It’s the evening of the opening of Ash Books and the twins and Eliot are at Rose House, the old guest house that Elsie lives in by herself. The three of them ate at the pub across the road from the shop for dinner, Elsie warning them that they wouldn’t be able to eat away their profits every night and Grace rolling her eyes and pointing out that they deserved a treat.

‘Was it a huge success then?’ Eliot asks.

Grace avoids eye contact with Eliot. Tonight needs to be simple. She nods and allows herself a congratulatory ‘whoop!’ as she finally manages to pop out the stubborn cork.

‘Yes. A lot of people came in and looked at the second-hand stuff. And the head of English from a high school in Lytham came in and we did a deal with him on a collection of the classics we’d put on offer. He ordered about two hundred pounds’ worth of stock.’

Eliot strokes the peppering of stubble on his chin as though he has a full beard. It makes an unpleasant scratching sound and Grace wants to prod him, to make him stop.

‘Two hundred pounds is great,’ he says. ‘If you make that much every day you’ll be heading for world domination in no time!’

‘World domination?’ Elsie says, and grins at Eliot. ‘You’re ambitious.’

Eliot smiles back. ‘I’ll bet the free cupcakes had something to do with it. Good work on those, by the way, Grace.’ He bites into a leftover cake, and Grace sees a faint trace of pink icing line his mouth.

‘More champagne, anyone?’ Grace asks loudly as she fills up her own glass. Elsie doesn’t answer, but looks at her own glass, which sits on the battered coffee table, untouched.

‘Go on then, Grace. I’ll have a top-up,’ Eliot says, leaning forward and jostling Elsie, who sits up and rearranges her hairclip.

‘I think I’ll go to bed actually,’ Elsie says.

‘Bed?’ Grace asks incredulously. ‘You’ve hardly had any champagne. I thought we were celebrating?’

‘Yes, bed,’ Elsie answers simply as she stands and stretches. ‘Night.’

There’s silence for a few minutes after Elsie has clomped upstairs. Grace and Eliot hear Elsie’s bedtime ritual float downstairs and through the open lounge door: aggressive teeth brushing, cupboard doors opening and clothes being tossed onto the floor.

Grace sighs and downs her champagne. It’s cheap stuff, not even really champagne, and tastes woody and too sweet.

‘I’m so relieved that the opening day went well,’ Grace says after a moment. ‘I started to worry this morning.’

‘About what?’

‘About opening the shop. It all seemed a bit overwhelming. I was worried we’d perhaps done the wrong thing.’

Eliot shakes his head and loosens his tie. Eliot always wears a tie, even if he’s not at work.

‘Taking a risk like this is never the wrong thing. You’ve both been talking about opening a bookshop for a while, so it was the obvious thing for you to do. You can’t have any regrets about that.’

‘I hope not,’ Grace says. She shivers. ‘It’s always freezing in this house. Don’t you make Elsie put the heating on when you stay over with her?’

‘I hate being too hot. I’d rather be cool,’ Eliot says. Grace sees him start to reach for the blanket on the arm of the sofa to give her, then watches as he thinks better of it. If only things weren’t this complicated.

‘Elsie’s the same as me. She hates being too hot as well,’ Eliot finishes. Grace thinks she detects a look of defence in his slim, stubbled face.

‘So you’re staying over here tonight?’ he asks.

‘Yes. Elsie and I are going into the shop together tomorrow. She’s made one of the spare beds up for me.’

‘You’ve not slept over here for ages.’

‘I know. I don’t like sleeping here. But Elsie wanted me to stay over so that we could celebrate our first night and go in together first thing tomorrow. I’m trying to do things right at the moment. I want us to feel like a team again. I barely even feel like we’re friends at the moment. And that’s surely bad for business,’ she finishes with a weak smile. An unexpected lump lodges in her throat like a boiled sweet.

‘Yeah. She said things were a little tense between you both.’

The reason for the tension hangs in the air, between Grace and Eliot. Grace won’t say it. Eliot doesn’t know it.

‘Let’s have another drink,’ Eliot says, filling their glasses.

