WHEN AFTERNOON TEA HAS BEEN reduced to tiers of crumbs, Isabelle stands. ‘Time for me to go,’ she says. ‘And for you to hand over your phones, Kindles, tablets, laptops, smart watches – anything that has internet access.’
‘Is this necessary?’ Rachel asks, hesitating before placing her phone in Isabelle’s briefcase. Her voice lowers, ‘It’s not as if Aunt Liliana is here.’
‘Then why whisper? Worried her ghost will hear?’ Sara says. Her saracasm is stronger than even Lily remembers.
‘You’d better hope not,’ Tom says.
‘What do you mean?’ Sara snaps.
Tom smirks. ‘Do you think your mum would be proud of you? Not going to her funeral but making sure you’re in the running for her house?’
‘At least I’m not a hypocrite like the rest of you,’ Sara replies.
The atmosphere chills as if placed in an ice bucket.
‘The rules of the game will be adhered to,’ Isabelle says. ‘While I’ve been close to your family for all of my life, I’m still acting according to Liliana’s will and wishes. As such, I hand the running of the game and the house over to Mrs Castle. I’ll be back on the 5th of January to crown the winner.’
Lily feels an undertow of panic. ‘So that’s it till then?’ she says. ‘We won’t see you at all?’
‘Liliana made it plain where she wanted me,’ Isabelle says. ‘And that is out of your way. I intend to keep to the letter of her instructions.’
‘There’s eight of us. That’s a lot of work for Mrs Castle,’ Tom says. ‘I presume we can help out?’
‘Nothing in the rules to say you can’t. As Ronnie is a chef, he may want to cook a few—’
‘Damn right!’ Ronnie says.
‘There are supplies and ingredients in the pantry, ready-made platters in the freezers, wine in the cellar, ice in the freezer and ice house,’ Isabelle continues. ‘With more storms forecast over the next week, you may get snowed in. Should the very worst happen, we’ve ensured there’s enough food and drink to last a month, even with your impressive appetites.’
Lily shivers at the thought of being trapped here: snow outside; Sara’s cold sniping inside.
Isabelle must have seen Lily’s concern as she’s looking at her when she says, ‘But don’t worry. That’s really unlikely. You’ll be fine.’ She pauses, scans the room. ‘Any other questions before I go?’
‘I presume when one of us wins and inherits,’ Sara says. ‘Can we do what we like with the place?’
‘Absolutely,’ Isabelle says. Lily detects, though, the curl of her lip as Isabelle lowers her head to pack up her briefcase.
‘Even sell it?’ Gray says.
‘I don’t see why the winner can’t sell it,’ Lily says.
‘You would say that,’ Sara says. ‘You were always shit at the Christmas Game.’
‘She wasn’t,’ Tom says, quickly. ‘She won a few then dropped back when you all made fun of her.’ Tom smiles over at Lily and she feels a wave of gratitude. Another person who saw her.
Lily had often known the answers to the Christmas Game. Probably because she loved learning from Mum, Grandma Violet and Aunt Liliana. But standing out made her a target, so she backed off, feigned ignorance. Sometimes she thinks she was born with a laced-up corset for a mouth.
‘You always did have rose-tinted spectacles when it came to Lily,’ Sara says to Tom. ‘Sweet, really.’ Her sneer says she thinks it anything but sweet. ‘If Lily knew the answers, why wouldn’t she say?’
She has a point.
‘Time for me to leave you to your Christmas bickering,’ Isabelle says.
‘Are you allowed to speak to us like that?’ Sara says. Her chin dips into her neck.
Isabelle smiles, and a flicker of the woman who met Lily at the door re-emerges. ‘I represent Liliana and her memory, I don’t have to be more polite to you than necessary,’ she says, closing the belt on her bag. Lily suddenly thinks of making a business-wear corset shaped like a briefcase and giving it to Isabelle. She chases the thought away.
