Secrets in the Shadows

by Hannah Emery

  ‘I can’t have children,’ she blurted out. Her feet blurred and she looked up at Lewis, who was beaming. His teeth were off-white but shiny and clean. His face, even though she had watched him shave that very morning, was peppered with a fine stubble. He didn’t have sideburns or a moustache like every other man in the world seemed to have. Just a nice, plain face with not too much detail. Louisa liked that.

  ‘Even better,’ he said, before clambering on top of her and kissing her again.

  The next day, Lewis took Louisa for a picnic.

  ‘But it’s freezing!’ Louisa said when he told her his plans. The Tower was surrounded by silver mist, and the whole town seemed to shiver in the crisp November air.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. I have taken the weather into account,’ Lewis said as he tucked a red blanket under his arm.

  When they reached the beach, he shook out the blanket and gestured for Louisa to sit on it. Then he covered her with a second blanket and poured her hot black coffee from a flask.

  ‘Do you think you will stay in Blackpool?’ Louisa asked Lewis as he poured himself a drink.

  ‘Now I have you? Of course I will.’

  Louisa sipped her coffee and felt it warming her slowly. ‘You make things sounds so simple. Don’t you have anyone to return to?’

  ‘No. My parents are dead. My friends have their own lives. So this can be my life: here with you.’ Lewis chinked his plastic mug against Louisa’s and a dot of coffee flew out and landed on her wrist. She wiped it away and sighed.

  ‘You don’t have a job.’

  Lewis set his coffee down on the sand, and Louisa could tell that he was getting irritated.

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked, his bright eyes fixed on hers.

  Louisa had had an unpleasant dream last night and had woken up sticky with sweat and tears. Lewis had been shouting at her in the dream. He had pointed a finger at her, snarling, and Louisa had knelt on the carpet sobbing. There was blood on the floor and a broken glass next to Louisa’s foot. Louisa had never had visions of the future through dreams before. Her visions had always happened when she was awake. But still, if it had been a premonition and it meant that there was a chance of this kind of thing happening between them, she wondered if she should spare them both the pain now. She wanted a baby, and warmth and contentment. She didn’t want smashed glass and blood and sobbing, and she didn’t want those things for Lewis, either.

  She stared up at him, her eyes watering in the freezing air. His jaw was set firm, his face pale with the cold.

  ‘Yes. I do love you,’ she said. ‘But I just—’

  ‘—Don’t. Don’t ‘just’ anything. If you love me, then that’s enough.’

  They were both quiet for a moment then, the sound of gulls and the sea gulping up the silence.

  ‘What about some work though?’ Louisa asked quietly. ‘I don’t want to seem negative,’ she added.

  ‘Well, although the circus is done with me now, there are a few odd jobs I’ve seen advertised in the paper. Painting and decorating, that kind of thing.’

  Louisa smiled, glad that Lewis seemed to be looking out for work.

  ‘I still can’t believe you made me think you were a clown in the circus. You had me fooled for weeks!’

  Lewis laughed and the tension that had been between them shattered in one second.

  ‘I never misled you on purpose. You just chose to assume!’

  Louisa shook her head as she recalled Lewis’s first few weeks at her boarding house. He had been rather reserved about his work at Blackpool Tower’s circus and Louisa had eventually decided that he must be a clown, mainly due to his eccentric dress sense and theatrical ways. Lewis hadn’t corrected Louisa, until they had bumped into somebody from the circus on the promenade one day who asked Lewis to have a look at the wooden stage where it needed patching up.

  ‘Mending the stage is a funny job for a clown to have to do,’ Louisa had mused afterwards, only for Lewis to hoot with laughter and admit that he was an odd-job man that the circus group had hired to keep their stage and props up to a good standard.

  Lewis put his arm around her now and brushed a strand of black hair from her cheek.

  ‘I can’t believe you didn’t know that I was an odd-job man all along. I mean, you’re a psychic!’

  ‘I know. But it seems like I spend so much time looking into other people’s futures that I never see what will happen in mine.’

