There was another room next door that Abby hadn’t shown her, and the door was shut. She opened it to find a small box room, in which an easel had been erected. Resting on it was a half-finished acrylic – amateur, obviously – a seascape drawn from the platform at the bottom of the steps. Ellie cocked her head as she looked at it – it had an earnest quality to it; the colours were too bright but it tried hard. Other canvases lay stacked against the wall, nearly all of them of the house, the garden and the sea view from the platform. Ellie wondered who’d painted them – Matteo or Abby – and then she saw the little signature in the bottom right-hand corner: ‘AM’. For a moment she wondered who that was, but then remembered that Abby was no longer a Miss Spencer like herself, but for three months now had been a Mrs Morelli –SignoraMorelli. Ellie hadn’t been invited to the wedding – nor had their mother – as Abby had somehow persuaded Matteo she wanted something small and private, and they’d surprised Ellie and Susanna with an email and a photo of the happy couple outside Portoferraio town hall.
Ellie had been shocked. Not so much that her sister had got married on the quiet, but how much it had hurt. When they were small, all Ellie had wanted was for Abby to play with her, to make up games together in the garden, pretend they both had imaginary pet dogs that they could take for a walk around the small lawn, but Abby was always aloof, would go off and do her own thing. This continued as they got older, Abby always seemingly with her eye on some private goal, something Ellie knew nothing about. Abby would be building a den in her room, an idea that she hadn’t shared with Ellie; she would arrange to go to a friend’s house for tea when Ellie was hoping to ask her about her new make-up; she’d come back to say she’d passed her driving test when Ellie hadn’t even known she’d applied for it; and, of course, the biggest betrayal was the years and years she’d spent saving and investing, never once sharing her goal or her financial savvy with her sister. Then out of the blue – wham! – Abby announced she was leaving the workforce forever.See you later, sucker– that was the message she seemed to be sending, while Ellie had been left abandoned and feeling like an inadequate fool.
You’d think she would have become used to it, hardened herself to the hurt, but one memory was still imprinted on her brain and, even after twenty-two years, it had the power to move her.
Ellie had been in the first year of secondary school, a place she found isolating after her sporadic primary education. She’d been placed in the bottom set in every subject; the years of missed schooling had taken their toll, and she felt slow-witted and ashamed of not being anywhere near her older sister’s league. One group of girls in particular noticed this fact. There were three of them who went around in a pack, two lesser bitches flanking the ringleader, and they would mock her for her stupidity. When Ellie had been found crying her eyes out, hiding behind the temporary classroom block, and Abby had extracted a name, Ellie had followed her sister from a safe distance back to the playground, wondering what on earth Abby was going to do.
She was rewarded by seeing Abby punch the ringleader on the nose. All hell had broken loose: blood and screams and a rapidly ballooning crowd.
Three big things changed after that: the nose was broken and would forever have a kink, Abby was suspended for a week, and the bullies never touched Ellie again. But the one thing she really wanted to change still didn’t happen. Abby was just as aloof and it had hurt even more because deep down Ellie now knew that, on some level, her big sister cared for her.
She suspected she knew why there had always been a distance between them: Ellie was their mother’s favourite, something that was never said aloud but was blatantly clear. In fact, Susanna had paid little attention to Abby’s successes, as she’d been so preoccupied with Ellie’s childhood illness, the doctors and hospital appointments, the constant care. If Abby did well in her exams at school, she was told not to speak of it, for fear that it would make Ellie feel inferior. The same if Abby achieved something sporty – Ellie had suffered from so much sickness, it was ‘unfair’ to ‘flaunt’ it in Ellie’s face.
Ellie had felt guilty for being so sick and blamed herself for Abby’s upset, but was often too ill to have the energy to try and make it any different. As they grew older, Ellie watched the gap between them widen, and even when the illness seemed to abate, years had gone by and she never caught up. Abby did so much more, achieved so much more, and Ellie’s confidence slowly disintegrated.
