The House at the End of Hope Street - By Menna van Praag Page 0,79
The characters on the crockery are suspended in the poses they were in when Harry sat down at the table. On Peggy’s plate Rumpelstiltskin is lifting the Lady of Shallot’s skirt above her head. On Harry’s, the Red Queen is engaging in a little light bondage with Dopey. They’ve been spending nearly every night with each other recently. Peggy doesn’t care anymore about the rule against overnight visitors. If the forbidden room is locking her out, if the house is ignoring her, then she will jolly well ignore it in return. If she’s going to be selfless and sacrifice the remaining days of her life to the house, then she’ll also be selfish and cram in all the mortal joy she possibly can while she’s still breathing.
“It hasn’t been that long.” He takes another bite of cake, while Peggy licks the cream off her fork. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Peggy says, “quite sure.” The desire to run away with him swells up but with some effort she pushes it down again.
“I don’t understand.” Harry takes her hand. “You’ve given up everything to be here, to do this. You haven’t had a husband or a family—”
“These girls are my family, they’re my daughters,” Peggy says, wanting to end the conversation.
“But they leave after ninety-nine days, which isn’t quite the same, is it?”
“It’s always suited me fine,” Peggy lies. “I told you that.”
“I’m not going to drop it, Peg. I know you’re hiding things from me. What about that door, the one that won’t open?”
“It’s just stuck.”
Harry, who has tried several times to pry open the door with a crowbar, knows this isn’t true. “I love you, Peg, so I’ve accepted your lifestyle. But it’s different now. Something’s changed—you want to leave, I can feel it.”
“Don’t.” Peggy holds up her hand to stop him, but Harry just enfolds it between his hands and places it on his chest, not letting her go.
After Harry has gone home, Peggy finds a hammer in a long-forgotten cake tin (along with a very moldy piece of cake). She’s decided to take drastic action; waiting clearly hasn’t worked, so she’s going to resort to brute force. She lifts the hammer high over the door handle and brings it down hard. This makes a little dent in the gold-plated knob, but nothing more. So she does it again.
Downstairs, in the living room, Carmen stops playing and wonders at the rhythmic banging above her, which is punctuated ten minutes later by an exasperated scream.
—
Alba lies in bed, unable to sleep. She’d been practicing with Carmen earlier, testing out the first verse of their song. They’d agreed it was okay, but far from brilliant. Finally she’d come to bed and picked up Chocolates for Breakfast, curious to see why Zoë loved it so much. Now that she’s finished it, the book lies next to her, open at one of its most well-thumbed pages, and Alba is a little nervous.
She looks back at the book, thinking about its sensual scenes. Is it ridiculous that she’s never touched herself before? Surely it’s something she should have done at puberty, but she was just too self-conscious. Every time she got the urge, she blushed. Alba’s never read anything as sexy as this before and the parallels of the book’s plot with her own life are shocking: the protagonist is a rich teenager with a crush on her teacher. Alba wonders if Zoë might be psychic.
Tentatively, Alba picks up the book again. She glances down at her tiny breasts under her T-shirt, studying them, then takes a deep breath and slowly begins to stroke her hand along her body, her touch as light and soft as the cotton. Alba shivers a little. She slides her hand along her ribs, gathering her T-shirt until it settles in folds over her belly. She licks a finger and strokes it across her skin as the lights in her room begin to flicker.
Air rushes through the pipes, rattling as Alba gasps. Soon every wall of every room in the house trembles, shaking the photographs in their frames so that eight hundred and twenty-one women giggle. Whispers on the lips of every woman rush along the corridors. As Alba’s body contracts, every light in the house flickers and every flower of the midnight glory bursts open. Every fuse in the house blows. And then, one by one, the streetlamps on Hope Street explode, scattering thousands of golden sparks into the night.
—
At two o’clock in the morning Carmen leaves the piano