In Her Shadow by Louise Douglas Page A

the beach, we sometimes found Mrs Brecht in the garden, leaning on Adam Tremlett’s arm, gazing out at what the two of them had created. When she was outside, enjoying the flowers, she seemed happier, as if the pain had receded. Indoors, it only became worse.
    Mr Brecht’s unhappiness and torment increased in direct proportion to the reduction in his wife’s health. I only saw him occasionally – he was often asleep during the day because he spent all night at Anne’s bedside, watching over her – but he seemed to grow more gaunt, less groomed, more handsome and tortured with every passing day. He paced through that big old house with a cigarette permanently between his fingers and his hair unkempt, trailing smoke and misery through the rooms. I felt as if my heart was breaking in tandem with his.
    On the days when Mrs Brecht was in the hospice, Ellen said it was better if I didn’t go into the house.
    ‘Papa can’t bear it when she’s not there,’ she said. ‘He has to drink to get through the day.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    Ellen looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘Alcohol is an anaesthetic. It numbs the pain.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘And he makes me play the piano, all the time, to remind him.’
    She picked at her nails and her face clouded over. I remembered how tenderly Mr Brecht had held onto Ellen the time I’d watched her playing piano through the window, and inside I gave a little sigh of sadness at the exquisite tragedy of the situation. This was a terrible time, I thought, and no wonder Mr Brecht was struggling to cope, but after Mrs Brecht was gone, I would step in to comfort him. He would be immersed in grief, no doubt, for a while, but one day the shadows would lift and, when they did, I would be there, waiting. He would see me and he would recognize my devotion and my inherent goodness, and he would reach out for me and hold me to him and whisper: ‘ Oh Hannah, how could I live without you? ’
    Mrs Brecht dying was like leaving school or going to university or having sex, something I knew would most likely occur at some point in the future, but which it was impossible to imagine in the present. Ellen was resigned to her mother’s death, though. She knew. During that long, slow time between the knowing and the dying, she hinted at it, always dropping the fact that the day of death was drawing nearer into the conversation as if to ensure nobody ever forgot that she was entangled in the dramatic, climactic scenes of her mother’s life.
    She told me that her mother had called her to her side while her father was sleeping and told Ellen a secret. Ellen was not supposed to tell a single soul about it, but she told me. Her grandmother, Mrs Withiel, Anne Brecht’s mother, had been a very wealthy woman. And she had left everything to Ellen. Ellen would inherit her fortune on her eighteenth birthday. Mrs Brecht was trustee of the money and she had put all the arrangements in place. The rules were very strict: Ellen had to wait until she was eighteen, she couldn’t have apenny before then. When Ellen told me this she was wearing the wide-eyed, excited, conspiratorial expression she reserved for special stories, and I was not the slightest bit jealous because I was pretty sure she was making it up.
    ‘Your grandmother didn’t seem that rich when we saw her,’ I said.
    Ellen shrugged. ‘Mama says she was. Mama says she didn’t spend her money but hoarded it.’
    ‘Why would she leave it to you? She never even met you. Why didn’t she leave it to your mama?’
    ‘They fell out. They hadn’t spoken to one another in years.’
    ‘And what about your papa?’
    ‘He doesn’t know,’ Ellen said. ‘You mustn’t tell him! Promise me on your life you won’t tell him!’
    I promised. As if I would tell Mr Brecht a tall story like that anyway!
    As the time for Mrs Brecht’s dying came closer, Ellen became quieter and thinner and more unusual than ever. Our roles, oddly, became reversed. When a