Love Notes from Vinegar House (13 page)

Sunday morning was like every other morning at Vinegar House.

I’d woken up early to a cold hot water bottle. I read the note, several times, then shoved it into my dresser. Then onto a quick hot shower in the downstairs bathroom to melt the icicles off my nose. I’d just finished dressing when Mrs Skelton came in and made my bed. I stood in front of the dresser, fussing around as if I had something to hide.

I decided it was a good day to do my homework. I needed to stay out of Rumer’s way and I definitely didn’t want to see Luke. I’d read the note so many times that I’d memorised it by heart. I wondered when Luke had slipped it under Rumer’s door, though it would have been easy enough when we were watching the movie together. I kept out of Grandma’s way, for whenever she saw me she’d tell me to go out and take some air. (I don’t know where I was supposed to take it.) But Luke was outside, so I stayed inside, prowling around the hallways of Vinegar House, peering into cupboards that held ancient linen and tarnished silver, gazing into the eyes of long-dead relatives – dusty oil portraits in the library, which smelled of wood ash and mildewed books – and occasionally checking the door to the attic, which remained locked.

I dreamed of Mum’s cooking. Mrs Skelton’s food was beige. No matter what vegetable she touched, she cooked it for so long that she managed to leach all colour from it. We had potatoes at every main meal, with meat and one other vegetable, which could be beans or carrots or broccoli or peas. Our main meal was in the middle of the day with a light dinner at five o’clock. This often had me hunting for food late at night when the others were in bed and the fire was burning low in the drawing room grate.

I’d offered to cook when I first arrived at Vinegar House, hoping to add some excitement to the menu, but Mrs Skelton seemed so cross with the idea that I didn’t bother. Instead, I was allowed to help her, which meant not doing very much at all. It was during one of these sessions that I asked Mrs Skelton about the attic.

Mrs Skelton and I were preparing the food for Sunday lunch. We were sitting at the kitchen table, a low, wide pine thing that she polished every night with a layer of beeswax. A gleaming new stove stood beside the faithful wood range that belched smoke whenever the wind blew down the chimney. The new stove had been a present from the family, but Mrs Skelton preferred to use the wood range, with its ancient thermometer set in the oven door and the plate racks above the hotplate where she could warm the dinner plates. Through the kitchen window I had a good view of the woodshed and, further down the path, the gardener’s cottage where a thin wisp of smoke hung about the aerial on the low roof. I imagined Mr Chilvers and Luke settled in at night, watching TV with dinner on their laps instead of having to sit up at a table in a stuffy dining room for a light meal. I wondered what they talked about all day. I wondered if Luke ever mentioned me.

“Was the attic always the attic?” I asked the housekeeper as I peeled a potato larger than my hand.

She peered at me. “Well, it was never the basement,” she said, slicing away a sliver of fat from a rolled piece of beef.

I laughed, thinking she’d made a joke, but she concentrated on her task without smiling. The clock on the kitchen dresser added a slow tick in the background and a breeze rattled the window. Mrs Skelton mumbled something about a certain person not doing his job properly as she stabbed viciously at the meat. Mr Chilvers was always in her bad books.

“I mean, was it ever someone’s bedroom?” I persisted.

“Not while I’ve lived here,” she said, turning the meat and slicing again. “There are enough rooms in this house without needing to use that as a bedroom, if you ask me.”

I grabbed another potato. “I guess.” I felt the housekeeper’s eyes on me. “Still, it would make a cool bedroom. It has such a great view.” I realised my mistake as soon as the words left my lips. As far as Mrs Skelton knew, I had never been up to the attic. “I mean … I imagine the view would be good. Cause it’s up high.”

I looked up to see Mrs Skelton pointing her knife at me. “The eyes,” she said.

I watched her grab the potato out of my hand then dig away at some small indents. “Second-rate potatoes at first-rate prices,” she muttered. “That’s what you get for buying from The Horn.”

The Horn was the vegetable shop in Homsea. As far as I knew, Mum had never had any complaints about the quality of its potatoes.

I wiped my hands and made an excuse to leave.

“If there’s something you want to ask, then ask it,” said Mrs Skelton. “I’ll either have an answer for you or I won’t.” She was working away at the potato, a few stray wisps of hair waving about her face.

“Why can’t I go in the attic? I won’t hurt anything.”

Mrs Skelton added the potato to a bowl of water. “When I was your age I was earning a living,” she said, covering the bowl with a checked tea towel.

This was no answer. I sighed and stood up to leave.

“There’s nothing up there for you. Just a whole lot of old things that need throwing away, if you ask me. Or a few that need airing out to the world. But, your grandmother won’t hear of it. And she won’t want you poking around up there.”

A memory of light pulsing from the attic window flashed into my mind, and I wondered why. Why think of that now? I had a sudden urge to go upstairs and check that Rumer’s note was still tucked away in my drawer.

I watched Mrs Skelton add some fat to a baking tray, then place the meat onto the tray. I thought it was strange that she had bothered to trim the fat from the meat when she had planned to roast it in fat all along. I watched the house keys, on the crocheted chain about her neck, swing over the pan.

“If you really want to help, there are library shelves that need attention,” she said. “You need to pull out the books to give it a good dust. I usually start at the bottom and work my way up.”

And with that she handed me a rag and shooed me out of the kitchen.

When I went upstairs later to get Rumer for lunch, there was another envelope under her door. As I wondered what to do, I heard footsteps approaching the door from inside her room, then the door swung open and Rumer stood before me.

“What?” she demanded.

“Mrs Skelton says to come down for lunch,” I said.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” she said, then shut the door in my face.

