by F. G. Cottam
It was funny, that. It wasn’t a funny thought for very long, though. It was actually quite worrying because he suspected that an eight-year-old could easily choke on her vomit. Plus it was unlike her to be so quiet. Sometimes two and two did the obvious thing and made four. What had happened to his little sis? What if she was gagging on a bathroom floor? He went to look for her, calling her name anxiously along the high corridor their bedrooms were off.
He felt a surge of relief when she called down to him from the floor above. It meant she had not drowned in a puddle of her own drool. She was okay. He climbed the stairs up to her.
She was kneeling on the bare boards of a small room with a fireplace and wooden shelves in the alcoves to either side of it. The fireplace was small and had a little engraved hood made of iron he thought was there to stop smoke from the fire getting into the room. It was a cosy sort of room with one window that overlooked the slate roofs of the village to the left of their house. Jack thought that it had probably been a study.
Livs had taken up a piece of floorboard. Jack could partially see into the cavity she had revealed under the floor. She had a package in her hand. The package was yellow, like the oilskins fishermen wore to protect them from the wet. But it was old and faded and cracked and tied up with twine that had turned brown.
‘Wow,’ Jack said. ‘Cool, a secret compartment. Clever old you for finding it, Livs. How did you find it?’
‘Madeleine told me where to look.’
‘Who’s Madeleine?’
‘She’s my real imaginary friend.’
‘She can’t be both.’
‘She can so.’
‘Is she an old friend?’
‘Very. She’s easily the oldest friend I’ve got.’
‘What’s that in your hand?’
‘Something Daddy must read.’
‘Is it valuable?’
‘It isn’t treasure. It’s a story.’
‘Is it a secret?’
‘I don’t know,’ Olivia said. She frowned. ‘It won’t be when Daddy has read it.’
Jack held out his hand. ‘Can I look at it?’
‘No. It’s only for Daddy. I promised Madeleine.’
Jack decided he would not debate the point. He could hear their mother calling them from downstairs. He thought the whole idea of imaginary friends slightly disturbing. He had the feeling that Olivia was a bit frightened of this Madeleine. He thought that Livs was very brave. She was much less scared of the dark than he remembered being at that age. The house was not sinister. The room they were in was not in itself scary. Madeleine sounded, though, like someone he wouldn’t much want to meet. He would let it go.
Obviously Madeleine had not told Livs where to find the package because she had made Madeleine up and even if she was real, she was likely someone in Livs’s year at her school in Bermondsey and therefore hardly an expert on secret compartments in a house in Cornwall she had never seen.
There was another explanation, but it involved elements Jack did not want to think about. They would make the house seem eerie and he did not want that. Anyway their mum was calling them and they needed to go down to their parents.
Mum and Dad were drinking coffee in the kitchen. Livs walked straight up to her father and presented him with the package she had discovered. ‘Please promise me that you will read this, Daddy,’ she said.
Their dad took the package and hefted it in his hand and glanced at their mum and shrugged. He put down his coffee mug and untied the twine and unwrapped a small hardback book. The book was bound in musty-looking fabric and when he opened it and thumbed through the pages, they were covered in neat handwriting that looked as though it had been done with a fountain pen. The letters were small and sloping and the ink black. There was a name and a date on the inside front cover of the book.
‘This belonged to Adam Gleason,’ he said to their mum. Then to Livs he said, ‘Where did you find this, darling?’
‘In a secret compartment,’ Jack said, ‘in a room that looks like it used to be the study.’
Jack had a feeling he thought would best be described as a hunch. It was very strong and it insisted that his dad should read the notebook his sister had found. His interruption had been to try to prevent Livs from mentioning Madeleine. If she mentioned Madeleine their parents would simply stop believing what she said. And it was very important that their dad read what she had uncovered. It was vital. Jack’s hunch told him so.
Their dad held the notebook between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and tapped it against the knuckles of his left. To their mum, he said, ‘I should pass this on to that florid old scholar chap, the local archivist.’
‘Michael Carney,’ their mum said.
Livs burst into tears. She did not just start to cry. Her shoulders heaved once and her face flushed a sudden bright red and tears rolled down her cheeks and then her little body shook and she wailed.
Jack reached out his arms to comfort her but he was not as quick as their dad who sank to his knees and wrapped his daughter in his arms saying, ‘I will read it, darling, I promise. I promise you I’ll read every last word of it.’ He kissed her. He ruffled her hair and dabbed at her wet cheeks with his shirtsleeve. He reached up and handed the notebook to their mum and said, ‘Put this in my small bag, darling. It’s in the boot of the car. It’s the bag I’ve packed as hand luggage. I’ll read it on the plane tomorrow.’
She hesitated. She said, ‘And Michael Carney?’
‘It’s been wherever Livs found it for about ninety years, by the look of it. He can wait a few more days to learn about its contents.’
Their mum frowned. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll go and put it in the bag. When I get back, I want to see this secret compartment, Olivia. Will you show it to me?’
Livs nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.
