The Shades Read online

  Catherine took a deep breath and tried to remember why she had wanted to see her. After so many weeks of wondering and waiting, the girl had come back as she had hoped she would. She had asked for her return, and here she was alive and safe. Safe and alive. Wasn’t this all that mattered? Until she had been given a chance to give her account of whatever happened with Lewis’s friend, Hetty, or Betty, it was only fair to suspend judgment and be open minded; it was possible Letty was culpable in the relationship. Even if the girl was guilty of all that Lewis had said, it was important to make peace with her, if only to give the relationship closure. After reminding herself of these simple values, the suspicion she had harbored was displaced with a heart-swelling gladness.

  The girl moved slowly. She seemed in no hurry to reach her, giving Catherine the chance to look at her again.

  Her eyes were smaller than she remembered, and her mouth curved down at the edges. Her expression was both sullen and dull, as if an internal light had been switched off.

  Catherine’s enthusiasm dimmed accordingly.

  When the girl was close enough to hear, Catherine called out: “It would have been nice if you had phoned.” As her words were intended to reproach, it maddened her that the girl didn’t respond. This provoked her to go forward and pull back the girl’s lapel.

  As expected, there were still price tags inside.

  “This doesn’t belong to you.” Catherine said, releasing her jacket in disgust. “You’ve probably taken from me too, but I’m too addled to have noticed.”

  The girl gazed insouciantly back, as if she knew she had been found out but didn’t care.

  Catherine wanted to slap her.

  “There was a summerhouse here,” she continued. “I saw a photograph. You must have remembered. I don’t believe you forgot. I want to know why you bothered to lie. Think before you answer—you might as well be truthful. I mean, apart from me, who else cares a shit?”

  “Oh, hello, Keira. How are you?” the girl said, strolling past. “I’m well.” She answered her own question. “Thanks very much for asking.”

  She sauntered toward the remains of the old gazebo. On her feet were black ballet-style pumps that were collapsed at the sides. As soon as she reached the foundations, she stopped and tapped the hard surface with her right toe.

  “Since you ask,” she said, “here it is—voilà . . .” She had an elegant point and used it to trace a circle. “It doesn’t look much now, does it? Considering this was the pinnacle of my mother’s existence.” She eyed the concrete fragment sardonically. “This was built as a stage for her, somewhere she could go to dance, express herself—although I never saw her use it for anything other than hanging out and drinking with friends—it was basically an open-air party place. There used to be candles, rugs and cushions, scattered about . . .”

  “They were all out here that night. My mother was with Elise, who was also a dancer. If you thought my mother was beautiful, Elise was more. I don’t know why my mother let her go anywhere near my father. Maybe she was using her as bait to lure him back, or maybe she was infatuated with her too. Everyone was drunk. The Stones were playing on a boombox—‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ The women were dancing together. They let me run between them, calling me firefly, twirling me around until I was giddy. I remember thinking how hip and sophisticated I was, to stay up late and be included. Then someone had the idea that the view on the roof would be incredible and the party moved up there. By then they had forgotten about me and didn’t notice that I was following. They just clambered on, loaded—the whole lot of them were plastered.

  “It’s true, the view up there is amazing. When you’re up that high you can see for miles. Once it was totally dark it was trippy, you couldn’t tell where the roof ended and the sky began. There was more dancing, more drinking, I saw my mother kissing another man—Elise was all over my father. A row erupted. My mother was shrieking at Elise and she backed away. As there were no railings or walls, she just stood back and dropped off the edge into the darkness. I had been hiding behind a vent and I ran downstairs to bed. I think I heard someone call after me. There was a clamor. Voices. I stayed awake as long as I could, but eventually I fell asleep. The next morning at breakfast everyone was wearing dark glasses. Elise wasn’t there and no one said anything more about her. It was as if she had never existed. Not long after I was sent to stay with my cousin and I never saw my father again.”

  “My God, poor child. What a terrible secret to carry,” Catherine cried. “Did you talk to anyone about this?”

  “Who was I to tell? The point is, I don’t know what I saw that night. It might have all been a dream.”

  She had a sense of foreboding as she climbed the stairs. She didn’t want to go, but having asked the question, she had committed herself to hearing an answer and was obliged to proceed. The girl went first as she knew the way, although it made Catherine very uncomfortable to be led through her own house by someone she no longer liked or trusted, and knew even less than she’d wanted to believe.

  They went to the top floor, the attic that she and Michael had taken pains to convert to make bedrooms for the children. It was a dusty spider trap once, a web of exposed beams, but after the ceiling had been raised, wood glossed with paint, and every other surface wallpapered and carpeted, it had become as comfortable as any country-house hotel.

