The Grip Lit Collection: The Sisters, Mother, Mother and Dark Rooms. Koren Zailckas
Then I notice the bracelet. It’s stunning, interspersed with sapphires, but a few of the stones are missing, as if she hasn’t quite finished it yet. As I leave the room I think how lucky Beatrice is to have all this: the house, the money, the talent, and most importantly, her twin.
The music gets louder – Lana Del Ray has been replaced by the Arctic Monkeys – as I round the stairs to the kitchen and when I get to the bottom step I jolt in surprise. I’d been expecting, hoping, that one of them would be here, waiting for me. But the only person in the room is a short, rotund woman with a greying blonde bob whom I don’t recognize. She seems oblivious to me as she leans over the table so that her large, heavy breasts, encased in a floral apron, are almost touching the wood as she quickly, and quite aggressively, kneads dough.
A glance at the kitchen clock tells me it’s just gone ten. I clear my throat to announce my presence and the woman looks up. Her eyes are small and dark, two currants in her rounded fleshy face, which is the colour of the dough that she is vigorously kneading.
She swivels on chubby ankles to turn down the Roberts radio that sits on the worktop behind her and her small eyes sweep over me, no doubt taking in my state of undress. ‘Ah, another one,’ she says in a thick accent that I guess has its origins somewhere in Eastern Europe, although I can’t be sure. ‘You are like little stray dogs,’ she says, not unkindly. ‘Pretty little stray dogs. You girls, you come and stay a while and then you go, never to be seen again …’ She shakes her head as if she’s trying to displace the memories of these ‘girls’.
I want to tell her I’m not planning on going anywhere and to ask her who the hell she is anyway, and why is she making what I assume is bread in Beatrice’s kitchen. (I can’t help but think of the house as Beatrice’s even though I know it belongs to Ben as well.)
‘I’m Abi,’ I say as I shuffle towards the table, the tiles sticky under my feet, pulling my dressing gown around me and suppressing a shiver. The large sash window is open and, although the day is warm, the kitchen is cold due to its basement location, deprived of the sun that blazes outside.
She smiles enigmatically but doesn’t offer her name. Who are you? I want to shout, and what are you doing here?
‘Where are the others?’ I ask instead.
‘Ah, the others,’ she replies as she digs her elbows vigorously into the dough. ‘They are out playing tennis.’
I feel a stab of hurt that they would go off and play tennis without asking me.
She goes to the Aga and, kneeling in front of it, places the bread tin carefully in one of its four compartments. ‘Shall I make you a coffee?’ She stands up, wiping her hands on the skirt of her apron. I nod gratefully, muttering my thanks, making sure I take a seat opposite the entrance to the kitchen so that I can see them as soon as they return from their game of tennis. I listen as she chatters over a different, more upbeat song on the radio, while fiddling with the coffee machine’s intricate workings. She tells me her name is Eva, she’s from Poland and she’s been a housekeeper for Beatrice and Ben for six years, ever since they moved to Bath.
‘The poor lambs,’ she says conspiratorially, as she hands me my coffee cup with surprisingly tiny delicate hands for such a large lady. ‘They were so in need of mothering when I met them. They lost their parents you know, a long time ago.’
I take a sip of my coffee as a surge of anticipation rushes through me that, at last, I might get to find out more about them.
Eva takes a seat next to me and launches into a story of when she first came to work for them. Although her words are heavily accented so that I sometimes miss exactly what she’s saying, I can tell by the relish with which she talks that this woman likes to gossip, and I think that this could work to my advantage.
‘I’m local so I don’t need to live in,’ she explains. ‘But I try to come over every day and make them a meal that they can cook up later or freeze.’ So, the delicious lasagne that we had for dinner last night was one of Eva’s offerings. ‘I also do a bit of cleaning for them,’ she continues. ‘Ben particularly likes things tidy. They have a gardener as well. They do need looking after.’
They’re thirty-two years old, I want to shout. They’re hardly children. But I stay silent, not wanting to interrupt her flow. She pauses and glances at me quickly, and I can see that she’s assessing whether she can trust me. She obviously thinks she can as she goes on: ‘When Beatrice first moved to Bath she seemed very fragile, she would keep bursting into tears, telling me she didn’t know what to do – about what, I never found out. She never told me what happened before moving here, but I got the impression she was running away from something, or someone. This house was in total – how do you say it? – total disrepair?’ I nod encouragingly. ‘She threw herself into doing it up. Spent a year having it modernized – it must have cost her a fortune. Then Ben moved in too and she seemed happier, more secure.’
I’m intrigued to find out who, or what, Beatrice was running from. I find the fact that she has a history that I know nothing about disconcerting. I want to know everything about her, otherwise it makes us little more than strangers. I take a sip of the coffee, savouring its bitter taste. ‘How did their parents die?’
‘I think it was a car accident.’ Another coincidence, another thing we have in common. ‘The twins were babies, maybe toddlers, I can’t remember exactly.’ She frowns. ‘They were brought up by their grandparents and, from what I understand, they were very wealthy. When they died, their money was put in trust for when the twins turned twenty-five.’
So that’s where all their money has come from. That’s how they can afford this magnificent house and why they don’t need to charge any rent.
I think of the three-bedroom semi on a small housing estate in Farnham, Surrey where Lucy and I grew up. It wasn’t a bad place to live, our parents always kept it clean, tidy and cosy and we knew no different, it was our home, but it was worlds away from a house such as this. I imagine Beatrice and Ben as children, the orphan twins, running through large draughty rooms of their grandparents’ rambling mansion with extensive gardens and a sweeping driveway, a completely different type of estate to the one where we spent our childhood.
Eva takes a noisy slurp of her coffee. ‘Now that their grandparents have died they’ve only got each other.’
‘At least they’ve got each other,’ I say, thinking of Lucy.
She nods in agreement, licking froth from her top lip with the tip of her tongue. ‘Yes, but it means they are very protective of one another, of course.’ She regards me over the rim of her cup. ‘They won’t let anything, or anyone come between them.’ Her words sound like a warning.
The patter of footsteps on stone and raised jovial voices prevent her from saying anything further. My heart quickens as Beatrice skips down the stairs carrying her tennis racket, followed closely by Cass, Pam and Ben. She’s flushed, a white tennis skirt skimming the top of her tanned thighs. I try to catch her eye but she doesn’t look in my direction.
‘Bread smells yummy, Eva,’ she says, as if I’m not even here. ‘We’ve had a good game, haven’t we, Ben?’ She reaches up and pulls the front of his cap down so that it covers his eyes and he protests good-naturedly. I look at him, willing him to acknowledge me, relieved when he catches my eye and flashes me one of his lopsided smiles. He’s wearing khaki shorts that come down to his knees and I’m pleasantly surprised by his muscular calves.
‘Morning, Abi.’ He moves away from his sister and much to my delight slides into the chair next to me. The sun has brought out the freckles across his nose and he looks tanned and healthy in a white Fred Perry. I resist the urge to touch him. He cheekily asks Eva to make him a cup of coffee and after a bit of banter about her not being his personal slave she gets up and goes to the coffee machine. I can tell by the way her face lights up when she jokes with him, her accent thickening so I can barely understand her, that she would do anything for him.
Now that we’re all in the kitchen it seems smaller, claustrophobic,