That Summer: A Novel (6 page)

And as he leaned forward to press a kiss against her brow, and then her closed eyelids, she heard a floorboard creak outside.

As though someone were listening.

Herne Hill, 2009

“Is someone there?” Julia’s voice sounded very small and tinny in the dark hallway. Get a grip, she told herself, and called out, more forcefully, “Hello?”

Her fingers fumbled for a light switch and found it. It was gummy, but it worked. Two bulbs blinked into life high above her head, encased in elaborately chased frosted glass. The pale light they produced only dusted the edges of the gloom. The hall wasn’t particularly large, even to her city-bred eyes, but the ceiling seemed to go up and up, the light fixture hanging from an elaborate, if dusty, plaster roundel.

A staircase, carpeted in red patterned with what might originally have been blue, rose up in front of her, turning sharply towards a landing.

Footsteps pattered down the stairs, accompanied by a voice calling, “Sorry! It’s just me.”

Julia’s hands, which had tightened around the strap of her computer bag—burglar knocked out by PC!—relaxed. The voice wasn’t familiar, but it certainly didn’t sound threatening. It was a woman’s voice, husky, and unmistakably British.

“Is that Julia?” The owner of the voice passed the curve of the stair, the worn treads squeaking as she cantered down the final flight, one hand on the banister, the other flapping for balance. She stopped, breathless, at the bottom, sweeping her long hair out of her face. “Hi.”

Her hair was a darker brown than Julia’s, expertly streaked with lighter highlights. Over a pair of designer jeans she wore one of those floaty chiffon tops that only the very tall and very thin can wear. She was both.

What was a fashion model doing in her front hall? The lawyer hadn’t said anything about anyone being in residence. The word “empty” had been used quite distinctly.

Julia dumped her computer bag on top of her wheelie. “Yes, it is Julia,” she said cautiously. “And you are—?”

“Oh, sorry.” The stranger came forward, hand extended in welcome. Even in ballet flats, she was a good four inches taller than Julia in her high-heeled loafers. “It’s Nat,” she said, and, when Julia looked blank, tried again. “Natalie? Your cousin? I’ve haven’t seen you since—well. Yonks.”

Julia forced a smile. Not very polite to admit she had no recollection of Natalie, no recollection at all, so instead she said, “It’s been a while.”

She didn’t ask,
What are you doing here?
but the question must have been implied, because Natalie laughed lightly and said, “Crenshaw told my mother that you’d be in this week, so I thought I’d pop by, make sure the lights worked and the loo wasn’t stopped up. I didn’t mean to scare you, though. They hadn’t thought you’d be in until tomorrow.”

Natalie was smiling, smiling brightly, but her eyes didn’t match her lips. Or maybe that was just the half-light of the hall, creating shadows, distorting perception.

Next to the other woman’s casual trendiness Julia felt even more dirty and disheveled than she had before, painfully aware that her jeans and shirt had been with her since New York. They had the accumulated stains on them to prove it. Her hair was coming out of her ponytail and she could feel the waves of dirt coming off herself like Pig-Pen in the old Charlie Brown comics.

It put her at a distinct disadvantage.

“That’s very sweet of you,” said Julia cautiously. It seemed rude to ask how Natalie had gotten in, but Julia wasn’t sure she liked the idea of cousins popping in and out at will. If Natalie was a cousin. “Does your mother have a key?”

Natalie wafted Julia’s question aside. “That kitchen door never closes properly.”

Good to know. She’d have to find the local equivalent of Home Depot and install a bolt.

“Besides”—Natalie leaned forward confidingly, bringing with her the slightly chemical scent of expensive shampoo—“I wasn’t going to leave you all alone in the chamber of horrors.”

“I was thinking more House of Usher,” admitted Julia. “Are there any other lights in here?”

“It wasn’t as bad when the foliage was trimmed,” said Nat, casting a dubious look around the hall. “There used to be some light from the windows. Not exactly cozy, is it?”

“I don’t know. A bit of Windex, some hedge trimmers, a can of gasoline…” Hmm, she probably shouldn’t joke about arson, not to someone she didn’t know. Julia massaged her aching shoulder. “Do you live around here?”

