The House of Secrets by Sarra Manning (9)

 

This was the hardest time. The two hours or so after the builders had left and before Win got home. The house was dark, full of shadows and strange noises. Things creaking and crackling, not the usual noises that Zoe was used to, like the gurgling of the hot water pipes as they still didn’t have any of them. It was also freezing – Zoe had to wear thermals, a onesie, a thick jumper, two pairs of socks, gloves and a Puffa jacket, which was fine as long as she didn’t need to move. She sat in her little makeshift office, which was a corner of the back bedroom, the only habitable room in the house, and really tried to sketch out the story of Reggie, the urban mouse, but it was no use. She was still drawing the face of the child that might have been hers. Not just hers. It would have been Win’s child too.

And like every evening when it got closer to the time that Win would come home, Zoe thought to herself, This will be the night that we talk about it. We have to talk about the baby, no matter how hard and painful it might get.

‘Zoe? Are you in?’

Zoe gave a start as she heard Win’s voice. Relief seeped through her, because so many evenings when she was expecting him, he’d ring to say he had to work late. She slowly uncurled limbs stiff with cold. Touched the button that now rested on the desk next to her pencil box. ‘I’m up here!’

‘Well, can you come down?’ Win sounded a little terse, which was usual these days.

There had to be enough money in the kitty that they could go out. There was a little Italian restaurant close by with communal seating, and a mid-week bowl-of-pasta-and-a-glass-of-wine special offer. They could go there, Zoe decided, ask for the quietest corner of the communal seating and begin to make sense of something that still felt utterly senseless.

‘Good day?’ she asked as she carefully picked her way down the stairs, because plastic sheeting on wooden stairs plus Ugg boots was a treacherous combination.

Win, still in his coat, was peering at his vast wall planner, a finger on that day’s date.

‘Why isn’t there a red sticker here?’

‘I have no idea,’ Zoe admitted cheerfully because she’d done enough moping and brooding today. Time to switch things up. ‘What do the red stickers mean again?’

‘Zo!’ Win squinted at his chart, his nose almost brushing against a little crop of blue stickers. Zoe had forgotten what the blue stickers signified too. ‘So, have they started on the plastering? Because it takes weeks to dry out properly.’

This was something that Zoe knew the answer to. ‘Gavin wanted to wait until the boiler had been installed. Said the plaster would dry quicker once the central heating was on,’ she said knowledgably, like her eyes hadn’t glazed over when Gavin had brought her up a mug of tea first thing that morning then stayed for a whole twenty minutes to talk about boilers. ‘But we can’t have central heating until they’ve managed to track down some valve-type things that are compatible with the radiators.’

One of the quirks of the house was that although it was unfurnished, undecorated, the original owners had seen fit to install cumbersome but now gloriously retro radiators in every room, which according to Gavin defied all the laws of modern central heating.

‘Jesus! How hard is it to find some valves?’ Win barked and he wasn’t barking at Zoe, he was barking at the situation, but she was the only person around to hear the peremptory pitch to his voice. ‘Please tell me that they’ve narrowed down the choice of boiler.’

‘I would if I could…’

‘Zoe, really! I need you to keep on top of all this.’ This time the barking was definitely directed at her. ‘I’m not asking you to project manage, as if, but I need you to pay attention when people, Gavin, tell you things.’

It was very hard to remember the Win she’d fallen in love with when the Win that she was currently living with was, well, so hard to live with.

‘I do listen,’ Zoe said evenly. ‘But daily boiler updates get a little wearing, especially when without a boiler it’s too bloody cold to think straight.’

Win shuffled a bit nearer to Zoe so they were eyeballing each other in the harsh glare of a naked bulb dangling down from the ceiling on a length of electrical cord. He pulled his hand free from one of his woolly gloves so he could trace her brow bone with the tip of his finger. They’d always used to kiss each other hello and goodbye and sometimes just for the hell of it but this was the first time he’d touched her since he got home. ‘You’re scrunched up,’ he said, because Zoe was frowning. She couldn’t help it and frowned even harder when Win’s finger made contact with the deep furrow between her eyes. ‘Sorry, I’m being a beast. Should I go out and come in again?’

‘There is a lot to feel beastly about,’ Zoe conceded. She took hold of Win’s sleeve so she could pull him to the stairs. ‘Let’s sit where we can see the wall planner and I’ll fill you in on the latest thrilling developments.’

