‘This can’t possibly be the main access to that house,’ I tell Jess.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘We’ve fucked up, haven’t we? But that might be the place.’
I turn the car around and we bump our way back out on to the main road, then turn left a hundred yards further along into what looks like the drive of a small cottage.
It’s only once we’re alongside the cottage that it becomes obvious that it must once have been a gatehouse, because behind it the narrow track opens out into a majestic driveway, curving gently around to the house. It’s bordered on one side by a pretty lake and on the other by a row of perfectly spaced oak trees.
Eventually, the house comes into view, and I can see that it must indeed have once resembled Downton Abbey. Today the overall impression is more one of lost splendour. Ivy has scaled the walls and half the roof, and what is still visible of the walls is covered in peeling flakes of paint that look like the scales from some dying pink fish.
The house may not be looking its best, but there are no burned-out cars, and other than the one in the field next door, no abandoned caravans either. And yet I’m sure this must be the place.
I pull up on a patch of scrappy gravel in front of the house, next to the only other car present, a surprisingly shiny white Renault.
‘D’you think that’s a good omen?’ I ask Jessica, pointing.
‘The car?’ she asks me, confused.
‘Yes, but what kind of car is it?’ I ask, with a wink.
‘Ahh,’ she laughs. ‘A Zoe! I’d say that’s a very good sign.’
As we’re climbing from the car, a man appears from behind the main building. He’s wearing his grey hair in a long straggly ponytail and is dressed in wellington boots, muddy jeans and a number of thick woollen jumpers. As he pushes his wheelbarrow of logs ever closer, I realise that he’s considerably older than I had first thought, in his sixties rather than his forties.
When he reaches us, he props up the wheelbarrow and stretches to rub the base of his spine with both hands.
‘Ouch,’ he says, then, ‘Can I help you?’
He has a hint of a smile on his lips, but the overall result is more amused than welcoming. Perhaps he thinks we look out of place here. Glancing at Jess’s lime-green trousers and pink coat and the muddy fields around us, I decide that his grin is pretty reasonable.
‘I hope you can,’ Jess says, stepping forward and offering a hand, which he ignores. ‘This is Siochain House, isn’t it?’
The man nods. Nothing else about his expression changes, and I decide that he is perhaps not amused after all. I’m thinking that he’s almost certainly stoned.
‘Thank God,’ Jess says. ‘We’ve been driving all over. You’re so difficult to find!’
‘Which is entirely intentional,’ the man says flatly. ‘May I inquire what your purpose is?’
‘Oh, we’re looking for my sister,’ I explain. ‘Zoe? Zoe Fuller?’
With the same expression of vague amusement, he says, ‘Ahh, Zoe. I’m afraid you’ve missed her.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Do you know when she’ll be back?’
‘Never is the most likely answer to that one,’ he says. ‘Though, of course, one can never tell.’ At this, he seizes the handles of the wheelbarrow again and starts to continue on his way.
‘But we’ve just missed her, you say?’ Jess asks, starting to trot along behind him.
‘Oh no, you’ve missed Zoe by about nine months,’ he says, casting the words over his shoulder.
Jess pauses to look back at me and we have an entirely unspoken conversation comprised of raised eyebrows and nods towards the house. As a result, I join her and we follow in the man’s wake, past the grand stone staircase to the front door, and around the far corner to a side door.
On arrival, he tips his load of wood on to the bottom step, and then turns to face us once again.
‘You’re still here,’ he comments. Again, his tone of voice is entirely without emotion. He sounds neither surprised nor annoyed by our presence. He’s simply stating it as a fact.
‘Yep, still here,’ I say, wiggling my eyebrows in a vague attempt at charming him.
‘We’ve come all the way from Bristol,’ Jess says. ‘So . . .’
‘From Bristol,’ he repeats. ‘Yes.’
‘Look, can you tell us anything at all?’ I ask.
‘Oh, many things I can tell you,’ the man says, sounding irritatingly like he’s channelling Yoda.
‘About Zoe,’ I say, as flatly as I can manage.
