The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  ‘Bed – in there,’ said the man Tarber. He pointed to a door in the bows.

  It was little more than a cupboard and unnaturally cold. It smelt of fish, river, mud, tar and fish again, or worse. There was a bunk against the bulkhead with some old horsehair blankets and a striped pillow with a large yellow stain. She looked at it and looked back at Mr Tarber. What was she supposed to do now?

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘this is your home for a while.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Food and drink,’ he told her, unloading the bag he carried, ‘will be provided. This is not just a bed and breakfast job. This is all in. For starters, here’s bread, two litres of water and an orange. I had to lure the orange from Mrs Tarber. Think yourself lucky. There’s a slop pail in the cupboard for your necessaries and a rainwater tank above for you to wash with.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay. There’s your six pounds back and twenty for expenses. Suit yourself. People normally stay for a week. When they feel refreshed, they tell me, off they go. I visit every day. There’s no charge. Folk would pay a fortune for a location like this.’ He waved his fist at the porthole.

  Marie looked out on a vista of purulent marsh and distant chimneys. Chink-chink-chink went the rigging.

  ‘Right then,’ said Mr Tarber. ‘I’ll be off now. Just one piece of advice. If anyone comes by – not that they will but if they do – keep your mouth shut. You’re having a holiday in a friend’s boat you met in a pub … the friend, not the boat. You know what happens round here to blabbermouths, don’t you?’

  She could imagine.

  ‘They get to be blubbermouths,’ he said, unnecessarily.

  You could see it was a joke he had used before. She watched him go, without emotion, and just as emotionlessly she sat down at the table, pulling her coat about her and shivering. She sat at the table for an hour and then went into the cupboard, shivering, and lay down among the fishy army blankets.

  Time passed. Night came. She started coughing. It was morning again. She drank some water, used the bucket, tried to eat some bread, lay down. It was night; she was coughing.

  Faces, Brickville, coughing, hot, cold, day, night, dark, dark … nothing…

  ***

  She woke to see the face of a gentle middle-aged grey-haired man looking down at her intently. When he saw her open her eyes, he smiled. She thought she recognised him. A hymn they used to sing at school came to her mind.

  ‘“And in the dawn”,’ she said, ‘“those angel faces smile, which we have loved long since, and lost awhile.”’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man.

  ‘Not,’ she corrected him, ‘that I have loved you long since. But I suppose you may be an angel and I think I know you from somewhere.’

  There was a sound from beside the man. A woman in white appeared. ‘Shh,’ she said.

  ‘Another angel?’

  You have been ill.

  ‘I have been ternimal,’ she said. She was so weak her mouth wouldn’t work properly.

  ‘She is still very ill,’ said the white angel. ‘She must not talk too much.’

  ‘I am Felix Middleburg,’ said the grey angel. ‘We met on an airplane. You had my card in your pocket. It was your only identification. You are not in heaven … or the other place … you are in the Abbotsbury Clinic in London.’

  ‘Oh.’ The import of what he’d said slowly sank in.

  She suddenly struggled, trying to get up. ‘My baby … I…’

  ‘You must go now,’ the nurse said to Middleburg, hurrying up again.

  She gave Marie something cloudy to drink in a little beaker.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the grey angel, ‘it’s all taken care of. Rest now.’

  ***

  The room smelt of polished furniture, hyacinths and applewood smoke from the fire. A pale sunlight woke richness from the Persian carpet that lay across the parquet floor.

  Marie, feeling rather precarious on her first day downstairs, wobbled towards the chair by the fire that Mr Middleburg indicated for her. She sank down gratefully.

  ‘Now,’ said he, ‘it is time we had a little talk.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Marie. ‘I still don’t understand…’

  ‘I will explain what I can. First of all, you have had both a breakdown and pneumonia. Either of them is bad enough. Together, of course, they could have been fatal. Luckily you were spotted by an alert security guard who found my number on you.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘No buts … I’m telling you what I know. The loss of your baby obviously precipitated the crisis, but I’ll say it had been building up for some time.’

  ‘But I didn’t lose my baby. I didn’t.’

  ‘That’s what the doctors told me you’d say. Think about it. Are you sure you had a baby, a baby that lived?’

  ‘She cried. She made an ‘ooo’ face. When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘This may take longer than we thought. Try to remember.’

  ‘I remember being so sad.’

  ‘Because the baby was dead?’

  ‘Because they took her away.’

  ‘Who took her away?’

  ‘Mrs Izzard. The man with the fist.’

  ‘We can trace none of these people.’

  She was beginning to think that she really had been mad.

  ‘What about the Time Shop? Time Out of Mind?’

