House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction; Suspense; Siblings; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

From #1 bestselling author Lisa Jewell, author of The Family Upstairs, Watching You and Then She Was Gone

AN UNFORGETTABLE STORY ABOUT
A FAMILY WITH A TERRIBLE SECRET

When a tragedy breaks a family apart, what can bring it back together?

The Birds seem to be the perfect family: mother, father, four children, a picture-book cottage in the country.

But one Easter weekend, something happens – something so unexpected, so devastating, that no-one can bring themselves to talk about it.

The family shatters, seemingly for good.

Until, years later, they are forced to return to the house they grew up in, and to confront what really broke the family apart...

© Lisa Jewell 2013 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Release date: August 12, 2014

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 401

Sample

Chapter 1

Tuesday 2nd November 2010

Hi, Jim!

Well, I must say, I didn’t think for a minute you’d be called something earthy like Jim! The Barbour and natty waistcoat in your profile photo make you look more like a Rupert or a Henry, something serious with two syllables, you know! And talking of syllables, and since you asked, no, I’m not really called Rainbowbelle. OF COURSE NOT! I’m called Lorelei and my name has three or four syllables, depending on how you say it. (My parents named us after mythical maidens. My sister is called Pandora. There was an Athena, but she was stillborn, so you know.) Anyway. Lor-a-lay-ee. Or Lor-a-lay. I’m not fussy really.

I’m sixty-five years old and I live in one of the prettiest villages in the Cotswolds in a big, crazy old house full of what I call TREASURES and what my children call CRAP. We are probably ALL right. 

I have four children. Megan is forty, Bethan is thirty-eight and the twins, Rory and Rhys, are thirty-five. Oh, and thanks mainly to the frantic reproduction of my eldest daughter I am a multiple grandmother too! Do you have any children? You didn’t mention them so I assume not? People usually tell you about their children before anything else, right? I don’t see them very much, unfortunately, they’re all so busy, and I’m, well, I suppose you could say insular these days. I lost my partner about four years ago and things kind of unraveled from there, you might say.

Anyway, what can I tell you about me? I love nature, I love the countryside, I love children, I love to swim. I’m fit, for my age. I’ve kept my figure over the years, and am grateful for that. I see some women I’ve known for many years just turn to woolly mammoths once they pass menopause! And, as you can see from my picture, I’ve kept my hair long. Nothing ages a woman faster than a haircut!!

Anyway, that’s enough about me. Tell me more about you! You say you’re a widower. I’m very sorry to hear that. And whereabouts in the North do you live? I can see from your photo that you have a dog. That is a very beautiful retriever. What is it called? We had a dog when the children were growing up, but once they’d all gone, I could never quite see the point of animals.

I will see what I can do about photographs. I’m not really very techy beyond my laptop. But there must be something else I can send you. I’ll check it out.

Well, thank you, Jim, for getting in touch. The Internet really is a marvelous thing, especially for old codgers like us, wouldn’t you say? I’d be lost without it really. I’d love to hear back from you again, but please don’t feel you have to, if you think I sound dreadful!!

Yours with best wishes,

Lorelei Bird

April 2011

The damp heat came as a shock after the chill of the air-­conditioning that had cooled the car for the last two hours. Meg slammed the door behind her, pushed up the sleeves of her cotton top, pulled down her sunglasses and stared at the house.

“Jesus Christ.”

Molly joined her on the pavement, and gawped from behind lime-green Ray-Bans. “Oh, my God.”

They stood together for a moment, side by side, the same height as each other now. Molly had caught up last summer, much to her delight. They now both stood at five foot eight. Molly long and lean as a fashion drawing, tanned legs in denim hot pants, honey-dusted hair bundled on top of her head in an artful pile, white Havaianas, a chambray shirt over a pink tank top, tiny ankles and wrists layered in friendship circlets and rubber bands. Meg, on the other hand, solid as a quarterback, sensible in three-quarter-length navy chinos and a Breton-­striped long-sleeved top, a pair of silver-sequined FitFlops and a last-minute pedicure her only concession to the unseasonal heat wave. Mother and only daughter, in the late stages of a nightmarish, clichéd teenage disaster that had lasted more than three years. Almost friends now. Almost. Someone had once told Meg that you get your daughter back when she’s nineteen. Only four more years to wait.

