by Hannah Emery
‘Fancy lunch?’ he says. Grace looks up, about to say yes, about to convince Elsie that they should shut the shop for half an hour, when she realises Eliot isn’t asking Grace. His eyes are pinned on Elsie; he wants to take Elsie out for lunch, and only Elsie. Grace dips her head back down to carry on reading.
‘Have a good time,’ she says quietly, her eyes boring into an illustration of the Cowardly Lion.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind me going?’ Elsie asks, looking uncertain. Grace feels a spike of guilt sear through her stomach.
‘Honestly!’ she says to Elsie, relieved to see Elsie start to relax. ‘I think I’ll start doing the displays with the stuff we found at yours last night. I’ll be fine doing it on my own. You just enjoy a few hours off.’
Once they have gone, Grace pulls out the white rabbit that she found at Elsie’s and places him with the pretty hardback copy of Alice in Wonderland. A pack of playing cards and a small print of the Cheshire cat that Grace bought years ago complete the collection that she arranges on a high table in the back corner of the shop. On a table a few feet away, she piles up their collection of Rupert Bear annuals, and sits their old stuffed Rupert on top of them. She sifts through the other children’s books that they have acquired and makes some notes of things she could look for to display with them. The time finally begins to speed up, and Grace is surprised when she looks at her watch and sees that almost two hours have passed without her picturing Elsie with Eliot. Speaking to Noel last night has done her good: she can feel it.
Noel didn’t mind Grace ringing him at midnight. She knew he would be up: he has told Grace before that he always stays up late. Bea had just left his flat after they had been out for dinner. Grace imagined Noel on a dinner date: quiet but attentive, interested in what Bea had to say. She wondered if he might do old-fashioned, romantic things for Bea, like pull out her chair and pour her wine. The thought of him with Bea wrenched her insides.
‘Is everything okay?’ Noel had asked, his voice popping the bubble in Grace’s mind so that it pinged into nothing.
He’d listened as Grace told him about one of the postcards she had found: the strange blank one from Blackpool that had such an impact on her mother.
‘She disappeared a few weeks after she got it,’ Grace said, pulling her duvet around her whole body. ‘Do you think that means something?’
‘It probably means it was the final straw for her. She obviously thought Lewis had given up on her, that she had left it too late.’
Grace jarred slightly at Noel’s choice of words and looked down at the postcard in her hand.
Grace hadn’t told Noel about the two earlier postcards of Rose’s, even though she held the one from 1960 – the one that had been sealed – in her hands as she spoke to him. For some reason, she wanted to keep that one to herself.
After Grace has piled children’s books into the small sections she has created throughout the shop, she stands back to admire her work. It’s starting to take shape. She turns to the front of the shop to gather more of the children’s books she has decided to display, and sees the door open. Elsie and Eliot are back.
As Grace moves towards them, Grace feels something enter the shop with them: an uncertainty, an awkwardness, an expectation. Eliot looks at Grace awkwardly, almost as though he is apologising for something. Elsie gives him a brief glance, and then throws her arms around Grace. As she does, Grace sees a flash of gold and white. She stands still as Elsie hugs her, and then takes a step away, pulling at Elsie’s left hand.
‘What’s this?’ Grace asks, her voice a strange, strangled sound.
‘We’re engaged!’ Elsie says, beaming nervously.
Grace looks down at the ring. It’s beautiful: a glistening centre stone on a solid gold band.
‘I’m really happy for you,’ she says, hugging Elsie again.
‘I had no idea!’ Elsie says, as everybody who has just got engaged does.
Grace thinks of the image she has seen so many times. The weight of her wedding dress pulls at her body. She holds ivory roses. Eliot is by her side, whispering things she will always remember into her ear.
Grace remembers the crooked words on the postcard she found last night. You cannot change what is meant to be.
‘No, me neither,’ she says, her head feeling light, as though she might float off somewhere.
‘He took me to the Hilton and ordered champagne,’ Elsie says, still beaming. Grace tries to beam too. ‘And then I knew what he had planned.’
