by Anne Fine
But then, as if those eyes of his had truly burned through bone to see inside my brain, he spoke aloud the last words that I’d been imagining: ‘So tell me, Daniel. What did your mother say of me?’
I needed courage now to meet his eye and still be honest. ‘I am afraid she never spoke of you.’
He stared. ‘What, never? Not a word?’
‘No, not a word.’
He seemed incredulous, and waved an arm to take in everything around us. ‘Nor anything about this house?’
I felt I had no choice but to shake my head. ‘No, nothing.’
‘Nor the least mention of all the years she lived here?’
‘No, not to me.’
Again, his tone turned thoughtful. ‘Well, well. Not a single word!’
And so long was the silence that lay between us that I will swear he had forgotten I was there when he said softly to himself, ‘Clearly there’s more than one way in the world to rid oneself of an unwanted life …’
It was a different Captain Severn who rose from the table – a man all smiles and affability. He showed me round the house, and once again it seemed more gracious to lean forward and admire the things that I already knew so well in miniature, and let him feel he was surprising me with rooms in which my dear Hal, and Rubiana and Topper, had played out their adventures a thousand times. So I might honestly claim that, at the start, it wasn’t just my sense of boyish dignity that stopped me even mentioning the doll’s house, but my good manners too.
And after that it seemed too late.
As we came back along the upstairs landing, I pointed to the only door he hadn’t opened yet. ‘Is this your own room? Do you keep it private?’
‘Private!’ he scoffed. ‘Lord, no! It is a veritable Piccadilly Circus. Here I do everything. I sleep. I study. I sort through tiresome papers. But I do have a view almost as fine as the one from your lofty eyrie. Come, let me show you.’
He moved towards the door, then suddenly turned to point back over my shoulder. ‘But before that, young Daniel, admire the chandelier!’
Obediently I leaned over the ebony banister. But the first thing to catch my eye was not the chandelier but a thin bar of bilious green light across the flagstones below, which startled me by rolling back upon itself and disappearing. As I turned, someone had promptly shut the door to the kitchen passage.
Had Martha, like that strange gardener, been watching me from the shadows? Now that whoever it was had gone, I dutifully peered at the drops of dusty glass hanging in airy circles and festoons some way away from me. And as I stared I heard behind my back a soft grunt, then the faintest tinkling sound, as if my uncle had seized the moment of my back being turned to reach for some metallic thing in one of the little Chinese porcelain jars that sat high on a shelf above the door to his room.
Did he not hear the sounds he made, just as he hadn’t heard my soft reply at table? Clearly my uncle’s hearing was nowhere near as sharp as mine. But if he chose to hide the key to his room, that was no business of mine, and so I leaned across the banister and spoke of the beauty of the chandelier until I heard the lock click.
Then I turned back. Already he was opening his door. But then, as if he’d spotted something in the room that gave him pause for thought, he pulled it shut again.
‘No. It’s too glorious a morning for grimy studies and old sailing maps. Another time!’
He ordered me ahead of him down the stairs to the hall. ‘One moment!’ Then, with the key dropped with a soft chink into the little porcelain pot, he hurried after me and took my arm. ‘You must see everything!’
And so we went outside. The sun shone on pale wisps of weed that sprouted through the cracks in the stone steps. He drew in breath. ‘See? I was right! It’s far too marvellous a morning to waste inside the house.’
He set off at a fearsome pace across the lawns towards the spreading cedar, and on towards the river he had pointed out the night before. Catching a flash of copper on the far side of the shrubbery through which we walked, I pointed. ‘Over there, was it planned first as a maze?’
My uncle looked puzzled. ‘Over there? A maze?’
‘The beech hedge circle,’ I explained.
He stopped dead in his tracks. ‘Ah,’ he said, peering down at me without a smile. ‘I see you’ve lost no time in prowling around the grounds.’
Prowling? My heart began to thump. ‘If it’s a place you would prefer me not to go—?’
