The Woman In The Mirror

‘Will this be adequate for you?’ says Jonathan de Grey. I nod. Of course it will be. It is, presumably, where his previous governess slept. She flits into my mind then vanishes just as quickly. I wonder about her sleeping here, watching the forest mural from her bed, trying to follow those creepers then unable to find her way out.

‘It’s lovely,’ I say. It isn’t true, just as perhaps ‘beautiful’ wasn’t quite true for Winterbourne. Just something people say to make things well. ‘I shall be very comfortable here.’ I go to the window, pull the curtains and flood the room with light. Already, it looks better. There is a little writing desk, a handsome wardrobe and an adjacent washing and dressing room. I think of my miserable lodgings in London and am once again amazed at the fortune that brought me here. All will be well.

‘I’ll leave you now,’ says the captain, stepping back. For a moment the daylight catches his features, the taut, pockmarked side of his face, and he shies from it like a creature of the night. ‘Mrs Yarrow will collect you shortly.’

The door closes and I am alone. Gradually the captain’s footsteps cease, and against the silence my ears tune into quieter sounds: sounds sewn into the building. I hear a soft tapping, most likely the flick of a branch at the window, but when I look out the wild trees are distant. I travel from one surface to another, the foot of the bed, the top of the wardrobe; I smile, as if the tapping is playing with me, a silly parlour game. It sounds louder at the desk so I open the drawer. Abruptly, the tapping stops – it was a draught behind the wall, or a mouse scratching at wood. Inside is a clock, small and round, 1920s, silver. The time reads twenty-five minutes to three, but the second hand isn’t working. There is an engraving on the back:

L. Until the end of time.

I remove the clock and put it on the table. I’ll see later if it can’t be fixed.

From the window, the view is tremendous. I must be on the westernmost gable because the sea appears huge and immediate, with no cliffs to separate us, as if it is washing right up to Winterbourne’s walls; or we could be on the Polcreath tower light, rising straight up out of the ocean, its root chalky with salt and seaweed. The water is dark, perfectly still closer to shore but in the distance little white crests jump and retreat on its surface. The sky is frozen white and copper, like a Turner painting, dashed with smears of dirty raincloud. I met a former lighthouse keeper, once, during the war. His house had been blown to dust in a bad Blitz. As I held his hand and waited for the ambulance to arrive, he told me of his time, years before, on a remote Atlantic outpost, and that he could never be afraid of the sea, no matter how it churned or roared. ‘The sea’s my friend,’ he assured me, his face blackened with ash. ‘If I fell into it, it would toss me back up. The sea would never take me.’ He missed the water like a lost love, he said; even through the noise and fury of war it called to him, calling him back to its lonely perfection. ‘It’s all right,’ he’d kept saying, as I told him he would find safety and a way to rebuild his life, ‘this wasn’t my life anyway. My life is out on the water,’ and he’d wept for a loss he could not express.

I consider if this sea will become my friend, looking at it every day, and it looking at me. So different from the rush and noise of London, which, once peace was declared, people told me would be a welcome diversion. Everyone was grieving, everyone was spent; everyone had known terrible things and faced terrible truths. But the city pumped on like an unstoppable heart, whisking us up with it, forcing us to go on even if some days we felt like lying down in the middle of the street and closing our eyes and never waking again. Carry on, carry on, that was the message throughout the war. What about after it ended? Carry on, they said, carry on. It was hard for me to carry on. There are some things from which you cannot carry on. Some things hurt too much. Things we did. Things we let happen. I close my eyes, unwilling to remember. A grasping hand, swirling hair, and her eyes, her eyes…

I am about to go and find Mrs Yarrow, whom I assume to be the cook, when something catches my eye that I didn’t notice before.

It is a painting, hanging in the shadow of the dark green curtain and no bigger than a place mat on a dining table. The frame, too, is large, so that the print inside is really quite small and delicate, and I have to lean in to see what it portrays.

It’s a little farm scene, a barn surrounded by hay bales and a grey band of sea just visible in the distance. A cow chews on a tuft of grass. Milking pails lie abandoned. A cluster of dark firs borders a simple cottage, its chimney smoking and a full moon hovering over its roof. The landscape is curiously recognisable as that around Winterbourne: we are here, in this place, at some distant, irretrievable point in the past. The moors are unmistakable, their wild desolation, the colour of the earth.

