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  All things considered, she had slept in the spare room more often than not.

  Now she felt hot. Febrile. She turned onto her side and threw her arm out from the covers to prompt a drop in her temperature. Her hand landed on the dog’s coarse, scratchy fur. She snatched it away but the dog, perhaps thinking that she had patted him, stood up and placed his fore-paws on Marianne’s bed. She felt the current of his hot, damp breath against her face and drew back. He was not the sort of dog who benefited from close-ups. His thick, matted eyebrows formed an awning over his rheumy amber eyes and spools of drool hung from the corners of his mouth. ‘Get down,’ Marianne hissed at him. He licked her face. She pushed his paws off the bed and turned towards the wall, pulling the covers over her head so she wouldn’t have to see or smell him.

  She must have fallen asleep eventually because she dreamed about Brian and Helen, which she sometimes did when her defences were low.

  In her dream, Helen was in bed but awake. Perhaps the baby had been kicking and woke her.

  No.

  Babies.

  Two of them.

  Twins.

  Brian hadn’t wanted a baby. Or babies. Neither had Marianne. This communal and fervently held pronouncement formed much of the foundation of their relationship. It was a done deal, as far as Marianne was concerned. Set like cement.

  ‘People change, Marianne,’ Brian had said, his tone soft and beseeching.

  ‘I haven’t,’ she said.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Oh, I see you’ve met George,’ said Rita, barging into Marianne’s bedroom the next morning and yanking the curtains open.

  Daylight flooded the room. It flung itself against Marianne’s face, charged into her eyes so that her pupils constricted, leaving her technically blind for a good minute.

  Rita bent to pet the dog, who rolled onto his back with his paws splayed so she could rub his belly.

  Marianne reached for the beaker of filtered water she kept on her bedside locker before remembering that there was no longer a beaker, there was no longer a bedside locker. She also remembered that she hadn’t brushed her teeth last night. She’d been too cold. She fancied she could feel the roots of a tooth loosening in her gum. She could hardly bear the thick, fetid smell of her own breath. She tried and failed to run her hands through her hair. In the absence of the taming product it required – or, indeed, even the benefit of warm water and shampoo – her hair had become matted and dense, like the forest that grew around the castle where Sleeping Beauty had slept for a hundred years.

  ‘You should eat something,’ said Rita.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Something nutritious,’ Rita went on. ‘I’ll make chia seed pudding. That’ll give you a bit of a lift.’ Her face was set with determined optimism as well as a thick layer of pan stick. Today, her turban was white, so bright that Marianne felt it might be dangerous to look directly at it. Rita held her vape pen between two short, fleshy fingers. The vapour smelled of Polo mints and brought to mind the chocolate mint ice cream that Marianne and Brian treated themselves to every Saturday night as they settled down to watch a nature documentary.

  ‘Or I could whip you up a smoothie. I’ve got avocados and blueberries. You look like you could do with—’

  ‘It’s hard to believe you used to count the olives and lemons in your vodka-tonics as two of your five a day,’ snapped Marianne.

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ said Rita, evenly.

  One would almost be nostalgic for the old Rita. The drunken, brawling one. At least you knew where you stood with her. With both of them. Her and William’s epic fights, which might start off in the bathroom over the misappropriation of one of their tubes of lip balm and end up in the garden, their drama softened by moonlight, one chasing, the other catching, then vice versa until they seemed to Marianne, with her nose pressed against the bedroom window, like beautifully choreographed blurs of colour, as fascinating and unknowable as shooting stars.

  ‘The hens have been busy this morning,’ said Rita, ‘if you’d prefer eggs.’

  ‘I thought you were a vegan now,’ said Marianne.

  ‘I am,’ said Rita. ‘Except for eggs. Free-range ones, obviously. And cheese occasionally. But I never drink milk.’

  ‘You hate milk.’

  ‘Come on, darling, get up. You need to bring George for a walk.’

  ‘Why on earth do I need to bring George for a walk?’ said Marianne.

  Rita pointed at George, who had scrambled onto all fours and was standing at Marianne’s bedside, gazing at her.

