‘But how did I know about her to see her?’ He paused and checked what he just said for sense. ‘If you know what I mean.’
‘You must have read one of your uncle’s notebooks and the suggestion of her was taken up by your subconscious?’
‘That feels a bit far-fetched.’
‘As far-fetched as a woman only you can see in a mirror?’
‘Well…’ His voice faded. The justifications that rallied in his mind weren’t strong enough to beat her use of logic. Then he remembered the album. ‘But I saw her photograph. I found an album in the other wing, and she was with Alexander. And she was just like the woman in the mirror. Explain that.’
‘You must have seen the photograph before,’ she said. ‘That could be enough to plant the suggestion.’
‘But I hadn’t. That was the first time I went into that room.’
She looked at me confused. ‘When was this?’
‘I can’t remember. Not that long ago.’
‘But, son,’ she stretched a hand out to touch his. Her face long with sadness, as if she was somehow complicit in this. ‘Your first weekend here, I found you up there. Don’t you remember?’
‘My first weekend here? You don’t work weekends.’
‘I did then. Just to be sure I could help if you needed something.’
Ranald scoured his memory and came up with nothing.
‘You say you found me?’ A nod. ‘You said you had no idea how you got into your grandmother’s sitting room. Thought you might have been sleepwalking.’
‘I did?’
‘You see, Ran. You have to forget all of this. You’ve read his memories and … and somehow taken them on. Some sort of weird gratitude? Jennie was a real person. Your great-uncle treated her appallingly, went to war and came back a changed person. He persuaded himself he had loved her and the tragedy of that twisted his mind over the years.’ She looked at him with kindness. ‘Maybe he had an undiagnosed condition. Maybe that’s what you inherited from him. I’m really not sure of any of this. But what I am sure of is that you need to leave that tragedy to die with him.’
He was aware that his physical self was wearing a mask of acceptance. He felt he had to let her think she was convincing him, but all the while his mind was rearing back from this version of events. Surely Jennie was as real as the clock on the wall, the books on the shelves, the clothes covering his flesh.
But what if Mrs Hackett was right? If Jennie was real, wouldn’t she run from him – a Fitzpatrick – not take him into her arms?
‘Right.’ Without making it seem to obvious, Ranald slowly pulled his hands away from hers. He felt heat building up in his neck and tried to understand where his new feeling of awkwardness was coming from. He broke eye contact with her and looked out of the window; read the gathering clouds in the distance and the sway of the leaves at the top of the trees.
He had heard her, but he could not allow himself to accept what she was saying. He was silent for a moment. ‘I found her letters, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Letters,’ Ranald repeated. ‘Jennie wrote to her family regularly, except the letters were never delivered. I found them in my grandmother’s desk.’
Mrs Hackett looked utterly mystified at this disclosure. ‘How on earth would they get there?’
‘You have no idea?’
Mrs Hackett shifted in her seat, and twisted again, as if that might dislodge some memory. ‘I remember Mum saying that as a young girl your grandmother was a spoiled little madam.’ She stopped speaking as if examining her thoughts. ‘Mum said she was hugely attached to Jennie and was devastated when she died.’ She took a deep, shocked breath as realisation hit. ‘Her bedroom was right next door to Jennie’s. Might she have heard her brother on his visits?’ She clasped at her throat. ‘Perhaps this was your grandmother’s way of punishing Jennie? Withholding the letters from her family? It would be easy enough for her to do. All the mail was piled on a table in the main hall for the doorman to see to. It might make sense to a girl that young: Jennie was hers, and her big brother took her away from her…’ Mrs Hackett’s eyes were full. She shook her head, back and forth, back and forth.
‘In what other family would any of that make sense,’ Ranald said, his voice heavy with certainty in the truth of what he just said.
Ranald made his way to the door, turned before he left and saw that Mrs Hackett had her mouth open as if to say something.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘You’ll think I’m a silly old woman.’
Ranald made a dismissive sound that he hoped encapsulated their previous conversations about women in mirrors and men reading to ghosts in lifts. ‘I’m sure nothing you could say would surprise me, Mrs Hackett.’
‘Alexander Fitzpatrick may have been changed by what happened to Jennie, but so was my mum.’ Her expression showed she was keen that Randal no longer thought badly about her mother.
‘I believe you, Mrs Hackett.’
‘The thing that haunted her most?’ She paled and held a hand to her throat once again. ‘Mum was feeling so bad about misjudging her that she went to visit Jennie in the asylum just before she died. She said there was no trace of that sweet little girl who first came to work for her. There, restrained on the hospital bed, hair plastered to her head, she screamed at Mum, said she would find a way to come back from the grave and make every Fitzgerald’s life a misery. She swore she would use her very last breath to curse the house and everyone in it.’
38
Ranald slept little that night, his mind a melee of images and emotions, and early the next morning he gave into his restless mood and made his way down to the library, hoping that the ranks of books would offer a soothing. It didn’t work. All he could think about was Mrs Hackett’s words and the curse of a desperate, maltreated young woman.
