Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Louise Douglas
Copyright
In Her Shadow
For Kevin, with love
CHAPTER ONE
I LOOKED UP and she was there. Ellen Brecht was standing just a few feet away from me, so close that if we had both reached out our arms, our fingertips would have touched.
‘Ellen?’ I whispered, and it was as if the past twenty years had never happened. For a moment, life became dazzling and exciting again, and I remembered how it felt to be young and strong and healthy, and without loneliness or regret. My desiccated, useless heart came back to life, pumping relief through me like some sublime narcotic. For the first time in two decades, I felt truly alive.
‘Ellen!’
I wanted to touch her, I wanted to reach out and take hold of her hand and never let it go. I wanted to ask her why she had gone away like that, why she had left me alone for so long, why she had let me believe she was lost – but before I could move, the lights began to fade and she had melted away into the darkness. Then I knew it was too late. I had lost her again. She was gone.
The day I saw Ellen had begun much like any other. I had woken at the usual time and gone to work in the Brunel Memorial Museum in Bristol. The morning had passed quickly and without drama. I’d eaten a tomato and mozzarella panini for lunch and then John Lansdown, the Curator of Antiquities, had asked me to assemble some materials for an illustrated lecture. One of the objects he needed was a jade amulet that was kept in the Egyptian Gallery on the mezzanine floor. Normally I would have asked our intern, Misty, to fetch it, but she was off that day and in any case I felt like stretching my legs. I picked up my keys and left the cramped backstage rooms where the academic staff worked, crossed the museum’s cathedral-like main hall and trotted up the sweeping marble staircase, its wide steps patterned with lozenges of coloured light reflected beneath the grand glass dome.
On the mezzanine, I wove through the tourists and visitors crowded around a visceral display on the science of embalming, and stooped to go through the low doorway designed to resemble a pyramid entrance. A narrow tunnel led into the gallery, which was a recreation of the interior of a tomb. It was dark inside, a deep and heavy darkness, black as pitch. This was broken by muted spotlights which were on timers; so as one faded, another would come in, and the jackal face of an eight-foot-high statue of Anubis would disappear as a rag-skinned mummy emerged grinning from the gloom. A soundtrack of a mournful wind played low in the background. The visitors spoke in hushed voices, and although I was used to the gallery, its claustrophobic atmosphere never failed to unnerve me.
I moved slowly amongst the displays while my eyes adjusted to the gloom, and when I found the relevant cabinet, I crouched to unlock it and disable the alarm. The glass door swung open, I reached inside to pick up the ancient amulet, closed my fingers around it and cupped it carefully in my palm. I shut the door and relocked it, stood up and straightened my back, squinting as the spotlights grew brighter – and that was when I saw her.
Ellen Brecht was there, in the chamber.
Ellen Brecht. My best friend. My nemesis.
She was wearing a green raincoat with the collar turned up, the red lipstick she had favoured when she was trying to look sophisticated, and her eyes were dark in her pale face. Her hair was damp. She was wearing her mother’s necklace, the treble clef charm lying in the hollow beneath her throat.
‘Ellen,’ I whispered, but before I could say anything more, the lights faded again. As the artificial darkness fell, I remembered what had happened to Ellen and me all those years ago, and my joy was replaced by fear. Panic crept up behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders. It shocked me back to my senses.
I took a few steps away, and then the lights came up again and I cried out in alarm because she was closer to me now, standing beside a display of canopic jars. Now I could see what I had missed before: Ellen’s gaze was fierce – her eyes bored into me and I was afraid of her, and of what she wanted from me. She hadn’t come to forgive me, she had come to punish me. She wanted to hurt me as I had hurt her. She had been waiting, all these years, to claim her revenge – and now the moment had arrived, it was almost as if I had been expecting it. I had known it was not over between us.
Cold fingers of dread tightened around my throat.
‘Go away!’ I pleaded. ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’ But she didn’t move; she stood and stared, and her eyes burned into mine, as if they could see into my soul and read its awful secrets.
I tried to back away but my legs were useless, like newborn legs. I tripped, bumping into a sarcophagus in the dark, and it seemed to me that the body inside in its ancient brown bandages was looming towards me. The floor was tilting, the chamber spinning. The lights faded again and I didn’t know where Ellen was. I turned and pushed into the tunnel entrance, scrambling and blinking back into the light. I ran along the edge of the mezzanine, holding onto the balcony rail, then I clattered down the sweeping staircase and into the main hall. A crowd was gathered in the shadows beneath the suspended Tyrannosaurus skeleton. My elbows knocked against adults with toddlers on their hips pointing up at the remains of the huge creature and I tripped over children flapping their educational quiz-sheets.
‘Excuse me!’ I cried. ‘Please, please let me through!’
At the far side of the hall, I stumbled into a dimly lit corridor leading out of the atrium. The passageway was low-ceilinged, and narrowed by lines of Victorian glass display cabinets containing threadbare stuffed animals. At the far end was a door labelled: Staff Only.
