘I was one year old, Mum.’
Marnie thought there was nothing new left to hear from her mother but she was wrong. The word cheesecake had taken the stopper off a bottle and it wouldn’t go back in. Things that Judith Salt had been holding back for years started frothing up inside her.
‘He would never have left me if it wasn’t for you. I thought you’d glue us back together, but you didn’t you drove us apart.’
‘I drove . . . ? Glue? What do you mean?’
‘They told me I couldn’t have children. He agreed to adopt, to save us, but he couldn’t take to you. He wanted his own child. He wanted a son. When he found out I was carrying another daughter, he left. Don’t you see?’
Marnie swallowed. Dad. The father that wasn’t really hers and that she couldn’t even remember. The one who had to pay maintenance for her and had resented every penny of it.
‘I see that he was a real catch.’
Judith screamed at her. ‘She was our little miracle. She would have kept us together. He would have loved her if you hadn’t put him off having a daughter.’
Marnie got it now. Gabrielle. All hopes and dreams had been transferred to her sister. All the sins of the father heaped on the adopted daughter. The cuckoo in the nest.
‘Is that what you really think, Mum?’ Mum. The word didn’t fit properly in her mouth. It never had.
‘And I was right,’ screamed Judith. ‘You spoiled everything. You tried to alienate my family from me. We had the perfect school . . .’
Marnie felt the heat of discomfort flare in her stomach. ‘I have to go.’ She couldn’t have that conversation. Not again.
‘You destroyed us. Gabrielle would have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, her teachers said so . . .’
‘Goodbye, Mum. My mobile number is the same if you need anything.’
She opened the door and Judith’s voice followed her out, at a pitch that Marnie had never heard before.
‘I don’t need anything from you. Don’t ring me. And stay away from my daught—’
Marnie shut the door behind her, slicing off her mother’s words. She didn’t even realise she was crying until she felt the itch of tears on her cheek.
Marnie walked away from her mother’s house. She had never thought of it as home; even when she was a little girl it had always felt as if there was a plastic layer over everything that stopped her being part of the Salt family. She might have had their name, but she’d never been one of them.
She was running away because she’d been a disappointment to herself. Possibly even more than she was to her mother. And that really was saying something.
She opened the birthday card in the car. It wasn’t a daughter one with a gushy verse about how special she was, but a generic one with a drawing of a woman in a stylish hat and an impossible figure. Inside was blank except for one word, ‘Mum’, and a cross that followed it, so tiny it looked as if it had been written under duress.
Marnie threw the card on the passenger seat and drove on.
HISTORY OF WYCHWELL BY LIONEL TEMPLE
with contributions by Lilian Dearman.
There have been a few sightings of ghosts in the manor at Wychwell, none substantiated, except for one relatively new entity which has been spotted on a few occasions in the long upstairs gallery, as seen from outside. The ghost takes the shape of an orb of light which travels slowly from one side to the other. Due to the chemical compounds used to make the window glass, the orb appears in a pinkish-purple hue. As such, the ‘ghost’ has acquired the nickname ‘The Pink Lady’.
Chapter 14
There was a small welcoming committee when Marnie reached Little Raspberries: Lilian and a buxom lady with a tight greying hair bun and the fresh round face of a dairy maid. Lilian was sitting on the low wall in the sunshine, the other woman was cleaning the outside of the window. Lilian’s face was lit up with a broad smile and her arms were open wide to greet her. Marnie couldn’t ever remember anyone else being that happy to see her.
‘How wonderful you are here,’ she said, throwing her arms around Marnie. ‘Cilla, come and meet Marnie.’
Marnie recognised the name: Lilian’s housekeeper. Cilla wiped her hands on her apron before bouncing over to shake Marnie’s hand with the reverence of someone meeting the Duchess of Cambridge.