In Her Shadow

by Douglas, Louise

  I had never, truly, believed she was dead.

  I couldn’t talk to anyone about this. It was too complicated. Even when I was at my most messed-up, I managed to hide how I really felt.

  In the hospital, after the breakdown, I was told to acknowledge my feelings for Ellen, and let them go. They made it sound so easy, those soft-voiced counsellors with their long silences, their: ‘How do you feel?’s, their: ‘Tell me what you’re thinking’s. Julia told me to go deep inside myself and dredge out the darkest memories, those that had buried themselves so far within my psyche that I was fearful of uprooting them. ‘Dig them out,’ she had said, as if she were talking about potatoes. ‘Take a good look at them, then move away!’ I never did as she suggested. If I had pulled out those memories and examined them too closely, I would have risked poisoning the present with the toxicity of the past.

  Only now, after all those years had gone by, I wondered if I had been right all along to deny Ellen’s death. And if she was still alive, if I could talk to her, then I could explain. I could make things better.

  Mum had placed a jug of garden lilies on the little windowledge in my room, and in the morning I knelt on the bed and looked past the flowers that were already shedding pollen on the sill, out of the window. They reminded me of Ellen’s eighteenth birthday – the spilled pollen on the white tablecloth, the sense of dread. I shook my head to chase away the memory. That was the past. This was now. The garden of the house that used to belong to the Cardells was tidy now, and ordered. The concrete had been dug up, the old rabbit hutch and clothesline were gone. Instead there was a tidy, pocket-handkerchief-sized lawn, a herb garden, bird feeders. A couple of foldaway chairs sat side by side on the patio. It looked like a pleasant place to sit and enjoy the sun and pass the time.

  It was true, I thought, that time made some things better. Bad neighbours were replaced by good ones, disorder by harmony. Only it worked the other way around too.

  I slid off the bed and picked up my towel and toiletry bag. I went into the bathroom, tiny and cramped, still with an old-fashioned chain-pull flush on the lavatory, old-fashioned white ceramic tiles and big old taps above the enamel bath. It was poorly ventilated and icy cold in winter. Black mould grew in the corners of the windows, and the grouting of the tiles. I’d tried to persuade my parents many times to upgrade and modernize the bathroom, I’d offered to organize and pay for a refurbishment myself, but they refused. They didn’t see the point. They said: ‘Why fix what’s not broken?’ They liked the bathroom how it was.

  I lay in the bath and remembered the day I received the letter from my mother, in which she told me that Ellen had died. It had been a big-sky, clouds-painted-on, bright South American day; handsome, long-maned horses stamping and blowing, kicking up red dust, the call of the cowhands, the answering bellow of young bulls. One of the Japanese students working in our group had taken the pick-up into town to fetch supplies, and had returned with a handful of mail along with the bags of rice and sugar, boxes of cereal, tins of meat and vegetables. She had handed out the letters – it was rare for post from England to reach us at all. There was only one letter for me. It had been posted, in Cornwall, more than two months earlier and had taken that long to reach me. I’d recognized my mother’s writing and gone into the barn we were using as a dormitory to read it in private.

  I’d sat on the top bunk, opened the envelope with my thumb and taken out the letter inside – just one folded piece of blue paper from the gift set I had given my mother for Christmas years before. She had written, without preamble:

  Dearest Hannah,

  I have some terrible news for you. I am sorry to tell you this in a letter, but of course I cannot reach you by telephone and I feel the news cannot wait until you return home as I don’t know how long that will be. Ellen Brecht has passed away. She has gone to join her mother in Heaven. It was a drowning accident and pray God she did not suffer. Her father has gone away back to Germany, so I have heard, and the house is closed up.

  I know you will be very sad and I’m so sorry I can’t be with you, my darling girl, to comfort you but I pray your good friends in South America will look after you in this difficult time

  I remembered each word exactly and the way my mother’s old-fashioned handwriting looped across the page, so the letter must have made a deep impression, but at the time, it hadn’t made sense to me. Was it because I was so far away from home? Because I felt so removed? Or had I just not been capable of facing up to the truth? My mother’s words seemed false and artificial. There was so little information in the letter, it was ridiculously brief given the news it contained. I didn’t believe it.

