The Butterfly Season: The House on Cliff Road, #1

By Heather Douglas

How well do we really know our friends? How honest are we with each other and ourselves?

On holiday in an Edwardian house on the Kent coast, five female friends from school, now 35, try to deal with fears for the future arising from problems in the past. 

With them are two 13-year-olds and watching from the shadows is Annie, who was a servant there long ago.  How does her life contrast with women’s experience today? 

What does Annie see? 

What will she do?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Q G S Publishing
• Release date: Dec 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386158127

Book preview

Prologue

ANNIE

She wakes up slowly, pushing through layers of years and a thin topping of dust.  There is noise outside: a car approaching on the drive, the sudden death of its engine, the wide click of doors opening and the thick clunk of their close.  As she crosses to the window there is a short silence and inside she feels a prickle of excitement.

A woman and two girls stand below, looking round.  Their car is parked behind a previous arrival so they are not directly underneath and Annie can see them clearly.  She feels unsteady suddenly, trying to balance between Then and Now.

The woman and the dark girl are talking.  The blonde girl raises her head to look up towards Annie at the attic window and she finds herself raising a hand in response.  It is not her Jane, but in that picture of large fair hair fallen back to frame a suddenly open face, for a moment this girl is the same. Annie even thinks that she sees a flicker of hope behind the sulky expression and that although she might lose it sometimes, inside this girl too is a certainty of her own worth when the world around her would deny it.

It is quite shocking how alike they are, though different too of course.  In her memory, Annie’s Jane always has a thick, mid-calf dress and highly polished black shoes, while these modern girls have jeans and tight little tops, huge things on their feet.  For those who grew up in heavy boots that never fit, it is hard to understand why girls now choose those great big trainers instead of pretty dainty shoes.  And the hair!  These days Annie often ponders on the hours girls used to spend on their hair, brushing and twisting and tying up and shaping, while now they just give it a shake and a spray and fix it in that wind-blown look.  Behind the hair, rich blonde threaded through with many colours, this girl’s face is beautiful, still child-soft for all she is so thin.  The fine edges will come, too sharp if she doesn’t eat enough, thinks Annie. She looks tall, but they are all taller these days.  She is different certainly, but at the same time she is Jane come again.  And Annie fears what she could bring with her.

This is a lovely house, but Annie has been here many years and seen many things that nobody should see.  The walls hold echoes of sadness and of death, though mostly they retain them well; it is only sometimes that cracks open up to let the bad things out.  The house cannot be blamed, it just holds history.  It is people, always, who coax out the good and the bad: in each other, in the land, in the buildings.

The house is still owned by the family, but they haven’t lived here for years.  The village has grown and crept up the cliff to surround it, first through London commuters and then through tourists, so the house is available for short summer lettings.  It is large, though, too grand for modern day families, and expensive.  That is what is said when it stays empty.  People want to be happy on their holidays, thinks Annie - though if they do come, mostly they are.  Children run and shout, or hide in the bushes; adults sit on the terrace or stand drinking on the lawn; and she is happy to see them.  It takes her back to those days when her Jane was small and the family was here for the summer.  Everyone seemed more relaxed than in London, even the servants who had to do the work of two and had beds under the eaves, trapped in with the heat.  Annie sometimes gave up on sleep and sat on the stairs, just to get a bit of air.  If anyone had caught her there’d have been trouble, but no-one did.  She was quiet as a mouse and invisible as a ghost and saw - well, things best not seen.

So the house isn’t always let and the girls who come up from the village get slack in their cleaning, for it is hard to take pride in an empty house.  They go crazy when there are guests, of course, but something is lost, Annie feels.  You don’t get the shine of regular polishing and they use these funny spray things now, no beeswax and linseed oil, and the smell has gone.  Just sometimes, on a summer night, a breeze walks through the house and carries with it that scent of polished wood. Annie closes her eyes and breathes it in, but then the fear comes, fear of what is at the back of it, blowing, just to frighten her.  They laugh, the cleaners.  Is that Annie? they say.  Get stuck in, girls, a bit of elbow grease, Annie’s watching!  But Annie just smiles.  She doesn’t mind their teasing, it’s friendly-like and Lord knows friends are rare.

She could have gone, but someone has to stay, someone has to watch over the place, someone has to bear witness.  Sometimes Annie suspects the presence has gone away for good, but no, back he comes, at odd times just to surprise her and always, always in the summer months when a young girl is in the house.  So she rests in her old room under the eaves where the heat doesn’t bother an old lady like it does young folk, and at night she sits in the kitchen corner where the old rocker still stands and he knows, when he is here, that someone is watching.

