‘A mother! How— Oh, how—“ A curiously intense expression came into his eyes, a sadness or a longing. ”What could be pleasanter than to have a mother!“ he finally exclaimed. It was clearly an invitation to say more.
Miss Winter asked no questions about my absence, nor did she tell me anything about the progression of her illness, but even after so short an absence, her decline was clear to see. The cashmere wraps fell in apparently empty folds around her diminished frame, and on her fingers the rubies and emeralds seemed to have expanded, so thin had her hands become. The fine white line that had been visible in her parting before I left had broadened; it crept along each hair, diluting the metallic tones to a weaker shade of orange. But despite her physical frailty, she seemed full of some force, some energy, that overrode both illness and age and made her powerful. As soon as I presented myself in the room, almost before I had sat down and taken out my notebook, she began to speak, picking up the story where she had left off, as though it were brimful in her and could not be contained a moment longer.
The pressure through the blankets is gone, a figment of sleep. I do not know whether I am relieved or disappointed.
And after the sound of the Missus’s feet shuffling cautiously down the stairs, all was quiet.
‘I see.“ Though I wasn’t sure I did see. Was Mrs. Love his wife? Though he’d said he’d been making her cake since he was a child. Surely he couldn’t mean his mother? Why would he call his mother Mrs. Love? Two things were clear, though: He had loved her and she was dead. ”I’m sorry,“ I said.
THE BOX OF LIVESWith the story of Hester, I fell quickly back into my routine. In the mornings I listened to Miss Winter tell me her story, hardly bothering now with my notebook. Later in my room, with my reams of paper, my twelve red pencils and my trusty sharpener, I transcribed what I had memorized. As the words flowed from the point of my pencil onto the page, they conjured up Miss Winter’s voice in my ear; later, when I read aloud what I had written, I felt my face rearranging itself into her expressions. My left hand rose and fell in mimicry of her emphatic gestures, while my right lay, as though maimed, in my lap. The words turned to pictures in my head. Hester, clean and neat and surrounded by a silvery gleam, an all-body halo that grew broader all the time, encompassing first her room, then the house, then its inhabitants. The Missus transformed from a slow-moving figure in darkness to one whose eyes darted about, bright with seeing. And Emmeline, under the spell of Hester’s shiny aura, allowing herself to be changed from a dirty, malnourished vagabond into a clean, affectionate and plump little girl. Hester cast her light even into the topiary garden, where it shone onto the ravaged branches of the yews and brought forth fresh green growth. There was Charlie, of course, lumbering in the darkness outside the circle, heard but not seen. And John-the-dig, the strangely named gardener, brooding on its perimeter, reluctant to be drawn into the light. And Adeline, the mysterious and dark-hearted Adeline.
‘It’s a shame,“ said my father in the shop that evening, ”that you can’t come home for a few hours.“
It did the trick. “Shiny,” Emmeline pronounced and, without knowing what it was or the magic it could work, she followed the key—and Hester with it—back through the cold corridors to the kitchen.
The gap between the two cats was about ten feet, and to converse we had to raise our voices slightly, giving the conversation a somewhat theatrical air, as though it were some performance. And indeed we had an audience. In the rain-washed light, close to the edge of the woods, a deer, stock-still, regarded us curiously. Unblinking, alert, nostrils twitching. Seeing I had spotted it, it made no attempt to run but decided, on the contrary, not to be afraid.
Aurelius’s face twisted momentarily. “Sadly—I have always wanted— Or a father, come to that. Even brothers or sisters. Anyone who actually belonged to me. As a child I used to pretend. I made up an entire family. Generations of it! You’d have laughed!” There was nothing to laugh at in his face as he spoke. “But as to an actual mother… a ”actual, known mother… Of course, everybody has a mother, don’t hey? I know that. It’s a question of knowing who that mother is. And I lave always hoped that one day— For it’s not out of the question, is it? And so I have never given up hope.“
‘Oh, I see! No! I have a camping stove. I used to have a Thermos flask, but“—he turned his nose up—”tea from a Thermos is not very nice, is it? Now, does it sting very badly?“
‘Thank goodness. I should never have forgiven myself. Now, you stay there while I… I’ll just get the… Back in a minute.“ And off he went. His feet danced delicately in and out of the jagged edges of wood, then skipped swiftly up the stairs, while the upper half of his body sailed serenely above, as if unconnected to the elaborate footwork going on below.
‘A skeleton! Me! A skeleton!“ He chuckled, delighted, and his entire body seemed to shake with mirth.
