I returned to the empty house and parked once more in the driveway. Looking at the outside walls from inside the car I realised that I was examining them for the cracks in the walls that, Usher-like, threatened to topple it. It was an impressive brick-built Victorian affair, out-of-keeping with the local architecture. The driveway ended in garages that would once have been a stable-block, and these were joined to the house by a long wing that must have been kitchens and store rooms. When I finally got out of the car the place seemed even more unnaturally quiet than it had before.
I don’t know what I expected to achieve by returning to the house, but I found myself aimlessly walking around its choked gardens, looking up at its big empty windows and various, changing rooflines. It was missing a few slates, and the woodwork was in sore need of new paint, but it did not appear to be in bad repair. Without realising what I was doing I was peering in through an old conservatory which housed only a few broken remains of cane furniture. The door had another ‘Condemned’ notice on it, with the smaller print explaining that it was private property, that trespassing was forbidden, and that the owners had no liability if anyone was injured by it. I tried the handle and the door opened.
In London, of course, they would have had to completely board-up the windows to deter vandals, and not just the downstairs windows. I’d seen some houses where they’d even bricked them up to stop people from getting inside and lighting fires, or turning it into a squat. I suppose it was well out of the way here. And Llanfihangel House didn’t have anything inside worth stealing, or vandalising. There were no period fittings or furnishings. It was bleak and lacking in any character. My footsteps on the bare, wide boards echoed off the pictureless walls, and a smell of damp was almost suffocating. It was bright without any curtains at the large windows, and simply dusty. I passed from room to room downstairs not seeing anything of any note whatsoever, and stood in the hall wondering whether there was any point in climbing the stairs to the next floor. What was I there for?
It was dark there, with the front door boarded up, but the sun was coming in through the etched glass fanlight above and slanted brightly across the wall forming a strange, stretched shape. Without the light at this angle I wouldn’t have seen the ridge under the wallpaper that travelled from the floor to ceiling. I followed it with my hand, and then with my fingernail I scored the paper along the edge and it tore. It wasn’t a crack that I could see into, but a ridge where something had shifted fundamentally in the wall. It was then that I realised what I might find out there.
In the depression by the front door that was meant to take the mat there was a debris of ignored post. It looked like impersonal stuff, mainly, but on the top of it I could see a printed invitation to the opening of a local gallery, addressed to a Cara Penrose.
So she had lived there. And she had still been using her maiden name. It was more likely, I decided, that she had reverted to her old surname after her husband had died. But whatever had been the case, I could have contacted her without using James Tobin as a go-between! If only I had simply telephoned directory enquiries the whole thing would have been clear. How many Cara Penroses could there have been living in the Hereford area, just inside the Welsh border?
The only thing that was certain was that James was right: Cara had lived here in a house suffering from subsidence. I looked through the rest of the post and saw that those letters at the bottom of the pile had not been moved since the 21st November. That seemed odd. And then I noticed, poking out from the envelopes and leaflets a familiar piece of stationery. It was my letter to Cara. It was the letter I had given to James Tobin containing my note and the cheque. He had scrawled ‘By Hand’ in the top left hand corner, so he had delivered it, but it was not opened.
Now, up until this moment I had walked through the empty house without a thought to any atmosphere it might have had. I was sitting on my haunches by the front door with my back to the dark hall when I suddenly had the idea that someone was behind me. It was absurd, of course. Nobody could have walked around in the house without their footsteps making a din on the bare boards, and I had been in that position by the door, motionless, for perhaps a half-minute. An unpleasant tingling at my spine and a feeling of cold rushed over me and for several seconds I wasn’t able to move. I was listening. In fact, all my senses were straining for the least suggestion that I was not alone in the house; that there was something there. I didn’t move, but far from being paralysed, I was forcing myself to be still, so that if there was anyone behind me in the empty house, I might not cause anything to happen until I was ready to move! Finally my muscles screamed at me to change my position and with a dread fear such as I’ve never before experienced, I turned my head and looked back in horror at the completely empty hallway. There was nothing at all there, but I could not shake off the feeling that threatened to overwhelm me.
I stood up gingerly. And without looking anywhere other than straight ahead I walked out of that dark space, and through the lighter rooms into the conservatory and made my way outside. At no time did I look back, and even when I was in the car and had reversed out of the drive, I did not once look in the mirror as I drove away from Llanfihangel House.
I was too disconcerted to notice that I was low on fuel, and it was only when the light started flashing on the dashboard that I realised I must find a petrol station. Being stranded out in that tangle of lanes did not appeal to me. I wasn’t quite certain of where I would find the main road and had a horror of finding myself back at Llanfihangel House; perhaps doomed to keep coming across the same lane and landmarks, with the great Victorian house inevitably appearing at the rise in the road.
