The Edge of the Fall (2 page)

But then, as she did so, the pressure of his palms began to change. It started to loosen, move away. She felt her body tremble. ‘Darling,' she began, but the words themselves seemed to shake her, move her closer to the edge.

‘See,' he said in her ear, his voice low. ‘Regard the beauties of nature.'

‘But—'

‘The world is ours,' he said, as muffled as the sound of a shell held against her ear. ‘We could hold it in our hands.'

She imagined, then, how it would be if she was falling, clutching at the air, begging. And – in a moment – she was. Falling.

She cried out. The air caught the sound.

PART ONE

ONE

Stoneythorpe, May 1919

Celia

Stoneythorpe looked nothing like it used to. Walking in, the house wound around Celia, threw its dust into her face, everything in it a mockery –
we aren't the same
! She tried to see it as someone new might, not remembering the house full of people for a party, her mother presiding, immaculate in one of her pale blue gowns. She came into the hall, reached out her hand for the Chinese vase in the entrance. They'd packed it up before they'd turned the place into a hospital in the last years of the war, she'd bundled it in newspaper full of reports from the front and advertisements for false teeth. Jennie and Thompson had wrapped up vases, boxes, portraits, silver frames, stacking them into crates and then dragging them out to the garden, hauling them into the ground by the rose bushes, throwing soil over the top, promising themselves they wouldn't forget where they were.

When peace was declared, Celia thought they'd seize the vases out of the soil as quickly as they could. But they didn't, not for ages. They left them languishing there for nearly four months.
We never get round to it
, Verena said.
We don't really think of them
. It wasn't true, not for Celia anyway. She'd dreaded the beautiful things coming out, how they'd throw into sharp relief the broken house, its shabby walls, how everything was lost, how they'd let it fall into such disrepair even before her mother had turned it into a hospital – and when did the harried nurses or soldiers have time to care for a house? And yet, when she and the servants finally did open up the soil, tugging the crates, unpacking the layers of paper,
pulling them off carefully – the vases, the boxes, the frames were not the same. She'd remembered them glittering, expensive – as a child she'd thought the vases the stuff of palaces. But the frames were tarnished, the boxes worn and the Chinese vase was not white but grey, tiny hairline cracks running down from the lip. Thompson had stared at everything, lifted the frames, turned the vase around. ‘But they were so well packed up,' he said. ‘I don't understand it.' It was as if the war had aged everything, dirtied it all, however much you hid things away.

Celia sat on the lowest step of the stair, the wood hard and cold on her legs. Her father Rudolf had longed for the house, said Elizabeth I had once visited. The de Witts would be Tudor highborns, Celia supposed he thought, not German meatmakers. And perhaps they were for a while, hosting great parties for the village, sitting in their pew in church, her sister Emmeline engaged to marry the local aristocrat, Sir Hugh Bradshaw. Celia looked back at them, almost laughing.
Didn't you know?
she wanted to cry.
It was all just make-believe, we were actors in some masque playing for Elizabeth
,
and then the war came and exposed the truth of what England felt: you are Germans and we hate you
. ‘Little Celia,' Rudolf had said, when he was finally sent home from the internment camp, the place he'd never talk about save the fact that they hadn't even had their own mattresses. ‘The war stole your childhood.'

But it hadn't, not really. She'd been fifteen when the war had broken out, adult enough for everything that came afterwards, all the things she did, the mistakes she made. She, the family, all of them, had kept going, looking ahead.

Now, when they'd got to the years they'd all been hoping for, she didn't want them. She didn't know what to do with peace. She didn't even want to be here any more, but there was no room for her at Emmeline and Mr Janus's flat now Emmeline was pregnant. Celia was like the vase: cracked, not the same, perched on her spot, still painted.

‘Louisa?' she called. There was no answer. She supposed they should have covered the place in bunting to welcome her. They would have done, before the war. But then, before the war her
cousin would have been staying because they were having a ball or going for some sort of holiday. She wouldn't be coming to live with them because her mother had died and she was alone. What was she going to say to her? Celia didn't know. Louisa, almost five years younger than her, was always the baby left out of their games. Now she was sixteen, parentless, nearly an adult, and she was come to be in their family, another sister.

The whole thing had got off on the wrong foot. They'd gone into town to collect some things for Louisa, some welcoming cakes for tea and the like (well, such was the plan; in the event the only whole cake in the baker's was a tired-looking plum sponge), and had meant to be back just before she'd arrived. But they were late starting out and Verena had to stop to talk to a woman she knew and then they saw Mr Pemberton, the solicitor, and you had to talk to him – and so they were late back even though, all the while, Celia felt the panic as if she was back in a dream about school and late for a lesson, wanting them to hurry along, go faster. Verena had talked on and on about being kind to Louisa, treating her delicately.
The poor child
, she said.

‘Can't you go faster?' Celia pleaded with Thompson, who was driving the cart in a flurry of mud (they'd had to give up the car in the war, and how could they ever afford another one?). But they were still late, and when they arrived, Jennie had come out to meet them, said that Louisa had been there for an hour or so, gone up to her room, hadn't wanted to talk.

