The House at the End of Hope Street

Chapter Four





Carmen hasn’t slept again. She stares up at the ceiling, at the shards of early morning light slipping through the curtains, and tries to will herself into unconsciousness. But she knows there is no point.

When she first moved in, the only thing that settled Carmen’s anxiety was being in her bedroom. With its sponge-painted blue walls, bright yellow floorboards and inexplicable view of the ocean, it’s an exact replica of her cousin’s childhood bedroom in Bragança, the place Carmen used to run to when her father came home drunk and started trying to pull her onto his lap. Carmen would pretend her cousin’s home was her own and that they were sisters as they lay together listening to records, lulled by the music and smells of her aunt’s cooking rising up from the kitchen below. Her own childhood bedroom had been entirely different, the size of a cupboard and without a lock. But it is not her father’s face she sees in the darkness anymore, it’s her husband’s. He is the one who haunts her now.

Tiago Viera was the most handsome man Carmen had ever met. She was nineteen, working at the only bar in Santo Estêvão, and one night he came with his band. With the first note, the first word out of his mouth, Carmen was hooked. Sipping lemonade, she stared at him throughout the set, ignoring all her customers, watching Tiago weave his spell over every woman in the bar. She’d never felt much for men until then, never responded to their advances. Instead she liked to dress provocatively, to cast the illusion that she was available, then tell them to go to hell, just as she had never been able to do when she was a little girl.

But Tiago was different. He was the first one Carmen ever wanted to say yes to, the first one she ever flirted with, the first one she ever pursued. It was the music that bound them. When he played, every thought left her head and her heart went still in her chest. Tiago taught Carmen about the great composers, played her every sonata and concerto he knew until she learned every note. Soon she was in love, though whether with the music or the musician, she couldn’t quite tell. The night she arrived at Hope Street, Peggy had read her a poem by William Butler Yeats, which had summed up Carmen’s feelings about Tiago perfectly: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Carmen sits up in bed and sniffs the air. The scent of the midnight glory lingers in her room. She can’t get rid of it. No matter if she shuts and locks all her windows, sprays the room with rose water, burns incense or smokes cigarettes, the smell always sneaks back. Carmen hoped burying it would mean she’d be free, but it’s not letting her forget. She knows she should dig up the flower and move what’s buried beneath it, in case the smell gets any stronger. Unfortunately she simply doesn’t have the courage and can’t imagine she ever will.

—

The toast pops up and Alba picks out the crispy slices, burning her fingertips before dropping the toast onto a plate. She can just see faint spirals of scent, the color of soot, swirl into the air. She walks back to the table where Tractarians and the Condition of England lies open at chapter two. Although reading this book brings painful associations, Alba can’t help herself, it’s like scratching at a scab even though she knows it will leave a scar. She’s an academic, it’s the only thing she’s sure of. And even though it’s all been snatched away (Dr. Skinner’s lies having no doubt already spread like wildfire through the history professors of England, ensuring she’ll never find another supervisor anywhere else), she can’t let it go. It’s in her blood. It’s what her brain was made to do.

Her obsession with history drives her current hobby: searching the photographs for famous women. The house joins in, rattling its pipes as if telling her where to look, shaking and whistling as she gets closer to someone, as if they were playing a game of “hot and cold.” Last night she found Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker in a bathroom, their photographs sitting above the loo. Alba guesses the poet came to the house in 1955 while studying at Newnham College, just before she met and married Ted Hughes. Given that hers was an unhappy ending, Plath must have been one of the tragic residents Peggy mentioned. Alba hasn’t managed to find the courage yet to strike up a conversation with any of them, though she’s working on it.

Now, munching toast, Alba glances at the book, turns the page and slips inside the cocoon of words. She could quite happily spend the remaining eighty-three days at Hope Street without engaging in real life at all, hiding the shards of her shattered heart. She isn’t yet worried about what she’s going to do after she has to leave—August feels so far away—but knows she should start thinking about it soon.

