The House of Brides Read online

  “She was probably distracted.” Fleur must be tired of sticking up for me.

  “She does it on purpose. So bloody ungrateful.”

  “‘After all I’ve done for her,’” I said to myself, thrusting my hand deep inside the safe, just as my father said those exact words outside the window.

  The doorbell rang loudly. Dad’s keys were on the table in the hall. Unsurprisingly, there were no sounds of my stepsisters. Ophelia was probably asleep on the sofa by now, Juliet still outside on her phone. My fingers finally wrapped around the small blue book, almost new and hard around the edges from lack of use. I slammed the safe shut and pushed the chair back into position.

  “Miranda!” He sounded angry now. Racing towards the door, I half tripped over the side of his rug, at the same time as my phone started to buzz on the desk where I had left it.

  My father had hidden my passport from me in the depths of my misery. He thought I was a flight risk. I’d known where it was all along, I just didn’t have anywhere to go. I jammed it down the front of my leggings as I unlatched the front door. Just in case. At the last moment, I tucked the letter in there as well.

  5

  My father didn’t come inside straightaway. Instead, he and Fleur had a quiet discussion I could not discern even though I was standing quietly on the other side of the door, my breath held, trying to work out if I had time to retrieve my phone. They had years of practice at this, having raised three daughters together. I too had years of practice at listening, unsuccessfully, the function of my ears having turned out to be only slightly better than my eyesight, despite years of consuming excess bananas. #potassium #hearhear #wellness

  This was bad. If my father was moderately upset, he would call the name of the offending daughter as soon as he opened the front door. Summoned in this way, the daughter would appear, slightly cautious but unfazed, knowing that for the greatest infractions a conference would first be held with Fleur. Motivations would be discussed and character assessments made, and eventually a punishment would be agreed upon, all inaudibly. An immediate summons is in itself a sort of reprieve.

  I am a grown woman, and even now, I know this is how it works. I should have put the car away. I should have moved the bins. I shouldn’t have been lazy or listened to teenagers. Listening to teenagers had gotten me in trouble before.

  I decided to risk it. Experience told me these conversations could go on for some time. I dashed back into the office and grabbed my phone.

  “Miranda!”

  I jumped. I had been so carefully listening for the small sounds, I was not at all ready for the big ones. The passport slipped ever so slightly from my waistband. Surprising, as my waistband had been quite tight of late.

  “Dad?”

  The door pushed open wider. I stood frozen in the middle of the room. It was too late to pretend to be doing anything. My hand went instinctively to the rose gold fob chain necklace—a family heirloom passed down from my mother—at my neck. I never take it off, even though it hangs low and annoys me while I run. Or used to annoy me when I still ran.

  “What are you doing in here?” my father barked.

  This question was like an impulse from him, the words out before he knew it. One of his many rules: no loitering in his office.

  “Just . . . just looking up something on your computer.”

  I was hoping that Dad’s command of computers remained as rudimentary as ever. The year before he’d surprised me by hiring an expert to bury negative search engine results with a series of more recent and more positive stories—which didn’t work, by the way. There’s an old saying, “The cream rises to the top,” which might have made sense in the days when people used to keep a cow in the backyard, but in cyberspace it’s just not true. The pale watery stuff, the part without any flavour or substance, that’s what sticks around these days.

  Anyway, I didn’t want him to know I’d been looking up Barnsley House on his computer.

  “I want to talk to you about something else.” I looked out the window; the car was already covered in the sticky sap he hated so much. Fleur had disappeared, deep into the house. Even she didn’t want to be around for my latest disappointment.

  “The car. I’m sorry.”

  Dad looked out the window, his face changing. His shoulders dropped slightly, like the battle he was preparing for had suddenly been called off. Breath visibly left his body.

  When he spoke, his voice was almost weary. I didn’t know if it was the carb overload or the Barolo, but he was tired.

  “I’ve asked you to put the car in the garage before, Miranda. The sap does irreparable damage to the paint if left for more than a few hours.”

  I wanted to say that it was Ophelia’s fault, that she was desperate to use the bathroom, that I meant to go back and move it, but even in my head those sounded like more petty excuses. By the sound of Dad’s voice, he’d had enough of my excuses.

  “Sorry. I’ll take it down to the car wash in the morning.”

  Fifty dollars. That’s how much the car wash cost, the only one my dad let near his car. Fifty dollars left a big dent in my paycheck these days.

  “What did you do with the letter?”

  I was so busy thinking about the car wash that I didn’t see his question coming. “What letter? I didn’t see any letter . . .” This was not convincing. Not by anyone’s standards. Certainly not by mine.

  “Don’t lie to me, Miranda! I’ve had enough of the lies.” Dad moved towards me, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought I had finally pushed him too far. Despite everything that we’d been through together, he had never reacted like this.

  I stepped back, hitting the desk. He had me cornered. The impact of the desk on my body brought him back to himself, and he breathed out. A long, frustrated sigh.

  “Miranda.” He held his hand out towards me, expecting me to give in.

  So I did. I fished the letter out from the waistband of my leggings. As soon as it was clear of my body, he snatched it from me and thrust it deep into his own pocket, without checking the contents. “I know what you’re thinking, Miranda.”

