The Woman in Silk
Page 23
Hal closed his eyes. “I’d like a glass of water.”
The Vicar filled a tumbler from the cold tap and handed it to him. “Your father also formed a relationship with Teresa who in turn gave birth to Francesca. The outcome of your father’s philandering. Francesca’s your half-niece. Perhaps—who knows?—this explains a little of The Towers’ evil.”
“What else do I need to know?”
“That Francesca wants to have a child with you. She and her mother want The Towers.”
“They’ll to have to wait till hell freezes.”
“That’s not what they believe. I’m afraid you’ll find the villagers are on their side. The Moster Lees community is close-knit. So close you can’t even see the stitching. More or less all the villagers seem to be hapless victims of The Towers. More practically, given the estate owns their houses, as tenants they’re in thrall to its contagion. They hint at secrets of violence, incest, abuse, torture, murder even.”
“They discuss all this with you?”
“Of course.”
“Do you believe them?”
“I don’t know what I believe.”
“You’re the Man of God. You either believe or you bloody don’t.”
“That’s a matter between the Almighty and me. Sometimes it seems the cauldron of The Towers is their sole demented topic of conversation. The gossips huddle together in different covens. Teresa, Francesca and MacCullum are one such. I’d say, as a more or less neutral observer, whose business is pastoral care, Teresa and Francesca have formed an unhealthy attachment to MacCullum.”
“To little Ryker?”
“I wouldn’t underestimate him, Captain Stirling. Ryker MacCullum’s possessed of the charm that accompanies low cunning. The born undertaker who relishes dealing with people at their most vulnerable. The natural chancer. Oh, I know he’s Good Old Ryker. Everyone’s friend, to be pitied for his drunken wife. He casts a spell. He’s also a creature who spends solitary hours prowling around in the wasteland of the disused mines, obsessively haranguing witless Carlisle crematorium assistants or any demolition man or passing soldier from Catterick about his repressed passion for military weapons, arms and explosives.”
“He hasn’t harangued me.”
“He wouldn’t, would he?”
“Why not?”
“Because he loathes you.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Betsy told me,” the Vicar said wearily. “She takes comfort in hatred.”
“She a penitent too?”
“Simply addicted to mendacious gossip. Like the majority of the sullen people in these sad parts, smoldering with quiet hatred for the Stirlings. They blame their misery, their perceived enslavement to the landed gentry on the Stirlings, and everything The Towers represents. Nothing changes. Perhaps it’s a class thing. As Smitty says: Neid frisst nichts als seine eigene Herz. Envy eats nothing but its own heart. It’s been the same for generations.”
“I find it very sad.”
“So do I,” the Vicar said with a sigh. “When I see The Towers from a distance, even on a clear and sunny day, I think it symbolizes a certain sadness, a kind of pain. It’s like one of those cathedrals in north Germany. A vast structure filled with piety and fine intentions, a house of God that’s seen too much evil and has been quite unable to cope with it. When one sees your family home in the rain it seems to weep. It reminds me of my visits to the dying. You’d be astonished how often they say: ‘I wish this would end. Can’t we get it over with?’ You see, there are more people than you’d ever imagine who don’t want to go on living. The instinct for death is innate. More so than life. That’s something Our Lord teaches us. The Towers exemplifies death and the living dead. You should know that too. More often than not, death shows us the friendly face. As Mark Twain tells us: ‘All say, How hard it is that we have to die—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live—’”
A gentle knocking at the door interrupted the drift of his Christmas homily.
70
It was Sumiko. The Vicar greeted Sumiko’s return as a sign that he’d heard Duty call. “I’d be more than happy if the three of you stay tonight. I won’t be back until the early hours. Midnight Mass and all that. And I have to put in my traditional appearance at the pub. Anyhow, make yourself at home.”
“What about joining us tomorrow at The Towers for Christmas lunch?” suggested Hal.
“I already have an invitation from Dr. Mackle and his wife. Thanks all the same.” He gave Hal a troubled look. “I wouldn’t go back to The Towers tonight.”
“I have to be there. Throughout its history it’s never, even for a minute, been uninhabited.”
“Will you mind staying up there alone?”
“No,” Hal lied. “I won’t. After all, it’s home, and there’ll be the nurses for company—”
The Vicar shook his head. “They’re staying with the MacCullums.”
“They didn’t tell me.”
“They didn’t? If I were you I wouldn’t sleep at The Towers alone.”
“We’ll be all right here,” Sumiko said. “Yukio will be happier here.”
“Then I’ll leave you two to make your own arrangements,” the Vicar said, stuffing papers into his briefcase. His face was gray with tiredness, his smile kindly, but Hal could read the fear in the weary eyes: fear; as well as a kind of relief. The Man of God had unburdened himself, and had passed the pain like a relay runner handing over the baton to the next person who had no other choice but to run with it.
71
“Serve immediately,” was Sumiko’s kitchen catchphrase. She was the kind of woman who thought good food conquered the cruelty of Fate.
