Terminus: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Louise Doughty

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       Terminus

      Note on the Author

      A Note on Emily Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE

      SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

      This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

       TERMINUS

       LOUISE DOUGHTY

      TWO YOUNG WOMEN ARE standing in a hotel lobby, on either side of a polished-wood reception desk. They are staring at each other.

      It is a Tuesday in February. Outside the hotel, lorries bump and thump along a dual carriageway. Beyond the dual carriageway, there is a wide esplanade, and beyond the esplanade a beach, where grey and brown waves chop against the pebbles, and a red warning flag furls and corrugates in the wind before straightening with a snap.

      ‘Do you have any form of identification?’ the young woman behind the desk asks politely, lightly enough, but the thick ticking of the clock on the wall behind her makes the query sound emphatic.

      The hotel lobby is empty, apart from the two women. Victorian-era, once very grand, it has a vaulted ceiling and curving staircase, but the carpet is frayed now, the furniture worn. From the bar and restaurant on the other side of the lobby comes the faint smell of disinfectant and cabbage, even though no one has cooked cabbage in this hotel for over fifty years.

      The reception desk is shiny oak; the brass clock ticks loudly; the walls are painted a leaden green colour that hints at a sanatorium. At the end of the reception desk is a white plastic orchid in a brown plastic pot.

      Who are you?

      Good question.

      The other young woman, the one in front of the desk, is called Maria. Maria has never been asked for identification at a hotel before, but then she has never shown up like this, walking in off the street with no luggage, a small backpack, and a stare in her eyes. A beanie hat is pulled low over her black curls, and there are shadows beneath that stare. The receptionist is slender, with a neat navy jacket, and fair hair in an immaculate ponytail. Her skin is very fine, the only make-up she wears is a slick of pale lipstick. Maria knows how she looks to this young woman. They are each other’s inverse.

      Maria reaches into the backpack and hands over a driving licence. The receptionist glances at it and hands it back. She doesn’t write anything down. Maria scans the receptionist’s face for signs of suspicion or hostility, but her expression is a calm, professional blank. Maria thinks how habituated she now is to interpretation, how experienced at watching a face.

      In high season the room the receptionist offers – a deluxe double with a sea view – would be over two hundred pounds a night, but it’s a Tuesday in February, and Maria gets it for eighty-five. Breakfast is included.

      ‘Would you like to pay now or at checkout?’ the receptionist asks.

      Maria has two credit cards that she has never used: when she applied