Follow Me Down by Tanya Byrne Read Free Book Online Page A

a house like Scarlett’s. If Jumoke’s condo had commanded an entire floor, then Scarlett’s house was the size of a city block. It looked like something from a BBC period drama – big and square with three rows of white-framed windows – and even though I’d heard so much about it (it’s talked about at Crofton almost as much as she is) I couldn’t help but be a little in awe the first time she led me around it; from the hall into the big yellow music room with its glossy piano and wireless, to the library with the buttery leather armchairs that remember the shape of you until you sit on them again.
    She announced each room with no fanfare, as though it was normal, as though every girl lived in a house with a name and a chandelier in every room, but when we got to the drawing room, she smiled. Everything in it looked so stiff, from the huge carved fireplace to the heavy silk drapes, that I couldn’t imagine relaxing in a room like that, but I do. We lie in there all the time – her lying on one couch, me on the other – eating fistfuls of popcorn and talking about where we want to go to university, where we want to live, what we want to see. Or, when the sun is out, we open the French windows and sit on the uneven mossy steps that lead to the lawn, the grass rolling out in front of us down, down to the canal with its rickety wooden bridge, and it feels like we have the world at our feet.
    That’s the thing with her house, it’s grand, but they really live in it. They don’t have a housekeeper (I didn’t know this until I noticed the dust on the piano and the white wax weeping from the candelabras in the dining room), which makes sense – her mother didn’t want her daughters to have the upbringing she had – but my father would have been appalled. An old house like that needs care, he’d say. He wouldn’t approve of the unpolished floors and rumpled rugs. He’d say it was neglectful. But Scarlett’s house is like a vintage bag; it has so many scuffs because it’s used. Loved . It’s not like Jumoke’s magazine-perfect apartment with its white sofas and bowl of green apples in the kitchen that no one is allowed to eat.
    The Chilterns live in every corner of their house. It has a smell, a nice smell: old, but kind of comforting, like a spent match or a second-hand book. There are photos of the girls on every wall. The one of six-year-old Scarlett in her yellow wellington boots, pouting and clutching her leather suitcase, is by the door in the mud room, presumably where it was taken before they waved her off. And there’s one of the girls in the drawing room, the three of them huddled together and giggling. It’s impossible to tell them apart, their faces and white cotton dresses covered in red, pink and blue powder. I guess they were in India for Holi and whenever I look at it, I can almost hear them screaming and chasing one another.
    That’s what I love about her house: it’s a home. There are tulips from their farm in every room and a bowl of browning bananas in the kitchen. Normal things. In the summer, I’m sure she sunbathes on the lawn in her heart-shaped sunglasses – Olivia next to her, reading a book – and slams doors when she doesn’t get her way. Every scratch tells a story, every dent, every repaired vase. Even the paintings say something, because that’s another thing her mother does that infuriates her grandmother: she rents rooms to writers and artists – like Mr Lucas – most of whom pay their way with poems or paintings. I’ve seen the paintings dotted around the house, wild splashes of colour between the dour portraits of the house’s previous residents.
    Every time I go to her house, I think of my house in Lagos, of its high gates and marble floors, and wonder what it was like to grow up in a house like that. I’ve never really felt the loss of being an only child, until I imagine the girls skidding in their socks along the floorboards outside their bedrooms and trying