Where We Belong

by Anstey Harris

  ‘Shall we talk in the dining room?’ I ask Araminta as we walk into the hall. ‘Out of Leo’s way?’

  ‘No.’ She shakes her head, walks towards the billiard room door. ‘Follow me.’ To the right of the billiard room is a smaller door, one of the many storerooms and cupboards that hide around Hatters: most of them are full of brooms and old buckets, broken furniture or paintings that have lost the chains that hang them from the picture rail. She takes a silver key from her pocket.

  It isn’t a cupboard. It is a room flooded with sunlight, as bright as if it has been lit with the huge lamps that hospitals use for surgery. But it’s not the two sash windows that light the room, it’s the glass bricks stretching the whole length of the far wall, floor to ceiling, edge to edge. It’s my bathroom wall from my poor lost house, the design Richard painstakingly laid out and then built, with his own hands, brick upon brick, solid and strong even as he himself was ebbing away.

  ‘I . . . What is this?’ I am close to speechless. The gentle undulations in the bricks reflect the colours of my dress but no details, no human shape.

  Araminta closes the door quietly behind us. ‘It was our playroom, mine first and then Richard’s. Colonel Hugo had it built so that we could be in sunlight, daylight, whatever the weather.’

  There is an antique rocking horse, stationary, in one corner of the room; his painted coat is a dappled grey and his saddle, a rich black leather. Bookshelves line one wall, the bottom three shelves hold hundreds of books, the higher ones toy trains and dolls and wooden aeroplanes. There is a large leather wing-backed chair in the corner by the bookshelves, and a round rug in pastel colours directly in front of it. Leaning against the glass bricks is a small red bicycle, the size that a four-or five-year-old could ride round and round this room without ever hitting anything.

  ‘How have I not seen this from the outside? Those bricks? The glass wall?’ My head is spinning. This room speaks of such privilege, such a magical childhood. It is a part of Hatters’ that Richard gave to me, brought into our house, without ever telling me where it came from.

  ‘The big trellis with the flowering jasmine on it?’

  I nod: it is a wall of flower and greenery that smells like perfume in the evenings. I have stood right up against it, inhaling its scent.

  ‘That trellis stands about six feet away from this wall: so that it can’t be seen from the outside but it doesn’t impede the sun in any way.’

  ‘Why? Why is the glass wall hidden? Why is this room locked?’

  ‘It wasn’t always,’ Araminta says. She walks across to the red leather chair, sits down and rests her hands over the end of the chair’s cracked, scuffed arms. The chair dwarfs her and she looks small, vulnerable.

  The world is completely silent. There are no ticking clocks, no chattering starlings. There are no other people to breathe between us, no puffs of air to stir the curtains or blow tiny dust mice across the floor. The eerie light seems to usher in silence.

  Something catches my eye, a glimmer in the corner. I bend down and pick up a tiny marble, a blue twist of coloured glass at its centre. I remember Leo having bags and bags of these exact same ones: I don’t suppose their design has changed for a hundred years.

  I look for a somewhere to sit, pull up a chair that is next to the small double desk. It is school-sized and I feel like I’m at parents’ evening again, talking about Leo’s progress.

  ‘Did Richard know all the secrets of Hatters?’ I ask Araminta the question without looking at her: I am peering at the tiny glass world caught inside the marble.

  ‘He only knew one. He knew about the thefts.’ She looks directly at me and I feel I have to turn my head towards her. Her eyes are rheumy with tears. ‘And knowing one on its own turned out to be worse than knowing none at all. He never spoke to Colonel Hugo again.’

  I am on the edge of a cliff. Below me, the secrets of this family I joined by accident – linking myself to two of them by my heart – swirl and bluster like a sea fret. Instinctively, I understand that the next words will blow me from that cliff ’s edge, that I will be freefalling through the family confidences and there may not be a ledge to save me. Below, the rocks are black and jagged. Perhaps Richard never wanted me to know.

  Araminta takes a breath, pauses.

