The Mystery of the Cupboard (5 page)

I
write this on my deathbed.

Since I have not seen or heard anything from Maria for nearly half a lifetime I cannot be sure she has not gone before me — though I have my own reason for believing she will outlive me by many years… Still, sooner or later we must come face to face on the Other Side. Much as I have missed and longed for her, I am in no great hurry to meet her there. Strange but true: I fear God in His Almighty Power less than I fear facing my sister Maria.

I am still at heart an artiste. So I write this account as
a kind of rehearsal of what I shall say to her - and Him. I shall excuse nothing, omit nothing, extenuate nothing. When I look now into the glass on the front of the wondrous Cabinet Frederick made with such anger in his heart (which sits on the table by my bedside), I see, not my face, but Death's. It tells me sternly that ‘naught now availeth' but scrupulous Truth.

My Little People would speak for me, if they could. They've seen the best in me. With them, at least, I've dealt honestly and kindly. I have not shown them my accursed jealousy and spite.

But they must Go Back, pursue their own lives and make their own accounting at last. Though I still bring them sometimes, when I'm lonely and afraid, to comfort and distract me, they can't help me now. Even though Jenny weeps (tears that are as small as points of starlight) when I tell her I'm dying. She weeps for herself, also… What will become of her? I can't send
her
back now.

I don't deserve the Wonder that has been my consolation at the end of my misspent life.

When Omri reached this point in the notebook, he found his heart was beating so hard and his breath had been caught in his lungs without breathing out for so long that he had to stop.

He swallowed, shut his eyes so he couldn't read the delicate brown writing, and breathed in and out several times until his heartbeats slowed. He felt dizzy, confused.
There was a faint sheen of sweat on his face. The ‘wondrous Cabinet' in which she could see her face in a ‘glass'! The Little People from another time! Was this real? Was he really reading about
IT —
his own cupboard? Was it conceivable that this great-great-aunt of his had had it in this very house, over thirty years ago?

To rehearse my story, I must tell it all, from the beginning. And then I must do what I must do, and Maria will know my guilty secret.

Maria, my beautiful elder sister… Everything came to her, without her even trying. Our parents' favour. The admiration of friends and relations. The chances in life that make all the difference. And the love of a man. In that, too, she was ahead of me.
Her
love was honest and true.

I hated her at times.

There, it's out. My jealous spirit infected me like a virus. I wanted to
be her,
and I was not, so I hated her for her beauty, and for the way she attracted love. And for being good.

Everyone praised her goodness. Was it all true? Was she really, deeply,
better
than I? Had she been me - little, plump, plain, mocked, ignored, where she was tall and graceful and clever - would she have been so moral then?

Who can tell?

When she was barely sixteen her suitors were already crowding our house. I remember them, callow young men, bringing her presents, fawning on her, while I
silently watched… But I didn't stay silent! Oh, no!

After they'd gone, I would mimic them. Mercilessly! I would
force
Maria to laugh at their antics even when she had thought she admired them.

“Oh, stop, Jessie, stop!” she'd cry, weeping with laughter. “You are a demon, you've caught him
exactly
with his funny walk and his lisp. Oh, stop it, I will never be able to look at him again!”

She was my first audience. Those were my moments of fulfilment when I forgot my plainness and began to be an actress.

But there was something else about me, and this I kept to myself.
I knew things.
I knew she was not going to marry any of these. I knew what would be. Oh, not everything! But certain flashes of future knowledge came to me, even as a child.

I had a dream, I had it over and over again, of myself standing in a building that was half lit and half dark. I stood high, and many people faced me from below, and I could do as I pleased with them — make them laugh or cry or sing or cheer, at my will. It was a theatre of course, but I didn't know it then — how could I? I had never seen one. My father thought a theatre was the devil's own den.

But as I grew up, I learnt about the world. Actors were not ‘respectable' but they were much talked of… and I found out the meaning of my dream, and I knew my destiny.

When I told our father I was going on the stage for a
living, he told me - and meant it - that he would rather see me dead in my coffin. He refused to consider it. I was punished for dreaming of it.

To actually do it meant leaving home, enduring disgrace, being cast out, abandoning all that was familiar and safe… It meant being poor, living alone, begging for jobs, mixing with every sort of person. Yet I did it. I am still proud of that. It took a lot of courage. Somehow I achieved my ambition, and my father — though he never forgave me — at least noticed me and came to know that I was not the little nobody-and-nothing he had always thought me.

And Maria stood by me. Not openly, of course, but secretly.

It was the first time she had ever deceived our parents or gone against her ‘good' character. But she loved me and she visited me. No one knew. But it counted.

When my chance came and I did my first ‘turn' on the stage of the Hackney Empire music hall, she was there in the stalls. What courage! We both had to be brave that night. I remember her, sitting alone — well, unescorted, at a time when women didn't go anywhere without a man — in her big hat and her pretty furs, laughing aloud as she used to laugh in our bedroom when I mocked her suitors, and she gave me confidence, more than the rest of the laughter.

Because I knew that if I were not truly funny, she would not have laughed. She was my sister, but she
wouldn't pretend — she wanted me to give up and come home and be her poor little second-rate sister again. She wanted my talent to be for her alone.

A debt was owed for those acts of loyalty and courage. How did you repay her, Jessica Charlotte?

And that wasn't all. When my Frederick was going to be born I had to go away to hide my shame, and I couldn't work, and was destitute.

