by Evie Wyld
Even so, she had replied immediately.
Even so.
I wonder what I have done to appear so filthy to her. I suspect the uneaten celery has upset her more than she lets on.
The bedding, she said, was in the wardrobe in the master bedroom. There is the duvet on the double bed, which I have no intention of using, and two over-plumped pillows. There are three wardrobes in the room. The first two that I open are stacked with shoeboxes, inside of which I find Christmas decorations, children’s toys, a threadbare teddy with orange eyes. For a moment it stops me from looking for anything else. I don’t like the idea of Deborah finding it, and I put it in my pocket, it seems cruel to lock it away again.
In the third wardrobe I find yellow and pale pink waffle-weave counterpanes with horrible satin rims, which I remember rubbing against my nose as a child. There is a tablecloth that will do as a sheet, and there are still cushions on the grey sofa I can use as pillows.
I stand in the doorway of Dad and Christopher’s room, twin beds side by side with their own bedside tables and lamps with yellow pleated shades that match the counterpanes I’ve pulled from the wardrobe. Katherine and I used to sleep in this room, with Mum and Dad next door in the study with its pull-out bed. I remember the sound of the wind as it whooped down the chimney breast. It never worried me then, but Katherine would sometimes get up and climb into my bed, allowing me a small moment of superiority, which in the morning she would explain away by saying she felt the cold more than I did, as though there was something uncouth about my not being cold.
I throw the counterpane on the bed and prop up the bear on the dresser. I’m not going to sleep with it, if that’s what it’s thinking. I’ve slept in the bed a hundred times before, just not since Dad died, and I can’t stop seeing the imprint of his small child’s body in this bed. I smooth the counterpane over it again and again but it always comes back.
On the wall, I continue trying to excuse myself to Katherine, without apologising or admitting that I did anything wrong in not staying in when she came round for dinner. I have tried saying I thought it was Thursday she was coming over, to which she replied by forwarding the text two above where it says Wednesday. I have also implied that I’m not feeling well, without specifying if I mean I have a cold or am having a breakdown. She does not reply. As I’m climbing off the wall, I notice a crow building a nest on the chimney pot. When we were small, Bet always had the fire on, the house needed drying out all the time. The seawater gets into the bricks, she used to say. You’ll smell seaweed if you don’t have a fire on. And at times it did smell of something salty, an ancient, mineral mud, not a bad smell exactly, just not the smell of a home.
Vincent messaged and suggested meeting when I’m back in London next week, going to see a film, but I’d rather just go for a drink. I only like the cinema alone. I don’t want the conversation afterwards, when it’s too late for dinner and too late really for a drink, and you have to say something pertinent about what you’ve just seen. I always get it wrong, say I loved the film when the other person hated it, or say I hated it when it’s a transforming moment in the other person’s life. In reality it is hardly ever either of those, it is just a story and a way of passing two hours in the dark without alarming anyone.
The crow takes off and flies to the top branches of the monkey puzzle tree. It yells at me from there.
‘All right, I won’t tell her,’ I say, but the crow carries on watching me. ‘Just don’t blame me if she starts a fire and it roasts you.’
Back inside, the lingering smell of the Booeys permeates the air. Nothing like a wet dog drying in the heat. Without a fire or the Aga, there is no blood flowing through the house. I know that before a potential buyer comes over, Deborah likes to arrive an hour ahead and set up heaters to blast the rooms. She has a spray that is meant to smell of coffee, but smells like a service station instead. The central heating just doesn’t reach the bones of the house. In the kitchen, I boil the kettle and sit at the table with a mug of hot water. It tastes salty, and I pour it away down the sink. I take a bottle of Deborah’s water from the fridge and twist off the top. I don’t remember having drunk a single glass of water the whole day. I cook some pasta and throw in half a can of clams and some olive oil at the end. I stand with the half-full tin of clams for a moment, then push it into the space left by the water bottle. That should get her juices flowing.
