Over Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Don and Louise’s eighteen-year-old daughter Miranda has died in a sailing accident. While Louise takes steps to move on with her life, Don cannot come to terms with the chain of events that led to her death. Instead, he is determined to bring someone to account. The surviving children handle the loss of their sister better than their parents, but what they can’t handle is their family being torn apart …

  Taut, heartbreaking and immensely moving, Over is a novel about love and loss, grief and hope, pain and resolution, and about what happens to human beings when tragedy strikes like lightning.

  About the Author

  Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster is the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady’s Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want?, Over and Isa & May, as well as bestselling memoirs (Hidden Lives and Precious Lives) and biographies. She is married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies, and lives in London and the Lake District.

  ALSO BY MARGARET FORSTER

  Dame’s Delight

  Georgy Girl

  The Bogeyman

  The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

  The Park

  Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

  Fenella Phizackerley

  Mr Bone’s Retreat

  The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

  Mother Can You Hear Me?

  The Bride of Lowther Fell

  Marital Rites

  Private Papers

  Have the Men Had Enough?

  Lady’s Maid

  The Battle for Christabel

  Mothers’ Boys

  Shadow Baby

  The Memory Box

  Diary of an Ordinary Woman

  Is There Anything You Want?

  Keeping the World Away

  Isa & May

  Non-Fiction

  The Rash Adventurer

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Significant Sisters

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Daphne du Maurier

  Hidden Lives

  Rich Desserts & Captain’s Thin

  Precious Lives

  Good Wives?

  Poetry

  Selected Poems of Elizabeth

  Barrett Browning (Editor)

  1

  I HAVE TO start somewhere, trying to understand.

  *

  We lived on a noisy road, on a hill. Our house was at the point of the hill where cars change gear. The house was a bargain, when we bought it. It had a long, narrow garden at the back, with a gate in the hedge giving access to the tennis courts belonging to a local club. We didn’t play tennis, but we thought the children might, later on. It was easy, because of the silence at the back of the house, where we slept, to forget about the constant traffic at the front, though sometimes, if a very heavy lorry was labouring up the hill, the whole house trembled. I worried about this, but he never did. The house was old. He said it seemed to him that it had survived worse things than lorries groaning past. Four houses down from us, there was a gap where a bomb had dropped in the Second World War. Our house had stood firm then. He had confidence in it. We had a survey done before we bought it and no structural faults had been revealed. But I worried.

  In all the years we lived there, the happy years, there was only once talk of moving, to somewhere quieter. He suggested it. We all objected, for different reasons. The twins were eight and were horrified at the thought of moving schools, and Finn, three years younger, had just become best friends with the boy next door and couldn’t imagine life without him. I’m not quite sure why I resisted the idea as strongly as I did. I liked the house, but it wasn’t perfect. I could have liked another, perhaps even more. He took us to look at the area he was thinking of. It was very attractive, not quite suburbia, but plenty of greenery, lots of wide, tree-lined roads, no noise. Most of the houses were detached, built in the 1930s I think, solid-looking but without much character. I shook my head, wrinkled my nose. I think I complained that there was no atmosphere. Our hillside location had cafés at the foot of the hill, and a row of small, useful shops, and there was no dull uniformity – the buildings were a satisfying mixture of old and new.

  He didn’t try to persuade me. He said if it was a case of four to one, then we would stay where we were. It was good of him to give way like that, but he was – is – that kind of man, decent, understanding, anxious to be fair. We got our wish, the children and I, and he never made us feel guilty at thwarting his own desire to move.

  *

  Why I have begun with the house I can’t imagine. The house was of no consequence whatsoever. I suppose I am trying to find a beginning and that describing where we lived when it happened helps me to start. But though there was a beginning, there is, as yet, no ending. That is what he wants, and he will never get it. I can see that, everyone else can see that, but he can’t. He remains single-minded, in pursuit of the truth. This, he says, has nothing to do with any desire for revenge. He wants to discover the truth and see justice done, in so far as it can be done. An admirable man. None of us can match up to him. He makes us feel unworthy, cowardly, feeble, ashamed. All we want to do is forget. Not forget her, as if we could, as if we would want to, but forget it. We want to recover, and we can’t, so long as he continues with his impossible quest.

  The thought of actually recovering is something I think he cannot bear. To recover would, for him, be the greatest betrayal of all.

  *

  It is strange living on my own again, though I don’t know why I say ‘again’ when I’ve never truly lived on my own. That’s odd, too, I suppose. It makes it sound as though I went straight from living with my parents to living with him, with Don, when we got married. But that’s not the case. There were years in between when I was training as a teacher, either living in a college hostel or in a flat with other girls. But all that time I never had my own room. I don’t remember minding this. Until recently, I’ve always liked company, I’ve always got on well with people. I’m still friends with Lynne, Pat and Ruth, the girls I shared with for three years. We meet at least once a year, have a little reunion, though it’s hard for Pat to come to London. We send each other birthday cards, and ring each other up if one of us has heard some news about one of the others which needs to be passed on. They all rang me, when it happened. They read about it in the newspapers. They kept on ringing too, they didn’t fade away – and my tears, and then my silences, didn’t embarrass them.

