Solsbury Hill A Novel (10 page)

For a moment Eleanor thought she saw the same children, but they disappeared in a dell, and when she saw them again they both had their heads down and were climbing a faraway hill.

She bent her legs tight beneath her to miss hitting the ground when she swung back across it. What an odd world, she thought to herself as she swung. A family tree that reached back for what looked like seven or eight generations. She hadn’t been on a swing since she was small. She remembered her mother telling her to reach her toes for the sky. Her mother would have told her to reach for the leaves on the top branches of this tree, if she’d been here. Had her mother swung from this tree when she was small, she would have leaned back so far that her hair would have brushed the ground.

What an odd place, Eleanor thought. She had been in England for only two full days and already she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be in New York City. Unbidden, the scene in Miles’ bedroom came to her and she tried to push it away by leaning as far back on the swing as she could
manage. She came close to touching the leaves on the branch with her toes. Her hair fell out of the bun and it did brush the ground. She felt it to the roots, and at the same time could hear the sound of Miles making love to the woman in his bed, heard him in that awful confusion she was there to witness as he was caught between ecstasy and dread, as he saw her seeing him through the doorway.

Working the swing to its greatest height, she brought her arms forward and leapt to the ground. Her sweater kept her warm as she walked, preoccupied, with her jacket tied around her waist. When she came upon two crosses in the ground, she stopped. They stood about as high as a ten-year-old child, thick, chunky crosses so close together that whomever was buried beneath might be holding hands.

Nausea overtook her and she wanted to sit down, but here the ground was muddy. Through a haze of feeling, she recalled an open grave. It was the wind, the swing, the exhaustion, she thought. Choked-down sobs turned her stomach sour as she remembered the day when her father stood beside her, not crying, the day of her mother’s funeral, when they placed the headstone on an empty grave. She had listened to recollected stories of her mother’s life, and prayers, but all she had in her head that morning was the passage she’d read in a book just days before of Heathcliff as he climbed into Catherine’s grave and cried out her name.

Eleanor hurried away, back toward her room at Trent
Hall, and when she looked back at the crosses, they seemed to turn toward her, with their arms spread wide and their chests lifted high.

I
n the background of the days but particularly alone at night, Eleanor felt a certain anxiety: an urge to pick up her e-mail, text on her phone, read Twitter, find news from home.

She’d lost track of time since she’d left New York, since she’d seen Miles on that day that was mixed up with bear claws in the morning and a pixie tangled in his sheets at night, but here she was lying in a bed on the other side of the world, in the middle of nowhere.

Eleanor looked for a phone. There was no Internet connection in the house, and her cell phone had no signal, but she found a phone in the hall. She dialed Miles’ number and when he answered, she hung up.

It was late at night and the small library was empty, but the fire was going. The chair was large enough for her to curl up in, and it was warmer by the fire than in her room, so she nestled there.

Her breath rose and fell. The house was silent. Wind and rain and crashes of thunder outside with flashes of lightning she could see right through the thick curtains. She’d brought her mother’s letters downstairs, to read them for a while.

The first one she pulled out of the pile, she’d read years
before and remembered. Her mother had written to her from a trip she was on in North Carolina. She wrote about the shoreline and the low gray skies. How cold it was at night on the beach, but when she wrapped up in sweaters and a slicker, it was fine. Her handwriting was even and curvy, elegant and refined.

Eleanor picked another letter at random, pulled it from the middle of the pile. It was a letter she hadn’t seen before. A letter to her father from her mother, written in Yorkshire, while they were engaged. Anne spoke of the imminent wedding, suggested a quiet elopement and beside this had drawn a smiling face. She’d been in London and had seen
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, was on her way to Stonehenge in the morning. She wrote John that she missed him terribly, that at night she sat on the edge of the fountain in the courtyard and imagined he might be looking up at the same moon. She made him promise to come, promise never to let her come back to Yorkshire without him. It was all love and purple prose: they would take their honeymoon in Jamaica and find the waterfall they’d seen in a brochure. Eleanor put the letter back into its envelope.

Relaxed by the sounds and the flames of the fire, Eleanor was finally growing tired. She pulled a pink envelope from the bottom of the pile. It was addressed to Martin Garrens in Scarborough, England, but there was no stamp, no postmark, and the envelope was empty. She unfolded the back flap and caught the scent of her mother’s perfume. She had expected
to cry when she sat next to Alice, but she hadn’t. Now, the scent of her mother was strong and tears came. She closed the envelope and opened it again, brought it to her face and inhaled.

Eleanor reached for another envelope and saw the return address from Martin Garrens in North Carolina. The letter was simple. It started,
Dear Anne, I’m still on the beach watching the sun come up, because that’s where my memory keeps you . . .
The body never bartered with the truth. Eleanor’s heart clenched at the intimation of an affair.

But she read on and found the rest was a common letter to a friend in which he asked mostly about her, about Eleanor, about the play she’d been in and the basketball games her team had won, about the weather he heard they were having in New York. Tucked in the envelope was a note in her mother’s hand that read,
There’s a storm outside, so El and I are going to make Thunder Cake from the Polacco book you sent her. There’s a recipe for wonderful chocolate cake at the back. A chocolate wonder with strawberries inside and one on top. We’ll eat a piece for you. Always, sincerely, your Annie.
He seemed to have received the note and sent it back because below her signature, in another hand, was written,
I can picture the cozy scene and can just taste the strawberry
.

