Trespass

by Clare Clark

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When your past is a lie, who are you?

'Provocative, moving and timely' Mail on Sunday
'All the excitement of a thriller with the depth of a literary novel' Cathy Rentzenbrink
'As memorable for her sharp and even funny social observation as it is for the powerful outrage that drives it' Sunday Times
'Brilliant, chilling' Helena Kennedy QC

As a teenager, Tess falls into environmental activism - and the arms of an older, charismatic protester. She has never been happier. When he suddenly disappears, leaving her pregnant and alone, she is shattered. Slowly, though, she rebuilds a life for herself and her daughter Mia. 'We're all we need,' she sings to Mia as they dance around the kitchen. 'Me and you, us two.'

But, as Mia nears her thirteenth birthday, the death of a relative sparks questions - about activism, about her family, about her father - that Tess cannot answer. And when a hidden letter is found, Tess suddenly has urgent questions of her own. As mother and daughter pull apart, caught up in their own private quests for answers, the certainties of memory and history begin to unravel and a single shocking question emerges: if your past is all a lie, then who are you?

Complex, profound and devastatingly timely, this brilliant psychological suspense explores the twisted world of undercover operations, the most secretive part of the secret state where nothing is sacred and no one cares to count the cost.

Release date: August 18, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

Tess made coffee properly for once, the French way, in the battered old aluminium espresso pot with the black handle. She even heated the milk, twirling the pan as she poured so that the foam made the shape of a heart, a heart with one side much fatter than the other, maybe, but a heart nonetheless. It was early, or early for a Saturday, but it was already hot. Upstairs Mia was still sleeping. In a month she would be a teenager and then presumably she would sleep all day and only come out at night, like a badger. Maybe, like a badger, she would even learn to make her own bed.

Tess took her cup outside. The garden chairs were grimy, silvered with snail trails. She had bought them as a set on eBay last summer, four of them with a matching table. The purchase was intended to mark the official end of six years of neglect, a declaration of commitment to a proper grown-up garden. A year later, it remained the full extent of her efforts. The tiny lawn was a jungle, the tangled grass studded with dandelions. Weeds pushed up between the flags of the patio. Dragging the least dirty chair into a triangle of sunlight Tess sat down. This summer, she thought idly, sipping her coffee, this summer I am going to get it into shape.

The sun was bright. Tipping the chair onto its back legs, Tess rested her head against the warm brick of the wall. She could be in Rome or Barcelona. She put her cup on the table and closed her eyes, pushing down the narrow straps of her top so that they looped around her arms. She was pretty sure women in Barcelona didn’t have suntan marks from their pyjamas.

Something landed softly on her arm. Tess brushed it away. All along their street in Palmers Green the houses were being tarted up, lawns being replaced with Astroturf and wooden decking, front gardens concreted over for off-street parking. By letting the garden run wild, Tess thought, she was at least providing a valuable habitat for wildlife. She could feel the heat of the sun sinking into her skin like oil. Stretching luxuriously, her eyes still closed, she reached out for her coffee.

She felt it in her mouth before she swallowed. Something insubstantial but also solid, like a tangle of threads knotted together. Grimacing, she spat. A flying ant, its ant body capped with pale papery wings. She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, trying to extinguish the memory – or had she just imagined it? – of the creature writhing against it. She could still taste its bitterness at the back of her throat.

Another ant landed on her thigh. She slapped at it. Glancing irritably down at her leg as she flicked it away, she recoiled. The ants were everywhere. The patio seethed with them. They swarmed over the flags, oozing up from between the weed-clotted gaps like the ground was sweating them out. They clustered on the legs of the table and over the shallow step to the kitchen and along the sill of the garden door, a rolling boil of black bodies and glistening wings. There was one on Tess’s bare foot. She kicked out blindly, folding her knees tight into her chest.

Abruptly, too loud, she heard someone calling her name. Her phone, it was just her phone. Mia had personalised the ringtone. Jeez, Tess, pick up already! Mia’s laughter breaking through her terrible American accent. Tess ran into the house on her tiptoes, the soles of her feet shrivelling. Even after she closed the door she could feel the whisper of ants on her skin, in her hair. The number on her phone was international, +33. France.