Hester had triumphed. She might have looked like a potato, but there was nothing that girl couldn’t do, once she put her mind to it.
‘How nice to see you,“ said Hester, coming down the stairs. ”Now, who are you? Adeline or Emmeline?“
‘That’s fine. No problem.“
HESTER ARRIVES
We sat in silence for a moment, each of us contemplating ghosts of our own.
You can imagine what she thought of Angelfield.
‘Do you have electricity here?“ I asked. I was feeling bewildered.
That night, drawing me out of sleep, a pressure on the edge of my bed. The angularity of bone pressing against my flesh through the bedclothes.
The fear dissolves.
I felt a start of surprise. People hardly ever notice me for long enough to ask me personal questions.
Slowly I walked down the drive to the church, my mind full of the stranger I had just met—met and befriended. It was most unlike me. And as I passed through the lych-gate, I reflected that perhaps I was the stranger. Was it just my imagination, or since meeting Miss Winter was I not quite myself?
Later came the sound of the household getting ready for bed. Footsteps on the stairs, the Missus, saying, “I hope you’ll be comfortable, Miss,” and the voice of the governess, steel in velvet, “I’m sure I will, Mrs. Dunne. Thank you for all your trouble.”
The handle of the kitchen door turned, then stopped. No amount of tugging and jiggling could free it. It was padlocked.
‘Mr. Love—“
‘You wait there, and when I come back, you and I will have a lovely tea!“ and he went back into the house. His huge back glided up the stairs and disappeared into the entrance of the corridor and the third room.
‘Aurelius. You know, with mothers, things aren’t always as pleasant as you might suppose.“
Night fell and the house slept. Except us. The Missus’s attempts to teach us that nighttime was for sleeping had failed as all her lessons had failed, and we had no fear of the dark. Outside the governess’s door we listened and heard nothing but the faint scratch scratch of a mouse under the boards, so we went on downstairs, to the larder.
In our separate ways we all felt daunted. All except Charlie, that is. When the day came, only Charlie was his usual self. Though he was locked away and out of sight, his presence was nonetheless made known by the thundering and clattering that shook the house from time to time, a din to which we’d all become so accustomed that we scarcely even noticed. In his vigil for Isabelle, the man had no notion of day or time, and the arrival of a governess meant nothing to him.
‘Oh my goodness.“
‘Ah?“ It seemed to have the force of a great revelation to him. He peered closely at me. ”Squabbles?“
She blinked again, shuffled in her seat and looked at me with a new, sharp gaze. She had cut the thread.
‘About the girls, Miss Barrow-—“
I ran. I jumped over the holes in the floorboards, leaped down the stairs three at a time, lost my footing and lunged at the handrail for support. I grasped at a handful of ivy, stumbled, saved myself and lurched forward again. The library? No. The other way. Through an archway. Branches of elder and buddleia caught at my clothes, and I half fell several times as my feet scrabbled through the detritus of the broken house.
Before we parted, Aurelius took my hand and patted it in an easy, old-fashioned manner. Then his massive frame glided gracefully up the wide sweep of steps and he closed the heavy doors behind him.
There was only one thing to do.
A governess was found. Her name was Hester. Hester Barrow. It was not a pretty name, but then she was not a pretty girl.
With Isabelle gone, it was felt in the village that something should be done for the children. They were thirteen; it was not an age to be left unattended; they needed a woman’s influence. Should they not be sent to school somewhere? Though what school would accept children such as these? When a school was found to be out of the question, it was decided that a governess should be employed.
‘Tell me…“ the stranger began, and I suspected he had needed to pluck up the courage to ask his question. ”Do you have a mother?“
The grubbiness of the house did not transfer itself to our pristine governess the way one might have expected. Instead it was the other way around. The few rays of light, drained and dusty, that managed to penetrate the uncleaned windows and the heavy curtains seemed always to fall on Hester. She gathered them to herself and reflected them back into the gloom, refreshed and vitalized by their contact with her. Little by little the gleam extended from Hester herself to the house. On the first full day it was just her own room that was affected. She took the curtains down and plunged them into a tub of soapy water. She pegged them on the line where the sun and wind woke up the unsuspected pattern of pink and yellow roses. While they were drying, she cleaned the window with newspaper and vinegar to let the light in, and when she could see what she was doing, she scrubbed the room from floor to ceiling. By nightfall she had created a little haven of cleanliness within those four walls. And that was just the beginning.
‘Me?“ She blinked vaguely. ”Oh, I liked her. That was the trouble.“
For a few moments we sat in silence. I looked out to the deer park. At the cusp of the wood, more deer were emerging. They moved with the sunlight across the grassy park.
