time Alba comes into the library she’ll invite her out. Zoë writes this in big, bold capital letters:
NEXT TIME.
So big and bold are the words that, this time, she almost believes she’ll actually do it.
Chapter Four
Carmen hasn’t slept again. She stares up at the ceiling, at the shards of early morning light slipping through the curtains, and tries to will herself into unconsciousness. But she knows there is no point.
When she first moved in, the only thing that settled Carmen’s anxiety was being in her bedroom. With its sponge-painted blue walls, bright yellow floorboards and inexplicable view of the ocean, it’s an exact replica of her cousin’s childhood bedroom in Bragança, the place Carmen used to run to when her father came home drunk and started trying to pull her onto his lap. Carmen would pretend her cousin’s home was her own and that they were sisters as they lay together listening to records, lulled by the music and smells of her aunt’s cooking rising up from the kitchen below. Her own childhood bedroom had been entirely different, the size of a cupboard and without a lock. But it is not her father’s face she sees in the darkness anymore, it’s her husband’s. He is the one who haunts her now.
Tiago Viera was the most handsome man Carmen had ever met. She was nineteen, working at the only bar in Santo Estêvão, and one night he came with his band. With the first note, the first word out of his mouth, Carmen was hooked. Sipping lemonade, she stared at him throughout the set, ignoring all her customers, watching Tiago weave his spell over every woman in the bar. She’d never felt much for men until then, never responded to their advances. Instead she liked to dress provocatively, to cast the illusion that she was available, then tell them to go to hell, just as she had never been able to do when she was a little girl.
But Tiago was different. He was the first one Carmen ever wanted to say yes to, the first one she ever flirted with, the first one she ever pursued. It was the music that bound them. When he played, every thought left her head and her heart went still in her chest. Tiago taught Carmen about the great composers, played her every sonata and concerto he knew until she learned every note. Soon she was in love, though whether with the music or the musician, she couldn’t quite tell. The night she arrived at Hope Street, Peggy had read her a poem by William Butler Yeats, which had summed up Carmen’s feelings about Tiago perfectly: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Carmen sits up in bed and sniffs the air. The scent of the midnight glory lingers in her room. She can’t get rid of it. No matter if she shuts and locks all her windows, sprays the room with rose water, burns incense or smokes cigarettes, the smell always sneaks back. Carmen hoped burying it would mean she’d be free, but it’s not letting her forget. She knows she should dig up the flower and move what’s buried beneath it, in case the smell gets any stronger. Unfortunately she simply doesn’t have the courage and can’t imagine she ever will.
—
The toast pops up and Alba picks out the crispy slices, burning her fingertips before dropping the toast onto a plate. She can just see faint spirals of scent, the color of soot, swirl into the air. She walks back to the table where Tractarians and the Condition of England lies open at chapter two. Although reading this book brings painful associations, Alba can’t help herself, it’s like scratching at a scab even though she knows it will leave a scar. She’s an academic, it’s the only thing she’s sure of. And even though it’s all been snatched away (Dr. Skinner’s lies having no doubt already spread like wildfire through the history professors of England, ensuring she’ll never find another supervisor anywhere else), she can’t let it go. It’s in her blood. It’s what her brain was made to do.
Her obsession with history drives her current hobby: searching the photographs for famous women. The house joins in, rattling its pipes as if telling her where to look, shaking and whistling as she gets closer to someone, as if they were playing a game of “hot and cold.” Last night she found Sylvia Plath and