The House at the End of Hope Street Page 13

  “Hey.” Alba leans against the counter.

  “Yeah.” The girl glances up. “How can I help?” The words are rote, probably because her mother’s been drumming them into her for years, resentful and dark brown: the color of boredom.

  “I’m looking for this house,” Alba says, displaying her father’s address. The girl gives it a cursory glance. “Two miles down the road, past the Old Forge.”

  “Oh, thank you.” Alba smiles. “Is it easy to find? I don’t have a street name.”

  “Everything’s easy to find.” The girl returns to her nails. “It’s fecking boring here. We only have, like, two streets, so the houses have names instead.”

  “Oh.” Alba’s suddenly slightly terrified. “Okay.” Her father might be a few miles away; she might be just about to meet him. Alba grips the counter and the girl looks up at her.

  “What you doing here anyway? You don’t look like you’d make it up a mountain, and there ain’t nothing else to do for fun. It’s just fecking boring. I can’t wait till I’m out of here.”

  Most of life is fecking boring when you’re fifteen, Alba wants to say, unless you’re the youngest-ever student at King’s College, in which case it’s a bit fecking stressful and lonely. “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Okay,” the girl sighs, having lost interest. “Whatever.”

  It takes Alba twenty minutes to reach the house and another hour to walk up the short path to the front door. The house is small with a thatched roof and walls painted white. The curtains are drawn. When she knocks the sound is dull against the wood. Alba peeks in through the letterbox, but it’s too dark to see inside. The weight of disappointment settles on Alba’s shoulders as she sits down on the doorstep to contemplate her next move.

  At first the sun is warm on her cheeks but then the wind starts to whip up. Alba slips her head and hands into her coat, shrinking like a turtle against the cold. But despite the chill and the disappointment, Alba is already quite captivated by Inverie, by the stark simplicity of the sea and the mountains, by the quiet, the muted colors of the sounds. In Cambridge Alba’s vision was flooded with contrasting colors: the rush of traffic, people shouting, radios, sirens, horns… In Inverie all she sees are the trails of soft blue as birds sweep through the air, light green spray off the water, waves lapping against the stony strip of beach, streaks of white as the wind whistles through. Alba loves the solitude and wonders if her father does too.

  “Well, hello there, little lassie.”

  Startled, Alba looks up to see an old woman with short gray hair mostly hidden under a woolen hat. Suddenly scared she’s trespassing, Alba jumps up and steps away from the house.

  “What might you be doing here, then?” the woman asks, but her tone isn’t harsh and her words are sky blue, the color of kindness and friendship.

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Aye, well then, maybe I can help.” The woman smiles. “Who is it you’re looking for?”

  “He’s called Albert,” Alba says. “I think he lives here.”

  “Aye, Al Mackay, he used to, but not anymore.”

  “Oh.” Alba swallows her regret. But at least she now knows his surname. “Where did he go?” Alba asks, desperately hoping she isn’t about to hear her father is dead and gone.

  “I couldn’t tell you, lassie, I’m afraid. And no one’s bought the house since Al left. Living here isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, wouldn’t you know. Some seem to think it’s the edge of the world.”

  “When did he leave?” Alba asks. “Do you know where he went?”

  “Four years ago, or thereabouts. But no, he kept himself to himself, did Albert. I was the only one round here he ever said more than three words to.”

  “Oh,” Alba says softly, tears gathering in her eyes. “Oh, I see.”

  After the woman leaves Alba returns to the doorstep to sit and soak up any remaining traces of her father, leaching the last molecules of his presence out of the stone, until the tips of her fingers are numb. When she pulls herself up to stand again, her legs are sleepy and leaden. At the gate Alba stops and turns to look at the low wall running back up to the cottage then continuing parallel to the house, leaving a passageway enough for a small person to squeeze through.

  There must be a back garden. Alba can’t believe she didn’t think of this before. There might be an open window, or one with a faulty catch, or a back door unlocked. Glancing around, Alba turns and hurries up the path, then squeezes through the passage.

