by Hannah Emery
‘I’ve spoken to somebody,’ he said, before Victoria could move. The image in her mind of his mouth drooping open, his eyes glazed with death, vanished and she tried to focus on his words. They weren’t slurred. He was so used to drinking that he never slurred his words.
‘There’s a place for girls like you. You’ll go and have the baby there. Nobody will know.’ He turned around and then glanced back at Victoria. In the pale light of the landing, she could see a flicker of something other than tyrant in his bloodshot eyes. Not hate or anger, as Victoria had come to expect, but something else. As she lay in her bed after her father had staggered to his own room, she realised with a jolt what it was she had seen.
Fear.
‘Victoria?’
The knock on Victoria’s bedroom door was soft, the voice hoarse. When she swung the door open, her mother lingered on the landing, saying nothing, her eyes wide. She was holding a small blue suitcase with a gold zip that curved over the rounded edge. In another circumstance, it would have been a pretty little case.
‘What’s that for? I’m not going away yet, am I?’
Mrs Lace shook her head slowly. ‘No. Not yet. Have a look inside. I’ve managed to find you a few dresses. I bought you the suitcase to put your things in, when you do go.’
Silence hung over them.
‘Thank you,’ Victoria sighed as she took the case from her mother’s delicate, pale fingers.
Her mother stayed there for a few minutes, leaning her willowy body against the doorframe. Her fingers, now that they didn’t have the case to occupy them, flitted about, making unpleasant flicking noises.
‘Have you seen Harry?’ Victoria said, before it was too late and her mother disappeared to bed for a week again.
Her mother blinked, her fingers suddenly still.
‘No. Don’t mention his name.’
Hot tears burnt Victoria’s eyes. She thought of Harry’s eyes and his skin, and his books and his little office, where he had kissed her. ‘Can’t I see him?’
Mrs Lace shook her head. ‘No, darling. You must forget about him. Your father mustn’t know his name. It would put Harry in great danger.’
Victoria sank onto her bed, her prison. She hadn’t been out for weeks. Her parents barely spoke to her. She hadn’t seen Harry since the day of the green dress. She hadn’t said goodbye to him. She wondered about going to see Sally, but Sally might tell somebody about the baby. She was a good friend, but Victoria didn’t know if she could trust her. That hadn’t mattered so much before, when all there was to trust her with was the loan of a new headband or a secret about somebody’s stuffed bra. But now, everything, oh everything, was different.
‘Hasn’t Harry been looking for me?’ she asked her mother miserably.
Mrs Lace shook her head again. She gestured to the suitcase. ‘Have a look what’s in there and try some of it on.’
Victoria nodded, and tensed as her mother moved forward and stroked her cheek with ice-cold fingertips. When her mother had drifted down the landing, back to her own bedroom, Victoria unfastened the gold zip and lifted the top of the suitcase open. In it were three white dresses, billowy and humiliating, the kind of thing that Mrs Lace wore to bed, only five sizes bigger. Victoria folded them up and put them back into the case. She noticed her initials embroidered onto the cream lining.
VL
It was her mother’s embroidery: shaky and uncertain. She had never been any good at stitching things for Victoria, like all the other mothers had. Victoria reached out and touched the raised letters, the satin lining cool on her skin. It was odd that her mother had given Victoria the suitcase today, when she was barely about to set foot out of her bedroom, let alone the county.
But as Victoria climbed back onto her bed, picking up Harry’s copy of The Blue Door, she realised why her mother had chosen today, why she had lingered in Victoria’s doorway for longer than usual and why she had given her the dresses and the suitcase and the wobbly embroidered initials.
The sky was heavy with evening mist and ice, the light fading into a velvet-blue darkness.
It was almost over now.
But today had been Christmas Day.
The shop lay empty and untouched between Christmas and New Year. Silenshore Hill was sleek with frost and silence.