  I can see the conflict in her mind as she forms her words. ‘I told you that Colonel Hugo was my best friend.’ She is cushioning her betrayal, oddly exposed in this bright room with no shadows to hide behind.

  I almost miss it when she says, ‘He was my grandfather too.’

  I have leapt. I am flying from the cliff, sailing down and down through the air. The rocks are perilous below me.

  My mind swings from fact to fact, but nothing makes sense. ‘Your grandfather? Richard’s grandfather?’ I try to join the dots but nothing connects. ‘Colonel Hugo had other children?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Just Geoffrey.’ She leans forward in the red leather chair, dwarfed by its winged sides. She takes a deep breath. ‘Geoffrey was my father.’

  My words tumble out like the freefall. ‘Then why do you live like this? Hand to mouth?’ I can’t control them. ‘Why do you let all those people boss you around?’

  And then, because it might have made such a difference to him to have had a sister, a sibling: ‘Why didn’t Richard know?’

  Her sigh is long and broken-hearted: I recognise the sound of defeat. ‘Because my grandfather begged me never to tell him. Made me promise that I wouldn’t. I grew up knowing that I never could.’

  ‘Why now? Why not when Richard was alive?’ My voice is very loud, urgent. The marble slips from my fingers and lands on the floor with a loud crack. I hear the noise of glass against wood, over and over, as it rolls back into the corner.

  ‘I knew this would happen. This is why I didn’t want you and Leo to come – before I mean, before I met you. I knew it would all unravel.’ She is whispering as a counter to my almost-yelling.

  I am trying to stop myself from speaking, from shouting. I need to listen to the rest of this, to her reasons, but I don’t understand how she could have let Richard be so isolated.

  ‘But, because of the fire, the police, I had to tell the truth. Because I was in London on the night of the fire.’ She sees the confusion on my face. ‘I’ll come to that, to all of it. But now . . . Now there will be investigations, outsiders. It is the time to give up the secrets.’

  ‘And Richard never knew? He had no idea?’

  She shakes her head. ‘It was about our reputation, the family name. And Geoffrey – my father – was a risk to that. Always. My grandfather was very ashamed of him, and of everything he did except . . .’ She pauses, swallows. ‘Except of Richard and, privately, of me. He loved us both very much.’ She gestures around the playroom: every luxury a child could want. The Edwardian dolls’ house, three storeys of pristine miniature, must have been hers. Richard would have played with it too after she’d grown up, building a family inside its wooden walls without the curse that had blighted ours. Or maybe not, maybe his play family was as doomed as ours, as doomed as every family he’d ever known.

  I remember the ledger, the lack of details. ‘What happened to Geoffrey? Richard always said he died in a car crash.’

  Now she stands, turns away from me. She puts one hand on the mane of the rocking horse and it moves quietly to and fro as she strokes her hand down the hair. ‘My father killed himself in 1970. He drove straight into a wall, terribly drunk. And no one will ever know – for sure – whether he did it on purpose or not.’

  There is a silence I cannot imagine how to fill.

  ‘My grandfather never spoke his name again.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say looking more at the pen marks and carved out letters on the little school desk than at her.

  ‘You couldn’t have known.’

  Real life laps at the edges of our conversation. ‘We need to come back to this, Araminta. I need to understand but, right now, we have to deal with Andre
w – with my part in the downfall of this poor house.’

  *

  As arranged, Andrew is waiting by the entrance to the museum. It has been easy to leave everything locked up this way, so that nothing could be interfered with. The only thing that has been moved is the door of the netsuke cupboard: I closed that carefully – and with Andrew’s help so as not to smudge any fingerprints – because I couldn’t put the alarm on without it. I wanted the alarm activated in case Patch came back: only one thing is certain and that’s that I don’t know who he is – I never actually have.

  ‘No news, I take it?’ Andrew asks.

  I have had more ‘news’ in the past twenty-four hours than I know what to do with. ‘Not from Patch,’ I say. I wonder if I should call him ‘Patrick’ now that he has betrayed us. ‘You?’

