by Helen Grant
There is nothing to prove that these are from my mother, I reminded myself. ‘Edith’ may really be Edith, some friend of Grandmother’s. These letters prove nothing.
I began to stuff all the papers and boxes back into the safe, not caring how untidily I did it. One of the blocks of banknotes had broken apart and the notes had fluttered everywhere, like leaves torn from a book I did not know how to read. Most people kept their money in banks, I knew that now, thanks to Tom. When had Grandmother taken all hers out, and how, and why? It came to me again that I could never ask her anything now. Some things would never be known.
I gathered up all the notes into an untidy stack and as I picked up the last one, I saw something gleaming on the floorboards, a small fragment of gold against the dusty brown wood.
That key again.
I put out my hand and picked it up, turning it over in my fingers.
Gold.
Something was prickling in the back of mind. Even in the poor light of a grey morning, the key was very shiny, and as I turned it over the light hit it, so that it briefly flashed gold.
All of a sudden it came back to me, the moment when I came walking down through the forest towards the old mausoleum and saw a flash of gold at the front of it. I remembered the bright sunlight, the cool bite of the air, the crackle of twigs under my feet, and the scent of the wild garlic in the basket I was carrying. I remembered how it had made me feel to see that tiny flare of gold: that something was right, that it was a kind of sign. Now I thought it was telling me something very different indeed.
A loud knock at the front door made me jump almost out of my skin.
Tom.
I had not heard the motorcycle coming, so engrossed was I in contemplating the key and its probable meaning. All of a sudden my heart was beating with a guilty wildness, as though I had been caught in some terrible act. I shoved the key into the bodice of my dress, stuffed the last few notes into the safe and swung the door shut. Then I ran for the front hall. My cheeks were burning and I prayed Tom would not see from my face that something was amiss.
When I opened the door, he was standing there with his arms full of supplies he had brought for me, and a wary smile on his face, as though he was not entirely certain how he would be received. He needn’t have worried; I was so concerned not to give anything away that I greeted him overenthusiastically, flinging my arms around him. A box of tea he had balanced on top of the other things hit the black and white tiles and crumpled.
“Hey,” said Tom, but he looked pleased. When he had taken the things into the kitchen and put them down on the table, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me. I kissed him back, feeling the familiar heat that seemed to run through me whenever we touched each other, an almost painfully intense sensation that made me feel reckless when I was with Tom, and restless when I wasn’t. But as I leaned against him, I felt something cold pressing into my flesh over my heart.
The key.
The realisation had a dampening effect. I drew back a little. We broke the kiss; the moment was gone.
I had forgotten about the cup of tea I had taken into the library. By now it would be stone cold anyway, exhaling all its heat into the frigid air. I brewed some more for me and Tom, and finally forced myself to eat a slice of bread and jam. We talked a little, Tom about his parents, I about the jobs I needed to do around the house and the vegetable garden, but the talk was half-hearted. We both knew what we were going to do that day. It was a strange thought, that we would be searching so carefully for something we desperately hoped not to find.
All the time, the key lay in the bosom of my dress, over my heart. Even after it had warmed to body temperature from contact with my skin, I imagined that I could still feel it, corpse-cold, pressing into my flesh. I said nothing about it to Tom.
And so began a very long day. Tom suggested that we begin in the attic and work downwards, which seemed as good an idea as any – assuming that you were not hiding a key to somewhere else entirely. I was hideously conscious of that as we climbed the stairs. Why didn’t I say anything then? I considered it, and I didn’t decide not to tell him, but I wanted to think about it a little longer. I suppose I was already convinced in my own mind that we would find my father there, in the mausoleum. Perhaps I wanted to steel myself to find out, or perhaps I simply wanted to put off having to face the truth.
Tom was carrying a lantern so that we could get into the very darkest corners. If I had thought that we might really force open one of the locked trunks and find the decomposed remains of a human being curled up in it, I would have drawn back from the task. But in my heart, I was sure we wouldn’t. I probably amazed Tom with my boldness, the way I went about pulling the dust sheets off mirrors and paintings, opening boxes and looking inside the larger pieces of furniture, seemingly unafraid of what I would find. Soon my hands and my dress were grimy with dust, and I suspected my hair was powdered with it, too.
It took a long time to cover the whole attic. We found two locked trunks that had never been opened in all the time I could remember, and we had to go downstairs to look for tools so that Tom could break the locks. One of them proved to be full of monogrammed bed linen that smelled so musty that I would as soon have wrapped myself in someone else’s winding-sheet as use it on my bed. The other contained furs. I plunged my hands in amongst them, and the feeling of the dead fur against my skin was strange, almost caressing. I burrowed down as far as the bottom of the trunk but there was nothing else in there.
Eventually we decided that we had spent enough time in the attic; there was nothing to find. We descended a floor, and I showed Tom the entrance to one of the servants’ staircases. After that we spent an hour going up and down all of the hidden staircases and along the passages. Tom was fascinated by the idea of being able to move about the house unseen, and wanted to see every inch, but the passages were very cobwebby and I soon became tired of picking the gossamer strands out of my hair. We found nothing, of course. I had been through these passages myself before and I knew we would not find anything.
Then we began on the first floor rooms. By now it was afternoon, and more overcast outdoors than before; the windows showed a grim vista of grey sky and dark clouds.
“We should have done the gardens first,” said Tom, looking out. “It’s going to rain.” He made a face. “It’s going to rain tomorrow, too. Dad was moaning about it this morning.”
I went and stood by him. He was right; already the first drops of rain were landing on the glass. I thought to myself that perhaps we might not look outdoors at all, not if it settled in to rain for days on end.
It won’t rain forever, I reminded myself. But it would be a reprieve.
Still I kept my own counsel. By late afternoon, we were both too tired to carry on. If it had been up to me, we would have given up hours before, but Tom was still tormented by the urgency to know the truth. It was not unreasonable for him to want to know what he had become mixed up in, I thought, but still I did not tell him about the key. I was acutely aware of it, still tucked down inside the bodice of my dress.
I don’t need to tell him I hid it, I said to myself. If I told him my idea tomorrow, or some other day, I could say I had only just come across it.
I knew that would be lying but still I comforted myself with the thought.
When Tom left, he promised to come back the following afternoon. He looked so discouraged that it was on the tip of my tongue to say: If my father is anywhere at Langlands, I know where it will be. But I didn’t say it. I kissed him goodbye and clung to him for a moment, and then I let him go and stepped back, and the key was still hidden in my dress.
After the sound of the motorcycle had diminished in the distance until it merged with the hiss of falling rain, I went indoors. I walked down the passage to the kitchen and sat down at the scrubbed pine table where I had sat so many times in the past, watching Grandmother make pastry or
slice vegetables. I slid my fingers into the front of my dress and retrieved the key, now blood-warm. I put it down on the table top, the blade pointing dagger-like towards me, and stared at it for a long, long time, as the sun sank in the sky.
The following morning it was raining heavily when I got up. It was late; when Grandmother was alive we had always risen early, but now it was nearly noon. I dressed hastily but instead of going straight downstairs, I went down the passage and into one of the other bedrooms, the one whose ceiling had been damaged that night the storm brought down the chimney. I went over to the window and looked out. With the rain running down the glass in streams, it was difficult to see anything clearly, but I knew what lay in the direction of my gaze: the old stone mausoleum. I stood there for a while looking out and chewing my lip.
I could go by myself. The key was still on the kitchen table. I had not put it back inside my dress; somehow, I did not like the idea of it next to my skin again. I could very easily pick it up, slip on a coat, let myself out of the house and go to look at the mausoleum. If I was wrong about the key, I would not have raised Tom’s hopes of finding something.
In the end, though, I didn’t do it. If the truth was buried out there, did I want to know? I walked around in a dream, thinking about that question. When Grandmother had left me and never returned, I had known that something must have happened to her, but there had been a very great difference between believing that and knowing it for certain. Now I thought perhaps there was a limit to the amount of truth that any one person could stand.
I put my hands to my head, which was beginning to feel as though it would split open with the terrible thoughts that throbbed through it. I had no answer to any of the questions that tormented me.
I was still thinking about it when Tom arrived in the afternoon; in fact, I had not come to a decision. But it was taken out of my hands. Tom came into the kitchen to warm himself up, water dripping from his clothes, and the first thing he saw was the key, still lying on the kitchen table. I had forgotten to hide it.
“Is that the key from the safe?”
I nodded, my throat suddenly too tight to speak.
Tom leaned over the table and picked it up. Then his blue-green gaze was on me, serious and urgent.
“Why is it here? Did you remember what it was for?”
“Yes.”
“To do with your dad?”
I looked at him in silence for a moment, struggling within myself. I didn’t want to say yes, not while I didn’t even want to think yes. “Maybe,” I said at last. “There’s a place in the grounds. A sort of...it’s a mausoleum. You know, a burying place. I think the key is from that.”
Tom was staring at me. “Why didn’t you say before?”
“I only thought of it today,” I said, and felt the blood come to my face at the lie. “I’ve never been inside. I’ve hardly even been near it, my whole life. Grandmother didn’t like me to – she said it was disrespectful to the dead.”
I stopped, realising what I had said. Tom saw it too; I could tell by the expression on his face, the reaction that rippled across it. The next thing that he would say for sure would be: Let’s go and look, right now.
“Tom,” I blurted out, “I’m not sure I want to look.”
Tom must have seen the anguish on my face. He put his arms around me, pulling me close, and held me for a little while. It would have been comforting except he still had the key in his fingers; I felt it pressing into me. “You wouldn’t have to look,” he said, into my hair. “I can go.”
“But I don’t know if I want to know,” I said.
“I think...” He paused. “I think we have to know, Ghost.”
I pushed my head against his shoulder, feeling the dampness of his jacket against my cheek. It was made of leather, for riding on the motorcycle, and it felt like cold wet skin.
“It’s pouring with rain,” I said.
“I know,” said Tom. “It’s only water.”
He gave me a little squeeze, and then he let me go.
I watched him refasten his jacket.
“Is it far, this place?”
“No,” I said.
He looked at me. “Will you show me?”
I let out a long breath like a sigh. “Yes.”
I went to the peg by the back door and took down a coat, a long one made of waxed cotton that would keep off the worst of the rain. I didn’t look at Tom while I put it on, my hands trembling a little as I did it up, taking my time as though I could put off what was to come.
Tom came over. “I mean it,” he said. “You don’t have to go. I can do it.”
I shook back the hair that had fallen over my face and made myself look him in the eye.
“I’ll come,” I said. I took his hand, and his skin was as cold as the leather of his jacket had been. It was like holding someone who had drowned. I shivered.
Tom slipped the key into his pocket and together we left the house. I could hear the rain before we even stepped out of the front door and into the stone porch. Over the hissing of its falling there was the more intrusive sound of water pouring out of a broken gutter and spattering onto the gravel. I didn’t bother suggesting we waited for it to stop. I knew this kind of rain; it would keep coming down for hours.
The moment we stepped out of the shelter of the porch it was like being pelted. Neither of us had a hood and before we had crossed the gravel both of us were blinking water out of our eyes, our hair plastered to our heads. I could taste it on my lips.
We rounded the corner of the house and crossed a patch of lawn that was becoming smaller every year as the overhanging trees encroached. Then we stepped into the forest, and the hiss of the rain became a rattle as it hit the trees above us.
We had to move slowly. I was used to going about in the forest; I stepped high over tangled brambles and my tread was light. Tom stumbled over knots of undergrowth, and his progression was accompanied by a percussion of broken twigs. We said very little to each other.
I saw the mausoleum before Tom did. The day was so dismal that its grey walls almost faded into the gloom under the trees.
“There,” I said, and I heard Tom swear under his breath. Then we began to clamber over fallen trunks and the damp and rotting remains of weeds, until we were almost close enough to touch the cold grey stone.
Now we could see that there was a grey metal door set into the front of the building. The metal was dimpled and speckled with darker patches so that from a distance it blended into the stone around it. The only thing that stood out to the eye was the gold-coloured padlock that fastened it. Today there was not enough sunshine to make it flash out golden fire as it had the day I had gone hunting for mushrooms, but it still gleamed.
Tom had the key in his fingers. I wanted to say, stop, wait a moment, let me think about this, but he had already taken the padlock in his other hand and was trying to fit the key into it. The lock was modern, unlike the rest of the mausoleum, but it had hardly been used in however long it had been there; I could not remember Grandmother ever going to the old mausoleum. Tom struggled for what seemed a very long time, while I bit my lip and my heart began to gallop in my chest. Perhaps it won’t open. Perhaps it isn’t even the right key. But at last he managed to get the key into the lock, and turn it. Even then, the padlock didn’t spring open; he had to prise it open with his fingers. Carefully, he detached it from the door and offered it to me, the key still protruding from the lock. I shook my head. Tom looked at me for a moment, and then he slipped it into his own pocket.
He didn’t ask me whether I was ready. It would have been pointless; I would never be ready. Instead, he seized the metal door handle and tried the door to see which way it would swing. There was no inward movement at all. He tried to pull it towards him, and it stuck on the tangle of plants and soil at the foot of it. Tom began to drag his heel along the ground, carving a f
urrow so that the door had room to swing out.
I watched him with a cold feeling of dread. I wanted to grab his arm and pull him away from the door, to stop him carving a path for it in the earth. I did nothing. I was paralysed. A sick horror throbbed through me with the pulsing of my blood; I could not even say, stop.
At last Tom stopped hacking at the ground and tried the door again. This time it swung towards him with a brittle complaint from the rusted hinges. For a moment we stared together at the gloom within.
What had I expected – that a grinning skeleton, propped against the inside of the door, would tumble out onto the wet ground and grin up at us with its lipless teeth? As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I saw nothing alarming, just grey stone walls and the rectangular shapes of two stone sarcophagi, one either side of the small room.
I stepped inside. The air in the room was several degrees colder than the air outside but the floor and the walls seemed perfectly dry; I saw the wet marks my boots made standing out clearly against the floor before Tom followed me through the doorway, momentarily blocking out the light.
I inhaled very cautiously. I could smell the damp forest outside and when Tom moved close to me I could smell his cologne. I could also detect a faint mineral tang from the cold stone. Was there something else, something sweetish, underneath? I wasn’t sure.
Tom moved past me, and the pale light streamed in again. I watched him go down on one knee between the two sarcophagi, examining the left hand one, running his fingers along the seal between the coffin and the lid.
“Cemented,” he said, glancing at me. “I could break the cement pretty easily but I’m not sure there’s much point. It’s been sealed a long time. More than, you know.”
