Page 44

Chapter 44

October 1931

‘I don’t know what you’re worried about.

’ Keith sat on the edge of the bed, dressed for work apart from his socks and shoes.

‘You don’t know this woman and you certainly don’t need to impress her.

’

Ann leaned forward and examined her reflection.

‘I look like her.’

‘You look like her?’ He shook his head.

‘You haven’t even met her yet.

’

Ann closed her eyes, pushed the fingers of both hands into her hair like giant combs and ruffled it, gently at first and then vigorously, turning it into a nest a rook would have been proud of.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘I look like her. No matter what I do, I still look like her.’ She kept poking and twisting, creating more and more knots.

He got to his feet and took the three steps required to stand behind her.

He rested his hands on her shoulders.

‘What are you talking about?’ he said softly.

She pushed the tangle of hair back from her face and studied her reflection.

‘Marginally better, I suppose.’ Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and began to spill over onto her cheeks, making little channels in her just-applied face powder.

He waited.

‘It’s no use.

As soon as I brush it again, she will be back.

’

He leaned forward so that their reflections were side by side.

‘Who will be back?’ He kept his voice low and quiet.

‘My mother. I look like my mother.’ She flopped the tangle of hair forward and flipped it back again.

‘See?’

He didn’t immediately respond.

It seemed important not to dismiss the outburst with anything flippant.

Eventually, after perhaps a minute of consideration, he spoke.

‘I mean, I never met her, but I’ve seen the photographs of your family, and she’s very different.

Your face is rounder, and she had a high forehead and you don’t have that.

I’m trying, but I can’t see anything of her in you.

’

‘I’m not talking about Ursula.

My mother was called something else, and there are no photographs of her in this house.

I burned them all after Father died.

I couldn’t do it before then because he would have objected, but I did it afterwards.

I burned them or I cut her out of the pictures with my needlework scissors.

You wouldn’t have known about her because I don’t speak about her at all.

I haven’t said her name in more than twenty years.

She was a despicable, wicked, unkind woman who abused Isobel and I will never forgive her for it.

’ She rubbed her hair again, tangling it even more.

‘And I look like her and every time I catch my reflection in a mirror she is in this house again and I cannot bear it.’

Keith straightened up.

He didn’t know what to say.

‘And now look at me. I’ve made it worse, if that were even possible.

’ She lifted up a wedge of hair.

‘How am I going to sort this out before Friday? Beatrice Sidcup will have a field day with her opinions about how I look.’

Keith ran his forefinger gently across the back of her neck.

‘Perhaps we need Isobel’s advice?

’

‘She has gone to help Agnes at number 38 this morning and won’t be back until lunchtime.

’ Ann glared at her own reflection.

‘My mother has been dead for more than two decades, but she is still having a malicious effect on me, on this house, on everything. I should have sold the place as soon as I inherited it.’

He shook his head slowly.

‘I’m sure it feels like that at the moment, but I’m afraid I don’t agree.

If you had sold it, then when I knocked at the door looking for work it would have been someone else who answered and we would never have met.

’

‘I suppose .?.?.’

‘And,’ he continued, warming to his theme, ‘you would have bought a little flat to live in by yourself and there would have been no room for Isobel when she needed a home. That plum tree down the garden might have been cut down to make way for a summer house, instead of giving us spiced fruit for our pies. And most importantly, Mrs Beatrice Stuckup wouldn’t have been able to find you and you wouldn’t have that letter about your brother.

’

Gradually, Ann began to feel calmer.

Everything he said was true and she wasn’t thinking logically at all, which, for someone who loved nothing better than a proper plan and a good list to go with it, was most out of character.

‘You know, you really should stop calling her that. I am quite likely to say it in front of her and then where would we be?’

‘I’ll try to remember.

’

‘Just see you do. It’s your fault we called her that in the first place!

’

‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that you look like Finlay. And like your father. You have curly hair, and I can see in their photographs that they did too, despite their best efforts to control it.’

‘My mother had straight hair. Fine and straight. She hated my curls and always insisted that my hair was brushed flat and put into plaits. Sometimes she pulled it so tight it gave me a headache. It was as though I had grown curls on purpose to spite her.’

He changed the subject.

‘Tell me about Finlay.’

She sighed.

