Feeling like an intruder, Sarah unlocked the large front door of number 19 Charlotte Square. She picked up the post from the floor and placed it on the hall table. Despite the warmth of the late-summer sun outside, the house was cold and smelled musty.
The hall, which still had the original mosaic tiles, was almost as big as her entire flat. There were oil paintings on the wall and a small ornately carved table with a Bakelite telephone. A mahogany and wrought-iron staircase led upstairs.
She opened a door to her left and entered. It was a sitting room, pretty much as it must have been in Victorian times, right down to the heavy damask curtains hanging on the full-length windows that overlooked the residents’ gardens in the square. The only nod to modernity was a gas fire.
Across from the sitting room was a dining room, furnished in a similar style but with a large, heavily polished mahogany table and chairs. The fireplace in this room had a bucket of coal and kindling next to it. In front of the window was a desk and she wondered if Lord Glendale used this room as an office.
Upstairs, the largest of the numerous bedrooms had obviously been Lord Glendale’s. The room was tidy, the bed neatly made, although his jacket, a dark blue and purple tweed, still hung over the back of an armchair. It smelled vaguely, but not unpleasantly, of tobacco smoke. But it was the painting above the fireplace that drew her attention. It was of the woman in the photo. She was wearing a cream blouse with little mother-of-pearl buttons. She sat on a rock with her knees drawn up to her chin, her woollen skirt pulled over her knees. The sea was behind her and in the distance, cliffs. Her blond hair was blowing across her face, wisps caught in the corner of her mouth. Unlike her wary expression in the photograph Lord Glendale had left for her mother, she was laughing, as if caught in a moment of perfect happiness.
On the mantelpiece, directly below the painting and next to a neat row of pipes, was a silver-framed black-and-white photograph of the same woman, this time wearing a man’s shirt over a black one-piece bathing suit. She was towelling her hair as if she’d just come out of the sea. Magdalena Drobnik had clearly meant a great deal to Lord Glendale.
It felt intrusive to be in his bedroom so Sarah continued with her exploration of the first floor.
As well as the bedrooms, there was a bathroom with a Victorian steel claw-foot bath and, as she peeped around the door at the end of the hall, a large, elegant drawing room.
Another flight of stairs took her up to three small attic rooms. This, she imagined, would have been where the servants lived in the days when people still had them. Now the rooms were used for storage. There were several cardboard boxes and old-fashioned trunks lined up neatly against the wall.
She retraced her steps to the drawing room on the first floor. Light flooded in through the large floor-to-ceiling sash windows, which, like the sitting room below, looked out to the residents’ gardens in the centre of Charlotte Square. A faded Persian carpet covered most of the polished wooden floor and oil paintings – originals, Sarah suspected – hung from picture rails. Tall, dark-wood bookcases lined the walls and Sarah ran her fingers over the spines. Interspersed between leather-bound first editions were a few paperbacks, mainly thrillers, but also the odd crime novel.
Above the fireplace, an oversized gilt mirror reflected a group of paintings that made her gasp and whirl around. She hadn’t noticed them when she’d first stepped into the room as they had been hidden by the door. They were landscapes – or more precisely seascapes – painted in bold, sure strokes and the artist had captured the sea in motion so well, Sarah could almost smell the salt air, feel the spray on her face.
She knew the artist. It was Mum.
The memory of their last holiday rushed back, bringing with it a sickening sense of grief and loss.
It was a summer afternoon, and Sarah had been between her junior and senior honour years. She’d returned from her waitressing job hot, sticky and irritated, to find her mother in the back garden, her shoes kicked off and drinking a glass of wine. Her mother was always immaculately groomed – except for the oil-paint under her fingernails when she was working on a canvas. She never went barefoot and she certainly never sprawled. One of these facts was unusual, taken together they filled Sarah with something she couldn’t quite define. Unease? Sadness? Most of all, she felt a terrible longing. She stood at the back door and watched her for a moment. Her mother’s eyes were closed, her face tilted slightly towards the sun, her toes pressing into the lawn. She looked almost abandoned; that was the word that came to mind.
