The window on the far wall faced the street, lining up with a mirror house on the other side. The couple who lived there were still eating when Elodie arrived home. They were Swedish, she had learned, which seemed to explain not only their height and beauty, but also their exotic Nordic habit of dining after ten. There was a lamp above their kitchen bench, which looked to be made of crepe and sent light shimmering pinkly onto the surface below. Beneath it, their skin glowed.
Elodie drew her bedroom curtains, switched on the light, and took the veil from its box. She didn’t know much about fashion, not like Pippa, but she knew this was a special piece. Vintage by dint of its age, covetable owing to Lauren Adler’s fame, but precious to Elodie because it had been her mother’s and there was surprisingly little of her left. Surprisingly little of a private nature.
After a moment’s hesitation, she lifted the veil and held it tentatively at the crown of her head. She slipped the comb into place and the organza unfurled over her shoulders. She let her hands fall to her sides.
Elodie had been flattered when Alastair asked her to marry him. He had proposed on the first anniversary of the day they’d been introduced (by a boy Elodie had gone to school with who now worked in Alastair’s firm). Alastair had taken her to the theatre and then to dinner in a fancy Soho restaurant, whispering into her ear as the cloakroom attendant stowed their coats that it took most people weeks to get a reservation. Whilst the waiter was fetching them dessert, he had presented the ring in its robin-egg-blue box. It had been like something from a movie, and Elodie had seen the two of them as if from outside: he with his handsome, expectant face, his perfect white teeth; and she in the new dress Pippa had made for her when she’d given the Stratton Group 150Year Presentation speech the month before.
An elderly woman sitting at the table beside them had said to her companion, ‘Isn’t that lovely. Look! She’s blushing because she’s so in love.’ And Elodie had thought, I’m blushing because I’m so in love, and when Alastair lifted his eyebrows she’d watched herself smile and tell him yes.
Out on the dark river a boat sounded its foghorn and Elodie slipped the veil from her head.
That was how it happened, she supposed. That is how people become engaged. There would be a wedding – in six weeks, according to the invitation, when Alastair’s mother said the Gloucestershire gardens would be at ‘their late summer best’ – and Elodie would be one of those married people who met up at weekends to talk about houses and bank loans and schools. For there would be children, presumably, and she would be their mother. And she wouldn’t be like her own mother, talented and sparkling, alluring and elusive; but her children would look to her for advice and comfort and she would know what to do and say because people just seemed to, didn’t they?
Elodie set the box on the brown velvet chair in the corner of her room.
After a moment’s uncertainty, she slid it under the chair instead.
The suitcase she’d brought back from her father’s house was still standing by the door where she’d left it.
Elodie had imagined getting started on the tapes tonight, but she was suddenly tired – intensely tired.
She showered and then, guiltily, switched off the lamp and slunk into bed. She would start on the tapes tomorrow; she had to. Alastair’s mother, Penelope, had already called three times since breakfast. Elodie had let the calls go through to voicemail, but any day now Alastair would announce that ‘Mummy’ was cooking Sunday lunch and Elodie would find herself in the passenger seat of the Rover, being transported up the tree-lined driveway to that enormous house in Surrey where the inquisition would be waiting.
Choosing the recording was one of only three tasks she’d been set. The second was visiting the reception venue owned by Penelope’s best friend, ‘just to introduce yourself, of course; leave the rest to me’. The third was liaising with Pippa, who’d offered to design her dress. So far, Elodie had completed none.
Tomorrow, she promised, pushing all thought of the wedding aside. Tomorrow.
She closed her eyes, the faint sounds of late-night customers buying battered cod and chips drifting up from downstairs, and without warning her thoughts returned to the other box, the one beneath her desk at work. The framed photograph of the young woman with the direct gaze. The sketch of the house.
Again that strange sensation, like the glimpse of a memory she couldn’t grasp, disquieted her. She saw the sketch in her mind’s eye and heard a voice that was her mother’s, but somehow also wasn’t: Down the winding lane and across the meadow broad, to the river they went with their secrets and their sword …
And when she finally fell asleep, at the very moment that consciousness slid away, the pen-drawn picture in her mind dissolved into sunlit trees and the silver-tipped Thames, and a warm wind brushed her cheeks in an unknown place she somehow knew like home.
II
It has been a quiet existence, here at Birchwood. Many summers have passed since ours, and I’ve become a creature of habit, following the same gentle rhythms from one day into the next. I haven’t a lot of choice. I rarely have visitors and those that do come these days don’t stay long. I am not a good host. This is not an easy place to live.
People, by and large, are fearful of old buildings, just as they fear the elderly themselves. The Thames Path has become a favourite rambling route, and sometimes in the evenings and early mornings people stop in the laneway and peer over the garden wall. I see them but I do not let them see me.
I rarely leave the house. I used to run across the meadow, my heart thumping in my chest, my cheeks warm, the movement of my limbs strong and bold, but such feats are beyond me now.
Those people in the laneway have heard rumours about me, and they point and dip their heads together in the way of gossips everywhere. ‘That’s where it happened,’ they say, ‘That’s where he lived,’ and ‘Do you think she did it?’
But they do not trespass when the gate is shut. They have heard this is a haunted place.
I confess to paying little attention when Clare and Adele spoke of spirits. I was busy, my thoughts elsewhere. Many a time since, I have regretted my distraction. Such knowledge would have come in useful over the years, especially when my ‘visitors’ have come to call.
I have a new one, just arrived. I felt it first, as I always do. An awareness, a slight but certain change in the stale currents that lick and settle in the treads of the stairs at night. I kept my distance and hoped that it would not bother me as I waited for the stillness to return.
Only the stillness did not return. Nor the silence. It – he, for I have glimpsed him now – is not noisy, not like some of them, but I have learned how to listen, what to listen for, and when the movements took on a regular rhythm, I knew that he intended to stay.
It has been a long time since I’ve had a visitor. They used to bother me with their whispering and thumping, the chilling sense that my things, my spaces, were no longer my own. I kept about my business, but I studied them, one after the other, just as Edward might have done, and with time I learned how best to move them on. They are simple creatures, after all, and I have become practised at helping them on their way.
Not all of them, mind you, for there are some to whom I have warmed. The Special Ones. The poor, sad soldier shouting in the night. The widow whose angry weeping fell between the floorboards. And, of course, the children – the lonely schoolgirl who wanted to go home, the solemn little lad who sought to mend his mother’s heart. I like the children. They are always more perceptive. They have not yet learned how not to see.
I am still deciding about this new one, whether or not the two of us can live peaceably together, and for how long. He, for his part, has not yet noticed me. He is much intent on his own activity. The same each day, traipsing a path across the malt house kitchen, always with that brown canvas bag slung over one shoulder.