‘Yes.“
I almost missed Charlie’s. Having eliminated every other stone in the chapel, I was about to give up, when my eye finally made out a small, dark stone. So small was it, and so black, that it seemed designed for invisibility, or at least insignificance. There was no gold leaf to give relief to the letters so, unable to make them out by eye, I raised my hand and felt the carving, Braille style, with my fingertips, one word at a time.
‘It’s a very sorry thing.“ He gave a shrug that he wanted to be casual, but wasn’t. ”I should have liked to have a mother.“
Other members of the household flourished, too. The Missus had her eyes examined by the doctor, and with much complaining was taken to a specialist. On her return she could see again. The Missus was so pleased at seeing the house in its new state of cleanliness that all the years she’d lived in a state of grayness fell away from her, and she was rejuvenated sufficiently to join Hester in this brave new world. Even John-the-dig, who obeyed Hester’s orders morosely and kept his dark eyes always firmly averted from her bright, all-seeing ones, could not resist the positive effect of her energy in the household. Without a word to anyone, he took up his shears and entered the topiary garden for the first time since the catastrophe. There he joined his efforts to those already being made by nature to mend the violence of the past.
‘I’m sorry,“ I said. ”It must be delayed shock.“
He thought. “Nearly twenty years. Though it seems more. Or less. Depending on how one looks at it.”
In the folds of the curtain my hunger pangs gave way to anger. Hester and her key! Emmeline! It was like the perambulator all over again. It was love.
‘Not exactly.“
‘The lady who took me in. She gave me her name. She gave me her recipe book. She gave me everything, really.“
Though I looked, I could not see the Angelfield name anywhere. But it did not puzzle me for more than a minute. The family of the house would not have ordinary graves in the churchyard. Their tombs would be grander affairs, marked by effigies and with long histories carved into their marble slabs. And they would be inside, in the chapel. The church was gloomy. The ancient windows, narrow pieces of greenish glass held in a thick stone framework of arches, let in a sepulchral light that weakly illuminated the pale stone arches and columns, the whitened vaults between the black roof timbers and the smooth polished wood of the pews. When my eyes had adjusted, I peered at the memorial stones and monuments in the tiny chapel. Angelfields dead for centuries all had their epitaphs here, line after loquacious line of encomium, expensively carved into costly marble. Another day I would come back to decipher the engravings of these earlier generations; for today it was only a handful of names I was looking for.
‘I’m bound to.“
Dr. Maudsley organized it all. Charlie, locked in his grief, was scarcely aware of what was going on, and John-the-dig and the Missus, mere servants in the house, were not consulted. The doctor approached Mr. Lomax, the family solicitor, and between the two of them and with a hand from the bank manager, all the arrangements were made. Then it was done.
While I ate and drank, my host sat on the second cat, which took on an unexpected kittenish appearance beneath his great girth. He ate in silence, neatly and with concentration. He watched me eat, too, anxious that I should appreciate the food.
I felt reduced to the size of a child. But for all his great dimensions, this man, too, had something of a child about him. Too plump for wrinkles, he had a round, cherubic face, and a halo of silver-blond curls sat neatly around his balding head. His eyes were round like the frames of his spectacles. They were kind and had a blue transparency.
I shook my head.
We were idling that morning in one of the front rooms on the first floor. A bedroom, you’d have called it, if the bed had been visible under the pile of junk that had accumulated there the way junk does over the decades. Emmeline was working away with her nails at the silver embroidery threads that ran through the pattern of the curtains. When she succeeded in freeing one, she surreptitiously put it in her pocket, ready to add later to the magpie stash under her bed. But her concentration was broken. Someone was coming, and whether she knew what that meant or not, she had been contaminated by the sense of expectation that hung about the house.
I nodded.
Emmeline waited patiently, blankly, for the door to open, as she had always waited before. Confident that in a moment there would be bread and butter and jam for the taking.
‘But you turned out to be a giant.“
‘Certainly. Was it long ago? That you lost her?“
The governess was shaping up into a real challenge. But she wouldn’t catch us that way. We would go out. You could always get into one of the cottages for a snack.
GRAVESI had left it too late for the light, and photographs were out of the question. So I took my notebook out for my walk in the churchyard. Angelfield was an old community but a small one, and there were not so very many graves. I found John Digence, Gathered to the Garden of the Lord, and a woman, Martha Dunne, Loyal Servant of our Lord, whose dates corresponded closely enough with what I expected for the Missus. I copied the names, dates and inscriptions into my notebook. One of the graves had fresh flowers on it, a gay bunch of orange chrysanthemums, and I went closer to see who it was who was remembered so warmly. It was Joan Mary Love, Never Forgotten.