Nat gave an exaggerated shudder. “Hardly.” From her expression Julia gathered that her question was a social solecism. “Would you like the tour?”

What she would really like was an hour of privacy to settle in and get her bearings. But Nat didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. Was this normal? Julia had never had any family before, or none that she remembered. It was hard to know where the boundaries were meant to be. She and her father had adopted the New Yorkers’ creed of keeping to oneself.

“Sure,” said Julia. “But first—a bathroom?”

“This way.” Natalie led the way to a tiny bathroom tucked away under the stairs, just a toilet, a sink, and a mirror. The toilet was the old kind, with a wooden seat and a tank hanging from the ceiling, chain dangling down. “It’s a bit primitive, but it works. Mostly.”

There were times when it was an advantage to be on the smaller side; Julia’s head just cleared the sloping ceiling. The wallpaper was covered with bits of verse.
I have wasted time, and now time doth waste me
.
If you neglect time, like a wilted rose, it withers
.
Tempus fugit
. Cheerful stuff.

Julia made a mental note to repaper the bathroom before showing the place to prospective buyers. Constant reminders of one’s own mortality weren’t exactly bathroom fare.

Despite Natalie’s dire predictions, the toilet flushed and the water, after a few moments, ran clear. Julia splashed her face with cold water, blotting it with a limp towel hanging from a ring in the wall. Looking up at herself in the streaked mirror, she was astounded by how normal she looked. Mid-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, wet wisps clinging to her cheeks. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes a little bleary from jet lag but more awake than half an hour ago. There was nothing like being scared out of your wits to wake you up.

Looking on the bright side of things, she decided, rubbing ineffectually at a water splotch on her shirt, Natalie’s appearance had scared her other ghosts away, at least for the moment. Jet lag, she told herself. Heat and jet lag. With another person in it, the house was reduced to exactly what it was: a large, elderly establishment that had the stale smell that comes of being shut up for too long.

Natalie wasn’t in the hallway when Julia let herself out of the bathroom.

“Nat?” Julia looked around, trying to figure out where she might have gone.

There were doors on either side of the front hall. A narrow hallway ran past the stairs, branching out into more hallways, more doors. From the outside, the plan of the house looked like it ought to be fairly simple, but it stretched farther back that Julia had thought, with hallways darting off at odd angles.

She pushed open the door to her right, directly across from the bathroom, and found herself in what must have been Aunt Regina’s rumpus room. The furniture was chintz and worn; there were piles of crossword puzzles on the floor next to the couch and a surprisingly large flat-screen television standing uneasily on a table that looked too small for it. She had obviously enjoyed James Bond movies. A box set of them sat next to the DVD player, with a gap where one had been pulled out.

It looked as though Aunt Regina had just stepped out for a moment. Her spectacles were still on the corner table, next to the lamp. There was still a tray table, one of the cheap, portable kinds, open in front of the couch, holding a placemat, an empty mug with something caked on the bottom, and no fewer than three remotes.

Why me?
Julia wanted to ask her, but Aunt Regina wasn’t there to answer. The glasses sat where they were on the side table, the lamp dark.

It was a slightly unnerving feeling. Julia hurried across the room, pushing open one of a pair of double doors, coughing at the dust. Somehow, she didn’t think that Aunt Regina came in here much, whatever it was. The room smelled dank, and in the dim light from the study Julia could just vaguely make out windows shrouded in heavy drapes.

The switch was one of the push kinds. Julia pressed down on it. Blinking in the sudden light from the crystal chandelier, she found herself face-to-face with a woman on the wall.

For a second, the dark hair, the pale skin, the flowers, made Julia think of her mother, of that faded image in an old snapshot.

But there was nothing faded about this picture. Even dimmed with dust and neglect, there was a vibrancy about the painted image that drew the eye like a magnet. It shouldn’t have. There was nothing particularly exotic about it, just a woman sitting in a garden, trees flowering all around her, roses twining as if reaching for her hand, the sun catching the gold lettering on the book that lay beside her, abandoned on the bench.

