‘No,’ he says in a clipped voice. ‘I’m not having an affair with your sister. I’m frankly amazed that would have come to that conclusion.’ He sits back and tilts his head. ‘I think it’s you that has some explaining to do.’ Distrust is back in his voice. ‘Why this charade? Why pretend to be Cecily?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I say. ‘But I offered to take her place for a week, so that she could make arrangements to divorce her husband.’

  ‘You’re pretending to be her in her own home?’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘And the husband and daughter… they don’t know?’

  I nod.

  ‘Why did she need a week? Surely, she could visit a solicitor in a day?’

  His words start a buzz of anxiety at the base of my skull. ‘She was feeling trapped. She seemed desperate.’ I fiddle with my napkin, folding and unfolding it. ‘But now she’s missing. At least, she’s been seen in Exeter, but I can’t get hold of her… I don’t know whether to be worried or not.’ I screw the napkin into a ball.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ he says. ‘About the divorce. The Cecily I know is a devout Catholic.’

  ‘Yes.’ I nod. ‘She still is, I think. But she told me that Gabriel – her husband – was controlling. An alcoholic.’ The starkness of her deception hits me as I say the words. ‘That’s why I said I’d take her place,’ I finish, quietly. ‘Only now she’s disappeared.’

  ‘Are you safe there?’ His eyes narrow.

  I remember Gabriel standing close on the landing, my longing to rest my head on his chest. I nod. ‘The thing is, she lied. He’s not controlling. He’s not an alcoholic.’

  ‘But are you safe from her?’ he says. ‘From your sister?’

  ‘From Cecily? What do you mean?’

  ‘She seemed… disturbed when I saw her. And she said some things. Things I can’t stop going over, asking myself, was she telling the truth?’

  ‘About what? What do you mean?’

  ‘She told me she’d killed Henry.’

  The waiter returns with our food. We sit back in silence while the man fusses with salt and pepper, checking if we want mayonnaise or ketchup. Our plates are placed before us: goats cheese salad for me and an omelette and chips for Jude.

  I wait for the waiter to move away. I lean forwards. ‘That’s crazy. He jumped. It wasn’t anything to do with her.’

  He turns his wine glass, fingers gripping the stem. ‘She said it was her fault. She said, “I murdered him, it’s my fault he’s dead.”’

  ‘But… She didn’t. She wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s what she told me, Alice. Those words exactly.’ He swallows. ‘It was hard to hear. I kept asking her what she meant, but she didn’t elaborate, kept insisting that she was sorry. She said she hadn’t understood about love between men. She’d been disgusted by us, she said, at the time. She’d thought it was a sin. She asked me to forgive her.’

  His words are like balls, thrown at me hard and fast. I’m shocked by the flash of implications. I stare at him. ‘You mean… You and Henry?’

  He glances at me sharply, as if he thinks I’m mocking him, but something in my expression makes him relax. ‘My dear,’ he says quietly. ‘Didn’t you know? Your brother and I were lovers. And your father found out.’

  I catch my breath. Why hadn’t I guessed before? My mind reels back, snatching at memories, trying to see what I’d missed. I settle on one image – Henry taking Jude’s lit cigarette and putting it in his mouth. There had always been such ease between them. I reach across and touch his hand on an impulse. ‘I’m so sorry, Jude.’

  ‘That’s what she said,’ he looks down at my hand over his. ‘She kept saying it.’

  I startle. ‘She knew back then… about you and Henry?’

  ‘Yes.’ He withdraws his hand and sits up taller. ‘Yes, apparently, she knew.’

  ‘God, I wonder how she found out?’

  ‘She must have seen us. We tried to be careful. But there would have been moments when she could have glimpsed us through a doorway or in the garden, behind the branches of the yew tree.’

  Cecily was a watcher. She moved quietly through the house, listened behind closed doors, wandered the garden with a book. It could have happened; she could have seen them. And I can imagine her reaction. It would have mirrored Daddy’s. ‘I wish she’d told me.’ I spear lettuce leaves with my fork; a tomato bursts, spreading seeds across my plate.

