Once university was over, she couldn’t contemplate returning to Riverbend. She’d killed off any lingering dreams about Aidan after her father assured her that if she had any contact with the Hunters, he’d disinherit her and sell Riverbend to developers wanting to turn it into a golf club. She had no desire to ever set eyes on her father again, and even if Leonard hadn’t been there, the reminders of what she’d lost – her mother, Aidan, that which was too painful to name – were more than she could bear. She knew Verity would be heartbroken by how their home was sliding further into ruin, but she numbed that guilt along with her shame and sadness, replacing her previous drugs of choice with the addictive lure of long-term security, and somewhere to belong.
When Peter proposed to Harriet during a dazzlingly sumptuous trip to Venice, love barely came into it. Their casual ‘I love you’s were no different from how they greeted friends or fellow art students. But they liked each other well enough, and Harriet adored the woods, wildflower meadows and beach where Peter lived. Surely this would soothe the ache of missing Riverbend.
So, Harriet settled for a man she liked, for a home that felt as wild as her heart, and a family who tolerated her as better than nothing. Unable to speak about her past sufferings, she painted them. Her bleak, anguished depictions of the Devon countryside – a dead rabbit lying in blood-stained dust, a blackened tree split down the middle by a lightning strike, grey clouds over a desolate field – started to win her critical acclaim, if limited sales, and she slowly established an existence she could live with.
Of course, their marriage of convenience was going to find its share of trouble. Peter became increasingly frustrated with Harriet’s failure to conceive – thanks to the secret stash of contraceptive pills. After her upbringing, there was no way Harriet was bringing a child into a family lacking in love, even if she could endure being pregnant again. He grew tired of what had first attracted him to her – the lack of domesticity and reluctance to embrace the role of demure Country Wife. She felt irritated at his hypocrisy and triggered by behaviour that began to mirror her father’s, not least how he’d convinced himself the other women were her fault. She withdrew further into her art, eventually not even bothering to pretend she cared any more.
After ten years of dysfunctional matrimony, Peter announced that he was divorcing her to marry the woman carrying his baby.
Harriet packed up her possessions and bought a plane ticket to Rome. On her way to the airport, she took a detour of several hundred miles up to Middlebeck. She parked her old Nissan Micra in a layby, hat and sunglasses enough of a disguise that after several hours, when Leonard eventually lurched past on his way into the village, he barely registered the car, let alone the woman inside it.
She felt a jolt of shock and pity at seeing the figure that had once been her proud, charming father, shuffling past. It was no worse than she’d imagined – all too often hoped – but, being confronted with his flaccid face and stooped, spindly frame, for a brief moment, she wondered if she’d done the right thing, leaving him to rot in his own miserable decisions.
When she pulled through the Riverbend gates and up to the disintegrating remains of her childhood home, any trace of guilt or pity hardened into rough, raw anger.
As she snuck through the front door, the key she’d stolen prior to her wedding needing a firm wiggle in the rusting lock, the wave of memories nearly knocked her to her knees.
It took a fraught twenty minutes to carry the boxes of memories and other encumbrances she couldn’t take with her, but had nowhere else to leave, up to the attic floor, where she placed them beside the remains of her mother’s things. Being there again, in what was once her prison, was like emotional assault. She felt dizzy, frantic, sick to her stomach. She could feel the ghost of her baby writhing inside her.
That man did this.
He deserved everything he got.
Before she left, she took another, shorter, detour, to a tumbledown cottage in the village. She sat outside for so long that the occupants, more observant than her father, came out and asked what she was doing there.
‘Blummin’ ’eck. Is it Hattie?’
Harriet thought about that for a moment. Was it time to be Hattie again?
‘Yes. I just… I was wondering if Aidan…’
‘Oh, bless you. He’s over in Kirkby now. With his missus, and two littlies. I’ll tell him you came round though, said hello, shall I?’
‘Um… yes. Thank you.’
‘Are you back for long? You could always pop over next time he’s visiting.’
‘I’m actually moving abroad. My flight’s tomorrow morning.’
‘No bother, love. I’ll tell him you came to say goodbye.’
* * *
That evening, we had our penultimate art therapy session. It was a mild night, feeling more like May than the end of March, and Hattie relocated us to the riverbank.
‘This is nice!’ Deirdre exclaimed as we set up camping chairs in the spot where Gideon usually watched the sunset. With the lighter evenings, that would be in an hour or so. I felt torn between wanting to see him and not wanting him to see whatever we’d be up to.
‘Are we going to be drawing on ourselves?’ Laurie asked, frowning at a forlorn plastic tub full of acrylic pens balanced on a tree stump. It appeared to be all Hattie had brought apart from the chairs.
‘Or on each other?’ Kalani screwed her nose up. ‘Not a chance unless you can 100 per cent guarantee that it washes off. My parents are bringing a load of uncles and aunties over for a takeaway tomorrow. I’m not greeting them with Deirdre’s BS version of my inner self scrawled over my face.’
‘Your family are coming over?’ I asked, thrilled that Kalani had made yet another huge step forwards.
‘What do you mean, BS?’ Deirdre asked, at the same time. ‘Humph. Right now, your inner self still needs some work, Kalani. While most of the drawing would be nice, I’d probably still have to add a tiny little witch, or a female dog to make it accurate.’
‘No one is drawing on anyone!’ Hattie interjected before Kalani could reply. ‘If we were, don’t you think I’d have brought face paints or make-up rather than acrylic pens?’
‘I don’t know,’ Laurie said. ‘You might have wanted us to display it on our face for a few days, hammer home some point or other.’
