The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House (40 page)

‘Will you wait here?’ I asked the driver as we drew to a halt in front of the house.

He cranked up the brake lever. ‘If you pay,’ he said, pulling a newspaper from the window ledge and breaking into a tobacco-stained cough.

I got out into a chicken’s dust bath, spattering my
trousers. I glared at the birds as they pecked around me, oblivious, and made my way to the door. The roof was not completely gone, I saw now, but many of its tiles were, and the barn beside it looked as if it might fall down at any moment.

The front door was of an ancient, thick wood, possibly oak. There was a bell with a pull, but when I tugged at it no chime emerged. I knocked on the wood, and my knuckles barely made a sound.

‘You gotta go round the back way,’ I heard a rumbling voice from behind me call. I turned and saw a beefy man in the field next door, manhandling a vicious-looking ploughshare. ‘They never answer that one.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, aware of how timorous my voice sounded. I walked carefully round the side of the farmhouse, resisting the temptation to pick up, petticoat-like, the bottoms of my trousers as I trampled the dusty ground, pursued by curious chickens.

The back door was more modern than the front, but in worse condition. Flakes of faded green paint peeled from the frame, and the glass panels were thick with grime. I knocked. After a while a dark shape appeared, and the latch squeaked back.

A hollow-cheeked woman with grey hair escaping from under a cap looked out. ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Mrs Trent. My name’s Robert Carver.’

‘Whassit about?’

‘Her daughter,’ I said.

The woman grunted and closed the door. I waited in the full beam of the morning sun, sweating gently, for several minutes until she returned and beckoned me in.
‘Wipe yer feet,’ she said, and then, as if the thought had just occurred to her, ‘Please.’

I wiped my feet on the mat. I was standing in a large kitchen, with roughly plastered walls and dangerously tilting beams overhead. There was a table piled with vegetable peelings at one end and several accounts books at the other, and a cat was sat in the middle. Along one wall was the range, and along another were a stone sink and counter. On a dresser with mismatched crockery stood a crib. Narrow leaded windows let in a minuscule amount of light. I shivered, despite the heat of the day outside.

‘Siddown,’ said the woman. ‘I’ll just get missis.’

I sat, abruptly. The cat landed on my lap with a yowl and I pushed it on to the floor. After a while a plump woman with a tatty shawl came into the room. ‘All right,’ she announced, leaning against the sink and looking down at me. ‘You might as well get it over with. What’s my bloody Vera done now?’

‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

‘Is she being kicked out the laundry?’ The woman picked up a cloth from the floor and threw it into the sink. ‘Well, you can tell her from me, she ain’t coming back here. I’ve had enough, all right?’

‘It’s not Vera,’ I said. ‘It’s about Sally.’

The woman straightened, and frowned at me. ‘Sally?’

It only occurred to me now that I might have done irreparable wrong coming here; that the family might already have written the girl out of their lives, and I, coming here to reopen those wounds, would hardly be welcome. ‘I – er – I – er …’ I began.

‘What about my Sally?’ said the woman. ‘And who the flamin’ ’eck are you, anyway?’

‘Is it him?’ I heard a distant voice say, and then feet came thumping down the heavy wooden stairs overhead, and a breathless, untidy, disappointed girl bundled into the room and stared at me.

She hung on the doorpost, her pale eyes lowering, her nose wrinkling, and as I got to my feet I saw the tangled, gingery hair, the freckles blasting her face, the bloom of fresh youth in her cheeks, and now I understood it all, from start to finish and everything in between.

‘Sally,’ I said. ‘You’re Sally.’

‘I thought it was
him
,’ she said, and kicked the doorpost.

Her mother turned to her. ‘If it was him, do you think I wouldn’t tell you? It ain’t going to be him. It’s never going to be him, all right?’

‘I’m his cousin,’ I said, and they looked at me as one. ‘I’m Alexander’s cousin. Robert Carver.’

The girl took a breath. ‘You got a message?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and saw the sag again in her eyes. ‘He doesn’t know I’m here.’

‘So you found out,’ said the mother. ‘Well, I hope you can tell him to do right by my girl.’

From the crib standing on the dresser across the room came a sound like a factory whistle. Sally walked towards it and bent over. ‘Don’t you ever stop crying?’

‘They don’t,’ said her mother, flipping a tea towel over one shoulder.

