Lost Girl Page 10

  Excitement fills me afresh and I return to the draft web post, adding some further points that have occurred to me about style being not just the clothes you wear but the way you wear them. Dare to be different, I write. Dare to be you.

  When I’ve finished, I am keen to send it to the Small Poppies website but am reluctant to use my own name or email address. In the end, I create a new email account and a byline inspired by the dress—Chartreuse—and submit the post and three of the images.

  Even when I am done, I feel so fired by energy that I wander the house as I have done since arriving here, laying fingers here, my cheek there, feeling its heartbeat as my own. If it were mine, I think, I would retain the slightly scuffed hardwood floors in the reception rooms but repaint the somewhat sombre walls in ivory or pale grey. The heavy drapes would be replaced by something lighter that blows in the breeze, but the old brass light fittings would be retained, except for in the drawing room where scale demands a chandelier.

  The peach-and-black bathroom dates from the Art Deco era and simply cannot go. I would, however, need a larger master en suite bathroom. The natural place for that would be the locked room if it is big enough. In the bedroom itself, I would opt for a magnificent bed with a padded French headboard and a couch large enough to make love on, comfortably. The ceiling stain would have to be dealt with, of course, and the walls finished in a soft grey with vintage-style wallpaper similar to the remnants of the old paper that has survived.

  Of the other bedrooms, each would have its own character—perhaps one echoing the verdant garden, with freshly cut hydrangeas arranged by the bedside in summer, another masculine and austere in stripes and the third guest room decked out in sumptuous jewel tones. The smallest bedroom, I don’t know. In other circumstances, it might have been a nursery in white and aquamarine, and filled with half-chewed books and odd-shaped soft toys in purple and orange.

  And a train set?

  The question is so clear, so immediate, that at first I think I have said the words aloud although I could have sworn my mind was on soft toys that look like alien-dogs.

  And then a small, slightly sticky hand slips into mine, and I know that the words were someone else’s.

  May last year …

  Our doctor wears half-moon glasses on a chain around her neck. They make her appear more severe than she probably realises. Or maybe it is just because she goes to such great pains to emphasise that fertility is a no-fault zone that I imagine she is accusing me of being to blame.

  Marc has had to supply a fresh sperm sample—something I had fun helping him with just this morning, following two days without making love—which has been duly handed over in its special cup. My starring role in today’s proceedings is just as undignified but far less enjoyable. Marc does not get to share it but is ushered outside to wait while the doctor checks everything is where it should be, takes a blood sample and asks a range of searching questions that I stammer and stumble over.

  We go away with a date for another appointment the following week and when we return, it is to find that, in fact, I am not at fault and neither is Marc. It is no surprise to me that his little swimmers are Olympic standard—not the doctor’s words but my interpretation. We go away with a prescription for folate, some dietary advice and Doctor Macpherson’s exhortation to keep trying.

  As we drive home, I envisage Dr Macpherson peering around our bedroom door, half-moon glasses firmly on, as we are having sex, urging us to try harder. I tell Marc and he laughs so much he only just brakes in time to avoid hitting the car in front that has stopped for the traffic lights. When he is back in control, he tells me he finds that mental image rather arousing. I tell him he’s disturbed.

  We drive to Marc’s office, which is in Castlereagh Street, in a low-rise, mid-century, serious-looking building that Marc says gives clients the confidence that he and his colleagues know what they’re talking about. His firm, McAllister & Co, is cautious when the competition is throwing caution to the wind, and takes risks when all others are sitting on their hands. It has paid off for the business in the eight or nine years of its existence so I guess he and his colleagues do know what they are doing.

  The financial crisis a few years ago that brought many of his competitors undone brought Marc to national and then international attention in financial circles, proving that there was far more to him than being one of Sydney’s most eligible young men. From the way people talk about him, he was some kind of wunderkind, not that long out of uni but with a phenomenal knowledge of economics and the confidence to go his own way. Claire describes him as a sexy Warren Buffett. That didn’t mean much to me until I realised she wasn’t talking about that plastic-y actor from The Bold and the Beautiful but some American squillionaire. Anyway, the point is that the clients in Marc’s fledgling firm came through the crisis well and smashed it in the aftermath. So Marc has a reputation.

  As a result, he’s often in demand by the media when they want to know what’s going on in the world of economics and high finance. Marc doesn’t often agree to interviews because of the time it means away from poring over spreadsheets and other nerdy tasks that would send most people cross-eyed. But today he is filming a short segment for the evening business news about interest rates, which is why he’s wearing his newest suit and a fabulous dark red tie that I bought him.

  ‘Wear your glasses,’ I tell him as he gets out and I hop into the driver’s seat. ‘They draw attention to your ears.’

  ‘My ears?’ Marc leans in the open driver’s side window.

  ‘Your best feature.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  I nod, the wattage of those mesmerising eyes and brilliant smile having taken my breath away.

  ‘You’ve never told me that before.’ He seems oddly delighted.

  ‘Your head’s already big enough.’

  ‘Did you say head? Or something else?’