On one of the last evenings of December, when her parents had gone out for dinner with somebody Jack was trying to sell an ugly old rocking horse to, Victoria heard a banging on the shop’s door. The rattling of the glass in the door vibrated up into the flat above, and Victoria knew without looking who was there. She reached for her duffle coat and pulled it over her shoulders, fastened it, then stood for a moment in her bedroom. She looked down at her belly. The duffle coat covered it nicely. Nobody would know, unless she took the coat off. She unbuttoned the coat quickly, her fingers cold and stiff. She stepped out of her blue smock dress, the constant banging on the door downstairs making her tremble. She had to get this right.
Victoria pulled on her old girdle that she had worn to parties last year, before everything was different, and winced as she fastened it, the stiff material straining over her skin.
‘Victoria!’ she heard Harry shout through the shop’s letterbox. She imagined him crouching down to call her and ached to see him. She zipped up her dress and put her coat back on, stuffed a piece of paper from the floor into her pocket, then ran from her bedroom down the stairs.
The girdle pinched her skin and her secret blasted through her body. When she opened the door to the shop, Harry stepped in, his nose and cheeks pink from the nip of cold air he’d been standing in as he waited for her. The sight of him made Victoria’s heart ache. His kind eyes, his strong hands, his soft hair.
Tell him, a voice inside her insisted.
She took out the piece of paper from her pocket and gave it to him. ‘Here’s my piece on the castle. I used the article you found for me, as well as your notes. And I tried to do as you said and make it mysterious. I hope you like it.’ Victoria’s voice cracked as she spoke and she bit her lip and looked down.
Harry gazed down at the paper for a moment, taking in her words. ‘Victoria,’ he said as he looked up again and took her hands in his. ‘I’m so glad you’ve given this to me. It feels like so long since we spoke about it, so long since I’ve heard you talk about things like your writing. I’ve been so worried about you. I’ve missed you. I’ve tried to come and see you here, but today is the first time I was sure that your father wasn’t here. I don’t want to make him angry with you. I don’t want to make things harder than they already are for you.’
‘I’ve not been well,’ Victoria said, looking down at the polished wooden toggles on her coat.
Harry touched her cheek. ‘What’s been the matter?’
Victoria hadn’t cried since that day at the doctor’s office. Every day she had sat in her bedroom, reading magazines and trying to knit and writing the piece on Silenshore Castle, she had tried not to think of much. Her feelings had been still, paused by pure horror. But now, seeing Harry, they somehow came to life again, and pain screamed around her and sliced through her.
‘How was your Christmas?’ she asked, brushing away a cool tear that was ambling down her cheek.
Harry frowned. ‘Victoria, what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing’s the matter. I just want to know how your Christmas was.’
‘It was horrible. I wanted to spend it with you. I love you, Victoria.’
Then tell him.
‘Harry, I…’ she began. But as she looked into his deep eyes, his expression of perfect concern, she stopped. She had one chance to get this right. She couldn’t lose him. She dropped Harry’s hands.
‘I’m going away with Sally. Next month. We are going to work for Sally’s old aunt. She’s dying and needs some help around the house. I’ll be back in the summer, and we can see each other then. We can pick up where we left off.’
It was all lies. The aunt, the illness, the dying. None of it exist
ed, yet still, it all came flooding through Victoria’s lips more easily than the truth would have done.
Harry took Victoria’s hand again. ‘The summer?’
‘Yes.’
She’d worked it out. She’d heard her parents talking about it the other night. Jack couldn’t ever lower his voice; it was beyond him to make himself more subtle, it wouldn’t occur to him. So a few weeks ago, when he’d been talking about the mother- and-baby home he’d found out about, every one of his words had seeped through Victoria’s bedroom wall. She’ll go to the home six weeks before she has the damned thing. Then she’ll get rid six weeks after and come back to us.
May, Victoria had worked out. The baby was due to come in April, and so she’d be leaving for the home in February and she’d be back in May. The sun would be shining and somehow, everything would be alright.
‘I thought Sally had a waitressing job?’ Harry said, a frown creasing his face.
‘Oh, she’s leaving Clover’s. She’d rather look after her aunt. It’ll be better money,’ Victoria said with a dismissive wave of her arm. ‘This Mayor man is buying Clover’s and so everything will change there soon anyway.’