Before she’s finished reading the page Alba sees the rich scent of roasting coffee circling around her. She glances at the stove, upon which sits a pot of coffee and, on the counter next to it, Stella: the reason Alba’s favorite reading place is now the kitchen.

“I thought you might be in the mood for a little caffeine,” Stella says.

“Thank you, I am.” Alba stands, walks to the stove and lifts the whistling coffee pot off the gas. “Do you want one?”

“Shut up.”

“Sorry.” Alba smiles and spoons a considerable amount of sugar into her cup. She feels the pinch in her cheeks, an unfamiliar sensation, and realizes it’s the closest she’s come to laughing in quite some time.

“Now you’re just tormenting me,” Stella says, gazing at the sugar.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot about your sweet tooth,” Alba says. “So, how about ginger biscuits? Any of those floating around?”

“Oh, ha, ha.” Stella raises her eyebrows. “You are so cruel, and so unfunny.” In truth, she doesn’t mind not eating at all, hasn’t cared a fig for food since she died. But Stella loves to see Alba smile.

Alba turns back to the table to see—a plate of ginger biscuits. She picks one off the plate, dunks it in her coffee and bites off the soggy half. Since she first tried the biscuits three days ago, they went straight to the top of the very short list of foods she actually likes to eat.

“Best biscuits I’ve ever had.” Alba takes another bite. “Promise me, if you ever decide to disappear, you’ll leave me the recipe. Not that I’ll ever make them, of course.”

“There’s as much chance of me leaving this kitchen,” Stella says, “as you putting down a book.”

Alba picks up another biscuit. She’s not sure whether it’s the caffeine, the sugar or Stella, but in the last few minutes her spirits have lifted considerably. “I don’t understand why you can’t leave.”

“You and me both,” Stella says, “though it doesn’t matter now I have you to keep me company, to come and bother me for biscuits. I’m a ghost, I’ve got nothing better to do. But do you really want to spend your life like this, as if you’re locked in a library?”

“Of course.” Alba grins. “I can’t think of anything better.”

“Then you have a more limited imagination than I thought.” Stella smiles.

Stuck for a retort, Alba returns to her book. She wants to know everything about Stella. How she lived, how she died, if she sleeps or dreams, how she can walk through things yet sit on them as well. Scientifically speaking, it doesn’t make much sense. But then there’s nothing very scientific about spirits.

“What’s that you’re reading now?”

Alba shrugs, embarrassed. She shouldn’t still be reading Dr. Skinner’s book. She should burn the book, scatter the ashes under the midnight glory and let the soil erase her memories. Perhaps that’s how the residents at Hope Street deal with their secrets.

“Tell me what happened.” Stella hops off the counter. Her dress puffs out above her feet but they don’t make a sound as she lands on the floor.

Alba looks at Stella and, for a moment, considers telling her everything. Then the kitchen door swings open and Carmen strides in, wearing a short red skirt and a blue T-shirt that clings to her breasts. Stella evaporates and Alba frowns at Carmen, annoyed.

Oblivious, Carmen smiles at her. “Good morning,” she trills, reaching into the fridge, removing a half-eaten chocolate bar off the top shelf and snapping off a chunk. “I wish I do not love sweets so much, but I can’t help it. When I not have a man to kiss I must find something else delicious for my lips. Do you find this true?”

Alba shrugs, unwilling to discuss such intimate subjects with a virtual stranger.

Leaning against the fridge, Carmen sizes Alba up. She finds herself drawn to the diminutive young woman in a rather maternal way, wanting to take care of her, wanting to liberate her. But how? And then it comes to her. Music will do it, of this she is certain. Music will quiet her mind. Music will touch her heart. Music will set her soul free. More than anything else, Carmen understands the power of music. She knows exactly how it can transform a mood, a moment, a life.

Sensing an imminent social invitation in the offing, Alba stands. “Well, I think I better . . .”

“You must come to The Archer, the bar where I work,” Carmen says, confirming Alba’s suspicion. “Tomorrow a singer does a show there, you will love to see her, I am sure.”

