Night & Day (expanded)

She’s running. She’s running so fast that her lungs are burning, but she isn’t running fast at all. She’s running through gardens, over hedges and fences, along streets that are lit eerily by street light that penetrates the dull grey of the morning. She can see her feet moving, she can see her chest heaving, she can hear someone behind her, breathing deeply. It feels as though the person is close, as though he (or she, but she knows it’s a he) is breathing down her neck. But at the same time, it feels as though he is lagging far behind her.

She can’t afford to slow her pace. She runs into a display outside a greengrocer’s. For some reason the crates of fruit and vegetables are penned in behind that orange netting you find on building sites. Her feet become tangled in the netting and the crates. The teenage girl who is setting out the crates smiles at her encouragingly, her shalwar kameez rippling in the night breeze.

Is it night, or is it dawn? The sky makes her think that it’s night. She tries to speak to the girl, but her chest is still heaving from having to run, and she can’t get any words out. The girl continues to smile encouragingly. She doesn’t speak either. She merely pushes a crate out of the way and holds back the netting.

Free of the display, she runs on, her breath raw and ragged in her throat, burning and hurting with the coldness of the air she tries to gasp into her lungs.

She hears him drawing closer behind her, but he is still far away. Urgency spurs her on. People appear on the doorsteps of houses, to watch her running along their street. The women stand with arms folded, the men holding steaming mugs of tea. They all look the same.

She longs to stop running, longs to sit down somewhere. She longs for the sun to rise, but time doesn’t seem to be passing, no matter how fast she runs or how far she goes. The sky stays the same, and he is always the same distance behind her.

She wakes up. The room is dark. She feels hot. She puts a hand to her own forehead. It is cold and clammy.

She sits up slightly and takes a drink from the glass of water beside the bed. He stirs in his sleep.

A dream, then. She wonders what it is about. She hasn’t dreamt of being chased in a long time. Her last dream was about choosing beans in a supermarket and having her legs stroked by Niall. She tries not to think about Niall. It isn’t fair to Ray, who sleeps heavily beside her, his dark curls against the pillow, his strong body an arm-stretch away.

She looks at the clock. It’s 3.38 in the morning. She thinks of Niall. It’s inevitable. You tell yourself not to think of something, and it’s all you can think of.

Niall will be up, drinking, trying to write, trying to be the person he is, not knowing fully what that might be. Her laptop is on the floor beside the bed. She could switch it on. Ray sleeps so deeply that, these kinds of nights, when she is Insomnia’s bitch, she can read, she can surf, she can do a fucking dance on top of the wardrobe, and he sleeps through it all.

She loves Niall, but not in a way that anyone else understands. It isn’t a heart-pounding, palm-sweating, voice-trembling love. It isn’t giggles, and coy looks, and birds flying off into sunsets. She loves him, and she hates him.

She pulls the pillows up against the headboard, so that her shoulders are supported, and she thinks about that other dream. She remembers the way it felt, in dreamland, to have him stroke the length of her legs. The way he had smiled his usual smile, his eyes narrowed, and told her that he liked how smooth they were.

She closes her eyes. ‘Just zizzing’ her mother calls it. But suddenly it is morning and she is awoken by the smoke alarm’s shriek.

He is in the kitchen, cooking sausages. The grill pan is a deadly vat of animal fat that smokes and threatens to burn each time he uses it. He never cleans it, and she refuses to wash away his pig grease. The price she pays for this is wafting a towel underneath the smoke alarm, while he cooks on oblivious.

The benefits of being deaf. She knows he feels the vibrations of sound, because when she plays the piano at her parents’ house, he likes to stand with one hand on it, smiling at her. Night & Day is his favourite.

“Go on, mum,” he says with his grin. “Go on.”

Her boy, her man, her eight-year-old hero. Abandoned, along with her, by his dad the instant he realised his son wasn’t perfect. Abandoned to a one bedroomed flat and a shared bed. Soon she’ll have to think about making him a room of his own, sacrificing a share of the living room, perhaps.

