by Nicola Upson
‘Even so. You probably wish you hadn’t.’
‘It’s not that. If I’m wishing anything, it’s that someone had been here to help.’ She thought about all the people that Hester had known in her life, the names in her address book, the people who had come to remember her in Covent Garden. ‘Did she really have no one?’ she asked. ‘No visitors from London? No old friends who came to see her?’
‘If she did, she never said anything to me. Before she lost her sight, she’d go down to London for a few days now and again, but I never saw anybody here. I think that all stopped when Walter died.’ He looked at his watch and gave the car one last polish. ‘I should go, unless you need some help moving that stuff in the garage?’
‘No, thank you. The car can stay out here for now.’ He seemed eager to leave and Josephine was in no mood to delay him. It was impossible to return to normal conversation after what had passed between them, and under different circumstances their hurried goodbyes might have amused her, like the embarrassment of lovers who regret their intimacy and can’t wait to part. As he reached the gate, she remembered the fresh flowers in the guest room and wondered if Bert had been keeping them there as a mark of respect. ‘Have you been inside the cottage since then?’ she called after him.
‘No,’ he said, turning back to her. ‘I fixed the window from the outside. And nothing personal, Miss Tey, but I’m not sure I’d want to go in again.’
She watched until he was out of sight, then went reluctantly back into the house and poured herself a drink. For a long time, she sat by the fire in the study, instinctively retreating to the part of the cottage that was furthest from where Hester had died. Surrounded by the evidence of her godmother’s vitality, she found Bert’s testimony of the last few months almost impossible to conceive – and all the more heartbreaking because of it. ‘Soft in the head.’ She remembered the phrase from her childhood; later, the reality of it in her grandmother’s final years. Then, as now, the label did so little justice to the truth. Her grandmother had been much older than Hester – nearly ninety when she died – but she, too, had outlived her husband by several years. During that time, she had buried two daughters, the only girls in a family of seven children: Mary, her eldest, who had died of heart failure when she was little more than Josephine’s age, leaving behind six children; and Josephine’s own mother, killed by cancer just thirteen years later. Josephine remembered how frail and confused her grandmother had been at the funeral, destroyed by her grief for one daughter, sheltered from the death of another by a mind that could no longer cope.
But she had never been alone. When her own time came, she was living with her youngest son in Crown Street, next door to the house where she had raised her family, in touch with the children who remained. Josephine had visited occasionally during the last years of her grandmother’s life, when she was back in Inverness and finding her feet again in the town she thought she had left for good. The small parlour at the front of the house was as cluttered in its way as this study of Hester’s, although the memories were of a very different life: Jane Horne’s audience had been her family, her stage a domestic one where she was loved rather than adored. It was diminished eventually to a single room which she never left, except in her mind; a small world, assembled in every sense from bits of the past, but it had been safe and she had been cared for. And she had never been alone. How must it have been for Hester, isolated not only from the life of the village but – through her loss of sight – from everything that had once been familiar, clinging to a house she loved but an old, contrary house that must have conspired with her blindness to make each day more difficult? How desperate was she to end her life in such a way, and how long had it taken her to die? Nothing left of her, Bert had said. Days without food and drink until she would have been too weak to change her mind, even if she had wanted to. Had she cried out towards the end, knowing there was no one to hear, or had the prospect of a reconciliation with Walter brought her comfort? Peace or fear in those last terrible hours, that was what Josephine would never know; she had been too afraid herself to ask Bert if the answer lay in the expression on Hester’s face.
His revelations nagged at her conscience like a personal rebuke, although she knew in her heart that the one person from whom Hester might have accepted help was gone, another charge to lay at the feet of her mother’s early death. It was Hester who had had to stand at her friend’s grave, wishing that she could have done something. Once again, Josephine tried to picture her among the mourners, but she would not come when summoned, except as the pitiful wretch of Bert’s testimony. Plenty of other images did, though. The coffin waiting in Crown Cottage, a house that Josephine had never lived in and didn’t really know. She had left home by the time her parents bought it and she loved it now, but then it had been alien to her and she had longed for the small, ordinary house in Greenhill Terrace where she had grown up, and where she would not have felt like a guest at her own mother’s bedside. Her father in a new suit which he would never wear again, fiddling constantly with his tie and worrying about the dress he had chosen to bury his wife in. Neighbours standing by the gate, kept at a distance by a request for privacy but stubbornly determined to pay their respects, pity and curiosity mingled on their faces. Her parents’ friends telling her that she looked well, that England obviously suited her. It had been all she could do not to scream at them to stop, because she did not want to look well, or to be reminded of her absence.
The study was too quiet, the tears too close and too insistent to risk. Josephine stood up and made the fire safe, then took her glass upstairs. She had so looked forward to her first night back in this room, warm and welcoming now in the lamplight; she had imagined herself falling asleep over one of Hester’s books, then waking in the morning to the sun on the fields and the soft smell of freshly cut hay. The door to the boxroom was firmly closed, just as she had left it, but it taunted her with the sadness it concealed and the nausea came again with the memory of crawling over clothes that had so recently covered Hester’s body. Unable to be near it any longer, Josephine swallowed the rest of the whisky, ripped the sheets off the bed and went next door.
