In Her Shadow (12 page)

I caught a taxi from Montpelier to Bristol’s Temple Meads station and the train, fortunately, was on time. I found a window seat, drank coffee and ate an almond pastry for breakfast as the train rumbled southwards through Somerset. It was altogether a pleasant journey. I had a book to read, the sun was shining, the countryside beyond was glorious. I even dozed for a while, and by the time I alighted at Helston, I was feeling better than I had for a while.

At the station, I caught another cab, one that took me through the tiny, winding country lanes that led to Trethene. I felt like an adult in a toy world. Everything in South Cornwall seemed too green, too pretty, too small. The car rolled through little fords, and wildflowers dipped through steep-sided lanes – all foxgloves, campions and oxeye daisies.
Sweet, whitewashed cottages sat amongst their gardens, and the leaves of the trees dappled the air.

As the car pulled up outside number 8 Cross Hands Lane I pushed my sunglasses up onto my forehead and studied the cottage. There was nothing of the chocolate box about my parents’ home. It was a small, plain council house, but Mum and Dad had always been happy there. It had been their home since they married. They had tried to prettify it. White and pink sea breeze had self-seeded in the garden wall, and little red roses scrambled around the door. The front garden was tiny – a toy garden. How had Dad managed to fit Jago’s old car in there? How had they managed to restore it in that pocket-handkerchief space?

I let myself into the house with the key that was always hidden under the plastic milk-bottle tidy by the front door. Mum was, predictably, in the kitchen wiping down the surfaces with a damp J-cloth and, through the window, I could see my father in the back garden watering his vegetables. The kitchen, as always, had been bleached to within an inch of its life and was neat as a pin. I called, ‘Hell-o-o! It’s me!’ and Mum’s face lit up as she turned to see me.

‘Hannah! What a lovely surprise,’ she said, drying her hands on a tea-towel, and then reaching her face towards mine for a kiss. She put the kettle on and asked, ‘We weren’t expecting you, were we?’

‘No, I just came over on a whim. I was missing you and Cornwall.’

‘That’s lovely! Can you stay?’

‘For the night, but I’ll have to go back to Bristol tomorrow.’

‘Oh.’ The single syllable was loaded with disappointment. I tried not to resent being made to feel guilty, turned my back on Mum so she wouldn’t see my face, and took some cups and saucers from the cupboard.

Mum fussed about with a packet of biscuits and a knife, waiting for the kettle to boil before she risked antagonizing me again by saying, ‘You’re looking a bit peaky, dear.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You look tired.’

I opened my mouth to reassure her, but suddenly I did feel tired. I wished I was thirteen again and that I could run upstairs and put on my pyjamas and snuggle beneath the coverlet of my single bed. I wished Trixie was still alive to lie across my legs, and my life was full of sparkly nail varnish and hair-crimpers, magazine problem pages, a passion for animals and Saturdays spent in Falmouth town trying on all the items on the sales rails and sitting on the sea wall dipping chips in ketchup with Ellen. I wished Jago was there, bringing his energy into the house and making us all laugh. I wished my mother was younger and less frail so that I could tell her everything, ask her what I needed to know, and trust her to take care of things without burdening her with the fear that I might be slipping back to the dark place she and Dad had had to pull me from before.

‘I’ve been working hard, that’s all,’ I said with a brittle cheerfulness.

‘You mustn’t overdo it, Hannah.’

‘I know.’

‘Remember what the doctor said about stress and—’

‘Mum, I
know
. Please don’t go on.’

I filled the teapot, laid a tray, and then me and my mother, she slightly chastened, went out through the little lean-to conservatory that Dad and Jago had put up years back so that Mum had somewhere nice to sit and read, and out into the back garden. Dad greeted me effusively, found mismatched deck chairs in the shed, dusted off the cobwebs, and set them up for us. He continued with his work, listening to the cricket on the radio, while we sat in the shade of the
cherry tree and chatted. For a while, the conversation was innocuous. I began to relax. I watched the bees busy about the honeysuckle flowers that grew through the hedge. And then … I don’t know what came over me – I truly did not mean to talk about the past – but for some reason I found myself saying, ‘Mum, you remember Ellen Brecht, don’t you?’

At that very moment, Dad dropped his hose and it twirled around him like a snake, soaking the washing on the line. Mum looked up at the bedlinen that had been almost dry and was now spattered with dark wet patches. She gave a little sigh but, uncharacteristically, did not scold Dad for his clumsiness.