  ‘Because he’s picked you,’ said Rita. ‘It’s about time he picked somebody.’

  ‘You said you’d never get another dog after you got rid of Bruno,’ said Marianne. If Rita heard the jagged edge of Marianne’s tone, she did not comment on it.

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ she said. ‘But then George showed up about a month ago, half starved and one paw bleed—’

  ‘I don’t need to hear his tragic back story.’

  ‘We fixed him up fine,’ continued Rita. ‘But up till now, he hadn’t picked anyone to be his pack leader. It’s like he was waiting for you to arrive.’ Rita looked delighted at this turn of events. Marianne did not.

  She struggled into a sitting position. Rita took the opportunity to snatch her pillow and punch a bit of life into it. Her collection of bangles jangled against each other and made Marianne want to clamp her hands over her ears. Rita drew the pillow behind her back.

  ‘It’s time to get up, Marianne,’ she said, and something about her tone – a hint of authority in it – made Marianne look at her mother. The two women studied each other, perhaps noticing for the first time that they had the exact same eye colour. Not just that their eyes were blue but that they were the same shade of blue, which is to say a gunmetal blue. Nobody would ever recommend that a living room be painted that colour. It must be awful for a mother to look into the face of her middle-aged daughter, Marianne thought. Especially one who is fully dressed, in bed, unemployed and, no doubt, unemployable, alone, homeless. Marianne could go on but thought it wise to stop there. The bottomless capacity of her self-pity remained a surprise to her.

  It was only when Rita left that Marianne noticed her mother hadn’t stepped across the line in the middle of the room.

  Marianne lay back down, idly wondering what Rita had done with the pillow. Her thoughts were like the emails and the phone calls and the instant messages she used to receive in work: they just kept coming.

  She missed her job with a savageness she did not know she was capable of. She remembered the T-shirt Brian wore the first time she met him, on one of those awful casual-clothes Fridays. A pale blue cotton T-shirt with navy writing across the front that said, ‘Numbers add up. People don’t.’

  Marianne couldn’t have agreed more.

  George’s head appeared beside hers, regarding her with his curious amber eyes, as if he was waiting for her to say something. To do something.

  ‘What are you plans?’ Aunt Pearl had asked.

  Marianne didn’t have any.

  George barked and looked as if he was set to bark some more.

  ‘Okay, fine,’ Marianne snapped at him. She kicked off the covers and swung her feet onto the floor. The shock of the cold, even through her thick socks, was like a shot of adrenalin.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she hissed at the dog, who now sat on one of her feet, his chest up tight against her legs. He licked her hand and padded to the door, scraped it with his paw. The noise made the fillings in Marianne’s mouth vibrate.

  ‘I said fine,’ she snapped. The idea of taking off her clothes and subjecting herself to an onslaught of water was exhausting. Instead, Marianne left on the clothes she had worn to bed, adding the scratchy wool cardigan lying on the floor where she had thrown it last night. She thought about the wall of built-in wardrobes in her bedroom in her house. The house that used to be hers. Every boot, shoe, scarf, blouse – everything – had its own
particular spot. And now look at her. She tucked the ends of her tracksuit bottoms into her socks, zipped herself into her anorak and clamped a woolly hat on her head.

  In the cavernous bathroom, Marianne sat on the edge of the claw-footed bath, its copper long tarnished and stained by the damp of years. The toothpaste fizzed against her gruel-grey tongue, which she scrubbed as vigorously as her teeth. She avoided her face in the mirror but she couldn’t help catching a glimpse of it as she stood to turn the water off, the bulging stump of the copper tap requiring two hands to persuade it to yield. Her face had a baggy, creased look about it, like a bag emptied long ago and forgotten at the back of a wardrobe.

  In the back kitchen, there was an entire cupboard dedicated to wellington boots. Marianne waded through it until she found a pair in size seven. She pulled these on and opened the back door, ushered George outside. Whereupon he ran. Much faster than Marianne would have given him credit for. A blur of fur, his long ears flying behind him, like they were trying to keep up.

  She hadn’t thought about a leash.

