Elly
THEN
“You ask too many questions, Little Mouse,” Margot tells her one night at the dinner table. She chews on a piece of liver and pulls out a knob of gristle from between her teeth. “Trust yourself. Trust Haina.”
* * *
Into the silence comes the woman’s voice from further down the hall, louder than the man’s, more confident. “Fuck,” she says. “This place is like stepping back in time. Theo, are you getting all this?”
They hear the door to the gardens open, close. The house is quiet again. Something has already changed, Elly can tell. Some delicate balance is being recalibrated with every second that passes.
* * *
The filmmakers are seated in the refectory when the rest of the guests enter for dinner that evening.
They sit at the head of the table, flanking Haina.
The light outside the windows is waning.
Someone has lit all the candles, and their reflections dance in the windowpanes.
Elly, Grace and Keiko spent the afternoon preparing rich beef pies, the joint cooked long and slow so the meat was falling off the bone.
They bring them to the table now in heavy cast-iron pots, serve them alongside fresh bread and tiny potatoes swimming in butter.
The women keep their distance from the filmmakers, and the refectory feels much quieter than normal.
There’s only the clearing of throats, the scraping of chairs along the wooden floor.
Elly sits beside Margot at the opposite end of the table to the newcomers, taking in their details with surreptitious glances.
The woman seems the younger of the two, but perhaps only by a couple of years.
She looks to be in her early twenties, likely around Elly’s own age.
She and the man have the same olive skin and dark eyes, the same sharp, watchful features.
The man wears glasses and rounds his shoulders in his seat, as if he’s trying to make himself smaller.
Perhaps he feels all their eyes on him, hears the thoughts the women don’t need to speak.
You are a man. What are you doing here?
The camera sits on the table in front of him, vaguely threatening, like a dog no one is quite sure won’t bite.
The woman seems less self-conscious, or just less aware, of the atmosphere in the room.
She engages in fluid conversation with Haina, her voice a little too loud.
She meets the eyes of the women as they enter, not smiling exactly, but something close to it.
Every now and again, she says something to the man, and he responds by nodding and jotting something down in his notebook.
To Elly, she looks like the kind of person who would think nothing of cutting into a queue; the kind of person who would be able to talk herself out of any resulting reprimand.
No one touches the food. When everyone has taken their seats, Haina gets to her feet, clasping her hands in front of her heart in the way she does before she addresses the group.
“My angels,” she says. There’s a warm, unspooling sensation in Elly’s stomach whenever Haina calls them that.
My angels. At first it had felt jarring, but now it makes her feel as though she is part of something.
“Let me introduce Siobhan and Theo. They’ll be spending the next few months with us to make their film. ”
“Documentary,” the woman named Siobhan corrects her. Margot scoffs. Elly’s pulse stutters. She has never heard anyone correct Haina.
Haina’s wide smile doesn’t change. “Documentary,” she repeats.
“They’re as eager as we are to demonstrate what a sanctuary Hex House is from the rest of the world.
Please make them feel very welcome while they get settled over the next few days.
” She looks down at the filmmakers. Her hand lands on Theo’s shoulder and he flinches slightly.
“Is there anything either of you would like to say?”
Theo pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, his small smile like an apology. His gaze skips over the cooling bowls of food as he says, “Just pretend we’re not here. Don’t feel any pressure to act in a certain way. We want to capture things as they are.”
“Be authentic, natural,” adds Siobhan, nodding. “Also, we’re looking for a couple of volunteers who wouldn’t mind doing some to-camera interviews – simple stuff, what brought you here, what you think about the house.”
Elly feels some of the women around her bristle.
Simple stuff. She doesn’t know many details of the women’s stories, but she doubts anyone around this table would define what brought them to Hex House as simple, or would feel comfortable unravelling it all in front of the camera and examining the threads.
“Excellent,” Haina says, clapping her hands together. “Let’s eat.”
The table rumbles into hesitant action and slowly, chatter starts up.