“This is worse than I thought. I mean, so much worse.” Meg shook her head and took a tentative step towards the house. There it stood, brick for brick, exactly as it had been the day she was born, forty years earlier. Three low windows facing out onto the street; four windows above; two front doors, one at either end; on the right by the side entrance a plaque, made by a long-dead local craftsman, an oval with the words The Bird House painted on it and a pair of lovebirds with their beaks entwined. The green-painted gate to the left of the house that opened up onto a graveled path to the back door, the stickers in the windows declaring membership of Neighborhood Watch (whatever happened to Neighborhood Watch? Meg wondered idly), allegiance to the RSPB and an intolerance towards people selling door-to-door.

All there, just as it had been forever and ever.

Except . . .

“This is the worst house I’ve ever seen,” said Molly. “It’s worse than the ones on the TV shows.”

“We haven’t even been inside yet, Moll, hold that thought.”

“And my nose too, right?”

“Yes, probably.” She sighed.

The windows, which to her recollection had never been cleaned, were now so thick with grime that they were fully opaque. In fact, they were black. The pastel-yellow Gloucester brick was discolored and damaged. The green gate was hanging off its post by one solitary nail and the graveled pathway was piled high with random objects: two old pushchairs, a rusty bike, a dead Christmas tree in a broken pot, a box of magazines swollen and waterlogged to twice their original size.

The flat-fronted style of the house meant that it held most of its personality within and behind, but even on such scant display, it was clear that this house had a disease. The village had grown more and more gentrified over the decades, all the old houses scrubbed to a gleaming yellow, doors and window frames Farrow-&-Balled to the nth degree, and there, lodged between them, like a rotten tooth, sat the Bird House.

“God, it’s so embarrassing,” said Molly, pushing her Ray-Bans into her hair and wrinkling her tiny nose. “What must everyone think?”

Meg raised her eyebrows. “Hmm,” she said, “I’d say that judging by our local reputation this is probably no more than anyone in the village would expect. Come on then”—she smiled at her daughter, nervously—“let’s go in, shall we? Get it over with?”

Molly smiled back grimly and nodded.

April 1981

Megan pulled back the ivy and pushed her fingertips inside a small crevice in the wall.

“Got another one!” she shouted out to Bethan and the twins.

“Oh, well done, Meggy!” her mother called from the back step, where she stood in her strawberry-print apron watching proceedings with a contented smile. “Bravo!”

Megan pulled out the small foil-wrapped egg and dropped it into her basket. “It’s pink!” she said pointedly to her younger sister.

“Don’t care,” said Bethan. “I’ve got three pink ones already.”

Megan looked up at the sky; it was cloudless, densely blue, hot as July. Mum had said they needed to find their eggs quickly, otherwise they might melt. Her eyes scanned the gardens. She’d found all the eggs in the woodpile, gingerly plucking them from next to rubbery woodlice. There’d been more in the beds of daffodils and hyacinths that lined the pathways around the greenhouse and she’d come across a big gold one sitting in the branches of the cherry tree outside the kitchen door. She counted up her eggs and found she had twelve. Bethan and the twins were still searching close to the house, but Megan suspected that the top garden had been all but stripped of its eggy assets, so she skipped down the slate-covered steps to the lower garden. Suddenly the sounds of her siblings and her mother faded to a murmur. It was warmer down here, soft and hazy. The grass had stripes in it, from where Dad had mown it yesterday, this way and that, and little piles of shaggy grass trimmings already turning pale in the burning sun. A camellia bush, confused by the early summer, had already bloomed and spilled its fat blossoms onto the lawn, where they lay browning and sated, halfway to ugly. Megan headed to the lichen-spotted sundial in the middle of the lawn. Three more foil-wrapped eggs sat on top of it and she brushed them into her basket with the side of her hand.