They left for the pub about fifteen minutes later. Jack had feared they might be forced to dress up for the event. He’d never been to a welcoming party before. But they went as they were, except that their mum put on a bit of lipstick and brushed her hair in the mirror. It had become a tad wild on the journey what with the roof down and all and, in the words she always used, needed taming.
Jack wondered on the way to the pub what Livs could possibly have said upstairs to her about the secret compartment. He was pretty sure she had left Madeleine completely out of it. That was his second hunch. Mention of the real imaginary friend and her instructions regarding the package would have worried and distracted their mum. But she wasn’t worried. On the walk to the pub her face was free of the frown that sometimes troubled it.
His sister looked happy too. She looked carefree, he realised, thinking that she had been unusually quiet by her standards in the car on the way down. There had been the one perfectly aimed elbow in the ribs, but that had come after nearly four hours of travelling. She had been subdued, hadn’t she? She had been worried about the task Madeleine had given her to carry out. It had been on her mind, nagging away at her on their journey. And now that she had done it she was unconcerned. She was free. Madeleine, Jack thought, imaginary or not, must be a right piece of work.
When they reached the pub the grown-ups of the bay struck him as every bit as picturesque as the place they lived in. The Penmarricks looked like rock stars, pure and simple. The woman who ran the school his sister was supposed to go to in September looked like one of those women James Bond snogged early on in the film and then ended up having to kill near the end. The bloke who ran the pub was the nightclub bouncer from hell. The man his dad had called the local scholar was about a hundred and twenty years old and totally gay in an orange tweed suit and a bright yellow cravat, with white hair so long it touched his shoulders.
Much more interesting to him was Megan Penmarrick, eleven years old which wasn’t ideal, but a total babe, all the same. Megan was absolutely gorgeous. She wasn’t like the girls at his old school, in that she seemed completely unaware of her sensational looks. He was used to good-loo
king girls being very conscious of the fact and stand-offish as a consequence. Megan didn’t seem to be at all like that. She was really friendly and approachable and interested in what he had to say. Sadly, she was also interested in what Olivia had to say. But nobody was completely perfect.
There were some other kids there. There was a boy about his own age called Andy Jasper and a boy and a girl called Rachel and Simon Tamworth who were ten-year-old twins. They all spoke quite slowly, with accents that curled the words they pronounced. Andy was a Plymouth Argyle supporter. Jack felt that he could only sympathise. Alec McCabe had told him that unless you had lived in Cornwall for about three hundred years you were an incomer and sometimes given the cold shoulder. That wasn’t happening, so far. Everyone there was friendly.
They all belonged to this club. They called it just that, the Club, and it seemed to involve loads of fun activities. Jack was quite anxious to get back into shape after his football lay-off and the Club seemed to be a good route to doing that. Windsurfing would help restore his upper body strength and climbing and trekking would strengthen his legs. They would learn to sail. The Club had a clubhouse – naturally – based on a small island they usually reached by canoe or dinghy. It all sounded, in a way Jack admitted to himself was obviously a bit Famous Five, actually quite exciting.
‘We’ve got a meeting tomorrow evening,’ Megan said. ‘Why don’t you two come along and see if it’s your sort of thing?’
Jack said, ‘You mean we can just turn up?’
‘Just a second, I’ll find out.’ Megan went and over and tugged at the sleeve of a bald, sinewy-looking man Jack knew was the headmaster of the Mount, the school he would be attending from September. He was a bit disappointed his school wasn’t being run by the headmistress who looked like a sexy Bond villainess, the one just then talking to his mum, but you couldn’t have everything and Philip Teal seemed friendly enough. He walked back across the room with Megan. They were both smiling.
He looked from Jack to Olivia and back again. ‘Do I sight new recruits?’
‘We can’t do anything,’ Olivia said. ‘I mean, we can swim and stuff, obviously. But we can’t do sailing and rock climbing.’
‘You’re more than welcome to learn,’ he said. ‘The Club exists in large part to teach those skills.’
‘It would be up to our parents,’ Jack said. ‘Personally I’d love to join.’
‘Me too,’ Livs said.
‘I’ve already mentioned the Club to your mum,’ Megan said. ‘I did so when your parents came to our house for lunch. So she does know a little bit about it.’
Philip Teal winked at them and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have a word with your folks, I’m quite persuasive.’
In no time at all it was eight o’clock and then suddenly it was almost nine and they were out of there and on their way back to their new house through the gathering dusk. Jack felt really happy. He looked up and saw some remote seabird soaring high through the silvery-blue sky on wings of brilliant white and thought that was how he felt. Then he remembered that his dad was going to America the following day and his heart plunged swiftly to earth. It didn’t seem right. It seemed the wrong time altogether for him to be going away from them.
Lillian got up with James the following morning as he prepared before dawn for his departure to America. She thought it only fair. He had travelled to the bay with them at her insistence. He was in for a long drive, a long check-in and a fairly long flight. She thought that the least she could do was send him off with a bacon sandwich and a decent cup of coffee inside him.
