Facing the Light

by Adele Geras

The silence in the house was so deep that Leonora could almost hear it as she tiptoed up the stairs. She looked down at her feet and not at the walls. The carpet here was a little threadbare, but that didn’t matter because no one was allowed to come up to the Studio. The corridor leading to it had some paintings hanging on the walls, paintings which Daddy didn’t really like, or he would have put them downstairs where everyone could see them. Leonora didn’t stop to look at them, but made her way quickly to the baize curtain that hung across the Studio door.

  She pulled it aside a little, turned the brass doorknob and stood for a moment on the threshold looking around her. In one of her books, there was a story about a magical country which had been frozen by a witch’s spell so that nothing could move and no one could speak. This room was like that. Leonora felt that if she put one foot in front of the other here, something would break, or crack or disappear.

  Don’t be silly, she said to herself. That’s a story. This is a real room in a real house. It’s where I live. There’s no such thing as magic. Nothing bad is going to happen in my very own house.

  The Studio was long and thin. There were canvases propped up facing the wall so that you couldn’t see the pictures. The easel had nothing on it. Paints had dried to crusty flowers of colour on the palette. Leonora walked the length of the room, and went to stand at one of the windows. There were lots of windows up here; the biggest looked down on the garden and the lake, and she stared out of it, wondering if she could catch a glimpse of the swans. Her headache had come back, and she leaned her forehead against the glass. Her eyes filled with tears. Why am I not better? she thought. Nanny said I was getting better but now I feel bad again. There’s a ball of pain behind my eyes. Maybe if I go and sit down …

  She stumbled to the chaise-longue that stood all by itself in the middle of the room and lay down on it. It was covered in pale green velvet, a colour Mummy used to call ‘eau-de-Nil’. It was Mummy’s favourite, but Daddy said it was wishy-washy. Leonora wondered briefly why he hadn’t chosen his best colour for something that was only meant for him to sit on.

  She closed her eyes and the lump of pain in her head grew smaller, weaker. She put her hand in the narrow gap between the seat of the chaise-longue and its wooden frame, and something soft caught in her fingers. She sat up to investigate. A small piece of cloth. She could see a corner of it now, sticking out a little, a white triangle of lace. She pulled on it and recognized it at once. Mummy must have been up here to talk to Daddy, because this was one of her hankies. Leonora sniffed it and the tears sprang up in her eyes. Mummy’s smell. Lily of the valley, it was called, and all of Mummy’s clothes smelled like that. Used to smell like that. Tears ran down Leonora’s cheeks but she couldn’t use the hankie to wipe them away. It would get dirty and crumpled. She tucked the precious square into her pocket and used the sleeve of her dressing-gown to dry her eyes. There was something foggy and dark inside her whenever she thought of Mummy. It meant she couldn’t properly bring her to mind; couldn’t remember how she really used to be.

  ‘What are you doing up here, Leonora?’ said a voice and there he was, Daddy, filling the doorway with his body, making the room suddenly icy with his voice. Leonora wanted to run away, to disappear, to melt into the floorboards, because she could hear his anger. Daddy was always quiet, very quiet when he was angry, and everything he said took on a special sound that made her tremble.

  ‘I was looking for you, Daddy,’ she whispered. ‘I only came here to look for you.’

  ‘And why would you think to find me here, may I ask?’

  Because it’s where you go when you paint, she wanted to say, but couldn’t bring out the words.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, hanging her head.

  Ethan Walsh strode to the chaise-longue and Leonora, sitting frozen, unable to move, felt his hard fingers on her flesh, pulling her to her feet, leading her to the door, pinching her hard on the upper arm, muttering things above her head as they went.

  ‘Never. You are never to come up here again, do you understand, Leonora? Never. You are quite forbidden to come into this room. Am I making myself completely clear?’

  Forbidden. What a horrible word, Leonora thought. I hate it. It sounds like a wall of black ice. Forbidden. She looked at her father. He’d knelt beside her by now, bringing his face closer to hers. He put both his hands on her shoulders, and shook her slightly. His eyes were full of something Leonora didn’t recognize. Something she’d never seen before and couldn’t give a name to. All she knew was that the love she usually saw in his eyes when he looked at her had disappeared and this person, shaking her and pinching her shoulders with bony fingers, didn’t like her a bit. Hated her, perhaps, and there was something else there in his face, too. Daddy looked scared. White and thin-lipped and frightened.

