“Sorry!” Henry was trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the corners of his mouth under control. “At least now I know where your password … Okay, carry on.”
“I had to find out what Charles really feels for Lottie—it was urgent. So I took his silly trapper’s cap and broke into his dream tonight.” It struck me, yet again, that at this very moment I was lying in my bed with the cap on—probably my hair was all sweaty by now. And presumably, also at this moment, Henry was thinking what I must look like in the trapper’s cap with earflaps. He was going to start laughing again, I knew he was, and who could blame him?
But he responded to my glare with an innocent look suggesting that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “I get that. So how did you do it?”
I didn’t see what he meant, and frowned. “Well, I went through his dream door.”
“Yes, but as who or what?”
“As myself, of course. I had a peaked cap on because the dream was on a golf course, so I had to wear the right outfit. I’d just brought Charles to the point where he was going to say something about Lottie, only then his stupid smoke—” Horrified, I clapped my hand over my mouth. “Oh, shit! I completely forgot! The smoke alarm! It went off, and all I thought of was how to get out of the dream super fast before Charles woke up. I’m a terrible person! I ought to have woken myself and called the fire department.”
The idea that Charles’s apartment might be on fire didn’t seem to worry Henry. He smiled at me and stroked my cheek with his fingertips. “Liv, surely you realize that in their dreams people don’t necessarily have to be honest, right? In my experience, most of us tell even more lies in dreams than in real life. So if you want to find out the truth about someone, it’s no use just strolling around in his dream and asking questions, because he’ll tell you exactly what he’d say if he was awake.”
That did sound plausible, of course, and to be honest the idea had occurred to me already. Looking at it that way, I’d stumbled into Charles’s dream without any sensible plan, no subtlety in my approach at all, simply because I wanted to protect Lottie. “But how else could I have done it? And don’t tell me I ought to have turned into a moon rocket.”
“Well, it’s always best if they don’t notice you’re there at all. As an invisible observer, you can learn a lot about people in their dreams, just from watching and listening. In fact, with a little patience, you can find out all about them.”
“But I don’t want to know all about Charles,” I said, disgusted at the mere idea. “I only want to know if he’s serious about Lottie. Because if he isn’t, then…” I clenched my fists. No way were Mia and I going to let anyone hurt Lottie, certainly not Charles. Mia already thought it would be better to marry her off to the good-looking veterinarian in Pilgrim’s Lane. “On the other hand—maybe poor Charles is dead of smoke inhalation by now because I didn’t call the fire department, so in that case everything’s settled.”
“I love you,” said Henry abruptly, pulling me closer, and I immediately forgot Charles. Henry didn’t exactly throw those three magic words around lavishly. He’d said them exactly three times in the last eight and a half weeks, and for some reason, every time he did I felt terribly embarrassed. The only proper, universally valid reply to that was I love you too, but somehow I could never get it out. Not because I didn’t love him, far from it, but because I love you too doesn’t carry nearly as much weight as an I love you coming out of the blue.
So instead I replied, “Even though I can’t turn into a moon rocket or make myself invisible?”
Henry nodded. “You’ll learn all that. You’re immensely talented. In every possible way.” Then he leaned forward and began kissing me, so it turned out to be a really nice dream after all.
3
THE DISADVANTAGE OF these lucid dreams by night—dreams when you were fully conscious—was that you never really felt you’d slept well in the morning. However, over the last few months, I’d developed methods of making up for my lack of sleep: a hot shower, then gallons of cold water for my face, and finally a quadruple espresso for my circulation, disguised with a topping of frothed milk so that Lottie wouldn’t go lecturing me on the sensitivity of young people’s stomachs. The Italian coffee machine that ground fresh beans and frothed milk at the touch of a button was one reason why living in the Spencers’ house wasn’t so bad. Lottie might think that no one should drink coffee until they were eighteen at the earliest, but for Mom there were no such age limits, so I had unlimited access to caffeine.