Striding to the door, Isabelle looks back at the group. Lily hopes that her gaze will settle on her like soft snow, but it falls across the other tables. ‘Happy Christmas, everyone. Try and have fun.’
And then she’s gone. The front door closes, and her steps crunch away.
Even with Tom and Ronnie here, Lily feels alone.
‘Are you going to drink that?’ Sara says, nodding towards Lily’s untouched glass of champagne.
Lily shakes her head. ‘Help yourself,’ she says.
Sara takes the glass and sips, closing her eyes. ‘Touch of lemon, shot of sherbet fizz. And just the right amount of yeast.’
Funny how yeast in champagne is good, but in an infection it’s bad. That’d be another good reply, for someone braver than her.
Mrs Castle glooms into the room. ‘Your rooms are all ready. Liliana assigned your bedchambers; your names are on the doors. Miss Lily, you’re in your old room.’
Lily feels the glances of her cousins slide her way.
‘Your luggage is on your beds,’ Mrs Castle says, rubbing her arm. ‘I took it up myself. Good job it’s snowing, otherwise all those clothes you’ve brought would be wasted.’ She stares at Ronnie who bursts into giggles. His laughter dies under her dowsing glare. ‘I’m sure you are all old enough and ugly enough to unpack your own suitcases. Cocktails will be served at seven, dinner at half past. Be prompt, if you please.’
*
Lily climbs the staircase, fingers tracing the familiar finials on the bannister. The carpet has changed since she was last here – the corporate grey from when Endgame was a conference centre has been replaced with plush hotel red. The creaks are still present, though, from the floorboards underneath. They whisper that nothing changes, not deep down. They crack as she steps on the fifth step, sigh on the seventh. She used to avoid those steps while playing hide-and-seek, or tread on them on purpose to send Tom looking the other way.
On the first-floor landing, she looks down the corridor leading off to the right. Some doors are open, some closed. A flash of her walking into Grandma Violet’s room comes into her mind, of holding her moth-soft hand. She turns, trying to blink away the grief.
As she makes her way up to the second floor, the flashbacks keep coming. The Sunday she and Mum strung a violin on the landing; the night she couldn’t sleep and crept around the silent house; the time she and Isabelle . . . every step sets off memories, like slinkies falling down stairs.
Her bedroom is, and was, on the second floor, in the East Wing. She stops by her door. On the other side of the corridor is Liliana’s room and the old nursery. Flashes of memory spark of playing in the nursery with her cousins. It’s like seeing little ghosts: her seven-year-old self trying to teach Ronnie object permanence by hiding a ball under a blanket. Ronnie blinking at her and toddling off to look in the airing cupboard. ‘It’s under there,’ Lily had said to him, pointing at the blanket. ‘It never goes away, even if you hide it.’
Opposite the nursery is her mum’s old room. Lily walks along the corridor towards it. It’s hard to catch her breath. She feels like someone is squeezing her lungs shut like an accordion. There are bare floorboards in this corridor, unchanged since Endgame was a private house in the nineteen twenties and the second floor reserved for staff. The Armitages kept the same arrangement when they took on the house and turned it into a conference centre – this time it was the owners that were kept out of the way.
The rug is the same, too. A dark red streak running along the hall like blood down a spine.
She turns away. She can’t go in Mum’s room. Not yet.
Instead, she opens the door into her old bedroom. She feels something like a hand on her throat as she gasps. The room is almost exactly the same as when she left it. She’s playing spot-the-difference with her own past.
One wall is covered in posters. The Spice Girls pose next to Eternal and Hanson as if they’ve merged into one almighty nineties supergroup. Tori Amos smiles with her lips closed. Christian Slater slants an eyebrow. There’s a smudge on Gillian Anderson’s lips from where Lily once practised snogging. Madonna stares down at her with blonde ambition, as if asking Lily what she’s done with her life. Lily doesn’t answer, instead turns to her old bed, tucked against the wall. On the pillow sits Christina, the doll her mum had made her one Christmas. Christina is a rag doll, with a dress made up of Lily’s old baby clothes cut into strips and sewn together by hand. Mum had always said that nothing was wasted, that you can make patterns from anything.
