Prologue
December 2023
"You'll need to keep an eye on Number Four," Joyce said, looking up meaningfully from the small sheaf of notes on the desk.
Her conspiratorial grimace might have been intended to indicate sympathetic tact. Parvati leaned away from a waft of Extra Strong Mints with an undertone of Wotsits and tried to arrange her face into an appropriately sombre expression of understanding.
"Poor old dear won't last the night," Joyce continued, with a prophetic little sigh. "Seen it a thousand times. She's on the way out."
"Poor old thing," Parvati echoed, obediently. "Should we call anybody?"
Joyce shook her head, unwilling to be upstaged by anyone else's concern.
"Been into all of that this morning, dear," she said. "There's only a granddaughter. Lives at the other end of the country somewhere. Surrey, I think. Never showed any interest in poor Granny anyway, just waiting to get her hands on the inheritance, I shouldn't wonder. No point in bothering her now. We'll call her in the morning."
Parvati looked doubtful for a moment. Joyce hastened to assert her authority on the topic of the dying.
"Mrs. Hamilton won't know anyway. She's past all that. When you've worked here as long as I have you get to know the signs."
Parvati, who had recently applied for a trainee's post at the local estate agent, had no intention of working at Golden Twilight Care Home for as long as Joyce had, or indeed for very much longer at all, but she nodded dutifully all the same.
"What should I do for her, then?" she asked.
"Just keep looking in during the night," Joyce said, signing her name on the last of the reports with a little stab of her pen. "There won't be anything you can do, but you'll need to keep a log of the times you've checked her, in case the family complains later. People get really funny when someone dies. They want to blame anyone other than themselves, as if we ought to be able to stop the course of nature. Goodness me, she's ninety six, what do they think is going to happen? You'll need to spend more time on Mr. Mortimer in number eight. His son's been complaining because he's in a lot of pain with the ulcer on his leg. Doctor's given him morphine, but he doesn't like taking it, says it makes him nauseous. Nurse is coming in the morning to put a drip up. Try and make sure he takes it in the meantime. And keep an eye on Mrs.Thomas. She's been wandering a bit, poor old duck. Keep an ear open for her getting out of bed. I think those are the worst. Janice's in, but off duty, she's gone to get an early night. I said we wouldn't call her unless it was an emergency. You shouldn't disturb her. Not unless the roof falls in.
Parvati composed her face into an appropriate expression of trustworthiness, and took the sheaf of notes from Joyce.
"I'll read through these and file them later," she promised. "I'll make a cup of tea and then go and have a look in on number four, make sure she's comfortable. Better not disturb her too much, not if she's on the way out."
"I've kept meaning to give her a clean pillowcase," Joyce said, sighing again at the recollection of her busy day. "It got very damp when I washed her this morning, and I think Janice has swabbed her mouth out a couple of times since as well. Not that it makes much difference at this stage. She's dribbling. You know."
Parvati nodded, and then glanced up in surprise at the sound of a distant banging.
"What on earth's that?"
"Sounds like somebody at the door," Joyce said, frowning. "Now why can't they just use the doorbell? Awful weather to be out. You make a start, I'll go and see what it is. I'm ready to clock out now anyway."
The front door of the Golden Twilight Care Home had been locked for the night, but Joyce could see the heavily-wrapped shape of a tall man through the glass window, hunched against the pouring rain. She did not open the door immediately, but flicked the intercom switch.
"I'm afraid we're closed for the night," she said, into the microphone. "Can I help you?"
The man turned to the metallic box by the door. He was younger than Joyce had first thought, perhaps in his mid thirties, and both broad-shouldered and tall. He was wearing a double-breasted navy woollen overcoat, clearly heavy and well-cut even in the dim outside light. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat and ran down his shoulders in little rivulets.
"I have come for Mrs. Hamilton," he said, his voice almost inaudible through the crackling of the tinny speaker. "I would like to stay with her tonight."
Joyce hesitated.
"It's far too late for visitors," she said. "Are you a relative?"
The man's response was drowned by the sound of the rain and the damply-crackling microphone, and Joyce relented. She hastened to release the catch, and the door slid sideways.
