weren’t going to cut it with his press-ganged son.
‘Your father is waiting for you in here.’ Måns paused, as though about to say something else, but he appeared to think better of it, and turned away and knocked on the door instead.
There was no reply, but he opened the door anyway and entered. ‘Your guests, sir.’
Bell and Linus looked at one another as they stood on the threshold. ‘You okay?’ she mouthed to him.
He nodded, but she could see the tension in the downward pull at the corners of his mouth. The man they were about to meet had threatened this poor child’s mother with a ruinous court case, public shaming and loss of custody. How could she put a positive spin on that?
She dipped her head closer to him, speaking in a hushed tone. ‘Remember, he’s your dad and he loves you. A very sad thing happened to him and he was poorly for a long time, but all he wants is to get to know you. That’s all this is. And I’ll be here the whole time.’
‘Promise?’ Linus breathed.
‘Hope to die,’ she mouthed, crossing her heart again. She gripped his hand harder and, taking a long, deep breath, they walked in together.
Måns was standing motionless in the centre of the room, his long shadow in the window frame flattering his stooped stature.
‘Where is he?’ she asked him, more snappily than she had intended.
The old man looked back at her with a look of fluster and bewilderment. She suspected it wasn’t a familiar feeling for him; he seemed to ooze capability. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Bell. I have absolutely no idea.’
Chapter Fourteen
The day passed quietly. Literally. Though Bell and Linus crept and whispered, not wanting to make an imprint on this new place of residence, the house seemed to breathe around them; other people’s stories were held in abeyance in every picture, table-top, chair. There were few photographs to identify the family who had built this house and inhabited it for five generations, but those that were around were old black-and-whites of long-ago scenes. The two of them peered at unrecognizable faces, trying to find Linus’s features in a young girl’s muddy squint into the sunlight, his gait in a boy’s stride as he walked away from the camera, the stern frown, caught off guard, of an older man fishing from a boat.
Måns’s embarrassed beseeching that they should make themselves at home whilst he located the absent host – and father – didn’t extend, they were sure, to skateboarding down the long, smooth corridors, though both she and Linus had caught each other’s eye and thought about it.
For a while, they had sat quietly in the bedroom – hers was next door to Linus’s, though not interconnecting – pretending to be interested in the old wooden and tin toys which had a retro charm to them, but little beyond that. Bell had flicked idly through the paperbacks in the bookcase whilst Linus dutifully sat on the floor, playing with an old red Corvette Matchbox car and building with the Lego bricks he’d found in a box – both of them waiting, braced, any second for the sound of footsteps on the boards and the door to open . . . But as the minutes turned to hours, their stiff manners had softened, both of them curling up on the bed for a quick nap, the emotional anticipation of the day having drained them.
Finally, boredom had propelled them into leaving the room and exploring the house. Timidly, they had crept from room to room, always knocking on the closed doors before peering in. There were eight bedrooms upstairs, and it was almost impossible to tell which were inhabited and which were for guests; all were sparsely decorated and restrained in content, as though to own anything more than was strictly necessary was infra dig.
Her own room was frustratingly charming. It had hand-painted hessian wallpaper, with drawn tendrils of ivy dangling and creeping down from the ceiling in varying lengths. Her bed was a pale grey sleigh-style with a green-and-pink padded eiderdown and there was a vast, peeling painted armoire against one wall which she felt sure must provide passage to Narnia. Everything felt weighty, substantial and grandiose.
Her room overlooked the ‘back’ garden, although given all approaches to the house were by water, she wasn’t sure there was any such thing as front or back; guests simply arrived wherever they docked, surely? The lawn swept around the property like a green velvet