The Stranger in Our Home

by Sophie Draper

  It was the same at the till. The assistant was all smiles with Craig as he bought his wine, but when it came to me she fell silent. As we left, I looked over my shoulder. The assistant was watching me. There was no aggression but I felt uncomfortable. I shot a look towards the butcher’s but the closed sign had gone up and the blind on the door had been drawn down. There was no sign of Angus McCready.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’

  My question seemed to take Craig by surprise. His stride slowed a pace.

  ‘Here in Derbyshire?’ I added. I opened the car door and placed my shopping on the back seat.

  ‘We’ve talked about this already. I don’t know, a few years, I guess.’ Craig rested his arms on the car roof, bottle still in one hand, looking across at me.

  ‘But you were brought up here, you said, before you moved into Lavender Cottage.’ I lowered myself onto the seat behind the wheel.

  ‘Yes, here, then Ashbourne. I left for a while, like I told you. I haven’t always lived in Derbyshire.’

  He’d opened the door and laid the bottle on the floor. I waited as he climbed into the passenger seat.

  ‘Oh. How old are you?’ I knew he was older than me, but I wasn’t sure by how much.

  ‘Hmmm?’ Craig had picked up his phone and was idly tapping on the screen.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’m thirty-four. What is this Caro, worried I’m too old for you?’

  I felt heat rising up my face. I chewed the side of my lip.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Craig was peering at his messages, clearly not that concerned. ‘Do you fancy going to the Wassail?’

  I was distracted by the about-turn. ‘The Wassail?’

  ‘The village Wassail – on Twelfth Night. It’s a tradition, you remember, don’t you?’

  I did. On the 6th of January, they held a parade through the orchards and gardens of the village. The aim was to anoint the fruit trees with cider and make as much noise as you could to chase away the evil spirits. Though most of the cider got drunk instead. It was a noisy affair in more ways than one. It hadn’t been Elizabeth’s kind of thing and I couldn’t remember ever having been. If I had, I had no desire to go again.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that – I’m not sure …’

  ‘I think it would be a great idea, meet the locals, get to know a few people. Break the ice.’

  Break the ice? Had he noticed too? The chilly reception I seemed to be getting in the village. The knuckles of my other hand clenched on the steering wheel and I felt my body tense.

  ‘Maybe.’

  He nodded, apparently satisfied with my answer. I pushed the handbrake down, released the clutch and the car slid onto the road.

  It was only later that I noticed. After Craig had gone, a quick check on Patsy he’d said.

  I’d gone back to the car to fetch that bottle of wine. Craig had sent me a text to say he’d forgotten it. The late afternoon sun was poking through the clouds, shining on the bonnet when I saw it. A continuous thin scratch, right along the passenger side of the car, from the rear wheel arch to the front bumper. Like a key held against the car, except there on the door the line morphed into letters.

  BITCH.

  The word leapt out at me. Someone had deliberately vandalised the side of my car. I’d have noticed it yesterday or this morning – it must have happened in the village, whilst we were in the shop.

  Oh God, had it been Angus? Or someone else? The locals hated me, I was sure of it now. It wasn’t just the butcher’s or the women in the Co-op, the gossips resenting a newcomer. I wasn’t a newcomer, this had been my childhood home.

  It was all of them, wasn’t it?

  CHAPTER 25

  When Craig returned an hour later, I didn’t say anything about the scratch. I didn’t want to ruin our evening and the celebrations for the New Year. I’d briefly considered calling the police, but what would they do? They wouldn’t be interested, especially on New Year’s Eve. There was no way of knowing who’d vandalised my car and I couldn’t face the fuss. But I did talk Craig out of a trip to the village pub for midnight. He seemed happy to agree. We raided Elizabeth’s drinks supply instead and drank the bottle of wine too, lying later in my new bedroom, bodies warm and tangled, only half aware of the sound of fireworks exploding in the sky above us.