I looked again, over my shoulder, and made out a figure at the entrance to the passageway moving slowly towards me. The light was bright behind, turning it into a faceless silhouette. With a sob, I fell against the locked door and fumbled over the security code. After three attempts, drunk with panic and weak with fear, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I cried out, my heart pounding, and slid to my knees, covering my face with my hands, and then a kindly voice said, ‘Hannah, dear, what on earth is the matter?’ And I looked through the cage made by my fingers and saw the concerned face of my colleague and friend Rina Mirza.
Rina helped me to my feet and took me through the door and into her office. It was tiny and overcrowded, a professorial burrow. I sat on a rickety chair squeezed in between filing cabinets piled high with bundles of paper and shivered while Rina made tea in the staff kitchenette. She returned and passed a mug to me. It was only half-full, even so my hands were trembling so badly that the liquid slopped around. I tried to contain it, holding the mug cupped tight in the palms of both my hands, steam curling from its surface. I felt icy cold inside.
Rina rubbed my back.
‘What happened?’ she asked, peering at me over her half-moon glasses. ‘Has somebody hurt you? Were you assaulted?’
‘No,’ I said so quietly that Rina had to lean forward.
‘What was it then? Something’s given you a shock.’
I looked up at the older woman, her kind face, her anxious eyes, black hair wisping out of its bun.
‘I saw somebody who used to be my friend,’ I said.
‘And that’s a bad thing?’ Rina asked.
I dropped my head forward, so that my hair fell over my face. The years since I had recovered from my breakdown, years that had formed a protective carapace of new memories and experiences around me, were crumbling to dust. I felt vulnerable as a newborn mouse, blind and squirmy and naked.
‘Hannah?’ Rina asked again. ‘Why did it upset you so much to see your friend?’
‘Because Ellen Brecht is dead,’ I said. ‘She died almost twenty years ago.’
CHAPTER TWO
THE STORY OF Ellen and me began in the 1980s in the Lizard Peninsula, a wind-blown, storm-tossed, rocky Cornish outcrop. That was where I was born and where I grew up and where I knew Ellen. As far as I am concerned, she was only ever there. It has always been difficult for me to imagine her anywhere else, out of that context.
There was a time before Ellen, when it was just me, of course. That time is further away and harder to conceive, but it’s possible; I can still go back, in my mind, to my early childhood in all its Hipstamatic brightness. Most of my memories pre-Ellen are a muddle, like snapshots jumbled in a drawer, but there’s one September afternoon when I was eight years old that I recall with perfect clarity. It was the only time I ever spoke to Ellen’s grandmother, and if I hadn’t, there would have been nothing to connect Ellen and me later. Perhaps, if that afternoon had played out another way, we would never have become friends and, that being so, I would have had a different and, most likely, a happier life. Before Ellen, things were easier and less complicated. They were either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, and I understood the difference. Since Ellen, everything has been coloured in shades of grey.
This is how it was that afternoon. The school bus had dropped off its last passengers – the Williams twins, Jago Cardell who lived in the cottage next door to mine, and me – at the stop in the lay-by on the Goonhilly Road. It was cold; the shadows were lengthening. A promise of fireworks and frost and spiderwebs hung in the air, and swallows sat like small dark sentinels on the telephone wires waiting to go somewhere warmer. The Williams boys ran off down the lane that led to their farm, and Jago and I went across to the stately horse-chestnut tree that overhung the boundary wall of Thornfield House. There were hundreds of conkers up amongst the big papery leaves just out of our reach. Jago dropped his rucksack on the grass, found a stick and jumped up and down, hitting the branches. I watched for a moment, then I had an idea. I picked up the rucksack, swung it by its straps and threw it into the air. It hit a branch and several prickly green cases fell, splitting as they bounced on the lane and releasing their glossy brown nuts. Jago whooped with delight and pounced on them. Made confident, I threw the rucksack again, but this time it fell the wrong way, over the wall and into the garden of Thornfield House, which we had always called ‘Haunted House’.
Jago turned to look at me. ‘Fuckin’ hell, Spanner,’ he said. ‘You’ve been and gone and done it now!’
I remember the feeling of dread in my stomach. It was more than a quarter of a century ago, but I feel it now so clearly. I feel it in my bones. At the time, I was afraid of the old lady, Mrs Withiel, who lived alone in the house. We half-believed she was a witch, and we were scared of getting into trouble, but with hindsight it seems obvious that this premonition was of something far worse than a childhood scolding. I knew something terrible was going to happen inside that house. I knew it even then.
Thornfield House was like no other house in our part of the world. It sat square at the top of the hill, surrounded by a wall, its upper windows overlooking the fields that led to the coast on one side, and the flat, marshy lands spreading out towards the satellite station at Goonhilly Down on the other. It was not the sort of place where normal people would want to live. It was too big, too severe, not hunkered down, white and wind-worn like most Cornish houses, but standing tall with its big proud windows and grand door, its steeply sloping roof topped by a weathervane shaped like a schooner riding a billowing wave.
That afternoon, I crept along by the wall to the gap where the huge, wrought-iron gates stood ajar, rusting on their hinges. I looked around the edge of the wall and I saw the old lady standing at the door looking out. I was the one who had thrown the rucksack, so it was up to me to go and ask for it back, but I didn’t move. I looked across to Jago. I knew he would help me because he always did. He didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward into the garden, he went right up to the witch, and he talked to her.
