Chapter Two
Their home was the last in a row of sagging brick houses east of the docks, serenaded night and day by the circling caw of seagulls.
The minuscule herb garden her mother had kept between the garden gate and the front door was now a thorny tangle of weeds, and the lamp that hung by the front bore no candle, only a sad pool of wax.
Oliver stopped at the black iron gate, blocking Ava’s path with his bicycle. ‘Go easy on him,’ he said, pushing sodden strands of hair from his forehead. ‘Please.’
‘And will he go easy on me?’ She looked at the house, at the dark windows, and wondered whether her father had already gone to bed. That wouldn’t be surprising, seeing as he hated homecomings almost as much as he hated goodbyes, although the fizzle in her stomach told her that it was disappointing.
It had been months since they’d seen one another.
Oliver shrugged, and Ava huffed a half-breath through her lips as she followed him up the three stone steps to their front door, wondering what level of ‘bad’ she would find behind it.
At its best, ‘bad’ meant her father sat in his armchair, and nursed the same bottle of amber liquid for nigh on a week. At its worst, ‘bad’ meant he would forget to eat, forget to wash, forget to pay rent.
But as she stepped through the door she realized that this … this was something else.
The windows had been boarded up.
Here, in the hallway, and then again in the sitting room, though the cardboard wasn’t thick enough to block out the light entirely, and little threads of golden lamplight crept in from the edges.
It was, however, enough to swathe everything in a pallid gloom, turning the cheerful yellow settee her mother had loved into a gloomy grey, the matching yellow curtains almost brown.
‘It’s the noise again,’ said Oliver, coming to stand in the doorway. ‘He says it’s waking him up.’
Ava blinked in disbelief. ‘So his solution is … this?’
It wasn’t just cardboard blocking the windows – her father had taken the yellow seat cushions from the settee and pushed them up against the glass.
They were held in place by two precariously balanced dining chairs, which he’d stopped from sliding back against the hardwood floor by dragging the curiosity cabinet over and wedging the chairs in place.
The overall effect was precarious chaos that looked ready to topple any moment.
‘And you didn’t think to stop him?’ Ava said, stepping back into the hallway – where her brother was dragging her bags inside. ‘To talk some sense into him?’
‘Yes of course I—’
‘Or even say “Pa, just to check, but have you lost your senses”? You thought, what? Leave him to it?’
She marched past him, checking the kitchen, the scullery. Only the kitchen still had light coming into it, from the high, narrow window along the southern wall. No doubt because Oliver had threatened to stop cooking altogether if he wasn’t able to let a thread of air into the place.
‘Now just hold on a minute here,’ said Oliver, following her and dumping her coat unceremoniously over one of the chairs. ‘You haven’t been here for months. You have no idea what has been going on.’
‘Because you mentioned none of this in your letters!’ She turned to him, feeling the worry that had whittled her down on the train transforming into something prickly, something hot.
‘Only page upon page about how much you despised working at the theatre, just as you hated working at the rug shop, the telegraph office, and the coopery. Not once did you say: “Oh, and by the by, Pa has turned the house into a crypt.”’
‘Yes, well,’ Oliver blustered. ‘I thought perhaps you would have enough to worry over – what with Jem, and—’
His name was like a hot poker to her skin, and she felt her cheeks flush. ‘I did not leave because of Jem.’
She’d left because it had all been too much.
A failed engagement was mortifying enough, but a failed career, a humiliating exit from the stage atop that?
She couldn’t fathom how one dragged oneself up from such depths – and she hadn’t tried.
She’d chosen another path instead, and told herself there was purpose to it. Meaning to it.
And perhaps there had been, in the end. Although not the sort she’d been seeking.
She watched her brother pause, heard him huff a sharp breath through his teeth.
‘I know how much Jem hurt you. And I know how much the theatre rattled you. And—’ He reached to rub his good hand against the back of his neck.
