‘Too close. Forever popping in here to give me advice.’ She smiled to show that she was speaking fondly. ‘You might catch her before her midday nap, if you hurry. Takes it like clockwork.’
Juliet hadn’t thought to visit Mrs Hammett, but she followed Rachel Lamb’s instructions anyway and arrived soon enough at the cottage with the red front door and black letterbox. She knocked and held her breath.
‘I’m so sorry, you’ve missed her,’ said the woman who answered. ‘Down for the count and I daren’t wake her. She can be testy when she hasn’t had her winks.’
‘Perhaps you could mention me to her,’ said Juliet. ‘She might not remember. I’m sure she saw so many guests come and go, but she was kind to my family and me. I wrote an article about her. She and her WVS ladies.’
‘Oh, well, you should have said so! Juliet of the Laneway! She still has a framed copy on the wall beside her bed. Her claim to fame, she says.’
They exchanged pleasant chat for a few more moments and then Juliet said that she ought to be going, she was meeting someone soon, and Mrs Hammett’s daughter-in-law said that it was just as well as she had some pantry-sorting to be getting on with.
Juliet was turning to leave when she noticed the painting on the wall above the sofa. A portrait of a striking young woman.
‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Mrs Hammett’s daughter-in-law.
‘Intoxicating.’
‘Came to me from my grandfather. Discovered it in his attic after he passed away.’
‘What a find.’
‘Quite the hoard, I assure you. Took us weeks to clear it – mostly rat-eaten rubbish. His own father had the house before him.’
‘Was he an artist?’
‘A policeman, back in the day. When he retired his boxes of old notes were put up top and forgotten. Don’t know where she came from. She’s unfinished – you can tell by the edges, where the colour isn’t right and the brushstrokes are rough – but there’s something in her expression, don’t you think? You can’t help but look at her.’
The woman in the painting stayed with Juliet as she started the walk back towards Birchwood Manor. She wasn’t familiar, not exactly, but the essence of the painting was reminiscent of something. Everything in her face, her expression, radiated light and love. It made her think of Tip for some reason, and Birchwood Manor, and that sunlit afternoon in 1928 when she’d fought with Alan and become lost and then found again, when she’d woken up in the garden beneath the Japanese maple tree.
No surprise, of course, that she should think of that day now. Juliet and Leonard had been exchanging letters for almost twenty years, ever since she wrote to ask him to contribute to a ‘Laneway’ article she’d planned to write but never got around to, about the many different lives led in one house. He’d received the letter too late, as it happened, and by the time he wrote back she was in London again and the war was wearily winding down. But they’d stayed in touch. He also liked writing, he said; he got along better with people on the page.
They had shared everything. All of the things she couldn’t write in her columns, the anger and grief and loss. And, by turns, the things that happened to them along the way: the beautiful, the funny, the true.
But they had never met in person, not since that afternoon in 1928. Today would be the first time.
Juliet hadn’t told anyone what she was doing. Her children were always encouraging her to go out for dinner with one eligible fellow or another, but this, today, him, was impossible to explain. How could she ever make them understand what she and Leonard had experienced, the two of them, that afternoon, in the garden of Birchwood Manor?
And so, he remained her secret; this journey back to the house their own.
The twin gables came into view, and Juliet felt herself begin to walk faster, almost as if she were being pulled along towards the house. She put her hand in her pocket to check that the tuppence was still there.
She had kept it all this time; now, at last, she could return it.
XII
Jack and Elodie have gone for a walk together, the two of them.
She said something about wanting to see the clearing in the woods for herself and he was only too happy to offer his services as a guide.
And so, here I am, sitting again in the warm spot at the turn of the stairs, waiting.
One thing I know for certain: I will be here when they get back.
I will be here, too, when they are gone and my next visitors arrive.
I might even tell my story again someday, as I did to little Tip and, before him, Ada, weaving together threads from Edward’s Night of the Following with the things my father told me about my mother’s flight from home, the tale of the Eldritch Children and their Fairy Queen.
It is a good story, about truth and honour and brave children doing righteous deeds; it is a powerful story.
People value shiny stones and lucky charms, but they forget that the most powerful talismans of all are the stories that we tell to ourselves and to others.
And so, I will be waiting.
When I was alive, and the great craze came first upon society – spiritualism and the desire to communicate with the dead – there was an assumption that ghosts and apparitions longed for release. That we ‘haunt’ because we are trapped.
But it is not so. I do not wish to be set free. I am of this house, this house that Edward loved; I am this house.
I am each whorl in each piece of timber.
I am every nail.
I am the wick in the lamp, the hook for a coat.
I am the tricky lock on the front door.
I am the tap that drips, the red rust circle on the porcelain sink.
I am the crack in the bathroom tile.
I am the chimney pot and the black snaking drainpipe.
I am the air within each room.
I am the hands of the clock and the space in between.
I am the noise you hear when you think you’re hearing nothing at all.
I am the light in the window that you know cannot be there.
I am the stars in the dark when you feel yourself alone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I share Lucy Radcliffe’s anxiety about the number of subjects to be studied and grasped within the limits of a single lifetime, so one of the best things about being a writer is having the opportunity to explore topics that fascinate me. The Clockmaker’s Daughter is a book about time and timelessness, truth and beauty, maps and map-making, photography, natural history, the restorative properties of walking, brotherhood (having three sons shot that one to the top of the list), houses and the notion of home, rivers and the power of place; among other things. It was inspired by art and artists including the English romantic poets, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Dodgson, and designers like William Morris (with whom I share a passion for houses, and who drew my attention to some of the unique ways in which the buildings of the Cotswolds mimic the natural world from which they emerged).