It wasn’t hard to imagine a whisper of wild and nefarious acts muffled within the confines of those books. But then Mother always says I have a dark and disobedient imagination. Mirabelle is, of course, even more acerbic, often telling Mother how I make things up. ‘You shouldn’t listen to a word she says. She’s a little storyteller!’ She even accused me of lying when Dad’s Bible went missing. It was mine to have and no one would have willingly given it to me. I find people like Mirabelle make it easier for me to justify my actions.
After Dad’s death, she painted me even more as the shadowy spectre — ‘Always with her head in a book,’ she said dismissively, as if it was a gutter. But as with most people who only see a silent person holding a book, they never imagine the raging flames behind the still, quiet eyes. I quickly discovered reading books was a perfect disguise. Sometimes I even suspected Mother was on to me, accusing me of hiding in my books. She just didn’t know what I was hiding.
At least I knew I could find solitude among the thousands of pages here — a safe harbour from the storms of Mother and her book club. They weren’t the kind of book club who would be troubling the library. They’d already dismissed it and moved on. I, however, stayed. I had, after all, found the perfect place for seclusion away from their judgemental eyes. We should all have our hiding places. We should all have our secrets.
The family at Ambergris Towers were clearly of the same mind. Judging by the space allocated for perfect concealment, this was a family with a lot to hide — like most families, I suppose. They were so private they had strictly followed Mother’s policy of no photographs. And yet, a thin atmosphere of lives lived and lost permeated every portrait, rug and candlestick. It was as if they had simply set down what they were doing and drifted into the past. They could all be here, watching us, waiting to see what would unfold. A remembrance of those lost lives seemed to cling to the fabric of every room, as if the brittle veil between the dead and the living had in some way been cracked, letting their spirits seep across the border.
Cough.
I swung round, suddenly very aware that I might not be on my own. My eyes flitted over the lost corners of the room. Shadows clustered in the remnants of light and seemed to make small movements as the draught caught at the curtain edges and fringed lamp shades.
‘Hello?’ My voice was dry.
Cough.
A faint movement in an alcove. My chest rippled.
‘Ursula, what are you doing here?’ Bridget Gutteridge, book club’s number one fan. ‘I thought this was for book club members only.’
‘I’m with Mother.’
‘Technically, the rules state—’
‘Book club doesn’t have any rules. You don’t even have to read any books.’
‘I’ll have you know, young lady, that I have read all the titles we have studied.’
‘What, Gone Girl — paperback edition, Gone Girl — hardback edition, Gone Girl — Kindle edition, and let’s not forget the very special Gone Girl — audiobook?’
Bridget narrowed her eyes. She made no attempt to disguise the fact that she was judging me.
‘You’re not an official member,’ her words were nettle sharp, ‘so you shouldn’t be here, and you definitely won’t be allowed to discuss the book.’ She gave a slight shuffle at the end, like a visual full-stop, and the slate-grey roof of her hair moved as one complete shell. She clasped her fastidious little fingers together as tight as if she were slowly strangling an imaginary person right in front of her. Perhaps she had someone in mind.
Yap.
There was a scuffling around her ankles.
‘Oh, Mr Bojangles!’ she trilled. ‘Come on, little man. Did the bad lady scare you? Oh, Mr Bojangles.’ She picked up the small dog, a shih tzu, she’d informed us proudly. She cradled him as though he were a child, rocking him slowly, as she murmured, ‘Mr Bojangles, oh Mr Bojangles.’
‘Well, Mr Bojangles isn’t a member.’
She paused her cooing and swaying. She and the little dog watched me silently.
She shielded the dog’s ears with one hand and, lowering her voice, said, ‘Mr Bojangles is a dog.’ She shot a quick look at him. ‘He cannot read.’
‘That’s not been a bar to entry so far.’
She tutted and marched the dog out as if they were in the ring at Crufts.
I sat alone for a moment, watching the motes of dust fall through the sallow light. A thin hum of silence was occasionally broken by the creak of wood or the forlorn sigh of the wind. I glanced at the empty fireplace and in the gloom, I could see a sparse pile of little bones. A bird perhaps. Chalky grey droppings were splattered and dried around the remains. It had taken some time to die alone in that grate. A few broken, black feathers lay beside it as though they were some sort of dark offering or remembrance. No one had seen it die. No one had cleaned it away. There was something familiar about this house and its cold sense of loss. A thread pulled in my thoughts. It was almost as if this place was in mourning.
A draught suddenly bristled around me as though a window had been opened and the outside world touched my skin. I felt something on my cheek, a damp air as if someone near me had breathed out. My chest clenched — the cold air caught between my ribs. I swung around and looked out of the window but only the grey world stared back, as still as a gravestone. A translucent sun was falling in the sky, casting only an insipid light. We were at the hinged point of the day when darkness was stirring and would soon turn over into dusk. The day was unravelling.
I looked at the sombre lines of books, a fine layer of dust in a settled path across their spines. Even though everyone had left, there still seemed to be the slight tremor of life, of something watching me. Its eyes lingered at the edges of the room. I knew this feeling well enough: I was unwelcome.
Time to go.
When I found the others, Mirabelle was still conducting her gauche tour. She showed us the gardens from the French windows with a dismissive ‘Garden’. Illiterate crone, does she not know in a place of such elegance as this, it is always gardens, never a garden? Such small nuances mark out the uncultured from those who are worthy of the invitation. Mirabelle has never been worthy of anything except a swift blow to the head with a sharp instrument.
As we threaded our way aimlessly from room to room, Mirabelle wittered on blithely about irrelevancies, ignorant of the fragile beauty of her surroundings. Each room thrummed with the insinuation of past lives, remnants of their voices whispering through the walls.
A wood pigeon hooted rhythmically, lulling the house into a composed, comfortable familiarity. And this shambling, aged house did still breathe with a little life. There were distant echoes of joy here — the thwack of a cricket bat, laughter and music. But there was sourness now, a morose resentment. Had we brought it with us? Perhaps.
The house was teeming with bedrooms, corridors, staircases, locked doors and passageways that seemed to lead back to the same place. It would be far too easy to lose your way here and never be found again. Mottled, black mirrors peered from shadows, eager to capture new faces. So many faces remembered in their silvering surfaces, each lingering on that lost moment when someone looked deep into the watery depths, a tiny fragment of them caught there for ever.
I checked my phone for the nth time, but there was still no signal, of course, let alone Wi-Fi, and it occurred to me that on our tour I’d seen no telephones at all. Bedrooms had the usual chests of drawers, dressing tables, nightstands. The hallway had a liberal scattering of side-tables and consoles. But there wasn’t a phone in sight. This growing realization made it seem like we had stepped from a golden age back to a darker one. It was no longer seclusion but isolation.