  He looks at the tablecloth, his face older, dragged down by gravity. ‘She said that your father found out because of her diary.’

  ‘Her diary?’ A cog clicks into place. I nod. ‘He would have had no compunction about reading it. But he would have made Henry’s life hell.’ I remember Henry locked in the hole for the night. ‘He would never have accepted a gay son. He probably threatened to send him into the army or something. Maybe conversion therapy.’

  Jude gives a weary shrug and picks up a chip with his fingers, eating it without enthusiasm. He’s hardly touched his omelette. ‘It hardly matters now.’

  ‘Did Cecily say anything about her plans – about what she was doing, or where she was going?’

  ‘To be honest, I was in shock after her confession. I think she said she was going away for a while, that she had important business to attend to. A task, I think she called it. Something long overdue. But she was cryptic, didn’t give me any details.’ He moves his plate away from him. ‘She seemed nervous. Highly strung.’ He looks at his glass of wine. ‘She drank a lot. Threw it back.’

  I shake my head. ‘I can’t believe that she really killed him – I just can’t.’

  He rubs his forehead. ‘I don’t want to believe it, either. But those were the words she used.’ His fingers have left red marks on his skin. ‘Whatever the truth, I think she’s unbalanced. She’s not well, Alice. I’m afraid she might be about to do something terrible.’

  My chest tightens. He’s right. Cecily’s behaviour points to a kind of madness or sickness – her drinking at night, the strange men – and she must have an ulterior motive for the swap, something she’s not sharing with me.

  ‘It’s all such a mess. I wish I could go back in time and change what happened.’ I fiddle with the salt cellar. ‘The party was the beginning of the end, wasn’t it? The beginning of it all going wrong. But I didn’t understand. I never knew why you were both in such trouble. Why you were sent away.’

  ‘I’ll never forget it,’ he says. ‘Your father marched me to the top of the house, locked me in a room and refused to talk to me. I may as well have been a mass murderer the way he treated me. My parents sent someone to collect me the next morning, and I was packed off to live with relatives in South Africa. Nobody talked about it, but I was told I would never see Henry again.’ He takes another gulp of his drink. ‘And I never did. I found out about his death months later, from an old school friend. It nearly killed me.’

  There seems to be nothing more to say. We are silent for a while before we stumble onto other subjects. I listen with half an ear while he tells me about his design business, and the man he lives with. I offer some details about my life since Hawksmoor. He wants to know what it was like at the kibbutz, and as I speak, he pushes his hands across his eyes. ‘If only we’d made it there too,’ he says, with a catch in his voice. I give him a moment to collect himself before I look at Cecily’s watch. We call for the bill, and he insists on paying. When I stand to say goodbye, he scoops me towards him. His chest has a new barrel-shaped weight, and I’m enveloped by the scent of his cologne, the fresh tang of washing power in the fibres of his crisp, patterned shirt. ‘Those weeks at Hawksmoor were my happiest,’ he murmurs. ‘I sometimes think your brother was the love of my life.’

  There are tears in his eyes when he lets me go. I lean in to kiss his still-beautiful, sculptured cheek.

  25

  CECILY

  Dear Alice,

  I’m here, at Exeter University! I didn’t do too badly in my exams (not so Cilly!) but in the end, I got the place through Clearing. ‘Stay clear of Lefties and druggies,’ Daddy said, when I told him I’d been accepted. I thought he might have been pleased. He probably is underneath – you know how he finds it hard to say ‘well done.’ Mummy held my hands so tightly that I had to tug to get them back. I think she’s worried because Exeter is so far from home, but I think that’s for the best. I’m settled in Halls, and I’ve worked out how to get around the campus, which is huge.

  The other students wear cool clothes, and they all seem to know each other. When they’re chatting in groups it sometimes feels like a language I don’t understand. I haven’t made any real friends. Nobody here could understand how growing up Catholic and coming from Hawksmoor sets me apart. Anyway, I don’t know how to connect with other people. I’d never needed to make friends before. I always had you. I miss you.

