If Only I Could Tell You Read online

  Dedication

  For Aurelia:

  from whom I promise never to keep secrets

  Epigraph

  Never to bid good-bye,

  Or lip me the softest call,

  Or utter a wish for a word, while I

  Saw morning harden upon the wall,

  Unmoved, unknowing

  That your great going

  Had place that moment, and altered all.

  Thomas Hardy, “The Going”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: June 23, 1988

  Part One: February 2016

  Chapter 1: Audrey

  Chapter 2: Jess

  Chapter 3: Lily

  Chapter 4: Audrey

  Part Two: March

  Chapter 5: Audrey

  Chapter 6: Lily

  Chapter 7: May 2009

  Chapter 8: Jess

  Chapter 9: October 1987

  Chapter 10: Jess

  Chapter 11: Audrey

  Part Three: April

  Chapter 12: Audrey

  Chapter 13: April 1972

  Chapter 14: Lily

  Chapter 15: Jess

  Chapter 16: September 1988

  Chapter 17: Audrey

  Chapter 18: July 2003

  Chapter 19: Audrey

  Part Four: May

  Chapter 20: Audrey

  Chapter 21: Audrey

  Chapter 22: Audrey

  Chapter 23: Lily

  Chapter 24: Christmas Day 1988

  Chapter 25: Audrey

  Chapter 26: Jess

  Chapter 27: Audrey

  Chapter 28: Lily

  Chapter 29: Jess

  Chapter 30: Lily

  Chapter 31: Audrey

  Chapter 32: Jess

  Chapter 33: Audrey

  Chapter 34: June 1988

  Part Five: June

  Chapter 35: Audrey

  Chapter 36: Lily

  Chapter 37: Audrey

  Chapter 38: Audrey

  Chapter 39: Jess

  Chapter 40: Lily

  Chapter 41: Audrey

  Chapter 42: Jess

  Chapter 43: Lily

  Chapter 44: Audrey

  Chapter 45: Jess

  Chapter 46: June 1988

  Chapter 47: Jess

  Part Six: July

  Chapter 48: Jess

  Chapter 49: Lily

  Chapter 50: Audrey

  Chapter 51: Lily

  Chapter 52: Audrey

  Chapter 53: Lily

  Chapter 54: Audrey

  Chapter 55: Jess

  Chapter 56: Audrey

  Chapter 57: June 22, 1988

  Chapter 58: Audrey

  Chapter 59: Lily

  Chapter 60: June 23, 1988

  Chapter 61: Jess

  Chapter 62: Audrey

  Chapter 63: Jess

  Chapter 64: Lily

  Chapter 65: Jess

  Chapter 66: Audrey

  Part Seven: November

  Chapter 67: Jess

  Chapter 68: Lily

  Chapter 69: Audrey

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  June 23, 1988

  It is a Thursday morning and Jess is walking up the stairs even though she has no need; she has already brushed her teeth and pulled her hair into some semblance of a ponytail. Her schoolbag is leaning against the umbrella stand by the front door and, in a few minutes, she and Lily will meet in the hallway and begin making their way to school.

  Later—many years later—Jess will speculate that somehow she knew, somehow she sensed what was happening: an inexplicable sisterly intuition compelling her to investigate.

  As she reaches the top of the stairs, Lily is coming out of the spare bedroom. Her back is turned to Jess and she closes the door quietly, reverentially almost, her hands clasped around the handle. Jess watches her take in a long, deep breath that she seems to hold in her chest for an impossible length of time before letting it out slowly, steadily.

  “What are you doing?”

  Lily jumps around, her face flushed, eyes darting from left to right. “Why are you creeping up on me like that?” she hisses at Jess in an angry whisper that does not sound like her usual voice.

  “We’re not supposed to go in there this morning. We were told not to.”

  Jess hears plaintiveness in her own voice, bordering on a whine, and she winces at the sound of it.

  “Do not tell Mum I was in there. I mean it, Jess. You don’t want to be a telltale.”

  Lily’s voice is quiet but firm, and there is a look in her eyes that Jess recognizes from all the times she has caught Lily using the telephone when their mum has told her not to, or the afternoons she has seen Lily smoking with her friends behind the children’s playground in the park.

  There is a moment of uncertainty, neither of them knowing what Jess’s next move will be. Until her left foot joins her right on the top stair, Jess isn’t sure what she’s going to do next, either.

  “I want to go in too.”

  The two sisters glare at one another and Jess feels something pass between them: something unknowable yet frightening that she can’t, or daren’t, articulate.

  “You are not to go in there, Jess. Do you hear me?”

  Lily’s body blocks the door, her arm stretched behind her as if in the process of being arrested. Around the corner of Lily’s body, Jess can see her sister’s hand gripping the handle, a final barrier should Jess get that far.

  “But I want to. If you’ve been in there, why shouldn’t I?” Jess edges along the landing, emboldened by what she senses to be Lily’s fragile hold over the situation.

  “Stop it. I mean it, Jess. You must not go in.”

  The expression on Lily’s face sends a cold draft tiptoeing along Jess’s spine: her sister’s flushed cheeks, narrowed eyes, pinched eyebrows. The panic trying to disguise itself as authority. It is unclear whether Lily is about to defend herself or launch an attack.