Halfway to the kitchen, I met my sister. She had been out walking our dog, Buttercup, and put her ice-cold hand to my cheek. “Feel that!” she said cheerfully. “They said on the news it might even be a white Christmas this year, and the coldest January for eleven years … and silly me, I’ve gone and lost a glove. One of my gray polka-dot pair. You haven’t seen it anywhere, have you? Those are my favorite gloves.”
“No, sorry. Have you looked in Buttercup’s hidey-hole?” Buttercup had rolled over on the floor in front of me and was looking as cute and innocent as if she’d never dream of dragging gloves, socks, and shoes away and bringing them out again only after they were chewed to bits. I tickled her tummy at length and talked to her in baby language (she loved that!), before getting up and following Mia toward the kitchen, or rather toward the coffee machine. Buttercup followed me, not that she was after coffee. She had her eye on the plate of cold roast beef that Ernest had just put on the breakfast table.
We’d now been living in London for almost four months, in this large, comfortable brick house in Hampstead, but although I really liked the city and for the first time in years I had a large, pretty room all to myself, I still felt rather like a guest.
Maybe that was simply because I’d never learned to feel at home anywhere. Before Mom met Ernest Spencer and decided to spend the rest of her life with him, she’d moved house almost every year, along with Mia, Lottie, Buttercup, and me. We’d lived in Germany, Scotland, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, and of course in the United States, where Mom came from. Our parents had divorced when I was eight, but Papa was no keener than Mom on staying in one place. He was always glad when his company sent him to a new job in a country that he didn’t know yet. Papa was German, and at the moment he and his two suitcases (he used to say no one needed more stuff than would fit into two suitcases) were living in Zürich, where Mia and I were going to stay with him for the Christmas holidays.
Was it surprising that all these years we’d wanted nothing more fervently than to settle down in one place? We’d always dreamed of a house where we could stay put and have all our things around us. A house with plenty of space, a room for each of us, a garden where Buttercup could race around and play, and an apple tree to climb. Now we were living in a house almost exactly like that (there was even a tree to climb, only it was a cherry tree), but it wasn’t quite the same, because it wasn’t our house: it belonged to Ernest Spencer and his two children, the seventeen-year-old twins Florence and Grayson. As well as the twins, there was also a friendly ginger cat called Spot, and they’d all three lived their whole lives here. But however often Ernest repeated that this house was now our house, it didn’t feel like it. Possibly because there were no notches in any of the door frames with our names beside them to show how we’d grown, and because we couldn’t connect any stories with the dark patch on the Persian rug or the cracked kitchen tile. Because we hadn’t been here seven years ago, when a napkin suddenly caught fire while the family was eating fondue, or in the case of the tile, when Florence, aged five, had been so furious with Grayson that she threw a bottle of fizzy water at him.
Maybe it would just take a little longer. But we certainly hadn’t left any traces behind us or created any family stories in the short time we’d been here.
Mom was already working on that problem, however. She’d always insisted on the three of us having a big breakfast together early on Sunday mornings, and she’d lost no time in introducing the same custom to the S
pencer household, much to the annoyance of Florence and Grayson, particularly today. Judging by Florence’s expression, she was in the mood to throw another bottle of water at someone. The twins had been out at a party until three thirty in the morning and couldn’t stop yawning, Florence with her hand in front of her mouth, Grayson with no such inhibitions about yawning widely in front of us all and making sounds of exhaustion. At least I wasn’t the only one having to fight off my weariness, although our methods of dealing with it differed. While I gulped great mouthfuls of coffee and waited for the caffeine to get into my bloodstream, Florence spiked orange segments on a fork and carried them elegantly to her mouth. She obviously thought vitamin C was the answer to tiredness. I felt sure the shadows under her caramel-brown eyes would soon go right away and she’d look as immaculate as ever. As for Grayson, he was shoveling mountains of scrambled eggs and toast into himself and had no shadows under his eyes at all. But for the yawning, no one would even have noticed how tired he was. He badly needed a shave, all the same.