They could live with her parents. The invitation is there. His parents feel so guilty about their son’s behaviour that they have offered to pay for a larger place for them. But she wants to be independent. She doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone. Having Ray, knowing Jimmy was unreliable, knowing he would have scarpered anyway eventually, Ray’s deafness just a convenient excuse, was her choice.

She has let the alarm shriek this morning. She doesn’t want to move from the bed.

Ray appears with a fully laden tray. Breakfast. It must be Saturday, then. He grins at her as he comes into the room.

She pulls herself up enough to sign to him, “You set the smoke alarm off, Ray.”

“Sorry,” he says. Beautiful sound when he speaks. She is so proud of him that he can do that. Form the words with his mouth and make his voice work to fill the shapes with sound. She knows it makes other people uncomfortable, so that they laugh or they look away, but she thinks his voice is the most beautiful sound on the planet.

He puts the tray onto the bed, and she sits up properly. He gives her the cup of tea he has made for her, and the plate of toast with silver shred marmalade. They smile at each other. He sits on the edge of the bed, eating his sausage butty, drinking his glass of milk, looking at her and grinning every now and then.

Sure that he is looking at her properly, she says, “Come here.”

He grins and shakes his head. He knows what mum is up to. He wants to finish his breakfast and get ready. In half an hour, Paul and his son will ring the doorbell, and she’ll nod to Ray. Off he’ll go for a morning of playing football, leaving the house to her. Perhaps this morning she’ll clean out that filthy grill pan. Even though he claims that it makes the sausages and the bacon taste better, having all that molten fat spitting up at it from beneath.

She says again, "Come here.”

He grins again; shakes his head again. He doesn’t want to be hugged or have his curly mop untangled by her fingers. He doesn’t want to be groomed like he’s a monkey.

She gives in and drinks her tea.

“Mum,” he says.

“What?” she answers.

“This afternoon. Is it okay if I stay out and go back to Jaden’s after football?”

“Yeah,” she says. “What new playstation game has he got now?”

Ray grins, and names the latest game. It means nothing to her. He explains its rules and the tricks for bypassing them to her in intricate detail, half speaking, half signing when he can’t get the words out. She loves her boy, her man.

She looks at the clock. He needs to be getting ready to go.

“Are you ready?” she asks him.

He isn’t looking, so she hits the flat of her hand against the bed. The breakfast tray jumps slightly. He looks at her.

“Ready? It’s time to get ready,” she says.

He wolfs the last of his sandwich and drinks up his milk, then goes into the bathroom. She listens to him wash his face, clean his teeth. She wishes he would let her untangle his hair.

He reappears in the bedroom doorway. The doorbell rings, and she nods in its direction.

“Go on,” she says. “Have a good day. Tell Jaden’s dad to ring me if he wants me to pick you up.”

“See you, mum,” he says, and is off.

She closes her eyes again and waits for the flat door to open and bang closed again. She thinks about ringing Niall. She has the day to herself, after all. But 8 a.m. is an uncivilised hour to be ringing people on a Saturday.

She wishes that Ray liked Niall. She doesn’t think to wonder why he doesn’t. She doesn’t want to know why he doesn’t. Acknowledging his dislike will mean acknowledging why Niall isn’t right for her. It will mean telling herself why she hates him as much as loves him.

Ray has only met Niall once.

“He’s a prick, mum,” was what he’d said. She hadn’t even thought to ask him where he learned the word prick.

Ray likes Paul. He talks about him all the time. How cool he is. How he gets Jaden all the stuff he wants. How he treats Ray to stuff as well. Nothing major, nothing for her to break Ray’s heart over by giving it back. Just enough for her to feel grateful that there is some man in the world who cares for her son.

She thinks about Niall, and she picks up the phone. She rings his number. The answering service clicks in. She leaves him a message.

“Hi, it’s me. Ring me when you get up. I’ve got the day to myself.”

He would know what that meant. She knows that he probably won’t call back, that he will tell her later that he’d been too busy. But she has remembered the dream now, and she wants to feel his hand against her skin.

She’s asleep when the phone does ring. In her dream she hears the ringtone as a tune on the radio; something played in the distance. It takes her brain a moment to register that the sound is coming from outside her dream world; that it’s coming from reality.

