Free Eloise by Judy Finnigan

When I woke up, it was nearly midday. This didn’t surprise me. The inability to get out of bed, to rejoin the land of the living, was a hallmark of my illness; and yet I had been so much better, more positive and energetic before we went to Cornwall, before Eloise’s ghost had overwhelmedme. I shook myself. Ghost? What was I thinking? She was a dream, not a ghost. Just a nightmare, one of many that disturbed my troubled nights. But she felt so real, and what she said to me was so coherent. She was always trying to tell me something urgent. The dreams I’d had when I thought Evie might die were nothing like my night-time visions of Eloise. When I had my breakdown, I dreamed of a baby in a matchbox, tiny dead kittens, gruesome severed heads. None of it made any sense. But Eloise, as she appeared to me, seemed to be trying to have a rational conversation.
    And yet, trying to be sane about it, what had actually happened? My friend had died of the cancer she had suffered for five years. It was not unexpected – just the opposite. And because my state of mind was still fragile – though I had hoped and believed I was better – I had allowed myself to be drawn into some Gothic fantasy, fuelled by Ted’s surly anger and Juliana’s obsession with
Wuthering Heights
. No. It was nonsense. This mad conviction that Eloise’s spirit was unquiet, that her death needed to be avenged and I was her chosen weapon of retribution was utterly unhinged. I had read too much Daphne du Maurier in Cornwall. I had let myself become darkly obsessed by Manderley and the malevolent image of Rebecca, stalking her little cottage on the beach, desperate, even in death, to ruin her husband, Max de Winter. So who was to be Eloise’s Mrs Danvers, I thought?Who was the one who was determined to suppress the truth? Eloise was begging me to find out.
    My head whirled. Was she a ghost? Or just a dream?
    I closed my eyes in despair. I was going mad. Chris was right. I was very ill again.

Chapter Nine

    It was June before I went back to Cornwall. Some of that time was a blur. Lots of hugs from my darling Evie and concerned faces from my sons, upset that their mum was once again drowned in a sad landscape they could not begin to imagine or share. Thank God.
    Chris was wonderful. I had to have treatment again, and pills; but he never made me feel I was going mad, that I was a lost cause; an embarrassment as a wife or mother, which of course I believed I was.
    Normal life gradually returned. My sleep was untroubled and I was, at last, completely better.
    So, when Chris suggested we should go back to Talland in late June, I agreed in a spirit of defiance. I was going home to my lovely cottage, to my healing refuge in Cornwall. I was no longer afraid of ghosts. I would take Evie, who was tired after sitting her GCSEs, and Chris who was due a much-needed holiday, and we would have a wonderful break. It would be like the old days; lots of walks on wild empty beaches, Cornish pasties and cider consumed with gales of laughter on the steep fields leading down to Lantic Bay.
    I couldn’t wait. The boys had finished their university exams and had other fish to fry. I, meanwhile, needed to embrace my lovely county again, fresh and full of ravishing blossom and luscious green meadows, with my husband and beloved daughter in my arms; swaddled in bedclothes dried on the line and smelling of grass, lavender and honeysuckle.
    On the first day back, Evie sat at the wide oak kitchen table, head in hand, staring out of the window at the clematis winding round the railing of our little patio.
    ‘Mum,’ she said dreamily. ‘Can you fall in love when you’re sixteen?’
    ‘You can fall in love however young you are,’ I said with a smile. ‘Look at Shakespeare’s Juliet. She was only thirteen when she met Romeo and was instantly besotted. Mind you, look where that got her.’
    ‘Yeah, I know. But that’s just drama. I mean, things can have a happy ending when you’re