Click

by L. Smyth

  ‘You’ve spent so long torturing yourself,’ my mother said. ‘Not everyone is angry at you. The Bedes aren’t angry at you, Marcus will show you that. You have to learn not to be so angry with yourself.’

  This was a thin argument, and all of us knew it. My parents did not want me to go to the Bedes because they were concerned for me, but because they were concerned for themselves. They wanted to send me somewhere, but couldn’t afford it. They wanted to alleviate their consciences about what I had done – but to frame it in a way to seem as though they were helping me to alleviate mine. Marcus’s offer presented an effective, cheap solution. It was a way for them to send me away, to ease the financial and emotional strain that I was forcing upon them.

  But I didn’t mind, not really. In fact, I was excited by the idea of going. After all, I had suggested it. For perhaps the first time since I had left school, this suggestion was an active decision: a decision with reasons that I could identify.

  The main reason I’d wanted to go had little to do with either being scared of another attack, or being ambitious for my future. It wasn’t really because I was remorseful either. I didn’t – at this point – feel especially guilty about the Marina impersonation. On that front my emotions had been eroded.

  Then why? Because I wanted to be in Marina’s house. I knew from Marina’s stories about her family that Marcus’s house in England, Mosebury Court, was her childhood home. I knew that she had loved the place – she had spent her happiest years there growing up – and it served as the setting for many of her stories about her family. The place where she’d been sent after her mother died. The place where she’d fallen and broken her hip aged 8. The place where, during the summer months, Marcus had played ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the ukulele. As a result, it held a special place in my imagination. I wanted to indulge that part of my imagination. I wanted to find out more about her.

  I still do, in fact.

  Once, early in the winter term, I had sat in my room and typed her address into Google Maps. I’d found the address on her university form. I’d heard so much about her house from her stories that I had wanted to see if it matched up to what my imagination had built. I had wanted to see if, when I zoomed in, I might catch Marina or her father walking around in the garden or the street, caught unawares by the Google cameras. But as it happened, when I put in the address nothing came up. The area was too private. The cameras could only offer a distant bird’s-eye view of the village. They must have had some clause protecting it from public view.

  The idea that I would now see this house in the flesh – to walk down its corridors, to be among Marina’s old things, to see old photographs of her, to live and eat and sleep where she had lived and eaten and slept, to be in the space of the stories she had told me – all of this was irresistible to me. And it might offer, too, an idea of what those asterisks meant.

  The following weekend, we set off for Mosebury.

  iii.

  Mid-April 2014

  The question of whether Mosebury Court met my expectations was quickly settled. The answer was: it didn’t. My image of the house had been hazy in details but of a specific type: something aged and rambling – probably Georgian – that might fit in a Wodehouse novel. This was not close to the mark.

  I caught sight of it at the bottom of the hill, and (with distaste) watched it expand as we made our way up the drive. In some respects it could have looked like an eighteenth-century estate – the central building was made of limestone, with a high roof, and thick pillars forming a portico. But when you took in the shambles around it, the overall effect was a mishmash of styles rather carelessly plonked together rather than a consistent – or even coherent – design. Behind the house, in the distance, was a black plasticky pagoda and beyond that, a sleek glass rectangle that I took to be a pool house or sun room. Fountains were dotted about a lush green garden, and in the distance stood a row of marble statues surrounding a pool. As our car creaked over the gravel, I soothed myself by thinking of Marina running around those statues as a child, her hair curling out like tentacles in the sun; her short legs stumbling over the grass.

  ‘Welcome!’

  Marcus was stood outside the front door. He wore a shirt loose at the collar, a warm expression on his face. He looked handsome in the sunlight. As he approached our car, his hair shimmered a pale gold and his neck seemed very straight, his clothes very clean. My mother smoothed the edges of her skirt.

  ‘Welcome, welcome!’ he said again, the corners of his mouth wrinkling up at the edges. ‘Do come inside.’