She looked again at the paintings. These, at least, were no masterpieces, and she was just turning to leave the room when her eye caught something.
She stopped. Frowned at the small bookcase in the corner of the room. Then she kneeled down in front of it, her heart racing.
There, on the very bottom shelf, was a collection of children’s books. Not just any old children’s books but first editions:The Hobbit,Where the Wild Things Are,The Wizard of Ozand an extensive collection of Roald Dahl includingCharlie and the Chocolate Factory. They were worth thousands of pounds.
Hand trembling, she reached out and touched them, hurt and confused by the sight of them. Not wanting to believe how they had come to be placed on a bookshelf here, in Abby’s house.
FOUR
1994
Ellie was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, her shoe-clad feet planted on the hall floor, trying to imagine them sticking to the wooden floorboards, growing roots so she didn’t have to leave. Her and Abby’s suitcase was upright by the front door and, if she turned her head she could just see through into the living room where her sister was kneeling on the sofa, leaning over the back so she could watch out of the rain-pelted window for the car.
Her mother was scarce, doing something busy in the kitchen, as she always did on these occasions. Ellie still didn’t quite understand why she never accompanied them on their trips to Grandma and Grandad’s, except that Susanna had said that she had had a ‘falling-out’ with her parents over ‘Daddy’ years before. Ellie couldn’t even ask ‘Daddy’ to explain more as he had left before she was born.
‘It’s here,’ Abby called through flatly and climbed down off the sofa, just as the large silver car pulled up and her grandparents’ driver, Harold, who had worked for them for two decades, climbed out.
Susanna appeared from the kitchen. Saw their downcast faces.
‘Come on, it’s not that bad.’
‘It’s horrible, Mummy,’ Ellie burst out. ‘They are always asking us questions. Questions, questions, questions!’ She felt on the verge of tears.
‘What musical instruments are you learning? What are your grades like? Why don’t you ever wear dresses?’ intoned Abby, as the doorbell rang.
‘It’s only twice a year,’ pleaded Susanna. ‘It’s not too much to ask, is it?’
‘And their house is so big,’ continued Ellie. ‘And full of breakable things! I’m scared of breaking something like last time. They were so cross. They said it cost thirty hundred pounds.’
‘Threehundred,’ corrected Abby, and Ellie felt humiliated. She always got things wrong. ‘For a vase,’ added Abby incredulously.
‘But it’s nice to have lovely things, isn’t it?’ said Susanna. She spoke carefully. ‘Just think. Some of those things might be yours one day. They’re your only grandparents. It’s important to get to know them. And it’s only for a week.’
Ellie, already feeling desperately homesick, couldn’t bear it any longer. She flung herself at her mother and burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to go. Don’t make me – please, Mummy. What if I get ill again?’ she suddenly wailed.
She felt her mother’s strong arms embrace her but then they loosened their grip and the familiar, comforting warmth was taken away.
‘You won’t get ill. You’ve been so much better the last few weeks. Now, Abby, why don’t you let Harold in and you can be on your way?’
Ellie and Abby sat in the back of the cavernous car, their seat belts unable to keep their small bodies from sliding around on the leather seats as Harold navigated the rain-slicked roads. Ellie pressed her nose up against the window, trying to keep the image of her mother in her mind, her kind face getting smaller and smaller as they’d driven away. The journey wasn’t long, as their grandparents lived in Weybridge, just a few miles away. However, despite the short distance, the two houses could not be more different.
Grandma and Grandad lived in a place called St George’s Hill, which, when she was five, Ellie had thought might also harbour dragons. But now she was eight, she realized this was a ludicrous notion and, in fact, it only housed very rich people. Grandma Kathleen and Grandad Robert’s place was a large, flat-fronted mansion with pillars either side of the imposing front door. Whenever she arrived, Ellie felt as if the dozens of windows were staring at her, or there was someone hiding behind the balustrade that ran around the top of the house. Grandma was waiting at the top of the steps as the car pulled into the enormous drive and Ellie scrambled out, knowing her grandmother was already scrutinizing her.
