Would that be so bad? The thought flared up, a spark catching hold of kindling. Would it be so bad to let the butterflies flock, to bring joy back into her life, to throw open the shades and let in the light?
April screwed shut her eyes. The fire’s after-image glowed in the sudden blackness, but was quickly overtaken by pictures that, even after this long, were more vivid than any flame. A blond head, a round face lighting up, small sturdy legs running, and then—
Her fault. She knew that with all her broken heart.
No light for her. No light ever again.
CHAPTER 12
mid-March
‘Are you aware,’ Oran asked April, ‘of the bacon beetle?’
April was on her knees in Empyrean’s kitchen, scrubbing the newly swept floor. Oran was perched on top of the sink bench, flicking through a book that Edward had lent them, a National Trust guide to conserving old houses.
‘Can it light an Aga?’
‘Dermestes lardarius,’ he went on. ‘More commonly known as the larder beetle. It feeds on dried meat, skin, cartilage, even hair and feathers.’
‘Can you use it to light an Aga? It sounds flammable.’
‘They’re quite a danger to stuffed fish, apparently. And by “stuffed”, I do not mean in a culinary-type fashion, but by a taxidermist.’
April sat back on her heels. To be fair, Oran could not be accused of slacking. Thanks to him, all wonky shelving had been made firm; the Aga was intact and in working order, its black top and white doors cleaned and shined; the butler’s sink was now in place, the surface crazing lightened by vigorous scrubbing, and the taps with their jaunty winged handles and the slim, curved faucet had been reunited with the wall and polished to as much original chrome shininess as age and wear would allow. Thanks to their combined efforts, the floor and surfaces had been swept free of dust, dirt and insect parts. The plumbing was beyond Oran’s abilities, as were the electrics, the house’s wiring being a Gordian knot that needed a subtler touch than a sword through its centre. The Aga was old enough to be fuelled by coal, a bag of which Oran had scavenged from somewhere. The sun provided a pale light but no heat, so while floor scrubbing did raise a sweat, April was keen for the Aga to bring the temperature in the room to above freezing when she took a break. But Oran didn’t seem to feel the cold. Today he had on a fisherman’s-knit jersey that looked as if it had been salvaged from a shipwreck off the Hebridean coast. There were holes in it an elephant seal could swim through.
‘Do you even know how to light the Aga?’ said April.
‘I do,’ said Oran. ‘I also know how to stand well back, cross my fingers and pray.’
‘Are you saying there’s a chance it’ll spew coal dust all over my clean floor?’
‘There’s a chance it’ll blow us both to kingdom come.’
‘Why don’t you help me scrub the floor then?’
‘Why don’t I sing while you work?’ said Oran, with a smile.
Oran would sing no matter what, so April did not waste energy on a reply. It had troubled her at first, listening to him, because his voice was such a pleasure. But his songs suited her. They were from different times, different places, but all had in common the same themes of sadness and regret, sometimes keenly felt, the emotions raw, and other times resigned and melancholy, as if the songwriters had raged so long they had no more in them.
April did wonder why Oran chose these songs, which did not seem to suit his personality at all. He sang them so well, though, that it was hard to imagine it any differently. This song said it did not matter where the songwriter was buried. When they were dead, they’d be free, wherever they lay. All their tears would be washed away.
The dead are free, thought April. But they chain us to their memories.
She resumed scrubbing. The old linoleum — another practical choice April assumed had been made by Mrs Potts, perhaps after consultation with the housekeeper — was never going to look as pristine as it had when first laid, but a time-honoured combination of sugar soap and elbow grease was bringing it up nicely. You could see the colours now: chambray blue and dove grey squares, with a charcoal edging. The last of the paint showed the kitchen walls had once been off-white, with blue and primrose-yellow accents that matched the cupboards and shelves. In its day, the room must have been as fresh and pretty as a china milkmaid.
The books Edward had lent them gave some idea of how it might have looked fully equipped, and Sunny had added in her recollections. She said that Mr Potts had been keen to acquire the latest appliances, which, when first released, would have been criminally expensive. Sunny’s memories were patchy now, but she remembered the Aga, upon which she’d cooked many a meal, and the refrigerator, which became a talking point for miles around as no one had ever seen its like. Not surprising, Edward had remarked. Even in the late 1940s, he informed them, only a tiny fraction of British households owned a refrigeration unit of any kind. Empyrean’s was a Frigidaire that Mr Potts had imported from America when James and Sunny were about eight years old. It had two doors side by side, a hydrator to keep vegetables crisp and, even more extraordinary, an ice maker that produced proper cubes in metal slide-out trays. It was probably powered by Freon, said Edward, which was less liable to explode than the original chlorofluorocarbons, but had not done the ozone layer any favours.
There’d been a copper electric kettle once, too, said Sunny, but that had expired when one of the housemaids had forgotten and placed it on the Aga. The toaster with the sides that opened had not been much liked either, as one tended to burn one’s fingers extracting the toast. It looked rather space-age, though, said Sunny. Circular and chrome. Edward expressed regret that the Hotpoint ‘El’ line of appliances had been a decade before Empyrean’s time. ‘El’ stood for ‘electric’, apparently, and the line included El Perco, an electric coffeepot; El Chafo, a chafing dish; El Boilo, an immersion heater; and an item called the El Eggo, which Edward was determined to one day track down.