‘Yes, I remember Ellen, and her parents. I cleaned at Thornfield House for a while when Mrs Brecht was ill.’

‘Of course you did. I’d forgotten.’

‘It’s been turned into a pub now, Thornfield House. Did you know?’

‘Last time I was here, you told me it was going to be knocked down.’

‘I think they wanted to demolish it and build holiday flats, but they couldn’t get permission.’

‘It would have been the best thing for it,’ said Dad. ‘Good riddance. They should have bulldozed that place years ago.’

‘It had been on the market for a while,’ Mum continued. ‘Nobody wanted to take it on. But now it’s a gastric pub. Sally Next-door-but-one went for lunch there the other week. She said it’s quite tasteful, if you like that kind of thing. Olives and you-know-what. It’s popular with the tourists. They’ve turned that lovely front room into a bar.’

I blinked and for a moment I recalled every detail of the room with its tall twin sash windows and the piano taking pride of place, and the chaise longue where Ellen’s mother
used to rest. I remembered how the sunlight fell on the beautiful chestnut-coloured wooden floor, the gently billowing curtains and the fancy plaster rose-work above the chandelier, the ornate marble fireplace full of candles, the smell of lavender and candle-wax, the sound of
Clair de lune
.

I remembered the bloodstain soaked into the floorboards that no amount of scrubbing would lift, the broken mirror, glass on the windowledge. I remembered Ellen screaming as if her heart was broken – oh God, the sound of her! I covered my face with my hands, trying to block out the memory.

‘Hannah?’

I blinked again and I was back in my parents’ small garden, sitting awkwardly in the orange-and-green-striped deck chair with the sound of the water splashing from the hose and the birdsong and children’s television coming over the hedges together with the smell of frying onions from the open kitchen window of the neighbouring house. I felt a little dizzy. I tipped the dregs of my tea onto the grass.

‘Were Ellen’s parents nice to you, Mum?’ I asked.

My mother frowned. ‘Oh, I don’t know. They were generous enough but I didn’t really get to know either of them. They weren’t the kind of people you could talk to. They weren’t like us.’

‘No. I suppose they weren’t.’

‘Mrs Todd kept herself to herself. And of course they were Catholics so we never socialized at church.’

Mum fiddled with her earlobe. Then she said, ‘I never used to like going into that house after Mrs Brecht was gone. It changed. Everything changed.’

‘I know what you mean.’

I glanced at my father. He had turned off the tap and was draining the hose, winding it around his shoulder. Water pooled on the concrete patio stones at his feet. He didn’t like
looking back at bad times. He didn’t like Mum thinking about them either.

I reached over and took my mother’s hand. It was large and dry, knobbly with knuckle, the skin age-spotted. My parents had always been old. I had never known them young.

‘Look at you, both sitting there with long faces,’ Dad said briskly. ‘It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t we walk into Trethene and get ourselves a sandwich and a bun. My treat, eh?’

‘That’s a good idea, Malcolm,’ said Mum, and she manoeuvred herself awkwardly out of the chair, picked up the teacups, and disappeared into the dark of the house.

My father rubbed his beard. ‘Your mum don’t like talking about that Brecht business,’ he said.

‘I know, Dad, I’m sorry. But—’

‘Leave the past alone,’ said my father. ‘No good can come of picking the scabs off old wounds. None at all.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

IT WAS DECEMBER
, the month after my seventeenth birthday. The peninsula was fogbound. The air was chill, even in my bedroom, and an all-pervading damp crept into everything – clothing, the walls, dreams, bones. For days there was no end to the fog and I hated it. I felt choked, strangled by it. I wanted to claw my way out, to keep walking until I found a place where I could step through its curtains out into daylight. At Goonhilly, the satellite dishes, smudged and indistinct, turned their huge faces to the skies, seeing through the persistent greyness as clearly as if it were not there, but on the ground the people struggled. The fog disorientated me. I found myself lost, more than once, close to home on lanes I’d known all my life. I didn’t know which way to turn, which path led home, which to the cliff edge. It was easy to imagine murderers in the mist, men with knives and cudgels, slit-throats and vagabonds, and the icy-cold touch of ghost-fingers on my cheeks, lifting my hair, whispering fog-breath secrets in my ear.