  I had folded the letter, put it back in its envelope and kept it in the pocket of my shorts, meaning to find a shady spot where I could take it out and read it again later, to compose questions in my mind, to understand it – but sometime during the morning it had fallen out of my pocket. The letter was lost and I did not search for it. That made it easier for me to put it from my mind. I didn’t say anything to anyone. I didn’t talk about its contents, not even to Ricky. I simply pretended I didn’t know that Ellen was dead. I did not allow myself to think about her death, or why she had died, or how. It was easier for me to carry on as if the letter had never existed. That way, I did not have to think about the last time I saw Ellen, or what I had said to her and the way we had parted.

  That way, I could pretend that one day there would still be a chance for me to put things right between Ellen and me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  SPRING CAME, AND with it came the daffodils that had been Anne Brecht’s favourite flowers. Her birthday would have been in April. It was an especially lovely month that year. The wildflowers were prolific and joyful, the blossom on the trees in the garden of Thornfield House gloriously showy in its pinks and whites, but rather than enjoying the natural beauty, Mr Brecht avoided it. Ellen told me he spent the whole of the anniversary of Anne’s birthday in the room where she had died, on his own, with only the music to keep him company.

  Since Mrs Brecht’s death, I had taken to spending more time at Thornfield House again. Ellen and I drifted through rooms that still seemed to be full of the presence of her mother, as if she had not managed to escape the place, even in death. I watched Mr Brecht carefully, from a distance, because I did not know what I should say to him, and because his torment was so biblical in its depth. Mrs Todd did her best to keep the household running on an even keel but it was a Sisyphean task.

  One morning, Ellen and I came upstairs to find her father standing on the landing, holding Mrs Brecht’s white cotton bedsheets in his arms, pressing his face into them. He was not looking after himself. He seemed thin and ill. His determination to suffer, his self-imposed martyrdom, almost broke my heart.

  A few days later, Ellen and I were sitting on the bench overlooking the fields at the back of the church, enjoying the spring sunshine, when she told me her father had been trying to summon Anne’s spirit.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘He wanted to contact her in the spirit world. He asked me to go into the room next door to mine and help him. He’d got a ouija board.’

  Ellen said this in a matter-of-fact way, not in one of her dramatic voices. I glanced at her, looking for signs she was making the tale up, but I couldn’t see any.

  ‘You didn’t use the ouija board, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t want to, but he made me.’

  ‘But, Ellen, those things are really dangerous! You might have ended up summoning the devil or something!’

  ‘I know. But Papa insisted.’ Ellen picked at the hem of her skirt. ‘He said what if Mama was trapped in some dark place surrounded by souls in torment, drifting through purgatory trying to get back to us. What if she was icy cold and lonely and everything was black, and the wind was howling around her and the souls were screaming and wailing … I didn’t want to touch the ouija board but I couldn’t leave her there, on her own, in that dark, lone
ly place.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. My voice was little more than a whisper.

  ‘Papa turned off the light. There was just a candle on the bedside table. We were sitting on the bed.’

  I shivered.

  ‘We put our fingers on the glass, and Papa called for Mama.’ Ellen was speaking very softly now.

  ‘Did she come?’

  Ellen pulled her coat tighter around herself.

  ‘Ellen?’

  ‘Something came. Something made the glass move. It moved across the board all on its own, not slowly but fast, like this.’ She scissored the air with her hand. ‘And at the same time, the candle was flickering and there was a strange smell in the room.’

  ‘What kind of smell?’

  ‘It was sweet, like lavender.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘Papa asked the spirit to prove it was Mama.’

  My heart was beating so hard I could feel the pulse in my neck. Our faces were close together. I could taste the spearmint from Ellen’s gum in her exhaled breath.

  ‘And then the glass began to move again, all by itself – and the candle blew out! There was a kind of misty glow floating above the bed, like a cloud. It almost looked like a person, it almost had a face and arms, but not quite. It hovered there, shape-shifting as the letters were spelled out on the board.’

