“Damn it,” I said and bent forwards into the fountain, submerging my face and rubbing briskly until it felt clean. I pulled away, then on second thoughts, scooped up some of the water and supped it into my mouth, gargling with it, then spitting it out in a gush onto the dirt below my feet.
The water left a lingering taste in my mouth, something not unlike roses. Quite pleasant. I took a deep breath and relaxed as my head began to clear and my stomach settle. Thank heavens.
“Isobel?” I called. I supposed I’d better apologise for my strange turn.
When there was no answer, I shrugged. I’d behaved oddly, but so had she. It had been a perturbing evening and now it was late. I ought to get home. I shouldn’t have left my dying mother alone.
Worried that I wouldn’t be able to find my way out of the labyrinth without Isobel’s help, I called for her again, but when she neither replied nor materialised there appeared to be nothing for it but to venture back alone. I found it surprisingly easy, hardly ever taking a wrong turn, and less than ten minutes later I found myself on the outer path of the garden with the house ahead of me.
I approached the house with caution as always, slipping down the stone steps between the lions with a watchful eye on the back door, but even the little light that hid itself at the heart of the house had been extinguished and only the empty black sockets of the windows stared back at me.
I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being watched.
But then we’d all be guilty of feeling that way, outside an old house in the wee hours of the morning, wouldn’t we?
By all rights I should have felt rough the next morning when my little travel alarm went off. I’d been setting it for 6.30 a.m. so that I could get up and have a shower before Cathy arrived to see to my mother and commandeered both the bathroom and the kitchen. It had been nearly two by the time I’d crawled into my bed the previous evening, and I usually found anything less than six hours sleep meant I came with a toxic hazard warning.
So I was surprised that I felt pretty good, awake and with it, and actually didn’t look too bad, either. No bags under my eyes. Even my skin was blemish free. As I studied my visage in the bathroom mirror I imagined I looked a few years younger. Fresher certainly. Less haggard than of late.
I made myself some breakfast and even boiled a few eggs for Cathy to offer my mother, then read the morning news via my iPad while I waited for the carer to do what she needed to do. Once she’d finished changing the bed around my mother, I took her place, brandishing my copy of Wuthering Heights.
I’d feared the worse the evening before, but my mother had a little more colour in her cheeks and more life in her eyes than I’d expected. “How are you feeling?” I asked her and she cackled.
“Not dead yet,” she answered, her thin lips drawing back in amusement. “Don’t you wish?”
I shook my head, a token protest and opened the book. I couldn’t be bothered to engage in any tit-for-tat, so I remained intent on reading to her until she dozed off.
Except today she didn’t go off as readily. As I finished a fourth chapter I glanced across at her. She wasn’t watching me, rather thinking about something—a faraway look in her eyes. I placed my right forefinger between the pages and closed the book on it. A sudden intense itchiness of the side of my hand made me yank my finger free. The book tumbled from my grasp as I turned my palm face-up to examine it. I’d forgotten about the rose incident.
I scrutinised my skin for a puncture mark. I expected to find a scab covering a deep hole. Nothing. Puzzled, I ran fingers from my left hand along my palm and the side of my right hand feeling for any discomfort. Still nothing.
Just the itchiness in the spot where I remembered the wound to be.
Curious.
But even more so was the fact that where I’d had the scar from the night we’d played Knock-down-Ginger across the road it had faded away to virtually nothing. It had always been a nasty scar. For some reason I hadn’t sought treatment in time, and the wound had become infected. When at last I did visit the local A and E department, they’d had to incise the wound and cut away infected tissue before stitching it up. The resulting scar had therefore been larger than it might otherwise have been. Over the years it had remained an angry purplish-red.
I stared at it now. It was little more than a virginal blush.
Mighty peculiar.
I swivelled in my chair to look out at the house across the road. The gates were closed. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the chain and padlock were back in place. I turned back to my mother. What did she know about that house?
The abrupt movement caught my mother’s attention, and she returned from the place in her head where I hadn’t been able to follow. Didn’t particularly want to follow.
“What?” she rasped.
“The house across the road is up for sale,” I told her.
“Is it?” Her voice lifted with surprise.
I nodded.
“After all this time?” My mother asked. “Has she kicked the bucket then?”
I raised my eyebrows. “I have no idea. I assumed you’d know.”
My mother wriggled her shoulders, shuffling down the bed slightly. “I haven’t seen her for years. Not that I ever saw much of her. An original recluse that one.”
I had to agree. “There is someone over there though. A young woman. Granddaughter maybe?”
My mother curled her lip, the way she always had when she thought I was saying something exceptionally stupid. “It won’t be a granddaughter. She never had any family.”
“How can you know that?” I asked, irritated by her dismissal of my suggestion. She hadn’t seen the girl. I had. “Have you ever, in the whole time you’ve lived here, even had a conversation with her?”
My mother looked at me, her eyes guileless. “Once or twice. A long, long time ago. When we first moved in here.”
