In Her Shadow (16 page)

‘He did,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t think he means to hurt me – at least, I don’t think it’s me he wants to hurt. I think it’s Mama.’

Now I knew she was lying. Mr Brecht was moody, he was passionate, but I knew he would never, ever put his hands around anyone’s neck, least of all Ellen’s, and never Anne’s. I remembered the absolute love in his voice when he said he would never let anything, or anyone, hurt his wife or daughter.

Downstairs, one end of the long cherrywood table in the dining room had been laid for three people, with silver cutlery, candles in candlesticks, linen serviettes. A record played on the hi-fi in the corner. The record was slightly warped; I could tell by the way the light reflected from its
rim as it spun on the turntable. It was a crackly live recording of Anne Brecht in performance. At the end of each movement the applause coming through the speakers was rapturous.

Outside the rain was still falling and the sky was dark. It was late and I hadn’t eaten in hours. I was hungry.

I sat opposite Ellen. Her father came into the room. He ground out his cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray on the sideboard, and came towards me. He smelled of Gitanes and vetiver and glamour.

‘You’re looking very beautiful tonight, Hannah,’ he said. He put his hand on my shoulder, and gave a little squeeze. The feeling travelled all the way through my body. I held my hands tight together in my lap and smiled up at him as elegantly and as eloquently as I could.

He pulled up a chair and sat beside Ellen, unfolded his napkin and spread it over his knees.

‘Are you talking to me yet, Ellen?’ he asked.

‘If I don’t have to, I’d rather not,’ she said. I winced at her rudeness. Mr Brecht took a deep breath.

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, that we ended up fighting, but you bring it on yourself,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be angry with you, but you make me angry. You don’t listen to me. You remind me of your mother and how she didn’t listen to me, and I can’t deal with that right now.’

‘That’s your excuse, is it?’ Ellen asked.

‘Oh, Ellen,’ Mr Brecht said. ‘We have a guest. Let’s at least be civil in front of Hannah.’

He opened the wine bottle on the table, and half-filled three glasses. I took a sip. We never had wine at home. I liked the sensation of holding the glass in my hand. I liked the way the light shone through the wine. I enjoyed feeling so grown-up. While we sat there, formally, like three people in a painting, Mrs Todd came in with a tray – three bowls of
steaming pea and dumpling soup, three small, home-made bread rolls and butter scooped into curls on a small dish. She served the soup and we ate in silence, listening to the music. After that, there was meat in an oniony sauce with herb-roast potatoes and tiny fresh vegetables. It was delicious. Mr Brecht wasn’t eating much, but drinking wine, topping up his own glass. When the bottle was empty, Mrs Todd brought another. Ellen picked at her food, moving it around the plate. She did not touch her wine.

After the main course was finished, she asked her father if the two of us could be excused.

‘Just a moment,’ Mr Brecht said, and he came around the table and took something out of his pocket. It was the little gold chain with the treble clef charm that Ellen’s mother used to wear round her neck. Ellen sat still as a statue while Mr Brecht fastened it around her neck. Then he leaned over and kissed the top of his daughter’s head.

‘I’m being hard on you for your own good,
Schatzi
,’ he said. ‘It is because I love you. If I did not love you so very much, I would not get so angry. You understand, don’t you?’

Ellen nodded.

‘Good girl,’ said Mr Brecht.

He was standing behind her. He couldn’t see her face. Only I, sitting opposite, saw the anger in her eyes. It scared me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I WALKED IN
the gloaming from the pub back to Cross Hands Lane. Mum and Dad were already in bed. They’d left a ham sandwich covered in clingfilm on a plate for my supper. I made some tea, ate the sandwich, watched a little television, then went upstairs and slept like a baby in the single bed on which I’d slept through my childhood and my teenage years. I had forgotten, until I slipped between the clean sheets, how soft the mattress was, how familiar and comforting. All that was missing was Trixie. She’d died at home, under my bed, while I was in Chile. Dad had wrapped her in a blanket and dug a hole in the garden to bury her.

