In Her Shadow (17 page)

‘What kind of smell?’

‘It was sweet, like lavender.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Papa asked the spirit to prove it was Mama.’

My heart was beating so hard I could feel the pulse in my neck. Our faces were close together. I could taste the spearmint from Ellen’s gum in her exhaled breath.

‘And then the glass began to move again, all by itself – and the candle blew out! There was a kind of misty glow floating above the bed, like a cloud. It almost looked like a person, it almost had a face and arms, but not quite. It hovered there, shape-shifting as the letters were spelled out on the board.’

‘What did the spirit say?’ I asked.

‘First it moved the glass to the letter S, then the U …’

‘Su? What does that mean?’

‘Wait, there’s more! There’s the C, the K, the E and the R.’ Ellen sighed. Then she sat back on the bench and looked at me, her eyes big and round and innocent.

‘Ellen?’ I was confused. ‘What did the spirit say?’

‘SUCKER! It said SUCKER!’

‘Why did it say that?’

‘Oh, you’re so thick sometimes, Hannah!’ Ellen stood up and began to run across the field, scattering birds that had been feeding in the long grass and screaming with laughter, calling, ‘Sucker! Sucker! Sucker!’

‘Ellen!’ I called. I picked up her bag as well as my own. I
was furious. ‘
Ellen!
’ I shouted as I ran after her. ‘Ellen Brecht,
I hate
you!’

Ellen turned round. ‘There are no spirits!’ she shouted. ‘There are no ghosts! Once you’re dead, you’re dead for ever and ever and ever! Amen!’ And she laughed and ran some more.

That was what she was like.

Only not all of her stories were lies.

One evening, when we were sitting in the back room playing gin rummy with Mrs Todd, Mr Brecht, who had fallen asleep in his chair, lifted his head. He looked across the room towards us. His eyes were unfocused.

‘She never loved you, you know,’ he said to Ellen. Ellen bit her lip, picked up the queen of diamonds and put down the two of clubs. Mrs Todd took a card from the pile and put down the ace of spades.

Mr Brecht raised his finger and pointed it at Ellen. ‘She blamed you. It was you who made her ill.’

‘Your turn, Hannah,’ said Mrs Todd. I already had two aces in my hand, but I was afraid to finish the game there and then. I took a card from the pile, and put down the ace of hearts.

‘She used to say—’ said Mr Brecht.

‘That’s enough now, Pieter,’ said Mrs Todd. She pushed back her chair.

‘She used to say,’ he repeated in a louder voice, still jabbing his finger towards Ellen, ‘that she should have had you drowned at birth!’

‘Go upstairs, girls,’ Mrs Todd said quietly. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

Afterwards, Mrs Todd came up to Ellen’s bedroom with a tray of Horlicks and biscuits. She put the tray on the dressing-table and her hand on Ellen’s shoulder. ‘Your father had too much to drink,’ she said. ‘He didn’t mean any of that.’

Ellen shrugged her hand away. ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

‘Your mother loved you,’ said Mrs Todd. ‘You know she did, Ellen.’

‘
I don’t care!
’ Ellen repeated.

Some of what happened at Thornfield House was awful, but all of it was exciting. Everything there seemed more important and more intense; emotions were heightened, everything was significant. Ellen and her father burned more brightly than ordinary people. They were dazzling. And of course I couldn’t help comparing my life with Ellen’s. While hers was gloriously poetic and extreme, mine was stagnant and plain as ditchwater. My parents were unemotional and predictable; they were the grey embers to Mr Brecht’s dancing flames. At home, I felt constricted and claustrophobic. Jago was working most evenings, or out with his friends, but I was expected to sit with my parents in front of the little old telly even though the reception was dreadful and Dad insisted on voicing a running commentary on every single programme. One or the other, or sometimes both, of my parents would fall asleep in their chairs and the snoring, interrupted every now and then by Trixie’s flatulence, was a soundtrack to those evenings. Our rented cottage was not even a quarter the size of Thornfield House; it smelled of Fairy Liquid and cabbage, and, worst of all, after supper every evening Dad went upstairs whistling ‘Whistle While You Work’ with the
Daily Mirror
tucked under his arm and locked himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes. It was so mundane, so boring, so crushingly, achingly dull.

April ran into May, and May into June. Ellen was not looking forward to her seventeenth birthday, her first without her mother. We took our exams, school broke up for the summer, and we returned to our respective jobs.