If this were a film or a book, I would sit and eat my clam spaghetti in front of a fire, and I would read. But there is a crow nesting up there, and if I spill oil on the grey sofa I’ll never sleep again. I haven’t been able to read in months. So I eat the food, drink another glass of water and then go to the living room to fetch the whisky. Christopher has put the cork in hard and it won’t be pulled out, so I search for a corkscrew in the cutlery drawer. The silverware is long gone. All that remains is a set of cheap utensils that could have been stolen from a school dining room. The next drawer houses a few items that I recognise as Betty’s. I wonder if my mother would want them. Her worn dark red spectacles case, a whistle she used to wear and blow if she wanted us down at dinner, to save her voice. A little notebook that listed times and dates and weights, which she recorded with the seriousness of one noting down medication. And a glossy pamphlet in a Perspex sleeve that also held a bunch of receipts. The pamphlet is from the nursing home that I have seen signposted on the road to Musselburgh. The pamphlet reads in a curly font reserved for old people’s homes: Coping with the death of a loved one – the Landbrooke House guide. I flip through it and inside is a form, filled out by Bet.
I never met my grandmother, Mary. I was only vaguely aware of her death, which, judging by the form, will have been twelve years ago in the summer. Mum is not cagey about her mother, but she is private. The story I know not to be the whole truth is that Mary was an epileptic and fell one too many times, that Landbrooke, when she first was admitted shortly after my mother was born, was not called a nursing home but something more sinister. Mum’s father she knows nothing about. We are a muddled family – Mum and Dad nearly brother and sister, but no blood. The servant’s daughter – sometimes Dad would tease Mum about it if she made a fish pie. The fact of their reconnection always amazed me. Mum was sent to school in London after our fabled grandfather left, and seven years later Uncle Christopher walked past her selling tights in the hypermarket. The three of them moved into a flat together and I don’t know what happened there, other than whatever it was was disrupted by my arrival.
The pamphlet brings with it all of a sudden a memory of Dad in the hospice, husky and mustard yellow. I walk briskly around the kitchen table until the image is gone – I replace it with the image in a photograph I have of him, in sunglasses and a panama hat, smiling. Not much of his face is visible but it does the job. After he died, and I stayed those few strange days in the psychiatric wing, a doctor told me it can take a few years before your memory of them as sick dissipates and lets the old memories of before back through. They asked my mother to bring in a photograph of him, got me to look at it when the memories came. I dream of him before the sickness now, but in the dreams I always know there’s something in the room with us, I just can’t remember what it is. So embarrassing to have made such a spectacle of myself while my mother and sister were left to get on with everything, with the extra weight of me in hospital. And there’s that rabbit hole again. I find a penknife and I use the tool to get stones out of horses’ hooves to lever out the cork.
At four in the morning I am tired enough to sleep. I have not drunk an appalling amount, and that is something. It’s not a good feeling turning out the lights and leaving the kitchen; the rest of the house gapes about me. I slide into bed, remembering once I’m in that I haven’t brushed my teeth. I let myself off that particular chore. I switch off the light and, though the room is in absolute darkness, I get out of bed again and turn the bear to face the wall, because it stops me from sleeping.
The birds are drilling outside and the
large curtainless window lets in white cold light. In the first moments of waking I am pleased to remember that I stayed at the house overnight, and slept, but I am quickly alarmed to find myself in Mrs Hamilton’s bedroom, under her quilt. I sit up, panicked, and pull back the covers. There is no longer any dark stain, Deborah must’ve replaced the mattress. That’s good. But there’s the small matter of waking up in the wrong room. Perhaps I was more drunk than I thought, perhaps I got into the wrong bed. The bear is in bed with me, and I am holding it in one hand.
When it is done, the three men look on the girl. There is not much to see, the darkness makes it so that blood is only another texture, and the sea air means that the smell of death is brushed away.