  ‘Gone, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Gone?’ What could he mean? There was no sanity anywhere.

  ‘It burned down. The owner was killed. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Ohhh.’ She put her head in her hands and shuddered.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t disturb yourself. They think it was the fire that was the trigger – distorted things in your mind – made you run off. Perhaps you felt guilty, even.’

  ‘Guilty?’

  ‘About leaving him. Guilt is a great distorter.’

  She didn’t know any more.

  ‘Poor Ivo.’

  Mr Middleburg put his arm around her comfortingly. It was a long time since anyone had shown her so much kindness. She turned and held on to his hand, confused at finding such openness and security at last. He was like the father she’d never had.

  ‘And what about the … other man?’ she asked presently.

  ‘You kept talking about that,’ he said. ‘What other man?’

  ‘Mr Brickville, my guardian,’ she told him. ‘He came to the shop. He was going to take me away.’

  ‘I know of a Brickville, of course,’ he said. ‘He’s quite a well-known name in the City. Dry old stick. Saw him last week.’

  ‘You … can’t have done. I struck him. He fell down. I ran away.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s all part of this problem of yours.’

  ‘I did. I hit him.’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying you’re wrong. Life is, after all, an illusion in itself. Maybe what you say happened; maybe it didn’t happen. Whatever the truth is, it was real to you. The important thing now is for you to get better. I will talk to Brickville. I will tell him you need rest and that you appear to have a deep-seated aversion to him.’

  ‘I don’t appear to have. I have. I don’t want to see him,’ she said. ‘Please don’t bring him here.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he told her. ‘I shall look after everything. You are to stay here with me until you are completely recovered. And now I think it is time you went upstairs again. We don’t want to overdo things on your first day.’

  As he helped her up from her chair, she gave him a little kiss of gratitude.

  ‘What was that for?’ he asked.

  ‘Saving my life, I think,’ she said and then, remembering the burden that she carried and knowing that Brickville was bound to tell him who she was, ‘for what it’s worth.’

  ‘It’s worth a very great deal,�
�� he told her, putting a finger to her lips.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘Just one.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘My name.’

  A look of concern crossed his face. ‘Have you lost your memory?’

  She shook her head. ‘I am Marie Sinclair, but I have another name … my father’s name.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  She could hardly bring herself to say it. At the same time, she felt she was emerging as something fragile and new. To shed a name is to shed oneself. It was butterfly time.

  ‘Lavell. I am Marie … Marie Lavell.’

  ***

  Felix, as she soon started to call him, was a charming and cultivated host. He was, it was clear, a man of immense wealth, and he carried his fortune elegantly.

  The weather was warmer now, and though he did not try to make her do anything more than her strength would allow, he began to take her with him on little visits to places of interest: Glynde, Bodiam Castle, the Brighton Pavilion.

  The house where she had been taken by him was called Hocking Hall. It was in Sussex, near the ancient town of Lewes. It incorporated a mediaeval building, situated in a pleasant spot between the Downs and a small river which had been dammed to make a lake. Hocking Lake trout were widely praised. Earlier, he had been obliged to leave for a couple of weeks to fly to New York but now his business affairs had been settled for the summer and he could – as he said – devote himself to pleasure. His pleasure, it seemed, was to be in her company.

  It turned out that he had a ready wit. He was always smiling, making little jokes, telling stories to entertain her. The difference between her surroundings and her previous experience was so great that she sometimes thought it had indeed been a terrible black dream before, a land of shadows which, by some miracle, she had now escaped. Time slid by as smoothly as Sussex butter melting over mushrooms.

  To test her luck, she ran away one day, though to say run would be putting it too limberly. She was still weak and had passing fits of confusion as to who she was, where she was, what she was meant to be doing; though these occurred at rarer intervals. Anyway, she walked away and made for the village of Hocking and then took a bus to Lewes without telling anyone. As it happened she grew quickly tired and, happening to see Mrs Beckwith the housekeeper coming out of the butchers, she hitched a lift back to the house with her.

  No one seemed to have noticed that she had gone, or minded in the least, except that Felix, who had been doing complicated business things with his private telex machine and his secretary, fussed about her overdoing things. Thereafter she never even thought about escape. Twice she went to London with him in the Bentley to see her specialist. Each time, the doctor told her that she was slowly improving, that she must concentrate on the future and forget the past.

  It had soon become obvious that Felix knew about her background: her father, her whole life – if not all the events after Time Out of Mind, which everyone seemed to agree were unknowable.

  ‘I had a long talk with Brickville,’ he’d told her. ‘The old stick was quite upset when I told him what a dreadful guardian he had been. Imagine giving those dry old bones the job of looking after a young girl! Your aunts must have been out of their minds.’

