Perfect Little Children Page 4

  “Not at all. I think she’s enjoying the mystery. Which I’m a bit closer to solving.” Dom smiles proudly, tapping his computer screen.

  “You’ve searched online?”

  “Extensively.”

  So he hasn’t been working all evening.

  “The good news is, nobody’s dead. They’re still in Delray Beach, Florida.”

  “If you’re waiting for me to say I didn’t see what I saw . . .”

  “All I’m saying is, they live in America.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re there right now, today.”

  Dom frowns. “True,” he concedes.

  “Maybe they never sold the Hemingford Abbots house. Rich people don’t have to sell a house in order to buy a house. They might divide their time between England and Florida.”

  “You’re right. Although . . .” He breaks off with a yawn.

  Although, even if the Braids still own the Wyddial Lane house, you didn’t see what you think you saw—because that’s not possible.

  “You should go to bed. Can I . . . ?” I point at his computer. My laptop’s in the car. I can’t be bothered to go and get it.

  “Sure.” He stands up. “Look at the search history and you’ll find everything I found. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “Only if realizing that I’m having psychotic delusions is a good thing,” I mutter, sliding into his chair.

  “Well, no one’s dead—that’s a good thing. And I wouldn’t call it a psychotic delusion. More of a—”

  “I saw Flora, Dom. And Thomas and Emily, as they were twelve years ago. I saw and heard it all, everything I described.”

  He squeezes my shoulder. “I’m exhausted, Beth. We’ll talk about it again tomorrow. Okay? Want me to bring you up some reheated cannelloni before I go to sleep?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll get some later.” I still don’t feel remotely hungry. “Oh—guess what they’ve called their house.”

  “Who?”

  “The Braids.”

  “You mean the people living in the house in Hemingford Abbots that used to be the Braids’,” Dom corrects me.

  “It was named by them for sure, whether they live there now or not. It’s called Newnham House. Typical Lewis. They lived in Newnham in Cambridge, so when they left Cambridge, they called their new house Newnham House, thinking it’s a nice way to remember where they used to live.”

  “And . . . it isn’t?”

  “No. It’s silly. It’s clinging to the past in an artificial way—trying to pretend your new place is your old place.” When Dom doesn’t look convinced, I say, “We also moved out of Newnham. If I’d suggested calling this house Newnham House, would you have agreed?”

  I never told Dominic why I wanted to leave Cambridge. Or, rather, I told him, but my explanation was a lie. It had nothing to do with wanting to live closer to my mum, though that’s where we’ve ended up—in Little Holling in the Culver Valley. Mum’s about fifteen minutes away by car, in Great Holling. Every time one of her friends pops in while I’m there, she says—and her wording of the line never varies—“What with me living in Great Holling and Beth living in Little Holling, it’s like Goldilocks and the three bears!”

  I’ve tried to tell her that it’s nothing like that, and that nobody knows what she means. “Of course they do!” Mum insists. Once, Zannah heard this exchange and said to me later, “You’re ruder to Gran than I am to you,” which made me feel awful.

  Mum also doesn’t know why I was determined to leave Newnham, having once thought I’d live there all my life. It was because of the Braids. Once they’d left, I couldn’t bear the thought of staying there like something they’d discarded, of being the left-behind friends while they moved on to something bigger and better. If they were going to have a new start, then so were we.

  “I’d happily swap the name Crossways Cottage for Newnham House,” says Dom. “Or for anything less twee. Remember, I suggested getting rid of the name and making do with 10, The Green, but you—”

  “Forget it.” I wave his words away.

  “Beth, I don’t see anything wrong about the house name. Sorry. Can I go to bed now?”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer.

  “Night,” I call after him.

  Once he’s gone, I look at his computer’s search history: LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. He’s been busy. No Facebook, though. Why didn’t he check to see if the Braids were on Facebook? I haven’t either, not once in twelve years. I assumed I knew everything I needed to know about Flora and her family. I knew they’d moved to Wyddial Lane because they sent us a “new address” postcard—nothing personal written on it, just the address, minus the house’s name. They must have added that later.

