by Eve Chase
‘I just love the way it’s stopped in another era, like a pocket watch.’ Jessie takes in the wide oak floorboards – really slices of tree, nothing like the reflective laminated wooden floors in their house – the William Morris wallpaper, curling away in fruit-peel strips, dotted with pale squares where pictures once hung. Included in the sale are pieces of brown furniture, bureaus, black-lacquered plant stands, even a crocheted blanket scrunched on a chair, the kind of thing Jessie imagines women once knitted together in the village hall on rainy afternoons. ‘Just needs a bit of a tinker, and it’ll start ticking again.’
Bella lets out a low moan and leans back against a writing desk, making it wobble, a large glass paperweight sliding along its upper shelf. She picks it up and holds it to the light, where it glints dully like a fairground crystal ball. Jessie half expects to see Applecote’s history swirling within it, picnics, croquet on the lawns, girls in gingham.
‘Dad will never go for it, Jessie.’ Bella sighs, not taking her eye off the glass. ‘Way too much work.’
‘Oh, it’s a paint job,’ Jessie says, sensing as she speaks that this might be an optimistic appraisal. Her mother always did up their houses, roping Jessie, protesting, into it: money was tight, and since there was no man about to do these things, her mother simply bought a DIY manual and did it herself, only once nearly electrocuting herself.
‘A bank job. Dad says it’s a money pit.’
‘I’m happy to get my hands dirty.’
‘Very dirty?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’ Jessie realizes just how hungry she is for a challenge, some kind of project, after the warm, sweet drift of being a stay-at-home mum to Romy. She may have overstayed her career in packaging design, frustrated by the prescriptive briefs, locked in by the usual things – habit, rent and saving to buy her own flat, money she never used, invaluable now – but she misses its creativity and focus. And she can’t help remodelling this house in her mind, the family, too, seeing them both emerge like a three-dimensional model. ‘I hate those overdone country houses anyway. A home should be a bit rough around the edges.’
‘But it’s never going to be our home,’ says Bella, with sudden intensity. ‘Dad’s not going to risk moving so far from London. Not here.’
Jessie doesn’t answer. Yes, there’s a risk in moving, she decides, not least for Bella, but there is also a risk in staying where they are. In London Bella could easily float further and further away, like a balloon in the sky, until they lose her completely. She imagines herself and Will looking back at this day, thinking maybe things could have turned out differently if they’d been braver. And who says Jessie can’t reinvent a freelance career from the country when Romy’s a bit older? She’s always been struck by how many smart city women daren’t change anything – home, relationship, job – in case it destabilizes the lot, as if all those busy London lives are improbably balanced on the tiniest of points, like ballerinas, and the merest tilt will send everything crashing to the ground. She refuses to become like that.
‘Are we going upstairs or what?’ Bella puts the paperweight back on the desk a little too hard, jolting the room’s stillness. ‘I might yet find my corpse up there, you never know.’
‘You never know,’ agrees Jessie, feeling an unexpected twitch of unease.
Emerging on the attic-like top floor, it feels instantly colder and smells mustier. Old servants’ quarters, Jessie supposes. The doors are in a boarding-house line off a dark, narrow landing.
‘That’s the room,’ Bella says, in a hushed voice, pointing at a scuffed white door at the far end of the landing on the gable wall, almost hidden in shadow.
It takes Jessie a moment to realize that the walls are actually subsiding slightly towards each other, giving the impression that the room is further away than it is.
The doorknob turns reluctantly with a rasp. A soup of dust swirls in front of her, obscuring the room. Jessie feels particles settling in her hair, tastes an odd sweetness on her tongue. As it clears, the room solidifies, still and shadowy as a Dutch interior painting, its world as self-contained and ripe with meaning.
It is not a storeroom.
The thick black beams on the eaves funnel their eyes to a small porthole window made of purplish stained glass – an ornate pattern of grapes and vines – that bruises the light against the wall. There’s another window too, larger, square, with tattered umber silk curtains that drape to the floor, making Jessie think of an antique, disintegrating ballgown. Most curious of all, a sleigh-style bed, still made up: a stack of pillows, a mothy pink blanket, with satin-ribbon trim, folded at its end; a wooden school desk with an inkwell and pen-scarred lid; a mirrored dressing-table, kidney-shaped, similar to one Jessie’s late nan owned.
