The House at the End of Hope Street Page 6

  “Oh?” Greer says. “And will you tell me what they are?”

  “No, my dear.” Peggy smiles. “I’m afraid it doesn’t quite work like that.”

  —

  Alba shuffles through the east wing of Ashby Hall, shivering. She can’t sleep and she’s starving—not that she wants to eat, her stomach is too full of sorrow. She refused dinner with Charlotte and Charles, pleading a migraine, knowing they wouldn’t settle for the simple reason of grief. For an Ashby mustn’t be buckled or broken by emotion, an Ashby must be strong. She imagines them downstairs, plowing through Cook’s four courses, drinking until they can’t feel anything anymore.

  As Alba turns a corner along the corridor the clouds part and her way is lit by moonlight. She sees the door, exactly as she remembers it, painted blue: the shade of a muted spring sky, her mother’s favorite color. It stands out against all the ancient oak that lines the walls and shapes the ceilings, the only painted door in the whole of Ashby Hall, a gift to Alba’s mother from a grateful husband on the birth of their first child: Charles Ashby IV.

  Alba places her palm on the wood, her pale fingers made marble by the moonlight, and stares at the door as though trying to see through it. She wonders if it’s been opened since her mother’s death and if, indeed, this was where she died. The siblings haven’t explained the circumstances yet, and she hasn’t asked, hardly sure whether or not she really wants to know.

  A cloud drifts across the moon. Alba’s hand disappears and the corridor is dark again. In the blackness she feels herself starting to fray at the edges, her molecules drifting off, evaporating, dissolving… She could be eight years old again, standing outside her mother’s bedroom door, pleading with her to stop crying and come out and play. Then Alba hears that song again, the one she heard the first night at Hope Street. Alba presses her ear to the door, but then the tune changes to another she knows, one about all the colors of the rainbow. Another memory rises up. She’s lying on the grass in a field, under an oak. Her mother lies next to her, singing that song. Alba can hear her own voice, young and bright. “Look.” Her tiny hand points up at the tree. “It’s breathing, Mummy, bright yellow like buttercups.”

  “The color of inspiration,” her mother says, “and youth.”

  “Yes,” Alba laughs. “Yes!”

  “What other colors can you see, my darling?”

  Alba sits up, glancing around the field. “That bird is singing dark green,” she says. “The tiny one in black, he’s complaining.”

  “Maybe someone stole his worm.”

  “I can’t understand what he’s singing, Mummy.” Alba frowns. “That’s what Dr. Doolittle does.”

  “Quite right,” her mother smiles, “so what else do you see?”

  But just as Alba is about to answer, the memory lets go and leaves Alba standing alone in the silence. A slip of light now shines from underneath the door and slowly she pushes it open. The room is exactly as she remembers: sparse and bare, with sky blue walls, wooden bed, wardrobe and rocking chair by the single long window. On the chair, Alba thinks she can see her mother, rocking back and forth, twisting her hands in her lap, muttering the same sentence to herself over and over again.

  The words are too soft for Alba to hear and the light too dim for her to see their letters, so she creeps a little closer, stepping across the wooden floorboards with great care so they won’t squeak. When she’s only a few feet away Alba stops, seeing what her mother says before she can hear her. The words are royal blue, the color of sorrow.

  “Where are you? Why did you leave me? I need you. Please, Ella, please come back, I need you, I need you now.”

  Alba frowns. Who on earth is Ella?

  Chapter Six

  Alba is curled up on the bed in her childhood bedroom. She’s always hated it: the dark mahogany-paneled walls, four-hundred-year-old furniture, ancient oak bed facing an enormous wardrobe and everything draped in the dust of long-dead Ashby ancestors.

  Hot white sparks flash in the air around her. From far off she hears the high-pitched shriek of her sister’s laugh as the siblings set the table for dinner. During the few instances of family tragedy to date—their father’s disappearance and their mother’s madness—Charlotte has always tended toward slightly maniacal laughter instead of tears. Her brothers, on the other hand, just shut down their emotions completely and say nothing.

