by Roger Curtis
‘I guess you’re wondering what I’ve got in here?’ Jessica challenged.
Afraid to be told the truth, he replied meekly, ‘More materials, I suppose.’
‘Right,’ she answered, grinning broadly.
From then on the door of the studio was always locked. ‘I’ll show it to you when it’s finished,’ Jessica said. ‘Only then will you understand it.’
Alex seldom, if ever, thought about his birthday. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d received a present from his wife or daughter, although each always gave him a card. So when the day came he was delighted to get not just a card – this time a futuristic creation by Jessica, with endearing messages from both of them – but the promise of a cake as well. It seemed out of character for them to have combined their efforts in this way, especially given their usual antipathy. That was a little strange, he thought.
They warned him at breakfast that he was not allowed to see the cake until he returned from work. At the kitchen door he looked back to find them exchanging wild glances, silently choking back laughter. When they saw him they waved him away. ‘We’ve still got to make it,’ Jessica joked.
That evening, turning the corner of the street, Alex saw a number of passers-by gathered on the pavement, staring at the front of the house. He ran towards them, thinking there had been an accident. Then – just as they had done – he stopped in amazement. The cake stood upon the table in the bay window of the living room, like a Bavarian castle embellished by Disney, its faceted surfaces rising up, reflecting the light of the forty-one candles burning brightly around it.
It would occur to him in his final moments that they knew he could not bring himself to mutilate something so magnificent. That that was why they had made him a miniature version in the form of an exquisite single turret, too small to share, yet… well… expendable. From their chairs across the room they watched him take his first bite, and then another as the excellence of the confection challenged his senses. Against a background of cinnamon and other spices there was another familiar – he could not place it for the moment – taste, smell, whatever. It gave him a sense of well-being and contentment.
Margery looked at him benevolently. ‘Now, as an additional treat…’
‘As if this isn’t enough,’ he interjected.
‘… Jessica will show you her creation. Actually, she’s been waiting for a suitable occasion and decided this had to be it.’
‘I’m just sorry it didn’t come sooner,’ Jessica said.
‘That was delicious, thank you.’ Alex said, wiping his mouth. ‘I’ll just go upstairs and put my papers away, then I’ll be with you.’
Alex climbed the stairs. The bare walls told him what he had achieved and he began to relish the prospect of being father to so prodigious a talent. He reached the door of the studio and turned the handle, but it was still locked. He walked on, then climbed the final stairs to the attic.
The taste in his mouth, that familiar distinctive, not unpleasant, intensifying taste, not cinnamon, not other spices, not anything known to the culinary repertoire, suddenly drove him to his desk. A sensation just as familiar was creeping into his head, subtly colouring the walls, distorting the straight lines of the furniture and making the room seem to curl and sway. Frantically he pulled at the drawer of the desk. Its contents spewed onto the floor. The whisky bottle rolled away with a clatter that resembled cackling laughter. He scrabbled about amongst the papers, throwing them into the air in desperation. But of the dozens of little polythene envelopes he expected to find, there were just two, as if they had been left deliberately to say that it had all been planned. A kind of ‘thank you.’
Staggering now – because he was losing control of his muscles and it was becoming difficult to keep his balance – he clutched the stair rail and somehow reached the floor below. The door, previously so resolutely locked, now stood wide open. He entered cautiously, almost creeping, looking around fearfully, down at the bare floor, then up at the lights that illuminated it. He saw the cages that lined the walls, with their demented occupants. Then he saw the cameras that, from their flickering red lights, he knew were activated, and heard the catch of the door click shut.
The Tunnel
The taxi bearing Thomas from the bus station swept up the drive and stopped in front of Laurel House. While the driver unloaded his case, Thomas waited patiently for someone to appear, but no-one did. He stepped back on the gravel and looked up at the creeper covered walls and white lattice windows, awed by a manifestation of wealth that set to shame his parents’ terrace house in Putney. A slight movement at one of the upper windows caught his eye, but he gave no further thought to the pale face of a woman he did not recognise watching him through the gap in the curtains.
As it had been throughout his journey, his mind was occupied by the prospect of greeting his Aunt Harriet, whose dark image had lingered in his memory since his last visit five years earlier, when he was just nine. That was before his mother and her sister stopped speaking to one another, a situation that had continued unresolved until his mother’s recent traffic accident and hospitalization. It was only through a perceived duty on the part of his aunt that he was here at all. But while he expected problems with Aunt Harriet, there was no way he could have foreseen that the bane of his stay would be his cousin Mirabelle.
Unable to find the banknote his father had given him, and thus placate the taxi driver, Thomas opened the door and ventured inside.
He found them in the drawing room. Mirabelle was seated in front of an easel, twirling a paint brush in an attitude of deep reflection. Aunt Harriet was standing behind with a hand on her daughter’s shoulder.
‘Thomas, did you remember to tip the driver?’ His aunt’s first words as were hardly welcoming.
‘Well, I only had…’ Thomas stuttered.
‘Then I suppose I’d better. While I’m busy with that Mirabelle can show you to your room.’
