10

2017

WINTER ASSAULTED THE REEVE FROM all sides. Battle lines were drawn in frost, traps were set in ice on the front steps. Those large flagstones in the porch, so beautifully smooth, wore their treachery as a slick cloak and Orla fell more than once on her way out to the bins or the village. The back patio was almost impassable until Toby heaved a bag of salted grit out of his Land Rover and liberally blessed the ground.

A thick hoar frost captured the garden and held it hostage for almost two days. It was impossibly beautiful to look at in the sun, sharp and ethereal, and then the sea mist rolled in and took back the land with its warm breath.

Sam loved it though, the cold, and spent a great deal of time outside with Toby, finding and shattering ice puddles with his red wellies.

Orla tried to lose herself in work. As much as it was a compulsion, it was also an escape, a process that offered a reprieve from the increasing pressure of living in a place that did not feel as though it belonged to her. She had become a reluctant archaeologist, uncovering relics to which she had no claim and did not want. The bracelet and shoe remained shoved away, buried in her dresser. At least once a day, she opened the drawer and reached to the back and felt with her fingers, making sure the parcel had stayed where she put it. The undulating glass of the orangery had stayed reassuringly ordinary, too. Still, Orla didn’t like the potential for trickery that lurked within the wall of repeating windows, and consciously averted her gaze whenever she passed through into the back garden.

Sam’s portrait occupied most of her time; Orla spent more hours with the painted child than the real one. The mood wasn’t coming out quite how she wanted it. Every painting has a feeling to it, a proprietorial energy that makes each piece unique. A lot of her landscapes were pensive, melancholy; some even felt like anger. Her critics accused her of despondence, and this was largely the same interpretation as that of her admirers. Orla had learned very early on that her worth was not fixed and intrinsic but precarious, and entirely a matter of perspective.

But this painting of Sam had a furtive vitality to it that verged on feral. It was so unlike her other work, even her other portraits, and no matter how she scraped and repainted and mixed her colours, she couldn’t rid the piece of its strange personality. She had intended it to feel joyful, bright, something like spring – but each stroke of the brush only intensified its peculiar vigour. Orla was affronted, as though the painting was playing a joke. Febrile was the word that sprang unbidden whenever she thought about it. Infectious.

‘Sounds interesting, love, if you ask me. You going to keep it?’ Claude set down a pot of tea and two mugs, with a plate of shortbread for Sam. She’d told him about the shoe, unsure how to explain the way it made her feel.

‘For now, I suppose. Don’t know what else to do with it, really. It’s just, just horrible. I hate the thought that it’s been in my house this whole time. Makes me feel like, what else am I going to find?’

‘What are you expecting to find?’

‘I don’t know.’ She took a piece of shortbread and crumbled it between her fingers on to the plate. ‘Claude, when I took Sam to the library a while ago, I got talking to a woman from the village. And she asked where I lived, of course, and when I told her, she said that our house, it isn’t safe. That it’s bad. And, honestly, I think she’s right.’ She looked at her son, who was focused on fixing a jetpack to a small plastic astronaut. ‘It’s been hard living there. It is hard.’

Claude didn’t seem at all surprised – in fact, it felt to Orla as though he’d been waiting to have this conversation. He shook his head. ‘Your house has itself a bit of a reputation. You know it does.’

Orla pressed on. ‘This is different. What you said, just about people coming and going, I could bear that. Because you’re right, it is a big house. It’s not an easy house. But this is something else – she said it’s a bad house, Claude. That children shouldn’t be there.’

Claude sighed and passed a hand across his beard. ‘It’s all gossip, mind. Foolish talk – me and Alice have no time for it. Toby, neither. Just superstitious stuff, nonsense.’

‘Really? Just nonsense?’

‘Now, listen, it’s an old house – plenty of people have died in it and plenty lived, too. It’s the way of old houses. Don’t go taking any notions.’ Claude leaned across and tapped a finger on the table.

‘Claude, please. What do you know?’

He picked up his tea and stared into the cup. ‘Few kids lost themselves, from families that lived there. But it’s passed through so many hands, that house, nobody stays long. So I say, of course there have been a few unfortunate incidents. Kids get sick, they have accidents – right? Number of families in and out of that house, it’s bound to happen. Even here, right, the café? Our flat upstairs – some poor old bugger offed himself up there, years ago. Doesn’t trouble us none, you can’t go making an enemy out of death. Comes for us all. So – don’t be worrying about what people say.’

Orla thought of the house’s generous scope for harm – the wide and uneven staircase, the splintered floorboards, the thin and brittle windows. The long drop from the landings to the expanse of floor below. ‘Claude – what sort of accidents?’

He hesitated and looked at Sam. ‘You sure you want to know this?’

‘Please.’

