The Woman in the Mirror:

by Rebecca James

  In the glow of the streetlight, Rachel made out the room around her: a student’s room, a rented room, a room lived in for hours at a time. Interspersed with her plans for the gallery, drawings, reports and journals filled with sketches and emails and wish lists, was a litter of empty cups, perfumes, piled up books, pictures that never made it on to the walls, propped up against wash racks, clothes strewn across the floor, handbags and pill packets and phone chargers…

  There were no photographs. Aaron had commented on it when he’d first come over. No framed family, no memories, nothing personal. It hadn’t been intentional, just how things were. She couldn’t help it. The past was a stranger.

  ‘Goodnight, Success Story,’ Aaron murmured, kissing the top of her head.

  She smiled into his chest, feeling the urge to cry. Exhaustion, that was all. And an expression of tenderness she had long learned to live without, so that when she received it, it hurt a little. Rachel had cried a lot at the start of her life, and she had cried a lot in 2012, but she hadn’t cried since. As a rule she didn’t cry. Instead she surrounded herself with noise and lights, with anything but quiet and dark.

  It took ages to fall asleep. She would manage a couple of hours and that was what she preferred: a brief sliver of quiet before the day drew her into its comforting, busy embrace. And yet the shorter the sleep, the deeper her dreams… Always they came in bursts, the same one on a cycle for weeks at a time. This one had lasted longer than most. Rachel felt herself floating in a familiar space, inexplicable, tantalising, as known to her as her skin yet as alien as the stars: a dimly lit passage in a huge, impersonal house, a moon-bathed window, coarse floorboards beneath her naked feet. This faraway place called her, whispering, whispering, This is where you belong.

  Chapter 4

  He left before she woke the next morning. Rachel was glad, fixed herself coffee and opened her emails. Her inbox was filled with messages of congratulation. They’d made a mint on some of the more expensive works last night and several write-ups had already appeared in the morning’s coverage, calling the Square Peg launch ‘a triumph’ and ‘an enthralling odyssey into the city’s burning talent’. Paul had written with news that tickets for next month’s exhibition had sold out, and that a renowned London artist wished to make an appearance at the weekend. Rachel summoned Paul for brunch and closed her tablet.

  It took minutes to get ready. Despite her lack of sleep, the bathroom mirror told her she looked good. With neat brown hair, warm hazel eyes and a smattering of freckles across her nose, Rachel was no supermodel, but she had a fine figure, great skin and she carried herself well. For a long time she had puzzled over the roots of her appearance. Most people didn’t have to – their parents were right in front of them, or they had pictures to go on, blood relatives to join the dots – and she had thought so many times about what a phenomenon that would be. Imagining her mother and father was a bit like imagining her own hypothetical child, as much of a mystery and a miracle. For she had no positioning in the world, no biological foundation: she wasn’t the branch or the leaf on a tree, running deep into the earth, permanent and enduring; she was her own shrub, small and lonely, with roots barely clinging to the soil.

  Rachel had got along fine with her adoptive parents, Maggie and Greg. They had longed for a baby and been unable to have one of their own, and when they’d welcomed her at a week old, it had been the answer to their prayers. She was lucky, she knew: they’d been loving, supportive, attentive, and truthful with her, explaining her adoption as soon as she was old enough to understand. But, really, one was never old enough to understand something like that, to properly get to grips with and accept deep inside without umbrage or bitterness that you weren’t loved enough to be kept in the first place. ‘We chose you,’ Maggie used to say over and over, ‘because you were special. We adored you from the second we laid eyes on you.’ And Rachel used to take reassurance from this – that she might have been cast aside by one set of parents but at least she’d been picked up by another – until her older, more complicated years, when she had learned about the adoption process and that Maggie and Greg hadn’t selected her, she had simply been the first baby to come along. It was hard to get a baby, most childless couples wished for babies and there weren’t enough to go round, so no wonder her adoptive parents had felt she was meant to be.

