T he cracks were getting bigger. I sat at the table eating Weetabix before I had to go upstairs to cook Madame Bowden’s breakfast. With every mouthful, I looked up again at the dark lines spreading across the wall like the branch of a tree. There was no crumbling plaster, but a very definite line of growth. A dark material was visible now and I slowly raised my hand to touch it. With a slight tremble, my fingers ran along the ridges and I discovered that the surface I was touching was wood-like. It wasn’t even wood-like, it was wood. There were branches growing in the basement. I would have to tell her now. This couldn’t be good. What if the house was structurally unsound?

‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about it too much,’ Madame Bowden remarked,

having finally made her way down to take a look. ‘Old buildings have their quirks. Now I think I shall have croissants for breakfast this morning, Martha. You can pop over to the French bakery,’ she said, already turning to leave.

I stood there with my mouth agape.

‘But they’re pretty big cracks and they weren’t here when I moved in!’ I said, unsure she’d grasped the seriousness of the situation. ‘Shouldn’t you call an engineer?’

She had a wistful look in her eye, as she let her fingertips rest on the cracks. She was touching the wall the way you would touch the soft cheek of a child.

‘It was always such a strange little place,’ she whispered, almost to herself. ‘Oh, Martha, do stop worrying so much, you’re giving yourself frown lines.’

‘Frown lines?’ I asked, perplexed (and giving myself more frown lines). That was when she spotted the leaflets on the table.

‘So, you’re going ahead with it then?’ she asked, raising her reading glasses that she wore on a pearl chain around her neck and peering at the papers.

‘University? Oh, um, yes. You would know this if you’d bothered to attend your own dinner party. Where were you?’

She gave me a filthy look and a hasty reminder that she was still paying my wages and I was living under her roof.

‘I can’t stand those women.’ ‘So why did you invite them?’

She walked around the room and wrapped her silk shawl around her shoulders.

‘Maybe I wanted to amuse myself; see how you coped with them. By all accounts, you held yourself rather well.’

Did I?

‘Hang on, what—’

‘I assume you’ll fit these studies around your work here?’ she interrupted.

‘Of course. I’m thinking I might just start with a part-time course.’ Shit. I hadn’t thought about how to ask her about it. Would I still be able to keep my job? A roof over my head? I tried to quieten my thoughts and read her story. Most of the time you could predict someone’s behaviour by their past. Most of the time people didn’t change. Most of the time.

I realised she was staring at me.

‘Croissants, Martha. And fresh coffee. Chop-chop!’ And with that, she went back upstairs.

‘So, when did you buy this house?’ I tried to act as casually as possible; as if the answer mattered little, one way or the other. I knew if she thought I was fishing, she wouldn’t bite. Perhaps it was her acting skills that made her so difficult to read.

‘Martha, a person such as myself does not buy a house, one acquires a house.’

It took all of my willpower not to roll my eyes. ‘Okay, well, when did you acquire number 12?’

‘Oh, it’s hard to say really. I feel as though I’ve always been here. In fact, it’s hard to remember a time when I lived anywhere else.’

I dusted the picture frames on the mantelpiece and picked up the black and white wedding photo.

‘It was 1965,’ she began, settling down to the cosmopolitan-style breakfast I had laid on the dining table. ‘I was a beautiful bride. Many of the guests likened me to Grace Kelly. Oh, you mightn’t think so now, but I was a natural blonde.’

A natural liar, I thought. It was hard to tell if her stories were real or mere fabrications of the truth – stories she had picked up along the way and made her own. I looked at the woman in the picture. It was true, she did look like an old Hollywood starlet, but I couldn’t see the resemblance at all. The man was tall, dark and handsome with the look of someone who had captured the moon in his pocket.

‘He was a pilot,’ she said, slathering butter on her croissant. ‘Far too old for me, or at least that’s what my mother told me. But I was hopelessly in

love with him. I thought he was so dashing. He was an American, you know, and to a twenty-something Irish girl, well, he was like Clark Gable.’

She lost herself in the past for a moment.

‘He adored this strange little house. But he was a perfectionist, always trying to fix things. You have to understand, old houses have their quirks. Some things are meant to be flawed. Therein lies beauty.’

She was a captivating storyteller. I knew there was a peculiar history within these walls and whatever it was, it must have happened long before Madame Bowden arrived.

‘What happened to your husband, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Plane crash. We were only married a year when his plane went down over Gibraltar.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘Yes, it was a difficult time. That’s when I met Archie.’ ‘Archie?’

‘My second husband. He was a doctor from Cork.’ ‘I thought you said he was Russian?’

‘Oh no, that was husband number three.’

‘But what happened to Archie?’ I realised that this was really none of my business, but I couldn’t help myself. Maybe when you got to her age, minor details like this didn’t matter any more.

‘Archie contracted malaria when he was working in Africa, poor fellow.’

I wondered what had happened to the Russian mathematician – death by numbers?

‘What’s with all of these questions? I hope you’re not planning on bumping me off and getting your hands on my house?’

‘Honestly, Madame Bowden, if anyone should be worried about getting bumped off, I think it should be me.’

She stared at me for a moment and I was full sure she was going to fire me for insolence, when she let out an enormous laugh. I really needed to hang out with people my own age.

I spent that entire day giving the house a deep clean. It was something I always enjoyed doing, not because I was a fan of housework, but because the methodical action of cleaning was the only way I’d ever found to make my thoughts stop. Thoughts like: I had married a bully, I had wasted my life, and now I could add a new one to the list – I had humiliated myself in front of Henry. Why did I care about his opinion so much anyway? Besides, it wasn’t my fault he’d neglected to tell me about his fiancée. But the truth was, I already knew. I could read in his eyes that his heart was tied elsewhere, so why did I act like it was such a big surprise? And why did it even matter? What kind of an idiot would start having feelings for someone when they’d just got out of an abusive marriage? That should have been the end of it. I simply couldn’t permit myself to feel anything.

I was exhausted by the time I got downstairs to the basement that night. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom and changed for bed with unseeing eyes. It was only as I pulled the covers down and flopped into bed that I saw it. Where the lines in the wall had been, there now emerged a shelf. With one single book on it. Standing upright. I looked around the room, for what, I don’t know. I almost felt like saying out loud, ‘Can anyone else see this?’ I was afraid to get out of bed and so I just stayed there, frozen for a minute. Nothing else happened, not a sound came. I had no idea how it got there, other than that Madame Bowden must have placed it there while I was busy steam-cleaning the curtains or bleaching the bathroom. My curiosity won out and I got up to inspect the book. The spine read A Place Called Lost but the author was anonymous. I got back into bed and opened

the beautiful old cloth-bound cover. It bore a picture of an antique shopfront with a stained-glass pattern in the window. I had to admit that, so far, it was very inviting.

I read the first line aloud: ‘Once upon a time in an old town, in an old street, there stood a very old house.’

I hadn’t told my employer of my issues with books or why I practically broke out in hives at the thought of reading them, so she wouldn’t have known. But perhaps it was a gesture of some sort and it would’ve been rude not to accept it. I decided I should try to read it, in case she asked me about it. Besides, I had to break through this mental block if I had any hope of going back to university. I had to face my fears.