She reminded herself that he had every right to be in a permanently bad mood and felt a twinge of guilt for owning a dog that would urinate on such newly cleaned brogues.
“Hello-o!” She heard her grandmother’s musical burr ring, as clear as a bell, from behind the closed bedroom door. “I said, hello-o-o!”
Esme stood up, pushed the remaining jumble on the floor toward the wall, and cocked her head to one side. Rod Stewart seemed to be softly rasping about some seventeen-year-old knocking on his door.
The singing was definitely on the outside of her head, and seemed to be leaking out from Granny Mac’s room. She moved over and pressed her ear against the door. Her grandmother’s favorite singer was crooning that the young strumpet could love him tonight if she wanted, but in the morning she had better be gone.
Gingerly, Esme opened the door and slipped into the room. It was dark, just the way Granny Mac had always liked it. She shook her head to rid herself of Rod and shuffled in the dim light toward the window, reaching out as she approached it to pull back the curtains.
“Hey, you, Hot Legs!” the voice of her grandmother suddenly filled the room. Esme spun around and found the old woman’s eyes twinkling at her beadily from the end of her bed. The room smelled suddenly and strongly of cigarettes. Cheap ones. Embassy Regal. Granny Mac’s favorites.
The hair stood up on the back of Esme’s neck. “Granny Mac!” she breathed with disbelief as her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and sought out the unwavering, challenging gaze of her grandmother.
“Aye,” answered Granny Mac, “amazing, isn’t it, at my stage in life?”
Esme blinked, said nothing for a moment, then blinked again. Feelings tumbled inside her, searching for a slot. Disbelief, fear, anger, delight: All clamored for space. “Granny Mac,” she said again, on the spur of that moment deciding to suspend her disbelief in favor of embracing her delight. “You’ve been smoking!”
Her grandmother, her wrinkles in the drab light dissolving and blurring on her crinkled cheeks, simply cackled.
“I don’t understand,” Esme said. “I thought that . . . Well, how could you? I mean, for goodness’ sake. You really ought not to . . . It’s just that, well . . . I thought you had, you know, you were definitely . . . Oh shit,” she said suddenly. “I am having such a strange day.” She sniffed the room again. There was definitely cigarette smoke in the air. And Rod Stewart.
“Well, turns out there is a quick way to give up smoking,” her grandmother said, “but I don’t know that I can entirely recommend it.”
Esme stood and contemplated the bed. She should not allow this, she knew that, of course she knew that, but how she adored her Granny Mac. And how she needed her! How she had always needed her. Without Granny Mac all the wringing and squashing in the world would not have kept one foot in front of the other since their move from London to the House in the Clouds. She was Esme’s savior. She always had been. And perhaps she always would be. Who was Esme to argue with that?
She threw her hands in the air and plonked herself down on the end of the bed, wriggling backward until her back met the wall. She looked in her grandmother’s direction and willed the blackness to stop smudging that much loved face, to snap it into focus. “You know, I was just thinking about where I wanted to live,” she said, ignoring just about everything, “and I wonder if perhaps it is in here with you, maybe just for a few days. I could smoke cigarettes and read Hello! magazines and spy on Gaga and Jam-jar next door. It would be just like the old days.”
Gaga and Jam-jar were the ancient neighbors who despite rather oddly living in a windmill were perhaps the straightest two people in Christendom and loathed Esme and her eccentric tower of relatives with a passion. The appropriately named assortment of Stacks, according to Gaga and Jam-jar, lowered the tone.
“You’d have to go out and get the Hello! magazines for a start,” Granny Mac said. “I’m dying for want of fresh dirt on poor Fergie.”
Esme felt a hot flush of devotion sweep through her. “I thought you could never forgive her,” she said, “for wearing that shocking hat to the Queen Mother’s funeral.”
“Och, did you have to remind me about the Queen Mother? It upsets me greatly these days to hear about dead people, Esme. Spare a thought for them, will you?”
