In Her Shadow (15 page)

When I’d finished reading, I put the newspaper down and wandered over to the window. I looked out at the rain, watching the drops chase one another down the glass. The night was drawing in now, the garden was darkening. I could see no further than the pond.

I went to the bookcase and pulled out an old copy of the
Tatler
that had been tucked in next to the marble bookend. I took it back to my chair and flicked through the pages. The Debutante of the Month interested me – a willowy blonde reliably dressed in a pale twinset and pearls. I was not
entirely sure what a debutante was – the posh people’s equivalent of a Page Three girl, I supposed. I turned a few more pages and the magazine folded open at a double-page spread, which had obviously been looked at many times before. The main photograph, taking up most of the first page, was of a woman holding a baby in her arms. The woman was Anne, Mrs Brecht, but younger than I’d ever known her. The baby had to be Ellen.

In the picture, Anne was wearing a white, scoop-necked dress and sitting in an upright antique chair beside a tall window. A heavily brocaded curtain had been tied back, and the window looked out over a formal terrace and landscaped parkland. The caption said the photograph had been taken inside the
Schloss Marien, the exquisite country home of Anne’s mother-in-law, Countess Friederike von Schontiede, in the glorious countryside beyond Magdeburg, overlooking the River Elbe
. Ellen had told me on many occasions about the castle where she used to live, and about how her father’s grandparents were related to minor German royalty. I had never believed her. Now I realized that some of what she had said, at least, was true.

It was only after reading the caption that I looked at the photograph again, more closely, and noticed Mr Brecht, standing beyond the open window, on the terrace. He was breathtakingly handsome, dressed in casual trousers and an open-necked shirt, leaning in a rather louche and completely adorable way against the base of a reclining stone hart, a cigarette between the fingers of his free hand.

I gazed at him for a while, touched his face with my fingertips, and read on.

The article gave a brief list of Anne’s musical accomplishments. Her last public performance had been in St Petersburg, eight weeks before Ellen was born. Anne was only twenty-one at the time but the article quoted several
sources proclaiming her to be an important, prodigious talent – her rendition of
Liebeslied
by Fritz Kreisler being regarded as the definitive version of the work, and so forth.
And
, the writer gushed,
the birth of Ellen Louisa is the icing on the cake of happiness for Anne and for her charming husband, Pieter, who has been her musical teacher and mentor since she was twelve years old
.

I didn’t read any further because a door slammed in the hallway and I heard Ellen’s footsteps running up the stairs. Mr Brecht came into the room where I was sitting and Mrs Todd followed behind. She poured a glass of whisky and passed it to him. He took it and drank. Neither of them had noticed me.

‘How was she today?’ Mrs Todd asked. Her hands were folded in front of her and her eyes were downcast.

‘Hopeless,’ Mr Brecht said. ‘She was deliberately sabotaging the piece. She won’t listen to me, she won’t do what I tell her, she won’t try. I don’t know what to do with her, Mrs Todd. I am at my wits’ end.’

He put his hands on the back of Mrs Brecht’s chair and dropped his head between his arms.

I cleared my throat. Mr Brecht straightened up and pushed back his hair.

‘Hello, Hanchen,’ he said, with a tired smile. I smiled back, hoping he would understand the exquisite depth of my sympathy.

‘Go upstairs and talk to Ellen,’ Mrs Todd said to me. ‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour.’

I nodded, laid the magazine down on the arm of the chair, and made my escape.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ON THE WAY
back to my parents’ house, I stopped at the Smuggler’s Rest, a small roadside pub, charming in its decrepitude. I didn’t make a habit of going to pubs on my own, but I needed a drink after seeing the woman on the cliff top. Either my mind was playing its terrible games again or Ellen really had returned from the dead. Or, and this was a thought that had been forming in my mind over the past few days, perhaps she had never died. Perhaps everything I had been told, everything I had believed, was wrong.

Maybe there had been some conspiracy and Ellen Brecht was still alive and was trying to reach out to me.

I did not know what to think, what to believe.

What I did know was that I could not let my mother see me as I was. I had to calm myself. Alcohol, I reasoned, might do the trick. Also, it would be reassuring to sit in the pub’s messy little beer garden amongst the lacy cow parsley and the tiny brown pollinating moths while the sun was going down, with people around me talking and relaxing as if everything was all right in the world.