  ‘Let’s sit down and go through it all.’ He’s obviously used to this – to dealing with people whose lives have turned upside down. I remember that Leo will be awake soon: I’m going to have to tell him everything too. I have so many questions for Araminta: I’m far from knowing what ‘everything’ is yet.

  Araminta is in the kitchen. She has put the kettle on, got cups and saucers and a teapot out for us, as if she’d never been away: at least one thing is righted.

  ‘We have some API information from Heathrow,’ Andrew says. ‘Mr Samson bought a ticket there last night.’

  ‘API?’ Araminta asks.

  ‘Advance Passenger Information, the legal requirements before you fly, passport number and so on.’

  ‘He used to live in Australia.’ My voice is quiet.

  ‘The ticket was to Thailand,’ Andrew says. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s gone – people do sometimes buy tickets as a decoy.’

  ‘Doesn’t a digital passport record where you go?’

  ‘Not in the way you might think,’ Andrew says. ‘But we’re still digging, looking into any past convictions he might have.’

  ‘What about Mike Green – or whatever his real name is?’ I sit down at the table, happy for Araminta to make the tea: my hands are shaking, I couldn’t trust myself with boiling water.

  Andrew nods slowly. ‘We’ll look at the CCTV from the Co-op in the High Street and the car park by the sea front – they both show the road – but I think we’ll find he’s a hired hand, a thug employed by someone who Mr Samson owed money to.’

  ‘Do you think that’s it?’ I ask. ‘That he owed money? I know he didn’t have any money but, really, who does?’ And then I remember that he borrowed the money for the cottage from Araminta as well as me: that the seeds of this deception were already in place.

  Araminta puts the tea things on the table. The ancient sugar lumps that Malcolm found for the trustees are still in the bowl. ‘Do you think he meant to do this, Andrew?’ she asks.

  ‘Do you mean, when he first arrived here was this his whole intention?’

  She nods.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Andrew says. ‘There are so many more things he could have taken if he’d been part of an organised crime operation. And he would have been more methodical.’ He clears his throat. ‘If I had to guess, and this is a guess – you can’t hold me to it.’ He half-smiles, trying to show us that he’s on our side, that he’s sorry to bring all this bad news to our table. ‘It’s not rocket science to assume that he was spooked by our friend finding him, grabbed what he could, and got out as quickly as possible.’

  He nods his thanks to Araminta as she pours the tea. ‘But a warrant has been issued for his arrest and, depending where he ends up, we could extradite him.’

  ‘And the netsuke?’ Araminta asks although I think we both know the answer.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll hang on to them for long.’

  ‘There’s a very strong market for them, worldwide.’ Araminta’s cup shakes slightly in its saucer. ‘They’re very collectable. And they’re worth at least a million pounds, depending on which ones are gone.’

  ‘They’re all gone,’ I remind her.

  ‘If you could get us as many photos of them as you can . . .’ Andrew looks at us both. ‘At least we’ll have something to go on. And you’ll have a crime number for your insurance.’

  Araminta explains to him about the insurance, the lack of it. I look out of the window while she talks and wish my skin wasn’t burning with embarrassment: that I’d been more cautious, more adult.

  ‘There are some very detailed sketches,’ I say. ‘That Patch did.’ I feel more stupid than ever.

  ‘And there will be some photographs in some of the older guidebooks,’ Araminta says.

  ‘Why though? Why would he do it?’ It’s the thing I most need to know.

  ‘Sometimes we never find out, I’m afraid. It could be drugs, gambling: we might know more when we start digging through his record. It’s a universal truth, I’m afraid, can happen to anyone – every man has his price.

  ‘And you never know . . .’ Andrew continues ‘ . . . what that price might be.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known, Cate,’ Araminta says. ‘You heard what Andrew said. Probably Patch himself didn’t know he was going to do it.’

  And then it is 10 a.m. on Sunday – the time we have to open the museum. We can’t abandon all the progress we’ve made by not opening on our second day after the newspaper article. Andrew asks us to keep the oriental room locked up until the fingerprint people can get there and that’s it, we are left to carry on as we were before.