  ‘Yes, Daddy,’ she said, ‘I understand. I won’t come up here again. Not ever. Never. I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ he almost shouted. ‘Just go back to your room and stay there, please. Wait for Nanny to come back. I have to think.’

  He turned away from her and blundered back into the Studio, slamming the door behind him. It sounded like thunder in the empty house, filling the corridor and reaching down the stairs so that the whole building seemed to shake. Leonora looked at the closed door, imagining her father standing at the window with the blank backs of the canvases staring out at him and the dried-up paint flowers turning black under the fire of his rage. She ran all the way back to her room and flung herself face down on the bed. Stars and blossoms of scarlet and purple exploded under her closed eyelids. Never. She never would go there again. It was a horrid room, cold and unwelcoming and filled with a light that was too bright.

  The hankie in her pocket. As soon as Leonora remembered it, she knew that she must hide it. If Daddy found she had it, he’d be angry all over again. She didn’t know how she knew this, nor why it would be so, but she could feel in every bit of her body that it was true. Where could she put it? Nanny Mouse went through her drawers to make sure they were tidy, and if she left it in her pocket it would be found when her clothes were washed, and all the lily of the valley scent would be gone forever. Then suddenly Leonora smiled. She knew where it would be quite safe.

  She got off the bed and went into the nursery. There, she crouched down in front of the dolls’ house. She took her mother’s hankie and folded it over twice. Now there was lace only on two sides of the little square. It can’t be helped, she thought. It has to fit … like that … there. She tucked the fine cotton neatly over the body of the doll that her mother had made to look like the real Leonora, and for a moment she felt as though the lifeless stuffed body was indeed truly her, and that she was the one lying there, safe under a lace-trimmed coverlet that smelled like her mother. She sat back on her heels and looked at the doll’s bed. They’ll never see it there, she thought, because grown-ups don’t look properly. I shall know about it, though, and I can come and sniff it whenever I want to. And when my dolls go to a dance, I can pin it around like a dress, and flowers of white lace will hang down over all the ordinary day clothes and make this doll really beautiful so that everyone at the pretend ball will want to write their names in her dance card. She’ll look like a princess.

  ———

  Both Freud and Leonora would have a word or two to say, Rilla thought, about my love of kitchens. Here she was again, with the whole house to choose from and her pick of family members available to chat to, sitting at the beechwood table and watching Mary peeling carrots for tonight’s dinner. Her way with these unassuming vegetables was legendary, and by the time she finished with them, they’d have turned into golden circles, glazed and sweet and delicious, and fragrant with a green sprinkling of fresh herbs.

  ‘Your scones, Mary,’ she said, adding home-made raspberry jam to a thick layer of butter, ‘are the eighth wonder of the world.’

  Mary sniffed and got on with her work. Her silence wasn’t unfriendly.
She was simply a quiet sort of person, not given to gossip. Rilla didn’t mind. Whenever she got a chance to sit about in the Willow Court kitchen, she felt as though she were on a stage set of some kind. It was Gwen’s doing, this rather clichéd prettiness. There was a Welsh dresser against one wall, predictably loaded with willow-pattern plates and plump teapots and flower-painted jugs. The walls were butter-coloured and there was a small sofa in one corner. The colour of the curtains picked out the swollen pink roses in the sofa fabric, a typical Gwen-ish touch. The working part of the kitchen was through an archway and down two small steps. When she was tiny, Rilla liked sitting on these and watching Cook at work. Nowadays the cooker was what was known as ‘state of the art’, but in those days it was an ancient, blackened range, like something out of Hansel and Gretel. There was one time when she’d stayed away from the kitchen for about a week, after Gwen told her that yes, that oven was indeed the actual one from the fairy tale, transported magically to Wiltshire straight from the Witch’s cottage.

  ‘I might have known you’d be here, Rilla,’ someone said, and she turned round with a mouth full of scone to smile at Efe.

