Chapter 15

15

SEAGLASS

1980

The face of my nine-year-old sister fills the screen. It appears to be Lily’s turn to be the star of the family home movie. Some people are born to be the stars of their own show, and she was never interested in learning life’s lines unless they were from her own script. Other people are viewed as little more than extras in Lily’s rather narrow field of vision. If you don’t have a scene in her story, you don’t exist in her world.

Our summers at Seaglass were always my favorite time of year as a young child. As soon as school was over for my sisters, my mother would load up the car with suitcases, food, wine, and us; then we’d make the journey from London to Cornwall and escape the city for six weeks. Inevitably we would always time it wrong, arriving when the tide was in so we couldn’t cross the causeway, but that didn’t matter. As soon as I could see the old house, with its turquoise turrets, it always felt like I was home. We would play on the thin strip of remaining black sand while we waited for the sea to retreat. Sometimes having to wait for something just makes you want it more.

Nana was always so happy to see us. She would cross the sandy causeway as soon as it was safe to do so, always with the rusty old wheelbarrow in front of her and a dog close behind. I remember a black Labrador called Bob before Poppins came along. Nana would hug and kiss us all, then load our bags onto the wheelbarrow, to make it easier to transport everything to the house. It took a few trips back and forth, and we’d take it in turns to ride on top. Our bedrooms were always as we’d left them, but with clean sheets, fresh flowers, and a chocolate coin beneath the pillow of each bed. Nana always knew how to make us feel welcome and loved when we were children.

Dad was rarely there, even before the divorce. My father would normally join us for at least a couple of weeks, but I don’t remember him being there at all during the summer of 1980, until after it happened. Which makes me wonder if my parents’ marriage was already in trouble, way back then. It was also around that time that our mother insisted we call her Nancy—she said that to keep calling her anything else made her feel old.

The room is completely quiet as the video begins. Nine-year-old Lily is standing in the hallway full of clocks at Seaglass … There are still spaces on the wall for the extra twenty or so clocks Nana has collected since. I remember this as Lily’s Fame phase. I think we all do, and Nancy smiles in the present when her favorite daughter smiles in the past. Lily takes a few steps back from the camera to reveal a 1980s outfit that these days would be mistaken for dress-up. The neon-pink T-shirt, purple leggings, tutu, headband, and pink leg warmers bring it all back. I notice the others smiling as the child on the screen dances to the music and sings along, knowing every word of the Fame theme tune. Her endless singing about living forever seems to bother me the most, along with the other word she repeats a few seconds later, staring straight at the camera.

“Remember. Remember. Remember. Remember.”

I do remember that summer at Seaglass. I wish that I didn’t.

If you were to walk into Nana’s house, there are three doors on the left of the hallway, two at the end, and one on the right. On the left you’d find a lounge, then a small library, then the music room. At the far end of the clock-filled hall is a door to the enormous kitchen, and a door to a tiny bathroom. An elaborate staircase is on the right of the hallway, but just before that, there is one other door. Which was almost always locked. Nana’s studio, or “the West Wing,” as she sometimes liked to call it, was very much out of bounds when my sisters came to stay. It runs the full length of the house, with a door at each end, and is where she liked to write and illustrate her children’s books. These days, there are giant framed book covers on the walls, including Daisy Darker’s Little Secret and some of Nana’s other favorites: Suzy Smith’s Best Birthday, Danny Delaney’s Lost Dog, Poppy Patel’s First Fib, and Charlie Cho’s Worst Weekend. But back in 1980, Nana was still illustrating other people’s books and had yet to write one of her own.

Inside the studio, there were three large desks permanently covered in sketch books and drawings, four windows letting in lots of light, endless rows of different watercolor paints, pots full of ink, pens, pencils and brushes, and enormous drawers filled with different colored paper. There were shelves crammed full of all sorts of paraphernalia that Nana once described as “a few of my favorite things,” and there was a huge easel with a white sheet over the top on the day this home movie was filmed. The sheet was hiding Nana’s latest work in progress—she didn’t like anyone to see her work until it was finished. A newspaper once described Nana as the female Quentin Blake. She was furious, and said that they should have called him the male Beatrice Darker.

Nana’s studio was the only room at Seaglass where my sisters were not allowed to look at anything, touch anything, or even venture inside. I was allowed, when it was just Nana and I, and so was Conor, but she never trusted my sisters. Even back then. They both knew and understood the rules, but Lily was never very good at following them. When she got a pair of roller skates for her birthday, all she wanted to do was skate around the house. With all the internal doors open, it was possible to skate from the hall, to the lounge, through to the library, then the music room, the kitchen, and Nana’s studio in a giant loop, and there was nothing Rose or I could say to persuade her that this was a very bad idea.

As soon as Nana had left that morning to cycle into town for supplies, Lily put on her skates. She insisted that Rose time her skating laps and film her doing them. It was my job to watch the causeway from my bedroom window upstairs and warn my sisters when Nana returned. Which I fully intended to do. But the sky was extremely blue that day, and the clouds drifting across it made very interesting shapes.

