In Her Shadow (14 page)

‘Stay here and watch television with me,’ she said. ‘There’s a history programme on in a minute that you’d like.’ It was
a half-hearted request. I went over to her chair and kissed her forehead.

‘Really, Mum, I could do with some fresh air,’ I said. ‘I’ve been stuck so long in the city and you know I’m still a country girl at heart. I miss the sea.’

Mum smiled then. She lived under the impression that Bristol was a terrible place full of drugs, sin and pollution. Anything I said to reinforce this prejudice pleased her no end.

‘I’ll be back before it’s dark,’ I promised, and I picked up my jacket and went out.

I walked for a while along the lane, then climbed over a stile and crossed into a field. The summer air was warm and balmy, the field full of butterflies. My mind slowed down, and I relaxed as I walked through grass that was waist-high, watching the rabbits scuttering at the field’s perimeter, and the little birds darting in and out of the hedgerows.

I didn’t set out with any destination in mind, and it was a while before I realized I was heading for Bleached Scarp.

It was further than I remembered, and a more demanding walk. The farmers had removed most of the footpath signs to deter holidaymakers from traipsing across their fields, and stiles I remembered climbing as a child were no longer there. I was charmed anew by the red-brown cattle grazing in the meadows, by the wildflowers, the profusion of yellow, white and purple amongst the blowing grass, and the old wall steps, flat stones built into the ancient field boundary walls, to assist walkers. I was less enamoured of the electric fences that seemed to have been wrapped around almost every field.

Eventually I reached the crest of the hill which rolled down on the other side towards the coastal footpath, and beyond that the cliffs leading down to the sea. Puffy, white flat-bottomed clouds scudded across a perfectly eggshell-blue sky, and the sea beneath was dark aquamarine, the waves
tipped with foamy white horses. I was proud of the view. I stood there for a few moments and summoned up the past. I could almost see us, the three children, Ellen, Jago and me, with our scabby knees and our dirty hands and our pockets full of pebbles and sweets. I could see us scrambling down the hill, running, falling, chasing, Ellen and Jago always ahead of me, calling to me to hurry up, to keep up, not to be such a scaredy-cat.

And then I blinked, and they were gone, and it was just me, all grown up and alone and enjoying the view for what it was – a beautiful view, one of the best in the world. Our view.

I took the traditional route, through the field, across the path and over the fence beside the sign that read
Danger of Death, Eroding Cliff Face
, trying not to smile with pleasure at my own daring. I used to be so frightened of this place, but the cliff was not so high, the path not so slippery. Was I braver now? Was I more confident because I was an adult, or had I merely imagined the dangers when I was a child? It took me a few moments to find the hole in the cliff that opened into the tunnel down to the beach. It was a smaller gap than I remembered, but the tunnel inside was less steep and dark; it was not the dizzyingly dangerous drop I recalled. The rough steps inside were manmade, hewn out of the rock to make getting to and from the beach easier and safer. It was likely, obvious even, that the passage had been used by smugglers. I scrambled down into the hole, listening to the sea slapping the cliff wall below, using my elbows and knees to keep my descent steady until I could climb onto the rocks and jump into the cave that opened onto the beach. The dank darkness, wet sand, the seaweed smell, the echoing of the sea in the cave felt like coming home to me. It was exactly as I remembered.

Other children had found the beach and claimed it. Empty
cans had been burned in a fire and old towels had been stashed in the shrubs at the cliff-foot. Yet it was still as it always had been: the sand marked with bird-prints and the tide rattling the pebbles, the wind and the light and the taste of the ocean. I looked up to the rocks where Jago and Ellen used to jump. If I squinted, I could almost make them out, those friends from my childhood, daring one another to leap into the sea. The memory made me smile. Coming back, I thought, had been the right thing to do. There was nothing to fear about this place. The memories I had of our times on the beach were good ones.

I followed the cliff wall to the place where the rock had cracked, forming a little cave where we used to hide things. I reached inside, searching with my fingers until they found a cockle-shell, and the ancient plastic cigarette lighter that Jago used to light fires. My drift-glass was gone. Somebody had found our hiding place and they’d taken my glass. I was glad if somebody else had it. I didn’t even care if it had been thrown back into the sea. It was a sign that life goes on. Places stay the same but children grow up and move on, and other children come to take their place.