Perhaps it’s instinctive to look for a human face in these things, because I do, but even though I am looking it still comes as a surprise to me when I see her. She is merely a detail, an impression, not really a person; it’s more the feeling of her, looking out at the window, looking right back at me. Her head must be the size of a farthing, if that, with a wisp of dark hair and two green eyes. The artist has made a point of her eyes, the brightest colour in the picture. I think of the girl peering out at me, just as, a moment before, I was peering out at the sea from my own window. I think of us peering at each other, and for an instant the effect is unsettling, because it really appears that she is seeing me, and I her. Not really a person. Not really.

‘Miss Miller?’ There is a knock at the door.

I tie the curtain back, obscuring the print, and go to answer it.

*

I don’t realise I am hungry until Mrs Yarrow puts soup and a sandwich in front of me, a doorstop of cheese and ham. I remember sharing my butter ration with Mrs Wilson at Quakers Oatley after her husband died, and what another world London seems.

Mrs Yarrow fusses about me like a mother, fetching milk, then a pudding of lemon meringue pie with gingerbread biscuits. I haven’t eaten so much in months.

‘Well, I’ve had practice,’ she says, when I compliment her on her cooking. ‘I’ve worked here for the captain for twenty years, and practice makes perfect, as they say.’ She has a West Country burr, is plump and pink-cheeked, and her frizzy brown hair escapes in soft tendrils from her cap. She sits opposite me, her hands in her lap.

‘Are we pleased to have you joining us, miss,’ she says, with such visible relief that it seems almost inappropriate.

‘I’m pleased to be here.’

‘I don’t know how much longer the captain could have coped. Things have been…testing.’

‘Since my predecessor left?’

Mrs Yarrow nods. ‘I’ve been in charge of the children. As you can imagine, I have my hands full enough with the daily running of things. It was really too much. But none of us wants to let the captain down.’

‘Of course not.’

‘It will be good for the children to have proper care.’ Mrs Yarrow shifts in her seat; she has the manner of somebody loose-tongued trying not to tell a secret. ‘All this up and down, here and gone, no consistency, miss, that’s the problem.’

‘It must have been confusing for them.’ I sip my tea.

‘Yes. Confusing. That’s it.’

‘And to have lost their poor mother, as well.’

‘Oh, yes, miss. That were quite a thing.’

I want to ask again after Mrs de Grey; I want her to tell me. But Mrs Yarrow has reddened and her eyes have fallen to her lap. She looks afraid.

‘I must say I feel fond of the twins already,’ I say instead. ‘To be so young and to go through so much.’

‘Ah, but the young are strong,’ says Mrs Yarrow. ‘Stronger than I, in any case. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them.’

She sees me gazing up at the kitchen shelves, at the soup tureens and jelly moulds coated in dust, at the giant mixing bowls and tarnished ladles, at the china plates and casseroles and long-unused tea sets with their chipped edges and mismatched saucers. The space is cavernous, great wooden worktops and a central island around which we sit, but it’s draughty now in the early evening and its size only summons the buzz and activity that’s missing. Once, this would have been the hub of the house. Today, it’s a graveyard: a ghost of times gone by. I wonder if Mrs de Grey cooked here, her hands dusted with flour and her babies crawling round her skirts. Or perhaps she cut a remote figure, closeted away with her thoughts, wringing her fingers, which I picture as studded with jewels. I know how treacherous thoughts can be. That if you are left alone with them for too long, they can turn against you.

‘It was strange how the war brought Winterbourne back to us,’ says Mrs Yarrow, brightening. ‘When we had the children here – the evacuees – it was like old times. Voices everywhere, running feet, excitement. You wouldn’t have recognised this place.’ She gestures about her. ‘We had littluns piled all round this table, sticking their fingers into cake mix, playing hide and seek in the tower, getting up to mischief with the bell box. Bells were ringing all through the house, miss, and we soon found out why! That was just after the twins came along. Madam used to complain that she couldn’t get any sleep because of the noise. She’d go upstairs to lie down in the day, while I took the babes, and she couldn’t rest for all the shrieking. But, now they’ve gone, it does seem quiet, doesn’t it?’ Mrs Yarrow shakes her head, as if at a fond memory. ‘I still think I hear them sometimes, isn’t that a funny thing? It’s a trick of Winterbourne, lots of creaks and knocks where the wind gets in. And the twins, of course, they can cause a racket – they can make enough noise for twenty children. You’ll have your hands full with them, miss.’

