The Shell House

by Linda Newbery

  Greg made his own face hard. ‘If I find you here again—,’ his voice came out low and menacing, ‘—I’ll smash your stupid face in.’ He gave a hard shake and flung the boy away. Dean stumbled and picked himself up, glaring his hatred. The other two came closer, circling, looking at Dean for guidance.

  This was stupid—three against one if it came to a real fight. They might be younger and smaller, but Dean Brampton had the look of a dangerous wild animal. Anger surged through Greg’s body. He picked up the anorak and threw it to the ground by the boy’s feet. ‘Fuck off out of here. Go on. Now.’

  ‘Run, Yusuf!’ yelled the smaller boy, who was already well on his way towards the ruined conservatory.

  The boy called Yusuf did, leaving Dean Brampton confronting Greg. Realizing that he was alone, the boy’s confidence wavered. ‘Wanker!’ He thrust two fingers at Greg’s face, then ran after his friends, leaping a chunk of masonry. With baboon-like whoops, the three disappeared towards the main steps, quick and agile.

  Greg stayed where he was. He wasn’t going to run after them, inviting more abuse or thrown bricks. Carefully, he examined the caryatid. Her beautiful face stared impassively over his head, undamaged. He could see only the small chip he had already noticed, from her garland. If he’d come along ten minutes later . . . what were they trying to do, reduce her face to broken stone, destroy it the way time and weather had destroyed her twin?

  He didn’t feel like drawing now. He sat on the steps of the summerhouse and stared across at the bearded telamons. This was stupid—it needed a high wire fence to keep those morons out. He could understand them coming here to muck about, to climb in the buildings, but this—! He was breathing hard, disturbed by the incident in more ways than one. Dean Brampton’s mocking face had fired him into not just anger, but violent rage. If he’d given way to impulse, he could have smashed the boy’s head against the stone of the summerhouse. He could still feel the itch of wanting to grab and hurt, flowing down his arms into his fingers and fists. He had made the first grab, even though the insolent little git had been asking for it. But what else could he have done? You couldn’t reason with someone like Dean Brampton.

  Wearily, he got up and went to find his bike. It was lying on its side halfway up the steps, with the rear-shift mechanism wedged in the spokes.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell!’

  It took him nearly an hour to get it home, with only the front wheel usable, by which time—ravenous, tired, fed-up and with his arms aching from lifting the back wheel clear of the ground—he had thought of a range of fitting torments for Dean Brampton and associates.

  EP

  Greg’s photograph (colour): close-up, part of the mosaic design inside the lakeside grotto at Graveney Hall. The mosaic is made of broken pieces of Delft tiles, white and shades of blue. Each fragment is embedded in plaster in what appears at first to be a random pattern, but when you look again you can see the initials E and P among the swirls.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Jordan said, standing in the rain. ‘I don’t suppose it was top choice for a Saturday night, someone else’s family do.’

  Greg zipped up his jacket and reached into his pocket for his bike keys. ‘It was fine, thanks. Different. Don’t get soaked—go on in!’ He pushed the bike out from its resting place by the wheelie bin. ‘You swimming tomorrow?’

  ‘ ’Course, first thing. You?’

  ‘No—I don’t work Sundays.’

  ‘I know. You could come and swim though,’ Jordan said. ‘Just swim.’

  Greg shook his head. ‘What, miss my Sunday lie-in?’ Besides, he was going to Graveney Hall. ‘How about—’

  ‘What?’

  On the point of asking if Jordan wanted to come too, after the training, Greg thought better of it. ‘No, nothing.’ Faith would be there, and something made him uneasy about the idea of Faith and Jordan meeting. He wanted to keep them in separate compartments. ‘How did you get so hooked on swimming, anyway?’

  ‘Dad started me off when I was quite little—he liked it. And, don’t laugh—’

  ‘No, go on.’

  ‘I used to have this dream of being rescued by a dolphin. There were stories I’d heard, or read. I’d be in the sea, drowning, going under, then just when my lungs were bursting for air the dolphin would race up and push me to the surface and carry me all the way to the shore. And after that I wanted to be a dolphin. Used to pretend to be one in the pool. See, I told you it was stupid.’

