She studied the back of her hand that dangled over the side of the mattress. The more she stared, the more alien it became. Weren’t humans odd, she thought, likening her fingers to the trussed-up bellies of pork the butcher along Camden Road squashed into bloodied steel trays. The skin both smooth and puckered and ‘perfect for crackling’, she’d heard him suggest to her mother in that I-don’t-half-fancy-you voice of his.
Caroline knew all about what it was to fancy someone – she fancied Dean Fry. With his rock-star looks and mirror-lens sunglasses. And to think, her fantasies about the two of them kissing and touching were about to come true. It filled her heart to bursting.
Laughter from downstairs forked through the floorboards. There was no laughter at home, not since Daddy died – her mother was too sad. It was why she needed to have her stomach pumped, they said. Caroline tried not to think about what this meant. Removed from the action as soon as the ambulance arrived, she was left to picture the brutality of rubber tubes and sucking machines. And would their mother be pleased? Would she thank her daughters for intervening and embrace their homecoming by pressing a thousand sorrys into their wounds? Sorry they needed to find her like that; sorry if she frightened them; sorry she didn’t think they were enough to live for and that for one gilded moment believed there could be an alternative?
The shriek of a fox stabbed the crust of her deliberations. As distressing as an infant’s cry, she hadn’t known what it was until Mrs Hooper explained. When it sounded again, she eased back the bedcovers and inched on to the landing. Chilly under her nightdress, she stood with her toes curled over the top stair, eavesdropping on the scuttling voices below. The popping of corks as wine bottles were opened, then tinkling sounds as it was poured into the long-stemmed glasses Caroline had seen loitering at the back of Dora’s cupboards. A frisson of loneliness as she left behind what little of the shadowy scene she could make out through the balustrades.
*
When Gordon and Lillian had gone, a rather dishevelled Dora – lipstick and powder long evaporated – decided to leave the washing up until morning. She looked around at the wreckage from an evening’s entertaining – it had been an enjoyable enough few hours, but worth the effort? She wasn’t sure. Not when she’d envisaged being alone with Gordon once the girls had been packed off to bed. Why he needed to include his mother, she didn’t know – perhaps he was shy and couldn’t trust himself to be alone with her. The idea made her smile, until she spied the cast iron Le Creuset soaking in the sink, the stubborn tide of burned-on goulash.
Moving into the sitting room for a few moments of freshness before securing the French doors against what was left of the balmy night, she pictured the horses at the bottom of her garden. Beyond the point where her ribbon of lawn met the boundary fence of the farmer’s field. And in this phantom-light, she half-fancied seeing them through the dance of mist: their meandering shapes, liquid as ghosts under the thin moon. Such majestic creatures, they were why she saved her fruit and vegetable parings, liking the sensation of their suede-soft noses nuzzling her palms when she fed them.
Switching off the last of her lamps, she turned to the hobby-horses that were now propped against the cold hearth. So kind of Gordon, she thought, simmering with resentment for Caroline, who had sat sideways at the table and sulked all through dinner. Such a naughty girl and so hostile to Gordon; if the child didn’t wise up, he might stop calling round. An image of Gordon glided into view and she held him there for a moment, wanting to enjoy him. How cool he was inside his expensive suits, how composed, barely seeming to notice the suffocating heat she struggled with. The man oozed sophistication and possessed an unruffled charm that belonged to a bygone era. It was obvious he nurtured feelings for her – how else to explain the frequency of his visits? And that lingering kiss goodnight. Dora, tingling into the memory, pressed a hand to her heart that was beating far too quickly. A gurgle of a laugh as she made for the hall and, trapped in the stairwell – a space jammed between the tight curve of stairs and the plum-coloured curtain her mother put up to keep out the draughts – Dora took the deep breath necessary to drag her bulk up the wooden hill. Pausing halfway to look at her prized John Everett Millais print of Ophelia’s face that, in the watery moonlight, looked as if it floated free. The rogue floorboard creaked as she pushed open the door in to the children’s room.
A few seconds passed before a small voice perforated the dark: ‘What you doing, Dora?’
‘Can’t I watch my beautiful nieces sleeping?’ The tone accusatory. ‘Is that a crime all of a sudden?’
