The Girl at the Window Read online

  Rowan Coleman

  * * *

  THE GIRL AT THE WINDOW

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rowan Coleman lives with her husband and their five children in a very full house in Hertfordshire. She juggles writing novels with raising her family.

  She really wishes someone would invent time travel.

  She is the bestselling author of THE MEMORY BOOK, WE ARE ALL MADE OF STARS and the critically acclaimed THE SUMMER OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS.

  Find out more about Rowan at www.rowancoleman.co.uk, Facebook or Twitter: @rowancoleman.

  Also by Rowan Coleman

  The Summer of Impossible Things

  Looking for Captain Poldark

  The Other Sister

  We Are All Made of Stars

  The Memory Book

  Runaway Wife

  A Home for Broken Hearts

  Lessons in Laughing Out Loud

  The Baby Group

  Woman Walks into a Bar

  River Deep

  After Ever After

  Growing Up Twice

  The Accidental Family

  The Accidental Wife

  The Accidental Mother

  For Julie, Steve, Kizzy and Noah, and all the residents of Ponden Hall, past, present and future.

  PART ONE

  No coward soul is mine,

  No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:

  I see Heaven’s glories shine,

  And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear.

  Emily Brontë

  PROLOGUE

  There’s a phone ringing, somewhere very far away.

  ‘Wake up, Tru. Wake up. Wake up, Trudy, wake up!’

  Abe. Hearing his voice I am instantly awake, turning to him at once. Unwilling to open my eyes just yet, I feel the weight of him sitting on the edge of our bed.

  ‘What is it?’ I murmur, reaching out for his familiar warmth. His long fine fingers that I am so used to being entwined in mine … my love, my husband, mine.

  ‘I was dreaming about when I was a girl, the day that Dad died,’ I tell him. ‘It seemed so real, just as if I was there again … It must have been the phone ringing that brought me out of it. But who’s ringing at this time of night? It is night, right?’

  ‘Tru, I’m so sorry.’ Abe’s whisper dissipates as my hand arrives on a cool and empty sheet.

  ‘Abe?’ My hand travels over an expanse of bed, searching, but he is just out of reach. ‘Abraham?’

  ‘Wake up, Trudy, wake up.’

  ‘Tru, I’m so sorry, I love you,’ he says very softly in my ear, close enough that I feel the heat of his breath on my neck. ‘Don’t forget that I love you – and nothing can change that. Not even this.’

  ‘Abraham?’

  ‘Mummy!’ Will grabs my arms and shakes me.

  ‘I’m awake.’ Sleep makes every part of me as heavy as lead. ‘I’m up. Wait, Daddy was just … Abe?’

  But there is nothing but the empty space of his side of the bed. With a sharp pang I remember: Abe’s not here. He’s overseas; Peru this time. Using his training as a general surgeon, midway through a six-week-long aid mission.

  ‘Can’t you stay at home?’ I’d begged him.

  ‘You know why I can’t,’ he’d said.

  ‘Mummy.’ Will climbs into bed, skinny legs and freezing feet snaking in between mine. ‘The phone woke me up; it’s been ringing and ringing. And stopping and ringing again. Didn’t you hear it?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Reaching out, I switch on a lamp.

  The landline telephone is next to the bed. No one ever phones the landline. Will and I flinch as it begins to ring once more.

  ‘Go on,’ Will urges me, wide eyes and wide awake, like only an eight-year-old can be. ‘It will be Daddy!’

  I don’t know why I’m so afraid to pick it up, but I am. I can hear distance on the line.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is it Daddy?’ Will reaches at once for the receiver. ‘Let me talk!’

  ‘In a minute.’ Twisting away from him, waiting for the other voice on the end to speak one moment more before filling the silence with a gush of hopeful words. ‘Abe? Can you hear me? I was just dreaming you were here. We miss you. Will is right here, say something!’

  I half laugh and hear the desperation in my own voice echo back at me down the line. In the short, silent space that follows, I somehow know everything all at once.