After that, I took off my boots and my socks and paddled into the sea, not caring that the legs of my jeans would be soaked. The sand was grainy beneath my feet and the water was icy cold. I knew if I waited a few moments my feet would become used to the chill and I wouldn’t feel the burn of the water any longer. I looked down at my feet. The water around them was stained red, streaks of red that dissipated with every wave. I pulled one foot, then the other, out of the water. Neither was cut. I looked again but the stain was gone.

It had only been momentary, but this made me uneasy. My heart began to pump with some urgency. A cloud passed over the sun and I glanced up, over the cliff, to see what was
blocking the light … and at exactly the same moment the cloud withdrew and the sunlight burned my eyes; it pierced into my brain. I took a step forward, stumbled and scrabbled back to my feet. My eyes were still sun-dazzled and half-blinded, but I noticed a movement on the clifftop above. I shielded my eyes with my hand and looked again. Someone was there, on the cliff edge. I blinked. There was a dark retinal spot in the centre of my vision. I looked away and when I looked back again I could tell by the silhouette of the person standing on the cliff that it was a woman. She was standing at the edge of the cliff, perfectly still, looking down, watching.

It was her, I was sure of it.

Who else could it have been?

It was Ellen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

IN JANUARY, FOUR
weeks after Mrs Brecht’s funeral, the rain came. It pattered against the glass of the tall French doors that opened out onto the terrace at the back of Thornfield House. It was raining so hard that the black compost Adam Tremlett had spent hours scooping into the pots that lined the terrace was spitting out over the pale paving slabs. The water in the pond was dancing in the twilight and flat grey puddles were forming in the newly laid turf.

I was sitting in the back room waiting for Ellen, who hadn’t finished her piano practice. She’d been practising when I called round that morning, and she was still practising at four o’clock in the afternoon. She was trying to master a particularly difficult passage and her father was with her, instructing her. I could hear Mr Brecht’s voice, low and persuasive, and I could also hear Ellen’s voice, frustrated and angry.

Her fingers were voicing her despair. I heard it, anyone could hear it in the notes of the tricky, twisty tune. It wasn’t even pretty music, nor the kind her mother preferred, not the moonlight music or the sea music or the heartbreak music or the love music or the music that reminded me of lying on the beach at Bleached Scarp with the sun on my
face and the wind breathing over the waves. It wasn’t Mozart or Grieg or the Saint-Saëns Concerto that Anne had loved, but something discordant and clangy, like the sound of pain.

Ellen’s father was trying to teach his daughter how to translate their grief into music. That’s what was going on and it was torture for Ellen because her grief was quite eloquent enough: it needed no translation.

They buried Anne Brecht in the graveyard of the Church of Our Lady Star of the Sea, out on the moors. It was a bleak winter’s day and a strange and lonely ceremony, the casket being lowered into the family plot beneath the wide arms of the ancient churchyard yew. Only a few local people were there – my family, Mrs Todd, of course, and Adam Tremlett, who was not in the church but stood at the edge of the churchyard, after the service, watching the interment from a distance. Most of the people attending were Germans, Mr Brecht’s family come over for the occasion, together with a handful of mourners from the world of classical music who were strangers even to Ellen; men in long coats and women with slender waists and high heels, their grief expensively and exquisitely accessorized. People whispered that they had come from London, from Germany, from Russia even. They were rumoured to have sat at the bar in the Seagull Hotel talking animatedly and drinking vodka into the early hours.

Ellen wore a simple black dress of her mother’s, a black coat, black tights, and she draped a lace mantilla she had found in her mother’s wardrobe over her head and face so that people should not see her tears. Her father was dressed in black from head to toe. His hair, uncut for weeks, hung about his shoulders, damp in the drizzle. He was thinner, more angular than he had been before, and this, together with the long hair and the dark stubble around his face and neck, made him seem younger; far too young to be a
widower. He and Ellen stood beside one another, wretched, but strangely dignified.