He walked along the rows, running his fingertips over the books, before picking one at random, taking it over to one of the sofas where he lay down and began to read.
Few of the words made any sense to him. They were just a jumble of black marks on the page, and eventually he gave up, dropped the book onto the floor, turned on his side and stared blankly at the back of the red leather sofa inches from his face.
Unable to lie still, he turned on his back and shifted across the sofa so that his head was hanging off. From this vantage point he looked over at the stacks of books. For some reason, today, they had failed to work their magic on him. He looked up the rows and noticed that from this angle the amount of each row of books he could see got smaller and smaller as they stretched up to the top, and there all he could see was about an inch of book. He turned his head slightly to see a top row that was bound in a light-tan leather, and it occurred to him that each book top was like the knuckle of a vertebrae. He sat up, head reeling. He could see bones everywhere. He was living in a house of spines.
Sometime later, when daylight was stronger and he judged that other people might be up and about, he sat behind the desk, picked up the phone and called Martie.
No answer.
He called Donna and let it ring beyond what was sensible. No answer either. Next he called Quinn to be told he was out of the office. He thought of calling War and Peace girl, Suzy. But he couldn’t remember if he’d ever taken down her phone number.
Why was he calling all these people?
No one was going to help him with this situation. What happened next was up to him and him alone.
But, if only he could just speak to someone. They didn’t even need to talk about the house or anything else, but the sound of their voice, the energy they might transmit down the line would be enough to take him out of himself, just for a moment.
That was all he needed to achieve some clarity.
Should he go back to the doctor? Renew his prescription? Chase that emergency appointment with his mental-health team? He knew he should, but he also worried that, if he did so, Jennie might never speak to him again. He swung in his seat and loo
ked out of the window. The leaves on the trees around the house had all but given up the fight. Just one or two stragglers persisted on the branch as if afraid of that final fall down to earth.
He could go to the café.
But he discounted that. They all just stared at him. They knew who he was, where he was from. What his family had done. And he could do without that silent, communal judgement.
Something was building in him, he could feel it. His fingers were drumming at the desk as if charged, as if the force of his fingertips could drive through wood. This was the moment he should take a step back. Find the app on his laptop and chart his mood.
Fuck it, he thought.
He reviewed everything he’d learned about his uncle and considered how, even from the grave, the man had tried to manipulate him into thinking he was entirely innocent of any wrong doing when it came to Jennie.
Since moving here, everyone had tried to handle him in some way.
He went through to the fitness suite, stripped off and dived in, hoping the meditative action of working his way up and down the pool would help him. After sixty lengths, his shoulders were aching and his breathing was losing its rhythm, but clarity still eluded him.
Reaching the end of the pool by the wide, glass doors, he rested on the pool edge, arms and chin resting on the side, his legs kicking in the water. He looked out into the garden and saw Danny trimming the grassy edge of a border with a pair of long-handled shears. Every now and then he would stop and look up at the sky to assess when the rain might start. It was as if this job had to be done that day and he resented the rest that a spell of rain would enforce on him.
Ranald was yet to learn the names of the wide variety of trees, bushes and flowers that Danny and the previous gardeners had planted over the years.
He’d miss all this if he had to go.
Both Donna and Mrs Hackett had said it would be better for him if he left. Mrs Hackett stopped short of saying his uncle was crazy and he would end up the same way if he stayed. But that was what she was saying, wasn’t it?
He could always sell up to a development company with whom Marcus and Rebecca had no dealings. This would mean they would still get something from the sale, but not quite so much as they wanted.
No. That’s not happening, he thought as he rested his hands on his chin. No way are they getting anything. They took advantage of his mental state and tried to convince him he’d had a hand in killing someone. They deserved nothing.
Nothing.
Rain pattered against the glass, like an introduction. Then daylight all but failed and the rain fell with surprising speed and force. He could see a bush at the side of the patio being whipped back and forwards.
He watched the storm for several long minutes, caught up in its simple beauty. I am here, it was saying, and there’s nothing you can do to gainsay me. I will stop in my own good time.
Being too still in the water for too long made him cold. He pulled himself out and walked up to the glass. Pressed himself against it with his whole body, arms up and wide, legs shoulder-width apart. But that was symbolic. If the storm was to take him he had to be outside at its mercy.
He pulled open the door and ran out into the middle of the lawn. There, he adopted the same stance and threw his head back and opened his mouth.
The wind and rain buffeted his forehead, his shoulders, buttocks and thighs: every inch of his naked flesh. The squall howled round him, circling him like a pack of baying hounds, deep-chested and hollow-bellied. The water filled his eyes and lashed into his mouth.
He let out a scream, an ululation.
‘Take me,’ he ordered. ‘Or tell me what to do.’
With the suddenness of a falling axe, the storm stopped. He opened his eyes and looked around him. He saw a spot of blue in the approaching sky. A bird started to sing, as if checking to see that its song had not been drowned.