Alba picks Tractarians up off the table. “I don’t really like music.” She steps toward the door. “Or singing. Anyway, better go, you know . . .” And she hurries out of the kitchen, leaving a bemused Carmen behind.

“Not like music?” She frowns. “Who does not like music?”

—

Greer sits at the kitchen table munching an apple and flicking through the classifieds, having found a copy of the Cambridge Evening News outside her bedroom door. She’s wearing her Katharine Hepburn costume: flared tweed trousers, matching waistcoat and crisp cotton shirt. The clothes imbue her with a strength she really needs right now. Every day she searches the Internet for auditions and opportunities, on a computer that materialized in her bedroom a week ago, but has so far failed to find anything promising. It’s all adverts or amateur dramatics, and frankly she’d almost rather be a waitress than do am-dram or adverts. Such efforts were fine in her twenties while she was just starting out, and okay in her thirties, but would be a bit bloody embarrassing in her forties. As a young, aspiring actress she’d always felt sorry for old, and still aspiring, actors who’d dress up as a carrot or a pantomime dame just to remain on-stage.

As she reads, Greer considers how lucky she is to have found this house. Without it she’d be sleeping at the YMCA or in the spare room of her mother’s flat in Bristol. She shudders at the thought and wonders if she can persuade Peggy to let her stay longer in exchange for extensive cooking and cleaning duties. Greer turns the page to read each career offering. Cleaner. Night porter. Postman. Waiter. Checkout assistant. Au pair. She isn’t quite sure what she’s supposed to be looking for. Is it any job at all, just to get started, or one she actually wants? In which case, she has no idea what that might be.

On the stove a pot of blueberry porridge bubbles, and the smell of coffee still lingers. Every now and then Greer senses something moving behind her, but when she turns, all she sees is the stove, the cupboards, the walls lined with photographs of unknown women. If she didn’t know better, Greer would swear someone is stirring her porridge, because every time she gets up to check, it hasn’t stuck to the bottom of the pan.

The kitchen door bangs open and Greer glances up from the newspaper to see Carmen. “Bom dia.” She walks to the stove. “You looking very gorgeous.” She lifts the lid off Greer’s porridge, sniffs it, then continues to the fridge and rummages around inside before extracting another chocolate bar. She munches enthusiastically while Greer watches.

“So.” Carmen licks her lips. “Peggy tell me you want a job.”

“Yes, I need something if I want to keep eating, and all that,” Greer admits. “I’m not sure what yet, but I’m checking . . .”

“What you like?” Carmen sits at the table. “What you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” Greer twirls the apple core between her fingers. Lady Macbeth, she thinks. Juliet, Ophelia, Titania, Viola, Beatrice. That last female, the heroine of Much Ado About Nothing, is her absolute favorite and she’d give anything to play her. But, apart from five nights at university as Viola in Twelfth Night she’s never had the opportunity to step into the shoes of any of these women. However Greer isn’t about to confess her hopes and disappointments to Carmen. Nobody, not even her mother, sees this side of Greer. One of the perks of being an actress is that she can hide behind masks, concealing the parts of herself she wants no one else to know. So instead she says, “I think anything will do for now.”

“I know something is free at the wine bar I working at.” Carmen finishes her chocolate. “Maybe you come tonight? I introduce you to my boss. If he like you, you have a job.”

Greer considers this. She could play that role. It might be fun for a little while, and a much-needed rest for her spirit from all the recent rejection. “Yes, that’d be great.” She smiles. “Thank you.”

“Nao problema.” Carmen studies her. “I like very much your clothes. Like a movie star.”

“I just like beautiful things.” Greer shrugs off the compliment. “Hey, but if you want to borrow any from the collection in my bedroom, you’re very—”

“Yes, please.” Carmen sits up straight. An offer of this nature is exactly what she was hoping for. “I would love this. Can we do it right now?”

“Okay.” Greer laughs. “Right now.”

