A Trick of the Mind (2 page)

Upstairs the mattresses were cold under my palm. I ran back down and filled the kettle. The hot-water bottles gave off a familiar old smell of warm rubber, winter nights, childhood. I tucked one
under a scratchy blanket on each mattress. I’d asked my friends to bring their own bed linen. May’s was a bit random, a few thin duvet covers, some crumpled sheets.

I put on May’s old Roberts radio for company and ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ tinkled in the background.

Pepper followed me, as if he couldn’t bear to be a foot from me, and I chatted to him, glad of his company. ‘We’ll light the fire, put out flowers, candles, chill the fizz. The
place is going to be warm and beautiful by the time they arrive.’

I could do this on my own! Play the hostess, run a house.

I filled one of May’s old pans with water ready for the pasta. Chiara, my flatmate in London and best friend, had said she’d bring a pudding. I’d asked Louise, who we’d
flat-shared with at art college, to make a salad. I’d brought the pasta, two sauces and a block of fresh, crumbly Parmesan. Bread and Parma ham, melon and artichoke hearts. We were going to
eat – those of us who ate at all, Chiara barely did – at May’s beautiful, circular kitchen table. A proper dinner table. You couldn’t play the hostess in our cramped London
flat. It was a novelty to do it here.

I grated the Parmesan, unwrapped the antipasti and put them on plates. I went up to the room I was going to sleep in – May’s old bedroom at the front – and unfolded the dress
I’d bought for the Private View party. I’d fallen in love with it, in a vintage store in Bethnal Green. It had a silk underdress and the rest was green lace, and when I put it on I felt
ridiculously pleased with myself, as if I was stepping into a new skin. I hadn’t worn feminine clothes with Finn, he preferred me in my painting overalls.

This room wasn’t musty like the others; it still smelt how it smelt when May was here, of clean air, windswept washing, and wide horizons. Yes, I thought, the sense of possibility, of
being different.

The others should be here soon. It was almost ten. Chiara, I knew, had had a meeting after work and Louise was picking up her new boyfriend from the airport, so I didn’t expect them much
earlier. The voice of the newsreader on the radio chattered in the background as I busied myself, placing the dress on a hanger so I could gaze at it from the bed, and organising my underwear into
May’s empty drawers, arranging my spare jeans and jumpers in colours on a chair. I was filling the spaces May’s death had left, rekindling the life in the house. I refused to feel sad
any more. She wouldn’t have wanted that.

As I moved from the front bedroom, which overlooked the dark dunes, to the back one, overlooking the road and the marshes, the thoughts were emerging slowly like an old film developing in my
unconscious. I felt slightly light-headed; I put it down to impatience for my friends to roll up. My palms were damp – I assumed it was due to excitement about seeing Louise after all this
time, sharing our news, talking about our art, wondering whether she’d changed.

My heart raced as I heard the crunch of tyre on shingle, and a beam of light swung across the room through the window. Someone was arriving. Pepper bounded down the stairs, yapping.

Chiara and her boyfriend Liam came in, dumping their bags, kissing me on the cheek, carrying bottles into the kitchen.

‘Sorry we’ve been so long. There was a diversion on the road back there. This is amazing, Ellie, you didn’t say it was actually
on
the beach. Wow! What a perfect
spot!’

‘I know!’ I was brimming with pride as I hugged them. ‘I’ll show you around.’

They followed me upstairs, making appreciative noises at the three bedrooms, the low-ceilinged bathroom with its claw-footed bath, then down again – exclaiming at the long sitting room
with its wood-burning stove. I still couldn’t believe all this was mine. They wandered to the picture window at the front, peered through though there was nothing to see now but tiny lights
far away on an expanse of darkness.

Chiara put her arm round me.

‘It’s just beautiful.’

‘I feel so privileged.’

‘Doesn’t it feel sad though?’

‘It did, at first.’ I didn’t want to burden my friends with the grief I had experienced when I’d heard the news. All that was six months ago now. ‘But you know
Aunty May would have loved the thought of us here this weekend,’ I said.

‘Ellie’s aunt was a painter too,’ Chiara told Liam. ‘And she fostered kids, didn’t she? Talking of which . . . look at this!’

She pulled a photo from her purse and waved it under my nose.

‘Oh, Chiara!’

