The Crystal Cage

by Merryn Allingham

  ‘No one looking like that should ever emerge from a place looking like this.’ He gestured derisively at the stained plasterwork that would need industrial solvent to burn it clean.

  We didn’t take long to find a welcoming wine bar, soft lights and even softer music, and settle down for some serious drinking. I guess we hoped that it might make the disappointments of the day seem a little less disappointing. We were well down the second bottle of wine and had argued our way through the works of several artists and their respective merits before Nick’s appetite kicked in.

  ‘We should find somewhere to eat, somewhere decent. And no salad,’ he threatened.

  ‘Okay, but no bacon rolls either.’

  ‘It’s a deal. I saw a rather sharp-looking place in a courtyard off Orchard Street. We could give that a try.’

  ‘Let’s finish the wine first.’

  ‘Should you?’

  My head was spinning slightly, but his words were too strongly reminiscent of Oliver. That was the second time this day and it jarred.

  ‘Yes,’ I said belligerently.

  His expression remained calm, appraising even; I imagined he was weighing up whether to make an issue of it. But he said nothing and I raised a defiant glass. I’d taken only the smallest sip when out of the blue he asked, ‘What’s your sister’s name?’

  ‘Verity.’ I blurted out the word, shocked at the brazenness of his attack. If there was someone I didn’t want to think about, it was Verity.

  ‘Verity and Grace,’ he mused. ‘Someone must have had a sense of humour!’

  The wine no longer looked so inviting and I stood up abruptly. ‘Didn’t you want to go to the best restaurant in town?’

  ‘Only if you’re paying.’

  ‘Who else?’

  I led the way to Orchard Street, thankful that he seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. But when dessert had been cleared and we were sitting over a second cup of coffee, it was evident that he was not going to let the topic go. I didn’t understand his persistence. What possible interest could my family be to him? But my reluctance to discuss the past was enough to make him want to worry his way into it.

  As so often, his words were a jolt. ‘So why don’t you speak to Verity?’

  ‘We just don’t get on.’ I was prevaricating, but it would have to be enough.

  It wasn’t. ‘Not many siblings do, but cutting them out of your life completely is pretty extreme.’

  ‘My sister was eight years older than me and we were never friends.’

  He didn’t appear to think that was a good enough reason and I rushed on. ‘Our parents were killed in a car crash when I was only ten. She was on the brink of going to uni and she gave up the chance in order to look after me. I don’t think I was very grateful. I missed mum and dad and felt guilty that they’d died. I couldn’t have been an easy child and we were always having arguments.’

  ‘Why did you feel guilty when your parents died?’

  Another can of worms, but easy enough to answer. I’d been asking myself the same question for years. I felt guilty because I was to blame. It was I who had set the whole terrible event in motion.

  ‘My parents had been quarrelling, and they were still quarrelling when they got into the car. My father drove off as though all the demons of the world were pursuing him.’

  ‘And the quarrel was over you?’

  I had to hand it to him, Nick was perceptive.

  ‘It was stupid.’

  ‘It usually is.’ He looked questioningly at me, and I couldn’t see the harm in telling him what I could remember.

  ‘I’d wanted to go on a sleepover at one of my very best friends’ and my mother had said I couldn’t. So I asked my father and he said yes.’

  ‘Because you could always wheedle what you wanted out of your father? Don’t worry, I know the score. I’ve a sister of my own, remember.’

  ‘My mother was furious—but at him, not me. She said he was always undermining her authority and then…’

  I didn’t know after all if I wanted to tell this story, but Nick was waiting.

  ‘Then she said that the only reason he encouraged me to go to Bella’s house was so that he could see more of Bella’s mother. That he was having an affair with her.’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘How would I know? I was ten years old and not even sure what an affair was. My father was very angry and denied it. He’de’dHHH been drinking heavily. Then he said that as he and my mother had been invited to the Langhams’ party, they should go. Now there was no sleepover at Bella’s house, her parents would be at the party, too, and my mother would have the opportunity of telling her tales directly to Bella’s father.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘It was more than ouch. The police found their car upside down in a ditch about five miles along the road. It had caught fire on impact and was still smouldering.’

