Hush (8 page)

The driveway went on forever. There had been wrought iron gates at the entrance, improbably high, but that had been at least five minutes ago. The comforting crackle of tyres on gravel made Lily feel as if she were coming home. But this place wasn’t home. All she could see were trees, and, far in the distance, a house as big as a palace.

Her parents were talking in the front, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. The radio was on, playing a song that she knew. She didn’t sing along, but she mouthed the words, echoing the tune in her head. Some of the words were unrecognisable, and she made up her own language to fit in the gaps.

They pulled up next to some stone steps, which led up to a door at least twice the size of their front door at home. There was a brass knocker, a gargoyle with a loop in its mouth that sneered down at them from above. The building was very long, with rows of windows in both directions, neatly lined up with the windows on the floors above. All the windows had bars across them.

‘What do you reckon, Lils?’ Her father turned round from the driver’s seat to face her. She looked up, but didn’t reply.

‘There’s no point, Marcus.’ Her mother’s mouth, twisted with the bitterness of her own bad luck.

‘We wouldn’t be here if there was no point. Come on, Lily. Let’s go and find out if anyone’s home, shall we?’

Her mother didn’t bother waiting for Lily to answer.

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll park the car.’

Her father mumbled something that Lily didn’t hear and climbed out of the car, opening the rear door so that she could follow. Her mother shifted awkwardly into the driver’s seat. She didn’t look at the back seat.

‘Come on,’ her father said, reaching down to take Lily’s hand. She let him, and followed him up the stairs. The car drove off behind her.

‘Do you want to knock on the door?’

Lily looked up at the knocker, with its gargoyle that glinted slightly in the mid-afternoon sun. It looked more menacing than it had done from the car. She shook her head.

‘Okay, then.’

Her father reached up, grasped the loop of brass firmly in his fist, and knocked three times.

The inside of the house was dark, despite all the windows Lily had seen from the outside. The hallways were wide, with black and white checked floors that stretched into infinity. There were a lot of doors, and all of them were closed.

A man – who introduced himself as Dr Hadley, though he didn’t look much like a doctor – had answered the door, and was leading them through the house. There were other people around, and everyone nodded to Dr Hadley as they passed, and smiled at Lily. No one looked at her father. The further they got into the house, the more worried she became that her mother wouldn’t be able to find them once she’d parked the car, but no one mentioned it and she tried not to think about it.

Dr Hadley showed them into a room that was full of books. There was a desk in the corner, with several chairs around it, and he and Lily’s father sat on opposite sides of the desk. Lily went to look at the books. She was good at reading,
but she didn’t recognise many of the words in the titles. Some of the books were so old that the titles had faded, and she couldn’t make out the letters.

‘Eighteen months, you say?’ Dr Hadley’s voice, though quiet, carried across the room. Lily turned around, and saw that he was bent over his desk, writing. Her father had his back to her, but she could see him leaning forward, looking at what Dr Hadley was doing.

‘About that, yes. Maybe a bit more.’

‘Has she said anything at all since…?’ His voice lowered still further, and Lily couldn’t make out what he’d said. She turned back to the books. A lot of the titles had the word ‘child’ in them. So he was a doctor for children. For her. She wandered away from the desk, until their voices were just a murmur in the background.

At the far end of the room there was a window, without bars on. It was too high for her to see through when she was standing on the floor, but there was a low pipe running round the skirting board that she could balance on. Clinging on to the windowsill with her fingertips, she could just about see out. She’d been expecting to see the front of the house, but instead she found herself looking out on to a courtyard. It was covered with grass, and flowers, and there were people outside. Two children, not much older than her, cartwheeled up and down the grass while a woman in a nurse’s uniform watched from a distance.

Lily stayed there for a while, until she felt her feet getting hot through the thin rubber soles of her shoes. She realised the pipe must be like the radiators at home. She jumped down, and rejoined her father and Dr Hadley. The doctor was talking on a telephone now, while her father stared off into the distance.

‘We’ve been talking about you,’ Marcus said, lifting her on to his knee. ‘Dr Hadley thinks it might be a good idea for
you to stay here for a while. Just a week or two. So that he can keep an eye on you and help you get better. Would that be okay?’

Lily thought about it for a minute. She didn’t like the house much, or Dr Hadley. But she wouldn’t mind more time to look at the books, and the courtyard looked nice. She nodded.

