In Her Shadow

by Douglas, Louise

  Jago and Ellen made love. That was why Jago went to Ellen in the night; that was why she summoned him.

  Later, when happiness had softened Ellen, when she had moderated her behaviour and I was allowed back into Thornfield House, she told me some of it. She touched her throat as she told me; her eyes shone and her voice was husky with excitement. I didn’t see it, but I could imagine her head thrown back and her shoulders, her small breasts, the chain around her neck and the catching of air in her lungs, her black hair spread about the white pillow, Jago’s pushing into her, her slender feet hooked around his back, so much incredible, mutual pleasure, such obligation, so much that was so right.

  She described the breathless moments of the sexual act itself, she feeling the fill of him, he always rushed with the pleasure of her, her glorious shivering. And afterwards, she told me how they suppressed their laughter and how Jago said, ‘I love you,’ into her ear, how his lips and his fingers were in her hair. ‘I love you, Ellen Brecht,’ he said. ‘Let’s be together always, for ever, let’s be lovers until we die. I love you so much it kills me to leave you. I think about you every moment of every day. I want to tell everyone about you. I want them to know.’ And she said in return, ‘You can’t! You mustn’t! Don’t breathe a word to anyone, not anyone.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  He always fell asleep first; he had been working all day and was exhausted by the physical act, worn out by the nervous energy he had used in the subterfuge of climbing into the house, and by the anticipation that had dogged him all day. Ellen stayed awake. She was on guard, protecting her lover from the dangers of the night. She turned over, spooned her back into his warmth, stared at the panes of glass in the window, listened out for footsteps on the landing, a giveaway cough. Outside, the night was brighter than inside. She watched the moon move slowly from one windowpane into the next. Her eyes were tired, but she did not sleep, not when Jago was with her. She knew that soon, before dawn, he would have to leave, and she did not know how, night after night, she found the strength to wake him, to send him away, to say ‘Goodbye.’

  Hers was the best drama, the most exciting life, the most thrilling and dangerous and liberating. Ellen lived and loved and she burned and burned, bright as a star, believing she would live and love for ever.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  EVENTUALLY, AFTER HOURS of crashing and booming, the thunder moved away from Bristol and I skimmed the surface of sleep. I dipped in and out of dreams and almost drifted off, but each time was pricked into wakefulness by the memory of the woman standing on the clifftop and the glass on the gravestone. I kept hearing Ellen’s voice. In my half-sleep she beckoned me into the mirror and I followed her. Behind were the Trethene moors, and she and I moved across the marshland. We were both in our nightgowns, barefoot, our hair blowing behind us as we stumbled through the mist, tripping on marshy hillocks as the moon drifted in and out of fast-moving, shape-shifting white clouds.

  I called out to her, ‘Ellen, wait! Let me see you!’ but she ran on, snatches of her voice on the wind, and, although I was compelled to keep her in my sight, I did not want her to turn. I did not want to see her face.

  In the early hours, an alarm went off down the street somewhere. It shrieked, splintering the dark, for ten minutes or so at a time, and then it went quiet again, before restarting. I couldn’t get used to the noise, or the intervening silences. I was too hot in my bed. I tried lying on top of the covers, but I was still too hot. Sweat prickled the skin that wasn’t exposed to the cooling air. I got up and opened the bedroom window, but no draught was coming through. I needed to open the living-room window at the front of the flat to create a through-draught.

  The power had been restored. That was probably what had triggered the alarm. In the orange glow of the streetlamp, I could see two men talking on the pavement below. It was clear from their body language that they were in some kind of trouble, or were expecting it. One was well-built and good-looking, holding a cigarette and shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other, like a boxer. The other was scrawnier, with yellow dreadlocks and a face that looked as if it had recently been in a fight. I wanted to open the window, but if I did, the men might hear the noise – they might look up and see me and think I’d been eaves dropping. I imagined them scampering up the wall like spiders, climbing in the window, prowling through the flat, hunting me down. I didn’t dare turn on the light.