  Lush! Love it, Mum, Rachel had said when she saw the finished room. She’d patted her mother’s shoulders, an aborted hug, before turning to explore the new decor. Catherine could have taken her in her arms to show her the way, but that would have been risky: Rachel could be prickly, and Catherine wasn’t demonstrative—they were not ones for physical affection. Rachel never had the chance to make the bedroom her own, having stayed there only twice. She left a toweling sweatshirt behind the door, and a rosary of carved wooden beads that Michael had given her years before, after coming back from a day’s sightseeing in Rome. At the time, Catherine hadn’t fully registered the gift, thinking it a tourist trinket that would get rubbished on her bedroom floor along with all her other things. Evidently it had more significance that Rachel had brought it with her. It was only after the girl had stayed at Hamdean that Catherine had ventured farther upstairs and realized it was there. When she told Michael about the presence of the rosary in her bedroom (like her, he hadn’t been in since the accident), he went directly to look. The sight of the beads draped across Rachel’s dressing-table mirror had made him break down and cry.

  Her failure to imagine that Rachel might have appreciated her father’s token wasn’t the only moment that Catherine had been out of sync with her family that day. During the week prior to the holiday in Rome, Rachel had bleated and complained about leaving London. It came as no surprise when Rachel was suddenly indisposed to go out the morning after their arrival. Catherine didn’t have the patience to parlay this challenge into a learning moment. Instead, she let her family to do what they all wanted and had walked out of the hotel to do the same. Her destination was the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria to see the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, a luminous marble beauty that John Bramley had once told her that she must visit one day. Bernini’s St. Teresa was a preternatural feat of sculpting. Entered by the Holy Spirit in the form of an angel’s arrow, St. Teresa reclined in rapture, gripped by paroxysms not entirely spiritual while her robes manifested sensation in a turbulent sea of waves. That Catherine had left her family to commune with this sensual work that her dead friend, already gone too long, had wanted her to see, was transgressive, defiant, yet ridiculously easy. In furthering her desires, she believed that she was making a stand for herself against the sometimes mind-numbing aspects of parenting. Her mother’s example was always there in the background as a warning: she had given herself entirely to her family, yet it had done her no good. If Catherine was more like her than she wanted to admit, withholding was fine too: there was less chance of inflicting damage on her unsuspecting family. Or so she thought. She regretted it all. What s
he wouldn’t give to have that day again, to fill it with messy love and frustration.

  We think we have unlimited time. But we don’t, and so we squander . . .

  They were outside Rachel’s door but Catherine kept walking. She didn’t want to draw attention to Rachel’s room in case the girl asked to go in there.

  At the far end of the landing there was a retractable wooden ladder and a trapdoor in the vaulted ceiling. The opening had been pointed out by the estate agent during their first viewing, but Catherine had never had the wherewithal to pull down the steps and discover where they led.

  Keira pressed forward and mounted the ladder. With her arms shaking above her head, she pushed up the hatch, enabling Catherine to follow her as she climbed up and out onto the roof.

  Braced by a cool wind, Catherine turned on her heels, 360 degrees. The view was tremendous. Apart from an unexpectedly pretty patchwork of golf course, and the occasional converted oast on the margins of the village, the Weald was untouched by urban development; the land, as green and pleasant as it had been at the time of Blake’s poem and the writing of the hymn. At first the sights thrilled and enervated her, but soon they were vertiginous. The height and exposure was dizzying.

  She checked her footing. It wasn’t bad, although a little uneven. The roof was leaded with odd castellated vents rising up, and many stacked chimneys, some of which couldn’t be seen from the ground. She couldn’t figure out where they all went. She quickly counted six chimneys on her side of the house, and that didn’t include the part belonging to Judith and the mysterious accountant. Catherine had three fireplaces; this meant another three had been made redundant, blocked one by one as the needs of former occupants dictated.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t been up here. Do you know your husband has? He loves these vistas.”

  Her comment was jarring. Inappropriately familiar coming from someone Michael had never met. How would she even know that when Catherine didn’t know he’d been up there herself?

  “A view like this can clear your mind, free you from your cares below.” She stated, a touch of parody in her voice.

  That was definitely something Michael might have said.

  With a thump in her chest, Catherine realized she must have met Michael, and if she had they must have met in secret.

  My God, had she seduced him as well?

  That thought was quickly followed by another: that she was after Rowan. She was behind Rowan’s sudden interest in his bequest. The night she stayed she must have rifled Catherine’s files and found out about his money. There was no way Rowan would have discovered by himself. He was always the most unworldly, unmaterialistic child. He never even liked getting birthday presents.

  “You’ll go through his money in no time. You’ll end up living in a yurt in the Hebrides. You’ll freeze.”

  The girl seemed to think this was funny. “That’s a very strange thing to say.” She smirked, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. Lighting up, she took a drag.

  “Rowan should stay in school.” Catherine was adamant. She couldn’t help saying of the cigarette: “That’ll kill you.”

  A cloud of smoke curled over her lips. “If life doesn’t first,” the girl said, exhaling.

  Catherine wanted the girl to go but the question was, would she ever leave? Her mind raced through the options. She could pay her off. That was the most likely solution for a venal operator. They were always short of cash but she could give her the Bramley painting of Sutton Hoo, worth over two hundred grand, her most valuable portable asset, a postmodern masterwork. The girl would sell it, but then she’d be gone . . .

  “You’d have to give me more than a picture of cabbages.”

