Cornwall, present day
The rest of the week passed decisively for Rachel. She kept the magazine that Aaron had brought on the chest in the hall, a reminder every time she passed it of the life to which she was set to return. She couldn’t spend her future trapped in her past.
Aaron contacted a new realtor about valuing the estate. Despite her initial misgivings, Rachel was grateful for his optimistic companionship. Could she return his feelings, in time? Could she learn to allow him close, even to fall in love with him? On paper Aaron was easy to love – gorgeous, generous, smart, successful – but she’d never considered it before. It hadn’t been part of their arrangement, and felt too much like a betrayal of Seth. But as she watched him sort through boxes, as he fixed her meals, as she felt him tenderly rub her shoulders at the end of a tough day, slowly she could start to envisage what their lives might be like together. It would be easy to say yes to him, to be loved and looked after, to share her hopes and fears, to have someone to make breakfast with in the mornings, just as she had when she was married. For this time at Winterbourne, they were that couple. They laughed and talked over late-night suppers; they walked along the bluff after hours cooped up.
Suddenly Aaron didn’t seem so at odds with Winterbourne. He appeared less tightly wound, more relaxed, more encouraged somehow. She supposed that, after all, he knew her best. She could talk herself into loving him. She could.
When the realtor visited, Rachel spent several hours showing him round Winterbourne and its grounds, then discussing her situation and her intention to shift the property from abroad. ‘Of course, Ms Wright,’ said the realtor, fawningly. ‘Rest assured we will look after everything, from viewings through offers through auctions – because there will be an auction – right to contracts, and we’ll keep you informed every step of the way.’ Rachel chewed her thumb. She asked about prospective buyers’ objectives: could they ask for an indication of how the successful bidder would handle the house? Would they demolish it or extend it; would they put a swimming pool out where the old stables used to be, or a gym in the chapel? She struggled to imagine change and felt protective of the place. ‘I guess I just want to feel it’s going to the right people,’ she said, and the realtor smiled his foppish smile and told her that they would do everything they could to manage her wish. When he asked a little pertly if she wouldn’t prefer to stay at Winterbourne herself, Aaron stepped up behind and put a hand on Rachel’s shoulder: ‘She wants to sell,’ he said.
Rachel was grateful to Aaron for maintaining her focus. She dreamed of a young family buying the house, of children’s laughter filling the rooms, but knew it was unlikely. More probably it would go to a developer who would raze it to the ground and build a block of apartments. Still, she couldn’t afford to be sentimental.
She and Aaron spent their days carefully packing up, sorting and signing paperwork, combing through the details together even when Rachel’s eyes were ready to close and Aaron had to all but put the pen in her hand. Much of Winterbourne’s contents would be sent to auction, but certain items Rachel wished to take with her: a delicate gold bracelet she decided to believe belonged to her grandmother; an elegant silver clock engraved with the letters L. Until the end of time, and, of course, the diaries her aunt had kept, haphazardly arranged inside that boarding-school trunk.
‘What about that thing?’ Aaron asked one evening, as he passed the mirror by the fireplace. He fingered its ornate gothic frame, somewhat uneasily, and then laughed at his reflection. ‘Not all that flattering, is it?’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Rachel. ‘Never have.’
‘Whose was it?’
‘My aunt’s, I expect. Though I don’t know for sure.’
‘You’re not taking it, then?’
‘God, no. The mirror belongs at Winterbourne. I can’t picture it anywhere else. I feel as if the house would be furious if I tried to take it away.’
*
Aaron was up early on the day of their flight, loading their travel bags into the Porsche. Rachel stayed a while in her bedroom, watching him out on the drive.
On impulse, she took the painting of the cottage off the wall. The little window was still wide open, a picture of clarity and stillness. Where all else at Winterbourne was flamboyant and looming, the image of the cottage was simple and quiet. It hadn’t occurred to her before how at odds it was with the rest of the house, but she liked its difference. Again she scrutinised it for a sign of human life, but naturally there was none: just the brown cow and the milk pails and the gently smoking chimney. She decided to take the painting with her. She would hang it in the gallery in New York, and every time she passed it she would feel a pull in her heart, and look at that name, M. C. Sinnett, and wonder to whom it had belonged.
As she was leaving, the corner of wallpaper she’d noticed when she first arrived once again caught her eye – a dark, mossy tangle just above the skirting.
Rachel bent and touched it, and, in doing so, she realised it wasn’t wallpaper at all but something painted directly on to the fabric of the house. She’d been wrong in thinking that the wall had been stripped: on the contrary, those violently torn ribbons were instead a spoiled attempt at covering up what lay beneath, not removing it. Perhaps several layers of paper had been applied in an effort to conceal it.
She began to pick at the paper. It soon became impulsive, like picking a scab, and the more she picked, the more came away, some in small nubs like the peel of a tightly skinned orange, and some in great sheets like skin after sunburn. She was aware how frantic she would look to anyone who noticed, but Aaron was outside and she was alone and just for now she could afford to be frantic, tearing at the paper without knowing why, just certain she had to see what it was hiding.
Afterwards, she stepped back to survey the design. It was blindingly intense.
The corner of moss she had spotted was just the start – a mere shoot in the most sprawling, colossal tree imaginable. Although it wasn’t a tree, it was more vaguely amorphous than that, it was vegetation, a dense forest of stems and stalks that wound and twisted over and under each other. To follow one tangle was futile, as it disappeared into a nest of its sisters, so intricate and elaborate that it made her eyes swim. The vines were a solid screen of blackest green, the green of seaweed washed up on a pale shore; and as Rachel stood before it, she had the unsettling impression that if she peered hard enough, if she even reached out and parted the branches with her hands, she would glimpse a pair of eyes peering back at her from the other side.
She stepped back, afraid. But the foliage drew her closer, with eyes and voices that flashed and whispered, whispered of something terrible…
‘Rachel?’ Aaron was at the door.
She looked up.
‘There’s someone here to see you.’