  I remember thinking it odd that we’d be on their list; Flora must have known, just as I did, that our friendship was over. Why would she want me to know where she was moving to? Perhaps she thought a complete cutoff would be too stark and obvious; easier to shift to a Christmas-cards-only friendship, allowing us both to pretend nothing was wrong, that we were simply too busy ever to meet.

  I go to the bottom of the list of Dom’s search results and click on the one he went to first. Might as well follow the same chronological order. I feel more alert than I have for a long time.

  It’s time to find the Braids.

  * * *

  Lewis is on LinkedIn, though there’s no photograph of him, only a gray-man silhouette. So he couldn’t be bothered to upload a picture. I skim over the list of his former jobs, several of which he had while I knew him. His current position, “2015 to present,” is “CEO of VersaNova Technologies, an application software company based in Delray Beach, Florida.”

  Dominic was right. How absurd that I needed to see it with my own eyes to believe it, given that my eyes have been seeing the impossible lately, in broad daylight.

  Still. Lewis working for a company in America doesn’t mean Flora couldn’t have been in Hemingford Abbots this morning. Yesterday morning, I correct myself. It’s after midnight; tomorrow is now technically today.

  In Lewis’s “Contact Information” there’s a VersaNova email address for him, and a link to a Twitter account. Clicking on the link, I find myself staring at his smiling face. The photo that he’s chosen to represent him on his Twitter page, the one that appears in a little circle next to each of the short messages he’s posted, is of him suntanned and grinning, wearing a black and gray baseball cap.

  Like most people, after a gap of more than a decade, he looks older than when I last saw him.

  Like everyone except his children, Thomas and Emily, who look exactly the same as they did twelve years ago.

  His official name on Twitter is @VersaNovaLewB. I remember Ben joining Twitter and having to choose a name like that. He called himself @boycalledBen, which prompted Zannah to say that she was embarrassed to be related to him.

  Lewis’s smile is exactly the same: wide and full enough to dimple his cheeks and narrow his eyes, and alarming in its intensity, as if he might be about to start teasing you in a way you’re not going to like very much. He used to do that a lot. There was no point in asking him to stop—he’d only do it more. For nearly a year he called Dominic “Rom-com Dom” after we all went to see a movie, About a Boy, that Dom liked as much as Flora and I did, despite being a man. Eventually Lewis professed to find this hilarious, though at first he found it implausible. On the way home from the cinema, he hounded Dom relentlessly: “Really? You liked it? I mean, liked liked? You actually thought it was good?”

  There’s a larger photograph, a kind of personalized banner at the top of his page. This one’s a picture of Lewis and two other men in suits and ties, all grinning as if in competition to look the most triumphant. Lewis is in the middle and holding a knife, about to cut into a large, square cake covered in white icing and decorated with blue piped writing. The cake has four candles. Farther down Lewis’s Twitter page, I find this same picture again, underneath the words “Happy 4th Birthda
y, VersaNova Technologies!”

  That was posted on January 28 of this year. So Lewis’s company is four years old.

  “If it looks like it’s four, it’s probably sixteen,” I mutter, then laugh. “Like Thomas and Emily.” Sorry, Lewis. You always hated my sense of humor.

  I’m exaggerating. He didn’t hate it, but he didn’t understand it either. Any joke that was eccentric or surreal, he used to object to. “But why’s that funny?” he would demand. “Tell me. I don’t get it.” His idea of funny was saying something and then contradicting it a few seconds later, especially if he knew it would disappoint you. The more crushed you looked, the funnier he found it. Like the time the four of us went on holiday together to Mexico. At Heathrow Airport, Lewis grabbed me by the arm and whispered in my ear, “Hey, see that lady over there? She said they were going to upgrade us to first class. Not just business class. First.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. “Do Dom and Flora know?” I couldn’t understand why he was telling me alone, when the other two were standing only a short distance away.

  “Actually, she didn’t say that at all,” said Lewis casually. “I made it up.” Then he spent the next hour laughing at my gullibility.

