I helped Chiara put her sheets onto the warmed mattress, pulling them tight, tucking them under.
We sat for a minute on the bed.
‘It’s going to be odd seeing Louise after all this time,’ she said. ‘Can you believe she’s been in Oz for two years?’
‘I know. It’s weird.’
‘I wonder if she’ll look different. I suppose we’ve all changed. Two years older and me with my bump.’
‘It barely shows yet. You look gorgeous. Blooming.’ I kissed her cheek.
Chiara smiled, stood up and wandered to the window. ‘I bet there’s a great view.’
‘Yes. Wait till the morning!’ I said, then wished I hadn’t. Something about that sentence filled me with unease. But why? I was here, in my aunt’s old home, that I’d always loved, with my best friends and Frank’s little dog. Nothing to worry about. I would be the new woman painter – replacing my aunt – with a dog and a house by the sea. An image I’d always dreamt of for myself. I looked over my shoulder three times, though, just in case.
‘How long did your aunt live here?’ Chiara asked when we were back downstairs. She was moving about the kitchen, picking things up and looking at them, curiosities from another era – a quilted tea cosy, the aluminium pans people no longer used. A glass egg timer filled with sand. Everything had May’s mark on it; she had painted her glasses, made candle holders out of pottery and decorated them in her distinctive style, pretty muted colours, reflecting the sand and sea grass, the sky outside. Ochres, lilacs and blues.
‘As long as I remember. My very earliest memories are of holidays down here with May. But listen, it’s late,’ I said. ‘You must be starving. Let’s have the antipasti and we can eat properly as soon as Louise gets here.’
‘I’ll make Bellinis for those who aren’t up the duff!’ Chiara said. ‘Ooh look, you got artichoke hearts. And Parma ham. I’ve taught you something. I brought the pudding, like you asked, a tiramisu.’
Luckily, since I wasn’t much good in the kitchen, Chiara was the greatest cook I knew. Yet she hardly ever ate a thing. Her baby bump barely showed though she was over eighteen weeks gone. The not eating was something I knew not to mention. She covered it up by feeding everyone else.
‘Babes, you’ve spilt something on your dress,’ Chiara said. ‘Oil, I think.’
I looked down and was startled to see that there was a dark stain across my hip. I must have spilt something on it as I got the food ready. My stomach turned over, my pulse began to race again. Anxiety, with no obvious focus. Just that uneasy feeling that threatened to spoil my weekend.
‘Bugger!’ I said. ‘ I’ll stick it in the wash.’ My mouth was dry. ‘Could you just light these candles, while I change?’
Upstairs I pulled the dress over my head. It was mad to feel anxious – my friends were here, everything was good. Yes, I’d left Finn, but that was something I’d been planning for months. I’d forgotten to switch off the radio and the presenter burbled on in the background. Something made me tune in to the next item on the news.
‘Police are appealing for witnesses after a hit-and-run incident on the A1095. Anyone on the road at approximately eight thirty this evening and who might have seen the pedestrian, who is in hospital in a critical condition, is asked to come forward.’
I stood, rooted to the spot. The anxiety I’d barely registered, my damp palms. It was all slotting into place. The car had jolted. Veered sideways. There had been oddly shaped shadows on the road behind me.
But I’d ignored the voice that urged me to turn round and check.
I hadn’t gone back. I hadn’t gone back.
CHAPTER THREE
Aunty May died too soon. Not age-wise, although I’m learning that however long a life, it is never as long as it could have been.
May was my mother’s much older sister and I loved her. It was six months since she’d died. She’d been in my life for as long as I could remember so I’d thought she would be here forever. I’d been planning to visit her the weekend I got the news.
‘We didn’t know, none of us knew she’d go and die,’ my brother Ben reassured me, but it made no difference. I wanted to wind the clock back. I had put off visiting May, the last weekend of her life, to spend a day shopping with Chiara! I’d thought I could go the following weekend and was now fighting the belief that if I’d gone I would have been able to prevent her dying – ever.
