The House at the End of Hope Street Page 20

  “Can you guess what it is?” he asked, as they snuggled down in their seats.

  “I think so.” She smiled. “And I can’t believe you did it.”

  “Anything, anytime.” He slipped his hand into her lap. “If it’s within the realm of my magical powers, you’ve got it.”

  The titles flickered onto the screen. Elizabeth squeezed Albert’s hand as Miss Bartlett appeared:

  “The signora had no business to do it, no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking onto a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!”

  Albert glanced at Elizabeth to see her mouthing the lines. He knew she wouldn’t leave her husband while her children were young; they’d lose all their privileges, relocate to a council estate and probably hate her forever. Albert, having grown up on a council estate, can’t see what a disaster that would be, but he understands about the children and is quite prepared to wait until they have left home, or whenever she’s ready, as long as it takes.

  With Elizabeth’s eyes still fixed on the screen, Albert kissed her.

  Without turning to him she whispered: “I’ll love you, Al, for the rest of my life.”

  Snapping out of the memory, Albert sees that his glass is empty. He heaves himself off the sofa and shuffles back to the sink. As the half-empty bottle comes into view, he stops. What the hell is he doing? Is he really going to give up on Alba as he did on Elizabeth? Will he let her run away, or will he find and fight for her? Will he drink himself into a coma, or search and not stop until he’s looking at his daughter again?

  Albert picks up the bottle and watches his hand—seemingly of its own accord—skim over the glass and tip the rest of the vodka down the sink. As Albert watches the last few ounces slip down the drain, he’s suddenly hit with an idea so simple he can’t believe it hasn’t struck him before. He doesn’t have to go from place to place, seeking out Alba in her regular haunts, hoping one day he’ll see her. He can go to one place and wait until she comes. And if Alba is still in Cambridge, then there is one place she’s sure to visit eventually, even if he has to wait a very long time.

  —

  Having left Harry upstairs waiting for her, Peggy knocks on Greer’s bedroom door. She holds a new note in her hand, one she found on her pillow this morning. She knows it was meant for someone else, which means it’s clearly time to stop stepping back and start interfering again. When no one answers she pushes the door open and crosses the room to the wardrobe. She finds Greer buried in the back. Peggy stands outside and softly calls her name until Greer pokes her head through the curtain of couture.

  “Oh, hello, Peg,” Greer says, a little flustered. She’s holding a silk tea gown as shiny and pink as the inside of a shell.

  “Sorry to burst in like this.” Peggy runs her fingers through the beaded tassels of a black sequined flapper dress. “I have something for you.” She offers the note.

  Greer unfolds it and reads,

  As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.—Goethe.

  “It came to me. For the second time this month,” Peggy says. “And I believe that, this time at least, it was meant for you.” Peggy notices the sea of shoes on the floor. “Goodness, how lucky you are, I do so love shoes.”

  Greer picks up a pair of velvet heels the color of Peggy’s earrings. “Try these on.”

  “Oh, no.” Peggy laughs, slipping them on. “I gave up heels years ago.” She thinks of how much Harry would enjoy them.

  Greer glances at the note again. “So, what do I need to trust?”

  “Your instincts,” Peggy suggests. “The truth about the things in your life.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  Peggy frowns. “Yes.” Though she’s not nearly as certain about that nowadays as she used to be.

  “But,” Greer says, “I don’t think I know what my instincts about things are.”

  “Oh yes, you do.” Peggy looks at her. “You know exactly, you just don’t want to believe it.”

  —

  “Won’t you move in with me, Peg?” Harry asks. “You don’t have to marry me, just live with me. Haven’t I paid my dues? Haven’t you paid yours?”

  Peggy bites her tongue. The temptation to say yes is so strong in her now that she can hardly hold it back. “You know the answer to that,” Peggy says softly, “it’s the same one I’ve been giving for the last twenty years.”

  “Yes,” Harry agrees. “But I’m not sure if I believe you anymore.”

  There is no point in marrying me, Peggy wants to tell him. You’d be a widower before we were even on our honeymoon.

