The Book of Lost Things (2006) (5 page)

David read the stories by day and by night, his blankets drawn around him to protect him from the cold, for Rose’s house was never warm. The wind found its way in through cracks in the window frames and the ill-fitting doors, rustling the pages of open books as though seeking within some piece of knowledge that it desperately required for its own purposes. The great sweeps of ivy that covered the house, front and back, had broken through the walls over the decades, so that tendrils crept from the upper corners of David’s room, or bound themselves to the underside of the windowsill. At first, David had tried to cut them with his scissors, discarding the remnants, but after a few days the ivy would return, seemingly thicker and longer than before, clinging ever more tenaciously to the wood and the plaster. Insects exploited the holes too, so that the boundary between the natural world and the world of the house became blurred and unclear. He found beetles congregating in the closet, and earwigs exploring his sock drawer. At night, he heard mice scurrying behind the boards. It was as if nature was claiming David’s room as its own.

Worse, when he slept he dreamed more often of the creature he had named the Crooked Man, who walked through forests very like the one beyond David’s window. The Crooked Man would advance to the edge of the tree line, staring out at an expanse of green lawn to where a house just like Rose’s stood. He would speak to David in his dreams. His smile was mocking, and his words made no sense to David.

“We are waiting,” he would say. “Welcome, Your Majesty. All hail the new king!”

DAVID’S ROOM was curious in its construction. The ceiling was quite low and rather higgledy-piggledy, sloping in places where it should not have sloped and providing ample opportunity for industrious spiders to spin their webs. On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web’s resident to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnid revenge. There was a wooden toy box in one corner, and a large wardrobe in the other. Between them stood a chest of drawers with a mirror on top. The room was painted light blue so that on a bright day it seemed like part of the world outside, especially with the ivy poking through the walls and the occasional insect providing food for the spiders.

The single small window overlooked the lawn and the woods. If he stood on his window seat, David could also see the spire of a church and the roofs of the houses in the nearby village. London lay to the south, but it might as well have been in Antarctica, so completely did the trees and the forest hide the house from the outside world. The window seat was David’s favorite place in which to read. The books still whispered and spoke among themselves, but he was now able to hush them with a single word if his mood was right, and anyway they tended to remain quiet while he was reading. It was as if they were happy once he was consuming stories.

It was summer once again, so David had plenty of time to read. His father had tried to encourage him to make friends with the children who lived nearby, some of them evacuees from the city, but David did not want to mix with them, and they in turn saw something sad and distant in him that kept them away. Instead, the books took their place. The old books of fairy tales in particular, so strange and sinister with their handwritten additions and new paintings, had increased David’s fascination with these stories. They still reminded him of his mother, but in a good way, and whatever reminded him of his mother equally helped to keep Rose and
her
son, Georgie, at a distance. When he was not reading, the window seat gave him a perfect view of one of the property’s other curiosities: the sunken garden set into the lawn close to where the trees began.

It looked a little like an empty swimming pool, with a set of four stone steps leading down to a rectangle of green, bordered by a flagstoned pathway. While the grass was regularly mown by Mr. Briggs the gardener, who came every Thursday to tend the plants and lend nature a helping hand where necessary, the stone parts of the sunken garden had fallen into disrepair. There were large cracks in the walls, and in one corner the stonework had crumbled away entirely, leaving a gap big enough for David to squeeze through, if he had chosen to do so. David had never gone further than poking his head in, though. The space beyond was dark and musty, and filled with all kinds of hidden, scurrying things. David’s father had suggested that the sunken garden might make a suitable site for an air-raid shelter, if they decided it should ever become necessary, but so far he had managed only to pile sandbags and sheets of corrugated iron in the garden shed, much to the annoyance of Mr. Briggs, who now had to navigate his way around them every time he wanted to reach his tools. The sunken garden became David’s own place outside the house, especially when he wanted to get away from the whispering of the books or from Rose’s well-intentioned but unwelcome intrusions into his life.

David’s relations with Rose were not good. While he tried always to be polite, as his father had asked him to be, he did not like her, and he resented the fact that she was now part of his world. It was not merely that she had taken, or was trying to take, the place of his mother, although that was bad enough. Her attempts to cook meals that he liked for dinner, despite the pressures of rationing, irritated him. She wanted David to like her, and that made him dislike her even more.

But David believed that her presence also distracted his father from the memory of David’s mother. He was forgetting about her already, so tied up was he with Rose and their new baby. Little Georgie was a demanding child. He cried a lot and always seemed to be ailing, so that the local doctor was a regular visitor to the house. His father and Rose doted on him, even as he deprived them of sleep almost every night, leaving them both short-tempered and weary. The result was that David was increasingly left to his own devices, which made him both grateful for the freedom offered by Georgie and resentful of the lack of attention to his own needs. In any case, it gave him more time to read, and that was no bad thing.

But as David’s fascination with the old books grew, so did his desire to find out more about their former owner, for they had clearly belonged to someone who was just like him. He had at last found a name, Jonathan Tulvey, written inside the covers of two of the books, and he was curious to learn something about him.

So it was that one day David swallowed his dislike of Rose and went down to the kitchen, where she was working. Mrs. Briggs, the housekeeper and wife of Mr. Briggs, the gardener, was visiting her sister in Eastbourne, so Rose was taking care of the chores for the day. From outside came the clucking of hens in the chicken run. David had helped Mr. Briggs to feed them earlier, and to check the vegetable garden for damage from rabbits and the run for any holes that might allow a fox to enter. The week before, Mr. Briggs had trapped and killed a fox near the house using a snare. The fox had almost been decapitated by the trap, and David had said something about feeling sorry for it. Mr. Briggs had scolded him, pointing out that one fox would kill every hen they had if he managed to get into the run, but David had still been troubled by the sight of the dead animal, its tongue caught between its small, sharp teeth, its fur torn from where it had tried to bite itself free from the snare.