‘I did not mean for her to die.’ The young one holds back the tears in his voice. The girl now seems to look a little like his mother. May have children herself. A sharp thought enters him. ‘What will happen to us?’
‘Us?’ says the short one. ‘I barely touched her.’ He takes a piece of cloth from under his coat and wipes his mouth again, as though after a good meal. The waves continue and the three men stand above the girl. White birds lift off the black rock, just visible on the edge of the darkness.
‘Rome’s eyes are cast elsewhere tonight,’ says the one with the high forehead. He bends down and picks up the girl under the armpits. She is not quite dead, and moans, and so he holds her under the water for just a little while. She does not struggle.
‘There,’ he says, ‘we don’t want more trouble. Help me move her further out, and the sea will take care of her as the tide comes in.’
The young one takes off his coat and lifts the legs. He had felt tearful but something else overtakes him now, something like anger – a stupid decision to come at night to collect seaweed next to the camp. What was she expecting to find? They wade out, not too far, up to their hips. It is rocky, and some of the rocks are loose. The one with the high forehead prises four large stones, and places them on the girl’s chest. It is cold and the strange thing is that her body is warm, even underwater. The one with the high forehead grunts.
‘That’ll do,’ he says, ‘judging by the tideline it comes right up to the dunes – she will be swallowed up before morning.’
He slaps the back of the young one. ‘Don’t feel too bad. She made so much noise, there was no other way.’ The young one nods. There was no other way and he had only meant to quiet her, but she didn’t understand that. Back on the sand the three look at the girl’s basket of seaweed.
‘Should we dispose of it?’ asks the short one. They look a moment more.
‘No,’ says the one with the high forehead. ‘No, there is nothing to say it is hers, and even if it is found by someone looking for her, they will only presume she is drowned.’
‘And the wound on her head?’ asks the young one.
‘Just the turning of a body on the rocks.’
The three men adjust their cloaks and walk back to the camp, where the fires are low, and someone has caught a hare and roasts it, and the smell reminds the youngest one of home.
St Baldred’s
I
My mother breathes loudly and deliberately for several moments. She is completing a sudoku at her kitchen table. I have come over to deliver the few things of Betty’s that I thought she might want, but I have arrived before she has finished her morning puzzles and she won’t be distracted from them. I didn’t manage to get to sleep in the night, so have been circling her house for about an hour, waiting for the cafe to open, with that rattly feeling that I need to talk to someone to prove that I can. It would not do to let myself in while she sleeps. That would give me away immediately, would make her worry. If I arrive with coffees I will have the cover of normalcy.
Nearly all the books, apart from those on a couple of shelves in the bedroom, are about mushrooms or lichen. Some have a certain amount of damp in them and need turning, but it would be a full-time job. Mum has grown immune to it and takes no notice of me picking up Toadstools of the Outer Hebrides between my thumb and index finger because it is covered in a black lichen-like mould.
‘Mum, your mushroom books are growing mushrooms,’ I say and she makes no indication that she has heard me. She inhales noisily through her nose.
‘I suppose Katherine and you aren’t talking again?’
I shrug. ‘It’s not that we’re not talking, it’s just that as usual she’s making a slight misunderstanding into a commentary about what a terrible person I am.’
Mum looks up briefly, just over her glasses. ‘Do try not to drive her mad, you know how she gets.’ I feel deep and unreasonable annoyance at this. ‘Darling, I’ve been meaning to say,’ she says, focusing again on the sudoku in the paper and rolling her pencil between her palms, ‘I do sometimes wonder if there’s someone living up there.’
‘Up where?’ I put the book down at a safe distance from my mug, imagine spores landing on the surface of my coffee.
‘What I don’t understand,’ she says, wiping a smear from her glasses as though it might help her to solve the sudoku, ‘is why . . .’