At May’s house I always had to touch the gatepost the right number of times, check outside the picture window before sitting down anywhere, look over my shoulder three times whenever a bad thought came into my head. Talismans I’d thought up as a child and still relied on to keep people – my aunt in particular – safe.
I knew these things made me look odd – tapping, counting, moving things into the right position. Finn thought they were funny, light things. He laughed at me. He didn’t know how I depended on them – especially when it came to anything to do with May.
‘You’re taking steps down bonkers alley here, Ellie. Tapping a gatepost, avoiding cracks in the pavement, sacrificing lambs – none of these things affect what was going to happen anyway. You should have been an ancient Greek. Or a character from the Old Testament.’
I knew this. I wished I could be more rational.
They found Aunty May on her bed, two empty pill bottles beside her, a hastily scrawled note saying she had simply had enough, that she had reached her journey’s end.
When I heard she had left me her house it felt like a strange, mixed blessing. I was grateful, of course I was – no one gets to own a house at my age unless they have extremely wealthy parents who can fork out for them. But it was all tangled up with the feeling I’d got something badly wrong. The owning of it was tinged with guilt. Why did I deserve the house? And why hadn’t she left it to my brother as well?
It was clear my mother wasn’t too happy about it either.
‘You must sort it out immediately and put it on the market,’ she said. She was so agitated, so restless when it came to anything to do with Aunty May. ‘Before it gets damp over the winter.’ She was quite adamant about it.
‘Sell it, repay your student loans early. Get the debts from round your neck. You might want to start a family one day, but if you don’t clear them you’ll be forty before you know it. And still in the red. You think you’ve got forever. You haven’t.’
‘It’ll need a lot of maintenance, Ellie,’ my father said. ‘For once I agree with your mother! You’d be better off putting it on the market the minute we get probate and letting someone else sort it out.’
‘I’m worried Aunty May would be upset if we sell,’ I said. ‘Surely she left it to me for a reason?’
It didn’t occur to me then that my parents were reeling, as we all were, from May’s suicide, that getting shot of her house was their way of obliterating the pain of this, the shock.
My brother seemed unfazed by my inheriting it, however, and offered to help me sort it, get rid of May’s clothes and other personal things – bottles of shampoo, packets of paracetamol – that had been left as if in suspended animation, in her kitchen and bathroom.
‘We’ll clear it up, it’ll be a way of putting Aunty May to rest,’ Ben said.
Perhaps May had left me the house because she and I were both artists, something that had always bonded us. And because she knew I would hang on to it, value its quirkiness, its idiosyncrasies, however impractical, while if she left it to my mother – or Ben even – it would have been a photo in an estate agents’ window before the earth had settled on her grave.
The house still contained her in those first few weeks after she died, back in October.
I thought the house was watchful, or perhaps it was Aunty May who was watchful. I stood in the front room on the day after her funeral, and looked out over the sea grass to the shingle dunes.
I saw my child self holding Aunty May’s hand, with my little brother Ben, moving west into the wind with our heads bent and our buckets
and crabbing lines clasped to our chests, our voices snatched up and carried out to sea. Seagulls swooping and crying overhead. I remembered perfect evenings that went on forever, when it never grew dark, the light simply fading as the stars appeared one by one, and May allowed us to stay up, our bare feet curling into the cooling sand. I could feel the warmth from the fires we built with driftwood. May baked potatoes wrapped in foil on them. I remember burning my fingers trying to pull them out, the sweaty white flesh searing my tongue. I could remember the white ashes that spiralled up when finally we had to admit that the dark and the cold had beaten us and it was time to dowse the flames.
As I stood, cherishing those memories, the house stirred, creaked. I don’t believe in ghosts, but that day, I felt Aunty May’s presence. Her breath and her footfall. She had not left yet, or perhaps the house had not released her spirit. The wind chime placed on the back porch (it would have been rattled to death by the easterly winds on the front) tinkled as if she’d just passed, even when not a breeze stirred the air. And in the fine veil of sand that coated the worn boards and linoleum inside I could make out the fresh imprint of her slippers.