The man stepped through quickly, and stood in the entrance hall, where he removed his hat, revealing tightly-cropped hair, and shook the rain from his face like an overgrown golden retriever. Joyce stepped back hastily.
"You'll have to sign your name in the book," she instructed. "Did you tell anybody you were coming? Nobody told me we were expecting a visitor."
"Mrs. Hamilton is dying, I think," said the man, tugging his scarf loose and unbuttoning his coat. "I would like to be with her." He smiled down at Joyce. His eyes were very blue. "We have known one another for many years. May I leave my coat and hat down here? I would rather not make her room quite so wet. "
Joyce reached for his coat, heavy with the rain.
"You can't take that upstairs." she said. "I'll find a hanger. I'd better put it by the radiator here, it might dry off a bit."
"Thank you."
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.
"May I go up?" he asked. "She does not have much time left, I think."
"Have you been before?" Joyce asked, hooking the coat hanger over the picture rail, and wondering if it would manage the weight.
"She is in Room Four," replied the man. "I know how to find it. May I?"
He turned to the stairs and was climbing them two at a time before Joyce had chance to reply.
"You'll need to sign the book," she called, but he was gone.
When Parvati glanced in, her first thought that Mrs. Hamilton had passed already. She hesitated, watching the fragile figure, tiny even in the narrow bed, but after a moment the sunken chest rose a little with a quavering breath.
Parvati noted the time on her pad and closed the door, her thoughts turning towards poor Mr. Mortimer in number eight.
She had turned the corner of the corridor, and so was gone before the man reached the top of the stairs. He turned number four's door handle quietly and slipped inside.
The papery eyelids flickered open as the door closed again, and the ancient mouth twisted in what might once have been a smile.
"I knew you would come," she whispered.
Chapter One
September 1950
"I quite understand that it seems that way now," Matron said, briskly, looking with what might have been a kindly expression over the horn rims of her glasses, "but I think you would possibly come to regret it. Shock makes us think and feel in ways unlike our usual selves. You have suffered a terrible shock, and it will still take quite some time before you are fully able to come to terms with it. Under the circumstances you should not make any - ah - irrevocable decisions."
Susan could not meet the unwavering gaze.
"I don't want any of it," she whispered. "Just burn it all. Everything. I don't want to see it."
There was a long silence.
"I'm afraid I can't take responsibility for that," Matron said, eventually. "We need to have a signature confirming that the correct items have been received by the deceased's next of kin. In any case, there are valuable items which we believe belong among your family's possessions. Your mother's wedding ring. There is a wallet with a considerable sum of money. The mortuary has been holding everything on your behalf for quite some time now. It is not the responsibility of the hospital or its staff to decide the fate of other people's property. I appreciate that this has been difficult and unpleasant, but I am afraid I must insist. This situation can continue for no longer. Yours was not the only family lost in this train crash, but theirs is the only property still stored here at the hospital. We need to make sure the last remaining items have been received by their rightful owners. You must either take them yourself or make arrangements for everything to be removed immediately, after which time you may do as you wish. And - " she rose to her feet - "I strongly advise that you do not dispose of things immediately, no matter how you might feel at present. You may feel very differently in a year's time."
Susan also rose to her feet.
"I shall make arrangements for everything to be collected this afternoon," she said, and the coldness of her tone surprised her. "Thank you for your trouble, and I apologise for the inconvenience. Good morning."
She did not look at the matron as she swept from the room, although as the door clicked shut behind her she knew that her knees were shaking. She held her shoulders firm and her head high as she walked steadily down the corridor, determined not to notice the sympathetic eyes occasionally turned in her direction as she passed.
Daniel was waiting beside the car. He ground the cigarette beneath his heel as she approached and straightened up.
"Darling." He kissed her cheek and reached to open the door for her. "Was it terrible? What did she want? Was she an old bat?"
Susan did not reply. She crumpled into the passenger seat, and sat very still for a moment, staring at the gloved hands on her knee.
"She wants me to take all their things," she said. "The things that the hospital has, I mean. The things they had with them. When the train - in the accident."
