by Susan Hill
He had brought a tin spade he had found in a cupboard. Its edge was rough and the wooden handle wobbled in its shaft and when he started trying to dig with it into the tussocks of grass he realised it would break before he had broken into the ground. But further along the grass petered out to thin soil and pine needles and using the spade and his hands, he dug out enough. It took a long time. His hands blistered quickly and the blisters split open and his arms tired. A thrush came and pecked at the soil he had uncovered and a wagon went down the road. He ducked behind the broad tree trunk.
When he came to bury the doll in its small cardboard coffin he thought he should say a prayer, as people always did at funerals, but it was not easy to think of suitable words.
‘Oh God, let Dolly lie in peace without crying.’
He bowed his head. The thrush went on pecking at the soil, even after he had dragged it over the coffin and the grave with his tin spade.
When he slipped back into the house, he heard Mrs Mullen from the kitchen, and his aunt moving about her room. It was after seven o’clock.
No one found out. No one took the slightest notice of him, he was of no account. A telegram had arrived saying that Leonora’s mother was in London and waiting for her, she should be put on the train as soon as possible that day.
‘I long for her,’ Aunt Kestrel said, as she finished reading the telegram out.
Mrs Mullen, setting down the silver pot of coffee on its stand, made a derisive sound under her breath.
The morning was a scramble of boxes and trunks and people flying up and down the stairs. Edward went outside, afraid to be told that he was getting underfoot, the image of the silent, buried doll filling his mind. He did not know what he might do if Leonora asked for it.
She did not. She stood in the hall surrounded by her luggage, her hair tied back in a ribbon which made her look unfamiliar, already someone he did not know. He could not picture where she was going to, or imagine her mother and the latest stepfather.
‘I will probably never see you again,’ she said. The station taxi was at the door and Aunt Kestrel was putting on her hat, looking in her bag. She would see Leonora onto the train.
‘You might,’ Edward said. ‘We are cousins.’
‘No. Our mothers hated one another. I think we will be strangers.’
She put out a slender, cool hand and he shook it. He wanted to say something more, remind her of things they had said to one another, what had happened, what they had shared, to hold onto this strange, interesting holiday. But Leonora was already somewhere else and he sensed that she would not welcome such reminders.
He watched her walk, stiff-backed, down the path, her luggage stowed away in the taxi, Aunt Kestrel fussing behind her.
‘Goodbye, Leonora,’ he said quietly.
She did not look round, only climbed in to the taxi and sat staring straight ahead as the car moved off. She did not glance back at him, or at Iyot House, which he understood was for her already part of the past and moving farther and farther away as the taxi wheels turned.
The sound of the motor died away.
‘And good riddance,’ Mrs Mullen said from the hall. ‘That’s a bad one and brought nothing but bad with her, so be glad she’s gone and pray she’s left none of it behind her.’
Edward woke in the middle of the night to a deathly stillness, in the house and outside, and remembered that he was alone in the attics. Aunt Kestrel was two floors below, Mrs Mullen in the basement. Leonora had gone.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture a sea of black velvet, which he had once been told was the way to bring on sleep, and after a time he did fall into drowsiness, but through it, in the distance, he heard the sound of paper rustling and the muffled crying of Dolly, buried beneath the earth.
PART THREE
14
I was abroad when I had the letter telling of my Aunt Kestrel’s death. She was over ninety and had been in a nursing home and failing for some time. I had always sent her birthday and Christmas cards and presents but I had seen her very little since the holidays I spent at Iyot as a boy and now, as one always does, I felt guilty that I had not made more effort to visit her in her old age. I am sure she must have been lonely. She was an intelligent woman with many interests and one who was happy in her own company. She was not a natural companion for a small boy but she had always done her best to ensure that I was happy when I stayed there and as I grew older I had been able to talk to her more about the things that interested her and which I was beginning to learn a little about – medieval history, military biography, the Fenlands, and her impeccable botanical illustrating.
I was saddened by her death and planned to return for her funeral but the day after I received the news, I had a letter from her solicitor informing me that Aunt Kestrel had given him strict and clear instructions that it was to be entirely private, followed by cremation, and so anxious had she been not to have any mourners that the day and time were being kept from everyone save those immediately involved and the lawyer himself. But he concluded: ‘However, I have Mrs Dickinson’s instructions that she wishes you and your cousin, Mrs Leonora Sebastian to attend my office, on a day to be arranged to your convenience, to be told the contents of her Will, of which I am the executor.’
I wrote to Leonora at the last address I had but I had had no contact with her for some years. I knew that she had married and been divorced and thought she sounded like her mother’s daughter, but she had not replied to my last two cards and had apparently dropped out of sight.
Then, the evening I received the solicitor’s letter, she telephoned me. I had just arrived back in London. She sounded as I might have expected, haughty and somewhat brusque.
‘I suppose this is necessary, Edward? It’s not convenient and I hate those bloody fens.’
‘He wouldn’t have asked us if he could have dealt with it any other way – he is almost certainly acting on Aunt Kestrel’s instructions. I shall drive up. Would you like me to take you?’
