In Her Shadow (21 page)

My parents got up early and went to bed early. By the time Jago was ready to leave our house, they were already fast asleep, the door to the bedroom slightly ajar, as it always was, so the landing light could guide them to the bathroom should they need it in the night. While Jago prepared to go to his lover, my father snored enthusiastically and my mother huddled beneath the blankets, curled towards him. The noises Dad made far exceeded the little creaks and clicks that Jago made as he left. The central heating in our house had switched itself off and the house was cosy, the air thick with the smell of washing powder and whatever Mum had cooked for dinner. Trixie was beneath my bed, or on it, dreaming of rabbits she would never catch, her paws and eyeballs skittering harmlessly. She stirred but did not make a sound when she heard Jago leave.

I heard him. Every night I heard.

I knew what happened. I knew what they did. Jago told me some of it, and Ellen some of it, and though I tried not to think about it, my mind filled in the gaps. I lay in bed, listening to the dog’s sleepy little snuffles and grunts while Jago jogged through the darkness up the winding lane to Ellen’s house. He saw the cats and the owls and the foxes, and they saw him. The lights of the fishing boats far out to sea pierced the night’s blackness; they twinkled and bobbed above the waves. Jago recognized some of the boats by their lights and
he felt less alone. As he ran to Ellen, his breath streamed away into the night behind him, disappeared. He did not think of anything as he ran but he knew this was what he must do. He had to go to her.

At Thornfield House, he stopped and waited at the gates, checking for any signs of activity downstairs, watching the window of the room beside Ellen’s carefully. The curtains to that room had been drawn since the night Mrs Brecht died, and the light inside was always muted but, if Mr Brecht was there, sooner or later a shadow would fall across the window. If, after a few minutes, Jago was confident the coast was clear, he stepped into the garden. He had to be careful not to trigger the porch light, which was motion-sensitive. He kept close to the garden wall, avoiding the gravel on the drive, looping around until he came to the far corner at the front of the house. There he stopped and looked up. Ellen had been watching, always. She had already pushed up the lower sash of her window. Her father believed that when he turned the key that locked her bedroom door, his daughter was inviolate. He didn’t know that Ellen and Jago were making a mockery of his precautions.

The night garden at Thornfield House used to smell sweetly of the stocks and wallflowers Adam Tremlett had planted in the beds that lined the drive. There used to be other scents, daphne, honeysuckle, rose. The flowers were long gone, and although the bees and butterflies didn’t come to the garden in daylight, the moths continued their nighttime pollination of the grass and the flowers that were safe from Mr Brecht’s secateurs because they did not look like flowers. Jago was like a moth, purposeful but silent. He knew the front of Thornfield House like the back of his hand; he knew the brickwork, where he could put his feet and where he couldn’t; he knew how far he had to climb before he could pull himself up into Ellen’s room.

He had to be careful. The light in Mrs Todd’s window, at the top of the house, sometimes burned on into the early hours. She liked to knit and read in her room. She was a light sleeper and easily disturbed. Years of caring for Anne Brecht had imprinted in her an ability to listen out, always, for the slightest untoward noise or signal that something was amiss. Jago had worked out what he must do if Mrs Todd’s light was still on. He waited until she went into the small bathroom beside her room. Any sounds he made climbing into the house were masked by the tapwater Mrs Todd ran while she brushed her teeth.

Ellen waited for Jago, barefoot and ready for bed on the other side of the window. She had already barricaded the door, moving her dressing-table up against it. She helped him through the window, smiling. Jago could not be too gentle with her although she was solid, strong. He was so afraid of damaging her, of hurting her in some way. All Jago wanted to do was rescue Ellen and make her happy. He wanted to set her free. Ellen saw herself as a real-life storybook princess, locked in a tower by her cruel father. She made Jago take on the role of knight in shining armour and it was a role that appealed to him, he who had been the underdog for so many years. Ellen had not chosen to be imprisoned by her father, but she did nothing to help herself. All she had to do was concede a little, humour him, be kind to him, empathize with him, but she preferred to dig in her heels and fight. The drama of the situation appealed to her. She liked the excitement of it. She believed there would be a happy ending for Jago and her, no matter how far the situation between herself and her father escalated, because stories always had happy endings. The characters in dramas always lived happily ever after.