  ‘George!’ Marianne shouted. ‘Come back.’ George ran to the bottom of the garden and disappeared.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Marianne. She ran after him. She hated running. She never ran. She didn’t understand why anyone would do it voluntarily. All that heaving and gasping and sweating. Now here she was, heaving and gasping and sweating. Because of a dog. Marianne didn’t care if she never saw him again but she imagined Rita would not take the news of George’s disappearance well.

  She set off after George, towards the rickety wooden gate at the bottom of the garden. She reefed it open and it creaked loudly in protest. She slammed the gate behind her, so hard that the gate post, already crooked, listed with a groan until it reached the ground and lay there, as if spent. The wood – splintered and swollen with sea and rain – lay against the hard, bare ground, like some abandoned, useless thing. Was there nothing in this godforsaken place that wasn’t falling apart?

  From here there were steps to the beach, steep and treacherous, covered with a slick layer of moss.

  ‘George?’ she called. From below, a single bark, faint, like an echo of a bark.

  ‘Get back here this instant,’ she called. The wind, salty and stinging, whipped her words away and she had no choice but to navigate the treacherous moss-slick steps.

  On the beach, George ran into the water, barking at the waves, turning tail as they crested, barking again when they crashed along the shore before wading back in to begin the process anew. He paid not the slightest attention to Marianne’s roared commands to ‘Heel, boy’. She faced into the wind and trudged along the beach, her hands bunched into fists and stuffed deep inside her pockets. She tried not to think about anything but she couldn’t manage it. She thought about a plan and the fact that she didn’t have one, and that thought went round and round her head until it was a blur.

  Marianne studied her feet and concentrated on walking, borne along by the elements that always seemed more dramatic here than anywhere else. Thick clouds obscured the sun as it struggled over the horizon, rendering the difference between night and day small and miserable.

  When she reached George, he abandoned his post at the water’s edge and fell in behind her, silent as a ghost. When she got to the end of the beach and leaned against the rock that was shaped like an anchor, he pawed at a stone near her foot, stood in front of her, expectant.

  ‘I’m not throwing that stone,’ Marianne said.

  George regarded her with his amber eyes. After a while, he nudged the stone with his nose.

  ‘No,’ said Marianne, refusing to look at him. She could feel his breath, warm against her frozen fingers, as if he was thawing them out.

  ‘Okay, fine, I’ll throw it once and then that’s it, understood?’

  George cocked his head to one side. Marianne picked up the stone and hurled it into the sea. The dog launched himself into the water as if it were not dark and cold and January and hopeless. When he returned he dropped the stone at her feet and shook himself. Marianne ran down the beach to avoid the freezing water arcing from his fur, but George followed her, dropped the stone at her feet again.

  ‘No,’ said Marianne. ‘I mean it.’ The wool of her hat was heavy with sea spray and she felt sodden with self-pity.

  George barked and Marianne picked up the stone and hurled it again. George chased it, retrieved it, returned it to her.

  No matter how far she threw it, the dog found it.

  Marianne threw it again.

  And again.

  Chapter 6

  The kitchen was empty when Marianne returned. Rita was probably out rescuing some cat stuck up a tree and Aunt Pearl was likely at mass imploring St Jude – the patron saint of lost causes – to work some sort of miracle for Marianne. Patrick was no doubt in his workshop, fashioning something both useful and beautiful from the gnarled stump of a tree. Or in his apartment, coming up with a grand plan to halt climate change. Or maybe Agnes had stayed over last night and he was making her an egg-white omelette, flavouring it with the herbs he grew in the kitchen garden.

  Marianne’s nostrils flared. Even Patrick had managed to sustain a relationship. She’d met Agnes a few times. A girlish type of woman, just as quiet as Patrick. She was a librarian, as far as Marianne knew. She had seen them once walking the cliff path. Not talking, just walking, their bare arms sometimes glancing against each other. They seemed happy. Looking at them, you could be fooled into thinking relationships were easy. Effortless.

  Marianne wandered through the house, up the stairs, towards the bedroom, George following her no matter how many times she told him not to.

