In Her Shadow (20 page)

I crossed the landing and pushed open the door to Mr Brecht’s bedroom, the one that he used to share with his wife. It was a large, light room at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. Sunlight fell in slabs across a wide, unmade bed, the sheets crumpled into white peaks, the pillows gathered together in the middle of the bed. I walked over to the bed, picked up a sheet, and cradled it in my arms. I took it down, out into the garden and gently I covered Mr Brecht to protect him from insects and from the sun. It was all I could do for him and he did not stir.

By the front door, Trixie wagged her stubby tail from side to side and grinned up at me, panting with pleasure.

‘What a good girl,’ I said, leaning down to
shhh
the dog as she made her funny grunty noises of welcome. ‘What a good, clever girl you are!’

I walked back along the lane, Ellen’s denim jacket hooked over my shoulders. I wondered where she had gone. If she’d been heading for our house, I’d have passed her on the way. Perhaps she was at the beach. Trixie and I reached the church and the dog looked up at me expectantly – this was one of our routes. We could walk through the churchyard and out into the fields, over to the cliffs and maybe we’d find Ellen. Pink, yellow and green confetti, left over from the previous day’s wedding, was dotted on the pavement outside the lychgate like late-summer blossom. We followed the
footpath through the churchyard, Trixie trotting behind me, her claws clicking on the flagstone path. The stone was sun-warmed, giving off its own heat. At the back of the church the graves were less well-kept. Some of the headstones were tilted and the plastic bin was full of old wreaths and faded flowers. The air was thick with the smell of rotting plants. I let Trixie off the lead and climbed across the graves, weaving my bare legs carefully around the stinging nettles, wafting at the midges. I went through the gate that opened out into the fields and Trixie came after me.

I saw Ellen before she saw me. She was sitting on the old bench, on the far side of the churchyard wall. She was sitting like a statue, with her legs crossed at the ankles and her hands folded in her lap. She was wearing her green sundress, the one patterned with daisies that had been her mother’s favourite. Her black hair fell down her back, over her shoulders. It was tangled, messy, stuck with leaves and bits of grass. The skin on the back of her arms was dirty.

I went towards her quietly, stepping carefully. I didn’t want to scare Ellen, who sat so still that the birds had come down to hunt insects by her feet and a single brilliant blue-black dragonfly was stretching its wings on the arm of the bench beside her. It was cool in the little overgrown corner of the field. Ellen glanced up as I approached, and smiled. I sat beside her and slipped the jacket over her shoulders. She was sitting rigidly. She looked dazed. Trixie came over, sighed, turned round three times and lay at my feet.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

Ellen nodded.

‘I saw what your father did, to the garden.’

Ellen looked at me. Her eyes were dark and shiny.

‘He’s mad. I told you, he’s mad. I asked him to stop but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘Did you fight him?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘What happened then, Ellen? How did you get so dirty?’

‘I locked myself in the bathroom while he was tearing up the garden. And then I looked out of the window and I could see he was asleep and he’d drunk so much I knew he’d sleep for ages. I was going to come to your house. I was going down the lane when Jago came by on his bike.’

Ellen hesitated and then took a deep breath and said, ‘We talked a bit, but I was afraid someone would see us so we came here, to be private.’

‘You just talked?’

‘No, Hannah, we didn’t just talk. Can’t you guess what we did? Can’t you work out how I got dirty?’

My heart was pounding.

Ellen smiled shyly.

‘I wanted to kiss him,’ she said. ‘I asked him to kiss me. He kissed my eyelids and I said, “No, kiss my mouth, kiss me properly, kiss me like we’re dying and it’s our last kiss ever.” And then …’

Ellen looked up at the sky. The jacket slid off her shoulders.

I held my breath. I was afraid of what she would say next, and at the same time I knew.

‘It wasn’t Jago, Hannah, it was me. I made it happen. I took off my dress and I wasn’t even embarrassed. The sun was all warm on me and he was looking at me like I was amazing. I felt so happy, Hannah. I wanted to do it. I made him.’ She laughed.

‘Oh God,’ I whispered, because I knew this meant a line had been crossed. There would be no going back now, for Jago and Ellen. I felt as if I were falling down into a hole, tumbling head over heels, disappearing, because now Jago and Ellen had united themselves there would be no room
for me at all any more. I might as well no longer exist.