‘Ahh, sorry, but Zoe is not my specialist subject,’ he says. ‘I’m very good on astrology, if that’s of use.’
‘Is there anyone else here we could talk to?’ Jess asks. ‘Someone who might know where she went?’
‘Nuala will,’ he says. ‘If she’s here. She’s far more aware of all the comings and goings than I am.’
‘And where might we find Nuala?’ Jess asks, tentatively.
‘You might find Nuala in the main house,’ he says. ‘Then again, you might not. She could be out. I really wouldn’t know.’
‘Do you mind if we look?’ I ask.
The man shakes his head gently. ‘I don’t mind anything at all,’ he says.
‘How stoned?’ I say, once Jess and I have left him behind.
‘Quite stoned, I’d say,’ Jess says. ‘D’you think they grow their own?’
‘They might,’ I say, emulating the man’s flat tone of voice. ‘Then again, they might not.’
We walk to the front of the house and climb the curved stone staircase to the main door. As this is wide open, we step inside the porch. One wall is lined with muddy boot-stacked shelves, and the other is taken up by an enormous corkboard on which are pinned posters for long-ago concerts, a couple of bills and tens and tens of scraps of paper with messages written on them.
I scan a few and learn that ‘This Monday’s house meeting is cancelled’ and that ‘Electric fires are not to be used in the bedrooms as they overload the wires.’
I cross the chequered tiles and peer through a dirty windowpane in the second door. Beyond it is a high-ceilinged entrance hall, but I can see no sign of life.
We knock a few times on the door and attempt to push an old doorbell button, but it has been painted over long ago.
After a minute or so of knocking, Jess tries the door handle, and when it opens, we step indoors and close it behind us.
‘Wow,’ Jess whispers. ‘It’s massive.’
‘It’s Hill House,’ I murmur.
‘What?’ Jess says.
‘The Haunting of Hill House? You’ve seen that, haven’t you?’
Jess shakes her head. ‘No, thankfully,’ she says.
‘Hello?’ I call out. When there’s still no answer, we edge further into the cavernous hallway. An image flashes through my mind of a party, in the thirties, perhaps – the house full of men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns; waiters whizzing around serving champagne . . .
I wonder if it’s an image I’ve retained from a TV series or if it’s an actual memory the house is somehow beaming into my brain. It wasn’t always like this, it seems to be saying. Once upon a time, life was a ball.
A shiver makes me notice the temperature. ‘It’s colder in here than outside,’ I say, my breath hanging in the air as I speak.
‘It’s like being in a fridge. Someone needs to light that fire,’ Jess says, nodding towards a huge stone fireplace on the right-hand wall, around which three ancient sofas have been haphazardly placed.
We cross to the nearest side door and peer into a large lounge with panelled walls. It has French windows looking out over the lake, beautiful worn wooden floorboards and, by way of furniture, a circle of twenty junk-shop armchairs, their stuffing oozing out. The walls have apparently been painted with whatever came to hand, so two are gloss green, one deep red, and the fourth canary yellow. On the ceiling someone has painted, apparently many, many years before, a gigantic yin–yang symbol.
‘The yin–yang?’ I say. ‘That’s Asian, isn’t it?’
‘No, silly. The red, green and yellow,’ Jess says.
‘Ah, right,’ I say. ‘Maybe.’
‘The drawing room?’ Jess says as we peer into another room with wall-to-wall bookcases. Again, the outer wall has French windows that reach from the ceiling to the floor, only this time someone has attempted to insulate them with bubble wrap and duct tape. The overall result of beige light filtering through is depressing and their efforts seem to have been in vain anyway, because it’s actually colder in here than in the hallway.
‘It was once a drawing room,’ I reply. With its five single beds and two tables, the room looks far more like an improvised dormitory.
‘There’s no stuff,’ Jess comments, as we step back into the main hall. ‘Have you noticed that?’
‘Stuff?’ I say.
‘Yeah, clothes, records, books, plates . . . There’s just furniture. Lots and lots of shitty furniture. If people live here, then where is all their stuff?’
