Another Heartbeat in the House (6 page)

Edie got out of the car and stood looking around while the driver pulled her luggage out of the boot and Milo skittered about, clearly intoxicated by the scent of hedgerow creatures. The fare came to five shillings; Edie handed over five-and-sixpence as she bade the driver farewell, then watched as the car lumbered across the courtyard and back through the gateway. She listened to the receding sound of the engine as it descended the tunnel of trees to the road below.

Then there was silence. It was the kind of perfect silence you can hear. Edie turned to the house, and smiled. It looked back at her with the merest hint of challenge, waiting for her to make the first move. They regarded each other for several moments before Milo returned from his recce.

The front door key was under the stone by the boot scraper as Mrs Healy had said. It was a long iron key with a clover-shaped bow, and it turned easily in the lock. The door swung open, and the house breathed out.

‘All right, Milo. Here we go!' said Edie.

The vestibule was as she remembered it: panelled in painted wood, the floor laid with quarry tiles. To the right was a fireplace, disused now and blocked up; above it was mounted a trophy case containing a stuffed fish. The salmon Uncle Jack had told her about, Edie conjectured: when she had last been there it had housed a stuffed pheasant. A recessed window seat upholstered in faded tapestry afforded a view of the courtyard; Edie noticed that tendrils of ivy had pushed their way through the casement. At the foot of the staircase hung a framed watercolour of the lake painted by her aunt, alongside a wall clock that had stopped at ten minutes to ten o'clock. She mentally ticked off the first three items to go on her inventory: trophy case, watercolour, clock. She'd look at them properly another time; right now she wanted to explore.

Milo was curious too. He had given the doormat a thorough sniff, he had scrambled up the staircase and somersaulted down again, he had beamed at her to show her what fun he was having, and now she could hear his clickedy claws skittering down the corridor that led to the heart of the house. She hefted her case inside, shut the front door, then turned into the corridor that ran the length of the building.

The first door opened into the room that she and Hilly had loved because the windows opened straight onto the terrace, like an Italian palazzo. It was a double sitting room with stucco-worked ceilings, a pair of fireplaces, and windows draped with heavy velvet. Under the dust-sheets, the furniture resembled a herd of slumbering beasts. Edie felt loath to disturb them, but did so carefully, as if to avoid a rude awakening. She caught sight of her reflection in a flyblown pier glass as she tugged apprehensively at the edge of a cloth, thinking that she looked like an actor who had stumbled into the wrong period piece.

The first time she had come here, the furniture had looked old-fashioned. She saw now that it was not only old-fashioned, but dilapidated, too. She supposed that since Uncle Jack had grown to realize that none of his children would take the place on, it had been allowed to disintegrate. Brocade upholstery was frayed and worn, with antimacassars draped strategically to camouflage stains. Surfaces that had been French-polished now bore ring marks where no one had bothered with coasters, and were criss-crossed with a patina of scratches. The soft pedal on the piano that Aunt Letty had used to play was missing, and when she lifted the lid a tentative chord told Edie that it was badly out of tune. Armchairs sagged and sofas bulged where springs had gone.

Edie crossed the floor and pulled first the shutters, then the curtains apart, allowing light to filter through a panel of cobwebby lace that lay behind. The garden of the lodge was all hillside, tumbling down to the lake. A limestone terrace lay beyond the French windows, cracked and overgrown and sprouting daisies and groundsel. Some effort had been made to prettify the lawn; a dozen or so shrubs had been randomly stuck in the earth and an attempt made to construct flower beds, but, Edie wondered, who would bother with a formal garden when you had such a gorgeous vista on your doorstep?

‘Onward, Milo!' she said, allowing the lace to drop back over the window.

Next on her itinerary were the library and the dining room. Edie drew more curtains, tying them back with frayed silk ropes, and opened windows to dispel the faintly dank smell of disuse. Although it was late afternoon and the sun was low in the sky, light bounced off the lake below and tumbled into the house. The carpets – which Edie was sure were as old as the house itself – had been bleached pussy-willow silver.