‘Hello?’ she said. Her mouth was dry, the word stuck to it. The espresso pot was where she had left it on the hob. Its faceted side caught the light and she thought suddenly, wildly, of Aladdin’s lamp and the genie inside who granted every wish.

‘Hello, Tess. This is Delphine.’

Tess’s fingers tightened around the phone. Tess’s father and Delphine had been divorced for ten years. There was only one reason she would call Tess now. Don’t say it, Tess pleaded silently. Please, Delphine, please, whatever it is you are about to say, don’t let it be that.

‘It’s Sylvie,’ Delphine said.

Sylvie, Delphine’s mother and Tess’s – Tess’s what? If there was a word for it, in French or in English, Tess had never known it. Dark clumps of ants clotted on the sill outside the window. She stared at them as Delphine talked, her voice quiet and flat as though everything she said had been said too many times before. She told Tess that Sylvie had been feeling under the weather for months, not that she admitted it, of course. That two days ago she had woken in the night with pains in her chest and abdomen. She called an ambulance, she thought she was having a heart attack, but when they scanned her they found tumours in her liver, her lungs and her stomach. The one in her stomach was bleeding. They gave her a blood transfusion but the cancer was too far advanced, there was nothing else they could do. Delphine’s English was as flawless as ever, almost without accent. Tess made herself look at the ants on the window, their wings glittering like splinters of glass. The consultant had told Delphine that they would need to keep Sylvie under observation in the ICU for at least the next few days. After that, if her condition was stable, there was a hospice in Brest. The staff were wonderful and it had a garden. They would do everything they could to make her comfortable.

‘A hospice? But surely—’

‘Please don’t.’ Delphine exhaled wearily. ‘Sylvie – I cannot fight you too.’

In all the time she had known her, Tess had never heard Delphine call her mother by anything but her first name. She had never found it strange till now. She pressed her phone to her cheek and looked at the espresso pot, the flare of sunlight on its lid. A hospice. The place you went to die, when dying was all that was left.

‘Look, the consultant is here, I have to go back,’ Delphine said. ‘I wanted to call, that is, the reason I am calling, I am not sure if this is appropriate, perhaps you will decide that it is not, it has been a long time, I understand that, but the doctors, they are not hopeful. If you wish to see her, if that is what you want, then you should come soon.’

Sylvie was dying. The words were sharp and clear, cut into Tess’s brain, and yet there was no sense in them. It wasn’t possible, not Sylvie, not yet. Sylvie was never ill. She was never even tired. The force of life ran through her like she was where it started. Tess tried to picture her in a hospital bed in a hospital gown, tubes running into the backs of her hands, but all she could see was Sylvie standing on the rocky promontory in her faded black swimsuit, her arms outstretched and her face turned up towards the rain, her hair streaming like seaweed down her back. The shout of laughter as she arced into the air and was gone.

In the garden the ants were taking flight, clouds of them swirling upwards like ash from a bonfire. When Tess closed her eyes, the ants went on rising in the darkness, only now the swirls were silver.

‘Look Tess, I’m sorry, I need to go. I’ll ring you back, OK?’

Tess put her phone down on the kitchen counter. She thought of the tumours growing silently in Sylvie’s body, making new shapes from the meat of her, sucking and twisting her into themselves to make bodies of their own.

‘Making art is like keeping a dragon in your cellar,’ Sylvie told her once. ‘Some days you feel utterly invincible. Some days you go up in flames.’

Sylvie couldn’t be dying. She was Sylvie. And she was only sixty-four.

Suddenly Tess’s head was too heavy for her neck. She leaned against the garden door, resting the weight of it against the glass. Above her, above the roofs of the houses that backed onto theirs, the sky was filled with birds. Seagulls, perhaps, though they didn’t scream the way seagulls usually did. They wheeled and swooped in silence, feasting on the glutted air.