Jago was two years older than me, a scruffy, skinny boy. From behind, his ears stuck out and so did the dark flame-coloured hair his aunt hacked with her kitchen scissors. His neck was long and thin with the hair tapering down on one side, his shirt was too small and his trousers were worn and scuffed at the hems. His hands, which seemed too big for his arms, hung at his sides.
I crept forward and stopped a few paces behind him.
The witch, Mrs Withiel, was stooped and trembly. She wore a long grey cardigan over a powder-blue dress with the buttons at the front done up all wrong, and grubby old tennis shoes. Her hair was thin and white.
‘Why do you children always run away from me?’ she asked. ‘Whenever I try to talk to you, you run away.’
Jago looked at his feet. He couldn’t tell the old lady we ran away because we thought she might put the evil eye on us.
‘I like children. I have a daughter, and a granddaughter,’ said Mrs Withiel. She looked at me. ‘She’d be about the same age as you, dear.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Jago politely. ‘Do they live in Trethene?’
‘Oh no. No, no, no.’ She wrung her hands. ‘They’re long gone. The devil came and took my daughter away. He stole her away from me, her and the child. I don’t know where they are. I don’t get a card at Christmas. Nothing. He’s evil, you know, evil through and through.’
The old lady’s voice rose as she spoke until it was so high and reedy it almost faded away. I felt sick. I thought perhaps Mrs Withiel was soft in the head with her talk of the devil and evil. Or maybe she really was a witch.
Jago glanced at me. I tried to convey, with my eyes, that we needed to get away.
‘That’s a shame you don’t see your family,’ said Jago. He toed the weeds that were growing through the gravel on the drive. Then he asked: ‘Is it OK if I get my rucksack now?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the old lady. She waved him towards the bag with the back of her hand, then she looked at me. ‘You’ll come back and see me, won’t you?’ she asked me. ‘Come back and talk to me. I’m so fond of children, especially little girls. Next time I’ll have some biscuits ready for you, dear.’
I tried to smile but my face didn’t feel like smiling.
‘Chocolate Bourbon biscuits,’ she said. ‘Those were my daughter’s favourites. Do you like Bourbons, dear?’
I nodded.
‘Don’t forget then. Come back to see me. You will, won’t you? Promise me?’
‘Yes,’ I said in a very quiet voice. Jago was dragging the rucksack through a large patch of dying nettles by one of its straps. When he reached me, we turned together and walked slowly back to the gates. We waved goodbye to the old lady, and as soon as we were hidden by the wall, we began to run as if our lives depended on it, to the crossroads and then down the hill that led to Cross Hands Lane, where we lived.
Jago and I amused ourselves for some time afterwards, pretending to be the witch.
‘I’m so fond of children,’ Jago used to say in a crackly, creepy voice. ‘Especially … for breakfast!’ And he’d reach out his hands which he’d made into claws and pounce on me. He used to make me cry with laughter and fear.
I never did go back to see Mrs Withiel, although I passed Thornfield House almost every day. I was too ashamed to look up to the window to see if she was watching, waiting for me, hoping I would go in and talk to her, and I tried not to think of the biscuits she would have bought specially going stale and soft in their packet.
CHAPTER THREE
I COULDN’T RECOVER from what I had seen at the museum that afternoon, couldn’t pull myself together, so Rina took me home. Her small car laboured through the city and into Montpelier, pulling up outside the building where I lived. My flat was on the first floor of a house that had been converted for multiple occupancy, squeezed between a trendy flower shop and one that sold second-hand clothes. The pavement to one side was cluttered with clothes-rails hung with brightly coloured dresses and shirts, and on the other with dark green plastic buckets filled with lilies, daffodils and tulips.
Rina helped me out of the car, put her arm around me and bustled me up the steps to the front door of my house, into the untidy communal hallway and up the narrow, carpeted staircase that led to the first-floor flat.
I felt better there. Everything was pale, muted, neutral. It was calming. My little grey cat, Lily, wound herself around my ankles and I picked her up and pressed my face into her soft fur.
‘Go and lie down while I make you a drink,’ Rina said.
‘I’ll be fine now.’
‘Do as I say. Let me look after you for a little while.’
Rina gave me a gentle push towards the bedroom. I drew the curtains, lay on the bed and was immediately overwhelmed with a fatigue so intense it seemed as if a great weight had been placed on my chest. I pulled the duvet over my body, let my heavy head sink into the pillows, felt the mattress absorb my angles. The cat pawed at the duvet, her little feet patting, tugging. I tried to relax but my mind would not stop spinning. When Rina came into the room some minutes later with a glass of camomile tea, my eyes were still wide open.
‘Were you very close to this friend of yours?’ Rina asked, leaning over me, stroking my forehead as if she were soothing a child with a temperature. I could taste the mintiness of her exhaled breath.
‘We were like sisters. Closer than sisters.’
‘It must have been hard when you lost her.’
‘Yes, it was.’
I turned my head to look towards the window. The top sash was open a foot or so and the cream-coloured curtains lifted softly in the air and then collapsed again, as if they were breathing. Outside were the familiar noises of traffic, children, music, dogs and the clatter of the kitchen being prepared for service in the restaurant down the road.
‘What did you say her name was?’