She heard Bethan tripping down the steps behind her in her flamenco shoes. Megan turned and smiled. Sometimes when she looked at her little sister she felt overcome with love. Her worst enemy and her best friend.

Meg and Beth looked identical. They both had what her mother called the “Bird face.” It was the same as her dad’s and the same as her auntie Lorna’s and the same as Granny Bird’s. Apple cheeks, high foreheads, wide smiles. The only difference was that Megan’s hair was brown and curly like Mum’s, and Bethan’s was straight and black like Dad’s. Rory and Rhys, the twins, looked like their mum. They had “Douglas faces.” Low foreheads, long noses, neat bee-stung lips, and narrow blue eyes peering curiously from behind curtains of long blond hair.

People always said, “Oh, such lovely-looking children.” They said, “You must be so proud, Mrs. Bird.” They said, “What perfect angels.”

And Mum would say, “You should see them when they’re at home,” and roll her eyes, with one hand running through ­Rory’s hair, the other wrapped around Rhys’s hand and her voice full of love.

“How many have you got?” Meg called out to her sister.

“Eleven. How about you?”

“Fifteen.”

Their mother appeared at the bottom of the steps with the twins in tow. “The boys have got nine each, I think we’re almost there,” she said. “Think yellow,” she added with an exaggerated wink. The boys let go of her hands and ran towards the slide at the bottom of the garden that had yellow handles. Bethan ran towards an upturned bucket that was actually orange. But Megan knew exactly where her mother meant. The Saint-John’s-wort bush right in front of them. She walked towards it and let her eyes roam over the clouds of yellow flowers abuzz with fat bumblebees before they came to rest on a row of terra-cotta pots underneath, overflowing with eggs and small yellow puffball chicks with glued-on eyes. She was about to scoop up the eggs and chicks when her mother touched her on her shoulder, her soft dry hands firm against Meg’s sun-freckled skin. “Share them,” she whispered softly, “with the little ones. Make it fair.”

Meg was about to complain but then she took a deep breath and nodded. “Here!” she called out to her siblings. “Look! There’s millions.”

All three hurtled to the Saint-John’s-wort bush and their mother divided up the remaining eggs into four piles and handed them to each child in turn. “Already starting to melt,” she said, licking some chocolate from the edge of her thumb, “better get them indoors.”

The cool of the house was shocking after the heat outside. It draped itself over Meg’s bare skin like a cold flannel. Dad was pouring juice into beakers at the kitchen table. The dog was dozing on the window seat. The yellow walls of the kitchen were entirely covered over with the children’s art. Megan ran her finger along the edges of a drawing that she’d done when she was four. It always amazed her to think it had been stuck to the wall there, in the very same place, with the very same piece of Sellotape, for six whole years. She could barely remember being four. She certainly could not remember sitting and drawing this portrait entitled megn and mumy, composed of two string-legged people with crazy hair, split-in-half smiles and hands twice the size of their bodies, suspended in a gravity-free world of spiky blue trees and floating animals. The wall of art was a conversation piece for anyone coming into the house; it spanned all three walls, spread itself over cupboard doors, over door frames, around corners and even into the pantry. Dad would try and take some down occasionally, to “update the wall” as he’d put it. But Mum would just smile her naughty-little-girl smile and say, “Over my dead body.” If Dad ever saw one of his children producing a piece of art he’d snatch it away the moment it was shown to him and say, “That is so very beautiful that I shall have to put it in my special folder,” and spirit it away somewhere (occasionally tucked inside his clothes) before Mum saw it and stuck it to the wall.

“Now,” she said, pulling her tangly hair back into a ponytail and removing her apron, “you can eat all the eggs you like as long as you promise you’ll still have room for lunch. And remember, keep the foils for the craft box!”