They sat side by side on the stairs and Zoe very gently told Win that they now needed to install a ventilation unit in the bathroom for reasons unknown. Win groaned and asked how much.

‘Does it even matter at this point? I mean, what’s another five hundred pounds?’

‘Do you remember back when five hundred pounds bought nice things like a week’s holiday including flights and hotel transfers?’ Win leaned into Zoe, pressed his cold cheek against hers, so she was forced to twist away until she had the rough wall against her back.

‘But we’ve both been in worse places than this.’ Zoe pointed at herself because she was talking geographically and not metaphorically. ‘I spent my formative years in an army barracks in Northern Ireland, though we did have central heating.’

Zoe could have sworn she saw the faint glimmer of a smile on Win’s face. ‘Worst place we lived was a flat in Willesden that makes this house look like Buckingham Palace. Crackheads next door, a family of six living in the garden shed in the house on the other side and Ed and I thought we had a poltergeist but our dad said it was just rats. Like that made it any better.’

‘Poor Win,’ Zoe murmured and she patted his knee in a consoling manner. ‘But we wouldn’t be the well-rounded individuals we are today if we’d spent our childhoods in one place.’

By his estimation, Win had lived in roughly twenty different locations in and around north London by the time he was twelve. From a house on The Bishop’s Avenue, that his dad was minding for a friend of a friend, to the place in Willesden and all points in between. Terry Rowell, Win’s dad, was a dreamer, a chancer, a wheeler-dealer. Stories of Win’s childhood sounded like episodes of Only Fools and Horses, with Terry cast as a Del Boy-type figure who had a good heart, an eye for the ladies and absolutely no business acumen.

Zoe’s dad, Ken, was about as far from a chancer as it was possible to get. He’d joined the army when he was sixteen, working his way up to staff sergeant before he’d retired a couple of years ago at fifty-five. He was steady and stalwart – Zoe had always felt safe when Ken was around, even though she’d spent the first six years of her life in Belfast. Then Aberdeen, Germany, Dorset, Larnaca in Cyprus and finally when she was thirteen, Zoe and her mother moved in with Nancy’s parents in Cambridge so Zoe could focus on her exams, while Ken was posted overseas again.

Her childhood meant that Zoe could adapt to most things, had always found it easy to make friends, but constantly moving house and school had been hellish for Win, who liked everything ordered, his days carefully planned out and who stumbled over his words when he was in an unfamiliar situation because he was horribly, painfully shy. People often mistook his shyness for an aloof kind of arrogance, as Zoe had when she’d first stumbled into Win’s office thirteen years ago.

She’d been a walk-in. A nineteen-year-old art student who needed an accountant as a matter of some urgency. She’d sat in the reception of an accountancy practice in Camden Town for what felt like aeons until she’d been ushered into the office of a young man, not that much older than her. ‘Mr Rowell,’ he’d said. He’d been wearing a grey suit that didn’t sit right on him, as if it were a costume, and he was tall and angular as he’d looked down his nose at Zoe.

So haughty, Zoe had thought, and it had wrong-footed her. Her rosy cheeks flushed even redder so it felt as if someone had taken a match to them as she gave him a garbled explanation as to why she was there. ‘So, I won a BBC writing competition in my last year of school and I got an agent and a book deal out of it. I didn’t think I had to pay tax if I was a student but now my agent says I have to and I’ve got all this paper and I don’t know what to do with it.’ She had held up a carrier bag. ‘Invoices and receipts and things. I just hoped it would go away and then I got a letter and even the words “Inland Revenue” on the envelope make me want to throw up and so I thought I’d better see an accountant and they’re totally going to send me to debtor’s prison, aren’t they?’

‘Sit down,’ Win had said gently. He’d taken Zoe’s arm and guided her to a chair. ‘Of course they won’t send you to debtor’s prison. They don’t have them any more. They’ll just send you to a normal prison.’

That had been Win’s feeble attempt to break the ice, to put her at ease, but at the time, Zoe wasn’t sure if she were going to vomit or cry. She did neither, but shut her eyes. ‘Oh God.’

Win had given Zoe’s hand a comforting squeeze and said, ‘I promise you won’t go to any kind of prison.’ Which had been uncharacteristically rash of him because Zoe could have been insider trading for all he really knew.

