Her life had been normal, she told herself. Her life had been the life of any young girl.
But it hadn’t been normal, had it?
When she was old enough she had left. She had run. There had been no chaperone. There had been no listless, beautiful Johanna with her low-lidded eyes telling her to make a baby and then bringing her home again when it was done. No. She had found her own crosswise husband, her own handsome man. And she had followed him to a place where the sun didn’t breathe down on the back of your neck, and all the while your mother insisting you wear a woolen vest—“Wear a vest to school, Eileen, you mustn’t catch cold! Please wear it. Wear it for me?”—even though it scratched in the heat, it made you feel sick inside, like you were wrapped up in all that wool, all that thick, clotted, scratching hair. . . .
She had gone away to a place that was cold and distant and shockingly free. She had been weak for leaving, she knew that. But she was weak.
“I’m tired,” Eileen’s mother said. Her hands twitched.
Eileen rested the photo of the rake with his pencil-thin moustache on top of one of Johanna’s old romance volumes where it skittered a bare half-inch across the fraying boards, caught in one of the unpredictable drafts that breathed through the hallways and set the windows rattling.
“I’m tired,” Eileen’s mother said. Her body had begun to shake like a leaf. “Oh, daughter mine, I’m so tired. It scares me sometimes, how tired I am. I’m always afraid here. Why did you leave, Ellie? Was it because of me? Did I make you leave?”
“No, mum,” Eileen said. Thought she said.
And then her mother was speaking again: “They come sometimes. In the night. “
“I know, mother,” Eileen said, one part of her cold and present. “This was too much, too fast. Come with me, mum. I’ll make us a cup of tea.”
And one part of Eileen watched her take her mother by the hand, a cold hand, a hand that quivered like a fine-boned pigeon. One part of her stroking, calming, soothing to rest that frightened thing she held, and all the while the other part she left, the other part, she did not touch, the other part she let free to roam in the darkness like a thread winding its way home.
“Come with us,” the men said, winding their fingers through her hair. Pulling her along.
“Where?” Eileen cried. “Where are you taking me?”
“To the room,” the men said, “in the centre of Ship House.”
There was no room at the centre of Ship House.
Ship House had no centre, that’s what Granny Tamsyn had always said. One of the grandfathers had built the house. He had been an architect. He had built banks and he had built churches when there were churches still to be built—one at Camps Bay and one at Newlands and a hotel at Bishopscourt with a great sweeping staircase and a whitewashed façade. But then had come the house, and the house was no easy thing, no, not a house such as Ship House would be.
It was a strange house. It was a special house. It was a house like a new cherry—without a stone at the centre of it. That’s what the grandfathers had told Tamsyn.
Eileen did not remember the grandfathers.
They had been dead and buried by the time she had come along, but the others would speak of them. And when they did, there would be a little twist in their voices, a little hitch in their breathing, that might have been sadness and grief or it might have been something else.
When they died, the house had gone to Jacob and Rees as the only boys left. And when they were gone, it had passed to Granny Tamsyn, the oldest of them all.
Eileen’s mother was sleeping now in her own little room. It was not the room she had shared with Eileen’s father—that was the bridal room on the second floor. Eileen had never been in that room either. It had a special key in the shape of a twisted heart, and though the key hung with all the other keys on the rack in the cellar, Eileen had never touched it.
There were things about a house like Ship House. There were rules to it, and the rules were like the rules to a happy marriage. There were doors that were not meant to be listened at. There were doors that stayed locked. You could learn to move around these places, to never think on them. You could blind yourself in one eye and train the other to see only what it needed to see. You could cut off your right foot and train your left to walk only in the places it was welcome.
Eileen ought to be asleep.
Somewhere in the house her mother was sleeping, her body curled up like a kitten’s. The house wanted her to sleep. The house breathed quietly and cautiously, and Eileen tried to let her own breath follow it. In and out. Silent in the lung. Silent over the lips.
