Chapter Twelve #2
She wasn’t wrong. It had been both my parents’ wish to keep Maggie here for all of her life if she wanted it, because they were so fond. Because she’d taken care of Alexander and me like we were her own. To some extent, she still believed that; hence the smack.
“That doesn’t entitle you to interfere with my affairs,” I said coldly. “And if you use your hands again, Margaret, I will use mine.”
She glared, but she backed off a little.
“You’ll destroy that poor child, and you know it.”
Just like I destroyed Louisa, I thought. We both thought it, but she didn’t say it.
“I don’t destroy my loved ones. I take care of them,” I said, with more than a little bitterness.
“And I suppose that means you’ll be telling her, in the name of equality and trust? Or would you like me to tell her?”
I swallowed hard, closing my eyes.
“I will tell her in due course,” I said. “It’s early days. I don’t wish to do or say anything that could jeopardise her learning.”
“Do me a favour,” she said, tearing off her apron and tossing it on the island counter. “Don’t use your own delusions on me. You’re going to keep her like a pet until she realises she’s in a gilded cage and tries to fight her way out of it, just like – ”
“Don’t say her name.” I warned.
Maggie looked away, deciding against it.
“I’ve made my point clear,” she said. “Now if you don’t mind, I hear the doorbell chiming.”
Grace was descending the stairs by the time we entered the hall. Maggie glided past her without even a glance in her direction. Grace’s eyes darted to me, looking for reassurance. I winked my right eyelid and watched her expression soften, feeling safe once more.
She looked stunning in her suit, stalwart and refined, with her white-blond locks pulled back behind her head in a neat bun. To think that I had made that pale skin pebble and flush pink just minutes ago.
?
“Did I fare much better than you expected in the car, sir?” Grace asked as she pulled the passenger-side door of the van closed.
I belted up and checked the mirrors before setting off.
We were in central London, the van nestled in a tight, steamy backstreet which smelled of rotting vegetables and sewage.
Despite collecting the client at a high-value block of period flats, the access routes behind left a lot to be desired, as was often the case.
A gentrified facade often disguised the disease and decay in London.
It would serve anyone well to be reminded of that; to know that a whitewashed visage hid all manner of sins.
We pulled out and entered the one-way system, merging with the ever-present congestion of cars, buses, and motorbikes.
“You fared very well indeed,” I said, changing gears as the lights changed. “I didn’t think you’d take so well to steering around a gravel courtyard, let alone operating gears. You must have sat in a driver’s seat before, surely?”
“I have, sir, though I’m certainly no driver. I wanted to surprise you.”
I smiled softly, enjoying the fact that Grace wanted to surprise me. Relishing that she wanted to impress me at all.
“You drove a small tractor on the farm back home, perhaps? Or a truck?”
“It was a truck, but it wasn’t mine. It was – ” She frowned, looking down at her hands in her lap. She swallowed hard, repeatedly, as if her mouth had suddenly gone dry.
“It’s all right, Grace,” I said. “You can tell me. It was his.”
Her eyes met mine briefly in the rear-view mirror.
“It was Tom’s. He’d let me ride it around the village, and along the paths and tracks around his farm.
He taught me how to change gears, and how to reverse park, just about – it was a rotten vehicle, clunky and old, like a rusty shell with an engine.
I felt every bump. I was hopeless, really, but it could be good fun. ”
It hurt a little to hear she’d made memories with the arrogant, brutish, low-grade man I’d slung from my doorstep like an intruding animal.
I forced the feelings away, knowing I was behaving childishly to entertain them for even a moment; to expect, for even a second, that anyone significant to Grace would evaporate the moment I entered her life.
Though I knew, if he came near her again, that he’d be in trouble. He’d regret it, but only if he lived. Only if I allowed him that mercy.
“You look hurt,” said Grace in a gentle, curious voice.
“Not at all,” I said. “You had an entire world of your own before it merged with mine. Considering all the years between us...I’ve no right to feel any bitterness about that. I’ve decades on you.”
“Yet it still upsets you?”
“I’m not upset,” I said, gritting my teeth as I barely stopped the van just short of a taxi’s bumper. “But forgive me for not considering your driving lessons a fond memory, given what he did to you. To track you down, to stalk you, to grab you by the hair as if you were property – ”
My eyes threatened to close as Grace’s hand slid over my thigh and covered my groin, stroking. I hadn’t realised that my anger had aroused me, and that she could see it. Humiliation flooded my neck with heat.