‘Ellen Brecht.’
‘What happened to her, Hannah?’
‘It was an accident. She drowned.’
‘Oh, how dreadful. Were you with her?’
‘No. I was in Chile. I only found out a long time after.’
Rina smoothed the bedlinen. ‘So you never had a chance to say goodbye?’
‘No.’
Rina gave a sad sigh. I looked up at her. I wanted her to understand.
‘We didn’t part on good terms, Ellen and I,’ I said. ‘The last time I saw her … The last time we spoke …’
‘Yes?’
The memory was like a pain inside me, like a fist clenched around my heart, bleak and cold as winter. I couldn’t put it into words. I couldn’t describe what had happened.
‘It was a misunderstanding,’ I said, although that statement was nowhere near significant enough to describe what had happened between Ellen and me. ‘I thought we’d be able to put things right, I thought there’d be plenty of time – but there wasn’t.’
Rina sighed. ‘These things happen. Young girls can be very passionate.’
The palm of her hand was flat on the bed.
‘Did something happen today to remind you of Ellen?’ she asked.
‘I dreamed of her last night.’
‘There you are then.’
It wasn’t unusual for me to dream of Ellen, though. I dreamed of her, and Thornfield House, most nights. The previous night I’d dreamed the big old house was derelict, burned-out, the roof caved in, the window-glass broken, the curtains grey and torn blowing through the shards, the trees and plants in the garden black and skeletal, cobwebbed, covered in ash. I was inside, searching the empty rooms, withered flowers scattered on bloodstained floorboards, looking for Ellen. I knew she was there somewhere – I could hear her crying in the distance – but in my dream, I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to look. I was walking blood through the house; it was wet on the soles of my bare feet; my hands were covered with it – each time I touched a wall I left behind a red smear. All the time the piano music was playing, winding round me like a mist; it was a requiem. And then the music faded and all that remained was the sound of Ellen crying as if her heart was breaking. ‘Ellen!’ I called. ‘Where are you? Ellen?’
She did not answer.
Rina said: ‘Hannah, shhh, it’s all right now,’ and I realized I must have cried out.
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.
Rina looked concerned.
‘Perhaps you should have a break,’ she said. ‘You work so hard, dear, and I don’t remember the last time you had a holiday. Why don’t you take a few days off?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re right. Maybe I will.’
‘That’s good,’ Rina said. ‘Think of somewhere nice you can go. The countryside maybe? The coast?’
I lay warm and comfortable in the bed and allowed myself to be calmed by Rina’s presence. I knew I would eventually sleep. Lily crept up onto the pillow beside me, turned several circles and tucked herself up. I watched the gentle billow and lift of the curtain at the window and remembered the first time I saw Ellen, how it had been a bright, sunny day, how it was the day when everything began, and began to end, for both of us.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS A long time ago, but not so far back as before; nearly two years after Jago and I spoke to Mrs Withiel. The memories are clearer now, sharp in my mind, the snapshots organized, if a little faded around the edges. It was the school summer holidays. I was ten and Jago was twelve. Jago still lived next door to me with his uncle and aunt, Caleb and Manda Cardell, and we were still the only children in Trethene village. Mrs Withiel had been dead for some time and Thornfield House had been boarded up and abandoned – left to go to pot, my father said. It had been sliding towards dereliction.
There had been a fight at the Cardells’ the night before. Dad had been out, working a late shift at RNAS Culdrose. Mum and I were at home, stoically trying not to listen to what was going on next door. Perhaps if we had had a phone Mum would have called for help, but none of the local authority-owned cottages in Cross Hands Lane had telephones in those days. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. People in Trethene didn’t interfere in other people’s business.
When something, or someone, crashed into the wall that divided the Cardells’ cottage from ours with such force that the pictures on our side had jumped on their hooks and fallen crooked, Mum said, ‘I can’t listen to this any longer,’ and put on her coat with some unspecified plan in mind – but then the shouting had stopped. Mum and I had gone upstairs to look out of my bedroom window and we saw Mrs Cardell in the back yard, all blue and silver in the moonlight, shivering in a thin cardigan and slippers and smoking a cigarette. Mr Cardell had come out and the dog had hidden under the rabbit hutch. Mr Cardell had put both his arms round his skinny wife and held her tight and kissed her frizzy yellow hair. The two of them stood together, rocking. I could see the red light at the end of the cigarette that Mrs Cardell had dropped, winking up at her through the night.
After fights like this, Mrs Cardell wouldn’t come out of the house for a few days. She’d send Jago to fetch her packets of Embassy from the village stores.
But this was the next day, the morning after. I was pushing my bike up the lane when Jago fell into step beside me. He started to act out the plot of a film he’d seen on television. He shot at imaginary adversaries concealed in the rambling rhododendron bushes that lined the lane, swaggered and blew the smoke from the barrels of his finger-guns. I held onto the handlebars of my bike and watched.
‘You’re a nutter,’ I said.
He laughed. He was happy because after a big fight, things were often better at the Cardells’ – for a while.
At the top of the hill, we turned left and I leaned, panting, over the handlebars. I was proud of my bike. It was a BMX my father had bought from a man in the Royal Naval Air Station. I rang the bell a couple of times with my thumb but Jago didn’t take any notice.