  I got out of the car, twisting my legs carefully to one side, and deliberately avoided eye contact with him. I walked along the side of the car and turned towards the front of the house.

  ‘Marcus this is just delightful,’ I heard my mother say.

  It had taken me a second to get used to it, but now I had compromised my prior expectations, I sort of agreed with her. It was beautiful and awful at the same time. It possessed the kind of eclectic aesthetic which didn’t work at all on paper, but was oddly magnificent when you remembered who it belonged to. That combination of refined taste and sloppy vulgarity seemed to characterize the Bedes. I imagined the child Marina hovering in the spot where I stood then, smiling in her school uniform. One of her socks would be rolling down her ankle, a stray curl would dangle across her forehead, a pudgy hand rising to brush it away.

  My mother giggled and said again: ‘Delightful.’

  I noticed that her voice sounded different. She had leaned in to hug Marcus. Their heads were very close together, and as she drew her neck to the side her curls brushed against his shoulder. His arms fanned out over her back. The cuff of his shirt poked out of his jacket sleeve.

  Just then Marcus turned his head and caught me looking at him. He held my eyes for a moment, his brow wrinkling, and then he smiled warmly.

  ‘We’ve just had the gardener in,’ he said. The words were addressed to my mother, but he was still looking at me. ‘I hope you won’t be too disappointed by the inside of the house.’

  My mother laughed a lot at this, more than was normal. I didn’t like that. Nor did I like her contrived pout, the flare of her nostrils, the pointed concentration.

  ‘Really, Marcus, how long have you lived here? And all alone, or is your wife …?’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Elena is currently in the US,’ said Marcus. ‘She’s looking at some fascinating papers on human rights law actually. Usually I live over there too, but I’ve taken some time off work to focus on the foundation. And, well, processing everything.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she gasped, ‘of course.’

  I hung back and I let them talk for a while. I looked at the back of Marcus’s jacket. He didn’t seem real. Since the funeral, Marcus had felt like an abstraction, someone or something I’d dreamt up. When he turned around again I narrowed my eyes and tried hard to concentrate on individual details to convince myself that he was a physical entity. He hugged me, it felt like an act.

  ‘Don’t look so nervous, Eva,’ he said. Then he murmured something in Italian which I assumed was a greeting.

  Spreading his arms wide, he opened the large wooden doors, ushered us in, and gave us a quick tour of the downstairs section of the house. This had been the family ‘abode’, he explained, but since his marriage had ‘collapsed’ virtually no one lived in it. Marcus lived in the US most of the time, so it was only ever inhabited during the holidays, or occasionally by short-term renters.

  All the time he talked, he walked a few steps ahead, and the sound of his black glossy shoes clipping against the tiles echoed down the corridor.

  I thought it was weird that Marcus referred to his marriage as having ‘collapsed’, without bringing up the fact that his wife had also died. But it would be inappropriate to pull him up on that, I figured, and I couldn’t be bothered to face the wrath of my mother anyway so I let it slide.

  ‘I’m only here now because of the launch,’ he said
.

  To distract myself, I studied the paintings along the walls. They were eclectically, even erratically, arranged – a zigzagging line of gold-framed squares dancing over smooth cream paint. Actually, the paint aside, everything along those walls was slightly out of joint. It was as though there had been an earthquake in a tsar’s palace, jolting all the furnishings so that they tilted at a quirky angle. Most of them were paintings of the garden or the house or certain important-looking ancestors. A few of them were old childhood photos of Marina. She sat smiling on Marcus’s shoulders; she lay curled up in the arms of an old lady. I suddenly thought of her curled on the pavement. The limbs at uneven angles, the crooked feet, the face mashed to pulp, the blood pooling out of her ear, out of her nose, out of her mouth.

  I shook the thought away.

  ‘In this direction is the kitchen,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s a long way down the hall.’