But she wasn’t tired. She paced the hallways, followed them to the backyard.
“It’s not safe,” she had told Andrew. “Emma couldn’t play in the back.”
“Nonsense,” he had said. “It’s just a place, darling. The world is full of dangers everywhere. She’ll have to learn some time.”
Jacob and Rees were buried in the backyard. They had lived and died at Ship House, the two golden boys, the two perfect ones. Rees had had hair the colour of her mother’s, Eileen remembered. Her two younger brothers. Identical. The two mirror halves of one another.
Of all of them, she had loved those two the most. Rees had built her a swing in the back and he would push her on it.
“Be careful,” her mother would tell her whenever she went out back, sometimes planting a delicate kiss on her cheek, sometimes smoothing out the tangles of her hair.
“Don’t let go,” Rees would tell her then. “Or you’ll sail all the way to the top of Table Mountain.”
“Faster than the cable car?” Eileen would scream as the air whizzed out of her lungs, bare knees kicking wildly at the dirt as she swung up and then down again.
“Faster than anything in the world!”
“I shan’t come back, you know,” Eileen had told him afterwards, gasping and giggling. Her little belly puffed against the linen of her dress as he straightened the hem, kneeling, in front of her.
Rees had beautiful hands. His fingers were long, and the palms were callused but he kept his nails clean and square. He held her ever so lightly. “Of course, you shall. You’re the little girl of the house, and you must come back. We should all be quite lonely without you, my button girl, my little dove. Your mother most of all, and then me after that!”
“No, you shan’t! You have Jacob!”
“Your uncle Jacob will be married soon and will bring his wife home—”
“Will they stay in mama’s and papa’s room?” she asked.
“Of course, they shall. And they’ll be very happy I imagine, the two of them, the little scamps.” And he chucked her underneath the chin. “And then who shall play with me in the garden? I shall be all alone in the world.”
“Is Jacob’s wife pretty?” Eileen had asked him. These things were important. She knew that. Granny Tamsyn had told her how things like that mattered, that making a pairing wasn’t easy and that if it was done badly, well, the family couldn’t afford another scandal such as Johanna had made.
“Not as pretty as a silly little button like you.”
“Good,” said Eileen. “I think I ought to be prettier than her, don’t you?”
“I think so too. Let Jacob have his less pretty young wife. I shall keep you, won’t I? I shall keep you safe.”
But Eileen had never seen Jacob’s pretty, young wife.
She must not have been beautiful enough.
She must not have been strong enough.
Or perhaps someone had told her to fly just as her own mother had been told. Perhaps someone had told her to come back pregnant. The first apple of her womb ripened and ready.
Rees and Jacob had died later that year. Eileen remembered. It was when the winter rains came and the air whistled through the walls of the house like a child calling a dog. A congenital heart defect, Tamsyn had told h
er. It struck them down together, and they had been laid side-by-side in identical, slender coffins and buried behind the house.
The swing was still there. It hung lazily from the branch of a giant walnut tree.
Eileen could see it from the window in the sitting room, and she went out into the garden—a weedy, tangled mess now—but she found she liked it anyway. There were a series of angular stone steps set into the dirt. Eileen stepped across them. She knew she shouldn’t be out here. It wasn’t safe. Not for Emma. Not for her.
But this had been her home once and, as she rested back into the swing, too small now and creaking gently with her weight, it felt like home again.
From the swing she could make out the headstones. She had worn black the year they had died. Nothing but black. And Tamsyn had wanted to cut her hair, just chop it all off, to make a hair wreath for the boys. Eileen had cried when she came in with the scissors. She had loved Jacob. She had loved him with all her heart, but still, she hated the way the scissors had gleamed, and the way that Tamsyn held them, her knuckles bulging around the curved grips.
“Don’t make her do it, Tamsyn,” she remembered her mother say. “She’s too young. She’s too young for this.”