‘Good girl. He’s just speaking to someone on the phone, and they’re going to find you a bedroom to sleep in. It’ll be like a holiday. Or going to boarding school.’

Lily had always been fascinated by the idea of going to boarding school.

‘I’m sure your mama will be here in a minute. Then we’ll say goodbye, and go away, because we can’t sleep here. But we’ll come back tomorrow.’

Lily knew she should feel afraid, being left here by herself. That was why her father was explaining everything. She didn’t feel much of anything.

Dr Hadley put down the phone, and looked up at them with a smile that didn’t quite look right. ‘We’ve found a room. Did your dad tell you, Lily? You’re going to be living with us for a little while.’

She looked up at him. His hair was going grey, like her father’s, and his glasses were too big for his face. They poked out over the edges, making him look like an owl.

She nodded, once.

Anna didn’t come inside, but crouched down on the front steps to give Lily a hug. ‘Goodbye, my darling. We’ll come back tomorrow. Make sure you be good and do everything the doctors tell you, won’t you?’

Lily tried to nod, but her mother was holding her too tightly and she couldn’t move.

‘Don’t worry if you hear any funny sounds. You’re quite safe here.’

Anna pulled back, keeping her hands on Lily’s shoulders. Lily noticed she was crying.

‘Goodbye, darling,’ she said again, looking Lily directly in the eye. She paused for a moment, perfectly still. Waiting. And then:

‘Oh, fucking forget it, then.’

‘In the beginning was the word.’ Richard was whispering, not sure if she was awake, not wanting to disturb her if she wasn’t. ‘And the word was…’

There was a pause, long enough for him to think that she was indeed asleep. He almost rolled over and left her to it. And then:

‘Lumbered.’ She was smiling, her eyes still closed. It was one of their favourites.

‘Okay. Well, once upon a time, in old England, there lived a girl called Sarah. She was a servant girl, and had been all her life, working with her mother and her grandmother and her two sisters, for a family called Stephenson. They weren’t a bad family to work for, despite the fact that they were very rich and very posh; they owned a house in London and another in the country, and acres of forest land, but they were always kind and never treated their servants as slaves. Sarah, as the oldest of her sisters, was in charge of looking after the two daughters of the family, Amelia and Amanda.

‘Amelia and Amanda were only a year apart in age, and virtually inseparable. They were both very lively, and kept Sarah busy all day, so that by the time she went to bed she was usually exhausted, and fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

‘Because they were very rich, Amelia and Amanda were constantly being given new toys to play with; and, because they got bored easily, they tired of their new toys very quickly.
Their parents were kind enough to pass on these disregarded playthings to Sarah’s sisters, who were similar in age, but it wasn’t long before they outgrew them, and it fell upon Sarah to find somewhere to store them.

‘Luckily, there was a room in the house known as the lumber room. It was the home for all the furniture that had been broken or discarded throughout the years, and, because the Stephensons were a very old and very rich family, the room was very large. It was one of Sarah’s favourite places to go, because there was so much history there. Her favourite piece of furniture was a beautiful old four-poster bed. One of the posts was broken, but it made no difference to Sarah; when the house was quiet and she had no work to do, her favourite pastime was to lie on the bed and imagine she was a princess.

‘No one else ever went in the lumber room, except to put things in there; and so it came to be that Sarah knew its contents better than anyone else. Admittedly most of the things in there were broken, but she loved them nonetheless.

‘When Amanda and Amelia were old enough to be thinking about finding husbands and starting their own families, the Stephensons fell on hard times. Mr Stephenson ran his own business, and in the winter of Amanda’s fifteenth year the business fell apart. It was quickly revealed that he had built up a lot of debt in the course of trying to save the business, and that he now owed a lot of money to people that he wasn’t able to pay back. The decision was made to sell the country house and move the whole family to London permanently, so that he could find a new job more easily.

‘There were, of course, many consequences that arose from this decision, and for a while Sarah and her family were worried for their jobs. Luckily, it transpired that they were to move to London with the family, although the rest of the servants would have to look for work elsewhere.

‘The most unfortunate consequence for Sarah was that the lumber room, and all its items, were to be abandoned in the country. She almost wept when she found out that the contents of her treasured room would not be coming with them; but of course there would be no space for a pile of broken furniture in the modest London house.

