In the new year, Eleanor became single-minded, devotional, in her mission. She was going to cure the house. Nothing mattered more than this. On Mondays, she put Rosie and Isobel in front of the TV for as long as she could; at work, she did as little as possible, while she compulsively trawled the internet. She learned about ‘sick building syndrome’ and ‘indoor pollution’, but none of it described her – people complained of asthma or breathing difficulties, but no one talked about vomiting or migraines. She read about illness caused by ley lines and water currents underneath the house, about dowsing, copper rods, feng shui and crystals. She bought house plants, covered mirrors, burned incense and changed the position of their bed.
She realized she’d always treated the house squeamishly, afraid of disturbing it or finding something she wouldn’t like. She decided to confront it. She checked the pipes and the boiler, pulled out the cooker and the fridge. She took out drawers, cleared shelves, unscrewed cupboard doors. Nothing went unearthed, apart from the basement; she wondered if there was a way of asking Zoe if she could spring-clean it, without sounding peculiar or rude. She didn’t know what she was looking for: mould, a leak. Something growing, something broken.
She bought a hygrometer to test the damp levels. She read that mites and spores could live in soft furnishings, so she gathered up the towels, stripped the beds, took down the curtains, pulled the covers off the sofas. She washed and dry-cleaned continually, shampooed the carpets, stuffed old clothes, cushions and duvet covers into bin bags. She bought new mattresses on credit cards. Zoe came home one Monday and found her working dementedly, washing the walls – the sofas nude, their mattress in the hallway, the cooker half out of the unit. Eleanor half registered how strange it must look. Zoe hung around the doorway, curious, and then said tentatively, ‘Are you spring-cleaning?’
‘That’s right,’ Eleanor said, clipped, wiping sweat off her face with her elbow, not stopping to take her rubber gloves off. She thought about saying something else, but she just wanted to get back to work. Zoe smiled nervously and went downstairs; Eleanor turned back to the wall.
*
It was during the excavation that she found the notepad. It was lodged behind one of the radiators in the living room, halfway down, at an angle – she thought it had slipped rather than been placed there. She levered it out with a wooden spoon and as she held it in her hands, she found she was shaking. It was an ordinary, spiral-bound, lined notebook. The pages were starting to stiffen and yellow. Someone had tied a pencil to a piece of string and attached it to the wire.
It was filled with handwritten notes: tasks and shopping lists. Eleanor felt uncomfortable as she read it: its banality only made it more intimate. It was mostly unremarkable: Cabbage, ring Susan, check bank balance, David. Pay Sarah, sausages, tins toms, Margot. But almost every list contained the name ‘Emily’. Eleanor’s stomach dropped sharply each time she saw the letters. Emily food, Emily appt, Emily haircut. Emily shoes. No other name appeared so frequently. She was dominating the house. Her stomach dropped as the words prescription, hospital, treatment, pills appeared again and again.
Eleanor read every page carefully, not sure what she was trying to find. There was the odd menu plan – Mon: fish fingers, Tues: bolognese, Weds: stew. About a third of the way through, she found a note to someone, as if the notepad had been left out for someone to see. It was functional and unaffectionate: This is the package for returning, don’t forget the recycling bags. At the bottom, it said, Emily not good. She found five or six more, full of imperatives, equally unrevealing until the last line: Emily very bad; bad night last night – Emily; Emily WORSE today. In the last, the writing became slightly wayward: WORSE was underlined twice, two diagonal lines that nearly scored through the paper.
*
Eleanor put the notebook in a kitchen drawer and felt it there, luminous and quivering, for the rest of the day. She grew more and more agitated the closer it got to evening. She was thinking about it as she shampooed Rosie’s hair, listening to her scream, saying, ‘Not long now, darling, I know you don’t like this bit,’ detached and automatic. The words ‘Emily WORSE’ played in her head while the well-worn sentences of Isobel’s picture books slid out of her mouth. As soon as she had got them both to sleep, she ran down the stairs, jerked the drawer open and put the notepad in front of Richard as he sat at the kitchen table. He flipped through it, ostentatiously disinterested. She sat opposite him, arms folded, heart beating loudly.
‘So?’
‘So, there was something wrong with Emily! This proves it.’
‘We knew that. All that writing – clearly something wasn’t right. And actually, this doesn’t prove anything at all, if you think about it. “Emily very bad” – she was a child! She was probably just badly behaved. Going through a phase.’
Eleanor thought of Rosie and her ‘phase’. Her stomach lurched briefly; she ignored it.
‘But all this stuff about hospitals, treatments . . . What if it was something more than bad behaviour? What if she was ill?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything. Could have been athlete’s foot for all we know.’ He skimmed the notepad back across the table to her. ‘Just chuck it. Stop thinking about it.’
Eleanor took the notepad back and folded the pages over carefully, one by one. ‘But so much, Richard. Every single day. And the lock on her bedroom door – this wasn’t a happy house.’
‘She was clearly . . . too much in some way. They were just at the end of their tether and they locked her in her room. It’s something people do.’
‘What people? What people do that?’
‘I know it’s not something you or I would do. I’m not saying it’s nice. I’m just saying it’s more common than you think.’