  ‘Ms Heaton?’ It’s not Abe that speaks; I knew it wouldn’t be. It’s not my beloved, my heart, my soulmate, my reason.

  ‘Ms Heaton, I’m so sorry to have to tell you …’

  I watch Will’s face as he watches mine. I see his face fall, and watch our whole world implode in the reflection in his eyes.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Eight months later

  ‘Here we are,’ I say to Will, reaching for his hand as I climb out of the car, parked just down the road from the house. I inhale the landscape around me. Bathed in the last of the afternoon sun, it glows softly of coppers and golds, and it’s just how I imagine it when I think of it, which is often: always different, always changing, always the same.

  Ponden Hall is a house built with light.

  It’s a beacon, a lighthouse with no sight of the sea, pulsing in the dark and sending messages far and wide for the special few that can hear them.

  ‘You can hear them, because you are a Heaton and we have always lived here since the first foundation stone was laid in 1540. Our ancestors made this place for you, and every Heaton there will ever be,’ he would tell me, the reassurance of his hand heavy on my shoulder. ‘They birthed the house out of the hillside.’

  ‘Yer, Ma,’ he’d say, lowering his voice, ‘isn’t a Heaton, so she can’t see the lights. She only sees the shadows.’

  Ma, who I haven’t seen for all these years, is somewhere within those thick, ancient walls, with sixteen years of ‘I told you so’ waiting to greet me. So why am I here? Because Abe was lost without trace, and, although I didn’t want to have to turn to her, at the same time there was only one place that I wanted to be: home. Months passed, hopes faded, money ran out … and eventually I gave in to the call of the beacon. I’d run back to Ponden. It just so happened that Ma would be there, too.

  Will scrambles past me, ignoring me, standing in the middle of the flat area of hardstanding, looking around him, trying to understand a landscape that is as unfamiliar to my little urban boy as the surface of Mars might be; more so, in his case.

  For me, though, it’s like breathing above water. Taking in a deep breath of clean, quiet air, tipping my face into the welcoming wind, it cools my heated cheeks with every passing whisper. The relief. The joy of arriving somewhere where even the air is a familiar friend. It’s only because my son is standing next to me that I don’t fling my arms open to embrace this place that I have missed, every single moment, for sixteen years.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ Will says, his body hunching up against the cold.

  ‘What do you mean, nothing?’ I look up and down the valley, hills billowing on either side of the flat, cool expanse of the reservoir and the sky reaching ever upwards. ‘There’s everything here.’

  ‘I don’t like it, I want to go home,’ Will says, his voice very fragile and small. In the silence that comes afterwards there is the resounding absence of London traffic, and of school friends shouting his name, footballs clattering against the neighbour’s fence. What he can’t hear is the hum of our washing machine and the TV always on. Of Daddy laughing and talking too loud on the phone, the last human on earth who actually liked making phone calls. All the noises that Will has always known are silenced here.

  ‘It is different here,’ I say gently, lightly droppin
g my arm round his shoulder. ‘It is, I know. But turn around and you’ll see your house. The one that has always been yours, even before you were born.’

  Gravel crunches under our feet as, ignoring the way he stiffens at my touch, I turn him around to look up the hillside at the house.

  And there she is: my friend; my mother; my haven. I see her for the first time again at the exact same moment as Will. Dearest Ponden Hall, perched in the crook of the hillside, watching out for me, waiting for me to come home, arms outstretched.

  The ancient walls are as solid and immovable as the rocky moor they are made from. The diamond-pane windows glint and wink, reflecting the cold bright blue of a cloudless October day. The tall drystone wall that encloses the garden is just about still standing, stones precariously balancing, one atop the other, just as they have for hundreds of years. Oh, the relief to be here, to be safe, to be near somewhere that has always healed me.

  Every Heaton knows that Ponden does have dark corners, deep shadows and lost stories caught within its history, fleeting shadows that are gone the moment you look at them. But every Heaton loves it nevertheless, and now it’s Will’s turn.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ he says, eyes dark. ‘It looks cold, and old, and full of spiders.’

  All Will sees right now is a house without his father in it.

  ‘I think you will love it; do you know why?’

  Will looks up at me, his brown eyes full of tears that he is doing his best to contain. Slowly, he shakes his head.

  ‘Because this house was built for you, five hundred years ago. Everyone who has ever lived in this house has been a Heaton, and nearly every boy that has lived here has been called Robert or William, just like you.’

  ‘Really?’ Will looks back at the house, and I hold my breath as his cold hand reaches unconsciously for mine, as it always used to before all this. ‘But I’m a Heaton Jones.’

  ‘You are,’ I say. ‘But you are a Heaton nevertheless, and this house will know you the moment you walk in through the door, I promise you. It will recognise you.’

  ‘That sounds creepy, actually,’ Wills says. He has a point, this little boy of a world of fitted kitchens and night lights.

  ‘Not creepy, just different. You’ll see.’

  ‘But …’ Will stops as we walk up the hill towards the front door. ‘What about Daddy? How will Daddy know that we are here?’

  ‘He …’ I stop. Every expert I have spoken to since it happened said I had to be clear when talking to Will about the light aircraft crash. That I had to explain that, even though no trace could be found of the plane, or the people in it, we had to understand that Abe was most likely dead. That no one could survive, unaided and injured, in dense rainforest. Tell your son his father is never coming back, they said, that he will never see him again.

  That is the only way for an eight-year-old to truly understand grief, they said. To be able to process, and eventually recover from, what’s happened, even if there is no body, and no grave. Don’t tell him his father has passed away, or gone to sleep. It sounds brutal and cruel, they said, the grief counsellors and the social workers, but in the end it’s the right thing for him to be able to face it and recover. So that’s what I did; I did what they told me to do for Will, even though it broke my heart.

  And yet Will won’t listen to me. He still believes that his father is alive, no matter what I say, and more than that, he is angry with me for not believing too.

  ‘I left the address at the flat,’ I tell him, which is true; I left a forwarding address. ‘Besides, I lived here when I first met Daddy – I have lots of stories to tell you about that time. So Daddy knows, he knows where we are. He knows that if we’re not at our flat, we’ll be here.’

  ‘Then why have I never visited here before?’ Will asks me as we stop at the front door of Ponden Hall. That’s a question I don’t have the courage to answer right now. For a fraction of a second I hesitate by the gate set into the high garden wall, seeing it out of the corner of my eye, unwilling to look right at it, remembering what I saw there once, a long time ago. Lifting the latch on the old front door, I push it open.

  ‘Hello,’ I say to the house, ‘this is my little boy, William. We’re home.’

  Light filters through the stained-glass window at the other end of the hall and dapples on the flags. The air inside is static and thick with dust; it smells like a museum, a long-forgotten, lost civilisation. Which is not like Ma and her fondness for lemon-scented disinfectant at all, constantly cleaning, in perpetual motion. But for someone like me, who has devoted their working life to exactly those sorts of institutions, it only adds to the homecoming.

  ‘Mummy.’ Will’s voice waivers in the gloom; the only thing he has ever been afraid of is the dark. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘It’s OK, I promise. I promise you will like it once you get used to it.’

  We follow the ever-so-gentle downward slope of the hall as it bends right, taking us down into the heart of the house. Firelight flickers under the door to the sitting room; there’s the snuffle, snort and scratch of a dog’s paw at the gap under the door.

  This is it, then. The reunion. Half of me wonders if, after the archaic exchange of short, curt letters, sent second class, and half-heard messages relayed via Jean from Middle Farm’s landline, if she has any idea that we are coming at all. But it’s too late to turn back now.

