Chapter 2 Elise
Elise
As soon as she heard her job application had been successful, Elise phoned her grandmother to give her the good news.
“Oh, Elise!” Gran said, overjoyed. “That’s fantastic! I knew you’d get it. It’s perfect for you.”
It was an unusual project. Sylvia Hammond, an American businesswoman, had bought a property on the North Norfolk coast with a view to turning it into a tourist destination.
The property had previously been owned by an artist, Lilias Carter-Brown, who had covered the walls in murals and the doors and window frames with hand-painted decorations.
Nothing had been changed since the Second World War.
As an established artist with qualifications and experience in picture restoration, the project was perfect for Elise.
If you didn’t count the fact that she hadn’t been able to put paintbrush to canvas for more than six months.
That she hardly slept, and it took her an age to find the energy to get out of bed in the morning.
Elise didn’t mention these doubts, not wanting to spoil her gran’s pleasure.
It was she who’d first told Elise about the vacancy; she who, along with Elise’s husband, Robbie, had persuaded Elise to try for the role.
At least, that was what they both thought, for neither her gran nor Robbie knew the real reason she’d decided to go through with the interview.
“You do know Charlie would have been thrilled for you, don’t you?” Gran said gently, and instantly Elise’s eyes flooded.
“If Charlie were still here, I wouldn’t be going.”
The words came out bitterly, and she heard her gran sigh.
“I know you wouldn’t. But, my darling, you don’t have to feel as if by accepting this job you’re somehow failing him.
Nobody could ever say you haven’t grieved for that sweet boy.
That you’re not grieving still. Look, d’you want to meet up?
I was just on my way to visit Nonna, but I can get a train into town and go to the care home later on. ”
It was so tempting to say yes. But her gran had been backwards and forwards on the train between Sussex and London to see her ever since Charlie had died. “No, it’s all right. Nonna will be waiting to discuss her party plans with you.”
Elise’s great-grandmother would be a hundred years old in a few months’ time. Charlie had wanted to live long enough to go to her party but had failed to do so by six months.
“She will,” Gran said. “The plans get more and more elaborate every time we speak. Did I tell you she wants pure-white doves to be released? And a cake with a picture of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers?”
Nonna always had loved old-time musicals with plenty of dancing, but Elise had to smile at the doves.
“And the truth is,” Gran was saying, “she probably won’t enjoy most of it. You know how she likes to find fault with everything. But never mind about all that. Is Robbie pleased you’ve got the job?”
“I think so,” Elise said, although actually she wasn’t entirely sure whether he was or not. Which was weird, considering it had been his idea for them to visit North Norfolk, where the project was to be based, after Gran had shown her the job advert.
“It wouldn’t hurt to go up there to take a look, would it?” he had said. “We could have a minibreak, and you can see what it’s like up there. Even if you decide the job isn’t for you, we’ve never been to North Norfolk, have we? It’s supposed to be beautiful.”
Recognising that he was trying his best to be positive, doing his bit to repair what—in the past six months or so—had become a pretty pathetic excuse for a marriage, Elise had agreed.
Because it was true, the job of restoring the paintings and murals did sound like an amazing opportunity.
It was just that, to Elise, the prospect of going anywhere Charlie had never been—would never go to now—was the very definition of bleak.
“I don’t think he could ever imagine living or working in Norfolk himself, though,” she said to Gran now.
“No, I can’t imagine that either,” Gran agreed. “Robbie’s definitely a townie. But I can imagine you liking it, darling.”
Elise spoke more confidently than she felt. “I’m sure I will,” she said. “Anyway, give my love to Nonna, won’t you?”
“I will. Bye, darling.”
Elise put down her phone and stared sightlessly out into the garden, still thinking about her trip to Norfolk with Robbie.
The idea had been to go there to absorb the place: get a sense of it, to see if she could imagine working there for several months.
At first, when they’d arrived at Selkey-on-Sea, she hadn’t been able to do that at all.
Their room at the pub had a balcony with a view over the salt marshes.
As she’d stood next to Robbie looking out, Elise could recognise that the landscape was beautiful.
