Theo takes the plate from her and places it on the side table. He sits on the edge of the bed and gestures for her to do the same. Elly hadn’t realised how tired she felt, how aching her legs and her hips were, until she sinks down onto the mattress.
“What happened last night,” Theo is saying, not looking directly at her, “Jesus. That was so insane. I just don’t understand it – any of it.”
“Me neither,” Elly admits.
“What is happening here, Elly?” Theo asks quietly, looking around at the walls as if there might be hidden eyes there, watching him. “This place is fuckingdangerous, right? That poor girl, I don’t even know if…” He covers his face with his hands before carrying on. “I told Siobhan we’ve got to leave. We’ve got to warn someone about what’s happening here. It’s not right.”
Elly listens to him voice all the thoughts that have run through her mind since Lakshmi fell, even since she arrived at Hex House. She knows how reasonable they all are, how true. And yet, although she doesn’t know why, and although it doesn’t make any sense at all, she feels a tiny kernel of resistance. There’s a tiny part of her that wants to say,But didn’t she look so beautiful? Didn’t she look so beautiful when she flew?
“Siobhan says we have to stay. She wants to finish the documentary. Says it’s important that we show people what this place is and what it does.” Theo laughs suddenly, and it’s a sharp, cool sound. “I thought there was no way that Haina would let us use that footage, but it’s like she wants it to get out. It’s almost like she’s proud of it. She…” He swallows, hard. “She scares me sometimes.”
Elly sits still, listening. She thinks of Haina’s gentle hands and deep voice.There’s nothing to be scared of, she almost says, but doesn’t.
“I don’t know though,” Theo is saying. “Surely, I have to tell the police? Rather than just staying here and filming everything? We could be in danger. All of us.”
“The police could never find us,” Elly says before she can stop herself. She doesn’t know where the words come from, only that they’re true. Theo seems to know it, too, because his expression is different now. He looks tired, defeated. She imagines that Haina has told him the same thing.
“Do you think you’ll stay?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says on an exhale. “Maybe Siobhan will. I’m not sure… I’m not sure if I can.”
There’s an unexpected spasm of panic in Elly’s bellyat that thought, that Theo might leave. She wants, she discovers, for his camera to see her again, to feel strange and powerful in the face of its gaze. She has never felt as solid or as real as when she was standing in front of the lens, letting him see her, really see her.
“What if I did the interviews?” she asks, and he looks up.
“What interviews?”
“Siobhan asked me if I’d do some interviews to camera. Would you…” She stumbles, feeling foolish, clumsy. Theo is staring at her, waiting for her to continue, so she forces the words out of her mouth. “Would you stay to interview me?”
The words feel heavier than they should, as if they’re soaked in water. Elly lets them hang in the air. Eventually, Theo says, very quietly, “Would you like me to?”
Fifteen minutes later, they’re in the refectory. It’s empty of guests, but with the disruption of Haina’s absence and caring for Lakshmi, no one has cleared the plates. Theo sets up his camera amongst the debris, the chunks of half-eaten bread and meat gristle, glasses smeared with the imprints of lips. The candles are still burning, making it feel warm. Elly fidgets in her seat while Theo lines up the shot, checking the lighting, moving candles closer and then further away again. She only relaxes when he peers through the viewfinder and she feels herself being observed, appraised, appreciated.
“Okay, we’re ready,” he tells her eventually, looking up. He looks more nervous than she’s seen him before, not meeting her eye. “Is there anything in particular you’d like to share? Or shall we just start, and see how we go?”
Elly bites the inside of her lip. She hadn’t really thought this through, hadn’t thought beyond the fact of Theo and his camera on one side of a room, her on the other. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know if I can talk about her. About Lakshmi.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “We’ll go slowly. You’ll have to be patient with me – usually Siobhan does all the interviews, but I’ll do my best.” He clicks a few buttons on the camera and then gives her a nod. There’s a short beeping sound, and then the light directly above the lens glows red. Elly feels it immediately – that sensation of a thousand eyes crawling all over her body, eyes from the future, eyes that know what happens tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. It makes her pulse buzz, but she can’t tell whether it’s with excitement or dread.
“Okay, Elly,” Theo says. He sounds hesitant, though he’s smiling. “Let’s talk a bit about what brought you here, to the house.”