‘There was a little girl, long past. Early part of the century. Drowned in the pond – used to be one up there. Terrible, of course, but an accident. Only a wee thing, took them a while to find her. So, you know how people get. Ghost stories and so on, and that made a good one. Family shut the house up and went back to London. A few people came and went, never stayed long.

‘Then, in the seventies, the same thing. A drowning. Something happened to one of the children, can’t remember rightly which one, now. There were a few up there, with a nanny. Twins, too – a biggish family. Pond was filled in, after that. Not many round here remember the details of why, any more. So the house got itself a reputation, but there’s nothing to it. Not as far as I’m concerned, anyway. People can be small-minded, you know that. Once an idea takes hold, it’s hard to shift it.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?’

‘And what would you have done if I had?’

A good question. Would it have put them off buying, if they’d known the history? Orla knew that Nick wouldn’t care, it was all so long ago. And would it have changed things, if she and Claude had had this same conversation on her very first visit? They wouldn’t have turned round and sold again, she knew that. There wouldn’t have been a way out and Nick would have admonished her for looking for one. What did any of this matter to them, to their family?

Claude continued, ‘Nothing to be done, if you ask me. It’s just stories.’

‘Toby found the pond. Well, where it used to be. He talked about putting it back. I said no.’ At least that was something about the house that she could control, even if she couldn’t alter its history or her own future there.

He laughed. ‘Sounds nice. Everyone likes a water feature.’

‘Claude. Come on. I don’t want that in my garden, not where people have died. It’s not right, it’s not safe –’

‘Why would you be worried, love? None of that’s got anything to do with you. All in the past, that stuff.’

‘You said people don’t take to it well, and I always wondered what you meant. The woman, too, she tried to say –’

Claude raised a hand and gestured out of the window to the street. ‘People here are superstitious, woolly-headed. It’s just that kind of town. It’s the Dorset way. We love to see things that aren’t there.’ He frowned. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Children had lost themselves. Such a strange way to phrase it, as though they were active participants in their own ends. Erased by a decisive hand. Such a thing to imagine, losing yourself. Setting out to be lost, turning yourself around and around so that when you opened your eyes, everything was tilted and nothing was familiar. Doing it on purpose, disappearing yourself.

Claude stood to deal with a customer and patted Sam on the head. ‘It’s a God-given house, Orla – you’re very lucky.’

*

Toby cut reams of ivy from the garden, and Orla spent the afternoon outside with him, working them into long, trailing garlands. One over the fire in the drawing room, one over the fire in the sitting room, a loop suspended above the Aga, and several more to wrap round the banisters on the main stairs and the first-floor landing. Nick helped her fix them with strings of fishing wire, and the effect really was grand – delicate stems of green ivy, soft against the polished wood. Heavy twists of mistletoe, ripe with fat white berries, hung in each doorway, and Nick made a point of kissing them all, laughing, anytime he passed by.

The garden was run over with the stuff; it grew rampant through the oaks. The oldest relationship in the world, Toby said, oak and mistletoe. The greed of the vine drinking up the strength of the trees: another of those symbiotic cruelties that occur so often where green things grow and gasp and die.

Orla knelt next to Toby on the patio and twisted ivy branches, her hands made clumsy by heavy gloves. ‘I saw Claude the other day.’

Toby smiled. ‘How’s he getting on? Haven’t been down for a while.’

‘Good. Fine.’ She sat back on her heels. ‘He told me about what happened here, about the pond. The deaths. Did you know?’

Toby shrugged and fixed his eyes on his hands at work. ‘My nan told me some stuff, but honestly I never took much notice. She used to be here a lot, she said, when she was young. Knew a few things. But it was a long time ago, all that. Didn’t think it mattered much.’

‘It matters to me. It’s something you should know, about your own house.’

‘Does it bother you?’ He handed her a length of wire.

Orla looked out across the lawn. ‘Yes. Yes and no, I think. It’s not a nice thought.’

‘No, I suppose not. Sorry, I really didn’t think it was worth mentioning.’

‘That’s all right. You weren’t to know. But, listen, won’t you come for drinks, on the twenty-third? We’d love to have you, honestly, Nick’s parents are dying to meet you.’

‘Now then, have you been telling people about me, Mrs McGrath?’ He smiled and waggled his secateurs.

‘I mean it, really – won’t you come?’

‘That’s very kind of you, honestly it is, but we’ve family over ourselves. You know how it is, gets busy.’

‘I do know. Well, that’s all right. Another time?’

Toby turned away from her and bent his head to his work. ‘Maybe. Sure.’ He seemed distracted, concerned, and Orla didn’t press him further.

Christmas Eve, cocooned in white, dawned blinding and breathless. It had started the evening before, the snow, and continued on through the night, falling reckless and thick.