  ‘It wasn’t them, I think,’ said Marie. ‘There was something about a Trust.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll get to the bottom of that,’ said Felix, ‘never fear. You’re of age now. You have a right to know what the situation is.’

  She walked over to the window and looked out at the clouds building up over the Downs.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind my…’ she started to say it but couldn’t finish.

  ‘Mind? Mind what?’

  ‘Me being the daughter of…’

  ‘Your father? I wouldn’t mind if you were Hitler’s child,’ he said.

  She kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’d like to know about the Trust,’ she told him, knowing it would please him.

  Felix rubbed his cheek thoughtfully as she left the room. Yes, she was mending fast.

  ***

  The months passed slowly in the manor house which was the way Marie liked it. Sometimes Felix was there, sometimes he flew off to America, Japan, Italy, Australia.

  Autumn came and a cold winter followed, although it was snug and warm in the house. A somewhat muted but charming little Christmas led into the new year. Here, too, there was a well-stocked library and Marie read a great deal – almost everything of Dickens, most of Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Patrick Hamilton, Daphne du Maurier, George Orwell – and slept and slowly recovered. The cold lasted into March but then it was daffodil time and the gardens were full of them, lighting the old house with flowershine. Marie started to take walks, first in the garden with its lawn and arbours, and then into the woods and fields on unfrequented footpaths. When Felix was absent, Mr and Mrs Beckwith looked after her discreetly, kindly. By the time summer came, it was considered that she was completely better, though she still preferred not to go too far from the place she had started to know, and she felt no inclination to discover new people.

  For her twentieth birthday in June, Felix planned a small dinner party in her honour. To her horror, he suggested inviting Mr Brickville.

  ‘I couldn’t see him,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘We have to lay this ghost to rest sometime, you know.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘I shall be there. It is important that we have a meeting with him. We must talk about your future. He cannot do anything to you now.’

  ‘I don’t need a future. Can’t I stay here?’

  ‘Everyone needs a future. Even the future has a future.’

  She thought he might have given in, but he was not to be turned. In due course, Brickville arrived. She saw him step out of the Bentley that had been sent to fetch him from the station in Lewes. It was the same man, the same slightly crouched bearing, even the same hat.

  She had, in a perverse way, been hoping that she really had obliterated him in London, that there was some imposter masquerading as him, but here he was – unmistakably Brickville. She really had gone mad. They’d called it a breakdown but there was madness in the family, wasn’t there? There were many ways it could break out; my father’s house has many mansions…

  She stayed in her room until the first guests began to arrive. Felix came up to fetch her down.

  ‘The truth is that really everyone is mad,’ she said. ‘It’s just that some people are better at hiding it than others.’

  ‘No one frightening is coming,’ Felix had told her. ‘Just some neighbours who want to meet you.’

  She put on a red dress and some pearls Felix said had belonged to his mother. Her hair shone in the lamplight as she came down the stairs. Everyone turned. She looked very pale, very beautiful.

  ‘Well,’ said one of the men, a jolly red-faced fellow who did something prosperous in Brighton, ‘I wish I’d met you before. I wouldn’t have got married to this old cow.’

  His wife kicked him and smiled at Marie. ‘Happy Birthday,’ she said.

  Marie smiled back. They gave her presents. She thanked them. Her eyes kept turning towards Brickville who stood by the fire talking to a woman in blue. At length Felix led her over.

  ‘Say hello to your old guardian then, Marie.’

  Marie walked over, trembling. She held out her hand without looking. ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Brickville took her hand in his dry paws. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘How time flies! I remember you when you were just a slip of a thing. Injurious time, I think Shakespeare called it.’

  It was unmistakeable. He had not forgotten the clock shop. She mumbled something back.

  ‘I gather we’re going to have a little talk tomorrow.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, I’ll say no more – except to give you what after all is rightfully yours.’

  He handed over a small, dispiriting looking par
cel wrapped in dun-coloured paper. ‘Open it, my dear.’

  ‘Perhaps later.’

  ‘Now.’ He put his skinny hand on hers and she shrank back. Felix looked up and started to walk over.

  ‘What is it, Marie?’

  ‘A present from…’

  ‘Don’t you want to open it?’

  ‘Now. Open it now,’ repeated Brickville. ‘Just a little keepsake. It’ll go with your dress.’

  Everybody was looking. Slowly Marie unwrapped the parcel. Inside was a small jewel box. She knew that whatever was inside was going to be bad but she had to open it. There was no drawing back. Slowly, she lifted the lid. Inside, on a little bed of red velvet, was a signet ring, its ruby flashing opulently in the firelight.