by Jane Healey
“My god, how horrible,” I said, aghast.
She nodded, her chin dimpling. I went to her and put my arms around her, and she hugged me tightly in return. I could feel a few of her tears dampen my shoulder and had the queer thought that maybe the salt in them, the tears, would stay even once the stain dried, like when the roads are salted against snow and one gets tide lines on shoes that cannot be scrubbed off.
“My mother could be cruel, but she would never do something quite so beyond the pale,” I said.
Her ribs pulled in a heavy breath, her chest brushing against mine. “She was mad, you see, some of the time, most of the time. Her moods entirely capricious, her temper volatile. Do you think it’s true, Hetty, that daughters always become their mothers?”
“Not at all,” I said quite firmly. “And you’re not volatile, you have nightmares, you get nervous. But”—I tried to gather my thoughts—“those are inward-acting things, aren’t they? You don’t lash out at other people, it’s all focused in on yourself.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that. Although I have acted out on your poor animals,” she said, pulling back.
“Nonsense,” I said. “There wasn’t a patch of damage on any of the things you moved around. That was what used to irritate me so,” I added wryly. “It was like a ghost, though I don’t believe in those.”
“You don’t?” she said, settling down on the couch once more.
I shook my head. What was I doing bringing up ghosts, I reprimanded myself silently, thinking of the figure—sometimes a beast, sometimes a woman—who haunted my nights. I crossed to the record player that was normally overlooked for the wireless and the grim news that flowed forth from it.
“Do you think if we listened to music quietly, it wouldn’t keep anyone else awake?” I asked.
She closed her eyes and tilted her head back. “I don’t think any occupied rooms are above this one, so we should be fine,” she said. She noticed me watching her. “Sometimes I try and picture all the rooms of the house, the floor plans, when I have trouble sleeping,” she explained. “It helps, but it also gives me strange dreams where I am wandering through the rooms. Perhaps that’s when my sleepwalking started,” she said with a slight shrug. “I used to find myself in the blue room in my nightmares, but I thought I had only imagined it—I had utterly forgotten that part of my childhood, I can’t understand it.”
“The mind is a strange thing,” I reasoned, “what it chooses to remember, to notice.” She nodded thoughtfully.
I put on a record and the murmur of music filled the room as I sat back on the sofa and smoothed my pajama trousers, subconsciously—I realized later—copying one of Lucy’s habitual gestures. I did not know why I felt nervous, pressured, as if I was the compere of the evening and she my guest.
“Do you ever name the animals?” she asked, staring at the polar bear. “Not their proper classifications, but silly human names?”
“Only very rarely,” I said. “That black panther over there”—I motioned to my favorite beast—“that was at the museum when I first started visiting with my nurse as a child. I’ve never told anyone this, but I named it Bastet. I had a book about ancient Egypt at the time.”
“Bastet, how lovely.” She nodded to the polar bear. “And if that fellow had a name, what do you think it should be?”
“Hmm.” I considered it thoughtfully. “Pierre?” I suggested.
We spent a good hour arguing about the names the animals should have, with lengthy anecdotes for certain names that belonged to school bullies or favorite actresses, and with much laughter, aided by the crème de menthe Lucy had opened halfway through and which we drank to the dregs.
I could almost forget the events of the day, that we were supposed to catch a thief, that the mystery of the person stalking Lockwood had yet to be solved. It felt as if, when we had closed the door, we had shut out the world and all its horrors and it was just the two of us left; that all that existed was this room.
“One Day When We Were Young” came on the record player and Lucy tugged me over to dance with her, twirling us slowly around the room; past the polar bear, the okapi, the panther, the Siberian tiger, the wolf and the foxes; a strange audience for a strange pair, I thought. Our high mood hushed as the song continued, our movements grew smaller, until we were barely turning at all. I had one hand holding hers and the other around her waist just as hers was around mine. I turned my head to the side, feeling too exposed, and then our cheeks were almost touching, my chin brushing against her taller shoulder. She smelled of soap and powder and when I sighed she shivered at the brush of air across her ear. I moved back as the song came to its end and looked at her. The side of her mouth tweaked into a smile as her eyes met mine.
“My feet are tired,” I said, breaking the odd mood.
“Let’s make a nest for the two of us,” she said, and then formed a neat pile of blankets and quilts. “There,” she said proudly.
I turned off the record player and two of the lamps, leaving the last small lamp burning, remembering Lucy’s fear of the dark, and then joined her, sliding awkwardly under the covers and turning to face her. We were so close I could smell the mint on her breath, although perhaps it was mine instead. Her eyes were dark glints and the planes of her face were illuminated in the faint wash of warm yellow light.
“Your hair looks white when you’re in shadow,” she whispered, bringing up a hand to touch a strand that had fallen on my cheek. She tucked it behind my ear and I felt my body shiver.
“It’s cold,” I said, and tugged the quilt up to my chin. The curve of her cheek looked soft, and I thought about what it would be like to stroke it with the back of my hand.
“This is a little like the term I spent at boarding school,” she whispered, her breath warm across my face, “or one of the pajama parties I had with friends. Did you have those?”
