to the window, where we both knew the cliff sat beyond the trees that shivered in the dark.
“I knew something was wrong,” she said, her voice beginning to break. “I knew. But of course, you never suspect someone is actually going to kill themself. Suicide happens to other people. Not the people you love.”
I winced at this. Nobody cared about me. Maybe that’s why I deserved it. But then, this logic didn’t apply to Aurelia—everybody seemed to love her. Even her housekeeper.
“You must have liked Aurelia very much,” I said carefully.
She swirled those words around her brain. “Aurelia was a wonderful person. I grew protective of her.”
“Protective?” I asked, thinking of how snippy Maren was with the girls. I tried to imagine her in a different capacity to the woman I only ever saw wrestling an ancient vacuum cleaner around the rooms, or swearing in Norwegian at the Aga.
“The problem with being a housekeeper is . . . you see things. I knew this when I took the job, of course. Family life is often . . . fractious, and messy. Being in someone else’s home means being in their lives. You don’t just keep the house; you keep the family, with all of its stains and grime. It requires a certain amount of emotional distance. You have to prevent yourself from being drawn in.” She drained her glass. I savored the word family. Family life. “I’m afraid I was never good at following rules,” she continued, blowing a thick cloud of smoke to the side, “and even worse at preventing myself from being drawn in. Aurelia was the sort of woman who . . . what’s the expression? Wore her heart on her shirt?”
“On her sleeve,” I said, uselessly tugging at my sleeve.
“She confided in me near the end. She told me she was hallucinating. Seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. It was distressing her very much. She felt she was failing as a mother, as a wife.”
The word hallucinating made me shiver. My own hallucinations were not pleasant. In fact, they were terrifying. Memories might come charging out of the walls with the force of a tornado. Not wispy fragments of remembrance at all, but real, blood-and-flesh incarnations with the power to knock me to the ground. Hallucinations could also transform ordinary objects into talking characters, but whereas a talking candelabra in a Disney movie was cute, I found that these kinds of hallucinations were the most terrifying. Your brain knows full well that a laundry basket that’s singing isn’t actually singing, except it is. And at any moment you might be having a natter with your boyfriend about Strictly or X Factor and the yucca plant on the coffee table will announce—in a thick Spanish accent, no less—that you don’t deserve to live.
I hadn’t expected the hallucinations to follow me here. Deep down, I knew I didn’t really come to Norway to write a book, or because I was homeless—those were superficial reasons. The deeper reason was that I was running away from my life in England, from talking toasters and swearing cutlery drawers. But then I’d seen a woman in the kitchen here, standing by the window, and I’d heard a voice in the basement. No, it said. And I’d felt something grab me. My hallucinations hadn’t just followed me—they were gathering strength.
“What sort of things did Aurelia see?” I asked carefully.
Maren finished off her cigarette with a sigh, scratching her temple with a thumbnail. “She said she’d seen animals in the house. An elk, I think. It’s not completely unlikely that she did see an elk, a real one, but she was so freaked out by the fact that she might be losing her mind . . . I think she wasn’t sleeping very much. She wasn’t the sort of woman to heed limitations. Even her own. Still, what I saw gave me cause for concern.”
“You hallucinated, too?” I said, stupidly.
“Hallucinate?” She gave a wry laugh. “No, no. I mean, what I saw in the household. Between Aurelia and . . .” She trailed off again.
“Tom?” I asked, only mouthing his name. She stared at me for a moment, and I suddenly panicked in case I’d misjudged the conversation entirely.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not my place . . .”
She set down her glass, leaned both elbows on the table, and stared me in the eye. “Nobody can fathom why he came back here to continue the build. Aurelia’s friends, even Tom’s own family.”