Grandmama's room had not been disturbed since the day of her funeral. The door was always locked. But Cordelia had recently discovered that the keys to the bedroom doors were interchangeable. Thinking that her father was safely downstairs in the drawing-room, she stole into the room, which smelt strongly of camphor, and began opening chests and closets to see what she could find. In the bottom drawer of a clothes-press, she came upon Grandmama's black veil, neatly laid out all by itself. She lifted it out and pressed the cool material against her face, breathing in camphor, and some other medicinal smell, and a very faint fragrance of perfume. When she put it on, the front of the veil came right down to her waist, whilst the back-it went all around, like a headdress-almost touched the floor. She could still see, though dimly, but when she looked in the long mirror her face was quite invisible, and because of the angle it seemed as if the veil was hovering of its own accord.
Panic seized her, and she fled into the corridor, only to confront a huge, dark figure blocking the way to the stairs. Her own shriek was drowned by a hoarse yell of terror, booming and echoing around her as she tore at the constricting veil and saw that the dark figure was in fact her father. Worse than her own fear, worse even than the beating that followed, was the memory of that cry, and of his face, momentarily frozen in horror before rage came to his rescue. Later he told her that he was sorry to have beaten her; he had lost his temper, he said, seeing her in Grandmama's veil. Though he was usually very indulgent, Cordelia found the apology troubling; she knew she had been terribly wicked, and deserved her punishment, and it seemed to her that Papa was trying to convince her-and perhaps himself-that he had not been frightened. She knew that Papa, a soldier, was as brave as a lion; Aunt Una was always saying so, yet she dared not ask what had so alarmed him. There were no more games of ghosts, and she was plagued for many months by a nightmare in which she was pursued and finally cornered by a malevolent, shrouded figure, who appeared in many guises but always became, in the instant before she woke in terror, her grandmother in the act of raising her veil.
She was, at the same time, fascinated by the portrait-the only surviving likeness of Imogen de Vere-which had hung on the second-floor landing for as long as she could remember. It showed a woman of great beauty, apparently in her early twenties, though she must have been about thirty-five when it was painted, against a dark, indistinct background. Her face, lit from above, was partly in shadow, accentuating the darkness of her large, luminous eyes. She wore an emerald green gown, cut high at the neck; her heavy, copper-coloured hair was loosely pinned up, with a few escaped strands curling across her forehead. The artist (who had not signed his name to the portrait) had captured some elusive quality in her gaze-an intense serenity, or perhaps a serene intensity of feeling-which compelled your eyes to return again and again to hers.
Though Cordelia did not doubt that the woman in the picture was, or had become, her grandmother, she found it curiously difficult to associate the face that so compelled her imagination with the veiled figure of memory-or nightmare. By the time she was fully grown, Cordelia had only to pause in front of the picture to feel that she was resuming a wordless intimacy which had accompanied her all through her childhood. Somehow her sense of communion with the portrait had become entwined with her feeling for her lost mother, whom she had never known: Frances de Vere had died of puerperal fever a few days after giving birth to Beatrice. It was not a matter of physical resemblance, for the photograph on Cordelia's dressing-table was of a shy, fair-haired girl, smiling tentatively at the camera. She looked about sixteen years old, and had died before her twenty-fourth birthday.
Imogen de Vere herself had died when she was not much more than fifty. Over the years, Cordelia had gradually assembled fragments of her grandmothers history; she had deduced that Imogen must have separated from her husband at about the time of the onset of her illness, and with her only child Arthur (Cordelia's father) who was then twelve or thirteen years old, come to live at Ashbourn House with her cousin Theodore Ashbourn and his sister Una. The illness-a mysterious and virulent disease of the skin, which no doctor had ever been able to diagnose-had plainly been far more severe than Cordelia had once believed. Imogen de Vere had spent the last fifteen years of her life at Ashbourn, permanently veiled and in constant pain. She slept badly, and would roam about the house in the small hours. Uncle Theodore had sometimes seen her wandering the garden by moonlight; she seemed to find relief in movement, and had walked miles every day until her final illness. So it was hardly surprising that many of the inhabitants of Hurst Green would swear to having seen a veiled figure peering from an upstairs window, or gliding amongst the trees of Hurst Wood, long after Imogen de Vere had been laid to rest in the village churchyard.
On a chill, grey afternoon late in February, soon after her twenty-first birthday, Cordelia was standing in front of the portrait, lost in sombre reflection. Beatrice had declined, reasonably enough in view of the weather, to come out for a walk, but then a little later Cordelia had seen her disappearing along the lane in waterproof and Wellingtons. As children, they had played together constantly, but their intimacy had not survived the death of their father, who had fought unscathed through four years of war only to lose his life a month before the Armistice. Cordelia, who was then thirteen, had tried to comfort her sister, but Beatrice had refused all consolation. She would not speak of her father, or remain in the room if his name was even mentioned, and if she wept for him, she did so alone. Nor would she tolerate any inquiry as to her feelings, which seemed to alternate between listless apathy and a sullen, silent anger at everyone and everything around her.
Thus she had remained for many months, and it seemed to Cordelia that her sister had never entirely recovered; or at least, that relations between them had never been the same. Perhaps they had simply grown apart, even in small things: both, for example, were avid readers, but Cordelia would always set her book aside for a chance of conversation, whereas Beatrice, who read only novels, had become even less tolerant of interruptions. In the game of animal comparisons Cordelia liked to play in the privacy of her own imagination, her sister had always been a cat. Beatrice had inherited their mothers almond-shaped eyes; her face narrowed markedly to a small, determined chin, making her cheekbones look more prominent than they really were. Now, at nineteen, she was more than ever the cat that walks by itself: watchful, silent, aloof, disdainful of petting, the kind that will settle only on the lap of its own choosing. Cordelia had sometimes accused herself of clinging to a romantic ideal of sisterly intimacy; yet she could not shake off the feeling that a door had been closed against her at the time of Papa's death, and never reopened.
Beatrice would not concede that anything had altered between them, but there was something about the very adroitness with which she had learned to evade her sister's overtures that seemed to say: "You have wounded me very deeply, though you profess not to understand what you have done; so I will not quarrel; there would be no point; of course we shall stay friends, but I shall never completely trust you again. As for the door you accuse me of closing, you are quite mistaken; it is you who have closed it; or perhaps there never was a door, only a blank wall, which is no more than you deserve." Cordelia had racked her memory and her conscience; she had privately asked her aunt and uncle, whether they knew of anything she had done to offend her sister, but no, Beatrice had said nothing against her. "You must not take it personally," Uncle Theodore had said only recently. "Your sisters nature is very different from yours; she turns inward, away from others, as you turn towards them. I don't think she has ever got over your fathers death. You must not blame yourself for what is none of your fault."