The next morning, Grace shuffles further under her blanket as wisps of her sister’s voice drift into the lounge like smoke. She wonders where she is for a moment when she opens her eyes, then remembers that she is in Elsie’s lounge.

When Grace and Elsie were younger they were never allowed in this room. It feels forbidden to Grace, even now. This was the guest lounge, only to be used at Christmas. Grace can still feel the visitors in the air. It’s like they never really left. Elsie has redecorated, trading the 1970s velour orange curtains and swirling gaudy carpet for classic beige carpet and blinds and chocolate brown leather sofas. But in the weak winter light of the morning, the new decor changes nothing. Grace can hear the sea here, and, for some reason, can’t bear it. She can hear it now: the clashing of the monstrous grey waves against each other. The more she tries not to listen to it, the more she hears it, until it feels as though the shards of water are crashing against her head.

Elsie is shouting at Eliot in the kitchen. The words blur into meaning. Grace can’t help but listen.

‘I’m not asking much, am I? My boyfriend in my own bed instead of downstairs with my bloody sister!’

There’s only a silence in reply.

So Eliot obviously didn’t make it upstairs to Elsie’s room last night.

Bad move.

Grace feels a tug of guilt. They got through quite a bit of champagne in the end, and Eliot had meant to go upstairs to Elsie. Grace remembers asking him to stay until she fell asleep in the lounge. She didn’t want to be alone in a spare room upstairs. She remembers her eyes closing slowly as they talked, the room in a blur around her. She wouldn’t have asked him to stay with her if she’d been sober.

The front door slams, the stained glass rattling in its splitting frame.

Sleeping here was a terrible idea. From now on, Grace will only ever sleep in her brand new flat, surrounded by brand new furniture and brand new other flats. There are too many memories here at their old home, creeping into Grace’s body and mind like damp. And it’s too cold. Rose House has always been horribly cold in winter. Even though the central heating clunks and bangs its way around the rooms like a metal snake, the old windows let all the heat out and all the outside air in.

Grace can remember being cold every single winter of her childhood in this house. She shared Room 5, the smallest, with Elsie. Their mother never came upstairs to bed until the very middle of the night. She would often come into Room 5 instead of her own room. Grace would wake as her mother banged around the bedroom, knocking over the twins’ things and whispering to herself. There would be further noise and cursing as their mother tried to undress; sometimes she didn’t bother, and Grace would wake to the sight of her mother, fully clothed, complete with jewellery and shoes, lying open-mouthed on top of her sheets.

Those nights, in the early days, had been quite easy to bear. It was the later nights that were the haunting ones. Elsie always claimed that she couldn’t remember, that she must have slept through it all. But how could she have slept through such potent alcohol fumes, such sickening screaming as their mother awoke from yet more nightmares?

Grace gets up and stretches her long pale limbs.

‘Eliot?’ she shouts.

He appears in the living room, his wavy, dark brown hair still crumpled on one side from where it has rested on the arm of the sofa all night. ‘Elsie’s gone to the shop—’

‘I know. I heard,’ Grace interrupts as she pulls her creased cardigan over her shoulders. ‘I’m going now. I just wanted to say sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have said I’d stay over, because I never feel relaxed in this house. It was my fault we both fell asleep down here.’

Eliot shrugs and looks at the table of empty bottles and toast crusts. Eliot always makes toast when he’s drunk. Grace remembers him fiddling with the toaster in the early hours and burning the first two slices. The sickly smell of charred crumbs still lingers in the air.

‘I know Elsie’s mad with you now but she’ll get over it.’ Grace says, then sits back down on the jumble of blankets and cushions.

‘I hope so. I told her nothing happened between us. But she won’t believe it.’

‘Well, I’ll tell her later as well.’

‘She’ll believe you even less than she believes me.’

Grace stares into space. She supposes that’s true. Is this what things have come to? There used to be a time when Elsie would believe anything Grace said, and vice versa.

But not now. Never, now. The time when things were straightforward between the twins glints beyond the darkness of the past, and Grace can’t work out how to grasp it.

She stands up, suddenly unable to stay in the house any longer.

‘See yourself out,’ she says to Eliot as she grabs her handbag and heads out to the hallway.

