by Diane Janes
Wendy felt herself go rigid with anger. Her cheeks burned. She stared at her daughter while Tara continued to eat her prawn curry, chewing steadily, regarding Wendy with thinly disguised contempt.
‘Tara …’ Wendy began at last. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Then I suggest you don’t say anything.’ Tara remained cool as the proverbial cucumber. ‘If I was you, I’d focus on your own problems in that department and leave me alone.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘These rooms aren’t soundproofed, you know. If you scream at someone when you’re in here, anyone who happens to be coming down the stairs can hear every word.’
Wendy looked down at her plate. The food she had eaten seemed to be churning in her stomach, trying to force its way back up her throat. She stood up slowly and walked across to the pedal bin, which she opened with her foot, slowly scraping the mostly uneaten curry downwards, so that it fell into the liner on top of a muddle of onion skins and tea bags. She would not cry. She kept her back to Tara while she put her scraped plate into the dishwasher, then got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water at the kitchen sink. She must not cry. She heard the scrape on the floor as Tara got up from the table and left the room. Wendy turned to see that her daughter must have continued to eat in silence, for her plate was empty.
During the next forty-eight hours, Wendy replayed their conversation again and again. This was what things had come to. Her family life was breaking apart. But it could be fixed. She had to believe that it could all be fixed, starting with Bruce.
When the children scrambled out of the car on Monday afternoon, she was waiting for them on the front step. Jamie returned her hug with his usual exuberance and hurled himself into the house and up the stairs. Katie, on the other hand, seemed uncharacteristically reluctant.
‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’ Wendy asked.
‘Nothing.’ Katie obliged with a kiss, but sidled into the house without meeting Wendy’s eye.
‘What’s wrong with Katie?’ she asked as Bruce approached, carrying the children’s bags, which he had paused to retrieve from the boot.
‘Nothing that I know of.’ He bent forward and pecked her on the cheek, in a gesture as perfunctory as Katie’s had been.
‘She’s not been in trouble, has she?’
‘Katie? No. I expect she’s just having one of her funny moods. You know Katie.’
‘I do … and she doesn’t have funny moods for nothing.’
‘Oh, come on … Katie’s capable of throwing a wobbler over all sorts of things. We saw a dead badger run over in the road earlier. It might have been that. If I was you, I’d ignore her and wait until she snaps out of it. Quizzing her will only make it worse.’
‘There haven’t been any more people coming to look at the house,’ Wendy said, as she stood aside to let Bruce pass and then followed him down the hall. ‘I think we should give up on trying to sell independently. Let’s just cut our losses and do a part-exchange on a new house, like you suggested in the first place. We can afford to do it and at least it would mean we were all properly together again, the way we should be.’
He didn’t answer immediately. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said eventually. ‘Tell you what, let’s just give it until the kids break up for the summer holidays. That’s barely six or seven weeks away. Shall I take these bags straight upstairs, or do you want them down here? Jamie’s is mostly stuff for the washing machine.’
Sometimes when I look back on those things that happened so many years ago, it’s hard to be sure how much of it was real. The house is real all right. The house is always there. Still standing. Solid. Permanent. Much harder to destroy a house than to destroy a life. I thought of burning the bloody place down once … but of course I couldn’t.
TWELVE
June 1981
Though Wendy had wasted no time in conveying the information about the murder of Edward Graves to Joan on the telephone, she had not actually seen her since their afternoon with Peggy Disberry so, feeling rather guilty about unreciprocated hospitality, she invited Joan to supper. She fed the younger children early (with her exams finished, Tara had already decamped to her father’s house in Solihull) and laid the table in the dining room for herself and her guest with a vase of flowers. They had three courses, including a lemon mousse dessert that she was rather proud of, decorated with tiny rosettes of piped whipped cream. Joan appeared to thoroughly enjoy herself, regaling Wendy with the adventures she had shared with George, whose work as an engineer had taken them to almost every continent.
‘I always went along,’ Joan said. ‘It might have been different, I suppose, if we’d had children, but as it was only the two of us, we could be flexible. We scarcely had what you could call a permanent home in almost thirty years. The place we stayed longest was Oakville in Ontario. We had a lovely house there. And the Canadians are such lovely people. George used to say that I could make a home anywhere, given twenty-four hours, but then he never really cared very much where he was, so long as we had a bottle of gin and his gramophone. He loved Beethoven. The Emperor, the Pastoral Symphony … I think he’d have been happy sitting on a packing case, so long as we got the gin flowing and the gramophone records on.’ She laughed indulgently, as if contemplating the foibles of a mischievous toddler.
‘The house in Oakville was one of the few where I had time to plant things in the garden and see them come up. Our garden in Surat was a marvel, but sadly we were only there for four months …’
They took their coffee into the sitting room, where Wendy continued to listen as Joan moved seamlessly about the globe. She felt as if Joan’s life had been lived on a fast train, while her own had consisted mostly of standing on the platform, waving a hankie as the train ran through. Only when the hour approached eleven did Joan return to the subject that had first brought them together.