Chapter 1 – Holiday Plans

ANDREA

Jane asked me if I would go on holiday with her and I didn’t say anything straight away, too surprised to decide what the right answer was.  It’s gonna be gross, she said gloomily.  "Mother and the Friends.  In a secluded residence in a peaceful village overlooking the sea, it says in the brochure.  I’ll die. Then she seemed to realise that gross was not the best word to persuade anybody to come, so she played the pity card.  It’ll be dred.  They have a bit of a holiday together every year, but this time it is two weeks!  Please come.  I need you." 

I kind of enjoyed this picture of Jane begging, of Jane admitting she needed anyone at all, never mind me, but I’ve known her forever and I know she’ll say anything to get her own way.  I would like to, I said cautiously.  I’ll just have to run it by Mum.

Would you? Cool.  She just ignored the bit about my Mum cos she knew she could get round her, no probs.  And of course I’d love to go on holiday with her, since not going would mean staying at home with my Gran and my little brother.  Anyway I adore her Mum and her Mum’s friends.  They are such excellent role models.

The bell rang and we went into Maths.  I’m in the top set and though she’s clever, Jane is in the second set because she hates it.  She hates quite a lot of things, actually, mostly the ones she can’t control, the ones immune to her charisma.  (Doesn’t that sound good!  Can’t remember where I read it.)  And then there’s her Mum.  She hates her Mum.  That’s supposed to be normal for thirteen-year-olds, isn’t it, but I don’t think it is.  I haven’t a clue why, or if there ever was a reason, but Jane has quite amazing will power and though she sort of floats around without showing a lot of zing, she has stuck to this hate idea for ages.  Luckily she doesn’t expect me to do it too and I can see it is a bit of a strain, so I don’t mind when she goes soft on my family.

Sometimes I wonder if Jane and I actually like each other, but we sure do like each other’s families!  It’s not surprising really cos my Mum has decided to act sympathetic.  If Jane is at ours when Mum comes home from work, instead of rushing upstairs like usual to get changed out of her office suit while yelling at me to put the kettle on, she goes into the kitchen to get the cup of tea herself and calls us to her so she can have a little chat about our day.  Except of course it is Jane’s day, or Jane’s life even.  (Mum thinks she knows all about mine.) Are you enjoying school? she coos.  Or How is your Mum, Jane?  Still working so hard?  Jane plays nice and oh so polite while I stand behind Mum and roll my eyes, then later when we go upstairs I mimic her in a posh voice ‘Oh yes English was so interesting today, I do so love that tosser teacher Mr Allen’ or ‘Mum is having a lovely time with that mad leching git off  Doing Up Your House on Channel 6’and she gives me a punch and we have a bit of a laugh.  She likes the attention, though, mostly because she is getting more than me.  Jane is competitive.

My Gran likes to shriek a bit about Jane wasting away and tries to feed her up.  They play this game where Gran pretends she has to persuade Jane to eat and tempts her with exotics like meringues and fairy cakes.  At least I suppose she’s pretending.  She can’t really think that Jane doesn’t eat, can she? Though she really does think bought cake is exotic, she got so fed up of baking herself when my Grandad was alive.  Jane, of course, soaks up the flattery, on the theory that you can’t be too rich or too thin, whoever said that.  She thinks Gran’s worrying at her is a compliment to her model thinness.

Then there’s my brother, who is six and an alien who can’t actually speak English.  He’d rather make horrific noises and that’s usually when you want to watch something on television that hasn’t got violence in it, so he gets bored and zooms his aeroplane round the room, then if you act like you don’t notice he’ll land it on your head.  He seems to think life on Earth is some experiment to find out what is and is not destructible, without a thought for what might happen if everything really is smashed up.  But when Jane is there he actually seems to turn into a human being and he follows her round staring in dumb male admiration.

Even my Dad thinks she is a good influence and he is normally quite sensible.  I think he kind of assumes mixing with Jane will make me elegant, who knows how he got that idea!  I haven’t tried to explain that mixing with someone tall and blonde and beautiful won’t make me anything other than short and dark and ordinary and if I tell him about her amazing new clothes he sometimes gives me money to get some for me.  I don’t do it often, though, it makes me feel awful.  I don’t want to raise his hopes.

