As I stare out of the window at Pittville Park and watch the pigeons – small black shapes lining up on the roof of one of the houses on the opposite side of the wide expanse of the park – I hear my daughter calling her father. She must be hungry. I am flooded with energy, so I grab my dressing gown and rush down the three flights of stairs to the bowels of the house. There are eggs and bread, I’m sure. I’ll make her boiled eggs with toast fingers; her favourite. But when I burst into the kitchen, tripping with anticipation, the aroma of beef stew greets me, and I know I’m interrupting when I see her sitting at the scrubbed pine table with Mrs Wilkes, our housekeeper. They are close together, and both stare at me. I blink back at them and want to point out it is me who belongs. Me who has lived here the longest.
My mind switches and the years peel back to the old days when the house belonged to my father and then to me after my mother died from the dreadful influenza. My father went to live in Bantham in Devon where our summer residence was, and he remains shut away there. He misses my mother and I really did try to visit, until travelling became too tricky. But before, when I was a child, I was happy enough in this old place.
I long to keep that window into a much safer past open for longer, but Mrs Wilkes gets up and as she does the window slams shut and I am jolted back to the present.
‘I stayed on. I hope you don’t mind, madam, but the girl needed feeding.’
I nod at her but feel the judgement in her voice.
‘Darling,’ I say, turning to my child. ‘Would you like me to read your bedtime story tonight?’
She raises her head and looks directly at me. ‘No thank you, Mummy, Daddy has promised to do it.’
I bite my lip and swallow. Then I turn on my heels and head for the stairs, moisture pricking my lids.
People here give me anxious looks and tell me it’s my nerves. Once I heard our housekeeper gossiping with the delivery boy – the delivery boy! ‘She’s a martyr to her nerves.’ But it’s not my nerves: I fear the voice.
Back upstairs in my room the rain is buffeting the window and the park looks bleak as dusk darkens into night. But I can still make out the lights in the houses on the other side of the park, and those little rectangles of gold, shining like beacons, give me hope. I imagine happy families, the husband coming home from work, throwing down his hat and embracing his wife. The children, maybe three of them, scooting down the stairs with cries of, ‘Daddy, my daddy is home.’ And the wife shooing them into the playroom, so Daddy can read his freshly ironed newspaper while enjoying a Laphroaig whisky in peace.
‘Drink, darling?’ she will say, with no idea of the frailty of things.