The “craft box” was another bugbear of Dad’s. It had once been a small plastic toolbox neatly filled with sequins and pipe cleaners and sheets of gold leaf. Over the years it had expanded into an ever-growing family of giant plastic crates that lived in a big cupboard in the hall, filled with an impossible tangle of old string lengths, knots of wool, empty sweet wrappers, toilet-roll middles, old underwear cut into rags, packing chips and used wrapping paper. Megan didn’t really do crafts anymore—she was nearly eleven now—and Bethan had never been as creative as her sister, while the boys of course would rather be roaming the gardens or charging about the house than sitting with a tube of Pritt and a handful of old ice-lolly sticks. No one really used the craft box anymore, but that didn’t stop Lorelei constantly topping it up with all sorts of old junk.

She pulled the egg foils eagerly from the children now as they discarded them, smoothing them flat with her fingertips into delicate slivers, her face shining with satisfaction. “So pretty,” she said, piling them together, “like little slices of rainbow. And of course, they will always make me think of today. This perfect day with my lovely children when the sun shone and shone and all was right with the world.”

She looked at each child in turn and smiled her smile. She ran a hand over Rhys’s hair and stroked it from his eyes. “My lovely children,” she said again, her words encompassing all four of them, but her loving gaze fixed firmly upon her last-born child.

Rhys had been the smallest of all of Lorelei’s babies. Megan and Bethan had both weighed over nine pounds. Rory had been the first twin out, weighing in at a healthy six pounds and fifteen ounces. And then, as her mother often recounted, out popped poor Rhys like a plucked quail, a little under four pounds, blue and wrinkled and just about able to breathe on his own. They’d put him under lights—or “lightly toasted him,” as Lorelei also often recounted—and declared him fit to go home only after three long days.

Lorelei still worried about him more than the other three. At just six years old he was smaller than Rory, smaller than most of the children in his class, with a pale complexion and a tendency to catch colds and tummy bugs. He clung to his mother whenever they were out in public, wailed like a baby when he got hurt and, unlike his brother, didn’t like playing with other children. He seemed happy only when he was here, at home, brother on one side, mother on the other. Megan didn’t know what to make of him. Sometimes she wished he’d never been born. Sometimes she really thought they’d be better off without him. He didn’t “match.” All the Birds were fun and gregarious, silly and bright. Rhys just dragged them down.

Megan unthinkingly squeezed her fist around the gold foil that she’d just unpeeled from the big egg she’d found in the cherry tree, and jumped slightly as her mother’s hand slapped down against hers.

“Foil!” Lorelei cried. “Foil!”

She immediately let her fist fall open and her mother took the crumpled foil with a smile. “Thank you, darling,” she said sweetly. She let her gaze fall on the foil and said, “Look at it, so pretty, so shiny, so . . . happy.”

The Easter holidays stretched out for another week. The heat wave continued and the Bird children came indoors only for beakers of juice, slices of bread and butter and desperately needed visits to the toilet.

Friends came and went, there was a day trip to the beach at Weston-super-Mare, and on the last weekend of the holidays they had a visit from Lorelei’s sister Pandora and her two teenage sons. Dad filled the paddling pool and the adults drank glasses of Pimm’s with fruit-shaped plastic ice cubes bobbing about in them. Megan’s cousin Tom played David Bowie songs on his heavily stickered guitar. Rory burst the paddling pool with a stick and the water seeped heavily onto the lawn, leaving it waterlogged and boggy, and Dad said, “Well, that’s that then.” Lorelei scooped the floppy remains of the punctured pool into her arms like it was an injured child and carried it into the garage murmuring, “Dad’ll fix it up.” Dad said, “You and I both know that Dad won’t fix it up. I have no idea how to fix paddling pools and I still haven’t fixed the one that got burst last year.” And Lorelei smiled and blew him a kiss across the garden.

Dad sighed and said, “Well. We now have three punctured paddling pools sitting in our garage—this house is just a dumping ground,” and raised his eyebrows heavenwards.

Pandora smiled and said, “Just like our dad. He never could throw anything away.”

Megan’s other cousin Ben smiled and said, “Tell us again about what Lorelei used to collect when she was a child.”

