Facing the Light (10 page)

She went into the nursery and there it was, standing against the wall. Every door was shut and every window too. She looked down at the roof, painted with a pattern of overlapping roof-tiles. A memory, like the wing of a white butterfly, fluttered briefly at the edge of her
thoughts. For the tiniest part of a second, she saw her mother's figure standing beside the dolls' house in a long white nightgown and then she was gone. Leonora blinked and tried as hard as she could to bring the memory back, but it wouldn't return and it felt to her as though a light had been extinguished somewhere inside her. There was no light coming from the dolls' house either. No light at all. It looked as though no one had played with it for ages and ages. Suddenly, sadness filled her, like a flood of something cold rising up inside her, and she began to weep.

*

Leonora was growing fretful. Nanny Mouse had made her lie in bed and rest for what seemed like days and days. Perhaps it wasn't such a long while after all, but it felt like years. Because she'd been so ill, Nanny Mouse let Mr Nibs, the big ginger cat, come into her room. He wasn't usually allowed upstairs and the sight of him sitting on the end of her bed or curled up behind the curtains with just his tail sticking out from under the flowery material made her smile. He purred when she stroked him, and that made her feel happier, always. But sometimes the words
my mummy is dead
came into her mind and then her eyes filled with tears and her head started aching, but she couldn't think of Mummy all the time, and it was then she started wanting ordinary things. If only I could get out of bed, she thought, looking at the square of sunlight in the middle of the carpet, I could go down to see the swans. I wish Nanny Mouse had taken me into the village with her. I could have bought some sweets from the shop. Liquorice allsorts, or a sherbet fountain. Nanny Mouse always chose barley sugar in twisted sticks, and Leonora had had too much of that to think it exciting.

Where was Daddy? He came in every afternoon and sat with her for a while, but he was still sad and didn't
want to talk very much. Perhaps he was in the Studio, painting. The Studio was out of bounds. It was an attic really, the big attic that took up most of upstairs, next to the maids' rooms. The door of the Studio was always kept shut when Daddy was in there working, but he wouldn't be working now. She'd heard Nanny Mouse and Mrs Page the cook talking about it when Mrs Page brought up her supper tray.

‘The poor man,' Mrs Page said. ‘He isn't eating properly. And all he does is pace around the house like a caged beast.'

‘He's not working, I know that,' Nanny Mouse said. ‘He stands at the Studio window and stares out of it. I saw him when I set out for church yesterday and he was still there when I came back. I swear he hadn't moved an inch.'

Leonora thought that perhaps he was up there now. I'll go and find him. I'll talk to him and that'll cheer him up. He won't mind. He can't. He's not working. She pushed back the bedclothes and put on her dressing-gown and slippers.

The silence in the house was so deep that Leonora could almost hear it as she tiptoed up the stairs. She looked down at her feet and not at the walls. The carpet here was a little threadbare, but that didn't matter because no one was allowed to come up to the Studio. The corridor leading to it had some paintings hanging on the walls, paintings which Daddy didn't really like, or he would have put them downstairs where everyone could see them. Leonora didn't stop to look at them, but made her way quickly to the baize curtain that hung across the Studio door.

She pulled it aside a little, turned the brass doorknob and stood for a moment on the threshold looking around her. In one of her books, there was a story about a magical country which had been frozen by a witch's spell
so that nothing could move and no one could speak. This room was like that. Leonora felt that if she put one foot in front of the other here, something would break, or crack or disappear.

Don't be silly, she said to herself. That's a story. This is a real room in a real house. It's where I live. There's no such thing as magic. Nothing bad is going to happen in my very own house.

The Studio was long and thin. There were canvases propped up facing the wall so that you couldn't see the pictures. The easel had nothing on it. Paints had dried to crusty flowers of colour on the palette. Leonora walked the length of the room, and went to stand at one of the windows. There were lots of windows up here; the biggest looked down on the garden and the lake, and she stared out of it, wondering if she could catch a glimpse of the swans. Her headache had come back, and she leaned her forehead against the glass. Her eyes filled with tears. Why am I not better? she thought. Nanny said I was getting better but now I feel bad again. There's a ball of pain behind my eyes. Maybe if I go and sit down …

She stumbled to the chaise-longue that stood all by itself in the middle of the room and lay down on it. It was covered in pale green velvet, a colour Mummy used to call ‘eau-de-Nil'. It was Mummy's favourite, but Daddy said it was wishy-washy. Leonora wondered briefly why he hadn't chosen his best colour for something that was only meant for him to sit on.

