Mandy asked presently as the dual carriageway widened into motorway.
‘I don’t know, your aunt didn’t say.’
‘It would be nice to see her again after all these years. I wonder what she’s doing now.’
Mandy saw his hands tighten around the steering wheel and his face set. She hadn’t intended it as a criticism, just an expression of her wish to see Sarah again, but clearly he had taken it as one. When her father had fallen out with his sister ten years ago and all communication between the two families had ceased, Mandy had been stopped from seeing her cousin Sarah, which had been very sad. They were both only children and had been close, often staying at each other’s houses until ‘the situation’ had put a stop to it.
‘It was unavoidable,’ he said defensively. ‘It was impossible for you to visit after…You wouldn’t know, you don’t remember. You were only a child, Amanda. It should never have happened and I blame myself. I vowed we’d never set foot in that house again. If it wasn’t for Grandpa being taken there, I wouldn’t, and I’ve told Evelyn that.’
Mandy felt the air charged with the passion of his disclosure. It was the most he’d ever said about ‘the situation’, ever. Indeed, it had never been mentioned by anyone in the last ten years, not in her presence at least. Now, not only had he spoken of it, but he appeared to be blaming himself, which was news to her. And his outburst – so out of character – and the palpable emotion it contained made Mandy feel uncomfortable, for reasons she couldn’t say.
She looked out of her side window and concentrated on the passing scenery. It was a full ten minutes before he spoke again and then this voice was safe and even once more.
‘There’s snow forecast for next week,’ he said.
‘So much for global warming!’
A few minutes later he switched on Radio 3, which allowed Mandy to take her iPod from her bag and plug in her headphones. It was a compilation – garage, hip-hop, Mozart and Abba; Mandy rested her head back and allowed her gaze to settle through the windscreen. The two-hour journey slowly passed and her thoughts wandered to the trips she’d made to and from her aunt’s as a child. The adults had taken turns to collect and return Sarah and her from their weekend stays. Mandy remembered how they’d sat in the back of the car and giggled, the fun of the weekend continuing during the journey. Then the visits had abruptly stopped and she’d never seen Sarah again. Stopped completely without explanation, and she’d never been able to ask her father why.
They turned off the A11 and Mandy switched off her iPod and removed her earpieces.
‘Not far now,’ her father said.
She heard the tension in his voice and saw his forehead crease. She wasn’t sure how much of his anxiety was due to Grandpa’s illness, and how much by the prospect of seeing his sister again, but Mandy was sure that if she hadn’t agreed to accompany him, or her mother hadn’t changed her mind and come, he would have found visiting alone very difficult indeed. His dependence on her gave him an almost childlike vulnerability, and her heart went out to him.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m sure Evelyn will be on her best behaviour.’
He smiled and seemed to take comfort in their small conspiracy. ‘We won’t stay too long,’ he reassured her.
They slowed to 30 m.p.h. as they entered the village with its post-office-cum-general-store. Mandy remembered the shop vividly from all the times she’d stayed at her aunt’s. Auntie Evelyn, Sarah and she had often walked to the store, with Sarah’s Labrador Misty. When Sarah and she had been considered old enough, the two of them had gone there alone to spend their pocket money on sweets, ice-cream, or a memento from the display stand of neatly arranged china gifts. It had been an adventure, a chance to take responsibility, which had been possible in the safe rural community where her aunt lived, but not in Greater London when Sarah had stayed with her.
Mandy recognized the store at once – it was virtually unchanged – as she had remembered the approach to the village, and indeed most of the journey. But as they left the village and her father turned from the main road on to the B road for what he said was the last part of the journey, she suddenly found her mind had gone completely blank. She didn’t recall any of it.
She didn’t think it was that the developers had been busy in the last ten years and had changed the contours of the landscape; it was still largely agricultural land, with farmers’ houses and outbuildings dotted in between, presumably as it had been for generations. But as Mandy searched through the windscreen, then her side window, and round her father to his side window, none of what she now saw looked the least bit familiar. She could have been making the journey for the first time for the lack of recognition, which was both strange and unsettling. Swivelling round in her seat, she turned to look out of the rear window, hoping a different perspective might jog her memory.
‘Lost something?’ her father asked.
‘No. Have Evelyn and John moved since I visited as a child?’ Which seemed the most likely explanation, and her father had forgotten to mention it.
‘No,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘Why do you ask?’
Mandy straightened in her seat and returned her gaze to the front, looking through the window for a landmark – something familiar. ‘I don’t recognize any of this,’ she said. ‘Have we come a different way?’
He shook his head. ‘There is only one way to your aunt’s. We turn right in about a hundred yards and their house is on the left.’
Mandy looked at the trees growing from the grassy banks that flanked the narrow road and then through a gap in the trees, which offered another view of the countryside. She looked through the windscreen, then to her left and right, but still found nothing that she even vaguely remembered – absolutely nothing. She heard her father change down a gear, and the car slowed; then they turned right and continued along a single-track lane. Suddenly the tyres were crunching over the gravel and they pulled on to a driveway leading to a house.
‘Remember it now?’ she heard him say. He stopped the car and cut the engine.
Mandy stared at the house and experienced an unsettling stab of familiarity. ‘A little,’ she said, and tried to calm her racing heart.
It was like déjà vu – that flash of familiarity, sensed rather than consciously thought. A dizziness; a feeling of not being there. It was as though she’d been given a glimpse of another life. It had been fleeting, and without detail, but as Mandy looked at her aunt’s house, panic rose. She’d been here lots of times as a child but couldn’t remember any detail. It was like looking at a holiday photo in someone else’s album of a place she too had once visited.
She read the old wooden signboard – Breakspeare Manor – and then looked at the house again. It was a large sprawling manor house with two small stone turrets and lattice period windows. The front of the house was covered with the bare winding stems of wistaria. Instinctively Mandy knew that in a couple of weeks the entire front of the house would be festooned with its lilac blooms, like the venue for a wedding reception at a far-off and exotic location. She knew it without remembering – a gut feeling – and also that the house was 150 years old.
‘Ready?’ her father asked after a moment, gathering himself. She nodded and, taking a deep breath, picked up her bag from beside her feet and got out. The air smelt fresh and clean after London but it had a cooler, sharper edge. Drawing her cardigan closer, she waited for her father to get out. He reached inside the car for his jacket, straightened and, pointing the remote at the car, pressed to lock it. Mandy looked around. There were no other cars on the sweeping carriage driveway, and the double garage – a separate building to the left of the house – had its doors closed. None of the rooms at the front of the house had their windows open and the whole