  Rachel knew this was ungrateful and unhelpful, so she’d stifled the truth of her emotions and instead focused on the future, always the next thing, getting ahead, refusing to look behind. When she’d referenced her mother in the gallery speech, she’d been remembering how Maggie used to describe her as ‘bloody-minded’. It was meant, for the most part, affectionately, but in her teenage years it had caused toxic fights. Rachel’s stubbornness, her iron will, whether it concerned dating a boy or staying out or refusing to finish her studies, came from a place that neither Maggie nor Greg could trace in themselves, a place so remote and unknown that it served only to remind them what was missing. That Rachel had a family out there who were just like her, and it was their blood that was running through her veins, not the Wrights’.

  Maggie and Greg had died within a year of each other when she was eighteen, so she hadn’t had all that much of them either. At the time she’d mourned, but she never shed as many tears over them as she had over her imagined, other parents. It had seemed thankless and hurtful to pursue her heritage while Maggie and Greg were alive, but after they went there was nothing stopping her. Rachel knew she’d been born in England to English parents, and had ideas about travelling there, to some charming retreat or else a townhouse in London, and being welcomed by a woman smelling of vanilla sponge, a friendly wirehaired dog trailing at her feet. However, her ideas came to nothing and her search was short-lived: Rachel discovered inside a week that her birth mother was dead and she had no father listed. That was when she’d decided to close the door on the past. She spoke to no one about it. Nobody knew she was adopted and she preferred it that way. Keeping a lid on her feelings was a trick she’d learned early on, and it had certainly protected her since.

  The sound of the mail hitting the mat pulled her from her thoughts. She grabbed her jacket and bent to scoop up the letters to look at later, but a single white envelope drew her up short. It was one of those envelopes that made you look twice. There was nothing menacing about it, nothing especially unusual but for the UK postal address and a red stamp reading STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.

  She picked it up and turned it over. Private documents enclosed. There was a return address, a Quakers Oatley & Sons Solicitors in Mayfair, London.

  She ran her nail along the seal and opened it.

  Chapter 5

  Cornwall, 1947

  Only when the captain moves to shake my hand does his face return to the light. It is a fine, distinguished face: the product of centuries of ancestral perfection. His eyes are blue and clear, startlingly bright in comparison with the rest of him. His hair is black and has grown out of its cut, longer and more dishevelled than is the fashion for gentlemen, and there is a faint shadow of, or prelude to, a beard, although that could be the gloom hitting him from beneath. The chin is striking, square and sharp, and his mouth is wide, the lips parted slightly, with a curl that could be mistaken for a sneer. It isn’t a kind mouth.

  I notice all this before I notice the most obvious thing: his scars. I was warned about the captain’s war wounds, but I hadn’t known about his burns. His left cheek is pitted like fruit peel, the skin pulled tight towards the angle where his jaw meets his earlobe, where it melts into spilled candle wax.

  His clear, blue eyes, as they meet mine, dare me to comment. For a shameful moment I am glad of his disfiguration, for if he were flawless I might not know how to speak. There is a scent about him, of tobacco and scorched wood.

  ‘Thank you, Tom,’ he says, ‘but I will show Miss Miller to her room.’

  ‘Very well, Captain.’

  The mouth lifts then, but it isn’t quite a smile. Nonetheless
I return it and follow him up to the landing. We make slow, awkward progress, and I see how much discomfort his leg causes him but also the pride that prevents him from admitting it.

  ‘Tell me,’ he starts, ‘what are your first impressions of Winterbourne?’

  ‘Well, I’ve only just arrived.’ We pass a glass case filled with stuffed birds: a hawk alights on a branch, wings wide, beak screaming. ‘But I should say what strikes me is that it’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Beautiful.’ The captain repeats the word, as if it’s foreign. ‘Winterbourne has been described as many things, but beautiful isn’t one of them.’

  ‘No? I’m surprised.’

  ‘It was built by a band of lunatics. Hardly the way to speak of one’s ancestors, but there’s the long and short of it. Too much money and too little discrimination. They thought they were recreating Notre-Dame, I’m sure. That families should be expected to live here, generations of us, hardly came into it. No – I’ve heard daunting, intimidating, bleak, desolate… but I’ve never heard beautiful.’