"Not their clothes, surely?" Daniel said, climbing into the driver's seat. "Wouldn't they be - well - you know. Ruined?"
"Not their clothes," Susan said, shaking her head bleakly. "Not even Matron could be that callous. I think their clothes were all burned. I mean the things from their pockets. Their bags. You know. Wallets, pocket knives, that sort of thing. It's all been stored in the mortuary since the crash and they want me to confirm that it's all theirs and take everything away."
"Well, is that a problem?" Daniel asked, "I mean, you're going to have to start sorting things out soon anyway. The house is full of their things. Both houses. Your parents' London house certainly is, and the old professor's cottage will be the same.You've hardly touched anything yet. That's why we're going to the cottage now, isn't it? You're going to have to decide what you want to do with it all. For goodness' sake, Susan, you can't just keep ignoring it."
Susan didn't reply.
Daniel reached over and patted her knee.
"I'll pop across to the mortuary and collect it all now," he said, a little more kindly. "We're going to the cottage anyway, we can just leave everything there in one of the upstairs rooms until you've decided what to do with it. Of course you can't face it just yet. That Matron's just a bossy old trout. Shall we stop at the Jolly Angler on the way? You look as though a drink might do you some good."
"Thank you," said Susan, suddenly feeling grateful. "And yes, a drink might be nice. I'd like that."
She waited, staring out at the neat hospital garden whilst Daniel disappeared back through the swinging front door of the cottage hospital. An elderly man was kneeling beside a distant flower bed tugging out weeds and depositing them in an ancient wheelbarrow. Susan gazed at him, without interest, watching his rhythmic movements.
She watched for some time, and the man had finished and trundled the wheelbarrow away, whistling tunelessly, before Daniel returned. He hurried down the steps, swinging an unfamiliar holdall and a small, battered-looking suitcase. With a small jolt, the sort that had often come to feature in her life now, Susan recognised the suitcase as an old one of her father's, used for a year or two by her youngest brother to take to school. Vaguely, she wondered which one of them had been carrying it on the train. She turned away as Daniel settled it into the boot of the car.
He slid into the driver's seat beside Susan.
"I've signed for it all," he said, easing the car into gear and sliding it away from the kerb. "Sorry it took so long. There was a lot to organise. Obviously I didn't have the first idea if it was all theirs or not but I signed for it anyway, I don't suppose it will matter now. There's a list here."
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. He proffered it to Susan, but she stared out of the window, her hands remaining folded on her knee, so he threw it on the dashboard and concentrated on the road.
*
By the time Susan stood, slightly unsteadily, on the overgrown pathway to the front door of the cottage, the late September sun was beginning to sink downwards. She gazed around her at the collapsing tendrils of jasmine and wilting hollyhocks as Daniel hunted through his pockets for the key. He had to put his shoulder against the door to force it open, and it moved reluctantly, scraping on the worn flagstones.
"Must have been raining a lot," he remarked, standing back to allow her to pass. "Need to do something about that pathway. Gravel, perhaps, then we've got somewhere to park the car. I don't see either of us suddenly growing green fingers, do you?" He laughed. "I'd carry you across the threshold, but there isn't any point since we're not going to live here."
Susan was not listening. She stepped through the door and blinked a little as her eyes adjusted to the dimmer light.
The evening was surprisingly warm. The windows had been left open so that a gentle breeze swirled through the house, and Susan breathed lavender and beeswax. Margaret had offered to come in that morning. She had lit the fires to banish any residual damp, and promised to give everywhere a good clean, but she had not volunteered to come again, and Susan did not know if she should ask. There had been a small annuity for Margaret in the professor's will, and Susan supposed that she might not wish to work for a stranger.
The hallway was narrowed by shelves and shelves of the books that Susan remembered from the old house of her childhood. The professor had not been able to bear to part with them, and they had filled almost the whole of a wagon when the big house had been sold. Indeed, every room in the small cottage was lined with overflowing bookshelves, and although Susan had not yet looked in the attic, she knew from her brother's descriptions that there were still more boxes of books silently collecting dust beneath the eaves there, unopened for the last few years and perhaps now never again.