Pandora frowned and then smiled. “Autumn leaves. Ring pulls. Tags from new clothes. Cinema stubs. The silver foil from Mum’s cigarette packets.”

“And hair!” said Ben gleefully. “Don’t forget the hair.”

“Yes,” said Pandora, “anytime anyone in our family had a haircut, Lorelei begged to keep it. She had a shopping bag full of it under her bed. It was quite gruesome.”

The adults and teenagers laughed and Megan looked at them curiously. They’d had this conversation before—every time they were together, it sometimes seemed—and whenever she heard them talking about her mum like this it sounded different. The older she got the less she found it funny and the more she found it peculiar. Because she was now the age that her mother had been at the time of these strange childhood collections and she could no more imagine herself collecting old hair than she could asking to go to school on a Saturday.

“Are you laughing at me?” her mother asked good-­naturedly as she returned from the garage.

“No, no, no!” said Ben. “Absolutely not. We’re just talking about you affectionately.”

“Hmm,” said Lorelei, wiping her damp hands down the length of her long denim skirt. “I strongly suspect not.”

And then she spread her arms upwards, revealing unshaved armpits of lush brown curls, and declared, “Look at that sky, just look at it. The blueness of it. Makes me want to snatch out handfuls of it and put it in my pockets.”

Megan saw a look pass over her father’s face at that moment. Love and worry. As though he was aching to say something unspeakable.

The look softened as Megan watched and then he smiled and said, “If my wife had her way, her pockets would be full of pieces of every single thing in the world.”

“Oh, yes!” Lorelei beamed. “They would be. Totally and absolutely bulging.”

Pandora had brought homemade butterfly cakes with fluffed-up cream and more tiny yellow chicks atop.

Lorelei served them in the garden with tea from a pot and scones and cream. There was more Pimm’s and a plastic bowl of strawberries. The twins ran barefoot back and forth from the hosepipe to fill their water pistols, which, after countless tellings-off, they were using to squirt only each other. Tom and Ben had retired to the bottom of the garden to smoke cigarettes in the hammock and share secret jokes together. Megan and Bethan sat side by side, listening to the grown-ups talk.

When Megan herself was a grown-up and people came to ask about her childhood, it was afternoons such as these that would impel her to say, “My childhood was perfect.”

And it was. Perfect.

They lived in a honey-colored house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-postcard Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens. Their mother was a beautiful hippy called Lorelei with long tangled hair and sparkling green eyes who treated her children like precious gems. Their father was a sweet gangly man called Colin, who still looked like a teenager with floppy hair and owlish round-framed glasses. They all attended the village school, they ate home-cooked meals together every night, their extended family was warm and clever; there was money for parties and new paddling pools, but not quite enough for foreign travel, but it didn’t matter, because they lived in paradise. And even as a child, Megan knew this to be paradise. Because, she could see with hindsight, her mother told her so. Her mother existed entirely in the moment. And she made every moment sparkle. No one in Megan’s family was ever allowed to forget how lucky they were. Not even for a second.

A cloud passed over the sun just then and Lorelei laughed and pointed and said, “Look! Look at that cloud! Isn’t it wonderful? It looks exactly like an elephant!”

April 2011

The keys were where Lorelei had always left them, under a cracked plant pot behind a water pipe beneath the kitchen window. Meg pulled them out and dusted the sticky cobwebs from her fingertips. “Yuck.”

The house had been impenetrable by either of its front doors for many years now. The family had always come in and out through the kitchen door at the back and for the last few years Lorelei had been using both hallways at the front as bonus “storage areas.”

“Right,” Meg said, rejoining Molly by the back door, “let’s go. Deep breath.” She threw her daughter a brave smile and was gratified to see her smile reflected back at her.

“You okay, Mum?”

Meg nodded. Of course she was okay. Meg was always okay. Someone had to be and she’d been the one to draw that straw. “I’m fine, love, thank you.”