It was eight years since Tess had left Sylvie’s house for the last time. There must have been cicadas that day, birdsong, the distant shush of the sea, but Tess remembered only the silence and Sylvie standing at the gate, her face like the face of the wooden saint who proffered his bread in Quimper cathedral, sombre and unshakeable. She was still standing there when Tess turned the corner out of sight.

A few months later she sent Tess a letter. It was March. Mia was five years old. There was snow in London and white blossoms like scraps of tissue on the spindly cherry trees along the street. Sylvie’s handwriting was like Sylvie, too big for the page. Tell her, the letter said. There will never be a better time than now. Tell her and bring her home. There is something I need to tell you too. The letter reawakened all of Tess’s anger and her fear. She knew that, if she did not answer, Sylvie would not write again. Sylvie never tried to change people’s minds. She couldn’t see the point. The people she loved, the people that mattered, those people made their way as she did, unerringly, their compasses turning them towards true North. As for the others, they hardly mattered at all.

Tess looked at the letter for a long time. With each sentence she felt Sylvie’s hands on her shoulders, turning her against herself. When it was time to fetch Mia from school, she tore the letter into small pieces and put them in the bin. Later that night she took them out again and burned them in the kitchen sink. Mia couldn’t read and she couldn’t reach the bin but Tess couldn’t shake the fear that she would find the torn-up words and put them together. That somehow the words would find her.

She never wrote back. Since then many years had passed. Tess noticed them pass, with a child you couldn’t help but notice, but she did nothing. What could she do? What Sylvie asked of her was impossible. With every year it grew more impossible still.

Eight years of not speaking. And yet she had always believed that the silence would come to an end. The weight of their past required a future to balance it. One day, not yet but soon, they would shake things out between them like one of Sylvie’s much-darned linen sheets, the ones they used to launder together and lay out over the rosemary bushes to dry in the sun. When they put them back on the beds, the scent of them was the scent of something just beginning.

When Tess looked up again the sky was empty. The birds were gone. Already the flying ants were thinning. By this afternoon only their wings would be left, scattered like torn-up ticket stubs across the patio. Then the birds would eat those too. Her unfinished coffee was still on the garden table. The coffee Sylvie had taught her how to make.

She closed her eyes, her arms tight around her ribs. Her heart howled.

There was supposed to be so much time left.

Mia glared out of the window at the dry yellow grass, the rubbish strewn along the side of the motorway. She had pulled down the plastic visor above the windscreen but the sun was still too strong. It burned her bare arm through the glass. Her legs fizzed from sitting still too long and she was starting to feel carsick. Beside her, her mum leaned forward, her hands so tight on the steering wheel that her knuckles shone like teeth. She kept blinking and rubbing her eyes but she wouldn’t stop, not even when Mia said she was hungry and needed the toilet. She said it wasn’t very far now and there was chewing gum in the glove compartment and went on driving.

It was an hour earlier in London. Yaz would be getting ready. They all would, everyone except her. Mia bit her thumbnail savagely. She wanted to scream at her mum, to tell her she had ruined everything forever because, if it wasn’t for her, she wouldn’t be in this stupid car at all, she would be going to Lauren’s, Lauren who had invited Yaz to her party and not Mia but who finally messaged her yesterday and said she could come if she wanted, Lauren who had never asked her before and now most likely never would again because Yaz said girls like Lauren only ever gave you one chance, and for what? For an old woman her mum hadn’t seen since Mia was little, a woman she wasn’t even related to, not since Grandpa Ivo and Delphine had got divorced, a woman who never visited them or asked them to visit or even sent her a birthday card, only none of that mattered when someone was dying; when someone was dying you weren’t allowed to be angry, all you were allowed to be was sorry and sad, even when the person dying was a total stranger, and anyway that wasn’t the worst part, the worst, most angry-making part was that it didn’t matter how mean and unfair it was, there was nothing Mia could say because her mum didn’t even know about Lauren’s party, she thought it was just an ordinary sleepover with Yaz because, if she knew about the party and Lauren’s parents being away, there was no way on earth she would ever have let Mia go.