“Don’t do that, Grace,” I said, clearing my throat. “Not while I’m driving.”
She sighed wearily, sitting back in her seat.
“I’ve been thinking of that awful night. I’d forgotten about it, what with all our...you know. I found myself distracted. But now that I think about it, that face at the window, the painting. I think – no, I’m certain – that it was – ”
“You mustn’t dream up ghost stories to corroborate your dreams,” I said dismissively, wishing to nip those thoughts of hers immediately in the bud. “It’s pure superstition.”
“I really think it was her,” said Grace, her voice more urgent. “She was furious with me, using her bedroom, her library, as if I’m replacing her – ”
“You are not a replacement and I’ll hear no more about it,” I bellowed, my knuckles white as I gripped the wheel. “No more about her.”
I glanced at Grace’s reflection in the rear-view mirror and saw she was biting back tears, refusing to allow them to fall.
She was hardy, resolute, and so much tougher than she looked.
Whatever happened at Heather House had given her more tenacity in a single lock of her hair than poor Louisa had in her entire body.
But still, I couldn’t stand the comparison. I wouldn’t stand the comparison.
“I only want to know more about the woman you loved before me,” said Grace in a meek voice that turned my stomach. Sometimes she really did remind me of her, and I couldn’t stand it.
“It was all a long, long time ago now,” I said. “You were only a baby when the fire broke out, when I lost them all.”
“You rebuilt her room and made it a replica of what it was before, saving the things which could be saved. Why did you do that?” she asked, sounding more determined now that she’d managed to open me up.
I groaned. “I shouldn’t have moved your hand.”
“Please, Nick.”
“Perhaps I should move mine – that usually makes you speechless.”
“You really won’t tell me?”
I sighed, turning now onto the dual carriageway.
“I didn’t cope well with the guilt, all right?
I lost everybody I loved, and even some that I didn’t love, but Louisa.
..she was my world. I failed her. The loss of all her trinkets and toys and clothes – there were so many that I could only recall a few – only symbolised everything that had been snatched from her, as well as from me.
“She lost her life, and all trace of herself with it. I re-created it to try and set things right, but I only created a shrine to a woman who could never come back. An empty set-design without the actress present. A doll-house without its dolls. I moved myself to the attic room to avoid that vacant, artificial replica, but I left it there nonetheless, just in case...”
“In case you found another doll to fill it?”
“Grace.”
“It’s all right, sir.”
“You aren’t a doll any more than Louisa was, and you’ve already become such a part of the house that you almost eclipse any impact she had on the place. You didn’t know that, did you?”
Grace’s mouth was parted in awe, her eyes misting over as she watched the traffic.
“Louisa never wanted to work with me. She found it far too gruesome. She wasn’t like you, not one little bit,” I said, desperate for Grace to focus on their differences. “She could never have handled this kind of work.”
“All those child-like things...the doll house, the rocking horse...did she still...?”
I smiled grimly. “No, she didn’t play with them.
She just liked to look at them. She brought them from home.
Louisa was...she was fragile. Child-like.
She sought comfort in those things, fearful of growing up.
You and I had our difficulties in our pasts, and they hardened us, forged us into something much tougher – but that isn’t the case with everyone.
“Louisa was beaten to a pulp by her upbringing. She was...god, I can’t say it, not in this van, not now.
Maybe not ever. They would burn her with their lighters, they’d heat up pokers and knives and scorch her skin.
I took her away from all that. She was the same age as you, a broken thing, unable to regulate her own turmoil into something resembling a functioning emotion.
She came to me when one of her torturers died.
Her father. We communicated, we...we connected.
I fell in love with her darkness, Grace.
I adored her tortured soul. I thought I could help her, but I couldn’t, and then I lost her forever.
The point is that there are similarities, Grace, in circumstance and in age and in all manner of things, but you are no replacement.
You are Crowthorne’s future, if you wish to be. Louisa is its past.”
Grace nodded her head thoughtfully, though I could see she was filled with questions that I would never answer. What she said next sent a shiver throughout my body.