The House at the End of Hope Street

Chapter Seven





I’m not saying you should get back together with him, sweetie, I’m only saying you should think about it.”

“Mum, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to,” Greer says, having only just confessed to her engagement ending. “He’s with the twenty-two-year-old and he’s welcome to her.”

“Stop feigning flippancy,” Celia says, “you’re too old for it. If you were the twenty-two-year-old, then perhaps, but you’re nearly forty.”

“In eleven months, Mum, not tomorrow.” Greer sits on the bottom step of the stairs, wearing 1950s men’s silk pajamas, the phone cord wrapped around her wrist. This is the topic she always dreads and the one her mother always brings up. Greer stares at the photographs lining the walls. She can picture Celia now: perched on the edge of the kitchen counter, legs crossed, phone in one hand, cigarette in the other. Greer’s grandmother named her daughter after Celia Johnson when she went into labor while watching Brief Encounter, and her mother in turn named her own after Greer Garson, star of her favorite film, Mrs. Miniver. They’d both been trying to live up to their names ever since. Sadly, neither of them has proved any good at either being brilliant actresses or managing to get married.

“You’re no spring chicken,” Celia says. “And if you leave it too late you’ll end up regretting it, I promise you. If I hadn’t had you I’d have nothing now, would I?”

“No, Mum.” Greer sighs. “I suppose not.” Her mother is the only one Greer can’t act with, the only one who isn’t fooled by the smile, the laugh, the pretending that everything is wonderful when it isn’t. No, Celia knows her daughter too well for that. The only thing she doesn’t know is the secret Greer’s been keeping since she was nineteen years old. Greer sighs again.

“I heard that,” Celia snaps.

“Sorry, Mum, it’s not you,” Greer lies. “I’m just knackered, that’s all. I had to do a double shift last night. Blake asked if—”

“Blake?” Celia perks up and Greer inwardly curses.

“He’s my boss, Mum.”

“Is he . . . ?”

“No, and we’re not.”

“Oh.” Celia blows out a puff of smoke. “Shame. He sounds nice.”

Greer laughs. “I only told you his name.”

“Well, it’s a good one,” her mother insists. “It holds promise. I’ll bet he has strong sperm.”

“Mum!”

“Listen, love, you can’t count on a man to stick around, but your kids will always love you. And you can’t wait much longer. I know it’s unfair, but that’s how it is for women, we . . .”

Greer squeezes her eyes shut and stops listening. All she can see now is Lily: big green eyes, bump of a nose, little bow mouth, dusting of dark red hair and tiny fingers that wrapped themselves tightly around hers and held on as long as they could. Celia knew nothing of the pregnancy and never suspected. Greer hardly showed until the sixth month, and by then she was at university. When she went into labor early, she didn’t call anyone. She met, loved and lost Lily in a single day, all by herself.

“Mum,” Greer says softly, “I’m doing the best I can, okay?” She can feel her voice crack and has the sudden urge to confess everything. To admit that sometimes she wakes from dreams so vivid she can still feel Lily’s head on her breast, the tuft of soft red hair brushing her skin. She wants to tell her mother the truth: that complications during the birth left her unable to have another child. But then they’d both be without hope.

“I know, love, I just worry about you, that’s all.” Celia sighs. “And why are you wasting your time in a bar? You should be onstage, that’s where you belong. I can—”

Greer mumbles something incoherent. She won’t get drawn in. This is one conversation she is determined to avoid today. Her insubstantial acting career has always been an explosive subject between them, almost as much as Greer’s childlessness. Celia, having failed to achieve the stardom she dreamed of, has always invested an intrusive level of interest in Greer’s own career. If Greer admits that she’s all but given up on the idea that she’ll ever be an actress of any significance, she knows she’ll never hear the end of it. Celia will hound her until she promises never to give up. Because if Greer lets her dreams of stardom die, her mother’s dreams die with them.

The other thing she certainly won’t tell her mother is that, last night, the charming American asked her out and she said no. At the end of their shift he’d offered her a cigarette, then suggested dinner, and had seemed extremely surprised when she turned him down. But she knows Blake is only interested in a fling. Of course, Celia would be furious that she’d passed up a prospect of any kind, no matter how improbable. For it is her mother’s firm belief that a man can always be changed, given incentive enough. Greer does not share this illusion and since she’s reluctant to subject herself to artistic or romantic rejection, she’s rather starting to suspect that she is destined to die a ninety-year-old waitress, single and surrounded by cats.

—

Alba sits on the floor of her childhood playroom, leaning against the piano. It’s far from her favorite room—the piano holds particularly painful memories—but it’s also the last place her siblings will look for her. And for that, she’s prepared to endure echoes of sorrow. The playroom has never contained toys because Alba’s father didn’t believe in them. Everything was educational: science kits, maps, globes, an abacus with wooden beads, diagrams of the Pythagorean theorem, exact replicas of major historical battles . . . Alba spent hours here as a child, before her father disappeared and she was sent to Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

And, if growing up alone in a cold, silent mansion was bad, then being sent away to boarding school turned out to be even worse. At last, Alba thought, she’d have friends, companions to confide in and share secrets with. But when Alba told the other girls that she could see sounds and smells, they didn’t respond as enthusiastically as she thought they would. Even though Alba promised she couldn’t see their thoughts, the girls in her class were still scared she’d discover their secrets, their hopes and fears, that she’d know when they wet their beds, cried for their mummies, or stole cookies from the kitchen. So they shunned and teased her and called her a liar. When the tormenting spread to the rest of the school, Alba stopped trying to make friends and instead sought refuge in the library. It was there she discovered worlds far more wonderful than hers, populated by characters so captivating and lives so sensational that it was quite easy, after a few pages, to forget about her own life.