Tentatively Sarah stepped towards her, the soft grass muting her approach. She looked down on the woman who was her mother but whom she had never felt to be her friend.
As if sensing her, her mother’s eyes opened and she smiled – another rarity. It lit her face and made her seem younger. More like the mother Sarah remembered before her father had left her – left them both.
‘Oh, hello, Sarah. I didn’t expect you back so soon.’ She waved her glass. ‘Would you be a love and get me a refill? And why don’t you join me?’
Sarah’s unease grew. Mum never drank and disapproved of Sarah drinking. Before Sarah left for a night out, her mother always gave her a list of warnings: never let anyone allow you to become separated from your friends; don’t go anywhere with anyone you don’t know – especially if it’s a man; put a jacket on or you’ll freeze to death; take a pair of sensible shoes with you; make sure you have enough money to get a taxi home – you never know who is on these late night buses… And so the list went on. If her mother had her way, Sarah would spend every evening at home watching TV drinking nothing stronger than cocoa. So for her to be drinking and to ask Sarah to join her was, well, unheard of.
But nice. Perhaps now that she was almost twenty-one her mother had decided she was adult enough to be trusted to look after herself. Whatever the reason, Sarah was intrigued by this new side of her.
She poured her mother a fresh glass of wine from the fridge, noting that half the bottle was already gone.
‘Here you are,’ she said, passing her mother the glass before sitting down on the lawn. Her mother didn’t even insist on her getting a blanket in case she spoiled her clothes.
‘Here’s to summer.’ Her mother raised her glass for Sarah to chink. The wine was good, much better than anything Sarah had drank at university – of course, despite her mother’s warnings, she had had her fair share of tipsy evenings.
‘Is that what we’re celebrating?’ Sarah asked.
Her mother waved her hand in the air and a little wine splashed on the ground. ‘I’ve sold a painting! My first one! Can you believe it? And the gallery wants more. Lots more.’
‘That’s wonderful, Mum.’
‘We should take a trip,’ her mother said, ‘to celebrate my sale and your twenty-first. Where would you like to go?’ She leaned forward and fixed her brown eyes on her daughter. ‘If you could choose anywhere – anywhere at all – where would it be? Imagine the world was your oyster.’
Go on holiday? They never went on holiday. Her mother barely left the house. Sarah would have loved to have gone backpacking in Europe or volunteer in Africa the same as Gilly, but Mum had made it clear that that was out of the question. Trips, especially to third-world countries, were filled with dangers, both specific and unimaginable. So what could she suggest? Where would her mother like to go?
‘What about Italy? We could go on the train as far as Dover and take a ferry from there and then another train.’
‘Abroad,’ her mother said doubtfully.
So much for the world being her oyster. It was getting smaller by the minute. Sarah searched frantically for an alternative. ‘The west coast of Scotland, then? Or Dorset or Devon?’ The idea took hold. ‘We could go and see our old house. The one with the apple tree in the back garden.’
Another shadow crossed her mother’s face. Clearly the thought of revisiting Devon, where they’d lived when Sarah was a little girl and her parents still together held little appeal. ‘Dorset then?’
Mum set her glass on the grass and clapped her hands together. ‘Dorset, it is. I’ll find us a little cottage somewhere we can see the sea. We could go next week.’
Sarah had been planning to visit Matthew in London but she held her tongue. This trip could mean a new start for her and Mum – a chance to get to know one another. She couldn’t let it slip away. ‘Dorset would be great.’
Now five years on she wondered if one of these paintings was the one they’d celebrated? If so, Lord Glendale’s buying it had made Mum happier than Sarah had ever seen her. It had also been the start of her mother’s success as an artist. So who was he? He’d bought a number of her paintings, left her properties in his will, yet Mum had been emphatic about not knowing him.
As a clock chimed, she glanced at her watch. Damn, it was four. Gilly was coming for an early supper and Sarah hadn’t been to the shops yet. In addition, she had to drop into the office with the proofs she’d been working on at home. As long as she’d been working as a copy editor she’d never missed a deadline and she didn’t want to start now.
But she needed to know more about Lord Glendale and the mysterious, beautiful woman in the photograph. And she had an idea where she could start.