Eloise

by Judy Finnigan

  Eloise drifted softly through my dreams all night, but not enough to wake or alarm me. Annie woke me in the morning with a cup of tea. Juliana, she said, was waiting for me in the breakfast room; I would have plenty of time for a bath; there was no hurry.

  Half an hour later, bathed and dressed but with no makeup on, I joined my hostess at breakfast. She smiled, lovely as always, but there was strain in her blue eyes.

  After the usual morning pleasantries, she stirred her tea and asked quietly, tensely, ‘Cathy, did anything strange happen to you last night?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly – and regretted the lie immediately. ‘Well, truthfully, I did have vivid dreams. About Eloise, actually, but they were calm, nothing really worrying.’

  ‘Have you been having troubling dreams about her?’

  ‘I suppose I have, but then I can be a bit … well, odd.’

  Juliana gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t think so. Or if you are, so am I. But … I feel I must tell you. She left me a message.’

  ‘What do you mean? Eloise left you – what? A letter?’

  ‘No. She left me Wuthering Heights.’

  I didn’t understand. ‘I’m lost. How do you mean? She left a book with you?’

  ‘It was in the library. I know that for a fact because I was re-reading it last week. It’s one of my favourite books and it was comfort reading for me when she was so ill, and especially after she … ’

  I swallowed. ‘Sorry, Juliana. What are you saying? That Eloise left a book for you in the library?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t in the library. Not this morning. That’s the thing. It was there yesterday. Eric, who’s been with the Trelawney family longer even than Annie, leaves the newspapers out on the library desk each morning, and I saw the book there yesterday when I went to collect them. I keep asking him to bring the newspapers to me in the sitting room but he always forgets. Anyway, Wuthering Heights was on the desk exactly where I had left it. That was yesterday. I remember it bothered me. I didn’t want to look at it again, because I was so upset about Eloise.

  ‘But this morning, when I woke, it was on my bedside table. And it was open at the page when Cathy Earnshaw’s ghost haunts Heathcliff’s new tenant when he sleeps at Wuthering Heights.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling my world tremble.

  ‘Juliana,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even, ‘I’m desperate to understand, but I can’t. You’ve had a terrible experience. Are you absolutely sure you left the book in the library? Perhaps you took it up to your bedroom without remembering?’

  I could hear Chris in my ear. Of course she did. She’s traumatised. She doesn’t know what she’s doing and you’d be mad to believe her.

  Maybe, I thought. But you think I’m mad anyway. So, what do we have here? Two mad women? Both convinced there is something terribly wrong about Eloise’s death? Sisters in hysteria? Or maybe an extraordinary moment of combined female intuition?

  I hardly dared to let the suspicion form in my mind. Eloise, her mother and me. Could we be joined in some kind of psychic triangle, and was there perhaps something real happening here, a message sent by dreams and misplaced books, a message from Eloise from beyond the grave? I shuddered.

  Don’t forget, don’t forget, I whispered to myself. Your mind is fragile; you imagine things. You thought Evie was going to die and she wasn’t.

  ‘I know how this must sound,’ Juliana said in a voice uncharacteristically tremulous. ‘But I am absolutely certain that Wuthering Heights was not by my bed when I went to sleep last night. You know, it was one of her favourite books too. I first read it to her when she was ten, and she’s always loved it.’ Juliana looked sad, exhausted and utterly defeated. ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’ve had a bad night. I felt sure she was trying to contact me, tell me something vitally important. But she was just all … I thought I could see her … almost … but then her face became so indistinct and her voice was lost – hollow, and too faint for me to hear.’

  I had to tell her. ‘Juliana, in my dreams she seems to be warning me about something. Something to do with her children. Do you know what she could possibly mean?’

  Juliana stared at me for a moment, then suddenly shook her head sharply.

  ‘No! Oh, Cathy, I’m such a self-indulgent fool. Having stupid supernatural thoughts about my daughter when she is dead from that horrible disease. Why am I even thinking like this? I was her mother, and I suppose that made me deny that she could possibly die so young – just as much as she denied it herself. But still. I had years to come to terms with it. I knew what was going to happen to my lovely daughter. I wept, I raged, I begged God to spare her. But He didn’t and I can’t bear it – forgive me.’