  The back of the house looks very much like the front, but before she can examine it, something else catches her eye. The stone wall runs to the end of the garden, marking a square around the house and grounds. At the end, where the wild, overgrown lawn should continue, lies a blanket of color that glints and sparkles in the sunlight.

  From fifty feet away, Alba can’t quite make out what she’s looking at. As she gets closer, a sense of foreboding swallows her curiosity and she slows to step carefully through the scattered daisies and cowslips. And then Alba is looking down at layers of multicolored glass, the fragments of smashed bottles forming a blanket of a dozen different colors. Like a piece of modern art, she thinks. Alba bends forward, her fingers hovering a few inches above the glass. Here and there, jutting out of the jagged edges are torn labels, historical evidence of the identity of individual bottles before they were sacrificed for the whole. Alba wonders if her father was an artist as well as a poet, someone who turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. She feels a flutter in her chest, a tiny, fragile connection to him across time and space.

  Then she catches sight of something else. On the neck of a frosted pink bottle is a splash of dried blood, a shadow left behind, a clue. And, all of a sudden, the years fold together, showing Alba a truth she first missed. Her father must have drunk every bottle before he smashed them. Thousands of glasses of wine, whisky, champagne, cognac… She’s looking at a graveyard of multicolored tombstones marking every hour of her father’s alcoholism.

  Alba stands, seized by an urgent desire to run, to be as far away from this display of pain and despair as it’s possible to be. She’s enough of a mess already, she doesn’t want a father who is even worse than her. She needs one who is strong and brave, a man who can hold her in his arms and promise that everything will always be all right. After a lost and lonely childhood, Alba doesn’t want another parent who really isn’t one at all. She wants strength, dependency, endurance, courage.

  Then, as she’s about to turn away, Alba spots something else: the tip of a pen sticking an inch into the air, a little ship in a sea of glass. She bends down again and gingerly picks it up. It’s a fountain pen: cream edged in black with a gold clip, faded from exposure, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. It’s weighty, expensive, the kind only a serious writer would own. Alba rubs it on her sleeve, then carefully places it in her pocket. And with her fingers still wrapped around the pen, she turns and runs out of the garden and past the house, leaving the layers of multicolored glass far, far behind.

  —

  Peggy finds Greer ensconced in the back of her wardrobe, trying on an assortment of leather jackets with various cocktail dresses and cowboy boots.

  “I thought I’d find you in here.” The old woman eases herself onto a pile of abandoned clothes with a soft sigh of effort. “Hiding out with your safety blankets.”

  “Yeah.” Greer smiles. “I suppose so.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, from time to time.” Peggy fingers the hem of a dress, rubbing black lace between her fingertips. “Though I’m afraid you can’t hide your head in the sand forever, my dear, you don’t have as long as—”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “Well, I am a little like one, I suppose,” Peggy says. She picks up a moss green cardigan and absently slips it over her shoulders. “At least, it’s my job to help you fin
d your way to happiness. And I rather think you’re losing yours. Don’t you?”

  Greer slips a green leather jacket over red chiffon and gives a slight shrug. “I haven’t successfully auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company or found a prospective husband just yet, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Not exactly.” Peggy laughs. “And I have a feeling that your acting career will sort itself out. But as for men, the one you’re currently carrying on with will bring you nothing but heartbreak.” She discards one of her slippers and pulls on a pink cowboy boot. “But then you already know that, my dear, don’t you?”

  It’s a moment before Greer is able to look her landlady in the eye. “Yes,” she admits. “I know it and I still can’t seem to stop myself.”

  —

  When Carmen wakes the next morning she feels a strange urge, an intuitive pull she’s never felt before. Still in her nightgown she walks down to the kitchen, past the long wall of cupboards, the photographs of women who watch curiously, and arrives at a door she had never noticed. It stands ajar. Carmen pauses a moment, then pushes it open. As she steps through it and into the sunlight, a thousand tiny multicolored butterflies sweep into the kitchen: a herald to the newcomer, a welcome. A second later, they are gone.

