Natalie and Julia had no trouble securing a table by the window. From her seat, Julia could just about see the tangle of trees that marked the edge of Aunt Regina’s property. Her property now. She kept forgetting that. For all that the keys were wedged uncomfortably into the pocket of her jeans, she still felt like a guest in a home from which the hostess was unaccountably absent.
Oh, well. It wasn’t likely to be hers for long. Clean and sell, that was the plan. The lawyer—solicitor?—she had spoken to long-distance from New York had assured her that that wasn’t likely to be a problem. Property values in the area were good, despite the general recession.
On the other hand, if there were ghosts …
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” said Natalie quickly. She curved her hands around her cup of black coffee. “Mother dragged us there every Sunday for years. Duty visits. Dead boring.”
From the way her eyes shifted, Julia suspected there was more to it than that, but she was too tired to pry. In the quiet of the jazz café, jet lag had come crashing down. Julia stifled a yawn as the waitress brought her a triangular piece of quiche lightly fringed with assorted greens.
“No restless spirits, then?” she said, giving the corner of her quiche a quick, exploratory probe. “No specters clanking chains and going bump in the middle of the night?”
Natalie’s perfectly manicured eyebrows rose. “I’ve never been there in the middle of the night. Andrew, my brother, did claim he saw something in the garden once.”
“What kind of something?” Julia asked indistinctly, around a mouthful of quiche. Whatever their jazz was like, the restaurant certainly had gotten the café part right. The taste of food reminded her that the last time she’d eaten was somewhere over Ireland, cardboard croissants and long-life jam.
Natalie shook her head. “Nothing, really. It was all rubbish, just telling himself stories. He said he saw a man, in old-fashioned clothes, down by the old summerhouse.” She shoved a lump of Gorgonzola out of the way with her fork, scooping up a quick bite of plain greens. “Probably just a tramp.”
“Or a bit of underdone potato?” murmured Julia, having images of Marley posing as Scrooge’s door knocker.
Natalie frowned at her. “What?”
“Nothing. Dickens. Never mind.” Julia scrubbed her hands over her eyes. Jet lag always made her slaphappy. “Tell me about Aunt Regina,” she said quickly. “What was she like?”
Natalie’s fork paused over her salad as she considered. “She was a photojournalist back in the forties and fifties,” she said finally. “Hanging out of helicopters, taking pictures of war zones, all that sort of thing.”
Julia’s image of the feeble old lady puttering away with her crochet hook underwent a quick revision. “Wow,” she said inadequately. “She sounds fascinating.”
“She was … outspoken.” Natalie drove her fork into a wad of arugula. “My mother always thought it was unfair she was left the house when she was the only one of them that didn’t have a family.”
Julia looked up from shoveling down the remains of her quiche. “She never married?”
“You’d have to ask Mum.” Natalie poked at her salad. “There was some story about someone when she was younger, someone unsuitable.” She made a face over the word, making a joke out of it.
“Standards were different then?” Julia hazarded.
“Don’t say that to my mother. Hers haven’t changed. In any event,” Natalie added quickly, pushing her plate out of the way, “Aunt Regina lived there alone as long as I knew her. From the way she carried on about the old place, you’d think she had a Rubens hidden away among the clutter; she was that possessive of it.”
And was that what Natalie had been looking for when Julia arrived?
No, that was too ridiculous. It wasn’t fair to dislike someone just because she looked like she’d stepped off the cover of Vogue.
“Do you think she did?” Julia asked cautiously.
Natalie lifted her hands in a quick, helpless gesture. “She might at that. Goodness only knows. She was rather paranoid in her old age. She thought people were trying to sneak in and steal her treasures.”
“You mean like those piles of old newspaper clippings?” said Julia drily.
“And that grim portrait in the drawing room. Poor old you. I say sort it all right into the bin.”
Julia hadn’t found the portrait grim. She’d felt a strange kinship with that unknown woman, whoever she was.
“I don’t know,” said Julia slowly, feeling her way along as she spoke. Her brain felt slow with food and fatigue. “It could be interesting. It’s like an archeological dig, layers of history all crammed together. I don’t know very much about our family.”