They drove through a pine wood for a long time, then down a narrow lane with long grass like a mohawk in the middle that rustled against the belly of the car. Halfway down, where the lane turned sharply, her mum stopped the car.

‘Look,’ she said, pointing towards a clump of twisted pines.

‘What at?’

‘The sea, can you see it? We’re almost there.’

‘Then why are we stopping? I told you, I’m desperate for the toilet.’

Tess nodded absently, staring out towards the sea.

‘I’m serious,’ Mia said. ‘For God’s sake, Mum. I’m literally about to pee my pants.’

Tess blinked.

‘Sorry,’ she said and, jamming the car into gear, she bumped down the lane to the house.

The back door was open. Tess called but no one came. She told Mia to use the bathroom at the end of the passage. The toilet had a tank up near the ceiling and a chain to flush it. It looked like something out of a museum. When she came out, Tess was gone. Mia walked back along the passage and into the kitchen. Her mum was leaning on the counter, her back towards the door. Her head was bowed. A thin woman with shiny dark hair and gold buttons on the shoulders of her sweater stood beside her.

‘Mia,’ the thin woman said. She tried to smile but her face didn’t want to. ‘I’m Delphine.’

‘Hi,’ Mia said. She waited for her mum to turn around, to smile at her, but she didn’t.

‘They just called from the hospital,’ Delphine said. ‘Sylvie died.’

Mia looked at Delphine, then at Tess. ‘Mum?’

Tess’s shoulders jerked. She made a strange strangled noise in her throat. Mia stared at the floor. Then, darting across the kitchen, she hugged her mother tightly, her face pressed against her back.

‘It’s OK, Mum,’ she said, and Tess turned round inside the circle of her arms and cried into her hair.

Tess walked across the garden towards the cliff. She wore a swimsuit and sunglasses, one of Sylvie’s threadbare hammam towels tied sarong-style around her waist. It had rained in the night, the grass was still wet, but already the rinsed cool of the morning was giving way to something heavier. It was going to be hot. Blades of grass clung to her bare feet. She thought of the nights she and Sylvie had lain on their backs in the darkness looking for shooting stars, Sylvie toasting their wishes with Armagnac and exhaling a thin ribbon of smoke up to mix with the Milky Way. Through the black grid of the pines the sea was an inky blue. The people who settled here believed that this jut of land was where the world stopped, Sylvie told Tess the first time she came. Finistère, the end of the earth.

Tess was twelve. After a protracted and acrimonious divorce her parents had both remarried. Tess lived with her mother and stepfather in London for most of the year but when the summer holidays came round her mother packed her off to Ivo and Delphine in Paris. She told Tess that Ivo was still her father, that just because he had married a child – and a French child at that – didn’t mean he didn’t have responsibilities. Tess was glad. She imagined a summer sipping Orangina by the Eiffel Tower but when she arrived in Paris Ivo announced that he was taking her to Delphine’s mother by the sea. No one with a crumb of sense, he said, remained in Paris in July. He drove her to Sylvie’s in a sports car with the roof down. Delphine didn’t come. She said she had to work. Tess pretended to be sorry. A whole summer, she thought, just her and Ivo, hugging the thought like a present. She didn’t think about Sylvie at all.

Ivo stayed at Sylvie’s for one night. The next morning he called Tess a jammy so-and-so, kissed Sylvie on the cheek, and drove back to Paris and Delphine.

The narrow path down to the beach was overgrown, the air heady with the coconut scent of gorse. Out beyond the bay a boat with white sails tilted towards the horizon. It was like a hologram, Tess thought, everything the same and none of it real. She could reach out her hand and the picture would resolve around it, the saturated colours moving over the screen of her skin. All the way here, on the deck of the ferry, driving from Caen along the old familiar roads, Tess had tried to order her thoughts, to find the set of words that would put things back together, but each time she tried to clear a space in her head for them the memories pushed their way in: the stormy crossing after her mother died when she was sixteen, the drive after Mia was born when she never stopped screaming, both times weary to the bone and weighted down with grief that was not just loss but anger and fear and confusion and the disorienting blankness of not belonging anywhere or to anyone. Tess never pretended that she could belong to Sylvie, Sylvie did not believe in owning or being owned, but she knew that if she could only make it to the house at the end of the earth then Sylvie would show her how to belong to herself. That was Sylvie’s gift. When she loved you her power ran through you, you could feel it as she looked at you, the fierce magnet of her certainty drawing you closer, gathering the filings of you into something solid, something resembling a whole.

