by Adele Geras
Rilla had always loved the nursery. In the old days, it had been Nanny Mouse’s domain, but for the last few years the old lady had been living in a cottage down at the end of the drive by the gates, looked after by a nurse-companion. She would have been sad to see it all quiet and echoey, stripped of toys, its bookshelves empty. It was not the room it used to be; the room Rilla had for years considered the centre of her world. Gwen’s grandson, Douggie, Efe and Fiona’s son, could have slept there whenever they visited, but Fiona liked to keep him near her still. He was only two and a half. Perhaps when he was older, he’d bring the room to life again.
Gwen opened the door and there was the dolls’ house in its usual place against the wall. Rilla smiled. Mother was not a sentimental person, but when it came to this, which she often referred to as almost my only link with my mother, she behaved in ways which could only be described as somewhat eccentric. Okay, Gwen was right, and it had been made for Leonora by her father, and her mother had decorated every room. Perhaps she didn’t want everyone in the world peering and poking at it, but still, not allowing the film crew to see it was taking matters a bit far. Also, only older children were actually allowed to play with it. Leonora would never permit toddlers to smear their grubby fingers over the wallpaper, or mistreat the tiny pieces of furniture. Everyone in the family knew that it was still very much Leonora’s own possession, and if they thought there was anything at all strange about a woman of over seventy being attached to what was, after all, a child’s toy, they never said so.
Making the house had been a labour of love, that was clear. Rilla found it hard to imagine her artistic grandfather, who’d been a bit of a Tartar by all accounts, getting down to child level, as it were, to create this most beautiful residence. Grandmother Maude, who was hardly mentioned in anything written about Ethan Walsh, had decorated it throughout, with exactly the same care that she had lavished on Willow Court. She had also made three little dolls to live in it – exact copies of herself and her husband and daughter. They were tiny rag dolls, but so carefully stitched together that every feature was not only clearly visible, but recognizable too. Ethan was the biggest of the dolls, with a dark moustache and heavy eyebrows over piercing blue eyes. Maude had nut-brown hair drawn into a bun at the nape of her neck, and wore a blouse with a high collar made of lace. The Leonora doll was in a dress cut from the same lilac fabric she wore in one of the portraits, the famous one which showed her sitting on the edge of a bed. The dress was trimmed with the lace Maude had used to make a collar on the figure of the mother. Each doll had a smile embroidered onto its face in pink silk. When she was a little girl, Rilla often said that you could see they were a happy family.
‘She used to let us look at them at Christmas time,’ Gwen said. ‘Do you remember?’
Rilla nodded. ‘That’s right. Didn’t we have some miniature holly or something that we decorated some of the rooms with?’
‘Wreaths,’ said Gwen. ‘They’re in a box in the attic, I think. With all the other Christmas stuff.’
‘She didn’t let us play with them at all, though, did she?’ Rilla could remember Leonora saying, I can’t let you have them for your games, darlings. They’re so fragile, don’t you see? But you like the new family I’ve bought for the house, don’t you? ‘She gave us our dolls as a sort of distraction, I suppose, but we did love them, didn’t we?’
‘Of course we did,’ said Gwen. ‘I can’t remember it bothering us at all that we couldn’t play with the ones Grandmother Maude made. I don’t even know where Mother keeps them these days.’
Because hardly anyone came into the nursery, there was a quality of chill in the silence that filled the whole room. Rilla thought that the dustsheet covering the house looked a little like a shroud. God, she thought, I’m letting my imagination run away with me.
Gwen nodded in the direction of the dustsheet and smiled at her sister. ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look at it.’
Rilla stared at the tall, rather narrow shape of the house under its white draperies. The roof was at the level of her waist. She reached for a corner of the sheet and lifted it, raised it up and folded it over, so that the dolls’ house was revealed.
‘I used to call it Paradise Mansions,’ she said. ‘Do you remember?’
‘That really annoyed me.’ Gwen laughed. ‘I played with it first when you were no more than a baby. I called it Delacourt House. And the family were the Delacourt family. That was their proper name.’
