Lilian's Spell Book

by Toby Litt

  The terror came suddenly. I wouldn’t allow this to happen. I jerked my hand away from the canvas and yanked it down towards Mary, to protect her.

  The tail of water, though, had dropped away the moment I broke contact. Instantly dead.

  I touched my t-shirt. It was dry, apart from my sweat.

  Before I went upstairs, I decided to try one more time to show Peter what was going on.

  Carrying Mary into the bedroom, I said, ‘No questions – just come with me.’

  He gave a grunt of annoyance at being got out of bed, but did as I asked.

  In bare feet, we went quietly down the stairs.

  Mary, no longer distracted by strange sights, was about to start crying with hunger.

  ‘Stop here,’ I said to Peter, then carried on into the dining room. I was relieved to see the painting was still flowing with water. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘now come in.’

  The moment he entered the room, something very strange happened. The water on Lilian didn’t exactly disappear, not all in a snap, but it was like I was suddenly seeing it in two ways at once – in my way, with it still there, and in Peter’s way, with it gone. And then I could only see it in Peter’s way, and I knew for certain he hadn’t seen it in mine.

  Even though I was sure it would be totally dry, I rushed over to the painting. I could feel Peter watching me. He was judging my actions, I knew. Were they something he should be really worried about? Were they something – in his masculine way – he should do something about?

  The canvas was very dry and a little flaky to the touch. A couple of tiny fragments of paint came off on my fingertips. They were from Lilian’s dress. When I looked at them closely, they were like specks of glitter – the sort you get on the side of your hand after writing in a spangly greetings card. Mary was wailing away on my shoulder.

  ‘What was it?’ Peter asked. ‘Did she move? Did she talk to you?’ Exhaustion was making him exasperated.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said.

  ‘Because she’s doing nothing now.’

  ‘You can go to bed,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay up to feed Mary.’

  ‘If this room spooks you, why don’t you stay in the bedroom?’

  ‘I’ll be up in quarter of an hour.’

  Haunting or no haunting, Peter wasn’t hanging around. He wanted all the sleep he could get.

  Mary went quiet as soon as she latched on. Her tugs were strong to begin with – a little frantic, even. But having her there relaxed me. This was my baby. I wasn’t completely alone. Perhaps if I had been, my reaction would have been different. As it was, I felt completely awake, and completely elated. The water on the painting coming so soon after the water in my bath told me something. It made a direct link between me and Lilian – or made the link that was already there quite explicit. The communication between us was becoming clearer. I was still some distance from knowing what she wanted to tell me. But at least now I could be certain that it was me she was talking to, and that she was going to have to teach me to understand her.

  ‘Not my children,’ I said, finally. ‘You can do things to me, but leave my children alone, okay?’

  All the time I fed Mary, I gazed at the painting. It didn’t move. It didn’t change. But I was looking at it in a different way. Before, it had been an interesting object, then an interesting picture of an interesting person. Now, though, it was my teacher. It was so full of details that I didn’t yet understand, and perhaps never would. What was the meaning of the odd silver-looking necklace she wore, or the two beautiful rings on her little fingers, one a ruby, one a sapphire? Why did she have a small fan hanging down from a golden chain around her waist? What was the book that Lilian held in her hand, and what image was on the end of the crimson ribbon she used as a bookmark – too twisted round to make out easily? Perhaps Andrew Gatward could help me figure it out. And what did Lilian’s smile mean? She looked as if she could keep a secret, but she also looked as if she’d be very willing to share everything she knew, if only the right person came along. Could that person really be me?

  Before I went back upstairs, I politely wished Lilian goodnight.

  Mary slept right through. Jack, however, woke at five and had too much energy to go back to sleep. I took him downstairs with him, leaving Mary and Peter to have a lie-in.

  As Jack was in the room, the kitchen taps worked, so I filled the kettle and made tea. When I sipped it, though, it tasted of nothing at all. And I couldn’t sense it in my mouth. It wasn’t warm or hot.

  I stuck my fingers into the mug, with the same result. The water in the tea was like the water in the bath.

  After making sure Jack was safely in the living room, I made a more radical experiment. I reboiled the kettle, then poured fresh water out into another mug. This I held, without feeling heat, then poured over my hand, without being scalded.

  Finally, I boiled the kettle again and was pouring the steaming water over my left arm when Jack rushed in.

  ‘Mum,’ he shouted, as a sharp pain dug into me.

  ‘Run the tap!’ I shouted. ‘Run the tap!’

  For a second, Jack didn’t move. This was definitely the stupidest thing he’d ever seen me do. Then he sprinted to the sink and turned both faucets.

  I shoved my hand under the flow of cold.

  ‘Watch me,’ I said. ‘Watch my arm. Don’t go out.’

  ‘What happened?’ Jack asked. I knew he had seen exactly what happened. He was asking a different, more difficult question.

  ‘I did something very stupid,’ I said, wincing at another wave of pain. The cold water on my arm felt both wonderful and terrible. ‘Don’t you ever, ever do anything like that. Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise,’ he said. He was quite pale. ‘Shall I get Dad?’