  But you are like a dolphin, Greg thought, when you swim butterfly, and nearly said so. Instead, he surprised himself by coming out with: ‘Was it sexy?’

  ‘Sexy?’

  ‘The dream. The dolphin.’

  Jordan thought for a moment, then laughed. ‘Yes. Yes, it was.’

  Greg pushed the bike out of the driveway, brushed rainwater off the saddle and mounted. ‘See you Monday,’ he called, wheeling away. He didn’t hear the door close, and when he looked back Jordan was still standing by the garden fence, in the slanting rain.

  Greg raised a hand in farewell, then ducked his head and concentrated on managing the unfamiliar gear system on his dad’s old bike. With his own in the repair shop he was having to make do with this; it had drop handlebars and an old downtube changer that had to be juggled, and whenever he got it wrong the chain came off. Head down, he pushed hard up the hill. The McAuliffes’ house was fifteen minutes’ bike ride out of town, in a village off the Chelmsford road—not so much village as a cluster of houses round a crossroads. ‘You could easily have stayed the night if we’d thought about it,’ Jordan’s mother had said when Greg was leaving. ‘You’ll get soaked, biking.’

  Michelle’s party had been the sort of family occasion that Greg’s mother occasionally tried to orchestrate at home. It never quite worked, mainly, Greg suspected, because his mum was too anxious to gild the proceedings with a fabricated happy-family gloss. Katy would get into a strop, or the meal would be an ambitious failure, or Nan would get one of her migraines and have to lie in a darkened room. Greg would sooner have sat ten Maths exams than risk inviting any friend to share such an ordeal with his lot, but the McAuliffes seemed better at it, as if they practised more often. Delicious food, lots of it, appeared on the table; no-one took umbrage with anyone else; the quiz games after the meal were conducted with enthusiasm rather than animosity. The house, one of a pair of former farm cottages, was rather shabbily furnished, but there were shelves and shelves of books and CDs; food, music and books were all taken seriously here, it seemed to Greg. The McAuliffe parents, a good few years older than his own, struck him as intellectual. Jordan’s dad, tall, spare and greying, could have appeared formidable if he hadn’t been compering party games and handing out chocolate prizes; Mrs McAuliffe was quietly watchful. The two boys, Jordan and the much younger Mark, got their looks from their father, while Michelle had her mother’s fair hair and sharp, intelligent face. There were three other girls present, her friends; one of them, Greg noticed with amusement, kept gazing at Jordan with undisguised adoration. He also saw that Jordan hadn’t registered this, though the girl couldn’t conceal her delight when she was teamed with him in one of the quizzes. Didn’t Jordan ever look in a mirror, and see the girl-pulling potential of what was reflected? It was one of the likeable things about him that he seemed oblivious.

  Nearing town, Greg changed gear at the summit of the long, gradual hill and found that he’d dislodged the chain again. Blast! He dismounted to sort it out, feeling the cold trickle of rain down the back of his neck. ‘It’s a matter of touch and delicacy,’ his dad had said when Greg complained about the bike’s temperamental habits. ‘You’ll soon get a feel for it.’ So far, Greg hadn’t. Touch and delicacy weren’t his strong points, obviously.

  He met Faith by the Coach House. ‘They’re boxing up the caryatids!’ she told him. ‘Isn’t it awful? The telamons too.’ Irregular hammering could be heard from the direction of the garden.

  ‘Boxing them up?’ Greg thought of coffins. ‘B
ut how did they get them off the walls?’

  ‘They didn’t, stupid! They’re making boxes to fit over them, on the summerhouses, for protection. It’s because of those awful vandals in the week. And they’re putting up barbed wire and padlocking the entrance to stop people trespassing. But Dad says if vandals are determined enough they’ll get in somehow.’

  ‘They did my bike in as well, those cretins,’ Greg told her. ‘Knackered the rear-shift mechanism. A hundred quid, it’s costing, to have it repaired! My dad’s putting in fifty but I’ve got to find the rest myself. That’s a big chunk out of my earnings.’

  ‘Dad says you know them from school. They sound like animals,’ Faith said with distaste.