It had taken Win months to sort out her financial affairs. Like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into the tube, he’d said. Zoe would pop in to see him every few days. Living away from home, from her mother, wasn’t the wild, liberated ride it should have been because Zoe wasn’t wild or liberated. She wasn’t cool or edgy either, like the people on her fine art course, and she’d been lost until she’d met Win.

Win. He was the only person Zoe had met in London who was certain of the world and his own place in it. The people she knew at Central St Martins were only certain of things that weren’t really important: which bands to like, the hip places to hang out, and how Zoe was the very opposite of cool because she wrote children’s books that featured anthropomorphic woodland animals. Whereas Win looked out for her best interests and claimed to be impressed that Zoe had a book deal before she’d left school. And once she got to know Win a little better when he said things in the deadpan, Sahara-dry way of his, Zoe no longer wanted to throw up or cry, but laugh in a way she never did when her college boyfriend Tony cracked jokes.

‘Do you remember when we first met, Win?’ she whispered now. ‘You must have known I had a crush on you a few weeks in because I used to go red every time I walked into your office. Or redder. You did know, didn’t you?’

Win made a noise that wasn’t yes and wasn’t no, but took hold of Zoe’s hand and brought it to his lips and even if all else was chaos, they still had each other.

‘I thought we’d go out tonight,’ he said, but before Zoe could extol the virtues of pasta-and-wine special offers, Win got there first. ‘It’s the pub quiz at the Maynard. We always used to go and so — Why are you pulling that face before I’ve even got to the end of my sentence?’

Zoe had already rearranged her features into a grimace. ‘It’ll be so noisy,’ she complained. ‘And we can’t really afford it.’

‘We absolutely can’t afford it,’ Win agreed. ‘But we’ll be able to afford it even less a couple of months from now, so, why not?’

‘I’m not really in the mood and anyway, the quiz is more your thing,’ Zoe said. She wanted to go out just the two of them, so they could find a way to close the distance between them that they’d filled up with packing crates and cardboard boxes.

Win looked at Zoe warily as if he didn’t trust her. ‘But Zoe, you haven’t been out, haven’t seen our friends, in ages. Not since you were ill.’

He still couldn’t say the words. ‘When you were ill’ was the closest he could come to describing the events of that November night and its devastating aftermath. Or ‘when you had your accident’, like it was something that had only happened to Zoe. As if it might even be her fault.

And Zoe had seen their friends since she’d come out of hospital. But once had been enough. A Christmas party when she’d still been reeling, trembling and everyone had known why.

‘I read somewhere that one in three pregnancies ends in miscarriage,’ one of Zoe’s friends had said, like that was some kind of consolation, when it wasn’t.

‘I didn’t have a miscarriage, I had an ectopic pregnancy,’ Zoe had said baldly and she wasn’t a violent person, she really wasn’t, but if she’d been feeling stronger there would have been a good chance that she’d have punched Katie in the throat. And she wasn’t feeling much stronger than that now. Physically she was better. Her scar had healed and over the coming months Zoe knew it would fade from red to pink and eventually silver. It was the stuff on the inside that took longer to heal.

‘I have seen people. I see Cath pretty much every day and anyway, I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with Reggie,’ she hurriedly explained.

‘The mouse?’

‘The one and same. But if you want to go out, that’s fine. You deserve a night off and I can stay here and make sure no one breaks in to steal all our copper pipes.’ Zoe said this because Flavia from next door had popped round to introduce herself and cheerfully inform Zoe that they’d moved out when they were having work done and their house had been broken into and the thieves had taken every inch of pipe they could dismantle. ‘But I am going to crank up the space heater like you wouldn’t believe.’

Win no longer seemed thrilled by the prospect of an evening spent in a warm pub with his closest friends, eating pizza from the wood-fired oven, drinking lager and arguing over the sitcom round. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked again.

‘Absolutely sure,’ Zoe said firmly, though she wasn’t quite as sure once Win had finally been persuaded. She thought about running after him, but then she thought of turning up at the pub and everyone looking at her, heads tilted to one side, and the concern.

‘So, how are you?’

‘No, really how are you?’

‘At least you’ve got the house to take your mind off things. You lucky, home-owning bastards!’

Zoe couldn’t do it. She just wasn’t ready yet, so she shuffled along to the makeshift kitchen in what had been the scullery, which she wanted to knock through and Win wanted to repurpose as a utility room. More like a futility room, she thought as she made toast and heated up a bowl of soup in the microwave. They had kettle, toaster and microwave but no oven, nowhere to sit either.