‘I thought it was rather obvious from the start. I was so anxious all the way there. I barely spoke!’ Eliot says, his eyes darting over to Grace as though he is still anxious now.
‘I suppose you were quieter than usual. The only thing you did say was that you felt a little queasy, and I was wondering why on earth you were taking me out for lunch!’ Elsie says, and laughs.
She’s happy, thinks Grace. This has made her really, really happy.
This is the first time, Grace realises as she watches Elsie talk and gesture with her newly decorated hand, that she has seen Elsie this animated in years. Ever since they were eleven, since the day of Rachel Gregory’s birthday party, the day of the car crash, Elsie began to distance herself from who she had always been, from Grace and from their mother, to step out of the light and into a darker version of herself.
The night of the car crash, the twins’ bodies had ached with tiredness. Elsie’s arm was wrapped tightly in a bandage under which dried black blood lurked. After watching some cartoons together, the twins began to feel a little more normal. When Mags arrived, and Elsie went out to say hello to her, Grace lay on the sofa, enjoying feeling as though things were okay again. Speaking to Noel on the phone had made her feel nicer. She was glad Elsie’s arm didn’t seem to be bothering her too much, and she knew that Mags would cheer their mother up.
But only a few seconds after Elsie disappeared out into the hallway to say hello to Mags, she returned to the lounge.
‘What’s the matter?’ Grace asked, sitting up.
Elsie’s face had been white since the accident. Now, it was red with anger, or humiliation, or something that Grace couldn’t recognise, even on a face identical to her own.
‘What’s wrong?’ Grace repeated, as Elsie stood frozen in the doorway of the living room.
‘She was trying to save you,’ Elsie said slowly, before standing in silence again.
‘Who was?’
‘Mum. She has just told Mags that she had a nightmare about the car crash before it actually happened, like a premonition. She knew it was going to happen. And she said to Mags that she tried to save you.’ Elsie looked down at her bandaged arm. ‘She made you move seats. But she didn’t bother to move me. That’s why I got hurt. She must have known I’d get hurt, but she didn’t move me. She moved you instead.’ Elsie’s voice was rising now to an injured yowling sound.
Grace suddenly felt like she had eaten too much, as though she might be sick. She sat up and turned off the cartoons. The white light in the centre of the television faded slowly in the black of the screen.
‘Well, she probably got it wrong. You know how superstitious Mum is. She probably had a feeling that turned out to be all wrong.’
‘No, that’s not what she said. She said she’d had “one of her visions”. It made it sound like she’s had them before. And then she said that she was trying to save you. So you are fine. And I have been hurt. She chose you. You’re the best one.’
Grace knew that her mouth was gaping open, and that she should say something. But she couldn’t say anything. And then, suddenly, Elsie was flying around the room, stomping and trembling, as though a volcano had erupted inside her. Her skin was red and her black hair was flying behind her, loose from the braid that their mother had done for her that morning: so long ago.
‘She hid my red dress. I know she did. I could tell, when I said I’d found it in the guest lounge. She didn’t want me to look nice, and she didn’t want to save me fro
m the crash! She doesn’t love me. Two daughters are too much for her. She wishes she just had you!’
‘Elsie,’ Grace said, words finally coming to her, ‘you’re being dramatic. As always. Go and ask Mum what she meant.’
Elsie stopped flying around the room and dropped onto the couch, suddenly exhausted. ‘No. Why don’t you? You’re the one she wants.’
That was the moment Elsie changed forever. And now, Grace can see a little of the old Elsie, the colourful Elsie, seeping back, because for once, somebody thinks Elsie is the better twin. Somebody appears to have chosen her over Grace.
And so they stand, surrounded by children’s books and pot animals and stuffed toys and other things that Grace had been enjoying displaying before Eliot and Elsie came back. Elsie beams and twists the ring around on her finger self-consciously. Eliot throws his arm around Elsie’s shoulder and adds elaborate touches to the retelling of the event. Grace smiles and watches how excited her sister is, and wonders what it all means.
‘It means that they’re engaged,’ Noel tells Grace later.