Jessie’s footsteps sound far too loud in here: the room feels private, inhabited. It’s like coming across a deserted old cabin in the woods, she thinks, and finding ashes still warm in the grate. She glances at Bella, who is hanging back, still standing in the doorway, long arms braced either side of it, countering the force that’s pulling her in. Her eyes are enormous, their blackness spreading, wire-tripped awake.
‘Well, this is a surprise.’ Jessie isn’t sure why she whispers. Like you do in a room where a child is sleeping. She encourages Bella forward. The dressing-table’s mirror reflects them both as smudges, half-formed future ghosts.
Bella moves cautiously into the room, running her flat palm along the faded floral wallpaper before stopping, staring intensely at the bed, panning it for meaning.
‘Do you like it?’ Jessie smiles, pleased to see Bella’s staple expression of sullen indifference replaced with absorption, as if she’s stepped out of herself for a moment. She even looks different in this room, her monochromatic beauty not modern at all.
Bella glances up, surprised, having clearly forgotten Jessie was there. ‘What?’
‘I think this room might have your name on it, Bella.’
Bella blushes, apparently caught out thinking the same thing. Sometimes, in rare, precious moments like this, Jessie glimpses the girl Bella must have been before her mother died, someone less shut off, more readable. She wishes she’d known that Bella. She’ll never give up trying to find her again.
‘If we move here, it’s yours. We can decorate it together, exactly how you like. And … and you can take the room next door as a den or something. You’d have your own bathroom up here too! Imagine that, a bath without Romy’s armada of rubber ducks.’
Bella nods absently, seeming not to be listening to Jessie but someone or something else that only she can hear, the wrong pitch for adult ears.
Jessie perseveres, nods at the bed. ‘You can have that too. We may have to stretch to new bedding, though.’
And that’s when Bella whips around, snaps back to the present, to being Bella Tucker, a teenager who doesn’t want to be there, whom the world has royally screwed over. And Jessie knows it’s coming, the sudden, unpredictable whiplash of rage that will pull Bella away hard. ‘Who are you to say what is mine? What we can buy?’ Bella’s voice trembles. ‘It’s not your house in London to sell.’
Jessie takes a deep breath. ‘Bella, I’m putting all my savings into this too. But it’s not about money, it’s …’ She catches herself. She mustn’t mention Bella’s behaviour in London: moving here is not a punishment. ‘Your dad wants a change.’
‘Don’t tell me what Dad wants.’ Bella stands straighter, broader, a threatening show of strength and unmistakable genetic difference, towering over Jessie’s petite five-foot-three frame, her spray of freckles and coppery hair, the softness that has settled on her hips since Romy’s birth. ‘Like I don’t know him better than you.’
Jessie presses the gold of her pendant between her fingers, feeling her heartbeat conducted along the chain. ‘He can work most of the week from home. You’ll see more of him, we all will.’ She tries to steady herself, take a breath. ‘He wants a slower pace of life, Bella.’
Bella hisses out the wo
rds, ‘All Dad wants is Mum back. Don’t you get it?’
Jessie recoils, steps back. The oak boards creak, the weight of them – their relationship, the complicated tangle of family ties – too much to bear. She tries to silence the little voice in her head, the one that fears Bella might be right, that she is less loved than Mandy, that she and Will met too soon after Mandy’s death for the love to be as real for him as it is for her.
Bella sizes her up. ‘You think Dad will come here and forget all about Mum, don’t you?’
‘Bella …’ she begins, not knowing how the sentence will end, a guilty heat rising beneath her skin. It is impossible to lie to Bella, even if she wanted to. She is too astute.
‘Well, he won’t, Jessie. And he won’t ever love you like he loved my mother. He never has. Everyone knows he married you because of Romy. And everyone knows this move will end in total disaster.’ She looks away, raises her chin.
Jessie blinks furiously, damned if she’ll let Bella see her tears. It’s not the first time Bella’s said these things, but it doesn’t hurt any less. ‘I only care about what’s right for us, for you. Where we might be happy.’
‘I’m happy where I am!’