  *

  I teach Reception, the babies. Teaching Reception is not easy. Margot Fletcher, the headmistress, wondered, when I came back afterwards, whether I was up to it. She said it was wonderful to have me back but maybe … and she left her sentence hanging in the air, waiting for my reaction. I said I would be fine. She nodded, said she trusted me to tell her if I found I was struggling.

  Struggling? Of course I was struggling. But without the children the struggle would have been lost.

  *

  I have a helper in Reception, a teaching assistant called Jeremy. He is sweet. He looks like a young Jesus Christ, with his long hair and beard and his soulful eyes. He feels like my son though he is nothing like Finn. Half the time he is in a dream and he has to be programmed to do what needs to be done, but he takes direction well. He isn’t lazy, just vague and lac
king in energy. I can’t imagine him in charge, sole charge, of a class.

  I wasn’t sure at first whether Jeremy had been told about me. I loved the idea of working with someone who knew none of my recent history, but I thought it unlikely that he hadn’t heard something. There are quite a few people on our staff who enjoy passing on dramatic information, though I’m sure never in a malicious way. A word in young Jeremy’s ear may have been irresistible. But if he did know anything he didn’t show that he did – there wasn’t that look in his eyes, when he met me, that I had grown to recognise and dread. All he said was that everyone had told him he was lucky to be with me and he’d have no problems. That was clever, and flattering.

  He is good with the children, gentle, affectionate and yet managing not to get too involved. I am pleased with him, on the whole, though his occasional trance-like state can be irritating. One or two of the girls have already started to boss him about, and they are only five years old. In fact, one of them, Paige, realised straight away that Jeremy would take orders. It was ‘Hang up my coat, Jeremy’ and ‘Wash my hands, Jeremy’ when, of course, she was perfectly capable of doing both herself and should have been told to do so. But he was amused, and hung up her coat and washed her hands, and her triumph registered with her. She is an attractive child, tall for her age. Like Miranda.

  Luckily, there isn’t much time for nostalgic ruminating in Reception. We started term with ten children and now another five have been phased in, soon to be followed by the final five, to make the class complete. They take some settling in, most of them. Even though nearly all have been to nursery school, this is ‘big’ school, and feels very different. We have a lot of tears, a lot of wanting of mothers, lots of wet pants. Some of the parents are more of a hindrance than a help – hovering at the door after I’ve closed it, peering anxiously through its glass panes, or managing to leave the building but then unable to resist trying to look through the windows (we are on the ground floor). I have to be firm. Pleasant, sympathetic, but firm. And I am.

  There are plenty of hugs from the children. I am generous with hugs in return, though I don’t let the children become clinging. A few moments on my knee, while I hear whatever the tale of woe is, and then eyes are wiped and the child lifted down. But they are good for me, the hugs.

  *

  So, I am living on my own, in a flat, quite near to the school, a ten-minute walk away. It is a first-floor flat in a modern block, with a view of the park and in the distance of the canal. Finn decorated it for me, glad to be doing something positive, I expect. Don told me to take whatever I wanted from our house, so I did. What I wanted was very little. The furniture I did bring looks strange in the flat – it hasn’t yet grown accustomed to its new surroundings. I thought the sofa from our old kitchen was small but here, in this room, it looks suddenly bigger. And shabbier.

  *

  Stopping and starting, bits about houses, about schools, about where I’m living – it’s no good. I sit here, at my little desk which – no, I won’t describe the desk or I’ll be off again, stuttering, putting off really getting to grips with why I want to write down anything at all. But I do. I want to have it all on paper, a record, from my point of view. I don’t expect anyone to read it. I don’t feel any obligation to posterity. Nothing so self-important. And as for grandchildren in the future, it will be Don’s version they will be more interested in, and there will be plenty of sources for them to use, if they want to. His photograph was in several newspapers. He appeared on television once. It got to the point, locally, when he was recognised in the street. People, complete strangers, stopped him and told him how they admired him and thought what he was doing was right. They wished him good luck, told him not to give up. As if he ever would.

  So I sit at this desk and try to be … I can’t think of the word. I try to concentrate on the point of this exercise. The point is … the point is, he didn’t seem to hear me. He didn’t seem to know how cruel he was being. He didn’t seem to realise how much worse he was making things for the rest of us. And I kept silent, first through grief and misery, afterwards because I was exhausted, numb. I had the other two to think about. I couldn’t afford to do what he did. And I suppose, too, that for the first few months afterwards I thought he was right. I agreed with him. It couldn’t have been an accident. Someone was to blame and that someone should be called to account, exposed. Yes, I thought he was right. I wanted him to act the way he did. What I can’t remember is exactly when I stopped caring about who was responsible. When did it become irrelevant? When did we part company on this?

