The House at the End of Hope Street - By Menna van Praag Page 0,12

the stomach to finish the sentence. Could it be that she’s lost forever her single chance at success, stability and security? Of doing the only thing she has ever wanted to do. Or at least, the only thing that made any sense. Alba can remember an old, secret wish for herself but it was ridiculously unrealistic and she’d let go of it long ago. “Anyway, what do you mean, visit her? It’s only a photograph.”

“Not at all,” Stella says. “Don’t you hear them whispering to each other at night? Any of them would be delighted to talk to you, you only have to ask.”

“Really?” Alba brightens. “Gosh. How exciting.” She’s not sure if she has the courage to approach figures such as Doris Lessing or Florence Nightingale and simply strike up a conversation, but the thought of it sends tingles of excitement along her fingertips.

“How many books have you read?” Stella asks. As of last night, when Stella completed the final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, her total is three hundred and forty-one thousand, nine hundred and two.

“I don’t know. A lot.” Alba shrugs. “You?”

“A few.” Stella smiles. “Not when I was alive though; I never bothered with books then. But being dead doesn’t give you much else to do. Not that it’s boring. It’s rather blissful, really.”

Alba sits forward, delighted that Stella is at last saying something about herself.

“And time isn’t the same,” Stella continues, wistful. “It doesn’t go forward or back. It’s vertical. Eternity sits inside you. So you can spend ten thousand years in one spot and it feels no different than an hour, you see?”

“No,” Alba says, “not really.”

“Well, I suppose you can’t yet,” Stella admits. “Not until you do.”

“How long have you been here?” Alba ventures.

Stella smiles at Alba’s hopeful look and decides to give her a little gift. “Forty-two years, eight months and seven days.”

“Why, why so long?”

“I’ve been waiting.”

“For what?”

“For you.”

—

For the past four years Alba, eschewing the cold austerity of online book-ordering for the comfort of paper and pen, has gone to the university library three times a week, every week, without fail. Now she hasn’t shown up since last Wednesday. This morning, Zoë was finally so worried she looked up Alba’s details and almost called King’s College, but the head librarian stopped her. Now Zoë leans against the library counter, doodling lightning bolts in a notebook. She’d promised herself that today she’d finally start the novel, the story that’s been floating around in her head for four years while she’s been procrastinating with endless amounts of research. Although it hasn’t all been a waste of time, because that was how she found out about Alba.

Zoë noticed Alba immediately, a scared, silent fifteen-year-old who, though five years younger than Zoë, could have been her twin. In fact, with the exception of Zoë’s striped blue hair and Alba’s bright blue eyes, it was like looking in a mirror. It had taken months before they exchanged their first words, and several years until they had anything approaching a conversation: about Sir Robert Peel and the Poor Law of 1844—an exchange that had lasted less than three minutes.

And then, while doing research for her nonexistent novel, Zoë accidentally stumbled upon the Ashby family, and a scandal: the disappearance of Lord Ashby eleven years ago. Zoë read everything she could find about the case. Charles and Elizabeth Ashby had been second cousins. It had been a loveless marriage by all accounts, producing three children before Lord Ashby took a flat in London and thereafter was often caught in discreet locations with indiscreet socialites. And then, nearly a decade after that, to everyone’s surprise, another child was born. It seemed that Alba’s arrival had triggered a change of heart in her father, who surrendered his bachelor pad and returned to the family home. There he remained, until his disappearance eight years later.

As the single product of a stable suburban relationship, Zoë was desperately intrigued by it all. She longed to ask Alba for more details, but there was no easy way to bring such delicate matters into casual conversation. So Zoë has been biding her time, waiting for an opportune moment to take her acquaintance with Alba to the next level. Though she has to admit her methods are perhaps over-cautious; at this rate they won’t progress to afternoon tea for another twenty years. Zoë glances down at the lightning bolts scattered across her page and tells herself she won’t wait any longer. Next