We cross the ochre floor tiles of the hallway to the base of the winding staircase. It, too, must have once been pretty grandiose, and it’s not difficult to imagine Ava Gardner floating towards us in a ball gown. Sadly, someone with a misplaced sense of taste has randomly painted everything, so the banister poles are all different colours.
‘Hello?’ I call out again, but there’s still no answer, so we duck down a corridor to the right of the staircase. It’s about twenty yards long with regularly spaced doors on both sides. As these are all closed and as the only real light is coming from the front door, now some way behind us, it starts to feel quite eerie.
‘It’s The Shining,’ I tell Jess. ‘Look out for kids on tricycles.’
‘Just stop it, will you?’ she says, slapping me gently on the shoulder.
We continue to the end of the corridor where a final door is ajar about half an inch, allowing a tiny strip of light to leak out on to the tiled floor.
I push the door and it swings open easily, revealing an industrial-scale kitchen with metal worktops and a twelve-burner gas stove. In the middle of the room, over a wide central island, a rectangular contraption hangs from the ceiling, and hooked on to this are a whole collection of school-dinner-sized pots and pans.
In the middle of the room, with her back to us, a woman is busy cooking.
‘Hello?’ I call out, because she seems oblivious to our presence.
When she still doesn’t respond, Jess and I glance at each other before jointly stepping closer. Her failure to react is a bit creepy, to be honest, and it crosses my mind that she might be a zombie. I guess I’ve been watching too many horror films on Netflix.
‘Hello?’ I say loudly, and this time she spins, her knife still in her hand, and on seeing us screams so loudly that both Jess and I jump backwards in fright.
‘Shit!’ she says, pulling her earbuds out, ‘Shit, shit, shit! Shit, you made me jump!’
She’s in her mid-fifties, with long, grey hair. She’s wearing jeans, dirty Timberland-style boots and a thick, knee-length jumper with almost as many holes as it has stitches.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘We called out, but . . .’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she says breathlessly, gesturing vaguely towards her ears. She blows through her pursed lips slowly. ‘It’s my fault, really . . . the music.’
‘We knocked on the front door for ages, too,’ Jess explains. ‘But no one answered.’
‘Well,’ she says, waving the knife around a little nerve-rackingly as she speaks. ‘That’s like everything else, isn’t it?’
‘Like everything else?’ Jess repeats.
‘Never mind,’ the woman says. ‘It’s just, you know, people leaving everything to someone else. It’s the cancer of every community.’
‘Oh, right,’ I say. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Sorry, but who are you?’ she asks, now pointing the knife right at me. I glance nervously at the blade, and when she realises what she’s doing she grimaces and turns and places it on the counter behind her, then wipes her hands on her hips.
‘We’re, um, looking for my sister,’ I explain. ‘A guy outside told us to ask for Nuala?’
‘Oh. OK, well, you’ve found her,’ she says. ‘That’s me. But he shouldn’t have let you wander around like this. Was it Gunter?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I tell her. ‘It was a guy with a ponytail and a wheelbarrow full of logs . . .’
‘Yeah, that’ll be Gunter,’ she says, her eyes rolling. ‘And your sister is?’
‘Zoe,’ I say. ‘Zoe Fuller. Do you know her?’
She nods in sad recognition and then clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth before replying, ‘God, yeah. Of course I do. We all know Zoe.’
She crosses to the cooker, on which there’s a frying pan full of onions, and for a moment I think that she’s decided to ignore us in the same way Gunter did, that she’s simply moving on to her next task. But then she stirs the onions, turns off the heat and returns, walking past us and on into the corridor. ‘Come up to mine for a minute,’ she says as she passes. ‘It’s freezing down here. Plus, I have tea.’
We follow her back through the main hall and up the Technicolor staircase.
‘It’s an amazing house,’ Jess says, as we trot along beside her.
‘Is it?’ Nuala says, then, ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
She leads us along another fridge-cold corridor on the first floor, and once again, almost all the doors are closed. When occasionally a door is ajar, I glance inside to see random collections of furniture, and ever more incoherent colour schemes.
