by Celina Grace
“You can listen to anything, anywhere,” he said, flourishing several different remotes. “Everything can go through the system; internet, film streaming, anything. Integrated wi-fi and the signal is boosted so you won’t have to worry about download speeds or anything like that. Everything you might need for twenty-first century entertainment.”
The kitchen had French doors that led onto a small area of decking, with steps down to the rest of the garden. That was pocket-sized, but still charming. I could just imagine Mike and me sitting out here on a summer evening with a glass of wine, watching the sun set.
Towards the end of the tour, Mr. Spencer stood back, tactfully giving us time to discuss the next move. My mind was made up and I just hoped Mike felt the same way.
“Well, Bea? What do you think?”
“Oh, please let’s buy it,” I said fervently. “It’s just perfect. It’ll be ours, Mike, yours and mine. Our own home. It’s so perfect.”
Mike laughed. “I knew you’d think that. Come on then, let’s get the deposit down.”
I was almost floating all the way back to Mr. Spencer’s office, despite my weight. Of course, I knew we weren’t going to live in that house but the one we could have would be just the same, just as perfect. Mr. Spencer ushered us to our chairs and took a thick sheaf of papers from his desk drawer. He flicked through them and suddenly stopped, frowning. I felt a sudden moment of terror. Was he going to say that there was a mistake, that all the Pinewoods had actually been sold?
“My word, it was lucky you came along today,” Mr. Spencer said. “There’s only one left.” I sagged back in my chair with relief. He looked up from the papers. “You’re not superstitious, are you?”
“No,” Mike replied. “Why?”
“Well, if your heart is set on the Pinewood then the only one left is number thirteen. I suppose the number put some people off. Lucky for you! It’s the only one left.”
“We’ll take it,” I said breathlessly. “Where is it situated?”
“Nicely central, actually, Mrs. Dunhill. Just off the main square. It’s finished, it just needs a snag check, so you’ll be able to move in very soon.”
“Oh, great,” I said. “Will we be the first to move in on the estate?”
“One of the first, I would think,” replied Mr. Spencer, hunting out a pen from his desk drawer. “We officially open next month.”
I felt a jump of excitement at the possibility of moving here in only a month. Of course, I knew it probably wouldn’t be that quick – we’d have to arrange mortgages and surveys and things like that – but I would cross my fingers that everything would go smoothly.
We’d signed all the paperwork and I handed over my debit card for Mr. Spencer to take a preliminary deposit. “Now, don’t forget, you’ll have to arrange for the remainder of the balance to clear by the end of this week, Mrs. Dunhill,” Mr. Spencer gently reminded me as he handed back my card and I nodded solemnly. We got up to go. My eye was caught by a painting on the far wall of the office, of a great stately home with formal gardens set out before it and a familiar looking fountain at the front.
“Is that – was that the original house?” I asked curiously, pointing at the picture.
Mr. Spencer followed my gaze. “Yes, indeed. That was Asharton Manor. That’s a print of course, but it was painted several times, back in its heyday.” We all walked towards it to it to look more closely. “Shame it had to go,” said Mr. Spencer. “I actually had a family connection to it. My grandfather worked there during the war. He was a doctor.”
“Oh, how interesting,” I said. Mike took a cursory look at the painting and then stood back, jiggling the car keys in his pockets. History had never been one of his interests. “Well, thanks for everything,” I said hastily. “I’ll send the rest of the deposit over this afternoon, once I’ve transferred the money to the joint account.”
Once we were outside, I grabbed Mike’s arm on impulse.
“Let’s go and look at number thirteen,” I said. “Have a look at our new house. Come on.”
Mike laughed. “All right. Let’s see what we’re spending all our money on.”
We stood and gazed proudly at our soon-to-be new home. It was just as I had imagined, although lacking the tubs of flowers outside the front door and of course there weren’t any curtains at the windows. The front door was painted black rather than sage green, and I thought to myself that that would be one of the first things I would change. Perhaps I wouldn’t use sage green though – a duck egg blue or even a bright teal colour might work better.