Rather than walking up the hill in the early-morning dark, I waited each morning at the bus stop at the far end of Cross Hands Lane for the school bus and heard the clattering rumble of its engine long before the twin yellow circles of its
headlamps materialized out of the gloom. Ellen was always on the bus already, sitting in the seat by the window, second row from the back, saving the space beside her for me. Until the morning when she was not there.

The day before, Mr Brecht came to the school early to pick up Ellen and take her home.

‘You go too, Hannah,’ said our teacher, when she read the message delivered by a younger child. ‘Look after her,’ she said, folding the piece of paper neatly into four, as if it were too important to be screwed up and thrown into the waste-paper basket. Everyone, the rest of the class, looked down, embarrassed, as Ellen and I packed up our things, picked up our coats, and left the room.

‘See you,’ Ellen said quietly. There was a murmur of farewells.

Ellen’s father was waiting outside the main entrance, smoking a cigarette in the fog. He was wearing a long coat and a scarf. He looked like an actor in a film. His breath was clouding around him together with the wreath of smoke, giving him a ghostly shroud. The planes of his face had sunk over the last months. Dark shadows cloaked his eyes, and his demeanour was that of a man on the brink of losing everything. I wished I had some way of letting him know that he was not alone; that I understood how he was suffering and admired him for it. Perhaps he
did
know. Perhaps one day in the future he would tell me that my unspoken devotion was what had seen him through those terrible days.

He looked up when the movement of the door caught his eye, and Ellen ran into his arms. He embraced her, hugged her close, and I held back and picked at my nail varnish.

‘You have to be brave,
Schatzi
,’ Mr Brecht was saying. ‘I need you to be strong for the next few hours because God knows how we’re going to get through them.’ He said
something else to her, in German. Ellen nodded and stepped back, holding her head high.

Mr Brecht’s car was parked by the main school entrance, beneath a sign which said
Strictly No Parking
. Ellen got into the front seat, beside her father. None of the Brechts ever used a seat belt. I sat behind Ellen and strapped myself in. The car was low-slung with leather seats and a hi-fi system that filled the interior with weird, windy classical music I did not recognize but it pulled at the strings of my heart.

Half a dozen twiggy stems of red carnations wrapped in florist’s paper lay on the back seat of the car beside me. They had a sickly, peppery scent and seemed sad, desperate flowers. I picked them up and held them on my lap, for something to do.

Mr Brecht drove fast through the fog but I was not afraid. I would have trusted him to drive me anywhere. Ellen sat still in front of me, with her hands folded together, staring straight ahead.

‘Will it be soon?’ she asked her father and Mr Brecht nodded and said, ‘Yes.’

‘I hope it’s not today,’ Ellen said. ‘Mama doesn’t like the fog.’ She began to cry, silently. This was not like her. I could see the tears running down her cheeks and falling into her lap. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed through the thick material of her padded coat, but Ellen did not react at all.

It was strange driving along the roads that I knew so well, and everything grey and blurred or altogether disappeared. I couldn’t see beyond the wire fence that enclosed Culdrose but I knew the aircraft hangars and the helicopters and the fuel tankers would still be in there, doing their work. Somewhere behind that fence my father would be sitting in his plain office with the notices squared up and pinned to the
board, his uniform shirt straining at the buttons; a functional desk lamp, a metal waste-paper basket, a telephone. He would be organizing the movement of personnel and equipment, ticking off tasks on the schedule in front of him, being jolly and bossy. He wouldn’t know that his daughter was driving by on the road beyond on the back seat of a low-slung German car. He didn’t know that Ellen’s mother was about to die, any time now.

At the traffic-lights we were caught in a jam and that felt even more strange, all the other people in all the other cars going about their business as if this were just another normal day and not the day when Anne Brecht would die. We drove very slowly past an accident – a car shunted into the back of a milk-float. People were standing around, blowing on their hands, shaking their heads. Shards of glass lay amongst the milk-pools. The milkman was still wearing his cap over a woolly balaclava. A tiny little Christmas tree with tiny little twinkling electric lights stood on the dashboard of the milk-float. I wondered what Mrs Brecht was thinking and what it felt like to know that, in a few hours, there would be no more life. Was she afraid? Was she praying, right now, for grace – hoping to live long enough to see Christmas, or the swallows returning for one last time and the primroses opening up their little yellow faces in the banks at the side of the road? Was she thinking about the things she would never see, or those she had seen already? Was she thinking at all?