The House of Secrets by Sarra Manning (41)

 

The Friday after the barbecue, when Zoe got home from a day of meetings in town she found Win sitting at the kitchen table, engrossed in the book he was reading.

‘I forgot you were out,’ he said, briefly looking up as Zoe stumbled into the room, Florence dogging her heels and intent on tripping her up. ‘I came home early.’

‘Did you?’ Zoe said. ‘You should have texted.’

‘I was going to but then I started reading Libby’s diary.’ Win held up the object in question. ‘She can’t add up to save her life. I’m not altogether sure she even knows how many shillings there are to a pound. Sorry, had to get that off my chest.’ He smiled sheepishly in a way that made Zoe want to perch on his lap and brush the hair out of his eyes, so she did. Winding her arms round his neck once she was finished with the brushing then bussing the end of his nose with her lips. ‘I’ve read through to the end and now I’m going back over a few things.’

‘I haven’t read through to the end. Not properly. I’m only up to the beginning of August…’

Win’s eyebrows shot up. ‘So, you haven’t seen the telegram saying Freddy was sh —’

Zoe slapped a hand over Win’s mouth. ‘That doesn’t mean you can spoil it for me.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You know how I feel about spoilers.’

Win did know how Zoe felt about spoilers because she’d once unfriended him on Facebook when he’d ruined the series finale of Mad Men for her.

He took Zoe’s hand away from his mouth. ‘Spoilers show a callous disregard for authorial intent,’ he parroted, looking up at Zoe from under his lashes with a sly smile. ‘You’re really red. You’ve been slurring your words and you appear to be sitting on my lap. Have you been drinking?’

‘Yes. Yes I have.’ Zoe had had the best part of a bottle of champagne inadequately mopped up with several portions of triple-cooked truffle fries. ‘That reminds me. Do you want the good news or the bad news?’

‘The good news, always.’

‘The good news is that I’ve got a three-book publishing deal for The Highgate Wood Mysteries but the bad news is that it’s a very small publishing deal.’ Zoe held up thumb and forefinger so Win could get an idea of just how small it was. ‘But there’s always foreign sales, right?’

‘Foreign sales have been good to us over the years.’ Win pulled her closer so he could kiss Zoe’s pink cheek. ‘But still, it is really good news, Zo.’

‘I was starting to worry that no one would pay me to write or illustrate another book ever again. I also hate it when I’m not pulling my financial weight.’

‘Rubbish,’ Win said. ‘Yeah, you have your quiet periods and then all your advances come in at once and you end up bringing in more in a month than I do in a year. It’s all good, Zo.’

Zoe kissed him for that because not once, not even at their very worst when they were screaming at each other daily, had Win ever brought up Zoe’s current lack of earning power though she’d strong-armed him into buying a money pit.

The kissing became quite heated, quite quickly. Hands starting to wander, which was unexpected and exciting, but then Zoe remembered what else she’d been about to say and pushed Win away.

‘I also have really, really good news and quite bad news. Shall I lead with the good news again?’

Win nodded, his expression hopeful, his eyes dark, face flushed.

‘It’s just as well you’re already sitting down because I’m about to blow your mind.’ Zoe shot finger guns at her own head for emphasis. God, she really was quite drunk. ‘So, like, do you remember that picture book I did about the robin who was down on Christmas and how he’d pull the berries off holly bushes and perch on the window sill of houses with their decorations up and tap on the glass in an annoying fashion until the Christmas Eve when he was flying along and he came across Santa Claus and —’

‘Are you going to give me a page-by-page rundown of a book that I’ve already read?’ Win jiggled Zoe on his lap. ‘Could we skip the plot?’

‘I suppose,’ Zoe agreed. ‘Anyway, I’ve been drinking champagne with Hardeep, my illustration agent, to celebrate being commissioned to design all the Christmas packaging for a leading high street store for next year.’ Zoe shook her head and blinked. It still hadn’t sunk in. ‘Confectionary, cakes, novelty food items too. Gift tags. Wrapping paper. Christmas cards. All adorned with a family of fat red robins getting up to all manner of festive high jinks.’

Win jiggled her on his lap again. Zoe didn’t have the heart to tell him that the jiggling was making her feel sick. ‘Which store?’