—

Alba lies across her bed in her pajamas reading Rebecca. She found it last night in her personal library slipped between biographies of Queen Victoria and Gladstone: a flower of fiction in a field of facts. And after opening the first page and reading the first line for the fifteenth time, she hasn’t been able to stop. It is the one novel that, no matter how well she knows the story, still shocks and surprises her. She is always scared by Mrs. Danvers, fooled by Maxim and utterly mesmerized by Manderley. The mansion reminds her of home and Alba finds the spookiness cathartic somehow, knowing that she wasn’t the only one who’d felt abandoned in a decadence of bricks and mortar and an absence of warmth and words.

As a child Alba read Rebecca under the sheets with a flashlight, pausing every now and then, when fear got the better of her, to hold imaginary conversations with the unnamed heroine (whom she called Lucy) about life, loneliness and homicidal housekeepers. The novel and its protagonist were companions Alba reserved for after midnight, when Ashby Hall was at its coldest and darkest. During the day she had other playmates, ones who could stem the longing for real friends, but not so absolutely necessary to her survival as Lucy and Rebecca.

The book brings her comfort still, now soothing different pains, a literary safety blanket Alba can wrap around her fingers and hold until she forgets all the things she wants to forget. Few other novels have been able to offer similar protection against poisoned memories, excepting Middlemarch and Mrs. Dalloway. History textbooks have never had any such effect; they’ve always stimulated rather than soothed. Which is fine since, as her father had always said, too much mollycoddling creates weakness of character. Which was, he also said, exactly what had gone wrong with her mother’s mind.

—

“Okay, Harry, time’s up, I’ve got things to do.” Peggy sits up. Much as she’d like to spend the day in bed with Harry, he can’t be here when she makes another attempt to get into the forbidden room. The door wouldn’t open yesterday. Not when she begged, pleaded and threatened. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. Why is the house being so obtuse? Why the note with no further explanation? She’d like a little clarification and extra details on the fact of her imminent demise. Is that too much to ask? She has questions. Not least of which, now that she knows she’s going to die, why isn’t she being given any help to find a successor? She can feel herself starting to fade; she can hear the slow tick-tock of the clock.

“Aw, Peg, please, just another cuddle.”

“You think I was born yesterday?” Peggy smiles. “I know full well what your cuddles lead to. Now bugger off.” She gently pushes Harry, who doesn’t budge.

“I’ve taken two little blue pills today,” he says. “If you give me twenty minutes, we can try again.”

“You’re a hedonist, Harry.” Peggy laughs. “Laboring under the illusion that you are forty-eight instead of seventy-eight.”

“You’re lovely, Peg,” he says, “you’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Don’t be silly, I’m ancient.”

“You’re gorgeous. You glow. You’re lit from within.”

Peggy brushes a wisp of white hair out of her eyes. “Does that illuminate all my wrinkles?”

Harry nods. “So I can see every smile you’ve ever had, I can hear the echoes of every giggle.”

And although she’s too modest to admit it, Peggy knows he’s telling the truth, that she’s marked with the particular beauty that every Abbot woman has: magical and ethereal, as though their features have been sprinkled with fairy dust until they sparkle.

With a cheeky smile that Peggy can rarely resist, Harry slips his hand under the sheets, running his fingers in little circles toward her belly. In twenty years, Peggy has always surrendered to this particular move. For a moment it seems as though she will again.

“No,” she says softly, “not now. I’ve got something important to do.”

“Oh, Peg, don’t be so heartless, I’ve missed you.”

She can’t tell him that she’s missed him, too, that she wishes he could stay all day and all night, every night. Because then he’ll only propose again and she can’t say yes, certainly not now that she has less than a year to live. Harry slides closer, gazing up at her with watery blue eyes. “And it’ll be another week before I see you again. Give me a little something to remember you by.” He pats his short white hair and, despite herself, Peggy smiles; she’s always liked a man with hair.

“Harold Landon,” she laughs, “if you’ve already forgotten what we just did, then you need to see your doctor.”