‘No, no!’ Suddenly he smiled, as if at some delicious joke. ‘A place I would prefer you not to go? The very opposite! I tell you honestly, I cannot wait to see you in the Devil Walks.’
‘The Devil Walks?’
He roared with laughter now, then told me, ‘It’s where the gentlemen of the house strode off to curse and swear.’ He took three steps, then smashed one fist into the other, startling me horribly until I realized that, far from his mood changing, he was only making a pretence of being in a fury. ‘The devil take him!’ he shouted. ‘Blast that man into hell! A curse on him and every last one of his family!’ Dropping back smoothly into his earlier tone, he added cheerfully, ‘That sort of thing. I fear it doesn’t take a lot to make the ladies blush.’
I was astonished. ‘Someone grew those high beech hedges just to walk behind when they were in a temper?’
‘That’s right. So that we untamed creatures – men not abroad at arms – can safely storm from the house and round its hidden paths, churning the gravel underneath our boots, and spitting and cursing fit to burst till we are calm enough to return to our more mannerly wives.’
He was so merry that I thought to share the joke. Tipping my head, I spread my hands and said in high-pitched wifely tones, ‘Do you feel better now, my dove?’
He took up the jest at once, and growled, ‘I’m quite myself again, thank you, my angel.’
We laughed together. And truly, from that moment, I felt that he set out to make his company a pleasure. He walked me all the way along a track to show me a badger’s sett. ‘We’ll come together one night to watch them frolic, Daniel. You will be amazed.’ He pointed out where mushrooms would be growing when the summer came to an end. He made the effort to explain how hares behaved in moonlight.
And yet he seemed to have no sense of the effect that some of the things he said might have on me. ‘That’s where your mother cut her knee and bled like a stuck pig.’ ‘Look over there. Do you see all those brambles? Well, Liliana claimed their fruit was always the juiciest. The times I saw her reaching up at them to fill her basket.’ ‘See, Daniel! There’s the hollow oak in which your mother spent whole days playing at being a squirrel. Lord, how I scoffed at her! I look back now and am ashamed of my young self-importance.’
What did he think? That all the feelings in my heart were buried with my mother? I stared towards the oak. Here’s where my mother had spent her hours kicking up leaf mould, catching her pinafore against tree bark, and jumping out of hollows. Why, I could almost see her there, her hand aloft, smiling at—
Who?
Well, not me, ever again. So my eyes filled and then the image blurred, just as the captain became impatient with my stolid gaze into the woods. ‘What are you staring at? What can you see?’
I turned away to hide my tears, only to hear a stir of leaves and catch a glimpse of yet another barely moving shadow. It was that same grizzled gardener as before. At any other time I might have taken the chance to ask my uncle about these strange servants of his who seemed to be forever peering out at me from behind doors or trees. But I knew that my voice would still be trembling from thoughts of how my mother had amused herself each summer in this place. So I just shook my head and, though my once weak legs were tiring more with every step, I let the captain lead me on and on, further towards the river.
On the way over a wide field he pointed to a blackened streak on a huge fallen cedar. ‘That’s where the lightning struck. It must have been a flash to wonder at, to fetch down such a beast.’
‘
You didn’t see it happen?’
‘No, no. You take the air beside a sturdy Old Salt. By then, in hopes of making a great fortune, Jack Severn here had turned himself into Jack Tar.’
‘You’d gone to sea?’
‘I had.’
And instantly his face turned dark and brooding. My earlier unease swept back in force, for I too felt on no firm ground with this tempestuous man – so affable one moment, so brusque the next. Perhaps, I thought, even from childhood his moods had swung this way and that, and the rough life on board ship had no doubt sharpened any tendency to gruff impatience.
Now, clearly irritated at my slowing pace, the captain strode ahead deliberately fast.
‘And do you miss the life?’ I asked, trying to slow him.
‘No, no! Seafaring is a fine and useful past!’ he called back over his shoulder so firmly that I felt he was attempting to persuade himself, not me. Then his voice dropped to a mutter, and it was only because I’d hurried to catch up with him that I caught his last words, meant for his own ears only, not for mine. ‘But me? I’m set on quite a different future.’