  After getting out of dinner last night, Alba knows they won’t let her off the hook again and she’s dreading it, wondering how long she’ll be able to fend off their interrogation. She wishes she could stay locked up in her bedroom until the funeral. She still can’t believe her mother is actually gone, after half a dozen suicide attempts in the last decade. Alba had long since stopped believing her mother even wanted to die. It was a bid for attention, the doctors had said, the act of a broken mind, though Alba had never entirely understood that rationale. If Elizabeth Ashby wanted attention, then why didn’t she speak to anyone? Why did she lock herself away and refuse to see her children? A psychotic breakdown, the doctors explained. An already unstable person pushed over the edge by the desertion and disappearance of her husband.

  Alba can feel tears running down her cheeks. After a lifetime of shutting down, she’s now overwhelmed by emotions. Loss. Love. Longing. Grief. Fear. Relief. Relief is the one she really can’t bear. It makes her feel selfish and guilty.

  Alba shuts her eyes and switches off her heart and wills herself not to think of her mother. But memories of seeing her in so many hospital beds rise up, memories of Elizabeth staring out of windows, rocking back and forth, of finding her in the garden in the middle of winter in her nightie. When Alba was very little she loved the manic times until she learned to be scared of those, too, because she knew what followed. Once, when Alba was five her mother turned up at school in pajamas, telling the teachers it was a family emergency and she had to take Alba home. Instead they had gone to the zoo.

  “Let’s go and see the monkeys, Mummy, they have the best laughs.”

  “The chimps blow blue bubbles,” Elizabeth, said, smiling. “The baboons’ bubbles are yellow.”

  “Yes,” Alba giggled, happy to be with the one person who shared her strange secret. She gripped her mother’s hand as they walked to the monkey cage. It had been a wonderful afternoon until at last they reached the hippos and Elizabeth started to cry. She couldn’t explain why but sat by the enclosure sobbing until a zoo attendant finally ushered them both away. Alba had sat in a cold white waiting room, her cheeks stained with ice cream and tears, until her father had come to collect them.

  Of all her childhood memories, most are of her mother or of nannies, very few of her father or siblings. Alba saw her brothers and sister only when they returned from their respective boarding schools during the summer. All extreme extroverts, they refused to play with their strange and painfully shy sister. Occasionally, while having picnics with cream teas and jugs of Pimm’s, Charlotte would permit Alba to sit on the same lawn and read while her giggly teenager friends squealed about boys and other things Alba didn’t understand. These experiences rarely ended well for Alba but, suffering with a manic-depressive mother and an uninterested father, she continued to covet Charlotte’s picnics anyway.

  One summer afternoon, a month after her seventh birthday, Alba lay on the grass with her feet in the air, reading an Agatha Christie mystery. She loved solving the murders in advance, and always did. She never tried talking to the teenagers, just liked hearing their giggles close by, seeing the colored bubbles of their laughter floating above their heads. But although Alba always kept a careful distance from the group, invariably one of them couldn’t resist teasing her.

  “What you reading?” a voice asked.

  Pulling away from Poirot and his “little gray cells,” Alba looked up to see Katherine, Charlotte’s best friend of five years, gazing at her.

  “The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd.” Alba held the book up to prove it, then returned to reading it. But Katherine wasn’t done with her yet.

  “Aren’t you going to Chelt in Sep?”

  Alba looked up again to see the girl’s words hanging in the air: pitch black and blood red. She shivered slightly and nodded.

  “So, shouldn’t you be reading more sophisticated stuff? I thought you were supposed to be a super brain-box, or something. I thought you read Shakespeare in your sleep.”

  “No.” Alba frowned. “Only when I’m awake.”

  At this the giggling girls burst into raucous laughter and Charlotte glared at her sister as though she wished she’d spontaneously combust.

  “Well, aren’t you the teacher’s pet,” Katherine sneered. “I bet you’ll go straight to the top of the class.”

  “Really?” Alba smiled. “I hope so.”

  With that the girls burst into another bout of cackles. Alba stared at them, completely confused.