“No,” I said, and shook my head.
“The silly things we got up to, the games and tricks. We put on shows for each other sometimes, sang and danced, and we gave dares and”—somehow I already knew what she was going to say next—“we practiced kissing, pretending we were each other’s boyfriends.” She reached a shaking finger to brush against my chin, to find my mouth in the dim light, and then rub the pad of it gently across my lips, which had parted under the pressure. I was holding my breath, I felt hot and my stomach trembled.
She took her hand back and yawned. “Drink makes me sleepy,” she said, and blinked slowly. Her head sank onto the pillow but she was still looking at me drowsily. “You mustn’t let me fall asleep, Hetty. You won’t, will you?” she murmured. “We need to stay up for the animals, protect them . . .” She trailed off, closing her eyes.
I did not sleep one wink that night, though my mind still spun strange half dreams in which guarding the animals from the intruder became guarding Lucy from the animals, the glint of their eyes watching us, the fur on their necks bristling, their mouths open with silent snarls. Other, shapeless thoughts nudged at my mind too, as I watched the shadows of her face and felt the heat of her beside me.
Twenty-Seven
If I had children, would I have minded the house getting quieter, servants and guests leaving? Would I feel a consolation in their company, or would they only increase my anxieties? It was a moot point, for I did not have children and, though I had never spoken this aloud to anyone, I was not sure I wanted them either. Children meant a husband, meant sharing my bed with some great oaf of a man, a stranger who would be curt at breakfast and particular about his office, a man who might start to think of Lockwood as his alone and me as the interloper, the intruder.
“Will I always live here?” I remembered asking my mother as she sat in the sun on the terrace one day, eyes closed like a cat. I was sitting near her, playing with a doll, dressing it up in one outfit after another, my fingers clumsy on the buttons that were giant in comparison to the doll’s frame.
“You shall,” she had replied without opening her
eyes. “You, and your husband.”
“My husband?” I said with bafflement. “Who is he?” I asked, as if some man had already been set aside for me.
She laughed. “You haven’t met him yet,” she said.
“But why? Can’t I live here just by myself?”
“You’ll be lonely.”
“Not with the servants I won’t.”
“You’re such a funny child,” she said, propping herself up, looking at me in the way that I hated, as if I was a being with no relation to her at all, as if I were a stray animal that had crawled into the house and prostrated itself at her feet. “It doesn’t matter what you think now, you’ll fall in love one day,” she said, “and then you’ll be stuck with him.” She laughed again, but it wasn’t a happy laugh.
* * *
I spent a term at a boarding school when I was thirteen or so, and husbands were a hot topic of conversation there too. There were twelve of us jammed into a room, each trying to outdo the other in how womanly we were—how many lipsticks we owned, and how red the shades; how perfect the waves were in our hair; how many dances we had been to, and how many different boys we had danced with; and the exact height of the stack of cards in our pigeonholes on Valentine’s Day. I joined them with wanting to look pretty, with wanting to be admired and grown-up, but I felt an uneasiness too, a reserve I couldn’t explain.
I was there for Halloween and we played two particular games for finding out more about our future husbands. We peeled apples with the blunt knives we used to spread butter on our suppertime toast, creating long strips of peel that we threw over our left shoulders and then we all gathered around the fallen peel to decipher the initial that had been created and call out men’s names. My peel had fallen in an “A,” it had been decided, and as the other girls suggested names—Arthur, Alan, Anthony, Alexander, Albert, Alfred—I roundly rejected them all, picturing a line of blank-faced men shuffling past. I was picky, the other girls said, the kind to have more than one husband; the kind, one girl called Ann said, to have an affair. This caused much consternation, for we were still of that prudish age where it was one thing to fantasize about a crowd of different men but another to have relations with any of them.
The second game was not quite so fun for a girl like me, with a febrile imagination, who was scared of the dark. We would light a candle each and stare into a mirror at midnight exactly and the figure of our husbands would appear behind us. The other girls had jostled me out of the bathroom where the long mirror above the sinks was occupied with six girls side by side (wouldn’t they be confused, I remember thinking snidely, if a figure appeared between them: how would they know that they had seen the right husband?), the three mirrors in the dormitory were occupied too, and another girl was using a large hand mirror that she had brought in her trunk. I was left with the mottled mirror in the long dark hall outside our dormitories.
Ann was the one who had counted down to midnight, her voice hushed so that we would not wake the housemistress, and as I stared at my reflection, candle fluttering with my nervous breath, I thought how terrifying it was to look at oneself, to see the movement of one’s face as if it was the face of a stranger. I should not have played this game, I knew that even then, standing there as the clock was ticking. I should have pretended, or shut my eyes tightly at midnight.
But I did play. I stared into the dark of my reflection at midnight and I saw someone else there with me.
I was told later that my screams brought the housemistress running with her head bare of her scarf, her robe half on her shoulders, that it took a girl throwing a bucket of water over me to bring me out of my fit, but I did not remember.
