Read the book: «Secrets in the Shadows»
Secrets in the Shadows
Hannah Emery
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Contents
Hannah Emery
Dedication
PART ONE
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
PART TWO
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
PART THREE
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
PART FOUR
Chapter Thirty Five
Chapter Thirty Six
Chapter Thirty Seven
Chapter Thirty Eight
Chapter Thirty Nine
About HarperImpulse
Copyright
About the Publisher
Hannah Emery
I studied English at the University of Chester and I have written stories for as long as I can remember. I love writing about how fragile the present is and how so much of it depends on chance events that took place years ago. My favourite things in life are my family, my friends, books, baking on a Saturday afternoon, going out for champagne and dinner and having cosy weekends away. I live in Blackpool with my husband and our little girl. Find out more at hannahcemery.wordpress.com and follow me on Twitter @hannahcemery.
For my family: past, present and future
PART ONE
Chapter One
Grace, 2008
Grace should be with Eliot.
Grace should be the one to take a bite of Eliot’s toast in the morning, to text him and see what he fancies for dinner, to carry around a solid weight of certainty that he is hers and she is his.
But Grace isn’t the one with Eliot, and doesn’t know how to be.
She sighs shakily and glances up as she walks along the promenade to Ash Books. She can barely see Blackpool Tower for the autumn mist. It’s a blue, cool morning and her icy breath streams behind her as she clatters down the glittering concrete. The tide is in, and to her left is the wide expanse of grey sea that she knows so well. Salty spray spits at her and she wipes it quickly from her face, disturbed by what the sea contains. By the time Grace reaches the shop an hour later, her face is stinging with the bite of cold air.
Even today hasn’t taken her mind off Eliot. She is tired of thinking about him, but her thoughts are pulled to the image of him like pins to a magnet. When Grace sleeps, which isn’t often, Eliot’s face floats through her dreams and his voice weaves around the jumbled stories of her subconscious. When she wakes, she can think of nothing but her connection to him.
Grace’s mother called it a gift.
There is only one person who has the power to make Grace think of something else. He is the only person who can make her feel as though the future might be different somehow. But he is not here.
After a slight pause, Grace tugs off one of her blue woollen mittens with her teeth so that she can find her keys in her bag, unlocks the heavy green door and shudders as she enters the bookshop.
As Grace enters Ash Books, she looks around and takes in her new business venture. Opening a secondhand bookshop with her twin sister Elsie seemed straightforward at first. Grace loves books, and Elsie loves books. The business loan application went through easily. It all seemed too simple to be the wrong thing to do.
There are new pine shelves lining each of the ivory walls, mostly filled with second-hand novels. Grace thought that they should sell only children’s books and Elsie argued that they shouldn’t narrow their target customer. The rainbow of creased spines is the result of their spat: a mixture of men’s black crime, women’s powder-blue romance and a colourful burst of children’s books piled up at the back of the shop. Grace runs a finger along the spines of the books on the shelf to her left, careful not to move them from their perfectly lined up positions. Her eyes wander to the stray leaflet on the counter.
ASH BOOKS OPENING DAY
COME AND SEE OUR NEW SHOP! DON’T LEAVE IT TOO LATE!
As she stares at the exclamations that scream out at her in acid yellow and thinks about the day ahead, a surge of panic fizzes through Grace’s blood and into her stomach, where it sits like a dissolving tablet. Hopefully Elsie will be here soon.
The scent of yellowed paper that has been thumbed through a hundred times hangs in the air like nicotine. The counter is to the left, cluttered with boxes of pens and lists of things to do before the grand opening. Grace moves over to a pile of stock behind the counter and picks up a stuffed owl that Elsie bought them as a good luck gift. Elsie has a thing for owls. She places him on top of the counter, then stands back to take in the view.
‘Perhaps you could be our lucky charm?’ Grace asks the owl, who glares at her with his frozen black eyes in response.
No, he doesn’t look right at all. And he might scare small children. Grace glances at the door uneasily, her nerves easing a little when she sees her sister appear behind it. Elsie is laden with tote bags and wearing a royal blue beret that Grace immediately recognises as her own.
‘You’re here already!’ Elsie says to Grace as she unwraps her gigantic yellow scarf from around her neck. She tosses the scarf on the floor next to where she dumps her bags. ‘Shall we make a coffee and then straighten up? We’ve got an hour until we officially open.’
Grace holds the owl up. ‘I’m worried he’ll scare the children,’ she says.
‘He won’t. He’s cute.’ Elsie snatches the owl from Grace and plonks him back in his rightful position next to the till.
The twins are quiet as they unpack the final boxes of books and gifts that they ordered last minute to try and fill up their shelves. As the boxes dwindle, the shelves begin to look a little more cluttered with choice and the counter and surrounding floor become tidy.
