The House at the End of Hope Street Page 5

  As a child Alba read Rebecca under the sheets with a flashlight, pausing every now and then, when fear got the better of her, to hold imaginary conversations with the unnamed heroine (whom she called Lucy) about life, loneliness and homicidal housekeepers. The novel and its protagonist were companions Alba reserved for after midnight, when Ashby Hall was at its coldest and darkest. During the day she had other playmates, ones who could stem the longing for real friends, but not so absolutely necessary to her survival as Lucy and Rebecca.

  The book brings her comfort still, now soothing different pains, a literary safety blanket Alba can wrap around her fingers and hold until she forgets all the things she wants to forget. Few other novels have been able to offer similar protection against poisoned memories, excepting Middlemarch and Mrs. Dalloway. History textbooks have never had any such effect; they’ve always stimulated rather than soothed. Which is fine since, as her father had always said, too much mollycoddling creates weakness of character. Which was, he also said, exactly what had gone wrong with her mother’s mind.

  —

  “Okay, Harry, time’s up, I’ve got things to do.” Peggy sits up. Much as she’d like to spend the day in bed with Harry, he can’t be here when she makes another attempt to get into the forbidden room. The door wouldn’t open yesterday. Not when she begged, pleaded and threatened. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. Why is the house being so obtuse? Why the note with no further explanation? She’d like a little clarification and extra details on the fact of her imminent demise. Is that too much to ask? She has questions. Not least of which, now that she knows she’s going to die, why isn’t she being given any help to find a successor? She can feel herself starting to fade; she can hear the slow tick-tock of the clock.

  “Aw, Peg, please, just another cuddle.”

  “You think I was born yesterday?” Peggy smiles. “I know full well what your cuddles lead to. Now bugger off.” She gently pushes Harry, who doesn’t budge.

  “I’ve taken two little blue pills today,” he says. “If you give me twenty minutes, we can try again.”

  “You’re a hedonist, Harry.” Peggy laughs. “Laboring under the illusion that you are forty-eight instead of seventy-eight.”

  “You’re lovely, Peg,” he says, “you’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “Don’t be silly, I’m ancient.”

  “You’re gorgeous. You glow. You’re lit from within.”

  Peggy brushes a wisp of white hair out of her eyes. “Does that illuminate all my wrinkles?”

  Harry nods. “So I can see every smile you’ve ever had, I can hear the echoes of every giggle.”

  And although she’s too modest to admit it, Peggy knows he’s telling the truth, that she’s marked with the particular beauty that every Abbot woman has: magical and ethereal, as though their features have been sprinkled with fairy dust until they sparkle.

  With a cheeky smile that Peggy can rarely resist, Harry slips his hand under the sheets, running his fingers in little circles toward her belly. In twenty years, Peggy has always surrendered to this particular move. For a moment it seems as though she will again.

  “No,” she says softly, “not now. I’ve got something important to do.”

  “Oh, Peg, don’t be so heartless, I’ve missed you.”

  She can’t tell him that she’s missed him, too, that she wishes he could stay all day and all night, every night. Because then he’ll only propose again and she can’t say yes, certainly not now that she has less than a year to live. Harry slides closer, gazing up at her with watery blue eyes. “And it’ll be another week before I see you again. Give me a little something to remember you by.” He pats his short white hair and, despite herself, Peggy smiles; she’s always liked a man with hair.

  “Harold Landon,” she laughs, “if you’ve already forgotten what we just did, then you need to see your doctor.”

  Suddenly, Harry’s serious. “Peg. We’ve got to talk about us, I need to say…”

  “Please.” She squeezes his hand. “Not now.”

  “You can’t keep putting this off,” he says, “I won’t let you. Not anymore.”

  “Okay,” she says, “but not now.” And with that, she lets go of his hand and slides out of bed. Peggy wishes she could tell Harry everything, but she isn’t allowed. And the house is very careful never to be magical when Harry’s around. Its walls stop breathing, its pipes stop rattling, the cast of characters on the china stop chasing each other around. So, even if she tried, he probably wouldn’t believe her.