‘There’s blood on the grass,’ Ellen said. ‘It’s a sacred spot. Somebody will put a statue there one day. People will come to look. It will be world-famous as the place where Ellen Brecht lost her virginity to Jago Cardell.’

She didn’t seem to realize what she was saying. She had no idea. This was just another part of the game to her, another act in the ongoing drama of her life. But I looked at her, and I noticed she was crying, silently; her face was wet with tears. My heart softened. I reached out and she leaned against me, like she used to; she twined her arm in mine and she rested her damp cheek against my shoulder.

‘He said he loves me,’ Ellen whispered. ‘He said he’s always loved me. He said he will find a way for us to be together.’

I watched a dragonfly settle on a leaf and stretch its wings in the sunshine. I followed the tracery of the lace pattern in the wing with my eye. I thought how easy it would be to hurt that dragonfly. Just one move of my hand, and it would be dead.

‘You need to be careful, Ellen,’ I said. ‘You must be very careful. What you’re doing, all of this … it’s dangerous.’

Ellen was still smiling to herself. She wasn’t listening. She thought nothing could hurt her now. She had no idea.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THE RUN OF
fine, balmy days ended that night with a literal bang as a massive thunderstorm thirty miles long pounded the south-west of England. The power in Montpelier went down almost immediately. Nobody was out in the dark streets, in the rain that lashed the roads and pavements, setting off car alarms, flooding the storm drains, causing water to bubble back up through the covers. I lay on my bed. Lily inveigled her way under the duvet and settled beside me. From time to time, lightning lit up the room, bleaching the walls and the dressing-gown hanging on the hook on the wardrobe door, the chest of drawers. I remembered how Trixie used to be terrified of thunder. When the storms came, she would shuffle under my bed and nothing would tempt her out until the noise and the lightning stopped. I used to turn up the radio, to try to drown out the noise, but it didn’t help.

I turned the piece of blue glass over in my hand. Lily lay, vibrating with purrs, on my chest. She liked the feel of my heartbeat. I liked her warmth.

I thought of Trixie, hiding from the thunder under the bed. I remembered Jago when he was still young, crawling under
the bed to comfort the dog, his long, skinny legs sticking out across the bedroom carpet, a dirty grey sock with a hole at the toe wrinkled around one foot, the other bare apart from a verucca plaster, and me, hanging over the other side of the bed to laugh at the boy and the ugly white dog snuggled together beneath it. I missed them so badly that I didn’t know if I could last another night without them.

I opened my eyes and stared up at the ceiling. The raindrops running down the window were reflected on its surface, illuminated by car headlights as they drove by, slowed to a crawl by the density of the rain.

I wondered if I was, unconsciously, somehow responsible for moving the drift-glass. I remembered reading some scientific evidence pointing towards the existence of poltergeists. Weren’t they the physical manifestation of a psychological disturbance? There were credible, well-documented cases of poltergeists moving, or causing the movement of, physical objects. Only usually it was something minor: a lightbulb swinging on its wire or a cup falling from a shelf. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that the glass could have been transported all the way from the beach to the gravestone by my own mind, no matter how badly disturbed that mind had been.

‘You’re tired,’ I told myself. ‘In the morning everything will make more sense.’ And then lightning filled up the room and I saw a shadow in the mirror – only it was not a shadow, but a face – Ellen’s face, looking out at me from behind the glass with a desperate expression in her eyes, wet hair streaming down her head and one hand reaching out towards me, the palm turned upwards in a gesture that said,
Help me!
For a moment, I thought she was trapped in the mirror – I thought I heard her scream, and her hands seem to scratch and scrabble at the other side of the glass – and
then the light dimmed, and all that was left was the glare of the negative image of Ellen’s face burned on the back of my eyes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

ELLEN DID NOT
return to school the following week. She was not on the bus for the first three days of term, and when I cycled up to Thornfield House on the fourth day to find out why, Mrs Todd answered the door and told me Ellen would be studying at home from now on.

‘But what about her A-levels?’

‘She can study at home,’ said Mrs Todd.

‘Can I see her, please?’

Mrs Todd shook her head. ‘Not today, Hannah.’

I felt a kind of panic in my stomach. I looked into the older woman’s face and was sure I discerned sympathy deep in her eyes.