After we’d looked our fill, we strolled down the rest of Manor Close. I was pleased to see that the very end of the street ended in woodland, graceful beech trees spreading their branches over grassy patches and thick leaf mould. The beech tree forest only stretched for about twenty yards before the trees became much darker and thicker – a pine plantation. Mike and I strolled into the woodland and walked through the beeches. It was funny, but as we came up to the pine trees, something made me pause. I felt uneasy, all of a sudden.
“What’s wrong?” asked Mike, whose arm was still linked with mine.
“Oh, nothing,” I replied, after a moment. The moment of uneasiness passed but I didn’t feel like going further. “Let’s not go any further, shall we? I have to get back to transfer the rest of the deposit.”
“Okay,” said Mike agreeably and we turned and retraced our steps. “Plenty of time to explore more when we move in.”
I had thought the next couple of months would drag terribly as we sorted out the mortgage and found a solicitor and began packing up everything in our rented flat. But it seemed to whizz by and almost before I knew it, Mike was staggering, with me in his arms, over the threshold of number thirteen to dump us both on the sofa, laughing. As we picked ourselves up and walked through the rooms of our new home, I sent a silent prayer of thanks up to Mum. When she died, the inheritance she’d left me had come as a terrible shock. I had no idea that she had so much saved. But then, she didn’t go out much. She hardly spent anything on herself. She’d been an extremely nervous, timid woman and she would never have gone on a foreign holiday alone or sat by herself in an expensive restaurant. Perhaps when Dad was alive she might have had more get up and go, but he’d been gone for so long that all of her potential courageousness had leaked away. I was a bit like her myself, I knew that, but at least I was trying not to be. This house would be a fresh start for me, I determined. I would lose weight, get fit, find a better-paying, more interesting job than my part-time position at the library, and make some new friends.
The last was a particularly welcome thought. I hadn’t realised it before that moment but I’d been essentially friendless now for several years. Lisa, my best friend from school, had moved to Australia at about the same time I met Mike, and the other few friends I’d had had sort of drifted away, mostly because I’d been so taken up with looking after Mum before she died. After she died, I was so fogged with grief that I was in a daze for what felt like months. It had been hard on Mike, I knew that. For weeks after the funeral, he’d been more like my carer than my husband. I felt a rush of misery at the memory of those times and mentally shook myself. That time of my life was over and gone, I told myself firmly. Here I was, in my lovely new house, with my lovely husband, and life was going to be a hundred times better.
It was a wonderful week, the first we spent in number thirteen. The sun shone every day and we had such fun arranging our furniture, doing the obligatory IKEA trip, gradually exploring our new neighbourhood and yes, christening our new bed. I was so pleased that we were getting intimate with one another again, it felt like the best possible sign. I made myself go along to the Midford Weightwatchers meetings again and weighed in, determined not to be downhearted at all the hard work ahead of me. Mike and I did indeed go exploring in the woods at the end of our street. I couldn’t help but remember that sudden sense of uneasiness – almost of fear – that I’d felt, that first day we were there. I didn’t feel i
t again so I put it down to one of those funny little feelings I sometimes get that I can’t explain. Mike told me once that I must be psychic, when I explained that I sometimes got these bizarre moments of anxiety, but he was grinning when he said it, so I knew he was joking.
For a few weeks we were the only people in the street. Then, one day, a family with a young blonde toddler moved in three doors down, and a few days after that, two different couples moved into the houses opposite us. Soon it seemed like the whole street was populated. Two months after we moved in, Mia moved in next door.
We met in a rather dramatic fashion and it was all my fault. I blush to think of it now – I was such an idiot. Mike was working late and I was on my own in the house, the first time I’d actually been on my own in the house at night since we moved in. If I’d thought about it, I suppose I might have felt anxious but actually, I was quite happy. I was comfortably sprawled on the sofa, a cup of cocoa on the coffee table in front of me, watching a very good BBC adaptation of Joan Hart’s classic mystery, Death at the Manor. I had a Jo Malone candle burning on the mantelpiece – a little treat for myself that I’d bought after successfully managing to lose half a stone – and the room was warmly lit and quiet. It wasn’t until I pressed pause on the remote and got up to go to the loo that things started to go wrong.