The marshes stretched out as far as the distant stripe that was the sea, peppered by lagoons and creeks, coloured by grasses and plants.
Black-and-white sea birds—unidentifiable to Londoners like them—flapped past, giving mournful cries that exactly suited her mood.
Yes, it was beautiful, but Elise’s heart and soul were too raw to accept beauty of any kind, so she had soon left the balcony to go inside.
“I’m sorry,” Robbie had said, joining her, and Elise had looked up, trying to read his face.
“What for?” She’d wanted to think he was apologising for all his unexplained absences since Charlie’s death, his complete disinclination to speak about their son so it felt as if he’d already forgotten him. But it wasn’t those things he was sorry about at all.
“I thought a sea view would be a treat, but you can hardly call that a sea view, can you? The sea’s bloody miles away. It’s a wasteland out there.”
And there you had it. Just one example of the gulf between the two of them.
Elise might have had neither the energy nor the enthusiasm to explore the salt marshes, but she could still appreciate their beauty.
Robbie, on the other hand, thought they were nothing but a barren obstacle.
Elise wanted to suggest they return their still unpacked suitcases to the car and drive straight home to Hampstead.
But she was soon to be very glad she hadn’t suggested any such thing. Because if they’d gone home, if they’d never killed a rainy half hour at the exhibition in the village hall, she would never have seen that photograph. And the photograph had been the start of everything.
Having initially supported her in her job application, Robbie’s enthusiasm seemed to have waned by the time he drove her up to North Norfolk with her suitcases and art equipment after her successful interview.
“I almost wish I hadn’t encouraged you to apply for this now,” he said as he navigated the narrow country lanes.
“Well, I’m glad you did. It will be good for me to have something else to focus on.”
She hadn’t told Robbie anything about the “something else” being her intense need to find out more about the photograph of a boy evacuated to Selkey-on-Sea during the war, and not the restoration work she was about to embark on at Marsh House at all.
When she’d shown Robbie the photograph in the exhibition on that rainy Saturday afternoon, he’d been reluctant to acknowledge how very much like Charlie the evacuee boy looked. Were he to find out the photograph was the whole reason Elise had come here, he’d probably think she was unhinged.
And perhaps she was, a bit. Because how could there be any significance in the evacuee boy looking like Charlie, if you thought about it logically?
People had doppelgangers; it was a known fact.
And the photograph had been very small. She was reading something into it that wasn’t there, because how could there be anything there?
But even so, the image had been a magnet, pulling her here.
Making her throw everything into her job application and the subsequent interview.
There had been a time when Elise told Robbie everything—all her thoughts and feelings, her innermost secret desires, her dreams. He’d done the same to her, or at least, she thought he had.
But since they’d lost Charlie, things had changed.
Grief had turned them away from each other, instead of towards each other.
With words hurting so much, Elise had resorted to a silence that quickly became a habit.
Even now, when the two of them were likely to be apart for weeks—if not months—she couldn’t really think of anything to say to her husband.
But as they arrived in Selkey-on-Sea and Robbie parked the car outside Marsh House, she tried to make an effort.
The gate to the house was closed, concealing what lay behind it. “I think there’ll be dahlias,” she said. “Big, spike-petaled dahlias and roses. An orchard and a vegetable patch.”
The impression was so strong Elise could visualise the neat rows; the tepeed garden canes tied with twine and runner beans winding their way up them. Sweet peas filling the air with their fragrance. Rosy apples almost ready to be picked.
But then Robbie pushed open the gate, and Elise gasped out loud at a reality which was so utterly different from the garden of her imagination.
“Quite a few years since there’s been anything resembling a veg patch in here, I should say,” Robbie said dryly.
He was right. The garden was overrun by weeds.
Tall thistles, stinging nettles, dandelions, and grasses.
Someone had bashed at them to keep the path to the front door clear, but for someone with an imagination, it was all too easy to imagine the weeds growing in the night, closing over the path again to trap you in the house like in some macabre fairy story.
As she stood there on the path, feeling bewildered and disappointed, Elise’s gaze was drawn to the left towards a collection of tumbledown outhouses at the end of another weed-choked path. Chickens. Someone had kept chickens there once. She was sure of it.