Now Jane’s Mum has some excuse for thinking her daughter might be anorexic.  Jane won’t eat what she cooks, but being the awesome person that she is, her Mum doesn’t fuss, she just makes food available and hopes.  I know she finds this really hard, but she has decided that ‘confrontation makes it worse and paying attention only encourages attention-seeking behaviour’ as my Mum says about my brother.  I mean, are we talking about a little kid here or a girl who is quite brainy really and thinks she is virtually grown up?  I drop visits to McDonalds into the conversation every now and again and Jane spends half her time at our house, then afterwards she can go on about the lovely spag bol or fish and chips, so her Mum knows she does eat.  She also knows that to refuse the Celebrity Chef type stuff and have junk instead is a real kick in the teeth.  If it was me, I’d just fill the freezer with pizza and the cupboard with pot noodles and tell Jane to get on with it, but her Mum will keep on cooking protein and fresh vegetables like some kind of TV personality.  Maybe she can’t stop, isn’t human behaviour fascinating, and me, I love it.  I know I shouldn’t encourage her, but I can’t help it.  She looks so sad when Jane pushes food round her plate, then gets up to scrape it loudly into the bin, and anyway it’s just wonderful, it’s like eating out in a proper restaurant.  So Jane wanders off to her bedroom with her phone.  She has 383 Facebook friends and spends a serious amount of time Liking, but she hardly ever Posts, she just changes her Profile Picture on a regular basis.  My Mum persuaded me to come off social networks when she said I was getting miserable and I don’t like it anyway, I find it so boring trying to keep up, who’d have thought being last year was such a crime, so Jane keeps in touch with the world for both of us.  While she’s doing that, her Mum and I sit at the table and eat and chat.  I make her laugh about the crap that goes on in school, though Jane won’t tell her a thing.

I think her Mum is just so cool.  She’s still good looking, that’s where Jane gets it from, you’d think she’d be grateful, and she’s got this awesome job working for an agency that handles celebs.  She meets the most amazing people you wouldn’t believe and she has these wicked boyfriends that look like they should be dating Katy Perry.  They have been known to appear in the kitchen in the morning and Jane’s Mum will rustle up real coffee and fancy eggs and nutty muesli - home mixed - on auto pilot with blue smudges under her eyes and a sort of sheen to her skin, which Jane calls sweat.  Jane’s Mum asked me once if I’d mind not staring so much and I tried, but Jane went over the top with the staring until one of the guys asked if she was retarded.  Okay, so maybe you wouldn’t want your own Mum to be sleeping with people who might end up on TV, but you could learn a bit about men and sex, I mean what am I going to learn at home?  I think my Mum and Dad get along all right.  They seem happy enough, although they don’t understand the first thing about each other and I have to try to explain what’s going on when they have a tiff.  I mean, why does he never realise when she’s premenstrual and take it all personally and why does she think he doesn’t love her any more just because he’s selfish?  Love and marriage seem quite simple to me.  It’s romance and sex I’d like a bit of instruction in.  Jane said of course my Mum and Dad still do it too, everybody does until they are forty or so, and I got in a bit of a panic and searched my Mum’s drawers to make sure she was taking the pill.  There is no way I could stand another baby.  Jane said don’t worry, your Mum probably feels the same way, and I calmed down a bit because of course she is right.

And then there are The Friends.  First off, I’ll admit that their names are bit sad.  There is Nikkieee and Chrissieee and Beckieee and Linnieee, so some time long ago when they were kids they must have thought that eeee was cool and got stuck with it.  Jane’s Mum I excuse because her parents called her Marlene.  She says they thought it would be Marlaynah, but anyone with an ounce of sense would have known it would be Marleen, so really you’d have to go with Marly.  I may joke about my Gran, but she’s a laugh and there’s not a mean bone in her body and she’s always there for us.  Jane’s grandparents are just alien.  They both still work, they have some sort of accounting company, so they hardly ever turn up and seem so awkward when they do.  You can’t help feeling sorry for her Mum, being a single parent and all, it can’t have been easy all these years since Jane was a baby without her own parents being much use.  I suppose that’s partly why Jane and I have seen so much of The Friends - they tend to do the emergency kid sitting and coping during illness bit that normal grandparents would have been there for.  Or maybe it’s not normal. I suppose I think all people are like my own family, or rather not think, more assume.  So okay, I’ll try to remember my family are pretty cool, but you do get a bit hung up on the downside, it’s human nature.

So, The Friends.  There’s Nikki who is a tall and loud, has long dark hair usually falling out of an expensive clip, can’t keep still for five minutes and has some awesome job in the City earning just huge amounts of money.  She also has a really nice husband, who follows along after her looking a bit lost, but on the whole is quite cheerful and actually talks to me and Jane in a good uncle kind of way.

And there’s Chrissie, who is beautiful.  They are all lookers, but Chrissie is tall and willowy and blonde with grey-green eyes and she dresses in designer stuff and is in a league of her own.  It’s hard to think what else she might be really, because the beauty bit sort of takes over.  Sometimes I try to think that there is a downside to looking like that, I mean even I don’t really listen to what she says, but I can’t keep it up.  Who wouldn’t like to be that amazing?  I think she’s a sort of professional wife to some Branson type businessman, but we never see him, he’s off trotting round the globe making millions.

Linnie looks tiny at their side, but she is loud enough to hold her own.  I don’t really know what sort of hair she was born with, because she is always dyeing it something spectacular. She is such a laugh, sometimes she doesn’t seem much older than we are, but she works with computers so she’s loaded as well.  She doesn’t take men seriously, she plays the field.