Joanna didn’t answer. Yawning, she dropped down on her pillow.
‘Is Carrie awake?’
Joanna turned her head, saw her sister’s arm flung out to the side. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘She’s dead to the world.’
‘Night, night, then … beaks under blankets.’ Dora’s parting shot fired off as a warning. Relieved not to have to converse with Caroline, she wondered later, hot between her polycotton sheets, why she could smell Gordon’s aftershave in the draught as she closed the children’s bedroom door.
Present Day
Joanna turns the key of her sister’s old flat and feels her pulse return to normal as she opens the door on to the musty, unlived-in smell. A dark shape over her shoulder and she twists in time to see the man she thought was following her. He strides across the sweep of landing, about to head up to the top floor.
‘Hello again,’ she calls, realising he must be Caroline’s neighbour.
‘Hi.’ The man steps backwards to look at her. ‘I thought I recognised you at the flower stall.’ He swings his bunch of pink carnations through the air.
‘Did you?’ Joanna, a touch embarrassed.
‘Yeah. You’re Carrie’s sister, there’s photos of you in her flat.’
‘Really ?’ Joanna doesn’t have pictures of Caroline. Aside from a single photograph of them as children squirrelled away in her sock drawer, there’s nothing of her sister in her home.
‘You’re Jo, aren’t you?’ The carnations drip water on the black and white floor tiles.
‘I am, yes,’ she confirms, relinquishing her holdall to the tenebrous embrace of the unlit flat. ‘I’ve come to sort things out.’
‘Well, pleased to meet you.’ He extends a broad, hairless hand. ‘Me and Yvonne, we were so sorry to hear what happened. Sorry, too, not to make it to the funeral – I couldn’t get the time off work. We’d have liked to have gone, we sent flowers.’
‘That’s kind of you, thank you.’ Joanna forces a smile. ‘Did you know Carrie well?’
‘Reasonably, yeah. We used to chat now and again on the stairs. Sometimes she’d invite me in for coffee, which I saw as a real privilege.’ He grins. ‘Your sister wasn’t one for visitors.’
‘No, I don’t imagine she was.’
‘She was nice, though, I liked her – we both liked her, me and my wife. She was very kind to us. Last year, we … we, erm, it’s Yvonne actually, she was pretty unwell. Cancer.’ Joanna hears his voice constrict against the emotion. ‘And Carrie, well, she was very kind to us, doing our shopping, checking Yvonne was all right when I was out at work.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that about your wife. She’s okay now though, I hope?’
‘She manages. We’re taking things one day at a time.’
Joanna bows her head, shares nothing of her own health scare. ‘Carrie could be very kind,’ she says instead. ‘And it’s nice to know she had friends – friends like you and your wife – Yvonne, you said?’ Another forced smile as she replays the contents of a telephone exchange she had with her sister during her gruelling treatment, which Mike reminded her of recently. ‘Did Carrie have many friends?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ The man stiffens inside his suit. ‘As I said, she kept herself pretty much to herself. It was odd, though.’ He rubs a hand over his face. ‘Me and Yvonne were saying, after we’d heard what happened in the mini-mart that night, we hadn’t seen Carrie around
for a quite a while.’
‘Really – was that unusual?’
‘It was a bit.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Oooh .’ He takes a moment. ‘At least a couple of months before she died. And another thing I noticed, looking up from the street – she was keeping her curtains drawn.’
‘And you didn’t think to find out how she was?’ Joanna pushes, even though she knows it’s a cheek when she hasn’t bothered with Caroline’s well-being for years.
‘We heard her moving around – but you don’t like to interfere.’ He waits for Joanna’s reassurance. ‘But yeah, we thought it was odd, because she was always gadding off somewhere. She’d been losing weight too, probably from all the dog walking.’ He laughs; a jerky, brittle sound. ‘She was working as a volunteer at that animal rescue place the other side of Hyde Park.’
‘Near St James’s, that’s right,’ Joanna confirms.