‘The inhabitants of The Ashes have always been stay-at-homes,’ she said. ‘Here for the duration, as it were. Except for you. Barely a year … but we must go wherever life takes us. Has anyone made you an offer for the house yet?’
‘Not so far, no.’
‘Didn’t you once tell me that you and your husband could be eligible for a part-exchange scheme?’
‘We could.’ Wendy hesitated. ‘We’d lose out a bit financially doing it that way, but it’s a possibility. Bruce was very keen on the idea at one time, but he seems to have lost interest in it. He said we should keep trying for a buyer ourselves until the schools break up, and when I mentioned it again on the phone last night, he said something about holding out until the end of the school holidays. For some reason he’s completely gone off the idea.’
Joan’s face took on a serious expression. ‘If I were you, my dear, I’d talk him back into it. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Peggy Disberry said, and in your place I would get myself down there to be back with my husband as soon as possible. Well, I must be going.’ She pushed herself up using the arms of the chair. ‘Look at the time! Dear me, I have gone on and on … and I have to be up for a dentist’s appointment at ten in the morning. It’s just a check-up, fortunately.’
Wendy stood up too, smiling and saying what a nice night it had been and how they must do it again. As they exchanged farewells, Joan leaned forward, unexpectedly placing her hands on Wendy’s shoulders and brushing her lips across Wendy’s cheek, something she had never done before. Wendy stood on the front step and watched Joan reverse her car down the drive, saw the arc of her headlights as she straightened up in the road, and then the tail lights, no more than a red glow through the hawthorn hedge as Joan’s car headed away up Green Lane. She wondered what Joan had meant about Peggy Disberry.
Three days later the telephone rang mid-morning, interrupting Wendy in the act of hoovering the sitting room.
‘Mrs Thornton?’ It was no one she recognized.
‘Yes? Hullo?’
‘My name is Fiona Huntley-Wilkes. We haven’t m
et, but I believe you knew my aunt, Joan Webb.’
Wendy instantly grasped the implication of the past tense. ‘Yes, I do. I did. Has something happened to Joan?’
‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you, but she was killed in a car accident on Tuesday morning. She was on her way to the dentist and there was a lorry coming down the hill in the village. It was her right of way, but his brakes failed and the lorry just came straight out of the side road and shunted her car into the wall. If it’s any comfort, they believe she died instantly.’
Fiona Huntley-Wilkes sounded almost dispassionate. It occurred to Wendy that hers must be one name on a very long list of people who had to be told. Joan’s niece must have said these same things so many times now that it had become hard to invest them with meaning. ‘The accident was on the local news, but no names were mentioned, so you mightn’t have connected it with Auntie. I don’t know how well you knew her,’ the voice continued. ‘But my sister and I are her next of kin and we’re going through her address book, telling everyone. Her funeral is on Monday at the crematorium. That’s what she wanted. She’d left instructions. Oh … and it’s family flowers only, please.’
Wendy fetched a pencil and took down the details like an automaton. The time of the funeral, the address to send donations in lieu of flowers. She didn’t tell her caller that Joan had been to supper the night before she died. It was hard enough trying to stifle the tears as it was.
It was only when she replaced the handset that she realized she must have been talking with one of Elaine Duncan’s granddaughters. Someone who, with Joan’s address book open before her, must have realized that she was speaking to the person who now lived in her grandmother’s old home. Funny that she had made no reference to it. Well, perhaps there was no reason why she should. She was probably too busy for small talk. She would have a lot of people to call.
Poor Joan. Tears welled in her eyes as she returned to the hoover. When she switched it back on, she realized that it wasn’t sucking properly and, on checking, she found that the bag was full. A tear overlapped her lower lid and dripped on to the vacuum cleaner as she removed the bag and headed for the kitchen. The pack of refills was normally kept on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard, but when she opened the door and reached up, she found that they had somehow got pushed towards the back of the shelf, so that her questing fingers only made contact with the polythene packaging. When she attempted to get a grip on it, she only succeeded in sliding it further away.
‘Dammit,’ she hissed. No one but Bruce was tall enough to reach things at the back of the top shelf without standing on something.
She was about to carry a chair across when she had another idea and instead grabbed a fish slice from the jar of utensils alongside the hob. Angling it until contact was made with the back wall of the cupboard, she brought it down and pulled forward. She scarcely had time to appreciate that there was more resistance than might be expected from a lightweight pack of hoover bags, when both the bags and a second object came hurtling towards her head, forcing her to take swift, evasive action. The unexpected item smashed against the floor, shattering glass across a wide area and splitting two bits of wood apart at a corner joint.
For a second Wendy was puzzled, but then she recognized the wooden frame amid a sparkle of broken glass as the picture Peter had given her all those months before, when he had found it in the attic. What on earth was it doing in the kitchen cupboard? She supposed that one of the workmen had seen it lying about and tucked it on to the top shelf of the cupboard to get it out of the way while they did some job or other, and then it had been unknowingly pushed to the back by the insertion of the pack of hoover bags. And now there was another mess to clear up …
She took up what was left of the frame and carefully picked away the remnants of glass. The photograph of the smiling young man was easily extractable now, and she slid the image free and automatically turned it over, wondering if a tentative identification might be available. The writing on the back was faint, the silvery grey remainder of a pencil dedication: To Dora from Johnny with all my love.