The last time I had been in that particular pub was when I was eighteen. I used to go there with Ricky, my first boyfriend. I still remembered what we did in the car park. As
I walked into the gloom of the bar, I looked across the garden, to the place where Ricky used to park his car all those years ago, and in spite of everything, I wrapped my arms about myself, and I smiled.

Only a handful of people were inside the bar, which was poky and dark and smelled of dishwasher steam. I ordered a pint of cider and the barman was filling the glass when I realized I had no money with me. This was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I felt like a child denied the one thing I really wanted. Everything was going wrong and it always seemed to come back to Ellen. She was always at the root of my unhappiness. Embarrassed, I apologized to the barman and turned to go when a slight, grizzled man stepped in front of me, pulled off the woollen beanie he was wearing, peered into my face and said, ‘It’s little Hannah Brown, isn’t it?’

I took the tissue he was holding out to me and used it to wipe away my tears.

‘Yes,’ I said, and stepped to the left to move past him, but he moved with me.

‘You don’t remember me, do you? It’s Bill – Bill Haworth. Your brother, Jago, used to work on my boat.’

‘Oh yes, Bill! How nice to see you.’ I tried to squeeze past, but he took my arm.

‘I’ll get your drink,’ he said. ‘You look like you could use it. Go and find a seat outside where we can talk. I’ll be with you in a moment.’

‘It’s kind of you, Bill, but—’

‘Go on,’ he said.

I wound my way around the bar to the garden, found a free bench, sat down and picked apart a beer mat until Bill arrived with my cider and a second pint for him. He put the glasses on the wooden table slats and sat on the opposite side of the bench, which rocked and creaked, all its joints
going out of kilter. I put my feet square on the ground to balance it.

‘All right then,’ said Bill. ‘Now you’ve got your drink, you can tell me what you’re doing here and what it is that’s upset you.’

I held the glass in my hands and drank several gulps. The cider was sweet and cold and delicious.

‘I’m down visiting my parents for the weekend,’ I said. ‘And nothing’s wrong. I just …’ I looked into my drink and watched the bubbles climbing the inside of the glass. It was too complicated to explain, even to Bill, who knew some of it already. ‘It’s difficult being back,’ I said. ‘I feel like a stranger, as if I don’t belong here any more and at the same time it’s as if I never went away.’

‘My opinion,’ said Bill slowly, ‘for what it’s worth, which ain’t much, is that when a person goes back to a place they left, they also goes back to the age they was when they left it.’

I thought about that for a moment. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly how I feel.’

Bill looked pleased. He took a long drink. I watched his throat move as he swallowed. Then he solemnly put the glass back on the bench.

‘You heard from that brother of yours lately?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘No. I haven’t spoken to Jago since Dad’s heart attack.’

‘That was years back.’

‘I know.’

‘Why don’t you talk to each other? You used to be thick as thieves, you two.’

‘We just don’t. We don’t have any reason to talk.’

Bill snorted. ‘That’s the daftest thing I ever heard. You’re living on opposite sides of the world, living different lives, you must have plenty to say to one another.’

I nodded, hoping he would change tack if I agreed with him. I brushed a ladybird from my forearm.

‘He’s all right though, is he – Jago?’ Bill asked.

‘He’s doing fine. He’s got a good job.’

‘And a good woman to go with it?’

‘No,’ I told Bill. ‘He can’t seem to find the right person.’

I looked down again. Somebody had folded a crisp packet very small and stuffed it between the slats in the bench.

‘Jago’s one of the good ’uns,’ said Bill. ‘He’s one of the best. Any one of us would’ve helped him. Whatever trouble it was he was running from – women, money, whatever – we’d have seen him right if the daft sod, excuse my language, hadn’t buggered off like he did.’

He drank again, licked his lips and put the almost-empty glass down. He had a tattoo of his grandchildren’s names on his forearm.
Shoni
and
Jude
.

‘You couldn’t have done anything to stop Jago leaving,’ I said. ‘Nobody could.’

‘Ah well,’ Bill said. He tapped a cigarette out of a packet and rolled it along the table. ‘Next time you speak to him, tell him I asked after him.’