My shin was stinging. I reached to investigate a tear in the knee of my trousers, and my fingers came away bloodied.
Miss Winter paused, her eyes set fixedly on the corner of the room, where her past presented itself to her with more reality than the present and me. At the corners of her mouth and eyes flickered half-expressions of sorrow and distress. Aware of the thinness of the thread that connected her to her past, I was anxious not to break it, but equally anxious for her not to stop her story.
‘Quite so! A giant.“ He wiped the laughter from his eyes and said, ”There is a ghost, you know—or so they say.“
He frowned. “Misunderstandings?”
He seemed sad and worried. I knew I was the cause, and I was sorry I couldn’t do anything about it.
We were imprisoned.
But Hester did keep the children under control and out of sight, and had he given it any thought he would have been grateful for this. Under Hester’s reign there was no cause for hostile neighbors to come complaining about the twins, no imperative to visit the kitchen and have a sandwich made by the Missus, above all, no need to leave, even for a minute, that realm of the imagination that he inhabited with Isabelle, only with Isabelle, always with Isabelle. What he gave up in territory, he gained in freedom. He never heard Hester; he never saw her; the thought of her never once entered his head. She was entirely satisfactory.
But there was no need to panic. The Missus’s apron pocket. That’s where the key would be. That’s where the keys always were: a ring of rusted keys, unused, for doors and locks and cupboards all over the house, and any amount of fiddling to know which key matched which lock.
I added another note to the card and underlined it.
After cleanliness came order, and the house was first to feel the changes. Our new governess did a very thorough tour. She went from bottom to top, tutting and frowning on every floor. There was not a single cupboard or alcove that escaped her attention; with pencil and notebook in hand, she scrutinized every room, noting damp patches and rattling windows, testing doors and floorboards for squeaks, trying old keys in old locks, and labeling them. She left doors locked behind her. Though it was only a first “going over,” a preparatory stage to the main restoration, nevertheless she made a change in every room she entered: a pile of blankets in a corner folded and left tidily on a chair; a book picked up and tucked under her arm to be returned later to the library; the line of a curtain set straight. All this done with noticeable haste but without the slightest impression of hurry. It seemed she had only to cast her eye about a room for the darkness in it to recede, for the chaos to begin shamefacedly to put itself in order, for the ghosts to beat a retreat. In this manner, every room was Hestered.
‘No,“ he sighed. ”Not even the shadow of a ghost.“
‘Leg feeling all right?“
Then I picked up my camera. “I think I should be going, actually. I ought to try for some photos at the church before the light quite disappears. Thank you so much for the tea.”
‘I’ve put the kettle on,“ he announced as he returned. It was a proper first-aid kit he had with him, white with a red cross on it, and he took out an antiseptic lotion and some gauze.
‘Will you come again, Margaret?“ he asked as I picked up my bag.
I took refuge in the folds of the long curtains just before she emerged onto the galleried landing. It was midnight. At the top of the stairs she stood, a compact little figure, neither fat nor thin, set on a sturdy pair of legs, the whole topped by that calm and determined countenance. In her firmly belted blue dressing gown and with her hair neatly brushed, she looked for all the world as though she slept sitting up and ready for morning. Her hair was thin and stuck flat to her head, her face was lumpen and her nose was pudgy. She was plain, if not worse than plain, but plainness on Hester had not remotely the same effect that it might on any other woman. She drew the eye.
CHARLIE ANGELFIELDHE IS GONE INTO THE DARK NIGHT.
‘That was lovely,“ I said. ”Homemade, I think?“
The door would not open. The lock had never been used in our lifetime, but tonight it betrayed itself with a trace of fresh oil.
‘Have you seen the ghost?“
‘I must be off in a few minutes myself. It has been so nice to meet you, Margaret. Will you come again?“
‘I expect so.“
‘Do you mind? Forgive me for asking, but— How can I put it? Families are a matter of… of… But if you’d rather not— I am sorry.“
Hester BarrowGovernessAngelfield HouseBorn: ?
It is her! Come for me at last!
The pocket was empty.
I know, I almost said, I saw her, but of course it wasn’t my ghost he was talking about.
I felt a sudden chill. Who had selected these words, I wondered? Was it Vida Winter? And what was the mood behind them? It seemed to me that there was room for a certain ambiguity in the expression. Was it the sorrow of bereavement? Or the triumphant farewell of the survivors to a bad lot?