‘He’ll have to wait until I’ve finished.’ Mirabelle said, slowly unscrewing a new tube of vermillion and squeezing a long worm of paint onto her palette. ‘Then I’ll see.’
Despite his embarrassment, Thomas’ powers of observation had not diminished. Brightly coloured and incomprehensible paintings – presumably Mirabelle’s – had displaced the original family portraits. The old upright piano had been upstaged by a baby grand that now basked in the light of French windows opening onto the lawn. Thomas only later realised that this extravagance, so clearly aimed at nurturing the gifts of a prodigal daughter, was quite misplaced. From that moment, and until it was unexpectedly ripped asunder two days later, a fine veil of unreason had fallen in front of all he beheld. Now he could only contemplate Mirabelle’s fair face, trying hopelessly to reconcile it with that of the tomboy he had once fought – and succumbed to through lack of interest – on his last visit. For the moment Mirabelle and all her doings were wonderful.
‘Bloody man’s a crook,’ Aunt Harriet said, returning to the angry scrunch of tyres on the gravel outside. ‘How can a fishing rod possibly be a second piece of luggage?’
‘I think fishing’s cruel,’ Mirabelle said, idly toying with her brush.
‘Yes, I quite agree. A stupid thing to bring.’ To restore her equanimity Aunt Harriet stepped behind Mirabelle, bunching the girl’s raven hair in her hands and looking at the painting. ‘What heavenly camellias. Do you have such glorious things where you are in London, Thomas?’
‘Dad’s got some marigolds and Michaelmas daisies.’
‘Has he really? Poor Samantha. What a destiny.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘Would you wish to paint marigolds, Mirabelle?’
‘I would never paint marigolds, Mother. Aunt Esther told me only yesterday that people who grow marigolds also eat turnips – or look like them – I can’t remember which.’
‘Aunt Esther couldn’t possibly have said that
, Mirabelle. That would be too much of a coincidence. You’re naughty to tease Thomas.’
‘Then it was something equally stupid,’ Mirabelle replied, feigning intense boredom while delivering a large blob of paint to the canvass.
As she was later to tell Thomas, Aunt Esther was listening intently to this exchange from behind the drawing room door. She was in an agony of indecision, uncertain whether to enter. The boy’s appearance from her window had rekindled thoughts that she had immediately dismissed as fanciful. Now, hearing his voice, they had returned with a force that set her heart pounding. Withdrawing her hand from the doorknob and grasping her stick she returned silently and thoughtfully to her attic room.
In her wardrobe mirror Aunt Esther contemplated a face that had managed to keep at bay a little of its seventy-five years span. She followed its lines with sensitive fingers, as if to brush them away, and parted the grey hairs at her forehead that seemed not so far removed, in this dim light, from their original gold. Not quite realising why, she crossed to the window to survey the landscape, letting her eyes dwell on the embankment at the boundary of the garden, where trains had once passed before Dr Beeching closed the line. Beyond that was the village of her childhood, its church now no more than a point of reference in the brown blotch of development around it. Then she did a curious thing. From the drawer of her dressing table beneath the window she withdrew a single penny piece and sat there, idly turning it over and over with her fingers until the daylight had quite gone. When Harriet knocked on her door she excused herself from dinner, claiming a headache. She needed that much time to think.
By the time he went to bed Thomas had begun to feel sorry for Aunt Esther. She was isolated in this household and in that respect at least it seemed he shared a kindred spirit. When she brought his breakfast in the morning and he saw her for the first time he knew he had found an ally.
But if an ally was needed, it was less for defence than to achieve a certain – though as yet indefinable – end; the same that had kept him turning, sleepless, in his bed until, with the dawn light, sheer exhaustion at last secured release.
‘They’ve had breakfast,’ Aunt Esther said from the door. ‘So I’ve brought you yours.’
‘They could have woken me,’ Thomas said, blinking angrily.
‘Mirabelle said she tried. She told me to tell you.’
Aunt Esther placed the tray with great care on his bedside table. Thomas thought that the decapitation of his egg was masterly.
‘I’d get up as soon as you’ve finished. Apparently Mirabelle wants to show you the garden.’ She paused. ‘I would keep on her good side if I was you.’
Mirabelle was waiting for him in the conservatory, her raven hair gleaming from a monotony of brush strokes. Its length over her shoulders equalled that of her body, but both were exceeded by the splendour of the legs that emerged from her white and very short skirt. It took several seconds for Thomas to notice the black and white rat perched on her shoulder; its presence there seemed only incidental.
‘There’s one for you. Mummy bought two. But that’s for after we’ve seen the garden.’
To Thomas gardens were rectangular flat constructions with geometric subdivisions and grass tailored to resemble a carpet. Here, from the conservatory window, there was a dynamic, almost limitless, sweep of green, cupping all manner of vegetation quite unfamiliar to him. The ground shelved irregularly downwards until halted by the rampart-like bar of the old railway embankment. The warmth of Mirabelle’s hand in his set him forward towards it, and the gentle seductive pressure of her fingers controlled his steps. He felt like one of those radio controlled cars that his Uncle Ken sometimes let him play with: he was under the same irresistible control. At another level it seemed like drowning in a sea of the most fragrant ice-cream.