‘That’s Dillon,’ she says, as we pass one open door, and the man in the room waves his fingers at us without even looking up from his book. ‘He’s a bit antisocial,’ she mutters a little further down. ‘Don’t take it personally.’
At the end of the corridor she unlocks a padlock, pushes the door open and ushers us in. Her bedroom is high ceilinged with another pair of beautiful French windows, this time leading on to a narrow balcony overlooking the lake. Unlike the rest of the house, the decor here is a single colour: a slightly pink-tinged beige.
She has a four-poster bed, a blue velour divan piled with clothes, a desk with a huge iMac computer and a Welsh dresser with cups, plates and a kettle. In the fireplace a two-bar electric fire is running, meaning that this room is slightly less arctic than elsewhere. I think about the warning on the noticeboard and wonder if she’s seen it. I wonder if the wires to the sockets are melting at this very moment.
Nuala clears just enough space on the divan for us to sit, and then heads to the dresser to make tea. ‘So, how did you find us?’ she asks as she fills the kettle from a filter jug and then switches it on.
‘It was luck, really,’ I tell her. ‘We turned down a farm track and then saw the house through the trees.’
‘No, I mean more generally speaking,’ she says. ‘Why did you think Zoe would be here?’
‘A guy in Morecambe told us,’ I explain. ‘He said she’d come here when she moved out, so . . .’
‘Morecambe, yes,’ Nuala says. ‘She was there before. But she’s long gone, I’m afraid.’
‘So I gather. But the guy outside – Gunter, is it? He seemed to think you might know where she went.’
‘Oh, I know exactly where she went,’ Nuala says, now dropping teabags into the cups and pouring on boiling water. I’ve just noticed that the teabags are green tea rather than black. Unfortunately, I’m not a big fan of green tea, but it’s too late to say anything now.
‘And where is that?’ I ask.
‘France,’ Nuala says. ‘Nick found a job out there, so off they jolly well went.’
‘Nick?’ I repeat.
‘If she’s your sister, then I’m assuming she told you about Nick?’ N
uala says.
I hesitate for a microsecond as to whether it’s best to lie and get her confidence, or tell the truth in the hope that she’ll explain. The first option wins out, so I nod. ‘Of course,’ I say.
Jess’s brow wrinkles at this, indicating, I think, that this was the wrong decision, so I send her a tiny shrug and a grimace.
‘I don’t know,’ Jess says. ‘Who’s Nick?’
‘Who’s Nick . . .’ Nuala repeats quietly, her eyes drifting to the window for a moment. She shakes her head slowly. ‘Well, Zoe’s partner, for one thing. And the last of the youngsters to leave us. It happens to them all in the end.’ She crosses the room with our teas and, seeing that we’re looking confused, she explains. ‘They meet someone on the outside. They fall in love. They bring them back here. It doesn’t work out. Everyone argues. And they leave. It’s why there are only eight of us left.’
‘Eight?’ Jess repeats. ‘In this huge house?’
Nuala sits on the edge of her bed and sips her tea and nods. ‘We’re dying, really,’ she says. ‘No one wants to admit it, but we are. Without fresh blood, we’re dying. Like vampires.’
‘But it didn’t work out?’ I ask. ‘With Zoe?’
Nuala laughs at this. ‘She’s a nice enough girl,’ she says. ‘But suited to communal living she is not.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, I can imagine that she might find that challenging. She struggled even with having a family.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ Nuala says. ‘Half the people here are escaping dysfunctional families. Zoe never mentioned you, though. She never even hinted that she had any kind of family.’
I sigh at this and sip my tea. There doesn’t seem to be much that I can say to that.
‘But you definitely know where they went?’ Jess says. ‘That’s brilliant news. Do you have an address or something?’
‘I do,’ Nuala says.
‘Oh, that would be wonderful,’ I tell her. ‘We’ve been driving all over the place trying to—’
‘I can’t just give it to you,’ Nuala says. ‘That would be . . . No, no, I definitely couldn’t do that. I can text them and ask if Zoe minds. Or I can give them your number, I suppose. Yes, that’s probably easier. Then it’s up to Zoe, isn’t it?’
The Road to Zoe Page 17