One evening after work, when Ellen and I were sunbathing in the garden at Thornfield House, Mr Brecht came
back from a trip to Truro with a largish, flattish cardboard box. It was coloured silver and was tied with a duck-egg-blue ribbon. He strode out into the garden, crouched down beside us, and passed the box to Ellen.

‘It’s a present,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘For you, Ellen. Does there have to be a reason for a father to treat his daughter?’

Ellen sighed and knelt up. We were both wearing bikinis, and I knew that Ellen was aware of how good she looked in hers. She sat high on her heels, with her back straight and her hair falling down behind her ears. I didn’t want Mr Brecht to notice the ripples of puppy fat about my waist, or my breasts, which were bigger than Ellen’s but white and heavy. I shook out the T-shirt I’d been using to pillow my head, and wriggled into it. Mr Brecht looked at Ellen, and smiled. He took his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, shook one from the box, put it between his lips, lit it and blew smoke out through his nose.

The skin on Ellen’s thighs was grass-patterned, crisscrossed by thousands of small indentations. She lifted the lid of the box.

Inside was a silver-grey evening dress made of beautiful, slippy material with tiny crystals sewn around the neckline. She held it up.

‘Oh, that’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen!’ I cried. I reached out to feel the fabric. ‘It’s gorgeous.’

Ellen folded the dress back into the box.

‘Aren’t you going to try it on?’ I asked.

‘Later,’ Ellen said. She was sullen; for the thousandth time her surliness towards her father embarrassed me.

‘You do like the dress, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘It’s lovely.’

‘Put it on then.’

‘Papa …’

‘Go on!’ he said. ‘I want to see you wear it.’

I couldn’t understand Ellen’s reluctance to please him. If Mr Brecht had given me a dress like that, I’d have worn it all the time. I’d never have taken it off.

‘Go on, Ellen,’ I said. ‘Make sure it fits.’

Ellen scowled, but she stood and slipped the dress over her head. It slithered over her shoulders and ran down her body like water. It fitted like a dream, and it shimmered in the sunshine, the crystals catching the light. Her mother’s necklace glinted where the little clef sat in the hollow at the base of her throat. She looked so lovely, in the dress, and it must have felt so good on her skin that it should have made her happy, but it didn’t. Her shoulders were hunched, and her eyes downcast.

Mr Brecht smiled and flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette. ‘You’re so like your mother,’ he said. ‘Turn around. Let me look at you.’

Ellen sucked in her lower lip. She looked as if she were close to tears. Reluctantly she turned.

‘Beautiful,’ Mr Brecht sighed. He took another drag on the cigarette, then dropped it onto the lawn and ground it out with his heel. ‘Shame it’s only skin-deep, eh, Ellen?’

Ellen shot her father a look. It was almost hatred.

I glanced from one to the other.

‘What about you, Hannah?’ he asked. ‘Do you think Ellen’s boyfriend will like the dress?’

I laughed awkwardly. ‘Ellen doesn’t have a boyfriend.’

Mr Brecht laughed too. He reached out to me and pulled me close to him. I fitted into the crook of his shoulder, felt the rough cotton of his trousers against the skin of my bare leg. He smelled of cigarette smoke and leather and something spicy and masculine. He squeezed the top of my arm.

‘She does,’ he whispered into my hair.

I looked up at him. He nodded with a teasing twinkle in his eye.

‘Don’t you know about Ellen’s secret romance, Hannah?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘She hasn’t told you? And you’re supposed to be her best friend? That’s not very nice, is it, Ellen?’

Ellen’s face had gone pale. She stared down at the grass. Her hair was hanging forwards, over her face. She looked ghost-like in the silvery dress with her bare feet and her long, hanging hair, like the mad heroine of some Gothic novel.

‘She sneaks out of the house to meet someone,’ Mr Brecht said, holding me even closer. ‘She says she’s going to see you, but I don’t think that’s always the case. She tells me that you’re always asking favours of her, begging her to go to your house. She says you’ve had your heart broken and that you need her. She says that you, Hannah, can be very demanding.’

I flushed now. I had never demanded anything of Ellen. It was the other way around. And how could she tell her father those lies about me? How could she make him think that I was weak and helpless and that I had been dumped? Ellen continued not to look at me.

‘It’s not true,’ I said quietly enough for him to hear. His fingers tightened on my arm.

‘I think,’ said Mr Brecht, ‘my daughter has been using you, Hannah, as an alibi.’