‘Are you?’ Jessie asks quietly. The question rearranges the air. ‘Really? Because from where I’m standing, it doesn’t look like that.’
Bella’s mouth opens, as if to say something, but no words come out. She spins around to the square window, roughly yanking back the curtains. Leaning forward against the sill, her legs coltishly crossed, she looks as young and vulnerable as she did menacing a moment before, and Jessie feels terribly sorry for her.
She waits for the worst of the mood swing to pass – a gritty sandstorm that will obliterate everything for a few moments, choke, then start to clear – before tentatively joining Bella at the window, careful not to touch her hot, angry edges. Sadly, theirs is not a tactile relationship: Bella has made it quite clear that any sort of physical contact with Jessie is so not okay.
Jessie’s heart lifts at the view from the window: the wild expanse of garden, the exact opposite of their outlook in London, tiny, Astroturfed (by Mandy), overlooked by neighbours, who see Jessie as a young cuckoo stealing another woman’s nest. Their earlier hurried route through Applecote’s garden is clearer from here too. She maps it: the orangery’s glass roof, the woody area known as the Wilderness, the small walled orchard, the black rectangle of derelict swimming-pool, a bit visually unnerving, like a void. At the end of the garden, although she can’t quite see it from here, she pictures the iron gate, where they’d stood staring out at a glorious expanse of meadow with its ancient circle of knee-high stones, like tiny savage people. (‘Pretty cool, eh?’ the earnest agent had panted, sniffing a deal. ‘Hardly fucking Stonehenge,’ Bella had replied drily.) At the edge of that meadow, scooped out of it, the distant glitter of the river. Oh, and a bird of prey. A kite, Jessie guesses, with that forked tail. She and Bella track it together, swooping, diving, momentarily united in the act of seeing, the space between them closing a little.
‘Is something else bothering you, Bella?’ Jessie asks gently. ‘I mean, apart from everything, obviously.’
Bella presses her nail-bitten fingers to the cold glass. ‘Bad stuff has gone down in this house.’ Her voice is thin, sapped by her earlier outburst. ‘I came into this room and I could feel it.’
Jessie studies Bella’s face, the thoughts rippling beneath the milky translucent skin: she knows it’s only Bella’s hyper-sensitive teenage mind externalizing its own indefinite fears. ‘Can you describe it?’ she nudges gently, hoping this might be a way of talking about the emotions Bella bottles up.
Bella frowns. ‘A sort of trapped feeling. Like the past is stuck, that’s all. Or someone. I don’t know, it’s weird.’
Jessie feels a sharp pang of sadness: Bella’s talking about her own grief, circling it. And Jessie knows better than to try to address it directly. ‘The house has been empty a long time, and neglected. But as soon as a new family moves –’
‘Even if we move in, this house won’t ever belong to us,’ Bella interrupts, her voice hard again. Outside, the kite plunges. A flock of birds rises: each one black, tiny, like a handful of nails thrown against the soft blue sky. ‘Just like I won’t ever belong to you, Jessie.’
2
Chelsea, London, May 1959
Ma’s certainly taking her time to die. She’s been draped on the chaise-longue beside the window for two days now, barely moving other than to reach for a cigarette and a sticky glass of gin and orange, her heavy-lidded gaze trained on the street below, where wind whips the blossom off the trees in a mocking swirl of confetti. Having declared her heart ‘shrivelled to a devilled kidney, barely capable of beating’, she’s determined to ‘fade away gently, surrounded by my four darling daughters’.
This poses a problem. It’s Monday. Our home weekend is over and we’re meant to be at school. Not only will we get punished for being late, but my classmates, who view my mother as an exotic circus act and stick their faces to the school windows whenever it’s rumoured she’s not forgotten to pick us up, will think us even more rackety. We get enough of this anyway: ‘Ah, yes, Bunny’s daughters,’ people say, flushing at Ma’s name, equally excited and disapproving. I want to tell them we’re not so different. That the wonky world of my sisters and mother contains all the passions and squabbles of a hundred normal families just like them, only that without Pa it’s been reduced to something more intense and salty, like a sort of gravy.