Rilla said nothing, but she could still see herself, kneeling down in front of the dining room, picking up the mother doll and pulling off her shawl and throwing it on the floor, and making her lie down on one of the upstairs beds. How furious Gwen used to get! She knew that even now Gwen was feeling a shadow of the outrage she felt then, at the violation of her things, her dolls.
‘You used to want to murder me when I changed things round that you’d already decided on, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Gwen. ‘We were only children, weren’t we? Children are all little savages.’ Her voice was light, casual, but Rilla knew she was right. Gwen came and knelt beside her on the floor. Rilla knew that however much her sister pretended that all this dolls’ house nonsense was ancient history, it wasn’t really. Bits and pieces of the past lay just under the skin, like buried splinters.
Rilla crouched down to look at everything more carefully. There were three floors, with the rooms arranged on either side of a long staircase. Kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, drawing room and study on the second floor, and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the third floor. In the attic space under the roof, Ethan had squashed in a tiny room for the maid. He’d made all the furniture, with beds for everyone and chests-of-drawers to stand beside them. Downstairs, the sideboards and the tables and chairs were intricate masterpieces of carpentry. Every wall was covered with some of the paper that Maude Walsh had chosen originally to hang in Willow Court. It was faded now, but you could still see the patterns: William Morris’s Willow, of course, and some by Walter Crane of a pomegranate tree with white birds in it. The sloping roof was a masterpiece of painstaking craftsmanship, and this, surprisingly, was Maude’s own work. She had painted sheets and sheets of thick paper with an intricate pattern of roof-tiles in watercolours and these had been skilfully glued to the plain wood. Leonora had often told them the story of how the new roof had been a birthday surprise from her beloved mother, just before her eighth birthday, just before Maude’s tragic death. Over the years, the greys and browns and pale saffrons had faded so that now it looked just like the real thing: weathered and rough; the authentic slatey-yellow of proper tiles.
Rilla suddenly thought what a sensation it would cause among art critics if they could see it. It must be worth a small fortune. How come her own stepdaughter Beth never spoke about it these days? Why didn’t Gwen’s children, particularly Efe (who was very mercenary, it seemed to Rilla, always fascinated by the price of things), realize what a treasure was stashed away up here?
The dolls were all present and correct. Queen Margarita (whom Gwen called Mrs Delacourt) and her husband, and the two children, Lucinda and Lucas (Dora and Dominic for Gwen) and the maid, who was called Philpott by both of them. They were all peg dolls with painted faces and unmoving bodies, but what life they’d breathed into them! Rilla had known what they thought and felt and wanted to do. She tidied their house, and arranged meals for them on their little table, but Gwen always said she did everything wrong, and once she pushed Rilla out of the way so roughly that she’d bumped her head on the runners of the rocking-horse and cried for hours. Serve you right. Rilla could remember to this day what Gwen had shouted at her then. You shouldn’t have moved them. I put them where they’re supposed to be, and you moved them. You mustn’t, that’s all.
‘We did have fun with them, didn’t we?’ she said to Gwen.
‘Yes, of course we did.’ Gwen stood up again. ‘Even though I seem to remember I always thought you got things wrong consta
ntly. I suppose I wanted it all to myself. Didn’t want to share it. Aren’t children horrible a lot of the time?’
‘Not me! I was totally lovable!’
‘That’s what you think!’ Gwen was laughing. ‘I know I’ve just denied wanting to murder you, but what is true is that you could be a real pest. But I suppose I was a bit bossy, wasn’t I?’
‘A confession! Wonders never cease, Gwen.’
Rilla stood up and lifted the sheet to cover everything again. The outline of the roof was sharp against the dark paper of the wall, and under the white avalanche she’d just created the dolls lay quietly. For a split second, Rilla found herself wondering what they thought of the whiteness blocking their windows. She laughed out loud, wondering whether this could be the onset of the menopause. You’re losing it, Mum! was something Beth sometimes said to her, affectionately.
‘Come down when you’ve unpacked,’ Gwen said, ‘and I’ll go and see to the drinks. It’s going to be such fun, Rilla, isn’t it? This party?’
