‘No.’ Tip fetched a glass bottle of milk from the fridge and poured some into each mug. ‘I was evacuated from London when I was a boy; we all were: my mum, my brother and sister and me. Not officially. My mum organised it. Our house was bombed and she managed to find us a place in the country. Wonderful old house it was, filled with the most incredible furniture – almost like the people who’d lived there before had left for a stroll and never come back.’
Elodie’s mind went to the sketch she’d found in the archives – her idea that the tale might have come originally from an illustrated book for which the sketch was an early draft. An old, furnished house in the country seemed like just the sort of place where a Victorian book might have been tossed onto a shelf, forgotten until a little boy unearthed it mid-way through the next century. She could almost picture the boy, Tip, finding it. ‘You read the story there?’
‘I didn’t read it. It wasn’t from a book.’
‘Someone told it to you? Who?’
Elodie noticed just the merest hesitation before he answered. ‘A friend.’
‘Someone you met in the country?’
‘Sugar?’
‘No, thanks.’ Elodie remembered the photo that she’d taken on her phone. While Tip was finishing preparing the tea, she pulled it out, swiping past another missed call from Pippa and scrolling to the photo of the sketch. She handed it to him as he set down her mug.
His woolly brows lifted and he took the phone. ‘Where did you get this?’
Elodie explained about the archives, the box discovered beneath the curtains in the antique chiffonier, the satchel. ‘As soon as I saw the sketch I felt a jolt of familiarity, as if it were somewhere that I’d been. And then I realised it was the house, the one from the story.’ She was watching his face. ‘It is, isn’t it?’
‘That’s it all right. It’s also the house my family and I lived in during the war.’
Deep inside her, Elodie felt something lighten. So, she’d been right. It was the house from the story. And it was a real house. Her great-uncle Tip had lived there as a boy during the war, where a local person had invented a story that had captured his imagination and which, in turn, he’d told many years later to his little niece.
‘You know,’ said Tip, still inspecting the sketch, ‘your mother came to ask me about the house, too.’
‘When?’
‘A week or so before she died. We had lunch together and then went for a walk and when we got back here she asked me about the house in the country where I’d stayed during the Blitz.’
‘What did she want to know?’
‘At first she just wanted to hear me speak about it. She said that she remembered me telling her about it, that it had taken on magical proportions in her mind. And then she asked me if I could tell her where it was exactly. The address, the closest village.’
‘She wanted to go there? Why?’
‘I only know for certain what I’ve told you. She came to see me, she wanted to know about the house from the story. I never saw her again.’
Emotion had made him gruff and he moved to clear the photo of the sketch from the phone’s screen. Instead, the picture swiped backwards. As Elodie watched, every bit of colour drained from his face.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Where did you get this?’ He was holding out the phone to show the picture she’d taken, the Victorian woman in the white dress.
‘I found the original at work,’ she said. ‘It was with the sketchbook. Why? Do you know who she is?’
Tip didn’t answer. He was staring at the image and didn’t appear to have heard.
‘Uncle Tip? Do you know the woman’s name?’
He looked up. His eyes met hers but all the openness had gone. They were the defensive eyes of a child caught lying. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘How could I? I’ve never seen her before in my life.’
IV
It is just before first light and I am sitting on the foot of my visitor’s bed. It is an intimate thing to do, to watch another person sleep; once upon a time I might have said that there was no other moment in which a human being was more vulnerable, but I know now from experience that’s not true.
I can remember the first time that I stayed overnight in Edward’s studio. He had painted until well after midnight, the candles that stood in green glass bottles burning one by one to rippled pools of molten wax, until, at last, it was too dark to continue. We fell asleep together on the cushions that littered the floor of the corner nearest the furnace. I woke before he did, as dawn was creeping softly across the pitched glass ceiling, and I lay on my side with my face in my hand, watching his dreams skate beneath his eyelids.
I wonder what this young man dreams of. He returned just prior to dusk last night and I felt the energy inside the house shift instantly. He went straight to the malt house room where he has set up camp and I was with him in a flash. He peeled off his shirt in one liquid movement and I found myself unable to look away.
He is handsome in the way of men who do not think about being handsome. He has a broad chest and the arms a man gets from working hard and lifting heavy things. The men on the wharves along the Thames had bodies like that.
Once upon a time I would have left the room or turned away when a man I did not know undressed; the learned privacies go surprisingly deep. But my observation can take nothing away from him, and so I watched.
He has a stiff neck, I think, for he rubbed the palm of his hand against it and then tilted it this way and that as he walked to the small adjoining bathroom. The night had continued warm and humid and my attention lingered on the back of his neck, the place where his hand had been, where the ends of his hair curl.
I miss touch.
I miss being touched.
Edward’s body was not that of a man who toiled on the wharves, but it was stronger than one might have expected for a man who spent his days lifting brush to canvas and eyes to subject. I remember him in candlelight; at his studio in London, and here, in this house, on the night of the storm.
My visitor sings in the shower. Not very well, but then, he does not know he has an audience. When I was a child in Covent Garden I used to stand sometimes and listen to the opera singers practising in the theatres. Until the managers came, waving their arms and their threats, and I ran back into the shadows.
Although my visitor left the door to the bedroom open, the cubicle is so small that steam filled it, and when he was finished he stood in front of the mirror, wiping the centre clear with his hand. I remained at a distance behind him and if I’d had breath it would have been held. Once or twice, when the condition of the light has been just right, I have caught a glimpse of myself in the looking glass. The circular mirror in the dining room is best – something to do with its curved sides. Rarely, I have been able to make others see me, too. No, not make them, for I have not been aware of doing anything differently.
But my visitor did not see me. He rubbed his hand across his bristled jaw and then went to find his clothing.
I miss having a face. And a voice. A real voice that everyone can hear.
It can be lonely in the liminal space.
Mrs Mack lived with a man known only as ‘the Captain’, whom I took at first for her husband but who turned out to be a brother. He was as thin as she was round and walked with a lopsided gait due to the wooden leg he’d gained after an altercation with a carriage on Fleet Street.
‘Got stuck in a wheel, ’e did,’ I was told by one of the children who lived in the streets outside. ‘Dragged ’im for a mile before ’is leg broke plain off.’