  Harry watches Peggy shuffle across the room, pausing at a chair to pick up her dressing gown, and, with a barely audible sigh, puts his hand to his chest and rests it there.

  —

  The house is silent and dark, except for the kitchen, where Alba and Stella talk endlessly into the night about books, long-dead authors, anything and everything except themselves. Despite this, Alba won’t give up trying to pry information out of her tight-lipped friend. “Why will you never tell me anything about yourself?” Alba waves her hand to disperse the orange vapor filling the kitchen from a fresh batch of ginger biscuits.

  “Because I can’t.” Stella sits in the sink, her knees folded over the ceramic edge. “I don’t have any memories. That’s how it is. You don’t remember your life after you die. So why don’t you tell me something? Anything.”

  “Well…” Alba considers that perhaps a quid pro quo of information might be in order. “How about when my sister Charlotte got caught hiding cards in biology class?”

  Stella puts her chin on her knees. “Go on.”

  “They were revision cards she’d made for her history test. The biology teacher gave her detention. Charlotte wrote a letter of complaint to the headmaster. Aged seven. Lotte always was an obsequious little swot, even then. Just like the rest of my siblings.” She sighs. “They’d disown me if they knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  Alba shrugs and tells Stella what she told Peggy: carefully phrased half-truths scattered with a few facts about getting kicked out of King’s College, about losing the life she worked so hard for. “So I’m not telling them—”

  “But haven’t they been asking?”

  “We don’t talk much.” Alba shrugs. “They’re too busy being rich and successful. The only one who won’t mind is Edward, and Mum. But she’s not very”—Alba searches for a nonspecific word—“very strong.”

  “Oh,” Stella says. She wants to say more, but knows she’ll have to wait. The subject of Lady Ashby is one that must be approached with sensitivity and care. “So, what will you do, when you have to leave here? Teach history in school?” Stella has only seventy-eight more days with Alba. And if the ghost is to help the girl believe in herself and her dreams, then she’s got to make more progress.

  “And spend the rest of my days trying to ram facts down the throats of hideously behaved children? I think I’d rather die,” Alba says, before realizing her insensitive choice of words. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  But Stella just giggles, louder and louder until she hides her face in her knees to muffle the noise. The sound is so ticklish that Alba begins to smile. Soon they’re both shaking with laughter, along with the ceiling and the kitchen walls. Hundreds of faces in hundreds of photographs regard them curiously. “I don’t see what’s so funny about being dead.” Vita turns to her friend. “Indeed,” Dora agrees, “it rather puts a cramp in one’s ambitions.”

  All of a sudden, a sharp ringing, insistent and shrill, sounds through the silent house. Alba glances up at the clock. It’s half past two. The noise will wake everyone. Alba leaps up from the table, dashes to the end of the hallway and picks up the phone.

  “Hello?” she hisses into the receiver, “hello?”

  “Is that you, Alba?” a voice echoes down the line. “Al, it’s me.”

 
; Alba almost drops the phone. “Lotte?”

  Successive waves of panic sweep along Alba’s spine, her hands start to shake. In the few seconds of silence that follow, fear-soaked questions flood Alba’s mind: How does her sister know? Will she tell the whole family? What will everyone say? How can she face them? Will they even want to see her again? And then she wonders how the hell Charlotte knew where to find her, how she got this number, a number even Alba didn’t know? But in the next second, all those questions are forgotten.

  “Alba, listen,” Charlotte says. “Mother is dead.”

  Chapter Five

  My m-m-um.” Alba stumbles over the word, hardly getting it out. “My mum, I don’t, I can’t… I have to go home.” This awful fact falls on top of the unbearable one, crushing Alba’s chest until she’s taking little gasps of air, barely able to breathe.