The woman’s clothes made Julia think of the cover of her high school volume of
Jane Eyre,
a tight-waisted dress in a deep, dark blue, with a modest white collar and cuffs. Her dark hair was uncovered, parted in the middle, pulled down smoothly to cover her ears, then looped and knotted in the back. Just another society portrait.

Except for her face. She was looking up, lips parted as though about to say something. The serenity of her hair and gown was belied by the turmoil in her face. She looked, realized Julia, as lost as Julia felt. The contrast between the woman’s restrained clothing, her carefully arranged hair, and the wildness in her eyes struck a powerful chord with Julia. She felt a kinship with this unknown woman, whoever she might be, with the confusion and frustration all bottled into that prim exterior.

Whoever the artist was, he was pretty darn talented to have conveyed all that, just in the tilt of a head, the slightly parted lips, the luster of the eyes. Julia took a step forward, feeling as if, if she only got close enough, those lips might whisper secrets to her. She could practically hear the buzz of expectancy in the air around her. Even the dust motes seemed to have paused to listen.

A door opened on the other side of the room, and the mood shattered.

“There you are!” It was Nat, slightly breathless. “I just went to make sure I’d closed the back door. Hideous room, isn’t this? It smells like someone died.”

FOUR

Herne Hill, 1842

“Arthur?” Imogen hovered in the doorway of Arthur’s study, a candle in her hand.

The linen of her nightdress billowed around her, the fullness of the fabric seeming to emphasize the emptiness beneath. Her abdomen felt hollow without the baby who should have been rounding it.

The first time Imogen had miscarried, she had scarcely known she was with child before she had lost it. This time, she had felt the tingling in her breasts, had seen her nipples darken and change. Her stomach had barely started to round, but she had known the child was in there all the same. She had felt it quicken, the smallest flutter of sensation, but there nonetheless.

Until it wasn’t.

Imogen pushed the door a little farther, stepping tentatively over the threshold into Arthur’s domain. It was less a study than a gallery, crammed with rare and precious objects of beauty. The light of her candle glinted off the stained glass of the window, off the richly polished wood of the shelves and paneling, off the gold illumination in her father’s Book of Hours, which lay open on its very own stand at the far end of the room.

Imogen seldom came here; Arthur had a way of hurrying her out again, in the nicest possible way but just as definitively for all that. Argument and entreaties alike were blunted against his smiling courtesy.

“Arthur?” she said again, and he looked up, blinking a bit.

“Yes, my dear?” He was still at his desk, impeccably dressed in jacket, cravat, and dark trousers. “Did you want something?”

She wanted to turn back the clock, to their courtship in Cornwall, to the way he had looked at her then, to the promises he had made her.

Somehow, ever since she had come to Herne Hill, nothing had gone quite as it ought. Instead of drawing closer to her, Arthur had retreated ever more into his own business, business that didn’t concern her. The door to his study was closed to her; the manuscripts he had once so vividly described to her were wrapped away in their own special casings and jealously guarded. There would be time enough for that, he had told her indulgently, once she had adjusted herself to her new life. Wouldn’t she be more comfortable in the morning room with Jane?

Jane hadn’t wanted Imogen in the morning room any more than Arthur had wanted her in the study. The only place in which Imogen had found a welcome was in Evie’s nursery. She had persuaded Arthur to allow her to sack Evie’s worthless governess and let Imogen take on the task. Those hours with Evie, reading with her, taking her through the rudiments of French grammar and basic mathematical equations, were the only times that Imogen felt truly useful.

It was only temporary, Imogen had told herself. Once the household was accustomed to her … once Arthur had dealt with the most pressing of his business …

Why did it all sound more and more like an excuse? It had been three years now, and, but for Evie, Imogen still felt nearly as much a stranger at Herne Hill as the day she had arrived. More so. Then she had been wrapped in the comfort of Arthur’s love, never knowing that he would grow more distant day by day until even his visits to her room by night became a rarity rather than a commonplace.

Didn’t he love her? He said he did; he paid her formal and flowery compliments on those occasions when their paths should chance to cross.

So why did it feel as though he was slipping away?

Imogen looked at Arthur, sitting behind his desk, and felt as though she were looking at a stranger. The thought filled her with a deep and nameless fear.