Coming Home to Island House

by Erica James

  ‘Think positively, Hope, think positively.’ He cleared a path through the piles of junk, wondering why their father had bothered to keep any of it. Or had it been a case of out of sight, out of mind? Not unlike his attitude toward his children, perhaps. He began pulling the old rocking horse with its peeling paintwork towards the door. Behind it lurked another childhood treasure. ‘Guess what?’ he said. ‘I’ve found our old toy donkey and cart, and unbelievably the cart has the wooden skittles in it we used to try and juggle with. Do you remember?’

  ‘I do. I also remember you and Allegra coming to blows over them and her hurling the skittles, one after another, from your bedroom window.’

  ‘She had quite a throw, if I recall rightly,’ he said with a laugh.

  But there was no laughter in Hope’s expression. She pursed her lips and frowned. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive her for what happened yesterday. I just can’t credit that anyone could be so thoughtlessly irresponsible. Did it not cross her mind for one second what the consequences could be? But then when did Allegra ever think about the consequences of her actions? She really hasn’t changed, has she? Still the same self-absorbed narcissist with a chip on her shoulder.’

  Not wanting his sister to get herself worked up again – he’d heard quite enough on the subject of their cousin – Kit said, ‘The important thing is Annelise didn’t come to any harm. Come on, let’s see if we can clean these toys up so she has something to play with.’

  As if understanding him, the little girl kicked her feet excitedly against Hope and pointed happily at Giddy-Up Jack.

  ‘I think we’ll take it that she’s in agreement with me,’ Kit said with a smile.

  He soon had the toys out on the lawn in front of the outhouse. With a stiff bristle brush he’d found hanging on a hook on the back of the door, he attacked the rocking horse, brushing away the cobwebs and dust, before using a handkerchief from his pocket to give it a final rub-down. ‘There,’ he said, thoroughly pleased with himself. ‘Let’s see if Annelise wants to go for a ride.’

  Hope settled her carefully on the saddle of the wooden horse and wrapped her small hands around the worn leather of the reins. When she had the horse gently rocking, the little girl beamed with delight, her blue eyes wide.

  ‘If only her parents could see her looking so happy,’ murmured Hope, a supporting hand resting protectively on Annelise’s back.

  ‘Have you heard from them at all?’ asked Kit.

  ‘No. I sent a letter a few days ago, but I’m not convinced it will ever reach Otto and Sabine. I’m equally certain that any letters they try to send out of the country will be destroyed by the authorities. The Nazis don’t want the rest of the world to know just what they’re doing to the Jews, how they’re restricting what they can and cannot do. I never thought I’d say this, and it goes against everything Dieter and I believed in, but the sooner we go to war with Germany, the better.’

  At the serious intensity of her expression, Kit put his arm around his sister. It was, he noted the first time he had done so in a very long time. And in that moment, as she relaxed imperceptibly against him, he wanted to believe that the fierce anger of her grief that had isolated her these last two years was beginning to ease. Perhaps now it was directed towards a new target – Germany – and she was no longer taking it out on those around her. Or herself, for that matter.

  With this thought came the realisation that Kit was actually enjoying himself being back at Island House. The weight of dread that had accompanied him on the train in response to Roddy’s telegram had gone, and in its place was a burgeoning sense of optimism.

  On the face of it, his father’s will had seemed a final and cruel act of disregard for anyone’s feelings but his own, as if forcing the family to come together under the one roof and pitting them against each other had been planned to give him some sort of twisted satisfaction. But in all honesty, Kit could see no reason why Jack would have wanted to do that, not when, if all that Roddy and Romily said was true, he had at last found happiness.

  When he thought about it, Kit could not recall a time when he had seen his father genuinely happy. It was a thought that had never occurred to him before. Was that because he had been too preoccupied with his own feelings? He was about to voice this idea to Hope, to explore it further, when he thought better of it. He didn’t want to say anything that might disrupt her mood – a mood that was so precariously balanced – and so he contented himself with enjoying the tentative renewal of the closeness they had once shared. For which he found himself thanking his father. If nothing else, this enforced time together at Island House was proving to be a positive experience for Kit, and hopefully for his sister too.

  Or was it the lull before the storm?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Arthur was at the top of the house in the stuffy heat of the attic. For the last five minutes, having taken a break from his own bit of poking about in the past, he’d been observing Kit and Hope down in the garden doing much the same thing in the outhouse, unearthing an assortment of their old toys.

  Many a time as a boy he had retreated up here, both to escape his family and to spy on them from the window if they were in the area to the side of the house that led to the kitchen garden. They each had had their own not-so-secret place where they went to be alone – Hope to the glasshouse, Kit wandering the woods and meadows, Allegra to the boathouse and he to the attic – and rarely had they breached the invisible barrier each had erected to safeguard their privacy. Even Arthur, wanting to avoid the threat of retaliation, had chosen to respect the unwritten rule, wanting no one to infiltrate his personal kingdom. Only Allegra had seen fit to flout it, and all hell had broken out when he’d found her up here one day hunting through his boyhood treasures – his stamp and coin collections, his chemistry set and model aeroplanes, and the rat he’d been dissecting. He’d tied her to a chair and, penknife in hand, threatened to dissect her unless she swore never to come up to the attic again.

