‘No.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t either, really. She wrote things – books and articles. She wrote all the time, when she wasn’t teaching and going to meetings or doing what she called fieldwork. But there was a book she was writing for herself. Nothing to do with her job, just an idea she had. It started with Jane Eyre because she loved Jane Eyre. She had various copies of it, but her favourite came from her godmother and was about eighty years old. Do you know Jane Eyre?’
‘No.’
‘She wanted to write a kind of history of the way Jane Eyre’s been imitated and re-written and generally ripped off. I teased her about it, how far up itself it was – a book about a book and all the other books it’s spawned. She didn’t mind. She enjoyed being teased. You don’t know what I’m talking about do you? Don’t listen to me. I don’t know why I’m talking so much.’
‘Don’t stop. It’s interesting. I like it when you talk.’
‘There were books she liked a lot. One that told the story of Rochester’s mad wife, all the things Charlotte Bronte doesn’t tell us and Jane Eyre doesn’t know – about her being a Jamaican and how she’s done in by men. I forget the name of it. And there were books that annoyed her, and books that made her laugh. She loved spotting Charlotte’s children, as she called them. Stories about Victorian husbands driving their wives mad and locking them in lunatic asylums. Stories about houses haunted by secrets, and you’d know it wouldn’t be over until someone had set fire to the house. I said once it was the houses I felt bad for and she pretended to be shocked. Of course I never actually read them, but she’d be in bed with a book and start giggling or get excited and then she’d tell me. I asked her once why she didn’t write a book of her own – a novel, I mean. And she said she didn’t have the talent for making things up. She was better at seeing patterns in other people’s stories. But she did once have this idea for a children’s story.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’m not sure I can remember it all.’
‘Tell me what you remember.’
‘All right. This girl lives in an orphanage. One day she finds a book hidden in the fireplace where they’re too mean to light a fire. It’s a beautiful book and she loves it like a friend, like a toy bear or something, hugging it at night. She starts having these strange dreams. Every morning she finds the story of her dream has printed itself in the book in place of what was there before. Meanwhile, in some other country, a wealthy man finds parts of his life disappearing – objects missing from his house, then pieces of his own history. Friends become unreachable and unknown as though they’d never existed. When his son doesn’t come down to breakfast, he sends his daughter to wake him. Go and fetch your brother from his room, he says, and she reacts as if he’s gone mad. What brother? What room? His piano disappears. He visits a friend, a violinist. He sits to play the friend’s piano and he can’t play a note. It’s as though he’s never touched a piano in his life. I can’t remember how it ends. Maybe that was going to be the end. It doesn’t sound like much of story does it.’
‘It’s sad.’
‘Yes, but Caroline wasn’t sad when she told me about it. She was excited. That’s the way she was.’
‘There’s something I must tell you, Jason.’
‘You can tell me anything.’
‘But this is a secret. I mean I’ve kept it a secret and I shouldn’t have, and now I’m afraid you’ll be angry that I didn’t tell you before.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Because I was afraid.’
‘You’re not afraid of anything.’
‘I’m more afraid than you know. If you weren’t here I don’t know what I’d do.’
I wait for her to tell me her secret, thinking she could hardly guess how hard it would be to shock me.
‘Do you think sometimes,’ she says, ‘that we’ve known each other all our lives?’
‘My life stopped, and began again when I woke up in this house.’
‘But we knew each other before.’
‘Is this about reincarnation?’
‘I don’t know what that is. But we did know each other. I was in Hebron. I was on the Jesus bus.’
And I am shocked after all. ‘What do you know about the Jesus bus?’
‘Everything. I was there. With my grandma. Grandma Cheryl. We left my mother in London because she didn’t want to come. I mean… because she was a streetwalker – that’s what Grandma Cheryl said. I think it must have been a hard life. I barely remember her and I never saw her again after we left.’
‘Abigail? I don’t remember any Abigail.’
‘I wasn’t Abigail then. Caleb gave us all new names, remember, when we reached Hebron. I was Tiffany before.’
‘Tiffany!’ I search her face for that child, that pudgy kid bundled up in clothes too big for her and clinging to Penny’s skirt. It is her. Now I see it, I wonder that I didn’t see it before. ‘But how come you’re here? It’s unbelievable.’ It makes me laugh with astonishment.
‘No, not unbelievable. I saw the house when you did. When we were getting apples in the orchard. And you said, one day you’d buy it and live in it and I asked if I could come too. I knew if I was ever going to find you it would be here – back along the road from Lloyd’s farm. Not that far away. Three days walk, as it turned out. When most of the others were dead and there was no one left to nurse.’
‘You grew up on Lloyd’s farm.’
‘Yes, Hebron.’
‘So you knew Penny.’
‘Yes.’
‘And my mother.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Derek and Walter and all of them.’
‘Walter I remember vaguely. He died when I was quite young. Just after you left. They said it killed him when you ran away.’
‘That’s a lie. He was dead already. I watched him go.’
‘And Caleb – Derek – that’s the part I was afraid to tell you.’
‘Why? What about him?’
‘I was his wife. One of his wives. After your mother died, and your sister ran away, he chose me. Then later a girl called Sarah, and then Maud.’
‘Three of you?’
‘It was better when it wasn’t just me. We took care of each other. I loved Sarah. We were everything to each other.’
‘You were all his wives?’
‘Yes, like in the time of the patriarchs, Caleb said.’
‘I bet he did. Were there any children?’
‘No, none of us had children.’
‘He was infertile, then, I suppose.’
‘Maybe, I don’t know if that’s the word for it. It’s hard to explain.’
‘Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’
There’s a pale movement overhead and I see the owl swooping among the trees to settle on a branch.
‘I knew what it was supposed to be like,’ Abigail says. ‘My grandma told me not to be scared, that it was nice when you got used to it. All good fun really, she said, as long as you don’t fight it. She saw me, one day, looking at the stallion in the field across the river with his pizzle hanging under his belly like something that didn’t belong to him, and she laughed and said it wouldn’t be that size. I knew that anyway. I’d seen one of the boys… you know… doing himself behind the barn. But it turned out different than I expected. Caleb never got hard like that. He’d get on top of me, but only to kiss me and rub against me.’ She stopped. ‘I didn’t think I’d tell you this. No reason to tell anyone now. I told Sarah, so she’d know what to expect. And Maud, later on. But I’ve no reason to tell you.’