‘I am home,“ I protested, feigning ignorance. But I knew it was my mother he was talking about. The truth was that I couldn’t bear her tinny brightness, nor the pristine paleness of her house. I lived in shadows, had made friends with my grief, but in my mother’s house I knew my sorrow was unwelcome. She might have loved a cheerful, chatty daughter, whose brightness would have helped banish her own fears. As it was, she was afraid of my silences. I preferred to stay away. ”I have so little time,“ I explained. ”Miss Winter is anxious that we should press on with the work. And it’s only a few weeks till Christmas, after all. I’ll be back again then.“
He laughed. It was a dark, rich sweetness, like the cake.
‘And you?“ I prompted softly. ”What about you?“
With the death of George Angelfield, the family’s loquacity came to an end. Charlie and Isabelle—for presumably it was they who decided—
But we saw her. Through Emmeline’s new hole in the curtain we stared. We didn’t know what to think. Hester was of average height. Average build. She had hair that was neither yellow nor brown. Skin the same color. Coat, shoes, dress, hat: all in the same indistinct tint. Her face was devoid of any distinguishing feature. And yet we stared. We stared at her until our eyes ached. Every pore in her plain little face was illuminated. Something shone in her clothes and in her hair. Something radiated from her luggage. Something cast a glow around her person, like a lightbulb. Something made her exotic.
I stared back through the archway.
‘Oh dear, oh dear. Did I startle you? Oh dear.“
Hester was clean. Scrubbed and soaped and rinsed and buffed and polished all over.
‘I think that’s enough for today. You can go now.“
‘I thought you were a ghost,“ I told him. ”When I felt the door handle move. Or a skeleton.“
‘No, I’m not a surveyor. I’m writing a book about someone who used to live here.“
I took a blank card and began to write.
‘Ah.“
‘I always said, someone will get hurt in that old place one of these days. I’ve had the kit for years. Better safe than sorry, eh? Oh dear, oh dear!“ He winced with empathy as he pressed the stinging pad against my cut shin. ”Let’s be brave, shall we?“
Emmeline spoke. “Yum yum,” she said. She was hungry. And when Emmeline was hungry, Emmeline had to be fed. It was as simple as that. We were in a fix. It was a long time coming, but eventually Emmeline’s poor little brain realized that the food she longed for could not be had. A look of bewilderment came into her eyes, and she opened her mouth and wailed.
We found out later, though.
‘Don’t move!“
I nodded. I was none the wiser.
‘Right. Well, let’s make you comfortable. The rain has stopped, so tea outdoors?“ He went to the grand old double door at the front of the house and unlatched it. With a creak smaller than one expected, the doors swung open, and I began to get to my feet.
Helpless, passive, we all shared in the anticipation, each with our particular mix of emotion. The Missus was divided. She felt an instinctive suspicion of this stranger who was to come into her domain, and connected with this suspicion was the fear of being found wanting—for she had been in charge for years and knew her limitations. She also felt hope. Hope that the new arrival would instill a sense of discipline in the children and restore manners and sanity to the house. In fact, so great was her desire for a settled and well-run domestic life that in the advent of the governess’s arrival she took to issuing orders, as though we were the sort of children who might comply. Needless to say, we took no notice.
Soon another noise was added to it. Not the blind shuffle of the Missus, but the smart, metronomic step of Hester Barrow’s feet. A brisk, unhurried click, click, click. Down a set of stairs, along a corridor, to the gallery.
‘Margaret.“ He beamed. ”Splendid. Quite splendid. Now, eat.“
He must have been six-foot-four or -five, and was broad, so broad that the house seemed to shrink around him.
There were no dates.
I must have been looking dazed, and pale, too, perhaps. He knelt by my side and took my wrist.
Aurelius nodded ruminatively. “They were twins, you know. Imagine that.” For a moment his eyes were far away.
‘Yes,“ he said. ”It will be Christmas soon.“
‘Secrets,“ I told him.
When she’d been in the house about a quarter of an hour she had the Missus call us. We ignored it and waited to see what happened next. We waited. And waited. Nothing happened. That was where she wrong-footed us for the first time, had we only known it. All our expertise in hiding was useless if she wasn’t going to come looking for us. And she did not come. We hung about in the room, growing bored, then vexed by the curiosity that seeded itself in us despite our resistance. We became attentive to the sounds from downstairs: John-the-dig’s voice, the dragging of furniture, some banging and knocking. Then it fell quiet. At lunchtime we were called and did not go. At six the Missus called us again, “Come and have supper with your new governess, children.” We stayed on in the room. No one came. There was the beginning of a sense that the newcomer was a force to be reckoned with.
