She explained it was called the boys’ room because there had been two brothers – Nat and Rowland – but they were both dead. Nat had died of typhoid when he was twelve, and poor baby Rowland had died of a mystery cough before his first birthday. This led on to an explanation of how their parents were dead too: their mother had died of ‘childbed fever’ (a common thing back in the day), a month after giving birth to Rowland, which explained the baby’s frailty, and their father had died of smallpox. The girls seemed quite matter-of-fact about it all. Though apparently Grace often woke in the night, having nightmares about little Rowland.
‘See,’ Rose said, sprinkling salt on my shame. ‘Plenty of sorrows to go around.’
She took me into the room. There was a little square window about the size of a portable television from 1980. (When I lived in a hotel in São Paulo in 1980 I watched a lot of TV. It made me think of the small square Hackney window.) The room was spare and modest but the bed had blankets and even though the mattress was stuffed with straw I was so tired that the queen’s four poster itself wouldn’t have seemed any comfier.
I fell on the bed, and she pulled my shoes off and she looked at me, and the motherly sternness she had displayed before melted away and she said softly, as if to my soul itself, ‘It will be fine, Tom. Rest now.’
But the next thing I knew it was the dead of night and I was sitting up in bed awake from the sound of my own scream with a fat full moon outside the window and my whole body was shaking and I could hardly breathe. Terror was flooding into me from every side.
Rose was now there, holding my arm. Grace, behind her, yawned sleep away at the doorway.
‘It is all right, Tom.’
‘It will never be,’ I said, half delirious.
‘Dreams are not to be believed. Especially the bad ones.’
I didn’t tell her the dream was a memory. I had to try instead to deny the reality of what I knew and dream up a new one, as Tom Smith. She sent Grace back to bed and stayed there beside me. She leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. It was just a peck, but a peck on the lips was not just a peck.
‘What was that for?’ I asked.
I could just about see her smile in the moonlight. It wasn’t a flirtatious smile. It was a plain, matter-of-fact one. ‘For you to have something else to occupy your mind.’
‘I am not sure I have ever met someone like you,’ I said.
‘That is good. What point would my life have, if there was a duplicate?’
There was a tear in her eye.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘This was the bed Nat slept in. It’s strange. The space where he was being filled again. That’s all. He was there, and now he isn’t there.’
I saw she was hurt, and for a moment I felt selfish in my own grief. ‘I can sleep somewhere else. I could sleep on the floor.’
She shook her head and smiled. ‘No, no.’
Breakfast was rye bread and a small cup of ale. Grace had some ale too. It was the one drink people could afford that they knew wouldn’t kill them. Unlike water, of course, which was basically Russian roulette.
‘This is my house,’ Rose explained, ‘and the lease has passed to me now my parents have died. So, so long as you live here, you must live by my rules. And the first rule is that you will pay us what you owe, and after that you can pay us two shillings a week as long as you stay here. And help us fetch the water.’
As long as you stay here.
It was quite a nice prospect, having somewhere I could stay indefinitely. And the cottage was a sufficient home. Dry and clean and well aired and smelling of lavender. A bunch of lavender, I now noted, stuck out of a simple vase. There was a fireplace for when the weather became cool. The cottage was a little larger than the one in Edwardstone, with separate rooms, but the same level of care was taken to keep everything as clean and tidy and well scented as possible.
And yet, the offer of indefinitely staying there – if that is what it was – made me feel sad.
I had the sense, even then, that there could be nothing permanent in my life from now on.
You see, at this point, I didn’t know things were going to change. I had no understanding of my condition. It had no name. And Iwouldn’t have known even if it had. I just assumed that was it. I was going to stay looking this age for ever. Which you might think would be quite joyful but, no, not really. My condition had already caused the death of my mother. I knew I wouldn’t be able to tell Rose or her sister about it, without putting them at similar risk. And back then, things changed fast, especially if you were young. Faces changed almost with the seasons.
‘Thank you,’ I told her.
‘It will be good for Grace, having you here. She misses her brothers greatly, we both do. But if you cause any mischief – if you bring us into any disrepute – and if you refuse to pay’ – she held the moment like a cherry still to be swallowed – ‘you will be out on your arse.’
‘In a ditch?’
‘Covered in shit,’ said little Grace, having finished her ale.