Ma presses a limp hand to her forehead. Her beautiful face is a study in poetic suffering. I’m not sure dying people look like that. Or wear crimson lipstick. Pam says we should just leave her with a hot glass of honey and lemon and jump on a train. But Ma’s purse doesn’t contain enough money for our rail tickets – we’ve checked – and while none of us believes Ma’s theatrics, there’s still a niggling worry that she’ll die anyway, since Ma can do most things when she puts her mind to it.
I glance at the carriage clock eating minutes above the fireplace. My French lesson has just started. Madame Villiot will be calling out my name on the register, powdered chalk on the tips of her fingers, her tiny ruby earrings trembling above her white lace collar. It’s hard not to be a little in love with Madame – everyone is – since there are no boys to fall in love with at Squirrels Ladies College, only the head girl with the Botticelli hair. I look back to Ma, feeling my forehead pinch up. ‘Are you sure we can’t send for the doctor?’
‘Don’t be hysterical, Margot.’
I stare glumly down at Fang, the moth-eaten tiger-skin rug on the floor, wondering what to do next. Pam tramps into the room, making the glasses on the drinks trolley clink – ‘Built like a Boche tank,’ Ma always says – and yanks open the window. Blossoms flutter in, to settle like white butterflies on the dark wood floor. Ma winces, pained, and covers her eyes with her hands.
Bunny Wilde is not a fan of fresh air. Her natural habitat is a smoky, post-six p.m. world, the sodium shadows of West End theatres, Chelsea soirées and Mayfair clubs, lit by guttering candlelight, chandeliers and the gazes of adoring men. Ma loathes the countryside and embraces daylight only in an artist’s studio, naked, modelling for Jack Harlow, the painter she’s madly in love with, a handsome, dark, crow-like man, who smells of paint and Pernod. He’s betrayed her again – taking only my mother by surprise – and is courting a new muse: ‘Some Berkeley Dress Show model,’ Ma whispered on Friday, too terrible a thing to name out loud, like Russian nuclear weapons or a bladder infection.
Unfairly, the torpedo of blame that should be directed at Jack’s house – crashing through the tall glass dome of his artist’s studio, a glorious explosion of oil paint – has been directed at us. Last night Ma slurred, in and out of sleep, that Jack would have married her years ago if she hadn’t had so many daughters, as if the small fact of her progeny was something that could be reshaped, like her eyebrows. It made me grateful that it isn’t just me – �
�My dear strange Margot,’ she says, as if I have dropped into the parlour from the moon – being an obstacle to her happiness, that there are four of us sisters, so the blame can be divided and dished out into four smaller portions.
Flora, Pam and I were a shoe size apart growing up, an inch of dress hem: seventeen, sixteen and fifteen now. ‘Quite impossible not to get pregnant with your father around,’ Ma says, mischievously making light of something so terrifying, explained at school with diagrams of mating livestock, investigated by girls in taxis with boys after dances. (I had my left breast caressed at Christmas. It was less exciting than I’d hoped.) Just when Ma thought she was done, her figure safe, along came Dot, three years after me. Dot doesn’t look much like the rest of us, dark where we’re fair, tiny where we’re tall. She doesn’t look twelve either. Her spectacles are too big for her face. A late starter as I was, her chest all ribs, like a boy’s. She can read well enough – she loves to read, her cocoa-brown eyes widening, living every page – but she can’t do arithmetic at all. We think this is because of what happened. How Dot started.
Ma was pregnant with Dot when the engine of Pa’s car cut out on the level crossing, seconds before the 14:07 from Edinburgh screamed down the tracks. The policeman took his hat off at the door – I remember that, the icy blast of winter as the door opened, the unseasonal film of sweat on his square forehead. And Ma not believing him, shaking her head, holding the hard balloon of her tummy, shouting no, no, no, not her Clarence, not when he had survived the war, a thumb blown clean off and, after that, the thing that had made him cower under their bed some nights, hands cupped over his ears. Ma went into labour later that day, six weeks too early, and out slid Dot, blue as the Piccadilly Line. After that, Ma was in bed for months, very still, her mind living somewhere else. When Dot cried I would soothe her. Just as other friends had kittens, I had a baby sister, the first thing I remember ferociously loving, wanting to protect. When Dot is sick now – she has lungs that whistle in winter, and needs to be steamed over the bath, like a creased dress – it’s me she calls out for, rarely Ma.