She does this. Starts a sentence out loud and carries it on in her own head. I will wait for the thing she doesn’t understand to be uncovered but it will turn out not to be for me. A lot of my mother’s life is internal these days.
‘What?’ I ask.
She looks up.
‘Mmm?’
‘What is it that you don’t understand?’ I try not to sound annoyed.
‘Well, I don’t know why . . . every time . . . ah. Aha!’ She writes down a number in a box. ‘Got it, you little bastard.’ She looks up, peers at me over her glasses. ‘Sorry – I’m talking to myself.’
‘Yes.’
‘But,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in the roof space. Sounds like a family of arseholes living up there.’
I ring the pest control people while Mum unloads the dishwasher.
‘Do we have any idea of what type of animal is making the noise?’
I want to tell them it’s a family of arseholes.
‘Probably squirrels – there’s a large tree by the front of the house.’
‘Yes, well, sometimes the odd cat gets in, so, are we sure there haven’t been any catlike sounds from up there? Have we opened up the roof space and looked ourselves?’
‘We have,’ I lie.
‘OK, well, we will have someone with you between four and six today.’
‘With us,’ I correct her.
‘I beg your pardon, madam?’
‘It’s nothing. Thank you.’
Mum comes into the kitchen as I hang up the phone.
‘Four to six today. The pest man cometh.’
She frowns. ‘You’ll have to stay – I have an appointment about my hip at four thirty.’
‘What’s wrong with your hip?’
‘If I knew that I wouldn’t need an appointment.’ She looks at me. ‘Well? Can you?’
I was meant to meet Vincent at five. We were going to have a look at a ceramics open studio – his suggestion. The cinema date had gone badly – the film was about a piano teacher who wanted her student to rape her. We’d agreed maybe not the cinema next time.
‘OK?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good.’ There is a distance of quiet air between us.
‘How are you finding the old house up there, darling? On your own? Are you sleeping all right?’
I shrug. ‘I don’t tend to sleep all right.’
‘No, of course. I used to see a little ghost there when I was young.’
‘What?’
‘A girl.’
‘Mum.’
‘Are you sleepwalking?’
‘Mum.’
‘Ah, you see. Don’t worry, she’s perfectly friendly, just a bit lonely I should think. I used to have a dream that I was following her down to the beach at night, and when I woke up, she’d be there and I’d have wandered all the way out of our quarters and to the top of the ho
use!’
‘Mum.’
‘Oh, darling, it’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I actually thought you might like it. She used to hang around that top bathroom next to Christopher and Dad’s room – the one you and Katherine shared. Christopher and Dad used to see her too, after all that beastly stuff at the boarding school. It’s no wonder.’
The school Dad and Christopher attended made the papers ten years ago after it was discovered to have been involved in what the press called a paedophile ring.
My mother had sniffed at the term. ‘I think that’s rather a glamorous term for what went on there. They used to tell me about it in the holidays. We’d smash the shells of crabs in the rock pools while they talked about it. I’ve always felt terrible about those crabs.’ She stands, signalling that the conversation is done. I want it to continue.
‘What was Mrs Hamilton like when you were a kid?’
‘Well, you know.’ She sighs. ‘She wasn’t an easy woman, but really she saved us all. She was a lonely person, I think. So was Betty. I always rather felt I’d let her down.’
‘Let her down?’
‘I think she wanted me to become something more spectacular, given I was the only child she really had any say in. She wasn’t allowed to take the boys out of boarding school, because that was their father’s lookout. So she put quite a lot of energy into me being happy.’
‘You are happy though.’
‘Yes, darling, of course, but I think she thought it might make her happy too. And I’m not sure, after all the effort she went to, that it did.’
Mum starts to shuffle papers around on the kitchen table, which is a sign she is about to leave the conversation.
‘Deborah’s selling the house. Or trying to.’
Mum looks up, rolls her eyes.
‘Oh Christ – do you have much to do with her?’
‘She sends me emails to let me know I’m very dirty.’