  I hope this letter will reach you. I’m sending it to the Paris address you gave me – are you still working as an au pair? Maybe you could visit me at Uni? Paris isn’t so far away. I know you don’t want to come back to this country – but Daddy doesn’t have to know – and I’d be here to welcome you. Think about it!

  Love Cecily

  It felt like a relief at first, being at the other end of the country to Hawksmoor. I didn’t have to walk past the place on the gravel where Henry’s blood had spilled around him like a red cloak unfurling. His head had been turned to the side, the shattered half hidden, just one eye visible. I kept seeing that open eye staring at me through its glaze of dirt. Sometimes I’d tried to imagine what his last thoughts and feelings had been as his feet left the tiles, as his body hurled towards the gravel. But I always stopped myself before my thoughts spun into the darker corners of my mind.

  I was homesick at university. It was too expensive to get the train back to the Lake District in term time. I longed for Hawksmoor. I tried to recall the feel of the carved banisters, the heraldic creatures and sea monsters rearing under my fingers. It was only in Hawksmoor that I knew who I was.

  I introduced myself to other students as an only child. No one would call me Cilly again. The pressing problem was how to make a success of my life. It was wrapped up with saving Hawksmoor. It was the key to everything. Here, at university, it occurred to me that I could be the one to make money from a career, to marry well. Why not? This was my chance to be noticed, to be the one to make Daddy proud. I was enjoying my current module: The Occult in the Victorian Age. But when the students in my class joked about the ludicrous spectres conjured up by psychics – the green phantasma, the children who crawled under tables to knock on the underside of the wood – I kept quiet, thinking of the ghosts I’d seen on the stairs at Hawksmoor, remembering the sound of the monk’s laboured breathing in the priest hole, the feel of the little girl clambering onto my lap, their voices coming through me like a strange haunting.

  ‘She’s a typical only child,’ I heard one of my flatmates say, talking to a friend in the tiny kitchen. I’d paused outside the door, listening. ‘Selfish. Doesn’t share her stuff. Standoffish.’ Then a short laugh. ‘Always chatting away to herself.’

  I realised with a small shock that they were talking about me.

  ‘Really? I think I’ve met her at the Student Union,’ the other person said. ‘She seemed okay – kind of fun.’

  I let out a breath, relieved it wasn’t me they were discussing. I’d never been to the Student Union – it was full of crowds of confident students and impossible social demands.

  My favourite lecturer, Gabriel Greenwood, was younger than the other tutors, fresh from his PhD, and handsome in the way of an academic, his hair a little too long and tousled, as if he spent the day pushing distracted ink-stained fingers through it, his back slightly stooped from leaning over books. His nose was interesting, crooked at the bridge, with flared nostrils, his mouth large and lush, quick to smile. I had to try extra hard to concentrate when he was talking, wanting to study him instead of his words. His collar was open at the neck showing a glimpse of smooth, golden skin, and I remembered the reddish hairs gleaming on Jude’s tanned forearm. But this lecturer wasn’t like Jude, I was sure of that. I was more experienced now. Could tell these things. And I’d heard the other girls talking about him. They all fancied him, discussed him in the canteen, guessing what his personal life was like. ‘No wedding ring,’ they’d discerned.

  I was certain he wasn’t gay, because for the first time in my life, I saw gay people around me, even two boys holding hands, walking hip to hip like an ordinary couple. I was shocked at first, outraged by their flagrant disregard for convention. I looked around, expecting to see other people’s reactions mirroring my own. But hardly anyone raised an eyebrow, and God didn’t strike them down. A handwritten banner hung out of a dorm window: ‘Gay Rights!’ it proclaimed. ‘Equality for All’. As the weeks went on, although I wasn’t comfortable around homosexuals, their affection for each other didn’t make me feel sick either and after a while, it began to feel almost normal. I realised Henry and Jude could have been happy too. I’d made a mistake, a terrible mistake.

