by Lily Graham
‘Like what?’
‘Well, like our enthusiasm, for instance. Americans are pretty passionate, and we show it. And, well…’
I grinned. ‘The British are well known for their reserve. I get it, we can be a boring bunch at times.’
He laughed. ‘Yeah. Well, not boring exactly, not when you get to know them anyway. And I suppose we can be a bit too enthusiastic. I’ve learned to tone it down a little, otherwise people think you’re coming on too strong, or maybe a little false.’
‘False?’
‘Sometimes.’
I laughed. ‘Well, I like that. You’d love my sister-in-law, Ivy. She’s like that, very high energy, and she’s a Brit so it does happen here too sometimes. But I know what you mean. I’ve had a few American friends and I love their energy. My editor in New York really makes writing fun – her emails are always full of exclamation points about the things she likes.’
‘Let’s hope she doesn’t do it with the bits she doesn’t.’
I laughed. ‘No, thank goodness. But, you know, coming here made me realise that I’m a Londoner, even if I don’t always want to be. I didn’t really think I was – I’m not a city girl at heart – but at the same time, I’m not from here.’
‘That’s it, yeah. I love it here, but I just can’t escape the fact that I’m a bit of an outsider too. Nice to know it isn’t just me. I wonder when that’ll start to feel different.’
‘Maybe when you get called “me lover”, like I was today?’
‘What? I’m jealous!’ exclaimed Adam with an irrepressible grin. ‘I’ve been here six months and it hasn’t happened yet. Do you think it’s because I’m a guy?’
I shook my head. ‘No, as far as I know they don’t discriminate.’
‘Well, that’s good to know. So I’ll just wait in hope.’
Just then, the person who’d given me my distinctly Cornish greeting called out from the front of the house.
‘Hullo?’ came a West Country brogue from the kitchen passage. ‘Here,’ I said, limping into the sea room with Adam at my heels.
‘Will! You’ve got to see this window,’ said a heavyset man with a balding head who was whistling at the view while he rocked on his paint-spattered heels.
‘Hello,’ I greeted. ‘I’m Victoria – we spoke on the phone?’
‘Hullo! Jack Abrams. This is Will, my son,’ he said as a young boy barely out of his teens came inside and stuttered a hello. He had large goggle eyes and was almost painfully thin. I couldn’t help hoping that there was more to this team than the two of them.
‘Pretty view, would have been half-tempted myself to buy this if I’d seen that. Looks Art Nouveau,’ continued Jack.
I grinned. ‘I think so too. It was the period, I think.’
Adam nodded. ‘My uncle said it was built in 1905, it didn’t say on the deed though when the construction started.’
Jack looked at him. ‘Graham Waters’ nephew?’
Adam nodded.
‘Ah, well, you’ll know all about this place then.’
I was about to ask Adam about the house, about his family being the owners of the cottage, when his phone started to ring.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Got to take this, it’s a client.’
‘There’s nothing like an old house for secrets,’ said Jack, as I pointed out the site of my accident on the steps. ‘Probably best to avoid these stairs, me lover, till we can get them seen to, alright?’
I grinned, glancing over at Adam, who was standing by the kitchen on the phone. His mouth had popped open and when Jack turned he gave me the victory sign. I stifled a laugh.
‘I’m going to have to take care of this, sorry,’ said Adam, after he finished his call. ‘But I’ll see you soon.’
‘If you’re free, come past the boat later,’ I said. Then I found myself blushing at how suggestive it sounded. ‘I, er, there’s something I wanted to discuss with you about the house, but I can give you a call if you’d rather.’
‘Oh?’ He looked concerned.
‘It’s not serious… just something I wanted to know a bit more about. It’s not important. No rush or anything.’
‘It’s no problem. I can be there about seven if that’s good?’
‘Great,’ I said, while Jack gave me a beady, knowing look that I tried to ignore.
‘So, I suppose what I’ve been wanting to ask is why the house was left abandoned, when it belonged to the Waters family,’ I explained a few hours later.
Adam was sitting in the egg-shaped chair next to the sofa, where I was curled up with a cup of coffee. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, soaking up the warmth from the wood burner, and a cup of tea rested on one knee.
If I’d felt slightly nervous about asking him over, in case he got the wrong idea, I was quickly disabused of the notion. There was something disarming about Adam. Perhaps it was the fact that he was rather direct, so you felt like you knew where you stood. Though there was something about his past that he seemed to be holding back. When I’d asked him about what he did before he came here, he’d been rather vague.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I hope that doesn’t sound like an accusation or anything – it’s really just curiosity. When Angie told me that the house actually belonged to your great-grandfather and not the Aspreys, well, I was surprised, to be honest.’
He nodded. ‘That’s completely understandable. It was a question I asked too. I mean, it would make sense that the cottage belonged to the Aspreys and for it to have been left in the state it was because they’d fled the country some time during the First World War, but it doesn’t make sense when the owners have lived in the county the whole time.’
I nodded. ‘Exactly.’
‘Well, the answer is simple. Like you, everyone thought that it belonged to the Aspreys.’
‘What? So you mean your family never knew it belonged to them?’