‘It’s finally starting to come together,’ Grace says, pushing a strand of black hair from her face. ‘It looks better than I thought it would when I first arrived.’
‘And still fifteen minutes to spare,’ Elsie says as she folds down the last empty box.
‘Yes,’ Grace frowns, ‘so why is somebody already at the door?’ As the tall figure behind the glass motions to be let in, Grace walks over to the front of the shop.
‘Oh, Mags! It’s you!’ Grace unlocks the door and ushers Mags in. ‘I’m so glad you made it. You’re our first customer! Come and have a look around.’
Elsie makes some more coffee in their little staff room at the back of the shop and Grace walks Mags around, pointing out the novels that she has given them to sell. Mags smiles at Grace and squeezes her arm as they return to the counter.
‘I’m so happy for you girls. It’s about time something good happened for you both, after everything you’ve been through.’
Elsie returns with three potently scented coffees and puts them down on the counter. ‘I hope it works out. We just kind of went for it without thinking it through in too much detail,’ she says, taking a sip of coffee and wincing when she realises it’s far too hot.
‘Well, that’s exactly what you have to do. People get far too wrapped up in what they think they should do, rather than what they want.’
Grace stares at Mags for a moment, thinking of her own mother. There’s a short silence, peppered with blows on coffees to cool them. After a few moments, Mags takes her oversized handbag from where she dropped it behind the counter and swoops out a bunch of roses wrapped in bright pink paper.
‘I brought you these. But I’ve just realised that you probably don’t have a vase here. I’ll pop and get you one later. Or I might send someone in my place.’
Just as Mags says this, the bell above the door tinkles again and two elderly women enter, cooing over The Wizard of Oz window display, which Grace assembled late last night after stumbling upon a 1960 edition of the book amongst their stock. Dorothy is a doll borrowed from the toyshop next door, and the yellow brick road is gathered crepe paper. Paper poppies surround the road, and in them nestles The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
It’s October, the last week of the illuminations, which always means that Blackpool and the surrounding towns are swelled with families who are there to see the flashing show of lights that dangles along the whole length of the promenade before the end of the season in November. The till is constantly beeping and at 2 p.m. they run out of paper bags. It’s the silly things that are sold first: the extras that Grace bought on a whim and Elsie didn’t think would match the shop of their imagination. Teddy bears wearing Ash Books hoodies; bundles of marshmallows in cellophane tied with curling ribbon; cheap children’s books with gaudy covers are all grabbed without much thought, paid for, probably forgotten soon after.
Towards the end of the day, when the buzz of new customers has died down, Grace is in the small office at the back counting through the money they have taken when she hears Elsie call her.
‘Somebody has brought us a vase for our flowers,’ Elsie shouts from the front.
Grace smiles as she piles the notes neatly on the desk and stands up, expecting to see Mags in the shop again, brandishing a vase. But when she turns around and sees who has just come through the door, Grace feels all the blood in her body rush to her head.
‘My mum said something about you needing a vase?’ Noel says, smiling at the twins and setting the vase on the counter.
‘When did you get back here?’ Grace asks, trying to dismiss the instant confusion that swarms around her mind, the warmth that blasts through her body at the sight of him.
‘Just now. I had a couple of days’ holiday to take, and I couldn’t miss the grand opening, could I?’
Elsie beams. ‘Grace, why don’t you show Noel all our stuff?’
‘I think he’s capable of looking himself,’ Grace says, suddenly sullen. Elsie shouldn’t try to pair her with Noel. Elsie has no idea. It’s just not that easy.
Noel touches Grace’s arm. ‘Come on, Grace. Give me a tour.’
Grace softens. ‘Okay.’
They wander around the shop, arm in arm to the back, where there are more boxes piled like bricks, two old office chairs and a small desk. The desk is crammed with the notes that Grace was counting when Noel arrived, piles of books and magazines, cups, a jar of cheap coffee, some powdered milk and a kettle.
‘So you came all the way from London just to see our shop on its opening day?’ Grace asks.
‘Yeah. I’ve heard how hard you’ve both been working, and I wanted to come and see how your first day was going.’
Grace flicks the little kettle on the desk on. ‘That’s really nice of you. Has Bea come here with you?’
‘No. She’s had to stay and work.’
There’s a silence, which is softened by the bubbling kettle. Grace glances across at Noel. He has been a part of Grace’s life for as long as she can remember, since those early, bright days that seem so out of reach.
‘How is Bea?’ Grace asks him, busying herself with cups, not really wanting to think about Bea at all, cursing herself for asking.
‘She’s okay.’
And then, because she has had a big day, and because it’s been so long since she has seen him, and just because she wants to, Grace puts the cups down, moves forward and hugs Noel.
