by Susan Hill
I drew up outside the house – the gate to the back entrance was locked and barred, so I parked in the road and got out. There was a light on in the sitting room, behind drawn curtains, one upstairs and possibly one at the very back. I did not want to startle Leonora, for she would presumably not expect callers on an early December evening, so I banged the door of the car shut a couple of times, and made some noise opening the gate and tramping up the path to the front door. I pulled the bell out hard and heard it jangle through the house.
Those few moments I stood waiting outside in the cold darkness were, I now realise, the last truly calm and untroubled ones I was ever to spend. Never again did I feel so steady and equable, never again did I anticipate nothing ahead of me of a frightening, unnerving and inexplicable kind. After this, I would be anxious and apprehensive no matter where I was or what I did. That something terrible, though I never knew what, was about to happen, in the next few moments, or hours, or days, I was always certain. I did not sleep well again, and if I feared for my own health and sanity, how much more did I fear for those of my family.
The front door opened. Leonora was standing there and in the poor light of the hall she looked far older, less smart, less assured, than she had ever been. When she held the door open for me in silence, and I stepped inside, I could see her better and my first impression was strengthened. The old Leonora had been well-dressed and groomed, elegant, sophisticated, hard, someone whose expression veered between fury and defiance, with an occasional prolonged sulkiness.
Tonight, she looked ten years older, was without make-up and her hair rolled into a loose bun at the back of her neck was thickly banded with grey. She seemed exhausted, her eyes oddly without expression, and her dress was plain, black, unbecoming.
‘I hope I haven’t startled you. I don’t imagine you get many night callers. I did try to call you.’
‘The phone is out of service. You’d better come into the kitchen. I can make tea. Or there might be a drink in the house somewhere.’
I followed her across the hall. Nothing seemed to have changed. The old furniture, pictures, curtains, carpet were still in place, as if they were everlasting and could never be worn out.
‘Frederica is in here. It’s the warmest room. I can’t afford to heat the whole house.’
We went down the short passageway to the kitchen. It was dimly lit. Electricity was expensive.
‘Frederica, stand up please. Here is a visitor.’
The child was seated at the kitchen table with her back to me. I saw that she looked tall for her age but extremely thin and that she had no hair and inevitably, the word ‘cancer’ came to me. She had had some terrible version of it and the treatment had made her bald and I felt sorry beyond expression, for her and for my cousin.
And then she got down from her chair, and turned to face me.
For a moment, I felt drained of all energy and consciousness, and almost reached out and grabbed the table to steady myself. But I knew that Leonora’s eyes were on me, watching, watching, for just such a reaction, and so I managed to stay upright and clear-headed.
Frederica was about three years old but the face she presented to me now was the face of a wizened old woman. She had a long neck, and her mouth was misshapen, sucked inwards like that of an old person without teeth. Her eyes protruded slightly, and she had almost no lashes. Her hands were wrinkled and gnarled at the joints, as if she were ninety years old.
‘There is no treatment and no cure.’
Leonora’s voice was as matter-of-fact as if she had been giving me the name of a plant.
I did not want to stare at the child, but I shuddered to look at her. There was something alien about her. I have never had any reaction to a human being with a disfigurement or disease other than extreme sympathy and it has always seemed best to try to ignore the outward signs as quickly as possible and address the human being within. But this was so very different. I felt the usual recoil, shock, pity but far, far more strongly, I felt fear, fear and horror. Because this small child had aged in the way the china doll had aged. And insane and irrational as it seemed, I had no doubt she had aged because of it. The consequences of Leonora’s violent temper and cruel, spiteful, destructive action all those years ago had come home to her now.
I did not want to stay at Iyot House. I had a drink and read a picture book to the little girl, saddened when Leonora told me in bitterness that she would not live beyond the age of ten or so. She was a happy, friendly child with the happy chatter of a three year old coming so oddly out of that wizened little body.
As I was leaving, Leonora asked me to wait in the porch. The child had been left playing with a jigsaw in the kitchen, where I gathered they spent much of their time, because the rest of the house was so cold and unwelcoming, though I thought that she might have made it more cheerful if she had tried.
She came downstairs and handed me the cardboard box which I had left.
‘Take it,’ she said, ‘hideous thing. What possessed you to leave such a thing here?’
‘I – It seemed the right place for it, now there is a child here. Could Frederica not play with it?’
Leonora’s face was pinched with a mixture of anger and scorn.
‘Get rid of it, for God’s sake. Haven’t you done enough harm?’
‘I? What harm have I done? You were the one who hurled the doll against the fireplace and smashed its head open, you were the one who caused …’
I stopped. Whatever crazy imaginings I had ever had, I could not conceivably blame my cousin for bringing such a dreadful fate upon her own child. I had no idea how the face of the broken doll had apparently aged but it was inanimate. It could not extract revenge.
I took the box which Leonora was pushing at me, and went. The front door was slammed and bolted before I had reached the gate.