Sylvie was dead.

The lurch in her chest was like vertigo. Tess swayed, covering her face with her hands. Sylvie was dead and she was going swimming. But what else was she to do? She had no idea what came next. When Tess’s mother died it was like a machine took over, the messiness and confusion shaped and sealed safely like sausages in their skins: funeral, burial, memorial, the same words repeated over and over until they were sounds with no meaning. A life catalogued and accounted for and filed away, case closed.

Sylvie had refused a funeral. According to Delphine, she thought that burial poisoned the earth and cremation released too much carbon into the atmosphere and that a corpse should anyway be put to good use, so instead she had bequeathed her body to the university in Brest for medical research. When Tess asked if she could see Sylvie before they took her away, Delphine said it was too late. Her body had already been collected by the faculty. It had to be stored in precisely the right conditions or it would be of no value to the students. No one could say when they would be finished with her. Sylvie had granted the university indefinite consent, which meant that they could keep her as long as they wanted. It might be one year or it might be three. The university would notify the family when they were ready to release her remains, along with an invitation to their annual service of thanksgiving at the Église Saint-Louis, a modernist monstrosity, Delphine said bitterly, built after Brest was flattened in the war. The medical students from that year’s class were also invited to attend the service. According to the university, it provided a wonderful opportunity for them to meet the families of their cadavers and express their gratitude. The way Delphine said it, it was like the words were bits of broken glass.

Tess pressed her fingers against her closed lids. Her eyes were gritty and her head ached. She hadn’t slept. In the long raw hours after Mia had gone to bed, she and Delphine sat up talking in Sylvie’s kitchen, except it wasn’t Sylvie’s kitchen because everything that made it Sylvie’s kitchen was gone, the blackened espresso maker and the copper saucepans and the sticky jars and bottles on their tin trays and the herbs spilling from their pots on the windowsill, the piles of sketchbooks and dog-eared novels and newspapers turned inside out, the clusters of candles braided with drips of wax. In the harsh strip lighting, its Formica counters scrubbed and bare, the room was dingy and unfamiliar.

They drank Armagnac from Sylvie’s small thick glass tumblers with the faceted sides. Sylvie did not own coffee cups or wine glasses. She drank everything from those tumblers, brandy, champagne, espresso, sage tea from the silver-green bush by the back door, holding them up so that they caught the light like jewels, their sides scabbed with specks of clay.

‘To Sylvie,’ Delphine said, raising her glass.

‘To Sylvie,’ Tess echoed, trying not to cry. She had tasted her first Armagnac in this house, Sylvie laughing as she screwed up her face at the burn of it, but this was something different, rich and smooth. She took a second, deeper swig. Immediately Delphine poured them both another glass.

‘The good stuff, thank God,’ Delphine said. ‘A present from Lucien.’ Lucien was Delphine’s second husband. He had telephoned earlier suggesting he drive out from Paris but Delphine told him there was no point, that there was nothing he could do. ‘He bought her a bottle every Christmas, each year more expensive than the last, but she always said she couldn’t taste the difference. It drove him to distraction. He called her a firewater socialist.’

‘I imagine she rather liked that.’

Delphine twisted her mouth. She studied her glass, then drained it in a single neat swallow. ‘Salt water and Armagnac, my mother’s keys to eternal life. Well, she was wrong about that, wasn’t she? But then she was wrong about a lot of things. It’s just that she would have died rather than admit it.’

Something passed over Delphine’s face, irony or bitterness or grief, Tess couldn’t tell. She wanted to protest but she bit her tongue. Sylvie was Delphine’s mother, Delphine could say what she wanted. A daughter had that right. Tess took another gulp of brandy.