  “Oh, love.” Stella looks at Alba, broken again so quickly, her whole world crashing down upon her. But with a gift of foresight such as only the dead and clairvoyant possess, Stella knows Alba must be allowed to feel her grief, must dive headlong into despair, before she can emerge again, her spirit deeper and richer than before. She knows that if she lifts Alba’s pain now, it’ll only postpone her healing. So she can do nothing, except stay so Alba is not alone.

  “She’s dead,” Alba says softly. “She killed herself. She finally did it.” She sits in the kitchen doorway and leans her head against the wall. It softens in response, gently holding her.

  Stella knows there are no words to say. Nothing will do, or fit, or make anything better at all. The only thing to be done is something she can’t do. She wishes with every fiber of her non-beating heart, that she could hold Alba in her arms now.

  “Will you come with me?”

  Alba looks up at Stella, who gently shakes her head. “I can’t.”

  “Why, why not?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t leave the house, the kitchen…”

  “Yes, but, are you sure?” Alba feels tears stinging her eyes. “Have you tried?”

  Stella nods. “I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t go alone,” Alba chokes, “I just can’t… ‘

  “I know you’re scared,” Stella says softly, “I understand and I’m sorry.”

  “No, you don’t.” Alba’s voice is sharp now. “You don’t have any idea, any idea at all. They’re awful. They hate me. They’ve always hated me.”

  Quietly Alba begins to cry. Not for the loss of her mother, which hasn’t sunk in yet, but for the fact that she has to face them. And that the one friend she wishes could hold her, can’t.

  —

  Alba catches the earliest morning train to London, makes the connection to Aldershot and waits outside the station for her sister. Biting her fingernails and rubbing her red eyes, Alba absently observes the chattering commuters swirling around her, their conversations a rainbow of colors. When Charlotte finally screeches along the road Alba sees flashes of silver lightning snapping from her tires just before the car turns the corner.

  “Ouch!” Alba glances down at her raw thumb she just bit and tastes blood on her lip.

  When Charlotte gets out of the car, they don’t hug. For a tiny, fleeting moment Alba thinks they might, but instead her sister just reaches out a delicate bejeweled and manicured hand to take the small bag Alba grips in hers.

  “Is this all you have?” Charlotte is carelessly dressed with the utmost care. Every piece of her outfit has been meticulously put together, precisely planned for maximum effect. And all of it, from the ivory silk shirt to the sky blue jeans and scuffed brown suede boots, cost more than Alba’s entire wardrobe, indeed probably more than all her worldly possessions. This was true even when they were children. As a teenager Charlotte would have her black hair trimmed in the London salons and pick her couture from the Mayfair boutiques. Ten years after her, Alba cut her own hair and wore boy’s clothes found in the village charity shops.

  “I didn’t…” Alba shrugs. “I didn’t know how long I’d be staying.”

  “It’s always wiser to over-prepare,” Charlotte says, throwing the bag into the boot of her BMW, “or you risk being caught short.”

  Alba nods, wondering if her perfectly prepared sister has ever actually been caught short or unprepared for anything. She doubts it. As they drive Alba closes her eyes and pretends to sleep. At last, when she hears the car’s tires crunching on gravel, she turns her head to look out of the window. They speed down the long driveway, passing through fields of flowers and sheep, and Alba feels her chest tighten, squeezing all the blood out of her heart. A moment later the family home comes into view, an overblown Victorian doll’s house with forty windows, eight chimneys (one for each wing) and a wide flight of stone steps leading up to a double oak door flanked with pillars.

  Alba misses Hope Street so sharply it hurts. It is the home she dreamed of as a little girl. Somewhere soft and loving, where the walls breathe, the garden hides your secrets, the inhabitants lift your spirits and the kitchen soothes your soul. Not a drafty mansion with dozens of sparsely furnished, freezing rooms and windswept corridors that never end. As a child Alba wished for a house the size of a shoebox, with everyone always within reach, so that when she cried or called out somebody would come to comfort her. But since she never had it, she learned to live without, to pretend she preferred to be alone. And Alba’s been doing it for so long now, she nearly always believes it to be true.