  Fragments of memory play in Jess’s head like conversational earworms: things she has heard that she knows she shouldn’t. All those murmured conversations behind closed doors, confessions whispered into telephones when the speaker thought no one was listening.

  Jess’s stomach somersaults beneath the elasticized waistband of her bottle-green skirt. She feels the blood pulsing at her wrists as if her body is urging her into action. She imagines taking a step forward and pushing Lily aside, a struggle in which she manages—against Lily’s advanced years and superior strength—to emerge victorious. But thoughts of what might happen afterward—what she might see and what she might learn—cement her feet to the floor.

  The alarm on Lily’s digital watch beeps. Lily jerks her hand to turn it off and Jess feels herself flinch. She knows it is Lily’s 8:30 a.m. alarm, the one her sister has set to ensure they leave for school on time now that their parents are too distracted to remind them. Lily holds Jess’s gaze for a few seconds more until Jess is the first to turn her head away. Jess begins to make her way down the stairs, and only then does she realize that her legs are trembling. She hears Lily’s footsteps close on her heels but does not turn around. She cannot bear to see that look on Lily’s face again: a look that has told Jess something she does not want to know.

  All the way down, Jess contemplates finding her mum, telling her where Lily has been, what she thinks has taken place inside that bedroom. But by the time she reaches the bottom stair, Jess knows she cannot. To tell her mum would be to voice suspicions Jess is not yet ready to a
ssert, things she does not, at the age of ten, have the courage to say out loud.

  Instead, she picks up her schoolbag and exits the front door, unsure whether it is the summer heat or Lily’s breath she can feel prickling the skin on the back of her neck. She does not yet know it, but by the time she gets home this afternoon, the fabric of her family will have been altered irrevocably, and the morning’s events will repeat in her mind like a record stuck under the groove of a needle for the next thirty years.

  Part One

  February 2016

  Chapter 1

  Audrey

  Audrey Siskin sat on the bed, palms flat beside her on the duvet, arms locked, as if unsure whether she was coming or going, and cast her eyes around the room she was being encouraged to think of as her own. Familiar objects stood forlornly and ill at ease, like children in a classroom on the first day of school. There was the wrought-iron double bedstead that had served all the years of her marriage and beyond; the white-painted dressing table she’d dreamed of as a child but hadn’t been able to afford until adulthood; the tall oak wardrobe she and Edward had bought when they’d first moved into the house in Barnsbury Square, newly married and five months pregnant.

  Leaning forward, Audrey ripped at the packing tape on one of the two dozen cardboard boxes stacked up around the room but couldn’t bring herself to flip open the lid. Once she’d unpacked, that was it: there was no going back.

  It’s not far, Mum. Only a few miles. Things won’t be that different at all.

  Both her daughters had said it, separately but equally persuasively. And technically—geographically—both Lily and Jess were right. It was barely seven miles, less as the crow flew. A simple exchange of north London for west. Islington for Shepherd’s Bush. Georgian for Victorian. And yet to Audrey it felt as though she’d swapped the Earth for the moon.

  She knew how lucky she was, having two daughters vying for her to move in with them, knew that it was better to make the move now rather than in a year’s time when she would likely find it even more difficult. But Audrey still couldn’t help feeling that it was all wrong. Children shouldn’t become responsible for their parents: it upset the natural order of things. But then, Audrey thought, images spooling through her mind of all the events she’d forget if forgetting were an option, so many episodes in her life had upset the natural order. So many of the defining moments—births, deaths, marriages—were not how they should have been had the world spun faithfully on its axis without ever tilting a few degrees out of kilter.

  “Granny, how are you getting on? Do you need a hand with anything?”

  Mia’s voice drifted up the stairs and into the bedroom which had, until today, been hers. She would now be sleeping in the small bedroom on the top floor that had once been the attic. There was concern in her granddaughter’s voice that had tried to reshape itself into something approaching normality.

  “No thanks, darling. I’m just going to make a start on these boxes. I’ll be down soon.” Audrey pushed herself to her feet, the mattress springs creaking in sympathy. Looking around her new bedroom, she didn’t know quite where to start. She’d organized the move in such a daze that she wasn’t sure what she’d thrown out and what she’d kept or what she might find.

  Ripping the tape off another cardboard box and pulling back the lid, she was greeted by a pile of carefully wrapped objects, neatly stacked. Unwrapping the first, she found a framed photograph, the color slightly faded. As she stared at the picture she was aware of the sands of time slipping back through the hourglass.

  Her girls on a beach—Woolacombe Bay, was it?—running along the shore, their arms and legs out of focus where their limbs had swept too swiftly across the frame for the shutter speed to capture them. The sun high in a cloudless sky, indigo sea greeting the horizon, the small white triangle of a boat’s sail visible in the distance. Her girls: holding hands, laughing, a shaft of light flaring across the frame to bathe them in an ethereal glow.

