I woke up with a start to a landscape of silence. I had left the curtains open as, when I had gone to bed, there had been nothing to breach the impeccable darkness. It was still dark now so I switched on the bedside lamp to check the time. It was gone seven. There was no hurry to get up so I turned the light off again and lay back down against the pillow, closing my eyes. When next I woke there was noise; purposeful footsteps, water running, muted voices. Late dawn was spreading its rosy light across the sky, melding with the red of the barn opposite to lend the snow drifting against the wall a pink glow. I could smell coffee.
I threw on my dressing-gown and dashed across the landing to the bathroom, my sponge bag and some fresh clothes in my arms. There was no shower so I ran a bath. I lay back in the hot water feeling worn out, although the day had only just begun.
Before I went downstairs I checked the mirror. I looked grim, pasty-hued and puffy-eyed, with a tight little mouth on me. I patted on some lip gloss the colour and transparency of red currants and rubbed some more into my cheeks. I walked down the stairs like a small child or someone old, waiting to take the next step until both feet were firmly together on the one above. I studied the pictures running down the wall. They were by a Swedish artist, Ivar Arosenius, a favourite of Grandmother Eva’s. Poor Arosenius had died aged only thirty, at the beginning of the last century. He had known he was going to die young through an inherited illness that had carried away his two brothers. So in his thirty years on earth he painted and married and had a child and his paintings depicted life as a tender tragicomedy and his small daughter as a fragile source of light in a grown-up world of dark and giant objects. If I had been able to paint like Arosenius maybe then I would have deserved my place on earth even after what had happened. But I couldn’t.
I reached the hall and in the kitchen they had heard my footsteps and Katarina called my name.
Uncle Ian was sitting at the kitchen table, eating porridge. He had been having porridge for breakfast for as long as I could remember. He said it made you live long. I knew there was a reason I liked Cheerios. Katarina poured me coffee which, like the day before, was black and bitter, and again like the day before I drank it down like medicine. I liked my coffee milky and best of all when sweetened with caramel syrup. I was sometimes told that I was lucky I wasn’t fat when I had such a sweet tooth. I said luck had nothing to do with it; I simply cut back on real food. It was a simple enough measure available to anyone.
Looking out of the window, we all agreed it looked like it was going to be a lovely day and Uncle Ian and I retired to the glass veranda. My body had noted the word ‘veranda’ and anticipating cold, shuddered, but although three of the walls were glass it felt snug enough as we sat down side by side each in our white painted wicker armchairs that faced the snow-covered garden and the fields beyond. The sun had risen as far as it would go, hanging exhausted just above the tree line, shedding its pallid light.
‘I have no one to talk to about her, about Rose. I speak of her and people look at me with a mixture of pity and boredom and I think that to them all she means is the social awkwardness of a long ago tragedy. The worst of it is, sometimes I can’t remember. Talk to me about Rose, Eliza.’
Talk to him about her, my shadow companion. I closed my eyes. I searched my mind, but to my distress all I could see was my own guilt and shame like a grubby overlay obscuring the view of Rose herself.
He turned his head slowly as if he were pushing something heavy with the side of his face. Age was working against him, age that acted as a counterweight to everything he wanted to do. ‘I know you remember.’
I felt so ashamed now at how hard I had worked not to remember. Ashamed of how I had skipped nimbly over memories that lay like jagged stones in my path. The lighter I stepped the less I felt.
I said, ‘She was very beautiful.’
‘Of course she was. That much is obvious from any photographs.’
‘She loved parties,’ I said. ‘And dressing up. Do you remember the trunk full of old clothes and costume jewellery and hats and bags that Grandmother . . . your mother kept for us?’
He sighed impatiently. ‘You could be talking about any one of a thousand sixteen-year-old girls.’
I closed my eyes. If I could just think of Rose up until that night and no further. If I could allow her to live in my mind how she had been up until that night then slam a door on what followed.
‘What else do you remember?’ Uncle Ian was growing impatient.
‘She was funny.’
‘Was she funny? I don’t remember her being particularly funny. You were the funny one. You were precocious, quick. I’m afraid that used to annoy me. Rose’s mother always accused me of turning everything into a competition and she was right.’
‘I always knew I annoyed you.’ I smiled. ‘I just assumed it was because I was an annoying child.’
He gave a dry little laugh. ‘Well, there was that too.’
‘I don’t mean she was particularly funny as in telling lots of jokes or saying funny things but she was so sweet, so other-worldly, in a funny way. She was funny-sweet.’
‘Funny-sweet. I don’t know what that means. What did she want to do with her life? What were her plans? Her hobbies? She liked ballet, I remember that.’
‘She wanted to be an actress.’
He sighed. ‘All young girls want to be actresses. Did she display any particular talent to mark her out in that field? And I don’t want a whole load of polite waffling, Eliza. I don’t have time for that.’