‘Le feu dansant,’ Delphine said. ‘That’s what the Gascons call Armagnac, did you know that? Not my mother. She called it phytothérapie.’

Herbal medicine. Sylvie had referred to marijuana the same way. Artist’s elbow, she used to say to Tess, rolling her eyes in mock despair, it’s a curse. Tess’s mother had been one of those drinkers who claimed they barely drank, dismissing the gin in her hand as mostly tonic, surreptitiously stashing her empties under a blanket in the airing cupboard. Sylvie never pretended about anything. She rolled joints a dozen at a time, expertly, and kept them in an old pastille tin in the kitchen drawer.

‘Do you know that old saying, that Gascony is so poor that even the crows fly over it on their backs so they don’t have to see it?’ Delphine asked. ‘Fight the crow, Delphine, Sylvie used to say. My God but she was a hypocrite.’ She raised her glass unsteadily to her lips and Tess realised to her surprise that she was drunk. She had never seen Delphine drunk before.

‘No.’ Tess shook her head. ‘Sorry but that’s not true. She was the opposite of a hypocrite, whatever that is. She never lied. She couldn’t. She wasn’t always right but she always told the truth, always, no matter what it cost her. Or anyone else.’ She was drunk too, or she would never have said so much. Immediately she wanted to take the words back but Delphine only slammed her hands down on the table, a kind of triumph on her face.

‘But that was precisely the nature of her hypocrisy, don’t you see? Insisting on the truth, yes, the one and only, carved from stone, the Platonic ideal, but never allowing even for a moment that it might not be hers. I pleaded with her not to do it, Tess. I said I didn’t think I could bear it, the thought of it, her like that, the students – and do you know what she said? That I was too sentimental. That it was barbaric to value ritual and ceremony over scientific knowledge. Barbare, like I was the savage.’

Tess could hear Sylvie saying it, her voice blithe and final at the same time, as though it was a game you both knew she would win, and immediately the kitchen was alive with her, her clutter jumbled back on the counters, the air stirred up as she padded barefoot around the table, her wild hair twisted up and secured with a rubber band, her hands sculpting sentences as she spoke. Her sudden fierce kisses, her mouth pressed against the top of Tess’s head as though she meant to print the shape of her lips on the bone.

All this time, Tess thought, all this time she was here and I didn’t come, and the thought sliced her like a scalpel, slick and deep.

Mia stretched lazily, her fingers grazing the sloping ceiling, and reached for her phone. Still nothing. She couldn’t believe there was genuinely no Wi-Fi here. How did anyone live without Wi-Fi? She wondered if Yaz was awake yet, if she had already posted pictures from last night on Facebook. Sighing, she slumped back on her pillows.

The skylight above her was speckled with bird shit but the sky was very blue. Delphine had called the room she was sleeping in Sylvie’s study but it looked more like a junk room to Mia. The bed was wedged in at one end by a chest of drawers and at the other by one of those old-fashioned desks with a flap you pulled down to write on. Where the ceiling was high enough to stand there was a huge table with a metal lamp on it and shells and pieces of seaweed and little clay sculptures and bleached-white animal skulls and stacks and stacks of paper weighed down with bits of pottery and big brown stones like potatoes. The walls were covered with bookshelves, so heavy with books that they bowed in the middle, and more books were on the floor, piles and piles of them, and canvases too, propped up between the piles. Delphine had apologised for the mess but Mia liked it. She thought if she ever had a study she would want it to be just like this one, so crammed with ideas that you couldn’t help but breathe them in.

She yawned. She supposed she should get dressed and go downstairs but she didn’t want to. It was too sad down there, it made her feel anxious, like whatever she did would be the wrong thing, and also bad for not feeling sad too, so instead she sat in Sylvie’s chair and looked at all the things on her table. The little clay sculptures were all of pregnant women, lying down or kneeling or sitting cross-legged, their clay hands cradling their bellies. The clay was rough, like dried-out plastic. . .