8
She slept in the guest room for the next three nights, but her dreams followed her there. During the day, she tried to stick to a routine: Claverhouse in the morning, then a walk to the village and Hester’s papers in the afternoon, but she found herself slipping earlier into Hester’s world each day, as if reading obsessively about her life would somehow blot out the awful knowledge of her death. Four times she put her hand on the door to the boxroom, and four times she withdrew it until, after a while, she took to using the other staircase and avoided that end of the upper storey completely. She wrote a letter to her father, and found herself inventing a normality for her stay as she would an adventure for a novel, stretching out the mundane, domestic details of her life at the cottage, and writing far more than she would normally write as a distraction from the real news and how she felt about it. At night, she drank to sleep, only to wake again in the difficult early hours, troubled by things she could do nothing about. Alone, and with no one to fool, she cried more often than she had in years.
In the end, she wrote to Marta and asked if she could come to the cottage earlier than planned. She kept the letter casual, not wanting to cast a shadow on the visit when they saw each other so rarely, and relied on the simple truth of longing to see her. The answer came by return of post: Marta would be with her on Wednesday, and Josephine no longer cared that the cottage would not be as miraculously transformed by then as she had hoped. They needed nothing more, really, than clean sheets, a warm fire and plenty to eat and drink, and she woke on Wednesday morning with a sense of relief that she would not have to spend another night alone. She had sent Marta directions and told her to come straight to the house via the Stoke road. One of the blessings of a house at the end of the village was that visitors did not have to submit to any rigorous inspection from Elsie Gladding and her friends, somethin
g that Hester must have appreciated during the days when she entertained at Red Barn Cottage. For now, Josephine felt that she was novelty enough for the people of Polstead; asking their curiosity to cope with Marta as well might put too much of a strain on everyone.
The day dragged by, and she waited for her lover with the impatience of a child on Christmas Eve, busying herself with cooking and cleaning; by late afternoon, when she finally heard Marta’s car, the cottage had never looked finer. Josephine went outside, soothed by a day that had involved nothing but the sort of domesticity she had written to her father about, and waved as the Morris bumped slowly down the track. In spite of everything, she was excited at the prospect of sharing the cottage with someone she loved while it was still so new to her, and she desperately wanted Marta to like it. The car negotiated the final pothole and drew up outside, and Josephine leaned over to give Marta a hug.
‘Well – it’s nice to see you, too.’ She pulled back and smiled at Josephine, pleased by the welcome. ‘I’m sorry I’m so late. I got hopelessly lost and had to ask in the village. The publican was very helpful.’
‘Yes, I imagine he was.’ Josephine watched her get out of the car, and wondered if Marta’s beauty would always silence her the way it did now. If Jenny Willis thought she was a threat to Bert’s moral fibre, God help them all when she saw Marta. Perhaps it was wrong to be so frightened of anyone guessing the truth of their relationship: in a village where the men were historically susceptible to temptation, it might actually be a relief.
‘He even offered to bring me out here himself. I’m not sure what his wife thought about that, but it was a kind offer.’
‘Very kind,’ Josephine said dryly. ‘I’m glad you didn’t take him up on it. Who did you say you were?’
‘I didn’t say I was anybody. You didn’t warn me I was supposed to arrive in character.’ She smiled mischievously. ‘They’ll get used to it. The first six months are the worst. When I first started to stay with Lydia, the daily woman walked in while I was playing the piano and I had very little on. I didn’t know whether to apologise or brazen it out, so I just carried on while she banged the tea down, fuming with moral outrage. I honestly thought she was going to hand her notice in there and then, but do you know what she said on her way out of the room? “Those bottom notes sound a bit flat, Miss. You ought to get that looked at.”’
The impression was finely judged, and Josephine laughed. ‘Luckily I don’t play the piano.’
‘Then what is there to worry about? Come here.’ Marta pulled her close, and Josephine felt a familiar mix of shyness, joy and desire. ‘This is absolutely beautiful,’ Marta said, looking round. ‘From the landlady’s reaction, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to find.’
‘Why? What did she say?’
‘That you’d be pleased to have some company, stuck out here on your own. I think her exact words were “in that godforsaken field”.’ She pulled the rug off the back seat, and Josephine saw a haphazard collection of boxes and bottles, piled on top of a suitcase. ‘Let me get this stuff out of the car and then you can show me round.’ She unloaded a hamper and a case of wine. ‘If it’s anything like the villages I know, you’ll be missing a few luxuries so I stopped off at Sudbury on the way.’
‘Just as well the publican didn’t bring you over. He’d think we were setting up in competition.’ Josephine picked up the hamper and Marta caught her arm. ‘What have you done to your hand?’
‘Oh, just burnt it on some steam. The kettle’s seen better days. In fact, all Hester’s kitchen facilities leave a lot to be desired.’
‘Fine by me if gin is easier than tea. I’m dying for a drink.’
