In Her Shadow (11 page)

On the days when Mrs Brecht was in the hospice, Ellen said it was better if I didn’t go into the house.

‘Papa can’t bear it when she’s not there,’ she said. ‘He has to drink to get through the day.’

‘What does that mean?’

Ellen looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘Alcohol is an anaesthetic. It numbs the pain.’

‘Oh.’

‘And he makes me play the piano, all the time, to remind him.’

She picked at her nails and her face clouded over. I remembered how tenderly Mr Brecht had held onto Ellen the time I’d watched her playing piano through the window, and inside I gave a little sigh of sadness at the exquisite tragedy of the situation. This was a terrible time, I thought, and no wonder Mr Brecht was struggling to cope, but after Mrs Brecht was gone, I would step in to comfort him. He would be immersed in grief, no doubt, for a while, but one day the shadows would lift and, when they did, I would be there, waiting. He would see me and he would recognize my devotion and my inherent goodness, and he would reach out for me and hold me to him and whisper: ‘
Oh Hannah, how could I live without you?
’

Mrs Brecht dying was like leaving school or going to university or having sex, something I knew would most likely occur at some point in the future, but which it was impossible to imagine in the present. Ellen was resigned to her mother’s death, though. She knew. During that long, slow time between the knowing and the dying, she hinted at it, always dropping the fact that the day of death was drawing nearer into the conversation as if to ensure nobody ever forgot that she was entangled in the dramatic, climactic scenes of her mother’s life.

She told me that her mother had called her to her side while her father was sleeping and told Ellen a secret. Ellen was not supposed to tell a single soul about it, but she told me. Her grandmother, Mrs Withiel, Anne Brecht’s mother, had been a very wealthy woman. And she had left everything to Ellen. Ellen would inherit her fortune on her eighteenth birthday. Mrs Brecht was trustee of the money and she had put all the arrangements in place. The rules were very strict: Ellen had to wait until she was eighteen, she couldn’t have a
penny before then. When Ellen told me this she was wearing the wide-eyed, excited, conspiratorial expression she reserved for special stories, and I was not the slightest bit jealous because I was pretty sure she was making it up.

‘Your grandmother didn’t seem that rich when we saw her,’ I said.

Ellen shrugged. ‘Mama says she was. Mama says she didn’t spend her money but hoarded it.’

‘Why would she leave it to you? She never even met you. Why didn’t she leave it to your mama?’

‘They fell out. They hadn’t spoken to one another in years.’

‘And what about your papa?’

‘He doesn’t know,’ Ellen said. ‘You mustn’t tell him! Promise me on your life you won’t tell him!’

I promised. As if I would tell Mr Brecht a tall story like that anyway!

As the time for Mrs Brecht’s dying came closer, Ellen became quieter and thinner and more unusual than ever. Our roles, oddly, became reversed. When a palliative nurse was employed to stay overnight at Thornfield House, the impending death became the single most important topic of conversation in Trethene and at school. Other girls whispered about Ellen as we dawdled in the grounds, and now I was the one who turned to glower at them.

‘What are you staring at?’ I would ask, pushing my face into theirs.

‘She don’t seem to care,’ was what the girls usually said. ‘If
my
mum was dying, I’d be crying all the time. But she just gets weirder.’

We would all look over at Ellen, who would be, perhaps, sitting on a bench, holding her knees and staring up at the sky.

‘You don’t know anything about it,’ I would reply. ‘You leave her alone.’

Some girls tried to befriend Ellen, because they wanted to be part of the drama, they were fascinated by the proximity of death, but Ellen was not interested in them. She seemed to need only me, and that made me proud to be her friend and I felt more protective of her.

It was true that her grief did not manifest itself conventionally, but I knew it was there. When she wasn’t being looked at, and judged, she depended on me for comfort. She bit her nails and shivered inside clothes that were suddenly too big for her. She came as close to me as she possibly could, all the time, as if to share my warmth. She put her hands into my pockets and I covered them with my bigger, warmer hands. Sometimes we squeezed into the same jumper, or we shared a cardigan, me taking one arm, she the other, and our bodies pressed together in between. I felt as if I was growing larger all the time, and Ellen, meanwhile, was disappearing. I was the big, fluffy mother hen, she the scrawny little hatchling.

