by Anne Fine
It seemed too soon to claim acquaintance with the house, so I said only, ‘This is a splendid place.’
He tipped back his head as though to admire the sheer volume of space around and above us. ‘Splendid, indeed! And yet without you I have rattled around it like a dead beetle shaken in a bottle.’
It was a horrid notion. But the captain seemed cheerful enough, opening a door to call an echoing order. ‘Martha! Our young man’s here and no doubt, like all others of his age, he has a wolf in his belly!’ Clapping his hand on my shoulder, he steered me up the curved wide staircase and along the landing to the small arched door set in the alcove. Shooting back the bolt, he went ahead of me up the narrow set of stairs that I already knew led to the attics. His heavy footfalls raised such clouds of dust that it seemed obvious the staircase had been little used for years, and it was hard not to wonder why, if my uncle had felt the need for company so very strongly over his lonely years, he had decided now to put me so far from the house’s heart.
He opened the first door along the unlit passage.
‘This will do nicely,’ he said. Tossing my bag onto the rickety-looking bed, he strode to the window. ‘See? You will have the best view in the house – over the woods as far as the rolling downs.’ He turned back to assure me, ‘You will be happy here. Though I can’t find you company of your own age, there’ll still be plenty to do. Why, I can teach you how to hunt and fish – indeed, I’m sure the river can be seen from here!’
Sticking his head out of the window, he craned as far as he could, presumably in hopes of seeing river water glint in the moonlight.
I took the chance to glance around. The shade on the only lamp was so mottled with age and damp it threw more shadow than light. The eaves sloped down so low I knew I’d crack my head if I sat up in bed. There were few pictures on the walls. And though the bed was freshly made, the place smelled musty.
Hearing a soft tap on the door, I turned.
There was a drab old woman carrying a tray laden with a tureen so fat and round I couldn’t think how she had mustered the strength to carry it up all those stairs. The instant her eyes met mine, what little colour there was in her face drained dead away. Fearing she would let slip what she was carrying, I stepped towards her to prise the tray from her hands and set it down safely as the captain turned. The woman was still trembling, but as his large frame now blocked the moonlight that had fallen on her shocked, lined face, he noticed nothing.
‘Ah, Martha! You’ve brought our young man’s supper.’ He lifted the lid of the tureen and raised a corner of the chequered cloth. ‘Fine soup! And plenty of rolls, hot from the oven.’ He wagged a finger at me jovially. ‘You must be on your guard. Martha will feed you so well you’ll soon peer in a looking glass and mistake yourself for a barrel.’
The captain stood while Martha bowed her head in recognition of the compliment and left the room. Then he turned back to me and once again clasped both his huge hands round mine. ‘There I go, rattling on! Tomorrow will be time enough to hear your story. Tonight you must do nothing more than polish off your supper, then drop your head onto your pillow and dream.’
Oh, he was right enough there! I never had such dreams as on that night. Welcome as it had been, the soup I’d drunk might have been made by goblins. My hours were wakeful and torn, yet still I couldn’t pull myself out of my haunted sleep. The damp stains on the walls became disfigured faces. The people in my dreams opened their mouths to speak and I saw fangs. I ran away from them, only to find myself in overgrown graveyards where stone cherubs wept real tears down marble cheeks, and I could hear their cries of anguish and the wails of the dead.
I forced myself to wake. Had I gone mad, like my poor mother? I made myself get out of bed, and padded to the window in bare feet. Outside lay peace itself. Already it was growing light. A fox was picking its way across the lawn, shaking dew from its paws at every step. Far off, owls hooted.
Gradually my sense of panic stilled. I washed in water from the jug I found outside the door. Then, pulling on my clothes, I crept along the passage and down the narrow stairs, through the small door and out onto the spacious landing.
So here it was – the house in which my mother spent her early life. Familiar – and yet strange. The chests of polished oak were just the same as in the doll’s house. And though the colours in the tapestries along the wall had faded to grey, I could make out the stag at bay and splashing waterfall that I remembered so well.