  Imagine if he knew that you’re gullible enough to believe Thomas and Emily haven’t aged in the last twelve years . . .

  Dom’s words from earlier replay in my mind: “Lewis Braid’s a weirdo. Always was.”

  We liked him, though. Didn’t we? We must have. We went on holiday with him more than once. He was one of our best friends.

  All the same . . . Now that I come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever wholeheartedly liked him. I was always wary of what he might do or say. I found his confidence impressive, and he had a great line in entertaining rants, but I also felt unsettled by him. He suggested more activities that I felt a strong and defensive need to resist than most people I knew: marathon boozing sessions, terrifying-sounding hikes up the sides of remote mountains, unpleasant prank campaigns against anyone that any of us disliked.

  He was interesting and unpredictable, and could liven up a room purely by walking into it.

  He had a strange habit of bursting in, like a cowboy crashing into a barroom, about to pull a gun. Instead of a gun, Lewis would typically produce an unexpected declaration of some kind, something that made everyone look up and take notice. It could be anything from “Your lord and king is here, motherfuckers!” to “Hey, Dom, Beth—your next-door neighbor’s wanking over his computer. I’ve identified the optimal vantage point, if you want to catch some of the action.”

  He was horrified when we all said we had no desire to watch. “What is wrong with you freaks?” he yelled, actually upset that we were missing out. “It’s the most grotesque and embarrassing thing you’re likely to see all year! You’re a bunch of fucking philistines.”

  Dom was right: Lewis Braid was weird, and he could be a giant pain in the arse, but we’d have had less fun without him around, no doubt about it. Life would have been much less colorful.

  I read a few of the posts he’s put on his Twitter page. There’s no hint of his more outrageous side here. It’s all bland and professional: “Small can be beautiful at VersaNova—great team, fantastic colleagues and a mission worth working for!” “It’s a beautiful day for the opening of the ATARM conference here in Tampa, Florida. Proud to be one of the sponsors of this fantastic event, April 18–20!” “VersaNova named in @technovators Top 10 Tech Companies to Watch in 2019” “Great to see our technology director Sheryl Sotork featured in CapInvest Magazine” “‘Patient Capital Delivers Results’—thrilled to be one of the software companies featured in this article.”

  I don’t know what I was hoping for. “Hey, guys, it’s a bit strange but my oldest two children seem to have stopped growing . . .”

  I keep scrolling farther down, reading tweets from last week, last month, the end of last year. Lewis doesn’t post on here very often—only once or twice a month. There’s nothing interesting in December last year, or November.

  Wait. What’s this?

  In October, he posted a link to what looks like an Instagram account in his name. I click to open it. I have no idea what a grown man’s account might look like. I’m more familiar with Instagram than with Twitter or LinkedIn. Zannah sometimes shows me selfies posted there by girls at her school and asks me if I think they’re flames, mingers or donkeys, which apparently, as everyone who is not “so lame” knows, are the only three categories.

  Soon I’m staring at a photograph of Lewis on the deck of a boat, with a beautiful sunset behind him. He’s been much more active on Instagram than he has on Twitter. There are a lot of photos on his page. I work through them methodically, opening them one by one: Lewis bare-chested in denim shorts, holding up a fish, Lewis with two other people, walking along a . . .

  Two other people.

  Are they . . . ?

  I try to tell myself that I can’t possibly know for certain, but I do. It’s them. It’s Thomas and Emily. Teenagers. As they should be. This is how the children I knew twelve years ago would look now. When I look at their faces, I have the same feeling I had when I first saw Lewis’s photograph on Twitter: absolute recognition.

  If this is them, then who were the Thomas and Emily you saw in Hemingford Abbots?

  Suddenly I feel dizzy, as if I’m tumbling forward without anything to stop me from falling. I hold on to the sides of Dom’s desk with both hands and breathe deliberately until the fuzzy dots in my head start to clear.