  ‘Ma?’ I call out as I push open the door. ‘Ma, we’re here. We’ve arrived.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Ma’s disembodied voice says. ‘I’ve got eyes, don’t I?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  At first the room, lit only by firelight and what’s left of the afternoon sun, looks empty of any life except the elderly retriever, standing legs set, grumbling in a decidedly half-hearted fashion.

  ‘Away with you, Mab,’ Ma says, and my head turns towards her voice, lost as she is in the great dark recess of an elderly hooded leather porter’s chair. The claws of her hands cover the ends of the cracked and worn armrests; stockinged legs ending in disintegrating slippers are set on the ground in the same stance as the dog she is talking to. ‘Too late to get your knickers in a twist now, old girl.’

  ‘Hey, girl.’ Dropping to one knee, Will holds out his hand to Mab and her nose delicately investigates his fingertips, her tail thudding against the same sofa we have had since I was a little girl. Will folds down next to her, eyes lighting up as she pushes the dome of her head under his palm, leaning her unsteady weight into his. Seeing him relax, so do I, just a little.

  Ma leans forward so at last I can see her face.

  ‘You’re older,’ she says.

  ‘So are you,’ I reply, taking her in. Her once-thick blonde hair is now streaked with silver and, always delicate and as fine-boned as a wren, she is truly thin now: much too thin. In the firelight, every hollow and dip in her face is deepened, revealing the skull beneath her skin, making her look so much older than her fifty years. A sudden longing leaps into my chest and I realise that, despite everything that happened, I have missed her. Or missed having a mother, at least.

  ‘And this is the boy.’ As she gestures at Will, her eyes meet mine, unreadable. No cue as to how to proceed. ‘This is William.’

  ‘Will. He loves dogs,’ I say, just to say something as I look round this familiar room where I grew up, longing to lose myself in nostalgia. The great hall, they called it long ago, though it is not so very great. The huge inglenook fireplace stands sentinel at one end, and at the other, the great dresser that has been in the house for almost as long as it has been built, elderly oak blackened by centuries of touch, standing floor to ceiling, so heavy it’s bolted to the wall. When I was a little girl I used to think of it being like Pippi Longstocking’s chest of treasures, always something miraculous to be found in every drawer or cupboard, whether it was meant for the hands of child or not; it was another place to go, another world to me. Ma talks about Mab, something about finding her starving in the back garden. Ma a
lways had so much more kindness to offer animals than she did humans.

  I half listen as Wills asks more about Mab, watching brand-new night unfurl against the stone window frame, the diamond-paned glass reflecting fragments of firelight into the room. Just visible, high in the ceiling, are the old metal hooks where pheasants and meat once hung, the ornately moulded Yorkshire plaster roses that decorate the very tops of the walls a sign that, at one time at least, the Heatons had gone up in the world. And beneath Ma’s scattering of rugs, the flagstones that have always been there, only a little worn by so many thousands of pairs of feet crossing them day after day. For a moment I remember how I used to lay my cheek against the cool stone and close my eyes and think of all of those feet that had smoothed it away. I’d always thought of one pair, in particular, which had known my house almost as well as I did. I’d close my eyes and try to imagine Emily Brontë sitting at our table, leaning against our dresser, warming herself by the great smoky fire and walking again and again across the flagstones to the Ponden library that she loved so much. And as I lay there, I’d whisper my secrets to her, because when I was ten years old I couldn’t think of anyone better equipped to keep them than the author of Wuthering Heights.

  ‘Anyway, it’s been nearly a decade since I took her in, ten years of just her and me. Old Mab here will be glad of new blood.’ Ma draws herself up to standing and I realise that I’m taller than her now. ‘She’s sick and tired of me, for the most part. Old bag of bones, I am; you can’t even chew on me, can you, Mab?’

  Mab is too lost in Will’s ministrations to care what Ma says, her large paw braced on Will’s shoulder as he rubs her tummy, setting her hind leg into a frenzy of agitation.

  ‘So, William …’ Ma peers at him with something like apprehension. ‘I’m your grandmother.’