  ‘You don’t like your home, Captain?’

  He gives a short, hollow laugh. ‘It isn’t a question of me not liking it. Rather the other way round.’

  I frown, but before I can speak he stops at a door and draws a chain of keys from his pocket. It is necessary for him to lean against the wall to do this, wheezing slightly, and my instinct is to help him but I don’t. We are at the end of a passage. Looking back, the way we’ve come appears impossibly long, distortedly so, a carpeted corridor flickering in the glow of feeble bulbs. Ahead is a narrow staircase, presumably the servants’ access.

  ‘This is your room,’ he says, and the door creaks open.

  The first thing I notice is the smell of age, a musty scent that seems to rise from the floorboards and seep from the walls. The atmosphere is deep, as weighty as the green velvet drapes that hang from the high window. There is a wooden four-poster bed, carved ornately in the Jacobean style, its quilts piled extravagantly. Chenille rugs adorn the boards beneath my feet, and behind me, on the wall we have stepped through, is an elaborate scenic mural depicting some dark, tangled foliage. Its pattern is dizzyingly complicated, impossible to follow one twisted vine without getting lost in the knots of the others.

  ‘Will this be adequate for you?’ says Jonathan de Grey. I nod. Of course it will be. It is, presumably, where his previous governess slept. She flits into my mind then vanishes just as quickly. I wonder about her sleeping here, watching the forest mural from her bed, trying to follow those creepers then unable to find her way out.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I say. It isn’t true, just as perhaps ‘beautiful’ wasn’t quite true for Winterbourne. Just something people say to make things well. ‘I shall be very comfortable here.’ I go to the window, pull the curtains and flood the room with light. Already, it looks better. There is a little writing desk, a handsome wardrobe and an adjacent washing and dressing room. I think of my miserable lodgings in London and am once again amazed at the fortune that brought me here. All will be well.

  ‘I’ll leave you now,’ says the captain, stepping back. For a moment the daylight catches his features, the taut, pockmarked side of his face, and he shies from it like a creature of the night. ‘Mrs Yarrow will collect you shortly.’

  The door closes and I am alone. Gradually the captain’s footsteps cease, and against the silence my ears tune into quieter sounds: sounds sewn into the building. I hear a soft tapping, most likely the flick of a branch at the window, but when I look out the wild trees are distant. I travel from one surface to another, the foot of the bed, the top of the wardrobe; I smile, as if the tapping is playing with me, a silly parlour game. It sounds louder at the desk so I open the drawer. Abruptly, the tapping stops – it was a draught behind the wall, or a mouse scratching at wood. Inside is a clock, small and round, 1920s, silver. The time reads twenty-five minutes to three, but the second hand isn’t working. There is an engraving on the back:

  L. Until the end of time.

  I remove the clock and put it on the table. I’ll see later if it can’t be fixed.

  From the window, the view is tremendous. I must be on the westernmost gable because the sea appears huge and immediate, with no cliffs to separate us, as if it is washing right up to Winterbourne’s walls; or we could be on the Polcreath tower light, rising straight up out of the ocean, its root chalky with salt and seaweed. The water is dark, perfectly still closer to shore but in the distance little white crests jump and retreat on its surface. The sky is frozen white and copper, like a Turner painting, dashed with smears of dirty raincloud. I met a former lighthouse keeper, once, during the war. His house had been blown to dust in a bad Blitz. As I held his hand and waited for the ambulance to arrive, he told me of his time, years before, on a remote Atlantic outpost, and that he could never be afraid of the sea, no matter how it churned or roared. ‘The sea’s my friend,’ he assured me, his face blackened with ash. ‘If I fell into it, it would toss me back up. The sea would never take me.’ He missed the water like a lost love, he said; even through the noise and fury of war it called to him, calling him back to its lonely perfection. ‘It’s all right,’ he’d kept saying, as I told him he would find safety and a way to rebuild his life, ‘this wasn’t my life anyway. My life is out on the water,’ and he’d wept for a loss he could not express.

