First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Jo Fletcher Books
An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
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Copyright © 2014 Alison Littlewood
The moral right of Alison Littlewood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78087 646 7 (PB)
ISBN 978 1 78087 647 4 (EBOOK)
This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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www.quercusbooks.co.uk and
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To Fergus
For showing me the unquiet houses
CONTENTS
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PART FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART ONE
2013 – The Arrival
CHAPTER ONE
It was five months after the death of her parents that Emma Dean first saw the house, so in an odd way it had become attached to them in her mind, though as far as she knew they’d never seen it. It was someone else’s passing that had brought her here, one that hadn’t touched her so deeply, and it was strange to think that it had affected the direction of her life just as much.
Mire House. It wasn’t a prepossessing name; it wasn’t a prepossessing start. She couldn’t find it, for one thing. It was supposed to be a little beyond the road that ran through a village called West Fulford – she hadn’t seen a North, South or East Fulford on any map – so she’d followed it through the village and past a country park and over a little bridge, and then she’d turned off into a narrow lane which led nowhere in particular. It wound between farm buildings and broken-down barns and out again until she reached a junction unmarked by any sign. There she turned around and retraced her route. This time she took it slowly, pulling tight over to the hawthorn hedge so that she could look to left and right without finding herself stuck in the middle of the road if anything rushed around the next bend. There was nothing, only a dip with muddy verges and the damp dirty shine of puddles in the road.
It was if it had never existed, and that, at this moment, seemed a more cogent explanation than that she was lost. She had never seen the house; she had never met Clarence Mitchell, the distant relation whose death at the age of eighty-two had made it hers. She didn’t know why he’d left it to her; he had a grandson, after all. She had considered finding the boy and asking why, curious to know what had happened within the family to make this happen to her, but the thought only summoned the image of her own father’s face: his eyes watery, his skin sallow and a little loose, no longer the strong man who’d once hefted her on his shoulders and made her laugh.
Now the house was hers. Hers. And she couldn’t even find it.
She let the car roll onwards into the bottom of the lane and glanced to the side. There was nothing but a field that rose away from her, tufted and rough and silvered by the breeze, and then she saw a small interruption to its curve and she squinted. What she was looking at was a chimney. There was a building set into the lower ground on the other side of the hill.
She accelerated towards the end of the lane, driving with purpose now. She was the owner. She had property. She should try to look as if she knew what on earth she was going to do with it. She turned right and went onward, spotting the turning at the very last moment, and she pulled into a lane even narrower than the last.
*
The house was set in a dip in the land where the humid air seemed to hang in place. It had been so near all along, and yet now she was looking at it, it looked like it was sitting in its own world, tucked away from everything and everyone. Emma loved it at once. It was hewn from blocks of stone which were deep grey in the damp air. It was tall and grand, and looked much older than she’d imagined; the style was of an earlier era than its age implied. The door was nestled into a porch and footed by three wide steps. There was little decoration, though the upper windows each had a small gable topped with a simple stone globe. Another globe was set over the porch and Emma thought there was writing carved into it, something she couldn’t read from where she was sitting in the car. She stared up at the house, and all she could think was: He didn’t even live here.
Mire House was beautiful, and imposing, and alone. She had a sudden image of herself coming down to breakfast in a silken gown, trying not to splash it with milk as she poured it onto her cornflakes, and she let out a brief giggle, a sound too high and too loud for the quiet interior of her car. It hung there, echoing in her own ears. No. She was an owner now. An adult.
Alone was the word her mind was trying to add, but she pushed it away. Independent was the word she substituted, already knowing it wasn’t the right one, not quite.
Her parents would surely have loved this place. Had they even known about it? It had been described as a second home in the will and she had thought it must have been meant for holidays, but judging from the blankness of the windows and the air of quiet, it hadn’t been used for anything in a long time.
