I want to tell you where this book came from, because it didn't come from where I expected.
I had been thinking for a long time about a particular kind of loneliness — the loneliness
of being seen and still not known. Of having someone look at you with real attention, real
intensity, and understand you completely wrong. It's a feeling I find harder to articulate
than most, which is probably why I kept circling it.
Then I started thinking about houses.
I've always been drawn to the idea of a house that holds something. Not in any supernatural
sense — I'm not interested in ghosts, not exactly. But buildings do hold things. The shape
of a doorway tells you something about what its designer believed a body deserved from the
space it moved through. A sealed room says everything about what is too difficult to face.
A hallway with a photograph on the wall says: someone wanted to be remembered here.
I put those two things together — that particular loneliness, and that kind of house — and
Iris walked into the frame.
Iris Vane is not me. She is more contained than I am, more deliberate. She moves through
the world with a kind of professional stillness that I admire from a safe distance. But the
wound I gave her is one I know: she has spent her life being accurately perceived and
incorrectly understood. People see her competence, her control, her composure — and mistake
those things for the complete picture. Her last relationship ended when the man she loved
told her he felt he had never truly met her.
She believed him. That was the part that hurt most to write.
Daniel arrived as a counterweight — a man who is also misreading someone, also holding a
version of another person in his mind that has nothing to do with who she actually is. He
is not a villain. He is not even particularly wrong about himself. He is simply a man who
has been in grief so long that he has mistaken it for personality. I find him easier to
forgive than he finds himself, which is perhaps the point.
Ashford House came from a place I visited once, years ago — a stone house somewhere in
the west of England, seen from the road on a grey afternoon, shuttered and still and
perfectly proportioned. I didn't go inside. I drove past and thought about it for three
days. In the novel it became something much more elaborate: a house with a sealed wing, a
garden that had stopped being formal, a corridor where the light changed colour by the
hour. I gave it the smell of damp stone and linseed oil, the sound of floorboards that
announced every movement, the cold that lives in old windows even when the fires are lit.
I wanted you to feel it the way Iris does: as beautiful and withholding in equal measure.
The question at the centre of the novel — who was Elena Marsh, and what does it mean that
she looks exactly like Iris — took a long time to answer correctly. I went through several
versions where Elena was simply absent, simply dead, simply a shape in a plot. None of those
versions were honest enough. The one I kept is the one that felt most true to what I know
about secrets: they are rarely about the thing you think they are. They are usually about
what someone was unable to say out loud at the time.
I hope that reading it costs you something pleasant.
That's what the best books do to me — leave me slightly altered, standing at the end of a
story thinking: yes, that was real. I wanted to write one that earns that feeling.
Manuela