“Shush up,” Tamsyn had snapped. “She’s old enough. As you were before her.”
“Look at her,” her mother had pleaded. “She’s just a little thing.”
And Tamsyn had taken the scissors. Had grabbed a fistful of Eileen’s hair. “Darling,” Tamsyn had said. “Little button. Please. Stop struggling.”
“No! Mama, no!” Eileen pleaded. “I don’t want to! Please, don’t let her cut my hair!”
“Didn’t you love Jacob? Didn’t you love Rees?” Tamsyn asked, a dangerous glint in her eyes. “You told me you loved them. How else will you honour them?”
“Mama, I loved them. Tell Grannie Tamsyn I loved them!”
“She’s so tiny! No, moeder, no!”
But Tamsyn was pulling her hair tight. Eileen could see the way it twisted around her fist. Her beautiful hair. She was weeping furiously now. “Mama!”
“She must honour them.”
Eileen shrieked as she felt the hair ripping from her scalp.
“No, moeder, not her!”
As quick as a snake, Tamsyn had released her clutch. Her hand whipped around and caught her mother on the flat across the cheek. Eileen was sobbing now. She touched her scalp and her hand came away sticky, fingers dappled in red.
“I love them,” she whispered. “I promise I love them. I promise, I promise.”
“You stupid, disrespectful child!”
Her mother stared at Tamsyn, dumbstruck, and now Tamsyn was pulling Eileen close, fat tears running down her cheeks as she twisted and struggled. But Tamsyn’s grip was unyielding. It bruised her tiny arm. And then Tamsyn was forcing the scissors into Eileen’s hand, her blood smearing the handle, splattering onto the floor.
“Let down your hair,” Tamsyn demanded.
“No,” her mother had pleaded.
“Someone must honour Jacob and Rees. Branch and bough, we are bound. Two by two. You have taken their blessings. You have taken their gifts, have you not? And you have given them a gift of your own, have you not?”
Eileen remembered the look on her mother’s face as she stared at Tamsyn. Eyes wide with fear. Lips trembling.
“Have you not?” Tamsyn demanded.
Eyes wide. Resistant. Then slowly shuttering the way a window shutters. “I have,” her mother said at last.
“And so will your daughter. Until then you must honour them.”
And slowly. Slowly. She pulled the black ribbon that bound her hair. Let it fall about her shoulders in a thick, sweet-smelling blanket. Glossy and rich.
“Good,” Tamsyn said. She was close behind her. Her fingers wrapped around Eileen’s fingers. Smashed her knuckles into the heavy handles of the scissors. “Now, child.”
“Go on,” her mother repeated in the barest, dull whisper.
Eileen didn’t want to but her hands were so small and she could not resist. She bunched the hair in a tight fist and she began to cut. It fell away in pieces. First it had looked as if someone had made a doorway into the back of her mother’s head, as the rest of the hair fell around the place she had cut. But it wasn’t enough. Eileen kept cutting. Snip, snip, snip she went until the hair lay around her like a heap of straw. Tamsyn gathered it up in her apron.
“You were always the weak one,” Tamsyn had told her mother.
The weak one.
Tamsyn had been a formidable woman. Uncrossable. Untouchable. But Eileen had seen her weaken. Seen her back hunch, her hair whiten, her own skin grow so slack and loose as if the flesh was eaten from her bones. Eileen had watched it. Her mother had watched it. And when Tamsyn had died in a black coughing fit, the house had gone to her mother.
They were all dead now. Rees who had made the swing for her. Whom she had loved a little more than the others. And Jacob. Johanna, the wild one, and Eirlys who had never left, who had stayed to take care of Tamsyn as she got on in years.
Two by two, the rows went. Except for the first of each generation. The first apple of the womb.
Two by two, she had tended them under her mother’s watchful gaze. Swept off the dust in summer and polished the granite to a smooth and silky shine after the winter rains. Thus, they had cared for the dead, and wound the hair wreath together, knotted it tight, and laid it to rest.