I didn’t know what happened, exactly, when Jago was in the room with Ellen, but I used to torment myself
wonderfully by imagining it. In my vicarious scenarios, they didn’t talk. They never talked. I imagined them kissing, Ellen tasting of toothpaste, her mouth receiving his. She would be hungry for him. Jago touched Ellen in the dark. He touched her hair, her shoulders, slid his hands down her smooth arms. He brought the fresh air in with him, the moon and the breeze, the sea wind, the tide and the wildflowers. They moved over to the bed. Ellen slipped between the covers. Jago stood beside her, and took off his clothes. His jacket first, and then his T-shirt that he pulled over the top of his head so Ellen could half-see in the star- and moonlight coming through the window the stretch of his chest, the muscles of his arm, the dark underarm hair, two pale nipples. She smelled him in the warmth of the abandoned shirt and she watched as he unbuttoned his jeans, let them fall, stepped out of them. And lastly he took off his shorts and Ellen felt a pleasure inside that was deeper and more exquisite than any pleasure she had experienced before. She was ready for him. She could not wait for him. She could not get enough of him.

Jago and Ellen made love. That was why Jago went to Ellen in the night; that was why she summoned him.

Later, when happiness had softened Ellen, when she had moderated her behaviour and I was allowed back into Thornfield House, she told me some of it. She touched her throat as she told me; her eyes shone and her voice was husky with excitement. I didn’t see it, but I could imagine her head thrown back and her shoulders, her small breasts, the chain around her neck and the catching of air in her lungs, her black hair spread about the white pillow, Jago’s pushing into her, her slender feet hooked around his back, so much incredible, mutual pleasure, such obligation, so much that was so right.

She described the breathless moments of the sexual act
itself, she feeling the fill of him, he always rushed with the pleasure of her, her glorious shivering. And afterwards, she told me how they suppressed their laughter and how Jago said, ‘
I love you
,’ into her ear, how his lips and his fingers were in her hair. ‘
I love you, Ellen Brecht
,’ he said. ‘
Let’s be together always, for ever, let’s be lovers until we die. I love you so much it kills me to leave you. I think about you every moment of every day. I want to tell everyone about you. I want them to know
.’ And she said in return, ‘
You can’t! You mustn’t! Don’t breathe a word to anyone, not anyone
.’

‘
I know
,’ he said. ‘
I know
.’

He always fell asleep first; he had been working all day and was exhausted by the physical act, worn out by the nervous energy he had used in the subterfuge of climbing into the house, and by the anticipation that had dogged him all day. Ellen stayed awake. She was on guard, protecting her lover from the dangers of the night. She turned over, spooned her back into his warmth, stared at the panes of glass in the window, listened out for footsteps on the landing, a giveaway cough. Outside, the night was brighter than inside. She watched the moon move slowly from one windowpane into the next. Her eyes were tired, but she did not sleep, not when Jago was with her. She knew that soon, before dawn, he would have to leave, and she did not know how, night after night, she found the strength to wake him, to send him away, to say ‘
Goodbye
.’

Hers was the best drama, the most exciting life, the most thrilling and dangerous and liberating. Ellen lived and loved and she burned and burned, bright as a star, believing she would live and love for ever.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

EVENTUALLY, AFTER HOURS
of crashing and booming, the thunder moved away from Bristol and I skimmed the surface of sleep. I dipped in and out of dreams and almost drifted off, but each time was pricked into wakefulness by the memory of the woman standing on the clifftop and the glass on the gravestone. I kept hearing Ellen’s voice. In my half-sleep she beckoned me into the mirror and I followed her. Behind were the Trethene moors, and she and I moved across the marshland. We were both in our nightgowns, barefoot, our hair blowing behind us as we stumbled through the mist, tripping on marshy hillocks as the moon drifted in and out of fast-moving, shape-shifting white clouds.