Hastily I fell back, leaving him to what he clearly believed to be a moment of privacy. But when he turned, his face was still the grimmest mask. What did he mean – a different future? If he still cherished all his childhood dreams, what was he doing, as he said himself, ‘rattling around the house like a dead beetle shaken in a bottle’?
Why wasn’t he out in the wider world, minting whichever fortune he had in mind?
What was he waiting for? What kept him here?
So once again I tried to coax my uncle out of his dark mood. To that end, I kept prattling as we walked on, asking a host of questions about the places he had sailed and dangers he’d seen. And he seemed happy enough, as we turned back towards the house, to talk of steamy islands he had visited, strange cargoes they had carried, and all the curious people he had met.
I couldn’t help but be thrilled. ‘One long adventure! And you were still a boy when it began!’
‘No older than yourself when I set off on my first voyage.’
‘Did you see natives like the ones in story books? Men with bones through their noses? Tribesmen with bows and arrows?’
‘All those – and more. You haven’t run till you’ve out-raced a poisoned blow dart.’ He grinned at me. ‘Why, I’ve dodged assegais, and fallen into traps, and once I even found myself whipped up into a tree and spinning from an ankle noose woven from creepers.’
I told him frankly, ‘I would be dead from fear alone.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s foolishness to let the things of this world frighten you. Better to save your anxieties for stranger terrors.’ And he went on to talk of pounding drums and eerie singing, of squawking chickens killed for sacrifice and altars sticky with blood. He spoke of men in fearsome masks, and tiny figures crudely carved from roots or fashioned out of clay, and naked priests who called up ancestors and chanted spells.
‘What sort of spells?’
‘Spells of all kinds. Spells to bring love, or end it. Spells to make people sicken or die. Spells of revenge.’
‘But Mrs Marlow told me such things are primitive nonsense, and there’s no power in them.’
‘Then she’s mistaken,’ came the sharp retort. Hastily he tempered his tone. ‘Why, even your own mother recognized that there was more around us than we understood. I can remember Liliana saying things your Mrs Marlow would have found very strange fancies.’
Perhaps it finally occurred to him, when I fell silent, that it was his mention of my mother that stilled my tongue. And that was partly true. Into my head had come a memory of her sweeping through my bedroom door with one of the musty books from those dark shelves below. Tales of the Caribbean Islands, it was called. For hours I’d thrilled over its graven plates of twisted trees in darkest mangrove swamps, and lush green forests set between mountain ranges. I’d read of moist trade winds and furious hurricanes, ground sloths and crocodiles. I’d been entranced with colourful accounts of priests performing rites of sorcery, witchcraft and magic. The book had been a favourite for many weeks. But, in the end, like all the others, it went back on the shelf and I moved on to something else, with only a few last images of what I’d seen, and traces of the things I’d read, becoming foggier in my mind.
But I soon threw off the grey cloak of memory to ask more questions. How could I help it? I’d led a life so dull I had to pester him about the battles he had seen, the ships on which he’d sailed.
And so the morning passed.
At noon, with my poor legs feeling as brittle as glass rods, and just as likely to snap, he walked me back into the house and told me he’d eat alone. ‘Martha will bring a tray to my room. I’ll join you again when the gong sounds for supper.’ He sighed. ‘Till then I face my usual struggle with the household accounts. And you must surely have at least one letter to write to those whose kindness has so miraculously brought us together.’
Letter to write? Still, in my mind, was the conviction I’d be back with my beloved Marlows sooner than any letter I might send. And yet my uncle had done his best to be a good companion and show me round my new home, so it seemed courteous to nod agreement and ask for pen and paper.
The captain took the stairs at a pace. I followed much more slowly, and once again heard that metallic rattle before he opened his door. Had he not realized that his slight deafness masked, not just soft answers and approaching footsteps, but this clear hint to where he kept the key to his room?