I had found it easy to grieve for Trixie. The tears had come unforced, the pain in my heart was genuine and oddly comforting. I remembered the dog’s big, ugly face, her timidity, her predisposition to drool, her bloodshot, trusting eyes, and I ached with love. I missed her, pure and simple. But it had been so difficult to grieve for Ellen. I had not cried when I read the letter that told me Ellen had died; I had not cried when I returned to Trethene years after that. I had done my best not to think about Ellen, or her death, at all. Deep in my heart, I did not accept that she was gone. I never articulated my feelings, but I convinced myself that ‘dying’ at
a tragically young age was simply another way for Ellen to put herself in the limelight.

I had never, truly, believed she was dead.

I couldn’t talk to anyone about this. It was too complicated. Even when I was at my most messed-up, I managed to hide how I really felt.

In the hospital, after the breakdown, I was told to acknowledge my feelings for Ellen, and let them go. They made it sound so easy, those soft-voiced counsellors with their long silences, their: ‘
How do you feel?
’s, their: ‘
Tell me what you’re thinking
’s. Julia told me to go deep inside myself and dredge out the darkest memories, those that had buried themselves so far within my psyche that I was fearful of uprooting them. ‘
Dig them out
,’ she had said, as if she were talking about potatoes. ‘
Take a good look at them, then move away!
’ I never did as she suggested. If I had pulled out those memories and examined them too closely, I would have risked poisoning the present with the toxicity of the past.

Only now, after all those years had gone by, I wondered if I had been right all along to deny Ellen’s death. And if she was still alive, if I could talk to her, then I could explain. I could make things better.

Mum had placed a jug of garden lilies on the little windowledge in my room, and in the morning I knelt on the bed and looked past the flowers that were already shedding pollen on the sill, out of the window. They reminded me of Ellen’s eighteenth birthday – the spilled pollen on the white tablecloth, the sense of dread. I shook my head to chase away the memory. That was the past. This was now. The garden of the house that used to belong to the Cardells was tidy now, and ordered. The concrete had been dug up, the old rabbit hutch and clothesline were gone. Instead there was a tidy, pocket-handkerchief-sized lawn, a herb garden, bird feeders. A couple of foldaway chairs sat side by side on the
patio. It looked like a pleasant place to sit and enjoy the sun and pass the time.

It was true, I thought, that time made some things better. Bad neighbours were replaced by good ones, disorder by harmony. Only it worked the other way around too.

I slid off the bed and picked up my towel and toiletry bag. I went into the bathroom, tiny and cramped, still with an old-fashioned chain-pull flush on the lavatory, old-fashioned white ceramic tiles and big old taps above the enamel bath. It was poorly ventilated and icy cold in winter. Black mould grew in the corners of the windows, and the grouting of the tiles. I’d tried to persuade my parents many times to upgrade and modernize the bathroom, I’d offered to organize and pay for a refurbishment myself, but they refused. They didn’t see the point. They said: ‘
Why fix what’s not broken?
’ They liked the bathroom how it was.

I lay in the bath and remembered the day I received the letter from my mother, in which she told me that Ellen had died. It had been a big-sky, clouds-painted-on, bright South American day; handsome, long-maned horses stamping and blowing, kicking up red dust, the call of the cowhands, the answering bellow of young bulls. One of the Japanese students working in our group had taken the pick-up into town to fetch supplies, and had returned with a handful of mail along with the bags of rice and sugar, boxes of cereal, tins of meat and vegetables. She had handed out the letters – it was rare for post from England to reach us at all. There was only one letter for me. It had been posted, in Cornwall, more than two months earlier and had taken that long to reach me. I’d recognized my mother’s writing and gone into the barn we were using as a dormitory to read it in private.

I’d sat on the top bunk, opened the envelope with my thumb and taken out the letter inside – just one folded piece of blue paper from the gift set I had given my mother for
Christmas years before. She had written, without preamble:

Dearest Hannah
,

I have some terrible news for you. I am sorry to tell you this in a letter, but of course I cannot reach you by telephone and I feel the news cannot wait until you return home as I don’t know how long that will be. Ellen Brecht has passed away. She has gone to join her mother in Heaven. It was a drowning accident and pray God she did not suffer. Her father has gone away back to Germany, so I have heard, and the house is closed up
.