I called out to her, ‘
Ellen, wait! Let me see you!
’ but she ran on, snatches of her voice on the wind, and, although I was compelled to keep her in my sight, I did not want her to turn. I did not want to see her face.

In the early hours, an alarm went off down the street somewhere. It shrieked, splintering the dark, for ten minutes or so at a time, and then it went quiet again, before restarting. I couldn’t get used to the noise, or the intervening silences. I was too hot in my bed. I tried lying on top of the
covers, but I was still too hot. Sweat prickled the skin that wasn’t exposed to the cooling air. I got up and opened the bedroom window, but no draught was coming through. I needed to open the living-room window at the front of the flat to create a through-draught.

The power had been restored. That was probably what had triggered the alarm. In the orange glow of the streetlamp, I could see two men talking on the pavement below. It was clear from their body language that they were in some kind of trouble, or were expecting it. One was well-built and good-looking, holding a cigarette and shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other, like a boxer. The other was scrawnier, with yellow dreadlocks and a face that looked as if it had recently been in a fight. I wanted to open the window, but if I did, the men might hear the noise – they might look up and see me and think I’d been eaves dropping. I imagined them scampering up the wall like spiders, climbing in the window, prowling through the flat, hunting me down. I didn’t dare turn on the light.

I walked to the kitchen at the back and slid open the window. Lily paced the sill, backwards and forwards, rubbing her head against my wrist. Outside, a cat was prowling the wall that separated the garden of my building from its neighbour. The rabbit that belonged to the children in our garden flat was crouching in its hutch; I could see it clearly through the wire mesh, which meant the lights downstairs must have been switched on. Perhaps the family who lived there had been disturbed by the alarm too. Perhaps they wanted the men outside to know they were awake. Lily jumped onto the floor and wound herself around my ankles. I reached down to stroke her.

I had a longing to be outside, in the cooler air. I imagined myself stretched out flat on the scrubby patch of rain-drenched lawn in the garden, in front of the rabbit hutch,
amongst the discarded plastic toys, beneath the moon. But I had no access to the back garden, and I could not go out of the front door, not with the two men standing there, by the streetlamp, waiting for something or someone.

I went into the living room but did not switch on the light, not even a lamp. I turned on the television with the remote, kept the sound to silent. The TV was tuned to a news channel; there were riots, people throwing petrol bombs, people being beaten with batons, people lying dead on the streets, blood making wet black shadows around them. I switched over. A different channel. Young men were sitting around a table, playing poker. I neither understood nor cared about poker. I turned the television off, feeling enervated. And outside, the alarm was blaring:
naah, naah, naah
– like a wounded animal with an electronic bleat.

I went back into the kitchen, took a bottle of whisky out of the fridge and half-filled a tumbler. There was ice in the freezer. I took my drink into the living room and sat curled in my white armchair in the almost-dark with Lily on my lap. I didn’t feel like music or reading or candles, any of my usual distractions. I didn’t feel like anything. I was numb and cold, despite the heat, and terribly alone, as if I were the only person in the world, the last person alive, the one to witness the fading of the sun.

It was a long night, but at last the morning came. I mopped up a leak on the kitchen windowsill with a cloth and listened to the early news on Radio 4. I ate yoghurt and muesli for breakfast, fed the cat, wrote a note to remind myself to buy some more litter for her box and was just about to leave for work when the phone rang. It was Julia, my therapist.

‘Hi, Hannah,’ she said in her positive but not overly chirpy counselling voice. ‘Just thought I’d give you a quick call to see how things are going.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK-ish.’ I tucked the phone under my chin and leaned down to find the umbrella in the hall cupboard.

‘Has something happened?’

I took the umbrella from the cupboard, and returned to the living room.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Would you like to tell me about it?’

I took a deep breath. ‘I went down to Cornwall at the weekend,’ I said. ‘I wanted to see my parents, but also … I don’t know why exactly, but I felt drawn to the beach where I used to go with Ellen. I was thinking about her and I saw something – someone was watching me.’

I heard Julia’s little intake of breath, like a small sigh in reverse.