  She stood up. She put a book before me and abruptly left the room. I picked it up. Wuthering Heights. There was a delicate tapestry bookmark within the pages and, suddenly feeling unbearably confined, I decided to take it into the garden and read it there.

  Outside it was cold but sunny. There was a little gazebo beneath the rhododendrons, with cushioned seats and a wood-burning stove against one whitewashed wall. It wasn’t lit but the room still felt cosy enough. I settled down with the book on my lap, but before I had time to open it, Juliana’s old manservant Eric shuffled slowly in with matches, bellows and kindling, his frail body bent almost double. He was so ancient I thought his spindly legs would buckle under the weight of his burden. He was closely followed by Annie, bearing a tray of tea and a tartan rug tucked over one arm.

  I leapt up, feeling horribly guilty at making them feel I needed looking after when I was so much younger and fitter. ‘Annie, Eric, this is terribly kind of you, but I’m fine as I am. Perfectly warm enough, thanks.’

  ‘Oh no, Miss,’ said Annie.

  Miss? I was forty-six next birthday. The spirit of Jane Austen was surely still alive within the confines of Roseland.

  ‘The mistress asked us to look after you, and you’ll catch your death out here without a fire. It is February, after all.’

  Eric said nothing, but lit the fire, smiled gummily and creaked off. Annie fussed about with the tea and the blanket, tucking it solicitously around my legs, informed me that lunch was at one o’clock, and followed Eric out of the gazebo.

  This is ridiculous, I thought; Juliana is living in the nineteenth century. Yet Eloise had been so modern, so down to earth. No servants for her – although, thinking about it, she could certainly have afforded them.

  Money. Was that the elephant in the room between her and Ted? We had never discussed it. Eloise always seemed slightly embarrassed about her aristocratic background, although she loved her mother fiercely, and Ted had sometimes referred obliquely to his wife’s wealth, teasing her about what they could do, the lifestyle they could enjoy, if only Eloise could persuade her mother to release more of her trust fund now, instead of waiting for Juliana’s death. But his teasing was always light and playful, and Eloise had seemed to be nothing more than amused.

  ‘Oh, Ted,’ she’d laugh. ‘Always wanting to be the gentleman landowner. Well, I find you much more sexy as you are. An impoverished artist. That’s what Cornwall’s all about. And we’re hardly living in a garret, are we? We’ve got more than enough.’

  And in truth they seemed happy then. Very physically wrapped up in each other. Sometimes when Ted looked at her, his eyes smouldering with desire, I felt quite jealous. Not that Chris and I weren’t close. We were, but somehow Ted and Eloise seemed such a romantic couple, she so beautiful, he so glamorous with his dirty-blond surfer good looks. She from such a rich and distinguished background, he a talented artist whose paintings were attracting more and more interest, with an exhibition due in London later this year. Chris was a psychiatrist; a professor no less, doing a distinguished and important job. But somehow Chris’s worthy profession lacked the edgy glamour of a Cornish painter …

  I sank down into the comfy squashy armchair, old but beautifully upholstered with white linen cushions, poured a cup of tea and, lo
oking at the glowing wood fire, felt impossibly pampered. Looked after. Like a child again, I thought to myself, not entirely happy with this regression into childhood, a mood that had enveloped me deliciously ever since I arrived at Juliana’s. I loved feeling so protected, but I couldn’t possibly accept it. This was all part of a dream, a fantasy into which Eloise’s death, Juliana’s grief and my own sense of dislocation and shock had sucked me.

  I opened Wuthering Heights.

  The pages parted easily and fell open at the part when Mr Lockwood, the unsuspecting new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, an isolated mansion in North Yorkshire to which he has retired to escape ‘the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven’ pays a visit to his landlord, Mr Heathcliff, at the latter’s gloomy and festering moorland pile, Wuthering Heights.