Opening her eyes just a crack, just enough to see where it is, she picks up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It’s Niall.”

She sits up and tries to wake up.

“Hi,” she says.

“Were you asleep? Did I wake you up?” Niall asks.

“Yes,” she says, “but I’m glad.”

“I’m afraid I can’t see you today.” Even though she knew that this was going to be what he said, she still feels disappointed. She stays silent and waits for more. Nothing more comes.

“Never mind,” she says. “It was just a thought.”

“It was a nice thought, but unfortunately, in this game, I can’t just drop things. I can’t always guarantee I’ll get a weekend at all. You know that.”

She yawns. “I suppose,” she says, mouth full of the conflict of air trying to reach her lungs and breath trying to give life to the words her mouth is forming.

“Are you pissed off with me?”

She sits in silence for a moment. Anything she says will come out sounding as though she is. She says no for form’s sake. It is the truth, she isn’t pissed off, but he won’t believe that.

“I am sorry,” he tells her, the regret he tries to infuse his voice with almost sounding real. “I’ve got loads to do. It’s impossible.”

She imagines what that 'loads' entails. Reading the papers. Playing on his computer, trying to look as though he’s working. Drinking in the middle of the day.

She wanted to feel his hand against her skin. That was all.

“I’ll ring you,” Niall says. “When I’ve got all of this out of the way, I’ll ring you. We’ll go out.”

She decides not to hold her breath. This is what she hates most about him; the way everything is on his terms; the way that he expects her to drop everything to be with him, including Ray, but he never does anything to fit in with her.

“Okay,” she says. It’s a half-whisper of disappointment.

“Ah, now you’re making me feel bad,” he says. “Don’t make me feel bad. This is how things are for me. You understand that. I know you understand that.”

She stays silent.

“You are sulking,” Niall says, and suddenly she wants to scream.

“I’ll let you go,” she says, biting down on the words she wants to say; that she isn’t sulking; that she just wants a bit of respect; a bit of consideration. “You should get back to what you’re doing.”

“Are you okay?” he asks, solicitous as far as he needs to be. “I’ve upset you. You’re disappointed. I don’t like it when you’re disappointed.”

“Well,” she says. “I wanted to see you. But it’s okay. I know. You’re busy.”

She doesn’t want to talk to him like this. She resents being forced into the role of importunate woman, pleading through the application of emotional blackmail. It isn’t what she means. She means the words factually, but she knows that he will hear them whichever way suits him; whichever way will turn the tables and make her feel as though she is the unreasonable one in wanting to see him.

“Well, yes, but… You know I’d rather see you. There’s nothing more I’d like than to spend the day with you. I just can’t.”

“Okay,” she says again.

“Okay,” he replies. “Well, I’m going now. But I will ring you.”

“Okay. Fine.”

“Okay. You’re okay?”

“I’m fine. Go.”

He puts the phone down and she tries to snuggle back down into her pillows, under the duvet, but the spell of going back to sleep on a Saturday morning in an empty house has worn off.

She throws back the duvet and sits up, sliding her feet into her slippers. She pulls her dressing gown from the back of the door and walks through the flat to the bathroom. She piles her hair up, pinning it loosely, and looks at herself in the mirror. She looks disappointed. She forces herself to smile, but her eyes are dead with weariness.

“You’re right, Ray,” she says to her absent son. “The guy’s a prick.”

She showers and, wrapped again in her dressing gown, she makes herself tea in the tiny kitchen that sits in between the bedroom and the bathroom. There’s just enough room to fit in a small table and two folding chairs. She unfolds one of the chairs now and sits at the table, nursing the mug of tea between her hands.

She wishes that she didn’t love him, that the few good things about him didn’t outweigh the disproportionate number of bad things. She is a sucker for intelligence and creativity. It pulls her in every time.

She smiles as she thinks about the night times. Long hours spent talking. Long stretches of silence while music plays and he holds her hand, stroking the back of it with his thumb. The slow urgency of his touch as they make love on the couch in his living room. Always the same pattern. Always at night. Always without sleep.

And then she steals away in the early morning in a cab he pays for, as night gives way to day.