The words felt odd on her lips. Our family. She’d been thinking of this as just another task, clean out an old house, put it on the market, but there it was, that strange, unexpected sense of ownership, of belonging.
“Well,” said Natalie practically, “if you need the help, just ask. I’ve a brother who can be put to work.”
“Does he know you’re offering him up?”
“Details, details.” Natalie signaled to the waitress for the check. “Besides, his oldest friend is an antiques dealer. We can drag him along, too. Maybe he can tell us who that portrait of yours is.”
At the word “dealer” Julia’s hackles immediately rose. “I don’t want to put anyone out.”
“No, it will be fun!” protested Natalie. The waitress set down a black plastic tray with the chit on it. Natalie put down two twenty-pound notes and waved away Julia’s fumblings for her wallet. “My treat. It’s not every day I get a cousin back from the States. In any event,” she added as they got up from their seats, Julia’s scraping back against the hardwood floor, “I’ll ring Andrew and tell him to ring Nicholas. Saturday?”
“There’s really no need,” said Julia, following Natalie out through the door. After the air-conditioned café, the July evening air felt hot and sticky. Twilight had fallen, obscuring the landscape, playing tricks with Julia’s eyes. There were cars in people’s yards, lights in the windows. Next to it all, Aunt Regina’s house looked particularly isolated. Julia fell in step with Natalie as they walked down the block. “Honestly, there’s a lot of pure garbage tossing that needs to happen before I get to anything like appraising.”
And if she was going to have appraisals, she’d be the one picking the person. It wasn’t just her New York–bred cynicism coming to the fore; she didn’t like other people interfering in her private business. Even if they genuinely meant well. Whether he had meant to or not, her father had raised her to be independent.
Maybe a little too independent?
Natalie turned back with a winning smile. “Oh, not like that,” she said. “I just thought you might use the manual labor. It will do them good,” she said innocently. “Especially Nicholas. Put them to work, get up a sweat.”
There was something about the way Natalie pronounced the name that gave Julia her clue. “This Nicholas,” she said. “Have you known him long?”
Natalie feigned indifference, but there was no hiding the sudden light in her eyes. “He’s been Andrew’s friend for yonks. They were at school together. Harrow,” she added importantly.
“Mmm,” said Julia noncommittally. They had come to Aunt Regina’s gate. In the twilight, the entrance to Aunt Regina’s house looked even more forbidding, shadowed, and overgrown.
“This is me,” said Natalie, pointing down the street at an SUV parked half a block away from the house.
“Okay.” The two of them stood there awkwardly. It felt, thought Julia with a tinge of amusement, like an awkward blind date. “Thanks for dinner. And for coming to help me get settled in.”
Natalie’s eyes shifted away and she made a quick, fluttery gesture with one hand. “It was nothing.” Looking from Julia to the house, she said awkwardly, “Are you sure you’ll be all right there on your own? My flat doesn’t stretch to a spare bed, but there is a rathe
r comfortable sofa.…”
Julia was touched by the offer, although she couldn’t think of anything she would like less than sleeping on a stranger’s couch. When it came to the trade-off, Julie would rather have the odd family ghost and a room with a door. She imagined that Natalie wanted to have her just about as much as Julia wanted to be there.
“I’ll be fine,” Julia assured her. “It’s really sweet of you to offer, though.”
Natalie looked uneasily over her shoulder at the long, winding walk down to the old house. “The offer stands if you change your mind.” She gnawed on her lower lip, clearly still feeling guilty. “I’d come in with you and see you settled, but I’d better be going. Work tomorrow morning.”
She grimaced expressively, and it hit Julia, with a jolt, that this was the first time work had come into the conversation. At home, that was the first thing anyone asked: What do you do? As though it were the sum total of one’s worth.
“No, no, that’s fine,” said Julia, stifling a yawn. With her belly full of food, her body was making a desperate bid for a bed. Or any flat surface, really.
