The House at the End of Hope Street

Chapter Twelve





Alba hates traveling. She hates staying in hotels, hates having to speak to strangers, hates not knowing where she is, hates being unable to find edible vegetarian food or a decent library. She’s never wanted to go to exotic places and is more interested in historical times and fictional worlds than those she could actually visit.

After failing to find her father in the virtual world, and still a little too nervous to interrogate Edward or hire a detective, Alba finally decided to try to find him in the physical one. The sighting of Dr. Skinner last week also made the idea of leaving the country rather more appealing.

Sitting on a sleeper train bound for Fort William, Alba bites her nails, trying to distract herself with books. She’s already read A Room with a View and they’re barely out of London. The scene of the bumbled kiss made Alba wonder if her own first kiss would be as unromantic. Considering her complete lack of experience and self-confidence, she imagines it might be. Although it also depends, she supposes, on the other party. Perhaps she’ll find someone like George Emerson, full of passion and fervor. But in all honesty, Alba doesn’t care how it happens, as long as it does. She’s beginning to worry that she’ll die a virgin, untouched, unloved and unkissed.

By the time the train passes through Yorkshire, Alba has read Howards End, A Passage to India and Maurice. And although A Room with a View is still her favorite, it’s Maurice that makes her cry. She nearly misses the connection to Mallaig, pulling her book-filled bag behind her and falling through the train doors just in time. On this leg of the trip, Alba just gazes out of the window, running lines of her parents’ letters through her mind. Somewhere in Scotland she falls asleep and dreams again of her mother. This time they sit together in the gardens of Ashby Hall.

“Are you finally happy now?” Alba plucks at a piece of grass. “You always seem to be nowadays.”

“I am.” Elizabeth smiles. “I truly am. What about you, my darling girl?”

“I’m fine.” Alba smiles. “And every time I see you I’m better than I was before.”

Lady Ashby strokes her daughter’s cheek. “That’s sweet, my love. But I hope you’ll find happiness with someone you don’t have to fall asleep to see.” She laughs. “It’s all I want for you, to be happy. Nothing else matters, only that.”

Alba reaches for her mother’s hand and is still holding it when the train jolts to a stop and she wakes up. As she queues for the boat trip across Loch Nevis, Alba is shivering so hard she almost can’t pay for her ticket. Great gusts of wind whip the water into waves that crash onto the wooden pier, splashing the passengers. Alba watches as the waves spray mists over her head.

Alba grips the side of the small fishing boat, her fingers raw with cold, but she won’t wear gloves, in case she loses her grip. When Inverie comes into view, Alba nearly passes out with relief. As they come ashore, a seal pops up in the water and Alba smiles. It’s a good omen, she hopes: she will find her father, he will be overjoyed and they will get along brilliantly.

An hour later, when she’s sitting on the edge of a bed in a twee little bed-and-breakfast, Alba’s not feeling quite so confident. She has forty-eight hours to find him, that’s until Monday morning, when the next ferry will take her back to the mainland. Her investigation is going to involve making inquiries of strangers, as well as, given the island terrain, physical exertion. Neither is a prospect she relishes. Alba kicks off her shoes, pulls off her jeans and drops them to the floor.

She looks up at the ceiling, at the pink wallpaper scattered with rosebuds, thinking that this is the craziest and bravest thing she’s ever done in her life. And although thoughts of tomorrow still leave her trembling, she suddenly realizes she’s doing something so daring and different that her steady, staid life has just taken a sharp turn to the left. If she keeps this up, she might one day get that kiss after all. And for the second time that day, Alba smiles.

—

After getting up, getting dressed and swallowing three cups of strong coffee, Alba ventures downstairs with a list of questions. Last night she’d been greeted by a friendly, portly, middle-aged woman. This morning the woman has been replaced by a much younger version of herself: a sullen, pretty teenager who slumps behind the desk, scowling at her nails while she paints them scarlet. She reminds Alba of the gorgeous Cheltenham girls who made her childhood a misery. As Alba approaches the counter, map in hand, she tells herself that she’s older now and, hopefully, braver.

“Hey.” Alba leans against the counter.

“Yeah.” The girl glances up. “How can I help?” The words are rote, probably because her mother’s been drumming them into her for years, resentful and dark brown: the color of boredom.

“I’m looking for this house,” Alba says, displaying her father’s address. The girl gives it a cursory glance. “Two miles down the road, past the Old Forge.”

“Oh, thank you.” Alba smiles. “Is it easy to find? I don’t have a street name.”

“Everything’s easy to find.” The girl returns to her nails. “It’s fecking boring here. We only have, like, two streets, so the houses have names instead.”