  It reminds me of the day Richard died, of the way Leo still needed his tea and the day turned into night, the night back into the dawn of the next day. The way we had to carry on walking round, speaking, being ourselves, even though he had gone.

  And then my mind cuts to an image of Simon and me, of the moment our lips met, the charged atmosphere, the electricity. Richard’s face flashes like a strobe against it. Every man has his price.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  If it wasn’t for the questions that are burning in my mind and the big white sign we’ve stuck on the oriental gallery door that says ‘Due to a fault with the lighting system, this gallery is closed for today’ and then adds several untruths about how sorry we are and how soon we will return to normal, this would be a great Sunday. There are even more people than yesterday.

  I’m suddenly suspicious, in the way that Araminta was when we first arrived, that more visitors means more opportunity for trouble. I watch them like a hawk, trying not to be too obvious as I assess their bags, their pockets, whether they ‘look’ like a thief or not.

  ‘Patch is not the first person to steal from the museum,’ Araminta had said to me as the sun crept into Crouch-on-Sea this morning. As soon as these visitors go, she can tell me the rest of her story. Maybe my heart will ache a little less for Richard, a little less for her, when I hear the whole thing.

  Leo is meeting-and-greeting front of house. He is great at persuading the most recalcitrant teen to wear an explorers’ hat as they look around the galleries. There is no time at all to talk to him about Patch and Leo doesn’t seem to have noticed that he’s gone.

  At about 4 p.m., when the stream of visitors that hasn’t abated since 10 a.m. has reduced to a trickle, most of them now wandering towards the gardens or back out to their cars, Leo comes to hand me what’s left of the stack of plastic pith helmets.

  ‘What do I want with these? I’m stuck in the box office – there’s no room for them in here.’ There’s barely room for one human in the tiny booth.

  ‘We’re going to the beach, Sophie and me. And Curtis later. We’re going to have a picnic tea. Maybe a barbecue.’

  ‘We’ve got two hours left until the museum closes.’ I want to remind him that he has responsibilities.

  He chews his lip, pats his thighs lightly with his palms. ‘I promised though.’ He puts his head on one side and gives me what he clearly believes is a disarming smile: it’s a comedy smile but it does the job. ‘Go then, shirk your duties. Hang out in the sun with your mates.’ I’m sm
iling but I add, silently, ‘Because the rest of life, from here on in, gets so fucking complicated it’s almost unbearable.’ And then I think of Richard, and of ‘complicated’ and how life really was unbearable for him: completely unbearable.

  ‘Have a good time,’ I say, and I mean it.

  *

  I need to stop. I need space to think, to take stock of everything that has happened, is happening. When the last visitors are definitely gone and I have locked the huge museum door from the inside with the old iron key, walked through to our end – via the off-limits oriental room – and set the alarm, I am fit for nothing. By the time I was making small talk with the last people, I was barely talking in sentences, unable to hold the string of one thought long enough for it to link up with the next. The empty silence is exactly what I need.

  There is an open bottle of white wine in the fridge door. I pour myself a glass and stare into it as if it holds all the answers, as it if were a crystal ball. I have so many questions, but I’m afraid of the answers.

  I go through to the dining room, where I can open the big French windows and feel less hemmed in, but still in the house – to take care of it in the way I’ve failed to so far.

  I stretch my legs out in front of me, flex my toes. The rug underneath them, which stretches almost to the edges of the mahogany floorboards, is faded but still patterned with the geometry of the East. I follow the pattern, the gold, the ruby-red threads, from one corner to the next, sticking to the angles and the loops, forcing myself to breathe deeply, to order my thoughts.

  Next to the big portrait of Colonel Hugo is a much smaller one of Harriet. I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before, the oval jaw, the high temples. The outline of hers and Araminta’s faces is exactly the same. Araminta looks like Harriet.

  ‘Cate?’ Araminta interrupts my thoughts. ‘Room for another?’ She is holding an empty wine glass and what is left of the bottle.

  ‘Of course,’ I say and, as she sits down in front of the portrait, ‘You look so like your grandmother.’