  The beauty of the garden takes Carmen’s breath away. She stands on the stone terrace for several minutes before seeing Peggy sitting at a table under an apple tree. Mog sits, invisible, at her feet. The old woman gives a small, resigned smile. The day has come. The garden is hers no longer; it has invited someone else in.

  “Paraiso,” Carmen whispers. “I can’t believe, I live here two month, I think it just fields…” She steps off the terrace and onto the lawn. Blades of grass reach up to soften her soles. Flowers turn their faces in her direction; blossom-laden branches of the apple tree drop and settle close to her head. A puff of wind blows a shower of pink petals at her feet.

  “Meu Deus.” Carmen sighs. “It’s like I step into a song.”

  “It’s always a little overwhelming the first time.” Peggy sticks her fork into a half-eaten slice of cake. “I love chocolate cake for breakfast,” Peggy stalls, “it sets me up for the day. A little decadence is good for the soul.” She’s been eating more cake than usual, lately. Impending death does have compensations after all, then, if only chocolate-covered ones. She’s also been thinking of Harry nearly every hour of every day. She knew she cared for him deeply but has recently realized that he might be the love of her life. The woman who never entertained regrets now finds herself facing a rather big one.

  Mog jumps up onto the table to lick chocolate icing off the edge of Peggy’s plate.

  “So, my dear,” Peggy stalls, “what brings you here?”

  “I don’t know. I feel something in my stomach and I follow it.”

  “Yes,” Peggy says, “well, the garden has invited you, which means… I’m afraid it’s time to tell you something you won’t want to hear.”

  Carmen kicks her toes against the stone terrace.

  “When you bury things instead of confronting them, they will haunt you until you do,” Peggy says. “And I’m sorry to say that if you don’t dig it up by Friday night, you will have to leave.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the seven weeks since he last saw her, Albert has searched for his daughter everywhere. But she’s apparently broken all her rituals and, as far as he knows, disappeared from the face of the earth. He can’t understand why she’d leave in the middle of her MPhil. Of course no one at King’s would tell him anything, and every other lead he had followed failed. Albert’s at a loss. He can’t afford a private detective, not unless he takes out a loan, so he roams the streets worrying about what might have gone wrong.

  At times, when he’s staring at an (as yet) unopened bottle of vodka, Albert actually contemplates going to Ashby Hall or calling Liz. It’d be a gross breach of promise, but should it matter anymore now, given that Charles is long gone? Although Albert has thought about her so often, he thinks he might turn into a pillar of salt the moment he sees Liz again. Perhaps a letter would be best. He could write and ask about Alba, surely she owes him that, doesn’t she?

  Finally, Albert decides on a letter. Of course he knows her address by heart, but there is a tiny possibility she might have moved. So he turns on his computer to search for Elizabeth Ashby’s whereabouts, just in case. And that is how he discovers that the love of his life is dead.

  —

  “You can’t give up,” Stella says, “you have to keep trying.” The kitchen ceiling sinks down then springs back up, twice, as if nodding in agreement.

  “How?” Alba asks, fingering the pen in her pocket. She holds it now like a talisman, a good-luck charm. “I only know his name and where he used to live.”

  “Well, don’t bother with the police, ’cause they’ll do nothing,” Stella says. “But you can pay a private detective because he will, I guarantee it.”

  “I don’t know,” Alba says, “it seems a bit… seedy.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Stella laughs. “They track down missing persons, too, not just philandering spouses. Anyway, what’s the harm in trying?”

  The disappointment, Alba thinks, the absolute crushing disappointment of having hope dashed, obliterated, blown to smithereens. There is something to be said for avoiding all that. “Okay, I’ll think about it,” Alba says, “but can we change the subject, just for a bit?”

  All right, Stella thinks, enough pussyfooting around. It is time to be direct. “Well, if you want a little distraction, why don’t you try fiction?”

  “Yes.” Alba frowns. “That’s exactly what I do for—”

  “No,” Stella says. “Not reading it, writing it.”