“Oh, but it isn’t worth it,” she tells herself, getting up from the table and taking her empty mug over to the sink.

It’s not what she needs; either for her self, or for Ray. As good as those nights are, as intense in their passion, they are no substitute for reliability and commitment. She has to be practical.

“Love has nothing to do with practical, Susan,” she says as she fills the washing up bowl and begins to clean the dishes.

She looks at the grill pan, abandoned by Ray on top of the hob. She decides that it’s too much to face. She has the day to herself; she isn’t about to waste it trying to clean days’ worth of grease from a grill pan.

She looks at the kitchen clock. It’s already two p.m. She wishes now that she had gone to the football to watch Ray. That might have been fun.

Her phone rings again. Drying her hands of the suds from the washing up, she goes into the bedroom and picks it up. Niall’s number shows on the display.

This time she lets it ring out.

She decides to catch the bus into town and see a film. Sitting alone in a room as dark as night in the middle of the afternoon has a charm all its own. She dresses and picks up her coat and bag. She takes her mp3 player from the living room table and leaves the house.

She puts her headphones in her ears, selects shuffle and presses play.

Ella begins to sing.

Her stride matches to the rhythm of the tom-tom and suddenly she knows that everything will be fine.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006/January 2007

The Withdrawing Room

He was there on a whim. He had lived close to the house for most of his life, and yet he had never once set foot through its doors. History, he told himself, was safer when it stayed inside a book.

He paid his entrance fee at the strange wooden hut just past the main gates and drove slowly through the parkland, watching out, as the signs instructed, for stray deer.

Parking the car on a handbrake-worrying slope, Martin walked up to the house. A young woman, a girl who could have been one of last year’s GCSE drop-outs, took more money from him at the door and handed him a brochure. Martin felt curiously gauche as he took the pamphlet from her and began studying the layout of the house. He decided to take the path of least resistance and started to walk up the stairs facing him to the upper floors of the house, simply because they were there.

In each of the rooms he entered there was a guide standing at a strategic point. Martin found them strangely off-putting. These guides were mostly women of a certain age, and Martin imagined that they smelled of face powder and ancient lipstick, like his grandmother and her sisters had. Then Martin remembered that he wasn’t as young as he used to be, and most of the women standing there in their National Trust uniforms were actually his mother’s age. In which case, he told himself, they would smell of fabric softener and Opium.

Each one looked as though she had been told to behave like a Guardsman outside Buckingham Palace, rigidly standing to attention. The few who had chairs to rest on leapt instantly to their feet the moment he set foot in the room they guarded. He found himself wishing for an audio-guide; something he could cover his ears with that would tell him everything he wanted to know and would mean that these creatures from another planet wouldn’t be there, making him feel like a potential thief.

Because he hadn’t been to one of these places since he was a bored teenager on a family trip, Martin wasn’t sure what to do. He decided to follow the general trend and wandered from room to room, looking at the meaningless pieces of antique furniture. He had the feeling he should have shelled out on a proper guide book.

After a few minutes’ wandering, Martin found himself in a book-lined room which he guessed was the library. For all he knew it could have been the salon. He had given up looking at the brochure three rooms ago, since all the rooms looked alike.

He looked around at the cracked and decrepit bindings facing out from the bookshelves. In the middle of the central wall, in between the floor to ceiling bookcases, was a door. There was something about it that drew his eye. It seemed to be ajar, but he couldn’t see what was on the other side. Martin was a curious man and he exhibited his curiosity very practically. He stepped over the velvet rope, intended to keep him from handling the books and sitting on the furniture, and walked confidently up to the door. In his determination to see if the door opened and acted like one of the hidden shortcuts at IKEA he was oblivious to whether this was acceptable stately home etiquette.

As he got to the door, he realised that it wasn’t ajar at all. It was a trompe l’oeuille. He inspected the painting that seemed so real it had tricked his eyes, and then he put his hand onto the doorknob. It was large and round and brass. It felt good in his hand. He turned it and pulled towards him, but the door didn’t move. He checked the hinges, to reassure himself that the door would move towards him and not the other way. There were no hinges to be seen, so he turned the handle again and pushed. Again it didn’t budge. The door, it seemed, was locked.