I liked it that I was the leader and protector now. I enjoyed the changed dynamic. I felt, at last, as if I was truly involved, and not just hovering on the sidelines.

And all the time Ellen’s behaviour became stranger.

When she was asked to read out her essay on ‘The Nature of Beauty’ in English, she stood up and recited a poem about a deer skull she’d found washed up on the beach and now kept on her dressing-table. It was, in fact, a sheep skull, but Ellen insisted it had been a deer. It was not even really a poem, more a random collection of words, like verbal driftwood. She didn’t get into trouble for that, nor for all the occasions she sat in class biting off her split ends and taking no notice of the teachers at all. They left her alone, they didn’t seem to know what to do with her. Even the sports mistress, Miss Tunnock, said nothing when she sloped off on her own instead of joining in with the cross-country running;
rather, to my joy, she sent me off too, to look after Ellen. I particularly enjoyed the expressions of jealousy and outrage on the faces of our classmates as I trotted back to the changing rooms. Ellen and I found a warm place beside a radiator and huddled together, a coat buttoned up around both of us, a single scarf around our necks, so close that our heartbeats aligned themselves and shared the same rhythm.

One afternoon, the school bus dropped us off and I was turning to go home to Cross Hands Lane when Ellen took my arm.

‘Walk back with me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you’ll be able to come in, but walk back with me anyway.’

It was cold and the wind was blowing in our faces. We tucked our chins down into our scarves and linked arms. Our feet shared a rhythm, like our hearts sometimes did.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘My fingers hurt.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s Papa. He makes me play the piano.’

‘Because your Mama likes to hear it?’

Ellen nodded. I felt a tingle of irritation with her. Was it really too much to ask that she played her mother’s favourite pieces of music at such a time?

‘It’s not just for an hour or two, it’s all the time,’ she said. ‘Yesterday I had to play the
Moonlight Sonata
fifty times.’

‘Honestly, fifty times?’

‘It felt like fifty times. Now the music’s in my head and I keep hearing it. I can’t concentrate! I can’t think of anything else!’

She pulled her arm free of mine, picked up a stick and whipped it against the leafless hedgerow. Some black-and-white cows on the other side raised their heads. They rotated their jaws and blinked at us.

‘He’s mad,’ she said then. ‘Honestly, Hannah, I really think Papa is going mad.’

‘Mad with grief?’

‘He’s obsessed. He won’t leave Mama alone, not for a single moment. He sits with her all night; even when she’s sleeping he won’t leave her. He sleeps beside her.’

I thought that was romantic. I imagined if I were Mrs Brecht, how pleased I would be to wake and find Mr Brecht next to me. I could see myself, my head on the pillow, my hair prettily spread about my pale face, and him, holding my little hand between both of his. I could see a tender smile on his lips as my eyelids flickered open and then he would raise my hand and gently kiss each of the knuckles in turn.

Ellen broke the stick in half and threw it over the hedge.

‘I have to play the piano even when Mama is asleep.’

‘Why?’

‘So she has music for her dreams. Papa said it will help her remember her happiest days, when she was young and healthy.’

I glanced at Ellen to see if she minded that her mother’s happiest days were before she was born. I could not tell from her expression.

‘If it helped Mama, I’d play the piano all day and all night,’ Ellen said. ‘I wouldn’t care that my fingers were sore or that I hated the music. But she’s tired of it too. That’s why she keeps asking to go to the hospice. She wants to get away from it … from
him
.’

I didn’t understand anything back then. I felt sorry for Mrs Brecht, of course, but I couldn’t understand why she was being so cruel to her husband. My heart was almost breaking in sympathy with Mr Brecht’s. I thought it must be awful to die, but better to be the die-er than the person losing someone they loved as much as Mr Brecht loved his wife. He was the most tragic person I had ever known. Thinking about him made my eyes fill with tears.

The last time I talked to Mrs Brecht was the day after my seventeenth birthday in November, a few weeks before she died. She was lying in the downstairs back room at Thornfield House where she could look out into the garden. She was covered with a cashmere shawl, resting. Mr Brecht had taken the car into Truro, and Ellen and Mrs Todd were looking after her.