As I moved into the kitchen, something fell onto the counter – rocked there for a moment, making that faint, regular sound a coin makes as it spins to a halt. I went across to peer at what had dropped but couldn’t find a thing.
There was the corner of something jutting from one of the floorboards. An edge of fabric. I pulled at it and wriggled it and tugged at it and at last it slithered out. It was a child’s bib, made of cotton with a hand-painted picture on the front – in May’s distinctive style, a fabric painting of a small lopsided figure with a crooked leg outside an old house with the words ‘Crooked House’ above it, and the words from the rhyme inscribed beneath it. Where had I last heard that song? Even in the Key Stage One classes at school we didn’t sing nursery rhymes any more – it was all calypso or African call and response chants or Indonesian folk songs. But I could hear a voice sing quite distinctly: ‘There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile and he found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.’
The bib. It might have been mine, or Ben’s. Perhaps it had lain hidden under the floorboards since I was a child and first came down to stay with her?
I tucked it into a drawer in the duck-egg blue, Fifties sideboard that had been there forever. Ben and I would sort these drawers later. They were stuffed full of tea towels and linen and trinkets that didn’t fit on the shelves – napkin rings and half-used birthday cake candles and biscuit tins rusting at the edges with faded pictures on the top. I picked up one of these tins, with a Victorian reproduction of a little girl on the lid, and prised it open. Inside was a piece of paper inscribed with the words ‘A piece of you’. I lifted it up. Underneath, a lock of fair hair. I gagged, put the paper back and the lid back on the box, stuffed it into the drawer and closed it.
Beside me, the curtains moved almost imperceptibly.
I took a step back. Let some quiet seconds go by. Someone, I was convinced, stood in the doorway through to her back room. I thought I saw a shadow. I had the sense of a presence. But when I turned, there was no one there.
I knew without question that May hadn’t fully left yet.
So to clear out her paintings and canvases and to sell her house to a stranger seemed brutal to me. Like a violation of everything that made May who she used to be, who she still was.
That night I’d shown Ben the bib and, gingerly, the hair, and he laughed and reminded me that May had always been a bit eccentric, although we knew her so well, it hadn’t seemed so to us.
‘Always collecting odd bits from the shore. Bird skulls and dried starfish and bones for her art. And remember when she took us right out in that tiny rowing boat, onto the sea, and you were crying and saying you wanted to turn back and she seemed not to hear you? And in the end I shouted at her and she did finally turn the boat around?’
The memory began to surface, fleetingly bright and hard, before it shimmered and slipped away again.
‘I thought we were going over the sea to France,’ Ben said. ‘I wasn’t afraid that she was taking a risk, I was afraid because I thought there were dragons across the sea!’ He laughed. Now Ben mentioned them, other things began to come back to me.
Moments when May seemed to not be there. Times when she kept us up so late at night it began to feel wrong, as if she had simply forgotten that children need to go to bed. Once she had fallen asleep herself and Ben and I were still playing around her and I had taken it upon myself to take Ben up to bed. I must have been six or seven then, and Ben only three or four.
A sort of darkness, underlying the things that we did that were more exciting than anything I’d known before.
The house had lain empty over the winter. It had needed time. I had needed time.
After Christmas I had come down with Finn a couple of times. I didn’t know much about houses, how quickly they deteriorated when no one inhabited them. As if they languished from grief themselves. Finn didn’t know much either, I was soon to discover. I told my mother not to worry, though, that we’d do our best to maintain it. We aired it – throwing open windows – and went around sweeping away cobwebs and mouse droppings and the dead insects that collected far more quickly than I would have imagined.
I painted the back porch.