With soap and with bleach, with energy and with determination, she imposed hygiene on that house. Where for generations the inhabitants had lumbered half-seeing and purposeless, circling after nothing but their own squalid obsessions, Hester came as a spring-cleaning miracle. For thirty years the pace of life indoors had been measured by the slow movement of the motes of dust caught in an occasional ray of weary sunlight. Now Hester’s little feet paced out the minutes and the seconds, and with a vigorous swish of a duster, the motes were gone.
‘I’ve packed a few books to take back to Miss Winter’s with me. I’ve put a note on the cards in the index.“
December gives me headaches and diminishes my already small appetite. It makes me restless in my reading. It keeps me awake at night with its damp, chilly darkness. There is a clock inside me that starts to tick on the first of December, measuring the days, the hours and the minutes, counting down to a certain day, the anniversary of the day my life was made and then unmade: my birthday. I do not like December.
‘Who exactly was Mrs. Love?“
‘You don’t have a mother, then?“ I asked.
‘They’re knocking it down soon. I suppose you know?“
He reached into his pocket and drew out a card. Aurelius Love, Traditional English Catering for Weddings, Christenings and Parties. He pointed to the address and telephone number. “Do telephone me when you come again. You must come to the cottage and I’ll make you a proper tea.”
I have woken up.
My companion wiped his fingers on his napkin, then shook it out and folded it into four. “You liked it then? The recipe was given to me by Mrs. Love. I’ve been making this cake since I was a child. Mrs. Love was a wonderful cook. A marvelous woman all round. Of course, she is departed now. A good age. Though one might have hoped— But it was not to be.”
‘Bless me, no. I have a house over there.“ He gestured toward the woods. ”I just come here in the afternoons. For, well, let’s say for contemplation, shall we?“
Compassion warmed his eyes and he handed me a neatly folded white handkerchief.
‘Don’t you worry about them, Mrs. Dunne. They’ll be all right. Good night.“
Middles
‘It’s all right,“ I said slowly. ”I don’t mind.“ And actually I didn’t. Perhaps it was the series of shocks I’d had, or else the influence of this queer setting, but it seemed that anything I might say about myself here, to this man, would remain forever in this place, with him, and have no currency anywhere else in the world. Whatever I said to him would have no consequences. So I answered his question. ”Yes, I do have a mother.“
‘The Angelfield girls?“
‘My, my, that was quite a tumble you took. If only I’d… I should never have… Pulse a bit high. Hmm.“
It was Emmeline who first heard the brougham. From the window we watched the new arrival alight, brush the creases out of her skirt with two brisk strokes of her palms and look about her. She looked at the front door, to her left, to her right, and then—I leaped back—up. Perhaps she took us for a trick of the light or a window drape lifted by the breeze from a broken windowpane. Whatever she saw, it can’t have been us.
‘Marvelous.“ He smiled as though it were indeed marvelous. ”Now, let us introduce ourselves. My name is Love. Aurelius Alphonse Love. Do call me Aurelius.“ He looked at me expectantly.
The sound of her cry carried up the stone staircase, turned into the corridor to the left, rose up another flight of stairs and slipped under the door of the new governess’s bedroom.
‘I think so.“ I slid off the cat’s back and tried my weight on it. ”Yes. It’s much better now.“
‘Worse?“ He was stupefied. He sought what the problem might be in the sky, in the woods and finally, in my eyes.
While I dried my eyes he looked away from me toward the deer park. The sky was darkening by slow degrees. Now I followed his gaze to see a shimmer of white: the pale coat of the deer as it leaped lightly into the cover of the trees.
Emmeline, openmouthed, was silent.
He accepted my condolences with a sad expression, then brightened. “But it’s a fitting memorial, don’t you think? The cake, I mean?”
‘Good girl. Quite a tumble that was. Now tea—lemon and sugar all right? No milk, I’m afraid. No fridge.“
‘No matter,“ the governess said. ”Would you like some supper? And where is your sister? Would she like some, too?“
Emmeline stirred, wondered distantly at the delay.
The pause lengthened.
‘Yum,“ said Emmeline, and I didn’t know if it was the word supperor Hester herself who had provoked it.