‘I admired her for that. Not many people happy to give their time for free these days. We brought a stray to her not all that long ago, but they wouldn’t let her keep it – said a flat wasn’t suitable and rehomed the dog elsewhere. A real shame that, it might have been company for her, because she did seem pretty lonely.’ He pinches the end of his nose, looks sad for a moment. ‘I know she liked visiting art galleries. Was always off to the Tate to look at that painting. She talked me and Yvonne through the symbolism of it once, the Christmas before last when she came to us for lunch … She’d bought us a printed tea-towel of it from the gift shop.’
‘Ophelia .’ Joanna smiles. ‘Yes, Carrie loved the Pre-Raphaelites. Especially Millais – she used to drag me along to look at that one when we were teenagers.’
‘Mmm.’ The man holds her gaze. ‘It seemed rather peculiar to us. We asked her to sign a petition once, can’t remember what for now, and she wrote her name as Ophelia, of all things. Anyway.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘You’re a pianist, Carrie said. Pretty famous, we heard.’
‘Did she— she said that?’ Tears prick her eyes.
‘She was very proud of you. Talked about you all the time—’ He breaks off, responding to something in Joanna’s expression. ‘I’m sorry, me and my big mouth; my wife’s always telling me I talk too much.’
‘No. No.’ She tugs her hair off her face, refusing to give in to her emotions in front of him. ‘I want to hear. I want to know everything. Me and Carrie, we lost touch, you see.’
‘Oh, dear. That’s a shame.’
‘You say you hadn’t seen her out and about for a couple of months?’ Joanna steers their discussion to her sister again. ‘D’you have any idea why? Had she been ill, d’you think?’
‘No, I don’t think she was ill – well, not ill like that.’ The choice of words suggests to Joanna her sister might have been suffering in some other way, but she misses the opportunity to ask him to elaborate. ‘Oh, now, hang on, I did see her,’ he mutters to himself. ‘Once. Coming in from work one evening – it must have been the last time I saw her.’ He shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot. ‘She would’ve heard the front door go and came out on to the landing. I barely recognised her, it looked like she’d just got out of bed – still in her dressing gown, hair all over the place. She said, but she was rambling a bit, that she’d been getting silent calls, plagued by them in the night. Said they were stopping her from sleeping.’
‘Did she know who they were from?’
A shake of the head. ‘They were silent, weren’t they? I told her to get on to BT, that they’d have ways to block nuisance numbers. But – but … ’ he hesitates, ‘her reaction did seem a bit extreme.’ A frown. ‘I don’t know, I suppose I sensed there was something more serious than a rogue caller bothering her. Getting weird phone calls in the night wouldn’t make you so … so … ’ He fished around for the right adjective. ‘Agitated. And she did seem very agitated. Sweating too, here and here.’ He taps his forehead, his top lip. ‘And so very insistent … wanting to show me her scribbles in a notebook, going on about how she was keeping tabs on him—’
‘Keeping tabs on him ?’
‘It’s what she said.’
‘Who ? Did she say who?’
‘No, she didn’t.’ He lowers his eyes to Joanna’s. ‘But whoever he was, she was obviously very afraid of him. In fact, I’d go so far to say she was so afraid, she’d stopped going out.’
Summer 1990
The lane threading its way to Pludd Cottage was festooned with Queen Anne’s lace. Coupled with the last of the condensed, white wood sorrel, the sisters imagined the hedgerows were preparing for a wedding. They held hands to cross the strip of tarmac – a habit forged on London’s streets and quite unnecessary here, as it was rare to see a car at that end of the village. Pludd Cottage, coddled by trees, was as squat as a pepper pot. The girls needed to stand on tiptoes to reach its fox-head knocker. Peeping over the rambling dog rose into the pretty garden, they listened to ‘All My Hope on God is Founded’, a favourite hymn of Lillian Hooper’s. The piano piece rang out through the open windows and hung in the pollen-heavy air. It gave the impression the cottage had a voice of its own.
The music stopped and the girls watched the front door swing wide. But no sign of Mrs Hooper – it was her little dachshund who greeted them. Dark and smooth as molasses, Lillian had named her Laika after the first dog in space, and the girls loved hearing the heartbreaking story of how the Russians made ‘no provisions for poor Laika’s return to Earth, which meant she died there’. The dog squeezed under the gate and shimmied towards them. Watching her carve a corridor through a verge of grass and buttercups, Joanna scooped her up for them both to stroke, wanting to love her for herself as well as her namesake they envisaged spinning in the firmament.