A long time ago, the worst time in Grace’s life, a time filled with screams and horror and nightmares and loneliness, Noel made things slightly more bearable for Grace. She was only sixteen then, and full of jagged emotions that made her feel as though she might tear open at any moment. Grace hasn’t hugged Noel for a long time, but now his solid, strong arms are around her again, his clean, musky scent transporting her back in time, she remembers that when she did hug him all those years ago, she felt safe and still for that moment, as though nothing was moving.
With Eliot, everything is moving, all the time.
Grace sighs, and breaks away from Noel. ‘Come on. It’s almost time to close.’
Chapter Two
Louisa, 1960
Louisa was in her bedroom when it happened.
She hadn’t been thinking about her mother to start with. She’d been lying on her bed with her feet up on the wall reading Bunty, when the strips on the pages before her became fuzzy as though they were hot.
This had happened before: it always happened before a vision. Louisa’s sight became silver around the edges and her head ached, as though what was in it was too big for her mind. And then she would see something that was about to happen. Louisa was the only girl she knew who had such premonitions. She delighted her friends by telling them what would be for school dinner before it had even been served, or what colour Miss Kirk’s dress would be before she came into the classroom.
So now, as Louisa’s head began to pulse with pain, she knew that she was about to see something that would happen shortly. It won’t be anything of interest, Louisa thought, for it never was. She shook her head, wanting to continue reading her strip about The Four Marys, but a stubborn image floated before her eyes, as though she was watching television. She scratched her leg idly as the vision began, but her body stiffened when, in her mind, she saw her mother wander out of their tall house, across the cool sand and into the roaring sea beyond. Louisa felt a suffocating pain in her chest as the sharp picture in her mind showed her mother’s skirt billowing out with water, as she moved further and further out to sea until she had vanished completely. The image disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. Louisa tasted salt and fear, and then nothing.
She flung her magazine onto the floor and sped downstairs to the kitchen, where she had heard her mother clattering about a few minutes before. Her mother had been more and more distracted lately, and Louisa had felt as though something might be the matter with her. There had been more of the nightmares than ever before. Twice in the night, Louisa had heard her mother moaning and crying. Those blue, anxious hours came back to her now, as she stood alone in the kitchen.
‘She’s fine. What I just imagined meant nothing,’ Louisa said to herself, her voice too loud in the empty room. She tried to make herself calm down a little, but her breaths had become short and sharp, and her heart was light and trembling.
Louisa called her mother, but there was no answer. She looked all around the kitchen for a note, a sign that her mother might be back any moment, but all she found was a half-finished cup of tea and an uncooked blackberry pie. She thudded upstairs, into all the empty rooms, and then fled back downstairs to the kitchen, knocking the pie from the kitchen table as she flew past it and out of the back door into the whipping, salty air.
‘Mum,’ she tried to call. Her limbs dragged along as though they were being pulled back, and her shout for her mother was sucked back into her mouth. She could not speak. She could not yell. Come and find me, she pleaded silently.
Louisa searched and searched and searched; she waited until her voice returned and bellowed for her mother over and over again; she wandered up and down the beach until her feet were numb and prickled with sand. Eventually she gave up and walked from the beach to Dr Barker’s house.
Dr Barker lived a few streets down from Louisa and her mother. Dr Barker tells me what to do too much, her mother used to say. But Louisa liked him. Something about him made her feel safe.
Louisa rapped on the blue front door. There was an immediate fumbling coming from within: a shift in sound and movement. Louisa tensed as Dr Barker loomed towards the glass window. She had never visited him alone before.
‘Louisa, what can I do to help you?’ Dr Barker said as he appeared in the doorway. A single white crumb of bread, or perhaps cake, dangled from his beard like a charm from a necklace and Louisa wondered how long it had been there. She didn’t imagine Dr Barker was the type of man who looked in the mirror very often so the crumb could have been there for hours, perhaps even days. For a very short moment, this thought eclipsed Louisa’s day so far. But as soon as it passed, the bright, burning memory reappeared.
‘I’m sorry to bother you. I didn’t know who else to go to. It’s my mother. I think she might be in trouble. I think she might have gone into the sea,’ Louisa said, noticing when she had finished speaking that her face was wet and that she was crying.
It was as though Dr Barker knew exactly what had happened. He didn’t make an urgent attempt to reach for his big leather bag that he kept by the door. He didn’t swoop his big brown cloak over his gigantic shoulders. He just held out an old, papery hand and stroked Louisa’s head kindly, and gave her a grey handkerchief to dry away her seawater tears.
Louisa stayed in Dr Barker’s living room whilst he went out to try and find her mother. She sat alone with his half-eaten cheese sandwich (that explained the crumb, then), his ticking clock and his scratchy carpet. She kicked her heels against his fuzzy green chair, and realised that whenever she saw a cheese sandwich from now on, she would think of her lost mother wading into the sea.
She lifted a leg and kicked the plate from the table so that the sandwich split and fell to the ground.
Had her mother seen that from wherever she was now?