‘Finlay was kind. He was everything she was not. He could be annoying sometimes, but after he rescued me from the fire things seemed to change between us. It was as though we were sort of stuck together, in a good way. He was untidy, and he was impulsive, and loved adventures, and he wanted to learn to fly, but never had the chance. You’re right about his hair, it was always escaping somehow, and he tried using all sorts of oils and potions on it because curly hair wasn’t the fashion, but he hated the smell of them so in the end he just gave up trying.

In the photo he had taken before he went away, the last one, where he was dressed up in his uniform, you can see a little twist of hair under his officer’s cap.

That was what he was like; trying to do the right thing and be responsible but somehow a little bit of fun always escaped.

’ She looked at the photograph of her brother on the dressing table.

‘And even now, I don’t know where he is.

He vanished and never came home.

There are days when I wonder if it’s a game he is playing with me.

I know you understand, because your brothers are still missing too.

’

‘They are, yes. In my head Harris is still sharing his marbles with me and Gregor is pulling me out of all sorts of scrapes.’ Keith folded his arms and hugged himself tightly in an effort to keep his feelings under control.

‘This is the real reason you never sold the house, isn’t it?

’

She nodded. ‘Just in case, because Finlay told me, he absolutely promised that he would be back, and I believed him.’

‘I think I would have liked your brother.’ He touched Ann’s comprehensively messy hair and hauled them both back to the present.

‘So what would he have done with all this?’

She thought about the question for a moment before replying.

‘Scissors, definitely. And he would have been the one holding them.’

‘And is that what you want to do? You always wear it braided, which is a little surprising, given what you’ve just told me.

’

‘It’s habit. Ursula braided it too, but not tightly.

And then I put it up of course, as I got older.

But mostly I simply can’t be bothered with it.

I have more important things to be thinking about than hairpins.

And the fashion is for sleek hair, and little pin curls, and mine will never behave like that.

I’m a lost cause.’

‘Will you let me brush it?’

‘You?’

‘To get rid of the tangles. I’ve never brushed anyone’s hair but my own, but we are going to have to do something before Friday.

’

‘Perhaps I should go out now and find a hairdresser who can chop it all off. I’m sure people think I should be able to forget about that horrible woman.

That I should just put it all aside and go on with my life.

’

He laughed. ‘I wouldn’t dare.

’

Ann spun round and pointed an accusatory finger at him.

‘Don’t you understand?

She is here . Here in this house, every day.

It’s not something to laugh about.

There’s not a single day that she isn’t in my head.

All her nasty comments and snide remarks.

And as I get older it’s getting worse because with every day that passes I look more and more like her.

’ She smashed her hairbrush down on the dressing table.

‘I cannot escape her.’

Keith knew he needed to say something, and quickly.

‘Does Isobel know you feel like this?’

‘I haven’t said anything to her.

It’s not anyone else’s problem but mine.

’ She waved her hand towards the front of the house.

‘I talk to myself about it all sometimes, when I’m up on Blackford Hill and no one can hear me.

I practise what I would say to my mother now, if she were here.

But she isn’t, so it’s pointless.

It doesn’t change anything.

’ Ann looked out of the window, trying to focus on the bird table, where a house sparrow with a twisted foot was pecking at an apple core that had been put out that morning.

‘I look at the birds outside, and that helps. They are all slightly different so I try to work out exactly which one of them I’m seeing and it gives me something else to think about.

’ She paused. ‘I wasn’t joking about moving house, you know?

For a while, after Ursula died, I really did think that if I moved, it would be better.

I even got as far as looking at other places.

I went on trips to Linlithgow, and Glasgow, and Perth.

And I was shown new properties, just built.

Houses without any ghosts.

’

‘And did it help?’

‘It did not.’ She sighed.

‘So I am stuck with her.’

‘I’m sure—’

Ann didn’t allow him to finish.

‘At least when Ursula was here, I could talk to her about it.’ She stopped, and her voice softened.

‘And I spoke to Finlay, of course. He was the only one who really understood, especially after fighting at Ypres. He knew what it was like not to be able to forget things he had seen and heard, even when that was all he wanted in the world.’ Ann stood up quickly and walked to the door.

‘I am going out. I cannot bear to be in this place for another minute.’

Before Keith knew what was happening, she was gone.

Her shoes clattered along the tiled floor in the hall, and he heard the front door slam.

He rushed through to the drawing room just in time to see her march out of the gate, leaving it to swing in the wind.

She had grabbed the Fair Isle hat she had knitted for him off the hall table on her way past, and her hair was shoved haphazardly underneath it with just a few straggly locks trailing.

If she had been going any faster, she would have been sprinting.