The inn at Cold Eeyle was as comfortable and snug as ever. I was given my old room, and after a stiff whisky, I dined and then slept well and left a happier man to drive back home the next morning.
20
How to tell the rest of my story? How to explain any of it? I prided myself on being a rational man, on having explained things clearly to myself and come to some understanding of the phenomenon of coincidence. I even studied it a little, via the books of those whose life’s work it is, and discovered just how much that was once thought mystical, magical, mysterious, is perfectly easily explained by coincidence, whose arm stretches far further than most people would guess.
Is that how I explain away the hideous events of the next few years? Am I convinced by putting it all down to likely chance?
Of course I am not. Things had happened to me in the past which I had pushed out of mind, buried deep so that I did not need to remember them. I had known then that they were not easily explained away and that the emotions and fears, the forebodings and anxieties that overwhelmed me from time to time were fully justified. Strange and inexplicable things had happened, and hidden forces had shaped events for reasons I did not understand. I also remained certain that Leonora was the lightning conductor for all of them.
A little over a year after my last visit to Iyot House my wife Catherine gave birth to a daughter, whom we christened Viola Kestrel. When she was almost three my work took me to India, which I loved, but about which Catherine had mixed feelings. She found the heat and humidity intolerable and the extreme poverty distressed her. But she loved the inhabitants at once, and found much to do helping women and their children in a remote village, where there were no medical facilities and where clothes and people were washed in the great river that flowed through the area. Viola was adored by everyone, and was an easy, smiling child, content to be petted and fussed by a dozen people in succession.
And then she was struck down within a few hours by one of the terrible diseases that ravage this beautiful country. Poor sanitation, contaminated water, easy spread of infection, any or all of them were to blame and in spite of Catherine’s care and strict precautions it
was perhaps a miracle that the child had not suffered from anything serious earlier.
Viola was very ill indeed, with a high fever, pains in her limbs and an intolerance of light. She was delirious and in great distress and we were in an agony of fear that we would lose her. On the fourth day, she woke with a rash of pox-like spots, raised, and red, all over her face and body. The spots were inflamed and became infected and scabbed, so that her fresh skin and beautiful features were hidden. After a week, handfuls of her beautiful corn-coloured hair began to fall out and did not regrow. She was a distressing sight and I think I was the one who felt the loss of her beauty the most. Catherine was absorbed in trying to nurse her, help her struggle through the fevers and relieve her symptoms, and so far as she was concerned that Viola should live, no matter what her eventual condition, was all she asked.
She did live. Slowly the fevers subsided and then ceased, her pain and discomfort eased, and she lay, limp and exhausted but out of danger, on a bed as cool as could be made for her, in a darkened corner. Her rash was less red and raised, but the hideous spots crusted and when they fell off left ugly pockmarks which were deep and unlikely ever to disappear. Her beautiful eyes were dimmed and lost their wonderful colour and translucence and seemed to have receded deep into their sockets.
Weeks and then three months went by before she began to regain energy and a little weight, to laugh sometimes and clap her hands when the Indian women who had agonised over her clapped theirs.
We returned home exhausted and chastened, wondering what the future held for our once-perfect daughter, still perfect to us, still overwhelmingly loved, but nevertheless, sadly disfigured. In London we consulted a specialist in tropical diseases, who in turn passed us to a dermatologist, and thence to a plastic surgeon. None of them held out any hope that Viola’s scars would ever fade very much. It might be possible for her to have a skin graft when she was older but success was by no means certain and there were risks.
Weeks went by while all this was attended to and we settled back with some difficulty into our old life in England.
It was then that I started to search for some particular files and in hunting, found both these and a white cardboard box. At first I did not recognise it and assumed it belonged to Catherine. I set it down on my work table, beside some drawings, but then forgot it until the following day, when I walked into my office early in the morning and as I saw it, remembered immediately where it had come from and what it held.
I saw Leonora again, in the semi-darkness outside Iyot House, thrusting the box into my hands and telling me, almost screaming at me to take it away. Well, my Viola might enjoy the Indian Princess doll, would recognise it as one of her friends and playmates from the country she still remembered vividly.I untied the loosely knotted string and lifted the lid. The rustle of the tissue paper brought goose flesh up on the back of my neck. It was not a sound I would ever again find pleasant and I pushed it aside quickly, not even liking the feel of it against my fingers.
The Indian Princess doll lay as I remembered her in the bottom of the coffin-like cardboard box. Her elaborate, richly embroidered and bejewelled clothes, her rings, earrings, bracelets and bangles and beads, her satin and lace and gold and silver braid and trim, were all as I had remembered them. There were just two things that were so very different.
Her thick long black hair had come away here and there, leaving ugly bald patches, and the fallen hair was lying in tufts at the bottom of the box.
And her face and hands, which were all that showed of her skin, were covered in deep and hideous pockmarks and scars. She was no longer a beauty, she was no longer about to be a bride, she was a pariah, a sufferer from a disfiguring disease which would mark her for life, someone from whom everyone turned away, their eyes downcast.