“Well, I think it was the Queen Mother.” Esme tumbled forward. “But you never know with those Royals, do you? I mean, I never saw the body. It could have been anyone. Did you know that Princess Diana has been seen working as a showgirl in Vegas? They might have carried the real Queen Mother out of Clarence House in a bedpan for all we know. She might be living the high life in Blackpool spending all our hard-earned taxes on slot machines and horses.”
Granny Mac seemed thrilled with the possibility. “It wouldn’t be such a bad life,” she said. “I might try it myself.”
“Oh no, Granny Mac, I need you here,” Esme said, a little too desperately, because even though the chances of her grandmother actually moving to Blackpool were close to nil, stranger things had happened, were happening. “I really, really do. You can’t possibly know how much.”
She felt Granny Mac’s eyes boring into her in a way she knew meant she wanted to know how much. She sighed.
“I’m losing it,” she said, simply, with a shrug of her shoulders. “I’m bloody losing it. I mean, look at me!” A ringlet, as if to back up what she was saying, suddenly sprang out of her hairclip and bounced in front of her face.
“This past month, Granny Mac, you know, since”—she struggled for words that would not upset her grandmother—“since Dr. Gribblehurst and everything . . .” She was silent for a moment, searching for the right approach.
“Nothing feels right anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know anything. It all feels dark and fuzzy and strange. I feel like I’m starting to unravel and I don’t know why and it’s bloody terrifying.”
“You do know why, you soft lass,” her grandmother said. “You just don’t want to face it.”
Esme felt fear clutch at her heart. Was this what she wanted to hear?
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t. It’s too soon.”
“But if you wait much longer,” her grandmother argued, “it will be too late. And maybe not just for you.”
“Don’t,” Esme pleaded. “Just don’t.” The room, apart from the barely audible lamenting of Rod Stewart, fell silent.
“Well, what about that miserable old stoat upstairs, then, eh?” Granny Mac switched the subject to one of her favorites: Henry. “Is he still getting up your nose?”
“No more than I deserve, I’m sure,” answered Esme, relieved at the change in direction. “I mean he’s a bit septic and I don’t seem to be able to do anything right but that’s nothing new.”
“Have you considered a London telephone directory to the back of the head?” offered Granny Mac. “Or a frozen leg of lamb, which you then proceed to serve up for dinner, or a bottle of wine?”
“I’ve thought about the wine,” Esme admitted, “but only drinking it. I hadn’t really considered the murder weapon potential.”
“Och,” her grandmother said, disgusted. “You’re not trying hard enough, Esme.”
Esme poked her errant curl back into her topknot. She was trying as hard as she could.
“Esme!” The sound of Rory’s anxious cry filtered through from the top floor of the house to the bottom. Waking up was not Rory’s best time. He suffered terrible nightmares, poor lamb, and the thought of what he dreamed about to wake up so angry and lost and lonely chilled her to the bone.
“Esme-e-e-e-e,” he called again, his voice sifting through the layers of the house to find her. No matter how hard she had tried to get him to call her Mummy, he only ever referred to her by her name. Gaga and Jam-jar found it criminal.
“Is the wee boy okay?” Granny Mac asked gently.
“He’s fine,” Esme said, heaving he
rself off the bed, loath to leave the coziness of Granny Mac’s company. And in truth, he was doing pretty well. The psychologist he saw every couple of months in London seemed pleased with his progress and his speech was truly astonishing. For a boy who had not spoken a single word until the day after his fourth birthday, at which point he debuted with “I’d rather have a chocolate biscuit, if it’s all the same to you,” his command of the English language would put most grown-ups to shame. “Truly, Gran,” she said. “He’s just tired, that’s all. Honestly, he’s fine. You don’t need to worry about him.”
“So, it’s just you, then,” Granny Mac said. “That I need to worry about.”
Esme smiled into the darkness of the foul-smelling room. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said softly. “I’m feeling better already.”
