فصل 05

5

JULES

You never changed. I should have known that. I did know that. You loved the Mill House and the water and you were obsessed with those women, what they did and who they left behind. And now this. Honestly, Nel. Did you really take it that far?

Upstairs, I hesitated outside the master bedroom. My fingers on the door handle, I took a deep breath. I knew what they had told me but I also knew you, and I couldn’t believe them. I felt sure that when I opened the door, there you would be, tall and thin and not at all pleased to see me.

The room was empty. It had the feeling of a place just vacated, as though you’d just slipped out and run downstairs to make a cup of coffee. As though you’d be back any minute. I could still smell your perfume in the air, something rich and sweet and old-fashioned, like one of the ones Mum used to wear, Opium or Yvresse.

“Nel?” I said your name softly, as if to conjure you up, like a devil. Silence answered me.

Farther down the hall was “my room”—the one I used to sleep in: the smallest in the house, as befits the youngest. It looked even smaller than I remembered, darker, sadder. It was empty save for a single, unmade bed, and it smelled of damp, like the earth. I never slept well in this room, I was never at ease. Not all that surprising, given how you liked to terrify me. Sitting on the other side of the wall, scratching at the plaster with your fingernails, painting symbols on the back of the door in blood-red nail polish, writing the names of dead women in the condensation on the window. And then there were all those stories you told, of witches dragged to the water or desperate women flinging themselves from the cliffs to the rocks below, of a terrified little boy who hid in the wood and watched his mother jump to her death.

I don’t remember that. Of course I don’t. When I examine my memory of watching the little boy, it makes no sense: it is as disjointed as a dream. You whispering in my ear—that didn’t happen on some freezing night at the water. We were never here in winter anyway, there were no freezing nights at the water. I never saw a frightened child on the bridge in the middle of the night—what would I, a tiny child myself, have been doing there? No, it was a story you told, how the boy crouched amongst the trees and looked up and saw her, her face as pale as her nightdress in the moonlight; how he looked up and saw her flinging herself, arms spread like wings, into the silent air; how the cry on her lips died as she hit the black water.

I don’t even know whether there really was a boy who saw his mother die, or whether you made the whole thing up.

I left my old room and turned to yours, the place that used to be yours, the place that, by the look of it, is now your daughter’s. A chaotic mess of clothes and books, a damp towel lying on the floor, dirty mugs on the bedside table, a fug of stale smoke in the air and the cloying smell of rotting lilies, wilting in a vase next to the window.

Without thinking, I began to tidy up. I straightened the bedding and hung the towel on the rail in the en suite. I was on my knees, retrieving a dirty plate from under the bed, when I heard your voice, a dagger in my chest.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”