  Almost worse than the pain was the embarrassment. But I knew I’d have to face Peter soon – any delay would only anger him.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  Jack went to fetch his father. As soon as he was out of the room, the water stopped cooling me, and the pain increased. I dashed into the pantry and grabbed a large plastic bottle of blue milk. I held the cool side of it against my arm, willing Jack to be quick.

  He was. A few seconds later, I heard him and Peter coming downstairs – Peter asking, ‘..on her own arm?’

  He came into the kitchen looking more furious than I’d ever seen him. ‘Let me see,’ he ordered.

  I held out my arm. The skin was already beginning to bubble up into a big white blister.

  ‘What are you using this for?’ Peter asked, taking the milk bottle away from me. ‘Put it under the cold tap and keep it there.’

  I didn’t want to explain in front of Jack my reasons for not using the tap water – that it wasn’t any use when no one was there. I’d told Peter all this the night before, but he clearly wasn’t thinking of that now. He was looking at a self-harmer. I didn’t know what to do. I felt shocked at myself for having been so reckless around Jack. Now I was going to have to submit myself to Peter, let him take charge. If I didn’t, he would feel powerless – and that was the worst thing he could feel.

  ‘I’ll call NHS Direct,’ he said. ‘See what they say.’

  ‘They’ll say go to hospital.’

  Peter went to the phone.

  ‘Will you be all right, Mummy?’ Jack asked. I was Mummy because I was wounded.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll just have a big bandage for a few days.’ We were all of us upset, though for very different reasons.

  Jack was going to go and listen in on the phone call.

  ‘Stay here,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  Jack came and stood next to me.

  ‘I don’t want you to be hideously disfigured,’ he said. I could tell hideously disfigured was a phrase he’d learned out of a comic book or from a computer game.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, although I knew a scald like this was bound to leave some scar. ‘The water’s very cold, isn’t it? You have a feel.’

&
nbsp; Jack put his hand into the gush.

  ‘Yes, Mummy,’ he said, ‘very cold.’

  I had just wanted to test that he did feel it. Although I realized that, with me in the room, this might mean nothing. If Jack started to be directly affected, haunted, we would leave the house. (I was glossing over the stones. They didn’t really count.) But then I saw him looking at my arm and knew that sometimes it’s being indirectly affected by something that is worst of all.

  Peter returned. ‘They want you to go to hospital.’

  ‘I’ll drive myself,’ I said. ‘Take Mary along.’

  ‘No. They say you might go into shock. We’ll all come.’

  It took half an hour to get ready. Peter told me to stay where I was, and I asked Jack to stay where he was. I think Peter assumed I just didn’t want to be left alone, so he brought Jack’s clothes down to him. Along with some green baseball boots and blue jeans, he chose a red sweatshirt that had been washed so many times it had faded to pink. Usually, Jack refused to wear it because pink was a girl’s colour. I had been meaning to re-dye it, after the move. But Jack put it on now without a word of complaint. I felt very proud of him, and said, ‘Come here.’

  I hugged him, one handed, then whispered, ‘Go and get another top.’

  Peter looked at me after Jack had run off.

  ‘Before Jack came in, I was fine,’ I said. ‘When it was just me in here, the water wasn’t hot or cold.’

  ‘You don’t have to hurt yourself, you silly woman,’ said Peter. ‘You have my full attention. I’ll listen to anything you want to say.’

  ‘It’s really not about that,’ I said, not even sure myself exactly what I meant.

  We didn’t speak again until Jack returned, in camouflage, and then it was only practicalities.

  I got dressed in the clothes Peter had chosen for me. Not a bad selection, I thought, before I realized that they were the next day’s outfit I’d put on a chair the night before.

  I wrapped my arm in a couple of damp dishcloths and, after Peter fetched a still-asleep Mary, we set off.

  Chapter 22.

  Peter refused to stop on the way, to let me feed Mary. ‘You can do it in the waiting room,’ he said. ‘They always take ages.’

  But I’d hardly begun to calm her down, sitting in A&E, when a nurse came to fetch me. Apart from the Jonson clan and the hospital workers, the place was empty. Mary let out a horrible wail when I pulled her off and didn’t stop screeching until we were in the examining room. The nurse, who looked extremely tired, told me there was no problem me feeding my baby while she did her work.

  ‘Accident?’ she asked.

  ‘A kettle,’ I said.

  ‘Easily done. May I take a look?’

  I wondered how often people refuse. Probably mad people do. And drunk, aggressive people. Was the question even worth asking? I suppose it’s polite.

  ‘Ow,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve seen worse.’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Have you taken anything? Any painkillers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll give you something strong.’

  I also got a bandage and a prescription for healing cream and an appointment for a check-up the following week. All the time I was with the nurse, I wondered what Peter was doing. If he told anyone I’d done this to myself, they’d probably force me to talk to a psychiatrist. They might even want me to do that straight away, worried that I might be a danger to the children as well as to myself. But when I rejoined Peter in the waiting room, he didn’t seem to have moved from the chair. ‘Let’s get you home,’ he said.

  We stopped off at a 24-hour pharmacy, to get the healing cream. And I insisted on buying ten big bottles of Evian from a garage.