‘Amelia and Amanda, being Sarah’s friends as well as her employers, realised how much it upset her to be leaving all those memories behind. When she explained that the main thing that upset her was the thought of leaving everything by itself to rot in the lumber room, they decided to organise a sale, so that every item of furniture could find a new home. They enlisted Sarah to help with clearing the room, and they had many hours of fun sorting through all of their old toys, which of course, being young women now, they had completely forgotten about.

‘On the day of the sale they laid out everything on their lawns, and invited all of their neighbours to come and see what they had to offer. Because their neighbours were very kind and they wanted to help the Stephensons, they came to see if there was anything that was worth buying, and many of them went home well pleased. But there were still several items left at the end of the day, one of them being the four-poster bed; and Sarah, though she knew there was nothing more that could be done, was very sorry to know that she had to leave it behind.

‘Soon afterwards they all travelled to London to live in the new house. Sarah and her family had all been there before, although they didn’t feel so at home there as they had in the country. When they arrived they made their way promptly to the servants’ quarters (which, because the Stephensons were so kind, were actually just another wing of the house); and because there were fewer servants than usual, the others having lost their jobs, there was enough space for them to
have a room each. The rooms had already been assigned, and Sarah made her way to her room straight away.

‘She didn’t know, of course, that Amelia and Amanda had arranged for all of the leftover furniture from the lumber room sale to be brought to her room for her to look after; and so she got a wonderful shock when she walked through the door to find the four-poster bed waiting for her.

‘Although her young friends had tried to explain to their parents how she felt about the lumber room, Mr and Mrs Stephenson never did quite understand, and so from that point on they always referred to Sarah as having been “lumbered” with their old furniture.’

Richard told the story with his eyes closed, preferring to wait until the end to see Lily’s reaction. It was worth it; when he opened his eyes she was facing him, smiling. ‘I like Sarah,’ she said, tilting her head forward to kiss him on the nose.

‘I like you,’ he replied, pulling her closer to him and returning her kiss. ‘And I especially like waking up next to you and knowing we don’t have to go anywhere.’

‘Don’t you have to go to work?’

‘Nah. I told them what happened. They said take as long as you need.’ He leaned in to kiss her properly, so that he wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. He never had been any good at lying.

‘Nice of them.’

‘Well, even horrible newspapers have to be nice sometimes. So. My little invalid.’ He grinned. ‘What can I get you? Coffee? Toast? Pancakes?’

‘Pancakes? Really?’

‘Well, seeing as we have to get your strength up. With maple syrup?’

She nodded. ‘And banana?’

‘Done.’ He laughed softly. ‘Do you think all women are this easily pleased?’

‘Mmm. Probably more so. But you’d have to put up with them chattering all the time.’

‘Couldn’t be having that.’ He took one more look at her, duvet pulled up to her chin, tousled dark blonde hair poking out from under the covers, and then rolled out of bed in one smooth movement.

The house was empty by the time Connie awoke. Nathan had left her a coffee by the bed. He’d dropped the boys at school on the way to work, as he always did. Usually Connie would have been up to make them breakfast, but evidently she’d been so tired she’d managed to sleep through the alarm. She reached out a hand to feel the coffee mug, and found it cold.

They’d argued when she got home the night before. Nothing serious; their arguments were rarely serious enough to be continued from one day to the next. He thought she was overreacting about Lily, worrying too much as usual. Didn’t understand. Would never understand, how it felt: as if she had to protect Lily, shelter her from the world.

Richard would have understood, of course, but there was no sense in phoning him now. They were probably still asleep. Or maybe he’d gone to work.

But he wouldn’t, surely, leave Lily to look after herself.

She wanted to speak to Lily. Such a stupid thing, when you saw someone every week. How to explain that it felt as if you never saw them at all?

Hadn’t seen them, in fact, for years?

She pulled the covers over her head. Considered staying there for the rest of the day. For a split second she could imagine it: Nathan’s face, when he got home to find that she’d spent the whole day in bed.

He’d call a doctor, of course. One that wasn’t him.

She pushed the covers back again, reached for the phone. Maybe Richard would be at work. Then changed her mind. Retracted her hand and sank back into the bed, exhausted.

Maybe she would leave it until tomorrow.