‘Please, Mrs Todd, just for five minutes.’

‘I’m sorry. Not today. Come again tomorrow – things might be better then.’ Mrs Todd pushed the door shut, literally closing it in my face.

I backed down the drive, looking up towards Ellen’s window. She was there, staring out. I held up my hand, waved. My eyes were stinging with the sun. Ellen bent down and lifted the lower window sash. She leaned out, holding one finger to her lips, and threw something out – a paper aeroplane. I chased it, caught it, held it up to show Ellen I
had it safe, and then I waved again and walked backwards out of the drive.

It was strange how things had changed. Everything had been so different a few years earlier; I remembered Ellen and me doing cartwheels on the front lawn at Thornfield House when we were thirteen or fourteen. The world spinning past us, the sky, the grass, the house. Standing up, panting, a little dizzy with our hair in our mouths and feeling happy from the exertion. Mrs Brecht, in her wheelchair, laughing, the sun catching the gold of the necklace around her pretty throat and Mr Brecht, the contest judge, stroking his chin saying, ‘
Hmmm. A very difficult decision
,’ and then awarding both of us the joint first prize of a 50p coin, even though we all knew that Ellen’s cartwheels had been better than mine. I remembered Mr Brecht pushing his wife, tipping the wheelchair back by its handles, making car-revving noises and then leaning over to kiss her face and her, still laughing, turning her lips towards his. And later, Mr Brecht sitting beside Anne on the chaise longue, her eyes closed to hide her pain and he massaging lavender oil into her hands, treating each sore knuckle with such tenderness and affection. Gentle, kind, good Mr Brecht, his poor wife, the two of them so much in love, and Ellen the spoiled, precocious, but still compliant daughter.

I unfolded the paper aeroplane as I picked up the bike that I’d left propped beside the wall. The message was brief, roughly scribbled in felt pen, done in the few moments while I had stood at the door talking to Mrs Todd.

Tell Jago come at midnight, stay close to the garden wall, hoot like an owl three times xxx

I had hoped it would be a message for me. I was the one who had bothered to come up to see Ellen and my reward was to be used as a go-between. It didn’t seem fair. I put the letter in my pocket, climbed on the bike, and rode it slowly along the lane.

Back home, I sat at the table in the kitchen, struggling with an essay about the similarities between theropod dinosaurs in the Mesozoic Era and the birds of today.

If I gave the letter to Jago, then I would be instigating a chain of events over which I would have no control. Jago and Ellen were natural risk-takers. Ellen would enjoy the thrill of whatever she was planning and Jago, I was sure, would do whatever she asked of him. It would be better not to give him the note. He wouldn’t know any different and I would be able to sleep sound in my bed knowing he wasn’t going to get into any trouble. In fact, not giving Jago the note would definitely be the right thing to do. I considered, for a moment, leaving it somewhere where one of my parents would find it. They would ask what it meant, and I would be obliged to tell them what I knew. That would put a stop to Jago and Ellen’s secrets and lies. I was enjoying this idea and playing out its various consequences in my mind, when my conscience intervened. It reminded me that Ellen was my friend and Jago my brother. Both trusted me. They both thought I was on their side. We were the Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. I could not let them down.

I shouldn’t have done it. I should have trusted my instincts and kept quiet, but in the end I gave Jago the message, and that night, Ellen and Jago’s love affair moved into a new phase, one that only the three of us would ever know about. From the beginning, I knew it would lead to disaster – I
knew
– but once it had started there was nothing I could do to stop it.

From that night on, almost every night, Jago crept like a thief out of number 8 Cross Hands Lane and walked up the hill to Thornfield House. Sometimes, he returned almost immediately. Those were the nights when the lights were still on downstairs, or when Mr Brecht was pacing the room next to Ellen’s, the room where his wife died, his shadow on the
curtains that hung at the window alerting Jago, and forcing him to turn away. Other times Mr Brecht drank himself to sleep, and slept so deeply that nothing would disturb him. Those nights it was safe for Jago and Ellen to meet, to be together. They were like a force of nature, like water or air or gravity. Nothing could stop them. Mr Brecht could put all the obstacles he liked in their way. He could try to contain Ellen in the house, in her room, but it was like trying to hold back the wind or the tide.