The One I Was--first chapter
1
Rosamond
Every atom of my body screamed at me to run away from the elegant and classical white house at whose door I stood.
I was a forty-something woman, a professional, a nurse, but I felt like a twelve-year-old again. I forced myself to push the doorbell. Sarah, the housekeeper, opened the front door and let me in. I heard myself exchanging pleasantries with her while my heart beat out a tattoo. I took stock of my surroundings. Duck-egg walls. A chandelier of twisted metal and crystal, hanging from the ceiling like an icicle.
I looked up the staircase, trying to accustom myself to being back at Fairfleet again. My fingers clenched the handles of my suitcase as I drew in a long breath. The house smelled of new paint and the large white lilies on the console table. An older, deeper smell undercut the scent: polished wood and old stone, but it should have been bitter like burning almonds, to remind me of my guilt.
The telephone rang. Sarah frowned. ‘That’ll be the district nurse. Excuse me one moment, Rosamond.’
Some of the balustrading on the staircase had been replaced, but the
work had been done with sensitivity; only someone who knew where to look would have spotted the new spindles. The flagstones replacing the old parquet floor might have been there for centuries. What had I expected: that the house would somehow remember what had happened on a clear, frosty morning just like this, thirty years ago?
I tried to clear my mind, to remember why I was here. I thought about my patient, Benny Gault, and his arrival at this house. Just before the war Fairfleet had taken in a group of Jewish refugee boys from Germany, made them a home while they grew up, and sent them back out into the world to make good lives for themselves. And then the adult Benny Gault had returned years later to buy Fairfleet and make it his own. Now he lay dying upstairs.
Sarah came back in. ‘Sorry about that: come through to the kitchen, Rosamond.’
I moved onwards into the house. I felt more relaxed now I wasn’t dwelling on myself and my past. I was thinking about how Benny must have felt when he’d first arrived in England. Homesick? Relieved? Excited? Possibly all of these.
Rosamond
Every atom of my body screamed at me to run away from the elegant and classical white house at whose door I stood.
I was a forty-something woman, a professional, a nurse, but I felt like a twelve-year-old again. I forced myself to push the doorbell. Sarah, the housekeeper, opened the front door and let me in. I heard myself exchanging pleasantries with her while my heart beat out a tattoo. I took stock of my surroundings. Duck-egg walls. A chandelier of twisted metal and crystal, hanging from the ceiling like an icicle.
I looked up the staircase, trying to accustom myself to being back at Fairfleet again. My fingers clenched the handles of my suitcase as I drew in a long breath. The house smelled of new paint and the large white lilies on the console table. An older, deeper smell undercut the scent: polished wood and old stone, but it should have been bitter like burning almonds, to remind me of my guilt.
The telephone rang. Sarah frowned. ‘That’ll be the district nurse. Excuse me one moment, Rosamond.’
Some of the balustrading on the staircase had been replaced, but the
work had been done with sensitivity; only someone who knew where to look would have spotted the new spindles. The flagstones replacing the old parquet floor might have been there for centuries. What had I expected: that the house would somehow remember what had happened on a clear, frosty morning just like this, thirty years ago?
I tried to clear my mind, to remember why I was here. I thought about my patient, Benny Gault, and his arrival at this house. Just before the war Fairfleet had taken in a group of Jewish refugee boys from Germany, made them a home while they grew up, and sent them back out into the world to make good lives for themselves. And then the adult Benny Gault had returned years later to buy Fairfleet and make it his own. Now he lay dying upstairs.
Sarah came back in. ‘Sorry about that: come through to the kitchen, Rosamond.’
I moved onwards into the house. I felt more relaxed now I wasn’t dwelling on myself and my past. I was thinking about how Benny must have felt when he’d first arrived in England. Homesick? Relieved? Excited? Possibly all of these.
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