  ‘You are not’, she said, when she could speak, ‘supposed to be rude to your auntie, Efe. Come over here and give me a big kiss. Gosh, you’re gorgeous! I could eat you alive!’

  ‘That,’ said Efe, hugging Rilla, ‘is what they all say.’

  He sat down on the chair opposite her and smiled at Mary. ‘Got a scone for me, Mary?’

  ‘You’ll spoil your supper, you know,’ she answered, with a smile, getting a plate down from the rack and putting two scones on it for Efe. Even Mary unbends under his gaze, Rilla thought. It’s amazing the effect he has on women. Dangerous, probably. He cut the scone neatly through the centre, and said, ‘You cannot imagine what a relief it is to see someone tucking into food. Fiona is forever on some diet or another. Although now she’s pregnant again, I expect she’ll lighten up on that. Hope so, anyway. I’ve given up wondering why women are so silly.’

  Rilla bit back a sharp comment. The reason Efe found women silly was because he wasn’t attracted to the sensible ones. She adored her nephew, but he definitely made a beeline for the puppyish kind of woman, the sort who, in return for even one word of kindness, tended to lie down and wave her legs in the air.

  ‘I should go and get ready for dinner,’ Rilla said. Efe looked up at her.

  ‘Get your glad rags on,’ he said. ‘Absolutely. Actually, Rilla, can I have a quick word with you? There’s something I want to ask you. I want to raise something with Leonora but it’s a question of timing. Have you got a moment?’

  The scones had been put away in a tin. The tin was on the dresser, ready to go in the pantry. Rilla stood up, went over to it, opened it and helped herself to another one. She brought this to the table and sat down again opposite Efe.

  ‘Go on, then,’ she said, reaching for the butter. ‘Tell me all about it.’

  The back door opened as she spoke, and James came into the kitchen. Efe made a rueful face at Rilla and stood up.

  ‘Hello, Dad, got to go, I’m afraid. Sorry about that, Rilla. Never mind. Catch you later, perhaps.’

  ‘What was all that about?’ asked James, as Efe left the room. Rilla looked up at her brother-in-law.

  ‘I really have no idea. I think Efe was going to tell me something. Confess, perhaps. D’you think he has things to confess, James?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be bit surprised. Chip off the old block, wouldn’t you say?’

  In Rilla’s opinion, James rather overdid the old roué routine. True, he looked the part, but he was altogether too moustache-twirling for comfort and that was without a moustache. She suppressed a giggle.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ James asked her.

  ‘Nothing, really,’ Rilla said. ‘Nothing important.’

  ‘Jolly nice to see someone laughing, I can tell you. It’s been quite tense round here lately. Gwen’s so busy with everything to do with the party that we’ve hardly exchanged two words in the last couple of days. Still, I expect things’ll go back to normal after Sunday, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘You’re never here, James,’ Rilla said. ‘I arrived yesterday just after lunch and it was breakfast today before I laid eyes on you. You can’t altogether blame Gwen, you know.’

  ‘Well, I was seeing people in town, of course. Couldn’t be helped.’ He pulled on his earlobe. Rilla had read a magazine article once called ‘What your body-language says about you’ and was almost sure that earlobe-pulling meant that person was lying through their teeth. He’d probably been knocking it back rather too much in a bar somewhere.

  ‘You look very well, James,’ she said, and was rewarded by his famously brilliant smile. It was true, too. He certainly didn’t look like someone who drank too much. His skin was more lined, and his hair greyer than Efe’s but they shared the stature and the charm. Such a shame, Rilla thought, that he knows it. He’d be completely irresistible if he was unaware of the effect his looks have. As it is, he’s too fond of himself by half. He was the kind of person – and there were plenty of men as well as women who were like this – who couldn’t pass a mirrored surface without checking to see whether their beauty was undimmed.

  ‘And you are as lovely as ever, Rilla dear,’ he said, automatically. Rilla smiled. He’d been saying the same things to her for all the years he’d known her, and once upon a time, might even have meant them. Still, it was kind of him to pretend she hadn’t changed, and she appreciated the gallantry.