I started down the curving stair and found myself peering in tarnished glass. So something had been changed. Back in my doll’s house, all the way down these stairs were tiny portraits: a woman cradling a child; a handsome, sturdy boy; a girl in a white gown. Here in their place there hung a positive jumble of country scenes and ill-assorted mirrors, around some of which were stronger patches of colour on the wall showing where differently shaped frames had hung before. Why had the portraits been removed? Perhaps, I thought, my uncle didn’t choose to be reminded of what a lonely life he led. Or had he moved the paintings of the ones he’d loved to his own room, so they’d be closer to memory?
Whichever it was, he’d done the job well. I scoured the hall, then each downstairs room in turn, studying everything inside a frame: more mirrors; and paintings of cattle at sunset, and enough fruit and flowers to feed a multitude and deck out a dozen weddings.
But not one portrait.
Hearing the faintest clatter, I pushed at the green baize door that led to the kitchen. And once again I saw there had been changes, because the cheerful passage of my doll’s house stood filtered here in greenish gloom; and, at its end, the high bright kitchen in which I’d made my dolls so clumsily handle all their pots and pans looked, in this real world, chilly and cavernous, with blackened water stains stealing down blistered walls towards the cracked meat dishes that were propped awry on the enormous dresser.
Quietly I stepped inside. The room was empty and the back door ajar.
Here was a chance. The kitchen of my doll’s house had opened onto nothing but a sea of carpet, or the patch of wall against which it was set. And since my mother never spoke of places she had played, I’d never gathered any sense of what might lie behind the house itself. Curiosity impelled me forward. Outside there was a cobbled yard crisscrossed with washing lines and walled by tumbledown sheds. Not wanting to be caught prying in stores and coal holes, I wandered through an arched gate to the side, thinking to walk around and see again that strange sight of the night before – a house I knew so well standing full-sized against real skies, set on real earth, and – unlike my cheerful doll’s house – looking as mouldering and decayed as if its very stones were only held in place by strangling ivy.
And then I saw a shadow move between the trees.
A man. For just a moment it occurred to me that this might be my uncle, up even earlier than myself. But when the figure stopped I saw that he was carrying a hoe across his shoulders, and though his beard was grizzled like the captain’s, he was a shorter man – not that much taller than myself.
As I drew nearer, he stepped back, rather as if he hoped that I would let him melt away into the dark between the trees. But I was stubborn, for this man was staring at me in the very same way that Martha had the night before. And something about the mystery of where I was, and who I was, and why things had turned out the way they had, fuelled bluntness in me. Here, I felt, was my first chance to put a shoulder to the door that had been kept so firmly shut against my past.
I came up close and asked the man boldly, ‘Tell me, do I look so like my mother?’
He kept his eyes on me, but stood in silence.
So I pressed on. ‘It’s clear from the look on your own face that you recognize mine.’
Still there was no response, just those grey eyes committing him to nothing but the bare civility of waiting wordlessly. Determined to persist, I challenged him, ‘And so I think you must have known my mother!’
Now he drew up as if a shock shot throug
h him. But when it came, his answer was steady enough. ‘Oh, yes. I knew your mother. I knew her very well.’
Why did my anger rise? Was it because it seemed to me that everyone in the world knew more about my mother than I? This painful thought provoked me into simple insolence. Surprising even myself, I tipped my head to one side like a girl and asked him impudently again, ‘Is there so much of a likeness?’
And now the shock was mine, because I sensed that it took all his strength of will not to reach out and slap me. But he did manage to restrain himself and, curling his lip, admitted only, ‘You are as like as it is possible to be, what with her having been a loving, faultless beauty – and you but a callow and unthinking boy!’
Then off he strode while I stood there ashamed, quite as unable to hurry after him with any further questions as if he’d left me mired in mud as thick as his contempt.
