They turned off the A11 and Mandy switched off her iPod and removed her earpieces.
‘Not far now,’ her father said.
She heard the tension in his voice and saw his forehead crease. She wasn’t sure how much of his anxiety was due to Grandpa’s illness, and how much by the prospect of seeing his sister again, but Mandy was sure that if she hadn’t agreed to accompany him, or her mother hadn’t changed her mind and come, he would have found visiting alone very difficult indeed. His dependence on her gave him an almost childlike vulnerability, and her heart went out to him.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m sure Evelyn will be on her best behaviour.’
He smiled and seemed to take comfort in their small conspiracy. ‘We won’t stay too long,’ he reassured her.
They slowed to 30 m.p.h. as they entered the village with its post-office-cum-general-store. Mandy remembered the shop vividly from all the times she’d stayed at her aunt’s. Auntie Evelyn, Sarah and she had often walked to the store, with Sarah’s Labrador Misty. When Sarah and she had been considered old enough, the two of them had gone there alone to spend their pocket money on sweets, ice-cream, or a memento from the display stand of neatly arranged china gifts. It had been an adventure, a chance to take responsibility, which had been possible in the safe rural community where her aunt lived, but not in Greater London when Sarah had stayed with her.
Mandy recognized the store at once – it was virtually unchanged – as she had remembered the approach to the village, and indeed most of the journey. But as they left the village and her father turned from the main road on to the B road for what he said was the last part of the journey, she suddenly found her mind had gone completely blank. She didn’t recall any of it.
She didn’t think it was that the developers had been busy in the last ten years and had changed the contours of the landscape; it was still largely agricultural land, with farmers’ houses and outbuildings dotted in between, presumably as it had been for generations. But as Mandy searched through the windscreen, then her side window, and round her father to his side window, none of what she now saw looked the least bit familiar. She could have been making the journey for the first time for the lack of recognition, which was both strange and unsettling. Swivelling round in her seat, she turned to look out of the rear window, hoping a different perspective might jog her memory.
‘Lost something?’ her father asked.
‘No. Have Evelyn and John moved since I visited as a child?’ Which seemed the most likely explanation, and her father had forgotten to mention it.
‘No,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘Why do you ask?’
Mandy straightened in her seat and returned her gaze to the front, looking through the window for a landmark – something familiar. ‘I don’t recognize any of this,’ she said. ‘Have we come a different way?’
He shook his head. ‘There is only one way to your aunt’s. We turn right in about a hundred yards and their house is on the left.’
Mandy looked at the trees growing from the grassy banks that flanked the narrow road and then through a gap in the trees, which offered another view of the countryside. She looked through the windscreen, then to her left and right, but still found nothing that she even vaguely remembered – absolutely nothing. She heard her father change down a gear, and the car slowed; then they turned right and continued along a single-track lane. Suddenly the tyres were crunching over the gravel and they pulled on to a driveway leading to a house.
‘Remember it now?’ she heard him say. He stopped the car and cut the engine.
Mandy stared at the house and experienced an unsettling stab of familiarity. ‘A little,’ she said, and tried to calm her racing heart.
It was like déjà vu – that flash of familiarity, sensed rather than consciously thought. A dizziness; a feeling of not being there. It was as though she’d been given a glimpse of another life. It had been fleeting, and without detail, but as Mandy looked at her aunt’s house, panic rose. She’d been here lots of times as a child but couldn’t remember any detail. It was like looking at a holiday photo in someone else’s album of a place she too had once visited.
She read the old wooden signboard – Breakspeare Manor – and then looked at the house again. It was a large sprawling manor house with two small stone turrets and lattice period windows. The front of the house was covered with the bare winding stems of wistaria. Instinctively Mandy knew that in a couple of weeks the entire front of the house would be festooned with its lilac blooms, like the venue for a wedding reception at a far-off and exotic location. She knew it without remembering – a gut feeling – and also that the house was 150 years old.
‘Ready?’ her father asked after a moment, gathering himself. She nodded and, taking a deep breath, picked up her bag from beside her feet and got out. The air smelt fresh and clean after London but it had a cooler, sharper edge. Drawing her cardigan closer, she waited for her father to get out. He reached inside the car for his jacket, straightened and, pointing the remote at the car, pressed to lock it. Mandy looked around. There were no other cars on the sweeping carriage driveway, and the double garage – a separate building to the left of the house – had its doors closed. None of the rooms at the front of the house had their windows open and the whole house looked shut up and empty.
‘There must be someone in,’ her father said, echoing her thoughts. ‘Grandpa’s here and we’re expected.’
She walked beside her father as they crossed the drive to the stone arched porch. Mounted on the wall to the right of the porch was a black-on-white sign announcing ‘Tradesmen’, with an arrow pointing to the side of the house. Mandy didn’t remember the sign but knew her aunt had insisted the butcher, housekeeper, gardener, newspaper boy, plumber and electrician used the side entrance, while friends and those arriving in big cars used the front door. She also remembered this had seemed strange to her as a child. At her house everyone used the front door, including those delivering goods and reading the gas and electric meters; the side gate was only used to take out the garbage.
‘Shall we let ourselves in the tradesmen’s entrance?’ her father asked, taking a step out of the porch and looking up at the front. ‘I don’t want to press the bell and disturb Grandpa if he’s sleeping.’
‘The gate is kept locked and the bell is even louder than this one. So they can hear it from the kitchen and laundry room.’ Her father looked at her, mildly surprised she’d remembered this detail. She shrugged and hid her discomfort.
Mandy didn’t know how she knew about the bell; her reaction had been instinctive, as though she’d absorbed the information from being part of her aunt’s family during all the times she’d stayed as a child. And while she still couldn’t remember visiting the house as such, nor had the least idea what the rooms would look like once they were inside, she found she knew that breakfast and lunch were taken in the morning room and supper in the dining room, and that Wednesday was the housekeeper’s day off. Perhaps she’d remembered this because it was all so very different from her own family’s modest home and routine, she thought.
Her father pressed the bell and almost immediately the door opened. For a moment Mandy thought the dark-haired woman standing before them was her aunt, until she saw the apron.
‘Good morning. Please come in,’ the housekeeper said, clearly expecting them. ‘Mrs Osborne is busy with her father.’ She smiled warmly and stood aside to let them in.
Although Mandy couldn’t have described the housekeeper from when she’d visited as a child, she felt sure this wasn’t the same woman, but they clearly used the same polish. The faint but distinctive smell of beeswax drifted into the hall from the