All the better when it was her lover’s favorite food, cooked according to her equations and consumed without delay.
She’d brought the ingredients in an icebox labeled: HAL’S FAVORITE MISO SOUP; HAL’S FAVORITE PAN-FRIED TUNA STEAKS; HAL’S FAVORITE SAKE.
They dined by candlelight at the scrubbed pine table in the center of the austere kitchen.
There was no mention of Sophie.
Afterward, Hal gave Sumiko the print by Kate Lilley and she obviously adored it.
“And now for your present,” Sumiko announced demurely. “Guess what I have for you?”
“Show me.”
“You’re looking at it.”
“Well—where is it?”
“Christmas quiz first. Questions. Who wrote: ‘I ache to see you. Your lips upturned. Your long eyelashes. To find the air filled with your lingering scent. To brush away the hair from your eyes.’”
“I think we know.”
“Who wrote: the poem ‘Funeral Blues’?”
“Auden.”
“Who knew he was alive when he heard a voice telling him: ‘Captain Hal Stirling … 101 Engineer Regiment, Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Counter-IED Task Force’?”
“You’re looking at him.”
“Who told who: ‘We are each other’?”
“I told you.”
“And—final question. Who’s expecting our child?”
For the first time in months, his world turned the right way up.
He held her close. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Wonderful.”
72
Understandably in the circumstances, Yukio had pleaded with Sumiko to leave The Towers. But Sumiko wasn’t prepared to risk the snow and icy roads.
Upset by Yukio’s request and mindful of Hal’s state of mind, Sumiko was fraught with indecision and fearful of what else The Towers might hold in store.
Hal suggested an alternative; that she go to Carlisle straight away and take a room at the Holiday Inn. In other words, sit things out at arm’s length. But Christmas Eve was no-room-at-the-stable time. Hal was still trying to offer her reassurance when he saw the kitchen curtains move.
Though he knew the face of the person peering in he didn’t recognize it. Instantaneously they locked eyes.
He could hear its silence: the silent voice muttering threats: the tones distorted as if a door intercom was amplifying the announcement of arrival, speaking his name. It was seeking to gain entry.
73
As in a nightmare, the disconnected narrative shifted abruptly without logic; he felt Sumiko’s warmth beside him, sensed the aura of her perfume.
“What do you want?” he asked.
The living death mask was pursuing Sumiko, hell-bent on seizing her.
Snowflakes floated toward him like spikes on the wind. Through the shifting barrier of whiteness the one certain form was the mask’s phantasmagorical mouth fixed in a joyless smile.
He felt compelled to stare it in the face. Eyeball to eyeball. A pair of prizefighters engaged in a prebout staredown of intimidation. The mask generated the electricity of fear, challenging him. I am waiting for you.
The voice warned: “Don’t Touch”—and he asked: “Why Not?”
As the mask closed its lips, he felt a wave of freezing air literally slap his face, its effect identical to cold spray from a canister: clamping an anesthetizing mask across his mouth.
He swept aside the curtains, knocking a rank of Christmas cards to the floor.
“What are you doing?” Sumiko said quietly.
He opened the window and stared wordlessly into the driven snow. The light from the room illuminated veils of silken white.
The mask had gone.
Sumiko reached past him to close the window. “We’ll catch our death of cold.”
Death of cold was waiting there outside.
“Did you feel the wind?” he whispered.
She looked at him in puzzlement. “The window’s closed.”
“It opened.”
“No, it didn’t, Hal. You were gazing at the snow.”
“Yes. Perhaps that’s what I was doing.”
“You’re deathly white.”
“Didn’t you see it outside?”
“See what?”
“You felt that sudden blast—that wind?”
She stooped to help him gather up the fallen cards and together they aligned them in ranks.
The largest was a singing Christmas card. Hal set it back in place and it began to threaten him: “Brightly shone the moon that night, Though the frost was cruel …”
“It was only the wind,” she said with a smile.
*
“You want to go back there?” she said.
“I’m worried what else might happen if I don’t.”
“I know. Well, Yukio and I will be fine here. I don’t mind if you go.”
“You don’t object to me leaving you two on your own?”
She smiled. “You should mind about leaving Sophie on her own. You’d better go and see she’s okay.”
“Only if you don’t mind.”
She didn’t and said she wanted him to do what instinct dictated. She recalled the Japanese proverb: “‘One kind word can warm three winter months.’ And,” she added, “Yukio still has to get used to seeing you in my bed.”
He told her he’d bring Christmas lunch provisions to the vicarage early in the morning. She said she was sure she could persuade Yukio they stay on, at least until Boxing Day.
They mulled over plans
—to ask Sophie and her two friends to assume the role of caretakers at The Towers until things returned to an even keel.
—to offer a good sum to Teresa and Francesca to move out with immediate effect. If needs be he’d pay for them to stay at a Carlisle hotel until they found alternative lodgings.