  Just then a faded black-and-white photograph, positioned slightly higher than the others, caught my attention. It depicted a group of people stood outside the front of the house. I squinted and attempted to identify them. Marina, with her cherubic pudgy face and a gap-toothed grin; Marcus, young and roguishly handsome, wearing a flat cap. Then there were three other adults – a man and two women, plus two children; a girl and a boy.

  One of the women looked disturbingly familiar. I hovered in front of the photograph, studying her closely. She had red hair and a soft, full mouth. I wondered for a moment if perhaps this was Marina’s mother – if this was the vilified alcoholic who had died from cancer. Then I looked closer. Suddenly the familiar features came to the fore. The full mouth, the startling blue eyes. I realized that it was the woman I had seen with Henry at the funeral. A child version of Henry – with his triangular face, straight teeth and haunted brown eyes – was stood in front of her.

  ‘So it’s just your UK residence?’ said my mother. Her voice was nasal. ‘I’m sorry but I didn’t realize academia was so …’

  ‘We’re very lucky,’ Marcus cut in. ‘But as I said, we do rent it out. For weddings mostly.’

  I stared at the photograph and tried to piece the scene together. The red-haired woman must be Henry’s mother. The man stood next to her was presumably Henry’s father. Who, then, was the girl at the front of the row? And the other woman with blonde hair – was that Marina’s mother? I stared at her profile. She had shoulder-length dark blonde hair, a fine bone structure, large grey eyes. She looked elegant, and I supposed a little like Marina. Yet it was such a different image to the bohemian alcoholic I had imagined.

  ‘Eva,’ said Marcus suddenly, ‘is your leg all right?’

  I looked up. There was a kind of forced, playful expression on his face.

  ‘Yes,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Then come along!’ he laughed. ‘We don’t want you to get left behind.’

  I laughed back, in a similarly superficial tone, but after that I found it hard to concentrate on what anyone was saying. The photograph had disturbed me – the rest of the house now seemed charged with Marina’s presence. I looked at the smooth paint of the walls. I looked at the oak panelling, the gold-edged school portraits of Marina. I imagined her returning here after her first term at Northam – throwing her bag down on the chair, racing to her bedroom.

  ‘Here we are.’

  Marcus’s voice erupted into my thoughts again. I looked up. His hand was propped against an oak-panelled door, pushing it open. There was the arc of a soft pink palm, curving up to the flash of his signet ring.

  ‘Lovely,’ my mother said.

  Then I noticed the room he was leading us into – the cream carpet, the double bed, a landscape painting hanging on the wall by the window.

  ‘This will be where you’re staying, if you don’t mind,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s quite small, and the ground floor isn’t ideal perhaps. But it should have everything you need.’

  Listening to him say this, it suddenly struck me that I would actually be staying in the house. Soon my mother would leave; I would be alone with Marcus; I would be abandoned in this house; sleeping in this room. Alone.

  The room began to spin. I felt sick and dizzy, and the outlines of my mother and Marcus seemed to blur into one another. I looked to my mother, but she seemed very far away, and she was turning, turning away from me. Now she was fiddling with the blind, shaking her hair back and tittering at her own clumsiness while Marcus was showing her how to work it.

  Gross. I adjusted my sightlines to the blind, just as the material rolled up and exposed the dark glass behind. I saw my figure dimly reflected there. My round face, my indistinct features. I could only properly make out my matted fringe, and perhaps a pair of expressionless eyes. Peering closer, ever so slightly, I thought I saw glints of gold in them.

  After Marcus had showed me my room, we ate a small supper in the kitchen. Then he took us on a tour of the rest of the house. I let Marcus and my mother go slightly ahead of me again, as I wanted to have time to process my surroundings. Everything in that house seemed to carry the ghost of Marina: from the childhood portraits along the wall, to the stash of old CDs spilling out of the cupboards, to the positioning of the old-fashioned chairs which somehow appeared to emulate her posture. Even in the kitchen, running my hands over the cutlery, I felt a strange proximity to her, conscious of the way that the silver felt against my fingertips, imagining how it would have felt against hers.