‘What a little velveteeny you are.’ Joanna copied the nickname Mrs Hooper used and buried her nose in Laika’s muscly sleekness. ‘You’ve been in the geraniums again.’ She giggled, the dog’s smell reminding her of her mother’s fingers after she’d deadheaded the tubs on their Camden windowsills.
‘You girls coming in?’ Lillian Hooper, her lustrous copper hair and beautiful smile, beckoned them inside. ‘I’ve made chocolate brownies.’
A quick scan of the drive told them Mrs Hooper had no visitors. Even Gordon’s car was missing today. Where had he gone then? The sisters’ thoughts collided, then forked off in different directions as they followed Mrs Hooper’s tall, elegant figure into the white-walled nub of her hall.
‘Is your cottage as old as Dora’s?’ Caroline fiddled with the hole she’d made in the sleeve of her cardigan.
‘I think so. They were made for the tunnel workers. You’ve heard about them, I’m sure?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Caroline nodded. ‘Dora showed us that book of old photos at the church for us to see the people who died building it.’
Mrs Hooper didn’t answer. Despite knowing it wasn’t uncommon practice for the Victorians to photograph their dead, she couldn’t bring herself to look at it, and wondered why Dora deemed it appropriate to show these children. Tuned into the afterlife as Lillian was through her palmistry and fortune-telling, Witchwood, with its gruesome history, was filled with enough violent myth and legend; the grisly images she carried in her head needed no further embellishment. Gathering a handful of last year’s conkers from a container in her kitchen, the girls watched her distribute them to dust-free windowsills. Brown and wizened, they reminded Caroline of the heads of the hardened drinkers she served lunches to at the pub.
‘What are they for?’ they chorused, trotting along behind.
‘To keep spiders away,’ Mrs Hooper told them, deliberately enigmatic.
‘Is it magic – like when you read tea leaves and stuff?’ Joanna wanted to know.
‘A bit. Now,’ Mrs Hooper clapped her empty hands, ‘who’s for a drink and a chocolate brownie?’
Lillian didn’t take a cake for herself, instead she poured a measure of her homemade rosehip syrup into two glasses and filled them and the
kettle from the tap. The pressure of the cold water soaked her forearm as she contemplated those who came to have their fortunes read. Carrying a ten-pound note pulled back from their meagre housekeeping, they travelled from the plain little town of Slinghill, as desperate for good news as she was for the extra cash. Displaced souls, she thought of them as, in the same way she thought of the Jameson girls. Not that she feared for Joanna, the child sparkled amid the mediocrity – it was Caroline she worried for.
‘D’you want me to read your palm later, Carrie?’ she suggested, to compensate for her uncharitable thoughts.
‘Please .’ Caroline grinned her tooth-filled grin over the top of her glass. ‘I love this flavour.’ She took another gulp. ‘Dora buys that horrible barley water – I hate it.’
She missed the look Mrs Hooper gave her. Caroline’s eyes, exploring the lemony-fresh kitchen, compared it to Dora’s hotbed of bacteria with its food-splashed surfaces and overflowing swing bin … salmonella, botulism, bubonic plague … deadly diseases learnt at school; it would be a miracle if they survived the summer.
Mrs Hooper scooped out loose tealeaves and poured boiling water into a dumpy teapot. Caroline pictured Dora’s fussy one, its illustrated scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the lid sticky from decades of fingers. And when passed a sparkling side plate with a simple square of kitchen towel, she inspected hers for the greasy thumbprints she associated with her aunt’s unwashed crockery.
Caroline saw that Mrs Hooper drank her tea black, that she held the cup close to her face and breathed out against the steam; until a clunk of empty teacup on saucer, and Mrs Hooper thrust herself back from the table.
‘Right then, little one. Shall we get going with your lesson?’
Bobbing her head, Joanna scooped up the last of the cake crumbs. Plump for her age, with nothing of Caroline’s sharp-boned angles, it added to her cuteness.
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