A House Without Mirrors (6 page)

I
was sitting up in bed with one of Wilma's books on my lap to stop me from falling asleep.

No chance of that, though. First, I was still angry with Wilma, and second, I was worried.

Wilma had been nicer while we were putting Signe to bed, but something was weird about her. As if she was ill, or…

The same uneasy feeling that I had while we were brushing Signe's teeth returned: that the person I had always thought was Wilma was just a shell. Something she was about to grow out of; something alien and soon to be abandoned. I'm not often scared, but that feeling really frightened me.

In spite of sitting with the book open on my lap for hours, I doubt I read a single word. In any case I
hadn't even turned a page when I heard the patter of Wilma's footsteps in the corridor just before two in the morning. In an instant I was out of bed and by the door.

Wilma stopped when she saw me in the doorway and her eyes gleamed in the light from my room. She was fully dressed and wearing her trainers.

“I won't get involved,” I said, exactly as I had rehearsed. “I just want to make sure you'll be all right.”

She put her finger to her lips.

“Shush, Thomas will hear you,” she hissed, squinting nervously towards Dad's door. “Talk quietly.”

I tightened the belt of my dressing gown and stepped across the threshold.

“Dad's upstairs with Henrietta,” I said as loudly as before. “I'm coming in with you, just so you know.”

Wilma stood still for a moment, and I could tell she was weighing different things up against each other. Plus and minus, for and against.

“Come on, then,” she said at last.

Signe had obviously not explained it very well, because it was me who had to show Wilma the right wardrobe, me who had to turn the key and push her inside. And when we had been standing there inside with the mirrors for a moment and she tried to get out, it was me who stopped her.

“Not just yet,” I whispered, grabbing hold of her. “Wait.”

I wasn't really aware of what I was waiting for, but when the shift in the darkness came it was so obvious that I almost laughed out loud.

“That's it, we can step outside now,” I said. “It's happened.”

The reversed room was furnished almost the same as before, but the light from the window was brighter. There was a tone of sunshine in it, although it was still impossible to distinguish any colours on the carpets and the furniture.

Wilma stepped quietly in front of me, looking down at her feet, which left imprints on the soft carpet, looking around at the walls and the window.

“But this is real,” she whispered. “Tommy, tell me it's real?”

I shrugged.

“I suppose it is in some way,” I said. “It's just not the kind of reality we're used to.”

The dressing table had moved, and there was another mirror on top of it replacing the gold-painted one that I'd carried away with me. The new mirror was larger and looked more modern somehow. The bottles and jars also looked newer, I noticed, with lids in pastel colours and labels in gold and red. Wilma sat down on the stool in front of the dressing table and tilted the new mirror until she could see herself in it.

“Like this, perhaps?” she whispered. “Perhaps I'm just supposed to sit here with my eyes closed?”

I leant forward and looked at the two of us in the dark glass. Wilma kept her eyes closed and her face turned slightly upwards, as if she were sunning herself. After a little while she started humming quietly.

“Mmm,” she said. “That's nice. Brush harder.”

I moved my gaze from our reflection in the mirror to Wilma's face with its eyes closed beside me. She looked the same, but somebody was standing in the shadows behind the stool, caressingly brushing Wilma's hair.

Hetty.

I
wasn’t at all frightened, actually.

Hetty smiled gently when she saw that I’d noticed her, and it felt quite natural to see her just standing there.

“Hello,” I said.

Hetty blushed—at least it looked like it in the faint light—and met my gaze.

“Hello,” she whispered. “Again.”

I was happy that she remembered me, but also because of something else that I couldn’t explain. Something about Hetty herself. She had the softest voice I’d ever heard, like silk against the string of a cello. It made you grow all warm inside, and I longed to hear her speak again.

But Hetty didn’t say anything else while she was brushing Wilma’s hair with long, steady strokes.
Wilma’s eyes were closed the whole time and for a while I almost believed she had fallen asleep.

I stole a glance at Hetty and noticed that she had grown. The first time I saw her she had been as little as Signe, but now she was almost like me. Not quite, perhaps more like somewhere between Erland and me. She wasn’t wearing the sailor dress any longer, but a blouse and a narrow skirt that stopped just below the knees. Her clothes and her hair, which was cut in a bob, made me think of old movies.

“Who are you?”

Without me noticing, Wilma had opened her eyes. She was looking straight at Hetty, but she didn’t seem to be afraid.

“You know who I am,” Hetty said. “You know me.”

Wilma continued looking at her for a long time. Then she nodded.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “But I don’t really know how.”

Hetty stopped brushing and took a bundle of velvet ribbon from her pocket. She held the ribbon carefully between her lips while she gathered Wilma’s curls at the nape of her neck, and then she tied the ribbon around them in a bow. It looked really lovely,
actually. I had never seen Wilma wear her hair like that before.

“Thank you,” Wilma said and reached for a powder compact on the table. “You?”

Hetty looked up.

“Yes?”