Courteously I hung back, pretending to admire a tapestry while he went in and shut the door firmly behind him. When he came out, he handed me a little pot of ink, a fat gold pen and generous amounts of paper.
‘There!’ he declared. ‘Now, like your mother, you may write your memoirs!’
‘My mother?’
‘Did no one tell you? Whenever she wasn’t tumbling round the grounds, playing at squirrels, Liliana would be found hunched in a corner, scribbling secrets.’
Smiling, he shut the door.
And I too probably kept a smile on my face till I was safely through the alcove door. I forced my tired legs up the stairs and into to my attic room, then slumped against the panels of the door and wept.
No! Wept is too weak a word. I fell into a very storm of tears. The rage I felt! She was my mother. Mine! Yet everything about her life and character came as fresh news to me. To me! Her son. I howled and howled, stemming my sobs of fury and resentment only on hearing footsteps trudging up the stairs, and then an old cracked voice outside the door.
‘Daniel?’
Martha. She tapped once, then again, but I said nothing, only pushed my spine back harder on the panels of the door to keep her out. I heard the scrape of the tin tray she left for me, and I ignored it. How long I sat there I don’t know, but only when it seemed I’d no more tears to fall did I climb to my feet.
Only to face another insult. Someone had searched my bag! Was it my uncle, while I was out of the house alone, early that morning? Or Martha, who had looked at me as if I were a ghost, and peered from doorways? Perhaps even that sturdy gardener, who’d seemed to track our journey through the woods? Who was to say which of the three had lifted out those layers of clothing with such care, then put them back in such good order, with even sleeves so neatly folded back?
And yet the secret of this visit to my room was out. For how could any snooper have imagined a boy might glance with swollen, reddened eyes at crumpled wads of newspaper and see the words Carriage in Ruins where Grand Theatre Opening! had been before, and Voters Frustrated where once had been the news that Government Minister Sickens, and know at once that someone in this house had searched the things he’d brought with him so thoroughly they’d felt down to the very toes of his new boots?
Once again, rage and frustration fought to take the upper hand. Why should I stay another single night in such a house? Wasn’t my bag already packed – twice over! The shillings in my pocket would get me as fa
r as London. I had the calling card of the doctor’s friend. He’d lend me money for the onward journey. And, if he wouldn’t, I could beg food, and walk. Why not abandon all these mysteries and hurry back to my old life?
But then the next thought sprang: what life is that? For till the day that Dr Marlow took me into his house, my life had been as much a blank as if I’d never lived. What had the captain said as he gave me the pen? ‘Now you may write your memoirs!’
A sour joke! For I’d deliberately been raised so I’d go nowhere, never meet a soul and waste my days in bed. Here was my only opportunity to find out why my mother kept me so hidden from the world that no one knew of me almost until her death.
Was I too scared to snatch the chance to make even my own past half-life real to me?
No. I’d be brave. Then I’d be gone – back to the family I’d grown to love.
So I picked up the pen and pulled my rickety little table across to the window to catch the light. I fetched my tray and ate my good fresh hunk of bread, and drank my frothing milk so I would seem to be a simple boy who noticed nothing and settled down obediently to do an uncle’s bidding.
And since I knew he might reach out – even in jest – to read what I had written, I picked my words with care. I wrote about the journey and the rolling downs. I tried to describe High Gates without a mention of the spiders and the dust. I told about the captain’s shock of white hair on his youthful frame, but not a word about the way he’d startled me with all his savage questions about my mother’s life. I told of the badger sett and the burned oak, then sucked the end of my pen and, fearing that Mrs Marlow would worry that there was no one in this house to care for me as she had done, I wrote of Martha and how I’d helped her peg out the kitchen cloths, and how I planned to fix her washing lines more firmly to the wall.
And then, at last, I wrote the only thing I truly wanted to tell them: how much I missed the happy hours in their company. I sent my love to all, then I laid down my pen, thinking so warmly of this family who truly loved me and had made the effort to introduce me to the world and make me smile and treat me plainly and honestly, without recourse to secrets and silence.
