At the top of the stairs, I catch my breath and take in the landing, its four wings branching off in different directions. To my right are the guest bedrooms we have been staying in; to my left the wing where Robert and Eleanor sleep; which leaves the two wings behind me as possibilities.
I turn and face them, the right-hand corridor dimly lit and matching the style of the rest of the house, the left-hand corridor bright and new, part of the new wing protected by a glass security door. The childhood bedrooms certainly won’t be in the new wing.
I grab the banister and propel myself around the landing towards the old wing, unsteady in my heels.
I pull up short. I can’t spend the rest of the evening like this. I listen for movement from downstairs, checking if I can hear the next player beginning, but the hall is silent. Taking my opportunity, I squat down, unstrap my heels and abandon them in the hallway as I race back to the blue room and grab my trainers. After shoving them on, I bolt back in the direction of the old wing.
I dash around the staircase, following the bend of the corridor away from the main building, and as the hallway doors appear, I throw one open after another looking for anything that resembles a childhood bedroom.
I don’t know why, but Bobby’s name springs to mind as I go. My clue mentions nothing being ‘quite what it seemed’， and nobody knew how ill Bobby was before he died, so perhaps I need to find Bobby’s old room.
The first childhood room I stumble across is all in pink. Matilda’s, I surmise, and quickly move on. The next room is green and filled with sports trophies, wrestling, football, boxing. A photo of a young man padded up for a football game – broad, muscular, his helmet raised in triumph. Oliver’s room.
The next is red, on its walls jet fighters twisting in the air, miniature supercars lining the shelves, a faded 1997 Pirelli calendar hanging dog-eared by the window. Stuart’s room. I fly on down the corridor.
The next room is blue. I pause, instinct telling me to. This room is harder to read. It’s eerily impersonal. A computer, a ’90s beige plastic box dominating the sparseness of the space. Pictures line the walls; a young man sailing, rowing, swimming. Again, trophies. Bobby rowed, but so did Edward. It’s impossible to tell from the doorway whose room this was, but the computer edges me towards it being Edward’s.
A door slamming somewhere deep in the house forces my gaze back down the corridor in the direction I have just come, but, of course, there is no one there.
I check the time on my mobile phone in the pocket of my blazer dress. I have been going for sixteen minutes already. Time is ticking, and I’m pretty sure I know what will happen if I lose this game.
I walk into the blue room and head for the nearest photo. It’s of Edward – younger, his face fuller, with an expression I do not recognize. There is something different in his eyes. I scan the room for another photo and find a framed one on the dresser; Edward sits beside Eleanor and someone else at a garden table, flowers in bloom around them. I gasp. The boy in the photo isn’t Edward, because Edward, much younger, is sitting right beside him.
The boy is Bobby. This is Bobby’s room. They looked so alike as children, and I realize that up until now I haven’t seen a photograph of them together as young children. The uncanny thing is that young Bobby looks incredibly similar to Edward as he is now, as an adult. And now that I think about it, this whole room, its aesthetic, had felt like Edward’s room when I entered it. The computer, the colour, the tidiness, the simplicity. Which makes me wonder: were they always so similar, or did Edward become more like his brother after the accident?
I leave Bobby’s door ajar and head to the next room.
Edward’s bedroom door swings open and I feel my brow pucker with confusion. This last room is incredibly busy; the walls lined with lithographs of historical architecture, intricate blueprints of elaborate and complex buildings. Columns and cornicing depicted in forensic detail, cross-sections, elevations. I step into the room, uncertain; I must have mixed the rooms up somehow, because nothing about this room is Edward. I let my eyes sweep the surfaces for anything that reminds me of him but there isn’t even a computer in here. Just books; books on books: Roman history, the Greeks, the American Civil War, the World Wars. History.