  It didn’t seem like an outright lie when she said it. It sounded like the truth. And if Louisa ignored the visions and dreams and whatever else she might have to make her think she didn’t belong with Lewis, then it perhaps would be the truth one day: perhaps she would stop seeing into her future and be able to take each day as it came.

  When Lewis had fed Louisa sweet strawberries and poured some fizzy wine into her coffee mug, and made her eat the last chunk of chewy, warm bread that he had brought, they stood and shook out their blanket. Sand sparkled as it flew into the air, and Louisa felt the icy wind slowly make its way onto her skin.

  ‘I’m cold again,’ she said, although she knew Lewis knew that.

  ‘I know,’ Lewis grinned. ‘I can’t keep you warm all winter, you know.’

  But in actual fact, he did.

  And then the spring came. Louisa’s boarding house slowly filled up with returning guests, and Lewis worked at the circus again, coming home each night smelling of tangy paint and wood. He made enough money to buy himself a new purple jacket, because the one he had arrived in was threadbare at the elbows. He bought new raspberry pink blankets for each of the bedrooms, and a new frying pan for the kitchen, and a new set of wine glasses for the dining room.

  ‘You shouldn’t keep buying things for Rose House, Lewis. It’s not yours,’ Louisa said to him one morning as he unpacked a shining new cutlery set he had bought from a man on the promenade.

  Lewis stood up, a teaspoon glinting as it fell from his knee. He bent to pick the spoon up, placed it quietly on the dresser and stalked out of the room.

  ‘Lewis!’ Louisa hissed, hurrying after him. ‘Lewis, come back! I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did!’

  The door slammed, and he was gone.

  An hour went by, and another. Dinnertime came. Guests commented on their new knives and forks, which Louisa found vaguely unsettling. These people were meant to be on holiday, having the time of their lives, and yet they all found the room in their minds to notice a change in cutlery. The house became lively as families gathered to set off out for the evening. It glowed with people, the smell of cigarettes, and the jostling of bodies anticipating their nights of dancing and drinking. As the guests left for their evenings of fun, the house became quiet again. Louisa shivered in the cool air of early summer as she locked the door behind the last guest. She gazed out along the road, where holidaymakers were dotted along the pavement, their voices merged and hazy.

  Where was he?

  A stone of unhappiness thudded down in Louisa’s stomach. She had felt this way for most of her life, wondering and waiting. She had been missing her mother and wondering why she had left for so long now that Louisa had begun to feel lost herself. And now Lewis had disappeared too. She clamped her eyes shut, squeezing out the grey street and dusky blue sky. But she saw nothing apart from Lewis’s face, as it was the last time she had seen it that morning: stained with the grime of the circus. She saw nobody’s future, and nobody’s answers.

  She shook her head, went inside, and locked the door.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Louisa, 1977

  As suddenly as Lewis had disappeared, he was back.

  Louisa was scrubbing the doorstep, which, she had noticed, was filthy with seagull mess and dropped cigarette butts and the yellowed rivers of an ice cream that a guest had dropped that morning. As she scrubbed, she felt a dark shadow pass over her where there had been sunlight. She looked up and pushed her black hair away from her eyes.

  ‘You’re back!’ she yelped, s
tumbling to her feet.

  ‘Of course I’m back.’

  ‘But I thought you’d gone for good!’ Louisa stood apart from Lewis and stared at him for a moment. She narrowed her eyes, her initial elation darkening. ‘I was so upset.’

  Lewis frowned. ‘Why? Why would I leave you? Because everyone else has?’

  ‘Not everybody. Only my mother,’ Louisa argued, not because she thought that was true, but because she suddenly wanted to argue.

  ‘Well, I’m not your mother.’

  ‘I know, but if you walk out and don’t tell me where you’re going, and don’t come back for two days, then what do you expect me to think?’

  Lewis sighed and took Louisa’s hand in his. ‘I expect you to think that I love you, and I will always come back.’

  ‘But where did you go?’

  ‘Well, that’s easy,’ Lewis said, his face breaking into a grin. ‘I went to buy you a gift.’ He rooted in his purple pocket and brought out a red box. ‘Here. Take it. Open it.’