‘I’m sorry I keep phoning you. I know it’s not your problem.’
There’s a pause, and Grace imagines Noel shrugging.
‘You know I said I’ve had premonitions?’ Grace begins, her mouth dry.
‘You think you should be the one who marries Eliot.’ Noel’s words are quiet, and calm.
‘How did you know?’
‘I’ve seen the way you look at him. I know you, Grace. I know you really well. And I also know that he’s not the one for you, Grace. I’ve been telling you that for years. I bet if you’d never had that vision of marrying him, you would never have even wanted him for yourself.’
Grace feels her face burn. ‘You’re making me sound selfish, as though I’ve wanted to steal him. It’s not like that.’
‘I know it’s not. I’m just saying that you’re getting yourself worked up over someone who isn’t right for you.’
Grace sighs, pictures Noel on the other end of the phone. The image of his face in her mind makes her prickle with a craving to see him. ‘I don’t know.’
But Noel hasn’t heard her: he’s on a roll, which is unusual for him. ‘In fact, you’re always getting worked up about Eliot. But he never seems worked up about you. I don’t think that’s right.’
‘I need a drink,’ Grace says. She wants to ask Noel to come and see her, or ask him if she can go and see him. She wonders what he would say if she did. Probably something about Bea. The heavy feeling that Noel is with Bea, that she will marry Eliot, weighs her thoughts down, making her head ache.
‘You don’t need a drink. You need to think about something else other than Elsie and Eliot.’
Grace has been lying on her neatly made bed for most of the conversation, but she gets up now and drifts over to her bedroom window. She pulls the slats in the blinds open between the fingers of her free hand. It’s a grey day. The orange-brick, square flats identical to hers on the opposite side of the road are a mirror reflection of the block she’s standing in. She half expects to see herself, peering through the blinds in the third window up, second in from the left.
‘I haven’t thought about anything else for years,’ she admits. ‘Not really.’
‘Well, I demand that you do.’
‘I’ve never thought of you as the demanding type,’ Grace says, hearing flirtation in her voice and wanting to pull it back. Noel doesn’t seem to notice.
‘Oh, I’m full of surprises,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Think of something else, anything else, and let me know how you get on. I’ll ring you tomorrow and you can report back.’
Once she’s off the phone from Noel, Grace takes her laptop from her dressing table and sits cross-legged on her bed, loading up the internet. She wonders if Noel is right. Surely there is something else she can think about, something else she can do with her time. She types into a search engine, and waits. Within a couple of seconds, she’s found the website of a local amateur dramatic group.
Grace has always loved acting. When she was at college, she won the drama award. The memory of being classed as the best in her whole year makes her smile even now. She was in every play possible whilst she was at college, and threw herself into the nightly performances until her voice was croaky and her limbs ached. She did some acting at university too, although fewer roles there appealed to her. Now, as she scrolls through the gallery of the society’s webpage, she acknowledges that the only roles that she’d taken were the ones where she starred opposite Eliot. Eliot was always overly fussy about which roles he accepted (for he was always offered the main part). He liked modern, avant-garde plays, and so the involvement she’d had with theatre in the three years she was at university was a handful of Beckett and Brecht roles.
Now, clicking away at the dramatic society webpage, Grace sees that the local group meets every Friday evening, and that their next performance, due to be organised in the next couple of months, is Macbeth.
In their last year of university, Eliot was involved in directing an experimental performance of Macbeth. Grace played Lady Macbeth. On her opening night, Elsie surprised her in the makeshift dressing room with a huge bunch of pink carnations.
‘I’m glad you’re working so well with Eliot,’ Elsie whispered as she hugged Grace just before the play began. ‘I know that a lot of our friends think he’s a bit arrogant. I love that you can see past it, like I can.’
Grace said nothing, just squeezed Elsie tightly and thought of her first lines.
They met me in the day of success: and I have learned by the perfectest report, they have more in
them than mortal knowledge.
Grace clicks on the map of the drama group and sees that the venue is a ten-minute drive from her flat. She snaps the lid shut on the laptop, springs up and pulls the blinds shut.
Chapter Twenty One
Louisa, 1976
Louisa liked Lewis because he was connected to nobody. Louisa still had to see Jimmy and Penny at weddings and funerals and gatherings, because Jimmy was Mags’s cousin, and Penny had known Sheila all her life, and Sheila was Mags’s sister. Suzie was Sheila’s daughter and Suzie’s boyfriend Mark worked Saturdays in the chippy next door to Pete’s ice cream shop. Suzie’s boyfriend’s sister lived next door to Penny’s mum, Dorothy. Everybody was connected with sticky, tangled tape. But Lewis was different.
It was as though he had come from nowhere.
On the day that Louisa met Lewis, she noticed his eye colour before anything else: before his torn violet trousers, before the grease in his hair, before the way he gestured wildly with his hands when he spoke. She noticed all these things later, one by one. But firstly, she noticed his eyes. They were the exact green that her father’s eyes had been.
She wondered for a few seconds when she met Lewis and noticed his apple green eyes what might have become of her father’s apple green eyes, which were buried deep in the ground. Then she pushed the terrifying thought to the back of her mind and asked Lewis if he would like his eggs scrambled or boiled.
The first time Lewis arrived at the boarding house, it was morning. Most guests arrived in the afternoon, in time for tea. But Lewis was different from everybody else. Everybody else’s tea was Lewis’s breakfast. And so he arrived at 8 a.m. on the dot, on the seventh of July.
‘I’m performing in the Tower Circus and need somewhere to stay,’ Lewis said simply when he arrived.
‘Ah. So you aren’t staying with the other performers?’ Louisa asked.
‘No. I’m just temporary. I don’t know anybody else. They’ve got me in to cover somebody who was in a car accident.’
‘So, what’s your trick?’ Louisa felt as though somebody had opened a door somewhere, and a chill spread over her bare arms.
Lewis leaned forward and Louisa was suddenly in his world for a moment: animals and sequins and musty backstage smells and clapping crowds.
‘That would be telling. Do you have a breakfast for me? Or sha
ll I find somewhere else?’
And so Lewis had his eggs scrambled and slept in Room 2, and stayed for much, much longer than a week.
When all the guests had gone home for the winter, and Louisa’s boarding house sighed with relief, Lewis stayed. He moved seamlessly from Room 2 to Louisa’s room.
‘I would have set up camp in here a long time ago,’ he told Louisa as he pulled off his boots and wriggled into bed, ‘but I didn’t want your guests whispering behind your back.’
‘I think they did that anyway,’ Louisa said. She had seen their dubious, judging glances as she poured Lewis extra tea and gave him the biggest slices of cake. And she didn’t care. They had talked about her when she had invited young men up to her room before, and so she was used to being the subject of speculation, but she didn’t want to tell Lewis about that so she sat on her bed in her white silk nightgown and put her arm on his. Even Lewis’s skin was different. Jimmy’s skin had been fuzzy and pale. Pete’s skin was thick and pink, like a piglet’s. But Lewis’s was darker, and rough, and strong.
Lewis kissed Louisa. He had kissed her before, briefly, in the dining room, but then Mrs Shingle had cleared her throat and pressed the bell in the hall for attention, and that was the end of that. This kiss was different. It was like gold, like melting gold that shimmered and sparkled and glowed all through Louisa, from her skin to deep inside her. She felt a longing for Lewis that she had never felt for anyone.
She pulled away from him. ‘There’s something you really should know if we are going to be serious about one another.’
‘Who says we’re going to be serious?’ Lewis smirked.
‘I do, because I’m psychic. I have premonitions about the future, so I’m actually very sure that things are going to be serious.’
‘Is that it? Is that what I needed to know? Because I meet people like you all the time. Magicians, psychics, you name it,’ Lewis said, ticking off the types of people with his fingers.
Louisa waved her hand impatiently. ‘Oh no, not that. That’s not important,’ she said, although it was important, really. Just not as important as what she was about to tell him. She sat up in the bed and focused on the outline of her feet, way down at the bottom of the bed, under her mustard covers.