  Catherine stiffened. This girl had calculated everything. She knew the value of the picture. She knew the value of what was left of her family. But that wasn’t enough. She wanted more. “They are not cabbages,” she corrected sharply.

  “You hate me now, don’t you?”

  Again, her perception was accurate. Catherine didn’t deny it. The disappointment was bitter but not entirely surprising. Hadn’t she known from the beginning that this girl would disappoint? Wasn’t this always part of her charm?

  Catherine watched her sashay to the farthest point south, where the roof levels dropped ten feet, and the eighteenth century lorded over the seventeenth century. Circling to the north, she stopped where the roof was flattest and open and there was the best view of the land.

  “Have you ever seen classical dancers jive to rock? They’re so wooden and awkward it’s hilarious, yet they have bodies that make every pose divine. It’s funny because when you meet them they seem larger than life, arresting, but if you try to get to know them or pin them down, they’re like vapor.”

  “Is that why you came? To find out what happened?”

  “I came because I heard about a woman who lived in a big house who thought she had everything, but it turned out that she had nothing. She had lost everything along the way because she hadn’t loved her family enough. And I thought, That place sounds familiar. Must see if anything has changed. I might get lucky.”

  Catherine wasn’t sure what happened next because she went toward the girl. If she was honest, there was anger in her heart and the girl might have mistaken this for intent. The girl took several steps back. As she had described before, there was no wall or barrier.

  She fell silently away.

  Whether she had fallen by accident or whether she had jumped because the will to go was greater than the will to stay, Catherine couldn’t say.

  How long Catherine remained outside before Judith found her and sounded the alarm she didn’t know. That was left to the police and experts to try to determine.

  Catherine had been in the shade longer than she had realized. The sun had bowed down behind the roof. With the sinking orb, the temperature had dropped as well. She moved her wrists and ankles to bring circulation back to her stiffening limbs. The cold seemed to have penetrated her bones. The forensic investigators worked with increased urgency and seemed to have accelerated their pace, as if they knew that with the fading light they were running out of time. Catherine was drawn to them, curious to know what they had discovered—one of them had tweezers and was putting something that looked like a cigarette butt into a plastic bag. She was interested to see what they had found.

  She didn’t want to be alone.

  As the workers neared, they moved politely aside, much as the archeologists had done that day at Sutton Hoo. She was grateful that she was being treated with respect, as one of them, not as a guilty party or dreadful perp.

  I wouldn’t be lying if I told them that she moved in on us at a bad time.

  Judith was wandering around, her crochet shawl trailing behind her on the ground. One of her braids had come undone, giving her a lopsided air. She was crying, a lost child with a blankie. She no longer looked beatific or particularly beautiful, but stark raving batty.

  The sky seemed to dim and lower over strands of bleeding gold. Somewhere in the distance, Catherine could hear the rhythmic chirp of a robin. It was the whistle and squeak of her father’s wheelbarrow on the way to the dump as he journeyed to make beauty and art. Underneath, she heard a more melodious warble, a figured bass.

  What color is that?

  She was talking to her father about his first bell krater.

  You tell me, Catherine.

  It’s not red or orange exactly, she answered. It’s burning. Like Saturn. Or the rays of the sun before it goes down?

  I couldn’t have put better myself, dear girl. That is true.

  She was confused because she could no longer see the vase, nor the bench, nor the wisteria. The tent seemed to have risen around her while she lay, helpless, on the ground, watching herself be enveloped.

  This was strange.

  She would have liked to complain, as she’d wanted when the spaceman had rudely trampled her daffs, but even then, with each passing second, the desire to protest
seemed to wane. The man who had interviewed her before was leaning over with his face intimately close to hers. She could have kissed him if she had been able to turn her head. She realized that she could no longer move her neck or body. She was frozen. Physical sensation was ebbing away, but not so much that she couldn’t feel the pressure in her temples; that her eyes were swollen and might soon burst and overflow; and that if that were to happen there was nothing she could do to wipe them clear.

  That was a pity.

  She would have liked to cry, to wish Michael by her side.

  But that wasn’t possible.

  Judith sobbed, “I saw her out here this morning, talking to herself . . . banging, banging, banging, every night on the walls. I should have known.”

  “Is there anything you would like to say?” the man whispered in Catherine’s ear.

  “You won’t get anything from her now. She’s almost gone,” someone answered instead.

  If she’d still had words, she would have told him to make sure that Michael understood that Rowan was all right because he mustn’t be allowed to think, even for a second, that anything had happened to their son. The jangle of the BlackBerry was always a reminder that disaster was one phone call away. Whenever the phone rang, there was always an awful pause before one of them would say, I’ll get it. That was something he should never have to experience again.

  She would have liked to tell Michael that she loved him more than she’d understood, that her infatuation with John Bramley, her ridiculous, special relationship, was only a heightened mutuality, a form of self-regard or narcissism. It was nothing compared to the grist and substance of their years together.

  Or maybe it was best that she couldn’t. Michael wasn’t aware of her petty betrayals.

  She wasn’t sure what she would have said about the girl.

  That she was slippery and dangerous?

  She came once or twice.

  Or not at all?

  She did me in all over again when she left.