  As usual she was getting under his skin, needling him. ‘Yeah, well, you do get all sorts at a comprehensive. I don’t suppose you get much vandalism at St Ursula’s. But I don’t do a lot of socializing with Year Nine yobs, myself.’

  If Faith registered his sarcasm, she made no comment. ‘Can’t you make them pay for your bike?’

  ‘The head of Year Nine had a go—their parents wouldn’t pay. And it was nothing to do with school really, so he said if I wanted to pursue it I’d have to go to the police.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Not worth it. They’re not going to budge, are they?’ Greg didn’t tell her the rest of what the year head had said: that Dean Brampton’s mother had fired off a torrent of abuse about Greg hitting and threatening her blameless boy. ‘But that’s—’ Greg had protested to Mr Rackham, then stopped. What was the point? It was one person’s word against three others, and anyway, it was true. The police, if they bothered to take up the matter, would get the same story from Mrs Brampton, with embellishments. ‘I can’t do any more, sorry,’ Mr Rackham said, ushering Greg out of his office. ‘It’s not a school thing, is it? If it had happened while your bike was on the school premises, things would be different. As it is I’ll have a word with the lads and give them a warning.’ And that was that: Greg labelled as a dubious character, a bullier of young kids. He felt sore about that, sorer still about the hundred quid.

  ‘I can’t bear to think of my caryatid!’ Faith said, though they were heading slowly in that direction. ‘All nailed up in a wooden box. When will I see her again? Not till all the restoration’s done, Dad says, and there’s a proper security fence. Oh, why can’t those idiots go somewhere else?’

  Her caryatid! Greg had begun to think of it as his, since the Art project. His main concern now was that he wouldn’t be able to take any more photographs, and would have to make do with the ones he’d taken last Sunday. He resented the whole incident, especially Faith’s implication that he’d practically invited Dean Brampton and friends to chuck bricks at the statuary. When he phoned Faith’s father to tell him of the damage, he’d omitted to mention the skirmish. Whichever way you looked at it, he hadn’t come out of it well—neither behaving with much dignity nor seeing the boys off effectively.

  ‘My mum doesn’t want me going down to the grotto on my own any more,’ Faith grumbled. ‘Only when I’m with you.’

  ‘What, because of those morons? They haven’t been down to the lake, have they?’

  ‘Who knows where they’ll go?’

  They had reached the summerhouse. One of the Friends, a man called Phil, was poised on a stepladder by the caryatids, while Michael Tarrant, by a heap of planks on the grass, steadied the ladder and passed up nails. The box being nailed into place was indeed shaped like a coffin; the caryatid was already hidden from view. Greg thought of her beautiful face, the face that had gazed impassively across the garden for two hundred years, boxed up in darkness. It seemed symbolic: beauty hidden by ugliness. Art too fragile for the brutish gaze of the twenty-first century. Youth and grace masked by a crude emblem of death.

  ‘Will you take all that off again for Open Day?’ Faith asked.

  The man called Phil looked down at her, laughing. ‘I don’t think this lot’s coming off very easily. This should stop your friends’ little game,’ he added to Greg.

  ‘They’re not my friends!’ Greg was getting fed up with this.

  ‘It’s so awful,’ Faith wailed. ‘Like she’s being punished for something she hasn’t done. Like a medieval torture—they used to brick people up in walls, didn’t they?’

  ‘Go and help your mum in the Coach House if you don’t want to watch,’ her father said.

  ‘Shall we?’ Faith turned to Greg. ‘She’s repairing the display stands, ready for Open Day. I said I might help.’

  Greg stalled. Once he got into Mummy’s clutches, she’d have him running errands all day. He’d met her the week before; she was an RE teacher at Faith’s school, and treated everyone as if they were ten years old. ‘You were going to show me the initials in the grotto,’ he reminded her. ‘Let’s go down there.’

  The lake was silent, away from the activity around the house; faint mist hung over the water. A mountain ash tree at the edge of the wood was bright with berries. Summer was over; it felt like autumn now, the air tinged with coldness to come. Faith was wearing a cable sweater, Greg his zip-up fleece.