Finn managed to fix a lock on the back door. He put up a banister on the rickety stairway, using, ingeniously, an old broomstick. He was resourceful like that, any old bit of driftwood and he could turn it into a shelf, or a stool, a table. May had met Finn, and she had liked this about him. His inventiveness. Now he hung curtains on pieces of rope he found down by the fishing huts. I used to love this about Finn too when I’d first moved into the Mile End flat. His makeshift constructions – everything he touched he could turn into something useful, or into a piece of art.
But it was dawning on me that I didn’t want this here. If this was going to be my house I wanted to do it my way, bring something different to it, bring new life into it. I wanted to renovate it with my own, more minimalist ideas. It was the first time I’d ever owned something that was completely mine. And I wanted to make the decisions.
‘We don’t need money, we don’t need to consume,’ Finn argued, bending a piece of wire into a loo-roll holder for the downstairs bathroom. ‘Most things can be constructed out of recycled found-objects.’
I began to find his presence irritating, stifling. He never gave me any space.
‘Show your mum you can look after it and she’ll stop badgering you to sell up,’ Finn said, sitting outside on the dune, smoking a roll-up. That was when he’d put his arm round me and said the words in my ear. The words that tipped everything over the edge so I knew it had to end. ‘We can bring our kids up here,’ he said.
And now I’d decided to come, invite friends, bring some life back into the house, to do it my way.
I wanted to let the last feather-like ashes of May’s memory fall back, to settle out there on the salt flats.
Then I could start afresh.
CHAPTER FOUR
My mobile sounded in my bag, startling me out of my catatonic state after hearing the radio news. I stared at it, as if it might explode in my face.
It was Louise.
‘It’s taken us forever. The road was closed. There was some accident, and we went on a mad diversion through the depths of the countryside. It really is the sticks out here! But we’re nearly there now. We’re in the high street by a pub. What’s it called, Guy? Oh. The King’s Head.’
I gave her directions and went downstairs to tell Chiara.
‘Great.’ She filled our glasses. Liam held his up and tiny bubbles shot out of its top in a fountain. I saw him through the golden liquid, smiling, his face distorted by the glass.
‘Congratulations, Ellie,’ he said. ‘Happy house-warming, and bloody ace job getting those paintings into the exhibition.’
Had I hit something on the road back
there? The impact had slammed my wing mirror back against the door. Who was to say it wasn’t me who had hit the man, injured him, maybe fatally, and hadn’t stopped?
The car had jerked, tilted to the left. I’d been distracted by Pepper. I hadn’t gone back.
‘Ellie?’
‘Yes?’
‘I said shall I put the pasta on now?’
‘Sorry. Yes, of course, let’s get the dinner on the go.’
No. I was being a fool. Letting irrational thoughts control me, when I’d resolved not to, any more.
A beam lit up the table in the sitting room as a car swung onto the shingle and there was the crunch of tyres and the slam of car doors, and the door burst open and Louise stood there, bleached and blonde and tall and gorgeous and we hugged each other. I realised I’d been feeling a little anxious about seeing her after all this time. Louise, like me, had continued to work as an artist, when we’d all left art college, and had emailed to say she’d sent some of her work to the same gallery, when she heard they were looking for contributors. There were only six artists exhibiting, however, and Louise hadn’t been chosen. In her shoes, I might have found this tricky, but perhaps this new man she’d met in Australia, who, by all accounts, she was madly in love with, had helped cushion the blow.
‘Louise!’ I said, and we kissed on the cheeks and hugged each other the way we’d always done.
‘I bought you these,’ Louise said. She thrust a huge bouquet into my arms. ‘Lilies for your new house!’ Her curly hair had grown long and her teeth looked very white, like the lilies.
‘You look fantastic, Louise,’ I said. ‘Even more beautiful than you already were.’
I filled a large vase with water and arranged the flowers so they fanned out, their stiff waxy petals white and bloodless, leaving a dusting of pollen on my sleeve. A vision of roadside shrines of flowers like these burst into my head. I’d had the music on loud, and I still heard a thump. Does a branch make a thump? I’d been looking at Pepper, not at the road. I hadn’t listened to the thoughts in my head that told me to turn the car around, go back, check.
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