The attic, it is true, did stop her in her tracks. Her jaw dropped and she looked aghast at the state of the roof cavity. But even in this chaos she was invincible. She gathered herself together, tightening her lips, and scratched and scribbled away at her page with even greater vigor. The very next day, a builder came. We knew him from the village—an unhurried man with a strolling pace. In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant. He kept six or seven jobs going at once and rarely finished any of them; he spent his working days smoking cigarettes and eyeing the job in hand with a fatalistic shake of the head. He climbed our stairs in his typical lazy fashion, but after he’d been five minutes with Hester we heard his hammer going nineteen to the dozen. She had galvanized him.
‘You don’t actually live here, do you?“ I asked doubtfully.
‘I never meant… You see, I only thought… Because you’d been there some time, and… But that doesn’t matter now, because the thing is, my dear, are you hurt?“
‘Secrets!“ His eyes widened to perfect circles. Baffled, he shook his head, making an impossible attempt to fathom my meaning. ”Forgive me,“ he said at last. ”I don’t know how to help. I know so very little about families. My ignorance is vaster than the sea. I’m sorry about the secrets. I’m sure you are right to feel as you do.“
All I have to do is open my eyes and look at her. But fear paralyzes me. What will she be like? Like me? Tall and thin with dark eyes? Or— it is this I fear—has she come direct from the grave? What terrible thing is it that I am about to join myself—rejoin myself—to?
‘Aurelius, please.“
Between the ears of the big black cat he had unfolded a napkin, corner by corner. Inside was a dark and sticky slice of cake, cut generously. I bit into it. It was the perfect cake for a cold day: spiced with ginger, sweet but hot. The stranger strained the tea into dainty china cups. He offered me a bowl of sugar lumps, then took a blue velvet pouch from his breast pocket, which he opened. Resting on the velvet was a silver spoon with an elongated A in the form of a stylized angel ornamenting the handle. I took it, stirred my tea and passed it back to him.
‘Trouble?“
The giant danced back toward me, bent down and picked me up. I felt myself being raised into the air and carried smoothly outside. He sat me sideways on the back of one of the black cats I had admired an hour earlier.
‘Comfy?“
Our voices were murmurs in the softening light.
I got up, repacked my things, and in the bleakness of the winter dawn walked to the station for the first train north.
‘Wonderful. Wonderful.“
Hester looked around, seeking the other twin. The curtain appeared to her as just a curtain, for after a cursory glance she turned all her attention to Emmeline. “Come with me.” She smiled. She drew a key out of her blue pocket. It was a clean blue-silver, buffed to a high shine, and it glinted tantalizingly in the blue light.
I nodded.
Died: ?
seemed not to have gone to any great lengths in summing up their father’s life and death for generations to come. Released from earthly sorrows, he is with his Savior now, was the stone’s laconic message. Isabelle’s role in this world and her departure from it were summed up in the most conventional terms: Much loved mother and sister, she is gone to a better place. But I copied it into my notebook all the same and did a quick calculation. Younger than me! Not so tragically young as her husband, but still, not an age to die.
John-the-dig’s feelings were less divided, were in fact entirely hostile. He would not be drawn into the Missus’s long wonderings about how things would be, and refused by stony silence to encourage the optimism that was ready to take root in her heart. “If she’s the right kind of person…” she would say, or “There’s no knowing how much better things could be…” but he stared out of the kitchen window and would not be drawn. When the doctor suggested that he take the brougham to meet the governess at the station he was downright rude. “I’ve not got the time to be traipsing across the county after damned schoolmistresses,” he replied, and the doctor was obliged to make arrangements to collect her himself. Since the incident with the topiary garden, John had not been the same, and now, with thecoming of this new change, he spent hours alone, brooding over his own fears and concerns for the future. This incomer meant a fresh pair of eyes, a fresh pair of ears, in a house where no one had looked or listened properly for years. John-the-dig, habituated to secrecy, foresaw trouble.
‘Only a bit.“
WE SHALL NEVER SEE HIM MORE.
‘It’s just that I thought you said you’d put the kettle on.“
The stinging in my leg had diminished. I was feeling better.
‘When I left Yorkshire, November was going strong; by the time I returned it was in its dying days, about to tilt into December.
Leaning over the gallery landing was not the skeleton or monster of my imaginings, but a giant. He moved smoothly down the stairs, stepped daintily and unconcernedly through the debris on the floor and came to stand over me with an expression of the utmost concern on his face.
‘I know.“ He stroked the cat, absently, fondly. ”It’s a shame, isn’t it? I shall miss the old place. Actually I thought you were one of their people when I heard you. A surveyor or something. But you’re not.“
I stopped. Thought. Did a few sums on my fingers. The girls had been only thirteen. And Hester was not old. With all that verve she couldn’t be. Had she been thirty? What if she were only twenty-five? A mere twelve years older than the girls themselves… Was it possible? I wondered. Miss Winter, in her seventies, was dying. But that didn’t necessarily mean a person older than her would be dead. What were the chances?