  ‘Here.’ Faith pointed, inside the grotto. Following her in, Greg looked closely, seeing that what he had taken to be an abstract design of swirls was in fact made up of twining capital Es and Ps. The whole tile pattern was a memorial to Edmund Pearson, the short-lived baby. He thought of the distraught father smashing tiles, sorting the pieces, dedicating himself to his task. The grotto was as vulnerable as the caryatids, just as easily damaged by spray-paint or lobbed bricks, but Greg hoped the Friends wouldn’t think of boxing it in for protection. Had Dean & Co. come down this far? If they had, they surely would have left evidence, but there was none—no litter of cans or crisp packets, no spray-paint graffiti. Greg thought of it as Faith’s special place; she was the only person he had ever seen here.

  ‘Did you find out any more about our one?’ he asked her.

  ‘Our what?’

  ‘Our Edmund. The other Edmund Pearson.’

  She shook her head. ‘I asked Dad, but he only knows what’s in the book. He agreed with me—most likely Missing in Action. He said the Commonwealth War Graves might be able to help. They could tell us if he’s got an official war grave somewhere, or if he’s on one of the Memorials to the Missing.’

  ‘But then why only Believed to have been killed?’

  ‘Missing means just that, doesn’t it? Missing believed killed. Those memorials are for people who have no known grave.’

  ‘I want to find him,’ Greg said. ‘I want to know.’

  Faith looked at him. ‘Why does he interest you so much? He’s only one of the people who lived here.’

  ‘It doesn’t seen properly finished, left vague like this. There must be something for us to find out.’

  ‘But why us?’

  ‘Because we’re the ones asking the questions.’

  ‘You are. I don’t think there’s much of a mystery. He died somewhere in France or Belgium and his name’ll be on a memorial there.’

  Greg thrust his hands into the pockets of his fleece and turned away to look out over the water. Again he felt that prickling at the back of his neck, a sense that if he kept quiet and concentrated, Edmund might appear on the lakeside path, strolling, his uniform jacket slung over one shoulder. Greg could identify with Edmund, the young officer thrown into the cauldron of the First World War, far more than with the wealthy squires and fox-hunting gentlemen who had lived at Graveney. Odd, really, because if Edmund Pearson had survived the war, he would have become a wealthy estate-owner in his turn, and would be no more interesting than the others. Did he come down here, home on leave, to sit in the grotto with his own initials entwined on the walls, a ready-made memorial, and look out at the water and ponder? What did he think about? Surviving until 1917, he must have known how high the chances were of being killed or maimed. What must that be like, at the age of twenty-one?

  ‘It’s one of the things that make
s me not believe in God,’ he said to Faith.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The First World War. How could that happen if God was in charge?’

  Faith had settled on the marble bench, taking out her bottle of water. ‘The war was made by man, not by God.’ Her answer came ready-made.

  ‘The other day you said you wanted a discussion—a proper discussion.’ Greg sat on the other half of the curve, with the gargoyle spouting its arc of water between them. ‘I’ve thought about this. It seems to me you want it all ways. Not just you—I mean Christians do.’

  Faith looked at him, interested, not prickly this time. ‘I don’t see what you mean.’

  ‘You want to believe in your God, so you’ve got easy excuses for all the things he makes a bodge of.’ He paused to marshal his argument. ‘Listen. You’d say, God knows everything, right?’

  ‘Yes, He’s omniscient.’

  ‘Right. And he can do everything, as well, because he’s God.’

  ‘Omnipotent.’

  ‘OK. Omniscient and omnipotent. And the third thing, God is good.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t add up, does it? You can have any two of those things, but not all three—it doesn’t make sense. Because as it is—as you believe it, I mean—your omniscient God knew hundreds of thousands of people were dying in that war, were going to die. They were going to be shelled to bits or get gassed or get gangrene or drown in shell-holes or die in agony in hospitals or go mad with fright. And he didn’t lift a finger to stop it. Even though he could have, if he’s omnipotent. So those two things rule out the third—if he exists at all, he can’t be good. And that’s only one example. Same applies even more to earthquakes or floods or avalanches. Acts of God, they’re called, aren’t they? What sort of God would deliberately act like that?’