‘Stop it!’ Ellen cried. ‘Shut up!’ She lifted up the hem of the dress and turned and ran from the garden, the soles of her bare feet flashing beneath the hem. Mr Brecht and I watched her go.

Mr Brecht sighed. He moved away from me and scratched his head with both hands.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

‘Ellen has been corrupted by her mother,’ said Mr Brecht. ‘She has learned the art of deceit and manipulation from an expert.’

I gazed up at him. He smiled at me, then he took hold of my face in his hands and he leaned down and kissed the top of my head, very gently.

‘You’re a good friend to Ellen,’ he said.

It was one of the best moments of my life.

I didn’t see much of Ellen for a while after that, but I found out the truth soon enough. I was at work in the Seagull Hotel. From the top bedroom window, a duster in one hand and the handle of the vacuum cleaner in the other, I saw Ellen and Jago sitting, side by side, on the harbour wall, swinging their legs, their heads close together, looking into the water and laughing. As I watched, Jago leaned his head down towards Ellen’s and he kissed her; she kissed him back, and the kiss seemed to last for ever.

Ellen’s father was right.

She had been deceiving us both.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

AFTER I’D BATHED
at my parents’ house, I dressed, went downstairs and ate a ‘proper’ cooked breakfast – the like of which I hadn’t enjoyed in a while – with my mother and father. Then, while they went to the morning service at Trethene church, I walked across the moors to the Catholic Church of Our Lady Star of the Sea.

In all the years since her death, I had never been to Ellen’s grave. I wasn’t sure why not, but not going had been a choice, not an accident. I supposed I hadn’t wanted the memory of it in my mind. When I thought of Ellen, I didn’t want to think of a headstone, a graveyard. That morning, though, I thought it would be the right thing to do, for Ellen and for me. I hoped it might bring me some kind of closure. A grave would be irrefutable evidence that Ellen was dead. It might stop my mind creeping away on its wild flights of fancy that Ellen might still be alive. I hoped it would make her leave me alone.

The church was far larger than the squat little seafarers’ church in Trethene. It was more than a mile from the village, standing on its own, at one of the highest points in the area, where it could be seen by those living all around. The graveyard was weatherworn, spread haphazardly inside the
boundary wall. I stood just inside the gate, looking around me, pulling my jacket close. There were hundreds of graves. I supposed Ellen must have been buried with her mother.

My legs felt weak as I stepped into the churchyard. I hadn’t been this close to Ellen in decades. I had a feeling she knew I was there, as if she were watching me from a hiding place somewhere in the leaves of the tree, or the mouth of one of the church gargoyles, a wraith in the tatters of that silvery-grey dress. It was ridiculous, of course. I put the thought from my mind but I couldn’t help the icy feeling at the back of my neck, the cold fingers creeping up my spine.

It was the graveyard, I told myself. It was the preconceptions most of us have about death, a culmination of the books I’d read and the stories I’d heard about ghosts and retribution. I’d been conditioned to be afraid of the dead by superstitions and legends.

I knew I should have visited Ellen’s grave before, not just for my sake, but hers too. With her father gone, and Jago in Canada, there had been nobody else. Now I’d finally made it to the church, I hadn’t even brought flowers. It had never crossed my mind to bring something for Ellen. What kind of friend was I? How could I be so thoughtless?

I walked around the perimeter of the churchyard, negotiating, with some difficulty, the uneven ground, trying to remember where Mrs Brecht had been buried. The older, overgrown, untended graves were scattered amongst the newer ones with their posies and photographs and wreaths. Some of the headstones were so worn that it was difficult to make out any of the inscriptions.
Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on my soul
, I read. I trailed my fingers along the gritty edge of the tops of the headstones, tilted as if they had been windblown. I had walked all the way around to the back of the church when I saw the yew tree clearly for the first time. It was enormous, squat – more than a thousand years old. Its
dark green branches spread out like arms sheltering the graves beneath, and I remembered then. I remembered standing beneath the branches of that tree at Mrs Brecht’s funeral, how some of the little poisonous berries had fallen and lay like dull rubies amongst the grass. I recalled the priest talking and how my toes were squeezed by the black shoes I’d grown out of but which my mother had insisted I wear for the occasion, and how I had wished I wasn’t wearing school uniform, how I’d felt too old for it, awkward, embarrassed. I remembered turning my head to look at Jago and how he had reassured me with his eyes. I remembered Adam Tremlett standing apart, the look on his face.