Drifts slumped against the house, the lawns and gravel were quilted silver and ice. The oaks hung heavy with their load, the magnolia strained towards the sky, pushing skeletal fingers up out of the snow that threatened to envelop it entirely. The pond at the bottom, half dug out now by Toby, was reduced to a soft divot rather than a hard gouge. Orla hated looking at it and avoided that part of the view from the kitchen. Since her conversation with Claude, she had become acutely aware of the unknown quantity of the place in which they lived.

Orla lit the fires in every room and, for the first time since the weather had turned, the house felt warm, even comfortable. The sweep had been right, too – the consistent heat of the drawing-room chimney finally killed off the little sapling growing from the stack, and, although she checked obsessively several times a day, Orla heard no more birds.

‘Mum! Hi, hi, come in – bloody hell, freezing, quick.’ Nick, the generous host, flung open the front doors to greet his parents, who entered in a flurry of bags and coats and snow. George bent to pull Sam into his arms.

‘Now then! Now then! Who’s this big fellow!’

Sam, upside down in his grandfather’s arms, tugged on his jumper to stop it riding up and exposing his stomach, which was being tickled by his grandmother.

‘Oh, look at this tummy! Just see how delicious it is! I think I’ll have this for my Christmas dinner!’ Eva landed a wet kiss on Sam’s torso and he reached out to pat her hair.

‘Orla! My goodness – what a house!’

Orla leaned into her mother-in-law’s embrace and caught the scent of Clarins perfume and petrol fumes from her camel coat. Orla was moved but embarrassed by her in-laws’ geniality – she welcomed it, but was also made a little reticent by it. She was never quite sure how much of herself to give in turn.

‘Thank you, yes, isn’t it!’

‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ said George, as he handed his coat to his son and looked skywards, up to the great glass dome sheathed in snow. Orla, out of nowhere, thought of woodlice under a cloche.

‘Nick sent pictures, obviously, but it really is something else.’ Eva put her hand on Nick’s arm.

‘We love it here, don’t we.’ Nick beamed at his wife.

‘We do – Sam loves it. The garden is wonderful, you’ve to come back in the summer, when everything’s up.’ Orla picked up Eva’s bag and started up the stairs. ‘Right, you’re next to Sam; there’s a lovely guest room. Looks out over the sea – you’ll like it.’

Such a beautiful Christmas.

It was perfect. The dinner, the wine, the gifts. The house shone, it preened. Beautiful old thing, centre of attention, glittering bride to marry them all to their future. Nick was elated, expansive. Sam was spolit and adorable, Bridie was cheerful and captivating.

Orla stood, occasionally, in the doorways, just to watch. This life she’d built, this family she’d been absorbed into, sometimes seemed removed, as though she experienced it from behind a tissue-thin sheet of glass. Present, yet separate, and no one else could see the divide. Her response to their happiness, her love for them, arrived a beat behind. There was always an infinitesimal pause between Orla’s observations and the reaction; it was what made her such a good artist – the ability to inhabit that brief space in which she decided how to feel before she felt.

The house seemed to enhance the separation, as if it was the fifth member of the family and demanded her consideration also, so that her focus was frequently split. Orla was suspicious of this version of her house, the one that shimmered with festivity and expanded itself to make room for guests and turned only its most lovely aspect outwards. It gathered up its secret corners and rotting walls and hid them away, and drew an organza veil over a scarred face.

The Reeve was limitless in its capacity for illusion. Usually so temperamental, over the last few days the heating had regulated itself reliably and the locked doors stayed locked and the dead things stayed outside. To be in the house now, one could almost believe that it had been like this since the first day, and might forget the bleeding hands and the scattered mouse shit and the dreadful, intermittent thumps of tired and desperate birds flinging themselves into those merciless windows.

This house, this temporary and celebratory house, encouraged a keyed-up festivity in its occupants. They’d never eaten so much, drunk so much. Cut off as they were by the snow that fell ever thicker, obligatory thoughts of Christmas services and carols down in the village church slipped away and the family turned inwards, and opened more wine. Decorum suffered; George wandered about in a thick jumper and pyjama trousers, and Orla caught Eva feeding Bridie trifle for breakfast.

Late on Christmas night, Orla found herself slumped in an armchair, half-asleep, with an empty brandy balloon in her hand. Nick, seated on the floor, reached over to take the glass, kissed her fingers and smiled up at her. He stood with an exaggerated groan, made a joke about getting old, and went off into the kitchen to fetch more wine.

George and Sam, heads bent together, tinkered with some sort of plastic board game involving catching magnetic fish with a pole. Eva watched them, eyes fixed on Sam. She turned to Orla.

‘So, how has it been?’

Orla tucked her feet under her thighs. ‘How so?’

‘You. The house. It’s really very beautiful.’

‘It is, isn’t it. Bigger, I think, than what we’d talked about.’ Orla wasn’t sure if Eva knew about the careless, authoritarian way in which the house had been bought, and she’d never welcomed criticism of her son.