So Verena sent Celia to find her. ‘You girls,' she said. ‘You'll know what to say to her.' Celia felt her frustration rising, angry with her mother for escaping any conversation that might be trying. And now here she was, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, shouting for Louisa, her voice echoing across the hall. Over the last month since they'd had the news that Louisa was coming, she'd imagined all the ways she'd be kind to her cousin, how she'd take her to places and they'd talk, play music together, discuss books. The poor girl was only sixteen! Celia would comfort Louisa – and in the process, feel better herself, less alone. Helping others,
that was the way to feel better, so the teachers at Winterbourne had told them.

She hadn't thought much of Louisa when she was young, always the little girl trying to join in, run after them when she was too slow and fell over her feet. Then, during the war, Celia hadn't seen her. As soon as the British newspapers started filling up with the Kaiser and his evils, Aunt Deerhurst said that it would be better if they really didn't meet. They'd come for Michael's funeral in that freezing winter, but Louisa had hardly spoken. Cousin Matthew had talked on, attracting all the light. Celia was ashamed of herself; she'd been so caught up in her own grief, she'd hardly seen Louisa at all. Now she would make it up to her. They'd welcome Louisa into Stoneythorpe and then it would begin.

She started up the stairs. Verena had arranged one of the spare rooms for Louisa, one previously used for storing bits of furniture. It was two doors along from Michael's room, which was still locked up, preserved as it had been – dozens of wooden aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling, his books and clothes piled up on the shelves and cupboards – waiting for him to come back from the war.

But instead they'd got the letter saying the body was buried in France after his brave act in battle.

She remembered walking past the dark window that late summer night in 1914, hearing voices, thinking nothing of it – but it had been Michael planning to run away to war with Tom, her best friend. It was all Tom's idea, she knew, he had no longer wanted to be their servant, assisting the groom, having to look after her. If she'd realised, if she'd gone out there, then perhaps Michael wouldn't have run off to join up.

Then, of course, she reminded herself, he'd have had to join up anyway by 1916, and probably the same would have happened.

‘Died bravely', the letter said. She was the only one in the house who knew that it wasn't true, who knew what had really happened. Michael's door, closed, still waiting for him, the one room in the house that had never changed.

She walked up the stairs, hands trailing the banister. ‘Louisa?' she called again. Surely her cousin could hear her. She passed her own door, wide open, the books strewn over the unmade bed. Louisa could have peered in, she thought, looked anywhere really. She'd had the house to herself.

She walked up to the next staircase. She never came here, up to the top of the house. Her brother Arthur's room was at the end of the corridor and she had no reason to visit him.

It was strange having Arthur around the house again, after he'd been away for so long. He'd spent many years in Paris – first hiding from Rudolf, then from the fighting. Sometimes she hated him; he'd been kept safe when Michael had died. Spending Rudolf's money, doing as he pleased, not even coming to Michael's funeral, never caring about any of them.

At other times she thought it had been nothing but slaughter, and at least someone had escaped. He'd always be the eldest brother, would grow older than his current age of twenty-six, while Michael couldn't move, stuck forever at twenty-two.

She knocked on Louisa's door. ‘Hello, cousin?' There was no reply. She pushed it open. The empty room looked unchanged, apart from Louisa's trunk in the middle of it. She'd made a half-hearted attempt at pulling a shawl out. Celia moved into the room, stood at the window. She couldn't imagine what Louisa would make of the garden, overgrown, untidy, stones missing from the walls, weeds sprawling across anything that was once a flower. Lady Deerhurst, Louisa's mother, would have thought it terrible – if she'd been alive. After the war, they'd promised they would improve it, make the beds and the gardens handsome, create Verena's Versailles garden again. But they'd let them collapse, really. She turned away, hurried out of the room.

‘Louisa?' she shouted, out in the corridor. Her words echoed back to her. She hurried down the stairs. She called again, with no reply. She felt a thin creep of fear slide up her body, wrap around her heart. Where was she? Celia hurried down into the hall, rushing now, throwing open the door of the parlour, the dining room, the study, the second receiving room. Broken furniture,
legs snapped and piled up in the corners, paintings still dusty on the walls. She hurtled to the kitchen. Jennie, Thompson and Mrs Bright said they hadn't seen Louisa.

‘Try the garden,' said Jennie. ‘She'll be somewhere.'

But what if she's not? Celia thought, heart pounding, pulling open the back door and running into the garden.
The poor child
, Verena had said,
she is so, delicate
. Celia ran, feet catching on the damp grass. There were spring flowers poking up from the soil; she ignored them. ‘Louisa!' she shouted. ‘Where are you?'

The words swung around the sky, flew. She called again. ‘Louisa!'

There was no sign of her. Perhaps, she thought, she'd walked into the village. She gazed around the deserted garden. She must have done. She could be anywhere now. Celia wanted to scream at her mother. Why didn't we go faster?

‘Louisa?' she shouted.

Then a sound. She heard a laugh – high, silvery. A woman's, definitely. Or a girl's. Then a man's voice, a laugh too. Celia edged forward. It was coming from her dell at the back of the garden. She stilled, listened. The laugh again. It was definitely coming from there. She ran to the back of the garden, cut through the gap in the wall, into the dell.