Mom, Ernest, and Lottie had obviously slept well and were beaming at us cheerfully, and for once Mom was fully dressed and had done her hair, instead of coming down to breakfast all a mess in a revealing negligee, as she often did on a Sunday morning. Relieved, I smiled back.
Maybe I also smiled back because Mom’s happiness was kind of infectious, and everything was so homey and Christmassy. The winter sun shone through the bay windows, which had wreaths decorating them; the red paper stars shone in the sunlight; there was a scent of melted butter, orange, vanilla, and cinnamon in the air (Lottie had been making a great mound of waffles that were smiling at me from the middle of the table); and Mia, sitting beside me, looked like a rosy-cheeked little Christmas angel in glasses.
Not that she behaved like an angel.
“Are we at the zoo here or what?” she asked as Grayson almost dislocated his jaw for about the eighth time, yawning.
“Yes,” said Grayson, unmoved. “Feeding the hippos. Pass the butter this way, would you?”
I grinned. Grayson was another reason why I liked living in this house; in fact, he was an even better reason than the coffee machine. First, he could help me with my math when I got stuck (after all, he was two classes above me); secondly, he was a really cheering sight, even when he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep and was yawning like a hippopotamus, and thirdly … well, he was just nice.
His sister wasn’t quite so nice.
“What a shame Henry didn’t have time for the party last night … again,” she said to me, and although her voice was dripping with sympathy, I could hear the malice behind it. It showed in the way she left that little pause before saying again. “You two really missed something. We had such fun, didn’t we, Grayson?”
Grayson just yawned again, but my mother leaned forward and examined me in concern. “Liv, darling, you went to your room without having any supper yesterday evening. Should I be worried?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but Mom just went on. “Anyway, it’s not normal to spend a Saturday evening hanging around at home, not at your age, and going to bed early. Just because your boyfriend doesn’t have time to go to a party, you don’t have to act like a nun and stay home yourself.”
I cast a dark glance at her through my glasses. That was typical of my mom. We were talking about the birthday party of a guy two years ahead of me at school. I hardly knew him, and anyway, I’d been invited only as Henry’s companion, so I’d have looked pretty silly going on my own. Aside from the fact that, whatever Florence said, I probably hadn’t missed much. Parties were all the same: too many people in a small space, too much loud music, and not enough to eat. You couldn’t talk except in a shout, a couple of people always drank too much and made fools of themselves, and if you danced, other people were poking their elbows in your ribs the whole time—it really wasn’t my idea of fun.
“What’s more,” said Mom, leaning a little farther forward, “what’s more, if Henry has to babysit his little brother and sister, which naturally I think is very nice of him—who’s to say you can’t go and help him?”
To my annoyance, she’d hit the bull’s-eye, right at my most sensitive spot. In the eight and a half weeks of our relationship, Henry had often come here to see me: we’d spent time in my room, in the park, at the movies, at parties, in the school library, in the corner café, and of course in our dreams. But I hadn’t been to his house once.
The only member of Henry’s family that I knew was his little sister, Amy, aged four, and I knew her only from dreams. I knew that he also had a brother called Milo, who was twelve, but Henry didn’t often talk about him, and he almost never mentioned his parents. Recently I’d wondered whether Henry was keeping me away from his home on purpose. I’d found out most of what I knew about his family not from him, but from Secrecy’s blog. I’d learned that his parents were divorced, his father had already been married three times, and he was now planning to make a former lingerie model from Bulgaria wife number four. As well as Milo and Amy, according to Secrecy, Henry also had a whole crowd of older half brothers and sisters.
Mom winked at me, and I hastily thought about something else. When Mom winked, it was usually suggestive, and therefore embarrassing.