It did not happen. Almost immediately I found the road I wanted, a sign showing Hereford as seven miles distant, and a petrol-station. It was an old-fashioned, slightly intimidating ‘attended’ service, and I was asked by a dour old man in overalls if I was there on holiday. I said, no, and added that I had been trying to look up an old friend and he insisted on knowing who. I decided to tell him, and he replied that the lady who’d lived there was dead.
‘Killed herself,’ he said without any consideration for any feelings that I may have had. My stomach lurched.
‘About a year ago,’ he said.
‘Surely not that long ago?’
‘Oh, it must be. Hanged herself from the banisters in the hallway. Postman saw her though the front door one morning. Her husband had died a couple of years earlier and left her with huge debts, so the local paper said.’
‘It must have been some time in the spring,’ I insisted. Arguing over when it had happened was a good way of deflecting the conflicting feelings of guilt and confusion.
‘No, it was definitely before Christmas, because at Christmas the house didn’t have its lights out around the windows, like it used to do, even when she was there on her own.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I insisted. ‘She wrote to me only this year.’ I had her letter burning a hole in my inside jacket pocket.
‘If you say so,’ he said, as annoyed with me as I was with him.
I also had my unopened letter to her in my pocket.
I still had not told anyone any detail of this story, though there was not a day when aspects of it did not surface in my mind, when questions did not appear before me, or waves of guilt pass through me. Twelve months on from the dinner party at which I first met the man calling himself James Tobin we received another invitation, and this time Judith was able to come too. At the last minute a fear that ‘he’ might have been invited as well made me suggest that we should not go. However, baby-sitters were on their way, taxis were booked to take us there and collect us afterwards, and Judith had not seen some people from that circle of friends for two years and was eager to go. I had no choice but to agree.
As we sat down to dinner early that evening I was relieved to see all the seats taken and that there was no balding, fat man present in his white linen suit. I was rather enjoying the evening, having had a couple of cocktai
ls before starting on the wine, and with the added comfort of knowing that a taxi would be taking us home. I relaxed and put everything from my thoughts but the trivial chatter of the dinner party. It was as I was being served with the sweet that Sally asked me, from the head of the table, what had happened to my friend in distress from a year ago. Completely unprepared, I simply gawped at her, unable to think of what to say. My unnatural inability to reply meant that in a matter of a couple of seconds the whole table had their heads turned to me. Even those who had not heard what Sally had asked were expecting me to say something.
Finally I excused myself:
‘It’s, well, a little distressing. Do you mind awfully if I tell you later?’
It was Sally’s turn to be embarrassed, and she apologised for saying the wrong thing, and everyone tactfully started or resumed talking among themselves. Only Judith continued to stare at me. Naturally enough she was rather perplexed, and I mouthed the word ‘later’ across the table to where she sat.
The moment we moved out of the dining room, before even Judith had the chance to come over to me, Sally was by my side and apologising profusely.
I told her that it was nothing. Over the last course of the meal I had had time to think of what to say to Judith, and decided to keep it simple:
‘I met an old school friend here last year,’ I explained to her, as Sally continued to stand with us just outside the living room. Everyone else had gone through and were being offered drinks by the host. ‘He told me of another friend who was in financial difficulties, and though I offered to help, he wasn’t very willing. I don’t quite know what happened. It was a bit of a muddle. I had no contact address for him, or her.’
I looked at Sally: ‘James Tobin, that’s what he said his name was, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, you silly!’ she exclaimed. ‘All you had to do was ask me. You know, a month or so ago he brought me some of my late brother’s things, the sweet man.’ She was directing this at Judith now: ‘By coincidence Christopher’s school friend was in the army with my brother, you know. Though if you saw him you wouldn’t believe he could ever have fitted into a uniform.’
‘So you’ve got his address?’ I asked.
She frowned. ‘Actually, no. He just turned up one day with a box under his arm, as he had said he would. I was going to write to thank him, but didn’t know where to write. What did you say his name was, Tobin?’
‘So, not only do you not know his address, but you don’t know his surname?’ I pressed her, receiving frowns from both women.
‘I gave them lunch…’
‘Them?’
‘Him and his wife, a quiet woman…’
‘His wife?’
‘Yes. She was very quiet, a little odd, called Cara, I think… Any more questions?’
No, I didn’t want to ask any more. I didn’t want to hear anything else. I just didn’t want to think about any of it. The last time that I had been to Sally’s for dinner I hadn’t availed myself of her husband’s wonderful liqueurs, but this time, knowing that a taxi would take me home, I got really rather drunk.
UNA FURTIVA LAGRIMA
Samuel Miller knew that he would recognise Clare Macdonald. His father had treasured a photograph of her which he had hidden away in the back of his wallet. It had become creased and dog-eared over time, the paper soft and slightly yellowed, but the image had remained colourful and sharp. Samuel had not seen it until after his father’s death, when the hospital had given him the items the old man had been carrying when he had been admitted. The son knew who it had to be, despite not recalling that his parents had ever mentioned her; he had simply guessed somehow that at some past time there had been another woman in his father’s life.