Sitting back on her heels and looking around, April had a vision of Empyrean’s kitchen new and working and busy — the cook ordering around the housemaids and banishing the boot boy, the children taking advantage of her distraction to scoop cake mix from the bowl with a quick bent finger or picking at the fresh-cut bread loaf, stealing strawberries meant for the Victoria sponge.
James and Sunny — they’d been the children. And perhaps Rowan and Lily had been allowed in, too, if James, the young master of the house, had insisted.
But James had been dead for over sixty years. Rowan and Lily — they must be dead now too, surely? Few people lived as long as Sunny. Some did not even make it to their sixth birthday …
A quiet crackling announced that the Aga was alight.
‘Are you aware,’ said Oran, ‘that the first Agas were sold here in 1929, two years after this house was built? This one would have replaced what I can only imagine was a perfectly good, spanking new coal range.’
‘Sunny said Mr Potts was a man for the latest gadgets,’ said April. ‘And what he wanted he got, I suspect.’
‘I find it easier not to want,’ said Oran. ‘But sometimes it can’t be helped.’
April worked the scrubbing brush into a stubborn patch of grime. ‘And what can’t you help wanting, Oran?’
She spoke in the offhand dryly teasing tone that had become her norm when conversing with him. They worked in close quarters for several hours a day, and Oran was naturally chatty, so silence was not an option. But April’s plan had always been to avoid their conversations becoming intimate, so she kept him at bay with a mix of direct requests — ‘Hold this’, ‘Pass the broom’ — and mildly sarcastic ribbing and rejoinders. It worked. Oran enjoyed banter; taking it too far was part of what got him into trouble in pubs. As a result, they never discussed anything personal or particularly meaningful. April had expected that her question would be answered with a jest, most likely one referencing alcohol, and it was several seconds before she realised no response had be
en lobbed back over the net.
April stopped scrubbing, and looked up. Oran was facing away, towards the window, the edges of his lean form blurred by light and shadow so that he appeared only half-present, as if in the midst of being transported there from another time. His hands were propped on the bench, his shoulders pushed up into a shrug.
‘What am I wanting?’ he said.
No jest in his voice, but the same soft-burred resonance of his songs.
‘I’m wanting to go back,’ he said. ‘I’m wanting to do what I didn’t do, and not do what I did, so I can make it all turn out different.’
He clenched both fists and hit them once, lightly, on the bench. Turned back to April.
‘But when you get so very close and falter at the last,’ he said, ‘you know then you’ve blown it forever, that there’ll be no second chance. And no amount of wanting, wishing or even prayer will ever change that.’
Edward had lent Oran and April more than one book, and Oran had handed them to April for safekeeping. She had not read a book for years, had discarded them along with everything else that gave her joy. But these were not fiction, or even stories from real life. They were functional, providing matter-of-fact information that would be of practical use for the task of finding the quickest, cheapest way to make Empyrean more presentable. April saw little risk in browsing through them.
The most recent and informative was a substantial guide to British and American domestic architectural detail from the 1400s to the present. The bookmark ribbon was at the start of the section on the Modern movement. Edward’s taste, April knew. All clean lines and purity of form. No novelty turrets or ornate mouldings or schmaltzy Arts and Crafts pictorial tiles.
The founders of the Modern movement believed ornamentation to be degenerate, April read. The author of the next book, The House Beautiful and Useful, wasn’t too fussed on it, either. In the introduction, the author expressed his particular loathing for art nouveau. In no case, April read, is this ghastly riot of form more marked than in Germany and Austria, where ingenious fancy, a craze for novelty, and a certain morbid strain in Teutonic temperament have combined with the most unhappy result.
That was telling them, thought April. The book, she saw, had been published in 1907, so the author could hardly have known that the real lesson was soon to come through two world wars.
Did James fight in the second war? He would have been old enough. He had died soon after, which, if he had fought and survived, must have been a harder blow for his parents to bear.
The House Beautiful and Useful had a grey-green linen cover, and was printed on thick paper, edges softened by decades of thumbs. In front and back were old advertisements, for fittings and furniture, tiles and fabrics. One supplier offered Carriage Paid on orders over £2 to any Railway Station in England, another Details and Specifications of Dwellings actually built at costs ranging from £75 to £300.
If only, thought April. You could restore multiple Empyreans for that price, and have change left over to splash out on all seventy colours of that most artistic of wall coverings, Hall’s Sanitary Washable Distemper.
The National Trust guide had been published in the 1980s. It was not a large book but covered a multitude of issues that apparently affected old houses and their contents. Old houses, in this case, meaning ones considerably more venerable and stately than Empyrean. Houses with boulle work and ormolu, harp stands and decorative friezes. Houses with illuminated manuscripts and stuffed rhinoceroses, portrait miniatures, blunderbusses and spinets.