‘I can’t tell you. I signed a non-disclosure agreement but it’s not just any store,’ she revealed with heavy emphasis.

‘Oh my God, you clever, clever woman.’ Win clasped his hands in the prayer position. ‘Will we get free food? Vouchers? Christmas hampers?’

Zoe glared at him. ‘Please don’t rain on my parade. Not when my fee will pay the mortgage for the next year and keep Florence in organic dog food.’

‘She has got very expensive tastes,’ Win agreed and his smile was equal parts pride and relief that they no longer had to live on just his salary and Zoe’s paltry royalty payments, which dribbled in twice a year. ‘Dare I ask what the quite bad news is?’

‘I need to have over a hundred preliminary sketches done and signed off by December twentieth,’ Zoe said and she pulled a horrified face for dramatic emphasis, though Win didn’t seem that bothered by the daunting task that lay ahead.

‘Oh, you’ll be fine.’ He pulled Zoe closer so he could kiss the top of her head. ‘Honestly, Zo, this is amazing news and just as I was about to instigate another round of quite brutal budget cuts and insist we finally gave up the quilted loo roll.’

‘Not the quilted loo roll!’ Zoe shrieked in genuine alarm. ‘I told you I’d give up alcohol before I give up cushioned toilet paper.’

‘Talking of alcohol, you really are hammered, aren’t you?’ Win peered intently up at Zoe’s face. One sniff of the barmaid’s apron and her complexion upgraded to lobster red. ‘We should have dinner. Sober you up a bit.’

‘Or you could get drunk too?’ Zoe suggested.

They compromised with a quickly pulled together carby dinner of pasta and pesto and a bottle of Cava left over from the barbecue and when Zoe put the bowls down on the table, Win opened his laptop.

‘We haven’t even talked about your Libby properly. I was wondering if you’d looked her up on the census for nineteen forty-one?’ he asked.

‘No, because the censuses are sealed for one hundred years,’ Zoe said around a mouthful of pasta. ‘But I couldn’t find her on the nineteen eleven census either. The problem is that I have no idea what her maiden name was – I’m pretty certain it wasn’t Edwards, I think that was a stage name, even though it’s the name she registered when she got married.’

Without log-in details for one of the commercial ancestry sites (and Zoe could tell that Win was sorely tempted to sign up) their only option was to use a free site that only logged the barest details of births, marriages and deaths.

Zoe had already confirmed that Libby and Freddy had been married in the Parish of St Pancras in September of 1935, but after that the trail went cold.

There was no marriage to a Hugo Watkins. No birth certificate for a baby either, even though they tried looking under Edwards, Morton and Watkins. In fact, there were no births for the first half of 1937 registered in London that fitted the scant information they had. Thankfully, there were no death certificates either.

Zoe was pleased that Libby was no longer a secret or the cause of more disagreement, but something she could share with Win. Win was always a great sounding board when she was drafting a new story, and he was a great sounding board now; happy to listen to Zoe’s theories or suggest new avenues they should search. Besides, it was lovely to do something together that didn’t involve spreadsheets or random acts of DIY.

‘We’re going round in circles now,’ Win said at last when they’d bounced around the internet for an hour but hadn’t come up with any new leads. He closed the laptop lid to prove his point. ‘The thing is, Zo, we’re butting up against the Second World War so if Libby did stay in London, what with the Blitz and everything, then chances are…’

Zoe didn’t want to hear it. ‘The important thing is that Libby got pregnant again. When she was sure that she couldn’t, when she’d lost a baby already. They didn’t have fertility-enhancing drugs or IVF then but she still managed it.’

‘I know what you’re doing, Zo, and I get it but stop looking for signs where there aren’t any.’

There were signs everywhere. Cycles. Circles. Strange coincidences, which couldn’t be explained by reason and logic. In January when she’d been raw with grief, Zoe had moved into this house and found a suitcase and diary belonging to a woman who, eighty years before, had been grief-stricken too.

Maybe the house had stood still all this time because it had been waiting for Zoe to finish Libby’s story. Zoe remembered back to that first evening, Win recoiling as they uncovered the house’s secret. ‘You said it was a sign when we found the suitcase,’ she reminded him. ‘A sign we should never have moved, but I think we were meant to turn this house into a home.’

