Page 11 of The Perfect Guests
Eventually, there’s movement by the back door. The fluffy dog lifts its head. A hand appears, gripping the doorframe. Someone is stepping out cautiously onto the veranda, taking their time about it.
Is this the new owner of Raven Hall?
It’s a woman in her forties. A loose summer dress billows over her bloated frame, and her pale hair is scraped back into a ponytail, creating the impression that her head is too small for her body. She shuffles across the veranda and collapses onto a swing seat with a groan that rolls out across the lawn. The fluffy dog springs up beside her and nestles into the folds of her dress, and she rests one puffy hand on its little head.
Almost immediately, a second woman, much younger, appears in the doorway. In stark contrast to the figure on the swing seat, this one is dressed to show off her slim frame: bright orange crop top, tight-fitting denim shorts, enormous hoop earrings. She hovers briefly on the veranda without saying anything, then swivels and disappears back inside thehouse with a swish of her waist-length hair. The swing seat rocks and creaks, and the older woman tips her head back and closes her eyes.
So, these are the new owners of Raven Hall. A slow-moving woman and her spoiled brat of a daughter.
She watches the woman on the swing seat for a while longer, but her resentment is an ache inside her rib cage, and her powerlessness makes her restless. She creeps back around the border of the garden and escapes over the curved branch, into the farmer’s field. Insects buzz all around her, and she stands perfectly still for a minute, thinking, weighing up her options. She needs to get back to the village; she’s got a long journey ahead of her, to return to her lodgings. But before that, she has a decision to make.
She lifts her chin and retraces her steps around the boundary wall, until she reaches the point where she’ll have to veer out into the open—where she might be seen. Before she leaves, she places her palms against the warm stone wall again, and she tells Raven Hall, “Don’t forget me. I’ll come back.”
Beth
July 1988
Each evening of my first week at Raven Hall, when Markus arrived home after work he asked me how my day had been and how I was settling in. By Thursday, I was able to give him a genuinely unforced answer.
“It’s been a brilliant day, thanks. I really love it here.”
He beamed, before hurrying away as usual, to check on his other projects. There was always a ditch that needed clearing out, or a broken piece of guttering that needed mending, or on this occasion some old gazebos that needed to be retrieved from the stable block before Leonora followed through with her threat to hire a grand new one for their upcoming party.
Leonora grew more tense as the week wore on. She carried around guest lists and food lists, and I heard her several times chasing up the caterers on the phone. Nina and I spent our days outside, exploring routes around the lake, swimming with Jonas, or rowing halfway across to the island, shelving the oars and stretching out inthe sunshine with a good book each and a picnic for when our stomachs began to rumble. But that Thursday evening, after Markus had gone off to look for the gazebos, Leonora told Nina to go and tidy her bedroom, and then she asked me whether I’d mind doing her a favor.
“Of course,” I said. “What is it?”
“There’s a dress in your wardrobe. I wondered if you’d try it on for me. I want to see if it fits you.”
I hesitated. The dress had looked rather restrictive and uncomfortable, and I was perfectly content in my shorts and T-shirt; I didn’t enjoy dressing up. On the other hand, Leonora had been nothing but kind to me, and my new life at Raven Hall had so far been one carefree day after another. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful.
“Okay,” I said.
“Come down and show me when you’ve got it on.”
I hurried upstairs and lifted the blue checked dress down from its hanging rail. My prediction was right—when I pulled it on, it felt tight and scratchy, and I no longer felt like Beth Soames at all. There was a big cheval mirror in the corner of the room, and I examined my reflection morosely. It wouldn’t be easy to scramble into and out of the rowing boat wearing something like this; I felt sorry for the olden-day girls who had to wear such things all the time. But I did as Leonora had requested, and I went down to the drawing room to show her.
“Ah, Beth.” She set aside her party list as if she’d forgotten she was waiting for me, but I wasn’t fooled—her bright eyes scrutinized me intensely, and there was a twitchiness in her movements. She walked in a circle around me, tweaking at the fabric, and then she lifted a lock of my hair, which was tangled from swimming in the lake that afternoon.
“Here,” she said. “Come and sit down. Let me brush your hair.”
Warily, I sank onto a chair in front of the black marble fireplace. A fine mist coated my cheek as she sprayed something over my head. But as soon as she began to pull the brush through the tangles, I felt my muscles relaxing, and the smoother the brush’s strokes became, the more soothed I felt. I closed my eyes and inhaled her rose-scented perfume, and the pleasant chemical fragrance of the spray, and the background lavender-and-polish smell of Raven Hall.
The sensation on my scalp took me back to a time when my mother used to brush my hair each morning before school. Sometimes she’d braid it into two long pigtails, and I’d skip all the way to my primary school, enjoying their thump-thump on my shoulders as I bounced. My brother, Ricky, used to walk tall in his high school uniform beside me, and he’d laugh at my enthusiasm and call me Skippy. I could have sat there and let Leonora brush my hair forever; I didn’t want her to stop.
“Now,” Leonora said finally. “Let’s see. Shall we plait it?” I nodded, my eyes suddenly stinging.
Deftly, she divided my hair into two sides and wove a pair of plaits, producing blue ribbons from her pocket to tie at the ends. When she was finished, she stepped back, and it was only then that I noticed Markus hovering in the doorway. Leonora’s voice was rather sharp.
“What do you think?”
She was looking at him, not at me. I kept quiet as Markus took a couple of steps into the room.
“Yes,” he said. “That’ll do.”
Then he spun on his heel and was gone.
Leonora turned away from me and picked up her party list. “That’s fine, Beth. You can change back into your own clothes now.”