  I walked to the kitchen at the back and slid open the window. Lily paced the sill, backwards and forwards, rubbing her head against my wrist. Outside, a cat was prowling the wall that separated the garden of my building from its neighbour. The rabbit that belonged to the children in our garden flat was crouching in its hutch; I could see it clearly through the wire mesh, which meant the lights downstairs must have been switched on. Perhaps the family who lived there had been disturbed by the alarm too. Perhaps they wanted the men outside to know they were awake. Lily jumped onto the floor and wound herself around my ankles. I reached down to stroke her.

  I had a longing to be outside, in the cooler air. I imagined myself stretched out flat on the scrubby patch of rain-drenched lawn in the garden, in front of the rabbit hutch, amongst the discarded plastic toys, beneath the moon. But I had no access to the back garden, and I could not go out of the front door, not with the two men standing there, by the streetlamp, waiting for something or someone.

  I went into the living room but did not switch on the light, not even a lamp. I turned on the television with the remote, kept the sound to silent. The TV was tuned to a news channel; there were riots, people throwing petrol bombs, people being beaten with batons, people lying dead on the streets, blood making wet black shadows around them. I switched over. A different channel. Young men were sitting around a table, playing poker. I neither understood nor cared about poker. I turned the television off, feeling enervated. And outside, the alarm was blaring: naah, naah, naah – like a wounded animal with an electronic bleat.

  I went back into the kitchen, took a bottle of whisky out of the fridge and half-filled a tumbler. There was ice in the freezer. I took my drink into the living room and sat curled in my white armchair in the almost-dark with Lily on my lap. I didn’t feel like music or reading or candles, any of my usual distractions. I didn’t feel like anything. I was numb and cold, despite the heat, and terribly alone, as if I were the only person in the world, the last person alive, the one to witness the fading of the sun.

  It was a long night, but at last the morning came. I mopped up a leak on the kitchen windowsill with a cloth and listened to the early news on Radio 4. I ate yoghurt and muesli for breakfast, fed the cat, wrote a note to remind myself to buy some more litter for her box and was just about to leave for work when the phone rang. It was Julia, my therapist.

  ‘Hi, Hannah,’ she said in her positive but not overly chirpy counselling voice. ‘Just thought I’d give you a quick call to see how things are going.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK-ish.’ I tucked the phone under my chin and leaned down to find the umbrella in the hall cupboard.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  I took the umbrella from the cupboard, and returned to the living room.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Would you like to tell me about it?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I went down to Cornwall at the weekend,’ I said. ‘I wanted to see my parents, but also … I don’t know why exactly, but I felt drawn to the beach where I used to go with Ellen. I was thinking about her and I saw something – someone was watching me.’

  I heard Julia’s little intake of breath, like a small sigh in reverse.

  ‘I don’t know who it was,’ I continued quickly. ‘The sun was behind her so I couldn’t see clearly, but it was a woman and she was standing on the clifftop in a place only Ellen would know.’

  ‘It could have been anyone, Hannah.’

  ‘I know.’

  I didn’t say it but I was thinking that
it could also have been no one.

  I sat down on the white chair. ‘And there was something else, something weird. I went to Ellen’s grave. I’d never been there before – I know you told me to go years ago, but I hadn’t. Anyway, I went and I found something there – something from our childhood.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  I was feeling a little dizzy. ‘Some pieces of glass. We used to call it drift-glass. Glass that had been in the sea. I used to collect it. I’d left it hidden somewhere secret, somewhere only Ellen would know. And somebody had moved it and put it on Ellen’s gravestone. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  ‘How could you be sure they were the same pieces of glass? You can’t have seen them for years.’

  ‘Because …’ I stopped. I couldn’t explain about the single blue piece and I didn’t think I should tell Julia about my growing feeling that Ellen was still alive. She would think I really had lost my mind. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’m certain they were.’

