The first thing was the sound. Not a sound at all, in fact — a not-sound: the absence of the thing she had been hearing, which was her mother’s breathing. Vivien had been sitting close, very close, the way she did only at the worst of times, when she could not bring herself to speak but could not bring herself to leave either, and the sound of her was the sound of a held breath. Then Vivien’s hand, which had been warm against Maeve’s hair, was not warm. Then Maeve heard a beep. Not her mother. A machine.
She did not know the word coma. She did not know the word yet. She knew only that she had been in a dark warm place and the warm place had been full of her mother, and now the dark had ended in a way she could not place, like a word on the tip of her tongue that would not come. There was the beep. There was a smell of something sharp and clean, the way the public library used to smell in summer. There was the sound of a lift, somewhere, opening and closing, opening and closing. There was the weight of a sheet across her chest, which was her own body, but she had forgotten that she had a body, and the weight was shocking.
A voice said something. A man’s voice. He used a word that meant a number, but the number was not the number of her age. She had been twenty-three in October. She was twenty-three still. The number he said was smaller than that, but she could not make out what it was counting. He said good. He said stable. He said the word we.
The dark came back, briefly, and Vivien’s hand, and Vivien’s voice, very low, talking to no one.
You don’t have to come back yet. I know. I know, baby. I’m not asking.
Maeve thought: I am here. I am still here. But the words could not reach the woman who needed them, and the dark came again, and this time the dark was not warm and was not full of her mother. It was a different dark. It smelled of salt.
She woke, the way one wakes from a long sleep, into a room that was not a hospital room.
There was a window. The light through the window was the colour of late afternoon, leaning gold. There was a wooden floor, pale, with a long rug that had been there for a hundred years. There was a chair by the window, and on the chair, a folded blanket. There was a fireplace, unlit. There was a clock on the mantelpiece. The clock was wrong. The hands were at three and the clock was still running, and three was not the time. There was a smell of salt. There was a smell of something else, harder to place — woodsmoke, or bread, or both, or neither. There was a sound of water, very far off, and a sound of a kettle, even further, and a sound, beneath both, of nothing at all.
She sat up. The bed was not her bed. The bed was iron-framed and the sheet was heavy and smelled of lavender and was tucked in tight the way her grandmother used to tuck sheets, which her mother had never learned to do. Maeve was in her mother’s mother’s house. She had never been in her mother’s mother’s house. Her grandmother had died before she was three, and the house had been sold, and her mother had not spoken of it more than twice in Maeve’s life.
She stood. Her legs worked. Her feet were bare and the floor was cold. She went to the window.
Outside, there was a garden. The garden was small and not quite tended, and the plants in it were familiar in a way she could not have said — a kind of rose, a kind of low bush, a kind of grass that grew between flagstones the way grass grew in the photograph that her mother kept by the bed. She had only ever seen the photograph, in passing, in the dark, when she was a child and could not sleep. She had never asked her mother about the photograph. Her mother had never offered. The photograph was of a house. This was a house. This was the house in the photograph, she thought, and then she thought: I am dead.
She did not feel afraid. She had expected, if she ever thought about it at all, to feel afraid. She did not. She felt the way one feels when one has been driving for hours and has stopped, finally, at a service station one has never been to, and the light is the wrong light, and the car park is mostly empty, and one is tired, and the question of where one is going has been postponed. I am dead, she thought. This is what comes after.
She went to the door of the room. The door opened onto a landing, and the landing onto a narrow staircase, and the staircase onto a small hall with a front door. The front door was painted blue and was, she noticed, locked. Not with a key — there was no keyhole — but with a kind of fastening she had only ever seen in her grandmother’s house, in the photograph: a small brass hook and eye. She tried the hook. It did not move. She did not try to force it. She turned and looked at the hall.
The hall had a row of hooks on the wall, and on one of the hooks hung a coat. The coat was not hers. The coat was a man’s coat, dark green, slightly too big for her shoulders. She did not touch it. She went instead into the kitchen.
The kitchen had a table, two chairs, a stove, a sink. A kettle on the stove. A cupboard, which, when she opened it, contained exactly the things she would have expected to find in a kitchen: cups, plates, a jar of tea, a jar of coffee, a tin of biscuits, a loaf of bread, a pat of butter wrapped in waxed paper, a small pot of jam. The pot of jam was the colour of her grandmother’s jam, dark and seedy, but she had never had her grandmother’s jam. She had been told about it, by her mother, once.
She made tea. She drank it. It tasted the way tea tasted in childhood, before tea had become something you drank for the caffeine, when it was still a thing you drank for the drinking of it. She sat at the table. She put her hands flat on the wood.
I am dead, she thought, and then: I am not dead. People who are dead do not make tea.
She did not know how she knew this. She suspected it was not true. She drank her tea.
She spent the first afternoon learning the cottage. There were three rooms on the ground floor: the kitchen, a parlour with a fireplace and a piano, and a small room that seemed to be a kind of office, though there was nothing in it but a desk, a chair, and a view through a small window of a yard. Upstairs, there were two bedrooms, the one she had woken in, and another, smaller, with a child’s bed in it. The child’s bed was not made. The pillow on it had a dent. She did not look at the pillow too closely.
