He closed his eyes and realised he couldn’t.
He heard her footsteps walking away, getting quieter and quieter until he opened his eyes and called out, ‘Melissa, wait!’
‘I’m sick of waiting,’ she shouted without even turning back.
He watched her figure recede into the distance. He could see the glowing sign of Hampstead tube just beyond, knew he could catch up with her, plead with her, bury her in a flurry of platitudes and promises. But she was right: he knew in his heart of hearts that he wouldn’t – couldn’t – keep any promises.
He closed his eyes, breathing cold air in and out, picturing the sun on the white stone of Casa D’Or, almost feeling himself back there: the warmth on his skin, the rush of excitement, of anticipation. And of love, true love. His mother had been right: he had been measuring every other woman against Jennifer. But as he watched Melissa turn the corner and disappear down the steps to the tube, he knew something else too: he knew he owed it to himself to feel something like that again. He had to try. And there was only one way he could do that. He had to go back to Casa D’Or. He had to get that house, that girl, out of his system.
Chapter Four
Jim slowed the car to a stop as he reached the imposing gates of the Wyatts’ family home.
It had taken him a whole hour to get from his hotel in Savannah’s historical district to the Isle of Hope, cursing himself for not taking the sat nav option at Hertz. He’d got lost in the city’s one-way system, around its warren of park squares and side streets, almost running into the back of a
horse-drawn carriage before he’d admitted defeat and asked a traffic warden how to go south. Even when he’d been put on the right highway, the traffic had been terrible, a stop-start hell past strips of nail bars and tyre change shops, until he’d turned off the Truman Parkway and time seemed to slow down again. The streets were wide and shady here, a world away from the grid of tightly packed elegant homes that typified the central historical district. Signs pointed to stables down dusty tracks; clapboard homes hid behind palm trees, picket fences and wide front lawns; and as the road crossed a sweep of freshwater marshland, Jim admired the vivid colours, the bulrushes, the sharp shade of a bowl of limes, against a sky that was a Caribbean blue.
Although he was already late, he turned off the engine and took a moment to think, a creeping sense of unease palpable as he looked up at the stone archway above him. Once scrubbed and honey-coloured, it was now mottled and wrapped in ivy, but he could still read the words ‘Casa D’Or’ chiselled into the centre.
It was over twenty years since he had last driven down this stretch of road, but he doubted a week had passed without him thinking about it. Casa D’Or was only a house, a collection of wood and brick and slate, but it had loomed so large in his life it had taken on an other-worldly feel, and now, as he glanced in the rear-view mirror of his hire car, his heart beating hard, the years falling away, he could almost see an unlined, hopeful face, hair stiffened by too much gel, his younger self who hadn’t wanted to come here in the first place.
It had been Easter 1994 when it had been decided that the Johnson family were to decamp from leafy Hampstead to Savannah, Georgia. No one said as much, but it had been obvious to everyone that the radical change of scene was a last-ditch attempt to revitalise Bryn Johnson’s career. His debut novel All My Fathers, a blistering polemic about class, sex and power, had been a huge hit, with the literary world hailing him as the voice of the zeitgeist. Riding the wave, lionised and preening, Bryn had taken three years to follow it up, and the resulting book had been self-indulgent and obscure. The literary elite of London and New York still fawned over him, but the public had moved on: sales were ‘disappointing’, and after diminishing interest for his third and fourth books, Bryn developed a writer’s block that had lasted for almost a decade.
His New York agent, Saul Black, had decided something must be done and ordered Bryn to lock himself away and write. He found a small cottage with adjoining boathouse on an acquaintance’s estate and bought them all one-way tickets. Create something, he had said, or don’t come back.
Jim snapped back into the present and looked down the drive, an arrow-straight avenue of overhanging trees. Ninety-six live oaks. The Wyatts had always made a great deal of the fact that every one of the trees planted by the original owners of the Casa D’Or estate was still standing, lining the driveway, staring at visitors in silent witness. They had survived hurricane, disease and civil war and it seemed they had managed to survive the last twenty years too. Jim felt their imaginary gaze as he engaged ‘drive’ and slowly rolled down the unpaved road, swerving to dodge potholes and puddles. He peered up, looking at the wispy grey Spanish moss interlacing the overreaching branches and blocking out the sunlight. He felt as if he had fallen into the rabbit hole, and he wasn’t sure if there was going to be a Wonderland at the other end.
As he approached the house, he stabbed a foot hard on the brake, skidding to a stop.
‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered, opening the door and stepping out.
The house was exactly as he had remembered it – tall windows, a wide terrace running front to back and a high gabled roof that spoke of grandeur, a desire to join a more elegant age – though when he looked closer, Jim could see it was in a fairly advanced state of disrepair. Tiles were missing from the roof, the once proud pillars were grey with bird excrement, the gardens hopelessly parched and overgrown. Even the front steps, once gleaming with their blue and white Italian tiles, were choked with unswept leaves and creeping weeds.
He walked towards it, gravel crunching underneath his feet. It was warm and balmy in Savannah compared with the cold grey winter that Jim had left behind in London, but still he shivered.
Casa D’Or represented the outer limits of his emotions: utter joy and crashing despair. Sometimes he had hated it, wished it had burnt to the ground that night, reduced to ash, but standing here now, he could see it for what it was: just a house, unique and beautiful. And someone had let it fall apart.
‘Hello, James.’
He turned to see a tall woman walking towards him, a familiar smile on her face. Marion Wyatt, or Marion Wilson as she had been back then, when she had been Casa D’Or’s housekeeper. He’d heard that she had married David Wyatt, her employer – inevitably there had been gossip. He supposed she must be early to mid-fifties: she was certainly still a beautiful woman, with alert dark eyes and smooth coffee-coloured skin. Perhaps a little heavier, and the gamine crop she had sported with such verve twenty years ago was now worn to her shoulders, but the cheekbones and the elegant bearing were still there. He could see how she had caught David’s eye.
‘Marion,’ he grinned, offering a hand. ‘So good to see you again. I didn’t know you were here. Couldn’t see a car.’
‘Oh, I parked at the back, by the staff quarters,’ she said. ‘Old habits, even now.’
‘Even though you’re lady of the house.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ She smiled as she touched him on the shoulder and led him into the house, where the temperature seemed to drop by twenty degrees.
The first thing that hit him was the smell, a cold, stagnant mustiness that reminded him of churches. The second was the sight of the wide sweeping staircase that dominated the wood-panelled hall. He found himself looking away, not wanting to think about that night, his last night in America. He imagined Sylvia Wyatt’s thin body lying on the polished walnut floor like a puppet with broken strings, then took a sharp inhalation of breath, forcing himself not to think about it.
‘I thought we’d have lemonade on the terrace, if that suits?’ said Marion.
He nodded, grateful to keeping moving and get out of the hall.
As he followed Marion, his eyes darted left, then right, towards the library and the kitchen. Corners of the thick paisley wallpaper were peeling away from the plaster, the paintwork was cracked, but everything else remained exactly as he remembered it. He could see the black grand piano by the arched windows, pages of sheet music still on its stand; a cookery book open on the farmhouse table, gathering dust.
He knew he should be looking at the house with a developer’s eye, working out how much work there was to do and how quickly it could be done, but it was impossible not to think about his last days there. The place looked as if it had been so hastily abandoned that the family had not even stopped to pick up their belongings.