  I hung back a little further as we ascended the stairs. I looked at the ceiling: a tall dome above the staircase, with a full chandelier dangling from the centre. It was bursting with glass droplets, and as I walked up the stairs I thought I could see my face in each curved bead, stretched out over their surfaces. I thought about how Marina had spent her final weeks in this house. What did she feel then? At what point had she decided what she was going to do to herself?

  We reached the top of the stairs, and I could see at least six rooms down the corridor. Marcus took us around each of them. I carefully studied the items inside. There was Marcus’s bedroom, which he gestured towards without showing us in. Then there was the bathroom, where the toilet was gilded and a large bath sat in a square in the corner. Beside that was a ‘steam room’. Then an upstairs playroom of some kind, and another study. Each of the rooms was painted in the same light grey hue, and had long translucent windows looking out onto the garden.

  As we walked back to the top of the stairs, I realized I had only counted five of the six bedrooms. Marcus was talking about something different, and beginning to turn towards the top step. My mother said: ‘Whoops,’ as her wine glass clinked against the bannister. A droplet of red liquid spilled on the carpet. I saw it; Marcus saw it, and we glanced at each other. My mother didn’t seem to notice.

  I looked past Marcus, who was still smiling at me. And then I noticed that behind his head there was a dark purple door, slightly ajar. My eyes tracked from the door to Marcus’s face and back again. There was a rectangle of Blu-Tack over the wood, as though a sign had been recently removed.

  ‘What’s in there?’ I asked.

  ‘In where?’ he said.

  ‘That room behind you.’

  He studied me carefully. His eyes seemed very green.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You mean Marina’s room.’

  He leaned backwards and pulled the door firmly shut.

  ‘No need to go in there.’

  iv.

  It’s hard to visualize all the stuff that happened after my mother left. If the past is a foreign country, then that section of my past is a broad wasteland without landmarks, without marks of any kind. The order of all those conversations and discoveries is impossible to pin down precisely. One thing that I do recall fairly clearly, however, is the work schedule: each morning Marcus would give me a list of things to do, and then leave me in the office. These tasks were manual, tedious, and the first section of the list usually took me a few hours. After that I would have lunch on my own and work again until the late afternoon. I had arrived
on Friday night. The event for the foundation was to be held on the Monday, which was a bank holiday.

  Saturday was to be spent doing preparatory filing; Sunday sorting physical tasks such as the table seating and printing off leaflets about the foundation. On Monday the catering staff would arrive and I would be able to go home.

  When I first arrived things were predictably awkward with Marcus. We sat in the sitting room and made small talk about the furniture.

  I gestured towards an armchair on the opposite side of the room.

  ‘Is that … a …?’

  His eyes flashed in my direction.

  ‘Sorry?’ he said.

  ‘Oh nothing.’

  ‘Sorry?’ he said again.

  ‘I just …’ I looked down. ‘That’s a nice armchair.’

  ‘Yes it is. Thank you.’

  ‘Is it old?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is it old, like an antique? Or is it …?’

  ‘That? Oh no, it’s one of Elena’s purchases. I think we bought it in France.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I looked at him – he looked back at me intently. His eyes hovered to my mouth, stayed there for a fraction longer than was normal. Then he looked away.

  ‘Your mother is charming,’ he said.

  ‘Yep,’ I replied. ‘She’s a character.’

  I felt weird. Being around Marcus was making me uncomfortable, guilty and ashamed, in a way that I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t a self-hating or repentant kind of guilt, but one that made me feel girlishly defensive. When he looked at me, his eyes seemed to linger. Sometimes he stopped mid-sentence and gazed at me, knowingly, as though I had – unconsciously – given him a signal.

  This was distracting and exhausting to think about. I just wanted him to be gone. I wanted to be in the house alone: to walk along its corridors and study the photos, to investigate the attic, to trawl through the old playroom and discover Marina’s childhood toys. I wanted to go into her bedroom.