‘By all accounts they’re well behaved.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ agrees Mrs Yarrow, wholeheartedly, as if in swift correction of having spoken out of turn. She slips a finger beneath the elastic of her cap and scratches her head.‘I mean only that they’re tiring for a woman my age. Do you have children, miss?’ The question is so abrupt and unexpected that I glance away.

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. I didn’t suppose you would, in accepting this station.’

‘You’re right. One day, perhaps.’ I force a smile. It takes an enormous effort of will, but I must manage it because she returns it easily, our awkwardness forgotten.

‘Well,’ I say, changing the subject, ‘I expect you’ll be a veritable mine of information and knowledge for me over the coming days.’

Mrs Yarrow nods. ‘Of course, I’d be delighted. Although,’ she lowers her voice, ‘between you and me, I confess I’m thinking about moving on.’

‘You are?’

‘It’s early days. But I’m getting too long in the tooth for this, miss. Since the last girl left…’ She swallows, an audible, dry contraction. Is it my imagination, or has the cook turned pale, her skin appearing waxen in the fading light, her brow heavy and her eyes deep with some unfathomable terror? ‘It hasn’t been easy. Looking after the children hasn’t been easy. It’s better if I have a fresh start, somewhere new. The captain won’t like it, but he’ll have you. You’ll be the woman of this house next, miss. And you’ll like it. Winterbourne is a special place, a very special place.’

At once, there is clamour from the staircase, a storm of battering, hurrying footsteps like the ack-ack gunfire of home, and Mrs Yarrow forgets her worried turn, straightens and smiles, smoothing her apron as if about to curtsey to the king.

‘Speak of the devils,’ she says, ‘here they come now. Would you like to come and meet them, miss? Edmund and Constance de Grey. They’ve been so looking forward to this.’

Chapter 6

The twins run straight into me, their arms around my waist. It almost knocks me over. I laugh, as if being greeted by dogs, friendly, tails wagging, craving attention.

‘Miss Miller, Miss Miller, what a delight!’ The girl looks up at me, impossibly pretty, her grin wide to expose a row of little teeth, as neat as a bracelet. A velvet clip holds her blonde ringlets back and her blue eyes are shining. She has the face of a doll, precise and sweet, with a dimple in her chin that you struggle not to press with your thumb. She is the loveliest thing I have ever seen.

‘Oh, call me Alice!’ I say.

‘May we play with her, Father?’ the boy says, and only then do I realise that the captain is present, his cane in hand. It must be an effort for him to stand because he lowers himself into a chair by the fire. ‘May we please?’

‘Be gentle, Edmund,’ he answers.

Looking at Edmund, it is impossible to imagine the boy being anything but. For all their twinship, the children do not look alike. Edmund has been blessed with copper curls, a crop of them that shine like burnished gold. Across his nose is a light dusting of freckles, and his skin is porcelain-pale and smooth as cream.

They are a pair of angels. Constance tugs my hand and I crouch so I can look up at them both. I have never seen two such innocent faces, shining with happiness and every good thing. ‘I have something for you,’ Constance whispers. Edmund nudges her: ‘Give it to her, silly!’ Constance fishes in the pocket of her dress.

It’s a chain, woven out of grass. The thought is so pure and touching that for a moment I don’t know what to say. Nobody told me how enchanting these children were, not my contact in London, not Tom, not Mrs Yarrow, not even Jonathan de Grey. But enchanting they are, smiling down at me, awaiting my response.

‘How clever of you,’ I say, admiring the grass. ‘And how kind.’

‘Put it on, put it on!’ Constance helps me.

In a flash I am reminded of another time, another bracelet, somebody else helping me to fasten the clasp. That bracelet was gold, and if I concentrate hard I can feel his thumbs on that part of my wrist, over my pulse, his skin warm against mine…

‘There!’ cries Constance triumphantly.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘doesn’t that look splendid.’

‘Capital!’ agrees Edmund.

‘Miss Miller is going to be tired,’ says their father. I glance at him, and for an odd, unaccountable moment the four of us seem absolutely right, together in this dim hall, with Mrs Yarrow hanging dutifully back, as if we are the family, and I am the wife, and I am the mother… The impression vanishes as soon as it appears.