  ‘That’s an ugly story.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed in a small voice. It still had the power to haunt me.

  ‘But no way was it your fault.’

  ‘Children always think the bad things that happen in their family are their fault.’

  ‘But not thirty-year-olds.’

  ‘Hey, wash your mouth out. I’m not thirty for at least three months.’

  We walked back along the quiet streets hand in hand; I felt warm inside and strangely mellow. For the first time in years I’d relived that dreadful experience, and it helped that Nick had been with me. When we got to the room, I pulled open the curtains and let the moon shine in. The room looked better like that. I opened the window and the cool night breeze flooded through, wafting the jasmine perfume I’d been wearing into every one of the four corners. We undressed silently, not bothering with the one-in-the-bathroom, one-in-the-bedroom routine we’d adopted the night before. We slipped into bed and let ourselves roll into the centre, bodies touching. He reached for my hand and held it tightly.

  ‘Don’t let anyone tell you you’re to blame for the ills of the world—your parents, your sister, Oliver. That’s not a line you should fall for, and you should fight it. Sometimes you need to fight, you know—if the cause is good, you need to fight.’

  ‘Thank you, Che.’

  He laughed softly. ‘I’m the last one to give advice—I do nothing but fight.’

  ‘A small chip on your shoulder perhaps?’

  ‘You’ve noticed.’

  ‘Slightly, but it’s not that obvious—the way you’re flippant about everything perhaps, the way you dress. The tee shirts, for instance. I don’t imagine your family would go a bundle on them, although they could be worse.’

  ‘They could. I haven’t yet worn SIZE MATTERS.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I won’t, I promise. You’re a calming influence. We should get together more often.’

  I could feel his body warm and strong beside me, and then his arms were cradling me and I lifted my face for the kiss I knew I’d wanted since I first met him. His mouth tasted of the best Beaujolais mixed with peppermint. It was a tender kiss, so tender it made me want to cry. I stroked his hair, still soft from the shower, and he kissed me again much less tenderly. His hands were on my body and I liked it; his kisses were hard and insistent and I liked them, too. The bright silver of moonlight illuminated our bodies, pushing the ancient bed and dilapidated furniture into a black background. His lips grazed my stomach and arrowed downward. A sharp burst of pleasure shot through me, and I heard myself gasp with delight. It had been a long time since that had happened. I wanted more and ran my mouth across his body, feeling him tense, harden, move against me. We were exploring now as though our lives depended on it, rapidly, urgently, greedily snatching at every moment of pleasure. He looked down at me for one arrested moment and then before we had time to consider consequences, I grabbed him by the shoulders and brought him down on me. There was only one thing I wanted and that was him, all of him.

  * * *

  It’s am
azing how much difference a day can make, or rather a night. I’d come on this trip against my better judgment and partly, I think, because I wanted to play truant and annoy Oliver. Nick had been right when he said I was in Dorchester because of a quarrel. He’d been right about a lot of things. I was scared of life, but I tried to dress my fear in golden garments: I was an agreeable person, an amiable woman; someone who kept her head down, didn’t tangle with conflict, happily went along with other people’s decisions. Who wouldn’t like me? Who would ever blame me? That was the heart of it. Ever since my parents died I’d been blaming myself—for causing their deaths, for losing Verity her chance of happiness, for not fighting for my own. Yet at the same time, a battle had been raging within me, a pressure building to resist blame and reject its claims as unjust, to say ‘I want’ rather than ‘I agree.’ My claws, as Nick had so expertly diagnosed, were there and starting to unsheathe.

  It took only a few minutes to pack our bags the next morning and flee the aptly named Crook Lodge before the hall clock sounded its nine wavering chimes. We passed an empty breakfast room, glad to give its home comforts a miss, and went straight towards the bacon rolls. Nick was looking bright-eyed and sprightly but apart from a swift kiss on the lips, he made no reference to what had happened between us. We instinctively fell into holding hands as we walked to the café, where over a good deal of black coffee we puzzled our way round a plan of Dorchester, tracing a route to Fordington and to Mellstock Close.