Two by two they had passed on with only her mother—the weak one—left to care for Ship House.
Staring at the sullen little graves, she came back to herself.
The knotted ropes of the swing pressed uncomfortably against Eileen’s thighs. Her clothes felt hot and sticky even though evening had spread a dampness as thick as jam over everything. She never stayed up this late at home. She had forgotten the way the world became a different place when the lights went out, now that she ventured past midnight into the early hours of pre-dawn only once in a blue moon. Like a mouse stealing crumbs.
Tomorrow. Eileen could almost feel the one day shifting into the other, the boundaries between them noiseless and lost in the indigo hush: that killing-jar quiet.
Tomorrow, she would call Andrew and tell him the progress she had made. For now, all she wanted was the feel of the night air on her skin, and the silence of the shadows creeping, stretched out like tar and woven together. Her mother was tucked away in the safety of the house. Her mother was sleeping. Her mother’s head was laid out gently on the pillow with a halo of vinegar-washed hair floating around her.
“Did I make you leave?” her mother had asked her.
“No,” she had wanted to say. “It wasn’t you.”
It had been the grandfathers.
There was a room at the centre of Ship House—the grandfathers’ room.
That was the way stories worked when you whispered them to your daughter at night, smoothing her forehead so she might sleep, kissing her cheek so she might know that she’s loved. There were chinks in stories. There were holes. There were pieces you forgot and lies you told and little wrinkles you smoothed out to make it all turn out right in the end.
And through the dark tunnels that wove through the mountain, the men brought her to that room.
The door to the room was thick and heavy, made of dark planks of oak and trimmed in old, black iron.
There were no other doors like that in Ship House. No doors with locks as weighted as a fist.
The men, together, opened the door with the tiniest of keys, a dainty little thing, in the shape of a twisted heart.
“You came home too late,” they told her.
“You have waited too long,” they told her.
It was like watching marionettes dance, the way they jumped and hopped together—the two pieces of them almost, but not quite, fitting together. Eileen wanted to laugh. But then again, Eileen very
much did not want to laugh. It was awful. It was so awful what they were doing.
They pushed her through the doorway. Just like that. She stumbled, and the skin came off her knees and palms easily the way it did when she was a child. She was not used to violence of any kind, not from Andrew, never from Andrew.
But from the men. . . .
From the grandfathers. . . .
She heard a click and a rattle of locking behind her. Then only silence in the black room at the centre of Ship House. A kind of dead, heavy silence. The silence like the beats between the blows of an old lady striking a hung carpet to rid it of dust.
The light was gone. None crept between the boards of the door. None snuck underneath.
But the air here smelled delicious and warm and sharp, and it reminded her of the smiling twins and their long, narrow coffins—or was it their long narrow beds? Perhaps she was back in her room. Perhaps she was asleep. Perhaps she would wake up any moment to the sound of her mother singing, “Bobbejaan climbs the mountain.”
But there was something tickling her fingers, something smooth and soft and brittle as snakeskin. It was all around her. It was like a cloak. It was like a blanket. The suffocating heavy vest she wore as a child. It made Eileen think of her mother.
She walked into the room at the centre of Ship House.
She moved into blackness. There was no light here, there was just that tickling like a rash and the thick, thick smell of vinegar all around her. She reached out her hands and there was a thing like lace in them. It might have been her mother’s bridal room with its key like a twisted heart, or it might have been her own bridal room, the one Andrew had rented in Niagara where they had gone for their honeymoon. He had carried her over the threshold even though that wasn’t exactly how the tradition was supposed to work, and she had kissed him. She had loved him, with his strong hands and his crosswise handsome face. She had loved the way he delicately lifted the heavy white skirt of her wedding gown, the way he had unhooked the garters and pulled the stockings off slowly, with his teeth, so he could kiss the inside of her thighs.
Gifts for the One Who Comes After Page 18