She didn’t get out of the car. She wanted to gaze at the hou
se a little longer. Behind it were only the low-rising hills which were sliced by the narrow lines of drystone walls. It looked cut off from anywhere and anything, but as she looked around, she realised it wasn’t quite alone, that there was another building close by after all. It was only a short distance away down the lane but it was masked by a stand of trees. She could make out part of a wall and, lower down, the lines of a fence. She returned her gaze to Mire House – her house. It had octagonal gateposts clutched by stems of ivy and it only occurred to her now that she could have driven through them. She wasn’t a guest.
Instead, she stepped out of the car and walked through the gateposts. The drive was a mixture of gravel, scabbed earth and weeds, but she could still imagine ladies dressed in finery being driven up to the door and servants rushing towards them with umbrellas as they exclaimed in lady-like fashion about the dampness of the day.
The day was damp. She sniffed at the air and as she did so a squadron of midges descended. She batted at them and they divided around her before settling again. They moved with her as she walked towards the door and her hairline started to itch. The scent in the air was sour and metallic, with the more musky under-note of rot. There was a river close by, wasn’t there? Perhaps the smell was coming from there. Yes, definitely the river. It couldn’t possibly be the house.
She tilted her head back and looked up at the windows, seeing only the heavy grey sky reflected in them. The house was hers. Hers. She smiled. It was odd that she already felt so proprietorial as she pulled the keys from her pocket. As she went to open the door, she wondered that she could feel so close to belonging to a place she had never seen and had no intention of doing anything with other than selling, as quickly and effortlessly as she could.
CHAPTER TWO
Emma could see at once that the house had not been used as a holiday home, or anything else. It didn’t look as if anyone had been there in a long time. Cobwebs laden with dust darkened the corners. The staircase wrapped around the square hall, which was floored with black and white tiles half-covered with grime. She found herself tiptoeing, her steps sounding like an intrusion. She peered into the first room on her left. It was a bright, spacious drawing room with large windows looking onto the front and side of the house, but it was dulled by the drab walls and heavily patterned carpet. It had a cornice like the frills on a wedding cake and a yellowed-looking chandelier. Hairline cracks spidered across the ceiling. There was a smell in here too: musty and unaired.
Emma walked to the side window, noting the cracks in the frames, the blackened wood beneath. The view was of thorny twigs jutting from a flowerbed, the colourless remnants of dead leaves, with a narrow strip of unkempt lawn beyond, and through the trees she’d seen earlier, more of the neighbouring property; it looked broader than she’d first assumed, and taller. It might even have a tower.
She stood there for a moment, sensing the weight and breadth of the house above her. It had six bedrooms. Six. A ridiculous number. She smiled, thinking of how her dad would have fussed around it, noting all the things that needed doing, and then she remembered and her smile faded. She still hadn’t decided what to do with her parents’ place. She was living in a small rented flat in Leeds. While her mother’s illness had dragged on and on she’d imagined that after it took its course, her dad would live there alone and that she would visit more often. It hadn’t worked out that way. The heart attack had taken him within weeks of her mother passing and now their house too lay empty. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to sell it. The very idea of cutting those ties had brought on bad dreams in which she simply disappeared, leaving no one to even remember her name. They were dreams from which she’d woken in a cold sweat. Now there was Mire House.
She looked around the room once more. Oddly, she knew the exact shade she would paint it if she were to live here: a soft sage green, traditional yet fresh. It would fit; it would belong.
*
Emma looked across the front lawn and the wall and into the road beyond, the bright metal of her car incongruous outside it all, like a visitor from a different era. The window was clouded with dirt and the carpet was greasy, but even so, she knew that if she were to stay here, this room, on the first floor in the centre of the building, would be hers. It was painted a shade of blue that was a little too dark, but it had a pretty little fireplace that was edged with flowered tiles and it felt like a place in which she could stay. Of course she wasn’t staying, but it was nice to imagine waking here to the distant sound of birdsong through the glass, the soft hum of farm traffic somewhere along the road.