  The next morning, I couldn’t get the damage to my car out of my head. After Craig left I went to look at it again, running my fingers along the scratch. It wasn’t deep but effective for all that. I felt shame, for no good reason. I couldn’t drive around in a car with that word. Could it really have been Angus? Revenge for his confrontation with Craig? Or sheer nastiness? Or was I jumping to conclusions? It could have been anyone, after all – someone who’d already been drinking perhaps, having a laugh. At my expense.

  It was Wednesday morning, the 2nd of January. Craig had rung to say he couldn’t see me for a couple of days. It came as a shock after such intensity. He had a project to finish. I said I quite understood, I had my own work to do. I held it in. It didn’t mean he’d lost interest, I told myself. We couldn’t carry on like this forever. There was a real world out there, life had to get back to normal sooner or later.

  The shops were open again and I drove to Matlock Bath to get my car fixed. I couldn’t bear to drive around with that scratch for all to see and I was lucky enough to find a garage actually open. It wasn’t a proper fix, a full re-spray was beyond my budget, and I was still agitated about it when I got back. I threw my keys on the kitchen table just as the phone rang. It jangled in my head and I went to pick it up.

  ‘Caro Crowther,’ I said, wariness vibrating in my voice.

  ‘Oh hello, is that Mrs Crowther’s daughter?’

  ‘Her stepdaughter, yes.’

  ‘Hi, it’s Hulland Ward Log Supplies. Happy New Year!’ It was a woman. Her voice sounded reassuringly normal and cheering.

  ‘Oh, hi.’ I stood up in an attempt to make myself sound more positive on the phone.

  ‘You rang.’

  ‘Yes, yes I did. Thank you. Elizabeth died a few months ago and I’m up at her house going through her papers. I found a bill for logs from your company. It’s dated the fourth of October. I wanted to know if it’s been paid?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you to check. Let me take a look.’

  There was a pause. I could hear voices distant in the background and the tapping of fingers on a PC.

  ‘Oh yes, here it is. The invoice was cancelled.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, someone rang to tell us she’d passed away. I’m so sorry for your loss.’ She paused but I didn’t reply. ‘The logs hadn’t actually been delivered yet, so it was a simple thing to cancel the order and reverse the charge. Please don’t worry yourself, it’s all sorted.’

  Now I was confused. The order had been cancelled after Elizabeth’s death and the logs had never arrived.

  ‘Please, can you tell me who rang you?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh well, I’m not sure I can. I can ask around, but I don’t think anyone in the office here would be able to remember.’

  ‘Don’t bother. It’s okay. Thank you.’

  I put the phone down slowly. Someone had been through Elizabeth’s things, had rung to cancel the log order after her death. Who? Who would have had access to her papers, to the house? One of Briscoe’s agents? I still didn’t understand about the second log order from Craig. Why would Elizabeth have done that?

  That afternoon, the doubts crept back. I was missing Craig already. Had it been too much, too soon? Had I been too enthusiastic, too eager, had it put him off? More doubts filled the void where Craig had been – about the people in the village, the rat, my car, the pear drum moving from the attic to my side that night. Danny. I didn’t want to think about Danny.

  To make matters worse, the clacking sound started up again. I checked the attic but the window was still fixed, so it wasn’t
that. It seemed to be coming from everywhere this time, in the wall, under the stairs, and I couldn’t figure it out. I searched but found nothing to explain it. Was I going mad? Was the house really haunted? Of course it wasn’t. But when I looked at the flagstones in the hall, at the bottom of the stairs where the rug had been, was I imagining that dull red stain growing? Maybe Elizabeth was haunting me. No, when I took a closer look it was nothing, just an old stain of who knew what and probably the reason why the rug had been placed there in the first place, to cover it up.

  But with the house to myself these thoughts tormented me. Memories flashed up in my head as I touched the banisters, or sat in the sitting room, or opened a door.

  ‘Look at you, Caroline,’ Elizabeth had once said. ‘What on earth have you done with that belt?’