“Oh.” Alba’s suddenly slightly terrified. “Okay.” Her father might be a few miles away; she might be just about to meet him. Alba grips the counter and the girl looks up at her.

“What you doing here anyway? You don’t look like you’d make it up a mountain, and there ain’t nothing else to do for fun. It’s just fecking boring. I can’t wait till I’m out of here.”

Most of life is fecking boring when you’re fifteen, Alba wants to say, unless you’re the youngest-ever student at King’s College, in which case it’s a bit fecking stressful and lonely. “I’m looking for someone.”

“Okay,” the girl sighs, having lost interest. “Whatever.”

It takes Alba twenty minutes to reach the house and another hour to walk up the short path to the front door. The house is small with a thatched roof and walls painted white. The curtains are drawn. When she knocks the sound is dull against the wood. Alba peeks in through the letterbox, but it’s too dark to see inside. The weight of disappointment settles on Alba’s shoulders as she sits down on the doorstep to contemplate her next move.

At first the sun is warm on her cheeks but then the wind starts to whip up. Alba slips her head and hands into her coat, shrinking like a turtle against the cold. But despite the chill and the disappointment, Alba is already quite captivated by Inverie, by the stark simplicity of the sea and the mountains, by the quiet, the muted colors of the sounds. In Cambridge Alba’s vision was flooded with contrasting colors: the rush of traffic, people shouting, radios, sirens, horns . . . In Inverie all she sees are the trails of soft blue as birds sweep through the air, light green spray off the water, waves lapping against the stony strip of beach, streaks of white as the wind whistles through. Alba loves the solitude and wonders if her father does too.

“Well, hello there, little lassie.”

Startled, Alba looks up to see an old woman with short gray hair mostly hidden under a woolen hat. Suddenly scared she’s trespassing, Alba jumps up and steps away from the house.

“What might you be doing here, then?” the woman asks, but her tone isn’t harsh and her words are sky blue, the color of kindness and friendship.

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Aye, well then, maybe I can help.” The woman smiles. “Who is it you’re looking for?”

“He’s called Albert,” Alba says. “I think he lives here.”

“Aye, Al Mackay, he used to, but not anymore.”

“Oh.” Alba swallows her regret. But at least she now knows his surname. “Where did he go?” Alba asks, desperately hoping she isn’t about to hear her father is dead and gone.

“I couldn’t tell you, lassie, I’m afraid. And no one’s bought the house since Al left. Living here isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, wouldn’t you know. Some seem to think it’s the edge of the world.”

“When did he leave?” Alba asks. “Do you know where he went?”

“Four years ago, or thereabouts. But no, he kept himself to himself, did Albert. I was the only one round here he ever said more than three words to.”

“Oh,” Alba says softly, tears gathering in her eyes. “Oh, I see.”

After the woman leaves Alba returns to the doorstep to sit and soak up any remaining traces of her father, leaching the last molecules of his presence out of the stone, until the tips of her fingers are numb. When she pulls herself up to stand again, her legs are sleepy and leaden. At the gate Alba stops and turns to look at the low wall running back up to the cottage then continuing parallel to the house, leaving a passageway enough for a small person to squeeze through.

There must be a back garden. Alba can’t believe she didn’t think of this before. There might be an open window, or one with a faulty catch, or a back door unlocked. Glancing around, Alba turns and hurries up the path, then squeezes through the passage.

The back of the house looks very much like the front, but before she can examine it, something else catches her eye. The stone wall runs to the end of the garden, marking a square around the house and grounds. At the end, where the wild, overgrown lawn should continue, lies a blanket of color that glints and sparkles in the sunlight.

From fifty feet away, Alba can’t quite make out what she’s looking at. As she gets closer, a sense of foreboding swallows her curiosity and she slows to step carefully through the scattered daisies and cowslips. And then Alba is looking down at layers of multicolored glass, the fragments of smashed bottles forming a blanket of a dozen different colors. Like a piece of modern art, she thinks. Alba bends forward, her fingers hovering a few inches above the glass. Here and there, jutting out of the jagged edges are torn labels, historical evidence of the identity of individual bottles before they were sacrificed for the whole. Alba wonders if her father was an artist as well as a poet, someone who turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. She feels a flutter in her chest, a tiny, fragile connection to him across time and space.

Then she catches sight of something else. On the neck of a frosted pink bottle is a splash of dried blood, a shadow left behind, a clue. And, all of a sudden, the years fold together, showing Alba a truth she first missed. Her father must have drunk every bottle before he smashed them. Thousands of glasses of wine, whisky, champagne, cognac . . . She’s looking at a graveyard of multicolored tombstones marking every hour of her father’s alcoholism.