Martin was suddenly overcome with desire; a desire to see what lay beyond this door that had invited him over for a closer look. He crouched down and positioned his eye at the keyhole. Beyond the wooden barrier was another room with more furniture; something that looked like a piano; some chairs; he could only see slices of the objects, though. The field of vision through the keyhole was narrow.

Suddenly something else appeared within his immediate sight-line. It was clear green, like a marble; a piece of glass manhandled by the ocean. Then it moved and he realised that it was an eye that was looking back at him through the keyhole.

He pulled back and tried to work out how an eye looking back at him through a keyhole could seem so clear and so alien.

“Are you looking for something?” a voice said on the other side of the door.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, Are you looking for something?” the voice said again.

“Erm, not exactly, no,” he replied.

The door opened and a woman looked at him, laughing at his still crouched form.

“It’s just a hobby of yours, then, is it? Peering through keyholes?”

He straightened his back. She was perfect. One of those arty women with glossy dark hair cut into an angular Louise Brooks bob. Even her clothes had something of the 1920s about them. Her eyes, a piercing green against the whiteness of her skin, seemed to look right into him. Her face was impish, its features neat. The smile that curved her lips chased laughter up into her eyes.

“I just wondered why the door was locked,” Martin mumbled, feeling sheepish, incapable of brazening it out. “Wanted to see what was on the other side.”

He couldn’t look at her; her gaze was too much to bear. He looked instead at the carpet. The woman stepped through the open doorway, then pulled the door closed behind her again and locked it with a large and gilded key. Her shoes were neat and Martin could have bitten the slender ankles that rose from them.

“The withdrawing room’s on the other side,” she said, forcing Martin to look at her again. She smiled. “You get to it eventually. It’s on the other side of the house and you have to walk through all the other rooms first.”

She was already walking away from him before she finished speaking. Her pace was fast and purposeful. Martin set off in pursuit, but he wasn’t fast enough. She reached the end of the room ahead of him, turned left and disappeared through a door marked Staff Only.

He paused at the door through which only members of staff could pass as though he were lost in thought. After a moment or two of distraction he moved on, making his way round the circuit of rooms, gazing abstractedly at the furnishings and the rare hand painted Chinese wallpapers.

She had asked him if he was looking for something. He wondered what it was that had made him walk in among the furniture in what he thought was the library, but which could have been the blue room, or even the salon, and put his eye to that tantalising keyhole.

He stopped. What had she been doing holding her eye to the keyhole as well?

Looking down on the scene from above, peeling away the ceiling, he saw the two of them, crouched on either side of the door, one eye to each side of the keyhole, looking for something. Or looking for nothing. Perhaps just looking for the sake of it.

Looking, all the same. And looking at each other, as it turned out.

Looking down on the scene as he did, from inside his mind’s eye, he didn’t see it right. He had it wrong.

Martin pictured the woman crouched in a mirror position to his own, the pair of them looking at each other but not knowing it until her eye moved. Although, her voice had held no hint of surprise when she had asked if he were looking for something. He blushed, standing there, still paused in the corridor as people tried to make their way around him on their conveyor belt tour of the house. He blushed because he realised in that moment that she must have been looking at him all along, and she must have realised that he didn’t know she was there.

He blushed and wanted to kiss her.

“Now where did that come from?” he wondered.

“Are you alright, sir?”

He turned to look behind him, to find out who had spoken at his shoulder. It was one of the official guides.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“I wondered whether you were alright. Whether you needed any help. You have been standing there for a while now.”

The woman smiled at him encouragingly in her bottle green sweatshirt and her neat, pleated skirt. He looked at her shoes. They were neat and kittenish for a woman her age. A woman his mother’s age.

“I’m fine,” he said, smiling back. “I was just thinking. Sorry.”

The woman continued to smile at him and put her head on one side the better to crinkle her eyes indulgently at him. Then she walked past him and on along the corridor, following the shuffling caravan of visitors. He had been right. She smelled of fabric softener.

Then he started.

“There is one thing,” Martin called after her.

