Now the Day is Over

by Marion Husband

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

This new novel from Marion Husband, best-selling author of the Boy I Love trilogy, is a story of adultery, love and redemption. 'Husband's stunning writing and inspired prose lend well to her honest characters . . . read when you're in the mood for something intense and moving' Three Dollar Bill Reviews USA In my more lucid moments I know I'm dead . . . So begins Edwina's story, a young woman whose spirit is trapped by guilt. Set between the present day and the First World War, Edwina's ghost tells the story of Gaye and David Henderson, the adulterous couple whose house she haunts. But she also has her own story to tell, gradually revealing the terrors that keep her from finding peace. Just some of the amazing GOODREADS REVIEWS: 'An absorbing page-turner.' 'Thoroughly enjoyable and only gets better the more you read.' 'This beautifully understated novel will keep you guessing until the last page.'

Release date: October 29, 2020

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 256

Sample

In my more lucid moments I know I’m dead. I’m frightened then; I panic over what is to become of me. I can’t keep still and quiet as I usually am so I go to the station and talk to strangers. I don’t have to say very much, a comment on the weather or the lateness of the train will do. The station is a safe place because I know I’ve done no wrong there, although it has changed, it’s not so busy nowadays and the soldiers that stand on the edge of the platform are fading. They are ghosts too, of course, but the kind that lack awareness, lucidity. I’m afraid of them; I hate their gunmetal stink. The urge I have to push one of them onto the tracks makes me clumsy with shame.

Often, however, the matter-of-factness of my death is easier to bear. Lately things have changed for me and I’m no longer as alone as I was. New people have come; they are called Gaye and David. I am becoming used to them; I am making them my interest.

Take today, for instance. Today I watched Gaye plant mint and chives and lemon balm in a terracotta pot outside the kitchen door. After she’d pressed each plant into the compost she crushed a leaf between her fingers and held it to her nose. I watched her chest rise and fall; her nostrils flare and her mouth turn down as it does when she’s satisfied. Her mouth turns down when she grasps a handful of sheet from the washing line and realises that it’s dry, or when the credit card bills torn from their envelopes are less than she’d expected. Sometimes her mouth turns down and she nods. She is happy. Gaye thinks happiness is simply an absence of remembering. I think she sets her sights too low.

The lemon balm she planted made me remember a field hospital in France. It wasn’t a bad memory; I had this feeling of tremendous calm as I saw myself smoothing sheets that curled my patients’ toes tight as fists. The smell of lemon in the air was warm and sharp and mixed with the spoiled meat stink of the lieutenant in the last bed. His name was Evans. I made myself remember that when Evans woke he spoke with a stutter and that I hoped his last word would be pronounced perfectly, that I would have the honour of hearing it, and that he would have the satisfaction of knowing that at least in this his life ended well. That was all I wanted for them: a satisfactory ending, for there to be no going on and on so pointlessly. There is no purpose in suffering, nothing to be gained or learnt. But perhaps I am being disingenuous and I shouldn’t make excuses for myself, because beside the beds of men such as Lieutenant Evans I was not a philosopher but a conduit. I can only say that I did what needed to be done.

When Gaye had finished her planting and had gone inside the house, I tore a leaf from the lemon balm and ate it, concentrating, my jaw working steadily. It tasted green, of nothing very much. Memories come and go; it’s no use trying to capture them.

I followed Gaye into the kitchen. She lives in the house I lived in. It’s a square, detached house, Victorian, three stories and a cellar and a garden with lawns and a vegetable patch. There’s a summerhouse and a small orchard of plum trees my brother Peter and I planted the year before the war. Gaye keeps the garden tidy. She’s not a gardener but a labourer, a would-be killer of weeds and slugs that are, of course, immortal if she only knew. Gaye mows the lawn and plants the flowers her father planted: snapdragons and sweet peas and London Pride, dahlias that run with earwigs. She bought a sculpture for the centre of the lawn, two metal herons entangled with one another so that their gangling awkwardness is emphasised. She worries that she paid too much for the metal birds because now, without the gloss of the catalogue’s page, they are ordinary.

Much of Gaye’s garden becomes ordinary after her first flurry of enthusiasm. Often her plants melt into the ground and often she doesn’t notice their passing. She pays men to come each spring and paint the summerhouse, choosing a new colour each year. This year she chose a pale blue that sometimes looks grey and makes the summerhouse disappear in the rain.

In the kitchen I sat on one of the mismatched antique chairs at the pine table. Lately the table has been covered in an oilcloth patterned with blue and red cherries. It’s an ugly cloth, a lapse in taste, I think, old-fashioned and too jarringly cheerful for such a dark room. The kitchen faces north and has always been gloomy, although Gaye brought in other men to modernise it, knocking down the walls of the scullery and the sitting room so that it’s all one big, draughty space. The men painted the walls cream to soften the cold light.