Her admission surprised me on a variety of levels, and my heart skipped a beat. Firstly because my mother had spoken to the mysterious woman across the road, when I’d always assumed nobody ever had. Secondly because the ‘us’ she referred to had to mean my mother with my father. I hadn’t exactly moved into number 27, I’d actually been born in the house, in this very room where we now sat. But primarily because my mother never ever talked about the past—not about my father, not about Ian, and not about me.
I decided to tread carefully. “She told you she didn’t have any family?”
I watched my mother cast her mind back to a conversation she must have had decades ago and paid little attention to. It lay blurry in the past, like a photo taken out of focus. “I’m not sure I can recall exactly what she said,” she offered finally. “I can’t remember the script, only the meaning.”
Confused, I leaned forward. “Meaning? Of what she said? What did she say?” I corrected myself before my mother could give me that look of hers again. “What was the meaning of what she said?”
My mother frowned, searching her memory once more. Then puffed her cheeks out. “I don’t think she was all there, even then.” She tapped weakly at the side of her own head, the universal sign for someone slightly crazy. Then she thought some more. I waited for my mother to grasp a straw and offer it to me. Finally she said, “I was pregnant. With you. She seemed oddly entranced by that. Come to think of it, that’s when we had most of our conversations, during the last three months of my pregnancy. You know, when I started properly showing. That’s when she took an interest. Used to ask me about how I was. The really weird thing is, after that, nothing. We’ve probably spoken only three or four more times in the past forty odd years.”
So she’d started off quite friendly towards my mother and then cooled towards her? “What the hell did you say to her to alienate her?” I couldn’t help the note of triumph. Score one for me. Confirmation—not that I needed it—that my mother was indeed a bitch.
But she protested her innocence. “I can’t think that I said anything to upset her.” She sniff
ed, her eyes getting that distant look once more. “In fact, I took you over, when you were about a week old. I thought she might like to meet you in person. I knocked and she came to the door, but she wouldn’t invite me in.”
“Had she ever invited you in?” I couldn’t imagine my mother and the woman across the road having anything in common, far less getting cosy in a living room over tea and biscuits.
“No,” my mother admitted. “All of our conversations were either in the street or while she stood on the steps. I mean, she was already old back then. Walked with a stick.”
My mother would have a better grasp of exactly how old the woman had to be, given that she had been an adult back then. “How old would you say she was?”
“My goodness, now you’re asking.” Mother screwed her face up, thinking hard. “It is difficult to say … but I’d have put her in her seventies then. Mid to late seventies. Maybe older. She had wrinkles on wrinkles, as I used to say about my own grandma when I was a child.”
I felt a warm flush spread out from somewhere in my solar plexus. My mother talking about something personal from her own past? This woman had locked herself down so tightly, she had never shared jack shit with me in four decades.
But I halted the fuzzy feeling dead in its tracks when I reconsidered what she’d said. “That’s impossible,” I contradicted her. “If she was in her seventies then, she’d be over 120 now!”
“Well that’s why I asked whether she’d finally kicked the bucket. You’d imagine that she’d been put out to pasture years ago.”
“Well, yes.” It all seemed highly improbable to me. Maybe we were at cross purposes. Perhaps there had been more than one woman living in that house over the past few decades, and we’d just missed the part where the previous one had died or moved on and been replaced with a new face.
“I don’t suppose you know what she was called?” I asked my mother, not holding out much hope, but her eyes brightened.
“I do as it happens. I remember it very well, because it was one of the first things she said to me.”
“Go on,” I said, amused by her triumphant tone.
“Isabelle Cadwallader.”
I sat up straight, my mouth dropping in astonishment.
My mother continued. “It was the way she said it. Very proper. ‘Isabelle Cadwallader’, she said. Oh and that’s right. She said, ‘my father is John something Cadwallader, of the Brighton or Bristol or somewhere something Cadwalladers’.”
‘Isobel or Isabelle?’ I’d asked my mother, but she couldn’t remember and didn’t consider there to be much in the way of a distinction there.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
I stood in front of the locked gates, peering through the railings at Oakview Villa. The familiar wisp of grey smoke curled up into a milky-white sky. No sun today. Gloom settled over me too, thick and scratchy like a wool blanket. Dead leaves, dried to husks, scampered around the ground, scratching at the path and then gathering at the foot of the steps leading to the front door.
That front door had to be the same one that had come with the house. Good and solid, but now as dried out as the leaves that scattered on the breeze.
One good kick would drive it inwards.
No sign of life anywhere. I hadn’t really expected there to be.
Isabelle or Isobel?
The women had to be related in some way. Unless the Isobel I had met the previous evening was playing an elaborate hoax of some kind. But why bother, if the only other person involved was me?
As I loitered in front of the gates, the postman strolled up the road, shuffling through his letters and small packages. As he reached me, he looked up and smiled cheerfully. “Morning.”
“Morning,” I echoed, and he nodded and moved on. Nothing to deliver at Oakview Villa.
“Excuse me?” I stopped him, and he turned back. “Do you do this round regularly?”