  ‘A capital fellow,’ enthuses Mr Lockwood, at first welcoming as a fellow recluse the satanic neighbour into whose lair he has just unknowingly strayed.

  That night, because of driving snow and howling winds, Heathcliff is reluctantly forced to admit that his visiting tenant cannot possibly cross the moor to reach home. With extreme bad grace, he allows Mr Lockwood to stay the night, and in a distant, cold and lonely bedroom, the poor man attempts to get some rest.

  The quietude he craves doesn’t happen. He discovers the window ledge on which Catherine had inscribed her name, for this had been her bedroom as Catherine Earnshaw; ‘Here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton.’

  Lockwood, filled with a maudlin curiosity, reads Catherine’s diaries, lying mildewed on the window ledge. After falling eventually asleep, his dreams are vivid and tortured.

  Then, his thoughts mangled by strange and vivid images, he wakes up. Or believes he does.

  In Juliana’s copy of Wuthering Heights, the following paragraphs charting the rest of Mr Lockwood’s hapless night were heavily underscored in black ink.

  This time, I remembered I was lying in the oak closet, and I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow; I heard, also, the fir bough repeat its teasing sound, and ascribed it to the right cause: but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it, if possible … ‘I must stop it … ’ I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in – let me in!’ ‘Who are you?’ I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself.

  And here the narrative changed. For in the book, of course, the ghost replies ‘Catherine Linton.’

  But on the page of Juliana’s Wuthering Heights, that name was heavily crossed out, and written in large black letters above the type was

  ELOISE TRELAWNEY

  Her maiden name.

  And underlined in the same heavy black ink next on the page:

  I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!

  Startled, I jumped up from the chair. What was this? A true message from Eloise, sent to her mother from beyond the grave? Or a result of Juliana’s own grief, a deep, tortured but unconscious response to the absolute despair she felt that her only daughter had left her so abruptly, so completely bereft? Suppose Juliana, in a fit of furious denial, had altered the words in her copy of Wuthering Heights? What if she, in the middle of the night, sleepwalked from her bed downstairs to the library, took up the fountain pen which lay on a blotter on the cherrywood desk, and wrote her daughter’s name so boldly in the book which had meant so much to both of them? And then took it back to bed with her, and woke up in the morning to find, with genuine shock, that she had received a supernatural message from her beloved dead child.

  I didn’t know. Agitated, mind churning, I left the book, the rug, the tea tray and the cosy stove, walked out of the gazebo and blindly followed a narrow path which wound away from the farmhouse.

  As I pursued the lovely, ancient way, I gradually felt soothed. Cornwall was timeless. These grounds, this parkland of Roseland Hall, had remained unchanged for centuries. Eloise’s ancestors had played as children underneath these trees, secure and loved. And, of course, the whole estate lay just at the foot of Bodmin Moor.

  With that thought peace fled and I shivered. Those haunted words wailed through the wintery trees.

  I’m come home. I’d lost my way on the moor!

  Juliana was waiting for me when I got back to the farmhouse and we sat down in front of the fire in her sitting room. She was agitated.

  ‘Did you read it, Cathy? Wuthering Heights? Did you see what she … ?’

  Eric came slowly in with a decanter of sherry. He placed the silver tray it stood on on a little sideboard, and poured the sherry into two small, exquisite crystal glasses. We said nothing until he had left.

  ‘Yes, I read it,’ I said non-committally.

  Juliana leaned forward eagerly.

  ‘Well, what do you think? I just don’t know what to make of it. What was she trying to tell me? I mean, she wrote that in the book, but what did it mean? Oh Cathy, please tell me I’m not going mad.’

  Luckily, because I really didn’t know what to say, before I could answer Annie came in and announced that luncheon was served. Juliana had perfect manners; if she felt irritated, she didn’t show it. We moved into the dining room and sat down at the old oak table, beautifully laid, as always at Juliana’s, with white linen, silver and crystal. Great vases of daffodils and forsythia stood on polished tables around the room. The atmosphere was gracious, tranquil and welcoming, but it did not calm Juliana’s obvious nerves.