I was taken home the very next day and did not return to boarding school; the experiment at my living elsewhere from Lockwood ended, and I was devastated. I had loved the school, not for its building, which was colder and more ramshackle than my home, but for the company, for the other girls, mean though they could sometimes be. I loved chatting with them and laughing with them after lights-out as the moonlight streamed through the thin curtains; or when we got into each other’s beds and cuddled up against the cold; how if I woke afraid from a nightmare, there might be another girl awake too to talk to or, if not, there would at least be the sounds of eleven peaceful sleepers, their snores and breaths and shuffling under the covers like talismans against any fears.
They were all married now, of course, and most of them had children of their own. How did their lives compare to the ones they had dreamed of; how did their husbands compare to the ones they saw in the mirrors or conjured up from a piece of apple peel?
I knew that they thought me strange, to still be unmarried, to have no fiancé or even a scandalous married lover. I often thought that it would easier if I had been wed briefly to a man who’d had a tragic accident, that I would be quite suited to being a widow, haunting this house alone, appearing at breakfast with dark shadows bred from loss instead of madness.
But this was my lot, to remain here at Lockwood unpartnered, and I was lucky, I was not so foolish as to not know that. How could I bemoan a life of luxury in a manor house like this, servants at my beck and call? My class gave me allowance to never marry, for I would inherit all my father’s wealth; it meant idleness would not result in my being starving and penniless, and that I would be known as an eccentric heiress to be pitied and spoken of as a warning to those girls who did not want to do what everyone else does, to tie themselves to the first man who asked for their hand.
Sometimes I pondered whether I might put the house to some other use when my father was gone, as it was now for the museum—a collection of art, perhaps, a convalescent home, or even a school. But then it would not be right to invite other vulnerable people here, when it had been living here that had turned my mother and me mad; when I was sure that something still lurked here inside these walls, something hidden, something—someone—malevolent and wrong.
Twenty-Eight
I regretfully woke a deep-slumbering Lucy just after dawn, and we gathered up the detritus of our night and emerged from the drawing room. Lucy took the back stairs up to her room, and I took the main stairs to my own room, nodding at the night guard sitting by the front door. I went straight to sleep the moment I crawled into my cold bed and woke up too late for both breakfast and the arrival of the locksmiths.
Having made myself presentable, I came downstairs to the sound of tools on metal and wood, the heavy clunk of hammers being set down on the floor, and the click of new keys being checked in locks. I peered into the rooms and felt an instant sense of relief when I noted the shining new brass of the locks that had already been changed. These particular locks, one of the workers explained to me once I had introduced myself, were almost impossible to pick.
But the noise of the locksmiths, the thud of work boots on wooden floors, and the continued clatter of tools was an unwelcome addition to my already whirling mind. I shut myself in my office and tried to do some work, but every clang and thump rang loudly in my ears and made me clutch at the edge of my desk.
I was thinking about that man in the hotel again. Thinking that I had felt more desire from Lucy’s hand on my waist, from her breath across my mouth, than I did having sex with him, more pleasure from resting my chin on her shoulder as we danced, from the soft touch of her finger rubbing against my lip.
My body heated as I remembered last night, and that afternoon last year when I had tried on dresses in her room, the feeling of her hands on my bare sides, moving me by my hips; the brush of her lips against my cheek when she greeted me out on the terrace at the ball.
I felt fevered. I could still smell her perfume from the bedding we had shared, and my hand kept lifting to my lips to touch the place where her hand had touched.
“This is madness,” I said under my breath. “Pull yourself together.”
That women could be with women was something I knew very vaguely, hypothetically—but surely in those cases one or both of the women were mannish
, with queer habits and manners of dress, not ordinary like Lucy and me?
I picked up my to-do list, trying to clear my mind of impossible thoughts.
Even if—if—Lucy felt the same for me, she would surely never act on it, just as I should not either.
And yet last night, with her talk of kissing; and yet every time she had looked at me; and yet this strange tension that had bloomed between us.
What was I to do? My life had been barren of anything resembling love, or companionship, or desire returned. Could I be happy living thirty more years knowing that there was a chance I could find that—love—here and now; could I live with myself if I did not take the chance?
I spent the rest of the day cloistered in my office, barely giving a thought to the museum, doing mindless work, copying notes, and answering letters by rote. I vacillated from embarrassment; from the certainty that this was all in my head, that I had allowed strange fancies to sway my thoughts in an unnatural direction, to hope, to a surety that Lucy did feel the same, that she wanted me as I wanted her, that we would hurt no one but ourselves by not being true to these feelings, that it—that I—was not wrong; and back again. I thought I might die when I saw Lucy again, and that I might very well die if I never saw her again too—these were the crazed thoughts in my mind that afternoon.
It became clear to me that I could not wait until dinner, I could not sit there opposite her with this maelstrom of thoughts still whirling, I had to know, this had to reach some apex, some end, even if it was my utter embarrassment and shame. And so, once my working day was done, I headed straight for her room, and the higher I climbed in the house, the more desperate I felt, until I had to wait in the empty hallway outside to gather myself together as best I could.
I knocked on her door. “Lucy?” I called, my voice breaking with tension.
“Come in!” she called back. I could hear the smile in her voice and it fortified me.