When the luggage was inside, they walked round the cottage together and it did Josephine good to see it through Marta’s eyes: filled with flowers from the garden, and with the evening sunlight streaming in through the windows, it was every bit as warm and welcoming as she had wanted it to be. For the first time, she was conscious of her own presence in what she still thought of as Hester’s cottage, and, although they were simple things – her books laid out on the desk in the study, the preparations she had made for their evening meal – Josephine felt more at home than she had since she first got there.
‘I’ve got you a house-warming present. Hang on a minute.’ Marta found the box she was looking for and Josephine opened it curiously. ‘I thought you might need some company occasionally, and this seemed more practical than a dog.’ It was a portable gramophone and Josephine set it up on the table, delighted with the gift. Marta gestured apologetically to the large stack of records that came with it. ‘While I was in the shop, I realised that I have absolutely no idea what sort of music you like, so I bought a selection. There are some play recordings there, too, just in case you’re bored with that melodrama stuff you’ve been talking about.’
‘You have no idea how welcome this is,’ Josephine said. ‘Thank you – I love it. Shall we have a look round the garden? It’s beautiful at this time of the evening. We can have a drink outside.’
They sat on the bench and talked while the sun set. The music drifted out from the house, seemingly written for an evening such as this, and Josephine was pleased to see that the Suffolk light was playing its customary trick on the landscape, weaving a cloth of rich red and gold across the fields. ‘You’ll be building a bathroom on, obviously,’ Marta said, looking doubtfully at the outhouse. ‘I can’t see that being much fun in the winter.’
Josephine laughed. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure? Anyway, I’ve got to decide if I’m keeping it before I get the builder in.’
‘You’re not in a hurry to give this up, surely? I can’t imagine anything more peaceful. I’ll move in if you don’t want it.’
‘Be my guest.’
‘Careful. I might take that as an invitation.’ Gently, Marta touched Josephine’s cheek, just below her eyes. ‘You look tired.’
‘Do I? I was aiming at something rather more glamorous for you.’
‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive. You are all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. I haven’t been sleeping very well since I got here, that’s all.’
‘Aren’t Hester’s mattresses up to scratch either? We obviously need to go shopping.’ The response was a feeble smile and Marta looked at her, concerned. ‘What’s wrong, Josephine?’
So Josephine told her, surprising herself with how much of the last few days she was willing to be open about, from the details of Hester’s death to her own sadness and the other, more complex emotions about her family that it had revived. ‘I’m sorry,’ she admitted. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you all this the minute you got here.’
‘Of course you must talk to me. I wondered why we moved so quickly through the bedrooms, and why you’ve obviously been sleeping – or not sleeping – in the single bed. I thought you were trying to tell me something.’
‘Hardly. I haven’t brought you all this way to sleep in separate rooms.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘It’s ridiculous, though, isn’t it? People die alone all the time and I didn’t even know Hester, but I can’t stop thinking about it.’
‘Why is that ridiculous? You’ve been left an old house in a place you don’t know, by a woman you barely met, in a will full of odd instructions that you can’t make head or tail of. That in itself would be enough to fuck with your sanity, but then you find out that she died in a boxroom, estranged from the few friends she had, after what sounds like months of sadness and suffering.’
‘I suppose when you put it like that . . .’
‘There’s no other way to put it. And apart from all that, when was the last time you were truly alone for any length of time?’
‘I’m often alone at home.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re on your own in an empty house, but that’s not the same thing at all. You have routines and a town life and a woman coming in to clean, and you know your father will be home in the evening. Having a
few hours to yourself is nothing like this.’ She waved at the open countryside to prove her point. ‘You’ve been brought face to face with yourself for the first time in years, and that’s enough to send anyone screwy.’
‘Thank you!’
Marta laughed, and held up a cigarette as a peace offering. ‘I didn’t mean that in quite the way it came out. I just meant that you only really ever learn who you are when you’re alone. God knows I’ve found that out in the past, for better and for worse.’ If Josephine had known a fraction of the grief and betrayal that Marta had experienced in her life, she doubted that she would ever have trusted herself with solitude again. They had known each other for little more than two years. Josephine had met Marta as the lover of a friend, had helped her through a terrible time in her life, and – against every impulse of loyalty, to Lydia and to a life free of commitment to anyone – had fallen in love. Marta rarely spoke of her pain, but the tragedy of that time – the death of two children, one executed for killing the other – was never far from Josephine’s mind, a peculiar hybrid of barrier and bond between them. ‘Look, I’m sure Hester didn’t mean to cause you all this soul-searching,’ Marta said, misreading her train of thought, ‘but if she’d set out to ensure that you didn’t sleep at night, she could hardly have made a better job of it.’
‘That’s true. Actually, my solicitor said that she was having second thoughts about leaving me the cottage.’ Josephine told Marta about the phone call that Hester had made to John MacDonald, her evident distraction and the doubts that her goddaughter would even want the gift. ‘By that stage, her sight was probably too poor to put any instructions in writing, so the will stayed as it was. But I can’t help feeling that something might have happened here, something that tainted the cottage for Hester and made her afraid to be in her own home.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s it. The thing that cries out to me about Hester’s death is fear.’