‘I see.’ Harry stepped back and looked away, out of the window to the deserted streets outside. Tired Christmas decorations hung forlornly in the few shops that hadn’t yet been prepared for the business of the New Year. ‘Well, that’s that, then. If you’ve already decided on going, then there’s nothing I can do to change it. I’ll miss you terribly though, Victoria.’
Victoria nodded. He’d probably find out it was all lies. She didn’t know what her parents were going to tell people about her absence; he’d probably hear another story before long that would pull apart the thin, fragile tale about Sally’s aunt. But Victoria’s whole body ached with tiredness and sickness and misery. All of this just needed to be over and done with. And the sooner Harry left the shop and left her life, the sooner he would be able to come back.
‘Let me kiss you goodbye,’ Harry said after a cold pause filled the shop.
Victoria leaned into him and tried not to weep as the scent of him flooded through her. His broad arms were tight around her.
May. Just get through until May. And then he will hold you like this again.
On the fourteenth of February, St Valentine’s Day, Victoria woke early. She ambled over to her bedroom window after managing to lie still for only a few seconds. The sloped cobbles of Silenshore glittered with blue frost. The narrow windows that Victoria’s bedroom faced were still dark. Everyone in Silenshore, it seemed, was still asleep and warm in bed. Everyone except her. The dark-grey buildings stared at Victoria mournfully through the darkness of the morning. It was as though they knew that she was leaving them behind.
‘I’ll be back,’ she whispered, her breath clouding on the window so that she couldn’t see anything but a plume of white on glass.
There were two hours until they were due to leave. Victoria hadn’t even tried to leave her bedroom in the last few days. She had been to Blythe’s bakery across the road a few weeks before, but since then she hadn’t dared to meet her father on the landing, or on the stairs. She hadn’t wanted to see the shop, or customers or the slanting streets of Silenshore, or the dramatic castle that reminded her of so much. But today, she must.
Her parents were still asleep. They’d stopped locking her bedroom door a few days after they had started, their initial bright panic faded and soured. She stood alone for a moment on the landing, taking in the worn carpets and pale-grey and green flowers that exploded across the walls. Would she miss this house while she was away? She shook her head. It didn’t matter.
The crumpled address that Victoria clutched in the pocket of her coat was, she had estimated, about a forty-minute walk away, out of the main streets of Silenshore and beyond the castle. Victoria’s cheeks burned in the cold violet morning as she ambled slowly uphill. She could feel her baby twisting inside her as she walked. The land that she had seen being dug up with Harry was flat and neat now, dotted with the skeletons of wide, low houses. She looked away from them, not wanting to think of that golden day with ice cream and Harry and the sweet, insatiable feeling that had bloomed inside her. She had known nothing then. Nothing at all.
Victoria glanced up as she passed the castle. It stood majestically, and she thought of the piece she had written about it for Harry. As she gazed up at the golden stone, sorrow that she wouldn’t be near the castle for the next three months, or near Harry or anything else that she knew, flooded through her.
Don’t, she told herself, looking ahead and trying to straighten her thoughts. She had studied the map voraciously every day and night since she had found the address in her father’s telephone directory. Now, she knew the order of streets by heart.
Back Castle Street
Tide Street
Hill Street
Finally, Victoria saw it.
Stone Street
Her breath caught in her throat. Questions pecked at her like birds. What will he say? Will he still want you? Will everything turn out after today? What about Sarah? She blocked them from her mind, pushing her legs forward, her eyes flitting over the numbers on the glossy front doors. Four, six, eight. She marched on until she reached the forties, and then slowed. The morning had become lighter now, the violet sky turning to a pale lilac as weak sun emerged over the horizon in the distance. She squinted at the row of doors to her left. Forty-four. Forty-six. Forty-eight.
She placed a hand on her covered belly and stared at the house. It was unremarkable, its door the dark green of holly leaves. Victoria swallowed as she reached up for the brass knocker. As she waited, Victoria let herself imagine, for a moment, that Harry might be hers soon, that he might have an answer to all of the questions that she had barricaded from getting into her mind.