Then there is Becky.  I get a bit stuck trying to describe Becky.  She’s dark and wears glasses and is quite normal looking, so she’s bound to fade into the background when she’s with the others.  She is a social worker, so you’d be thinking, oh Becky doesn’t have a lot of money, Becky does good work and reminds us all that life can be hard.  But when she is there, well it’s not a downer at all, it’s more like there’s a rock of good sense with a wicked sense of humour so quiet you might miss it. Because she’s on her own - she always has been I think - it was Becky who was around most helping out when Jane and I were little.  Yet when she is not there, it’s hard to remember her somehow: what she actually said, how she really looks, what she really meant.

So.  Me on holiday in a house of women.  Can’t wait.

Chapter 2 – The House

CHRISSIE

I picked Becky up on the way down to our holiday house.  There were several reasons why, the most simple being that I was staying overnight not too far away in our London flat and the second being that she hates driving.  She said, as Becky would, that she could easily get the train, which brings us to further reasons.  Becky needs bullying regularly or she will get completely out of the habit of accepting help - asking for it being impossible for her - and I feel it my duty to do it on behalf of us all.  One day Becky will be old or ill and will need help, so I am training her up for it.

There is another reason lurking here.  I am quietly convinced that Becky has a secret life.  I have never mentioned this to the others, so do not know if they would laugh at me or agree with me; have never done it because I respect her right to privacy and secrets if she wants them.  I cannot switch off the curiosity, however, and take every opportunity I can to peek into her life for a clue.  Today she was sitting on her travel bag on the pavement reading a book while she waited for me, so not much chance this time.  Or most times.  I can’t remember when I last saw inside her flat. It is above a Greek restaurant in Fulham, so gives the impression of being part of a lively community, but it has its own private entrance door and staircase and the Greeks, while being super friendly in a superficial kind of way, have never bothered to learn much English.  I tend to think we are lucky if they know her name and I tend to think that’s why Becky stays there.  The thought crossed my mind that I could demand use of a loo and/or a cup of coffee, but it didn’t stick.  I didn’t want to start the holiday with any sort of pressurizing.

Hey, Becky, how are you doing!  I stopped on the double yellow since she was out there waiting and she slung her case down by the back seat before getting in beside me.  I couldn’t give her a real close look as I had to get the car moving again, but in any case Becky always seems the same.  If she was ever ill, I’m not sure anyone would be able to tell.

Great.  She fumbled with the seat belt then turned towards me.  How about you?  Have you driven down this morning?

I live in Cheshire. David and I both hate London and our home is not far from Manchester Airport, from where he can easily get to the Schipol (Amsterdam) Airport hub of the universe if he can’t fly direct.  He travels a lot and I want to live in a place where I can relax.  Also it is fairly near both mothers, mine in Hathersage in the Derbyshire Peak District and David’s in Chester, so I can do the dutiful daughter thing; but David has to have a base in London, of course, and I have to keep it up to scratch. No, day before yesterday.  Had a few things to do.  Stayed in the city flat.  Can’t wait to get out of London though!  Countryside, here we come!

Another reason – to make sure that Becky came at all!  All these reasons might not show me in a good light, but they do say a great deal for Becky.  I love her.  I respect her.  And while I am quite kind, I think, I am an uninvolved sort of person.  I don’t easily get cross or feel strongly about things, but when I do I mean it.  Becky is kind of exasperating, because her self-esteem is so low you long to give her a smack, but instead of hiding under a blanket, which I suspect is her real ambition in life, she goes out there and gets on with it.  For Becky to get up in the morning takes more courage than most of us need to summon up to tackle the builder about the wonky wall in the extension.  There, you see, that’s why I know.  We’re kind of kindred spirits, me and Becky, except that I am tall and thin and blonde and she is fairly short and square and dark.  If I acted shy and retiring, I’d be laughed off the stage or assumed to be stuck up, but it is expected of Becky and the force of expectation is one of the most powerful in the world.

Becky stretched and smiled.  "Yes, I could do with a break.  And it will be so nice to catch up with everybody.  Have you been busy?  And how is David? Where is David, for that matter?"

We chatted about the usual as we crawled out of London.  We were way past Dartford Tunnel before I could get any speed up and Becky looked out of the window while I concentrated.

The purely selfish reason for giving Becky a lift - yes, of course, we always have at least one of those - is that I wanted to diffuse her dismay on the approach to the house so it was out of her system before it could infect the others.  I’m mainly a straightforward kind of person, but this house is one of the few things I have felt strongly about.  As soon as I saw it in the brochure, I had to have it.  It’s a six bedroom, detached, Edwardian house in a little village on the coast not far from Dover, beautifully maintained in character with a garden overlooking the sea. I knew it was far too extravagant for Becky and Marly, if not the others, so I lied about the price.  I had said that it was difficult to let because it was too big,