Sally lifted from the crib a dribbling comma of a baby and joggled it up and down. ‘So now you seen her before her father,’ she said. ‘Pr’aps that’ll make him come by, eh?’

She was young, not more than seventeen. ‘I didn’t know about … about the baby,’ I said. ‘I don’t think anybody knows, except for Alec.’

‘I didn’t tell nobody, except when I run off, ’cause then I was getting so big I couldn’t hide it.’ With one practised hand, she pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. ‘I didn’t even tell
him
. He never noticed, or he pretended not to.’

I sat down too and looked from the girl to her mother. I pulled out the torn envelope and showed it to them. ‘Is that what you wrote to him about?’ I asked.

Mrs Trent leaned over to look, then turned to the sink and rattled water in the kettle. ‘Twice, I written to him now. First time after she was born, then again last week. Course, he don’t want to know. I said to her, “That’s what Upstairs is like.” ’

‘He’s bankrupt,’ I said, cringing because Alec’s version of poverty was a rich tapestry of wealth compared to Sally Trent’s life. ‘He’s having to sell the house.’

‘I don’t care about the money,’ said Sally. Her mother harrumphed loudly and dumped the kettle on the stove. ‘I just want him to visit.’

‘I’ll speak to him,’ I said, aware of how pitiful my promise sounded. ‘He ought to do something. Or perhaps I could … I don’t know. Tell my uncle.’ Although as I said it I knew no good would come of that.

Mrs Trent did not believe me anyhow; I saw it in the twist of her mouth as she put the cups and the teapot in its knitted cosy on the table. Sally chattered brightly about Alec as the baby drooled against her neck.

‘He loves me,’ she said simply. ‘I know he does.’

‘Hush, you silly girl,’ said her mother. ‘Why won’t you see the truth? He’s got a wife, and no doubt he’ll have other kiddies soon.’

‘He doesn’t love his wife,’ said Sally. ‘They hate each other. Everybody knows that. So why wouldn’t he love me?’

Mrs Trent gave me a look. ‘Always living in a fantasy world, that one,’ she said. ‘Best we can hope for is some bloke comes along who don’t mind too much she’s already got a nipper.’

‘Josh would marry me.’ She dandled the baby on her knee. ‘But we don’t love Josh, do we? Because he has eyes that look different ways and he only talks about furrows.’

I wondered if Josh was the fierce-looking farmhand I had seen earlier, and felt rather miserable that this would be Sally’s best hope. I could understand why Alec had been attracted to her. She had a certain vitality in her features, a zest for life that he would have needed. A child, Clara had called him. A child who had no idea of the harm he could cause.

As I was leaving them, Sally said, ‘Wait a minute, I got something to give you,’ and passed the baby over to her mother. She went up the stairs, and when she returned she was holding something in her hand.

‘Will you give this to him?’ she said, passing it to me. ‘My brother took it with a Box Brownie just after she was born.’

It was a small photograph of the baby in its crib, taken outside somewhere; I saw the blur of grass behind it, and the sunshine slanting across its forehead. On the back, in scratchy ink, somebody had written in best copperplate,
Baby girl Grace, born 23rd June 1924
.

I swallowed, put the photograph in my wallet and said, ‘I’ll see he gets it. I’ll … I’ll talk to him.’

‘Good luck with that,’ called Mrs Trent from the sink.

Sally smiled at me. ‘I know he’ll marry me in the end,’ she said. ‘He just needs to come round to the idea, that’s all.’

‘Ye-es,’ I said. ‘I hope so.’ There, at least, I was speaking the truth, even if hope was a rather poor truth to feel. I left her standing on the porch, holding Grace. She waved the baby’s hand at me as the taxi pulled away, and I waved back, wondering if I would ever see my – what would she be? My second cousin, perhaps – again.

When I arrived back at Castaway, the house was in pandemonium. I paid off the driver and went through the wide-open front door. Two men were carrying a trestle table into the house and along the hallway, the floor protected from their boots by newly laid raffia mats.

Scone was in the hall directing the men along towards the garden. ‘Everything all right?’ I asked him as I passed him on the way up to my room.

‘Tip-top, sir,’ he replied wearily. Scone would be leaving Alec’s employ directly after the house was sold. He had a family in Shanker awaiting him with baited breath, and, according to the servants’ rumours, for a much-increased salary. As a consequence, although he was still completing his duties, I sensed that he very often could not be bothered to accommodate the Brays’ little whims, of which this party was surely one.