  The district of Fordington lay beside the river on the southern outskirts of the town, an area that not so long ago would have been countryside, and Diggory Cottage, when we found it, still looked much as I imagined it had two centuries ago. It was set back from the road with a long, narrow front garden leading to a white-painted porch. From the rear of the house came the contented cluck of chickens munching their equivalent of bacon rolls. Hector must be back, alive and fit.

  Mrs Gardiner came to the door, with a cat under one arm and a dog frisking around her ankles. Two other cats made for the stairs as they glimpsed strangers on the threshold. The cottage had all the appearance of an animal refuge and Mrs Gardiner of a live-in attendant. Long strands of grey hair escaped what I thought must be a bun at the back of her head and the dress she wore bore all the signs of long cohabitation with an assortment of creatures. But her smile was pure joy.

  ‘Come in, my dears. How nice of you to call. Mr Fawley—such a pleasant gentleman—said you would come by. I would have made a cake, but it seemed a little early in the day to be eating sweet things and then there was Hector to see to. Yesterday was a bit of a mess.’

  I imagined every day was a bit of a mess for Mrs Gardiner, but we thanked her politely and followed her into the sitting room. She waved us to take a seat, and we gingerly lowered ourselves into chairs patched with wisps of fur. They had a tendency to sag to one side so that when the three of us looked across at each other, it was as if we were aboard the deck of a listing ship.

  We declined the offer of tea and went straight to the point. Mr Fawley had mentioned that she had papers that originally belonged to Lucas Royde. She nodded enthusiastically and I hoped that she would go immediately to find them, but she was as garrulous as Mr Hammond. She wanted to talk so we let her. It was possible that we might even learn something.

  ‘I inherited the papers from my godmother, you know, Miss Flora Hannington. She left them to me because she had no children of her own. Well, of course she wouldn’t have, being a spinster lady. And she herself was an only child and was left the papers by her mother, Henrietta Hannington.’

  She noticed our puzzled looks. ‘You’re wondering what the Hanningtons have to do with Mr Lucas Royde. The fact is that Henrietta was a great friend of Mr Royde’s young sister, his only sister, in fact. He left his personal possessions to Mary—that was his sister. All of his brothers were dead by then. Mr Royde lived to a very good age, for those days at least. Eighty-two.’

  ‘He had no children of his own?’ The biographies we’d read had avoided or been uninterested in the great man’s personal life.

  ‘My dear, no! He never married. Strange, isn’t it? One thinks of the Victorians as being particularly prolific in making families, but Mr Royde seems to have decided early in life to stay single.’

  ‘And his brothers?’

  ‘I believe that three of them married and had children and a fourth died very young—not that unusual at the time, unfortunately.’

  ‘So Lucas Royde had nephews and nieces?’

  ‘Yes, quite a number. But he was particularly fond of his sister, or so it’s said. She was some sixteen years younger than him but often that kind of friendship springs up within a family. He must have decided that she would be the caretaker for his most personal possessions.’

  ‘And when Mary died, she didn’t think to leave them to her brothers’ children?’

  ‘I don’t know why not. My godmother, Flora, said that her mother always maintained that she and Mary were the greatest devotees of Mr Royde’s work, and that Mary felt she could do no better than leave his personal effects to her friend who was bound to treasure them.’

  ‘That’s interesting, isn’t it, Nick?’ I could see his eyes had been on the brink of closing and he was perilously near to falling asleep. It had been an energetic night. He jerked his head up and beamed vacantly.

  I turned to our hostess with what I hoped was a slightly more lively smile. ‘Would it be possible for us to see them, I wonder.’

  ‘But of course, my dear, I have everything right here. When I knew of your interest yesterday, I made sure to start searching as soon as I got Hector home. It took a while to locate my godmother’s stuff, but I’ve brought down what I think you’ll find most interesting.’