  ‘What did the spirit say?’ I asked.

  ‘First it moved the glass to the letter S, then the U …’

  ‘Su? What does that mean?’

  ‘Wait, there’s more! There’s the C, the K, the E and the R.’ Ellen sighed. Then she sat back on the bench and looked at me, her eyes big and round and innocent.

  ‘Ellen?’ I was confused. ‘What did the spirit say?’

  ‘SUCKER! It said SUCKER!’

  ‘Why did it say that?’

  ‘Oh, you’re so thick sometimes, Hannah!’ Ellen stood up and began to run across the field, scattering birds that had been feeding in the long grass and screaming with laughter, calling, ‘Sucker! Sucker! Sucker!’

  ‘Ellen!’ I called. I picked up her bag as well as my own. I was furious. ‘Ellen!’ I shouted as I ran after her. ‘Ellen Brecht, I hate you!’

  Ellen turned round. ‘There are no spirits!’ she shouted. ‘There are no ghosts! Once you’re dead, you’re dead for ever and ever and ever! Amen!’ And she laughed and ran some more.

  That was what she was like.

  Only not all of her stories were lies.

  One evening, when we were sitting in the back room playing gin rummy with Mrs Todd, Mr Brecht, who had fallen asleep in his chair, lifted his head. He looked across the room towards us. His eyes were unfocused.

  ‘She never loved you, you know,’ he said to Ellen. Ellen bit her lip, picked up the queen of diamonds and put down the two of clubs. Mrs Todd took a card from the pile and put down the ace of spades.

  Mr Brecht raised his finger and pointed it at Ellen. ‘She blamed you. It was you who made her ill.’

  ‘Your turn, Hannah,’ said Mrs Todd. I already had two aces in my hand, but I was afraid to finish the game there and then. I took a card from the pile, and put down the ace of hearts.

  ‘She used to say—’ said Mr Brecht.

  ‘That’s enough now, Pieter,’ said Mrs Todd. She pushed back her chair.

  ‘She used to say,’ he repeated in a louder voice, still jabbing his finger towards Ellen, ‘that she should have had you drowned at birth!’

  ‘Go upstairs, girls,’ Mrs Todd said quietly. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

  Afterwards, Mrs Todd came up to Ellen’s bedroom with a tray of Horlicks and biscuits. She put the tray on the dressing-table and her hand on Ellen’s shoulder. ‘Your father had too much to drink,’ she said. ‘He didn’t mean any of that.’

  Ellen shrugged her hand away. ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

  ‘Your mother loved you,’ said Mrs Todd. ‘You know she did, Ellen.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Ellen repeated.

  Some of what happened at Thornfield House was awful, but all of it was exciting. Everything there seemed more important and more intense; emotions were heightened, everything was significant. Ellen and her father burned more brightly than ordinary people. They were dazzling. And of course I couldn’t help comparing my life with Ellen’s. While hers was gloriously poetic and extreme, mine was stagnant and plain as ditchwater. My parents were unemotional and predictable; they were the grey embers to Mr Brecht’s dancing flames. At home, I felt constricted and claustrophobic. Jago was working most evenings, or out with his friends, but I was expected to sit with my parents in front of the little old telly even though the reception was dreadful and Dad insisted on voicing a running commentary on every single programme. One or the other, or sometimes both, of my parents would fall asleep in their chairs and the snoring, interrupted every now and then by Trixie’s flatulence, was a soundtrack to those evenings. Our rented cottage was not even a quarter the size of Thornfield House; it smelled of Fairy Liquid and cabbage, and, worst of all, after supper every evening Dad went upstairs whistling ‘Whistle While You Work’ with the Daily Mirror tucked under his arm and locked himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes. It was so mundane, so boring, so crushingly, achingly dull.

  April ran into May, and May into June. Ellen was not looking forward to her seventeenth birthday, her first without her mother. We took our exams, school broke up for the summer, and we returned to our respective jobs.