The woman paused and turned to look back at him, down along the corridor. She didn’t move, so he walked towards her. She smiled as he approached.

“Yes?” she said, once he was close enough for her not to have to raise her voice.

“There was a woman, a member of staff I think. She came through the door from the withdrawing room and then went off through that door there,” he gestured to the door marked Staff Only, “does she work here?”

“I hope she does, if she went through that door,” the woman replied, her smile hardening, less indulgent now.

“Do you know her name? I mean, I’d like to speak to her, to ask her a question,” he was blushing again. “A question about the withdrawing room.”

“I can answer your question about the withdrawing room.”

The woman looked at him, rigidly welcoming his question. He let the silence stretch on. He wanted her jaw to ache, to see how long she could hold the customer care grimace in place.

It didn’t waver.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll write in or something.”

The woman gave him a curiously anachronistic nod, as though she were a gentlewoman in a period drama, and continued her perambulation of the rooms.

Again he pictured the two of them, the green-eyed woman and him, looking at each other through that keyhole. He watched as though he were an external observer. He had the impression that she was taller than he was. It was her eye that made him think that. The shine in it, the sparkle, hinted at the purer air of high altitude.

He couldn’t have described her to anyone. He’d barely seen her. Dark hair; 1920s clothes; the clarity and the greenness of her eye was what had caught his attention.

He continued through the house and eventually reached the withdrawing room. He half expected to see her there, still paused in front of the door, still bent at the waist with her eye to the keyhole, looking at him who didn’t yet know that he was looking at her. He wished that he could freeze time and step out of it so that he could see exactly what she had been doing on this other side of the door.

He walked in among the furniture, as he had done on the far side, confident enough as he crossed another red velvet rope that signified No Entry to again not be noticed. He walked up to the door and bent down to put his eye to this side of the keyhole.

He heard a giggle. He thought he saw the movement of someone pulling their face away from the door. He stood up and tried the handle, thinking he would pull open the door and surprise her there, but the door was locked.

He put both hands against the panelling and leaned his face as close to the wood as he could.

“Is it you?” he whispered.

He thought he heard her whisper back, “Yes. Is it you?”

“It’s me,” he whispered again.

“Sir, why are you whispering to the door?”

He jolted and turned around, almost whiplashing himself. It was the same guide as before, the one with the kittenish shoes.

“Sir, visitors shouldn’t walk among the exhibits. Would you please return to the designated route?”

“I thought I - ”

“Sir?”

“Never mind.” He moved away from the door, back through the careworn furniture to the official pathway through the house. “I’m sorry. I thought I’d seen someone go through that way earlier.”

The guide looked at him, apparently taken aback.

“That’s impossible, sir,” she said. “That door’s been locked since 1923 and nobody knows where the key is.”

“But I saw someone, a woman, she was looking through the keyhole at me. She opened the door and came through, then locked it after her.”

“Which room were you in, sir?”

“The blue room. Or maybe the pink. I don’t know. There were books. It might have been the library.” Martin realised he was babbling. “Anyway,” he continued, “I asked her what the room was that she had come from, and she said the withdrawing room.”

They were standing now on the designated route, close to one of the tall windows that looked over the ha-ha and the landscaped gardens to the rear. The guide was frowning at him.

“Are you sure sir? That door doesn’t have a key and it hasn’t been opened since - ”

“Since 1923, yes you said.”

“What did she look like, this woman?” the guide asked him.

Martin shrugged. “I don’t know. Louise Brooks maybe. All I know is that I looked through the keyhole, to see what was on the other side, and her eye was looking back at me.”

“You make a habit of wandering where you shouldn’t to look through keyholes do you, sir?” The guide was trying to hide a smile.

Martin laughed in response. “I’m curious,” he said. “What can I say?”

He looked back at the door, at the furniture between them and it.

“That is the withdrawing room, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. At least, it was a withdrawing room at one point in the life of the house. We have it set up as a music room now. Do you see the spinet over there? It’s a very rare example of the instrument.”

“So it’s not the withdrawing room?”

“Well, technically, no it’s not.”

“So whoever came through the door was lying to me?”

“But nobody could have gone through the door, sir. The door is locked.”