“If you’re sure…” Natalie brushed her cheek against Julia’s in a quick, practiced embrace. Julia thought inconsequentially of Japanese rice paper, silky and scented. Over her shoulder, Natalie called brightly, “I’ll see you on Saturday?”
Saturday? The door had closed on the SUV before Julia could tell her not to bother.
Herne Hill, 2009
Julia spent a satisfying week sorting through old papers and throwing out moth-eaten sweaters.
The house wasn’t quite as unmanageably large as it had originally appeared to her apartment-bred eyes. There were only six rooms on the main floor, although an ancestor at some point had knocked through a wall to make room for a conservatory, which bulged from one side of the house like a large glass mushroom, filled with ancient rattan furniture, droopy cushions, and dispirited potted plants. On the second floor were four bedrooms, although it seemed a good guess that the large bathroom with its claw-footed tub had once been a fifth. The floor was dotted with odd little nooks and cubbyholes, dressing rooms and linen closets and doors to narrow staircases that led up into the attics or down into the basement.
The attic wasn’t properly an attic, at least not as Julia understood attics. One-half of it had been knocked into a single large room. A nursery? There were colored tiles around the fireplace, decorated with images from fairy tales: Cinderella and her slipper, Rose-Red and her bear, Rapunzel letting down her long, long hair. Someone had used the room more recently than that. There was an easel in one corner, and a pile of art books next to it, a dried-out palette sitting on top of the books.
Julia had skirted around the easel without lifting the linen draping over it. Later, of course, she would have to—but she was starting with the rooms downstairs, she had already decided. This was just an exploratory mission, to get the lay of the land.
The other rooms in the attic, small and dormered, were all heaped with detritus from downstairs: old furniture, piles of clothes, steamer trunks, and cardboard boxes. Had no one in the family ever thrown anything away?
Still, it was better than the basement. That was a damp space with large stone sinks, a rusted coal stove, and a series of dark and faceless pantries, all crammed with obsolete kitchen equipment dating from roughly the origins of the house up to decrepit 1950s mix-masters in molding cardboard boxes. The original kitchen must have been down there once. Julia sincerely pitied the poor domestics who had had to work down there. The only windows were well above their heads. Forget light; the ventilation must have been terrible, especially with that old stove belching coal smoke, even in the height of summer.
It really did make one think twice about the good old days.
Still, Julia couldn’t deny the fascination of it all, of sinking her hands into the detritus of the past: cloche hats and crumbling newspapers, buttoned boots and letters that began with phrases straight out of an Edwardian manners manual. By the end of that first week, her days had begun to fall into a pattern. Coffee in the morning, from the surprisingly good stock and sleek coffeemaker Aunt Regina had left behind, and then off to the room of the day, to empty closets and sort drawers into three stacks: throw away, give away, keep/sell?
Many of the throwaways were easy—clothes so moth-eaten that not even the charity shop would want them, shoes with the heels worn down, broken coffeemakers—but the other two categories tended to slide back and forth. The china pug with the horrible bow around its neck could easily go on the giveaway pile, but what about the rosewood sewing box with the hidden compartment on the bottom? Not that Julia sewed, but there was something rather neat about it, and about the stack of ancient magazines from the 1920s and ’30s, a little yellowed but still perfectly readable.
Aside from some treasured pictures and a tattered collection of books from college, there was very little in Julia’s apartment that wasn’t immediately functional. Some of it she blamed on being a consultant for all those years; it didn’t make sense to haul family heirlooms around from posting to posting or to acquire large and bulky souvenirs. She had lived light; her last move had taken ridiculously little time to pack. But now she found herself suddenly seized with unreasoning cupidity. What was she going to do with a rocking horse with a missing tail, or with piles of photo albums filled with sepia pictures of people who had been dead before she was born?
She didn’t know, but she wanted them anyway.