“I always had no end of fun babysitting. Particularly when the babies were asleep.” She winked again, and now Mia put her knife down in alarm. “In particular I remember the Millers’ sofa.…”
So much for a homey, nearly Christmassy mood.
“Mom!” said Mia sharply, and at the same time I said, “Not now!” We already knew about the Millers’ sofa, and no way did we want Mom talking about her experiences on it over breakfast.
Before she could take another deep breath (the worst of it was that she remembered not just one embarrassing experience, but she had an almost inexhaustible supply of them), I added quickly, “I stayed home last night because I felt like I was coming down with a cold, and anyway, I had a lot of work to do for school.” I could hardly say that I’d wanted to go to bed early on a secret mission, wearing the incredibly ugly trapper’s cap that I’d stolen from Charles. Of course we hadn’t told anyone what we did at night in our dreams—and presumably no one would have believed us, anyway. We’d have been carted straight off to join Anabel in the psychiatric hospital. Of everyone at the breakfast table, only Grayson knew about the dream business, but I was fairly sure that since the events of eight and a half weeks ago, he hadn’t once gone through his own dream door, and I also guessed he thought we’d all keep away from the dream corridors. Grayson had never felt happy going into other people’s dreams; he thought it was all creepy and dangerous, and he’d have been horrified if he knew that we simply couldn’t leave it alone. Unlike Henry, he’d definitely have condemned my operation last night as immoral.
Incidentally, I’d had to wash my hair twice to get rid of the smell of sheepskin from that cap, but there was still something the matter with it. When Lottie, who had gone to get herself a second helping of scrambled eggs, passed behind me, my hair crackled audibly and stood on end, only to lie back against Lottie’s pink angora sweater. Everyone started to laugh, one by one, even me once I’d glanced in the mirror above the sideboard.
“Like a porcupine,” said Mia as I tried smoothing my hair down on my head again. “We really might as well be at the zoo this morning. Speaking of zoos, who’s the extra place for?” She pointed to the empty plate beside Lottie. “Is Uncle Charles coming to breakfast?”
At the sound of his name, Lottie and I jumped almost at the same time. Lottie presumably in excitement; mine was more of a guilty start. As if on cue, we heard the front door open, and I tried to prepare myself for the worst. But the singed smell that suddenly rose to my nostrils came, to my relief, from my slice of toast.
And the energetic footsteps click-clacking along the hall didn’t belong to Charles either, but to someone else. They were unmistakable. Mia groaned quietly and cast me a meaningful look. I rolled my eyes. I’d really
rather have seen a singed Charles. So long as he was only slightly singed at the edges, of course.
The last of the warm Christmassy feeling seemed to leave the room, and there she stood in the doorway: the Beast in Ocher. Also known as “the she-devil with the Hermès scarf,” in ordinary life Philippa Adelaide Spencer, or Granny, as Grayson and Florence called her. Apparently her friends at the bridge club knew her as Peachy Pippa, but I wasn’t going to believe that until I heard it with my own ears.
“Oh, I see you’ve started without me,” she said instead of hello, good morning, or anything like that. “Are those American manners?”
Mia and I exchanged another glance. If the front door hadn’t been left unlocked, then the Beast in Ocher had a key to it. Alarming.
“You’re over half an hour late, Mother,” said Ernest, standing up to kiss her on both cheeks.
“Really? What time did you tell me?”
“I didn’t,” said Ernest. “You invited yourself yesterday, remember? You said you’d be here for breakfast at nine thirty.”
“Nonsense, I never said anything about breakfast. Of course I had it at home. Oh, thank you, darling.”
Grayson was helping her off with her (ocher) coat—a fox had given its life for the fur collar—and Florence beamed and said, “Oh, you’re wearing your (ocher) twinset; it really suits you, Granny!”
Lottie, sitting beside me, had tried to get to her feet as well, but I held her firmly down by the sleeve of her sweater. Last time she had bobbed the Beast a curtsy, and no way was I having her do that again.