I had nothing black to wear to the funeral, so had to resort to the only formal clothes I had, my school uniform. I stood between my parents, feeling childlike and ridiculous, watching Mr Brecht and Ellen. When it came to sprinkling the earth onto the coffin, he turned away. He then strode away from the grave, and disappeared behind the church. Ellen followed. I wondered if I should run after them, but Mum looked down at me and whispered, ‘Leave them be.’ A little later, I heard a wail of abject despair in the distance, from beyond the church, and I knew it was him.

Jago was at the funeral too, standing beside my father. He listened to the graveside words, and then he crossed himself and walked away. I saw him crouched beside a different grave, not a proper one, just a grassy spot beside the far wall. Mum said that was where the ashes of people who couldn’t afford a proper memorial were scattered.

‘Do you think that’s where Jago’s mother was laid to rest?’ I whispered.

Mum nodded. ‘Probably.’ She glanced at my father. ‘We never thought to ask him, did we, Malcolm?’

Dad shook his head. ‘He’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about the lad. It’s what’s in his head and his heart that counts. Not a spot of turf.’

Now, more than a month later, the Brecht household was still deeply in mourning. Mr Brecht paced the house, refusing to let anyone touch anything of Anne’s, insisting everything was left where it had been as if he really believed that one day she would come home. The room in which she had died was locked and he had the key. He wouldn’t even let Mrs Todd in to air it, but went in there himself and stayed for hours sometimes. The room was next to Ellen’s and some nights she heard him through the wall, walking up and
down, listening to recordings of her mother playing the piano.

The cashmere blanket that used to keep Mrs Brecht warm was still folded neatly at the head of the chaise longue in the front room, and the hot-water bottle she used to soothe the pain in her heels still lay, unemptied, at its foot. In the back room, where I was waiting for Ellen, her mother’s books were lined up on the shelves of the bookcase. They were new books, mostly unread, because in the last months her fingers had been too sore to turn the pages. She used to ask Ellen to read to her sometimes, as an alternative to listening to music. Her sunglasses had been left on the fireplace; her walking stick lay across the armrests of the wheelchair that stood beside the French windows; the ribboned straw hat she wore in the garden in summer was hooked over the handle. A pair of flip-flops sat side by side next to the French windows, as if they were waiting for Anne to return and slip her small, deformed feet into them. Her rings, all her beautiful rings, were in a glass dish on the fireplace.

All the light, all the energy seemed to have seeped out of the house, under the doors and through the keyholes. Where it had been airy and elegant and full of life, now it felt cavernous, empty and looming.

Ellen was having nightmares. She told me she could feel something lurking in the shadows of her dreams, not the fragile presence of her mother, but something big and threatening, something violent. She said, in her dreams, she knew whatever it was that threatened her was watching her, waiting for her to do something that would trigger it to kill. Only she didn’t know what it was that she must not do. She believed the essence of the dreams. She said she knew she was going to be hunted down, and that she would die, only she did not know where, or when, or how. During her
waking hours, she worried about setting the curse in motion, like the Lady of Shallott. What she said disturbed me. The shadow of her nightmares began to infiltrate my dreams too. I worried when I was awake – not about me, but about Ellen.

I felt uncomfortable sitting alone, waiting for Ellen, in the back room where Anne Brecht so often sat. The fancy German clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly and the rain beat against the window, and the off-key piano music was like the soundtrack to a horror film. I was torn between sympathy for Ellen, and sympathy for her father. How could he expect her to play well so soon after her mother’s death? And how could she play so badly when all he asked of her was a little concentration?

I looked down at the newspaper on my lap. Mrs Todd had given it to me, opened out and flattened at the page she wanted me to read. The article was an obituary. The author had clearly been an admirer of Anne Brecht. He had written at length about her talent, and how her youth and beauty and vibrancy combined to make her one of the most popular and famous female pianists ever. The accompanying photographs showed Anne at work and at leisure during her celebrated visits to New York and Rome, and she looked beautiful and happy, posing in the sunshine like someone who knew they had been gifted the luckiest of lives.