Ranald dug his toes into the thick, wet grass and felt his connection with the earth. He looked to the side and saw the flat plate of a large leaf shine with rain and watched as drops slid from it to the earth with a slow reluctance.
What was that? he asked himself. A cleansing?
Or acceptance.
Now shivering against the cold, he remembered what Mrs Hackett said about the boy’s memorial. He went back into the pool area, roughly dried himself off and put on his clothes. Decent again, he stepped outside and walked to the far reaches of the garden searching for the spot Mrs Hackett had described.
This area of the garden was darker, less well tended. The path was slick with moss. The rhododendrons had long lost their bloom and, as he passed, he could see the small, dark stems from where the flowers would have sprouted in the spring, sticking up like withered fingers.
The path led to a small clearing with a low stone bench to one side, and there, on a waist-high granite plinth was the boy. He was naked, balanced on one foot, the other leg raised and bent at the knee. His arms were plump, positioned wide, palms down as if that pose might help him better maintain his balance. The sculptor had bent his neck so the boy was looking down and to the side at a slight angle. The aim might have been to give him a playful look, but time and weather had worked at his features, blurring them slightly, giving his smile a melancholy cast and his eyes an aspect tinged with regret.
Ranald sat on the stone bench and placed his hands either side of him. The garden was quieter here. The tall, wide trees and bushes muffled the sound around them. Even the birds in this area seemed quieter, more reserved.
He stretched his hands out to the side, running his fingertips over the rough, cool sandstone. Doing so, he noticed the seat there was worn. He tilted his head to the side, judged the shadow and saw there was a slight grove there, as if a small, narrow-hipped person had sat there through countless lonely evenings.
Who might that have been, he wondered? Alexander’s mother? Mrs Winters? It could have been anyone, really. The bench looked long-weathered and very old. It could have been well worn even before the bench was sited there.
The garden grew still around him, a cool breeze fingered through the hair on the top of his head, blowing his fringe in front of his eyes. He brushed it away and realised that the day had darkened again. In front of him the undergrowth formed an edge of dark leaf, and it was harder to distinguish one species of bush or tree from another.
The air cooled even further, the shadows thickened around him and he felt her hand take his. Warm and light, her bones as fragile as the breast cage of a wren, and he was certain, in that moment, what his future should look like. And he accepted it without a single note of regret.
I’m here, he sent her. And I’m yours.
‘You are,’ she answered, her words no more than a breath on the fine hairs on his earlobe. ‘Come,’ she said and he was aware of movement as she stood. The light flickered. Her long skirt fluttered in the wind.
He got to his feet, feeling as light as a seed borne on a breeze – truly calm for the first time in his life. An image of the library flowered in his mind. Shelves upon shelves of unread books. Bound papers and the scent of vanilla and burnt almond. Realms beyond count that he had yet to witness. The real world held at a distance by imaginings that were untarnished by fact.
‘What have people ever done for you?’ she asked.
He saw the pale silk of the inside of her forearm and the long, thin thread of a blue vein as she stretched out towards him. ‘Come. We are young yet and we have dreams and a long sleep to share.’
He walked back into the house, into the kitchen where he found a blister pack of drugs that had survived his last purge of them, and swallowed a mouthful. Guessing that he might need more, he swallowed another handful, took a drink of water and then walked to the conservatory, pushed open the door and stepped inside.
For once he used the ladders and climbed down into the water. For once he kept his clothes on. It seemed too much of an effort to take them off, and, besides, when someone found him he didn’t want t
he task to be too unpalatable.
That was him all over, he thought, as he stretched out across the surface of the water face down; considerate to the last breath. He opened his eyes, ignoring the nip of chlorine and looked down into the depths. There, from the bottom she looked up at him, her long dark hair waving in the water around her head like kelp. As the drugs began to take effect, weighted his mind and his muscles with fatigue; making it difficult for him to understand why he couldn’t breathe, and how he could restore motor function, enough to find some air, he read the look on her face.
Triumph.
39
Breathing.
That was the first thing he heard. Slow and deep and evenly spaced.
Where was it coming from? Who was it coming from?
He tried to take stock. His head and neck were cushioned and his legs pinned down by something. Cloth. He stretched his arms out, and they reached the sides of the bed with ease. Where would he find such a narrow bed? Where was he?
The breathing continued. It wasn’t him. It sounded like it was coming from the left of where he lay.
He sent a command to open his eyes. Nothing happened. He tried to wiggle a toe and felt the movement, heard the whisper of skin brushing cotton.
The last thing he remembered was a storm. Standing under a dark, bruised sky, naked as the day he entered the world, screaming into the wind. So, how did he get here, wherever here was?
Without casting a thought or command, his eyes opened onto … a white ceiling so bright it looked like it must have just been painted. Then he took in the rest of the space. A curtain rail. Walls painted an institutional cream.
Hospital.
He opened his mouth; it felt dry, which was odd given … did he end up in the pool? He had been clothed, he now remembered, which was not like him. Wet cotton like a heavy, cold second skin had encased him, weighed on his limbs. Making movement more of an effort.
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