  Alba is struck dumb. The ghost has just looked straight into her heart to see the secret desire she’s never admitted to anyone. Alba stares at the frayed sleeves of her T-shirt and fiddles with a loose thread.

  “But I’ve got nothing to say, and no imagination.” Alba speaks softly, without looking up. “That’s why I’ve always written about facts, not fiction.”

  “Except that you don’t write now, either fact or fiction,” Stella says. “Do you?”

  —

  Albert Mackay had clung to sobriety for twelve years, eleven months and six days. Until he learned that the love of his life, the mother of his child, was dead. That night he drank half a bottle of vodka. It was cheap and tasted like paint-stripper. But it was enough to take the edge off his agony, to numb his suicidal urge, to slide him into a coma of no longer caring about anything anymore.

  But it didn’t last. And the ache in Albert’s heart hasn’t ceased. He can’t eat, he can’t sleep for more than a few moments, he can’t focus on anything. Instead he remembers. And, clearer than any other memory is the time he first saw his daughter. She was a week old and looked nothing like him, except for the little blue eyes. Those eyes were a perfect reflection of his. They blinked up at him as he held her. Since then, he always wondered how he could care so suddenly and so deeply for such a small, oblivious being. How could he feel that way for someone who had no feelings for him at all?

  Now Albert drifts off in the middle of sentences, leaving his students staring at him. He’ll be reading a scene from Waiting for Godot or Antony and Cleopatra, then stop halfway and forget to read on. When he has no students and is supposedly marking essays, he simply stares at the same page for hours. At some point he will look up at the clock and realize the day is long since over and the school is deserted.

  Albert knows he has to do something. He can’t go on like this. Last night he walked into a lamppost and cracked his glasses. This morning he overheard his departmental head discussing Albert’s descent into distraction in not altogether sympathetic terms. So he has to do something, or he’ll lose his job. And that would be a tragic event worthy of Godot, Bovary, even Hamlet. Teaching literatur
e is all he wants or knows how to do.

  —

  Since Carmen left Peggy’s garden she’s been worrying about what she has to do. She doesn’t know if she has the courage to face again what she thought she’d got rid of forever. But right now, as she walks out of The Archer, she refuses to think about it. She has a few days left to decide what to do. And now songs from choir practice still echo joyfully in the air, and as she crosses the street she starts to sing—and then she hears Blake calling her name. Carmen turns back to see him leaning against the door and grinning.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “Home.” Carmen recognizes his smile, it is the sort that bewitches women into doing foolish things, causing them to fall down rabbit holes into other worlds. But not her. She is safe from this, she won’t fall in love. Tiago killed that possibility off years ago. Her heart is cold now, and numb. And in this, Carmen senses that she and Blake are a perfect match.

  “Hey, sugar.” He crosses the street to reach her. “Fancy a drink?”

  Carmen laughs. “I think I have enough of drink at work.”

  “How about a cuppa, then?” The slang sounds strange on his southern tongue.

  Carmen notices that he often asks questions as if they aren’t really questions. He isn’t requesting permission; he already knows that the answer will be yes. But she doesn’t care. A gypsy woman in Bragança once told her that a man leaves his mark on the spirit of every woman he sleeps with. And Carmen is ready to have Blake wipe away Tiago’s. So she shrugs. “Okay.”

  Instead of going to a coffee shop, Carmen asks him back to the house. She can’t explain why she does this, but once the invitation has slipped out, she can’t take it back. As Blake follows her across town, always half a step behind, she can feel him watching every curve of her body as she walks.

  Thirty minutes later, in the kitchen, Stella, Vita Sackville-West, Dora Carrington and one hundred and fifty-seven other women eye Blake suspiciously. Oblivious to this, he leans back in his chair and slides his feet onto the table. With a pang of guilt and remorse, he thinks of Greer, working until midnight at The Archer. For her sake he regrets what he’s doing. But he still has to do it. He can’t fall in love with Greer and if that means sleeping with Carmen then so be it. In this life, Blake has to protect himself. He must put his own needs first, just as his mother did.