I bumped into Clara coming out of her room, attired in an ivory dress with a red felt corsage at her hip, and swinging a green satin pochette. ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said. ‘I thought you weren’t going to turn up at all.’

Her hair had been reset, her eyes outlined in emerald, and her lips were coral pink. She was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the woman I sometimes saw in the early dawn, her face cold-creamed and de-masked. I wanted to put my lips to her neck and kiss it, but I knew that would end badly for me, so I simply said, ‘Don’t be silly; I’m just off to change.’

‘I thought you might be with Alec.’ She raised an ironic eyebrow. ‘But apparently he’s incapable of turning up to his own party on time.’

There was a commotion downstairs: it appeared one of the tables’ legs had come off. Clara sighed dramatically and hung over the banister to shout instructions. As I passed her I murmured, ‘I think you’re in your element,’ to which she gave a sniff of derision.

I went to my room and looked out of the window. Servants were hurrying about, setting out fold-up chairs in semicircles. Another was stringing lanterns along the trees that lined the path. Clara was certainly doing her best to bring back to the beating heart of the house a sense of her mother-in-law, at least with regard to emulating the dazzle of my aunt Viviane’s garden parties, and I thought of the little girl in a dirty dress and loved her more fiercely than ever.

I changed into the new linen suit I’d had made, at great expense, from Mr Solomon’s shop in the Snooks, and smoothed back my hair with a comb. I had a new set of handkerchiefs; I folded one red polka-dotted number and tucked it into my breast pocket. I put my hands in my pockets and smiled at myself in the full-length glass; a debonair sort of a smile that said I would sail through life
without letting it trouble me much, that I would hear all the rules and disobey them just the same, that I was the sort of man to enter a room and hold all the people there in the palm of my hand.

I looked at the mirror with a sense of recognition, not of myself, but of someone else. It took me a few minutes to realize to whom I had committed this act of homage: it was Alexander Bray, of course, but not as I knew him now. The Alec Bray who winked at me from the mirror was the charmer who had whisked me round the Natural History Museum on a whim one day, not the man who currently bore his name.

I heard the bell sound, the click of Scone opening the door and the rumble and squeak of male and female voices. I watched out of the window as they were led into the garden, and Clara came towards them and embraced them extravagantly with many kisses. I waited a while, enjoying the small observations I made, and then extricated myself from the window and went to the door.

There were several people in the garden now, milling about and quaffing champagne. I took a glass from the white tablecloth-covered bar, and meandered round the edges of the garden, along the path to the arbour, drifting and eavesdropping. There appeared to be a lot of theatrical types here, visiting from London. I passed by a couple discussing ‘dear Dickie’s latest outing’, which apparently had been ‘an absolute scream’, especially when ‘Sophie’s scarf caught on the flies, quite by accident, you know, and she nearly bought it in full view of the plebs in the gods.’ They smiled at me as I walked by, and I nodded and did not have the slightest clue what they were talking about.

By the fish pond at the end of the garden I saw Eli Golden, proprietor of the night club I had visited with Clara, still wearing his blue-tinted glasses and talking to a handsome man I finally recognized as George, the barman from the club. I was rather surprised Golden had brought along his employee, but I supposed they must be chums, especially as they seemed to be in fits of laughter about some private joke they chose not to share with me as I went past.

On my way back along the path I heard my name being called from the arbour, and on entering saw, to my dismay, Bump sitting next to a scrawny girl with a disdainful expression.

‘Carver!’ he roared. ‘Not seen you since that debauched night at the Majestic, what?’

‘Indeed.’ I felt ten years older since that shameful evening. ‘I’m surprised you were invited today, to be honest.’

He stared at me with his piggy eyes. ‘And why on earth shouldn’t I be?’

I was no longer intimidated by him, and it was a pleasant thought. ‘If you haven’t been told, then it’s not my place to say.’

I was about to move on when he said, ‘Not that damn Hall of Fame nonsense? So Bray’s lost a few shillings on it, what does that matter?’

‘It was more than a few.’

‘He should never have invested more than he could afford to lose.’ Bump looked at the girl, whose attention appeared to be elsewhere, and pouted. ‘You don’t want a job lot of waxworks, do you, Adne?’