‘I think she did.’ I smiled as I did recall something concrete. ‘Our drama teacher, Mr . . . Oh . . . Mr Whatever, I remember him saying that Rose reminded him of Vivien Leigh.’
‘Did he really? Vivien Leigh.’ He gave a delighted little laugh. ‘You know now you point it out I can see similarities.’
‘It wasn’t just the looks but Rose had that same air of fragility. And these days people agree that Vivien Leigh was a much better actress than her contemporaries gave her credit for.’
‘And she didn’t like maths.’ Uncle Ian’s voice held a triumphant note as if he had found something he had lost and had been searching for. ‘I remember her coming to me once when she was a little slip of a thing, crying and holding out this exercise book. “My head doesn’t like sums,” she said.’ He was smiling. ‘ “My head doesn’t like sums.” You’re right, she was funny.’ But he was hungry for more. ‘She was a good friend to you?’
‘Of course she was. The best.’
‘Was she kind?’
‘To me?’
‘Generally. Was she a kind girl?’
I thought about it. ‘She was to me, of course. And she loved animals.’
‘All young girls love animals,’ he said.
‘Kind?’ I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t suppose you think about kindness very much when you’re that age. You notice if people are kind to you directly, but I reckon that’s about as far as it goes. I’m sure she was, though.’
‘Why? Why are you sure? You just said you hadn’t thought about it.’
I felt as if I were in court. ‘I’m sorry if I’m not precise enough.’
‘Don’t be sorry, just be more precise.’
‘I suspect, though, that we were all rather self-centred. It goes with being a teenager. It’s not that you don’t care about others, it’s more that you forget that there are others. I think we were a bit like that, Rose and I and our friend Portia Dennis. You remember Portia?’
Uncle Ian nodded. ‘What became of her?’
‘You know, I have no idea.’
‘You didn’t keep in touch?’
I didn’t know how to explain, to him or to myself for that matter, how, far from finding comfort in the company of someone else who’d known and loved Rose, I had done everything to avoid her until we had lost touch altogether.
‘It was my fault. Being with her hurt. Looking at her I didn’t see her, only . . . well, things I didn’t want to think about.’
Uncle Ian nodded. ‘I can understand that.’
Of course he could.
There was another pause and then Uncle Ian said, ‘Rose wasn’t very academic.’
I relaxed. ‘Oh I don’t know. She was very good at English Literature and her spelling was brilliant.’ I nodded. ‘Really excellent.’
‘Of course, you were the bright one.’ His face assumed a familiar look of puzzled irritation.
‘Rose was perfectly bright. You can be bright without being academic. And anyway, it’s what you do with your talents that matters.’ Had I really said that? Had I said something so stupid, so insensitive?
I shook my head. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know how I could have said that.’ I hid my face in my hands.
‘It’s all right.’ I felt a hand on my arm, fleeting, a little awkward, as if it were the wing of a clumsy bird.
I looked up and our eyes met. The kindness in his took me aback.
‘I’m very well aware that after Rose’s mother left, Rose, without you and your mother, would have been a very lonely young girl.’
I swallowed hard and then I flashed him a quick smile. ‘Would you excuse me, I’ll . . . I won’t be a moment.’ I got to my feet, stumbling over a chair leg as I hurried from the room.
In the hallway I ran straight into Katarina. ‘Eliza, are you all right?’
I nodded, avoiding her gaze. ‘Fine. I’m absolutely fine.’
‘You don’t look fine.’
‘It’s just a headache. I get them all the time. I’ll just lie down and shut my eyes for a bit. Would you explain to Uncle Ian, please?’
Katarina brought me a cup of sweet milky tea – she said she knew that was what all English people wanted when they were under the weather, and a plate of plain biscuits that looked like Rich Tea but were actually called Marie. She fetched an extra pillow and made me lean back against them like a poorly child so that I could sip my hot drink.
‘Did you tell Uncle Ian?’
‘I did and he’s just sorry you’re not feeling well. I’ll come and see how you are at lunchtime. Do you want the blinds drawn?’
I shook my head. ‘I like looking out at the snow.’
I finished the tea and as I looked around the little room with its yellow rosebud wallpaper and white lace curtains, as I saw a tiny distorted reflection of my face in the polished brass bed knob at the foot of the bed, I wondered how it was possible to feel so wretched and so comfortable both at once.
Over lunch we spoke politely of not very much until Katarina went through into the kitchen with the dishes, having refused my offer of help. ‘You stay and talk to your godfather.’
‘No, I insist.’ I was halfway to my feet.