‘She says we can call her Alice!’ says Constance, tugging at my hand once more, her fingers looped through mine. It’s infectious, I’ll admit, and I laugh. It sounds unfamiliar in my throat, girlish, as if it’s a younger me making the sound.

‘Very well,’ says the captain. ‘Alice,’ he pauses, tasting my name: I see him taste it, ‘will be tired. You’re to let her rest this evening. Tomorrow is another day.’

‘But we can’t sleep,’ objects Edmund. ‘We want to play with her – please, Father? Please may we play with her, please?’

The captain stands, his cane striking the floor in a deafening blow. Mrs Yarrow gasps. I get to my feet. The children drop my hands.

‘Do I need to repeat myself?’ the captain says.

Edmund shakes his head.

‘Did you hear me the first time, boy?’

The child nods.

‘Then I neither expect nor welcome your protest. You are to follow my instructions to the letter, do you understand? And, from tonight, you are to follow Miss Miller’s.’ He turns to me. ‘Miss Miller, if you would…?’ I try not to feel afraid, for the growl of his voice and the thunder of his cane casts a shadow across the house.

‘Up to bed, children,’ I say softly. ‘Cook will bring you some cocoa.’

The children retreat, sloping upstairs like kittens in the rain. It troubles me to see the spirit pinched out of them. It troubles me how fast the captain’s temper caught light. Now he bids us goodnight and slips away to another part of the house.

‘The captain prefers the children to be seen and not heard,’ says Mrs Yarrow.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I rather got that impression.’

*

Morning arrives with a burst of sunshine. I wake in my four-poster bed, shrugging off a deep, dreamless sleep, the likes of which I haven’t had since before the war, and go straight to the window to welcome the day. Despite the thick drapes, sunlight razes through the cracks like an outline of fire. I pull them open and let it in. The sea is green today, light, sparkling green, and the sky above a hazy blue. I prise open the window, a hook on a rusted latch, and a draught of fresh, salty air hits my nostrils. I feel like a girl on Christmas morning. I cannot wait to see the twins once more.

When I tie back the curtains, I spy that painting again – the little girl looking out of the cottage. She has one hand flat against the panes, a detail I hadn’t noticed yesterday. The hand is raised as if in greeting or acknowledgement. Or warning.

A bell sounds downstairs. It makes me jump. I feel as I did at Burstead, late for breakfast, the house matrons stalking the corridors with their starched bosoms and shrill whistles. ‘Come on, Miller! Get dressed, Miller! What are you doing, girl?’

In minutes I’m downstairs – but the bell wasn’t for me, of course, it was for the children. Mrs Yarrow has bowls of porridge steaming on the table, decorated with honey and walnuts. ‘Did you sleep well, miss?’ she asks me.

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘You didn’t hear the dogs?’

‘What dogs?’

‘We’ve got a wandering madcap,’ she rattles cutlery out of a drawer, ‘Marlin, they call him. Well, he’s got these giant hounds and walks them on the cliffs at night.’ She lays the spoons on the table. ‘God knows why, miss. And they make the most terrible noise, howling and yowling and yelping at the moon. It used to keep Madam awake something rotten. The children, too, when they were babes. Luckily he doesn’t come as close to Winterbourne as he used to, since the captain and he had words. But do you know what this man Marlin said to the captain? He said: It’s your house that makes my dogs afraid. It’s your house that’s the trouble. So the captain says not to bother walking them round here again, if that’s the way he feels. But still he does.’

‘Is he a local man?’

‘Lived here for years. Not the most sociable person you’ll meet.’

‘I do like dogs. What breed are they?’

The cook goes to the bell a second time, rings it. ‘You won’t like these ones, miss. These aren’t right. They’re great snarling things with huge teeth, and paws that could fell a man in a stroke. To think of them being scared by a big old house is a nonsense. The captain chooses not to let it vex him, but I hate to hear them at night.’

‘I didn’t hear them.’

She turns her back. ‘You must have slept soundly.’

We are interrupted by the children’s arrival, a tornado of gold and copper and neatly pressed shirts and shorts, a frill of dress, twinkling eyes and gracious smiles. ‘Miss Miller! Alice! See, I said we didn’t dream her!’ In the glow of the kitchen, Constance and Edmund appear even more adorable than they did last evening.