  Louisa took the box and opened it. Inside was a ruby ring, sparkling blood red in the afternoon light.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said shakily. She looked up at Lewis. ‘Which finger is it for?’

  ‘Whichever finger you think I bought it for,’ Lewis shrugged.

  Louisa thought for a moment. She didn’t try to squeeze her eyes shut, or wait for the beginnings of a violent headache, or look into Lewis’s eyes to try and see what he was thinking. She just thought. And then she eased the ring very carefully out of its tight velvet casing and slid it onto her finger: the fourth finger on her left hand.

  To begin with, Mags was to be the only bridesmaid.

  ‘But I’ll look daft,’ said Mags, after throwing her arms around Louisa in her initial excitement. ‘Nobody has only one bridesmaid.’

  ‘Alison Hall had one bridesmaid,’ Louisa pointed out as she flicked through the Yellow Pages and jotted down telephone numbers of dressmakers. ‘Do you fancy wearing green?’

  ‘Alison Hall is not the woman to be inspired by. She doesn’t like her husband, that’s obvious. She put no effort at all into her wedding. She didn’t even smile at her husband when they said “I do.”’

  ‘Well having one bridesmaid is no reflection on how I feel about Lewis. You know that,’ Louisa said, replacing the lid on her pen.

  ‘I do know that. But you don’t want other people talking about you, and making comparisons, do you?’

  ‘Mags, I don’t care what people think. And I don’t have any other friends that are as good as you.’

  ‘What about Suzie?’

  Louisa considered it. ‘Suzie’s not my friend.’

  ‘She adores you.’

  Louisa let out a puff of amused air through her nose, and picked up her pen again.

  ‘Suzie barely knows me.’

  ‘Well, she still likes you. And we’ve never forgotten, you know.’ Mags’s voice suddenly became rather quiet. Mags’s voice was never quiet. Louisa had to strain to hear her next words, even though she knew what they’d be: not because she could foretell them, but because they were the only words that Mags could possibly say next.

  ‘You saved her life that day on the beach.’

  Louisa drew a star next to the name of a florist. ‘I know.’

  ‘She’d love to be your bridesmaid. It could be her way of paying you back. So, are you going to ask her?’

  Louisa waved her hand. ‘Yes, I probably will. And while we’re on the subject, I have something to ask you, too. I was wondering if we could have Noel as a Page Boy.’

  Mags sat back and lit a cigarette. ‘Of course you can. I’d already decided that he would be.’

  ‘Oh, really? Are you suddenly in charge of my wedding day?’ Louisa laughed.

  Mags blew out some smoke from her nose. ‘Well, somebody needs to take charge of the best day of your life. Might as well be someone who loves you almost as much as Lewis does. And yes, green will be beautiful.’

  Louisa looked down at the Yellow Pages, at the starred numbers and circled names and the notes she and Mags had made next to each one, and felt a pleasant tug of happiness in her stomach.

  Louisa didn’t manage to find exactly the same colour green as Lewis’s eyes for Mags’s and Suzie’s dresses, but she found a nice bright leafy green that the lady in the shop told her was this summer’s bestseller for weddings.

  ‘Mother of the bride outfits, bridesmaids, you name it,’ she said as she plonked the material in a bag and tapped roughly on the till. ‘Has your mum chosen her outfit, love? It’d be nice if she matched the bridesmaids. I’d do her a deal.’

  Louisa stood, her mouth gaping open silently, thinking of her mother wading into the sea, tasting salt and sand and fear.

  ‘Yes, yes. The mother of the bride has chosen her frock. She’s wearing red,’ Mags said hurriedly.

  Louisa didn’t speak again. She handed over her money in silence as Mags spun elaborate stories about the red dress that didn’t even exist. When they left the sweet-smelling fabric shop, she let herself picture Rose: Rose in leaf-green, cheering Louisa on as she married Lewis.

  ‘I’m so sad she won’t be there,’ Louisa said to Mags in the end, as they meandered through the back streets of Blackpool, the noise and delight from the promenade a distant blur of noise and colour. Mags paused and alternated the bags of fabric she was carrying to stop her arms from aching.