‘I feel like something was seriously wrong. What if she died?’
‘Well, then that would have been very sad. But there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest—’
‘What if she died in the house?’
‘What if she did? Eleanor, it’s a Victorian house! People will have suffered, and grieved, and died, and had babies, and fallen in love – all in this house. All in any house we could possibly live in. It doesn’t mean anything.’
Eleanor said quietly, ‘I feel like in this house it does.’
Richard was still for a minute. Then he got up and put his arms around her.
‘Why can’t you just forget about it? They’re a different family. They might have been unhappy but we’re not. Why can’t you just enjoy the house?’
*
The notepad made Eleanor hungry for information. The next Monday, she went into Richard’s study and got out the documents from the house sale. She reread the surveyor’s report, but found nothing unusual. Physically, the house was healthy.
She thought back to the sale, raking it over for clues. Little peculiarities, submerged at the time, now began to surface. On the second viewing, she’d asked the estate agent directly if the family were still living there. He’d said they were and she’d been satisfied, but now his tone – cautious, evasive – preyed on her. They were moving away, he’d said, and weren’t going to buy somewhere new until they’d settled. ‘I feel like they’re not telling us something,’ she’d said to Richard, on the tube to the solicitor’s. ‘We don’t even know why they’re moving.’ ‘It could be anything,’ he’d said. ‘Maybe they’re splitting up. Maybe one of them lost their job.’
Fleetingly she’d thought it was strange, to have no contact with them, but the sale had been smooth and quick. They had been compliant, acquiescing to anything Richard tried to negotiate. The estate agents had said they were in a hurry; the house had been on the market for months. They were the only people to make an offer. Richard was proud of this; she found it unnerving.
Now, she wished she’d asked more. The contracts for the sale gave the names of the previous owners – Claire and Steven Ashworth – but no forwarding address. She put their names, and Emily’s, into Google and trawled through every result but could find nothing that fit. They had left no trace. She knew rationally that this was not unusual, but it felt almost vampiric not to have made any impact on the internet, like having no reflection in a mirror. She rang the estate agents and asked for their details; they were polite and apologetic but said they couldn’t give out that information because of confidentiality. She found the name of their solicitor in the correspondence about the sale: she rang and said she needed to get in touch with their clients urgently. At first they were reluctant to help, but she persisted and they agreed to forward a letter. She composed it hurriedly, simply asking them to get in touch with her, and sent it off, only half expecting anything to come of it.
The next evening, after the children had gone to bed, she told Richard that she needed something from the shop, to steal a little time away from the house. Walking back, clutching her plastic bag of unwanted goods, trying to absorb as much air as she possibly could, Eleanor passed the flat of the neighbour whose cat she’d rescued. The basement window emitted a blue glow from the television screen and she saw the shape of the woman through the net curtains, on her sofa. The curtains were ratty, with a gash in them. Eleanor stopped. She didn’t have long. Impulsively, she ran down the steps and rang the doorbell.
Her hands twitched by her sides as she waited for the woman to come to the door. It took a long time, and her breathing rasped when she finally answered. Eleanor felt bad for disturbing her, for forcing her to get up when movement was clearly difficult, but it was overwhelmed by a fiercer desire: to know. She tried to sound calm, measured and polite, as she introduced herself again and explained which house she was from.
The woman gave no indication that she remembered meeting her. She did not introduce herself; she just stared impassively, getting her breath back. ‘Oh. You all right?’ she asked, grudgingly.
‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I need to get in touch with the people who lived in our house previously – the Ashworths? Do you have their new address or a phone number . . . ?’
The woman shook her head slowly. ‘No. No, I wouldn’t have anything like that.’
‘Would anyone on this street? Was there anyone they were friends with?’
‘Not that I’d know. Goodnight, dear.’ She started to shut the door.
‘But— Sorry! I’m so sorry to keep you, did you know anything about them? I thought I remembered you saying that there was something . . . something odd about them?’
The woman paused.
‘I didn’t know them, dear. I mean, the girl wasn’t right, you could see that much. But none of them were right, really.’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, there was always something going on in that house. The mother was cold, you know, snappy, though I expect you would be running round after a little girl like that.’
‘What was wrong with the girl? Was she ill?’
‘She was . . . disturbed, I suppose you’d call it. Mind you, the whole house was disturbed. There was always noise coming from upstairs, always something going on. I don’t get out of the house much these days, but if I was going past, you know, to the shops and that, there was always something. Some commotion.’
The cat sidled past her and out of the door. It ran, surprisingly fast, up the steps.
‘Now you’ve gone and done it!’
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ Eleanor dropped her carrier bag, raced after the cat and picked her up, putting her back in the doorway. The woman turned away from Eleanor and pulled the door to, so it was just ajar.
‘Go on, get back inside, you! Shoo!’
‘I’m sorry to keep asking, but what sort of—?’
‘I don’t think I can help you. I didn’t know them, like I say.’
‘But—’
‘Bless you, dear. Goodnight.’ She closed the door and Eleanor was left outside. She picked up her bag and dug her fingernails into her palm.