Solsbury Hill A Novel (13 page)

“I don’t read the paper, but if I did it would be that one . . . ,” she said.

“Because?”

“Because it’s pink.”

Mead pulled the paper far enough away from his face as if to see whether or not it was pink. He shook his head and scrunched his face to tell her she couldn’t be more wrong, he’d been reading it most of his life and it was quite clearly some vague sort of beige.

In a worn Windsor chair, she sipped her chocolate. “I’ve seen almost no pictures of my mother. My father kept a wedding picture and I’ve seen a couple of their honeymoon, but nothing from when she was young.”

“Makes sense. I suppose they’d be here, the pictures from when she was small,” he said.

“I guess they would.” Her mind was miles away and befuddled. She ran her fingers through her hair. “I’m a mess. I want to take a bath at the house. Can we go back soon? Do I seem a prima donna?”

“Not in the least.” He folded the paper and got out of his chair, touched her arm. “You’ve been through the worst of it.”

“Mead, you’ve been so kind to me, but how are you?”

“I’m fine. It was coming and we knew it, and I’m fine. Thanks, though. We best get on home.”

As he said the word
home
she realized it was at least partly her home and she shared it with Mead, in some way. As peculiar as it was in Yorkshire, different from any place she’d ever been, she was beginning to feel something at ease in her soul here, something hard to pin down.

With a faint trill, the cell phone rang inside her purse. It took her a moment to realize what it was. On her phone was a picture of Miles’ most seductive face, the one where he lowered his chin and looked up from under his brow with a bare, faint smile.

She said, “Hi, Miles,” in a voice that was soft and weaker than she expected it to be. The relief she heard in his voice as he spoke her name was almost heartrending.

“Just a second.” She put down the phone and put on her coat and stepped outside.

Miles repeated her name, because she didn’t say a word for a while. Again he said, “Eleanor.”

“I’ve been in this place without any connection most of the time,” she said. “It’s kind of a fluke that you caught me.” They weren’t the words she wanted to say. Her tone was not the one she would have chosen.

The snow was already melting, and the sun felt warm.

“I’m glad I caught you.”

“You caught me?” she said and immediately regretted it. She hadn’t meant to address it, not now, not on the phone,
not in the middle of nowhere. She hadn’t meant to say anything. She wished she hadn’t answered the phone.

“Oh, God.” He’d heard exactly what she meant. “I’m going to get this wrong, but I want to get it right, because I love you. I’ve never loved anyone but you. I know you don’t have to listen to any explanation, but I do have one, a lame one . . . Shit. I’m meant to make you happy and instead I hurt you. I’d never— I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He waited. “El?”

“I’m here.”

“It’s not enough—nothing will be enough—but I want to have a chance to explain, to hold you and explain. God, it’s awful not to be able to . . .”

Though there were tears in her eyes, she ignored what he was saying and interrupted him. “I got to see Alice and talk to her. Do you remember Alice? She sure remembered you.”

His breath changed. She imagined him shifting his posture. “Of course I remember her. From ages ago. How is she?”

“She died.” Eleanor remembered. “My God, I forgot, you don’t even know why I came. That night, it was that night, you know? Anyway, Alice’s partner called me to say she was sick and wanted to see me. That night. Anyway, I guess it was yesterday, or the night before last night. I’d been with her just before, and I’d kissed her good night. She was sleeping when I kissed her and then, just a few hours later, she was gone, just like that.”

He was silent. He waited a while for her to say something else, but she didn’t and he said, “It must have been great to
get to be with her. I can’t imagine, El. God, I wish I were there with you. Should I come? Are you all right?”