  He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, then, moving away from the window, which he’d just opened, returned to the task in hand. It really was extraordinary what the old man had stored up here – side tables, wardrobes, vases, lamps, rugs, ornaments, tennis racquets too warped ever to be of use, a split cricket bat, a train set in its box, any number of umbrellas, a pair of stout walking boots, pictures, blankets, books, a gramophone player with a selection of records, a set of golf clubs, and countless box files of yellowed papers and documents. For the love of God, why the hell hadn’t the stupid man ever thrown anything away?

  It had been photograph albums that Arthur had come up here in search of, along with anything of worth that nobody would notice if it disappeared. He saw no reason not to help himself when Romily wouldn’t have a clue what was here. As far as he was concerned, she had no claim to anything that had belonged to the family prior to her arrival. She might be his father’s legal widowed wife and principal benefactor, but she had no claim to what Arthur considered his by birthright. If he had believed he stood a chance of winning, he would have contested the will; it was tempting to give it a go just to stir things up, but Roddy Fitzwilliam had made his feelings clear on that score.

  He eased open the rusting catches of a large wooden steamer trunk that was plastered with luggage labels from hotels around the world – the Astor House Hotel in Hong Kong, the Gritti Palace in Venice, the Cairo Grand, the Paris Ritz, the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, the Budapest Imperial, the Majestic in New York and the Grand Hotel Suisse. Each and every label was irrefutable evidence that Jack Devereux had spent more time away travelling and enjoying himself than at home with his family. He cast aside a layer of fusty old tissue paper and found several photograph albums resting on top of a thick woollen blanket, as well as a box of assorted photographs and postcards. He took his find over to the window and sank into the battered armchair t
here, with its broken springs and feathers leaking from the seat cushion.

  He tackled one of the albums first, turning the pages with a slow and careful hand. It was foolishly sentimental of him, but being back here at Island House had made him think about things he hadn’t thought of in a long time, things he had preferred not to think about.

  He had been three years old when his mother died, and so any tantalising memory he had of her could not be relied upon for authenticity. Very likely anything he thought he remembered had been conjured up inside his head based on hearsay, or purely of his own invention.

  But despite accepting this as perfectly logical, a wholly illogical part of him was firmly of the opinion that he most certainly did remember certain things about Maud Devereux. Firstly, he remembered her as being gentle and loving towards him, in a way that nobody since had been; and secondly, she had been beautiful. Of this he was absolutely sure, because as a child he had seen photographs of her. For a time he had possessed one, taken from an album his father had kept in his study. It had been a rare photograph of his mother standing alone – mostly she was captured arm in arm with her husband, or lost amongst a group of people.

  He had hidden the photograph within the pages of a book inside his trunk when he had been sent away to school. It had become his most treasured possession, had taken on a far greater importance than it should have, but then one day, a boy he’d taken to be a friend had discovered the photograph and had taunted him with it, snatching the small square of precious paper out of reach of his grasp when he tried to take it back. Two other boys then joined in with the fun and held him down while the so-called friend took a torturer’s delight in slowly tearing up the photograph, letting the pieces flutter to the floor.

  Arthur learnt two important lessons that day – to trust no one, and never to treasure anything, or anyone, again. To fear losing something precious was effectively to make one vulnerable, and he was determined never to be at the mercy of another. As a consequence, he had decided that the cause of his misery – his sentimental adoration of a woman he had scarcely known – had to be revoked. Better to revile her memory than cherish it and make himself weak.

  And yet now here he was, all these years on, curious to know more of the woman who had given life to him. What sort of woman had she really been? Was he like her in any way? And why, since returning to Island House, had he recalled a handful of memories of a woman sitting on the edge of his bed stroking his forehead when he was unwell; of a quietly spoken woman reading to him by the fireside; of a woman in a sage-green coat playing with him in a garden?

  Were these false recollections, a confusion of reminiscences that may or may not have actually taken place; or if they had, was the woman in question merely one of the myriad nannies who came and went? It annoyed him that he could not be completely clear on the matter, because if there was one thing he craved in life, it was a sense of control over all that he did and thought.

  The only way to find that clarity, he had concluded, was to revisit the past by investigating his father’s photograph albums. Having searched the house downstairs and drawn a blank, he had been left with one last place to look: the attic. Should he have been surprised that that part of his father’s life had been consigned to the junk pile up here?

  He continued to turn the pages of the album, not recognising anyone or anything. There were men in labourers’ clothes – shirtsleeves, trousers held up with string, and workmen’s boots – and women in high-necked dresses; a gang of sickly-looking ruffians like something out of a Dickens novel, and then a lone boy peering out from beneath an oversized cap and with a determined jut to his chin, pushing a market street barrow. Presumably, thought Arthur, that was Jack Devereux just starting out in the world, embarking on his rags-to-riches success story.