  Come on, Beth, get a grip. Nothing has changed, except in a good way. If these two golden, perfect, healthy-looking teenagers are Thomas and Emily Braid—and they are, I know they are—then they didn’t die and get replaced by a new Thomas and Emily. And, all right, I still don’t know who the two children were that I saw at 16 Wyddial Lane, but I never knew that, and so nothing has changed, nothing is any more frightening now than it was before. The Hemingford Abbots children could never have been Thomas and Emily Braid; they were too young. I should have known that from the start. I did know it, but I didn’t fully believe it—not until I saw these photographs.

  Do all Florida teenagers look radiant, sun-kissed and wholesome or is it just Lewis Braid’s children? They certainly all seem to have a great life in America. Lewis’s Instagram is an apparently endless pictorial log of every pleasure available to humankind: glasses of champagne, cheese-and-salsa-drizzled nachos, sunsets, beaches, swimming pools, balcony terraces in fancy-looking restaurants . . .

  I take in all these things at a glance, but I don’t care enough about the details to look at them properly. The Braids are lucky and rich; I knew that already. Now, in Florida, they’re luckier and richer. Of course they are.

  Thomas and Emily are all I’m interested in. I scroll down, hoping for more photos of them.

  Here’s Emily in very short black shorts, a long, floaty white blouse and a red-and-navy-blue-bead ankle bracelet. Thomas, in the most recent pictures, has a surfboard under his arm and sun-bleached hair almost down to his shoulders. Unlike his sister, he seems to favor longer shorts, right down to his knees.

  His sister . . .

  My breath catches in my throat.

  Georgina. Where is she?

  I search two, three times to make sure. She isn’t here. There are no children in these pictures apart from Thomas and Emily. And no Flora either.

  Why would Lewis fill his Instagram with many pictures of two of his children, but none of the third? And none of his wife?

  A memory surfaces suddenly, from the last time we were all together. Lewis said that if he were Thomas or Emily, he would hate Georgina, because now their parents’ sizable estate would have to be divided between three people instead of two. Instantly, Flora looked unhappy. She often used to roll her eyes at him affectionately, as if he were a lovable but disobedient puppy, but this time she looked seriously uncomfortable. He put his arm around her and said, “I’m joking. Relax. There’s plenty for everyo
ne.”

  I only saw Georgina once, but she was a beautiful baby. And Lewis loves to show off all the wonderful things in his life—this Instagram account is proof of that—so why not Georgina? Why not Flora?

  Other questions crowd my mind: Why wasn’t Georgina in the car yesterday? Why did Flora start crying when she spoke to Chimpy on the phone? Is there some kind of pattern here that I’m missing?

  Has something happened to Georgina Braid? No, there’s no reason to think that. Flora’s not in these pictures either, and I know nothing’s happened to her. I saw her yesterday.

  I did. I saw her. The rest of what I saw makes no sense, granted—but nothing is going to persuade me that I didn’t see Flora.

  I think back to the conversation at the kitchen table. When I told Zannah that the Braids had a third child in addition to the two I was sure I’d seen that day, Dom said, “Did they?” He didn’t seem to know. If I hadn’t told him, would he have remembered? Did he remember, genuinely, or did he simply take my word for it, assuming that I was bound to know better than him?

  No. It’s not possible that I imagined the existence of Georgina Braid. I can prove I didn’t. It’s the easiest thing in the world: all I’d need to do is dig out the pieces of a photograph I cut up many years ago and then kept, in its vandalized form, because it felt like the only way I could make amends for that small act of violence.

  I stay where I am.

  Of course Georgina Braid was real. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. I’m not crazy.

  4

  “It’s seven in the morning, Beth.” Dom blinks as I pull open the bedroom curtains. “I’ve been awake less than five minutes.”

  “I’m not asking you to do it now.”

  “I need coffee before I do anything.”

  “In the kitchen, all ready. Proper tar sludge.” My name for Dom’s preferred style of coffee is a running joke, as is his for mine: beige water.

  “Thanks, but . . . Beth, I’m not bothering Lewis Braid. If you want to, fine, but I don’t.”