‘But perfect, really. Room to grow. Room for Sam.’

‘He seems to like it here. I think he does. He hasn’t told me different.’

Eva stiffened; she didn’t like it when Orla talked about Sam like that, as if he’d said real words. ‘And does he tell you much, these days?’

Orla knew what Eva was asking. ‘Same as ever, really. The psychiatrist we saw gave us flash cards for things, but that’s not really helped. He knows the words – that’s not the problem. He just won’t say them.’

‘Aren’t you doing anything?’

Orla opened her hands. ‘There really isn’t much we can do at this stage, Eva. That’s what the woman said. Just encourage him, let him know it’s safe. Being cross with him won’t help. It’ll come at his own pace. For now, it’s just part of who he is.’

Nick returned with a bottle and two glasses. ‘He’s doing great. We’re really hopeful. It’s fine, Mum.’

Eva took the wine from her son. ‘Well, I suppose you know best. He’s so like you.’ She clasped his wrist and laughed. ‘Such a clever little boy.’

Orla received Eva’s pointed message with perfect understanding. It sailed right over Nick’s head, of course, the sharp edge of female competition beneath Eva’s concern. Eva needed to believe that Nick was right about everything, that it was Nick who held their family together with his strong, decisive hands.

Orla’s head ached, the room was overly hot, and she wanted to be between cool sheets in a silent place full of open windows. She stood up and stepped quietly across the hallway, heading for the stairs. As she left the sitting room, she heard Nick and his father laughing, Eva cooing at the baby. She heard the crystalline kiss of the neck of a wine bottle against a tall glass, the dull retort of her father-in-law slapping his knee at a joke. She wondered what Sam’s voice might sound like, how long it might be until he joined in.

At the top of the stairs, Orla turned right, down the landing to Sam’s room and the guest room. Few of the ceilings had been wired for overhead lights and so most of the illumination came from strategically positioned lamps. When night came, the family were left to make their way from room to room via a series of golden pools, a little like stepping stones. The hallway was so vast, the landings so long, that one could spend a second or so in darkness before approaching the next island of light. Orla had left Sam’s night-light plugged in and it glowed a sickly orange. The door to the guest room was open a few inches, showing only darkness.

She went in and turned on a bedside lamp, shook down the duvet and smoothed it out. The curtains were open and she drew them tight against the night.

Small feet, running; a little shadow past the door.

‘Sam! No running upstairs, you know that.’ She heard him go into his room, the thump as he discarded his slippers on the floor. Orla sighed.

She heard Sam leave his own room and start, loudly, towards his parents’ bedroom.

‘Oh, Sam, come on –’ Orla stepped out of the room and caught the turn of his thin shoulder and the white flash of his leg as he slid from the solid darkness of the landing into the dim light of her bedroom.

‘Sam, stop it – you know it’s time for bed. Come here, please.’

A beat of silence.

‘Sam!’

She set off after him and knew that she was too tired to deal with him in her usual equable manner. She didn’t want to be cross with her son on Christmas Day, but she feared she might not be able to help it.

‘Orla!’

At Eva’s call, Orla stopped and turned to where her mother-in-law stood at the foot of the stairs in a river of mellow light spilling from the open door of the sitting room. Eva, pink-cheeked from white wine, hair escaping its tortoiseshell clip. Eva, afloat on those mesmerising black and white tiles, holding Sam, asleep, in her arms.

Orla opened her mouth. She put out her hands.

Eva held her grandson close. ‘Sam’s here, Orla. He’s down here, with me.’

Orla came down the stairs on legs that felt too easily buckled. ‘How long has he been asleep?’

‘Orla, what’s wrong?’

‘Jesus, Eva, just answer me.’

‘He fell asleep when you went upstairs. What is it? You look dreadful – are you ill?’

Orla put her hands on the banister. ‘No, no, I’m not ill. I’m all right. I’m – has he been with you? He hasn’t come upstairs?’

‘No, I told you, he’s been with me. Sit down, sit.’

‘I thought I saw him. Upstairs. It must have been something else.’ She shook her head.

Eva shifted Sam in her arms. ‘What?’

‘Nothing, it’s nothing. I’m sorry, I think I’m just tired.’

Eva stepped past her and disappeared up to the first floor. Sam’s white feet dangled over the crook of her elbow and Orla pressed her lips together to hold back the sudden and frantic compulsion to call out for her son, to make Eva bring him back, bring him back!

Instead, she sat alone on the stair and listened to Eva’s footsteps above. After a moment she rose and pulled hard at the cold brass handles of the front doors. Locked – of course they were. She’d locked them herself, hadn’t she? She felt the weight of the house at her back, the whole house, waiting for her to turn so that it might embrace and swallow her – as though it were a living animal, ready to bite.