I wasn’t at all frightened, actually.
Hetty smiled gently when she saw that I’d noticed her, and it felt quite natural to see her just standing there.
“Hello,” I said.
Hetty blushed—at least it looked like it in the faint light—and met my gaze.
“Hello,” she whispered. “Again.”
I was happy that she remembered me, but also because of something else that I couldn’t explain. Something about Hetty herself. She had the softest voice I’d ever heard, like silk against the string of a cello. It made you grow all warm inside, and I longed to hear her speak again.
But Hetty didn’t say anything else while she was brushing Wilma’s hair with long, steady strokes. Wilma’s eyes were closed the whole time and for a while I almost believed she had fallen asleep.
I stole a glance at Hetty and noticed that she had grown. The first time I saw her she had been as little as Signe, but now she was almost like me. Not quite, perhaps more like somewhere between Erland and me. She wasn’t wearing the sailor dress any longer, but a blouse and a narrow skirt that stopped just below the knees. Her clothes and her hair, which was cut in a bob, made me think of old movies.
“Who are you?”
Without me noticing, Wilma had opened her eyes. She was looking straight at Hetty, but she didn’t seem to be afraid.
“You know who I am,” Hetty said. “You know me.”
Wilma continued looking at her for a long time. Then she nodded.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “But I don’t really know how.”
Hetty stopped brushing and took a bundle of velvet ribbon from her pocket. She held the ribbon carefully between her lips while she gathered Wilma’s curls at the nape of her neck, and then she tied the ribbon around them in a bow. It looked really lovely, actually. I had never seen Wilma wear her hair like that before.
“Thank you,” Wilma said and reached for a powder compact on the table. “You?”
Hetty looked up.
“Yes?”
“Can…”
Wilma hesitated and grew quiet. Then she handed the compact to Hetty and started again.
“Can you do something with me? I mean, make me prettier?”
Hetty took the small round compact and looked at it for an instant. Then she shook her head.
“Only you can do that,” she said, putting the compact back on the table. “But I can show you how. Come with me.”
At first Wilma hesitated. She looked quizzically at the bottles and jars on the table, and then at Hetty. But Hetty was already halfway out of the door, so Wilma got up and followed her.
I followed a few steps behind, through the corridor towards the hallway. The house was really just like Henrietta’s. But the things that should have been to the left were to the right, and vice versa.
“I’ve heard that you enjoy reading.”
Hetty’s question made Wilma look up at her.
“Read?” she said hesitantly and pushed her glasses onto the bridge of her nose. “Sometimes. Yeah, I suppose I do.”
“But you do, Wilma,” I said. “You read all the time.”
Neither Wilma nor Hetty turned around. They hardly seemed to know that I was there.
“You can read people too,” Hetty continued. “You hear all the things that they’re not saying.”
Wilma didn’t reply, but she stopped and looked at Hetty.
“Not everyone can do that,” Hetty said and held her arm. “It’s a special gift.”
She opened a door and entered. After a couple of moments Wilma followed, and then me.
We went into a room full of books, and I mean full from floor to ceiling. On all the walls apart from the one with the windows, there were built-in bookshelves with row after row of books, and other books were piled on the tables and in small, low shelves by the floor. It could have been messy, but it wasn’t. There was an order to the wall of books’ spines, which made the room calm and restful. I was certain that I had never been there before, but when I walked over to the wall with the windows I recognized where I was. The view looked towards the part of the garden where Dad had told me there used to be a rose garden when he was little. I realized that the room was the same as the one that was used as a dining room in Henrietta’s house, only reversed.
“Sit down,” Hetty said, pointing towards the sofa in the middle of the room. “Kick off your shoes and make yourself comfortable.”
Wilma did as she was told, but it still didn’t look all that comfortable.
“But there are only books in here…” she said. “You were supposed to show me how I could be prettier.”
“Take a look at the books on the table for now,” Hetty said as if she hadn’t heard her. “I’ll look for some good ones.”
Wilma leant forward and looked suspiciously at the pile of books on the sofa table.
At first she just dragged her finger along the spines, and then she looked up. She wriggled out a thin green book with fabric covers from the pile and opened it.
I lay down on the sofa. It was lovely to stretch out next to Wilma, and nice to listen to her calm breathing right beside me. Apart from that the only sound was the faint scraping of Hetty every now and then moving the library steps she was standing on, or the rustling when Wilma turned a page. The feeling of sunlight was stronger in here, but I still could not see any blue sky outside the window.
How could it be day? It had been night when we entered the wardrobe.
It wasn’t important. Night turned into morning, which turned into day in the house of mirrors too, but it didn’t really matter.
In this room time could not alter anything. It was a comfortable thought, like Wilma’s arm around my shoulders, and I fell asleep wrapped in it.
I slept. I don’t know for how long, but when I woke up it was darker. Someone had covered me with a blanket, but Wilma had got up from the sofa. She was standing by the window with something in her hands. There was no sign of Hetty.
“Wilma?”
She turned her head.
“Come here, Tommy,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for me to wake up. “Come and have a look.”
My body was stiff and my feet stung and itched when I walked across the carpet. I stood behind Wilma and saw that it was a mirror she was holding. It was one of those oblong ones that you put up in hallways, with a simple wooden frame and barely a metre tall. We were both reflected in the mirror, along with the bookshelves behind us.
“Can you see?” she said.
I had to blink to stop my eyes from hazing over and all the time I wanted to yawn. I stifled the yawning and really tried to look.
“I see,” I said. “It’s you and me.”
“Take another look.”
I looked again, for a long time. And then I saw it.
Something had happened to Wilma. It was nothing peculiar, but she had changed. Her face was calmer, her neck straighter, her eyes clearer. To tell the truth, she looked just the same, but with one difference.
She was beautiful.
“How lovely,” I said. “Did Hetty help you with the make-up?”
Wilma smiled. It was a smile I had never seen on her face before, but it made me relaxed and full of hope.
“She helped me find my way home,” she said. “This is me.”
She waved her hand in front of herself and I couldn’t tell if she meant her reflection in the mirror, or the room, or what. Probably everything.
“From now on this room will always give me a way to look at the world,” she said. “Hetty told me so, and now I know that is how it is.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded. It was true, I realized that. For my own part I hadn’t changed at all, but the energy that streamed from Wilma was so tangible that it would be ridiculous to doubt it.
It struck me that the thing I’d been so afraid of had happened now, and that it wasn’t so bad after all. Wilma had changed, but it didn’t mean anything. If anything, she was more like my Wilma now.
She put the mirror down against the radiator under the window and reached out her hand for me.
“That’s it, Tommy,” she said when I took it. “We can go back now.”