“I am. I’m tired and a mess today. This house here, it’s called Trent Hall and it’s huge and right in the middle of the moors.” Her body responded to the sound of his voice and fell into friendship. “And it’s kind of just the way you’d think it would be. On the moors.” She wished she had a cigarette and an hour or more to sit with him. Despite herself, she unfolded like a sunrise. “Except it’s like another world, another planet. I mean another century, for sure.” She knew he would be sitting at his desk in lower Manhattan. His legs would be up on his desk, his chair tipped back, and there’d be that appreciative smile he always had when she rambled on. “Anyway, Miles, I should go. I’m dizzy, I’m so tired right now. I’m not thinking straight.” She saw Mead coming out of the pub. She should be mad at Miles, she knew, but she couldn’t find it. It was so good to hear his voice again.

“Before you go, El, I just want to say I want to come over there, I really do.”

“You said something about that on the message.”

Mead leaned against the hood of the car.

“It’s probably not a good idea,” she said. “Miles, I’ll be home. I don’t know when, but I’ll be home. We’ll talk about things then.

“It’s good to hear your voice. It feels good that you remember Alice.” She started to cry a bit.

“El . . . I’m coming over there.”

She heard Mead start the car. “I’m gonna go now,” she said.

She clicked off, pushed a button, and he was gone.

M
ore than a week had passed since Alice’s quiet funeral. Eleanor was sleeping through most nights and always waking hungry. Her long walks on the moors had her soul feeling strong and her muscles almost sinewy. She was beginning to grasp the idea that this house and the land, for as far as she could see, were hers.

There was a stable of horses, there were crops, pigs, poultry, and sheep on the land, with complicated grazing rights. The entailment could not be changed without an appeal to Parliament, Gwen had said, so the land was hers and would continue to pass through her children as long as she had daughters, but without daughters it would skip a generation and go on regardless. It was a lot to take in.

She resolved not to worry about it, as she sat on the edge of the bed.

She’d been invited for lunch the next day at the house of Alice’s old friend and lawyer Mr. Wilcock, who happened to live in Haworth, the famed Brontë town. She’d met him briefly at the house the day Alice died, but couldn’t remember him. He was handling the details of the transfer of the estate, and she had to go see him.

Mead had offered to drive her, but Eleanor wanted to go
on her own, to stay the night at an inn and wake in the morning. Though it might be nice to take another long drive through Yorkshire with Mead, many of the questions she wanted to ask Mr. Wilcock pertained to him. It felt wrong to take away the only house he’d ever known. Now that she knew him, it felt even worse.

Still, she had to borrow his car to get there, so she would stop by the old barn for the keys. Something felt different, she was nervous about seeing him. She walked through the kitchen and grabbed a brown roll from a basket of rolls on the kitchen table. She went through the vegetable garden into the courtyard and heard a shout.

“Christ almighty!” she heard Mead yell, then the crunch of gravel as he ran. “What the hell . . .” His voice faded.

Granley was on the gravel with a box on top of him and books spilled all around.

“Are you hurt, old man?”

“’Course I am.” Grumbling, he sat up. “. . . blasted boggy books. Help me up, lad, damn it.” He swept the books off his body like barnacles that clung.

“Not on the wet ground, man!” said Mead. The box was split in two and books were splayed open. “Can you get that wheelbarrow over there?” he called to Eleanor.

“Where?”

“That one against the barn—can’t you see it?—it’s right there.” She’d never heard his sharp, angry tongue, but she got the wheelbarrow and maneuvered it up the rocky hill.

“They can bear worse than mud, where they already been,” the old man said. Mead bore the weight of Granley and held him steady. “A book’s just a book, after all’s said and done,” Granley muttered, embarrassed to have fallen and making light of the mess around him.

Eleanor picked up one book at a time and placed them gingerly into the wheelbarrow. It started to drizzle and then to snow a bit while she and Granley moved the books into a small shed, where he laid the wet ones out to dry under a heat lamp used for sprouting seeds.

In the old barn there were bookshelves on the floor and a sky-high ladder against the wall. Cracks and holes had been sealed, so there were no owls or mice or windy corners. The walls were dry and sturdy and though the work wasn’t finished there was a living area with a large desk, an oak cupboard, and two armchairs.