When Grace arrives at the shop, Elsie is standing stiffly behind the counter.

‘So did you have fun with Eliot last night?’ she asks as soon as Grace has closed the door behind her.

‘Yes. I did. Surely you don’t think I should apologise to you for that?’

Grace watches as Elsie drops her eyes to the wooden counter. They have splashed out on oak. The joiner who made it for them claimed that oak was a hard wood and would be able to survive a little better over the years. If only their sisterly bond was made from oak, too.

‘For God’s sake, Elsie,’ Grace replies. ‘We had a few drinks and crashed on your sofa. Honestly, you should be pleased that we get on. It’s you who Eliot wants, you know,’ she continues, her tone softening a little. ‘I’m his friend. That’s all. You were the one who went to bed. We wanted you to stay up with us.’

Grace moves forward and traces a line along the oak counter with a purple fingernail as she speaks. She thinks back to last night as she waits for Elsie’s answer. Surely Elsie doesn’t blame her for staying up. Early nights aren’t for everyone. Old ladies and children. But not Grace. Not Eliot.

Elsie follows Grace’s finger with her eyes and sighs, relenting. ‘Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s forget it. Do you want a hot chocolate?’

‘I might have a coffee,’ Grace says, relaxing at Elsie’s truce. ‘Ugh, I won’t be drinking champagne again for a while. I hope I don’t look as rough as I feel.’

‘You’re so gorgeous that you couldn’t possibly look anything but amazing,’ Elsie assures her twin with a smirk.

‘It’s funny that you of all people should think that,’ Grace laughs, returning an identical smile. ‘I’ll make the drinks, shall I?’

As Grace stirs cheap coffee granules into two new mugs, she sees the vase of flowers that Mags brought the twins the day before. She wonders if Noel will come and see them again today. Her stomach tightens at the thought. She squints out of the window to the square beyond as she wanders back to the front of the shop. Noel never wanted to stay in Blackpool. Grace remembers him reading about other worlds, other people, for the whole of their lives. Wherever they were when they were all young, Noel was usually tucked away in a corner, head deep in a book full of facts. The moment he could, he bolted from Blackpool to university in London. Grace was mad with him, for a time. She was mad that he had left her alone with a sullen Elsie and a distracted mother. She was mad that he was seeing new places and meeting different people, while Grace was stuck in her green bedroom that she knew every single inch of. She was mad that Noel suddenly wasn’t always just there, reading in the corner, in case Grace wanted him.

But then, as Noel phoned Grace every week and sent her cards and the occasional gift: a keyring, some sweets, she began to forgive him for leaving. She began to miss him a little, and look forward to his phone calls and visits home.

But somewhere, somehow, between Grace wandering around town with her friends, being in plays after school and being out when Noel made his phone calls, and Noel getting his first job in London and wearing shirts and suddenly being important, the cards and gifts faded. Their phone conversations became less frequent, and when Noel visited Blackpool, Grace felt like she knew him less.

And then her mother disappeared, and it all changed again.

Chapter Four

Louisa, 1960

Along the bumpy road they went. Dr Barker didn’t say any more and Louisa didn’t ask him to. She had never met her father before, and the news that she was going to live with him made the ham sandwich she had eaten hours before at Dr Barker’s house feel heavy in her stomach, as though she had eaten a dollop of glue. It swerved around the corners as the car did and threatened to come up into her throat.

And then suddenly, the car stopped. Dr Barker tugged at his handkerchief until it came loose from his pocket, and wiped his face with it. Louisa felt a sudden urge to take the handkerchief and keep it forever, but she didn’t tell Dr Barker this and she didn’t tell him that she almost loved him, and that if she had been allowed to stay with him and his daisy plate with ham sandwiches on it for longer she would have been almost happy. Instead, Louisa looked up at the house that loomed over them.

Maybe, just maybe, Louisa’s mother had known all about this house, and had sent Louisa here. Maybe it was all planned. Maybe her mother would be inside.

Louisa let herself be pulled from the car by Dr Barker. He held her hand as they ascended the steep, green hill. The front door was shiny and tomato red. When it opened, Louisa stared at the man behind it.