She turned to leave and blinked. Her first thought was that that she was seeing things, that the door in front of her had doubled somehow, but then she saw that one of them was a little narrower than the other. She hadn’t noticed the second door, which was set into the same wall as the entrance. She didn’t remember seeing it from the landing on the other side and for a fleeting moment she thought of the stories she’d read when she was young, tales of impossible doors leading to strange and magical lands. She shook her head in amusement. The landing had narrowed in that place, hadn’t it? She stepped forward and opened the door. It swung outwards, revealing only a cupboard. One side was lined with shelves and the other held a single high clothes rail. Something was hanging from it. She leaned in and made out the shape of a man’s three-piece suit, the shoulders of the jacket misshapen against the curve of the hanger. There was a sour, unwashed smell. She thought of Clarence Mitchell. Was it his, saved for some special occasion, perhaps? She had a sudden image of a funeral – the suit was black, after all – and she grimaced.
He didn’t even live here, she reminded herself, and she closed the door and went to explore the rest of the rooms.
It wasn’t until she entered the master bedroom – the largest one, next to the blue room she was already thinking of as hers – that she saw through the tops of the trees that marked the edge of the garden. When she did, she realised her neighbours were not as she’d expected. She had assumed there would be a house, a farmhouse perhaps, like the one she could now glimpse a little further along the lane, but instead she saw a stone structure with a neat grey-tiled spire. The property next door was not a farm or any such thing: it was a church, and she realised she could see into the graveyard too, the crooked stones ranked across the rising hillside.
*
She could never have imagined owning anywhere like this. The house was too big for her. It had too many rooms. She would disappear within it. If she was to speak her voice would echo from the empty walls, too loud and too flat, and she knew she wouldn’t like to hear it. But then, she hadn’t spoken. There was no one to speak to. It crossed her mind that perhaps it was only that the house echoed her own emptiness, her aloneness, and she shook the thought away.
And yet, the house was beautiful. It was run down and drab and unkempt and unclean, but even so, something in it called to her. She could easily imagine this place filled with life, with parties, the distant laughter of children. Another brief image: herself smiling, calling down the stairs to her own children as they kicked off muddy boots in the hallway, a man behind them, his face a blur. She smiled at herself. She wasn’t even seeing anyone, not just now. But still, it was a shame – wrong, even – that somewhere so lovely should be locked up and abandoned. And one day perhaps that could be her. For a second she pressed a hand to her belly, smoothing down her top. This place would need a fortune spending on it, a fortune she didn’t have. Unless she sold her parents’ house. The thought slotted neatly into her mind as if it was something she’d been planning for years, as if it was natural. But it wasn’t natural. It wasn’t anything she’d been able to do. She wasn’t ready.
Emma let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding and a mist rose in front of her face. The heating probably hadn’t been on for a long time; it might not even work. It had been ridiculous to think of staying here, even for a moment. People her age didn’t have houses like this. It was too m
uch. Her flat was what she needed: somewhere she could never really be alone, in the heart of a city. In a city things were never as silent as this; a silence so deep it would only leave her at the mercy of her own imaginings.
She gathered herself to leave and as she did, she heard the long slow creak of a door. She turned to see that it had swung wide open. The place was draughty, too, then: perfect. She half smiled as she headed outside. It was as if the house itself was showing her out.
*
The grass was so soft and giving that Emma sank into it as she walked. It was thick with moss and moisture seeped around her feet with each step. When she looked back she found she had left a trail of perfect footprints, each one still bearing the pattern of the soles of her shoes.
Midges and mire, she thought as she approached the boundary. This side ended with a wall and when she looked over it she saw a narrow path. It was choked with nettles and there was a hedgerow with dead stunted trees. Insects hung thickly in the air, soundless and weightless, as if this were their source. The scent of stale water was stronger here. So perhaps there was a marsh somewhere close by. She wondered if that was how the house had come by its name.
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