Her father's gate had always opened inward. Anna pushed it the wrong way and waited for him to come out and tell her.
He didn't.
She lifted the latch higher, pulled, and got into the little front garden. The hedge was shorter. Someone had taken out the lavender which used to grow through the path. She could see its pale outline on the paving, where years of leaves had kept the stone clean.
For a moment she was angry about the lavender. It was an easy thing to be angry about.
Leonard opened the door before she knocked.
He looked older than he had at the last prison visit. That was seven years ago. She knew it was seven years, had known it on the train down from London, yet she still expected the man who had left that room to open this door.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Anna.”
He held the door with one hand.
She had imagined being unable to speak. Now she wanted to tell him she'd had trouble with the gate, that the train was crowded, that somebody at the station had mistaken her for a woman on television and then recognized her properly. She wanted to complain in a house where complaints could be ordinary.
“Can I come in?”
He looked behind him.
“I wasn't expecting you today.”
“I rang.”
“You said you were coming down.”
“Here.”
“I know.”
She waited for the distinction to develop into something she could understand. Leonard rubbed the side of his face, where he used to have dark stubble and now had something like dust.
“Come in a minute,” he said.
The hall smelled of washing and the same polish Maggie had used. Anna looked for Maggie's coat on the pegs before she remembered. Her stepmother had raised her from six; Mum in Anna's mouth, your mother in Leonard's. Maggie had been dead ten years. There were things she knew on paper which the house hadn't yet told her.
A pair of trainers lay beneath the radiator. Large, white once, with red laces. Tess's, she thought. A woman could have those feet.
Leonard shut the door.
“Tea?”
“Is she here?”
“No.”
“Where?”
“At work.”
“She's finished school.”
“Yes. She has a job.”
“I know she has a job.”
He had told her in a letter. Not where. Anna had pictured a supermarket till, Tess standing under hard lights and knowing how to work a machine her mother had never used. She had asked what Tess liked about it. Leonard replied with news of the house insurance.
“Will she be back soon?”
“Not yet.”
“What time?”
“Anna.”
There it was: her name as something to put between them.
She walked past him into the kitchen. The table had been replaced. The old one had a scorch mark from a pan Maggie said nobody should have put down there. This one was pale and unmarked, with one chair pushed in and another pulled out. A glass stood by the sink, a little red colour at the bottom. Blackcurrant, she thought, with such immediate certainty that she nearly smiled.
Tess had loved blackcurrant. At four she called every purple drink Ribena, even when it wasn't. Anna remembered washing it out of a nightdress in a bowl, Tess beside her with both hands in the water making matters worse.
Leonard picked up the glass.
“She's eighteen,” he said.
“I can count.”
“I mean she decides.”
“Has she decided she doesn't want to see me?”
He rinsed the glass before answering. Anna watched water fill it, darken, clear.
“Not today.”
“When?”
“I don't know.”
“You've asked?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“That you'd like to see her.”
“And that they overturned it? That I'm out because I shouldn't have been there?”
“She knows about the appeal.”
Anna pulled the chair out farther. She didn't sit. The trainers in the hall had begun to seem like somebody else's shoes.
“I've been waiting fourteen years.”
Leonard put the glass on the rack.
“I know.”
“You don't.”
He turned then. It was the first sharp movement he'd made.
“You think I haven't been here?”
“That's what I think. You've been here.”
They stood looking at one another. Anna wanted the words back, not because she didn't mean them but because she'd heard how quickly they had become the beginning of the old argument. She had prepared different things to say on the train. Quiet things. A mother could be patient. A mother could show she understood.
“I'm not asking you to make her,” she said.
“All right.”
“I want you to tell her I'm here. Not that I'll be here at some point. That I've come.”
“She knows you were coming.”
“Then where is she?”
“At work.”
He was saying it so carefully she wanted to strike the table. Instead she gripped the back of the chair.
In 2019, Tess had sat across from her in the visits room and said she didn't want to come the following month. There was a school thing. Anna couldn't remember which school thing now, though at the time she'd demanded to know every detail, as if an incorrect answer might mean the child could still be kept.
Leonard told her to let Tess finish.