“Is that so? Well, may I be so bold as to ask if that was a quince making its way down the stairs with such enthusiasm just before?”
“How could you possibly know that?” Esme was stunned.
“Es-meeeeeee,” Rory howled from above.
“A quince, Esme, of the quince variety? At this hour of the morning when you would normally, I am sure, be putting a loaf of your delicious sourdough bread in the oven?”
“Blame Doctor bloody Gribblehurst,” Esme burst out. “It’s all his fault.”
“Well, it’s you who bakes the bread Esme. Or not, as the case may be. And now is not the time to let go of what is dear to you. Now more than ever you should be clinging to it.”
“I just haven’t had it in me,” Esme said despairingly. “I just couldn’t . . . I just can’t . . . It just went.”
“Well, just get it back, lassie. Just get it back.”
And with that Rory roared so loudly that Esme could bear it no longer, and to the retreating strains of Rod Stewart, she slipped out of the room and headed up the stairs.
As she clumped past Henry’s room she saw that all signs of the recent quince-flavored disaster had disappeared. He would be cleaning his brogues again, no doubt, his schedule thrown out most inconveniently. She clenched her buttocks, not because she was thinking of her father-in-law, but because her friend Alice, who was addicted to personal trainers, had told her that combined with climbing the stairs ten times a day, it constituted proper exercise.
By the time she clattered up the last set of steps to where Rory lay pink and flushed under his favorite blanket in a corner of the kitchen, she was puffing and wheezing like an old steam engine and wishing he was old enough to know CPR so he could practice it on her.
And her bum hurt. These were the ramifications of living in a house with seventy-eight internal stairs, but every time Esme looked out the window of the top floor in her nutty tower she remembered why it was all worthwhile.
She scooped up her small, sticky, sobbing son and held him tight against her chest as she looked out across the scattered rooftops of Seabury village, over the tips of the leafy green oaks, across the lake—or the Meare as the locals knew it—to the waters of the cool North Sea lapping at the pebbly shore and trying moodily not to glisten in the watery sunshine.
She rocked Rory, quietly shushing him back from despair, and thought back to the dreary, gray, London afternoon when she had only too happily abandoned her own thriving publishing empire to drag Pog away from his office and up to the Suffolk coast to look at the house of her dreams.
“But it’s not even a real house,” Pog had moaned, aghast.
“Leave it out,” Esme had teased, “you’re an architect—you’re the last person who would know what a real house looks like.”
He did have a point, she’d agreed at the time, in that it was a highly unusual dwelling, but that was what appealed to her. They wanted to escape their city lives, didn’t they? They wanted to start anew?
“But couldn’t we just get a sweet little cottage by the sea?” Pog had asked. “Like normal people?” But they were no longer normal people—recent unimaginable events had changed that—and Esme wanted the House in the Clouds not in spite of its oddness, but because of it.
“But the whole village is not quite right,” Pog had complained, his face crumpled with worry. “There are all these corners where there should be straight lines and far too many turrets and towers.”
Esme agreed that the village was from the Not-Quite-Right Shop—as Granny Mac would say—but that only endeared it to her further. The whole settlement of Seabury had been dreamed up a hundred years earlier by a wealthy landowner who wanted to custom make a fairy-tale holiday resort for “nice” people like himself.
He’d gone a bit overboard, it had to be said, on reviving the spirit of the Tudor Age, long since past, and so the town sported more than its fair share of inappropriate wooden cladding, heavy beams, curved roads and quaint if entirely unnecessary corners.
And over this eccentric collection of homes and gardens loomed the House in the Clouds, a giant dovecote, its tall slender stalk painted black and peppered with tiny white windows, and the big square room on top a deep, delicious red with pitched roofs and views of almost everywhere.
“I mean even normal-sized dovecotes are pretty bloody barmy,” Pog had continued to grumble. “But one that’s seventy feet high? That you live in?”