Louisa sprang to her feet and reassembled the soft spongy bread and waxy cheese. She put it on its plate and back onto the table, muttering something about kicking it by accident.
Just in case.
When Dr Barker returned, his face was puckered into a strange, sympathetic bundle of features. He took Louisa’s hand in his.
‘Louisa, my dear.’ Louisa waited for him to say more, for more words to come out from the depths of his beard. But none came. He shook his head and his eyes filled with grey water and turned pink around the edges. She looked down at his paper hands and at hers inside them.
‘You shall sleep here tonight,’ Dr Barker eventually said. ‘I’ll find you a blanket.’
So Dr Barker found Louisa a blanket and she found herself thinking about how much her mother would have liked the blanket because her mother loved colours and the blanket was made of hundreds of different colours, all wrapped around each other.
Louisa’s mother used to speak in colours. She used to ask what Louisa’s mood was, and Louisa would answer in a colour. It was a game Louisa liked and was good at. ‘Red’, she might say, if her day had made her angry; ‘blue!’ she would shout if she was cold; ‘yellow!’ she would holler if she felt happy and the sun was shining.
As Louisa lay wrapped in all the colours of the blanket on Dr Barker’s couch, she tried to think of a colour to describe how she felt now. But no colour came. Her mind and her thoughts were clear, like ice.
The next day, Dr Barker took Louisa back to her house. As they walked towards the front door, Louisa looked up at the grey building. It seemed different somehow: taller and more intimidating. Louisa could hear the sounds that she had always heard from the Pleasure Beach, but the squeals of joy now sounded more like screams of terror. They came in waves, like the waves of the sea.
The pie that Louisa had knocked over the day before was the only thing out of place. Its purple innards spewed out over the grey stone floor in a bloody mess and its sour scent drifted up around Louisa like a ghost.
‘Get together anything you want to bring with you, dear Louisa.’ The way Dr Barker spoke made Louisa want to cry. A lump of pain appeared in her throat. She tried to swallow it down as she climbed upstairs to her bedroom. The summer holidays had filled the small, square room with shells and books and socks, and Louisa had planned to tidy it up before she returned to school. Her copy of Bunty lay on the floor where she had dropped it after the vision of her mother the day before, making her feel sick and hot.
‘I don’t know what I’ll need.’
Dr Barker didn’t seem to know what a twelve-year-old girl with a missing mother might need either. But that didn’t matter. He knew to take Louisa’s hand, and to offer her his handkerchief and to walk beside her as she left her house behind.
Louisa stayed with Dr Barker for a time. She couldn’t remember how long. Those days were misshapen and blurry in her memory, as though they had been left outside and rained on. One day, while she was sitting in Dr Barker’s lounge, there finally came a moment when suddenly she felt a tiny crack of space opening between that terrible day when she had lost her mother and her life now. Dr Barker’s eyes twinkled when Louisa told him that she felt a little better and that she might be hungry. He slipped out of the room, leaving his newspaper and his reading glasses to peep at Louisa from the little table next to his chair. When he returned, he handed Louisa a plate with daisies around the rim and a ham sandwich stacked together in the centre. Louisa took a bite and focused on the daisies.
It was soon after the sandwich that Louisa found herself in Dr Barker’s car, which smelt faintly of leather and fish. Dr Barker was very quiet for most of the journey. It was after almost an hour when he turned to Louisa, his big hands settled on the steering wheel, and said:
‘Louisa, today is a very special day. Because today, you’re going to live with your father.’
Chapter Three
Grace, 2008
‘A toast is definitely in order!’ Grace says as she struggles with the cork of a champagne bottle.
It’s the evening of the opening of Ash Books and the twins and Eliot are at Rose House, the old guest house that Elsie lives in by herself. The three of them ate at the pub across the road from the shop for dinner, Elsie warning them that they wouldn’t be able to eat away their profits every night and Grace rolling her eyes and pointing out that they deserved a treat.
‘Was it a huge success then?’ Eliot asks.
Grace avoids eye contact with Eliot. Tonight needs to be simple. She nods and allows herself a congratulatory ‘whoop!’ as she finally manages to pop out the stubborn cork.
‘Yes. A lot of people came in and looked at the second-hand stuff. And the head of English from a high school in Lytham came in and we did a deal with him on a collection of the classics we’d put on offer. He ordered about two hundred pounds’ worth of stock.’
Eliot strokes the peppering of stubble on his chin as though he has a full beard. It makes an unpleasant scratching sound and Grace wants to prod him, to make him stop.
‘Two hundred pounds is great,’ he says. ‘If you make that much every day you’ll be heading for world domination in no time!’
‘World domination?’ Elsie says, and grins at Eliot. ‘You’re ambitious.’
Eliot smiles back. ‘I’ll bet the free cupcakes had something to do with it. Good work on those, by the way, Grace.’ He bites into a leftover cake, and Grace sees a faint trace of pink icing line his mouth.
