The House at the End of Hope Street - By Menna van Praag Page 0,65

stepping forward to kiss her again. “I know exactly what you want.”

Chapter Sixteen

Peggy can sense what’s happening with her girls, how events have taken a sharp downward turn, but she knows that intervening right now, especially with regards to Blake and Greer, will do no good. Sometimes a surrogate mother has to know when to step back and let her kids learn their own lessons. So instead she thinks of herself and Harry.

Whenever she misses him during the week, she arranges a rendezvous in the bathroom. A decade ago, Harry bought a flat around the corner, the bedroom window of which overlooked her bathroom. Of course the other inhabitants of Mill Road Mews, in the absence of need or invitation, can’t see the house at all. Unfortunately, buying the flat didn’t halt Harry’s campaign for cohabitation. Sometimes he hangs homemade posters in his windows with Come To Me written in letters two feet tall. On their anniversary he writes Marry Me, not bothering with a question mark, but leaving it as a statement of interest, a declaration of intention.

When she’s feeling frisky Peggy performs a little striptease at her bathroom window. Nothing very risqué—she wouldn’t want to give Harry a heart attack—just a suggestion of what’s to come on Sunday. For his part, Harry would gladly risk a coronary. What better way to go, after all? But he looks forward to these teases enormously. He is so in tune with the rhythm of Peggy’s heart that he’s always ready and waiting just before she appears at the window.

Peggy can’t now pinpoint the exact moment she must have fallen in love. Unlike Harry’s almost instantaneous tumble down the rabbit hole, her feelings crept up gradually. For their first anniversary they returned to the cinema to celebrate, watching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Peggy thought the film dreadful, but refrained from saying so when she saw Harry with a tear in his eye at the end. That was the moment she first loved, although she’d refused to fully admit it to herself until now. Having never known real love before, she has taken a while to recognize it. But she recognizes it now.

—

“How are your lyrics coming along?” Stella sits cross-legged at one end of the table, elbows balanced on her knees, cupping her chin.

“They aren’t, really,” Alba admits.

“How long until the show?”

“Two and a half weeks.” Alba puts down her pen. “I’m not sure I can do it.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself,” Stella says. “Have you heard from the private dick yet?”

Alba shakes her head, caught by a sudden longing for her father. She wonders if she’ll ever find him. Then she thinks of her mother. “Please tell me about the song you were singing the night I came,” Alba says. “How did you know it? I’m going to keep asking until you tell me, so it may as well be now.”

Stella smiles at Alba’s tone, at the new injection of strength and determination. “All right then, yes. I heard it in the air, on the breeze.” Stella tells a half-truth. “I heard your mother singing that night. The recently departed are easy to hear.”

“But she didn’t die that night; it was a week after I came here.”

“No, that was when Charlotte called you,” Stella says, “but that wasn’t when she died. She walked into the woods to take the overdose. They didn’t find her for five days.”

“No,” Alba says, “that’s not true, they didn’t tell me that, it can’t be—” Shock and disbelief shiver through her body as if she was walking barefoot on ice.

“They didn’t tell you a lot of things, though, did they?”

“I don’t believe you.” Alba forces the words through her frozen lips. “How do you know?”

“The dead know a lot more than the living,” Stella explains. “It’s one of the perks.”

“I don’t believe you.”

But they both know that she does. Alba thinks of all the secrets her siblings have kept from her, she thinks of the father she never knew was hers and the one she thought was. Charles Ashby was hardly a model dad. In fact, he was so rarely home when Alba was young that it had taken a few weeks for her to realize he’d gone for good, though many months passed before anyone actually confirmed it. Her brothers were traveling in Europe and her sister found her in the playroom. An hour after she broke the news, Alba was still asking questions.

“He isn’t coming back,” Charlotte had said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell