House of the Lost

by Sarah Rayne

  Catherine did not want to be present at Monday’s lunch with Mr Kendal and his cousin.

  It was only an informal arrangement, the Bursar had made that clear.

  ‘He’s coming to use the computer,’ she said on Sunday evening, after the Polish nuns had left. ‘Sister Catherine can show him where to switch it on. But I thought it would be courteous to invite him to lunch, we’d all enjoy meeting him again, I daresay. He’s bringing a cousin with him – she’s at Fenn House for the weekend.’

  Sister Agnes, informed there would be two extra for the meal, said her shepherd’s pie was more than equal to the occasion but she would whip up an apple pie by way of pudding. Most men liked apple pie. Reverend Mother thought Sister Miriam could show him their library: they had a couple of signed first editions of George Borrow and the children’s author Anna Sewell, both of whom had lived in Norfolk.

  Catherine was appalled to realize she was considering staging a minor illness in order to miss the whole thing and that she was even subconsciously planning the details of a fictitious stomach bug. She was so disgusted with herself she went along to empty the ortho-bins by way of penance. It was hard work because the bins were large metal containers, and it was disagreeable because the discarded plaster casts were usually grubby and sweaty, but it should help to drive out all thoughts of Theo.

  But it did not. The idea of seeing him again – of showing him the computer’s intricacies in the enforced intimacy of Reverend Mother’s study – made her stomach bounce with such pleasurable apprehension, that at one point she thought she might really have a stomach bug, which would serve her right. She wondered about the cousin he was bringing. ‘Cousin’ might be a polite euphemism, of course, and if you wanted to be facetious you might remind yourself that nine – nearly ten – years ago Theo Kendal had been very partial to cousins, to the extent that he had made his cousin Charmery pregnant. He would never know that on that long-ago afternoon, Catherine had held his son in her arms and felt the warmth of the small body and looked down at the vulnerable little head with the soft dark hair. And then watched the tiny body swept away by the muddy flow of the Chet…

  She still offered prayers for the little lost David on the anniversary of his birth and death: each year she thought how old he would have been, and how he would be celebrating his birthday, going to school when he was five, learning to read and write, exploring the world around him. At other times she thought about him lying in the green depths of the river. Or had his body been washed up somewhere miles away, and found by people who had never heard of the Kendals or Melbray?

  She wondered if any of the other nuns experienced this kind of struggle over a man. It was impossible to imagine Reverend Mother or Sister Miriam or the Bursar lying in bed and staring up into the darkness, with wild thoughts of romance rioting through their minds. No, let’s be honest, thought Catherine unhappily, what I’m imagining is a whole lot stronger than romance. It isn’t moonlight-and-roses stuff, it’s double beds and unclothed bodies. And Theo Kendal would not have given Catherine a second thought. He probably had scores of women in two separate continents panting for his attention, to say nothing of assorted cousins queuing up.

  But when he came into the dining room on Monday, his eyes went round the room as if looking for someone and stopped when they saw her. A smile of unmistakable intimacy lit his face, and he gave her a nod of greeting that seemed to set her apart from the others. Catherine’s heart leapt with delight and she was glad she had fought down the idea of faking illness, but at the same time came the thought that she did not want this, she did not want to feel like this.

  The cousin was introduced as Lesley Kendal. She was a few years younger than Catherine, perhaps twenty-three, and she had short hair, the colour of autumn leaves, and wide-apart eyes. She was wearing a long green velvet coat, with, beneath it, an ankle-length black skirt and sweater with a rope of amber beads wound round her neck. Every time she looked at Theo her eyes seemed to take colour from the amber. Catherine could not decide if she regarded him as a much-loved surrogate elder brother or a lover. Theo’s hair was slightly damp although Catherine did not think it was raining. Perhaps they had been making wild love all morning and reluctantly broken off because they were committed to eat shepherd’s pie with a crowd of nuns, and he had taken a shower before coming out.

  She listened quietly to Reverend Mother enquiring how Mr Kendal’s work was progressing. He did not say much, other than that it had taken an unexpected turn and sometimes an author had to sit back and give the characters their heads and see where they took the story. Sister Miriam for once joined in with the discussion, offering some opinions about modern novelists which Mr Kendal seemed to find interesting.

  The Bursar wanted to know what work Lesley Kendal did, and on hearing she had recently left the Slade, said they had a few paintings at St Luke’s. Nothing valuable, she didn’t think, but Miss Kendal might like to look at them while her cousin pursued his research on the computer?

  ‘I’d like that very much,’ said Lesley. ‘All paintings are interesting and this part of the country has a terrific heritage. Alfred Munnings and Cotman. And Turner, of course. So I’d love to see your paintings.’

  Catherine saw Theo glance at Lesley with a brief smile as if he was proud of her for making such a very good answer. Was it an avuncular smile – an older cousin, indulgently pleased with a younger one? Or was it the smile of a lover, proud of his lady’s knowledge and warmth?

  After lunch Catherine was expected to take Theo to Reverend Mother’s study where the computer lived. She booted it up and explained which internet provider they used, and which email programme. He didn’t really need her help, of course, but Catherine sat next to him for a few minutes, watching his hands operate the keyboard. After a moment, she said, ‘If you’re all right now, I’ll leave you to get on with your research. Feel free to print anything you want. The printer’s on that table.’

  ‘Thanks, I might do that. My writing’s practically illegible.’

  ‘Is there anything else you need?’ Let him say there is, she thought. Let me have a bit longer sitting with him like this.

  But he said, ‘No, nothing. Thanks for this.’ The smile showed, briefly.

  I was wrong about that moment of intimacy earlier, thought Catherine, but as she got up to go, Theo said, ‘It’s been nice seeing you again, Catherine – sorry, I probably shouldn’t call you that.’

  ‘It’s my name. These days most of us keep our own names.’

  ‘Well, then, Catherine, will you call at Fenn some time for another cup of coffee?’

  Catherine stared at him and felt the telltale colour flood her face. I’ll have to refuse, she thought. I daren’t accept. Probably he doesn’t mean it. Even if he does… I really will have to refuse.

  ‘If it wouldn’t interrupt your work, I’d like to call.’

  ‘Good. Any morning is fine. I’m not being polite, you know.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m never polite,’ he said, and this time the smile was a mischievous grin.

  Catherine, her heart racing, the treacherous blood singing through her veins, managed to get outside the door.

  Theo had no idea why he had issued that invitation to Sister Catherine, or why he had used her name in that way. But he had the impression that she was a good listener, and he had suddenly felt a strong wish to pour out everything that was happening at Fenn House.

  He brought his mind back to the task in hand, consulted his notes, and began typing in search requests. Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu came under this heading as well, although there would be no shortage of information about those two. As he worked, St Luke’s and its inhabitants ceased to exist for him. He travelled to a country with a violent and vivid history, and to an era when an iron dictator had held its people in poverty and fear.

  There was a wealth of material about the years of Ceauşescu’s reign – which had begun in 1965 and ended on Christmas Day 1989 – and also o
f the years leading up to his election as leader. Matthew and Mara’s years, thought Theo. There were also several first-hand accounts written by prisoners who had been incarcerated in Pitesti Gaol or in the equally grim-sounding Jilava Gaol, and he read these carefully. They were written with varying degrees of literacy by people from widely different walks of life. Some of the automatic translations read a bit oddly, but the emotion and the suffering came through so strongly that Theo felt his throat constrict with the pity and horror of it. One account, apparently an extract from a book published by a survivor of Jilava, told of the physical and mental torture inside the prison.

  They called it by many names but, boiled down to the bones, it was brainwashing. They employed torture to remove our real natures and beliefs and loyalties. One of the names they used for it was ‘re-education’, but in fact they were systematically turning us into robots and making informers of us. We had to work for exhausting periods doing humiliating tasks – I often had to clean the floors with a rag clenched between my teeth. Our food pans were seldom washed, and sometimes we were forced to eat from them with our hands bound – that doesn’t sound much, but to kneel down and lick food off a dish like an animal is degrading.

  I protested, and was punished. They shut me into a tiny coffin-shaped room with a bright light permanently on, making it impossible to sleep. After three days, I managed to reach the light bulb and unscrew it – I was exhausted and dizzy; I thought I would give anything for a couple of hours’ sleep. But they came in before I could replace the bulb, and I was punished even more. They tied my hands behind my back, and pushed me to a sitting position on the floor, leaning against the cold stone wall. Then they jerked my lips wide open and pushed the glass light bulb straight into my mouth, with the narrow brass end jutting out and the wide bulbous part scraping against my teeth. I couldn’t move. If I tried to dislodge the bulb it would have splintered in my mouth and glass pieces would have gone down my throat.

  They left me for an hour – I knew it was that because I counted the seconds and added them into minutes. The darkness was an added torture because earlier I had craved darkness in order to sleep. I could not sleep now. After only a few minutes my jaw ached intolerably with the strain of keeping my mouth open and still, and saliva ran from the corners of my lips. The pain was so fierce I wanted to cry with the misery of it.

  When finally they came back and removed the bulb, I broke down, sobbing. I was so grateful for the ending of the pain, I confessed to whatever they wanted to hear. Years afterwards, trying to rebuild my life, I learned that the light-bulb treatment was an old Nazi trick.

  It was the most detailed account Theo found from inside any of the gaols, although there were several others, brief and scrappy in the main, but all telling of physical and mental torture: sparse food, cramped and dirty cells, medical attention which consisted of the dispensing of an aspirin or strychnine shots.

  As he read, an image formed in his mind of the woman in Andrei’s photograph. Had she existed in real life, that dark-haired rebel, who had been Matthew’s mother? He tried reminding himself that Elisabeth had been forged out of his own imagination, but it did not help. Matthew and Annaleise had been forged from his imagination as well, but they were also real people. He was starting to have the feeling that Elisabeth Valk was real as well, and that if he stretched out his hand he would feel her take it. He began to read a set of documents grouped under the heading of ‘Student Movements in Communist Romania’. The translations were heavy and confusing and by the time he reached the fourth one he was thinking it was a blind alley. He would check this last account, however.

  The final document was not a blind alley at all. Rearranged into an English structure of sentences, it read:

  In the mid-1950s, events in Poland, which led to the elimination of that country’s Stalinist leadership, provoked unrest among university students in Eastern bloc countries.

  A clandestine group created links between all the faculties, with a view to organizing protests, and on 28 October 1956 a radio station calling itself ‘Romania of the Future: The Voice of Resistance’ began broadcasting. Not all the locations of this group were found, but one was certainly in Yugoslavia. The station, considered a nationalist one, presented the students’ demands and incited people to rebel.

  A radio station, thought Theo, recalling his story. ‘The October Group calling,’ she had said. ‘Elisabeth Valk here, wishing a very good evening to all my friends…’ That beautiful voice challenging and defying, and calling people to a rally. But she’s imaginary, he thought angrily. I gave her a beautiful voice and dark hair and eyes – she’s my creation, she’s not real! None of them are real, they can’t be. He read on.

  The October Group, which was behind so many protests and also much of the illegal broadcasting, was to last far longer than the Securitate could ever have visualized.

  Oh God, thought Theo, staring at the screen. The October Group. He plunged back in.

  Even in the mid-1960s, the October Group was still broadcasting from the country then known as Yugoslavia. Some of the ringleaders were caught, and one of the stations in a small village outside Krivaca, just across Romania’s south-west border, was summarily closed down.