‘No, I’m not sure what arrangements I shall make. I want to see the house, do you? I presume we are the only legatees and we’ll get everything? Though as I am older and my mother was older than yours, it would seem fairer that I get the lion’s share.’
She left me speechless. We agreed to meet at Iyot House, and then again at the solicitor’s the following morning. I wondered what she would look like now, whether she still had the wonderful flaring red hair, if she still had a temper, if she had married again and borne any children. I knew almost nothing about Leonora’s adult life, as I imagined she knew little about mine. She would not have had enough interest in me to find out.
She had not, of course, turned up the previous evening at the house, and left no message. I daresay she couldn’t be bothered. But that she would bother to attend the reading of our aunt’s Will I had no doubt.
15
The solicitor’s office was everything one would have expected, housed in a small building in the Market Square of Cold Eeyle, which was probably Elizabethan and little changed, but the solicitor himself, a Mr James Maundeville, was quite unlike the person I had pictured. He had worked for his father and uncle, and then taken over the firm when both had retired. He was only in his late thirties, at a guess, and had a woman as junior partner.
‘Mrs Sebastian is not here yet. Can I get you some coffee or would you prefer to wait until she arrives?’
I said that I would wait and we chatted about my aunt and Iyot House, while we looked out onto the Square, which was small, with shops and banks and businesses on two sides, the Town Hall and an open cobbled market on the other. It was a cold, windy morning with clouds scudding past the rooftops, but the fog had quite gone.
We chatted for perhaps ten minutes, and then Maundeville went out, saying he had something to sign. Another ten minutes went by. I was not surprised. It fitted in with everything I had known of Leonora that she should be so late and it was forty minutes after ten when I finally heard voices and fo
otsteps on the stairs. Maundeville’s secretary opened the door and said that he was on the telephone, apologised, and said that she would bring coffee in a couple of minutes.
I had wondered how much my cousin might have changed but as she walked into the room, I knew her at once. Her flaring red hair had softened in colour a little, but still sprang from her head in the old, commanding way; her face was as pale, though now made up and with a tautness at the sides of her eyes and jaw that indicated she had probably had a face lift. Her eyes were as scornful as ever, her hand as cool when she put it briefly into mine.
‘Why are we being dragged to this godforsaken place when everything could easily have been sent in the post?’
She did not ask me how I was, tell me where she had come from, mention Aunt Kestrel.
I said I supposed the solicitor was following our aunt’s instructions and I heard again the short, hard little laugh I had got to know so well.
She sat down and glanced at me with little interest.
‘God I hated that place,’ she said. ‘What on earth am I going to do with it? Sell it, that’s the only possible thing, though whoever would be mad enough to want it? Do you remember those awful poky little rooms she gave us in the attics?’
‘Yes. Do you …’
‘And that woman … Mrs … pinch-face …’
‘Mullen.’
‘You were a very meek little boy.’
I did not remember myself as that, though I knew I had been intimidated by Leonora, and also quite careful in manner and behaviour, anxious not to cause any trouble.
‘Quite the goody-goody.’
‘Whereas you …’
The laugh again.
‘God I hated it. Nothing to do, the wind howling, boring books, no games.’
‘Oh but there were games – don’t you remember playing endless Bagatelle?’
‘No. I remember there was nothing to do at all.’
‘You had your birthday while we were there.’
‘Did I? What, eight, nine, something like that?’
‘Nine.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘No, I’m afraid …’
‘Nor do I yet but I’m expecting one, God help me.’
I must have looked startled.
‘Yes, yes, I know, I’m forty-three, stupid thing to do.’
‘Your husband …’
‘Archer? American, of course. He’s twenty years younger, so I suppose he ought to have a family but this will be it, he’s lucky to get one.’
She told me that he was her third husband, an international hotelier, that they had flats in New York and Paris but spent most of the time travelling.
‘I live in grand hotels, out of a suitcase. Where is the man?’
Every so often I caught sight of the child Leonora inside this brittle, well-dressed woman, but she was more or less completely masked by what, oddly, seemed to me a falsely adult air. I wondered if she still had terrors and a temper. I was about to find out.
James Maundeville came back, full of apologies. Leonora made a gesture of annoyance. He picked up a file on his desk, and took out the usual long envelope in which solicitors file Last Will and Testaments.
‘I won’t read the preamble; it’s just the familiar disclaimers. Mrs Dickinson had savings and investments which formed the capital on whose interest she lived for many years but that capital was considerably eroded by the needs of her last year in a nursing home. The remainder amounts to some twelve thousand pounds. There are no valuables – a few items of personal jewellery worth perhaps a thousand pounds all told. But she expressly asked that you should both, as her sole legatees, come here to learn not so much what she has left but the somewhat – er – eccentric – conditions attached. I did not draw up Mrs Dickinson’s will, my father did and I’m afraid he has been suffering from dementia for the last eighteen months and so I wasn’t able to discuss this with him.’
He looked up at us both. His face was serious but there was a flicker of amusement there too. He was a good looking, pleasant man with a strong trace of the local accent in his educated voice.
Leonora sat with one stockinged leg crossed tightly over the other. I tried to imagine her as the mother of a child, but simply could not. I felt sorry for any offspring she might produce.