She closed her eyes and the lump of pain in her head grew smaller, weaker. She put her hand in the narrow gap between the seat of the chaise-longue and its wooden frame, and something soft caught in her fingers. She sat up to investigate. A small piece of cloth. She could see a corner of it now, sticking out a little, a white triangle of lace. She pulled on it and recognized it at once. Mummy must have been up here to talk to Daddy, because this
was one of her hankies. Leonora sniffed it and the tears sprang up in her eyes. Mummy's smell. Lily of the valley, it was called, and all of Mummy's clothes smelled like that. Used to smell like that. Tears ran down Leonora's cheeks but she couldn't use the hankie to wipe them away. It would get dirty and crumpled. She tucked the precious square into her pocket and used the sleeve of her dressing-gown to dry her eyes. There was something foggy and dark inside her whenever she thought of Mummy. It meant she couldn't properly bring her to mind; couldn't remember how she really used to be.

‘What are you doing up here, Leonora?' said a voice and there he was, Daddy, filling the doorway with his body, making the room suddenly icy with his voice. Leonora wanted to run away, to disappear, to melt into the floorboards, because she could hear his anger. Daddy was always quiet, very quiet when he was angry, and everything he said took on a special sound that made her tremble.

‘I was looking for you, Daddy,' she whispered. ‘I only came here to look for you.'

‘And why would you think to find me here, may I ask?'

Because it's where you go when you paint, she wanted to say, but couldn't bring out the words.

‘I don't know,' she said, hanging her head.

Ethan Walsh strode to the chaise-longue and Leonora, sitting frozen, unable to move, felt his hard fingers on her flesh, pulling her to her feet, leading her to the door, pinching her hard on the upper arm, muttering things above her head as they went.

‘Never. You are never to come up here again, do you understand, Leonora? Never. You are quite forbidden to come into this room. Am I making myself completely clear?'

Forbidden
. What a horrible word, Leonora thought. I hate it. It sounds like a wall of black ice.
Forbidden
. She
looked at her father. He'd knelt beside her by now, bringing his face closer to hers. He put both his hands on her shoulders, and shook her slightly. His eyes were full of something Leonora didn't recognize. Something she'd never seen before and couldn't give a name to. All she knew was that the love she usually saw in his eyes when he looked at her had disappeared and this person, shaking her and pinching her shoulders with bony fingers, didn't like her a bit. Hated her, perhaps, and there was something else there in his face, too. Daddy looked scared. White and thin-lipped and frightened.

‘Yes, Daddy,' she said, ‘I understand. I won't come up here again. Not ever. Never. I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.'

‘Don't say that!' he almost shouted. ‘Just go back to your room and stay there, please. Wait for Nanny to come back. I have to think.'

He turned away from her and blundered back into the Studio, slamming the door behind him. It sounded like thunder in the empty house, filling the corridor and reaching down the stairs so that the whole building seemed to shake. Leonora looked at the closed door, imagining her father standing at the window with the blank backs of the canvases staring out at him and the dried-up paint flowers turning black under the fire of his rage. She ran all the way back to her room and flung herself face down on the bed. Stars and blossoms of scarlet and purple exploded under her closed eyelids. Never. She never would go there again. It was a horrid room, cold and unwelcoming and filled with a light that was too bright.

The hankie in her pocket. As soon as Leonora remembered it, she knew that she must hide it. If Daddy found she had it, he'd be angry all over again. She didn't know how she knew this, nor why it would be so, but she could feel in every bit of her body that it was true. Where
could she put it? Nanny Mouse went through her drawers to make sure they were tidy, and if she left it in her pocket it would be found when her clothes were washed, and all the lily of the valley scent would be gone forever. Then suddenly Leonora smiled. She knew where it would be quite safe.