The cottage didn’t have a downstairs loo. Mike and I had discussed whether we could convert the cupboard under the stairs into a cloakroom but, of course, we hadn’t actually got around to doing it yet. I walked into the hallway and snapped on the upstairs light, preparing to go upstairs. It was then I saw the shadow, up in the upstairs corridor.
It was a tall shadow, in the blurry shape of a man, projected onto the cream coloured wall of the upstairs corridor. Just as if someone was hiding behind the angle of the wall at the top of the stairs. It was there for a long, long second and then the moment my eyes blinked in shock, it was gone.
I froze, my hand still on the light switch. Had I really seen a shadow? Was it just a trick of the light? It’s nothing, I told myself over the thunder of my heartbeat. It’s just a – a dressing gown or a curtain blowing in the breeze and casting a shadow on the wall. That’s all. But I still could not make myself walk up the stairs and check. I stood in the hallway, as if rooted to the floor, for what felt like an hour but was probably only a few minutes, staring up at the wall of the upstairs corridor. After a long moment, I saw it again, just a brief flicker of blackness against the wall and, at the same time, there was a long creak from the floorboards upstairs, as if someone had shifted their weight from one foot to the other.
My nerve, never very strong, broke. I shrieked and turned, scrabbling for the door lock and, once I’d wrenched it open, rushed outside, almost sobbing in fear. A woman was unlocking the front door of the house next door, number fifteen. Cardboard boxes were stacked about her on the path. She looked at me in astonishment as I almost fell over my own feet in terror.
“There’s someone in my house, there’s a man in my house, I can see him at the top of the stairs—“ I gibbered. The woman didn’t hesitate. She swung her leg over the little wooden fence that separated our front gardens and came over to me, clutching my arm.
“What it is? What’s the matter?”
I gasped out what I had seen, fighting the urge to throw myself into the arms of this total stranger. She listened intently to my terrified ravings.
“An intruder?”
“I think so,” I quavered. “Should I call the police?”
“Not just yet,” said the woman. She looked at the boxes she’d clearly brought with her and climbed back over the fence, pouncing on one with a triumphant, ”A-ha!” She opened it up and withdrew a cricket bat. “Knew I had this somewhere,” she said. “Belonged to my ex-husband. Always thought it might come in handy.” She brandished it and walked straight into my house as if she owned it, shouting up the stairs. “We know you’re in there, come on out! You can’t get away!”
I’m ashamed to say that I shut my eyes at this point. I could hear the woman walking up the stairs, still shouting. I held my breath, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t hear a sudden scream, or the thud of a cricket bat meeting a skull. Of course I didn’t. After a long five minutes, the woman walked back out the front door, the cricket bat hoisted onto her shoulder like a gardener carries a spade.
“Nothing there,” she said cheerfully. “I looked around. No one hiding under the beds or anything.”
“Oh,” I said feebly and wondered about bursting into tears of embarrassment. Somehow I managed to stop myself.
“Perhaps your eyes were playing tricks on you,” said the woman. “Were you watching something scary on TV?”
I laughed reluctantly. “Actually, I was, a bit. That must have been it. I’m really sorry to have bothered you.”
Mia – I found out her name later – laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Do you live on your own?”
I explained about Mike and, almost before I realised it, I was inviting her in for a drink and she accepted. It was then we introduced ourselves and I told her about us moving in and where we’d lived before, and even a little bit about how we’d managed to afford the house. Mia was easy to talk to. She was a little older than me, maybe late thirties, with lots of very curly, reddish-brown hair and a pretty, snub-nosed face, a bit like a cat’s.
Mike came home when we were halfway down a bottle of wine and getting on famously. I introduced him and told him how Mia and I had met, making sure I laughed especially loudly at my stupid fright and how I’d mistaken an innocent shadow for a burglar.