Suddenly, Harry’s serious. “Peg. We’ve got to talk about us, I need to say . . .”

“Please.” She squeezes his hand. “Not now.”

“You can’t keep putting this off,” he says, “I won’t let you. Not anymore.”

“Okay,” she says, “but not now.” And with that, she lets go of his hand and slides out of bed. Peggy wishes she could tell Harry everything, but she isn’t allowed. And the house is very careful never to be magical when Harry’s around. Its walls stop breathing, its pipes stop rattling, the cast of characters on the china stop chasing each other around. So, even if she tried, he probably wouldn’t believe her.

Harry watches Peggy shuffle across the room, pausing at a chair to pick up her dressing gown, and, with a barely audible sigh, puts his hand to his chest and rests it there.

—

The house is silent and dark, except for the kitchen, where Alba and Stella talk endlessly into the night about books, long-dead authors, anything and everything except themselves. Despite this, Alba won’t give up trying to pry information out of her tight-lipped friend. “Why will you never tell me anything about yourself?” Alba waves her hand to disperse the orange vapor filling the kitchen from a fresh batch of ginger biscuits.

“Because I can’t.” Stella sits in the sink, her knees folded over the ceramic edge. “I don’t have any memories. That’s how it is. You don’t remember your life after you die. So why don’t you tell me something? Anything.”

“Well . . .” Alba considers that perhaps a quid pro quo of information might be in order. “How about when my sister Charlotte got caught hiding cards in biology class?”

Stella puts her chin on her knees. “Go on.”

“They were revision cards she’d made for her history test. The biology teacher gave her detention. Charlotte wrote a letter of complaint to the headmaster. Aged seven. Lotte always was an obsequious little swot, even then. Just like the rest of my siblings.” She sighs. “They’d disown me if they knew.”

“Knew what?”

Alba shrugs and tells Stella what she told Peggy: carefully phrased half-truths scattered with a few facts about getting kicked out of King’s College, about losing the life she worked so hard for. “So I’m not telling them—”

“But haven’t they been asking?”

“We don’t talk much.” Alba shrugs. “They’re too busy being rich and successful. The only one who won’t mind is Edward, and Mum. But she’s not very”—Alba searches for a nonspecific word—“very strong.”

“Oh,” Stella says. She wants to say more, but knows she’ll have to wait. The subject of Lady Ashby is one that must be approached with sensitivity and care. “So, what will you do, when you have to leave here? Teach history in school?” Stella has only seventy-eight more days with Alba. And if the ghost is to help the girl believe in herself and her dreams, then she’s got to make more progress.

“And spend the rest of my days trying to ram facts down the throats of hideously behaved children? I think I’d rather die,” Alba says, before realizing her insensitive choice of words. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

But Stella just giggles, louder and louder until she hides her face in her knees to muffle the noise. The sound is so ticklish that Alba begins to smile. Soon they’re both shaking with laughter, along with the ceiling and the kitchen walls. Hundreds of faces in hundreds of photographs regard them curiously. “I don’t see what’s so funny about being dead.” Vita turns to her friend. “Indeed,” Dora agrees, “it rather puts a cramp in one’s ambitions.”

All of a sudden, a sharp ringing, insistent and shrill, sounds through the silent house. Alba glances up at the clock. It’s half past two. The noise will wake everyone. Alba leaps up from the table, dashes to the end of the hallway and picks up the phone.

“Hello?” she hisses into the receiver, “hello?”

“Is that you, Alba?” a voice echoes down the line. “Al, it’s me.”

Alba almost drops the phone. “Lotte?”

Successive waves of panic sweep along Alba’s spine, her hands start to shake. In the few seconds of silence that follow, fear-soaked questions flood Alba’s mind: How does her sister know? Will she tell the whole family? What will everyone say? How can she face them? Will they even want to see her again? And then she wonders how the hell Charlotte knew where to find her, how she got this number, a number even Alba didn’t know? But in the next second, all those questions are forgotten.

“Alba, listen,” Charlotte says. “Mother is dead.”