  Theo’s mind had spun into whirling confusion. Krivaca, he thought. That’s where I sent Zoia, Annaleise and Elena Ceauşescu that morning. That bleak frozen grey morning, when they drove across the border and found the thin tall house and dragged Elisabeth out and took her to Pitesti Gaol. He had never heard of Krivaca – he had simply looked it up in an atlas. He might easily have picked any of a dozen places near the border.

  A precise list of the people involved in organizing protests is difficult to reconstruct. The primary sources are transcripts of the trials that followed the crushing of the various student movements and groups such as the October Group. But a list is appended here for the researcher or enquirer.

  The names were set out alphabetically, but her name seemed to leap from the page and deal a blow straight into his eyes.

  Elisabeth Valk. Incarcerated in Pitesti Gaol, November 1965, for crimes against the State. No record of a trial exists.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Theo sat back and stared at the glowing screen of the monitor. So Elisabeth was real. She had lived – might still be living – and she had been a rebel, responsible for broadcasting against the communist rulers under whose sway she lived. She had risked losing her husband and small son but she had taken the gamble and it had failed. She had been caught and taken to Pitesti Gaol and, in the enlightened twentieth century, the supposed era of justice and fairness, she had not even been given a trial to establish what she had done.

  Moving like an automaton he made notes of dates and times, and even found a map reference for Krivaca that might be useful and jotted this down as well, wondering for a wild moment if he would end up travelling to Romania. He was just thinking it was more or less on the normal holiday route now, when there was an apologetic tap at the door and the Bursar put her head round.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, but Sister Miriam and I are taking your cousin along to the old wing to look at some of the paintings stored there.’

  Theo was so deep in Elisabeth’s world that for a moment he found it difficult to focus on what the Bursar was saying. With a massive mental effort, he came back to the present, and said, ‘That’s fine. She’ll enjoy it.’

  ‘There’s quite a lot of stuff, most of it fairly old, but we used some for a display for our centenary celebrations last year illustrating the history of this house and so on. Quite an excitement for us all. Oh, and Miss Kendal says don’t forget her train’s at six. She’ll meet you downstairs in half an hour. If you’re not there, she’ll just go back to Fenn House. She says you gave her a spare key.’

  ‘I did. But I won’t be much longer – I’ve been at least an hour over the time I envisaged, anyway.’

  ‘You’re welcome here for as long as you want. Come again if you need to do any more r
esearch. In fact, come back to see us anyway,’ she said.

  Theo returned to his research about Elisabeth, but it was almost as if the small interruption had broken a spell, or sealed up a portal into the past. There was nothing else about her, although he found some useful background details: descriptions of Ceauşescu’s iron rule, and of the State orphanages that had sprung up to deal with the flood of unwanted children – again, the television images rose up before Theo’s eyes.

  A report in the Guardian’s online archives, dated 2006, stated unequivocally that children had been used by Ceauşescu’s Intelligence Service. They had to report to their Securitate handlers on their friends’ and families’ opinions on the Communist Party, on whether they listened to Western radio stations, or even if they made jokes about Ceauşescu. In some cases, the children had been blackmailed over trivial childish sins – things they had done wrong at school, tiny offences they had nervously committed. Some had been threatened that their parents or brothers and sisters would suffer if they did not do what was wanted. Theo remembered how he had described the children in Matthew’s school being set a weekend composition to describe where they lived and the people around them. Had that been a sly ploy to get information about the ordinary men and women in the outlying districts, or had it come from Theo’s own mind?

  He sat back massaging his aching neck muscles, then seeing the half hour was up, turned off the computer and shuffled his notes into some sort of order, along with a handful of pages he had printed out. Lesley was not in the main hall, and Theo was just thinking he would have to find someone to direct him to the old wing, when she came down the stairs with the Bursar.

  ‘Sorry, Theo, were you waiting?’ said Lesley. ‘I had to go back for my coat. Bursar, thanks so much – I’ve loved seeing the paintings. Sister Miriam’s very knowledgeable, isn’t she?’