  I consider if this sea will become my friend, looking at it every day, and it looking at me. So different from the rush and noise of London, which, once peace was declared, people told me would be a welcome diversion. Everyone was grieving, everyone was spent; everyone had known terrible things and faced terrible truths. But the city pumped on like an unstoppable heart, whisking us up with it, forcing us to go on even if some days we felt like lying down in the middle of the street and closing our eyes and never waking again. Carry on, carry on, that was the message throughout the war. What about after it ended? Carry on, they said, carry on. It was hard for me to carry on. There are some things from which you cannot carry on. Some things hurt too much. Things we did. Things we let happen. I close my eyes, unwilling to remember. A grasping hand, swirling hair, and her eyes, her eyes…

  I am about to go and find Mrs Yarrow, whom I assume to be the cook, when something catches my eye that I didn’t notice before.

  It is a painting, hanging in the shadow of the dark green curtain and no bigger than a place mat on a dining table. The frame, too, is large, so that the print inside is really quite small and delicate, and I have to lean in to see what it portrays.

  It’s a little farm scene, a barn surrounded by hay bales and a grey band of sea just visible in the distance. A cow chews on a tuft of grass. Milking pails lie abandoned. A cluster of dark firs borders a simple cottage, its chimney smoking and a full moon hovering over its roof. The landscape is curiously recognisable as that around Winterbourne: we are here, in this place, at some distant, irretrievable point in the past. The moors are unmistakable, their wild desolation, the colour of the earth.

  Perhaps it’s instinctive to look for a human face in these things, because I do, but even though I am looking it still comes as a surprise to me when I see her. She is merely a detail, an impression, not really a person; it’s more the feeling of her, looking out at the window, looking right back at me. Her head must be the size of a farthing, if that, with a wisp of dark hair and two green eyes. The artist has made a point of her eyes, the brightest colour in the picture. I think of the girl peering out at me, just as, a moment before, I was peering out at the sea from my own window. I think of us peering at each other, and for an instant the effect is unsettling, because it really appears that she is seeing me, and I her. Not really a person. Not really.

  ‘Miss Miller?’ There is a knock at the door.

  I tie the curtain back, obscuring the print, and go to answer it.

  *

  I don’t realise I am hungry until Mrs Yarrow puts soup and a sandwich in front of me, a doorstop of cheese and ham. I remember
sharing my butter ration with Mrs Wilson at Quakers Oatley after her husband died, and what another world London seems.

  Mrs Yarrow fusses about me like a mother, fetching milk, then a pudding of lemon meringue pie with gingerbread biscuits. I haven’t eaten so much in months.

  ‘Well, I’ve had practice,’ she says, when I compliment her on her cooking. ‘I’ve worked here for the captain for twenty years, and practice makes perfect, as they say.’ She has a West Country burr, is plump and pink-cheeked, and her frizzy brown hair escapes in soft tendrils from her cap. She sits opposite me, her hands in her lap.

  ‘Are we pleased to have you joining us, miss,’ she says, with such visible relief that it seems almost inappropriate.

  ‘I’m pleased to be here.’

  ‘I don’t know how much longer the captain could have coped. Things have been…testing.’

  ‘Since my predecessor left?’

  Mrs Yarrow nods. ‘I’ve been in charge of the children. As you can imagine, I have my hands full enough with the daily running of things. It was really too much. But none of us wants to let the captain down.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It will be good for the children to have proper care.’ Mrs Yarrow shifts in her seat; she has the manner of somebody loose-tongued trying not to tell a secret. ‘All this up and down, here and gone, no consistency, miss, that’s the problem.’

  ‘It must have been confusing for them.’ I sip my tea.

  ‘Yes. Confusing. That’s it.’

  ‘And to have lost their poor mother, as well.’

  ‘Oh, yes, miss. That were quite a thing.’

  I want to ask again after Mrs de Grey; I want her to tell me. But Mrs Yarrow has reddened and her eyes have fallen to her lap. She looks afraid.

  ‘I must say I feel fond of the twins already,’ I say instead. ‘To be so young and to go through so much.’

  ‘Ah, but the young are strong,’ says Mrs Yarrow. ‘Stronger than I, in any case. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them.’