Wendy gave a little gasp. Oh, Joan … Oh my goodness. This surely must have been the local boy about whom Peggy Disberry had spoken. A photograph hidden under a loose board in the attic, where Dora’s disapproving parents would not find it. Where no one had found it, not for over forty years. Hadn’t one of the children said, on that very first day when they all came to view the house together, that attics were always full of secrets, or something of the kind?
As she fetched the dustpan and brush to clean up the glass, she wondered whether she had been directed to break the photo frame, today of all days, just after hearing the news of Joan’s death. Bruce would have dismissed it as a coincidence, but so many aspects of her relationship with the house and its past seemed pre-ordained. Look at the way she had come into the money in the first place; it was as if she had been meant to have the house … as if her fate had been tied to it. She double-bagged the glass before putting it into the bin, moving about the kitchen like an automaton. Could there be other clues up in the attic? Things Peter hadn’t found? After all, he had only discovered the photograph by accident. It wasn’t as if he had been searching up there. It wasn’t as if anyone had ever searched up there.
Though the electricity supply to the attic had been restored, the provision of lighting did not amount to more than a couple of bulbs, suspended from wires which hung from the ceiling: good enough not to fall over anything, but no good for a proper search. Wendy armed herself with the big torch, checking the batteries before she mounted the stairs to the upper landing.
At the attic door she hesitated, just as she had done that night when she’d thought she’d heard someone moving about up there. Bruce was probably right about that. Old houses always creaked, their woodwork subject to changes in temperature and humidity. She opened the door, switched on the light and slowly mounted the stairs.
Up in the attic, her footsteps echoed around the large, relatively empty space. So far, they had made little use of its storage potential. The cardboard boxes containing the Christmas decorations were up there, and some boxes of old toys which should rightly have been donated to the Scouts jumble sale but had somehow been overlooked. There were a couple of slowly deflating lilos leaning crazily against the boxes of toys, probably the result of some sleepover in Tara’s den, but that was about all. There was nothing to be afraid of. Wendy moved around the perimeter first, shining her torch across one patch of brickwork after another, looking for any possible cranny which a young girl might have utilized to conceal love letters or a diary, but nothing presented itself. When she reached the furthest corner from the stairs, she thought she heard voices, whispering. She turned back so that she was facing into the room.
‘Who is it?’ she asked. ‘What do you want?’
She stood for a few moments, feeling foolish in the silence. It was probably just the wind on the roof slates or something. And yet there had been so many rumours of ghosts.
‘I want to help,’ she said aloud.
Laughter? Surely, that had been the sound of laughter, faint but definite? A moment later, she caught the faint whoops and shouts of some boys, passing in the road outside, probably on their way home from school for lunch. That must have accounted for the other noises too. They were just sounds coming in from outside. Kids being loud. Maybe. For an unheated space it was surprisingly warm. Airless, too.
When her search of the walls produced nothing, she turned her attention to the floorboards. So far as she could remember, Peter had implied that he’d discovered the hidey hole by accident, having trodden on a loose board. She tried to remember exactly what he had described, as she crossed and recrossed the attic floor, hoping to identify the place. No boards sprang up when she stepped on them, or even seemed particularly rickety. Think, think, what had he told her about the place where the picture had been? Then it occurred to her that it must have been a short section of wood. A young girl couldn�
��t have lifted the kind of long planks which made up most of the attic floor. She began to search again, this time looking for shorter sections of wood, of which there were very few. Only half-a-dozen and none of them loose … But of course, Peter would have nailed the board back into place … and here was a length of board no more than a foot long if that, held in place by nails which were much shinier than those holding the adjacent boards in place. As she headed down the attic stairs in search of Bruce’s tool basket, that strange laughter came again, sounding uncannily as if it was coming from within the attic itself, though she knew that it must really be seeping in from outside.
Peter had done his work well and Wendy found it impossible to extract the nails, which had been hammered home flush with the wood. Next she attempted to work the prongs of a claw hammer into a tiny gap at the end of the short board, but there wasn’t enough room and eventually she had to use a narrow metal file, which dug painfully into her hands as she attempted to prise the end of the board up. When the nails eventually loosened their grip, the board jerked upwards so suddenly that Wendy was all but thrown backwards. Once she had recovered her balance, she held up the end of the board with one hand while holding the torch in the other, angling it so that it shone into the little cavity where Peter had almost certainly located the photograph of Johnny. She was astonished to see that he had missed something. It appeared to be a string of beads. She reached in and picked it up in order to get a proper look, expecting something dulled with time, another keepsake given to Dora by her forbidden boyfriend.
‘No …’ She whispered it. It was hardly a word, more of a groan.
The beads had lost none of their modern brightness. She stood the torch on the floor and used a finger of her spare hand to twist them until they lined up the right way round and spelled out their owner’s name: Leah.
‘Oh God, oh God,’ she whispered.