  They’re sitting at the kitchen table, sharing a slice of postcoital chocolate cake with cream. The characters on the crockery are suspended in the poses they were in when Harry sat down at the table. On Peggy’s plate Rumpelstiltskin is lifting the Lady of Shallot’s skirt above her head. On Harry’s, the Red Queen is engaging in a little light bondage with Dopey. They’ve been spending nearly every night with each other recently. Peggy doesn’t care anymore about the rule against overnight visitors. If the forbidden room is locking her out, if the house is ignoring her, then she will jolly well ignore it in return. If she’s going to be selfless and sacrifice the remaining days of her life to the house, then she’ll also be selfish and cram in all the mortal joy she possibly can while she’s still breathing.

  “It hasn’t been that long.” He takes another bite of cake, while Peggy licks the cream off her fork. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Peggy says, “quite sure.” The desire to run away with him swells up but with some effort she pushes it down again.

  “I don’t understand.” Harry takes her hand. “You’ve given up everything to be here, to do this. You haven’t had a husband or a family—”

  “These girls are my family, they’re my daughters,” Peggy says, wanting to end the conversation.

  “But they leave after ninety-nine days, which isn’t quite the same, is it?”

  “It’s always suited me fine,” Peggy lies. “I told you that.”

  “I’m not going to drop it, Peg. I know you’re hiding things from me. What about that door, the one that won’t open?”

  “It’s just stuck.”

  Harry, who has tried several times to pry open the door with a crowbar, knows this isn’t true. “I love you, Peg, so I’ve accepted your lifestyle. But it’s different now. Something’s changed—you want to leave, I can feel it.”

  “Don’t.” Peggy holds up her hand to stop him, but Harry just enfolds it between his hands and places it on his chest, not letting her go.

  After Harry has gone home, Peggy finds a hammer in a long-forgotten cake tin (along with a very moldy piece of cake). She’s decided to take drastic action; waiting clearly hasn’t worked, so she’s going to resort to brute force. She lifts the hammer high over the door handle and brings it down hard. This makes a little dent in the gold-plated knob, but nothing more. So she does it again.

  Downstairs, in the living room, Carmen stops playing and wonders at the rhythmic banging above her, which is punctuated ten minutes later by an exasperated scream.

  —

  Alba lies in bed, unable to sleep. She’d been practicing with Carmen earlier, testing out the first verse of their song. They’d agreed it was okay, but far from brilliant. Finally she’d come to bed and picked up Chocolates for Breakfast, curious to see why Zoë loved it so much. Now that she’s finished it, the book lies next to her, open at one of its most well-thumbed pages, and Alba is a little nervous.

  She looks back at the book, thinking about its sensual scenes. Is it ridiculous that she’s never touched herself before? Surely it’s something she should have done at puberty, but she was just too self-conscious. Every time she got the urge, she blushed. Alba’s never read anything as sexy as this bef
ore and the parallels of the book’s plot with her own life are shocking: the protagonist is a rich teenager with a crush on her teacher. Alba wonders if Zoë might be psychic.

  Tentatively, Alba picks up the book again. She glances down at her tiny breasts under her T-shirt, studying them, then takes a deep breath and slowly begins to stroke her hand along her body, her touch as light and soft as the cotton. Alba shivers a little. She slides her hand along her ribs, gathering her T-shirt until it settles in folds over her belly. She licks a finger and strokes it across her skin as the lights in her room begin to flicker.

  Air rushes through the pipes, rattling as Alba gasps. Soon every wall of every room in the house trembles, shaking the photographs in their frames so that eight hundred and twenty-one women giggle. Whispers on the lips of every woman rush along the corridors. As Alba’s body contracts, every light in the house flickers and every flower of the midnight glory bursts open. Every fuse in the house blows. And then, one by one, the streetlamps on Hope Street explode, scattering thousands of golden sparks into the night.