Win was halfway to the sink with their dishes, but he paused. ‘Does it feel like home to you? When did that happen? Somewhere between the new kitchen being installed and the Tuesday when we had that row in the middle of IKEA? I’m not there yet.’

Neither was Zoe really. There were some things missing before 23 Elysian Place became their home. The house needed a pram in the hall. The bedroom next to theirs transformed from spare room to nursery with a sunny mural painted on the wall, and in the cot, solid and real, their child. Zoe could see it, feel it, so completely that it had to come true.

If Libby could do it, against all the odds, then so could she.

 

When Win committed to a project, he really committed to a project.

When he’d decided to take up running after his nan had warned him there was a history of high cholesterol in the family, he’d completed his first marathon within six months.

Then there’d been the Great KonMari Purge of early 2015 when they’d started sprucing up their old flat ready to put it on the market. Win had become so obsessed with decluttering that Zoe became dry-mouthed each time he appeared with another black bin liner full of things that absolutely didn’t need to be thrown out.

And now he was about to embark on Project Libby and Zoe recognised the signs that indicated that he was all in. Their kitchen whiteboard had been repurposed so it looked like Win was conducting a Missing Person investigation, he’d taken a huge pile of books on English theatre and the car industry between the wars out on inter-library loan and was fielding phone calls from the Highgate Historical Society.

Whereas Zoe was about to sequester herself to draw more robins than any other person had ever drawn in the history of illustration. But first, before he left for work one morning, Win sat her down with a serious expression on his face and Libby’s diary in his hands.

‘You should finish reading the diary before we go any further,’ he said gravely. ‘In case you decide that it’s best to leave Libby to rest in peace, as it were.’

The way that Win put it was ominous so that Zoe had a metallic tang of fear at the back of her throat, like she’d been licking batteries. But it wasn’t just the diary.

‘And you’re meeting Jackie for lunch,’ she reminded him.

‘Yeah, I know I am,’ Win said as he gathered up his briefcase. ‘Said she wanted to have a chat about something. I hope it’s not her VAT return.’

Win squatted down to pet Florence goodbye so he missed the anguished look on Zoe’s face because she knew the mother/son lunch-date was nothing to do with Jackie’s VAT return.

The look was still on Zoe’s face after she’d made a pot of tea then reached for the diary with some hesitation. Taking a leaf from Clive’s book, she was armed with a magnifying glass, which made reading much easier as finally Libby talked about the house and though she didn’t give its address, Zoe knew that she meant their house when she wrote about her hopes and plans for it.

I want it to be light and bright, no dark wood, no cumbersome Victoriana. A place where we can live and love and be happy, she’d written in mid October. Just as Zoe had, Libby was planning to go white with accents of blue in the downstairs room and had even drawn a rudimentary sketch of their living room; sofa and armchairs in roughly the same place but a radiogram instead of a television.

And then.

And one final entry.

That was how Libby’s diary ended. Not with a bang, but a pained whimper and a doctor’s appointment.

 

Zoe had wondered if Win might come home straight after his lunch with Jackie. If he’d be angry with Zoe for asking Jackie about Terry when he was persona non grata in their lives, but Win was home at half past six as usual and even called out a cheery ‘hello!’ as soon as he came through the front door, kissing the top of her head when he walked into the kitchen a moment later. She tugged hold of his sleeve. ‘How did lunch go?’

‘Fine. As it happened, Mum didn’t want to talk about her VAT return after all,’ Win said mildly. He kissed the top of her head again then busied himself with putting the kettle on and making tea, though Zoe didn’t know if he was genuinely desperate for a cuppa or if was punishing her a little by withholding. ‘Do you want tea or coffee?’

‘Tea, please. So, what did you talk about?’ she asked a little desperately with an eye roll at Florence who cocked her head like she couldn’t believe Win either.

‘I know that you know what we talked about already,’ Win said, placing a mug down in front of Zoe. ‘Mum said I had you to thank for giving her the courage to come clean about Terry.’

‘Right. OK.’ Zoe blew on the tea before she took a tentative sip. ‘I wasn’t prying but we had a heart-to-heart at the barbecue and the subject of Terry came up.’

