If I had children, would I have minded the house getting quieter, servants and guests leaving? Would I feel a consolation in their company, or would they only increase my anxieties? It was a moot point, for I did not have children and, though I had never spoken this aloud to anyone, I was not sure I wanted them either. Children meant a husband, meant sharing my bed with some great oaf of a man, a stranger who would be curt at breakfast and particular about his office, a man who might start to think of Lockwood as his alone and me as the interloper, the intruder.
“Will I always live here?” I remembered asking my mother as she sat in the sun on the terrace one day, eyes closed like a cat. I was sitting near her, playing with a doll, dressing it up in one outfit after another, my fingers clumsy on the buttons that were giant in comparison to the doll’s frame.
“You shall,” she had replied without opening her eyes. “You, and your husband.”
“My husband?” I said with bafflement. “Who is he?” I asked, as if some man had already been set aside for me.
She laughed. “You haven’t met him yet,” she said.
“But why? Can’t I live here just by myself?”
“You’ll be lonely.”
“Not with the servants I won’t.”
“You’re such a funny child,” she said, propping herself up, looking at me in the way that I hated, as if I was a being with no relation to her at all, as if I were a stray animal that had crawled into the house and prostrated itself at her feet. “It doesn’t matter what you think now, you’ll fall in love one day,” she said, “and then you’ll be stuck with him.” She laughed again, but it wasn’t a happy laugh.
I spent a term at a boarding school when I was thirteen or so, and husbands were a hot topic of conversation there too. There were twelve of us jammed into a room, each trying to outdo the other in how womanly we were—how many lipsticks we owned, and how red the shades; how perfect the waves were in our hair; how many dances we had been to, and how many different boys we had danced with; and the exact height of the stack of cards in our pigeonholes on Valentine’s Day. I joined them with wanting to look pretty, with wanting to be admired and grown-up, but I felt an uneasiness too, a reserve I couldn’t explain.
I was there for Halloween and we played two particular games for finding out more about our future husbands. We peeled apples with the blunt knives we used to spread butter on our suppertime toast, creating long strips of peel that we threw over our left shoulders and then we all gathered around the fallen peel to decipher the initial that had been created and call out men’s names. My peel had fallen in an “A,” it had been decided, and as the other girls suggested names—Arthur, Alan, Anthony, Alexander, Albert, Alfred—I roundly rejected them all, picturing a line of blank-faced men shuffling past. I was picky, the other girls said, the kind to have more than one husband; the kind, one girl called Ann said, to have an affair. This caused much consternation, for we were still of that prudish age where it was one thing to fantasize about a crowd of different men but another to have relations with any of them.
The second game was not quite so fun for a girl like me, with a febrile imagination, who was scared of the dark. We would light a candle each and stare into a mirror at midnight exactly and the figure of our husbands would appear behind us. The other girls had jostled me out of the bathroom where the long mirror above the sinks was occupied with six girls side by side (wouldn’t they be confused, I remember thinking snidely, if a figure appeared between them: how would they know that they had seen the right husband?), the three mirrors in the dormitory were occupied too, and another girl was using a large hand mirror that she had brought in her trunk. I was left with the mottled mirror in the long dark hall outside our dormitories.
Ann was the one who had counted down to midnight, her voice hushed so that we would not wake the housemistress, and as I stared at my reflection, candle fluttering with my nervous breath, I thought how terrifying it was to look at oneself, to see the movement of one’s face as if it was the face of a stranger. I should not have played this game, I knew that even then, standing there as the clock was ticking. I should have pretended, or shut my eyes tightly at midnight.
But I did play. I stared into the dark of my reflection at midnight and I saw someone else there with me.
I was told later that my screams brought the housemistress running with her head bare of her scarf, her robe half on her shoulders, that it took a girl throwing a bucket of water over me to bring me out of my fit, but I did not remember.
I was taken home the very next day and did not return to boarding school; the experiment at my living elsewhere from Lockwood ended, and I was devastated. I had loved the school, not for its building, which was colder and more ramshackle than my home, but for the company, for the other girls, mean though they could sometimes be. I loved chatting with them and laughing with them after lights-out as the moonlight streamed through the thin curtains; or when we got into each other’s beds and cuddled up against the cold; how if I woke afraid from a nightmare, there might be another girl awake too to talk to or, if not, there would at least be the sounds of eleven peaceful sleepers, their snores and breaths and shuffling under the covers like talismans against any fears.
They were all married now, of course, and most of them had children of their own. How did their lives compare to the ones they had dreamed of; how did their husbands compare to the ones they saw in the mirrors or conjured up from a piece of apple peel?
I knew that they thought me strange, to still be unmarried, to have no fiancé or even a scandalous married lover. I often thought that it would easier if I had been wed briefly to a man who’d had a tragic accident, that I would be quite suited to being a widow, haunting this house alone, appearing at breakfast with dark shadows bred from loss instead of madness.
But this was my lot, to remain here at Lockwood unpartnered, and I was lucky, I was not so foolish as to not know that. How could I bemoan a life of luxury in a manor house like this, servants at my beck and call? My class gave me allowance to never marry, for I would inherit all my father’s wealth; it meant idleness would not result in my being starving and penniless, and that I would be known as an eccentric heiress to be pitied and spoken of as a warning to those girls who did not want to do what everyone else does, to tie themselves to the first man who asked for their hand.
Sometimes I pondered whether I might put the house to some other use when my father was gone, as it was now for the museum—a collection of art, perhaps, a convalescent home, or even a school. But then it would not be right to invite other vulnerable people here, when it had been living here that had turned my mother and me mad; when I was sure that something still lurked here inside these walls, something hidden, something—someone—malevolent and wrong.