was more interested. He asked me questions about my work and pointed out where things weren’t quite right – and when I’d improved. I complained to him about the lack of light in my bedroom and wished aloud that I had a place of my own in which to paint. Then one day, when Father was in Manchester, he’d taken me up the rickety stairs to the attic room, which had once been a home for old furniture, trunks, and linen.
‘Look,’ he’d declared, standing back to let me enter the room.
I’d gasped in pleasure. He’d moved all the junk out – into the outhouse in the garden he told me later – cleaned the wooden floor, and distempered the walls. A battered old chaise stood in one corner (‘Who knew that was up here?’ Philips had said with a good-natured grin.’) and there was a bowl with a jug next to it.
‘I thought this would be a good spot,’ he’d said. ‘It catches the sun, see?’
I had been overcome with gratitude and excitement. Now I could really work.
That had been nearly two years ago. The attic room remained hidden from Father. I hadn’t lied exactly but I’d never told him about it and he’d never asked, obviously just assuming it was still a storage space. Philips continued to help me. He mended the stairs and made them safer for me to run up and down. He even bought paints and brushes for me in Brighton when I asked him to, and proved to be a useful sounding board for my musings about art.
As time went on, Father seemed relieved that I had – as far as he knew – abandoned art. He began to talk about my potential as a wife and I ignored him most of the time. I knew nothing of men. In fact, I knew little of women. I had no friends, only a cousin who I’d lived with for a few years when I was younger. But he’d mostly ignored me, and anyway the family had moved away and I hadn’t seen them for years. With Father away so much we rarely had visitors and when we did, it was normally another man just like Father. I would dine with them in silence while they discussed business and then escape to my room when we’d finished eating. The idea of marriage was so odd to me that I disregarded it entirely.
But now – now the vague talk of becoming a good wife had changed to specific mentions of Mr Wallace – I knew I was at a crossroads. I knew that unless I asserted myself, I would be Mrs Wallace within a year, and I wasn’t sure I could live that way. But the alternative – the very idea of telling Father how I really felt – was horrifying.
Father and I had always rubbed along quite nicely. I knew I was loved, even if Father was strict. I missed him when he was away, which was often, but I didn’t miss my mother any more. Not really. She had died when I was so young that I could barely remember her.
Only once recently had I wished my mother was there. I’d been looking out at the sea from the attic window, when I’d heard laughter from the front of the house, so I’d gone to the opposite side of the room and looked out of the smaller windows there.
Outside Mabel was talking to an older woman who looked just like her, only a bit shorter and more squat, and who had to be her mother. There were two little girls playing in the lane, running up and down with their hair flying behind them – it was their laughter I had heard. A slightly older boy with fair hair like Mabel’s leaned against a tree and watched the girls – his sisters, I assumed – with an expression of disdain.
Mabel, who was the oldest of her siblings, I knew, was talking to her mother in what seemed to be an urgent way, waving her hands about as she told her story. The older woman listened, and she took Mabel’s hands and held them still as she replied. Then she brushed a stray hair from Mabel’s forehead and tucked it up under her cap, talking all the time.
Mabel nodded and threw her arms round her mother as I watched. Her mother extracted herself from Mabel’s embrace, kissed her on the cheek then walked off in the direction of the village. The little girls ran after her waving goodbye to Mabel gaily and, after a few seconds, the boy followed, giving Mabel a salute that she returned.
Mabel watched them go, then she adjusted her cap and walked back into the house, smiling.
I had stood at the window wondering what it would be like to have a mother who listened to your woes, who gave advice, and who made sure your hair was neat. Imagining having little sisters who played with you, or a younger brother to torment. I pictured our echoey house full of noise and laughter with children in all the rooms and my mother looking after them all, and I felt a pain in my heart so acute that I had to sit down on the floor for a moment to recover.
‘I miss my mother,’ I whispered to myself.
I stayed on the floor for a little while, feeling lost and alone. Then I got up, brushed the dust from my skirt, and carried on with my painting.
Present day
Ella
The puppy was called Dumbledore. Stan had pushed hard for his name to be Batman but when Oscar suggested Dumbledore, the puppy bounced around the lawn and we all agreed he’d chosen his own name.
He was sitting on my lap in the kitchen a few days later when Priya came round. Mike was mending the back door, which was sticking, and we were chatting about not much as he worked.
When the doorbell rang, Dumbledore stirred slightly in my lap. Gently I picked him up – he was still just a little bundle of fluff and too-long ears – and put him in his basket where he burrowed into the blanket and went back to sleep. Then I ran to the front door.
For as long as I’d been writing my thrillers, I’d wanted a massive whiteboard so I could scrawl ideas for my twisty-turny plots and check everything made sense. I pictured it like the incident boards I’d seen in CID offices, only with fictional incidents recorded instead of real-life crimes. So I was absolutely delighted to see Priya in our drive wrestling the very thing I’d imagined out of the boot of her mud-splattered car.
‘We’re moving offices so we’re having a clear-out,’ she said. ‘Thought you could probably make use of this.’
I was speechless with delight.
‘God it’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘Can I give you something for it?’
Priya shook her head. ‘Honestly, it was heading for a skip.’
‘Cup of tea at least?’
She shook her head again.
‘Midwife,’ she said, pointing to her bump, which seemed to have got bigger in the few days since I’d last seen her.
‘Later?’ I asked.
‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘Or, come and see me at work one day this week? I want to know more about this mystery of yours so I can do some digging.’
‘Deal,’ I said.
Mike helped me carry the board up to the attic, and lent me his drill so I could fix it to the wall. I put it on the far side of the room – on the wall with the extra window, or air vent. I half expected – or hoped perhaps – the drill to go right through and prove the wall was just plywood but it didn’t. The wall was definitely brick – the dust drifting down onto the floor proved that. Slightly disappointed that our mysterious window was simply for ventilation after all, I shoved rawl plugs into the holes I’d drilled, and with Mike’s help, screwed the board to the wall.
‘Not bad,’ I said, standing back to admire my work.
‘Dead straight,’ Mike agreed. ‘What are you going to use it for?’
‘Plotting,’ I said with a grin.
After Mike had gone, I checked on the puppy, then I took a cup of tea, some biscuits, and feeling faintly ridiculous, Stan’s old baby monitor so I could hear if Dumbledore woke up, upstairs. My heroine, Tessa Gilroy, was a private investigator. She mostly worked on divorces but occasionally – and usually reluctantly and inadvertently – got involved in something more dangerous. I was well aware my sort