Maybe just a few things, she told herself, and let herself squirrel the photo albums into the keep/sell pile. And the sewing box. She knew enough to know that she had no idea what she was doing; at some point, a real appraiser would have to be called in. But, right now, Julia was finding the whole process oddly restful. She should have felt isolated, but she didn’t, at least, not yet. In the evenings, bone-weary and content, she would take her glass of plonk (four pounds per bottle at the liquor store down the block) out onto the patio and collapse into a deeply uncomfortable old specimen of lawn furniture. Sometimes, she would call her best friend, Lexie, catching her between meetings at the office; other times she would just sit and sip her wine and look out over the tangled expanse of lawn stretching out in front of her.
The garden—although “garden” was far too grand a word for the wilderness she could see from her bedroom window—stretched out the length of a full city block. As she sat there, the world felt very far away. Sometimes, if the windows were open and the wind was right, she could catch a faint snippet of someone else’s television or dinner table conversation. But mostly, it was just the sound of crickets and the wind in the leaves of the trees. From the patio behind the house it might have been a hundred years ago, a world without cars or Internet or electric lights.
“Are you sure you’re all right out there?” her father asked when she called him four days in.
“Fine,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Somehow, it seemed disloyal to admit that she was actually enjoying herself, enjoying the hauling and the sorting, and the absence of the grinding self-doubt that came of sitting idle in her own apartment, waiting for the phone to ring with job offers that didn’t exist. She’d been in the rat race for so long. She felt as though she’d stepped not only out of her own life but somehow also out of time.
The contents of the drawers and cupboards aided her on that. Friday night, she stayed up way too late reading through a pile of an old magazine called the Tatler, from the 1920s and ’30s. It was better than reading the headlines of the supermarket tabloids. Good Lord, had people actually lived like that? Socialites bolted to Kenya, viscounts eloped with Gaiety Girls (Julia gathered that Gaiety Girls must be the 1920s equivalent of exotic dancers, from the way the magazine went on), and debutantes were caught in compromising positions with members of the Russian ballet. It was fascinating. Also, strangely addictive.
Julia slept through her alarm on Saturday morning and woke up with a 1920s tabloid hangover. She’d mean
t to explore the garden today.… But first coffee. Pulling her unbrushed hair into an untidy ponytail, she pulled on ancient shorts and tank top—the few 1970s window units scattered around the house didn’t do much to condition the air—and stumbled downstairs to the blessed chrome coffeemaker.
She’d only just dumped milk into the miraculous life-giving brew when the buzzer rang. It took Julia a few moments to realize that it must be the front door.
Who in the hell would be on her doorstep on a Saturday morning? Neighbors, complaining about the amount of garbage she’d been dumping out front? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Did they even have Jehovah’s Witnesses in England?
Coffee clutched firmly in hand, Julia opened the front door, prepared to tell off whoever it might be.
Natalie stood on the steps, a male person in tow.
Julia resisted the urge to swear. She had forgotten about Natalie. It didn’t improve Julia’s mood that she’d been caught in ancient Yale shorts and a tank top with holes in the hem. Natalie, in contrast, was wearing a yellow linen sundress. There were matching sandals, with delicate ribbons that tied around the ankles.
The man beside her looked like he was trying to be anywhere but where he was. Next to him, Natalie looked little and dainty—which put Julia at somewhere near pigmy status. His sun-streaked blond hair suggested ski vacations and tropical getaways.
Julia wished they would. Go away, that was. They looked very pretty together. And she needed more coffee.
“Hi,” Julia said shortly, trying to remember when she had last washed her hair. Yesterday? At least, she thought it was yesterday. She took another slug of her coffee. “So—you decided to stop by!”
“We’ve come to help you,” Natalie said brightly, then turned to the man standing next to her with a swish of her blindingly clean hair. “Welcome to the old family homestead. I know it’s not anything like your old family homestead.…”
“You mean the flat in Fulham?” he said drily.
Natalie gave a tinkling little laugh. “You know it’s not.”
Julia stood in the doorway, feeling decidedly superfluous. Was it really necessary for them to come all the way to her doorstep to have this conversation? Or to make her watch? Her coffee was getting cold and her greasy hair was making her head itch. She repressed the ignoble urge to slam the door on them and go in search of more coffee.