Lily doesn’t remember leaving Christina on her bed; in fact, she’s sure that, after Mum’s death, she’d placed the doll in the wardrobe so she didn’t have to look at her. Looking at all those embellishing stitches her mum had sewn had felt like a needle passing through Lily’s heart again and again, but with no thread to unbreak it.
Liliana must have left instructions to leave Christina on the bed. Liliana was as soft as the medjool dates she loved at Christmas. Lily loved them too, although she never forgot the stone inside.
That bit of stone inside her aunt is what summoned Lily here. It’s cruel, when she thinks of it, to ask her to return to this house, with its secrets written on walls and she’s the one who has to strip back the wallpaper. If Liliana had wanted to expose the truth, she could have done so at any time. Why wait till now? Why leave it up to Lily? She could’ve just told Lily what happened to her mum. It’s not fair to put her through this.
Anger swells inside Lily like the crescendo in a forty-part motet, voices within her crying out. She doesn’t have to do this. The secrets can stay hidden as far as she’s concerned. She won’t unpack, she’ll just leave.
There’s still time to drive back down to London and be in her teeny flat by midnight. Or she’ll find a Premier Inn on the way, if there’s room. Anything but staying here.
Unless the snow stops her.
She moves over to the window, avoiding looking directly at the maze. Dusk has given way to winter dark. Victorian-style lamps cast haloes of golden light onto the grounds to the back of Endgame House.
The snow is already deep. It’s up to the knees of the statue on the lawn. It’s of a woman, naked but for a stone toga. As a kid, Lily had felt sorry for her, and once dressed the sculpture, which she had called Mary, in a parka and woolly hat. Is it more or less dignified to be covered in snow when you’re so exposed all the time? Doesn’t matter. The snow’s falling even as she thinks. She’d have to leave now. The roads round here get hazardous quickly. Aunt Veronica and Uncle Edward died in an accident on a night like this.
She turns to go, then stops. There’s a pull in her, making her look back. She knows she shouldn’t, but she can’t stop herself directing her gaze at the maze. Her heart picks up speed, urging her to run, but she’s stuck still, like Mary the statue. Maybe she too got frozen by looking back and now is forced to stay that way.
The maze is huge, at one time the biggest in the UK. It was built to be the same size as the house, before the East and West Wings were added. Its twists and false endings are picked out in snow. The tops of the tall hedges are white, the paths shown up in shadow. The way through the maze is not as clear as it used to be, though; the hedges not cut as sharp.
Her eyes, though, can still follow the route to the hidden section where Mum was found. And then she sees her, as she does every night in dreams that leave her sheets twisted: Mum slumped against the hedge, her neck all wrong. Her eyes staring straight ahead, unblinking.
Lily grabs the heavy curtain and pulls it across the window. Even so, she can still feel the maze behind the velvet. Her breath is sprinting, hard to catch. A panic attack is at her throat.
She tries to focus on sensations that root her in her body, that’s what her therapist told her. She closes her eyes. Feels the worn rug under her feet. Her old desk against her legs.
As her breathing slows, she opens her eyes. Her desk is also as she left it. Her fountain pens and biros are in a neat row, ready to be picked out of the line-up. Scissors sit next to a set square. Blue ink fingerprints still stain the wood. Two child-safe knitting needles hold the beginnings of a woolly scarf. A coloured pencil bouquet sprays out of a Simpsons mug. She can still remember the last time she sat at the desk. She had written a goodbye note in Isabelle’s favourite colour – red. The pencil had needed sharpening and the shavings still lie curled up on the desk, like lipsticked woodlice. She takes the red pencil from the mug. All this time it’s been waiting, not doing what it’s meant for.