Anna had said, “You listen to him more than you listen to me.”
Tess's face closed. She was eleven. Her feet didn't reach the floor comfortably. Anna remembered those feet now, the ankles moving beneath the chair while her daughter tried to find somewhere to put them.
She had said Leonard wanted to keep Tess. Said it in front of the child. Said worse when he began gathering their things.
Afterwards Tess stopped coming.
Anna wrote. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, letters explaining herself and letters pretending she didn't need to. Sometimes Leonard answered. Sometimes Tess wrote a few lines that sounded like homework completed before something better could begin.
Now Leonard had the grown girl's trainers beside his front door.
“Does she have my number?” Anna asked.
“Yes.”
“The new one.”
“Yes.”
“Tell her she can ring. She doesn't have to have a whole conversation. Tell her that.”
“I will.”
There was a photograph beside the cooker, held in a little wooden stand. Tess in a dark green dress, laughing at someone beyond the picture. A school occasion, maybe. She was older than eleven and younger than now. Anna moved toward it.
Leonard's hand went out.
Not to stop her. To straighten the stand. The movement had the same effect.
“Who took that?”
“A friend.”
“Of hers?”
“Yes.”
“What was the occasion?”
He hesitated.
“The leavers' dinner.”
“This year?”
“Yes.”
Anna looked at Tess's bare shoulders. She would have liked to ask about the dress, whether Tess chose it herself, who she went with, whether the friend outside the picture was a boy. There were so many small questions that none of them could reach her mouth.
“It's nice,” she said.
Leonard nodded.
“Would you like a copy?”
The offer hurt. She wanted it anyway.
“Yes.”
“I can print one.”
“Will you?”
“I said I would.”
He sounded tired. Anna put the stand down.
She asked for the toilet. He pointed as if she might have forgotten where it was, then caught the movement and lowered his hand. The downstairs room had been fitted with a taller basin. She used the lock, then unlocked it to check she could. It was old, like the gate, something her body could learn again.
When she came out, Leonard had made tea.
She drank standing up. He offered a biscuit from a tin that used to hold sewing things. She took two, then wished she'd taken one, then ate them both.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
“I thought—”
She stopped.
He looked down at the tea.
“You thought here.”
“I didn't think in words.”
“Tess has her things in that room.”
“My room.”
“Yes.”
The room at the back, with the wall she painted yellow at sixteen. Anna knew it couldn't still be yellow. She wanted to ask.
Leonard said, “I can help with a place.”
“I have money.”
“Enough?”
“Some.”
“Miriam gave you—”
“Advice. Help. A telephone which I've managed not to drop in the sea yet.”
He almost smiled. Anna saw it and wanted to let the moment grow. She could say something else, let him become the father who laughed when she was rude about a boring person. But she would have to do it while he helped her find somewhere else to sleep.
“I'll sort it,” she said.
“Anna.”
“You can tell her I'm nearby. If she asks.”
She left the mug by the sink. At the front door she stepped over Tess's shoes.
Outside, she went back through the gate correctly. She walked to the end of the road before taking out the phone. She didn't want Leonard watching her search for a bed through the window.
Miriam had put two numbers in the notes. Anna chose the second because the first said no vacancies on its website. The woman who answered asked how many nights.
“A week,” Anna said.
“We do weekly rates for the rooms at the back.”
“Can I see it?”
“You can. You won't see much more once you've stood in it.”
Anna laughed.
“Fine.”
The woman told her where to go.
It was near the old cinema, which had become flats. A sign on the guesthouse door said to ring the bell rather than bang. Anna rang.
The woman was about her age, with a little white dog pressed against her leg.
“Dogs?” she asked.
“No.”
“Good. He likes people who don't like him. Paula.”
“Anna.”
There was recognition, perhaps. Anna watched for it while Paula reached for the key. If it came, it didn't arrive as a question.
The room at the back had a single bed, a wardrobe and a kettle on a narrow chest. Through the window she could see somebody's washing and the roofs beyond it. The bathroom was along the landing. Paula showed her how the front-door key needed turning twice and asked her not to let the dog out.
“Does he want to leave?”
“All the time. He has nowhere to go.”