  Katherine turned to Charlotte and said, “With the exception of your gorgeous brother Charlie, you really do have the most ridiculous family. You have my deepest sympathies.”

  “She’s your sister?” a new girl piped up. “But she’s so plain, and her clothes are beyond tragic. Have your folks fallen on hard times, or something?”

  Charlotte looked at Alba with fury. “It’s not my fault she’s like that. Anyway she’s not my sister, she’s an orphaned cousin who stays with us during the summers.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, “poor you.”

  “Yeah.” Charlotte continued to glare at Alba. “Exactly.”

  Afterward, even though Alba locked herself in her bedroom for two whole days, Charlotte refused to apologize. Her brothers didn’t want to get involved. It was only the cook who eventually coaxed her out with a strawberry blancmange made from real fruit. As a child Alba had adored red foods—strawberries, peppers, chilis, tomatoes—for the bright flaming colors they emitted. She ate them all the time, though her siblings neither knew nor cared why.

  —

  Greer stands in front of Carmen’s boss, Blake, trying to focus on what he’s saying and formulate words in response. But the impact of his presence makes it difficult. He’s tall, with thick blond hair, green eyes and a smile that is almost too bright. His thick southern U.S. accent speaks of swamps and alligators, colonial houses and cotton fields, sweat and heat. As though he’s stepped out of A Streetcar Named Desire and into a small Cambridge bar, purely for his own pleasure.

  It’s the green eyes that are her undoing. She just wants to kiss him, press her lips against his perfect mouth until they are both naked and sweating.

  Carmen nudges Greer with an elbow in the ribs. With a blink she returns to reality to see Blake looking at her with a slight frown.

  “So then,” he says, “what do you say? Yea or nay?”

  “I’m sorry.” Greer flushes. “Could you repeat the question?”

  “Sure.” Blake laughs. “I asked if you were gonna take the job?”

  And although Greer hasn’t been hearing a single thing that the job actually entails, she just grins. “Oh yes, I will. Absolutely.”

  —

  For Harry Landon, it was love at first sight. A clichéd phrase and one he never believed in before. It was the day he met Peggy, in the cinema at a matinee of an obscure French film. Until that day he’d been perfectly content with life as it was. A confirmed bachelor, a nearly retired milkman who spent his afternoons, and some of his evenings, watching films. Harry loved the cinema. Ever since his father took him to a Saturday matinee showing of Gone With the Wind in 1939, the year it took eight Oscars, stole the hearts of millions of women worldwide and broke every box office record to date, and the year Harry senior went to war and was never seen again.

  Little Harry had hated the film but fell in love with everything about movies: the soft seats, the enormous flickering pictures, the darkness, the sweet smells of popcorn, sugar and Earl Grey tea served during the intervals. During the war he’d delivered papers, shined shoes, stolen milk bottles—anything to get the fourpence necessary for admission every Saturday. And when he snuggled down deep into his red velvet seat, his feet dangling off the edge, when the lights went off and the picture came on, he forgot—for two glorious hours—that his father was gone. His first favorite film was Ninotchka, when he fell in love with Greta Garbo, a crush he loyally stoked for seven years, until his fourteenth birthday and Rita Hayworth appeared in Gilda. Two months after that, with the revelation of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, he was never monogamous again, at least not where celluloid was concerned.

  As a man Harry had a few affairs in real life, but none that touched the heights of his film-star fantasies, so he never bothered with them for long. Women always looked at Harry, even after his hair turned white and his wrinkles multiplied. He rather resembled Paul Newman, with a strong jaw, high cheekbones and bright blue eyes, and had aged just as well. Sometimes they waited for him when he delivered their milk, and sometimes he went inside when they invited him in.

  Harry heard Peggy Abbot before he saw her. The cinema was almost empty, no more than a dozen other people cluttering the seats, just how Harry liked it. She sat three rows in front, her wild white hair slightly obscuring his view, so he disliked her at first, until he heard her laugh. There was something about Peggy’s laugh: a magical mixture of sunshine and champagne that floated through the air and lifted him out of his seat. He’d never heard anything so beautiful, so inviting, and, despite the fact that the giggling mess of white hair was ruining his film, he knew he had to meet her.

