Since then I’ve been trying to shake off this awkward, irrepressible feeling that has crept over me ever since she came home: the need to know exactly where she is and what she’s doing. As time goes on the urge grows stronger. I’ve managed to get through the last forty-seven years without knowing her whereabouts, yet now, since twenty-four hours ago, I’m liable to panic if at any point I don’t know where she is. It’s completely illogical, I know. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to knowing exactly where and how things are in the house, because my surroundings are fixed, a constant if you like, and that, until Vivien came home, I was the only variable.
Luckily she doesn’t realize I’ve been spying on her. I know this house so intimately that I don’t need to be right on her heels. I’ve been developing a system whereby I can track her movements by listening to its sounds while staying within my own boundaries. I know all the views from the windows. I can recognize the doors that creak, the boards that squeak and the pipes that rattle. I can interpret the echoes that reverberate through the air spaces, the windows that shake when certain doors are opened and closed and the sounds that old ventilation pipes bring me from all directions. It is as if the entire internal workings of the house have been transformed into a vast communications network, carrying to me the sounds of Vivien, wherever she may be.
For instance, I might look through a window on the first floor to see her pass by another in a different wing or on a different floor, and I know if I move to a back room on the ground floor I will be able to hear her footsteps above me. Then, with the creak of a door, I can judge where she’s headed. I’ve been following her routine (at our age you always have a routine, it’s impossible not to—your body dictates it): last night she got up to go to the lavatory twice, and this morning to get her—and my—tea. All these noises are brought to me by this loyal house, as though it’s alive and throbbing and I am in tune with it, or even part of it, as Vera once said she was. It’s on my side.
However, it means I’m always trying to make sure she doesn’t see me, so our paths haven’t crossed as much as you might imagine they would, and there seems so much that is still unsaid between us.
Listen, I can hear her again. She’s bashing about loudly—in the hall, I think. I pull myself off the bed and creep onto the landing. She’s rattling the door to the cellar, trying to open it. She’s got various keys in her hand that she must have found in the house and she’s trying each in turn. I’m baffled as to why she wants to open it. I tread as quietly as I can down the stairs and finally step out behind her.
“Oh my God, you gave me the fright of my life!” Vivien gasps, as her hand shoots up to her chest.
“Sorry.”
“I never know where you are or where you come from. It’s always so quiet and then you appear out of nowhere.”
“I saw you were trying to open the cellar door,” I say.
She looks at her hands as if to remind herself that that’s what they’ve been doing. “Yes I was, as a matter of fact. That’s exactly what I was trying to do.” She puts them back on the door latch and gives it a demonstrative yank.
“What do you want from there? What are you looking for, Vivien?” I want her to know that I’ve guessed she’s come back to look for something.
“I don’t want anything. I just want to take a look, but the damn thing’s got stuck,” she says, pulling at it again. She stops and stares at me. “I’m allowed to, you know,” she says testily, although I didn’t say she wasn’t. “Sometimes I think you forget it’s my house too.”
Her saying that surprises me a little. Of course I’ve always known it’s both of ours, but she’s right. I never really think of it as hers.
“I’ve had the door locked,” I say. She might as well know her labors are futile.
“But I’ve unlocked it.”
“You’ve unlocked it with the key but there’s a bolt on the inside.”
“On the inside?”
“I got Michael to put it on the inside, then climb out through the window.”
She looks at me strangely.
“Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“It was years ago, after Maud’s death. I never wanted to see the damn cellar after that. I didn’t want to be reminded of it or have it happen again. The problem is, it’s completely dark and the stairs are so steep and they’re right in front of you. It’s easy to see how you might step out into nothing as you reach for the switch. And that would be it.”
“So that’s why you locked it?”
“Yes.”
“Because Maud fell down the steps.” She eyes me carefully, uncertainly, as she has many times the past day. It feels intrusive, as if she’s looking right through my clothes to my nakedness.
“Yes,” I say impatiently, and even as I say it I can tell that Vivien has planned, in her mind, the entire future of this conversation, and I don’t like it.
“So you still think that’s what happened?” she says, to my astonishment.
It’s been years since I’ve felt someone’s goading me. I thought I’d long grown out of it, but here I am now, feeling tight as a coil, like an adolescent, remembering with irritation how Vivien had a way of obfuscating everything, and how Maud had to tell her to stop it because I never found a way to react that didn’t make it worse.
“Yes, that’s what happened,” I reply, with mild indignation.
She considers, and nods.
“Never mind,” she says, stepping back from the door and turning to leave.
Is she really going to end the conversation right there, like that? She can’t do that. You can’t start a revolution and then go home for tea.
“I was here, Vivien,” I say. “I saw her. I phoned for the ambulance.”
“Were you, Ginny?” she says, stopping to look up at Jake. “Were you standing right there? Did you see her fall?”
“Where were you?” I retort, more sharply than I’d imagined I could.
She shakes her head and turns to go, another of her most maddening teenage tendencies. She had a habit of introducing an infuriating idea or a niggling suspicion, and then she’d refuse to explain herself, presumably because she couldn’t. And even if the whole thing was complete and utter rubbish, she’d still have left the tiniest doubt to nag away at you for years.
“Vivien, you can’t walk away. I asked you a question. I said, ‘Where were
She seems a little surprised.
“Where were you when Maud died?”
“In London,” she says.
“Exactly.” But she doesn’t seem to understand the relevance.
“So who is better placed to say what happened?” I say, spelling it out for her.
She is clearly stunned that I’m fighting back. I feel myself redden. I don’t remember standing up to her like this before. By all logical reckoning I’ve won the argument, but for some strange reason it doesn’t feel like a victory. She stares at me for longer than I like—as if, for the first time ever, she’s lost for words.
“Well,” she begins slowly, “I think that depends on who is able to see things as they really are.” And then she adds glibly, “Was the cellar door always left open?” Again, a question to which she already knows the answer.
“No. It was left open accidentally and Maud mistook it for the kitchen door.”
Now she laughs. Not a real laugh, but an affected, condescending one, emanating superiority. Is it really us having this conversation, exactly the same adolescent girls battling it out with infuriating pauses and omissions, leaving everything unsaid? Why should she make me feel small in my own house?
“Mistook it for the kitchen door?” she says with ludicrous disbelief. “Ginny, how I would love to have your cozy view on life, everything slots into place. You never question anything, do you?” She pauses.
Of course I should be infuriated by her belittling strategy, but instead I’m bewildered. I can’t begin to work out what she’s getting at.
“She wasn’t an