  As I flush, he grins and ducks his head for a quick kiss. There’s a camera flash and a smattering of applause, and I realise we’re attracting attention—not only from a few onlookers. Marc’s car is stopped in a no-stopping zone and now a police car is drawing up behind us.

  ‘Look what you’ve done,’ I hiss.

  As usual, he’s unfazed, giving a brief bow to the crowd and me another kiss.

  The police officer approaches, sees me and says something about how his girlfriend loves my show but unfortunately he still has to give me a ticket. Then he notices Marc, does a double-take, shakes his hand enthusiastically and forgets all about the ticket and me in the haste to ask him some question about superannuation. I take my chance to make a ticket-less escape.

  I’m not sure if I am more amused or annoyed—both that the police officer mistook me for someone else and that—among some people, anyway—my husband is better known than I am.

  Today, I am inclined to feel gracious towards Marc as I also have work—a real paying job. Gordon has come up trumps and I am taking a brief to restyle the house of an old friend of his. All I know is that her husband recently died and she needs a bit of a shake-up. I’m not quite sure how we will get along given the age gap, but Ina Johnson turns out to be a sprightly sixty-year-old, fond of dropping four-letter words and whose interior design style looks like a crime scene. When I find two Jackson Pollock prints in her study, I understand her reference points.

  We have a blast and when I get home late, I am so full of myself I almost forget to ask Marc about the interview. We watch it later, and he nails it with absolutely the right mix of fact, opinion and sincerity. I tell him that when Ina pays me I’ll invest it with him.

  It’s a good day, a great day. That night, we make love on a high, joyously oblivious to the long fall that awaits us.

  Present day, evening

  The touch is there—a child’s hand in mine, a soft weight against my leg—and then it’s gone. I almost think I’m imagining it, except that I can still feel the stickiness of their palm in mine.

  ‘Who are yo
u?’ I whisper at the foot of the stairs, staring upwards into the dark. I’m not sure why as I’ve heard no footsteps in any direction. ‘Come back. I won’t hurt you.’

  Of course, there is nothing except the grumbles of an old house settling in for the night, the creak of timber boards and the clank of the loose gutter, or whatever it is, in the wind.

  I do not know what to think; that is to say, I know which way my thoughts are veering but I am trying to push back. True, I have been through a devastating experience, but this is not the first time I have faced difficulties, and I have somehow fumbled my way through without losing my mind. The oddest thing is that I don’t feel I’ve lost it, not at all. Since those first awful days of overwhelming grief, I have improved. I am sleeping and eating. I have had exercise and fresh air. I have spoken to people in the village, even had a constructive conversation with Marc. I have kept myself busy and, in fact, just before the little hand wormed its way into mine, I felt fired by creativity.

  Alive, that’s what I feel. After weeks and weeks of simply existing, first in a fog of disbelief and then in a maelstrom of unassuaged grief, I feel alive. Or is it all a mirage? That’s what madness is, isn’t it? A disconnection from reality when it becomes too much to bear? Perhaps none of this is real.

  I have a sudden and desperate urge to call Marc, to tell him everything and let him take over and make it all right. He would know what to do, the best doctor to see. I could so easily let my burden rest on his shoulders. But I can’t do that. I took that option away from both of us by running. The loss of his dependability and sure-footedness pierces me suddenly. Nature is remarkably clever, pairing us off in a way that offsets one person’s inadequacies with the other partner’s strengths. And how quickly we come to take it for granted! Now I have to somehow work this out alone. It is up to me but I have no idea where to begin. The sense of paralysis is overwhelming, and I have a sudden insight that this may be what madness is, a trap from which there seems no way out.

  Instead of eating, I turn in because it is cold and too late to light a fire. Huddled under the blankets and with the lamp from the library on a table beside me spilling light onto my phone, I make a listless attempt to find my answers online. But it is next to impossible to find authoritative or more than superficial information, and what there is seems to be targeted not at the person experiencing strange symptoms but at their nearest and dearest.

  The only pages that strike some sort of chord are those that deal with schizoid conditions. It is common in many of these cases to hear strange voices exhorting the victim to perform unusual acts, even violence. I suppose an urge to acquire a train set could be deemed a strange act—for me at least. But it doesn’t seem consistent with the cases referenced online. I’m reassured by that, and at the same time feel utterly alone. If even Google has no answers, what hope do I have?

  On the verge of catastrophising, I find the strength to resist. I have never before seen things that aren’t there. Maybe seen isn’t the right word. Whatever the thing is my mind has conjured, it has engaged just about every other sense. I have felt its touch, heard its whisper and sensed its proximity. But there has been nothing to see, except …

  Except, once or twice, there has been a shadow where there really shouldn’t have been, which made it easy to pretend it wasn’t there. My memory rewinds to that day in the garden, the movement captured in the corner of my eye that I thought was the dart and swoop of a playful bird. Except that it wasn’t. I think I’ve always known that.

  My hand curls around the rug and I feel the stickiness of my palm against the wool. When I raise my hand in the dark, it still smells faintly of oranges, sugar and salt.

  Just as I drift off, a thought flits through my mind, that perhaps there is another way to approach this. But before I can grasp hold of it, the thought is gone and sleep is upon me.