‘Really, you have so much to talk about and you’re not over for very long.’ Katarina reminded me of our old housemistress, Miss Philips. At school we had been constantly amazed at the way she managed to get us to do what she wanted without resorting to shouting, threats, bribes or chasing people down corridors, all those methods favoured by other, lesser members of staff. Even Miss Philips’s hair, golden blonde and back-combed, appeared to know better than ever to stray. It was certainty that did it, I thought now, a quiet unshowy conviction that you knew best. There was nothing that gave you as much easy authority. With an inaudible sigh, I sat back in my chair.
‘You never wanted a family?’ Uncle Ian asked.
I was used to people walking around the subject of children with me, especially once I had turned forty and there was an assumption that I was running out of choices. This straight question took me by surprise. Buying time, I shrugged. When he kept his gaze on me I shrugged again. Finally I said, ‘We thought about it but . . . well, we weren’t married very long.’ I took a bigger mouthful of the excellent white wine than I had intended. ‘So it’s all for the best.’
‘You really think that?’
I looked at him over the empty wine glass. ‘Yes, I do. I think.’
‘Can you never be sure of something?’ He was frowning at me.
I wasn’t going to tell him about the way I had looked wistfully at toddlers on reins and babies in Bugaboos, or of the times I’d been loitering outside Baby Gap and Petit Bâteau. Nor was I going to explain that seeing as every time something went wrong in my life it felt like a victory for justice, it followed that it was best I never had what I could not bear to lose.
‘I do find it quite hard,’ I said. ‘To be sure.’
‘So what about your work? You enjoy it?’
‘Oh yes. In fact I am sure about that.’
‘You were very good at drawing and painting when you were at school. I asked your mother if you had done anything with it when we spoke the other day and she told me you turned down a place at art school.’
‘I did History of Art instead. I went on to West Dean for my practical training.’
‘You don’t miss being the creator of works?’
I shook my head. ‘As I see it there’s enough mediocre art out there in the world to last for all eternity. Why add to it? I’d rather spend my time saving what’s truly exceptional.’
‘And who decided that what you would have produced would have been mediocre?’
‘I did.’
‘I see. And your mother tells me you’re about to be thrown out of your flat.’
I frowned. ‘For a woman at the other end of the world my mother says an awful lot. And I’m not being thrown out. It was always going to be a reasonably short-term rental. I’ll find somewhere else nice.’
Uncle Ian sat back in his chair, a look on his face as if he were about to solve all my problems. ‘Well, we’ll see.’
It was still only half past one; meals in Sweden were early, so I went for a walk. I had wondered a little at Uncle Ian deciding to live by a lake. Myself, I avoided them whenever I could, lakes, ponds, even reservoirs; all those places more usually connected to sunshine and picnics and family fun. But as I gazed out over the tranquil water just the right blue shade of grey, I thought his might have been a good choice. The lake of my nightmares was a mere, as deep and as dark as despair. The trees did not stand guard as they did here but trailed their branches in the black water like skeletal fingers, the reeds reaching out from the depths as if begging for help. And always there was Rose, Rose being dragged to the bottom, her hair heavy with weeds, her eyes wide open and begging me for help I could, would not give.
But here, in the pale winter sunshine, Rose was dry and safe and seated next to me on the trunk of the fallen tree. She was not Uncle Ian’s visitation nor the vengeful Rose of those nightmares but simply a peaceful presence, my beloved old friend.
‘I wish I knew what Uncle Ian wants from me,’ I said to her. ‘You didn’t really come to see him, did you?’
Of course, I knew I wasn’t actually speaking to Rose so I didn’t expect a reply. I left all that to Uncle Ian. He was so much more convincing at it. But everyone knows that articulating a problem, even if it’s only before an imagined audience of one, could be helpful. And it was, it has to be said, so very quiet in the woods by the lake with every sound muffled by snow or wrapped in cold, still air, that you felt that when you did speak your voice might easily carry through time and space, even beyond life itself.
I couldn’t see to the lake’s end but Uncle Ian had told me that to get to the far shore would take some twenty minutes of rowing or on skates if it were frozen over. I was wearing a heavy quilted jacket and a knitted hat and gloves but the cold was winning and it most certainly drove Rose away. As I said, I didn’t believe in ghosts but someone/something had been there by my side and now it was gone I felt more alone than I could ever remember feeling before.
I wanted the presence back. I whispered to it to return. When nothing happened I sang ‘Sweet Rose of Allendale’. It was Rose’s favourite song. She’d sing it all the time. We had worked out the harmony, taking turns as to who sang the melody and who joined in on the refrain.
I sang quietly. I only wanted the dead to hear. I sang it twice and then I gave up. The lake stretched out before me, covered with a layer of ice that was just enough to lure the unwary, or stupid, out across, but too thin to carry the weight. I buried my face in my mittens. When I looked up again the setting sun was showing me a path across the ice. As I got to my feet I thought how easy it would be to walk out and never return.