‘I kept the note, you know,’ Isabelle says from the doorway.
Lily turns, heart pounding. The pencil drops onto the floorboards and rolls towards the skirting board. ‘You can still creep up on me, then,’ she says.
‘You always were off in your own world.’ Isabelle walks in, briefcase in her hand, and closes the door, but not before checking there’s no one in the hallway.
For a moment, Lily is ten again, and her mum is down the hall, singing to herself, and Isabelle is in the doorway with her book and a bag of apples as they’re off to the attic to both pretend to be Jo from Little Women. They’d then do wordsearches and crosswords together, making their own language, composing silly songs. She has a strong urge to grab the cushions and blankets from the bed and climb up to the attic with Isabelle, make a fort as they used to with the boxes, the ottoman and the dressmaker’s doll. Under there, canopied by Grandma Violet’s holey crochet, they’d dust off the years that had settled between them until their friendship shone again.
And then she remembers. She’s leaving.
Isabelle moves over to the window, a few feet away and peels back the curtain to gaze over the snow-smothered lawn. ‘You’ll have to hurry if you’re going. The road out will be impassable within an hour.’
Lily takes a step back. ‘How did you—?’
‘You’re not exactly making yourself at home,’ Isabelle interrupts, nodding at Lily’s still-full suitcase. ‘I get it, there are memories everywhere. I’d say you got in here, had a head-to-head with the past, and decided you couldn’t be arsed to stay.’
Isabelle is seeing her for the second time today.
Even more reason to go.
Lily moves off to get her luggage, but Isabelle stops her, placing a hand on her shoulder. She feels warmer under her touch. ‘Liliana said in her letter that if you came she’d let you know more about your mum’s death.’
‘I’ve lived without knowing so far.’
‘Are you really living, though? Or just playing at it like you used to play the Christmas Game – keeping close to the wall, hoping no one will see you mouth the answers? Do you live as you should, as your mum wanted you to?’
Lily knocks Isabelle’s hand away. ‘Low blow, Izzy.’ She pushes past and grabs her suitcase.
Just as she opens the door, Isabelle calls out, ‘It wasn’t just your mum who was murdered.’
Lily stops. Her stomach clenches and she has to hold onto the wall. ‘Who? Liliana? You think they were both killed?’
‘I know it. I just can’t prove it. And I tried to get the police to investigate, but there was no evidence. They say it was simple. Liliana had an asthma attack and, as a result, her heart failed.’
‘Then why do you think someone killed her?’
‘She was convinced someone would murder her before the game started, that’s why she had me enshrine the rules and everything else into the will. Liliana may have been frustratingly cryptic, but she wasn’t delusional. It’s too much of a coincidence that she died when she did.’
‘And she never believed in those.’
‘“Look for the pattern,” she always said.’ It was true. Liliana believed that words repeated, whether in a book, a poem, or someone’s drunken monologue after dinner, reveal everything if you look hard enough. She’d have made a great detective.
‘So, who did it?’ Lily said after a while.
Isabelle closes her eyes. ‘Wish I knew.’ She looks older suddenly, as if all the years between them have just caught up with her. ‘I’d have killed them myself already.’
Lily believes her. If Isabelle would do that for Aunt Liliana, then the least Lily can do is help. ‘I’ll stay, for a day or so anyway,’ she says. ‘If the clues lead nowhere, then I’ll leave with the snow.’
Isabelle’s grin is huge. ‘Fair enough,’ she says. ‘Then I won’t see you when I come back on the 5th?’
‘I’ll be long gone.’ Lily remembers then what Izzy said earlier. ‘Why did you come back in? You said you had to leave.’
‘I had to talk to you first. Tell you what I was going to earlier before we were interrupted. I didn’t want the others to know I was still here. I could do without Sara pestering me.’
‘I thought you said you were a rule follower?’ Lily says.