  *

  It was a little girl called Lola’s birthday today. Her mother, she’s a single parent, brought in a cake she’d made herself, dripping with chocolate icing that hadn’t set, and we all had some. The mother had provided five candles but the cake was so soft the candles wouldn’t stick in properly and Lola cried. Jeremy got some plasticine, and made a cake shape and stuck the candles into that and lit them, and we sang ‘Happy Birthday’, but Lola went on sobbing. She was still weeping when it was home time and her mother came to collect her. I explained what had happened, taking care not to criticise the cake, stressing how delicious it had been, every crumb devoured, but the mother’s face collapsed and she started crying too. ‘Nothing I do is right,’ she said. ‘I can’t even make a cake properly.’ I gestured to Jeremy to see to the other children being collected, and sat this young woman down in a corner, with Lola on her knee. By then Lola had stopped crying, fascinated by her mother’s tears, or maybe alarmed by them. I talked to her. I said how well Lola was doing, how willing to learn, how popular with the other children. I said, she, the mother, must be doing something right, to produce such a well-behaved, responsive child. The mother dabbed her eyes, and smiled, thanked me. She said she expected she was just tired. I said I expected that she was. Then she said, ‘She’s everything to me, see. She’s all I’ve got. I want things to be right for her, I want to do my best.’ ‘We all do,’ I said.

  *

  This year the date has come and gone as, of course, it is bound to every year. There is no point in trying to forget it or ignore it. That’s impossible. But I refuse to commemorate it in any way. I never mention the date. This year it was a Wednesday.

  On the first anniversary, afterwards, we received cards. Several of them, some from people we did not know very well. I imagined a lot of care had gone into choosing them. They were tasteful, either with a simple flower on the front, the colours pale, or else a peaceful view of hills. The messages inside were more or less identical – ‘Thinking of you on this sad day’ vied with ‘Always in our thoughts’. It would have been silly to be upset by them, and I wasn’t. I think I even smiled slightly as I passed them to Don, who immediately scrunched them up and threw them in the wastepaper basket. ‘They were only being kind,’ I murmured. ‘Kindness does no good,’ he said.

  Doesn’t it? I know what he meant: kindness does not get to the root of what happened. This is true, but nevertheless for everyone except Don it did, and does, help even when it makes the tears come. Finn appreciated kindness. He said over and over how kind people were to him, what consideration the boys and teachers at school showed. For a while, a short while, he couldn’t speak. He was literally mute with shock, couldn’t answer a single question of the most ordinary variety. ‘Potatoes?’ the server at the school canteen would ask, spoon poised, and I was told that all he could do was nod. In any situation where a nod or shake of the head wouldn’t suffice, he was panic-stricken, but he said his friends spoke for him. Then later on, when he could speak again, he knew he often sounded rude and brusque, but he was never told off for it.

  Finn was the first of us who actually said to Don that he wanted to forget. One evening, at supper, when Don was in the middle of recounting his latest interview with someone who had sailed the same kind of boat, Finn got up, leaving his plate almost untouched, and left the table. ‘Finn?’ Don said. ‘This is important.’ ‘I don’t want to hear
it,’ Finn said. Don sat motionless, knife and fork poised in his clenched fists over his plate. When he began eating again, he cut the meat very carefully, as though he was worried about hurting it. There was no scene. He didn’t call Finn back, or get angry. I wanted to help him and asked him what he had been about to tell us that was important. He shook his head, and said, ‘Not now, later.’

  Finn began to separate himself from Don. It was managed in small, unobtrusive ways, an indication, I thought, that he was aware of how upset his father would be that he no longer wanted to hear any news of his ‘investigations’. Finn was trying to limit the damage, I’m sure. The moment Don began on anything connected to the accident, Finn would leave the room, saying he had to go and phone someone, or he was late for football practice, or he’d forgotten something. The reason for his exit was always plausible, there were no more abrupt departures in the middle of meals, or outspoken announcements. Sometimes, if he was caught unexpectedly, he hummed, very quietly, till he could escape. He would stare into the middle distance and I knew he was chanting ‘I’m not listening, I’m not listening’ in his head.

  I tried, in those days, early on, to defend Don. ‘He wants to find out the truth,’ I said to Finn. ‘Surely you can understand that? Don’t you want to know exactly how it happened? Don’t we owe it to her?’ Finn frowned, and rubbed harder at the boots he was cleaning, then began picking the lumps of mud off the studs and breaking them up with his fingers.

  ‘It was no one’s fault,’ he said. ‘The man said so, at the inquest. It was an accident.’

  ‘But your dad doesn’t believe that. He wants to find out …’

  ‘But she’s dead, Mum, it doesn’t make any difference. Even if he finds someone to blame, it won’t bring her alive, so what’s the point?’

  ‘I’ve just told you what the point is, finding out the truth is the point.’

  ‘But why doesn’t he believe the police?’

  ‘He’s gone through the statements they took. He doesn’t think they asked the right questions of the right people.’