  There was a silence at the other end of the line for a moment or two. It made me feel vulnerable.

  Then Julia said, ‘I’d like to see you, Hannah, just to catch up for a coffee. It would be good, I think, to have a talk face to face. How would you feel about that?’

  I felt relieved. Julia would know if I was all right or if I was falling apart. She was a professional. She’d be able to tell. And perhaps she could prescribe me some drugs or some therapy; something to help me sleep. Perhaps, if we were together, I could be honest with her and she would be able to make things clear in my mind.

  ‘It would be lovely to see you again, Julia,’ I said. ‘I think it would be really helpful for me.’

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  We arranged to meet in Bristol the following day.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I WAS EIGHTEEN in November. Mum and Dad took Jago and me into Exeter. We ate pizzas in a lively Italian restaurant complete with a real pizza oven and a waiter with a huge, comedy pepperpot. The waiter kept kissing his fingers to indicate that something was delicious. Dad said you could tell the restaurant was authentic by the little dishes full of grated Parmesan on every table. I enjoyed it and Jago did his best, but he was fidgety. Dad had made him wear a shirt and tie. They didn’t suit him. My parents gave me fifty pounds for my birthday and Jago gave me a charm bracelet. I put it on my wrist and he promised to buy me a new charm every year.

  My best gift was from Ellen and Mr Brecht. Ellen presented it to me the next time I went to Thornfield House while Mr Brecht opened a bottle of champagne. Mrs Todd was looking on. The gift had been beautifully wrapped. It was an encyclopaedia of Natural History, a huge tome full of beautiful colour pictures. Inside the front of the book, Ellen had written: To my best friend always and her father had simply written: with love. I traced over those two words with the tip of my finger so many times that they began to fade.

  The pages of the book were heavy and silky. They smelled divine. I never tired of looking at them and imagining what it must be like to be on an ice-floe, or in a jungle, or a desert at sunset with the polar bears and the monkeys and the snakes. The book was what made me decide for certain what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be an explorer. I wanted to visit remote parts of the world and discover new species. There were so many places to go, so much to see. Most of all, I decided I wanted to be away from Trethene.

  The gift also confirmed my suspicions that things couldn’t be so bad between Ellen and her father if they could still collaborate when it came to choosing a present for me. After I’d unwrapped the book, they stood together, both delighting in my pleasure, Mr Brecht’s hand on Ellen’s shoulder and she leaning slightly towards him, each raising a glass to me. I went to thank them, and they both kissed me. They were, in many ways, so alike. They had, by mutual consent, called a truce in my honour. If only, I thought, Ellen didn’t always make life so difficult for herself and for everyone else, then maybe everything would be fine.

  Except, I couldn’t see Mr Brecht ever forgiving her for what she was doing with Jago. Not now. Not when the deception had gone on for so long in his house, under his nose. Not when they were effectively making a fool of him.

  My heart ached for Mr Brecht.

  The winter rolled in, cold and grey and sullen. Time moved so slowly back then, as if the world were spinning at a different speed. In any day, there would be hours when I had nothing to do except wander around the countryside, or lie on my bed with my eyes closed thinking about how boring my life was and how I wished it was more exciting. I planned out my future: A-levels would start in the new year, and then I’d work in the Seagull during the summer and go off to university in September. I’d study the sciences and then go to work for the BBC’s Natural History Department, or for a wildlife charity, and I’d make films or write books. I would be famous. I’d change the world.

  Without Ellen, I was lonely at school and often bored. I wasn’t interested in the boys who were my contemporaries. They were like cattle, I thought, slow and heavy and smelly, in comparison to Mr Brecht. They would not know how to charm or seduce or love or suffer. Their interests were mundane, their conversations inane. I couldn’t bear the thought of them near me yet they seemed to be all the other girls thought about.

