A collection of Russian matryoshka dolls painted brightly in red and blue peeked out at me expectantly from one of the shelves. I couldn’t resist opening one, revealing a smaller doll inside. I opened that too, on and on until I had five dolls, each decreasing in size, all made to perfectly fit inside the largest one. It was exactly how I felt: a fully formed woman, but the little girl inside was still there.
A heavy thud made me turn around with a fright. I held the candle out in front of me.
‘Hello?’ I whispered, feeling slightly ridiculous. Perhaps a cat had come in through an open window. I walked to the rear of the shop where the noise had come from. There was a modest glass cabinet of books, its doors open and a tome lying on the floor. The temperature was so cold and I was in my bare feet, so I bent to pick it up and replace it quickly. A cursory glance at the cover almost made my heart stop – Dracula, by Bram Stoker. A terrifying image of a vampire was on the cover. I looked around the shop. All was quiet now. I replaced the book and turned to go back downstairs when another thud made me jump. Looking back, I saw the book on the floor once more.
‘That’s very strange,’ I said out loud, trying to sound calm. The very fact that I thought someone （or something） was listening confirmed my state of mind. I picked up the book and once again spoke out loud. ‘Yes, I think I shall take a book to bed,’ I said with a little uncertainty, before bringing it back downstairs with me. I read until the candle extinguished, terrified, exhilarated and unsure whether the book was a warning or an invitation.
Chapter Seventeen
MARTHA
The cracks were getting bigger. I sat at the table eating Weetabix before I had to go upstairs to cook Madame Bowden’s breakfast. With every mouthful, I looked up again at the dark lines spreading across the wall like the branch of a tree. There was no crumbling plaster, but a very definite line of growth. A dark material was visible now and I slowly raised my hand to touch it. With a slight tremble, my fingers ran along the ridges and I discovered that the surface I was touching was wood-like. It wasn’t even wood-like, it was wood. There were branches growing in the basement. I would have to tell her now. This couldn’t be good. What if the house was structurally unsound?
‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about it too much,’ Madame Bowden remarked, having finally made her way down to take a look. ‘Old buildings have their quirks. Now I think I shall have croissants for breakfast this morning, Martha. You can pop over to the French bakery,’ she said, already turning to leave.
I stood there with my mouth agape.
‘But they’re pretty big cracks and they weren’t here when I moved in!’ I said, unsure she’d grasped the seriousness of the situation. ‘Shouldn’t you call an engineer?’
She had a wistful look in her eye, as she let her fingertips rest on the cracks. She was touching the wall the way you would touch the soft cheek of a child.
‘It was always such a strange little place,’ she whispered, almost to herself. ‘Oh, Martha, do stop worrying so much, you’re giving yourself frown lines.’
‘Frown lines?’ I asked, perplexed （and giving myself more frown lines）。
That was when she spotted the leaflets on the table.
‘So, you’re going ahead with it then?’ she asked, raising her reading glasses that she wore on a pearl chain around her neck and peering at the papers.
‘University? Oh, um, yes. You would know this if you’d bothered to attend your own dinner party. Where were you?’
She gave me a filthy look and a hasty reminder that she was still paying my wages and I was living under her roof.
‘I can’t stand those women.’
‘So why did you invite them?’
She walked around the room and wrapped her silk shawl around her shoulders.
‘Maybe I wanted to amuse myself; see how you coped with them. By all accounts, you held yourself rather well.’
Did I?
‘Hang on, what—’
‘I assume you’ll fit these studies around your work here?’ she interrupted.
‘Of course. I’m thinking I might just start with a part-time course.’ Shit. I hadn’t thought about how to ask her about it. Would I still be able to keep my job? A roof over my head? I tried to quieten my thoughts and read her story. Most of the time you could predict someone’s behaviour by their past. Most of the time people didn’t change. Most of the time.
I realised she was staring at me.
‘Croissants, Martha. And fresh coffee. Chop-chop!’ And with that, she went back upstairs.
‘So, when did you buy this house?’ I tried to act as casually as possible; as if the answer mattered little, one way or the other. I knew if she thought I was fishing, she wouldn’t bite. Perhaps it was her acting skills that made her so difficult to read.
‘Martha, a person such as myself does not buy a house, one acquires a house.’
It took all of my willpower not to roll my eyes.
‘Okay, well, when did you acquire number 12?’
‘Oh, it’s hard to say really. I feel as though I’ve always been here. In fact, it’s hard to remember a time when I lived anywhere else.’
I dusted the picture frames on the mantelpiece and picked up the black and white wedding photo.
‘It was 1965,’ she began, settling down to the cosmopolitan-style breakfast I had laid on the dining table. ‘I was a beautiful bride. Many of the guests likened me to Grace Kelly. Oh, you mightn’t think so now, but I was a natural blonde.’
A natural liar, I thought. It was hard to tell if her stories were real or mere fabrications of the truth – stories she had picked up along the way and made her own. I looked at the woman in the picture. It was true, she did look like an old Hollywood starlet, but I couldn’t see the resemblance at all. The man was tall, dark and handsome with the look of someone who had captured the moon in his pocket.
‘He was a pilot,’ she said, slathering butter on her croissant. ‘Far too old for me, or at least that’s what my mother told me. But I was hopelessly in love with him. I thought he was so dashing. He was an American, you know, and to a twenty-something Irish girl, well, he was like Clark Gable.’
She lost herself in the past for a moment.
‘He adored this strange little house. But he was a perfectionist, always trying to fix things. You have to understand, old houses have their quirks. Some things are meant to be flawed. Therein lies beauty.’
She was a captivating storyteller. I knew there was a peculiar history within these walls and whatever it was, it must have happened long before Madame Bowden arrived.
‘What happened to your husband, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Plane crash. We were only married a year when his plane went down over Gibraltar.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘Yes, it was a difficult time. That’s when I met Archie.’
‘Archie?’
‘My second husband. He was a doctor from Cork.’
‘I thought you said he was Russian?’
‘Oh no, that was husband number three.’
‘But what happened to Archie?’ I realised that this was really none of my business, but I couldn’t help myself. Maybe when you got to her age, minor details like this didn’t matter any more.