Above the deep recess where the kitchen range used to stand she’s hung a print of Picasso’s coffee pot. Unfashionably, Gaye likes instant coffee – Kenco from the blue-lidded jar, almost the same blue Picasso used in his painting. Every morning she sits at the kitchen table in her dressing gown and drinks strong, milky Kenco from a mug decorated with childish drawings of Easter bunnies. Her cat comes in from its night’s hunting to become a pet again, curling innocently on her knee. Later, still in her dressing gown, Gaye will tour the lawn, noting the positions of headless mice or small brown birds that hardly have a mark on them but are just as stiffly dead. Her cat is quite a killer and there’s a part of her that takes pride in that. Dressed, protected in her gardening shoes and gloves, she will dispose of the corpses beneath the shiny, artificial-looking laurels. She imagines their quick decomposition, remembering the speeded-up film she saw of a rat breaking down into the earth. She thinks she remembers this film every time she throws a little body away but she doesn’t; often there are more pressing things on her mind.

Often enough she thinks about David. David is her husband. He’s a dentist, and he hasn’t time for any of this.

Seeing David for the first time is like coming across a masterpiece by a favourite artist in a junk shop. Like all beautiful men he seems familiar. You begin to imagine you’ve met before because the characteristics of beauty are always the same: square jaw, straight nose, full mouth, dark hair and eyes. Beautiful men have high foreheads and firm, clear skin. They have small, tight ears and are clean-shaven, although they need to shave often. They are intelligent and they don’t suffer fools; they are hard and driven and ambitious. Their shoulders are wide and their hips are slim, their bellies and backsides taut. David seems familiar, then, but only superficially; he’s quite singular, really, although his ideas of happiness chime too harmoniously with Gaye’s. Like her he would prefer not to remember; like her, he’s unsure if this wanting to forget is the right way to go on.

From my vantage point at the table I watched as Gaye prepared supper, a risotto to use up the dark chicken meat and the half-glass of Chardonnay left from Sunday’s supper. She doesn’t drink very much. Sometimes Gaye becomes hung-over after a single glass of wine. She would like alcohol to have the same effect on her as she imagines it has on others: a relaxed, pleased-with-the-world feeling that would make her body forget itself. Wine causes David to fall asleep. Stretched out asleep on the couch he looks earnest, as though something important is going on in his dreams, and she remembers how pompous he is. Years ago she would cover his sleeping body with a quilt. Now she thinks that such small, caring gestures were just play-acting.

She met David at a nightclub called Bentley’s in the summer of 1980. She was eighteen, dressed in a red, knife-pleated rayon dress she wore only that once. The dress clung to her hips and thighs and breasts; the disco lights made it almost transparent; sweat marks appeared beneath her arms as she danced. David watched her from the gold metal rail that separated dancers from drinkers. He liked her slim ankles and small breasts and the fact that she smiled as she danced. Also he liked that her face was flushed with exertion. He guessed she would be good in bed, lithe and uninhibited, and that she would care less about the trivial things he imagined most girls cared about. David was nineteen and anxious to lose his virginity. He put his pint of beer down on a nearby table and walked onto the dance floor just as the music changed. He stopped her as she was about to dance with someone else, tapping her shoulder and smiling shyly, old-fashioned, courteous; when she remembers that meeting now she imagines that he bowed.

In those days she drove a sky-blue Fiat 126. She drove him back to his parents’ house and took his virginity on a draylon sofa as chipped mugs of tea cooled on the floor and Donna Summer played quietly on the stereo and his mother and father slept in the room above. The parents were professors of history and philosophy and their house was dirty because what were houses, anyway? Who with any intellect cared about hoovering crumbs from carpets or buffing the stainless steel sink to a shine? The sofa creaked and sagged when David climbed on top of her. As he finished and she turned her face away from his, she inhaled a smell of stale biscuits from the cushions.

Driving away that night she knew that she would marry him. She knew without any doubt she would be Mrs David Henderson, that she would settle for being his wife and it would be OK. She knew he was steady and sure of the future, although she didn’t think he knew yet that his future would include her. She imagined it dawning on him gradually: he would believe it was his idea that they should be married. I know that she was happy then and it wasn’t only that she had less to forget.

I seem to have absorbed her memories as if they are my own. I know that when she was a child she was afraid of causing damage, a fear that made her timid. If she said too much, secrets might be given away: words were dangerous as a still-glowing match dropped into a waste-paper basket. She didn’t believe in accidents; everything, in the end, could be blamed on her wilful negligence. Someone might die because of her.

I know all about negligence, of course.

