No Mark Upon Her

wakes up with bad dreams.”
    “Does she dream about her parents, then?” Melody asked.
    Gemma swirled the wine in her glass. “Sometimes. Sometimes she calls out for them.” She didn’t want to confess, as she had to Winnie, how helpless and inadequate she felt when Charlotte woke up sobbing, “Mummy! Daddy!” Only recently had she begun calling out for Gemma as well, but Gemma wasn’t sure that was an improvement.
    Melody glanced towards the sitting room and lowered her voice. “I’d think that was pretty normal, under the circumstances. I can’t imagine what it must be like for a child to lose her parents, her home, everything familiar . . .”
    “The odd thing,” Gemma answered slowly, “is that except for the separation anxiety, during the day it seems as if she’s adjusting quite well. She does talk about her mum and dad in the present tense, as if they were just away somewhere, but she doesn’t ask to go home.”
    “Have you taken her back there?”
    Gemma shook her head. “No. We didn’t think that was a good idea. But Louise is getting ready to put the house up for sale, and we wanted her to have some familiar things.”
    Louise Phillips had been Charlotte’s father’s law partner and was now the executor of the estate.
    Although art dealers—including Pippa Nightingale, who had represented Sandra Gilles, Charlotte’s mother—were begging for the textile collages that remained in Sandra’s studio, Lou Phillips had decided she would store all Sandra’s works and her notebooks until Charlotte was of age and could sell or keep them as she saw fit. Her mother’s art would be a legacy for Charlotte’s future, and the money from the sale of the Fournier Street house, which should be considerable, would go into a fund to pay for her education.
    “So I took her to the park one day when the boys were at school,” Gemma went on, “and asked her to play a game. She had to close her eyes and name her favorite thing from every room in her old house.”
    “I can’t think of a thing I’d save from my flat even in a fire,” Melody said, sounding wistful. “It’s not like this house.”
    Gemma looked round at her cheerful blue and yellow kitchen, with her treasured Clarice Cliff tea set on the shelf above the cooker, then glanced into the dining room, where her piano held pride of place.
    She’d loved this house from the moment Duncan had shown it to her, when she’d thought their lives held a very different future. And it seemed to her, oddly, that in making Charlotte feel at home, she had grown deeper into the house as well, learning every nook and cranny, every creak and sigh, as if they were etched in her bones.
    But the house belonged not to them, but to Denis Childs’s sister and her family, and Gemma’s love for it was always tinged with the ache of impending loss. One day they would have to give it up.
    “What did Charlotte choose?” asked Melody.
    Gemma smiled at the recollection. “From the kitchen, an old egg cup with a chicken-foot base. I imagine her mum picked it up at a street stall. It’s hideous, and Charlotte adores it. From the sitting room, she chose the chaise longue.”
    Charlotte had called it the “crazy chase,” and it had taken Gemma a moment to work out that she meant the chintz crazy-quilt chaise longue, but she, too, loved the whimsical piece that had seemed such an expression of Sandra Gilles’s personality.
    When they’d begun officially fostering Charlotte, they’d had to meet the requirements imposed by social services, which included moving Toby back in with Kit so that Charlotte could have a room of her own—the room that had been meant as a nursery for the baby they had lost.
    They’d brought Charlotte’s bedroom furniture from the house in Fournier Street, and there had been enough space in her new room for the crazy chase as well. When Gemma had told her they could paint her room any color she liked, Charlotte had chosen not a little girl’s pink, or blue, or even lilac, but a deep saffron yellow that picked out the dominant color in the quilted chaise and glowed like distilled sunlight on the walls. The child had without doubt inherited her artist mother’s eye.
    “From her parents’ bedroom she wanted her mother’s petticoats,” Gemma continued, “although I brought the colored-glass bud vases that Sandra kept on the chair rail as well.
    “And from Sandra’s studio, Charlotte wanted the duck pencils. When I pointed out that