She had become even more drawn since the last time I had seen her. She was a person going backwards, in reverse, fading like a pencil drawing being erased, bit by bit. Adam Tremlett had brought on some daffodils in his greenhouse for Mrs Brecht, to remind her of the spring she would not see, and Mrs Todd told me to help Ellen carry them into the room. The whole house was full of flowers. My mum had been to Thornfield House once or twice to help Mrs Todd with the cleaning during this difficult time, and she said it was like coming into a botanical garden. Neither of us had ever seen so many flowers in one place.

The daffodils were nothing special, in my eyes. They had small, sunshine-yellow heads bobbing and nodding on weedy green stems hardly strong enough to support them. Ellen walked into the room solemnly, holding her pot to her chest; I followed behind. Ellen placed her pot on the floor, by the French windows, where her mother could see them.

‘Aren’t they beautiful, Mama?’

‘Are they from Adam?’

‘Of course.’

Mrs Brecht gave a sigh. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, raising her tiny, misshapen hand a little. I stepped forward, into her line of vision, and put my pot down beside Ellen’s. Mrs Brecht smiled when she saw me. I was so shocked by how little of her was left I had trouble smiling at all.

‘Come and give me a kiss goodbye, Hannah,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid. This condition of mine is not contagious.’

I leaned down and kissed her forehead. Her skin was cool and waxy.

Ellen perched on the edge of the daybed, and took her mother’s hand.

‘How are you feeling, Mama?’

‘I’m all right,
Schatzi
.’

‘Do you want anything?’

‘I want you to stay with me a while. Where’s your father?’

‘He’s out. Do you want some music, Mama?’

‘Dear God, no,’ said Mrs Brecht. ‘Let’s enjoy the quiet.’ Her lips, which used to be so full and juicy-looking, were pale and dry, greyish in colour.

Ellen twisted a strand of hair around her finger. Her cardigan gaped and I noticed bruises on the inside of her upper arm, four small, ugly bruises, sized and spaced like fingertips. Ellen let her arm drop. I meant to ask her what had happened and how she came by the bruises, but I never did. I forgot them.

Mrs Brecht spoke softly. ‘The daffodils remind me of my birthday. I used to have beautiful parties in the garden here when I was a child,’ she said. ‘My mother filled it with decorations, paper lanterns, bunting … and the daffodils. Thousands of daffodils. I always thought they were my flowers, grown specially for me.’

She rested her head back against the cushion. ‘I wish you had known your grandmother,’ she said to Ellen. ‘She had a good heart and she would have loved you very much.’

‘Yes, Mama.’

Ellen shot me a significant look that I ignored. Nothing her mother had said had hinted at an inheritance. I remembered Mrs Withiel and how all the Trethene children called her ‘witch’ and how she lay dead for three weeks in Thornfield House before anyone found her. I twisted a strand of hair around my own finger and sucked the end of
it. The clock on the mantelpiece was ticking, and Mrs Todd was vacuuming somewhere inside the house.

‘I’m so tired of this waiting,’ Mrs Brecht said quietly. ‘Really, I’ve had enough.’

‘The nurse will be here soon,’ Ellen said. ‘Do you want anything in the meantime, Mama?’

‘Pull the curtains back, would you, Ellen. Tie them back so I can see the whole garden.’

Outside, Adam was digging over one of the beds, wrapped in a donkey jacket and boots. It was so cold that his breath was fogging around him. Frost on the trees made them sparkly and white. It was like looking through a window into a Christmas globe.

‘I’ve known him all my life,’ Mrs Brecht whispered. ‘I was friends with Adam long before I knew your father.’

Ellen stroked her mother’s hand.

Mrs Brecht smiled. ‘When we were children we danced together at the Helston Flower Festival. He always used to say …’

‘What, Mama?’

Ellen’s mother closed her eyes slowly and turned her head to one side as if trying to catch hold of the words from the past.

‘That’s where I wish I was,’ she murmured, ‘out in the garden with Adam.’

‘But it’s so cold out there, Mama.’

‘I wouldn’t feel it,’ Mrs Brecht said. ‘The cold wouldn’t bother me at all.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I WAS UP
early on Saturday morning, feeling less edgy. I’d slept better and was glad to have something planned for the weekend, so it did not stretch out in front of me like a straight road going nowhere except towards another Monday morning. It would make me feel good to see my parents; they’d be pleased to see me and I would be less concerned about the fragility of my mental state if I was with other people. It was solitude I dreaded.