‘I’m not mad at you, Zo,’ Win said, as he sat down opposite her. ‘Mum and I needed to talk it out and I’d always suspected that something he’d done had finally made her snap. Ed did too. They always fought a lot but why else would Terry disappear for good instead of popping up like he usually did, when we’d just got used to him not being around?’ He looked thoughtful as if his mind were still on the conversation he’d had with his mother over lunch. ‘You know, I did sometimes worry that Terry left because I was a disappointment to him. I wasn’t good at sports, hadn’t discovered running back then. He was always telling me to man up, stop being so sensitive, that kind of thing.’

‘That couldn’t have been easy,’ Zoe said, reaching out with her foot under the table to nudge Win’s ankle. He smiled at her, a smile that was a pure distillation of the man she’d married: quiet, knowing, warm.

‘It wasn’t. And so secretly I was pleased and relieved when he left and then I felt guilty for being pleased, especially as Ed did really genuinely miss him, but life was still much better for all of us once he’d gone.’

‘Jackie said the same thing. She got quite emotional,’ Zoe said, removing her foot as Florence started trying to lick her toes.

‘She got very emotional in the middle of Pizza Express when I said Gav had been more of a father to me than Terry ever had. She even cried but then she swore it was because her doughballs were too garlicky,’ Win said with a smile. ‘Then when I thought we were over the worst, she started on at me about babies.’

Zoe widened her eyes. ‘Oh? Did she?’ She looked down at her half-finished mug. ‘I might have mentioned babies in passing too.’

‘Not fair, Zo,’ Win admonished with the tiniest hint of a bite to his voice. ‘You said you’d be patient.’

‘I’m the definition of patient,’ Zoe said with a bite to her own voice.

‘You really aren’t,’ Win told her. ‘And I had Mum going on and on about our superior combined genes and how she’s counting on us to buck the trend and provide her with a granddaughter, which she’s going to dress all in pink because she has no time for gender-neutral child-rearing. I’ve heard quite enough on the subject of babies for this week.’

There was plenty Zoe had to say about that but then Win rubbed the bridge of his nose and yawned and she decided, for once, to let it drop. He made it sound as if coming to terms with his father’s disappearance and twenty-odd years of hurt and confusion had been a breeze, but Terry had been right, Win was sensitive (it was one of the reasons why Zoe loved him) and she knew it must have been emotionally exhausting for him, so now really wasn’t the time to plead her case. Though it was starting to feel as if it would never be the right time.

Better to change the subject entirely. Zoe picked up Libby’s diary. ‘I read this to the end. I can’t believe that Libby went all the way to Paris to bring Freddy home.’

‘And then there was the showdown with Pamela,’ Win said eagerly, as if he were happy to change the subject too. ‘Who has to be Hugo’s wife, right?’

They speculated about Pamela over dinner. Win said that he’d try and find a wedding certificate for Pamela and Hugo, scour newspaper archives to see if there were any records of their divorce.

‘So, do you want to carry on, Zo? All the signs are pointing in a direction that’s, well, not good,’ Win asked, as Zoe washed the dishes and he dried.

The answer was a tentative ‘yes’, because Zoe had come this far and she had to see it through to its bitter conclusion. It was inevitable from the baby clothes in the suitcase to a diary that ended with a doctor’s appointment for the eleventh of November then silence, that the conclusion of Libby’s year, her story, would be bitter. Zoe also knew how diligent, how thorough Win would be when he had a target in his sights.

If anyone could find out what had happened to Libby, then Win could.

Libby dried her hands on a tea towel and picked up the diary again. All those blank pages for the rest of November, December… but there was something else.

The pages of the eleventh and twelfth of December were stuck together by the gum from an envelope that had been wedged between them. Inside the envelope was a piece of paper. A note.

‘Did you see this?’ she asked Win, holding it up. ‘Right at the end of the diary?’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe I missed it!’

The letter was like the clouds parting to allow the sun to beat feebly down on an otherwise dark day. ‘This makes me feel better,’ Zoe said, as she handed Win the letter. ‘Maybe it did come good in the end.’

‘Maybe,’ Win said. ‘Just don’t get your hopes up is all I’m saying.’

‘Whatever, Eeyore!’

But it was time to let Libby go for the moment. Win could carry on without her, while Zoe drew robins until robins were all that she could think about.