  This was impressive because even I had no idea what I was thinking. All I knew was that I had found a letter with a plea for help from a relative I had never met. That I had been waiting to hear from someone, anyone, from Barnsley for as long as I could remember. That at this point it would be nice to be useful. To have a fresh start. I wouldn’t call it thinking, though. Thinking was too precise a word for the giant maelstrom of emotion I was experiencing.

  “What am I thinking?”

  “You’re thinking this might be a way to escape all your problems.”

  I pictured myself at the airport. Carry-on luggage only. Waving my father and Fleur off at the gate. Tears in their eyes. Even better, I pictured my arrival at Heathrow. A large family greeting me. An old uncle, a gaggle of friendly teenagers. An overgrown and shaggy wolfhound. In an airport? It was a fantasy, after all.

  “I’m starting a new job next week.” I hoped it sounded more convincing than it felt.

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t got any money.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve never met this girl.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve no obligation to her. She sent this letter to my mother. She doesn’t even know I exist.”

  Dad looked shifty. “Does she know I exist?”

  The house around me was quiet, as if it was holding its breath alongside me. Outside, the boy next door bounced a basketball in a steady rhythm only punctuated by irregular thuds against the backboard. Usually my father sighed in exasperation at this constant sound track to our evening, but tonight he didn’t seem to notice. He did, however, step back and softly close the study door, as if he hadn’t realized how utterly self-absorbed Ophelia and Juliet were and how little interest they would have in this conversation.

  “Your mother and I tried to keep in touch with them. We sent them photos when you were born. When
your mother died, I contacted her brother. Do you know what I got back? A solicitor’s letter.”

  Oh. I was familiar with that feeling. My father rubbed his eyes. The buzz from the wine at dinner had faded, leaving him tired and crumpled.

  “What did it say?” I tried to ignore the crushing disappointment building inside me. Tried to forget about the years of thinking there might be a letter from my mother’s family. That there must have been some reason they didn’t get in touch. From the look on my father’s face, it didn’t seem like that letter was the one I had been waiting for all these years either.

  “It didn’t say much at all. Just the usual solicitor-speak. That neither your mother nor any of her descendants had any claim on the Barnsley estate.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I assumed it was because of what happened with your mother when she left. But now I don’t know if he even knew at all.”

  “What happened?”

  He shook his head. Clammed up again, like all the other times in my childhood when I asked questions about my mother and her family. He wandered over to the sideboard and poured himself a whisky into one of the crystal tumblers Fleur had arranged just so.

  “Is that safe to drink?” In all the years the whisky had been there, I had assumed it was just for show. Another Fleur touch. In fact, up until that moment I hadn’t been 100 percent certain it wasn’t cleaning fluid. By the look of the grimace on my father’s face, he wasn’t either.

  “So, what I’m trying to say to you is: there is nothing there for you, whatever harebrained scheme you’re cooking up. And I know you better than you know yourself—even if it hasn’t occurred to you yet, at some time in the next day or so your mind will come back to this letter in my pocket, and you’ll think maybe, just maybe, you should get involved.”

  “I wasn’t . . .”

  My father put his hand—the one holding the whisky—up vigorously. The tiniest amount of whisky splashed out on his hand. I watched the droplet sit there, anything rather than make eye contact. I wasn’t sure I could disguise the emotion in my eyes.

  “Some things—some people—are better left in the past. You might think it’s a good idea to head over there and see what you can do to help. That you can make up for—” He hesitated. “That you can fix things for everyone. That you can do something extraordinary. But Miranda”—and he looked at me this time, square in the eye, and I couldn’t do anything but look back—“it’s time for you to grow up. It’s time for you to accept that life is ordinary.”

  I knew he was wrong then. I knew that I was destined to do something great. Sure, I’d had a false start or two. Sure, I’d made a few mistakes. But if my mother had shown me one thing, it was that life didn’t need to be ordinary. I didn’t need to be ordinary.

  I had been young, the day of our conversation, but my mother had been insistent. The fob chain—removed from her neck as she lay in the bath, warm water dripping down my neck and under my school tunic as I bent down to receive it—was a piece of my mother, the essence of my mother. I didn’t know it was a farewell gift, that the words she spoke that day were a calculated bequest. That she must have known then how sick she was.

  “This belonged to my mother. And now I’m giving it to you. It’s a reminder of where I come from. Of where you come from.” She stopped to draw breath—whether due to her illness or because she had always been inclined towards dramatic pauses. “Barnsley House.”

  I waited again, taking a moment to inspect the necklace closely. Even though it had always hung around my mother’s neck, it was mine now, and every curvature of gold and precious link belonged to me. My fingers traced the initials etched into the shield:

  P.G.

  It didn’t make sense. My grandmother’s name had been Beatrice, the name my mother had chosen for me as a middle name. Miranda Beatrice Courtenay.

  “The most beautiful place on earth,” my mother said, her eyes roaming around her current situation in disdain. The bathroom had not yet been renovated. My mother had tried her best with a secondhand claw-footed bathtub, but the floorboards were bare and the wallpaper hung down in places. Many places. “One day maybe you will go there.”

