down to a dinner of baked beans on toast, that this was very likely the first time she’d ever been alone at Greenacres. No mother or father going about their business in another room, no excitable sisters making the floor-boards creak upstairs, no baby brother, no pets. Not so much as a hen roosting in the boxes outside. Laurel lived by herself in London, she’d done so on and off for the better part of forty years; to be frank she was rather fond of her own company. To-night, though, surrounded by the sights and sounds of child-hood, she felt a loneliness the depths of which surprised her.
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ Rose had asked that after-noon before she left. She’d lingered in the entrance room, twisting the end of her long strand of African beads and inclining her head towards the kitchen—‘because I could stay, you know. I wouldn’t mind a bit. Perhaps I should stay? I’ll just call Sadie and tell her I won’t be able to make it.’
It was a strange turn up for the books, Rose to be worried about Laurel, and Laurel had been taken aback. ‘Nonsense,’ she’d said, perhaps a little sternly, ‘you’ll do no such thing. I’ll be perfectly fine by myself.’
Rose remained unconvinced. ‘I don’t know, Lol, it’s just, it’s not like you to phone like that, out of the blue. You’re usually so busy, and now …’ The beads threatened to snap their bonds. ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t I just ring Sadie and tell her we’ll catch up tomorrow? It’s really no bother.’
‘Rose, please—’ Laurel did a lovely line in exasperation—‘for the love of God, go and see your daughter. I told you, I’m just here to have a little down time before I start filming Macbeth. To be honest, I’m rather looking forward to the peace and quiet.’
She had been, too. Laurel was grateful that Rose had been able to meet her with the keys, but her head was buzzing with the list of what she knew and what she still needed to find out about her mother’s past, and she’d been eager to get inside and put her thoughts in order. Watching Rose’s car disappear down the driveway had filled her with a sense of enormous anticipation. It had seemed to mark the beginning of something. She was here at last; she’d done it, left her life in London in order to get to the bottom of her family’s great secret.
Now, though, alone in the sitting room with an empty dinner plate for company and a long night stretching ahead, she found her certainty waning. She wished she’d given Rose’s offer a little more thought; her sister’s gentle patter was just the thing to keep one’s mind from drifting someplace dark, and Laurel could’ve used the help right now. The problem was the ghosts, for of course she wasn’t really alone at all, they were everywhere: hiding behind corners, drifting up and down the stairs, echoing against the bathroom tiles. Little girls in bare feet and smocks and various lanky states of growing up; the tall lean figure of Daddy whistling in the shadows; but most of all Ma, who was everywhere all at once, who was this house, Greenacres, whose passion and energy infused each plank of wood, each pane of glass, each stone.
She was in the corner of the room right now—Laurel could see her there, wrapping a birthday present for Iris. It was a book about ancient history, a children’s encyclopedia, and Laurel could remember being struck at the time by the beautiful illustrations inside, black and white and somehow mysterious in their depictions of long-ago places. The book, as an object, had seemed distinctly important to Laurel and she’d felt jealous when Iris unwrapped it on their parents’ bed next morning, when she started turning the pages with proprietorial care and readjusting the ribbon bookmark. There was something about a book that inspired dedication and a swelling desire to possess it, especially in Laurel, who hadn’t many of her own.
They hadn’t been a particularly bookish family—it always surprised people to hear that—but they’d never gone without stories. Daddy had been full of dinner table anecdotes, and Dorothy Nicolson was the sort of mother to invent her own fairy tales rather than read them out of books. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ she’d said once when Laurel was small, and resistant to sleep, ‘about the Nightingale Star?’