The Last Anniversary

‘I thought you’d forgiven me for breaking up with Thomas.’ Sophie softens her voice because Veronika just wants to be her friend, that’s all. She’s not really a vampire. ‘I thought you said it was time to move on.’

Veronika ignores that. ‘I bet you were trying to get your claws into Aunt Connie at my wedding.’

Sophie is outraged. ‘What? I barely spoke to her!’

Connie had been far to busy having a good time, remembers Sophie. Her husband Jimmy had still been alive. They had danced the Charleston: an elderly, white-haired couple who still somehow managed to flutter their fingers and kick in perfect timing, crossing their hands across their knees and giving Sophie a split-second glimpse of the vibrant young couple they had been. Everybody had applauded madly. They were gorgeous.

Veronika switches topics again. ‘Look, you’re just going to upset people by turning up tomorrow. Mum, Grandma Enigma, Aunt Rose–none of them wants you to be there.’

‘Veronika, your Aunt Rose phoned me today to ask if I was coming.’

There is silence, which is so unlike Veronika that Sophie thinks they must have been cut off. ‘Veronika?’

Her voice is strained. ‘I don’t believe you.’

Of course. The worst betrayal for Veronika is when she is left in the dark about something.

And now Sophie is back to feeling guilty because Veronika is right. She isn’t part of their family. She has a handful of memories about Aunt Connie when Veronika has a whole lifetime. It isn’t fair. Sophie has charmed an old lady into leaving her a house. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t deliberate. It’s wrong.

‘I’m sorry, Veronika,’ she says.

Veronika’s voice is full of icy, righteous hurt. ‘I’m sorry I ever met you.’

16

‘Do we tell Sophie the truth about Alice and Jack? Do you think that’s what Connie would have wanted?’

‘Yes, I think so, but not until she’s forty. Just like the others.’

‘How old do you think she is?’

‘I don’t know. They all look about twelve to me.’

17

Did Alice and Jack Munro deliberately abandon their baby, knowing that Connie and Rose would stop by and that their family could give the baby a better start in life than them? Surely not. It was far too boring an explanation, and luckily it didn’t account for the boiling kettle, the marble cake or those satisfyingly mysterious blood stains on the kitchen floor. And why not opt for the simple baby-left-on-doorstep solution?

Did Jack kill Alice in a fit of rage because he hated marble cake, dump the body and leave the baby to die? Or did Alice kill Jack in a fit of rage because he said something derogatory about her marble cake, dump the body and leave the baby to die? Certainly the diary found in the Seventies would suggest something along those lines.

Did the baby kill Alice and Jack?

The last one was ten-year-old Veronika’s suggestion, made on the beach one day to Thomas and Grace, who fell about laughing, imagining the baby (their Grandma Enigma!) leaping out of its cot to strangle Alice and Jack with tiny hands.

It is the day before Aunt Connie’s funeral and Grace is bathing her baby and thinking about the mystery of her great-grandmother Alice Munro.

Grace hates bathing the baby. When he is dressed and wrapped tightly in a rug he is a solid, manageable football. But when he is naked he is all flimsy and breakable, skinny legs all bent up at angles like an uncooked chicken. The fragility of his tiny limbs makes her feel sick. He seems to know how horribly vulnerable he is when he is naked because the moment she starts undressing him he screams and screams, which does something to her brain like the shrieking scrape of nails across a blackboard. When she holds him in the bath, his legs and arms thrash. The possibility of drowning him seems more likely than not; it is as if the point of each bath is to save him. She feels that her nails, although she deliberately keeps them short and filed, will surely tear his purplish paper-thin skin.

Of course, Callum loves bathing Jake. Grace could let him do it every day but she has the feeling that she is on some sort of treacherous journey, and if she stops, even for a moment, then she might never get up again. It is better to just go doggedly on and on.

Grace wonders how Alice Munro had bathed her baby. It had been winter when they vanished, just like now. The island gets very cold. Alice didn’t have hot water or electricity or warm gas heating. No TV to blank out her mind while she was breastfeeding. No CDs to drown out the sounds of a silent house. No refrigerator. No washing machine. No dryer. No gleaming white-goods at all. They had been very short of money, like everyone. ‘You children have no idea,’ Aunt Connie used to say. ‘You think terrible things happened on the battlefields, but terrible things happened in ordinary suburban homes.’ Jack was unemployed. Seventy years later their combined savings of two shillings and sixpence are still sitting in the tin on the shelf above the sink. Guests on the Alice and Jack tour are allowed to peer in the tin as it is rattled under each nose by the tour guide. (‘No need to rattle quite so loudly, Veronika,’ Aunt Connie would say.)

Grace can’t imagine how her great-grandmother coped, although then again, in light of what happened, perhaps she hadn’t. She’d made a marble cake, though. That was indisputable. That indicated coping, didn’t it? Well, of course it didn’t. You can still bake a perfectly good cake while losing your mind. Grace remembers watching Aunt Margie in her kitchen efficiently grating lemon rind for a lemon meringue pie while she cried great wrenching sobs over her father’s cancer diagnosis. Aunt Margie had been closest to Grandpa out of any of them. Who knows what thoughts were going through Alice’s mind while she baked that marble cake. Did she know it was the last cake she’d ever bake?

Grace takes the baby from the bath and lays him on his back on the change table. At least he can’t roll over yet. When he learns to roll over he’ll be in even more danger. He’ll be like a slippery glass ball. Just thinking about it gives her a drilling sensation behind her eyes.

What did Alice think of her new baby girl? Was she besotted with her like a mother should be?

It’s strange really that she’s never thought much about the fact that she is Alice Munro’s great-granddaughter. It had been hard enough for Grace and her cousins to get their heads around the fact that grey-haired Grandma Enigma was the same person as the tiny abandoned baby who had smiled so sweetly at Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose. Alice Munro never seemed particularly real or even that interesting to Grace. It was Veronika who was forever coming up with new and more macabre solutions to the mystery.