‘Have you got any money?’ he asked.
‘Nope.’
‘You should have. We could have got an ice cream.’
I pulled a face at him and then we stopped together. We’d reached the entrance to Thornfield House and for the first time in months it looked different.
After Mrs Withiel’s death, planks had been nailed over the windows, and the gates had been propped up and padlocked. Wisteria grew rampantly over the walls and the garden became so overgrown that it was impossible to make out the features that had once been there, the lawn, the path, the drive.
But that day, the gates had been removed and the shutters taken away from the windows; some of them were open. Nettles, brambles and saplings had been cut down and piled high in one corner of the garden, and the flagstone path that led to the front door had been cleared.
Jago and I exchanged glances. He scratched behind his ear.
‘We ought to go and have a look,’ he said. ‘To make sure nobody’s inside, thieving.’
His face was serious, one eyebrow slightly raised, and his thumbs were tucked into the sides of his jeans. He was pretending to be somebody from a film. Jago was always pretending to be somebody he wasn’t.
‘What if there is someone inside?’
‘Then we’ll tie them up and get a reward.’
I propped my bike against the wall.
‘I don’t think we should go in,’ I said. ‘We’ll be trespassing.’
‘It’s OK,’ Jago said. ‘I’ll go first.’
He crept forward, light as a cat in his tatty old trainers. I followed at a distance. The garden around the drive was so green and dense with overhanging branches and plant-life that I had the impression of falling into water. Bees buzzed in the heat and the air was heavy with the scents of flowers.
Jago pushed at the front door. It creaked beneath the palm of his hand and when he pulled it away, flakes of old green paint were stuck to his skin. He wiped his hand on the side of his jeans.
‘Hello?’ he called softly, then more confidently: ‘Hello-o!’ but there was no answer. He looked at me over his shoulder, beckoning with his eyes. He went into the house and I followed.
It took me a few moments to accustom myself to the gloom of the interior. The hall floor was tiled, the walls were tall and elegant with ceiling roses and fancy cornices. The air that had been trapped inside for so long smelled stale but a faint, summery draught was breezing through, chasing away the mustiness. A fly corkscrewed through the hall, and Jago and I stepped carefully forward, looking into each of the abandoned rooms. The odd piece of furniture remained shrouded in dust-sheets, casting shadows in the huge oblong shafts of mote-filled sunlight that fell through the windows. An enormous grand piano had been uncovered and stood proud in the centre of the front room.
I knew Mrs Withiel had lain dead in the house for three weeks before her body was discovered, and wondered where exactly she had been and if I would recognize the spot when I saw it by the aura of unquiet that must hover over it. The thought of the old woman lying there, alone in the dark, sent a chill of horror through me. I knew I’d walked past Thornfield House many times when she had been inside, dead, and the knowledge frightened me. What if I’d looked up and seen her ghost watching through the upstairs window? I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered.
‘Come on!’ Jago called under his breath. He ran upstairs and I followed him into one of the large front rooms. The walls were covered with floral pink-and-green paper, the pattern mostly faded but still strong in the places where the furniture had protected it from the sun. Jago dropped to his hands and knees and peered into a mouse-hole in the skirting board. I went to the window. Wisteria blooms hung like paper garlands, framing the view. A lorry slowly passed by on the lane beyond, and stopped. I could see the top third of it over the wall. And then I sensed, rather than heard, somebody come into the room, and I turned and there was a girl: Ellen.
She was close to me in age and about the same height, but that was where the similarities ended. She had dark hair, a fringe, dark eyes. She was slightly built, long-legged, wearing denim shorts and a sleeveless green T-shirt and although her feet were bare, her toenails had been painted bright green. I was pink and fair, big-boned, round with puppy fat, sticky with sweat and dressed in a pastel-striped T-shirt and towelling shorts.
I had never seen anyone my age as self-composed as this girl and felt childlike in comparison. I tugged at the legs of my stupid, babyish shorts. The elastic was tight around my tummy. I wished I hadn’t put my blonde hair into pink bobbles that morning. I wished I wasn’t so hot.
Jago scuttled to his feet, brushed himself down and cleared his throat. He licked his lips, anticipating trouble. Adult voices rose up from outside and the rumble of a heavy-duty engine. ‘Left hand down!’ someone called. ‘Mind the wall!’
‘Who are you?’ the girl asked. ‘What are you doing here?’ Her accent was strange and attractive, her words more precisely enunciated than ours.
‘We’re just checking everything’s OK,’ Jago said in a formal voice. He was pretending to be older than he was. He was trying to impress the girl. I frowned at him. ‘What about you?’ he asked casually. ‘Why are you here?’
The girl laughed a little artificially and pushed her hair back over her shoulders. She was showing off too. ‘I’m Ellen Brecht. This was my grandmother’s house but now we’re going to live here.’
‘The old lady was your grandma?’
‘Yes.’
‘She told us about you.’
Ellen’s eyes widened. ‘Did she?’
‘She said you never visited.’
‘I couldn’t.’ Ellen wandered over to the window. She held back the net, accidentally replicating the exact pose her grandmother used when she looked out. ‘My mama worried about Grandma all the time. I told her she would be all right. She was, wasn’t she? She wasn’t lonely?’