  Audrey ran her fingers across the glass, over plaited hair, tanned limbs, and sun-kissed cheeks, and could almost feel the heat of that summer’s day. She could hear the sound of her daughters’ laughter, the waves undulating against the sand, the gulls calling across the sky. She could smell the salt on the breeze, feel the sand between her toes, taste her daughters’ joy. She longed to stretch her arms into the photograph, wrap them around her children’s shoulders, pull them close and never let them go.

  Audrey gripped the photograph, her heart twisting beneath her ribs.

  Sometimes, nowadays, only photographs reassured her that she hadn’t made it all up, that it wasn’t just a fantasy. That once upon a time her daughters had been friends.

  She breathed slowly as she thought about all the years that had been lost. Even now it still seemed unreal to her that it had been almost three decades since Jess had turned against Lily. Audrey could picture Jess now, at ten years old, face hardened almost overnight by things no child should ever have to experience, as if those events had stolen Audrey’s little girl and replaced her with a child she barely recognized. For months afterward, Audrey had hoped it was shock that had changed Jess’s behavior, that soon she would revert to the happy little girl she had been before. She had spent years clinging to the belief that the events of their childhood would eventually bring Lily and Jess back together. Instead, they had torn Audrey’s family apart.

  Audrey’s pulse quickened as she thought about all those family meals eaten in silence: Audrey, Lily, and Jess at a kitchen table too big for just the three of them, Audrey keeping her voice bright as she asked the girls about school, trying hard not to react to Jess’s monosyllabic responses. She could picture her hand, knocking on Jess’s bedroom door, asking if she wanted to come and watch TV, and hearing the same flat reply, night after night: No, I just want to be on my own. Audrey had asked herself repeatedly over the years what she might have missed and whether she could have done anything differently to change the course of her daughters’ relationship. So many times since Jess had left home and cut Lily out of her life completely, Audrey had begged Jess to tell her the reason, but Jess had refused to confide in her. Now Audrey had two daughters who never spoke and two seventeen-year-old granddaughters, born just six weeks apart, who were not permitted to meet.

  Her nails dug into her palms as she remembered the last time she had tried—and failed—to reconcile her family.

  “Granny, is everything OK? Do you want me to come and help?”

  “Thanks, darling, but I’m fine. I’m just pottering.”

  Fine. Audrey didn’t know why she used a word they all knew to be so far from the truth.

  Looking into the dressing table mirror there was no sign, nothing to give her away. Only the most modest lines around her eyes. Her hair, salon-dried yesterday, was artificially brown but still kicked up playfully from where it rested on her shoulders. Her makeup was faultless, applied that morning before she’d even got dressed.

  People often told her they couldn’t believe she was sixty-two. You look at least a decade younger, they’d exclaim and foolishly she’d allowed herself to believe there was some significance in it, that an outward appearance of well-being automatically filtered through to the inside. As though a perfectly appetizing apple couldn’t be rotten when you bit into it.

  It was only if you looked a little closer, as Audrey did now, that you might have detected the palest purple hue forming half-moons under her eyes, or the frequency with which the muscles across her forehead pulled into a frown. It was only watching her closely that you might have observed the shortness of breath, the small half-gasps as if some air had got left behind and was trying to catch up. But there was nothing really on her face to inform a casual observer that, inside her, cells were dividing and multiplying with unremitting speed. There was nothing to betray the truth that she was, in fact, dying.

  Audrey turned away from the mirror and bent down toward the box at her feet. As she reached inside, a sharp pain sliced through t
he right half of her abdomen, causing her to ease herself back onto the bed. As she breathed slowly against the pain, Audrey understood why Jess had been so keen for her to move in sooner rather than later. Audrey had wanted to wait, to hold on to her house and her independence for as long as she could. She had hoped to live at home until her body made it clear that it could no longer cope. Now she felt grateful for Jess’s counsel, grateful that she had sold the house and her furniture, keeping only the essentials—both practical and sentimental—before her health deteriorated even further. Sitting on the bed, willing the pain away, she realized that had she waited she might not have been able to organize the move herself, might have imposed an even greater burden on her daughters.

  Pulling another framed photograph free of its wrapping, she was greeted by Edward and his parents staring back at her. In the center of the photograph, Lily lay swaddled in Edward’s arms, his parents standing stiffly on either side of them in front of a Christmas tree. Turning over the frame, she found her handwriting scrawled across the back: Barnsbury Square, Christmas 1972. Her and Edward’s first Christmas as a married couple, their first as parents, their first in their own home.

  As her eyes roamed from one person to the next she searched, as she had so many times over the years, for any hint in those time-frozen expressions of what was to come. But all Audrey could see was her father-in-law’s rigid social etiquette, her mother-in-law’s sour grimace, and Edward’s joy in the six-week bundle of perfection he held.

  Looking at the photograph, Audrey wondered how Edward’s parents would have coped with what happened sixteen years after that picture had been taken. The year her and Edward’s lives had changed irreparably, the ground rupturing beneath them, sucking them deep into a sinkhole from which they would never truly emerge. She wondered how his parents would have borne the grief, the anger and the shame, how it had been a blessing, really, that neither of them had lived long enough to witness it. Sometimes Audrey envied them their ignorance, envied them being spared the guilt, the confusion, and the litany of unanswered questions that had plagued her all these years.