He shook his head. ‘Well, most of the family anyway. My uncle didn’t know about it until it came into his hands in the seventies. And I didn’t know about it till I found the deed. Maybe the secrecy was something to do with the “curse” – I’m not sure. I do know that even my uncle can’t talk about the cottage without getting the shivers. I think that’s why it was left… To be honest, I think there’s more to the story, but no one in the family speaks about it.’
‘But don’t you think it’s strange?’
‘Definitely. I mean, even if there are some old rumours floating about, you can’t help but see that it was a lovely place once. The idea that my uncle actually wanted to demolish it, well, it seemed rather awful. To be honest, I’m rather curious about the place myself. I didn’t know who the Aspreys were until I found that deed in my uncle’s office and since then I’ve tried to find out about them, about what happened to them,’ he admitted.
I looked at him in surprise and set down my coffee cup. ‘Me too. I thought it was just a professional hazard, you know, but I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who’s curious.’
His eyes fell upon the small stack of biographies I’d written, arranged on the bottom shelf. He grinned. ‘I googled you, you know.’
I put my hands on my cheeks. ‘Ah, no!’
‘Sorry,’ he grinned. ‘I wanted to know why someone would buy an abandoned cottage… It made more sense when I found out that you were – are – a biographer.’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess so. It’s still a mad thing to do though, even for me. All I can say is that I felt in some way like it was calling out to me when I saw it.’
‘What do you mean?’
I told him how I’d found it, while out walking. I didn’t tell him, though, that it was in the immediate aftermath of the implosion of my marriage. My fingers touched the place where my wedding ring used to be, felt the pale emptiness. ‘I looked up and I saw this house in the cliffs and I decided to go and look. It was trespassing, of course,’ I said with a grin. ‘Sorry.’
He waved a hand. ‘I’d probably h
ave done the same thing.’
‘But you’re a lawyer!’ I said in mock horror.
He shrugged. ‘Still human, mostly.’
I laughed. ‘Well, I’m glad you’d also have done it. It’s hard to explain, but I felt drawn to it…’ I cleared my throat, and decided to come clean. ‘Also, it’s how I found this,’ I said, picking up Tilly’s diary, which had been sitting on the coffee table, surrounded by loose sheaves of paper upon which I’d painstakingly started to decode the diary, page by page.
‘What is it?’
‘Open it.’
He unwound the turquoise ribbon and I pointed out the name embroidered on the thread. ‘Do you see the name?’
‘Tilly?’
‘Tilly Asprey. It’s her diary.’
He looked at me in surprise, his blue eyes wide. ‘Asprey? But what was her diary doing at the cottage?’
‘That’s the question I keep asking myself.’
He opened the diary, his mouth falling open slightly as he scanned the pages. ‘It’s in code?’
I nodded, then lifted the sheets of paper with my transcriptions. I showed him the letter I had found and how I’d worked out the code. I never mentioned the old man. He was the one secret I wasn’t quite ready to divulge, mostly because I knew that he would probably want to call the police and I didn’t want to do that, at least not until I’d found him and spoken to him.
His eyes went huge. ‘This is incredible. And you’ve done this all yourself?’
I thought of my old professor, Stan. ‘I had some help, but the theft – well, that was all me, baby,’ I said with a wry smile, and a slightly nervous laugh. ‘Technically, these belong to your uncle,’ I admitted apologetically.
Adam shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about that – my uncle’s instructions were that you could have the house as it was, with everything inside. He never wanted any of it, and if we’d demolished it, everything would have been destroyed, this along with it.’
I looked at Tilly’s diary and thought of how sad it would have been never to have read her words. Even though we’d lived over a hundred years apart, I felt like I was getting to know a friend.
‘So how does the code work?’
I explained the system. ‘I’ve written it here to make it easier for transcribing,’ I said, pulling out a scrap piece of paper. ‘It’s hard going though, as each page can take ages.’
He took a sip of his cold tea and gave me an appraising look. ‘What if you had an assistant?’
‘You’d want to do that?’ I said in surprise. Part of me had relished it as my own delicious secret. I always worked alone – it’s what I enjoyed. But the thing about secrets, I’ve often learned, is that they are almost always better once shared, and I had to admit that having someone to discuss it with would help.
‘Yeah, I mean, you can say no, of course, but for me, it would be really interesting to learn more about my family, and about why the cottage was left like it was. It’s so covered up that even now my uncle won’t speak about it, you know?’
‘That’s so strange, when you think that the cottage was built for them. I mean, the Waters and the Aspreys must have been friends for John Asprey to have done that. It makes you wonder then what went wrong.’
Adam looked at me in surprise. ‘I don’t think they were friends – not exactly. From what my uncle has said about it, I think the house was about something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘A debt.’
‘A debt?’ I said in surprise. ‘For what?’
‘The war.’
Chapter Fourteen
Cornwall, 1905
Tilly
Father never spoke about the war. I just saw the medals, and later, the scars. Like the long purple welt that puckered like a kiss where his hand had nearly been sawn in half. Sometimes, when he’s angry and his fist is clenched, it glows white. Like whenever anyone asks him about his time in South Africa. The first time he’d ever seen the country was when he was asked to go and fight for it. To defend ‘The Empire’, something I don’t think he believed in all that much by the end. And now here was this growing reminder at the end of the estate, starting to take shape.