‘More champagne, anyone?’ Grace asks loudly as she fills up her own glass. Elsie doesn’t answer, but looks at her own glass, which sits on the battered coffee table, untouched.
‘Go on then, Grace. I’ll have a top-up,’ Eliot says, leaning forward and jostling Elsie, who sits up and rearranges her hairclip.
‘I think I’ll go to bed actually,’ Elsie says.
‘Bed?’ Grace asks incredulously. ‘You’ve hardly had any champagne. I thought we were celebrating?’
‘Yes, bed,’ Elsie answers simply as she stands and stretches. ‘Night.’
There’s silence for a few minutes after Elsie has clomped upstairs. Grace and Eliot hear Elsie’s bedtime ritual float downstairs and through the open lounge door: aggressive teeth brushing, cupboard doors opening and clothes being tossed onto the floor.
Grace sighs and downs her champagne. It’s cheap stuff, not even really champagne, and tastes woody and too sweet.
‘I’m so relieved that the opening day went well,’ Grace says after a moment. ‘I started to worry this morning.’
‘About what?’
‘About opening the shop. It all seemed a bit overwhelming. I was worried we’d perhaps done the wrong thing.’
Eliot shakes his head and loosens his tie. Eliot always wears a tie, even if he’s not at work.
‘Taking a risk like this is never the wrong thing. You’ve both been talking about opening a bookshop for a while, so it was the obvious thing for you to do. You can’t have any regrets about that.’
‘I hope not,’ Grace says. She shivers. ‘It’s always freezing in this house. Don’t you make Elsie put the heating on when you stay over with her?’
‘I hate being too hot. I’d rather be cool,’ Eliot says. Grace sees him start to reach for the blanket on the arm of the sofa to give her, then watches as he thinks better of it. If only things weren’t this complicated.
‘Elsie’s the same as me. She hates being too hot as well,’ Eliot finishes. Grace thinks she detects a look of defence in his slim, stubbled face.
‘So you’re staying over here tonight?’ he asks.
‘Yes. Elsie and I are going into the shop together tomorrow. She’s made one of the spare beds up for me.’
‘You’ve not slept over here for ages.’
‘I know. I don’t like sleeping here. But Elsie wanted me to stay over so that we could celebrate our first night and go in together first thing tomorrow. I’m trying to do things right at the moment. I want us to feel like a team again. I barely even feel like we’re friends at the moment. And that’s surely bad for business,’ she finishes with a weak smile. An unexpected lump lodges in her throat like a boiled sweet.
‘Yeah. She said things were a little tense between you both.’
The reason for the tension hangs in the air, between Grace and Eliot. Grace won’t say it. Eliot doesn’t know it.
‘Let’s have another drink,’ Eliot says, filling their glasses.
The next morning, Grace shuffles further under her blanket as wisps of her sister’s voice drift into the lounge like smoke. She wonders where she is for a moment when she opens her eyes, then remembers that she is in Elsie’s lounge.
When Grace and Elsie were younger they were never allowed in this room. It feels forbidden to Grace, even now. This was the guest lounge, only to be used at Christmas. Grace can still feel the visitors in the air. It’s like they never really left. Elsie has redecorated, trading the 1970s velour orange curtains and swirling gaudy carpet for classic beige carpet and blinds and chocolate brown leather sofas. But in the weak winter light of the morning, the new decor changes nothing. Grace can hear the sea here, and, for some reason, can’t bear it. She can hear it now: the clashing of the monstrous grey waves against each other. The more she tries not to listen to it, the more she hears it, until it feels as though the shards of water are crashing against her head.
Elsie is shouting at Eliot in the kitchen. The words blur into meaning. Grace can’t help but listen.
‘I’m not asking much, am I? My boyfriend in my own bed instead of downstairs with my bloody sister!’
There’s only a silence in reply.
So Eliot obviously didn’t make it upstairs to Elsie’s room last night.
Bad move.
Grace feels a tug of guilt. They got through quite a bit of champagne in the end, and Eliot had meant to go upstairs to Elsie. Grace remembers asking him to stay until she fell asleep in the lounge. She didn’t want to be alone in a spare room upstairs. She remembers her eyes closing slowly as they talked, the room in a blur around her. She wouldn’t have asked him to stay with her if she’d been sober.
The front door slams, the stained glass rattling in its splitting frame.
Sleeping here was a terrible idea. From now on, Grace will only ever sleep in her brand new flat, surrounded by brand new furniture and brand new other flats. There are too many memories here at their old home, creeping into Grace’s body and mind like damp. And it’s too cold. Rose House has always been horribly cold in winter. Even though the central heating clunks and bangs its way around the rooms like a metal snake, the old windows let all the heat out and all the outside air in.