She did not want to think of her brother. She sighed, and felt her way down the dark, narrow steps to the stone-flagged kitchen.
*
The terms of the professor's will had been clear. Apart from a handful of annuities, mostly to former servants, everything had been left to Susan's eldest brother. Since the same train accident had taken them all, Susan, as her brother's only living relative, had inherited. There had been a few anxious days when their mother had hovered, agonisingly, between life and death, but Susan's few reluctantly whispered prayers had been met with a devastating silence, and a week later her mother had slipped silently after her husband and the rest of her children.
The professor's cottage, along with her parents' London house, now belonged to Susan.
Once the whole dreadful business of funerals and insurance companies and probate was finally over, it was as if the world had slammed to a sudden, shocking stop. Susan found herself alone and unoccupied in the London house, and time slowed to an unspeakable crawl. Each day yawned longer than the last, from dreary dawn to exhausted, sleepless night, and Susan crept from room to empty room as if she had been the one to become a ghost, restlessly haunting a place from which the living had fled.
"You need something to distract you, old girl," Daniel had said. "You need to get out of yourself, take your mind off it all, can't go on grieving forever. It isn't as if you were especially close to them anyway. They all behaved as if you were some kind of medieval sinner, and I was worse, as if I ought to take you for prayers in the woods instead of to the Odeon. It's a shock, I know that, but really, come along. You've got to pull yourself together."
Susan listened, and knew he was right, and yet it was as if the colour had faded from all of her old occupations. No book or play could hold her attention, no dance music could tempt her from her listless fatigue. She occupied days curled on the elderly wrought-iron lovers' seat in the shade of the tall beech tree in the London garden, listening to the wind in its branches and to the hourly clattering of the trains as they hissed and chattered along the slow route to St. Pancras.
Daniel had been a tower of strength, she thought wearily, if only she had needed a tower for anything. At the beginning of June he had made a proposal of marriage, tentatively, wondering if they should delay the wedding until the following summer out of respect for her grief. Susan had accepted, because she did not know if the dreary numbness that had engulfed her truly was grief, or simply an absence of any purpose in a life which seemed to have danced out of her reach. She supposed that she loved him, although she was surprised to notice that she could no longer exactly say how love might feel. He was quick, and decisive, and cut sharply and swiftly through the suffocating fog which seemed to have descended on all aspects of Susan's life, and she knew that she was grateful.
She had no wish for delay, even for a few weeks, and the absence of everyone who had been close to her had put paid to any need for an extravagant ceremony. There was no part of her old life to which she wanted to cling, and she thought, hopefully, that a new beginning might bring with it some fresh interest in life.
Daniel had suggested that they settle permanently in the London house, her childhood home. The nursery was still there, and several bedrooms which could be given a coat of paint and used for entertaining, and a good-size garden, even a croquet lawn, but Susan had refused. In what almost became their first argument she told him what she had not even realised herself until that point, which was that she did not want to spend another minute in the London house, not one. She hated its whispering silence, the dusty corners and draughty windows. She could no longer bear its empty reproach. She did not have the smallest wish to fill it with children, and wanted nothing more than for it to be closed up and sold.
Daniel said that she was being ridiculous and melodramatic, and that it all needed a good clean, and a gramophone, and plenty of people in it, and it would soon spring to life again. She should think about how convenient it would be for him for work, and they would have to look very hard before they found anything half so suitable. You couldn't just stop living because people had died, old girl, otherwise half of Britain would have collapsed after the war. You had to pick yourself up and get on with it.
Susan knew that this was true, although the act of picking herself up seemed to be elusive. She had resigned herself to the London house for the time being, and had avoided even thinking about the professor's cottage, which she had never so much as visited during the last years of the professor's long life. Instead, she drifted, like a dandelion seed on a late summer breeze, listening to Daniel's arrangements and waiting for life to find her again.