That theatrical landowner of yore had originally devised the house to add, rather dramatically, to the landscape but more important to disguise the town’s water supply, 30,000 gallons of which was once kept in what was now the kitchen and family room.
“Disguise?” Pog had nearly fainted when Esme revealed this detail. “He disguised his water tower as a giant dovecote?”
“Yes, that’s why there’s a windmill in the backyard,” Esme had answered, as though that made any more sense. When it came down to it, she told Pog, the house had spoken to her, in words that only she could hear.
“Like chocolate?” he had suggested, rather gloomily.
“Like chocolate,” she’d replied, “only bigger.”
The House in the Clouds had been the antidote Esme thought she needed to the life she knew she could no longer live, her escape from the torment of tragedy, and Pog, because all he ever wanted was for her to be happy, had soon relented and the entire Stack clan had decamped.
So, it could be infuriating to get down to the car and realize she had left the keys on the kitchen table high in the sky above her, but mostly Esme had adored her tower and the higgledy-piggledy town it came in.
“Where’s Mrs. Brown?” Rory whined into her neck as his hot little body clung to her. “I want Mrs. Brown.”
Esme kissed her son’s thick, curly, bright orange hair and resisted the urge to tell him that Mrs. Brown, as he had originally christened the dog, had been savaged by angry cave bears and would never be coming back. Not as a dog anyway. Possibly as a potted plant but definitely not as anything with a bladder.
“Where’s Mrs. Brown?” Rory continued to sob dramatically. “Where’s my friend, my only friend.” Esme shushed and rocked her son. The floor was still covered in quinces, the kitchen counter set up and ready for paste-making.
She caught a whiff of Rory’s sweet, cranky little boy breath and kissed his nose, but at this he twisted away from her and out of the corner of her eye she saw his shadow wriggling across the kitchen cupboards and felt a clamp deep in her stomach, an inexplicable mixture of sadness and secrets and unshed tears.
At that moment a gentle sea breeze blew in through an open window and nudged open the pantry door so the sun, like a torch beam on an inky black night, sought out the stone jar that sat smugly on the floor, its contents quietly bubbling and roiling. You may have given up on me, it whispered into the morning air. But I have not given up on you.
Chapter 2
Granny Mac had always loved Rod Stewart. Rather bizarrely for a thrice-widowed matron in her sixties, she’d once even had her hair cut in a blond “shaggy” just like his. Each of those late husbands had had their own Rod signature tune and the merest hint of “You’re in My Heart” could always be relied
on to conjure up her last, Jerry O’Brien.
On a good day the most mild-mannered, polite and caring of men, on a bad day he had a mouth like a sewer rat and a contempt for Granny Mac’s Catholicism that bordered on psychotic, given she was not herself a Catholic.
“Jesus was a faker, a fraud, and Mary was a hussy,” he would roar at Esme and her grandmother from the safety of his armchair, his eyes roving wildly around in his head and his dyed black hair sprouting out spookily around his bald patch.
“Son of God, be damned!” he would spit, grabbing at the crème de menthe, which was all he drank.
“Did you get that, Esme?” Granny Mac would ask her granddaughter as they hid in the hallway on either side of the open sitting room door. “Did you get the bit about being damned?” Esme would studiously write down every word, although the spelling on some of his curses truly stumped her.
When the poor man awoke in the morning with a raging headache, green teeth and enough remorse to fill an entire hemisphere, Granny Mac would be sitting on the bed staring at him and would call immediately for her granddaughter.
“Off you go, Esme,” she would say, at which point Esme would take out her notebook and start reciting his obscenities of the night before.
“‘Fuck the pope,’” Esme would read from her notes in her sweet schoolgirl voice, “‘and the blessed virgin too even though we all know she wasn’t really a virgin.’”
Jerry O’Brien would lie in his bed and weep as Granny Mac’s eyes bored into him with the fervor of a Texas oilman. For the next month he would be the picture of sobriety until the demon de menthe got hold of him again and the whole process was repeated.