Zoe carried her dinner tray upstairs to the back bedroom. She’d get into bed and read something comforting, maybe Ballet Shoes, which she always thought of as a literary security blanket, that was the plan, but instead she was marching straight over to the inbuilt cupboard, to the suitcase.

Zoe hadn’t forgotten about it. She’d thought about it, what was inside it, every day. But like the baby, she’d tried not to think about it. Told herself that the brittle button in her pocket was enough. But still she could feel the suitcase’s unwelcome presence in her house. Zoe imagined it like Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart’: beating away in its hiding place, disturbing the rhythms of the house. Perhaps if she got rid of the suitcase, the terrible secrets inside it, then everything else would start to get better.

Standing on tiptoes, she grabbed the handle, gave it an almighty yank and nearly fell over backwards, because she’d expected it to be heavy but it wasn’t at all. And as soon as it was in her hands, all her good intentions were gone. She squatted down, opened it, casting aside the dark green dress, burrowing through the papers, to take out the baby clothes again.

They would have once been white. A soft, snowy white but now they were tinged yellow like nicotine stains. Zoe tried to imagine that unknown woman, the mother-to-be, because someone, the woman in the photos, Elizabeth Edwards, maybe, had sat and knitted the booties, the cap with the ribbon ties, the little jacket, her fingers busy, her mind on the baby growing inside her. Would it take after her or her husband? Would it be a fusser? What kind of person would it grow up to be?

Then Zoe remembered the letter that had been wedged in the diary and retraced her steps until she found it again.

I don’t believe that I’ve ever managed to give you one single moment of the true, pure happiness that you deserve. 

Zoe couldn’t bear to read those lines again. There were so many things she couldn’t bear to do these days; she never used to be such a coward.

She forced her eyes down to the page. The letter was addressed ‘Dearest Libby’. Wasn’t Libby a diminutive of Elizabeth? Elizabeth Edwards, actress, it had said on the back of the photographs. Did that mean this letter, the diary, belonged to her too?

The letter, dated 7 December 1935, had been written on stationery from a hotel in Paris by a man called Freddy. It was a Dear John letter, a Dear Libby letter, explaining why he was leaving her, even though Libby had just lost the baby she was carrying. Their baby.

The words, already faint in their old-fashioned, looped script, blurred in front of Zoe. She brushed her tears away, carefully folded the letter though she wanted to tear it to pieces, and slotted it back into the diary. How she hurt, ached, for poor Elizabeth, Libby. Abandoned by the one person who should have been there to hold her, pull her through.

The diary, at least, was a comforting, solid weight in Zoe’s hands. She hesitated momentarily, because she couldn’t take any more heartache. Not her own. Not other people’s. But curiosity got the better of her as curiosity often did.

Zoe started to flick through the book, the pencil marks simply vague indentations on the page in some places, but if she positioned herself directly under the naked lightbulb, she could just about begin to decipher the diary entries.

Elizabeth, though already Zoe thought of her as Libby, was forever totting up her expenses and mostly used the diary to keep track of her appointments, though January had been a quiet month.

On today’s date, 17 February, Libby had written:

Zoe decided that Withers had to be the theatrical agents, Withers & Withers, whose details were printed on the publicity stills.

There were also several pieces of paper tucked into February’s pages. A newspaper report on the Spanish elections, the page carelessly torn out. A business card: Hugo Watkins, Watkins Motors, Park Lane W1, MAYfair 3745. And on a lined piece of paper was a hastily scrawled shopping list.

Suddenly, there were so many things Zoe wanted to know about this woman, separated from Zoe by eighty years, a lifetime, but connected to her too through the same sad loss.

Zoe pulled out the photographs again. She was sure she could see a mischievous gleam in Libby’s liquid eyes; the curve of her smile seemed more pronounced as if she were about to toss back her head and laugh and laugh. She looked much more like a Libby than she did an Elizabeth.

By the time she packed everything except the diary back in the suitcase, Zoe realised that she’d forgotten to bring the space heater in with her, her soup would be frozen in the bowl by now, and she was so cold that the tips of her fingers were almost numb, but she felt a little better. Even the baby clothes didn’t make the sobs start to soar when she placed them at the bottom of the case.

For the first time since it happened, since November, Zoe no longer felt alone.