Her father.

He was a grey man: grey hair and grey clothes and grey skin. He looked down at Louisa and gave her a half-smile. She gave him a grim smile in return. He would, she decided, have to work for a real smile.

‘Well,’ Dr Barker said brightly. The word hung in the air like a sheet out to dry, flapping this way and that, getting in the way of things.

‘Well,’ Louisa’s grey father repeated after a while.

They stood for a few moments.

‘It happened, then. You knew it would,’ her father said to Dr Barker, looking over Louisa’s head and directing his words only at him, as though that would make Louisa unable to hear them. Dr Barker bowed his head slightly, his hands held together in a steeple.

They all shuffled through into the hall. It was a pretty hall, with an umbrella stand and a huge framed painting of a girl and a dog on the wall. Louisa looked up at the girl. She looked sad, and Louisa wondered why. Louisa’s mother would have been able to tell her. If her mother was here, she would stare into the painting and hold Louisa’s hand and tell her a rich, beautiful story filled with colour and happiness and sadness. But Louisa could tell by now that her mother wasn’t here after all. Tears burned the backs of her eyes, but she would not let them fall. Not now.

‘So, you’re all ready for her then?’ asked Dr Barker.

‘Yes, yes. I have a bed made up. Thank you, Gregory. For everything.’

Louisa watched Dr Barker’s face droop in a sad smile as her father said this, and knew then that Dr Barker liked her father, and had met him before, that he knew him more than Louisa did. Then she looked at her father. Did she like him? The man who had an umbrella stand and grey hair and grey skin?

Not yet, no. But she knew that one day, she would.

Just a year after Louisa had gone to live with her father, a silent, steady drift of snow began to fall one Monday afternoon and continued on and on, until nothing could be seen from the highest window of the house but a blue-white world with no boundaries.

The day Louisa had arrived at her father’s the previous autumn, he had enrolled her at the local school that smelled of scrubbed potatoes and old shoes. Louisa had liked school in Blackpool and she’d had good friends there who adored the fact that Louisa could see into the future, and who had given her sweets in return for a clue about what might happen that day. But in her new town, with her new father and her new school, things were different.

Oh, how different, Louisa thought each night as she lay underneath a cool eiderdown and listened out for the sound of the sea that never came. Louisa’s gift was stronger than ever: she knew exactly what the teacher would be wearing every day, and she knew whose knuckles would be rapped and what would be served for lunch. But she said nothing now. If she ignored the visions, then perhaps they would eventually go away. Her vision of her mother had been too late. No good could come of them.

So, because Louisa had apparently nothing to offer them, and perhaps because her face was plain and her hair a little too dark for her pale complexion, the other girls at her school made no real attempts to befriend her, or to poke fun at her. They simply let her be.

At weekends, Louisa and her father took little outings. They walked to the park, the duck pond, the high street. Her father spent more money than her mother ever had done and Louisa’s tummy swelled ever so slightly with a weekly bag of fudge from Spencer’s sweet shop. The outings were strange at first, and Louisa and her father spoke little. Words seemed to be difficult to find now, and when Louisa did push a word from her lips, her father might simply nod, or shake his head, or give a small smile.

After a year, Louisa’s life still seemed to be colourless. And the snow that fell that Monday made it even whiter, even more unreal. School was out of the question, Nancy the maid said that morning as she cleared away Louisa’s toast crumbs. And Louisa’s father would stay at home too.

Louisa sat and watched her father eat the last of his eggs. He ate slowly, and neatly. Her mother had always made eggs that oozed orange onto the plate and the bread. Her father’s eggs were more like foam and he cut them carefully so that there was no mess on his plate. He could, Louisa supposed, have just eaten them off the table.

‘What will we do, then?’ he asked Louisa once he had swallowed the last of his breakfast.

Louisa shrugged. She didn’t think they would be able to go for a walk in this weather.

‘Come with me,’ he said, as he stood and pushed his chair back. He took Louisa’s hand, led her to the coat stand in the hallway, and offered her the red wool coat that he had bought her a few weeks ago. Louisa put it on. The buttons were gold, and made her feel as though she was a queen.