  When the credits rolled, Harry hurried down the aisle and back along her row before sitting in the seat right next to her. Peggy turned to him and smiled. “Hello.”

  Harry opened his mouth, but his mind was blank. She was in her early sixties and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, either in real life or in film.

  “And you are?” Peggy prompted him.

  “H-Harry,” he said at last.

  “Well, hello, Harry.” Peggy smiled again and he felt his heart thump against his chest. “What can I do for you?” She waited, gazing at him.

  “Did you like it?” he finally asked.

  “What?” she asked, giving him a look that sent a sharp shiver of excitement through his body and made his heart beat faster still.

  “The film,” he said.

  “It was funny.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be.”

  “Isn’t all that just a matter of perspective?”

  That was the moment Harry knew he was hooked. “Do you come here often?” he asked, regretting the cliché before the last word was out.

  “No.” Peggy laughed. “I really came in just to get out of the rain. Not that I don’t love the cinema, but I just wasn’t in the mood today, you know?”

  Harry had never met a woman quite so unpredictable, whose words knocked him off balance and whose way of being—her stillness and total lack of self-consciousness—made him forget where and who he was.

  “Anyway.” She picked her bag up off the floor and stood, letting the seat flip back into place. “I’d better be off, now the rain’s stopped.”

  “Has it?” Harry asked. He didn’t mind that it was a strange thing to say, or care how she knew; he just didn’t want her to leave. She waited, pulling on her gloves, while he gazed up at her. He opened his mouth again, desperately trying to think up something witty or charming to say, but nothing came out.

  “Okay.” Peggy slipped her hat on. “Since you’re clearly a little lost for words, would you like to come for tea on Sunday morning? You could practice some conversational subjects before then, give yourself a head start.”

  “What?” he said, torn between shock and sheer delight. “I—”

  “I believe that’s yes, then.” She smiled, then pulled a card out
of her bag and handed it to him. “Ten o’clock is fine, but don’t be early. I like to sleep in.”

  And that was how Harry’s love story began.

  —

  The four Ashby siblings sit around a long mahogany table. It’s ancient, dark and gleaming. Alba stares at her plate while her two brothers and sister consume vast quantities of wine. Every humiliating childhood memory settles around the table, materializing in the empty chairs; ghosts anchoring Alba to her past. Until somewhere between the pea soup and the pheasant she can’t remember who she is anymore. All she knows is how much she hates Ashby Hall with all its heavy, oppressive Tudor trappings.

  “You’re playing your cards close to the chest this evening, Al,” Edward says softly.

  “Yes, indeed,” Charles declares. “Tell us how life in academia is progressing. I’m guessing your MPhil is going swimmingly, you little swot.”

  “It’s fine,” Alba says, still staring at her plate.

  “Is it Dr. Skinner supervising you?” Charlotte asks. “I can’t recall.”

  “I must drop in next time I’m down.” Charles takes another gulp of wine. “Skinner helped get me a first in finals. And I promised the old beaut a bottle of Bolly for it.”

  Alba holds her breath. She has to say something now, or she’ll never find the courage. She’ll tell them the bare minimum, nothing more. And if she’s very, very lucky, they’ll leave it at that.

  “Oh, I’ve been meaning to mention this friend of mine,” Charlotte says. “He’s written a brilliant paper you must read, especially—”

  “N-no,” Alba stutters, not knowing what she’s going to say, only that she has to say it now. “No, I, well, that is, I mean…”

  “What are you blathering about?” Charles says. “Speak in sentences.”

  “Charlie,” Edward says softly, “go easy.”

  “Yes, well,” Alba stumbles on. “I, um…”

  “What is it?” Charlotte asks. “Spit it out.”

  “I wasn’t doing well enough,” Alba finally blurts out. “Dr. Skinner dropped me. My studies, my PhD, I don’t…”