‘Mrs Dickinson left her entire estate, which includes everything I mentioned above – the money, pieces of jewellery and so on, plus Iyot House, with all its contents – with an exception which I will come to –’ He cleared his throat nervously, and hesitated a moment before continuing, ‘to Mr Edward Cayley…’ A glance at me.
‘The exception …’
But before he could read on, Leonora let out an animal cry of rage and distress. I had heard it once before. The voice was older, the tone a little deeper, but otherwise her furious howl was exactly the same as the one she had uttered the night of her birthday when she had opened the doll Aunt Kestrel had brought for her from London.
Mr Maundeville looked alarmed. I got up, and took Leonora’s arm but she shook me off and raged at us both, her words difficult to make out but not difficult to guess at. He proffered water, but then simply sat waiting for the outburst to run its course.
Leonora was like someone possessed. She raged against Aunt Kestrel, me, the solicitor, raged about unfairness and deceit and hinted at fraud and collusion. The house should have been hers, the estate hers, though we could not discover why she was so sure. Desire, want, getting what she believed ought to be hers – simple greed, these were what drove her, as they had driven her in childhood and, I saw now, throughout her life.
In the end, I persuaded her to calm and quieten by saying that whatever Aunt Kestrel had willed, once the estate was mine I could do what I liked and there was no question of not sharing things with her fairly. This stopped her.
Mr Maundeville had clearly formed a poor impression of Leonora and wanted her out of his sight. He went back to the Will.
‘Mrs Dickinson has left one item to you, Mrs Sebastian. I confess I do not fully understand the wording.
‘My niece Leonora should have the china doll which was my 9th birthday gift to her and for which she was so ungrateful, in the hope that she will learn to treat it, as she should treat everyone, with more kindness and care.’
He sat back and laid down the paper. Leonora’s hands were shaking, her face horribly pale and contorted with fury. But she said no word. She got up and walked out, leaving me to smooth things over, explain and apologise as best I could and follow her into the square.
She was nowhere to be seen. I wandered about for some time looking for her but in the end I gave up, and drove back out to Iyot House. Of course, I intended to share my inheritance with Leonora. I could not in conscience have done anything else, though she had made me angry and tempted me to change my mind and keep everything, simply out of frustration at her behavior. She was the child she had been and if no one else could bring her face to face with her unpleasant character, perhaps I could.
But whatever I decided, I was determined that she should have the wretched doll. As I drove across the fen something was hovering just under the surface of my mind, as it had been hovering all the previous night, but when I had heard Maundeville read out the clause about the doll, something had bubbled nearer to the surface, and I had remembered Leonora’s outburst that terrible evening, Aunt Kestrel’s hurt and annoyance, and then something else, something closer to me, or rather, to my eight-year-old self.
The sun was shining and there was a brisk breeze. As I went towards the gates to the yard, I saw that they had been opened already and that a large car was parked there. Leonora was ahead of me.
The house felt cold and bleak, and smelled more strongly of dust and emptiness than I had remembered from the previous day. I went inside and called out. At first, there was no reply, but as I went up the stairs, calling again, I heard Leonora’s voice.
She was in the attics, standing at the window of her old room,
looking down.
‘How weird,’ she said. ‘It’s smaller and dingier than I remember and it reeks of unhappiness.’
‘Not mine,’ I said, ‘I was never unhappy here though I was sometimes bored and sometimes lonely. But I thought you and I had quite a happy time that summer.’
She shook her head, not so much in disagreement as if she were puzzled.
‘Did you understand that nonsense about a doll?’ She spoke dismissively.
‘Anyhow, why should I care tuppence about it, whatever she meant? The old woman was obviously demented. But now, I suggest the only thing to be done here is for you to sell the house and divide the money between us. God knows, I wouldn’t want to come back again and I doubt if you do.’
But I had stopped listening to her. We were in my old attic room now and I had seen the cupboard in the wall again. And I remembered I had first hidden the doll there. I stood transfixed, a small boy lying in the bed and hearing the rustle of the tissue paper. I was looking again inside the white cardboard box and seeing the smashed china head and the blue, sightless yet staring eyes, and feeling sorry for the doll even though, like my cousin, I did not care for it very much. I had been frightened too, for what doll could cry, let alone move so that its tissue covering rustled?
She had gone back down the stairs and I could hear her snapping up one of the blinds in Aunt Kestrel’s sitting room.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I know where it is.’
‘What are you babbling about now?’
But I was out and down the path to the gate. I called back to her over my shoulder. ‘I’m going to get it for you.’
I was not in control of myself. I felt pushed on by the urge to find out if I was right, get the doll and give it back to Leonora, as if I could never rest again until I did. It seemed to be the doll that was urging me, demanding to be rescued and returned to its owner, but I knew now that it, or perhaps, the memory of it, had possessed me for all those years. I felt partly that I wanted to be rid of all trace of it, partly responsible because only I knew where it was and could rescue it. I did not pause to consider how sane this all was, or that I was behaving bizarrely, a man in his forties who had never before been under the influence of something I could only fear was other than human.