He seemed a bit preoccupied, which was understandable. The trip was so important in terms of his self-esteem and he had not really had a very tranquil time in which to prepare for it. That said, she thought that he must have rehearsed the moment to come in Colorado endlessly in his mind over the past few years just as a means of spurring himself on. He would not let himself down.
For one thing, the old anxiety had gone. He had confided that to her. He no longer needed the mental tricks and deflections taught him by the hypnotherapist who had treated him for his panic attacks. He was not prey to them any more. The anxiety of waiting for his son’s prognosis, when he did not know whether Jack would live or die, had cured him of it completely. He had fought to retain his composure then and had won the fight. Nothing in business life could flay him in the way his ordeal in the hospital had threatened to do. Everything, by comparison, was a stroll in the park.
Lillian considered, though she had not said as much, that the hospital vigil had made her husband a much stronger man than he had been before it. She believed she had seen the proof of this strength in his reaction to her confession of infidelity. He had lost his composure briefly to shock and the bitter grief of betrayal. Then he had gathered himself and found from somewhere in him the strength to forgive her. The result of this for her had been that she did not just love him more than she had; she had far more respect for him too.
She walked with him to the car, parked at the back of the house. Mist concealed the hills that rose to the rear of the bay. The stone circle would be wrapped and enfolded in it, damp and stubborn in its ancient mystery. The fishing fleet would be miles out, nets trailed through a tranquil sea. James asked her if she would feel stranded and trapped by his taking the car and she said no. The single word sounded more emphatic about that than she actually felt, but it was still not quite yet a lie.
She kissed him. She wished him luck. She said goodbye. She waved at the retreating car until it turned a corner out of sight and then she went back into the house and closed the door softly behind her and stole up the stairs past the rooms in which her children slept and went to examine the room on the third floor in which Olivia had found that old notebook under a section of floorboard.
She had replaced the board. Lillian’s eyesight was excellent, but it was still difficult to make out the section that could be lifted, with the naked eye. It was a foot long and so smoothly fitted to the boards with which it adjoined that though nothing but gravity secured it, it did not move even a fraction of an inch when pushed or trodden on.
It had been cleverly concealed. The hiding place was the result of work painstakingly done. Only by applying thumb pressure at a very precise point at one end of the board could the other end be made to stand proud the fraction of an inch necessary for fingertips to lever it out.
There was no way in the world Olivia could have found it, as she had claimed she had the previous afternoon, by accident. Her account contradicted itself. It provided no compelling reason why James should have to read the hidden book. Olivia sincerely believed in the importance of that. Urgency was not something a little girl manufactured in her head for no reason. Someone had told her daughter precisely where and how to find the package and instructed her very firmly on to whom it must be given.
Why?
The answer to that question would only reveal itself when James had read whatever it was Adam Gleason had committed to paper. Lillian was fairly sure, though, that, whatever it was, it was more than just ideas for poems.
It was very quiet in the house. Lillian had remembered the imaginary friend with whom her daughter had been seen conversing, by an alert teacher on playground duty, at the railings near the school gate. She shivered. She did not really believe in ghosts. But the mysteries were mounting up, weren’t they? She had pictured perfectly a place she had never been to in a book she could not remember having worked on. Something had frightened Robert O’Brien to death. Her brother-in-law had told James he had seen something not really human haunting their Bermondsey garden. Mark Greer ate too much junk but takeaway kebabs, for all their ills, did not provoke demonic hallucinations.
She put her foot on the unsecured board and pressed with all her weight and was not even rewarded with a creak. She had remembered Richard Penmarrick’s words of greeting to her when she had first met him and his beautiful wife. ‘Welcome home,’ he had said.
Her maiden name was
Matlock. It was not that common a name. She remembered what McCabe had said about the census and wondered if there was a parish register. She recalled her painting of the church in the book. It was the one anomalous image included there. It was the one illustration that jarred with the idyllic portrait of the village conjured by the rest.
The church might still be derelict. She had seen no cleric at the mass gathering on the beach that Saturday night. That did not mean there wasn’t one. He might have been costumed like most of the rest for the event. Or more likely he would not have gone. Essentially that had been a pagan gathering, had it not? She had not understood the chanting and singing and the strange dance at the edge of the water that had summoned the shellfish from the sea. But they had all been too blasphemously pagan for a priest to feel comfortable with.
Even if the church was a ruin and the parish register long disappeared, there were still gravestones. She would go and look at them. O’Brien’s death had robbed her of her most pressing work commission. In the absence of her husband, she had a bit of time on her hands. She would go and look at the church and its headstones. She would do it while the kids had fun and learned wholesome new skills at the Club that evening.
She had not lied to James. She had resolved never to deceive him again. In doing so, she only deceived herself and, anyway, he deserved better. She did not feel trapped or stranded without the car. It was only a couple of days, after all. She did not feel isolated or claustrophobic. But she was starting to have thoughts that, however ill-defined, might make her feel differently when they clarified further in her mind.
Welcome home, Penmarrick had said with his charismatic smile. Home now to her family was a place where no one had committed a recorded crime since 1932. You could view that statistic with a smug glow of white-flight relief. Or you could side with the clever police detective who thought it signalled something very wrong.