  It was my habit after lectures to wait for the crowd to disappear before I got up, that way I avoided being jostled, and could leave in my own time. I was in the front row after one of Gabriel Greenwood’s lectures, sinking low in my seat, occupying myself by rereading Alice’s latest letter. She’d left the kibbutz and it was about the two French children she was looking after, and their handsome father. The lecture theatre rang with students’ voices, shuffling feet, seats being flipped up. I glanced at the podium where Dr Greenwood was doing up his briefcase. He caught my eye and smiled. My lungs faltered. I glanced down at Alice’s letter and then back to find that he was still looking at me, but now it was with something like concern. I guessed he’d noticed my isolation, my lack of friends. He probably pitied me.

  26

  ALICE

  All the way back on the train, I go over Jude’s words. I can’t accept that Cecily pushed Henry off the roof. Not on purpose, not in cold blood. Maybe they’d had an argument? Maybe it was an accident? But he was only on the roof because someone let him out of his room. It had never occurred to me before, but as he’d been locked in by Daddy, and it wasn’t me who unlocked the door, and Mummy would never have gone against his wishes, there was only one other person it could have been. Realising she’d lied about that makes me wonder if she’d lied about where she was and what she was doing when he fell too – the police had come and interviewed all of us, and we’d had to say where we were and what we’d been doing at the time he fell. Daddy had told us not to say that Henry had been locked in his room.

  I’m aware something is different as soon as I walk into her bedroom. I look around, puzzled, and notice that the window I thought I’d left locked is slightly open. I walk over to it and shut it, feeling a sense of concern – have I left it open all day? I think of the person watching the house from the shadows, the image of someone at the bay window.

  My clothes smell of trains, a pong of dirty air and grease and stale sandwiches. I shrug off the blue blouse and tailored trousers I chose from Cecily’s wardrobe this morning, pulling on one of her sweatshirts and pair of black leggings. Thank God for her exercise clothes. I think with longing of my own things stuffed into my rucksack and glance down at the pair of trainers I’d left on the floor. Except, they’re not there. I must have tidied them away. I open the wardrobe, check the shoeboxes, look under the bed.

  I put my head around Bea’s door. She’s at her desk, working, an exercise book open. She looks up and smiles.

  ‘Did you, by any chance, borrow my trainers?’

  She wrinkles her forehead. ‘Your feet are half a size bigger than mine, remember?’ She looks at her clumpy DMs. ‘And no offence, Mum. But your trainers aren’t really my style.’

  ‘Right.’ I force a smile. ‘Of course. I must have mislaid them. No problem.’

  She glances down at her textbook.

  ‘I’ll leave you in peace then.’ I turn to go, and pause, looking back at her. ‘Is everything okay at school?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She twirls her pen between her fingers. ‘Better, thanks. I ignore Megan and that lot. I’ve made friends with a girl called Lily. She’s been in my class for a year, but because she’s a bit of a wallflower, I’d never spoken to her. But she’s really nice. And interesting.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I say. ‘Funny, isn’t it, how we can miss good things right under our noses.’

  She shrugs a shoulder and turns back to her work.

  I hesitate for a moment, watching her, and then nip into Cecily’s room, quickly rummaging through my rucksack to pull out a book. I slip back into Bea’s room and place the book on her table. ‘Thought you might like this,’ I tell her.

  ‘Yoga for Beginners,’ she reads. She grins at me. ‘Thanks. I wondered how you’d learnt all that stuff.’ I am warmed by her smile, rosy as a Greek sunrise.

  Back in Cecily’s room, I lock the window. What if someone did break in? I check the bedside drawer. I’d left a stack of bills in the corner. They’ve gone. I check again. My heart thumps. Someone has taken fifty quid. But our mother’s pearl necklace and gold brooch are still there. Perhaps the thief got disturbed and left. Perhaps it was Bea coming in from school that frightened them off? The thought of her alone in the house with a criminal dries my mouth. I’ll have to own up to Gabriel. We might need to call the police.

  ‘I’m afraid I left a window open when I went out today,’ I admit, as I meet him in the kitchen. ‘Could you check your stuff and make sure nothing is missing?’

  ‘I’m sure everything’s fine,’ he says, lifting the lid on the casserole dish on the stove with a tea towel. ‘This isn’t exactly a crime-ridden area.’ He takes his jacket off and hangs it on the back of a chair. ‘I’m starving.’