That was the first night and it was Hester’s victory.
Emmeline, at the foot of the stairs, had been sobbing with hunger a moment ago, yet the instant Hester appeared in all her glory, she stopped crying and stared, apparently placated, as though it were a cakestand piled high with cake that had appeared before her.
Leaving the church and walking slowly down the gravel drive to the lodge gates, I felt a light, almost weightless scrutiny on my back. Aurelius was gone, so what was it? The Angelfield ghost, perhaps? Or the burned-out eyes of the house itself? Most probably it was just a deer, watching me invisibly from the shadow of the woods.
For all my biographical projects I have kept a box of lives. A box of index cards containing the details—name, occupation, dates, place of residence and any other piece of information that seems relevant—of all the significant people in the life of my subject. I never quite know what to make of my boxes of lives. Depending on my mood they either strike me as a memorial to gladden the dead (“Look!” I imagine them saying as they peer through the glass at me. “She’s writing us down on her cards! And to think we’ve been dead two hundred years!”) or, when the glass is very dark and I feel quite stranded and alone this side of it, they seem like little cardboard tombstones, inanimate and cold, and the box itself is as dead as the cemetery. Miss Winter’s cast of characters was very small, and as I shuffled them in my hands their sparse flimsiness dismayed me. I was being given a story, but as far as information went, I was still far short of what I needed.
Emmeline thrived under the new regime. She was well fed at regular hours, allowed to play—under tight supervision—with Hester’s shiny keys. She even developed a passion for baths. She struggled at first, yelled and kicked as Hester and the Missus stripped her and lowered her into the tub, but when she saw herself in the mirror afterward, saw herself clean and with her hair neatly braided and tied with a green bow, her mouth opened and she fell into another of her trances. She liked being shiny. Whenever Emmeline was in Hester’s presence she used to study her face on the sly, on the lookout for a smile. When Hester did smile—it was not infrequent—Emmeline gazed at her face in delight. Before long she learned to smile back.
‘Electricity? But it’s a ruin.“ He stared at me, astonished by my question, as though I might have suffered a concussion in the fall and lost my reason.
‘Margaret Lea.“
The broken window in the drawing room had been boarded up, and the shutters secured in the dining room. There was only one other chance. To the hall and the great double doors we went. Emmeline, bewildered, padded along behind. She was hungry. Why all this fuss with doors and windows? How long before she could fill her tummy with food? A shaft of moonlight, tinted blue by the colored glass in the hall windows, was enough to highlight the huge bolts, heavy and out of reach, that had been oiled and slid into place at the top of the double doors.
I took a deep breath and waited.
Charlie was less directly influenced. He kept out of her way and that suited both of them. She had no desire to do anything other than her job, and her job was us. Our minds, our bodies and our souls, yes, but our guardian was outside her jurisdiction, and so she left him alone. She was no Jane Eyre and he was no Mr. Rochester. In the face of her spruce energy he retreated to the old nursery rooms on the second floor behind a firmly locked door, where he and his memories festered together in squalor. For him the Hester effect was limited to an improvement in his diet and a firmer hand over his finances, which, under the honest but flimsy control of the Missus, had been plundered by unscrupulous traders and businesspeople. Neither of these changes for the good did he notice, and if he had noticed them I doubt he would have cared.
Within a few days there were mealtimes, bedtimes, getting-up times. A few days more and there were clean shoes for indoors, clean boots for out. Not only that, but the silk dresses were cleaned, mended, made to fit and hung away for some mythical “best,” and new dresses in navy and green cotton poplin with white sashes and collars appeared for everyday.
We had no idea what it was. We’d never imagined the like of it before.
At last, inevitably, I crashed to the ground, and a wild cry escaped my lips.
‘Dear, oh dear. It’s the leg, is it? Is it broken? Can you move it?“ I wriggled my foot, and the man’s face was a picture of relief.
‘Lemon will be lovely.“
‘It’s getting chilly,“ I remarked.
This year the sense of foreboding was made worse by the weather. A heavy sky hovered repressively over the house, casting us into an eternal dim twilight. I arrived back to find Judith scurrying from room to room, collecting desk lamps and standard lamps and reading lamps from guest rooms that were never used, and arranging them in the library, the drawing room, my own rooms. Anything to keep at bay the murky grayness that lurked in every corner, under every chair, in the folds of the curtains and the pleats of the upholstery.
