Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Maude was unconcerned by the injury her foot or ankle had sustained since Catherine’s previous visit. She only wore one boot and her hobble was more pronounced as the other foot was entirely encased in a bandage. She should have been resting. Asking Maude about the injury seemed like a useless gesture, and Catherine’s pity would make a weak show of appearing for anyone but herself. Edith seemed entirely unaware that Maude had even suffered an injury and issued orders as if the housekeeper were a slave.

‘You must understand, dear, that my mother and uncle were Victorians. They believed animals had souls. That they were good and evil. The Victorians were fascinated by an animal’s true nature. So they depicted it.’ Edith looked to the red squirrels prancing upon the piano forte and smiled.

And rats are most like us. Pests. Vermin. Scurrying. Frenzied. Determined to survive in any landscape and in any conditions.

‘I think you understand, Miss Howard. Understand perfectly.’ Edith smiled as if acknowledging Catherine’s thoughts that she had heard as loud as the handbell the old woman began to ring. ‘I’m afraid I must rest now. It’s time for you to go. But before you leave your home on Monday, do not pack too much. We don’t like our home cluttered with things that don’t belong here. Just prepare your toilet. We have everything else you will need.’

‘Sorry?’

‘While you work to prepare the world for our treasures, you shall live upstairs with me.’

Catherine nearly choked as she smothered the gasp of horror that tried to slip out. Then felt paralysed by a sense of social awkwardness she imagined growing to unbearable proportions if she ever spent one night beneath the roof of the Red House. ‘No, I really couldn’t impose like—’

‘Nonsense!’

Catherine flinched. Her watery, perfumed tea slopped over the saucer’s edge and on to her skirt.

‘Time is wasted with all this toing and froing in your motor car. The matter has been decided. Maude has prepared your room.’

Catherine coughed to clear her throat. ‘She has?’

‘But you must be patient with us. We are unaccustomed to guests.’

From shock at the very prospect of staying at the Red House, her head felt empty, her mind a void. No thoughts echoed inside her. She felt like a doll; something to be positioned by the insistent and capricious will of a nasty little girl.

Catherine had been waiting in her dad’s car for three hours when she saw them together.

Mike opened the little iron gate at the front of the short path that led to the terraced house he shared with two trainee teachers in Worcester, and he paused to look out at the street. Surreptitiously, so the woman beside him wouldn’t notice he had done so. So she , the woman he had left her for, would be untroubled by the gesture. It was like Mike expected Catherine to be there, watching. Because she had form. She was a nutcase.

Catherine had parked tight to the curb, positioned some distance from the house so Mike wouldn’t see her when he left or entered the building. He always walked up the street and away from the shops in St John’s Wood. She’d never known him approach the house from any other direction, so was sure he would not see her position when he came home, if he came home . To make herself harder to identify while she conducted surveillance, she’d even borrowed her father’s car. Her red Mini would have revealed her pitiful behaviour even in Mike’s peripheral vision.

She was there because what had given her no peace since he dumped her at the dinner table in public was the fact that he still had not attempted contact, in any medium. Not even an apologetic text message, or a letter including reasons, explanations, an insincere desire to remain friends, or any other insulting platitude designed to make her feel better. Nothing.

Catherine could think too easily of reasons why he’d rejected her. He’d probably known her at her best, each time they had been together, so even at her best she’d been made to remember she was intolerable. But before she went away for a few days to work in residence at the Red House, she urgently needed to know the exact reason why he had broken her heart. And now she did.

Mike had offered no opportunity for discourse because communication would have forced his hand. Explanations would have been required. Disclosure of motive for what he had done. Who he had met and replaced her with.

Mike’s flight from her had been frantic, trousers-in-hand. She understood this now. Because he had been desirous of immediate availability to see her, this other, such was his need for her.

Her.

For Mike, Catherine had thought such cruelty was not possible. Until proven otherwise.

When Catherine thought of the incident at Handle With Care, she realized the incident was one of the few things that had given her real satisfaction in her professional life. Though what she had done was contrary to her nature, because she always directed harm inwards and not at external targets. But everyone has a limit.

The events and feelings and thoughts that led to the incident she had discussed endlessly in therapy for six months following the first act of violence she had inflicted upon another human being. And she admitted that directly after the incident she experienced a profound calm. The endless loop of anxiety, fear and loathing had stopped for a few hours. Because she’d no longer cared about anything. The future, the past, repercussions, how she looked to everyone else was irrelevant. And the only emotion that she could identify in the period of tranquillity following an occurrence in which she’d drawn blood was relief. She was thankful there was no going back. She had done something so definitive and shocking, the entire period of her life in London, and even the city itself, was closed to her for ever. She’d freed herself.

She never wanted to repeat what she did to her. It wasn’t a case of her having learned a new strategy to deal with her tormentors, nothing like that. But as someone who had been brought up to believe that fairness should be a universally observed value, she did feel that justice had been done, albeit briefly. As well as feeling relief, she’d also felt satisfaction.

The only person she ever admitted this to was her last therapist, whom she had asked, ‘How often do any of us feel satisfied in a lasting way, in this life?’

She still had no regrets and felt no guilt about the incident. The only thing that still alarmed Catherine was that she often wished she had gone all the way and killed her. And that, surely, was wrong.

Her. She had a name. A name Catherine had avoided speaking out loud, though often screamed the name through her imagination. So she and her therapist had settled for pronouns in therapy. But her and she was actually a woman called Tara Woodward.

And Catherine had gravely underestimated Tara.

Catherine had always believed that Tara never pressed charges because she did not want to be associated with the tawdry process of police statements and court appearances, and of victimhood, because it was bad PR for her status, self-image, and her professional and social reputation. It was counterproductive to the entire idea of Tara.

If Tara had dragged her through a criminal court, then in Catherine’s defence of her actions as a last resort against a bully, Tara’s behaviour at work would have been recounted under oath, in greater detail than Tara would have wished, before Tara’s employers, her family and the press. And the incident would have made headlines: a female subordinate with no history of misconduct resorting to violence against an office bully, an Executive Producer no less.