They were married in Clerkenwell registry office in the first week of September, accompanied by Daniel's family and a handful of Susan's old school friends. The ceremony was brief and reassuringly simple. Susan promised, white-faced, that she knew of no reason why she should not lawfully be joined to Daniel. Outside a dog launched into a cacophony of barking, and a baby started to cry. Daniel's mother dabbed at her eyes, and the Registrar smiled kindly over his spectacles, and pronounced that they were man and wife.
There was no honeymoon. Susan could not bear to return to the deserted London house as a bride, and instead they had spent the night after the wedding staying with Daniel's aunt, who kept a boarding house not far from Oxford.
Their third morning as man and wife had seen them climbing into in Daniel's polished Austin and heading along the narrow roads to the hospital, in reply to the two letters from Matron which Daniel had discovered unopened on the hall table.
*
On the cottage kitchen table there now lay a piece of lined paper.
"Dear Miss Susan," she read, in Margaret's rounded hand. "I have made up Spare Room bed for you. Milk and cold ham is in the pantry and fires is done so there will be Hot water. Stove will need banking last thing and again in the morning. Butcher will send boy round tomorrow morning if you need anything, hope you are well and Congratulations, Respectfully Yours, Margaret Cooper."
Daniel had followed her along the narrow passage.
"Well, this is something else," he said, with a grin. "Like visiting your great granny. I don't believe there's even a telephone. Somebody's going to have to do a lot of work to this when they buy it."
Susan passed Margaret's note across the scrubbed table. He scanned it briefly.
"Spare room, eh?" he observed, with a scowl. "Not good enough for the old professor's room, aren't we? Well we'll sleep where we like, it's our place now. Shall we have a look round?"
Dutifully, Susan followed him out of the kitchen and up the narrow, creaking stairs. The golden evening sun cast dappled colours through a dusty stained glass picture in the tiny round window on the landing, so that Daniel's shoulders flamed red and blue and green as he turned towards the bedrooms.
There were three bedrooms and a peculiar little bathroom, with an enormous old bath whose stand had been fashioned in the shape of a lion's paws. It was yellowed with years of use, but clean, and Susan saw with some pleasure that fresh towels had been laid on the little stool beside it, and a new bar of soap had been left in a pretty dish beside the washstand.
They soon saw why they had been allocated the spare room rather than the professor's old room. Daniel flung the door open, yet hesitated to cross the threshold for a moment. Susan stepped up to join him, and shivered.
It was as if the professor had just popped out. Margaret had opened the window and left a vase of sweet peas on the sill. The faded yellow curtains swayed a little in the breeze, and dust motes twinkled in the last of the sunshine. Apart from that, the room was untouched. A pair of polished shoes waited beside the narrow bed, neatly filled by cedar shoe-trees. A woollen dressing gown hung on the hook at the back of the door, and a pair of blue pyjamas were neatly folded on the chair. A handkerchief and a pair of glasses had been left on top of a worn Bible on the bedside table, and the bed had been made and the blankets turned back.
Daniel picked up the shoes.
"I always wondered if he and his lady friend were - well - you know," he remarked, "but I suppose that question's answered now. You'd never fit both of them in there. Good shoes," he continued, turning them over. "Wonder what size he was."
Susan turned away.
Daniel followed her out on to the landing.
"Really, you need to pull yourself together," he remarked. "He wasn't even somebody you knew, what was he, your mother's cousin? I didn't think you'd seen him since you were at school. You've never been here in your whole life, and he's lived here for years."
Susan sighed.
"I know," she said, reluctantly. "I'm sorry, Daniel. I suppose I'm being silly. It's just - just - so awfully wrong. It almost feels as if he's still here somehow. Still around and watching us. It feels so dreadful that we're going to have to go through his things as if we were housemaids at a village rummage sale."
"Well he isn't going to want them where he's gone," Daniel said, putting his arms around her. "I know this isn't easy, but it's going to have to be done. We're going to have to have a bonfire, and anything that nobody wants to keep can just go on it. That housemaid's married now, isn't she? She might want some of it. We can't sell the place with all of this lot cluttering it up. I mean, look at it all. That wardrobe must be a hundred years old."
Susan closed her eyes.
"I know," she said.