T here was a world outside of Lockwood, I reminded myself in the small hours of the night when I woke from nightmares and could not get back to sleep, when the dark shapes of my bedroom pulsed around me and my mouth felt dry and hot, when I felt sorry for myself. I would try to listen to the wireless, thinking that at least I might use the lost hours to keep myself better informed, that my own meager misfortunes wouldn’t stand up against those of others.
But when I fiddled with the dial of the machine trying to find a signal, the hissing sound, the voices in different languages sliding and burbling in and out of range across Europe, made me frightened. As if, were I to turn the dial to the right position, a ghostly voice might speak to me and call me by my name.
I should keep my hands busy, I thought next, distract my mind by putting myself to industry. But I had never been good at knitting, and my shaking fingers were forever dropping stitches, and what use would my hats and scarves be to the sailors who needed them if they were full of holes to let in the icy winds of the North Sea? And when I occupied myself with looking through the attic or the shut-up rooms for goods I could give to the drives or to auctions in aid of war efforts, I would only find myself unnerved, partly because old and faded things, broken things, have a tendency to make one feel melancholic, and partly because, as I scrabbled through boxes and cases and under dust sheets by the bright spotlight of the lantern and torches I brought with me, it didn’t feel like I was searching for iron or fabric or whatever else was needed, but something else, something nebulous and shifting, as if I was almost tempting the house to reveal something terrible to me, as if I wanted to hasten whatever horrors it felt like my dreams were foretelling.
But a brisk walk around the gardens—there could be nothing sinister, nothing frightening about that, surely? Every nurse of mine had espoused the wonders of a walk, as had my grandmother, whose walking stick and sturdy boots were kept polished and ready by the door for her twice-daily constitutions.
“She’s surveying,” my mother used to say when we caught sight of her through the windows, arm resting on the crook of her stick as she stood on the lawn and peered back at the house. “She’s checking that everything she owns is still there, still up to snuff; she’s striding the boundaries of her little kingdom.”
One morning we were on the terrace with tea while my grandmother paraded around the garden with the help of a long-suffering servant at her elbow. “The old servants say that Lockwood was a wreck when her husband arrived, that she married him only for his money,” my mother said. “The east wing had been shut up completely, with birds nesting there and wood rot and damp and all manner of mess, and his money filled it with servants again, a whole host of them to do her ladyship’s bidding. She should have been happy, and perhaps she was, but in later life, she has never been able to get over the fact that your father didn’t marry for money as she had done—because he met me and my family didn’t have any left,” she said with a laugh. “He married me for love, and saved me.”
Saved you from what? I thought later, when her nerves were at their worst, when she blamed my father for ever bringing her here.
They argued about money sometimes, my parents, about the cost of all her parties, even though I knew that my father relished each one, that there was nothing he liked better than sweeping across the ballroom or a crowded drawing room, greeting all and sundry and showing off Lockwood at its best.
Old houses bleed money, he used to say, especially when we had been visited by the men he had to hire from outside—the craftsmen, the blacksmiths, the plasterers and builders—they’re an endless gold pit. That was why, I surmised—because my father had stopped talking to me of money long ago, fearing perhaps that it would only worry me—he had set up his businesses and built his factories, to raise funds for the upkeep of Lockwood.
“Even walls can crumble, remember that, my dove,” he told me once, and I recalled his words as I circled the house on my walks, pausing in the orchard where the arms of gnarled apple trees had been pinned to the worn brick wall, the mortar wet and crumbling beneath my searching fingers.
If I concentrated on the gardens, on my memories of a childhood running through the grass and down the paths and weaving in between the trees, laughing with the other children as we shone buttercups beneath our chins, made daisy chains, and gathered colorful leaves, then I would not be tempted to look up at Lockwood, to let my eyes run across its walls, its windows, its turrets, and its towers. Because there was another motive to my walks, one that I was trying to ignore—for, having searched the interior of Lockwood from top to toe for a room with blue wallpaper, a room with an old candle chandelier and bare floorboards, a room that came to life only in my nightmares, and having found no such room, I was now searching from the outside, counting the windows and the spaces between and mapping out a ghostly floor plan. As if my tired eyes might be able to peel back brick and wood and plaster and find it there, my lost room, and whatever terrible secrets it held.