From the book, April learned that bronzes could become diseased. That you should never store pewter in oak drawers because the organic acids would make it unstable. That an International Wool Secretariat was researching the use of druggets on carpet. That you should never iron the cushions on a billiard table. And that stacking too many plates in one pile was simply asking for trouble.
When Edward had offered them the guide, April had expressed her doubt about how much application it would have to their work on Empyrean. But Oran had been very taken by the chapter on taxidermy, and added it to the pile.
The thought of Oran made her chest constrict, and she took measured breaths to ease it. That expression, when he’d turned — it was one April knew well. She’d seen it on the face of Ben’s father when she’d told him she was leaving, and at their last meeting, when he’d finally conceded defeat, and let her go with only the clothes she was wearing and the few items she needed to start a new life without him, without anything she’d ever held dear.
April had not asked Oran to explain. She did not want to know what memory had brought that look to his face. If her silence had disappointed him, he hadn’t shown it. He’d taken a screwdriver from his toolkit and set about tightening the hinges on the canting cupboard doors.
Last in the pile were three volumes, slightly smaller than The House Beautiful, and bound in brown leather. The title on the cover — The Popular Encyclopaedia of Gardening — was grass green. No date again, but judging from the clothing in the black and white photos, these books had been issued in the late 1920s, early ’30s.
Volume three was on top. April turned at random to a page near the back. Torch Lily, she read. Tortrix Moths. Tournefortia. Trachelium Caeruleum.
She turned carefully — the binding was flimsy — to a page before. Scorzonera. Scutellaria. Sea Buckthorn.
Like the words of some ancient incantation, April thought, chanted as you throw herbs, hair and goat’s blood into an iron cauldron.
The garden. That was another project entirely. The house might be a shabby mess but the garden had become a jungle, taken back by the wild, tameable only with a machete and, in some parts, the use of fire. Edward had not mentioned the garden, but he had loaded these three books into Oran’s arms along with the others, and April suspected his plan was to let the idea worm its way into her mind.
His plan would fail, April vowed. Working on the house was quite enough; she would not be starting on the garden, especially not now with spring around the corner. It was becoming harder every day she spent in the house to keep her distance from it, to keep pictures of how it had been out of her mind, to block out the voices from the past, particularly the children’s voices, their laughter and shouts. All imaginary, she knew, but still she heard them. Outside, even though it was still officially late winter, the new growth was already showing. When spring proper came, the garden would smell of blossom and new grass and perhaps even fruit. Real scents, not imagined. Even harder to ignore.
It was three o’clock. There was an hour or so of daylight left. April had intended to bring in more wood from Kit’s ample store, light the fire and make a cup of tea, and sit dreaming of nothing, resting arms that ached from a morning of scrubbing floors.
Instead, she put on her coat, scarf and gloves and went out for a walk. Once around the house, she decided, then back to the cottage.
The route she chose led her to the entrance of the walled garden. She was about to pass it by when the sound of a voice came to her. Only a murmur, a few words, but most definitely a human voice. Someone inside the garden walls.
Oran, April knew, had left for wherever it was he lived. He’d driven off in a Bedford van, borrowed he’d said, but not from whom. The van had been bright yellow once, in the early 1970s. You could still see the shadow of a sign on the side: McLuskey’s Radio and Television Repairs. The van’s old diesel engine rumbled like a combine harvester, and its exhaust popped and banged. April would have heard if Oran had returned.
Which meant this person, this stranger, was an intruder on property that was, at least for a while, her own. April hesitated — should she investigate? The voice had not sounded aggressive. It could be a local birdwatcher, who knew? April decided to brave it and find out.
The garden entrance was a brick arch smothered with climbing rose brambles, brown, knotted and thorny as a witch’s fingers. A new tendril had snaked right across the entrance, and April paused to push it aside, caref
ully, its budding thorns already sharp. Weeds, big and leafy, knocked at her shoes and dragged against her knees as she walked on in.
Inside now, April could see down to the derelict greenhouse. Was that a person crouched behind it, or an object, like an upturned wheelbarrow?
She saw the dog first, rounding the greenhouse corner, nose to the ground. Gabe’s tail went up as he spotted her. He gave a single bark.
April waited, but the dog stayed in place, tail wagging, so April walked to him. Gabe loped the last step to meet her, and shoved his nose in her hand. She fondled his ears, and plucked up the courage to peer around the corner.
The man was squatting, taking a pocketknife to a plant that looked to April like any of the weeds. He was trimming off the leaves. Putting them in an old leather satchel.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
He glanced up. Seemed unperturbed at being caught trespassing.
‘Poor man’s mustard,’ he said. ‘Or Jack-by-the-hedge.’
‘Any relation?’
He ignored the joke — quite rightly, thought April — shoved the last bit of green in the satchel, and stood up. He flipped shut the knife and put it in his jacket pocket. His dog sniffed at April’s shoes.
‘Is it edible?’ said April. ‘It looks like a weed.’
‘Lots of weeds you can eat.’
‘Does it taste nice?’
‘It’ll do.’
April knew she should not be interrogating him. It was growing dark and she could tell he was impatient to leave. But she’d only come upon him by accident. Who knew when she’d get another chance?
The Hiding Places Page 12
