Hannah Emery - Secrets in the Shadows

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, Louisa thought as she drifted into sleep.

And then it was morning. Louisa had dressed quickly and stepped out of her bedroom, expecting her father’s bedroom door to be firmly shut as it always was early in the morning. But the door was flung wide open, and she heard the clattering of pots and jars coming from the kitchen. Louisa followed the sticky smell of flour and eggs until she was standing in the doorway of the large, upturned kitchen, watching her father whip a grey mixture in a bowl. He looked up, and his face fell in despair.

‘Louisa,’ he said. ‘This was meant to be a surprise. Nobody was meant to see me … ’

Louisa had thought how odd it was to see a man holding a spoon. She pictured her father getting out of bed early to make her goodness knows what kind of birthday cake on Nancy’s day off. And then she thought of the 9.47 train, and how she would not be getting on it.

That, Louisa recalled now in the bloody air of the butchers, was the day she had decided that Blackpool could wait.

Until now.

‘So your father didn’t mind you coming along with us, Louisa?’ Hatty’s mother, Mrs Kennedy, asked the following Monday as their train began to amble along the tracks.

‘No. He doesn’t really notice whether I’m there or not, these days. So he didn’t mind,’ Louisa murmured, noticing as she spoke that Mrs Kennedy’s face was a shade darker than her neck.

‘Ah, Doctor Ash is a busy man. I am sure he does notice you, even if it doesn’t feel as though he does,’ Mrs Kennedy offered, misunderstanding.

She must have known my father some time ago , Louisa thought, when he was busy and important . Time seemed to have washed away his importance like a tide. Each day, Louisa would sit with him and talk to him about his life, his house, their happy times together. As dusk fell, he would be shining with the knowledge of his life, but with the morning sun his face and mind would be blank again.

‘Yes,’ Louisa sighed, not wanting to explain. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘So!’ Hatty said rather more loudly than she needed to, eyes wide. ‘Let’s get into the holiday spirit! What do you want to do when we arrive? There’s the beach, and it’s a gorgeous day so we could sunbathe. Or we could go dancing in the Tower, or we could go to the Pleasure Beach, although we’re probably best waiting until tomorrow for that so we have a full day there, or we could … ’

Hatty’s voice drifted away as Louisa stared out of the train windows into the fields beyond. Had she done the right thing coming on this holiday? Perhaps she should try to get a train back somehow, and explain to the Kennedys the truth about why she had come and why she definitely shouldn’t have.

‘Louisa? What do you think? I don’t feel exposed in it, so I don’t see a problem. Sally Smith has a bikini, and she’s fatter than me. If she can wear one, then I certainly can.’

Louisa nodded. ‘Hatty,’ she began, ‘I think that I’ve perhaps made a bit of a mistake. I don’t … ’ Her words stopped abruptly as she thought of what she was speeding away from. She looked at Hatty, who sat waiting patiently for the rest of Louisa’s words. ‘I don’t remember packing my sunglasses,’ she finished, embarrassed by the sad little ending to her sentence.

‘Well, that’s not a problem. I’ve packed three pairs,’ said Hatty.

When the girls were finally settled on the swarming sands, Louisa lay back. She draped her arm lazily over her eyes, having yet to receive an offer of sunglasses from a rather bikini-preoccupied Hatty. Eventually, the sun managed to glare through the crook of Louisa’s arm, and she sat up. Hatty was splashing about in the sea with some boys who were staying at the hotel next door, her headscarf tied carefully over her rollers and her new bikini showing off her lean legs and flat stomach. Louisa glanced down at her own stomach, and pulled it in, suddenly self-conscious, then looked away again, not wanting to dwell on her old-fashioned bathing costume.

I can’t believe I’m here , she thought, as she drank in the sights of the beach and the promenade. The last time she had smelled salt and skin and sun had been so long ago. Those smells had belonged to her old life, and had been replaced by the meaty, heavier smells of soup and wood fires and her father’s cologne, and later, his sweet medicines.

Smelling her old life reminded Louisa that it hadn’t left her. She had left it. Hadn’t she? After her failed plans to return to Blackpool three years ago, the idea that her mother might be dead lay untouched in a shaded corner of Louisa’s mind. The thought was sharp and Louisa never took it out to inspect, for fear of the pain of handling it. Her father never mentioned her anymore; he never mentioned anything. But now, here, with the thought of what was about to happen to her father trapped in her mind too, Louisa’s mother seemed to float out, freed with the evocative sights and sounds of the sea.

Louisa scoured the beach for anybody who might look like her mother would now. But after a few minutes of gazing into the crowds, of seeing horribly stiff hairstyles and velvet lapels and wide smiles and sultry frowns, Louisa covered her eyes with her sand-dotted palms. It was too much. Her mother wasn’t here. She wasn’t anywhere. All because Louisa had been too late to save her.

‘Lou! Lou!’ Hatty shouted, her dampened scent of hairspray preceding her grip on Louisa’s arm. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

Louisa allowed her hands to be peeled from her face. ‘Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.’

‘Then why on earth are you sitting there like that? Join in the fun for heaven’s sake! I didn’t bring you on holiday to mope. Now,’ Hatty continued, her tone changing promptly and effortlessly, ‘what do you want from the van over there? There’s tea, or ice cream, or oysters, but my friend Anita came to Blackpool last summer and got some oysters and she had the most terrible stomach problems for months after. She puts it all down to those oysters, you know, and she said that she bought them from a little blue van. So with that van being blue, I think we’ll give the oysters a miss. What do you think?’

Louisa looked over at the blue van, a snake of people queuing right into its mouth. ‘Ice cream,’ she said, trying to cram as much joy into those two words as she possibly could. She winced as she heard her voice: too high-pitched, too false. But Hatty didn’t seem to care. She gave a firm, single nod, and stood up.

‘You know,’ she said, as she brushed flecks of sand from her golden thighs, ‘I think we should find ourselves some men tonight.’

‘Yes,’ Louisa agreed, her merry tone much improved second time around, ‘I think you’re right.’

Later, when Hatty had carefully backcombed her hair and applied plenty of eyeliner on herself and Louisa, they followed Mr and Mrs Kennedy down to the hotel bar. The Fortuna was a very grand hotel, Louisa thought as she descended the rather regal staircase. She wished she had on a long, sweeping dress rather than her short blue dress, a dress that she could swoosh along the red carpet.

‘Mother,’ Hatty was grumbling as they reached the bar, ‘I don’t see the harm in just one drink. After all, we’re eighteen on our next birthdays.’ She turned and rolled her eyes at Louisa.

Mrs Kennedy fiddled about with the clasp on her cream leather handbag. ‘Okay, darling.’

Hatty squeezed Louisa’s arm excitedly. ‘Knew she wouldn’t put up a fight,’ she hissed in Louisa’s ear.

And so, one drink turned into two drinks. Two drinks gave Hatty the courage to ask her parents if she and Louisa could leave the hotel bar and go to Yates’s, and gave Mr and Mrs Kennedy the courage to say yes.