He had discovered the photograph in the wallet as he sat in the hospital grounds, and felt awkward looking at it, as though his father was at his shoulder; he stared at the woman who stood tall and confident in what would have been a fashionable dress; her hair in a style that was starting to come back into vogue. She was striking, without being obviously good-looking, and he understood what his father had admired in her. Samuel was now the age that his father would have been when the photograph was taken.
It was later, perhaps a whole year afterwards, that Samuel started to read the papers his father had written regarding this woman. He had described his relationship with her, and the scandal that had surrounded her due to the murder of three small children. At no time while alive had his father ever mentioned that he had once been caught up in events that had made the national press.
It was a full two years later that the son finally took the papers with him to see Clare Macdonald in North Yorkshire. As he drove there, the car slowly covering the miles, he tried to picture the woman as she would look now. Like his mother, she would be in her very late fifties, and he wondered if time would have treated her as unfairly. Since his father had died Samuel’s mother seemed to have aged terribly; her loss had taken her strength from her and she seemed smaller and slower. It was as though something in her had been broken beyond repair.
Clare Macdonald, Samuel supposed, would also be some crabbed old lady with wispy grey hair and shapeless cardigans, but he was wrong. The woman who eventually answered the door of the stone built house on the hillside overlooking the small town was tall and still quite handsome, despite the inevitable lines. In the photograph she had had long blonde hair, which was now dark and not quite shoulder-length. It trailed unkempt about her face. She was older, yes, but she had not yet become an old lady.
However, she had appeared so unwilling to answer the door after he had rung the bell that he had nearly left without seeing her at all. At first, through the closed door, she had asked him what he wanted.
‘Are you Clare Macdonald?’ he asked.
‘My name’s Lykiard,’ she insisted, after a pause.
‘Of course, but you were Macdonald before?’
‘May I ask who wants to know?’
‘My name’s Samuel Miller.’
There was a further silence. He knew that she had heard him, but he could not understand why she was taking so long to reply.
It was already twilight and the temperature was dropping; returning to his warm car suddenly seemed like a good idea. The longer she hesitated the more his self-possession began to desert him.
Eventually he heard bolts drawn back and the door was opened a fraction, obviously on a chain.
‘You said, Samuel Miller?’ she asked, suspicious.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Through the gap she appraised him warily, but with obvious delight.
‘I can see it now,’ she said slowly, unhooking the chain and opening the door properly. ‘Bloody hell. Ambrose’s son?’
‘Yes.’
She ushered him inside and shut the door quickly. She then locked it again, which disconcerted Samuel. Having done so she seemed to relax, and she looked at him again in the dark hallway.
‘And how is that no-good father of yours?’ she asked.
‘He’s, ah, dead, I’m afraid. He died about three years ago.’
‘Oh,’ she replied, deflated, lowering her eyes. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she continued, distracted. ‘Three years?’
She did not move, and after a time he coughed and she appeared to suddenly remember he was there.
‘Won’t you go inside?’ she asked, gesturing for him to walk into the brightly-lit front room and she followed him. Samuel turned to face her as she closed the door to the hall and then sat down.
‘Dead?’ she asked, flatly.
Samuel remained standing, wondering if he too could sit down.
With an effort she composed herself: ‘So,’ she said, looking into the fire in the grate rather than at the young man who had brought her the news. ‘Three years ago, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it took you all that time to come and tell me?’
‘I didn’t know that you existed,’ he replied, and then added, ‘At fir
st.’
‘Oh.’
There was a further silence and he looked around. It was a nice room, cosy without being cluttered. There were just a few pieces of antique furniture and a number of framed watercolours on the walls.
‘Did your father not mention me?’ she asked.
Still she would not look at him.
‘Well, he never said anything about you when he was alive; at least, not to me. But he wrote about his time with you, in London, and then meeting you later, up here in Yorkshire. He left some papers behind, as a kind of record.’
‘And what did he say about me?’
‘He wrote a quite a lot. It’s rather complicated.’
‘But what did he seem to think of me?’
‘It’s obvious that he loved you.’
‘Perhaps he thought he did.’ She now looked up at Samuel: ‘Did he write why he never came back up here to me?’
‘No, he didn’t write that down,’ Samuel replied. ‘But I do know the reason he didn’t come back.’
‘You do? Well, I’ve been waiting for ten years or more to find out.’
As he looked down at her upturned face he could see that her eyes were shining.
‘Please take off your coat and sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll offer you a drink in a moment, but I think that first you should tell me what happened.’
‘Of course. Well, he tracked you down after many years, and was delighted to have found you. Your meeting meant a lot to him. But he said he had to go back to London, to sort things out. And you told him to come back to you within a week, didn’t you? To return within a week or not at all?’
‘He wrote that?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded in agreement.
Literary Remains Page 7