I was born in 1897. When I was a girl my father took my brother Peter and me to the seaside every summer. We’d take the train from Thorp to Saltburn, a little town with grand hotels and a long pier and a lift like a miniature railway carriage that carried holidaymakers down the cliff to the beach. Donald, my father, insisted that we three walk to the beach, carrying our picnic and seaside paraphernalia down the many steps cut into the cliff face. The steps zig-zagged gently, we were protected by a wooden rail that I grasped obediently, while Peter, older than me by three years, ran ahead. Peter galloped to the sea, hopping from one leg to the other to take off his shoes and socks as he got closer to where the waves sucked at the wet sand. I stayed behind to help Donald spread out a tartan rug and erect the windbreak. The sea had to be ignored for a while, my excitement at the sight of it subdued. My pleasure wouldn’t be snuffed out in a gush of enthusiasm as Peter’s was. Later I would swim in the freezing water, far, far out beyond the suicide cliffs where the only sound was my own steady breathing; I imagined how it would be to drown.

My mother drowned. She drowned in her bath when I was seven. Peter and I were alone in the house with her, as far as I remember. If memory serves me correctly, Peter and I were quite alone; she had left the bathroom door unlocked, as though she wanted us to find her.

What am I to make of this now? Sometimes I imagine how it would be if I was to see her around the house; I wonder if she would be dressed (not all of us dead are clothed – even shrouds are sometimes lost). Perhaps I would try to help her; or perhaps I would, as always, abdicate all responsibility, just as she did when I was a child.

I was a slight, gangling child. Other parents might have imagined I was delicate but Donald was not that kind of father, not when we were children. His practice took him to the poorest backstreets where children my age were stunted from malnutrition, their chests rattling beneath the carefully warmed metal of his stethoscope. Despite our mother’s death he told Peter and me we were lucky. Until the war it was this luck of ours that kept him distanced from us.

After a day on the beach we would climb the cliff to the promenade and stroll to the Queen’s Hotel for afternoon tea. There would be salmon paste sandwiches and cakes decorated with sugared violets. We drank pale, scalding tea from cups delicate as razor shells. The Queen’s dining room had a high ceiling painted with naked cherubs puffing at sailing ships and the white tablecloths seemed to take on the blue of the cherub sky. I was tremendously impressed; even my crush on the head waiter seemed noble in such surroundings. I ached to impress him but the only time I dented his fantastic aloofness was when I turned up in my WVS uniform in the winter of 1916. My new shoes creaked and gave away my half-baked intentions. He served me tea and smiled at me as I left, wished me luck and called me Miss. At once the stop-start train journey, the solitary walk along the November beach were worth it: he had noticed me. I wasn’t quite as invisible as I’d imagined.

Even in those days I looked in the mirror and saw a plain Jane whose eyes were too big and hungry, at odds with her mousiness. Beneath that decadent ceiling my greed could almost be excused, though it was there, in the Queen’s Hotel dining room, that I would catch my father watching me, his face ugly with concern. I remember my own face distorted in the silver teapot as I studiously avoided Donald’s eye, relieved that Peter was there to diffuse the embarrassment that surely would have been unbearable if we’d been alone.

During our last visit to the hotel together, Peter’s voice had risen as the tiered plate of fancies was brought to our table.

‘Pa, could we have teacakes, too? I could eat a mangy horse.’

Mildly Donald said, ‘Don’t call me Pa, Peter. It makes you sound affected.’

To the waitress he said, ‘Could we possibly have toasted teacakes? Three rounds?’

Peter watched the waitress walk away. She had been making eyes at him, as many girls did. When she’d disappeared through the swing door into the kitchen Peter grinned. ‘I heard that if you tell them you’ve joined up they throw themselves at your feet.’

It was August 1914. I remember how tanned Peter was, his dark hair still damp from the sea. His long brown fingers tap-tapped his teaspoon against his cup and he bowed his head, his grin slipping a little because he was shy, really. I dared myself to look at Donald and was relieved to find he’d turned his concern onto my brother.

‘We need to think about what you might need when you go away, make a list.’

Peter glanced at me as though I might share his amusement at our father’s faith in lists.

‘There’s bound to be something you’ve forgotten,’ Donald said.

‘Hankies, headache powders, syrup of figs.’ Peter laughed. ‘What else? Vests. Ear muffs? Damn noisy, those guns.’

Donald poured the tea. ‘We’ll go shopping before you leave.’

Peter said, ‘Wilson and Tilsley have joined up, Duggan, too.’

I thought of Wilson and Tilsley, that double act of dullards. Duggan too, captain of the rugby team, squat and vicious. I pictured them killed and lingered on the image of their corpses and their fat, weeping mothers. Peter kicked me under the table.

‘University will seem pretty dull with all this going off, Edwina.’