Behind the glass doors of the bookcases, a diverse collection had been gathered. Classics rubbed shoulders with more recent publications: Charlotte Brontë stood next to Agatha Christie, Thackeray next to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jane Austen next to Dorothy Whipple. The Complete Works of Dickens were bound in morocco leather. A magazine rack contained ancient copies of
Horse & Hound
,
Country Life
and
The Lady
. Jigsaws and board games – the usual ones that were dragged out on rainy days – were stacked in a cupboard. A writing desk was crammed with rubbishy items – old pens, elastic bands, cigarette cards; Edie lit with glee upon a dog whistle.

‘Listen to this, Milo! This means you must be a good dog, and come when you're bid.' She blew it, but Milo just stuck his tongue out at her and scarpered into the corridor.

In the dining room, table, sideboard and chairs were shrouded, lending it a spooky resemblance to a funeral parlour. When Edie pulled away the dust-sheets, the air filled with feathers. Some bird must have found its way inside and perished there.

The kitchen was the most modern room in the house, although Edie felt tempted to put inverted commas around the word ‘modern'. It was also the warmest. A new stove had been installed since she had last visited, and Mrs Healy had lit it in advance of her arrival. The cupboards were painted buttercup yellow, and had glass panels through which Edie could see mismatched crockery, storage canisters and cookery books.
What Shall we Have for Dinner?
, a
Be-Ro
recipe pamphlet,
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
. The date displayed on a calendar on the windowsill was 9 August 1930: no one had been here for over half a decade. She picked it up to read the motto:
Life is like walking through Paradise with peas in your shoes
.

‘Life is like walking through Paradise with peas in your shoes, Milo,' she said, heading back along the corridor to where she had left her luggage. ‘So aren't you lucky you don't wear them? Come on. Let's find out where we're sleeping tonight.'

She carried her bags upstairs. Mrs Healy had made up the room that she and Hilly had shared. How strangely comforting to know that there was something of Hilly here, in the room where she would sleep! It was a pretty room, with wallpaper sprigged in apple green. There were two high beds with rose-patterned counterpanes, and there were roses, too, on the accoutrements on the marble-topped washstand: basin, ewer, soap dish and toothbrush-holder.

A patch of damp by the window had caused a strip of wallpaper to come away, revealing a layer of Amaranth purple paper, and beneath that another of Prussian blue. Edie picked at the edge but resisted the temptation to start pulling, because she knew that once she started she would not be able to stop. There was a word for it, she knew – a word for layers upon layers upon layers. Palimp-something. It would come to her later.

Hilly would have known it, for Hilly had been brilliant with words; Edie had badgered her for years to write a novel. She remembered how they had once spent an afternoon concocting a pastiche of a popular bodice-ripper, with a cast of characters that included a heroine with silvery blonde hair, a dashing French aristocrat and a Russian prince. They had all danced to tzigane music at Maxim's and disported themselves on the polo field and on the croquet lawn and in bedrooms in Claridge's, and feasted on Beluga caviar and quails' eggs. Hilly's fabricated blurb described it as a story of dainty sentiment, fishy goings-on and hot kisses, and Edie had laughed so hard that she had fallen off the sofa and onto the fire irons, giving herself a black eye.

Suddenly she felt cold – and she was hungry, too, she realized, and very, very tired. She had had a cheese sandwich on the boat and a bar of chocolate on the Dublin–Cork train, and nothing since.

‘Come on, sweetheart,' she said to Milo, who was chewing the fringe on the carpet. ‘Let's go get some grub.'