Grace can remember being cold every single winter of her childhood in this house. She shared Room 5, the smallest, with Elsie. Their mother never came upstairs to bed until the very middle of the night. She would often come into Room 5 instead of her own room. Grace would wake as her mother banged around the bedroom, knocking over the twins’ things and whispering to herself. There would be further noise and cursing as their mother tried to undress; sometimes she didn’t bother, and Grace would wake to the sight of her mother, fully clothed, complete with jewellery and shoes, lying open-mouthed on top of her sheets.
Those nights, in the early days, had been quite easy to bear. It was the later nights that were the haunting ones. Elsie always claimed that she couldn’t remember, that she must have slept through it all. But how could she have slept through such potent alcohol fumes, such sickening screaming as their mother awoke from yet more nightmares?
Grace gets up and stretches her long pale limbs.
‘Eliot?’ she shouts.
He appears in the living room, his wavy, dark brown hair still crumpled on one side from where it has rested on the arm of the sofa all night. ‘Elsie’s gone to the shop—’
‘I know. I heard,’ Grace interrupts as she pulls her creased cardigan over her shoulders. ‘I’m going now. I just wanted to say sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have said I’d stay over, because I never feel relaxed in this house. It was my fault we both fell asleep down here.’
Eliot shrugs and looks at the table of empty bottles and toast crusts. Eliot always makes toast when he’s drunk. Grace remembers him fiddling with the toaster in the early hours and burning the first two slices. The sickly smell of charred crumbs still lingers in the air.
‘I know Elsie’s mad with you now but she’ll get over it.’ Grace says, then sits back down on the jumble of blankets and cushions.
‘I hope so. I told her nothing happened between us. But she won’t believe it.’
‘Well, I’ll tell her later as well.’
‘She’ll believe you even less than she believes me.’
Grace stares into space. She supposes that’s true. Is this what things have come to? There used to be a time when Elsie would believe anything Grace said, and vice versa.
But not now. Never, now. The time when things were straightforward between the twins glints beyond the darkness of the past, and Grace can’t work out how to grasp it.
She stands up, suddenly unable to stay in the house any longer.
‘See yourself out,’ she says to Eliot as she grabs her handbag and heads out to the hallway.
When Grace arrives at the shop, Elsie is standing stiffly behind the counter.
‘So did you have fun with Eliot last night?’ she asks as soon as Grace has closed the door behind her.
‘Yes. I did. Surely you don’t think I should apologise to you for that?’
Grace watches as Elsie drops her eyes to the wooden counter. They have splashed out on oak. The joiner who made it for them claimed that oak was a hard wood and would be able to survive a little better over the years. If only their sisterly bond was made from oak, too.
‘For God’s sake, Elsie,’ Grace replies. ‘We had a few drinks and crashed on your sofa. Honestly, you should be pleased that we get on. It’s you who Eliot wants, you know,’ she continues, her tone softening a little. ‘I’m his friend. That’s all. You were the one who went to bed. We wanted you to stay up with us.’
Grace moves forward and traces a line along the oak counter with a purple fingernail as she speaks. She thinks back to last night as she waits for Elsie’s answer. Surely Elsie doesn’t blame her for staying up. Early nights aren’t for everyone. Old ladies and children. But not Grace. Not Eliot.
Elsie follows Grace’s finger with her eyes and sighs, relenting. ‘Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s forget it. Do you want a hot chocolate?’
‘I might have a coffee,’ Grace says, relaxing at Elsie’s truce. ‘Ugh, I won’t be drinking champagne again for a while. I hope I don’t look as rough as I feel.’
‘You’re so gorgeous that you couldn’t possibly look anything but amazing,’ Elsie assures her twin with a smirk.
‘It’s funny that you of all people should think that,’ Grace laughs, returning an identical smile. ‘I’ll make the drinks, shall I?’
As Grace stirs cheap coffee granules into two new mugs, she sees the vase of flowers that Mags brought the twins the day before. She wonders if Noel will come and see them again today. Her stomach tightens at the thought. She squints out of the window to the square beyond as she wanders back to the front of the shop. Noel never wanted to stay in Blackpool. Grace remembers him reading about other worlds, other people, for the whole of their lives. Wherever they were when they were all young, Noel was usually tucked away in a corner, head deep in a book full of facts. The moment he could, he bolted from Blackpool to university in London. Grace was mad with him, for a time. She was mad that he had left her alone with a sullen Elsie and a distracted mother. She was mad that he was seeing new places and meeting different people, while Grace was stuck in her green bedroom that she knew every single inch of. She was mad that Noel suddenly wasn’t always just there, reading in the corner, in case Grace wanted him.
But then, as Noel phoned Grace every week and sent her cards and the occasional gift: a keyring, some sweets, she began to forgive him for leaving. She began to miss him a little, and look forward to his phone calls and visits home.