As they approached the bottom Mirabelle prised a path between the bushes. Thomas could hear the metallic tinkle of running water. Then he saw a stream that widened into a pool skimmed by blue dragonflies, and beyond that a gentle cascade where the water glistened over yellow sandstone rocks.
‘Perhaps I will let you fish after all,’ Mirabelle said. Thomas stared at her, wondering what condition might be implied by this change of manner.
‘You’d never guess that above us was the old railway. Daddy planted all those trees to hide it. Then they decided to close the line.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Thomas replied, with his mind on other matters. The black pinpoint eyes on Miranda’s shoulder were already accusing him, but not of indifference. He looked away. ‘That’s a fine rat you have,’ he said.
‘Rats are lovely,’ Mirabelle said. ‘They’re mysterious but can be quite evil. Except Horace. Mummy says he’s an aristocrat.’
‘Or an aristorat,’ Thomas said, but without sufficient conviction to make an impact.
‘That’s a stupid thing to say.’ She turned away from him, but not quite fast enough to deny Thomas a glimpse of her attempt to hide a smile.
He followed her doggedly along the path by the stream, his attention divided between the bright white folds of her skirt and the lapping water. Then, without warning, the stream seemed to disappear. He looked closely at where she was pointing, to an arch of red bricks, less than a metre high, almost obscured by hanging fronds of ivy. The gurgle of escaping water told of its function.
‘Aunt Esther said that when they built the railway the stream had to go underground to get to the other side.’
‘Have you been to the other side?’
‘Silly boy! It’s far too overgrown. All brambles and nettles.’ She paused. ‘We must go now. Horace is hungry and needs feeding. After that you may get some lunch, although I don’t think you’ve earned it.’
Thomas flushed red. ‘Why do you say that?’ he demanded.
‘Girls like me like to be… excited.’
‘Tell me what I should do then.’
‘For a start stop asking silly questions like that.’
She raced up the grass to the house. At the conservatory door the white flame of her skirt was extinguished like a snuffed candle.
Thomas realized it was pointless to follow. Idly he turned his attention to the black orifice of the tunnel. He stayed because the place had assumed a dark aura of fascination that was strangely and deliciously familiar. There was a riddle here that demanded resolution, expressed, for the moment, in starkly physical terms. He had felt the same when his neighbours in London had shown him a dark, forbidding passage leading from their cellar towards his own house, and again when he had cast a stone into the depths of his first well. From the path he was too high to see inside, even with his body flat on the ground. He tried to stand on the wet stones with his head held low, but succeeded only in slipping and getting water in his shoes. Then he found a fallen branch, which he placed across the water. With his toes on firm ground and grasping the wood with both hands he was able to bring his eyes level with the entrance. For a metre or so he could make out primordial stalactites at the apex of the glistening brickwork. Beyond that was nothing but blackness, and distant muted sounds that only imperfectly echoed his own movements.
After lunch the children sat at the kitchen table and played with the rats. Mirabelle presumed Horace to be a willing subject, having fed him copiously with chocolate drops. Horace’s less engorged companion was called Henry.
‘Henry is yours,’ Mirabelle said.
Thomas had never owned an animal before, but the bond between them, from the first touch of its twitching whiskers against his nose, was immediate and serious.
‘The game,’ Mirabelle said, ‘is to race them.’
Thomas now appreciated the purpose of the household objects littering the table top.
Contrary to expectation Henry negotiated the course rather well, of the two being the more eager to reach the promised reward of a chocolate drop. Horace managed the cor
nflakes packet but refused to enter the cardboard tube that had begun life in a roll of wallpaper.
‘He will go in,’ Mirabelle hissed, squeezing his tail.
‘You’re hurting him.’
‘Nonsense, he’s used to it,’ Mirabelle said, taking the animal in her hand and stuffing it into the tube.
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘No.’
‘Try to stop me.’
For the first time in their relationship Thomas took the initiative. He tried to wrest the tube from Mirabelle’s grasp. With the rat still inside, the tube executed spectacular aerobatics above the table top.
Whether by design or accident – Thomas was never able to tell which – Mirabelle let go. The tube swung backwards over Thomas’ shoulder, expelling the rat onto the floor. It looked up at them once with an expression of amused pity, then scampered behind the Aga. Attempts to locate it occupied the children for the next hour. It is sufficient to record that the animal was never seen again.
When Aunt Harriet appeared the children were again sitting at the table. Mirabelle, who was now stroking the surviving rat, was first to break the silence.
‘Mummy, Thomas has killed Henry.’
‘That’s a lie,’ Thomas said.
‘Mirabelle doesn’t lie, Thomas.’ She turned to Mirabelle. ‘Tell Thomas why you know that rat is Horace.’
‘From the markings. This rat is definitely Horace.’