The misery I felt, standing abandoned by those dark, dark woods! I could have wept. I wanted to be back in Mrs Marlow’s comforting arms. I wanted to be sitting at the table as Sophie teased her sisters, and the doctor scolded her for her unladylike ways. I wanted to be done with this great house of stone, whose shadows threw a real chill over a real lawn, and hurry back to where I’d come from, so I could sprawl instead in front of my pretend and cosy doll’s-house world.
No, I’d not stay! Not in this cold and empty place where I was banished into attics, and people stared at me as though I were some ghost. I’d stay here only as long as it took to prise a little of the truth about my mother out of Martha the cook, or this strange gardener.
Then I’d be gone.
My mind was fogged with childish misery, and I was in no mood to meet more strangers who might seize the chance to show me their disdain. So I set off back to the house, not over open lawns the way I’d come, but by a narrow path I took to run along the edge of the woods, keeping me in shadow. But it was ravelled with so many twists and turns that I soon lost all sense of where I was, and had to wander quite some way till once again I caught the glint of sunlight and, stepping off the path to follow that, pushed my way through thick undergrowth between the trees until I finally stepped out onto open grass.
Now, between me and the house’s distant chimney pots, there was a high beech hedge. I skirted it, to find to my surprise it was a curve that led round and round to make a perfect circle, with only one way in: an arch trimmed in the beech, with a small gate.
Was it a maze?
With beeches grown so high, surely my mother must have known the place in childhood! Had she run this way and that round the tricky curves and into green dead ends?
Wanting to trace some sense of her young life, I stepped in through the gate, only to find myself again in deepest shadow. The high beech hedges blocked out all sun and warmth. Moss grew so thickly underfoot that I made no sound as I walked along – or rather, round, because the high hedge circle turned out to be, not a maze, but simply an endlessly unfolding spiral. As I walked inward, round and round, the hedges were so high on either side that I began to feel like some poor ant picking his way along a deepening furrow.
Then suddenly the tightening spiral came to an end and I was out in a clearing.
Ahead of me were stones – two or three standing as tall and shapely as grave markers in a churchyard, and more beside them, one short and broken off, one almost flat to the ground. The whole assembly looked so strange, as if this quiet clearing had been some sort of meeting place in which a mix of lives had suddenly been turned to stone and, in the intervening years, damp moss had tightened its soft grip, spreading all over.
What was the terror that suddenly gripped me then? All I know is that in an instant I had turned to run – back, back around the spiral path, breathing more easily as it opened out, but still only feeling halfway to safe as I burst out into the welcome flood of morning sunlight on the open grass.
I found I was still trembling horribly. Knowing the simple presence of another soul, however bent and old, would help me feel more steady, I hurried back across the grass towards the house, and round into the courtyard.
Martha was there, bent over, tugging at a heap of scullery cloths lying entangled in a woven basket.
I’d cried, ‘I’ll help you!’ even before I’d reached her side.
Again she stared, as if the very way I spoke unnerved her utterly. But I was determined not to be ordered off, and bent to scoop up an armful of her damp, rinsed rags.
So that’s where the captain found me a few moments later, pegging the last of the cloths onto a sagging line.
‘Ah, here’s the boy! An early riser! I am glad to see it.’ Glancing at my handiwork, he added, ‘And a skilled hand around the kitchen and the scullery. Your poor dear mother must have taught you well.’
I tried to gather my wits to tell him it was Dr Marlow’s maid who’d shown me how to shake things out and peg them in neat rows. But he’d already turned to Martha.
‘Daniel and I will take our breakfast together now. I have a host of questions for the boy.’
He looked my way, and in the morning light I saw for the first time the scars on his face: a narrow livid streak across one cheek, and tiny pitted holes upon the other as if he’d been peppered by shot. I felt ashamed to have had the petty thought that I’d been banished carelessly to my high attic. Here, after all, there stood a man who had been tried in battle. To him, my dusty, faraway room might truly seem the most exhilarating place – a veritable crow’s nest!
Surely, in his gruff way, this uncle of mine was doing his very best to make a young boy welcome in his house.