David made himself a glass of Borwick’s lemon barley before sitting at the head of the table and asking Rose how she was. Rose stopped washing the dishes and turned around to speak with him, her face bright with pleasure and surprise. David had planned to try very hard to be nice in the hope of finding out more from her, but Rose, unused to any conversation with him that did not center on food or bedtime, or that was not conducted in surly monosyllables, immediately embraced the chance to build bridges between them, so David’s acting abilities were not stretched very far. She dried her hands on a dishcloth and took a seat beside him.

“I’m fine, thank you,” she said. “A little tired, what with Georgie and all, but that will pass. It’s been a little strange this last while. I’m sure you feel the same way, the four of us all thrown together suddenly like this. I’m glad that you’re here, though. This house is too big for one person, but my parents wanted to keep it in the family. It was…important to them.”

“Why?” asked David. He tried to keep himself from sounding too interested. He didn’t want Rose to realize that the only reason he was talking with her was to find out more about the house, and particularly his room and the books that it contained.

“Well,” she said, “this house has been in our family for a very long time. My grandparents built it, and lived in it with their children. They hoped that it would stay in the family, and that there would always be children living in it.”

“Did they own the books in my room?” asked David.

“Some of them,” said Rose. “Others belonged to their children: my father, his sister, and—”

She paused for a moment.

“Jonathan?” suggested David, and Rose nodded. She looked sad.

“Yes. Jonathan. Where did you learn his name?”

“It was written in some of the books. I was wondering who he was.”

“He was my uncle, my father’s older brother, although I never met him. Your room was once his bedroom, and a lot of those books were his. I’m sorry if you don’t like them. I thought it would be such a nice room for you. I know it’s a little dark, but it had all those shelves and, of course, the books. I should have been more thoughtful.”

David looked puzzled. “But why? I do like it, and I like the books too.”

Rose turned away. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” said David. “Please tell me.”

Rose relented.

“Jonathan disappeared. He was only fourteen. It was a long time ago, and my grandparents kept his room exactly as it had always been, because they hoped that he would come back to them. He never did. Another child disappeared with him, a little girl. Her name was Anna, and she was the daughter of one of my grandfather’s friends. He and his wife died in a fire, and my grandfather took Anna to live with his family instead. Anna was seven. My grandfather thought it would be good for Jonathan to have a little sister and for Anna to have a big brother to take care of her. Anyway, they must have wandered off and, oh, I don’t know, something happened to them and they were never seen again. It was just very, very sad. They searched for them for so long. They looked in the woods and the river, and they asked after them in all of the nearby towns. They even went to London and placed drawings and descriptions of them anywhere that they could, but nobody ever came forward to say that they had seen them.

“In time, they had two more children, my father and his sister, Katherine, but my grandparents never forgot Jonathan, and never stopped hoping that he and Anna might someday come home. My grandfather in particular never recovered from their loss. He seemed to blame himself for what had happened. I suppose he thought he should have protected them. I think he died young because of it. When my grandmother was dying, she asked my father not to disturb the room, but to leave the books in their place just in case Jonathan should ever return. She never lost hope. She cared about Anna too, but Jonathan was her eldest son, and I don’t think a day went by when she didn’t stare out the window of her bedroom in the hope of seeing him walk up the garden path, older but still her son, with some wonderful tale to tell of his disappearance.

“My father did as she asked: he left the books as they were, and later, after my father and mother died, so did I. I always wanted a family of my own, and I suppose I just felt that Jonathan so loved his books that he would have liked to think there might be another little boy or girl in there someday who would appreciate them, instead of them being left to decay, unread. Now it’s your room, but if you’d like us to move you to another one, we can. There’s lots of space.”

“What was Jonathan like? Did your grandfather ever tell you about him?”

Rose thought. “Well, I was as curious about him as you are, and I would ask my grandfather about him. I made quite a study of him, I suppose. My grandfather said that he was very quiet. He liked to read, as you can tell, just like you. It’s funny, in a way: he loved fairy stories, but they scared him too, yet the ones that scared him the most were the ones that he most liked to read. He was afraid of wolves. I remember my grandfather telling me that, once. Jonathan would have nightmares in which wolves were chasing him, and not just ordinary wolves: because they came from the stories that he read, they could speak. They were clever, the wolves of his dreams, and dangerous. My grandfather tried to take his books away, his nightmares were so bad, but Jonathan hated being without them, so my grandfather would always relent in the end and return them to him. Some of the books were very old. They were old when Jonathan owned them. I suppose a few of them might even have been valuable, except someone else had written in them once upon a time. There were stories and drawings that didn’t belong. My grandfather thought that it might have been the work of the man who sold them to him. He was a bookseller in London, a strange man. He sold a lot of books for children, but I don’t think he liked children very much. I think he just liked scaring them.”

Rose was staring out the window now, lost in memories of her grandfather and her missing uncle.

“My grandfather went back to that bookshop after Jonathan and Anna disappeared. I suppose he thought that people who had children of their own would come to buy books there, and that either they or their children might have heard something about the missing pair. But when he got to the street in question, he found that the bookshop was gone. It was boarded up. Nobody lived or worked there anymore, and no one could tell him what had happened to the little man who owned it. Perhaps he died. He was very old, my grandfather said. Very old, and very odd.”