A cool trickling underneath her skin. “You want me to talk about Ethan?”
Theo frowns. “Who’s Ethan?”
“My husband.”
Something flickers across his features, fleeting and unreadable. “Right. Well, yes. Let’s talk about Ethan.”
Elly lets a breath pass through her, turning to the side so that she can look out of one of the refectory windows and into the garden. The rose bushes and oak trees are nothing more than shapes in the gloom. She’s thought often about the day she and Ethan met, especially in the run-up to the wedding. In the last moments before falling asleep, she’d fantasise about what she might have done differentlyto change the outcome of that first day, the day that determined everything that came after. Perhaps there were words she could have said that wouldn’t have appealed to him, a colour she could have worn that he wouldn’t have liked so much. Sometimes she likes to pretend she took her lunch half an hour earlier and so didn’t see him at all, or perhaps only glimpsed his retreating form on the street as he walked away from the bakery. Instead, she starts to tell Theo what did happen, the truth, the finely tuned sequence of events that led her to now, to this room.
Four years ago, December, a colder one than anyone could remember. In the village, icicles clung to the drainpipes, impending skewers above everyone’s heads. Snow edged the pavements. A thick coating of glistening grit ran down the centre of the high street, which was quieter than usual, except for the odd person bundled up in a coat, barely looking up. Elly was working with Suzanne, and the warmth of the bakery was a sanctuary from outside. Customers lingered longer over the scones and upside-down pineapple cakes, buying more than they usually would. When a stocky man with reddish hair dusted with snow entered the bakery, ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! was playing. Elly will always remember that.
What did she think of him, at first? Not much.
She remembers that he smelled nice, that he brought the expensive smell of aftershave into the bakery with him, the scent of elsewhere. She remembers that he was wearing a tailored coat and a striped cashmere scarf. He had a taste for the finer things – she’d learn that later. He had a certain set of standards. She’d smiled at him, asked him what he wanted. She might even have said something like,Isn’t it so cold out there, just to be polite. Maybe he could see it, even then: her inbuilt need to please people, to break herself down into tiny pieces so that others might find her easier to consume. Ethan had looked at the cakes and tarts behind the glass as if he had no idea what any of them were. Later, he would tell her that he’d glimpsed her in the window (You looked so sweet, that red jumper against your blonde hair), and decided to come inside without even knowing that it was a bakery. In the end, he ordered three strawberry tarts, two scones and a seeded loaf. The way he was unsure as he said,Maybe that, and,Add two of those, please, was endearing. She’d thought then that he was the kind of man who found it easy to be vulnerable. They chatted a little bit – she told him she’d lived in the village all her life, he told her he was down from Edinburgh for the weekend to walk the hills, get some headspace, you know. He didn’t ask for her number until everything was bagged up and paid for. Elly could feel Suzanne watching them from the back room, barely repressing a snigger. He asked politely and with a smile so warm she didn’t feel like she could say no. When he left the bakery laden with things he didn’t need (and, she would find out later, didn’t even eat), he’d been blushing, and Suzanne had said something like,Well he’s a bit wonderful, isn’t he, and Elly had let herself think that yes, maybe he was.
She didn’t see any other side to him for months, maybe half a year. And when it did emerge, it was a creature skulking out from the shadows, testing to see if it could survive the light. When had she first felt that tipping feeling in her belly, like everything was sliding out of alignment? Maybe the first times were too subtle for herto remember, but the one that comes to her now, the one she tells Theo about, is the first time she met his brother, Martin. They went to a steak restaurant in Edinburgh. It had white tablecloths and a wine list bigger than the menu. Some of the steaks cost the same as the wage Elly made in a day. Elly and Ethan arrived first, and Ethan was fractious as they waited for Martin at the table. He kept suggesting they had a drink at the bar instead, not seeming to like the idea that his brother would know he’d kept them waiting. The next minute, he’d change his mind and fiddle furiously with the napkin, barely talking to Elly. She couldn’t understand his anxiety, but when Martin arrived soon after, things began to shift into focus. Martin was the elder of the two, the more classically good-looking, tall with dark hair and broad shoulders. He worked for a bank in London, a bigger and more well-known bank than the one where Ethan worked, and was only up in Edinburgh to wine and dine clients.