Jago and I exchanged glances. Jago scratched the eczema on the inside of his elbow. Was it possible Ellen did not know the circumstances of her grandmother’s death?
‘She looked fine last time we saw her,’ Jago said. ‘Only … she said some weird things.’
Ellen dropped the net. ‘What things?’
Jago gazed round the room. ‘I dunno. About the devil keeping you away from her … and stuff.’
‘That’s silly! We couldn’t come and see her because we were living in Germany, that’s all.’
I felt embarrassed. I frowned at Jago. He pulled a face back.
‘What are your names?’ Ellen asked.
‘I’m Jago and she’s Spanner.’
‘Hannah,’ I said, and I pushed his arm.
‘Are you her brother?’
‘No. We live next door.’
Ellen examined us for a while, as if to get the measure of us. Then she said: ‘Come and meet Mama.’ She looked at Jago. ‘Only don’t tell her about the devil stuff.’
We followed Ellen downstairs, where her mother, slight and glamorous, was leaning on a stick, and her father, who looked to me like a film star in skinny black jeans and a black shirt, was waving a cigarette around and directing the removal men as to where to place the chaise longue with which they were struggling.
Ellen’s mama was about as different from my mother as it was possible for another woman to be. She was young, slight and beautiful. Shiny hair slip-slid down her back, falling in lovely brown curls over a dress the colour of terracotta. She wore cherry-coloured lipstick and her teeth were small and straight and white.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Who have we here?’
‘This is Jago and Hannah,’ Ellen said. ‘They were friends with Grandma.’
‘You knew my mother?’ Ellen’s mama asked, and without waiting for a reply she stepped forward and embraced me, and then Jago, sweetly and tenderly. She smelled exotic and her skin was soft as silk against my cheek. She stepped back and looked at us with her head slightly to one side. Her sunglasses were pushed up onto her forehead, holding back her hair. She wore gold hoops in her ears and a chain with a treble clef charm around her slender neck, and she would have been perfect if it hadn’t been for the joints of her fingers and wrists, which were badly misshapen.
‘I hated the thought of my mother being in this monstrous house on her own,’ she said, straightening her back with difficulty and making the bangles on her arm chink. ‘I didn’t know she had young friends. And you,’ she looked at me and smiled a smile that warmed me inside, ‘you must have reminded her of Ellen, mustn’t she, Pieter! How perfect that you were there to look after her!’
Ellen’s father gave a little mock bow and graced me with a smile so devastating that my stomach flipped and my cheeks burned. I had never met anyone like him in my whole life. Never.
‘We didn’t exactly look after her,’ I said.
‘Of course you did!’ said Ellen’s father.
Just then, a shorter, stocky, older woman, dressed in dark clothes, came through from the back of the house. She was carrying a box of ornaments, wrapped in news paper, which she placed on the small table beside the telephone. Ellen’s father backed away from the woman, like a snail retracting from salt. He moved into the shadows and watched from under his hair, rubbing his chin.
‘Are these children bothering you, Anne?’ the woman asked Ellen’s mama.
‘Not at all.’
‘You should sit down. You’re overdoing it – you need to rest.’
‘I’m fine, thank you, Mrs Todd,’ said Ellen’s mother.
‘Your mother needs some peace and quiet,’ Mrs Todd said to Ellen. ‘Go and play somewhere else.’
From behind Mrs Todd, Ellen’s father rolled his eyes. I put my hand over my mouth to contain a giggle. Then he beckoned me over to him. He took a wallet out of his pocket and removed a five-pound note, which he gave to me. He closed my fingers around the money. ‘It’s for sharing,’ he said, enclosing my hand in his fist and giving it a squeeze, and then he leaned down and whispered, ‘But you, adorable Miss Hannah, must be responsible for it.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered. He winked at me. I held the note very tight in my hand. Nobody had ever called me ‘adorable’ before.
Outside, Jago, Ellen and I were tongue-tied. We walked along the lane in silence for a while. I kept looking at the money to make sure I hadn’t lost it.
‘Your parents are very nice,’ I said eventually.
‘Mmm.’
‘Who’s the other lady?’
‘Mrs Todd? Oh, she’s our housekeeper.’
‘Is she a servant?’ Jago asked.
‘Kind of. She does the cleaning and cooking and looks after Mama.’
‘Hannah’s mum’s a cleaner too,’ Jago said.
It was true but I wished Jago hadn’t said anything. It took all the shine away from the morning. I didn’t want Ellen knowing that my mum wore a housecoat and spent her days scrubbing floors and toilets and that her fingers were rough and her arms meaty and that she smelled of bleach. I wanted her to think we were the same.
Ellen looked at me in a curious way but I turned my head and didn’t elaborate.
We bought iced lollies at the garage and then walked to the church and sat on the wall looking out over the sparkling sea beyond the fields. Ellen peeled the paper from her Fab fastidiously, and dropped it behind her, into the graveyard.
‘Where do you two live?’ she asked.
‘Down there.’ Jago pointed. You couldn’t see Cross Hands Lane from where we were, or the pebble-dashed cottages, only the slate-grey colour of the roof-tiles way below in between the leaves of the trees.