Shadowy limbs and etched sinews not unlike the clouds smudged against the sky in my rear-view mirror on the way here. A tiny head with a turned-up nose. It hit me in an unexpected way, the
reality of the new life within my friend. I crushed a second’s panic; I was going to be left behind, my friends were settling down, starting families – the feeling again that there was
so little time to get it right.

Liam put his arm about Chiara and they gazed at the scan picture of their baby together – a vision of perfect happiness.

‘I tell you what though,’ Chiara said, slipping the photo away again. ‘It must have been nerve-wracking for your aunt, watching kids so close to the sea. There’s no fence
between the house and the beach, is there?’

‘Get you! Already thinking like a mum!’ I said. ‘People didn’t worry so much about health and safety in those days. Kids looked out for each other.’

‘Well anyway, I love it,’ said Chiara. ‘It suits you, Ellie. All these beautiful paintings!’ There was one of May’s landscapes on every wall, a cluster of them on
the stairs. ‘Now, can I take our stuff up? Before we relax?’

I helped Chiara put her sheets onto the warmed mattress, pulling them tight, tucking them under.

We sat for a minute on the bed.

‘It’s going to be odd seeing Louise after all this time,’ she said. ‘Can you believe she’s been in Oz for two years?’

‘I know. It’s weird.’

‘I wonder if she’ll look different. I suppose we’ve all changed. Two years older and me with my bump.’

‘It barely shows yet. You look gorgeous. Blooming.’ I kissed her cheek.

Chiara smiled, stood up and wandered to the window. ‘I bet there’s a great view.’

‘Yes. Wait till the morning!’ I said, then wished I hadn’t. Something about that sentence filled me with unease. But why? I was here, in my aunt’s old home, that
I’d always loved, with my best friends and Frank’s little dog. Nothing to worry about. I would be the new woman painter – replacing my aunt – with a dog and a house by the
sea. An image I’d always dreamt of for myself. I looked over my shoulder three times, though, just in case.

‘How long did your aunt live here?’ Chiara asked when we were back downstairs. She was moving about the kitchen, picking things up and looking at them, curiosities
from another era – a quilted tea cosy, the aluminium pans people no longer used. A glass egg timer filled with sand. Everything had May’s mark on it; she had painted her glasses, made
candle holders out of pottery and decorated them in her distinctive style, pretty muted colours, reflecting the sand and sea grass, the sky outside. Ochres, lilacs and blues.

‘As long as I remember. My very earliest memories are of holidays down here with May. But listen, it’s late,’ I said. ‘You must be starving. Let’s have the
antipasti and we can eat properly as soon as Louise gets here.’

‘I’ll make Bellinis for those who aren’t up the duff!’ Chiara said. ‘Ooh look, you got artichoke hearts. And Parma ham. I’ve taught you something. I brought
the pudding, like you asked, a tiramisu.’

Luckily, since I wasn’t much good in the kitchen, Chiara was the greatest cook I knew. Yet she hardly ever ate a thing. Her baby bump barely showed though she was over eighteen weeks gone.
The not eating was something I knew not to mention. She covered it up by feeding everyone else.

‘Babes, you’ve spilt something on your dress,’ Chiara said. ‘Oil, I think.’

I looked down and was startled to see that there was a dark stain across my hip. I must have spilt something on it as I got the food ready. My stomach turned over, my pulse began to race again.
Anxiety, with no obvious focus. Just that uneasy feeling that threatened to spoil my weekend.

‘Bugger!’ I said. ‘ I’ll stick it in the wash.’ My mouth was dry. ‘Could you just light these candles, while I change?’

Upstairs I pulled the dress over my head. It was mad to feel anxious – my friends were here, everything was good. Yes, I’d left Finn, but that was something
I’d been planning for months. I’d forgotten to switch off the radio and the presenter burbled on in the background. Something made me tune in to the next item on the news.

‘Police are appealing for witnesses after a hit-and-run incident on the A1095. Anyone on the road at approximately eight thirty this evening and who might have seen the pedestrian, who is
in hospital in a critical condition, is asked to come forward.’

I stood, rooted to the spot. The anxiety I’d barely registered, my damp palms. It was all slotting into place. The car had jolted. Veered sideways. There had been oddly shaped shadows on
the road behind me.

But I’d ignored the voice that urged me to turn round and check.

I hadn’t gone back. I hadn’t gone back.