But when it came, the figure through the mottled silver glass of the door was not Harry’s.
Out of all the questions she’d had to suffer, she had stupidly missed out one: perhaps the most important of them all.
What if Harry was not there?
When the door swung open, Victoria stepped back slowly, wanting to run. She had never let herself imagine Sarah. She had never asked Harry what she looked like, and he had never told her. She didn’t want to know. But now, Sarah stood before her. She was taller and thinner than Victoria, her face pulled down at being disturbed, her light-brown fringe curling slightly at the edges, her skin pale and freckled.
‘Yes?’
Victoria stared. This was the woman who got to say Harry was her husband, who saw him every day, who could touch him whenever she liked.
‘Can I help?’ the woman asked.
‘I’ve come to see Harry.’
Sarah’s face snapped, her features becoming sharp and unpleasant. ‘Oh. I see. I suppose you’re the girl he’s been nagging me about?’
Victoria suddenly felt as though she was being pulled down into deep mud, sinking, her limbs heavy. ‘I – yes.’ She took another step backwards. ‘I’m sorry to come here. Harry didn’t ask me to. I just really need to see him. It’s very urgent.’
She noticed Sarah staring downwards then, at Victoria’s belly. She’d thought the coat covered it well, and perhaps it had when she last saw Harry. But now, she saw, it covered nothing.
‘He’s not here,’ Sarah said, her eyes crawling back up to Victoria’s.
‘Will he be back in the next few hours?’
‘No.’
They stared at one another. Sarah’s eyes were narrowed in scorn, or perhaps hatred.
‘I really am very sorry,’ Victoria said again, mud pulling her down and down. ‘I wouldn’t have come here if it wasn’t very important.’
‘I’ll tell you what’s important,’ Sarah said. ‘My home. My name. My pride. And I won’t have you coming here, threatening to snatch them all away.’
‘Do you love him?’ Victoria heard herself ask. Her voice was brisk, assured, not her own. But the bravado dese
rted her as soon as it had arrived. She felt her legs weaken and shake, and she held her hand out to grab at the low brick wall that ran along the path.
Sarah frowned, her whole face contorted in irritation. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Do you love Harry? I want to know. If you do, then I will leave you alone.’
Sarah stared past Victoria somewhere.
‘Do you love him?’ Victoria’s voice was rising now; she could hear herself wailing like a hungry gull. Time was everything. She needed to know. If this woman didn’t love Harry, then surely they could come to some sort of arrangement.
Sarah suddenly jerked her head and looked straight at Victoria. ‘It’s bad enough that he was stupid enough to get you into such a mess. But making you want him for yourself!’ Sarah laughed, revealing pointed teeth. ‘I don’t know how he managed it. Did he not talk you to death about his students? About that bloody castle? Did he not bore you to tears?’
Victoria shook her head. ‘No,’ she said quietly. Here was Sarah’s answer, then, as clear as the sun that was beginning to emerge in the distance. But the answer alone meant nothing.
Sarah stopped laughing and sighed, waving away Victoria with her hand. ‘Go away. I don’t want you here. I don’t want people talking.’
‘Please,’ Victoria said. ‘Please, just tell him that I want to see him.’
Sarah shook her head. ‘No.’
She closed the door softly and retreated back into the darkness of the house without hesitation, as though Victoria had been a passing salesman or a Christmas caroler, nothing more.
Victoria stared up at the holly-green door. There was nothing left to do now. Nothing left but to turn around, face the long walk home and begin this strange new life alone.
The drive to the home was silent. Victoria’s mother came along, which was a surprise, but she didn’t say a lot. Her father’s leather gloves squeaked on the steering wheel, making Victoria simmer with irritation. She stared out at the passing streets and twisted her neck so that she could see the hill disappearing out of sight. As soon as the spires of the university and the crooked row of ascending shops vanished around the corner, Victoria turned again and shut her eyes, not wanting to see anything that lay before her.