‘Our houses are semi-detached,’ Jago said.
‘Joined together,’ I explained.
Ellen was impressed by this. I licked the bottom of my lolly, which was melting down my hand, and smiled at Jago. He smiled back. Ellen was watching. I moved my leg a little closer to his, scraping my thighs on the wall.
‘Tell me about your families,’ Ellen said.
‘My mum is dead of cancer and my dad is gone away,’ Jago said without looking up. ‘I live with my uncle and aunt. He’s a bastard and she’s a bitch.’
‘Oh,’ said Ellen, her eyes widening. ‘That’s so sad!’
Jago shrugged.
Ellen sat for a moment, swinging her legs and processing this information. ‘I never met anyone whose mother was dead before.’ She turned to me. ‘What about you?’
‘Nothing really. Boring. One mum, one dad, that’s all.’
‘Same as me,’ said Ellen. She smiled at me then and it was a friendly smile. This was something we had in common. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. It was enough.
CHAPTER FIVE
DARKNESS WAS SWIRLING around my legs like fog and my bare feet were cold. I was hiding in the back garden at Thornfield House. It was dusk, or dawn perhaps, and the sky was bruise-coloured. Trees and bushes were illuminated by the shadowy light of candles flickering in jars made of barbed wire hanging from the branches. We were playing Murder in the Dark and Ellen was the killer. She’d already found Jago and her father and Mrs Brecht. Only I was left, pressed against the trunk of an old willow tree hidden in the swaying umbrella of its long fronds. ‘I’m coming, Hannah!’ Ellen called softly. ‘I’m coming to get you!’
I peeped through the willow leaves and saw her approaching through the twilight. She was smiling a charming, chilling smile and her hands were behind her back. I crept backwards as she came forwards, holding my breath, feeling the ground beneath my feet: toes, sole, heel, treading as carefully as if I were walking on glass. ‘I know where you are, Hannah!’ Ellen called. ‘I can see you!’
I was careless – my foot slipped and I fell backwards, tumbled down and I was suddenly falling through water and Ellen’s cold little hands were holding onto my ankles, her fingernails digging into my bones, pulling me down away from the daylight, down, down, down. Too late, I realized she had tricked me, and as the light faded in my head I could hear Ellen’s voice whispering: ‘You can’t get away, Hannah. You know you can’t. Not now! Not ever!’
I opened my eyes wide and thanked God I was in my bedroom in my flat in Montpelier, and there was the antique vanity mirror over the chest of drawers with the shell necklace Jago had given me hooked over the stand; there were my Klimt prints on the wall, the picture of my parents – and the beams of light sent by passing cars outside were sliding over the corner of the ceiling as they always did. Everything was in order, everything was normal. Everything except me.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eye-sockets.
I wished I could get Ellen Brecht out of my head.
I had to stop her tormenting me in this way. I couldn’t go on like this.
The room was almost dark. Dusk had fallen while I slept. Lily was still beside me, but Rina had gone. The day had died and the ghosts of my past had come creeping in through the open window.
The telephone was ringing. Had that been what woke me? I counted seven rings, then it fell silent. I turned onto my side, pulled the duvet over me and tucked myself into a foetal position. Sleep had not refreshed me; rather I felt exhausted, emotionally battered. The telephone rang again. I didn’t want to move, I felt safe in the cocoon of the bed, but I craved company; even a voice at the end of the line would be better than nothing. I slipped out of bed, turned on the lights, went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. I could see from the caller display that it was John Lansdown, my colleague from the museum.
I answered, tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder, filled the kettle and plugged it in while John apologized for disturbing me. ‘Rina said you’d had a bit of a turn,’ he said. ‘I wanted to make sure you were all right.’
‘What did she tell you, John?’
He hesitated a moment. Then he said: ‘She told me you thought you’d seen a ghost.’
‘It was a migraine,’ I lied. ‘They affect my eyes.’
‘I thought it must have been something like that. How are you now?’
‘I’m absolutely fine, John. It’s kind of you to ring but you don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be back at work as normal in the morning.’
‘I know you will, Hannah, that’s not why I called. Actually I wanted to ask you a favour.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Charlotte’s out, the girls are at a sleepover and there’s no food in the house. I was going to go out for supper and I wondered if you’d like to join me.’
I hesitated.
‘It would be a good opportunity to talk about the plans for the new museum annexe,’ John continued. ‘And I thought after the day you’ve had, you probably wouldn’t be in the mood for cooking either.’
Still I hesitated. I had little doubt Rina had somehow engineered this invitation to make sure I was not left on my own that evening.
‘Low blood sugar is very bad for migraines, you know,’ John said. ‘Although if you have other plans …’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I’d love to come.’
‘Great,’ said John. ‘That’s great. I’ll pick you up in an hour.’
I tried to pull myself together before John arrived. I showered, dried my hair and dressed, then listened to a recording of Beethoven’s Prelude for Piano as I wandered about the flat barefoot, with the cat winding around my ankles. The gentle music soothed me. The Brechts had taught me the alchemy of music. They were experts in the subject. They knew precisely which music would comfort and which would cause pain, and how music’s echo lives on in the mind long after the record has finished.