Anna put her bag on the bed.
“I'll take it.”
The money left her account in a few quick movements. She hadn't used banking on a phone before this week. Miriam had sat beside her while she worked it out, asking before she touched the screen. Anna liked her for that. A woman could learn a thing without being reduced to someone who needed to be shown everything.
When Paula had gone, she sat on the mattress. It made a loud spring sound. She stood, then sat again, testing whether it always did.
It did.
She unzipped the bag and put her underwear in the drawer. Shirts on hangers, toothbrush in a glass, phone charger near the socket. Her belongings were too few for the room, though the room was too small for anyone else's.
She found the card she meant to give Tess. No childish animal on it. She had chosen a plain one with yellow flowers, written three lines, crossed two out and begun again on a fresh card. The envelope wasn't sealed.
She put it on the chest.
The day still had hours in it.
Anna left the guesthouse and went toward the seafront. She remembered the route, then found half of it changed. A shop which sold fishing tackle had become a place for expensive coffee. The old newsagent was empty. At the crossing she waited after the light changed because the group beside her hadn't moved. Then she realized she could go without them.
The air near the water was warm and smelled of chips. She stopped at the first open shop.
“What can I get you?” the man asked.
She looked up at the menu.
The choices annoyed her. She wanted all of them and hated being asked to know which thing would make the most of a day she had already spoiled.
“Fish and chips.”
“Large?”
“Yes.”
“Salt and vinegar?”
“Yes.”
“Mushy peas?”
“No.”
She said the last no with pleasure.
On the bench above the beach she unwrapped the paper. The chips were too hot. She ate one anyway, breathing through her mouth. A gull landed a few feet away and watched her with undisguised purpose.
“Get your own.”
A man passing smiled. Anna smiled back before remembering that people might know her face.
He kept going.
She ate slowly after that. There was no call to finish, no tray to return before a hatch closed. She could leave a chip until it was cold enough to taste properly. Halfway through the fish she wanted a drink and could stand up, buy one, come back. The packet would probably be taken by the gull. She carried it with her.
At the shop she chose lemonade in a glass bottle. The man opened it against the metal lip fixed beneath the counter. A sharp little sound, familiar from pub shifts years before, a job she had once been good at.
She asked if he knew of anyone needing bar staff.
He looked at her properly now.
“You could try the Anchor.”
“Still going?”
“Barely.”
Anna thanked him and went out. It was something to write in the phone, an action she could do tomorrow which didn't require her daughter to agree.
She had a message from Lorna, sent from a number she didn't know.
How's the wild world? Have you eaten something wrong yet?
Anna wrote: Chips. No peas.
Living dangerously.
Lorna had been out a few months. They had shared a table, arguments about a television, long silences when each understood the other wanted the room to become private. Anna started describing Leonard, then stopped. She didn't want to give the day away in an account which would make her hear how little she'd got.
Got a room. Spring in the bed is possessed.
Kick it.
Anna laughed aloud. The gull had followed her back to the bench and took this as encouragement.
By late afternoon she'd finished the food and checked the new phone several times. Tess hadn't rung. Anna went back into town.
She knew Rachel's shop. She had passed it before the murder, had borrowed money from Celia when the shop was doing well enough for Celia to enjoy being asked. The price of the loan became more than the amount. Celia could remember it in every room Anna entered.
That night, in 2012, Anna slapped her. Her lip split. Anna had seen the blood and left her alive.
She had never seen the person who killed her. Rachel said she had.
Anna stopped outside North & Venn.
The old painted sign remained above the window. There were different dresses behind the glass, fuller skirts and softer colours than Anna remembered. A little card gave the opening hours. The door was locked.
She cupped a hand against the window and looked in. A rail, a counter, a machine beneath a lamp. A person who knew how to make a place inviting had made this one inviting to everyone walking past.
Leonard had listened to Rachel. The town had listened to her. At the trial Anna watched her give the wrong name with a calmness nobody could shake.
If Rachel would say one different thing now, perhaps Leonard would hear it.
Anna lowered her hand. She looked at the opening hours again, committing them to memory, then took a photograph because she could.
Nine tomorrow. She could be here at nine.