  —

  At two o’clock in the morning Carmen leaves the piano and returns reluctantly to her bedroom. She’s been practicing until her fingers went numb. Since she’s agreed, or at least surrendered, to the crazy stubbornness of Nora and Sue, Carmen is determined not to make a fool of herself, if she can possibly help it. She walks slowly across her floor and stands in front of her dressing table. Finally, she opens the drawer and peers inside, half hoping the box will have disappeared. But of course it hasn’t moved. It sits among the clothes, partially hidden by the sleeves of a silk shirt and the hem of a red dress. Every time Carmen enters the room she’s compelled to check on the box, though she still hasn’t flipped the lid and looked inside.

  The smell of Tiago is overwhelming, rising off the little box in waves of sweat and spice as it sits in the drawer. The smell has sunk into Carmen’s skin and, no matter how many showers she takes, she can’t seem to wash it off. She’s soaked herself with perfumes, rubbed her skin raw with scented soaps, but nothing works. If Blake were to kiss her now he’d taste nothing but Tiago. For the thousandth time she wonders how the hell she’ll be able to get rid of him for good.

  An hour later Carmen is sitting on her bed, the box in her lap, willing herself to pry it open. She can feel it feeding on her fear. Her room has lost all of its color. The view of the ocean has disappeared, replaced by gray skies that never shift no matter what the weather is outside. The box is slowly draining the life out of everything, and if she doesn’t do something soon, it will have her too. She’s already off her food and her clothes aren’t fitting as tightly anymore. Next her heart will start to shrivel, her lungs will dry to dust and, worst of all, her voice will evaporate. She can’t allow this to happen. She has to do something to stop him.

  Carefully, as though fearing it might unleash the Apocalypse, Carmen picks up the little box and forces it open half an inch. The spring catch snaps back, nearly grabbing Carmen’s fingers, but she pulls it open again, all the way this time, until she can see the glint of a band of gold. Very slowly, Carmen lifts the ring and places it in her palm, staring at it as if seeing her husband again for the very first time. Tiago’s hands were delicate, the hands of a guitar player, his fingers long and thin. So the ring looks as though it might fit her; but Carmen knows it’ll slip right off if she tries it on. Not that she has since their wedding night. She curses herself for bringing it to England. Why couldn’t she have left it? Why did she have to be so sentimental?

  Carmen stares at the golden circle, at the engraving inside, at the drop of blood that covers the T of Tiago’s name. It grips the gold like a limpet, still as red and fresh as six months ago, when she pulled the ring off her dead husband’s finger.

  Chapter Twenty

  Alba lies across her bed, playing with words and sentences, trying to finish Carmen’s song. It’s far from perfect, but the show is in less than two weeks, so she can’t mess around forever. She’d hoped working on it would help her forget about her father for a few hours, but it hasn’t. She thinks of his bright blue eyes, his tatty clothes, his sorrow, deep and dark, weighing down the air, seeping into her name when he said it, coloring the letters the darkest blue she’d ever seen. Is that what scared her so much?

  Alba bites the end of his pen and glances up at the thousands of books lining the walls. And there it is: A Room with a View, the title bright in gold letters, sandwiched between Howards End and Maurice. On the shelf above sit the other books she’d borrowed.

  Alba frowns. “So, you can provide anything, a grand piano, a thousand books, but not the ones I need until I’ve already read them. Why is that?”

  The pipes in the room rattle, as if giggling. Alba’s frown deepens. What is the house playing at? She thinks of Dr. Skinner and the words that ignited her obsession, words that sweep into her head even now, mixing with and muddling her own. Alba had never heard anyone speak with such passion before. She remembers the very first lecture, on Gladstone and the Great Gordon Debacle, as she watched the words flow forth:

  When Gladstone abandoned General Gordon at Khartoum, allowing him and his remaining troops to be massacred by the invading Mahdi army, the public, goaded by a saber-toothed press, turned against him. And the Grand Old Man became the murderer of Gordon. Because he couldn’t play the political game as well as Disraeli…

  Dr. Skinner’s words had poured forth in dozens of different hues: puce for passion, violet for joy, bright green for truth, scarlet for dedication, deep purple for wisdom, orange for insight, bright yellow for inspiration. Alba had never before seen so many brilliant colors all at once. And by the time her teacher fell silent, she was in love.

