The Last Anniversary

47

What if Connie and Rose killed Alice and Jack together? What if they stabbed them, their innocent young-girl faces ravaged with hatred while blood splattered, the marble cake baked and the baby slept? It’s early Saturday morning, the seventy-third Anniversary of Alice and Jack’s disappearance, and Sophie wakes up in Connie’s bed with this thought clear and horrible in her head. Perhaps that is the family secret.

For some reason, instead of feeling happily intrigued by anything to do with the Alice and Jack mystery, today she feels not exactly frightened, but unsettled, a little nervy. For the first time she isn’t thinking of it as a story to enjoy, to puzzle over, but as something that really happened to real flesh-and-blood people, younger than Sophie, who most probably didn’t want to die, thank you very much.

And if Connie and Rose did kill them…well, it wasn’t very nice, was it? They’d made fools of everyone for all this time. They’d also made quite a lot of money out of their cover-up. It has been interesting to see the Alice and Jack business up close. Sophie has come to realise how cleverly they’ve developed the island so that everything looks charmingly comfy–never too slick. Visitors are given the carefully calibrated impression that the Alice and Jack house is a sweet family-run museum only opened as a generous favour to the public so they can share and marvel in this unusual history. Sophie herself had that impression, before she moved here. Now she knows that every possible opportunity to relieve people of their money is ever so sweetly exploited. There’s nothing illegal or even especially underhand about it, of course. It’s just the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s good business. It’s just that if it’s all based on a murder, it’s actually quite evil.

Sophie doesn’t like the way her mind is heading. It’s that same heart-sinking sensation you get a few weeks or months into a new relationship when you discover to your horror that your amazing new lover actually has a fault! Not just a sweet, quirky flaw but a really horrible fault, like the fact that the slow, methodical way he has of checking the bill actually indicates intense stinginess and it’s not adorable at all–how could it ever have been adorable?–it’s bloody ANNOYING. Sophie hates it when that happens.

She throws back her quilt and walks across the floorboards in her flannelette pyjamas to the window to watch the early morning shimmery haze above the river. It looks like a religious painting at this time of the morning. She doesn’t want to fall out of love with the island, with her life, her new family.

But the other night, when she was out with the girls, for the first time she’d caught herself thinking wistfully about how she used to just hop in a cab and be home at her old flat in less than twenty minutes, instead of the long, rattling train trip followed by the boat trip across the water in the frosty moonlight.

Oh, but look at that view. It’s worth some inconvenience.

This is the point in a relationship when you begin the process of carefully deluding yourself.

Tonight she will be selling pink fairy floss dressed up in a pink fairy dress complete with tiara and glittery wings. Apparently there are quite good margins in fairy floss.

Sophie makes tea in Connie’s ceramic teapot. (Enigma saw her making tea with a teabag once and said sadly, ‘Oh, darling, please don’t do that’, as if she’d caught a child picking their nose.)

As she waits for the kettle to boil she finds herself tentatively massaging her stomach. She’s still got that feeling of apprehension she had when she first woke up. But why? Tonight will be fun. Tonight will be great!

Is she nervous about being the Fairy Floss Fairy? For heaven’s sake, no. She’ll love it.

Is she nervous because both the Sweet Solicitor and the Gorgeous Gardener have said they’ll be coming tonight? Not really. She’s only been on one date with each of them. She’s not exactly two-timing them. Besides which, Rick will be working–apparently he does a fire-eating performance–and Ian is just stopping by for a while before he has to go off to some family function. So there shouldn’t be time for any awkwardness. Also, in her mind she tends to sort of amalgamate Ian and Rick into the one sweet, gorgeous gardener/solicitor. She’s not nervous about them. They’re both lovely.

No, it’s something to do with that picture in her head of Connie and Rose wielding knives. And it’s something to do with Callum. And Grace. And how much she wanted to kiss Callum in the bathroom the other night and the expression on Grace’s face when they came back into the living room, as if she knew exactly how much.

Rose is dreaming that a slimy, silver, flapping fish is trying to hug her. She wakes up with her arms wrapped around an icy-cold flaccid hot-water bottle and cries out in disgust and shoves it away from her. You horrible, vile thing!

For a few seconds she lies there trembling with disgust, and then finally she forces herself to smile. Only a dream.

She rolls over–oh, how everything aches first thing in the morning. Nobody knows what an effort of will it requires for Rose to just get out of bed each day. She has to give herself a pep talk. ‘Come on. You can do it. One leg. Second leg. That’s it!’ There should be a daily award ceremony. Congratulations on your achievement, Rose Doughty, you overcame terrible pain and got out of bed. Hooray!

Still, there’s no need to get up just yet; she’s not going swimming this morning. There always comes a point in winter where one day the water just gets so laughably icy that it’s time to stop until spring. Sophie had clasped her hands together in prayer and said ‘Thank you, God’ when Rose had told her there would be no more swimming.

It’s the Anniversary, again. It is astounding to believe that there are seventy-three years between this day and that day. Year after year after year. She can remember it clearer than things that happened much later. What did she do in the Seventies, for example? Nothing much that Rose could recall. That whole decade seemed to have taken about a week to live through. She remembered she’d liked the fashions. Colourful. And the children had been such a pleasure. Thomas used to sit on her lap for hours, sucking his thumb. Veronika, trotting around behind her, asking question after question after question. And Grace, painting in companionable silence beside her. Sometimes Rose would reach over and take her little paint-spattered hand and kiss her knuckles. Grace was never one for cuddles.

The way Rose had felt about those three was somehow different from the exasperated affection she had for their mothers, Margie and Laura, those golden-haired Misses with their big blue eyes and sticky, greedy rosebud mouths, who were both in love with their daddy anyway. And it was different again from what she’d felt for their grandmother. Rose’s love for Enigma had always been interlaced with fear: What if we do something wrong? What if they take her away? What if they find out? But with Thomas, Veronika and Grace it had just been unadulterated, besotted love. Sometimes she was filled with such love for them it felt almost mystical, almost sexual, almost enough to make it seem the point of…everything.