  Home, too, seemed ever more constricting. My parents were settling comfortably into late-middle age; they had their routines, their favourite programmes, their regular menus. And Jago, who could have brought some fun into my life, had no time for me.

  I was walking the dog along the river estuary one afternoon, when I found him sitting hunched on the rocks, watching the tide come in, spilling along the mudflats where the wading birds with their long, thin legs and arced bills strutted and fed. I sat beside him, not touching him, not saying anything. I wrapped Trixie in my coat. The three of us sat on the rocks and stared out at the gunmetal-grey water and the sky and the birds.

  Jago picked up a pebble and skimmed it across the surface of the water. It bounced twice. Dad always used to say that meant bad luck.

  ‘Throw another one,’ I said. ‘You need three bounces.’

  Jago tried again. The pebble jumped off the water once, as if struck by electricity, but the second time it dropped into the water and disappeared.

  ‘Again,’ I said, but Jago shook his head.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ I asked.

  ‘I have to take Ellen away from here,’ he said. ‘I need to get her away from her father, far away, somewhere he can’t find her.’

  ‘Why?’

  He frowned at me. ‘Why do you think? So we can be together without all this sneaking around.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Abroad. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter.’

  Jago put his head in his hands. I let my head fall to the side so that my cheek rested against his shoulder. I hugged the dog close to me.

  ‘If you just waited a while,’ I said, ‘until Ellen’s a bit older, then her father won’t be able to stop you seeing her. He’d probably be fine if you just—’

  ‘No,’ Jago said. ‘He’ll never let her be free. He’ll never let us be together. I’ll have to take her away, and you’ll have to help us.’

  I sighed. This was Ellen’s lament. She had taught it to Jago, and now he was following the script too.

  ‘What can I do?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but I’ll think of a way. We’ll have to decide where we’re going, as far away as possible, and I’ll have to find a job. We’ll need money. Especially if we’re living abroad. We’ll need the cash to tide us over.’

  A pair of mute swans circled overhead. Their necks were extended impossibly long and their wings rippled through the air, stately but loud as gunshot. Trixie looked up and growled.

  ‘Ellen’s going to get an inheritance when she’s eighteen,’ I said quietly. ‘At least, she told me she was. A fortune, she said. Hundreds of thousands of pou
nds. I don’t know if it’s true, but—’

  ‘It is true.’

  I moved away a little to look at Jago’s face.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Ellen told me,’ he said. Inside, another little bit of me curled up in pain. I had thought I was Ellen’s confidante. All those secrets she’d told me that I thought were private, just for the two of us – had she told Jago too? ‘She doesn’t know how much the inheritance will be,’ Jago said. ‘And that’s not the point. I don’t want to be scrounging off her. I want to look after her. I want her to be proud of me.’

  I said nothing. I was trying to contain my hurt.

  ‘The money will help, of course,’ said Jago. ‘It’s not like it won’t be useful. It means we’ll be able to go wherever we want, anywhere in the world. Do you think the witch would be pleased to know we were using her money to escape Trethene?’

  ‘You shouldn’t call Mrs Withiel a witch,’ I said crossly. ‘It’s unkind.’

  Jago laughed. ‘When did you get so up yourself?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  He put his arm around me and said, ‘Don’t be such a spanner.’ And because he had used my childhood nickname, I burrowed into his warmth and forgave him.

  ‘I don’t want you to go away,’ I said. ‘What will I do without you? What will happen to me? What about Mum and Dad?’

  ‘They’ll be fine and you’ve got your own life to lead. You don’t need me. You’re going to be a famous explorer.’

  ‘I don’t want to be anything without you.’

  ‘You won’t be without us. You’ll be our accomplice. You’re the key to everything. In fact,’ Jago said, ‘there’s something you can do now. You can start collecting supplies and putting them in the cave at Bleached Scarp so that Ellen has somewhere to go to if things get too bad with her father.’

  ‘What supplies?’