In the kitchen, she set about finding something to eat. Mrs Healy had left milk, butter, eggs, cheese and ham in the cold larder; soda bread, jam, tea and cornflakes in a cupboard. There was a packet of Marietta biscuits, too, and a bowl of apples. She helped herself to bread and cheese and scraped the remnants of yesterday's minced chicken into Milo's bowl, hoping that and a biscuit or two would do him until she could make the journey into town. If he was really hungry, she could give him some ham, or try him on an egg. Mac had loved raw eggs …

It was the first time since her arrival that she had allowed herself to think of Mac. Before then he had never strayed far from her thoughts: he and Hilly, though they were dead, were still more real than legions of people in Edie's life. Every day she heard her friend's voice utter the last lines of the letter she had written:
We have been so stupid. Let's pretend last year never happened.
And every day Edie tried her best to pretend because she knew that Hilly would want her to – but it wasn't easy. Every day she thought thoughts like: ‘Hilly would love this song!' or ‘Hilly would hate this book!' or ‘Hilly would know this!'

And then she remembered the word that had eluded her earlier. It was ‘palimpsest'. It had been the answer to a crossword puzzle clue, and when she and Hilly consulted the dictionary they had found, among the less prosaic definitions: ‘pă´lǐmpsĕst, noun: a layering of present experiences over faded pasts'.

For Edie the faded past – the summer holidays, the afternoon teas in Valerie's, the carefree evenings at the Gargoyle – was irredeemably precious. She wished she didn't feel so very guilty for continuing to live in a present that did not have Hilly in it.

The next morning, Edie was astonished to find that she was the recipient of a letter. She had slept well for the first time in months, risen late, washed, and dressed in clothes appropriate for the day's work (an old pair of gaberdine trousers and a flannel shirt). She had just sat down to a bowl of cornflakes when the scrunch of feet on gravel announced the arrival of a visitor. Peering through the kitchen window, she saw that the postman had leaned his bicycle against the wall of one of the old outhouse buildings and was putting something through the letterbox. Turning, she ran across the kitchen floor and started along the corridor, her progress impeded by Milo capering to and fro ahead of her, barking joyously. When she finally reached the front door, the postman had gone – probably unnerved by the ferocious baying of the hound – and there was a letter lying on the doormat. It was emblazoned with the shield, helmet and crest that characterized the Fleming coat of arms.

Dearest Little Edie
,

I thought it would be a great wheeze to write, so that you would have a letter delivered to you in Bogland on your first day there.

I hope you and Perkin de Poer are getting along. I know you pooh-poohed the idea of a Maltese, saying they were actresses' dogs, but Storm has one (it's called Bimbo), and since I've got to know the little chap, I've discovered that they have a delightful sense of humour. And you, my dear, badly need to be cheered up. So that is why I decided to ambush you with Perkin. I know he won't replace Mac, but would you want him to? That's not why we keep dogs as pets, to have one long succession of companions all with the same traits and temperaments. You will never have another Mac, just as you will never have another Hilly
– [here Edie's hand flew to her mouth]
but you have had Mac and Hilly in your life for as long as theirs lasted, and what a privilege that was for you, and, indeed, for them. I'm sorry – I'm not expressing myself very well. I'm awfully bad at this sort of thing, which is why I steered clear of the subject the night we had dinner in the Dorchester. But I can't bear the idea of you beating yourself up over Hilly's death. Nobody is to blame for that – not Hilly, not the driver of the car, and especially not you. Everybody gets drunk on New Year's Eve, and unfortunately some people die, and even more unfortunately for you, one of the people who died that night happened to be your friend.

Hilly would hate to think of you moping. I know that is why you have gone to Ireland – to mope – and you probably couldn't have chosen a better country to do it, but please don't mope for too long. If Hilly were still around, she would tell you to crack on and stop being such a bloody bore.

Love, Ian.

PS: I won 25 shillings playing backgammon last night. I shall treat you to a night on the town when you have doffed your mourning garb and fancy a bit of fun.

Edie folded Ian's letter and put it back in the envelope.
If Hilly were still around, she would tell you to crack on and stop being such a bloody bore
…

It was true. It was time to go to work.