“Since 1923, I know. Except,” he paused and looked at the guide, “I definitely saw someone else’s eye on the other side of the keyhole and then she came through the door and she locked it after her. She told me I would get to the room if I carried on through the house, then she disappeared through a door marked Staff Only.”

The guide turned down the corners of her mouth and shook her head. She wanted Martin to know that there was nothing else she could say. They stood and looked at each other for a moment more and then she moved off, in the opposite direction to the general flow of traffic, her shoes tapping on the parquet flooring.

Martin turned to look again at the door. As he stood there trying to puzzle out what he knew he had seen, the door opened and the same green eyed woman came through it.

“Hello,” she said as she locked the door behind her. “Fancy seeing you here. Have you found what you were looking for yet?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t think I was looking for anything, and a guide just told me that it wasn’t possible for anyone to go through that door because it’s been - ”

“Locked since 1923, I know.” She grinned. “It hasn’t really been locked all that time. Everyone thinks that the key is lost, but actually,” she held up the key, then slipped it into a pocket on the front of her dress, “I have the only key in the place.”

She’d crossed the room by now and was standing next to him. He was right, she was taller than he was. Light from the afternoon sun came through the window and made her eyes shine like emeralds.

“You said this was the withdrawing room,” he said.

“It is. This is a mock up of a music room. Every home should have one.” She smiled again, then, “Well,” she said, “I hope you’re enjoying your visit. I’d best get back to my work.”

And then she was off again. He watched her as she walked away from him.

Her eyes really were a perfectly clear green.

This time he chased after her.

“Wait!” he shouted. Another visitor looked at him disapprovingly. He pulled a face at her and continued chasing after the woman.

“Miss, wait!” he shouted again.

The woman stopped and turned slightly to look back at him. She was smiling.

“Listen,” Martin was panting. He tried to control his breathing. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had to run. “Listen,” he said again.

She put her hand on his arm. Through the layers of his jacket, his jumper and his shirt, he could feel that it was cool. “Take your time,” she said. “Get your breath back.”

Martin bent at his waist, putting his hands on his thighs to support his upper body weight.

“God, I’m out of condition,” he wheezed.

“I bet you smoke as well,” the woman said dryly.

Martin looked up at her and laughed. “Actually, I don’t,” he said. “But I might as well, for all the good abstinence is doing me.”

“Are you okay now?” she asked as he straightened up and looked at her.

“Better,” he replied.

“You were saying, then?”

“I was saying?”

“Listen, was what you said.”

“Oh yeah. Listen, can I take you for a coffee or some lunch or something?”

“Are you propositioning me?”

Martin tried not to look embarrassed, but failed. “No,” he said, “of course not!”

“Shame,” the woman told him, mischief filling her eyes. She laughed once, and her hair shook, the glossy shafts of blackness falling to and fro across each other before settling back into perfection. “Most men can’t resist.”

They were standing by another window. The angle of the sun came through the glass and caused the flecks of green in her eyes to sparkle. On impulse, Martin took her hand.

The woman squeezed his hand and said, “Can I show you something?”

Martin felt perplexed, and almost drew his hand away from hers. At the first movements of the bones and tendons in his fingers she held onto his hand with a slight increase of pressure.

“What do you mean?” Martin asked her, allowing his hand to stay where it was, relaxing again into the mutual grip of the thing.

With a deft movement, the woman interlaced her fingers with his and began to walk back through the house, the way he had come, the way she had kept avoiding by slipping to and fro through that eternally locked but unlocked door. Martin had no choice but to go with her.

“I mean,” she said, pausing before the door marked Staff Only, “I want to show you something. Something I’ve been working on. Daddy doesn’t know.”

Martin frowned. He didn’t remember reading anything about the family still being around; certainly not still connected with the house; but he supposed it wasn’t out of the realms of possibility for the daughter of a former owner to be taken on to help look after the place.

She had opened the door and was leading him down a narrow corridor. They walked in silence. She had the purposeful gait of someone doing something she shouldn’t; knowingly marching him to his fate before anyone could stop her. Martin had the good sense not to try to make conversation.