  She said nothing until Annie had served the first course, pea and ham soup, and withdrawn.

  ‘I can tell that you think I’m being fanciful and ridiculous.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t. Because I’ve had the most extraordinary thoughts and dreams about Eloise myself. But the thing is, we have to make sure we’re being sensible about all this.’

  Juliana gave me an incredulous smile.

  ‘Sensible? Do you really think any of this, what I feel and know with every fibre of my body, could possibly be called sensible? Cathy, you know something is terribly wrong, I can tell. So please don’t tell me to be sensible. There’s very little sense to be found in any of this.’

  I murmured my agreement. I was on her side, I really was, but at the same time I was becoming increasingly anxious to leave Roseland. The comfort and solace I had revelled in had given way to a febrile hysteria. Juliana, I thought, was even more fragile than I was. The mutual support and reassurance I had hoped for when I left Talland Bay was clearly not going to happen.

  Again I heard Chris’s voice when I’d rung to tell him that I was going to stay the night at Roseland.

  ‘Darling, nothing good will come of your stay with Juliana. You’re both too damaged – she by Eloise’s death, you by your delicate mental state. I’m coming to get you, honey.’

  I would go home now – gladly.

  Annie and Eric served the main course – chicken and leek pie, so delicious it lulled me into a drowsy and contented stupor. By an unspoken agreement we no longer talked of Eloise; but it was an uneasy alliance, both of us keenly aware that we were skirting an issue of vital, urgent importance.

  Instead, we discussed domestic things. I, with genuine curiosity, asked her if she always ate like this.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ she chuckled. ‘Everyone has to eat.’

  ‘No, I mean so formally. With the table beautifully laid and everything? It’s absolutely lovely, of course, such a gorgeous room, such a delicious lunch. But these days everyone tends to eat much more casually, unless it’s a special occasion of course.’

  ‘And what makes you think this isn’t a special occasion?’ she smiled. ‘Eloise’s best friend has come to lunch. But, no, I’m teasing. I only eat in style at lunchtime. This is my main meal of the day, you see. Supper
is just beans on toast or scrambled eggs on a tray in the sitting room while I watch the news.’

  She smiled. ‘Charles would be horrified. He was always such a stickler for doing things properly. I think that’s why I feel I must have at least one formal meal each day. To appease his memory – and it’s good to preserve some discipline in one’s day-to-day life. Also it gives Annie and Eric something to do, a familiar routine. That’s important at their time of life.’

  She went on to talk about her worries about her elderly manservant, who was an astonishing ninety years old.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘it’s not that I’m worried he won’t be able to work. We have girls in from Fowey who do the real housework. No, the worry is looking after Eric in his great old age. I will be totally responsible for him, you know. He has no family, no home of his own. He will stay here, of course; I will never ask him to leave. But Annie is eighty-one, you know. Hale and hearty, thank God, but still … And I, of course, am an incredibly youthful seventy-five. Goodness, I might as well turn this place into an old people’s home!’ She looked suddenly wistful. ‘You know, I had always hoped I would hand the farmhouse over to Eloise in a few years’ time. There’s plenty of money, and she could have hired staff to keep the house cared for, not to mention us,’ – and with that she gave a small snort – ‘the decrepit pensioners’ army.’

  ‘But surely you could hire staff yourself to … to care for you all?’

  ‘Oh yes, I suppose I could. And now of course I will have to. Employ staff to look after my staff. And me. Not a prospect to be looked forward to, but inevitable.’

  She looked up at me, her eyes wet. ‘Don’t you see, Cathy? I am old. I have no future. Eloise was my future. And now, nothing.’

  ‘But you do have a future. You are a grandmother. You have two beautiful granddaughters. That’s your future.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Ted won’t let that happen.’

  Annie came in with dessert. Juliana straightened her back and thanked her elderly maid in a soft but controlled voice. But Annie was not fooled. She gave her mistress a sharp and worried look, then looked at me accusingly. I had obviously upset her beloved Juliana. She put the apple crumble before us and left the room with a troubled backward glance.