Mead held the weight of one tower of shelves and tipped it up straight, then shimmied it across the room till it found its place between two other shelves—a corner piece, stained but not polished, that slid in with a snap. He chewed his lower lip and picked up the ladder, leaned it where he needed it to be, then climbed to the top, where he secured the corner piece with some screws and a drill, then smoothed what was rough and blew off the dust. He climbed down and started in again.

The bookshelves were unwieldy, but he knew to pivot their weight and swing them upright, then tip them, wiggle them, swerve out of the way to accommodate them. Eleanor
watched without making a sound from the doorway. She stood still and took in his bare torso, the muscles on his belly from hard physical work, his thick hair tied back and his body brown and damp with sweat, an arc of sinew on the side of his hips. As he danced each shelf across the room, he ground his teeth and heaved it into place. Eleanor recognized the grim aggression in his jaw, the sharp angle of his cheekbones, the wide lip he seemed almost to bite through. She was used to a more refined figure of a man.

Eleanor cleared her throat. With a grunt to punctuate the heave, Mead tossed the shelf back against the wall with a slam, bang, and it wobbled. For an endearing moment, his face showed doubt, as together they watched. He stood ready to catch it, should it fall, but it settled where it belonged and he smiled at her.

She picked up his shirt and held it out to him, the woolen button-down. She watched as his body disappeared inside the fabric.

“Give me a hand with the books, will you? It’ll take your mind off things.”

Many more boxes had arrived in the morning. As she started to unpack the books, Mead continued working on the far wall of shelves.

“Is there an order to this? Don’t you want to put them in categories or something? Dewey decimal system?”

“I thought we’d just get them out of all these boxes.”

“Where are the boxes from?” She started in again. She
grabbed a chunk of books and slid them in, then another chunk beside the first chunk until a box was empty and a shelf was full of faded colors. “The bindings are beautiful.”

“Well, some have been in Haworth for a while, and some have come up from Hay-on-Wye. I think that’s mostly where they’ve been. But the oldest ones, over there, they come from Scarborough.”

Eleanor grabbed a handful of books and arranged them. The colors worked no matter how she placed them: the bindings were soft and lovely, and it was better that they didn’t move from tallest to shortest, she had decided. A wall of pale red, blue, green—all dull and dusty colors—she stepped back to look at her work once three lengths of shelf were filled.

He came down from the ladder. “You’ve arranged them by color,” he said, deadpan.

“Looks pretty,” she said. “And they stack way better than sweaters.”

The wind blew the door open.

“Would you mind kicking that closed?”

She closed it but it swung back open.

“Slam it.”

She slammed it.

“Now would you slip that bolt into place, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.” She did. She slid the bolt into its slot and turned it to lock it in.

“What is it you’ve got on?” he said, suddenly taking notice.
She wore wool trousers, full in the leg like trousers in the 1940s, a fitted cashmere sweater tucked in, and a strong leather belt. Lace-up shoes with smooth leather soles. “You look smart,” he said, having taken her in from foot to head.

“Thanks,” she said. She took in the bookshelves, the capacity of them, and he watched her.

“They’re your books now,” he said. “They’ve belonged to your family for a long time. Alice collected a deal of them herself, stepped in when your granddad wanted to get rid of them, and it’s a good thing she did, ’cause there’s a fortune in them.”

“If someone sold them.”

“Well, yes, that, too, I suppose, but I mean a fortune of history. They’re gems, some of them. Originals, first editions hardly even touched, some of them.”

She remembered the first edition Miles had given her of
Alice in Wonderland
, on her last birthday. She was puzzled by the book, having expected a ring. Now the thought amused her.

“Whisky?”

She flopped down into one of the large upholstered armchairs. “Sure, but I can’t stay long, I’ve got to get on the road. You know, Mead, these are your books, not mine. I live in New York City. I don’t know anything about this place and the value of first editions and”—she looked around the barn—“sheep.”