  I’d used one of my dad’s old belts to pull a skirt tight around my waist. Trying to give my teenage self a figure. To be attractive to the boys at school, I suppose.

  ‘Really, Caroline, you’re ridiculous!’

  Elizabeth mocking my appearance, as she often did.

  Or another time when I’d come running in from the garden.

  ‘Caroline! Caroline!’

  I’d fallen in my rush to climb down from a tree. My hands were covered in mud and my hair hadn’t been brushed for a week, my trousers had been rolled up to my thighs and my knees were black and bleeding.

  ‘Look at the state of you! Do you expect to eat tea like that? You can go to bed early tonight with no supper!’

  I was already close to tears from the pain of the fall. I’d stared at her like Orphan Annie. She’d cuffed me round the ear then and my head rang as I stumbled up to my bedroom.

  My memories of Steph were more confusing. There had been too much of an age gap for us to play together, and she was gone by the time I was nine. Mostly she ignored me, but we did occasionally fight, much to Elizabeth’s satisfaction – it gave her an excuse to punish me again. Me – always me. If there was a choice between us, it was Steph who got away with it. Her own arguments with Elizabeth, however, were different. There was a bitterness I didn’t understand.

  One day, in the summer when I was seven, I was reading a book in the garden. Elizabeth had given it to both Steph and me, a shared gift at Christmas.

  ‘You know how to share, don’t you both?’ Elizabeth had said. I could see Steph frowning.

  Steph commandeered it, but months later, I’d found it in the sitting room and thought I’d take a look. It was an illustrated copy of The Lord of the Rings. I was struggling with most of the words but loving the pictures: dragons and hobbits and all those elvish runes lining the edges of each page.

  A shadow fell over me.

  ‘That’s mine!’ Steph’s hand whipped the book from my lap.

  ‘No, it’s not! It belongs to us both!’ I had the strident voice of a child for whom right and wrong is black and white.

  ‘It’s mine now!’ Steph held the book high above my head.

  I stood up and tried to snatch it back. When she laughed, I grabbed the sleeve of her dress. The fabric tore and she gave a shriek of distress. Her arm lowered and the book dropped to the ground.

  ‘You little …!’

  I dived for the book, but already Steph was there. We each held one half, pulling with all our might. I could hear the spine of the book rip.

  ‘Please, Steph!’

  A book was such a precious thing to me, even then. It would split down the middle if one of us didn’t let go. Steph wasn’t letting go. My fingers opened and I fell back on the grass with a sob.

  ‘Cry baby!’ screeched Steph, waving the book in my face. ‘Nothing in this house is yours!’ she hissed. ‘You don’t belong!’

  It was the law of possession, and who was biggest. I knew that.

  She came to me the next day. I’d heard voices, moments before, Elizabeth and Steph shouting, Steph’s voice shrill and fierce. I didn’t know what it was about.

  Steph came to my bedroom – she never did that. She walked into the room without knocking and closed the door, holding something behind her.

  I was sitting on my bed by the window, leafing through a picture book from school. I pushed the book under the pillow behind me. She didn’t react.

  ‘Hi Caro.’ She seemed oddly not herself.

  ‘Hi, Steph.’ I didn’t know what to say.

  She sat on the edge of my bed, her face turned away from the window, so I couldn’t see her expression. Her long hair fell over one shoulder and with her free hand she was fidgeting with the end of it. I wriggled back against my pillow as far from her as I could get.

  ‘You know, you and I shouldn’t fight. We’re sisters, you know that, don’t you?’

  What was she trying to say?

  She brought her hand from behind her back. It was the book from yesterday. She dropped it onto my lap. I looked at her in surprise.

  ‘It’s you and me, just you and me against Elizabeth and the rest of the world, right?’

  I didn’t reply. Being sisters didn’t make you best friends, at least not in my experience. I looked at the book in my hands, eyes darting back to Steph.

  ‘Do you remember our father?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’ My voice was just a whisper and my fingers clutched the book.