When they both had their coats and shoes on, Louisa’s father opened the front door. The snow was piled so high that they could see nothing beyond it. Louisa’s father pushed at it with both of his hands and then, as though he was a boy of ten, launched himself on top of it. Snow puffed out from underneath him, and his face turned red.

He’s gone mad, Louisa thought.

And then she threw herself into the snow too.

Freezing water raced through her shoes and her wool coat, and Louisa shivered. She felt a strange laugh escape her mouth. Guilt coursed through her immediately: she had vowed that she would never laugh again, not unless she found her mother.

But then her father laughed: a deep, loud laugh that made Louisa giggle more. She choked and wiped her eyes with her cold, wet sleeve.

‘I’m not used to snow. We hardly ever get any in Blackpool,’ she said.

Her father didn’t correct Louisa’s present tense. He smiled and wiped a piece of ice from his rounded jaw. ‘It’s because of all the salt near the sea. It stops the snow from settling.’

Louisa nodded, her face frozen and all her words used up, for now. But it had been a start. A very good start.

When they had thrown snowballs, and made a tall snowman with currants for eyes, a stone nose and a shoelace mouth that insisted on falling and dangling on one side, Louisa and her father went back inside. Louisa changed into some dry clothes and her father asked Nancy to make them some hot chocolate.

‘I don’t often have hot chocolate,’ Louisa’s father said as they sat sipping.

‘It’s nice,’ Louisa said.

‘Nancy is good to me.’

‘Yes. She’s nice.’

There was a stretch of silence dotted with sipping. Louisa looked out of the window. The sky hung down heavily, yellow grey. The snow would continue forever, it seemed.

‘Mum talked about somebody,’ Louisa said all of a sudden, leaning forward a little, her heart racing. ‘She talked about a boy with purple eyes. She talked about finding him. But I don’t know who he was.’

Louisa’s father scratched his chin and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said sadly, ‘I don’t know who he was, either.’

‘Perhaps if I could find him, he would be able to tell me where Mum went?’

Louisa’s father put down his hot chocolate and Louisa saw that he hadn’t finished it. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Is somebody else living in my house now?’ Louisa asked. Her toothbrush and clothes and a couple of dolls she had outgrown had been parcelled up and sent to her a few weeks after she had moved into her father’s, and she still hadn’t looked in the box properly. She felt that if she did, a sorrow too deep to recover from would pull her in. So the things that had been sent were still untouched, in Louisa’s big fancy wardrobe next to her new, soft bed.

Her father sighed sadly. ‘Yes. It’s being used as a guest house now.’

Louisa swallowed a big gulp of chocolate and scalded her throat. So that was it. She couldn’t go back. ‘It feels strange to think of somebody else brushing their teeth at my sink,’ she said, wondering if her father would understand.

He nodded, and sighed again.

‘I can’t sleep at night,’ Louisa said next. It was as though her words were suddenly dripping out with no control now, like her mouth was a broken tap. ‘I can’t seem to sleep without the sounds of the sea.’

‘I see. And a girl needs her sleep.’

Louisa nodded, pleased that her father appeared to be listening to her and thinking about what she had said. It seemed so long since she had had a conversation, a real one where she felt like something had happened at the end of it.

‘You know,’ her father said after a little time, ‘if you hold a seashell up to your ear, then you can hear the sea.’

Louisa raised her dark eyebrows, interested. The idea reminded her of something her mother would have said, and made Louisa’s insides tremble a little with grief.

‘I’ll try to get you a shell so that you can listen to it each night before bed. We need you to sleep well.’ Her father stood and left the room, and Louisa finished her hot chocolate, and when she was sure that her father wasn’t coming back, had the rest of his too.

That night, even though going out was out of the question, and even though Louisa and her father were goodness knows how many miles from the coast, Louisa saw that there was a small, shiny seashell on her pillow. It was cream, with tiny pink veins running through it. It was beautiful.

Louisa held the shell to her ear to hear the crashing of the sea, and wondered how her father had managed to find it for her.

And as she sank into bed, and listened to the waves, a little bit of colour seeped back into Louisa’s world.

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