It was then I came to this house for the first time. It was still a farmhouse then and the farmer's wife was a relative of my young man. I will not name him… I have forgotten him! He wasn't worthy to be remembered! But he made her take me in (it was the last thing he ever did for me) and Frederick was born here, here in this very room in this old house in the Hidden Valley — how rightly named! I was hiding at last, ashamed at last, I who had stood brazenly on a stage for men to look at, and sworn that I would never be ashamed. I was ashamed of my child, of my own son.

Perhaps Fred felt it, even then, and that was why he never loved or forgave me.

Maria, though she couldn't come so far from home without arousing our parent's suspicion, wrote to me secretly and sent me money. She understood by now about love, for she was in love with Matthew Darren. I was to meet him in time, and she would say, her face all a blaze of love: “Well? Can you mock him, can you turn me off him?” and I had to say “No”. He was above my mockery and my mimicry…

I never saw a woman so fond as she was of him. But there was a long delay before they could be married because he was working in India, and our father would not allow her to go out there to that tropical climate that he said would kill her. The Old Queen was dead, and her son fat Edward too, before they were wed at last, and a year later Lottie was born.

Little Lottie. My sweet, adorable niece. My little girl whom I wronged. There can be no forgiveness!

I am crying… Let me rest. I can write no more for the present.

“G
illy.”

“Oh,
what?”

“Sorry to interrupt. What are you doing anyway?”

“Homework,” said Gillon virtuously.

“You're not - are you really?”

“If I don't I'm seriously stitched up. It's last week's. Pit Bull'll tear me to pieces.”

“Ah.” Mr Pitt was indeed fiercer than Mr Butcher.

“What did you want?” asked Gillon.

“Just to ask you something. You know the cupboard.”

“The precious cupboard, taking up space in the bank safe! Yeah?”

“Where did you get it?”

Gillon was silent for a long moment. Too long. Then he said, “I told you at the time. Found it in the alley behind our old house. Our old-old house, the one before last.”

“No, you didn't.”

Gillon sat at his desk without turning, but there was something about the back of his neck that told Omri he was right.

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Tell me where you got it really.”

Gillon turned on his swivel chair. “Listen—” he began. Then he stopped, frowned, and said, “What's up with you? You look funny.”

“Funny how?”

“I dunno, as if you were zonked out. Look, so what if I made up about the alley? I didn't pretend I'd paid for it. I said I'd found it, and that was true. I thought the alley would make it more sort of — interesting.”

“Go on.”

“Well. I found it in our basement. Among a whole lot of stuff. Most of it was just junk. Ask me, that cupboard was junk too, only you were gone on secret drawers and boxes and stuff and I thought you might think it was a bit of fun. I was skint at the time, it was the best I could do for a birthday present for you. I didn't expect you to go crazy over it.”

“Whose was it?”

“Mum's, I suppose. All the junk that collects in our houses is hers.”

“And did you ask her - you know, if you could have it to give me?”

“Well, no. I didn't think she'd miss it. And she never recognized it, did she? She never knew she had it.”

This was evidently true. His mother hadn't flickered an eyelid when Omri had unwrapped Gillon's present. It was because she had such a lot of stuff, half of it just bunged down in the cellar (or, in the next house, in the attic) without much sorting. His mother just couldn't throw anything away — when they'd moved here, to this much smaller house with no attics or cellars, she'd stored all her ‘family stuff', as she called it, in the outbuilding that had once been a pigsty.

Family stuff…

He went to look for his mother, and found her feeding the hens. She looked so countrified, scattering the corn with great sweeps of her arm like the sower-of-seed in the picture, Omri would have laughed if he hadn't been feeling so solemn.

“Mum.”

“Yes, darling.”

“You know all your family stuff.”

“Oh, don't talk about it! I
really must
sort it out one of these days.” She'd been saying that at intervals for as long as Omri could remember.

“Where did it come from?”

“My grandmother mostly.”

“Her name was Maria, wasn't it?”

“Yes. Granny Marie I used to call her.”

“When did she die?”

“Oh, not till I was grown-up. Adiel was a baby. I have a photo somewhere of her, holding him in her arms. She was really old — well into her eighties.”

So Maria was not waiting for her sister on the Other Side. Jessica Charlotte herself would have had a long wait - nearly twenty years - for the chance to explain. Explain what?

Omri had had to stop reading the notebook for the moment. He felt too wound up. The story was too — too strong for him to take in much at a time. That poor old lady, dying alone like that, feeling so bad… Now, getting himself ready to read on, he was doing some investigating.

“What about your grandfather?”

“Matt. Poor Matt. Well, I never knew him. He died long before my time, when my mother was only a child.”

“Lottie…”

“Yes.”

“Did he die — abroad?”

His mother looked at him curiously. “No. He spent years in the colonies as an administrator, but — no. He died in London, in an accident. Terribly sad. Granny Marie never got over it. Just think of losing your husband, and then your only daughter in the bombing…”

“She had you.”

“Yes. And I loved her. But we were very hard up — Matt's pension was pitifully small. We rented a little house in the East End, and Granny Marie had to work until she was quite old - it was a hard life for her, but she never let me feel it. I had a very happy childhood, thanks to her.”

Omri went back upstairs. Gillon met him at the top.

“Don't you want to watch TV? Rats to homework, there's a great film on.”