‘It’ll be great,’ Rilla answered, and felt that she was telling no more than the truth.
*
‘And where’, said Leonora, turning to Gwen, ‘are you putting Chloë and her young man? What’s his name? Philip something. Smart, that’s it. Doesn’t he do something rather fascinating for a living?’ She took a sip of wine from her glass and applied herself to buttering a Bath Oliver and arranging dainty crumbs of Stilton on it.
‘He’s a picture restorer. He works at the V & A, I think, though of course, he’s very young and junior. Chloë says he’s longing to see the Willow Court paintings.’
The last of the evening sunshine found its way into the dining room, glancing off the yellow velvet curtains and falling on to the window seat where Gus, one of Leonora’s two cats, lay curled up like a furry marmalade-coloured cushion. His brother, Bertie, was fond of soft duvets and only came downstairs when hunger called him to the kitchen.
‘In my old room,’ said Gwen. ‘Chloë’s always liked it.’
Rilla concentrated on peeling an apple. It had only been her and Gwen and Leonora at dinner, after all. There was no sign of James anywhere. As though she were reading Rilla’s mind, Leonora said, ‘James, I take it, is still in town?’
Gwen nodded. ‘Yes, he phoned me just before dinner. He’s chatting with wine merchants and so forth, and seeing about the marquee, I think. Liaising, he calls it. In any case, he said he’d pick up a sandwich or something on his way home.’
Rilla laughed. ‘James would never chat to anyone if he could possibly liaise, would he?’
Gwen smiled, rather half-heartedly it seemed to Rilla. Rilla helped herself to another cup of coffee. James might actually be liaising on this occasion, but on the other hand he might not. She glanced at Gwen. In all the years since their marriage, she and James must have worked out a way of coming to terms with his past infidelities. Nowadays, she was a little tense when he came home late and somewhat the worse for wear, but she had put her foot down about driving right from the very beginning, so at least that was not a worry.
‘That’s how my father died,’ Rilla remembered her shrieking at James during one blazing row she’d witnessed between the two of them. Gwen had been pale with fury and her voice sounded quite unlike her normal measured tones. ‘I’m damned if you’re going the same way.’
Why did Gwen put up with it at all? She must love him, Rilla supposed. She wondered briefly whether she could stand life with James and knew she couldn’t. She wouldn’t have been able to overlook the women, right at the start of the marriage. As far as she was concerned, it would take only one tiny slip, one kiss even, and she’d be off. Or send him, the man, whoever he was, packing. Fidelity surely wasn’t too much to ask for. Or was it? Did people nowadays even care? She had no idea, and on her present form, she wasn’t likely to find out. Who the hell found true love at her age?
She bit into her apple and turned her attention to what Leonora was saying. Something about her work. Rilla sighed inwardly, opened her mouth and prepared to make two cameos on afternoon soap operas sound like star parts for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Talking yourself up, it was called, and she’d grown rather good at it over the years. She tried not to sound defensive. There was nothing wrong with a mother showing some interest in what her daughter was doing. Grow up, Rilla, she said to herself, and launched into an account of the last commercial she’d been in.
*
In some cupboards, wire hangers made a sound like wind-chimes when you hung your clothes up, but not at Willow Court. Leonora didn’t believe in wire hangers. You might just as well take your best dresses and shred them at the shoulders, she used to say, with typical exaggeration. Still, Rilla had to admit that padded hangers covered in material that felt satiny to the touch were both pleasurable and oddly comforting. At least my garments will be in good shape, she thought. Even if I’m not.
She’d been here for some hours and everything was all right. She had managed to look out of the window, earlier on, and there was the kitchen garden in the afternoon sunshine, looking restful and pretty and not a bit threatening. She had to be careful of some places, of course, even in the house. If she wasn’t on her guard all the time, he’d appear in front of her eyes and the pain of that was too much to bear.