  ‘What about Mum?’ She didn’t wait for my reply. ‘No, you wouldn’t remember her, would you. You were just a baby.’

  There was a hint of contempt in the word baby. Then her face softened.

  ‘I remember her, though.’

  She seemed to think.

  ‘You and me are sisters, Caro. Elizabeth’s not our mother. Whatever happens, we should remember that.’

  Then she stood up and left the room.

  CHAPTER 26

  I hadn’t forgotten these things, I’d simply chosen not to think about them once I left Derbyshire.

  School could have been my escape. I’d loved my studies, curiosity filling me with an eagerness that earned me the name Swot. Yet school had been no better than home. The other children had sneered and shouted at me. Me, the pathetic waif in the corner of the playground, the one with no friends. They’d all snubbed me in the end.

  There’d been a new girl once, Natalia. I’d been about ten years old. Her dad was a vet, newly moved down from the Lake District. I’d liked her – she was quiet like me. She’d had a recorder and she played it for me on that first day she started at school, a shy rendition of Greensleeves. I’d thought it was wonderful, the tune liltingly romantic, like listening to a small bird singing amongst the brown solidity of the playground’s drystone walls. I asked her to sit next to me at lunch – and she did. I showed her my sketches, scribbled in pencil on the pages of my English exercise book. We even got into trouble, the two of us, for talking in class – I never got into trouble for talking, but I did that day. I was happy. For the first time in a long while, I had a friend.

  But the next day when I’d got to school, several of the other girls had already surrounded Natalia, laughing and smiling, complimenting her hair, inviting her to sit with them. She soon realised. If she sat with me, she got ignored, but if she sat with them, she was Miss Popular. Why did they do that? It didn’t take long. By the end of the week I was on my own again. That was the way it stayed, throughout my school years.

  The one memory I couldn’t recover was Danny. When I tried to think of him, my mind veered away, as if this was a place it didn’t want to go. I’d been young, and memories were bound to be vague or non-existent, but he was my blank wall – nothing. Why? Why? How could I possibly have forgotten him so completely? Now I wanted to know what had happened. An accident, Steph had said. What sort of accident? I resolved to ask her again when next we spoke, if only I could find the right way to approach it.

  In the evening, I painted, working on the commission. It was an attempt to distract myself, to unravel the terrors of the long night ahead, tossing and tu
rning, listening to every creak and groan of the house, the last remains of the snow slipping from the roof, hidden pipes singing and rattling in the wee small hours, each sound amplified in my head. It fuelled my imagination, the images transferring to paper now that the house and my bed were empty again. More versions of my swan prince burning from his nettle-spun shirt. The handless girl drifting through her orchard, cherry-red spots speckling the grass at her feet. Eostre supplicated against the earth, her face filled with love but disfigured by her downy cheeks and hare lips.

  When I did eventually sleep, I was dogged by nightmares, snatches of something I couldn’t pin down, waking to the blood surging through my veins, my body slick with sweat and a name hovering on my lips.

  Danny.

  I put off calling Steph. In the end, it was she who called me just a few days into the new year.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, peering down her camera, like a dog, nose down a badger hole.

  ‘Hello, Steph.’

  There was a short uncomfortable pause. But my state of mind wasn’t her fault. I sat myself up, speaking more cheerily.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ I said.

  ‘Me? Oh, not very much. I was back in the office yesterday.’ Her voice was bright. ‘We went to see a musical, last night.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and my boyfriend.’

  ‘You never said. Well, not much. What’s his name?’

  ‘Oh sorry, Scott. He’s a financial analyst.’

  I was right about the banker bit. Men liked Steph. As a teenager she’d always had some kind of bloke in tow. I remembered a lad she’d sneak off to meet in the hills. She’d take me too, when she was babysitting. I’d have to watch, plucking at the long grass as they sat on a bench in some bleak, windy car park, the two of them groping and kissing, oblivious to my presence. She’d moved up in the world since then.

  ‘Oh, he’s gorgeous.’ Steph laughed, that last word spoken with particular relish.