There was a bookcase in the parlour. The bookcase was full. The books in it were not books she had read, exactly, but they were the kind of books her mother had read, and the spines were the colours of her mother’s books, and several of them had the same kind of cracked leather and gilt lettering. She pulled one down and looked at the title. The House in the Field. She had not read it. She had heard of it. Her mother had mentioned it, once, while passing her own bookshelf, in the way one mentions a person one has not seen for a long time and is not sure one wants to see again. Maeve had asked her, what was it about, and her mother had said: A house. A woman who lives in it. A thing she doesn’t say. And then her mother had moved on.
She put the book back. She went back to the kitchen. She made another cup of tea. She drank it at the table. She listened.
The sounds of the cottage were the sounds of an inhabited house. The kettle ticked as it cooled. The wood of the floor made small sounds as the light moved across it. Somewhere, a pipe was making a faint, regular sound that she could not place. There was no wind. There was no weather. The window showed only the same late-afternoon gold. She had been in the cottage, she thought, for perhaps an hour. The clock still said three.
She went outside through the back door, which was not locked. The back door opened onto the garden she had seen from the window. She stood on the step.
The sea was closer than she had thought. There was a path down through the garden, between two low stone walls, and at the end of the path, a gate, and past the gate, a beach. The beach was empty. The sand was the colour of wet cardboard. The water was slate-grey. The sky above the water was a paler slate, and at the horizon, where the two met, there was a band of gold that matched the light through the window, as if the light were coming from somewhere out there. There were no boats. There were no gulls. There was a long, low sound, which she had been hearing since she woke, and which she now understood to be the sea.
She went down to the beach. She took off her shoes. She stood at the edge of the water, where the sand was darker, and she let the cold come up to her ankles. She stood there for a long time. She did not think about anything in particular. She thought about the feeling of her feet in the sand. She thought about the way the cold moved up through her skin. She thought, briefly, about Daniel, and then she thought, no, not Daniel. She thought about her mother. She thought, briefly, I will have to tell my mother about this, and then she thought, there is nothing to tell, and she stood for another ten minutes in the cold water, and the water did not rise any higher, and the light did not change.
When she went back to the cottage, she noticed that the door at the front, the blue door, was still locked. She tried the hook again. It did not move.
She did not mind. She did not, at that moment, mind anything.
She made dinner. She did not know how she knew what to make. She opened the cupboard, and the things she needed were there, and she made a thing her mother used to make on Sundays, which Maeve had not made herself in five years. She sat at the table. She ate it. It was good. She thought, I should call my mother and tell her I made this. She thought, my mother is not here to call. She thought, my mother is somewhere else, and I am here, and that is the way it has been for a long time. She ate the rest.
She washed the plate. She went into the parlour. She sat in the chair by the window. The light was still the colour of late afternoon. The clock still said three. The books on the shelves were still the colours of her mother’s books. The piano stood against the far wall, closed, with a small framed photograph on top of it. She did not look at the photograph. She sat in the chair for a long time.
She thought about the accident. She did not remember the accident, exactly. She remembered the road. She remembered the wet kerb. She remembered a sound that was her own voice, beginning a word she did not finish. She remembered the dark, and then the dark had been warm and full of her mother, and then the dark had been cold, and then she had been in the cottage. She remembered, before all of it, the job interview she had been on her way to. She had not wanted to go to the interview. She had been in a coat she did not like, on a bus she did not like, with a CV she did not like. The man who was going to interview her had a voice on the phone that was the voice of someone who already did not want to give her the job. She had decided, on the bus, that she was not going to the interview after all. She had decided, at the stop before hers, that she was going to walk. She did not know why she had decided that.
She thought: I have been given a second place.
She thought: It is a place my mother has been to, or my grandmother, or someone I do not know.
She thought: It is a place that someone has loved enough to remember in detail, and I am in that detail now, and they are not.
She did not know what to make of this. She sat in the chair. The light did not change. The clock said three.
She slept, eventually, in the iron-framed bed. She did not remember getting into it. She did not remember taking off her clothes, or putting on the nightdress that was folded under the pillow, which was not her nightdress but which fit her well enough. The nightdress was old. It smelled of lavender. It smelled of the bed. She slept.
In her sleep, she heard a sound. It was a small sound, very far away, and it was not a sound of the cottage or the sea. It was a sound she had heard before, in the other dark, in the warm dark. It was the sound of a machine, very far away, going beep. She thought, in her sleep: that is the sea. The sea did not beep. She knew the sea did not beep. She slept anyway. The sound went on. She let it.
She woke. The light was still the colour of late afternoon. The clock still said three. The kettle in the kitchen was making the sound that kettles make when they have just been taken off the stove.
She lay in the bed for a long time, listening.
The kettle made its sound again. It was not a sound she had heard before, in this cottage. The kettle had been silent the whole of the previous afternoon. She had not made tea since dinner. Someone had made tea.
She lay still. She listened. She listened for the sound of someone else in the cottage. She listened for footsteps, for breathing, for the small sounds a person makes when they think they are alone. She heard only the kettle. She lay still for a long time. Then she got up. She put on the slippers that were by the bed. She went to the door of the bedroom. She opened it. The landing was quiet. The staircase was quiet. The hall was quiet. She went down the stairs. She went to the kitchen door. She opened it.
The kitchen was empty. The kettle was on the table, and it was still hot. There were two cups on the table. One was hers, from the night before. The other was new. The other was clean.
She stood in the doorway. She looked at the second cup. She did not touch it. She stood in the doorway for a long time.
The clock said three. The light was still the colour of late afternoon. The sea, far off, was making its long, low sound. She stood in the doorway. The cottage, around her, was quiet, and warm, and full of a kind of waiting she had never felt before in a house.