Elly helps herself to a slice of pie. A skin of grease has formed over the top of the potatoes while they’ve been sitting.
Her eyes return to the head of the table.
Siobhan whispers something to Theo, then elbows him in the ribs.
He pushes her gently and she laughs, her mouth wide open, full of food.
There is an easiness to both of them, to the way they interact, that gives away the invisible stitching of family.
Something about it makes Elly’s stomach ache.
Haina speaks more to Theo than she does to Siobhan, pressing into him and giggling, squeezing the top of his arm.
“It’s been so long since we’ve had a man in the house,” she hears Haina say at one point. “It’s been such a long time.”
Theo smiles uncertainly, leaning away.
“Don’t like this,” mumbles Margot beside her. Her plate is empty.
“It’ll be alright, Margot,” says Elly. “You don’t have to speak to them. Pretend they’re not here, like he said.”
Margot says nothing. Her fingers are splayed and running up and down the length of her thighs, making ripples in the faded blue denim.
“Come on, you should eat something.” Elly piles some vegetables onto her plate, but Margot doesn’t touch them. Throughout dinner, she ignores Elly’s attempts at conversation and mutters to herself under her breath, barely looking up. Elly can only pick out the odd phrase.
“Not safe here anymore, Little Mouse,” she says. “Not safe.”
* * *
For a couple of days, no one really speaks to the filmmakers.
Life at Hex House unfurls in its familiar routine – breakfast, chores, lunch, downtime, dinner, evening in the parlour, and eventually, bedtime.
Sometimes, while Elly is working in the kitchen, baking loaves and laminating pastry for croissants and carving endless joints of meat, she forgets all about them.
They sleep separately to the rest of the guests, in an attic room overlooking the garden.
But then she’ll catch a glimpse of one or both of them, cameras pointing at faces from a distance, drinking up the house’s secret details, committing it all to tape.
It’s strange, the things they deem important enough to film: a butterfly landing on the upturned face of a coneflower, the red sisters scrubbing the hallway floors, singing to each other, the messy covers of the just-vacated beds in the dormitory.
Sometimes, Elly notices Siobhan alone, no camera in hand, just observing.
Perhaps she means to be inconspicuous, but her height and the confident way she moves mean she always draws attention.
Watching her, Elly feels like the interloper.
Theo is more stealthy, more able to slip by unnoticed.
Sometimes, she won’t even realise he’s in the room until she hears the soft bleep of a camera as it stops recording, and when he meets her eye it’s with a sheepishness, a wordless apology.
Will her mum ever see this footage? she finds herself wondering.
Will Ethan? Will they glimpse her in the background, jump forward, pause the TV?
At least then, she reasons, they’ll know she’s okay. That she left them, but she’s okay.
The signs of acceptance come slowly, subtly.
Elly notices Janine smile at Theo when he walks past her one afternoon in the hallway, rubbing a hand shyly over her shorn head once he’s gone.
Over breakfast one morning, Lakshmi passes Siobhan a bowl of porridge.
Margot is still fractious, but at night she whimpers in her sleep, rather than screams.
On the morning of Elly’s second session with Haina, she finds herself fidgety at breakfast, barely able to touch her food.
She pulled a grey Harvard sweatshirt out of the communal clothing bin this morning and now it feels too heavy and too tight, straining over her swelling stomach.
She’s been waiting for this, for the opportunity to be in a room alone with Haina again, to ask questions, to begin to understand.
But now she only feels a creeping sense of dread, a fear that makes tea taste bitter in her mouth.
She looks down at her fingers wrapped around her mug.
Her gold wedding ring catches the light.
Last night, she’d tried to remove it, only to find her pregnant fingers too swollen.
It feels now like a tiny manacle, slowly cutting off her blood supply.
As the guests start to leave the refectory for chores, Haina gets up from the table. She lays a heavy hand on Elly’s shoulder as she passes, giving her a silent nod. Elly’s skin tingles at the point of contact. She takes a deep breath, then follows Haina down the hallway and into the study.