  At least, she’d thought so then. She understands now it was just infatuation, addiction, obsession. She was as obsessed with Dr. Skinner as Dr. Skinner was obsessed with becoming an acclaimed academic, even if it took cheating, lying and ruining other people’s careers to get there. But the pain of all that is dull and muted now, almost entirely eclipsed by thoughts of her father and by her preoccupation with Carmen’s song, the current version of which is definitely lacking something.

  —

  “Have you ever… ?”

  “What?” Stella asks, though she knows what’s coming.

  “Well… what I mean is,” Alba says, fumbling for the right words and not quite sure why the subject embarrasses her so much. “That is, I wonder what…”

  “Yes?” Stella asks, knowing Alba needs to be able to say the words herself, to talk about it, if she ever stands a chance of actually experiencing it.

  “Love,” Alba says. “Tell me about being in love.”

  At last. Stella smiles. “Of all the musicians, Ellis was the one I loved the most. We read together. I’ve never done that with anyone, not before or since. I like to be alone for certain things…”

  “Yes.” Alba nods, shocked at the thought of sharing something so intimate as reading. She isn’t sure what scares her more: the possibility of reading with someone else, or sex.

  “Oh, but it was wonderful.” Stella laughs. “We’d lie on the sofa together, or in bed, and share a book. We would take it in turns to read aloud. Sometimes we’d both silently read at once. But I was always so much faster than him, and I’d get impatient to turn the page, so that was rare. Ellis had a beautiful voice… I could have shut my eyes and listened to him forever. I’m not sure which was better, soaking in his words or his sweat.” She giggles again, and it ripples along the kitchen walls as Dora, Vita and a few hundred other women echo her. Alba blushes.

  “I can still hear his voice,” she says, smiling. “It rather makes me feel all—”

  “What happened to him?” Alba interrupts to avoid hearing a potentially embarrassing revelation.

  For the first time Stella’s eyes fog over and she puts her chin into her palms. “Pills.”

  Alba doesn�
��t have the right words so she says nothing. They sit in silence.

  “Do you want to know what love feels like?” Stella looks up, her eyes shining again, though whether with tears or excitement Alba can’t quite tell.

  Slowly, Alba nods.

  “Well,” Stella says, “if you’re sure you’re ready, then I can show you.”

  “You can?”

  Stella nods. “There are certain abilities the dead have. Give me your hand.”

  Alba reaches out. Holding her own hand a few inches above Alba’s, Stella looks at her more deeply than she ever has before. Her gaze is two parts joy, one part hope, one part compassion, with a sprinkling of pure adoration. At first Alba feels nothing, then a sensation tingles her skin. A deep, sudden rush of warmth seeps into her, into every inch and every cell. It’s the softest, strongest, most wondrous thing she’s ever felt—as though every single cell in her body is bursting with light, being born again. And she feels her heart as intimately as if she were holding it in her hands.

  —

  There is one thing Zoë has done in her life of which she is truly ashamed. But she’s been excessively punished for it, and that’s served to ameliorate her guilt a little. Nearly three years ago she found a story of Alba’s slipped between the pages of a very tattered copy of Rebecca. For seven days Zoë kept it in her bag, telling herself she’d return it unread. But, as the days passed and Alba came and went, Zoë held on to it. Until she finally had to admit the truth, that she was going to read it and wouldn’t give it back.

  In an attempt to soften this betrayal of Alba’s privacy, Zoë read the story (six pages, handwritten and obviously autobiographical) in the library, sitting behind the stacks after everyone else had gone home, pretending it was a book that Alba had published, that anyone might pick up and read. It was a difficult self-delusion to pull off, as Alba’s tiny scrawl was nearly impossible to read and clearly not intended to be seen by any eyes other than her own. Deciphering the story required immense concentration on Zoë’s part, along with a flashlight and a very powerful magnifying glass.