This place, once so magical to me, so safe, now feels threatening. It’s as if that halcyon summer I was last here was just a fever dream, or a figment of my imagination, conjured up from the pages of a romance novel to be replaced by a thriller.
It’s rained overnight and the bird’s black and white coat looks scrawny and decayed. ‘I don’t know how long it’s been there.’ I shiver and wrap my coat further around my body.
‘What the hell? Why would someone do this?’
We stand and stare at it, unsure of what to do. Neither of us are outdoorsy types or gardeners; we’re used to inner cities and concrete, not woods and bird carcasses.
‘Someone wanted us to see it. It could be a warning. For us. You know the rhyme. One for sorrow …’
Uncertainty crosses Josh’s face. I can see him oscillating between wanting to reassure me and admitting I might be right. He lands somewhere in the middle. ‘Maybe it’s a country thing. Some kind of ritual? Or perhaps someone found out you’d inherited the house and is pissed off. Wanted to leave a little message. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Let’s get back in the house. It’s cold out here. I’ll find some scissors and cut it down.’ He wraps an arm around my shoulders and steers me away from the dead bird, pulling me closer to him as we cross the lawn so that I’m snuggled tight against him, wrapping my arm around his waist. Thank goodness he’s here. And I think again of Dorothea, all alone in this huge house, perhaps being watched, threatened, with dead birds strung up on trees for her to find. Except the magpie was fresh when I first found it. It hadn’t been there long. I know it and Josh knows it too, we’re just not admitting it to each other.
Josh is already being extra protective because of my fight with Alison yesterday. He was as appalled as I was about Alison’s suggestion that I visit my dad in prison. ‘I don’t get your sister sometimes,’ he’d said, his expression darkening. ‘She’s being really unfair, but then, that’s Alison. She doesn’t get that you had two very different experiences with your father – she was much older when the violence started.’ And I know he was only sticking up for me, and I love him for it, but still, it niggled that he was putting Alison down.
I’d texted Alison as soon as I got home yesterday to apologize for walking out on her. I’m still mad at her but she is the only family I have left. When she replied with a brusque,It’s fine. Talk soon, I wished I hadn’t bothered.
I leave Josh rummaging through the kitchen drawers for scissors and I go back upstairs to unpack. I try not to let the dead bird unsettle me but it’s lingering in the back of my mind. I’ll be alone in the house tomorrow when Josh is at work, and, not for the first time, I wish we had a dog. This house seems empty without animals, especially as last time I was here there was a menagerie milling about the place. I vow to myself that I’ll bring the subject up with Josh tonight. He’s in such a great mood at the moment, so happy with our windfall, that I might be able to persuade him. Maybe Dorothea’s neighbour, Dennis, would consider letting me have Solly. This was his home after all.
Half an hour later I’m in the bedroom, sorting out my clothes and hanging them up in the wardrobe, when I hear a clatter and the sound of Josh swearing under his breath. I go into the hallway to see him trying to manoeuvre a huge cardboard box full of electrical stuff through the doorway of Dorothea’s study.
What the hell is he doing? I march down the hallway.
He sets the box down on Dorothea’s beautiful 18th-century walnut desk. ‘I thought this could be my office.’
‘What? No!’
He turns to me in surprise. ‘Why?’
‘Because … because this was hers.’ I can still picture Dorothea sat at this desk, her eyes softening every time I’d shyly poke my head around the door, wanting her attention. It was here that we discussed art and history and novels. It was where she’d peruse her bookshelves looking for my next read, whether it be a tome on the Russian Revolution, which I was studying at school, or the autobiography of Agatha Christie. ‘It’s important that you know the difference between a biography and an autobiography,’ she’d said to me as she pressed it into my hands. ‘These are Agatha Christie’s very own words. No one else’s.’
I’d asked her then if she would ever write an autobiography. ‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ she’d replied. ‘I’m better at expressing myself through art than I am with words.’
This room is where Dorothea came up with her ideas for her art. Signs of her particular taste are everywhere, from her Louis XVI-style armchair to her antique furniture. It’s a room for a woman, and the thought of Josh in here with his gadgets and his maleness changing the energy just feels wrong. ‘It’s so … Dorothea,’ I finish lamely.
‘So we’re just going to leave this room empty as some kind of shrine to Saint Dorothea?’ His tone is cutting. Josh likes to get his own way and he certainly doesn’t like being told what to do.
‘Well, I was thinking I’d like to have this room as my office …’
‘But you’re not working at the moment.’
‘That’s not going to be forever, Josh. I’m considering perhaps freelancing …’
He sighs in irritation. ‘Fine. Whatever. You have the room, then. It’s your house after all.’ He makes a great show of hugging the massive cardboard box and hoisting it up from the table. ‘Excuse me.’
I step aside so that he can leave the room. ‘Oh, wait,’ he says. ‘You better tell me which room I’m allowed.’
My heart sinks. ‘Don’t be like that …’
‘Like what? You’re obviously the boss.’
‘What about this one?’ I indicate a bigger room next door to the study. It’s empty apart from a built-in wardrobe and a single bed. ‘It has the same views.’
‘It doesn’t have a desk.’
‘We can buy a desk. And get bookshelves built.’ I push down my irritation – it’s not like he ever works from home anyway.
Without saying anything else, he carries the huge box into the room and plonks it on the floor. He kneels down to go through it, keeping his back to me. I leave him to it.
When I wake up the next morning, Josh has already left for work without saying goodbye. We’d barely spoken last night so this doesn’t surprise me.