But somewhere, somehow, between Grace wandering around town with her friends, being in plays after school and being out when Noel made his phone calls, and Noel getting his first job in London and wearing shirts and suddenly being important, the cards and gifts faded. Their phone conversations became less frequent, and when Noel visited Blackpool, Grace felt like she knew him less.
And then her mother disappeared, and it all changed again.
Chapter Four
Louisa, 1960
Along the bumpy road they went. Dr Barker didn’t say any more and Louisa didn’t ask him to. She had never met her father before, and the news that she was going to live with him made the ham sandwich she had eaten hours before at Dr Barker’s house feel heavy in her stomach, as though she had eaten a dollop of glue. It swerved around the corners as the car did and threatened to come up into her throat.
And then suddenly, the car stopped. Dr Barker tugged at his handkerchief until it came loose from his pocket, and wiped his face with it. Louisa felt a sudden urge to take the handkerchief and keep it forever, but she didn’t tell Dr Barker this and she didn’t tell him that she almost loved him, and that if she had been allowed to stay with him and his daisy plate with ham sandwiches on it for longer she would have been almost happy. Instead, Louisa looked up at the house that loomed over them.
Maybe, just maybe, Louisa’s mother had known all about this house, and had sent Louisa here. Maybe it was all planned. Maybe her mother would be inside.
Louisa let herself be pulled from the car by Dr Barker. He held her hand as they ascended the steep, green hill. The front door was shiny and tomato red. When it opened, Louisa stared at the man behind it.
Her father.
He was a grey man: grey hair and grey clothes and grey skin. He looked down at Louisa and gave her a half-smile. She gave him a grim smile in return. He would, she decided, have to work for a real smile.
‘Well,’ Dr Barker said brightly. The word hung in the air like a sheet out to dry, flapping this way and that, getting in the way of things.
‘Well,’ Louisa’s grey father repeated after a while.
They stood for a few moments.
‘It happened, then. You knew it would,’ her father said to Dr Barker, looking over Louisa’s head and directing his words only at him, as though that would make Louisa unable to hear them. Dr Barker bowed his head slightly, his hands held together in a steeple.
They all shuffled through into the hall. It was a pretty hall, with an umbrella stand and a huge framed painting of a girl and a dog on the wall. Louisa looked up at the girl. She looked sad, and Louisa wondered why. Louisa’s mother would have been able to tell her. If her mother was here, she would stare into the painting and hold Louisa’s hand and tell her a rich, beautiful story filled with colour and happiness and sadness. But Louisa could tell by now that her mother wasn’t here after all. Tears burned the backs of her eyes, but she would not let them fall. Not now.
‘So, you’re all ready for her then?’ asked Dr Barker.
‘Yes, yes. I have a bed made up. Thank you, Gregory. For everything.’
Louisa watched Dr Barker’s face droop in a sad smile as her father said this, and knew then that Dr Barker liked her father, and had met him before, that he knew him more than Louisa did. Then she looked at her father. Did she like him? The man who had an umbrella stand and grey hair and grey skin?
Not yet, no. But she knew that one day, she would.
Just a year after Louisa had gone to live with her father, a silent, steady drift of snow began to fall one Monday afternoon and continued on and on, until nothing could be seen from the highest window of the house but a blue-white world with no boundaries.
The day Louisa had arrived at her father’s the previous autumn, he had enrolled her at the local school that smelled of scrubbed potatoes and old shoes. Louisa had liked school in Blackpool and she’d had good friends there who adored the fact that Louisa could see into the future, and who had given her sweets in return for a clue about what might happen that day. But in her new town, with her new father and her new school, things were different.
Oh, how different, Louisa thought each night as she lay underneath a cool eiderdown and listened out for the sound of the sea that never came. Louisa’s gift was stronger than ever: she knew exactly what the teacher would be wearing every day, and she knew whose knuckles would be rapped and what would be served for lunch. But she said nothing now. If she ignored the visions, then perhaps they would eventually go away. Her vision of her mother had been too late. No good could come of them.
So, because Louisa had apparently nothing to offer them, and perhaps because her face was plain and her hair a little too dark for her pale complexion, the other girls at her school made no real attempts to befriend her, or to poke fun at her. They simply let her be.
At weekends, Louisa and her father took little outings. They walked to the park, the duck pond, the high street. Her father spent more money than her mother ever had done and Louisa’s tummy swelled ever so slightly with a weekly bag of fudge from Spencer’s sweet shop. The outings were strange at first, and Louisa and her father spoke little. Words seemed to be difficult to find now, and when Louisa did push a word from her lips, her father might simply nod, or shake his head, or give a small smile.
After a year, Louisa’s life still seemed to be colourless. And the snow that fell that Monday made it even whiter, even more unreal. School was out of the question, Nancy the maid said that morning as she cleared away Louisa’s toast crumbs. And Louisa’s father would stay at home too.