Molly peered at her curiously and then took one of her hands in her own and squeezed it gently. Meg almost flinched at the tender power of it. Her daughter’s touch. Until recently her last memory of her daughter’s touch had been the sting of a palm across her cheek, the jab of toes against her shins, the drag of fingernails down her arm. It had been that bad. Truly. Everything she’d been warned of about teenage girls, squared and squared again. But lately, things had started to change. Lately, it seemed as though her daughter had started to like her again.

“Thank you, love,” she said again.

“You know you can talk about it, don’t you? You know I want to listen. I want to help. You’ve lost your mummy. If I lost my mummy, I’d . . .” Molly’s eyes filled with tears and she smiled through them. “Oh, God, well, you know.”

Meg laughed. “I know, baby, I know. But honestly. I’m good. Really.”

Molly squeezed her hand one more time before letting it go. She pulled in her breath theatrically and then nodded at the key in Meg’s hand. Meg nodded back and fitted it into the lock. She turned the key. She opened the door.

March 1986

The sky was dark with rain clouds and in the very far distance, thunder was starting to rumble. The York stone paving slabs were still stained charcoal gray from the last downpour and fat droplets of rain clung tremulously to the edges of leaves and spring blossoms. Behind the cloud was a strip of blue and there on the horizon, the faint beginnings of a rainbow. Lorelei stood barefoot just outside the kitchen door, wrapped in a long multicolored angora cardigan. Her waist-length hair was twisted and held on her crown with three large tortoiseshell combs.

“Look, Meggy,” she said, her head appearing around the door. “Look. A rainbow! Quick!”

Meg glanced up from her revision, spread before her on the kitchen table, and smiled encouragingly. “In a minute,” she said.

“No!” cried her mother. “It’ll be gone in a minute. Come and look now!”

Meg sighed and rested her pen on her notepad. “Okay,” she said.

She joined her mother outside, feeling the wetness of the flagstones seeping through her sheepskin slippers.

“Beth!” her mother called back into the kitchen. “Boys! Come quickly!”

“They’re watching telly,” said Meg. “They won’t be able to hear you.”

“Go and get them, will you, darling?”

“They won’t come.”

“Of course they will. Quick, darling, run in and tell them.”

Meg knew it was pointless to argue. She sighed again and headed towards the sitting room. Her three siblings sat in a row on the grubby sofa with the dog lying listlessly between them. They were watching Saturday Superstore and eating carrot sticks.

“Mum says there’s a rainbow,” she said defeatedly. “She wants you to go and look at it.”

No one acknowledged her so she returned to her mother with the bad news.

Lorelei sighed melodramatically. “That’s a terrible pity,” she said. “And look”—she gestured at the sky—“now it’s gone. Gone for good. Forever . . .” A small tear rolled down the side of her nose and she wiped it away with a bunched-up fist, the way a small child might do. “Such a pity,” she murmured, “to miss a rainbow . . .” Then she forced her face into a smile and said, “Ah well, at least one of you saw it. You can always describe it to the others.”

Meg smiled tightly. As if, she thought to herself, as if I will sit with my siblings and regale them with descriptions of the red and the yellow and the pink and the green, the awe and the splendor of the purple and the orange and the blue, the miracle of distant prismatic stripes. “Yes,” she said. “Maybe, later.”

It was still raining the next day. Lorelei insisted on the egg hunt taking place regardless.

“Let’s do it indoors, darling,” Colin had suggested gently.

“No way, Jose!” Lorelei had countered. “Easter Sunday is egg hunt in the garden. Rain or no rain. Isn’t that right, kiddies?”

Meg looked out towards the garden, through the rain-­splattered panes of glass, and thought of her hair, lovingly back-combed that morning into a fat quiff and sprayed hard with Elnett. She thought of the muddy lawn and the cold, wet grass and her canvas pumps, and she thought of her drainpipe jeans that she’d had trouble squeezing into this morning, and the date she was going on next week, for which she planned on being able to wear said jeans, not to mention the troublesome spot forming on her chin.

The twins jumped into their Wellington boots and raincoats.