The Telling - Softcover

Baker, Jo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080417265X ISBN 13: 9780804172653

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

From the bestselling author of Longbourn comes a ghost story that is a thrilling—and sometimes chilling—tale about two women, separated by almost two centuries, grappling with change and loss.

After her mother dies, Rachel sets off alone to pack up and sell off the remnants of her family’s isolated country house. But from the moment she steps through the front door, she feels that the house contains more than she had expected. Generations earlier, a young housemaid, Lizzy, called the same dwelling home. On course for a life of service no different from her mother and her mother’s mother before her, Lizzy’s world is upended by the arrival of a mysterious lodger. Interweaving the two narratives, Jo Baker brings these women, both struggling against their stations and their duties, vividly to life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JO BAKER was born in Lancashire and educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast. She is the author of Longbourn, The Undertow, and of two earlier novels: Offcomer and The Mermaid’s Child. She lives in Lancaster, England.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

The light was fading. I was pretty sure I was lost. The car wasn’t used to that kind of driving and had started making a nasty whining sound on the bends. I hadn’t reached the Hall yet, hadn’t passed a house in miles. I pulled in at the side of the road, bumped up onto the grass, switched off the engine. There was a breeze, a bird singing; it was so quiet.

I rifled through the junk on the passenger seat for the directions, snapped them straight and peered at Dad’s crabbed handwriting. The car ticked as it cooled. If I’d gone wrong, I couldn’t see where. I’d come off the motorway at the right exit, taken that turn, passed the lake and the farm. The next landmark was listed as Storrs Hall, a grand old house with a tower, in woodland, off to the right of the road. The village would be shortly after that.

I slipped another chip of chewing gum into my mouth, crossed my fingers, and turned the key in the ignition. The engine started first time. Another ten or fifteen minutes, I told myself, pulling out onto the empty tarmac, bothered by the low-level whine from somewhere down and to the left. After that, I’d have to think of something else, find someone, ask for directions. But that was easier said than done: I hadn’t seen a soul, hadn’t even seen another car, since I left the motorway.

The tarmac spun on between stone walls and patches of hedge. Wide scrubby fields sloped up towards the sky; trees stood torn and twisted by the wind. A building blurred past. I glanced back in the mirror. A square-fronted house, its windows blank, and a vast stone barn standing in the blue twilight. It made me notice the dark. I flicked my headlights on.

The road ahead became a tunnel, and I hurtled down it far too fast. Any minute I would catch up with the sweep of my own headlights and blunder on into the darkness beyond. The road dipped into woodland. Branches broke the sky into a flickering craze. I eased my foot off the accelerator as the road swept in smooth bends downhill. Glimpsed in passing, a crenellated tower stood against the evening sky. Then flash of wrought-iron gates, a curve of gravel. The Hall: it must be, at last. I felt as if I’d been driving forever. Even so, I wasn’t keen to arrive.

*

A terrace of stone cottages first, and then a crossroads. A shop, a pub, a school, a parish hall, none of them open. According to the directions, it was half a mile down the village street, towards the church. I made the turn, and drove on about half a mile, slowed to a residential-area crawl. And there it was.

The cottage stood elevated and set back from the street, six stone steps leading up to the front door. I pulled in at the side of the road. Whitewashed walls glowed in the twilight; four front windows reflected back the evening sky. It looked like a child’s drawing of a cottage. I’d seen it in a photograph, but then it had stood flat against a blue-summer sky, and Mum had been sitting on the top step in jeans and a print blouse. Now it loomed solid, stony. I got out, took a lungful of clean, cold, wet air. Reading Room Cottage. The place they chose to be.

The front steps were worn into hollows and the handrail was skin-smooth. The clutch of keys weighed heavy in my hand, the old leather key fob pressing against my curved fingers, folding back on itself.

I turned the key until it clicked.

The door opened into the living room. I saw the faded blue sofa-bed, sagging in the middle, the arms worn shiny. Next to it, the smoked-glass coffee table from when I was a kid. Stuff that could be spared from home. Stuff that would do for summer holidays and Easter breaks, while they did the place up. Stuff that would do until they retired, until they lived here.

I went in and dropped my holdall. The carpet was flattened and tracked with grey. A breakfast bar corralled off a stark kitchen extension. To the right of it there was a staircase, modern, with separate planks whacked into the wall and a banister of cheap dowel and unsmoothed wood. The smell of the place hit me: a smell like forgotten Sunday dinners, damp, long emptiness. I wanted to be home, stepping over toys, the flat smelling of coffee and baby and drying laundry.

I headed straight back out to fetch the rest of my stuff from the car; it seemed to have got much darker already, as if I’d blinked, and afterwards something of that internal darkness lingered. I opened the boot, lifted out Sainsbury’s bags, and glanced up the village street.

The tarmac was slick as graphite in the moonlight; windows caught a gleam here and there. There were no lights on in any of the houses. And beyond the street, the darkness seemed deep, and somehow absolute. I knew that out there, the M6 was streaming with light and fumes, strip-lit service stations were selling coffee and cigarettes and travel sweets, that there were towns and cities and hospitals and people, teeming people; but it didn’t quite seem possible, didn’t quite seem real. Not beyond this blue-black night, a tree’s bones, the call of some bird or other.

I shivered. I slammed the boot shut, scooped up the bags and scrambled up the steps. When I flicked on the light, a latticework of shadows scattered across the room. The lampshade was one that Mum had made in a craft class, out of string and glue and a now long-burst balloon. It was way off-centre. It gave the room an uneasy feeling, as if everything were slipping sideways, as if it were sinking.

I dumped my groceries and took my bag upstairs. Here and there I could see traces of something real and beautiful in the building. Smoke-stained stone, ancient wood. Clues to what they’d seen here, what they’d wanted to realize. They must have thought they had years to peel all this away; the stained carpets, the greyed woodchip, the varnished plywood. That they would be able to uncover something.

I glanced into one of the bedrooms. Two single beds lay draped with white candlewick. The curtains were thin and drooping. A dressing table, varnished thickly brown, stood underneath the window with a primrose-yellow kitchen chair pulled up to it. None of it was familiar, it must have belonged to the previous owner, and there was a smell, a faint lingering sourness that I couldn’t identify. I pushed open another door: a box room, stacked full of boxes; shoeboxes, cardboard boxes, a tangle of wire coat hangers on the floor. An old brown suitcase trimmed with aluminium that I remembered from childhood airport carousels. Laundry bags full of books, carrier bags stuffed with objects wrapped in newspaper. I lifted out a papery bundle, weighed it in my hands, instinctively knowing the cool heaviness of it. I peeled back the paper: the pewter jug, for big bold flowers, for daffodils in springtime, long-stemmed roses in summer, dahlias in autumn. The sleek curve of the metal sucked the warmth from my hands. I could smell newsprint, and the jug’s metallic tang. The room felt cold; it was as if the shadows had taken a step closer.

I could just go. I’d be home by midnight. The flat with its night-time smells of baby bath and milk; I’d sneak into Cate’s room and kiss her head, her hair curling into sweaty ringlets, and pull the covers up over her shoulder, and slip down the corridor and out of my jeans and into bed beside Mark. He’d mutter something, not really wake; I’d listen to him breathe. The alarm would go at half past six, and we’d lurch awake, and I’d be there, where I shouldn’t be, and that would make him right. Right about me, and about what should be done about me.

I pushed the final door.

As it swung slowly open my mobile rang.

I remember that moment, the sense of pause. Even though I was looking down...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 080417265X
• ISBN 13: 9780804172653
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 369
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien