Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (34 page)

    All she could think was that something, some
being,
had surfaced out of the sea off Nolton Haven. A malign apparition. The old man went fishing there, married to the waves as much as he had been married to his wife. Perhaps he had drowned her, or perhaps one stormy night she had taken the boat and saw something… never to return.

    Pondering this, the hard ball of pain in her belly intensified. She cupped her hands around her abdomen, held her breath, wondered why the sense of loss was centred there. A heavy stone of hurt, curled up inside her. An anguish that might, in the end, reach her mind and end the numbness.

    Gilbert searched endlessly for an answer. Stephanie felt that she would not. Perhaps he came close enough the other night. He nearly netted whatever it was that wallowed and hissed amongst the swell of the deep sea along the beach. And Stephanie felt that if she had been in his position, and had seen what the old man knew was there, she too would set a nightly tryst with the night dark sea. Peering into the kingdom of underwater moonlight and racing surf. An insane and possibly futile pursuit for a lost love, or something that might replace it. Casting her net, trying to catch that elusive dream.

15 - Reggie Oliver - The Children of Monte Rosa

    IT was my mother who first noticed Mr and Mrs de Walter as they

    strolled along the promenade. She had a talent for picking out unusual and interesting looking people in the passing crowd and often exercised this gift for my amusement, though mainly for my father. He was a journalist who was always going to write a novel when he could find the time.

    My parents and I had been sitting in a little cafe on the front at Estoril where we were on holiday that year. In 1964 it was still unusual to see English people in Portugal, particularly in the north, and the couple my mother pointed out to us were so obviously English. "They're probably expatriates," she said. As I was only eleven at the time I had to have the term explained to me.

    They must have been in their late sixties, though to me at the time they simply looked ancient. They were of a similar height but, while she was skeletally thin, he was flabby and shapeless in an immaculate but crumpled white linen suit. He wore a "Guards" tie - this observation supplied by my father - and a white straw Panama with a hatband in the bacon-and-egg colours of the MCC, which I, a cricket enthusiast, identified myself. A monocle on a ribbon of black watered silk hung from his neck. He had a clipped white moustache and white tufted eyebrows that stood out from the pink of his face. His cheeks were suffused with broken veins that were capable of changing the colour of his complexion with alarming rapidity.

    His wife was also decked out in the regalia of antique gentility. Her garments were cream-coloured, softly graduating to yellow age at their edges. Their general formlessness seemed to date them to the flapper era of the 1920s, an impression accentuated by her shingled Eton Crop which was dyed a disconcerting shade of blue. Her most eccentric item of dress was a curious pair of long-sleeved crocheted mittens from which her withered and ringed fingers seemed to claw their way to freedom. The crochet work, executed in a pearl coloured silky material, was elaborate but irregular, evidently the work of an amateur, making them resemble a pair of badly mended fishermen's nets.

    My mother, who was immediately fascinated, was seized by an embarrassing determination that we should somehow get to know them. I have a feeling she thought they would make "good copy" for my father's long-projected novel, or a short story at least. My father and I went along with her plans, not because we approved them but because we knew that resistance was useless.

    We were staying at the Grande, one of the big old Edwardian hotels on the seafront, but my mother noticed that "the ex-pats", as she was now calling them, often took a pre-dinner aperitif on the terrace of the Excelsior, a similar establishment adjacent to ours. Accordingly, one evening we went for a drink at the Excelsior, positioning ourselves at a table near to where my mother had seen the expatriates drinking.

    For once, everything went according to my mother's plan. The couple arrived shortly after we had, sat down and ordered their drinks, gin and Italian vermouth, a fashionable pre-war cocktail. ("Gin and It," my mother whispered to us, "it's too perfect!") My mother, who had been an actress in her youth, was the possessor of a very audible voice, so our conversation was soon overheard.

    Presently we saw that the lady was coming over to us. She seemed to hesitate momentarily, looming over us, before saying: "I couldn't help noticing that you were speaking English." Her mouth was gashed with a thin streak of dark red lipstick, of a primeval 1920s shade.

    So we joined them at their table, and they introduced themselves as Hugh and Penelope de Walter. I was a well-behaved boy at that time and, being an only child, had no siblings with whom to fight or conspire, so I think I made a favourable impression. Besides, because I had either inherited or acquired by influence my mother's appetite for human oddities, I was quite happy to sit there with my
sumo d'ananas
and listen to the grown-ups.

    The de Walters were, as my mother had correctly surmised, expatriates, and they had a villa at Monte Rosa, a village in the foothills above Estoril.

    De Walter had been in the wine trade, hence his acquaintance with Portugal, and, on retiring in the 1950s had decided that England was "going to Hell in a handcart", what with its filthy music, its even filthier plays and the way the working classes generally "have the run of the place these days". De Walter conceded that Salazar, the then-dictator of Portugal, "might have his faults, but at least he runs a tight ship". I had no idea what this meant, but it sounded impressive, if a little forbidding.

    Their life at the Villa Monte Rosa - so named because it was the grandest if not the oldest dwelling in their village - was, they told us, more serene and civilized than any they could have hoped to afford in Worthing or Eastbourne. I wondered, though, if it were not a little lonely for them among all those foreigners, but said nothing.

    I think it was after a slight lull in the conversation that the de Walters turned their attention on me. In answer to enquiries I told them where I was presently at school and for which public school I was destined. De Walter nodded his approval.

    "I'm a Haileybury man myself," he said. "Are you planning to go to the 'varsity after that?"

    I looked blank. My father came to my aid by informing me that "the 'varsity" meant Oxford or Cambridge. I said I hoped so without really knowing what was meant.

    "Never got to the 'varsity myself," said de Walter. "I was due to go up in '15, but a certain Kaiser Bill put the kibosh on that."

    The First World War was ancient history to me - a series of faded sepia snapshots of mud-filled trenches and Dreadnoughts cutting through the foggy wastes of the North Sea, a tinkle of "Tipperary" on a rickety church piano. Trying to imagine a young de Walter going to war all those years ago silenced me.

    "Do you have children yourself, Mr and Mrs de Walter?" my mother asked.

    There was an unpleasant little silence. My father, who was frequently embarrassed by my mother's forthrightness, passed a hand through his thinning hair, a familiar gesture of nervous exasperation. The broken veins in de Walter's face had turned it a very ugly shade of dark purple. Mrs de Walter seemed about to say something when her husband restrained her by tightly grasping one of her stick-like arms.

    "No," said de Walter in a lower, firmer voice than we had hitherto heard. "We have not been blessed with that inestimable privilege." There was another pause before he added: "We couldn't, you see. War wound."

    With Old World courtesy, he cut off my mother's abject apologies for raising the issue. "Please, dear lady," he said, "let us say no more on the subject." Soon we were discussing the present state of English cricket in which de Walter took a passionate interest, even if he could not quite grasp that Denis Compton was no longer saving England from the defeat at the hands of the Australians, or some people whom he called "the fuzzy wuzzies".

    My father, an enthusiast whose information was rather more up-to-date, was able to correct some of de Walter's misapprehensions, while Mrs de Walter told my mother how she had all her clothes made up and sent over to Portugal by her dressmaker in England.

    Everything passed off so amicably that we found ourselves being asked to take lunch with the de Walters the following day at the Villa Monte Rosa.

    The next day a taxi delivered us to a pair of rusty wrought-iron gates in the pleasantly unspoilt hill village of Monte Rosa. The gates were situated in a high stone wall that surrounded what looked like extensive grounds; a drive from the gates curved into the leafy obscurity of palm and pine trees, and other overgrown vegetation.

    We were about to push open the gate when down the drive came a wiry middle-aged woman in overalls. Her head was tied up in a bandanna and she had a narrow, deeply lined face, the colour and consistency of an old pigskin wallet. Silently she shook our hands with an attempt at a smile on her face, then gestured us to follow her up the drive.

    The grounds were not well kept, if they were kept at all, but we saw enough of them to guess that they had once been laid out and planted on a lavish scale. Once or twice through some dense and abandoned screen of leaf I caught a glimpse of a lichened piece of classical statuary on a plinth. Then we turned a corner and had our first sight of the Villa Monte Rosa.

    It looked to me like a miniature palace made out of pink sugar. Both my parents were entranced by it, but, as they told me later, in slightly different ways. To my father, the ornate neo-Baroque design evoked a vanished world of elegant Edwardian hedonism. Had it been only a little more extensive, it could have passed for a small casino. To my mother, this rose-coloured folly encroached on all sides by deep, undisciplined vegetation, was a fairy-tale abode of the Sleeping Beauty. She said it reminded her of illustrations by Edmond Dulac and Arthur Rackham in the books of her childhood.

    The de Walters were there to greet us on the steps that led up to the entrance portico. Lunch, simple and elegant, was served to us on the terrace by the woman who had escorted us up the drive. She was their housekeeper and her name was Maria. The terrace was situated at the back of the villa and looked down a gentle incline towards the sea in the distance. What must once have been a magnificent view was now all but obscured by the pine trees through which flashes of azure tantalized the spectator.

    Mrs de Walter informed us proudly that the Villa Monte Rosa had been built in the 1890s by a Russian Prince for his ballerina mistress. It might not have been true, but it was plausible.

    The conversation did not greatly interest me. It consisted largely of a monologue on wine from de Walter, who obviously considered himself an aficionado. Though my father knew more than enough to keep up with him, he had the journalist's knack of displaying a little judicious ignorance. My mother and Mrs de Walter, who appeared to have less in common, sporadically discussed the weather and the flowers in the garden of the Villa Monte Rosa.

    After lunch, Maria wheeled out a metal trolley on which a large selection of ports and unusual liqueurs were displayed. De Walter proposed a tasting to my parents and then turned to me.

    "Why don't you go and explore the grounds, young feller? We won't mind. We'll hold the fort for you here, what? All boys like exploring, don't they? Eh?" This project appealed to me and was acceptable to my parents.

    "Don't get lost!" said my mother.

    "It's all right," said de Walter with a raucous laugh. "We'll send out search parties if you do!"

    So I walked down the shallow steps of the terrace and into the gardens of the Villa Monte Rosa. After crossing a small oval lawn with a lily pond at its centre, I took a serpentine path that led down through shrubberies. Great tropical fronds stooped over me. The gravel path was riven with weeds, and more than once I tripped over a thin green limb of vegetation that had clawed its way across it in search of nourishment. I imagined myself to be an archaeologist uncovering the remains of a lost civilization.

    It is often a great shock to find one's fantasy life confirmed by reality. I came down into a dell to find a structure consisting of a statue in a niche above a stone basin in the shape of a shell. It looked like the fountain at the gate of some ancient city. The statue was of a naked woman, lichened and weather-worn, holding a jar, tilted downwards, from which, water had once fallen into the basin which had been dry for a long while. The figure, I now think, was probably modelled on Ingres'
La Source,
which made it mid- to late-nineteenth century in origin. On its pedestal was carved the word DANAIDE. This meant something to me even then. I knew from the simple gobbets of Greek prose that I was beginning to study that the Danaids, because they murdered their husbands, had been condemned to fill leaky vessels for all eternity in Hades, the Land of the Dead.

    I stared for a long time at this ancient conceit, turning its significance over in my mind, but coming to no conclusion, until eventually I decided to follow the path around it and travel further down the slope. After a few minutes I came to another clearing, where I received my second and more prodigious shock.