I asked too many questions. Questions no one else dared to, something only a child would do. I couldn’t seem to help myself. I must have asked Father a thousand times before he finally told me that the house was for someone who needed a place to stay. As if it was the most natural thing in the world to build someone a home right at the end of your property.
Maybe it was for people like my aunt Cassie and my uncle Win, who looked after their estate in Hampshire as if it were a charity, which Mother had once told us as if it were the very worst thing a person could do. Perhaps, to her, it was. Asprey is a name that has never been on more than nodding terms with the idea of charity. ‘You don’t make money by giving it away,’ was something Father was fond of saying.
My cousin Tim said this just proved that in his heart Father was really just middle-class, even if his wealth, title, and privilege said otherwise. His attitude, if nothing else, showed that the Aspreys remained resolutely self-made men, and this wasn’t something my Father was ashamed of.
I was brought up learning about the family business, about the estate, the farms, the tenants and all two thousand acres of the agricultural land which the Aspreys and their tenants have worked for over two hundred years. Most of all I learned about Father’s pet project, Idyllwild, the passion of his life – the daffodil farm into which he’d sunk every last penny. Growing and cultivating keeps him busy every day of his life, fighting the wind and the rain and the snow – and God, if he has to. It’s kept us in last season’s dresses and my mother in a steady state of simmering rage, because he refused to invest in tin or copper or the railway instead, like all of their friends.
Which is why it was so strange that he did what he did.
‘This house,’ I asked, when we were alone at breakfast. ‘It’s for a friend?’ Somehow, Father wasn’t the type I’d ever imagined to have friends. Colleagues, associates, allies, perhaps, but never friends.
‘A friend,’ he agreed.
When I asked why he had to build his friend a house, instead of giving him a cottage from one of the farms on the estate, he just shrugged and said it wouldn’t be right.
Up until then I had thought I understood my father – his austerity, his black moods, his sense of duty to Asprey House, its farms, his contradictions, the frankly befuddling love he had for his daffodils and the way he wouldn’t budge for anything or anyone. But I didn’t understand at all, really.
The thing that was odd, even then, was how normal Mother was about it all. How accepting. A woman who’d waged war against her husband about the appointment of Mrs Price for an entire year, before she finally let it go, just simply accepted it without fuss or ceremony.
‘Just leave it be, Tilly,’ she said, a few weeks after the builders arrived. ‘You don’t need to know why, just accept that it’s happening – and do not go down there. Do you hear me? It is forbidden.’ And she headed up the stairs, her back starch-stiff.
‘But why?’ I’d asked.
‘Don’t ask questions. Go, Celine is waiting for you. She says she is always having to find you and that your French is appalling. Six months without any improvement – it’s shocking.’
I sighed. That’s all Celine taught. French – in French – all day. It was je suis, tu es, vous etês as soon as you walked in the nursery door – who wouldn’t run away?
‘Mother, honestly, why can’t I just go to a school?’ I asked for the millionth time. ‘I’m so bored with Celine. I love her, but I want to learn something besides French!’
‘The village school?’ she said, eyes popping as she turned to look at me, her heel coming to a halt on the polished mahogany staircase. ‘Over my dead body! Your father may run this place as if we were cut off in some blasted colonial outpost, but I insist upon a proper education, at the very least.’
‘There’s nothing proper about my education. By my age Tim was learning mathematics, geography and Latin.’
‘Even if I pointed out the obvious – which is that Tim is a boy and therefore has had an education vastly different to your own – do you honestly believe you could attain anything like it from the village school? I fear you’d be sadly disappointed.’
‘Well, maybe not, but at least I could be spared from reading Chaucer in French. And there are schools for girls now. Rose said that Lady Hammond’s girls have gone to one in Surrey.’
The Hammonds were a trump card. They were the sort of company my mother wished to keep – if only she could persuade my father to behave himself accordingly.
Her mouth twisted. ‘I’ll think about it. In the meantime, stay away from that house and stop hiding away from Celine.’
I did my best, for a while at least.
The buggy arrived after dark, while Mrs Price was preparing dinner and the staff were getting the dining room ready. As it rolled through the grounds and past the house, the tarpaulin rustled in the wind and flapped open, and I saw a pair of trousers before they were whipped out of sight, on to a destination I wasn’t allowed to investigate.
The new rule came at breakfast, after Father was done with the toast, and Rose had complained about Mrs Price’s salt-ridden marmalade, and Mother – who’d come down to join us for a change – had sniffed disapprovingly all through her second cup of coffee.
‘Girls,’ Father said, barely looking up from his newspaper as he turned the page. ‘The south part of the estate, near the cove, is now out of bounds. Don’t let me hear that you’ve ventured there. The consequences will be serious.’ At this he looked up, pinned a dark eye on me, and said, ‘Understood, Tilly?’
‘But why?’ I began.
‘Don’t ask ques—’
‘Questions,’ Rose and I repeated resignedly.
‘Quite,’ said Father.