  He was about halfway through the album when he came to a picture that made him pause. Looking back at him was a smiling young woman with a baby swaddled in a lacy shawl in her arms. Beneath the photograph were the words: Maud proudly holding our darling seven-day-old Arthur Ronald Augustine Devereux.

  He stared at the woman as if holding the gaze of the woman who stared steadily back at him. Was this the mother who had comforted him when he’d had a fever, who’d read to him and played with him in a garden? He turned another page and found the same woman standing beside a large pram: Maud takes Arthur for a walk. The following page showed a woman sitting on a tartan rug on an area of grass; on one side of her was a picnic basket and on her lap was a baby. Maud and Arthur enjoying a picnic in Hyde Park, read the caption beneath.

  There followed page after page of mother-and-son photographs, interspersed with several containing Jack Devereux, who occasionally took his turn at holding Arthur. Nobody else featured in the photographs, and it would have been an easy assumption to make that this tight-knit family of three wanted for nothing but themselves.

  By the time he reached the final page of the album, Arthur was left with a disturbing realisation: Jack and Maud had not only adored each other – that much was evident in the happy looks they shared – they had also adored their firstborn child. The discovery should have pleased him, but it didn’t. It made him feel confused and adrift, cut off from the only reality he had ever known. He’d gone from certainty to its polar opposite. All his life he had been convinced that Jack Devereux had cared for no one but himself, yet now it seemed there had been a time when that wasn’t the case.

  He studied the photographs slowly, one by one, then turned to the next album. The first page showed the arrival of Jack and Maud’s second child, Hope. There then followed page after page of her progress, just as his own had been charted. Occasionally he featured in the pictures alongside Hope, but there was no getting away from the fact that he was no longer at the centre of his parents’ affections; Hope had taken that position and pushed him to the sidelines. Where he’d been ever since, he thought grimly.

  He slapped the album shut and tossed it onto the rickety table at his elbow. It had been a mistake coming up here, snooping for verification of something he could never fully know.

  Out of the armchair, and kicking aside the box of photographs and postcards he’d put on the floor, he made his way towards the stairs. He needed air. Fresh air, not this ancient dust-filled air that was suffocating him.

  Cursing himself for giving in to the foolish desire to revisit the past, he slammed the door after him hard. There was nothing useful to be gained from such an exercise. Nothing whatsoever.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  With Dr Garland’s words of warning from yesterday still echoing in her head, Allegra was heeding his advice and resting. Only a short while ago, losing the baby might have seemed like an answer to a prayer, but now wholly unbidden, the pendulum of her emotions had swung and she would do all within her power to keep this child safe. And if that meant doing as Dr Garland said, then so be it.

  However, just as she’d predicted, she had succumbed to boredom, and with Romily’s permission she had been allowed out of bed to rest down here in the garden. The sun felt good on her face. It was good too to listen to the cheerful chattering of the sparrows and the joyous tuneful song of a blackbird in the apple tree. It was strange, and contrary to all that lay ahead for her, but she felt oddly at peace. She no longer cared who knew that she was pregnant; it would all come out eventually anyway. What did it matter what anybody thought of her? Only one thing mattered, and that was her baby’s survival.

  Romily had put forward the idea that Allegra could invent a fictitious Italian husband for herself as a way to give her and the child a veneer of respectability, if she so chose. ‘Not that I’m implying you need to,’ she had added. ‘But you could pretend he’s died very conveniently and no one would be the wiser.’

  The thought had already occurred to Allegra, but it would take effort to maintain the lie while the child was growing up. And what then? Would she then tell the child the truth when she b
elieved he or she was old enough to understand? She knew from her own experience that there were some questions to which there were no answers.

  One thing that her child would never doubt or question would be Allegra’s love. She would also make sure he or she never doubted their place in the world. What was more, Allegra would provide the kind of loving home she herself had craved while growing up. Her inheritance from Uncle Jack would see to that.

  Increasingly she was beginning to revise her opinion of her uncle, and such was the turnaround in her emotions, and the extent of her calm acceptance of her situation, she wished she could thank him for his generosity. He needn’t have left her a penny, but he had, even if it did come with certain stipulations. It was hard to admit, but perhaps Roddy was right; maybe Uncle Jack had cared for her after all. Or perhaps it was regret, a way to atone for how miserable her life had been at Island House.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the harmonious rhythmic cooing of a dove, and before long its comforting sound had almost lulled her to sleep. Suddenly she sensed she wasn’t alone. She opened her eyes and saw Elijah standing in front of her with a wheelbarrow to the side of him.

  ‘I’m sorry if I woke you,’ he said, his voice as soft and soothing as the dove still cooing.

  ‘You didn’t,’ she answered him, shifting her position in the wicker chair to look up at him. ‘Thank you for your message yesterday, that was sweet of you.’

  He shrugged. ‘How are you now?’

  ‘I’m under orders to rest. Which, as you can see, I’m doing to the best of my ability.’

  After glancing around them, he drew closer. ‘Is it the baby?’ he asked, his voice lower than ever.

  She nodded.

  ‘Does anyone else know?’

  ‘Just Dr Garland and Romily. For now. She’s been very good about it.’