‘I suppose I thought I would be protecting you if I could just fix this myself.’ She watched the muscle in his jaw flicker.
‘But I couldn’t even do that. Instead, I had to go and break something else. Because that’s all I ever do.’
He looked down to his arm, to the sling, and to Ava’s surprise she saw wetness welling in his eyes.
‘Your arm will mend,’ she said. ‘It was just a bicycling accident.’
‘I’m not talking about my arm, Ava. I’m talking about … everything.’
‘Not everything is broken, Oliver.’
‘Isn’t it?’ He turned to look at the precarious stack of furniture against the windows, and she turned to look with him, and felt something within her twist.
In the first few months after her mother had passed, she’d wanted to do something similar. Wanted to shut the world out entirely, and exist in the darkness – for that was how everything had felt without her mother. Dark. Endlessly so – and senseless.
Somewhere within her, that feeling was still there – though each year that passed leeched some of its power. But time had not helped her father. It held no sway on his grief – that much she could see, now.
He still mourned her as though it were yesterday.
‘When did this begin?’ she asked softly.
‘A few weeks after you left. So … June’
‘And now it’s September,’ she muttered. ‘Where is he?’
‘Upstairs. But Ava—?’
‘I know,’ she huffed. ‘Don’t be too hard on him.’
Ava lit a candle stub to carry up, watching her shadow pass the blank spaces on the wall where her mother’s paintings had once hung.
She could still picture them as she walked up the creaking steps, the blue-yellow petals of an iris, neat pencil lines showing through oily green paint, like the veins on a leaf.
Now, the wall was bare, though the stairs still creaked in all the same places, and she winced as the third-to-last gave a great, yawning bellow.
‘I’m asleep,’ called her father’s voice through the doorway.
Ava padded to the door, resting her forehead against it. ‘You talk rather coherently in your sleep, Pa.’
‘Yes, well. Someone was clomping around downstairs.’
Ava closed her eyes, the warm candlelight flickering behind her eyelids. ‘Why have you put cardboard upon all the windows?’
‘Because I couldn’t find wood slatting cheap enough.’
Ava had thought the house rather coffin-like already, and she dreaded to think what it would look like with wooden beams nailed into the wall.
‘And what does Mrs Moss think of all this? You know – our landlady? The one who owns the house you are turning into a mausoleum?’
There was a silence from behind the door. ‘She’s been in Manchester the past week with that damned club of hers.’
‘And when she comes back?’
‘She won’t notice.’
Ava straightened, feeling the exhaustion begin to tug at her. Considering Mrs Moss’ favourite business was knowing everyone else’s business, Ava found that rather unlikely. ‘Aren’t you going to come and greet me?’ she asked softly. ‘I haven’t seen you for months.’
‘You’re the one who left,’ her father said. There was no malice in his voice, no venom, but she felt his words like a paper cut – the painless swipe, and then the sting.
‘Well I’m back now,’ said Ava. ‘And I missed you. Don’t you wish to hear what I did in Edinburgh?’
There was no reply from behind her father’s door. Nothing but silence.
‘How did it go, Ava?’ she asked herself, lowering her voice into a crude impression of her father. ‘Did you reinvent yourself, as you wished? Did you get a job at the Empire, and rise to stardom there instead of here?’
She cleared her throat. ‘I suppose you already know the answer to that, for you’d have seen it in the papers, otherwise. Although I did manage to find Ma’s mentor – you remember her? The French lady?’
There was nothing but silence from behind the doorway, and she shook her head, the wood pressing into her forehead. ‘I thought perhaps if anyone could help me become even a fraction of what Ma was, it would be her. But things did not work out quite as neatly as that.’
She felt her breath catch in her throat.
‘Well, I suppose I should get to bed,’ she croaked, patting one hand against the wood. ‘Always nice talking to you.’
And then she turned, and padded her way back down the stairs, past the empty spaces on the wall, the places where her mother’s spark had been, and feeling the chill that hung there now instead.