I know you will be very sad and I’m so sorry I can’t be with you, my darling girl, to comfort you but I pray your good friends in South America will look after you in this difficult time

I remembered each word exactly and the way my mother’s old-fashioned handwriting looped across the page, so the letter must have made a deep impression, but at the time, it hadn’t made sense to me. Was it because I was so far away from home? Because I felt so removed? Or had I just not been capable of facing up to the truth? My mother’s words seemed false and artificial. There was so little information in the letter, it was ridiculously brief given the news it contained. I didn’t believe it.

I had folded the letter, put it back in its envelope and kept it in the pocket of my shorts, meaning to find a shady spot where I could take it out and read it again later, to compose questions in my mind, to understand it – but sometime during the morning it had fallen out of my pocket. The letter was lost and I did not search for it. That made it easier for me to put it from my mind. I didn’t say anything to anyone. I didn’t talk about its contents, not even to Ricky. I simply pretended I didn’t know that Ellen was dead. I did not allow
myself to think about her death, or why she had died, or how. It was easier for me to carry on as if the letter had never existed. That way, I did not have to think about the last time I saw Ellen, or what I had said to her and the way we had parted.

That way, I could pretend that one day there would still be a chance for me to put things right between Ellen and me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

SPRING CAME, AND
with it came the daffodils that had been Anne Brecht’s favourite flowers. Her birthday would have been in April. It was an especially lovely month that year. The wildflowers were prolific and joyful, the blossom on the trees in the garden of Thornfield House gloriously showy in its pinks and whites, but rather than enjoying the natural beauty, Mr Brecht avoided it. Ellen told me he spent the whole of the anniversary of Anne’s birthday in the room where she had died, on his own, with only the music to keep him company.

Since Mrs Brecht’s death, I had taken to spending more time at Thornfield House again. Ellen and I drifted through rooms that still seemed to be full of the presence of her mother, as if she had not managed to escape the place, even in death. I watched Mr Brecht carefully, from a distance, because I did not know what I should say to him, and because his torment was so biblical in its depth. Mrs Todd did her best to keep the household running on an even keel but it was a Sisyphean task.

One morning, Ellen and I came upstairs to find her father standing on the landing, holding Mrs Brecht’s white cotton bedsheets in his arms, pressing his face into them. He was
not looking after himself. He seemed thin and ill. His determination to suffer, his self-imposed martyrdom, almost broke my heart.

A few days later, Ellen and I were sitting on the bench overlooking the fields at the back of the church, enjoying the spring sunshine, when she told me her father had been trying to summon Anne’s spirit.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘He wanted to contact her in the spirit world. He asked me to go into the room next door to mine and help him. He’d got a ouija board.’

Ellen said this in a matter-of-fact way, not in one of her dramatic voices. I glanced at her, looking for signs she was making the tale up, but I couldn’t see any.

‘You didn’t use the ouija board, did you?’

‘I didn’t want to, but he made me.’

‘But, Ellen, those things are really dangerous! You might have ended up summoning the devil or something!’

‘I know. But Papa insisted.’ Ellen picked at the hem of her skirt. ‘He said what if Mama was trapped in some dark place surrounded by souls in torment, drifting through purgatory trying to get back to us. What if she was icy cold and lonely and everything was black, and the wind was howling around her and the souls were screaming and wailing … I didn’t want to touch the ouija board but I couldn’t leave her there, on her own, in that dark, lonely place.’

‘What happened?’ I asked. My voice was little more than a whisper.

‘Papa turned off the light. There was just a candle on the bedside table. We were sitting on the bed.’

I shivered.

‘We put our fingers on the glass, and Papa called for Mama.’ Ellen was speaking very softly now.

‘Did she come?’

Ellen pulled her coat tighter around herself.

‘Ellen?’

‘Something came. Something made the glass move. It moved across the board all on its own, not slowly but fast, like this.’ She scissored the air with her hand. ‘And at the same time, the candle was flickering and there was a strange smell in the room.’