  Having no place to be and no tasks to do felt so much more vast, here at Ancaire. She sat on her bed and George sat beside her, resting his head on her knees. She shifted her legs but he just stretched his neck to slot his head back on her knees. She moved down the bed but all he did was shuffle along the floor until he reached her again.

  The wardrobe was where it had always been, along the wall at the end of Marianne’s bed. It was a monstrosity of a thing, dark with mahogany. The stout, curved legs had long ago settled into the floorboards, the hollow of the dents they had made there smooth and almost ornamental. Marianne put her fingers on the handle.

  ‘If you can’t find me, don’t worry,’ Flo had said, opening the wardrobe door and lifting Bruno inside, before crawling in after him, settling herself beside him against the back of the wardrobe. ‘I’ll be in Narnia.’

  Marianne squeezed her eyes shut. Shook her head to dislodge the memory. But Ancaire was like the past itself, reaching through the years to grip her with both hands, to pull her back.

  The wardrobe door released a sigh when Marianne opened it. She winced at the smell: a damp, musty smell, laced with dust and wood.

  Empty clothes hangers hung from the rail and moved against each other in the draught, creating an eerie noise, hushed and insistent. On the floor, one white sock. An ankle sock with a yellow rose embroidered on the side. A lacy frill around the top. Marianne’s hands gripped the edge of the wardrobe door. She thought briefly about pulling it off its hinges.

  Instead, she closed the door, leaned her head against the hard wood. Rage was exhausting, Marianne thought. She favoured quieter emotions, if she had to endure any at all.

  But the anger was there all the same. It was in her breath and the ragged way it poured from her mouth. It was in the pounding of her heart in her chest and her ears and at the base of her throat. All that blood, racing and pushing and pulsing about her body and no way to contain it. At least, that’s how it seemed to Marianne.

  She strode out of the bedroom, ran down the hallway. ‘Rita,’ she shouted at the top of the stairs. When there was no answer, she shouted again. ‘RITA.’

  ‘What on earth is all the racket about?’ Aunt Pearl’s bedroom door opened and she glared at Marianne, her bony hands clamped on her bony hips.

  ‘I’m looking for Rita.�
�� Marianne’s voice sounded hot and strangled. There was spit on her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

  ‘I managed to work that much out all by myself,’ said Aunt Pearl. ‘I also worked out that she does not appear to be in the house. I am hoping that you have arrived at a similar conclusion?’ She arched her eyebrows into stiff peaks near the top of her forehead.

  ‘Rita has gotten rid of …’ Marianne began, then stopped. She pointed towards her bedroom. ‘The wardrobe is empty,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it is. It’s been twenty-fi—’

  ‘Rita should have told me she was emptying it.’

  Aunt Pearl sighed and the sigh robbed her face of some of its severity. She looked tired. And old. ‘She did tell you. She asked me if she should and I said, yes, of course she should, and then she spent an eternity wondering if she should write to you. Or telephone you. Or pop into your house. You know how she thinks nothing of popping into people’s houses without giving them due, or indeed any, warning?’

  Marianne nodded. Her head felt heavy.

  ‘She phoned you. Do you not remember?’

  Marianne shook her head this time.

  ‘And you said, fine. You insisted you didn’t want anything out of the wardrobe.’ Aunt Pearl craned her neck towards Marianne and peered at her.

  Marianne shook her head again. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said.

  ‘Well, she did,’ said Pearl, straightening with sudden briskness. ‘Now, come along.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t say what, say pardon.’ Aunt Pearl trotted out the well-worn line. ‘I need help.’

  She swivelled and vanished into her room. Marianne entertained a fleeting notion of not following her. Of shutting herself in her bedroom with the empty wardrobe and carrying on.

  Aunt Pearl’s bedroom was a vast mausoleum of a room containing the same five pieces of furniture that had been here since Marianne was a child. A single bed with legs as skinny as Pearl’s. At the foot of the bed, a wooden tea chest, locked with an enormous, rusty padlock. Marianne and Flo had once tried to open the chest using one of Pearl’s long, rigid hairpins during the one and only time their aunt had left the house for a protracted period of time. She’d gone to hospital to have a heart bypass. Marianne remembered being surprised. That Pearl had a heart to bypass.