By the time she reached university, Alba had given up trying to befriend anyone with a beating heart and pretended she was only truly interested in fiction and in historical fact, learning about lives that would reward her with excellent examination marks. So, when she met Dr. Skinner, the first person who seemed to see behind her pretenses and into her heart, it didn’t take Alba long to fall in love.

At first it didn’t matter that her feelings were unrequited. But as they spent more time together, Alba began trying to win the love she wanted so much. She stole library books so she could stay up all night, uncovering obscure research, creating brilliant and complex theories to convince Dr. Skinner she was someone worth loving. After nearly a year of unfulfilled longing, Alba would do anything for a kind word or suggestive smile. When Dr. Skinner agreed to be her MPhil supervisor, there was nothing she wouldn’t have done in return. So, when her esteemed and beloved supervisor asked for help in writing a paper on marriage in Victorian England, Alba didn’t hesitate to say yes.

—

Zoë doodles hearts around the edges of her page. Hearts are so much more clichéd than lightning bolts, but she doesn’t care. Love is a common, unoriginal emotion that turns people into simpering idiots who resort to the same terms of affection, gifts, silly iconography and the same tears when it all goes wrong.

Zoë has seen the love affairs and mating rituals of hundreds of students, like an anthropologist dedicated to the study of a cliché: how they circle each other, sneaking secret kisses behind the stacks, giggling with an optimistic, all-embracing joie de vivre, gazing out of windows for hours on end with smiles plastered across their faces, unable to focus. She sees how love breaks them when it leaves, splitting them open like pea pods, their hearts exposed, their eyes red, their souls much darker than before.

Zoë also sees the worst type of love, the sort that never illuminates those it afflicts but renders them perpetually raw: love of the unrequited kind. This is the one she knows best of all. She can identify it at five hundred paces, across a crowded room, behind closed doors. She can see the signs in anyone: the dazed gaze, the hollow eyes, the sallow complexion, the look of resigned despair tinged with the tiniest spark of hope. For it is the love she’s infected with, and fellow sufferers can always recognize one another.

Zoë has often thought she ought to try to do something useful with her pain, like channeling it into a bestseller. But whenever she tries, she can’t get past page one. Because when she writes it down, it’s the same tale shared by a hundred thousand others, not worth the waste of paper or ink. So instead she absently fills the little hearts with A’s.

Admiring her handiwork, Zoë thinks of another “A” in her life, her colleague Andy, with whom she had a rather strange encounter last summer, one that momentarily knocked Zoë out of the monotonous ache of her own unrequited love. It began when Andy accidentally brushed against Zoë’s breasts in the rare-book room while reaching for a first edition of Salomé. He apologized, laughing, expecting Zoë to slap him. But she didn’t. Instead she shocked herself by kissing him. Bemused by it, but never one to reject a pretty girl, Andy shrugged and kissed her back. It was an interaction they repeated once or twice a week for three months, until the students returned at the end of the summer and the library was too crowded to risk such encounters. After which they never touched or spoke about it again.

Zoë can’t say she actually enjoyed it. It was an experiment, a foray to the other side. And even the shock of sexual experimentation didn’t stop Zoë from thinking about the one she loved. For, even while she had allowed another “A” to touch her lips, Alba Ashby remained firmly lodged in her heart.

—

The desire to run the hundred and fifty miles back to Hope Street wraps its fingers around Alba’s heart and squeezes hard. She shivers with that fever all night, and the next day she doesn’t go down to breakfast, lunch or dinner. Whiffs of color float up to her room but she blows them away. She hears Charlotte, Edward and Charles arguing over funeral arrangements—their words black and spiked as they drift past her window. Alba wonders what her mother would have wanted.

Since visiting Elizabeth’s bedroom, Alba hasn’t slept well. She wonders who Ella was, why her father left and why her mother went mad. She stares at memories on the ceiling: random pictures passing like a reel of film haphazardly spliced together. In an odd way she feels closer to her mother now than she did when Elizabeth was alive. Hardly surprising, perhaps, since Lady Ashby spent the last decade of her life lost inside the mazes of her own mind, a labyrinth she could navigate only alone. So, even with her special sight, Alba couldn’t see the directions to find her again.

Now, in the dark, Alba picks and chooses what she wants to remember—the moments Elizabeth wasn’t manic or depressed. Reading bedtime stories together, holding hands while they walked around the garden, lying in the fields, skipping along the sand, searching rock pools for limpets and crabs . . . Alba’s siblings rarely step into these memories, so she can enjoy her mother alone.

The day her father left was the start of losing her mother for good. But now she’s finding her again, conjuring up Elizabeth’s smile, her frown, the way she could look at ordinary things as if it was the first time she’d ever seen them. As milky moonlight seeps through the curtains, Alba’s heart is so full of her mother it’s as though she can not only see her but reach out and touch her. It’s not until Elizabeth speaks that Alba realizes she’s really there, sitting at the end of the bed.

Quite the opposite of her daughter, Elizabeth is tall and willowy, with long curly blond hair the color of sunlight. She wears a fitted white dress splashed with poppies that reminds Alba of Stella.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” Elizabeth says softly, “but first you must stop hiding out here.”

Sleep-deprived, Alba thinks that perhaps she’s dreaming, or having a particularly vivid memory. Either way, she has no idea what to say. A decade’s worth of words swell inside her and slowly subside.

“Please, my love.” Elizabeth pats Alba’s feet beneath the bedsheets.

Alba nods, tears spilling down her cheeks. Now she knows why the colors were so dazzlingly bright when she first came to Ashby Hall, because they’ve been infused with her mother’s spirit, her faith, by the one person who cared about what Alba could see.

“Oh, Mum,” she whispers at last, “I’ve missed you so much.”