Eleanor gathered the letters together, pulled her sweater close, and closed her eyes. Her heart let go and now it fluttered. Her eyes beat like butterfly wings under the lids and the sky was bright white inside the dream she fell into, where
there was a snowy white owl, close up, turning its head all around and batting its wide eyes slowly. A knowing owl who watched Eleanor as she folded letters into airplanes and made them fly, letters that disappeared against the white sky and then the snow on the ground, when they landed. The owl’s tree oozed sap that dripped onto the ground where Eleanor lay and Mead arrived on a horse, covered her with a blanket, then stepped away into the fireplace and burned in the flames.

She startled awake, wiped drool from the corner of her mouth, oriented her eyes.

“I was set to stir the fire a bit. I wakened you,” he said.

She rubbed her eyes. Her body stretched, writhed like a waking cat, an involuntary shiver, and she ran her fingers through her hair.

“I’ve been considering carrying you upstairs over an hour now.”

Eleanor moaned. “I’ve been sleeping that long? God, I’m glad you didn’t. I would have been scared.”

He sat down.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Three or four, I’d say, the fire will burn awhile more.”

“What are you doing up so early, or didn’t you go to bed?” she asked him.

“No, I did. I slept.” He gazed beyond her face, into the fire. “I woke up at two or so and went in to check on Alice,” he said. “And what about you? Your clock still boggled by travel, eh?”

“You know, it’s not just that. I hadn’t realized how much tension I held in my body till it started to unwind. That first day walking on the moors I could feel it, and now I’m this strange new mix of vivified and ready to sleep at the drop of a hat.”

He sat down with his legs wide and his fists dropped between his thighs, his shoulders collapsed. “I must say I’m glad you’re here. Maybe I was hoping to wake you.” He looked despondent.

“What’s wrong?” She sat up.

“I just happened to wake and come in the house, which I don’t often do. Alice was barely breathing. Of course Gwen was there already. Should we have come to get you? I didn’t think of it . . .”

Her hair was all mussed and her eyes were unfocused.

“The doctor’s here. Gwen’s up there, and if you want to see her, you might . . .” He bobbed his head from side to side.

“Will you come with me?”

His eyes held her eyes and saw she hadn’t understood. “She’s gone,” he said. “She went just a while ago.”

“Mead?” Empty and dry, she felt a stiff familiar feeling, the edge of going lifeless.

“Yes, I’ll go with you. But we don’t have to go up, right now. We can stay here awhile, if you need to.”

But she stood. She waited for him and they walked together to the stairs, where she stopped because she felt herself moving like bones without flesh and blood attached to
them, a skeleton swinging its limbs making its way through space on to the next thing that had to be done. She thought she was going to faint from the emptiness.

“Would you take my arm?”

He took her arm as they mounted the stairs.

The bedroom doors were open. Eleanor saw the doctor was there. Gwen was lying on the bed beside Alice’s body.

“I can’t believe she’s dead,” Eleanor whispered. “I don’t know if I should go in.”

“You should go in,” he said. “You can’t do wrong here. You belong here.” His accent seemed strong with a Yorkshire lilt now.

She hesitated a long time.

“You don’t need me to give you a hug, do you?” he said. Rough and sweet and young and sad.

Alice’s face was already blue-gray. Gwen climbed off the bed when she saw Mead and Eleanor come in. She hooked an arm into each of theirs and said, “I can’t cry unless I lie down beside her.”

It all seemed so strange, so warm and convivial. Tilda brought tea and small sandwiches into the room and set them on a table. When Eleanor’s mother had died, her body remained in England. When her father had died, they took him away before she had a chance to see him. The housekeeper found his body and they had him in a big black bag coming down the front stairs when she burst into the house, unaware. The boy who, just then, let his end of the gurney
fall looked mortified. In weeks or months, a wood box came in the mail with her father’s dusty remains inside.

She’d never seen a dead body, but here was Alice, whom she’d kissed just hours before. Time and change were overwhelming her.

Gwen joined Eleanor where she sat in the bay window. She drew up the wheelchair and sat in it to drink her tea, saying to Eleanor in a hushed tone, “I lay beside her and prayed she might hear me say a few last words of love. I’m not a believer, but I was praying that God might be able to tell her I was lying there waiting for her to smile at me, when suddenly she turned her head and gave me a wink. A saucy old Alice wink.” Tears streamed down the fine woman’s lovely old face. “Wherever she’s going, she’ll be altogether well there.” Gwen nodded. “She was my only love. I can’t believe she’s on her way without me.”

Mead sat on the lounge chair on the far side of the room, sitting still for the longest time and not speaking to anyone.

“Is he going to be okay?” Eleanor spoke softly.

“He is. They’ve had a good life together with no regrets, nothing left unsaid.”

With a sharp pain behind her left eye and a headache in her temple, Eleanor felt a churning in her stomach. A feeling surged inside and she thought, I’m not a part of this, I shouldn’t be here. She felt cold, thought she might be sick, and stood up, asked if there was a bathroom nearby, and was
shown to it by Granley, who seemed to come from nowhere and moved quickly with her on his arm.