  It was nine thirty by the time we got back to the house.

  There was a note put through the front door, neatly ripped from a narrow-lined A4 pad.

  Dear Mrs. Jonson,

  Sorry not to catch you. I will endeavour to call again at a more convenient hour.

  Yours faithfully,

  Andrew Gatward

  9.15am

  He had written his telephone number at the bottom of the page.

  I insisted on calling straight away, even though Peter wanted me to leave it.

  The phone rang and rang. Perhaps Mr. Gatward wasn’t back home yet, or perhaps, now he was out, he’d decided to do something else – stock up on tobacco. There was no answerphone, so I couldn’t leave a message.

  ‘I’d forgotten he was coming,’ I said. ‘He was so keen to look at the archives. He’s waited years and years. He must have been so disappointed.’

  Peter made me go into the living room, then brought me a cup of tea and some marmalade on toast. Jack, I could tell, was going to be clingy for a while. I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all.

  Beneath the bandage, my arm felt a little bit better already. That was probably due to the painkiller the nurse had given me.

  Around ten, the electrician came to install a TV aerial and a satellite dish on our roof. Peter had decided on the satellite dish without consulting me. Now, he confessed.

  ‘As long as you can’t see it from the ground,’ I said. ‘Imagine how common that would look. Like we were lottery winners, or something.’

  ‘And we aren’t?’ Peter said.

  He and the man went upstairs to try and find a way onto the roof.

  I snuck across the hall and tried Mr. Gatward again.

  He answered by saying the name of the village and then giving his phone number without the dialling code. I’d never heard anyone do this, outside of repeated TV programmes.

  ‘It’s Mrs. Jonson,’ I said. ‘I had an accident. I’m really sorry we weren’t in when you came.’

  We arranged for him to return straight after an early lunch. He wanted to go into great detail over this – that it would be ‘merely a salad’ and that ‘no cooking would be engaged in’. I said that I would definitely be at home to welcome him. He said, once again, that he was sorry to hear about my accident. I really liked his old-fashionedness. You didn’t meet people like him in London.

  When I turned round I saw Peter standing on the gallery. ‘Where’s Mary?’ he asked.

  ‘Asleep. In there,’ I said.

  ‘Come and have a look at this,’ Peter said.

  As I went up the stairs, I asked, ‘It’s not more doors, is it?’ I wasn’t sure if I could take the house revealing any secrets right that moment – leave it till the evening.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said.

  The door into the attic was now open, above the spiral staircase.

  ‘All the way to the top,’ said Peter.

  He let me go first.

  The spiral staircase felt slightly wobbly as we ascended.

  ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ I asked.

  ‘Says the woman who poured boiling water over herself,’ Peter replied, with a sad chuckle.

  There was a light on in the attic, quite bright. This was surprising. I had been expecting them to be fumbling around in the dusty dark with torches.

  I should give the layout – the roof of the New House had four peaks or triangular pointy bits, and three gutters or whatever separating them. This divided the roof-space into four very high rooms, with a long corridor joining them West to East. Peter led me through them, one by one. The first three were empty – although the second had a skylight out of which the aerial man’s feet were dangling.

  ‘I don’t want to leave Mary for long,’ I said.

  ‘It’s in here,’ said Peter, grabbing my hand (non-bandaged arm) and pulling me into what at first looked like another library. There were shelves full of the same kind of ivory-coloured old books as downstairs. But also, on the far wall, there were eight filing cabinets in a row.

  ‘Looks like your friend Mr. Gatward has his work cut out,’ said Peter. ‘These here are the archives.’

  ‘But why are they up here?’

  ‘Because they�
��re the secret archives,’ whispered Peter.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice behind us. It was the aerial man. ‘I can take a line off one of these lights for the power. No need to turn off the mains. The aerial can go in-between the chimneys. I can put the satellite on the back of the house. You won’t see nothing from the ground.’

  ‘Great,’ said Peter.

  ‘That’s a lot of books,’ said the man.

  ‘We’ve only just found them,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘They can’t’ve used this place much. You see that lightbulb? Have a guess when it dates from?’

  ‘It must be old,’ I said, ‘or you wouldn’t be asking.’

  ‘Nineteen seventy-five,’ said Peter.

  The aerial man looked at me. I knew he wouldn’t be satisfied unless I said something definite – unless I was definitely wrong.

  ‘Nineteen sixty-three,’ I said.

  ‘My best guess would be nineteen fifty-five,’ the man said. ‘That’s the oldest I’ve ever seen, outside of a museum. And do you want to know something else?’

  After a pause I said, ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘They’re all of ’em like that. Not a one of ’ems new.’

  ‘Does that make any difference to you?’ I asked. ‘For the work?’

  ‘No, not at all. Just thought you’d be interested.’

  ‘We are,’ I said, hoping Peter could do enthusiasm better.

  ‘If you was wondering whether the folks before used up here very much.’

  ‘Obviously they didn’t,’ said Peter. ‘Let’s hope none of the bulbs blow whilst we’re up here.’

  ‘Whilst you’re up here,’ I said to Peter. Then, to the man, I said, ‘I’m glad it doesn’t look too difficult.’