I didn’t want to think about the Brechts. The curtains were drawn, all the lamps were lit. I was in my home. I could choose to listen to whatever I wanted, or I could choose silence. I felt safe. When the buzzer rang, I slipped on my shoes and picked up a jacket. John was waiting for me on the pavement outside the front door.
I’d known John for eight years, since I’d taken up my position at the museum. Rina had told me he came from a wealthy background, and he’d obviously had a good education, but he was so down-to-earth that it was easy to forget his privileges. It didn’t matter that our upbringings could hardly have been more different; they never interfered with our friendship. I enjoyed his company and respected his methodical approach to work. We shared an interest in ancient history and often John lent me books, or forwarded links to articles or discussions he thought would interest me. He also enjoyed circulating quirky or funny cuttings and pictures – he found humour in many things and it was largely due to his buoyancy that the museum was such a happy place to work in. The whole team liked John, but I believed I was closest to him. He teased me, gently, if ever I became too immersed in a project or took something too seriously. He told me off if I worked too late. I always felt as if he were looking out for me, and I reciprocated.
John was one of the most highly regarded academics in his field but it was not unusual to find him standing in the museum involved in an earnest discussion about the comparative ferocity of different dinosaurs with a group of small children. He wasn’t being patronizing, he was genuinely interested in their opinions and ideas.
John was wonderful.
I didn’t feel the same about his wife. Charlotte worked in the Admissions Department at the University. I’d met her on many occasions at functions and events, and she was the kind of woman who made me feel uncomfortable – all cleavage and innuendo. She was a keen and apparently competent showjumper and, as far as I could tell, she only had two topics of conversation: horses and sex. Everything about her was loud and colourful, she was a peacock of a woman, and she was happiest when she was surrounded by admirers.
I’d heard her talking about John at the launch of the museum’s summer exhibition. ‘He’s so obsessed with his job that I honestly think he’d pay more attention to me if I was a fossil!’ she had said, with wide eyes and a melodramatic shudder. ‘I bought some new lingerie for his birthday and was draped in the doorway like so …’ she adopted a provocative pose, ‘and when I asked him if there was anything he fancied, he said: “Yes, the Panorama special”!’
Everyone had laughed; everyone except me.
Worse still, it was impossible to be part of a team that worked so closely with the University staff and not hear the rumours about Charlotte. I didn’t know what was true and what was not, and a person who flirted as obviously and as much as Charlotte did was bound to be the subject of gossip, but I believed there must be some substance in the speculation that she had had, and was still having, a series of affairs. John was one of the most honest and honourable people I’d ever known. I could not bear to think of him being hurt and humiliated. That was why I avoided Charlotte where possible. That was why I could not stand her.
That evening, he had taken the roof off his little sports car and I felt more like myself as he drove me through the quietening streets of St Paul’s and into the centre of Bristol. The city wind was warm in my hair. I closed my eyes and felt it on my face and I smelled the smells of the city and was grateful to be out with John and not in the flat, on my own.
When we stopped at the traffic-lights, I looked at him. He turned to smile at me and I smiled back. His gentleness was balm to me. That evening, and not for the first time, I wished he and I were together, a couple, so that I could reach my hand out and take hold of his. If he was mine, he would tether me. He wouldn’t let me go. In a world of inconsistencies, John was a constant, somebody who could be relied upon. For the thousandth time I wished he and Charlotte had never met, never married, never had children. If things had been different, if it had been me instead of her, then perhaps …
‘Don’t even think about it, Hannah!’ Ellen’s voice whispered in my ear. ‘He wouldn’t look at you twice.’
I turned away from John and intertwined my fingers, and as he pulled away from the lights, I concentrated on watching the city go by. I did my best to ignore Ellen, but she was there; all the time she was there, with me like a persistent ache. I sensed her presence in the golden stains seeping across the twilight sky; I glimpsed her reflected in the glass panes of shop windows; I heard her voice in the breeze.
‘I won’t go away, Hannah,’ the voice whispered. ‘You know I won’t. Not now. Not ever.’
CHAPTER SIX
THAT FIRST SUMMER, the summer the Brechts moved into Thornfield House, I went there almost every day during the school holidays. My parents were both out at work, Jago was helping at the farm and I was bored at home. There was nothing for a young girl to do in Trethene, and anyway I loved going up to the house to call on Ellen and her parents. I liked seeing how they were settling in, how the rooms were being redecorated and the garden cleared, and how traces of Mrs Withiel were being painted over and scrubbed away. Mr and Mrs Brecht were different from other adults. They made me feel welcome in their home, as if I were special. They were more sophisticated than the Trethene people I’d known all my life. They didn’t have mud on their boots, their skin wasn’t red-raw from being outdoors too much and they were interested in other things besides the weather, the tourists and the tides. They were glamorous, attractive and exotic, and they made me feel like I was one of them – almost. I wanted to spend every moment I could with them, hoping some of the gold dust of their perfect lives would rub off on me.
Ellen’s father was German but had gone to university in America on a music scholarship, and he spoke with a sophisticated accent, like a film star. Whenever I went to Thornfield House, butterflies of anticipation would flutter in my stomach at the thought of being close to Mr Brecht with his long legs, his teasing, his cigarettes and his pointy-toed boots.