Daisy’s Notes- Wednesday, 20^th of March, 2019

Aunt Coralie was not kidding about the ivy.  Most of the house looks as if it’s being eaten by a hedge.  I’d say that Elodie Healy should hire a decent gardener, but, honestly, it looks like the ivy’s the only thing holding the place together.

I was pretty shocked when Elodie agreed to speak to me, but Gran wasn’t.  “Any excuse to talk about herself,” she said.  I asked her if she wanted to come with me, and she said no.  So did Mum and Coralie.  So did my cousins, though in their case it was less because they’d vowed never to go anywhere near THAT WOMAN again, and more because they didn’t want to spend their days off driving to the other side of the country to talk to a crazy old lady they didn’t know.  If Uncle Matt hadn’t agreed to come along, I’d have had to decide between cancelling the whole thing and agreeing to be alone in an old, creepy house with somebody who terrifies most of my extended family.

Honestly, after reading Coralie’s last couple of letters, I think she terrifies me as well.  Nausea, dizziness and headaches are consistent with, say, the flu, but you know what else they’re consistent with?  Carbon monoxide poisoning.  And, given what we know about Elodie Healy, I wouldn’t put it past her.

Apparently Elodie’s famously cagey about her real age, but from what I can gather, she’s probably about 86.  In some ways, she looks a lot younger- dyed blonde hair, perfect makeup, plus I suspect she had a facelift or two back in the day.  But… you know when you find an insect, and you’re not sure if it’s still alive, so you tap its shiny shell with your fingertip, and it crumples to bits because everything underneath’s already rotted away?  Something about her made me think of that.  Of course, it could be that that simile just popped into my head because there are so many ACTUAL dead insects in her house.  Every surface I saw in there had a bunch of little specks on it that I didn’t really want to think about.  The whole house looked as if it had been uninhabited for about two hundred years.  Here and there, you could see traces of that splendid architecture Coralie was always banging on about, but most of it was under about six inches of dust.

Elodie’s not easy to pin down to any particular subject.  In the first half hour that me and Uncle Matt were there, she managed to talk about her artistic talents (varied and plentiful), her thoughts on iPhones (negative), her view of the modern world (cold, aloof and petty), and her children (still not speaking to her.)  Then, it was as if she suddenly remembered who we were, because she abruptly changed the subject so she could launch into a tirade about how terrible Gran was when she worked for her.  “My husband and I took Lorna in and nurtured her gift.  Could anyone else in her life say that?  I doubt it!”  She waved her hands about to celebrate scoring a point.  “Maybe if we’d got her two or three years earlier, it would have been different, who knows?  But by the time we met her it was already too late.  She’d got used to grabbing for herself and never considering her duty to the theatre itself.  All three of them were like that, really- spitting on their ancestors’ gifts to them, the future generation they longed to know would succeed and thrive.  If only they’d known!”

Matt cut in.  He’d end up regretting it.  “When you say ‘all three of them’…”

“Her and those boys,” said Elodie, “Her paramours.”  Her lip curled.  “It was shameful, the way those three behaved.  You’d have thought they were animals.  It didn’t matter which combination of the three of them, as long as there was a hole and something to put in it.”

I think she was trying to pick a fight, but I didn’t really want one.  Matt might have, but he’d gone quiet and ill-looking.  I didn’t blame him- if Gran had a lot of threesomes in the Sixties, then I’m happy for her, but I didn’t want to hear about it from Elodie Healy.  And in Matt’s case, these were his PARENTS we were talking about.  Anyway, I decided to steer the conversation elsewhere.  “That’s why Coralie came to yours in 1981, right?  Because she thought her parents’ friend Adam might have been her real dad?”

“Oh, no doubt about that,” said Elodie, smiling snake-ishly, “Let me let you in on a secret- I might have played along, but I knew who Coralie was the moment she opened her mouth.  It was as if I had Lorna Lazenby and Adam Summers in my hallway all over again.”  She sighed.  “Passing off another man’s child as her husband’s.  Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.”

I frowned.  “Coralie’s kids are…”

“NOT Coralie’s children!”  Elodie snorted.  “My God, I wonder what goes through the minds of…  LORNA’S mother.  SHE had another man’s child.”

I thought of that letter I’d found in the attic, the one Gran had written to her mum.  I don’t know if the Len Healy I met is the same one you did, but…

“Yes, my husband was Lorna’s father.  That’s why she sought us out in the first place.”  She let out a laugh that sounded more like a bark.  “I suppose that made me the wicked stepmother.”

I glanced at Matt.  He shrugged, as if to say, I guess that makes sense.

“I was married to your great-grandfather, Daisy,” Elodie added, as if prompting me to be more shocked.  As if she’d expected me to fall to my knees and wail, “You mean my great-grandad wasn’t some guy I never met because he died before I was born, but actually a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT guy I never met because he died before I was born???  Say it isn’t so!”

Instead of that, I asked her about Coralie again.  Luckily, this time she remembered she hated her as well, and started talking.  “I trusted the Daniels girls,” she said, “I wanted to show them something truly special.  And how did they repay me?  By invading my home under false pretences and lying as easily as they breathed.  She didn’t care about the school at all. She just saw it as a means to an end.”  She put her hand on her heart.  “To me, that was the greatest insult of all.”

“But you didn’t tell her you knew who she was?”

“And she completely believed she had me fooled!” Elodie crowed, “Can you believe it?  How people take each other for granted?”

Which totally justifies poisoning someone, obviously. It was around then that I started looking around to check that I had a clear route to the exit if I needed it.  “So… did you have a plan?”

“A plan?”

“Say, when you locked her in her room at the end?”

Elodie went silent for a moment, and I honestly expected her to try and deny it.  She didn’t, though.  “That school was my dream.  Do you understand? And we were up against powerful forces.”

“Right,” I said, “So you locked her in because…?”

“I wanted to teach her a lesson.”  She made a face.  “I’d suffered long enough.  It was her turn now.”

I glanced over at Uncle Matt, to check that he wasn’t about to scream at her and walk out.  I mean, it would have been understandable if he had, but if he left I’d have been stranded here.

“She wasn’t in any danger,” Elodie added, “I planned to unlock the door before it came to that.”  As if she was an expert on how much carbon monoxide will and won’t kill you.  “I planned to write to the sister and tell her she could pick her up from the local hospital.”  She let out another bark-laugh.  “Poison in her veins.  Given what she and her mother put me through, I found that quite fitting.”

I could actually FEEL my skin crawl.  I reached out and grabbed Matt’s hand.

“I couldn’t let the insult to the school stand.  It was the one thing keeping me above the drudgery of everyday life.  I saw it as an oasis, a utopia.”  She smiled sweetly.  “Ever been through that kind of dream before?”

I swallowed.  My throat had gone dry.  “But then when you unlocked the door…”

Elodie’s eyes went wide with remembered disappointment.  “She was gone,” she said quietly, “I never worked out how she escaped.”

And that’s about what I assumed.  Coralie says she remembers waking up on Friday morning to find that her bedroom door was locked, and pounding on it for about an hour before she finally managed to break the lock and get it open.  She says she rushed through the door and found herself in the upstairs hallway of her house in Brighton.  When she looked back at the room she’d just left, it had completely vanished.

Mum, Gran and Matt all corroborate her story- according to them, Coralie just turned up in the house, and none of them could remember letting her in.  You’d have thought they’d have told me this story a million times (at the very least, it’s the kind of thing Coralie could use as a talking point anytime she liked), but I only found out about it two years ago, just after what happened with Keiran.  Before that, I probably wouldn’t have believed them.

Now, though…

The End

(One more set of papers to go.)