  *

  Fiona was feeling queasy. Pregnancy was the biggest drag going and part of her felt resentful that she had to go through it yet again so soon. Douggie was only two and a half, for heaven’s sake. Bless him! Her son was very busy on the floor at her feet, constructing a fort or something out of Lego bricks. She’d produced an heir, someone to inherit the Walsh Collection and everything that went with it, hadn’t she? Surely now she could have a few years off to recover her waistline and have a bit of fun?

  She wondered whether she was going to be able to get through dinner without throwing up. It wasn’t fair. Some people only got morning sickness, but she had it at different times of day, and it ought to have been getting better by now. She listened to Efe, waiting for him to start humming in the bathroom, which he often did, but he was oddly silent. He’d been in a funny mood altogether for the last few days and, anyway, he was always a bit strange down here at Willow Court. Never mind, she thought, he knows I’ll be here for him whatever. She wondered why it was that some women were forever running their husbands down. She always supported Efe. Some of her friends thought she was mad to be so submissive and she knew that Chloë certainly, and Beth too, probably, reckoned she was nothing but a living doormat. Fiona didn’t care. She regarded obedience as a wife’s duty. That wasn’t a fashionable view, and privately she thought that was most likely why divorce was so common. Women just had no idea, some of them. Men needed to be jollied along, rather like children did, and it didn’t surprise her at all that she got her own way much more frequently than most of her friends managed to.

  Fiona knew very well that no one gave her credit for any intelligence, and there were, she acknowledged, many things she had no idea about. She’d left school with two GCSEs and they were in Art and Food Technology. But there was more to her than everyone thought. She may not have read many books, but she understood how to please a husband.

  It wasn’t hard for her, of course. Who in their right mind wouldn’t adore Efe? She did sometimes wish that he could have been named differently. Efe was silly, really, like a lot of nicknames, and Fiona avoided it by saying ‘my husband’ when talking to others and ‘Darling’ or, more embarrassingly, ‘Pie’ when she addressed him directly. ‘Pie’ was a silly nickname too, short for ‘Sweetiepie’ and he frowned blackly at her whenever she uttered it outside their bedroom, so she tried hard not to let it cross her lips once he was fully dressed.

  He emerged from the bathroom
with his mobile clamped to his ear. She was used to that, but still, it was a bit much to be still talking just before drinks. His whole family was here, so it must be business. Fiona looked at him and tried to guess who he was speaking to and what exactly was going on. It was something to do with the Collection, she realized, but was a bit hazy about the details. All she knew was that her husband was preoccupied and she wished he’d go back to being his usual self again. She needed him to act as a sort of guard around her, to protect her from his family.

  They’d taken some getting used to. Efe was the only one, for instance, who took after James and Gwen in any way that Fiona could see. Her heart still gave a little jump in her chest whenever she looked at him – handsome, well-dressed, successful – everything a man should be. His father was like that as well. Oldish now, of course, but he must have been a heart-throb when he was young. Gwen, too, was always expensively dressed, even if style wasn’t exactly her middle name, so what had gone wrong with Alex and Chloë? Neither of them would have looked out of place lying around in a shop doorway with a thin dog on the end of a string.

  Fiona sighed. Efe was worried these days, and it was because of the bloody paintings that were everywhere you looked in this house. She didn’t understand the ins and outs of it all exactly, and in fact was rather bored by the whole subject, but they had been in Efe’s mind. They’re my responsibility ultimately was something he said quite often. Leonora won’t last for ever, and then they’re in my hands.

  Even though she’d been a married woman for more than three years and had a baby and everything, the old lady made her feel about six years old, shy and tongue-tied and silly in every possible way. It wasn’t anything she actually said, but just the way she looked at you. It drove Fiona mad, but she couldn’t ever admit it. Leonora had cast a sort of spell on the whole family and criticism of any kind was strictly forbidden. She’d more than once pointed out to Efe that when his grandmother died, Willow Court would actually pass to Gwen, his mother. And Efe always laughed and said, ‘Well, yes, of course, but that means me, really, doesn’t it? Ma will do exactly as I say, because she knows I’m right.’