“Soon enough,” he said, “I’ll have to go back to Headley Court.”
“You can stay with me,” she said. “Let me look after you. You have to relieve yourself of the burdens of The Towers and—”
“And what?”
“—familiarize yourself with impending fatherhood …”
Cell phone signals permitting, they agreed to call each other at midnight.
74
The Range Rover’s warmth intensified the aroma of her perfume. Overjoyed by her announcement, the elation induced new confidence and resolution.
The headlights’ beams dipped and dived across the wilderness of snow, the drifts rising and tumbling like cascading Arctic waves.
The vertiginous facades of The Towers held no fear for him.
No light shone from the ranks of windows.
He didn’t give the statue of Sir Glendower in the portico a second glance. Sir Glendower was no longer murmuring encouragement: “Capax Infiniti—Capable of the Infinite.” If the patriarch was pondering the isolation, he wasn’t spoiling Christmas by sharing any of his thoughts with his only surviving heir.
It was time to bathe The Towers in light.
His hands were warm and the entrance door swung open so easily it might have been an omen.
75
Click-and-click-and-click. He ran the palm of his hand down the light switches in the hallway.
He walked back and forth across the flagstone floor turning on yet more lights. In the long passages leading to the Victoria Tower he repeated the procedure, ignoring the eerie sound of his shoes clacking on the stone floors; sometimes muffled when he crossed the threadbare floor rugs.
As he passed the vast wooden staircase rising to the gallery on the floor above, the familiar scent of damp soot greeted him as a friend. Lights went on here too, sparkling across the largest window of the ground floor. If his mother was chattering, he didn’t hear her. There was no remembrance of things future. “We Stirlings have lived here perfectly happily for a hundred and fifty years. And, as long as there is a Stirling, we will continue to do so until hell freezes. Capax Infiniti.”
The ceilings filled with kindly light. Lights went on in the Stone Drawing Room. They illuminated the doubtful works by Rubens, Van Dyck and Claude Lorrain.
On they went in the nineteenth-century Baccarat six-arm Napoleon III crystal chandeliers.
The nineteenth-century Italian gilt metal chandelier hung with crystal drapes and drops came on in the Gothic Library, its reflected lights sparkling in the glass of the bookcase fronts.
Lights shone across the Billiard Salon and the Music Room where the “Elgar Piano,” rotted like a broken coffin, stood against the curtained double doors.
The lights of Christmas forced the devils of ill fortune to seek refuge in the luminous ether pervading space to infinity.
The demons had quit the haunted stage of the expanse of unsullied snow across the lawns.
Tiny sparks of Christmas lights in Moster Lees, in the hamlets further afield in Stonsey, in Gretan and Warely had exorcised them.
Silent night, holy night
Son of God, love’s pure light
Radiant beams from Thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace …
Between The Towers and the world beyond the wall of darkness parted.
76
22:00
2 hours till the Birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary: fulfillment of Messianic prophecy.
2 hours till Sumiko and I wish each other Happy Christmas.
TEN
As fear rises to an extreme pitch, the dreadful scream of terror is heard. Great beads of sweat stand on the skin.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals
77
The lights flickered. Filaments became dull red. Then faded. Off, then on. Wary of an imminent power failure he found a flashlight.
In the silence of the kitchen he prepared a box of Christmas foodstuffs to take to the vicarage in the morning.
He wanted music to break the silence. So BBC Radio 3 echoed through The Towers.
So far as he could tell nothing in his room had been disturbed.
The room that had temporarily been Sumiko’s was much as she’d left it. Some of Yukio’s bloodstained winter clothing lay in
the broken wicker laundry basket.
Sophie’s bedroom was empty. Pillows and sheets lay neatly folded on the bed.
Surprised and hurt that she’d abandoned him without so much as a by-your-leave, he went in search of Teresa and Francesca.
He made a brief and unrewarding inspection of their rooms.
Except for a residue of the stale aroma of scented candles there was no sign of them either. Likewise, no explanation for their departure.
He looked into the bedroom that had been his mother’s. No change there.
To begin with he felt no unease about being alone in The Towers.
Where was Sophie?
78
Outside his mother’s bedroom, shortly after he began to search for Sophie, a pair of long-bodied white-and-fawn odd-eye rats startled him.
With pink left eyes and black right eyes, about ten inches long, the rats leapt away from him, skittering for cover in a brownish linen dust sheet hanging from the frame of the mirror Teresa had smashed.
He grabbed a corner of the dust sheet and shook it, intending to stamp on the vermin when they hit the floor. Too quick for him, the rats pelted across the landing to the sanctuary of the shadows.
Had it not been for the rats he might never have made the discovery that drew the future closer.
He’d caused the frame to slip its moorings. It fell to the floor, taking the dust sheet with it, exposing the rims of a false door.
The door opened without difficulty to reveal a second. The door of a combination safe.
Like the first, he’d never seen the door before. Here was another of The Towers’ secrets he wasn’t going to leave undisturbed.