“Can…”

Wilma hesitated and grew quiet. Then she handed the compact to Hetty and started again.

“Can you do something with me? I mean, make me prettier?”

Hetty took the small round compact and looked at it for an instant. Then she shook her head.

“Only you can do that,” she said, putting the compact back on the table. “But I can show you how. Come with me.”

At first Wilma hesitated. She looked quizzically at the bottles and jars on the table, and then at Hetty. But Hetty was already halfway out of the door, so Wilma got up and followed her.

I followed a few steps behind, through the corridor towards the hallway. The house was really just like Henrietta’s. But the things that should have been to the left were to the right, and vice versa.

A house of mirrors.

“I’ve heard that you enjoy reading.”

Hetty’s question made Wilma look up at her.

“Read?” she said hesitantly and pushed her glasses onto the bridge of her nose. “Sometimes. Yeah, I suppose I do.”

“But you do, Wilma,” I said. “You read all the time.”

Neither Wilma nor Hetty turned around. They hardly seemed to know that I was there.

“You can read people too,” Hetty continued. “You hear all the things that they’re not saying.”

Wilma didn’t reply, but she stopped and looked at Hetty.

“Not everyone can do that,” Hetty said and held her arm. “It’s a special gift.”

She opened a door and entered. After a couple of moments Wilma followed, and then me.

We went into a room full of books, and I mean full from floor to ceiling. On all the walls apart from the one with the windows, there were built-in bookshelves with row after row of books, and other books were piled on the tables and in small, low shelves by the floor. It could have been messy, but it wasn’t. There was an order to the wall of books’
spines, which made the room calm and restful. I was certain that I had never been there before, but when I walked over to the wall with the windows I recognized where I was. The view looked towards the part of the garden where Dad had told me there used to be a rose garden when he was little. I realized that the room was the same as the one that was used as a dining room in Henrietta’s house, only reversed.

“Sit down,” Hetty said, pointing towards the sofa in the middle of the room. “Kick off your shoes and make yourself comfortable.”

Wilma did as she was told, but it still didn’t look all that comfortable.

“But there are only books in here…” she said. “You were supposed to show me how I could be prettier.”

“Take a look at the books on the table for now,” Hetty said as if she hadn’t heard her. “I’ll look for some good ones.”

Wilma leant forward and looked suspiciously at the pile of books on the sofa table.

At first she just dragged her finger along the spines, and then she looked up. She wriggled out a thin green book with fabric covers from the pile and opened it.

I lay down on the sofa. It was lovely to stretch out next to Wilma, and nice to listen to her calm breathing right beside me. Apart from that the only sound was the faint scraping of Hetty every now and then moving the library steps she was standing on, or the rustling when Wilma turned a page. The feeling of sunlight was stronger in here, but I still could not see any blue sky outside the window.

How could it be day? It had been night when we entered the wardrobe.

It wasn’t important. Night turned into morning, which turned into day in the house of mirrors too, but it didn’t really matter.

In this room time could not alter anything. It was a comfortable thought, like Wilma’s arm around my shoulders, and I fell asleep wrapped in it.

I slept. I don’t know for how long, but when I woke up it was darker. Someone had covered me with a blanket, but Wilma had got up from the sofa. She was standing by the window with something in her hands. There was no sign of Hetty.

“Wilma?”

She turned her head.

“Come here, Tommy,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for me to wake up. “Come and have a look.”

My body was stiff and my feet stung and itched when I walked across the carpet. I stood behind Wilma and saw that it was a mirror she was holding. It was one of those oblong ones that you put up in hallways, with a simple wooden frame and barely a metre tall. We were both reflected in the mirror, along with the bookshelves behind us.

“Can you see?” she said.

I had to blink to stop my eyes from hazing over and all the time I wanted to yawn. I stifled the yawning and really tried to look.

“I see,” I said. “It’s you and me.”

“Take another look.”

I looked again, for a long time. And then I saw it.

Something had happened to Wilma. It was nothing peculiar, but she had changed. Her face was calmer, her neck straighter, her eyes clearer. To tell the truth, she looked just the same, but with one difference.

She was beautiful.

“How lovely,” I said. “Did Hetty help you with the make-up?”

Wilma smiled. It was a smile I had never seen on
her face before, but it made me relaxed and full of hope.

“She helped me find my way home,” she said. “This is me.”

She waved her hand in front of herself and I couldn’t tell if she meant her reflection in the mirror, or the room, or what. Probably everything.

“From now on this room will always give me a way to look at the world,” she said. “Hetty told me so, and now I know that is how it is.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded. It was true, I realized that. For my own part I hadn’t changed at all, but the energy that streamed from Wilma was so tangible that it would be ridiculous to doubt it.

It struck me that the thing I’d been so afraid of had happened now, and that it wasn’t so bad after all. Wilma had changed, but it didn’t mean anything. If anything, she was more like my Wilma now.

She put the mirror down against the radiator under the window and reached out her hand for me.

“That’s it, Tommy,” she said when I took it. “We can go back now.”