In some anxiety – What questions would he ask? Would I be equal to his curiosity? – I followed him along the passage to the dining room. Our places were already laid, so I sat down and fiddled nervously with my fork until he laid a hand on mine to stop my tiresome rattling.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you and I must get to know one another.’
He sat there quietly for a while, studying my face. When Martha brought in our hot plates he’d still not said a word, while I sat trying to quieten my fast-beating heart. He’ll ask me first about my education, I assured myself. He’ll ask if I have friends. He’ll question me on where I’ve travelled, and what I want to do when I am grown. And I’ll have nothing to say except that I spent the whole of my early life malingering in a back room, persuaded I was at death’s door.
And then it suddenly occurred to me that, just as I knew nothing of my mother’s upbringing, so no one here knew anything of mine. Dr Marlow had talked to me of making a fresh start, and told me that he’d been discreet in letters, mentioning to my uncle nothing of my mother’s strange fixations, or of her death at her own hand. I was the only witness to my former life. And so, I thought, if I was careful with my answers, I might lead Captain Severn to believe I’d had a boyhood much like any other, with nothing hidden there to make him think I might be tainted by my mother’s morbid temperament or strange beliefs.
When the first question came, it took me by surprise. Leaning his elbows hard on the polished table, his sharp green eyes bored into mine. ‘So, Daniel,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me how Liliana fared, once she had fled from all who trusted and loved her.’
Here was a fighting start! I stared down at my plate and, not wanting him to think me a fool for knowing nothing of my mother’s early life, I said to him only, ‘As far back as I can remember, the two of us lived quietly together at Hawthorn Cottage.’
‘Liliana, quiet? Now there’s a fine surprise for those of us who knew her as a child!’
And a surprise for me! My mother not thought of as quiet? Already bafflement was taking hold of me.
Meanwhile my uncle kept up his stare and chewed on his fist. ‘Quiet, you say? So did your mother not mingle with the townsfolk?’
I still had hopes of hiding her deluded ways, and so it didn’t seem much of a lie to answer only, ‘No, sir. She mixed very little.’
Staring at me, he said, ‘There were no ladies who became her bo
som friends and shared her confidences? No handsome men who hoped to win her widow’s heart and call you son and heir?’
Again I looked down at my plate and muttered, ‘No, sir.’
‘What?’ he said after a moment. ‘Will you not answer me?’
I wondered then if he were a little deaf, so raised my head to say again, more clearly, ‘No, sir.’
‘No’ – here he seemed to chuckle – ‘Mr Cunningham, to offer you his name?’
‘My father died before my birth,’ I told him somewhat coldly.
Perhaps from kindness, hastily he turned the conversation back. ‘You say that Liliana had no friends or suitors.’ Narrowing his eyes almost as closely as if he hoped to catch me out in lies, he said, ‘Are you so sure?’
I reckoned it need be no secret that my mother’s life and mine had been so closely entwined. ‘We lived in one another’s pockets,’ I told him. ‘So I am sure.’
His tone turned thoughtful. ‘So,’ he said, ‘a life as quietly lived as if the two of you had been halfway to entombed.’
I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. How had he cut so quickly to the heart of things? Bending my head, I made a show of stabbing at my food while he sat drumming his scarred fingers on the table top. Then on he went. How had my mother earned her living? How did she pay her bills? Did she get letters? Did she travel from home? Keep any maids? One after another questions spilled out of him, as if the years he’d spent waiting to know the answer to each one had spawned a dozen more.
I did my best to answer civilly. But the sheer bluntness of his inquisition gradually turned my mood, first to unease, and then resentment. For if this uncle of mine was bothered to try to win my confidence and make me feel welcome, then surely he might have thought to start his fierce inquisition with something more brotherly. Perhaps, I thought, he could have asked me, ‘Was your mother happy?’ Or, ‘Did she ever speak about this house?’ Or even, ‘What did she have to say about me?’
