Until he was. And by then, it was too late to do anything about it.
What she wrote:
Dear John,
It was a disaster, my love, and it was all your fault. When one travels, one should be rested and fresh, and I am neither (and I believe you know why, you naughty man). As you suggested, I had my sketchbook on my lap, and prepared myself to draw my last images of the sea before I was delivered to that den of stuffy rooms and tiresome conversation that is the place of your birth, but instead of a picture, all I have are the first intimations of wind before my hand drifted to the side of the page and I drifted to sleep. So the sketch is ruined, the painting is ruined, and you, dear husband, are dreadful.
To make it worse, I missed my stop at Westhoughton, as I was fast asleep, dreaming of you (my love, you wretch). The train stopped with a terrific jolt just outside of Bolton, in view of the station, though not pulled in. Whether it was a faulty engine, or that we simply ran out of fuel, I do not know. No one could say. In fact, no one spoke to me at all. The other passengers milled about outside of the train for some time, muttering, the lot of them, like idiots. I marched myself to the desk and attempted to ring the bell, which did not ring, and I immediately began to hate the war. Now in addition to sugar and jam and beef, we must, apparently, also give up bells.
And I the sea, and you your wife. What will be next?
The man did not turn away from his telephone as I tried to talk to him, and instead just jabbered endlessly about the train. What was there to say about the train? It didn’t work, clearly, and it had, evidently, devoured my trunk.
A kindly man with a truck agreed to give me a lift, though he did not speak either, deaf and dumb, poor man. But I listened as the station guard gave him directions to Westhoughton, and then repeated the directions, not once but three times, to the poor, dear simpleton, and then wrote them all out. So I sat next to him on the cart as we drove. He never once glanced upon me—I daresay he is little used to female companions, so I drew his portrait for him and left it on the seat with a note. I assume he liked it, because as I walked down the track to your infernal mother’s house, I could hear him weeping. Weeping like a child.
As I wept then. On that terrible day. When we were children. Do you remember? How strange that I should think of that now!
Forever yours,
Angela
What she did not:
She should have been thinking of greetings and directions. But as she walked down the well-trod track that led to the dark hulk of her mother-in-law’s family home, she barely noticed where her feet touched the earth. For all she knew, they might not have touched the earth at all. What she did notice was memory. A memory so sharp it pricked her tongue. After a while, she tasted blood. Or, she thought she did.
When Angela was a child, she and her parents and brother spent their summers at John’s family’s home, as their parents were all musicians and spent their summers playing endless adagios in the garden. John, four years her senior, had little time for Angela the child, and spent most waking hours in the company of her elder brother, James, a thin, pale, serious boy, often ill, who much later died of pneumonia while studying at Oxford.
During that summer in question, however, James had, yet again, taken ill with a fever and could be neither visited nor played with for two weeks. On one particularly fine day, Angela found John in the library, lounging in a pool of sunlight on the floor, and poring over a stack of books. Angela, then nine years old, sat next to John and patted him on the thigh. He didn’t notice her at first. Or at least he pretended not to. She patted him again. John propped the book on his chest, uncurling and stretching his long limbs outward into the sunlight, like a cat.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Watching,” he said, not looking up from the page.
“Watching what?” she asked.
“Ghosts,” he said.
“What ghosts?”
“Well, it’s an old house, isn’t it? The older the house, the more spirits haunting it. Thought everybody knew that.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Well, it’s as true as I’m sitting here. Look around you. You can see ’em trapped in every window.”
Angela looked up. She gasped. She saw them. Saw them. Each window held a face—pale, dark eyed, and livid. Each with a pink slash for a mouth. Each with seaweed hair and seafoam skin. Each moving softly, as though underwater. Angela screamed and covered her face with her hands. She wept for each face, each pink mouth. She wept for things lost and things she could not name. John laughed loudly, with gusto, and slapped Angela hard on the back as though they were both men.
“Poor little idiot,” John said both kindly and unkindly. “Poor little thing.” He left the room, still laughing, and shut the door with a hollow click.
The ghosts remained in the windows for the rest of the day. Angela shut her eyes when she could and stared at the floor when she could not. Her