Mike sat down and joined us in a glass of wine, chatting to Mia in the easy way that he had. I listened and smiled and responded to Mia’s questions, but a little part of me was remembering just what I had seen. What had it been? It was a shadow, I told myself firmly. That’s all. Even so, that night when Mike and I went up to bed, I made him go first and made him check every room again, which made him laugh, but he did it anyway.
After that, Mia and I quite often sat down together for a coffee or, if it was later in the day, a glass of wine. We tended to alternate, my house and then her house, which was a mirror image of number thirteen on the inside. The first time I was there, I saw the same cricket bat she’d brandished when she’d marched confidently into my house that first day. It was leaning up against the corridor wall, by the door.
“Thought I might need it, in case I ever get burgled,” Mia said, with a wink. “That’s not blood,” she added, laughing, as I stared at a dark red splotch at the top of the bat, by the handle. That’s nail polish, I accidentally spilt some on it one time. My ex-husband went mad.”
She rolled her eyes. Later that week, as we met for tea and biscuits, she told me a bit more about her ex-husband. “We got married too young,” she said. “We didn’t really know what we wanted. It’s a shame, because perhaps if we’d met later on, we would have been okay. I don’t know…” She pushed the plate of chocolate biscuits towards me and I managed to shake my head. “Oh well,” Mia went on. “That’s all water under the bridge now.”
“Did you have children?”
“No. One thing to be thankful for, I suppose, no children caught up in a divorce. What about you?”
I was confused for a moment. Surely she knew we didn’t have any children? Then I realised what she was asking. “Oh. Well, we hope to. If I’m not too old, that is!” And too fat; I didn’t say it but thought it to myself. Still, I was losing weight, slowly but surely. I just had to keep it up. “Mike’s keen.”
“Is he? That’s good. Sometimes it’s the bloke that isn’t interested. That must be difficult.”
I nodded. “That’s why Mike split up with his first wife. She didn’t want kids and he did.”
Mia raised her eyebrows. “Career-woman type?”
I shrugged. “I suppose so. I never met her, it was years before we met.” I wavered and then thought, to hell with it, I’m going to have another biscuit. Then I thought, no, don
’t. You’ve been doing so well.
Mia was asking me something but I had to ask her to repeat herself.
“I said, have you—“ She hesitated a moment and then asked again. “It sounds a bit stupid, actually, but have you… seen anything else that was strange? You know, like you did the day I moved in?”
I stared at her. She sounded different to how I was used to Mia sounding – confident and assertive. Now she sounded… worried.
“What do you mean?”
She sounded even more anxious. “Well, anything – strange. Things that make you pause for a second.” I must have looked even more confused because after a moment she shook her head impatiently and said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not important.”
“But—“
“Really, don’t worry about it, Bea,” said Mia, even more firmly. “Forget I said anything.”
I opened my mouth to pursue it and then shut it again. Then I gave in and took a chocolate biscuit, cursing myself for being so weak.
Perhaps it was because of that strange conversation I’d had with Mia but that night, I felt particularly jumpy in the house. Ever since I’d seen the shadow up on the landing, I’d purposely avoided looking up the stairs when the light was on at night. Sometimes it took a real effort of will not to look, and sometimes, if I was on my own, the only way I could go upstairs was to run as quickly as I could until I’d passed the danger point at the top of the stairs and made it into our bedroom. Once I’d tried shutting my eyes as I groped my way up the stairs, but that was far worse – I kept expecting someone – or something – to grab me.
Whether it was because of all these precautions or because there had never really been anything there in the first place, I hadn’t actually seen anything else strange in the house. I was so glad, because the last thing you want to feel is unsafe in your own home. But that night, as I lay beside Mike listening to him breathe peacefully beside me, the fear began to come creeping back. It was then I became aware of just how noisy a house it was: it creaked and groaned and whispered like a much older building. Just the timbers settling, I told myself, turning over in bed and drawing the duvet up to my chin. Go to sleep.