  One evening after work, when Ellen and I were sunbathing in the garden at Thornfield House, Mr Brecht came back from a trip to Truro with a largish, flattish cardboard box. It was coloured silver and was tied with a duck-egg-blue ribbon. He strode out into the garden, crouched down beside us, and passed the box to Ellen.

  ‘It’s a present,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For you, Ellen. Does there have to be a reason for a father to treat his daughter?’

  Ellen sighed and knelt up. We were both wearing bikinis, and I knew that Ellen was aware of how good she looked in hers. She sat high on her heels, with her back straight and her hair falling down behind her ears. I didn’t want Mr Brecht to notice the ripples of puppy fat about my waist, or my breasts, which were bigger than Ellen’s but white and heavy. I shook out the T-shirt I’d been using to pillow my head, and wriggled into it. Mr Brecht looked at Ellen, and smiled. He took his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, shook one from the box, put it between his lips, lit it and blew smoke out through his nose.

  The skin on Ellen’s thighs was grass-patterned, crisscrossed by thousands of small indentations. She lifted the lid of the box.

  Inside was a silver-grey evening dress made of beautiful, slippy material with tiny crystals sewn around the neckline. She held it up.

  ‘Oh, that’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen!’ I cried. I reached out to feel the fabric. ‘It’s gorgeous.’

  Ellen folded the dress back into the box.

  ‘Aren’t you going to try it on?’ I asked.

  ‘Later,’ Ellen said. She was sullen; for the thousandth time her surliness towards her father embarrassed me.

  ‘You do like the dress, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘Put it on then.’

  ‘Papa …’

  ‘Go on!’ he said. ‘I want to see you wear it.’

  I couldn’t understand Ellen’s reluctance to please him. If Mr Brecht had given me a dress like that, I’d have worn it all the time. I’d never have taken it off.

  ‘Go on, Ellen,’ I said. ‘Make sure it fits.’

  Ellen scowled, but she stood and slipped the dress over her head. It slithered over her shoulders and ran down her body like water. It fitted like a dream, and it shimmered in the sunshine, the crystals catching the light. Her mother’s necklace glinted where the little clef sat in the hollow at the base of her throat. She looked so lovely, in the dress, and it must have felt so good on her skin
that it should have made her happy, but it didn’t. Her shoulders were hunched, and her eyes downcast.

  Mr Brecht smiled and flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette. ‘You’re so like your mother,’ he said. ‘Turn around. Let me look at you.’

  Ellen sucked in her lower lip. She looked as if she were close to tears. Reluctantly she turned.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Mr Brecht sighed. He took another drag on the cigarette, then dropped it onto the lawn and ground it out with his heel. ‘Shame it’s only skin-deep, eh, Ellen?’

  Ellen shot her father a look. It was almost hatred.

  I glanced from one to the other.

  ‘What about you, Hannah?’ he asked. ‘Do you think Ellen’s boyfriend will like the dress?’

  I laughed awkwardly. ‘Ellen doesn’t have a boyfriend.’

  Mr Brecht laughed too. He reached out to me and pulled me close to him. I fitted into the crook of his shoulder, felt the rough cotton of his trousers against the skin of my bare leg. He smelled of cigarette smoke and leather and something spicy and masculine. He squeezed the top of my arm.

  ‘She does,’ he whispered into my hair.

  I looked up at him. He nodded with a teasing twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Don’t you know about Ellen’s secret romance, Hannah?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘She hasn’t told you? And you’re supposed to be her best friend? That’s not very nice, is it, Ellen?’

  Ellen’s face had gone pale. She stared down at the grass. Her hair was hanging forwards, over her face. She looked ghost-like in the silvery dress with her bare feet and her long, hanging hair, like the mad heroine of some Gothic novel.

  ‘She sneaks out of the house to meet someone,’ Mr Brecht said, holding me even closer. ‘She says she’s going to see you, but I don’t think that’s always the case. She tells me that you’re always asking favours of her, begging her to go to your house. She says you’ve had your heart broken and that you need her. She says that you, Hannah, can be very demanding.’