I looked at him, a look I had perfected only recently, a coolly interested gaze. It only made Peter grin.

‘Think of it, Eddie – all those men in uniform – you’ll hardly know where to look first –’

‘Peter, that’s enough!’ Donald’s face had coloured. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so angry. Only the arrival of the teacakes saved us.

Gaye doesn’t know about me. There are some that are sensitive, those who glance towards me when I enter a room; those who shiver theatrically and rub their arms. Years ago a little girl used to talk to me. ‘I know you’re there,’ she’d say, ‘I’m not afraid of you.’ Once she laughed, surprised at her own perceptiveness, ‘Are you afraid of me?’ I sat on the floor beside her, amongst the furniture she’d taken from her dolls’ house and arranged in doll-sized rooms on the rug. She looked a little to the left of me, as the blind do. ‘Daddy says I make you up.’

Her Daddy had white streaks in his hair. He’d lost half a leg at Dunkirk. He dragged memories after him weighty as a sack of limbs.

When Gaye first came here I had been alone for years. I remember watching her from the attic as she stood on the drive and looked up at the dark windows. I willed her to go away, just like all the others who had trailed after the estate agent. Most of them had only liked the idea of such a broken house, the idea of making it whole again, wholly theirs. Prospective purchasers had to wear yellow hard hats supplied by the estate agent whose name was Martin. Martin blushed as he handed out the hats, all the same insistent that they should be worn. ‘Health and safety,’ he’d say, almost the only words he’d utter. He led them up and down stairs, from cellar to attic, thinking of his lover, Graham, who only called in the early evening, an unromantic, unsatisfying time of day to Martin’s mind. As he watched his clients tap pointlessly at the flaking plaster, he thought about things he’d said to Graham the evening before and cringed, all the time keeping his face dully polite. He hated these clients, these wasters of time; he believed the house should be demolished. No one was more surprised than Martin when Gaye and David bought the house, no one except Gaye herself.

On the day Gaye and David moved in, after the removal men had left and the house resounded with silence, Gaye slumped on the stairs, imagining she might cry. But it seemed too self-conscious an act, too mannered and too much expected of a woman in her position. She could hear David walking from one bedroom to another and she thought of a cat marking its territory, acknowledging the ordinariness of the thought even as she wished him dead. I sat beside her and she stared straight ahead, her face blank. Then she turned to me and for a moment I believed that she had some understanding, that she had recognised me. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself; she began to rock back and forth on the stair. ‘It’s all right,’ she said softly, ‘all right, all right. Everything will be all right,’ and I thought for a moment that she was talking to me because her voice was wheedling, the kind of voice the living use when speaking to the dead.

I was so convinced that she saw me that I touched her face. She jerked away, shocked for that instant it took for rational thought to return; and then her expression became that of someone who does not believe in ghosts, only in draughts or the twitching of nerves below the skin, disconcerting but ultimately explainable. All the same, she went on staring at me. I found it hard not to speak her name, to test her further, because some of the living are like tightly folded buds, clenched against what they won’t acknowledge until finally they allow themselves to see. With some of the living it is only a matter of timing.

I’m not sure that I want Gaye to recognise me. As I said, I am making a study of Gaye and her husband, they are my subjects. It’s best they behave normally, without the distortions of suspicion.

My brother Peter was sent to France very soon after the war began. He wrote nonsense home, the same nonsense I was to write myself, knowing as I wrote that Donald wouldn’t be taken in, that in time worry would transform our father into an old man we hardly recognised. During that time Peter discovered he was a coward, although he told no one but me. Halfway through the war we sat opposite each other in a London pub strung with patriotic bunting and loud with the half-drunk voices of enlisted men.

‘I find myself watching the others, you know?’ Peter leaned towards me, his face intense with the effort of making me understand. ‘Watching to see how they behave, trying to work out what they’re truly thinking. I can’t be the only one who watches for signs, can I?’

To sudden, explosive applause, a woman sat down at a piano and began to play some music-hall song. Peter winced. He sat back in his seat and his eyes lost their focus. ‘I can’t be the only one.’

In the blue, smoky light of the public bar, his face was translucently pale. He was thinner, his wrists sticking out sharply from his tunic sleeves. His hands were disfigured with eczema and his breath was rank. He repelled me. I’d been sitting on the edge of my seat, better to hear him above the noise. I sat back. I felt that I might catch something.

Peter snorted, his nose wrinkling in that expression of disgust he often used on me. ‘Look at you. Miss Florence Nightingale. Hold out your hands.’

I obeyed. Without touching me, Peter examined my hands as my cigarette wasted smoke between my fingers. Eventually he met my eyes. ‘You’re ruined, you know that, don’t you?’

He looked away toward. . .