  As they drive Alba remembers the last time she baked biscuits with her mother. She was six years old and it was three o’clock in the morning. Elizabeth Ashby, dressed for dinner in a silk gown, woke Alba, carried her to the kitchen and sat her on the table amid a mess of flour, eggs and sugar.

  “What are we doing, Mummy?” Alba rubbed her eyes.

  “We’re making your favorite, sweetie, gingerbread men.”

  “But it’s nighttime. I have school in the morning.”

  “We’re having a midnight snack. You love them, remember?” Great puffs of flour filled the air as Elizabeth frantically stirred the ingredients. “We’ll eat them together, won’t that be fun?”

  “Yes, Mummy.” Alba had nodded. “It’ll be fun.”

  Charlotte brakes to a halt at the stone steps, spitting gravel at the feet of Alba’s oldest brother, Charles. He glances down at his shoes then looks up, flicking his hand in a half-wave, while walking around to the back of the car.

  “Hello girls.” Charles opens the boot and lifts out Alba’s bag. “Pleasant trip, I trust, under the circumstances?”

  Alba holds her breath, begging herself not to cry, then pushes open her door. Charles waits at the steps until Alba reaches him, patting her shoulder so quickly Alba wonders if he touched her at all.

  “Did Edward bring Tilly?” Alba asks, thinking that her niece’s soft little cheek pressed against hers might be the only thing to get her through this agony. “I miss—”

  “Left her in London with the nanny, thank God.” Charles walks toward the stone steps.

  “Bloody dreadful traffic on the M11.” Charlotte slams her door and the sports car shudders. “Can’t stand queuing for hours for no discernible reason.”

  “Cook isn’t happy she’s had to hold dinner,” Charles calls out, taking the steps two by two, “though she’s only clanging pots, not throwing them. Out of respect for Mother, I believe.”

  And sure enough, Alba can see flashes of electricity striking the air around the kitchen in the east wing: long, spiky snakes that crack up into the clouds. The colors are so bright, so vibrant it surprises her. She thought the sadness of her mother’s death would have clouded her sight again, but it now seems brighter than ever before.

  “Oh, hell,” Charlotte sighs, “I suppose we’d better get a move on.”

  As her sister strides after Charles, Alba follows, taking each step as slowly as she possibly can. She knows that even the f
amily tragedy won’t stop the interrogation about her career. Her heartless siblings, with the exception of her brother Edward, softened by fatherhood and the loss of his wife a year ago, won’t be shedding tears that might dampen their curiosity. So Alba will eventually have to tell them what happened, though she won’t tell them why. Because, apart from anything else, they’ll never believe her.

  —

  That afternoon Greer sits on the floor of her wardrobe, surrounded by discarded dresses. Carmen stands in front of the mirror, trying on a blue silk trouser suit while Peggy perches on the bed in a cream linen shirt and skirt emblazoned with bright purple orchids.

  “This is so fun,” Peggy giggles. “I’ve never felt so fancy, like I should be out courting with a man on each arm.”

  “Try this.” Greer holds out a dark red poodle skirt to Carmen. “Tight tops set off by big belts and flouncy skirts, that’s your thing. Perfect for your figure.”

  Carmen discards her trousers, slips on the skirt and smiles. “Perfecto.”

  “So, my dear.” Peggy turns to Greer. “Apart from playing dress-up, have you given any thought to what you want to do with your life?”

  Greer gives a nonchalant shrug, not in the mood to delve into her angst about acting and her seemingly bleak future in general. “I’ve an interview with Carmen’s boss on Saturday.”

  “Well.” Peggy smoothes her skirt. “That might do for now, but I think, since you’re here, the house probably has bigger plans for you than that.”