Louisa sat and watched her father eat the last of his eggs. He ate slowly, and neatly. Her mother had always made eggs that oozed orange onto the plate and the bread. Her father’s eggs were more like foam and he cut them carefully so that there was no mess on his plate. He could, Louisa supposed, have just eaten them off the table.
‘What will we do, then?’ he asked Louisa once he had swallowed the last of his breakfast.
Louisa shrugged. She didn’t think they would be able to go for a walk in this weather.
‘Come with me,’ he said, as he stood and pushed his chair back. He took Louisa’s hand, led her to the coat stand in the hallway, and offered her the red wool coat that he had bought her a few weeks ago. Louisa put it on. The buttons were gold, and made her feel as though she was a queen.
When they both had their coats and shoes on, Louisa’s father opened the front door. The snow was piled so high that they could see nothing beyond it. Louisa’s father pushed at it with both of his hands and then, as though he was a boy of ten, launched himself on top of it. Snow puffed out from underneath him, and his face turned red.
He’s gone mad, Louisa thought.
And then she threw herself into the snow too.
Freezing water raced through her shoes and her wool coat, and Louisa shivered. She felt a strange laugh escape her mouth. Guilt coursed through her immediately: she had vowed that she would never laugh again, not unless she found her mother.
But then her father laughed: a deep, loud laugh that made Louisa giggle more. She choked and wiped her eyes with her cold, wet sleeve.
‘I’m not used to snow. We hardly ever get any in Blackpool,’ she said.
Her father didn’t correct Louisa’s present tense. He smiled and wiped a piece of ice from his rounded jaw. ‘It’s because of all the salt near the sea. It stops the snow from settling.’
Louisa nodded, her face frozen and all her words used up, for now. But it had been a start. A very good start.
When they had thrown snowballs, and made a tall snowman with currants for eyes, a stone nose and a shoelace mouth that insisted on falling and dangling on one side, Louisa and her father went back inside. Louisa changed into some dry clothes and her father asked Nancy to make them some hot chocolate.
‘I don’t often have hot chocolate,’ Louisa’s father said as they sat sipping.
‘It’s nice,’ Louisa said.
‘Nancy is good to me.’
‘Yes. She’s nice.’
There was a stretch of silence dotted with sipping. Louisa looked out of the window. The sky hung down heavily, yellow grey. The snow would continue forever, it seemed.
‘Mum talked about somebody,’ Louisa said all of a sudden, leaning forward a little, her heart racing. ‘She talked about a boy with purple eyes. She talked about finding him. But I don’t know who he was.’
Louisa’s father scratched his chin and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said sadly, ‘I don’t know who he was, either.’
‘Perhaps if I could find him, he would be able to tell me where Mum went?’
Louisa’s father put down his hot chocolate and Louisa saw that he hadn’t finished it. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Is somebody else living in my house now?’ Louisa asked. Her toothbrush and clothes and a couple of dolls she had outgrown had been parcelled up and sent to her a few weeks after she had moved into her father’s, and she still hadn’t looked in the box properly. She felt that if she did, a sorrow too deep to recover from would pull her in. So the things that had been sent were still untouched, in Louisa’s big fancy wardrobe next to her new, soft bed.
Her father sighed sadly. ‘Yes. It’s being used as a guest house now.’
Louisa swallowed a big gulp of chocolate and scalded her throat. So that was it. She couldn’t go back. ‘It feels strange to think of somebody else brushing their teeth at my sink,’ she said, wondering if her father would understand.
He nodded, and sighed again.
‘I can’t sleep at night,’ Louisa said next. It was as though her words were suddenly dripping out with no control now, like her mouth was a broken tap. ‘I can’t seem to sleep without the sounds of the sea.’
‘I see. And a girl needs her sleep.’
Louisa nodded, pleased that her father appeared to be listening to her and thinking about what she had said. It seemed so long since she had had a conversation, a real one where she felt like something had happened at the end of it.
‘You know,’ her father said after a little time, ‘if you hold a seashell up to your ear, then you can hear the sea.’
Louisa raised her dark eyebrows, interested. The idea reminded her of something her mother would have said, and made Louisa’s insides tremble a little with grief.
‘I’ll try to get you a shell so that you can listen to it each night before bed. We need you to sleep well.’ Her father stood and left the room, and Louisa finished her hot chocolate, and when she was sure that her father wasn’t coming back, had the rest of his too.
That night, even though going out was out of the question, and even though Louisa and her father were goodness knows how many miles from the coast, Louisa saw that there was a small, shiny seashell on her pillow. It was cream, with tiny pink veins running through it. It was beautiful.
Louisa held the shell to her ear to hear the crashing of the sea, and wondered how her father had managed to find it for her.
And as she sank into bed, and listened to the waves, a little bit of colour seeped back into Louisa’s world.
The free sample has ended.