  ‘I know.’

  A couple of streets down, after they had walked for around ten minutes in uncharacteristic silence, Mags paused again. This time she put the shopping bags down beside her for a moment, put her arms around Louisa, and hugged her.

  ‘I should have saved her,’ Louisa muttered as Mags picked her shopping bags back up.

  Mags shook her head. ‘Don’t be worrying about that. There’s plenty of other people you can save.’

  But Louisa wasn’t listening. She was looking out, past the lines of houses and washing and children skipping, past the blur of holidaymakers, out to the glinting waves.

  The wedding was held in the church near to Rose House. Louisa’s dress was billowy and ethereal-looking with elaborate lace daisies stitched onto the sleeves. The guest list was rather compact. Lewis had no family and Louisa had no family. They had few friends between them. She still hadn’t spoken to Hatty since her father had died. So Louisa and Lewis invited their small selection of friends, and friends of those friends. Suzie, who looked stunning in her leaf-green bridesmaid dress, brought her boyfriend Mark, who brought his brother Adrian. Jimmy and Penny came with their red-haired little boy who garbled a string of toddler gibberish throughout the ceremony. But even with the friends of friends and children of friends, the church still looked almost empty when the huge double doors were pushed shut.

  As Louisa said her vows to Lewis, she felt a part of herself flutter up above them both, above the congregation, up past the myriad of sugary colours of the stained glass near the high church ceiling. She felt herself look down along the pews on the guests’ heads, bobbing like buoys in a wooden sea. She felt herself fly out of the church and into the burning August air, and smelt the salt and the crowds of the promenade. She felt herself search and search for her mother, for a grey-haired woman wading back out from the sea with a faded dusting of copper freckles on her cheeks and shoulders, and for a boy with purple eyes who could tell Louisa why her mother had wandered out into the waves seventeen years ago. And then, suddenly, Louisa was back in the church, with Lewis clutching her hand and smiling at her and people applauding as he leaned in to kiss her. His lips were soft and kind, and tasted of black cherries.

  At a few minutes past three o’clock, the small party moved from the church to The Fortuna Hotel in an assortment of cars. Louisa found that Mags had painted the car she and Lewis were to travel in with white hearts and smiling faces. ‘Just Marreid’, it said on the back of the car, for Noel had been given the job of writing. She smiled at Lewis as they drove the short distance to the hotel
. She ignored what she knew, and smiled as though she was happy and thought she always would be.

  As they moved around the dance floor to The Carpenters that night, Louisa looked up into her husband’s apple green eyes before resting her head back down on his shoulder. She gazed around at the empty glasses and the paper plates of chicken bones and flakes of fallen pastry, at the other couples dancing with one another and the sleeping children sprawled on parents’ knees, at the flashing disco lights and the relentless August evening light outside the window. She carried on looking and resting her head on Lewis and swaying with him until the music stopped.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Grace, 2008

  I can’t believe she’s done this to me, Grace thinks as she stares up at Rose House.

  The FOR SALE sign is a garish yellow and is nailed ruthlessly next to the front door, where the guest house sign used to be. As Grace stands before it, unable to continue, for the moment, with her day, the front door opens and Elsie appears: all scarf and keys and shiny, wavy hair. She fumbles around a bit in her bag before noticing her mirror image standing before her.

  ‘Grace!’ she says, with a small smile. But then she glances to her left and sees the sign, huge and ugly. She clamps her hand over her mouth, her bunch of keys dropping to the floor and splaying on the concrete step.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispers eventually, but her words are carried away by the wind and the sea.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I was going to! I was going to tell you today!’

  ‘That you’re selling our house? How did you think it was okay to not tell me about this?’

  ‘I was going to tell you today,’ Elsie repeats, making a fury spread through Grace like fire.

  ‘You are not the one who gets to make all the decisions! We’re meant to be a team! Why do you have to have everything to yourself? Why can’t you talk to me about anything?’ Grace screams, knowing that she has lost control, knowing that she must calm down, but unable to stop her voice from rising and rising like a flame.