Alba stands, seized by an urgent desire to run, to be as far away from this display of pain and despair as it’s possible to be. She’s enough of a mess already, she doesn’t want a father who is even worse than her. She needs one who is strong and brave, a man who can hold her in his arms and promise that everything will always be all right. After a lost and lonely childhood, Alba doesn’t want another parent who really isn’t one at all. She wants strength, dependency, endurance, courage.

Then, as she’s about to turn away, Alba spots something else: the tip of a pen sticking an inch into the air, a little ship in a sea of glass. She bends down again and gingerly picks it up. It’s a fountain pen: cream edged in black with a gold clip, faded from exposure, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. It’s weighty, expensive, the kind only a serious writer would own. Alba rubs it on her sleeve, then carefully places it in her pocket. And with her fingers still wrapped around the pen, she turns and runs out of the garden and past the house, leaving the layers of multicolored glass far, far behind.

—

Peggy finds Greer ensconced in the back of her wardrobe, trying on an assortment of leather jackets with various cocktail dresses and cowboy boots.

“I thought I’d find you in here.” The old woman eases herself onto a pile of abandoned clothes with a soft sigh of effort. “Hiding out with your safety blankets.”

“Yeah.” Greer smiles. “I suppose so.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, from time to time.” Peggy fingers the hem of a dress, rubbing black lace between her fingertips. “Though I’m afraid you can’t hide your head in the sand forever, my dear, you don’t have as long as—”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Well, I am a little like one, I suppose,” Peggy says. She picks up a moss green cardigan and absently slips it over her shoulders. “At least, it’s my job to help you find your way to happiness. And I rather think you’re losing yours. Don’t you?”

Greer slips a green leather jacket over red chiffon and gives a slight shrug. “I haven’t successfully auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company or found a prospective husband just yet, if that’s what you mean.”

“Not exactly.” Peggy laughs. “And I have a feeling that your acting career will sort itself out. But as for men, the one you’re currently carrying on with will bring you nothing but heartbreak.” She discards one of her slippers and pulls on a pink cowboy boot. “But then you already know that, my dear, don’t you?”

It’s a moment before Greer is able to look her landlady in the eye. “Yes,” she admits. “I know it and I still can’t seem to stop myself.”

—

When Carmen wakes the next morning she feels a strange urge, an intuitive pull she’s never felt before. Still in her nightgown she walks down to the kitchen, past the long wall of cupboards, the photographs of women who watch curiously, and arrives at a door she had never noticed. It stands ajar. Carmen pauses a moment, then pushes it open. As she steps through it and into the sunlight, a thousand tiny multicolored butterflies sweep into the kitchen: a herald to the newcomer, a welcome. A second later, they are gone.

The beauty of the garden takes Carmen’s breath away. She stands on the stone terrace for several minutes before seeing Peggy sitting at a table under an apple tree. Mog sits, invisible, at her feet. The old woman gives a small, resigned smile. The day has come. The garden is hers no longer; it has invited someone else in.

“Paraiso,” Carmen whispers. “I can’t believe, I live here two month, I think it just fields . . .” She steps off the terrace and onto the lawn. Blades of grass reach up to soften her soles. Flowers turn their faces in her direction; blossom-laden branches of the apple tree drop and settle close to her head. A puff of wind blows a shower of pink petals at her feet.

“Meu Deus.” Carmen sighs. “It’s like I step into a song.”

“It’s always a little overwhelming the first time.” Peggy sticks her fork into a half-eaten slice of cake. “I love chocolate cake for breakfast,” Peggy stalls, “it sets me up for the day. A little decadence is good for the soul.” She’s been eating more cake than usual, lately. Impending death does have compensations after all, then, if only chocolate-covered ones. She’s also been thinking of Harry nearly every hour of every day. She knew she cared for him deeply but has recently realized that he might be the love of her life. The woman who never entertained regrets now finds herself facing a rather big one.

Mog jumps up onto the table to lick chocolate icing off the edge of Peggy’s plate.

“So, my dear,” Peggy stalls, “what brings you here?”

“I don’t know. I feel something in my stomach and I follow it.”

“Yes,” Peggy says, “well, the garden has invited you, which means . . . I’m afraid it’s time to tell you something you won’t want to hear.”

Carmen kicks her toes against the stone terrace.

“When you bury things instead of confronting them, they will haunt you until you do,” Peggy says. “And I’m sorry to say that if you don’t dig it up by Friday night, you will have to leave.”