Mr Carter was here.
And she would have to keep her promise to him, to herself. She would have totry.
It was a larger house on the inside than Damien had imagined. From the street it had looked like one of the two-up, two-down houses that he’d shared in London – cramped into the front bedroom with five other men. But here the squat square of a hallway extended past the stairs, disappearing into a doorway at the very end. The walls were painted, shades of blue and green, sun-bleached, except for a few squares dotted up the staircase – the places where paintings might’ve hung once, though they didn’t anymore.
‘This way,’ said Ava, leading him through a set of double doors and into a dark but cosy parlour. There were flickering lamps everywhere – though she hadn’t lit the fire – and they cast an unsteady glow upon the mustard-yellow settee, the mismatched armchair, the fraying blue rug beneath them all.
This looked like a home well lived-in. Well loved.
If you discounted the cardboard blocking the light from the windows.
‘Sit anywhere you’d like,’ said Ava, stepping past him to twitch the curtain closed over the last glimmer of light seeping in through the edges.
‘Is this all part of it?’ Damien asked – hovering by the mantlepiece, his gaze captured by the portrait hanging above it. A man sat in the centre, a boy at his shoulder, and though Damien could spy Ava’s white-blonde hair easily enough, now it was shared by another woman. ‘The darkness? The lamps?’
‘For now, yes,’ Ava said.
He peered a little closer. ‘I rather like the dark,’ Damien mused, wondering where the ticking was coming from – for it wasn’t the clock on the mantlepiece.
‘No onelikesthe dark,’ said Ava.
‘I do,’ he said, quietly. ‘This woman in the picture … is it your mother?’
Unlike the rest of them, the woman was beaming, and it didn’t look like the forced sort of smile that one often saw in portraits – for the sitter had to be utterly still, and certainly not blink at the great, bloody flash of the photography bulb. It was a true smile. A gleeful smile.
Which made the sombre expressions of the rest of them seem so out of place.
Ava’s mouth became a line, but she turned her head nonetheless, following his gaze above the fireplace. ‘Yes,’ she said.
He leaned a little closer, the edge of his lips tweaking upwards. ‘You look alike, you know.’
She came to stand beside him. She was almost a full head shorter than him, and where he hunched to study the picture, she lifted her chin. ‘That’s where the similarities end, I fear.’
He risked a sideways glance at her, but her expression was unreadable. Smooth as marble. ‘What was she like?’
‘Strict,’ she said. ‘But reasonable with it. Calm. Nothing stirred her. Nothing fazed her.’
‘Nothing?’ Damien asked, looking closer at the picture. She didn’tlooklike a woman untouched by the world around her. She looked like a woman who glowed with it, who mirrored it, and reflected it back.
‘Do you want to sit down?’
Ava gestured behind him, and he turned – and hesitated. She had pulled the mustard armchair so close to the settee that they would be knee to knee – with nothing to separate them. It was an oddly intimate set-up, and it made a different kind of something fizz in his stomach as he pulled off his coat, and slung it across the arm of the sofa.
She sat in the chair opposite him, close enough that he could count the pale indentations in her skin – pock marks from childhood, perhaps – and see that a strand of white-blonde hair had fastened itself to one of her eyelashes.
‘We’ll start with something easy,’ she said, her voice softening a little. ‘Your childhood.’
Something twisted in his stomach. ‘My childhood? Why?’
‘Childhood memories are powerful,’ said Ava. ‘Unlocking them can often be the key to other memories, and so they are a good place to start. A safe place to start.’
This felt anythingbutsafe. Everything in his body was telling him to run – though he only reached to grip the cushioned arm of the settee, squeezing and squeezing until it hurt his fingers.
‘The first thing I shall do is try and get you to relax.’
‘I am relaxed,’ said Damien, even as he listened to the uneventh-thumpof his own heart – in time with theincessant tickingof the metronome.
‘You are fidgeting,’ said Ava. ‘It’s perfectly normal. Everyone fidgets when they are nervous.’