  And she waved her hand proudly at the table which sat beneath one of the cottage’s small-paned windows. At her words Nick, who had so far contributed nothing to the conversation, was out of his chair and at the table before I could blink. Then he remembered his manners.

  ‘Perhaps you could take us through what you found,’ he suggested.

  Mrs Gardiner exuded pride. She picked up the battered leather-bound books and started to leaf her way through first one and then the other.

  ‘These are photograph albums. I believe the pictures are all of the Royde family—many of them of recent generations, but there are a few of Lucas. Well, one is an engraving. See here.’

  And she held up the book for us. It was a very early image; the figure depicted seemed to be barely out of his teens. Something of his youth and innocence had been caught by the delicate engraving process, but in truth he could have been any very young man on the point of starting out in life.

  ‘But these,’ and she shuffled through more of the old pages, sending clouds of paper dust into the air, ‘these are photographs of his immediate family, I believe. Naturally they’re later in date than the engraving since photography was only then in its infancy.’

  Most of the photographs were of different groups of family members and had been taken standing under trees in what looked like an orchard, sitting on a stone flagged terrace in the summer sun, posing against a backdrop of a garden bursting with produce. It looked a homely existence, comfortable without ever being easy. The family seemed to enjoy being together. It was strange that there was no sign of Lucas in any of the photographs—some of them must have been taken in his lifetime.

  There was just one other of him, taken—or rather posed—in a photographer’s studio. He would have been a well-established architect by then. He was standing stiffly, almost to attention, and the photographer had arranged the backdrop to illuminate him. He wore a dark cutaway jacket, a white shirt with a slightly winged collar and a glossy black cravat. Almost a study in chiaroscuro. He was clean shaven and his hair parted very precisely high on the right side. It was a good-looking face, very good looking: wide clear eyes, straight nose and a sensitive mouth. I looked at the face for a long time and began to realise that though h
is eyes met the camera head-on, they were in reality looking elsewhere. Where I didn’t know, but my impression was of a man a little worn, haunted even, as though he’d known a difficult life. That was hardly likely. He’d made his name early on, he’d been a precocious talent, and riches and good living must have flowed abundantly. Whatever troubles he’d had, they had been nothing that money could cure.

  I tried to murmur suitable approval as one photograph followed another, but I could see that there would be nothing of real interest to us here. Nick had relapsed into silence, his earlier enthusiasm replaced by indifference. Or so I thought, but when I glanced across at him, I saw him looking at me, thoughtfully, even lovingly. I felt myself blush. I’d assumed he would dismiss last night as one of those things that happen occasionally when two people are away from home and just a little drunk. It hadn’t felt that way, but I was never one to take anybody’s feelings for granted. How could I be, when the people closest to me had proved so unpredictable?

  I must have been sounding increasingly fatigued because he decided that we’d suffered enough. He smiled persuasively at our hostess.

  ‘These photographs are really interesting, Mrs Gardiner—seeing Lucas Royde in the flesh, as it were. But I wonder, do you have any actual papers among the stuff you inherited?’

  ‘My dear, yes, plenty of papers.’ We sat up, a little invigorated. ‘But first there’s one other thing you might like to see.’ We slumped back again.

  ‘It’s this. A most beautiful necklace. I have no idea why it was among the photographs, but I think it must be valuable.’ She opened a small box that had been sitting amid the albums.

  Highly valuable, I guessed, when she held up three stunning strands of lapis lazuli weaved into a glowing crescent. I took the proffered jewellery and nestled it in my palm. My hand instinctively began to close over it and for a moment I felt the most powerful connection. The necklace was quite beautiful, of course, yet there was something else making me reluctant to let it go. But then I saw Nick looking meaningfully at his watch and I went to replace the necklace in the box, loosening a small piece of cloth as I did so. Instantly I was aware of the scent. I put the faded velvet to my nose and sniffed. It was a perfume I knew well.