“I do. Have been for fourteen years on and off.”
I indicated the house in front of us. “Have you ever delivered anything here?”
He scanned the building, his eyes crinkling, and shook his head. “No. I don’t believe so.” He waved a pile of letters at me. “Sometimes we have to deliver circulars, and if the gates are open I’ll put one through the letterbox, but to be honest I don’t believe anyone has lived here for donkeys’ years.”
I pointed up at the swirl of smoke. “Someone has a fire going inside. I see that quite often.”
He shrugged, nonchalant, not particularly interested and obviously busy. “I can’t help you there then. Sorry.”
I watched him walk away, heading towards the big houses on the park end of the street. He had to duck to avoid the For-Sale sign. It had now listed so far over, the only thing keeping it upright was the railings.
Which reminded me… I wanted to check out the listing. No time like the present. I crossed the road and headed inside to retrieve my phone.
Over a cup of tea in the kitchen, I scrolled through the listings for Albright Estate Agents, eventually locating Oakview Villa. As expected it had a hefty price tag attached although offers were invited. To my disappointment, the available information about the property was limited – there were no floor plans and no internal photos. I tutted in annoyance.
Call us for more information, the website instructed me. So I did.
“Albright Estate Agency. Good afternoon. Leigh-Anne speaking. How may I help you?” The bright breezy voice of a young woman sang down the phone with exuberant professionalism.
“Oh, hi there,” I started, my voice sounding strangely breathy, while butterflies flitted around my stomach. I realised in surprise that I felt oddly nervous. “I was just looking through the properties on your website and I was quite interested in one you have listed. Let me see…” I pretended to thumb through some paperwork. “Oh yes. Oakview Villa on Park Close.”
“Park Close, Exeter, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Oakview Villa?” I listened to her typing, and then clicking a mouse a few times. “Bear with me, my computer is a little slow this afternoon.” More clicking. “Oh yes. Here we are. Quite a new listing. How can I help you with that?”
“Do you have any interior photos?” I asked. “I was wondering about the state of the property inside, you see?”
“Yes. Yes.” Then, “No. We don’t appear to have any photos of the inside at all.” Leigh-Anne’s tone registered disbelief. More clicking.
“Will you be getting any?”
“As far as I know we haven’t been able to get access to the property yet.”
“Can I arrange a viewing then?” I asked, suddenly—and probably irrationally—annoyed with this young woman. Did she want to sell the house or not?
“One second,” she said, there was a click followed by dead air. I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table while I waited for her return. Eventually the silence was replaced by the sound of the office behind her and the distant rumble of traffic on the high street. “Hello again,” she said. “Sorry to have kept you. I’ve just spoken to Mr Albright, and we are unable to arrange any viewings at this time.”
Was she for real? “Has it been sold?” I wanted to know whether Isobel and her father were the new owners.
“That seems unlikely. It’s only just gone on the market.”
That was no answer. “Is the house for sale or not?” The situation was quite ridiculous.
I heard more tapping as Leigh-Anne searched for information from her database. “To be honest,” Leigh-Anne now sounded puzzled herself, “we’re not entirely sure.”
“Surely you can contact the owner or whoever it was that instructed you to sell the house in the first place and ask for more details?” I asked, a definite snarkiness to my tone.
Leigh-Anne laughed, trying to diffuse the tension. “Ah… yes. You’d imagine so, wouldn’t you?”
I slapped my forehead. “So…?”
“I can’t really help you at this time, but if you give us a few
days I can try and find out some more information for you, try and contact the owner, and we can arrange a viewing through them. Would that be alright?”
It would have to be, wouldn’t it? “Was it the old lady who owns the house who put it on the market?” I tried one last time.
“I’m sorry, I really can’t share that information with you,” Leigh-Anne replied smoothly.
Can’t or won’t, I wondered. “Right.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
You haven’t helped me at all so far, I wanted to say. “No, thank you. Goodbye.”
I hung up before she could respond and mashed my knuckles into the side of my head in an attempt to ease the tension building there.
In the past, when things began to get on top of me, I’d sometimes feared a mental breakdown. I could get trapped in a maelstrom of overthinking and anxiety. This blasted house across the road was rapidly turning into an obsession. Was I becoming unhinged?
I slammed my phone down on the table, knocking my mug and spilling my tea.
“Are you okay?” Cathy’s voice, behind me. I hadn’t heard her come in. Was it that time already?
“Fine,” I snapped, and headed to my room, leaving her to clean up my mess.
I sat on my bed staring out at Oakwood Villa. Forty-four years old and hiding out in my bedroom as I had as a child.
From the floor below came the sounds of Cathy moving around attending to my mother. Helping her wash, changing her sheets, cleaning the bedroom and the bathroom and preparing a light supper. I could hear the sound of the radio, all the way down on the lower ground floor. Cathy obviously liked music while she worked.
In all the years—since the passing of Ian at any rate—I had never heard this house sound so full of life. It seemed strangely alien.
Midnight Garden Page 5