‘This was in the rules, the ones given just for me.’ Isabelle takes a folder out of her briefcase. ‘Liliana wanted me to give you this. Her Christmas present to you. And before you ask, no, it’s not cheating.’
Lily runs through the rules in her head. ‘Any papers in the house!’ she says. ‘It’s there in the rules.’ Opening the folder, she glances inside. It contains a blueprint of the house from before the East and West Wings were added.
‘This gives me an advantage, I assume?’ Lily asks.
Isabelle’s eyes shine. ‘Bending rules so that they stretch but not break is part of their appeal. You should remember that when you play the game. Your cousins certainly will.’ Isabelle’s face grows solemn again. ‘One last warning. I’m certain that whoever killed your aunt is after the house, so please be careful.’
‘I will. And I’ll bend the rules till they creak but won’t break them. Like corset bones.’
They smile at each other, and Lily feels their old connection begin to knit together.
She feels a pang, a tug on the wool, as Isabelle moves towards the door. ‘Is that it, then? I’m left here on my own with, potentially, a murderer and I have to find them out?’
‘You’ve got Ronnie and Tom.’ Isabelle points to the desk. ‘And Christina will keep you company. I thought she might remind you of the home you once had here. Good luck,’ she says, and walks slowly out as if she too wants to keep the connection between them for as long as possible. She stops in the hallway and leans against the door. ‘I meant it, you know. The note where you said goodbye. I still have it.’
‘I should have come to you before I left. Said it all in person,’ Lily replies. She swallows back the next bit: Maybe then you’d have replied.
‘When I was older, I realised you had to get out of here and not come back,’ Isabelle says.
‘But you didn’t at the time.’
Isabelle stares down at the floor, but even from across the room Lily can see the flash of pain crease her forehead. Isabelle then shrugs, a half-smile forming. ‘We were kids,’ she says, as if that covers those years like a snowfall on a stone path.
Lily knows, though, that unsaid hurt also has object permanence. Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it goes away. The unuttered has been growing inside her ever since Mum died, and even more so now. She’d love to be honest with Isabelle, tell her everything.
‘You know what you said about me having an heir?’ Lily says.
Isabelle nods.
‘If I have one, in the future, they’re not eligible to inherit, right? Because of what I signed?’
‘Technically, according to Liliana’s will, your heir could inherit. Although you’d have had to be pregnant when you signed the papers. If a child was already conceived, then your aunt’s old will would stand.’ Isabelle laughs. ‘She always did like a technicality.’
Lily laughs too, shakes her head as if her being pregnant is the least likely thing in the world. Her hand, though, floats to her corseted belly and strokes back and forth. She tries to stop herself, but Isabelle has already seen.
‘Tell me you’re not,’ Isabelle says. She’s no longer smiling. ‘Because that could make things very difficult. Dangerous, even.’ Without the light in her eyes that sounds almost like a threat.
‘I’m not,’ Lily replies.
Isabelle nods as if reassured. But she’s still staring at Lily’s tummy. ‘You can trust me, you know.’
There’s nothing Lily wants more than to trust her. She imagines what it would be like to be open with her. With anyone. She’d be vulnerable, squishy. A date without a stone.
‘Can you imagine if I was?’ Lily says, keeping her voice light. ‘What would I know about being a parent? I’d be terrible. I’d have no idea how to be a mother.’
Isabelle laughs but she’s still not smiling. The connection between them lies frayed on the floor. ‘Be careful anyway,’ she says. ‘If anyone in this house thinks you’re a threat . . .’ She leaves the sentence without casting off, then walks out of the room, not once looking back.
Lily waits till she can hear Isabelle going downstairs before closing the door, lifting off her dress and scrabbling with the hooks on the front of her corset. When the last hook is released, and the laces loosened, she breathes out. She goes over to her bed and lies down next to Christina. Her hand goes again to her rounded belly, and the foetus fluttering inside.