I spotted a cloud pony and a cloud castle, both of which were distracting for a four-year-old with a big imagination. I’d been taught to name a few clouds by Rose, the walking, talking encyclopedia of the family. There is nothing more calming than a good fluffy white cumulus in a bright blue sky, or the birdlike beauty of cirrus clouds made from tiny ice crystals, or a sky full of thick stratocumulus, because in real life we all contain shades of light and dark. There are as many different kinds of clouds as there are different kinds of people and, like people, they all float and drift as they please, being one thing one minute, transforming into something quite different the next. Unrecognizable in the blink of an eye. The circle of life exists in every aspect of nature, and we all just play our part for as long as the universe decides.

The home movie begins with Rose filming from the hallway as Lily shoots past, skating through every room and singing the Fame theme tune at the same time.

“Is this my best side?” Lily asked, whooshing by.

“They’re both as bad as each other,” ten-year-old Rose replied from behind the camera, and I imagine her smiling to herself.

The video is surprisingly good. Then the star of the show got a little more ambitious and decided to film herself while skating and singing. Sometimes she aimed the camera down at her feet, and I could see the red-and-white roller skates I remember so well zooming across the wooden floors. It took her forever to lace up those skates, and Lily was almost as tall as Rose when wearing them. Perhaps that was another reason why she loved them.

The music was so loud that neither of my sisters heard Nana return. The home movie shows Lily’s point of view as she is filming and skating into one end of the studio. The camerawork wobbles when she spotted Nana standing at the other end of the room, with her arms and face folded into cross shapes. Then Lily collided with an enormous easel, sending a giant painting crashing to the floor. The film ends on a sideways, ground-level shot, showing puddles of red and blue paint.

Nana marched over and peered down at my sister where she had fallen.

“Lily Darker, you have a lot to learn. If you must always break the rules in life, you need to understand how to do so without getting caught. ‘Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.’”

“What?” Lily said, rubbing a bruised knee.

“Pardon, not what. It’s Shakespeare.” Nana may as well have said it was Swahili. “Look, Lily, I admire your spirit and your ambition to always get your own way in life, but I fear others might find your personality tiresome and petulant when you are older. If you want to be bad and get away with it, you need to be better at pretending to be good. Like the innocent flower they all wish you were. Understand?”

Upstairs, I had just spotted a cloud dragon in the sky outside my bedroom window, and when Lily appeared in the doorway, red-faced and with flaring nostrils, she looked a lot like a dragon and nothing like an innocent flower.

“You were supposed to be on lookout,” she hissed. “Why must you be such a baby, and when are you going to grow up?”

I reached inside myself for a suitable response but, despite a frantic search, could not find one until the moment had passed and she was no longer there to hear it. There are a lot of things I wish I’d said to my older siblings when I was a child, if only I had been clever enough to think of them at the time. But I just said sorry, like always. Apologies were a bit like Get Out of Jail Free cards in our house.

Lily was banned from roller-skating inside or outside Seaglass for a week, and I got the blame. She didn’t speak to me at all for three days—which was a blessing in some ways—but then Lily did something I have never known her to do before or since: she apologized.

“I’m sorry I shouted at you, Daisy,” she said, wearing another one of her neon-colored ’80s costumes. “It wasn’t fair of me to blame you for what happened. And I’ve got you a little surprise to make up for it. It’s in the cupboard under the stairs.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, because I didn’t—Lily was always telling fibs, and we were all a bit scared of the cupboard under the stairs. The reason why someone is lying is almost always more interesting than the lie itself.

“Don’t then,” she replied with a custom shrug of her shoulders. “Rose! Isn’t there a surprise for Daisy downstairs?”

Nana was out walking the dog and had left Rose in charge because our mother was taking a nap. Rose was passing my bedroom with her nose in an Encyclopedia Britannica that looked heavier than me, and she was clearly only half listening. Rose knew that she wanted to be a vet from a very young age, just like Lily knew that she didn’t want to be or do anything. Neither of them changed their minds over the years. It was different for me. My dreams changed shape as often as the clouds I liked staring at. One year I wanted to be a musician like my father, another I dreamed of writing books like Nana, but I never thought I’d live long enough to do either. Which might be why I stopped aiming for a life that felt too out of reach.

Rose was often left in charge because she was the oldest. It was a responsibility that she, like a lot of eldest siblings, came to resent. “Oh, yes, the surprise,” she said. “We all know about it … the one downstairs?”

Looking back now, I don’t think she knew what was going on. But I trusted Rose, so I went down the creaky steps sideways and one at a time—they were steep, and my little legs were still rather short—completely oblivious to the fact that Lily was filming the whole thing.

“That’s right, step inside the cupboard,” she said. “There’s a secret fairy door in the wall, right at the back there, do you see it? You’ll have to go all the way in to find it.” The idea of a secret fairy door in the skirting board was very exciting to four-year-old me. I soon overcame my fear and went inside. “Knock on the wood,” said Lily. “The fairies might come out and say hello.”

I did as she said, but what appeared wasn’t a fairy. The tiny door shape in the skirting board was in fact a mouse hole, but the mouse that ran out looked enormous, more like a rat. As soon as I screamed, Lily closed the cupboard door, locking me inside.