  Twelve

  Present day

  Isn’t there a saying about idle hands doing the devil’s work? If there’s not, then there should be. I make a resolution not to dwell on the subject of madness, and over the next few days keep occupied with physical tasks and simple decision-making that requires a minimum of imagination.

  In reality, the garden at Lammermoor House requires all three. But the imaginative bit can wait until later. For the moment, there is plenty of hard graft to do. From shortly after eight each morning for the next few days, I am out there doing something somewhere in the garden.

  At first I am less than strategic and organised, flitting from one disaster zone to another, not always finishing one job before I begin another. Today, my priority is to move the hydrangeas to a shadier position. I have them dug out before I have decided where to move them, and spend the next half hour carting them from place to place, trying to decide. But finally I decide on a spot on the southeast corner of the house. It is shady, and provided the plants respond positively, I envisage a spectacular mauve display next summer, even though I will not see it.

  The spot I choose is already occupied by something straggly that I remove and dump in a wheelbarrow. Carefully, I dig large holes for each of the three hydrangeas, grouping them together for impact. After scattering slow-release fertiliser, I spray with the hose and then place a plant in each hole. The next stage is to reapply the displaced earth around the plants. I give them another shower with the hose for good measure; this is called watering in, according to Google.

  At that point, I realise how overgrown the front garden has become. The rain over the past few days has flattened trees and shrubs so that they spread themselves across the drive. Unlike the back garden where the structure is just about visible beneath the overgrowth, it is almost impossible to see the garden’s original bones.

  One of the first things I must do is cut back the shrubbery along the driveway. It is not exactly exciting work but I roll up the sleeves of my shirt and hack away with saw and secateurs. It is slow, dirty, miserable work—especially when the sky begins to spit cold rain—but by early afternoon I have made solid progress.

  After a short break for a tuna salad sandwich and hot chocolate, I return outside. The rain has stopped but there is a real bite to the air. As the day lengthens, every breath puffs out a mist of warm air into the cold. It is while taking a brief rest, leaning against a tree, that I realise May has ticked over into June. That explains the falling temperature, and the short days. By half-past four it is too dim to work on, and I pack up for the day, feeling good that the drive is substantially clear of foliage, but annoyed that I haven’t quite finished.

  All I want to do now is get inside, build a fire, take a warm bath and snuggle up with Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester. The last few days, I have not read much, partly because I have been too distracted but also because once it ends I will be even more alone. I am tempted to leave everything in the garden where it is; after all I will be back out here tomorrow. But with the likelihood of more rain, I trudge back and forth until all the gardening equipment is returned to the shed. I return for a final time in the gloom to return the wheelbarrow to the shed, when a flicker of light catches my eye in the direction of the gates.

  My pulse quickens as it comes again, and I am thankful for the new padlock on the gate. Sheltered by the trees, I feel certain I cannot be seen. Cautiously, I inch towards the gates until I can see that the flicker is coming from car lights on low beam; presumably it’s Val.

  Someone is there, waving tentatively. It takes me a second. It is not Val, but her offsider, Sally.

  ‘Hi!’ I call. ‘Hang on a minute, I’ll get the key for the padlock and let you in.’

  She shakes her blonde mop, made even wilder by the humidity. ‘No! I can’t come in. I just have a message from my uncle.’

  Bemused, I approach the gate. ‘Sally, we’ve already had this conversation. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘I’m serious!’ She is really upset and I am completely at a loss to understand it. ‘My uncle says you’re in danger.’

  ‘If your uncle has so
mething to say, why doesn’t he speak to me himself?’

  ‘He wanted to. He tried, but he finds it difficult to talk about it.’

  ‘Tried? When?’

  ‘At the hardware store. And he came out to the house.’

  ‘Oh.’ Evidently, he hadn’t simply been bushwalking that day I’d seen him where his niece is standing right now. ‘He helped me with my hydrangeas. I don’t understand why he didn’t say something.’

  ‘If you knew what he’d been through you’d understand,’ she says, her eyes flicking around uneasily.

  ‘Look, why don’t you come in? I’m ready for a glass of wine. You’re welcome to join me.’

  I don’t really want company, apart from Jane, but neither do I want to linger out here.

  Sally backs away from the gates. ‘No! No way. My uncle would kill me.’

  I shrug. ‘All right.’

  ‘He didn’t want me to come out here. But I’ve been trying your phone and couldn’t reach you.’

  ‘It’s inside. I’ve been working out here all day.’

  ‘He says there are things you don’t know about this place. Things—’ Her face closes in and abruptly she stops.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘I don’t know. Stuff. You should talk to him.’ She turns away. ‘I’m not supposed to be here.’

  ‘What can he say now that he couldn’t say when I went into his shop?’

  But she is leaving, heading for a small, older model car.

  ‘Wait! Sally!’

  She does not stop, hurrying away almost as though she believes I can pursue her through the padlocked gates. Seconds later her car takes off, the small engine pushed to its limit. And I am left here, on my side of the gate, thinking that if I am not mad then perhaps the world is.