The corridor was white. Modern plasterboard walls ran along their left, with occasional doors that led, Martin assumed, into offices for the curatorial staff. He hoped, for the curators’ sakes, that there were windows on the other side of the offices.

The woman stopped at the end of the corridor and turned to him. There was a door behind her, another of the house’s original doors. She had her hand on the door knob; was about to open it to reveal the surprise.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

Martin obeyed.

He felt rather than heard the door open. There was something like a gust of wind, or a breeze, that passed across his face. The woman had let go of his hand and left him standing there, eyes closed, waiting for her next instruction.

“Can I help you?” a voice said.

Martin opened his eyes. Standing in front of him, door thrown open to reveal an office behind her, was a woman whose staff badge said Julia. She was looking at him as though she wanted to appear brave.

Martin opened his mouth but didn’t know what to say.

“How did you get in here?” Julia, asked him.

Martin was still standing there open mouthed, incapable of speech.

“I…” he managed to get out.

“This area is Staff Only,” she said, enunciating the capitalisation. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

“Where did she go?” Martin finally managed to blurt out.

“What?”

“The woman who brought me through here. Is she in there?” He tried to see into the room behind Julia, then realised that there was no more room to see. Her desk and a pair of filing cabinets filled the space.

“What woman?” Julia said, relaxing and leaning against the door frame. She folded her arms and looked at him with curiosity. Her green eyes cut straight to the quick of him.

Martin blushed under her gaze. He felt as though he were fifteen years old, trying to describe the girl at school that he fancied.

“She brought me in here,” he said, helplessly.

“I’m the only one here,” Julia told him. “What do you say to that?”

Martin’s posture was beginning to take on the question “Am I in trouble?”

Julia remained silent. She carried on leaning in the doorway, looking at Martin, trying to suss him out.

“I don’t know,” Martin said eventually.

Julia laughed. “I think you’d better go,” she told him, standing up and preparing to return to the quiet of her office. “You really shouldn’t be here.”

“Sorry,” Martin said. “Of course. I’ll go now.”

Julia smiled at him. She didn’t know why, but something about him made her want to ruffle his hair, or take care of him, or something.

“Maybe you’ll come again,” she said, without knowing why.

Martin smiled back at her. “Maybe,” he agreed.

She closed the door, still smiling, and Martin turned to walk back down the corridor and out through the door where he had come in with the strange green-eyed woman. Julia had unsettled him slightly, but he didn’t know how.

The kitten-shoed guide was waiting outside the door as Martin emerged. Martin started, instantly feeling guilty, but the woman didn’t speak.

“Hello again,” Martin said.

“You do get around, don’t you?” she responded.

Martin smiled. He wanted to laugh, but stifled it. He was thinking of Julia; thinking he might come back again. Soon, he thought. He looked at the guide and smiled. She reminded him of someone. The sparkle in her eyes, the steadiness of her gaze.

Nothing more was said between them. Martin nodded his head briefly, by way of goodbye, then made his way back through the house to the exit.

The guide followed slowly in the same direction, her shoes tapping out a sedate rhythm on the flooring; more sedate than when her grandmother would skitter through the house wearing them. She reached her post in the music room, by the wall where the portrait of her grandmother hung. She looked at the picture, at the tall woman with the 1920s clothes and the emerald green eyes, poised and posed beside a window looking out onto a ha-ha and a perfectly landscaped garden. The guide winked at her grandmother’s portrait.

“You picked well,” she told her, silently.

Feeling a presence at her shoulder, the guide in her grandmother’s kittenish shoes looked away from the original Julia, captured in the frame, and turned to see the replica standing there, with the same window behind her, the same view outside.

“Hello, mum,” Julia said. “Are you ready for some lunch?”

“Yes, dear,” her mother replied.

They walked back together to the door marked Staff Only. Julia opened the door and let her mum go through first. As her mother walked past, Julia spoke. She tried to make it sound as though the question was idle, but her mother knew the sound of false disinterest when she heard it.

“Mum,” Julia said. “Did you notice a strange man visiting the house today?”

Her mother smiled but didn’t turn around.

“Yes, dear,” was all she said.

© J R Hargreaves January 2007