  She closed her eyes. “Barnsley is so beautiful. So beautiful. It’s magnetic. People are drawn to the place. Special people.” Her eyes snapped open, fixed on mine. “People like you and me.”

  “Who’s P.G.?” I asked, glad to have her attention. I showed her the shield, but she wouldn’t look at it.

  “The House of Brides.”

  I was too young then to know or understand the mythology of the place. All I knew was that The House of Brides was my mother’s book. The book. She was The House of Brides.

  “Sarah . . . Gertrude . . . Elspeth . . . there’s been some amazing women in this family.” My mother sat up, bathwater sloshing and cascading. I looked away, protecting my mother’s privacy, but she grabbed my hand, forcing me to look at her. I tried not to notice how bony her fingers were, how her once strong body looked so frail. “Promise me, Miranda. Promise me not to be ordinary.” Her lip curled slightly at the word. “Promise me you’ll be an amazing woman too.”

  My skin prickled at the memory. There was a shout from next door. A basketball bounced heavily down the road. A dull thud as it landed on the bonnet of my father’s car, and then the slightest pause before the car alarm pierced the still night air. We stood looking at each other for a moment longer, as if a few seconds more might clear the air between us and somehow magic away the disappointment and regrets of the last year. Finally my father sighed and turned to leave. I heard him grab the car keys from the dish outside in the hallway, and then suddenly his head reappeared in the doorway.

  “Grant and Farmer, Miranda. Next Monday. No excuses.” And then the front door slammed.

  6

  It was the shame that got me in the end. People say you can’t run away from your problems, but you can. You just need to find somewhere like Barnsley with a dodgy internet connection and people so self-occupied that they couldn’t care less about what everyone else in the world is doing. It was a shock to find people who didn’t know or care what was happening on Instagram or social media. It was just what I needed.

  It wasn’t the letter that finally pushed me over the ledge, though. Despite what my father said that night in the study. I didn’t have a plan at that point. But maybe the seed was planted, and all it took was for someone to nurture it along. In the end, it was some woman I didn’t even know who made me hit rock bottom. A stranger. She was one of the few people who said something to my face. Most people hid behind their Twitter profiles or tried to soften the blow of what they were writing with endless hashtags. #authentic #wellness #phony

  A normal day at work, a couple of days after I found the letter. It was my last week at the activewear store; I was due to start at Grant and Farmer the following Monday. Despite the building summer heat, I felt cold all the time. It was either the guilt or the air conditioning they ramped up in the shop to make customers feel more like trying on compression pants and man-made fibres.

  The woman who tipped me over the edge seemed innocuous at first. Early forties, reasonably fit; good legs but self-conscious about her midsection. Standard weekday customer. We were getting along well. After everything that had happened, my most meaningful connections were with strangers. She played cardio tennis twice a week, did Pilates. Drank more than she should, but doesn’t everyone? Tried the 5:2 and the blood type diet without much success.

  I was on change-room duties that day. We took it in turns to rotate around the store. An hour by the change room, an hour on the floor merchandising and chatting to customers, an hour at the register. Perhaps if I had been on the register, she might not have said anything. It’s less of an emotional exchange at that point. Customers are starting to worry. The logical brain kicks back in.

  Have I made the right decision?

  Should I put this on the Visa or use the grocery money?

  D
o I really need this crop top/yoga mat/waterproof shell jacket in both colours? Is that the parking inspector?

  The real world edges closer.

  But we were back in the cocoon of the change rooms: all soft lighting and well-angled mirrors. The world is a good place back there.

  I had her on the ropes: three-quarter tights in the new barely-there fabric, two extra-long tank tops with racer backs, which in turn necessitated the purchase of a particular bra. It would be a good start towards hitting my total for the day. She had just made the obligatory turn and stretch in the mirror when she said it. One minute I was assuring her that no, I definitely couldn’t see her underwear through her leggings, and yes, she should feel 100 percent confident during her Pilates squat sessions; the next minute I was left reeling, bent over and backing from the change room. My safe place? Not so safe anymore.

  “You’re that girl, aren’t you?” she said, her head bobbing between her knees as she tried to catch a glimpse of her rear view in the mirror.

  At that stage I was a shell: I went through the motions of day-to-day life but I found no joy. Apart from my family and my work colleagues, I didn’t see anyone. I was too scared to contact my old friends, and my followers, well, they were following someone else by then. The store manager knew my story, but no one else knew who I was. The extra ten kilograms I had gained through comfort food and house arrest had something to do with it, but I had stopped highlighting my hair and avoided eye contact. Besides, most of my posts had been of food and what I used to call #fitspo. I mostly kept my face out of it.

  The hanger I was holding clattered to the ground. I hastily pulled the door to the change room closed so she couldn’t see me.

  So she couldn’t be sure.

  “Who?” I said, trying to keep the wobble out of my voice.

  “That girl? The one with the app? The one who made the claims about fertility and cancer and whatnot.” She laughed, as if she found the whole thing ludicrous. As if she couldn’t quite believe she was even talking about me, let alone to me.