‘I will.’

‘And tell him to get his arse back here. Tell him there’s still work for him. Tell him …’

I waited.

‘Tell the bugger that we still miss him.’

Bill stood up then, put the cigarette behind his ear, picked up his empty glass, patted me on the shoulder, and went back inside the pub.

I pulled the sleeves of my cardigan tighter around me and gazed out into the distance, across the flat bogland where a summer mist was forming, wreathing itself around the great satellite dishes of Goonhilly.

I closed my eyes for a moment. When I shut them, I could see the figure on the clifftop clearly silhouetted against the sun’s glare. It was Ellen. Always Ellen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I WENT UPSTAIRS
to find Ellen, as Mrs Todd had told me to; she was in her bedroom, sullenly collecting her towel, shampoo, conditioner. She went into the bathroom, and I followed. She locked the door and turned on the hot tap as far as it would go. I waited for her to speak. I couldn’t help but notice that Anne Brecht’s toothbrush was still in its mug, the flannel embroidered with her initials still folded on the windowledge; the mat she used to prevent her from slipping in the bath was still there too, along with her cosmetics, her lotions and creams and oils.

‘He’s a bastard,’ Ellen said without looking at me. ‘He’s a fucking evil lying bastard.’

I was used to this kind of outburst. I folded down the lavatory lid and sat on it, my hands clasped between my knees, while Ellen took off her clothes and dropped them on the floor. I could smell the warm, private scent of her skin, her armpits, her sweat as she undressed. She continued to rant, half-sobbing.

‘What happened exactly?’ I asked.

‘I said some things to him.’

‘You swore?’

Ellen shrugged. I sighed. If she didn’t want to make her father angry, why did she behave like this?

‘It was his fault!’ she said. ‘I
had
to swear to shut him up. He said some horrible things.’

‘What things?’

‘He said Mama didn’t love us, that she was a liar, that she was seeing other men behind his back right up until the day she died. He said …’ Ellen paused and looked at me ‘… that she was a whore.’

I gasped. I could not imagine Mr Brecht saying such a horrible word, and especially not about his wife. He had worshipped the ground Anne walked on and the air she breathed. This had to be another of Ellen’s lies, or at the very least an exaggeration.

‘Why would he say that?’

‘I think he’s mad. Do you know, Hannah, sometimes when I’ve been playing the piano, he’s called me “Anne”. He’s spoken to me as if I were her. He’s—Oh, I don’t want to tell you! But I have to remind him. I have to say: “Papa, it’s me, Ellen!” And even then, sometimes, it takes a while for him to recognize me. That’s not normal, is it? That would freak anyone out.’

She picked up her clothes and stuffed them into the tall linen basket in the corner of the room. I bit a fingernail nervously. I wasn’t sure how much of this to believe, or how to react.

‘Perhaps he needs more time to get over losing your mother,’ I suggested.

Ellen snorted. ‘He needs a lobotomy,’ she said. She was a little calmer now. This was almost a joke.

She wrapped a green towel around herself, leaned over and tested the water with her hand, half-disappearing in a mist of apple-scented steam. She topped the bath up from the cold tap, water gushing like a geyser.

‘Don’t look,’ she said. I turned my head slightly to the left and lowered my eyes, but still I watched beneath my lashes
as Ellen wriggled out of her pants, dropped the towel, stepped into the big, old-fashioned bathtub and sank beneath the water. Her hair stuck to the back of the bath. She held her hands up in front of her, stretching and clenching her fingers, trying to ease the soreness in her joints. The skin on her face and shoulders gradually pinkened. Then she closed her eyes and slid under the water and most of her disappeared Her knees stuck up, glistening wet. I wanted to do something to help Ellen. I knelt at the side of the bath, poured shampoo into the palm of my hand, and when she resurfaced, I reached over and washed her hair. Ellen didn’t protest. She kept her eyes closed while my fingers explored the shape of her head, wiped suds from the curve of her little ears, worked the shampoo through the skein of wet hair. I tried to wipe away a mark on her neck, but it wouldn’t wash off and I realized it was a bruise.

‘What happened to your neck?’

‘Papa did it.’

‘Oh Ellen, don’t say things like that.’