If there was one thing in the whole world you never forgot, not ever, it was a dead child, and Mark was always with her, contained in her flesh and in every atom of her body, gathered more closely into her than he’d been in the months before his birth. There was no way that he could not be, but it was only here, at Willow Court, that she sometimes heard his voice, and even actually saw him, behind the curtain in the drawing room where he loved to hide, or sitting on the bench in the Quiet Garden with a cat on his lap. This, she thought sleepily, is a haunted house. I should be used to it by now, but I dread it. I dread the sight of him, the impossibility of it actually being him. And of course she couldn’t sleep in her old room.
Rilla wondered who would be sleeping there. She’d ask Gwen. Dinner had been quiet and peaceful tonight, but from tomorrow everything was going to be different. Gwen’s younger son, Alex, was getting a lift down with Beth. Efe, her eldest, would arrive in the afternoon with his family and Sean Everard, the TV director, was expected before dinner. There would hardly be time to turn round, and no time at all for heart-to-hearts of any kind. Not too much time for Leonora to interrogate her even further about work (How long is it since you’ve been in a film, darling?) or the current state of her love life or ask her in a roundabout way what she intended to do about her weight. (Efe goes to the gym every day, you know. Even when he’s busy.)
Well, bully for Efe, Rilla thought, and reached into her enormous carpetbag to find her secret supply of chocolate bars. It was going to be a long time till breakfast. She peeled the wrapping off a Crunchie and lay down on the bed, biting into the gorgeously yellow honeycomb filling, feeling the sweetness fill her, feeling her mood lift. Dinner had gone much better than she’d feared. Nothing contentious, nothing difficult had come up at all. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, this time here with the rest of the family. Leonora would be as nice as she possibly could be and make the effort to show some affection, and I must as well. Maybe everything would be fine, or better than fine. Maybe.
Thursday, August 22nd, 2002
Beth Frederick found her breath catching in her throat at the thought of seeing Efe again. Efe. Pronounced ‘Eefe’. She was the one who’d named him, when they were both two years old, and she couldn’t manage to say ‘Ethan’. He was Gwen’s eldest child. They had practically grown up together. In those days, Rilla and Dad used to spend most of their time at Willow Court, even though they lived in London. That had changed suddenly, after what happened to Mark. Thinking of her little half-brother, even after all this time, was painful, and so Beth concentrated on Efe. She didn’t want to cloud with any ghastly memories from the past the happiness she was feeling at seeing him again.
It was ne
arly time to go. She looked around her flat and thought of the layers of tissue paper between every garment in her suitcase and how impossible she found it not to line up the shirts in her drawer and the sheets in her linen cupboard. It was probably a good thing that she lived by herself. She would have hated to share the space with anyone. Anyone except Efe.
She knew that certain members of the family felt sorry for her. Twenty-eight and still living alone. Leonora thought that and said it too, sometimes. Beth didn’t mind. She was happy in her work, and couldn’t imagine anything worse than marrying the wrong person as so many of her friends seemed to have done.
Yesterday, before leaving work, she’d printed out Efe’s latest email, and for once it was interesting and intriguing as well as ending in the best possible way of all, with an affectionate sentence before his name. She knew the whole thing by heart, and wouldn’t be separated from it. It was folded up and hidden away in her handbag, in a silky little pocket in the lining that she hardly ever used.
Hey, Beth! What a fantastic few days coming up, eh? But I do have something of utmost urgency to put to you. Can’t say anything now, but we’ll talk more at Willow Court. The whole matter is rather important and may have quite serious repercussions. Look forward to seeing you there, kiddo. Love and kisses, Efe.
It was the longest message she’d ever had from him, the Efe equivalent of a thesis. And love and kisses was unprecedented. She wished she could imagine it meant something romantic, but admitted to herself that it probably didn’t. Kiddo was a bit depressing, with its definite older-brother overtones, but you couldn’t have everything. And what did he mean by ‘repercussions’? What on earth did he have up his sleeve? She was curious to know, of course, but mainly she wanted to see his face again.
All through their childhood Efe had led, and Beth followed him slavishly. She loved him better than anyone else in the whole world. Even though they’re only step-cousins, and not related by blood in any way, Beth and Efe are devoted to one another, Leonora told everyone, and that was the family wisdom. He confided in her still. Whenever he had a problem, she was the one he came to, in spite of being married now and head of his little family.