CHAPTER THREE

Aunty May died too soon. Not age-wise, although I’m learning that however long a life, it is never as long as it
could
have been.

May was my mother’s much older sister and I loved her. It was six months since she’d died. She’d been in my life for as long as I could remember so I’d thought she would
be here forever. I’d been planning to visit her the weekend I got the news.

‘We didn’t know, none of us knew she’d go and die,’ my brother Ben reassured me, but it made no difference. I wanted to wind the clock back. I had put off visiting May,
the last weekend of her life, to spend a day shopping with Chiara! I’d thought I could go the following weekend and was now fighting the belief that if I’d gone I would have been able
to prevent her dying – ever.

At May’s house I always had to touch the gatepost the right number of times, check outside the picture window before sitting down anywhere, look over my shoulder three times whenever a bad
thought came into my head. Talismans I’d thought up as a child and still relied on to keep people – my aunt in particular – safe.

I knew these things made me look odd – tapping, counting, moving things into the right position. Finn thought they were funny, light things. He laughed at me. He didn’t know how I
depended on them – especially when it came to anything to do with May.

‘You’re taking steps down bonkers alley here, Ellie. Tapping a gatepost, avoiding cracks in the pavement, sacrificing lambs – none of these things affect what was going to
happen anyway. You should have been an ancient Greek. Or a character from the Old Testament.’

I knew this. I wished I could be more rational.

They found Aunty May on her bed, two empty pill bottles beside her, a hastily scrawled note saying she had simply had enough, that she had reached her journey’s end.

When I heard she had left me her house it felt like a strange, mixed blessing. I was grateful, of course I was – no one gets to own a house at my age unless they have extremely wealthy
parents who can fork out for them. But it was all tangled up with the feeling I’d got something badly wrong. The owning of it was tinged with guilt. Why did I deserve the house? And why
hadn’t she left it to my brother as well?

It was clear my mother wasn’t too happy about it either.

‘You must sort it out immediately and put it on the market,’ she said. She was so agitated, so restless when it came to anything to do with Aunty May. ‘Before it gets damp over
the winter.’ She was quite adamant about it.

‘Sell it, repay your student loans early. Get the debts from round your neck. You might want to start a family one day, but if you don’t clear them you’ll be forty before you
know it. And still in the red. You think you’ve got forever. You haven’t.’

‘It’ll need a lot of maintenance, Ellie,’ my father said. ‘For once I agree with your mother! You’d be better off putting it on the market the minute we get probate
and letting someone else sort it out.’

‘I’m worried Aunty May would be upset if we sell,’ I said. ‘Surely she left it to me for a reason?’

It didn’t occur to me then that my parents were reeling, as we all were, from May’s suicide, that getting shot of her house was their way of obliterating the pain of this, the
shock.

My brother seemed unfazed by my inheriting it, however, and offered to help me sort it, get rid of May’s clothes and other personal things – bottles of shampoo, packets of
paracetamol – that had been left as if in suspended animation, in her kitchen and bathroom.

‘We’ll clear it up, it’ll be a way of putting Aunty May to rest,’ Ben said.

Perhaps May had left me the house because she and I were both artists, something that had always bonded us. And because she knew I
would
hang on to it, value its quirkiness, its
idiosyncrasies, however impractical, while if she left it to my mother – or Ben even – it would have been a photo in an estate agents’ window before the earth had settled on her
grave.

The house still contained her in those first few weeks after she died, back in October.

I thought the house was watchful, or perhaps it was Aunty May who was watchful. I stood in the front room on the day after her funeral, and looked out over the sea grass to the shingle
dunes.

I saw my child self holding Aunty May’s hand, with my little brother Ben, moving west into the wind with our heads bent and our buckets and crabbing lines clasped to our chests, our voices
snatched up and carried out to sea. Seagulls swooping and crying overhead. I remembered perfect evenings that went on forever, when it never grew dark, the light simply fading as the stars appeared
one by one, and May allowed us to stay up, our bare feet curling into the cooling sand. I could feel the warmth from the fires we built with driftwood. May baked potatoes wrapped in foil on them. I
remember burning my fingers trying to pull them out, the sweaty white flesh searing my tongue. I could remember the white ashes that spiralled up when finally we had to admit that the dark and the
cold had beaten us and it was time to dowse the flames.