She got off the bed and went into the nursery. There, she crouched down in front of the dolls' house. She took her mother's hankie and folded it over twice. Now there was lace only on two sides of the little square. It can't be helped, she thought. It has to fit … like that … there. She tucked the fine cotton neatly over the body of the doll that her mother had made to look like the real Leonora, and for a moment she felt as though the lifeless stuffed body was indeed truly
her
, and that
she
was the one lying there, safe under a lace-trimmed coverlet that smelled like her mother. She sat back on her heels and looked at the doll's bed. They'll never see it there, she thought, because grown-ups don't look properly. I shall know about it, though, and I can come and sniff it whenever I want to. And when my dolls go to a dance, I can pin it around like a dress, and flowers of white lace will hang down over all the ordinary day clothes and make this doll really beautiful so that everyone at the pretend ball will want to write their names in her dance card. She'll look like a princess.

———

Both Freud and Leonora would have a word or two to say, Rilla thought, about my love of kitchens. Here she was again, with the whole house to choose from and her pick of family members available to chat to, sitting at the beechwood table and watching Mary peeling carrots for tonight's dinner. Her way with these unassuming vegetables was legendary, and by the time she finished with them, they'd have turned into golden circles, glazed and
sweet and delicious, and fragrant with a green sprinkling of fresh herbs.

‘Your scones, Mary,' she said, adding home-made raspberry jam to a thick layer of butter, ‘are the eighth wonder of the world.'

Mary sniffed and got on with her work. Her silence wasn't unfriendly. She was simply a quiet sort of person, not given to gossip. Rilla didn't mind. Whenever she got a chance to sit about in the Willow Court kitchen, she felt as though she were on a stage set of some kind. It was Gwen's doing, this rather clichéd prettiness. There was a Welsh dresser against one wall, predictably loaded with willow-pattern plates and plump teapots and flower-painted jugs. The walls were butter-coloured and there was a small sofa in one corner. The colour of the curtains picked out the swollen pink roses in the sofa fabric, a typical Gwen-ish touch. The working part of the kitchen was through an archway and down two small steps. When she was tiny, Rilla liked sitting on these and watching Cook at work. Nowadays the cooker was what was known as ‘state of the art', but in those days it was an ancient, blackened range, like something out of
Hansel and Gretel
. There was one time when she'd stayed away from the kitchen for about a week, after Gwen told her that yes, that oven was indeed the actual one from the fairy tale, transported magically to Wiltshire straight from the Witch's cottage.

‘I might have known you'd be here, Rilla,' someone said, and she turned round with a mouth full of scone to smile at Efe.

‘You are not', she said, when she could speak, ‘supposed to be rude to your auntie, Efe. Come over here and give me a big kiss. Gosh, you're gorgeous! I could eat you alive!'

‘That,' said Efe, hugging Rilla, ‘is what they all say.'

He sat down on the chair opposite her and smiled at Mary. ‘Got a scone for me, Mary?'

‘You'll spoil your supper, you know,' she answered, with a smile, getting a plate down from the rack and putting two scones on it for Efe. Even Mary unbends under his gaze, Rilla thought. It's amazing the effect he has on women. Dangerous, probably. He cut the scone neatly through the centre, and said, ‘You cannot imagine what a relief it is to see someone tucking into food. Fiona is forever on some diet or another. Although now she's pregnant again, I expect she'll lighten up on that. Hope so, anyway. I've given up wondering why women are so silly.'

Rilla bit back a sharp comment. The reason Efe found women silly was because he wasn't attracted to the sensible ones. She adored her nephew, but he definitely made a beeline for the puppyish kind of woman, the sort who, in return for even one word of kindness, tended to lie down and wave her legs in the air.

‘I should go and get ready for dinner,' Rilla said. Efe looked up at her.

‘Get your glad rags on,' he said. ‘Absolutely. Actually, Rilla, can I have a quick word with you? There's something I want to ask you. I want to raise something with Leonora but it's a question of timing. Have you got a moment?'