It wasn’t until I walked away that I noticed I had the note concealed carefully in my hand. I didn’t remember picking it up. I went straight to my room and closed the door behind me. There was the same R on the envelope. I didn’t bother to open it but put it into my dresser drawer then went downstairs for lunch. And all the time it was like I was watching myself do this. It was like watching a movie.

And the lead character was making no sense.

I wasn’t surprised that Luke and Rumer had got together again, but it did make me feel alone in a way I’d never felt alone before. Obviously, they’d had a fight, but that was typical of Rumer. She’d get over it and everything would be sweet until she changed her mind again.

I am not a bad person. If you ever told me your deepest darkest secret, I wouldn’t tell anyone. If you gave me your most precious thing to care for, I would care for it. If you wanted the truth, I would give it to you.

So, I’d like to tell you that I handed the notes over to Rumer and confessed to everything. Or even that I’d slipped them back under her bedroom door. But I did neither of these things. Instead the notes lay in my drawer, a guilty secret that made my heart race just with the sheer thought of it. Maybe it was guilt that woke me in the early hours of the following morning.

Every house has its own sounds in the dark hours. Our shack at Ocean Side has a tin roof that
tick-ticks
as it cools down after a hot summer’s day. At home I can usually hear the Colonel snoring from his bedroom or the dog scratching fleas as he sleeps outside my door. Vinegar House has its own dark hour noises. There’s the grandfather clock that stands in the entry hall and chimes the arrival of every new quarter hour. The hissing of possums as they scurry over the roof. The creaks and sighs and groans as the house settles its bones after a hard day’s work. And then there is the rattling of the windows during windy nights and the never-endingness of the waves beating themselves up against the bluff.

I’m not sure which noise woke me at 2.47 am the next morning. All I know is that one moment I was dead asleep and the next my eyes were wide open and I was checking the clock on my mobile. There was something about the time that bothered me, then I realised it was the same time I’d woken nights before. I lay in bed for a while listening to the waves break below the bluff. I wanted to be home. I wanted to leave Rumer and Luke to whatever game they were playing and Mrs Skelton and her horrible food and Grandma Vinegar and her grumpy ways.

I hadn’t eaten much of Mrs Skelton’s light dinner. We’d had something she called mock fish – grated potato and flour pressed into a patty and fried up. She’d served it with a light salad and, strangely, boiled potatoes – just in case we didn’t have enough potato on our plate. The patty didn’t taste like anything much except maybe half-raw potato and uncooked flour. I’d poked at it and moved it around my plate. The salad was limp with too much dressing. I picked at the potatoes, which had been boiled so long that they fell apart like floury clods of earth. In bed, at 2.53, my stomach rumbled as I thought of fresh bread from the pantry. Mrs Skelton made her own, and it was the one thing she was good at. I grabbed my mobile, turned on the torch app, slipped on a windcheater, and made my way to the bedroom door without bumping into anything. As I stepped out of my room I noticed silvery light spilling down the attic stairs.

The attic door was open.

My heart skipped a beat as I stood and considered my options.

1. Return to bed, forget about the pantry, and wait until breakfast to fill my stomach.

2. Go downstairs and make a sandwich, then go straight back to bed. Or …

3. Go to the attic and have another look around while the door was open.

I decided on the pantry. I began to plan the filling for my sandwich – maybe bread and cheese, or some of the leftover beef from lunch – when I found myself standing at the foot of the attic stairs. I may have decided to go to the kitchen, but my feet had other ideas. As I stood at the bottom of the attic stairs, the muffled creak of an opening door in another part of the house sent me scurrying up the stairs and closing the attic door softly behind me. The moon’s light was reflecting off the Blue Room’s mirror, although the light didn’t extend to the shadowed corners of the room.

As I passed the mirror I saw something flit across its cracked corner, but when I checked behind me there was nothing there.

“Idiot,” I said aloud, but my voice was unsteady and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.

I paused again in front of the hinged chest and tried to lift its lid, but a rusted padlock held it firmly in place. I shook the padlock from side to side, but it held fast, and I soon gave up trying.

At the octagonal window I caught sight of the sea beyond the bluff’s edge. The moonlight traced a silver path across the dark water. The scene in the front garden was shades of grey. Down below, leading away from Vinegar House, was the lighter grey of the driveway. To my left was the tree house. Further down were the trees that lined the driveway. And something else … there was something in the shadows that had shadows of their own …

Before I had a chance to think further there was a rustling above my head that made my scalp crawl. Visions of bats or mice or … what other things rustled like that in the dead of night? I shone my phone light into the rafters, but the beam skipped about as my hand shook. It was too feeble to be any use anyway. The groan of the attic door opening made me jump with fright, and a sudden voice from the darkness said, “I nearly locked you in.”

It was Mrs Skelton. She was wearing a long flannel nightgown buttoned up to her collarbone. Her usual wispy hair hung in a skinny braid that fell over one shoulder. She flinched as I turned my light onto her face.

“Sorry,” I said, moving the light.

I could see she was waiting on an explanation – a reason that I might be poking about in the attic in the dead of night.

“I was hungry …”

“Yes?”

I watched her step towards the locked trunk and rest a hand on its lid.

“A strange time of day to be getting hungry, if you ask me,” she said.

“I saw the light. From the attic …” I trailed off and listened to the crash of the waves in the distance.

“Which is why I’m here. I remembered I’d left the door open this evening,” said Mrs Skelton smoothly. “Though I don’t remember leaving a light on.”

“Moonlight,” I said. I wondered why she had been in the attic at all.

“Ah.”

We stood, silent for a moment.

“Well,” I said.

She stood aside, and I scuttled down the stairs, my mobile torch beam bobbing in crazy arcs over the staircase and hallway. I heard the firm whump as the attic door shut and the definite click of the lock as it moved into place. I had just reached my bedroom door when she called out softly, “Not hungry any more?”