Constance takes my hand, her small, perfect fingers looping through mine.

‘Father said we’re not to touch her,’ says Edmund. ‘Remember?’

‘Alice doesn’t mind,’ says Constance, ‘do you, Alice?’

‘I won’t break.’

‘Constance breaks all her toys,’ says Edmund. ‘That’s why I won’t let her play with any of mine. Especially my locomotives.’

‘I do not!’ objects the girl.

‘Chop-chop, children,’ says Mrs Yarrow, encouraging them to sit. ‘Miss Miller will want to get on with your lessons this morning. Eat your breakfast first.’

‘I can eat one-handed,’ says Constance. ‘I’m not letting go.’

I ought to deter her, follow the captain’s rules. But there is such charm about her, about them both, that I am happy to be held.

I’m not letting go.

I was told that before, in another life, when I was another girl. It’s not an easy thing to hear, neither is it easy to resist. And I was let go, wasn’t I? Our hands parted, and I fell.

*

Thus far the children have been educated in an upstairs bedroom, one of the many chambers at Winterbourne that otherwise go unused. On seeing the forlorn space, a dark turret with the oppressive atmosphere of a sanatorium, I immediately decide to relocate. ‘Oh, I never liked it,’ agrees Mrs Yarrow, as she helps Tom and me carry the desks to the drawing room. As the stand-in between governesses, she’d been employed short-term in the twins’ tutelage. ‘Too dingy, and the children kept complaining of coughs and chills. Besides, I could feel her watching me all the time.’

‘Her?’

‘The woman who was here before you,’ Mrs Yarrow says quickly, under Tom’s dissatisfied glare. ‘She had her ways of doing things. That’s all.’

‘What sort of ways?’

‘Oh, nothing, nothing important…’

‘Is this very well for you, miss?’ Tom squares the desks so they’re facing the window. ‘Will you need anything else?’

‘Thank you, Tom, that will be all. Children should be educated in a good light, don’t you agree, Mrs Yarrow? I want Edmund and Constance to feel inspired by our lessons, and where better place to start than with a fine view of nature.’

‘Right you are.’

And I must admit, an hour later, I am feeling positive about our progress. The de Grey twins continue to amaze me in their enthusiasm, their confidence, and their understanding that whatever they know is a mere grain when set against what still remains to be found. They are unfailingly polite, amenable characters with a zest for learning, making my job no less than a pleasure. I had worried, slightly, for the educative aspect. I had been honest about my lack of teaching experience but feared it would prove a challenge. Now I see why my honesty didn’t count against me: these pupils are just about the easiest, loveliest, most rewarding novices a teacher could hope to influence. Whatever methods my predecessor had, they must have worked.

After lunch, the three of us venture into parkland. The lawns at Winterbourne would once have been impeccably tended, but now, as I observed in the Rolls when we first approached, they are hopelessly overgrown. Creepers straggle across the paths; chipped stone planters are covered in moss, and two lion heads at the top of a run of steps have ears and eyes missing, stolen by the elements. The topiary is melted out of shape and the whole impression is one of a garden underwater, liquid and strange. Behind us, Winterbourne rises in giant, eerie magnificence. I hear the sea, an incessant, rhythmic breath as it washes into shore.

‘This afternoon,’ I tell them as we take the path to the wood, ‘we’re going to draw a picture.’ I’m invigorated by the day: the sun, the sky and the birdsong.

‘Like a flower?’ says Constance.

‘Like a fox,’ says Edmund.

‘A flower would be easier to draw than a fox,’ I say, ‘because we need to be able to really look at it. We’re going to look at it in incredible detail, and keep looking at it as we draw, so that we can reproduce as accurate a likeness as possible.’

‘It has to be still, then,’ says Edmund.

‘That’s absolutely right. One can draw a moving thing, of course one can, but one isn’t able to study it with as much care.’ We pick our way over a twisted tree branch. The children are used to coming this way for they step over it easily, while I am obliged to stop and adjust my skirt. ‘Tom found a dead fox,’ says Edmund. He collects a stick and pokes the ground with it. ‘He’s always finding dead foxes.’

‘Edmund!’ Constance covers her ears.

‘It’s all right, Constance.’ I smile. ‘Nature is red in tooth and claw.’

‘I don’t like it.’