The beautiful summer was ripening to autumn when Harry told her he was leaving Charcombe Park.
‘I have to go back to my law work,’ he said. ‘But as soon as I get back, I’m going to hand in my notice and give it all up. This summer has made me realise that life’s too short to waste doing something you hate, even if it makes money. I want to start living. I have a cottage in Cornwall, halfway up a hill overlooking the sea. I’ve learned everything that Luke and Gwen can teach me, so I’m going to live there and start my carpentry business.’
She was in the kitchen making soup for Mama, who was sick with a chill, and she’d stirred it slowly without saying anything. She’d closed her mind to the possibility of Harry leaving. She’d hoped he might simply decide to stay indefinitely.
‘Xenia?’
She turned around to look at him, hoping he wouldn’t notice the tears in her eyes, but his expression was too much for her, and two hot rivulets ran down her face. She sniffed hard and wiped them away. ‘I don’t want you to go. You’re my friend. My only real friend.’
‘You’re my friend too.’ He smiled at her and took her hand, his roughened by woodwork and sawdust. ‘You know that. I want us to be closer.’ He stared into her eyes intently. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something for some time. I know that nothing has really happened between us, not romantically, but I feel something and I think you do too. I just don’t think it can ever happen here, in this place. So I want you to come with me to Cornwall.’
‘What? Cornwall?’ She gazed back, taking in his words, a flower of happiness unfurling within her.
He nodded. ‘My cottage is big enough for two. I want to get you away from here, so you see what life might be like without the mighty burdens you’ve got. They’re crushing you but you can’t see it.’
Xenia felt as though someone had switched on a light and banished darkness. What a wonderful, marvellous idea. A new life. Freedom. Companionship. Perhaps love . . . Her happiness wilted almost as soon as she imagined it. She said blankly, ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’ Harry looked exasperated and miserable at the same time, but he wasn’t going to let it go. ‘This house . . . it’s no good, Xenia. I want to get away from it, and you should too. Come for a short while. Give me six months, just six months.’
‘Harry, I can’t leave, you know that, not for any length of time. What about Mama? She’d never go. She’d be so unhappy anywhere else.’
‘She’s ill, Xenia. You can’t look after her for the rest of your life, she wouldn’t want that from you. We’ll find a wonderful place for her to live nearby where she can be cared for properly, and you can begin to live for yourself.’
As he said it, she wanted it more than anything. But she knew that it wasn’t possible. She couldn’t rip Mama away from Charcombe, it would kill her. If Harry left, he would go without her.
‘We have to stay,’ she said, turning back to her soup. ‘That’s all there is to it.’
‘Xenia, please. I want to look after you.’
‘I don’t need looking after,’ she said haughtily, taking refuge from her pain in her pride. ‘We’re never leaving here. How would my father find us if we go?’
‘You can’t still believe that he’s coming back.’ Harry looked at her sadly. ‘You know he never will.’
She burst into tears and shouted, ‘How dare you talk to me like that! How can you say such awful things! Go away.’
So he had.
I knew he was right.
Xenia was ready for the party now, wrapped up in Mama’s fur coat. She went to her bedroom window with its view over the park towards the big house, a view she almost always blocked with a drawn blind, so that she didn’t have to see it. But now she stared at the squares of light that showed the windows of the house through the dark, frigid air.
I wonder what’s happening in the house. They’ll be getting ready for their party, making it beautiful with decorations and lights, trying to mask the truth about that place.
It had been the sadness that soaked into its stones that drove Harry away.
‘You’ll always know where I am,’ he said to her, pressing a paper with the cottage’s address on it. ‘If you’re ever free, come and find me.’
‘I will,’ she’d said, but she’d known then that she would never be free, not while there was still time for her, at least.
The spikes of rooftops and chimneys stood out against the night sky, the whole facade turned golden from the floodlights, ready to welcome people in.
It’s a terrible house and always has been. Why does it draw badness and corruption to it? Like the wicked surgeon who cut through the fibres of Mama’s brain and destroyed her forever.
Only a few years later, he had been implicated in a huge scandal of illegal operations and jailed for his activities. But it was too late for Mama, and for all the other poor souls he condemned to a living death.
Harry had written to her too, begging her to change her mind.
‘Please, Xenia – your mother would want you to live your life, not exist in the shadow of hers.’
She had not written back. He wouldn’t understand. Xenia had a debt to Mama that she could never repay. Mama had agreed to the procedure because Xenia and Papa had told her to. Papa had promised he would love her and stay with her, and he had failed her. She, Xenia, could not also fail. Not when she carried the burden of guilt that tormented her.
But perhaps it was the house that did it, after all. Perhaps it arranged all of it: the madness and the failed cures and the terrible operation. It brought me Harry and then sent him away. It punished Luke and Gwen with illness. It banished Papa.
Or had it? Had Papa chosen to inflict the final, awful blow of abandonment on them himself? Had he been, at heart, selfish and deceitful to the last?
She thought of her mother’s last days, before the pneumonia came and finally killed her. Natalie had appeared at the top of the staircase in a long white nightdress, her face bizarrely made up, her hair gathered into curls around old hair rollers and bits of twig. ‘You’ve all come here today to find out one thing,’ she said in that perfect American accent. Her voice was creaky now, but she still sounded like her most famous creation. ‘You want to know who killed Delilah.’ She walked down the stairs to Xenia and said, ‘Do you want to know who killed Delilah? It’s very simple. I killed her. And I’m glad I did. I’d do it again tomorrow – and so would you!’
That was the last thing her mother ever said to her.
The pain of loss hit Xenia with such force she thought she might fall down. Tears stung her eyes. Where did you go, Papa? Why did you leave us?
She turned to face the ancient old house.
If I had my way, every last stone of you would be torn down.