2008 - Recipes for Cherubs (7 page)

She couldn’t eat in this place, though. The state of that kitchen would put a rat off its food.

“Thank you, but I’m not hungry,” she lied. “May I use the telephone?”

Ella nodded. “If you’d care to follow me, I’ll show you the way.”

They set off along the corridor. As Catrin was about to step past the rotting green curtain she glanced behind her and her mouth fell open in astonishment.

A man in a wide-brimmed hat had slipped out of Aunt Alice’s room and was hurrying along the corridor. So there had been someone hiding in the wardrobe in Aunt Alice’s room all the time. But why would anyone in their right mind do that?

Catrin stood riveted to the spot as he hurried soundlessly down the servants’ staircase.

So Aunt Ella wasn’t as alone as she imagined she was. No wonder she thought she could hear someone wandering around up here. This was such a weird place with peculiar men who hid in wardrobes and newly found aunts who were definitely short of a few marbles.

Down in the hallway Ella pointed out the telephone booth and Catrin picked up the dusty receiver and with a shaking finger dialled the number of St Agnes’s. She waited impatiently, imagining Sister Matilde pausing in what she was doing, then hurrying through the dim corridors, past the silent saints and the guttering candles to answer the telephone.

The phone rang and rang but no one answered. Surely any moment now a breathless voice would say, “Saint Agnes’s Convent School, Sister Matilde speaking…”

She was close to tears as she replaced the receiver. What on earth was she supposed to do? She couldn’t have stayed here even if it had been a proper hotel, because Aunt Ella had said that she didn’t want her here, didn’t want anyone. She wiped her eyes, rang the number again, but to no avail.

“I can’t get through and it’s really odd because there’s always someone at the convent,” she said, stepping out of the telephone booth.

“You’re at a convent?” Ella enquired with surprise.

“Yes, Saint Agnes’s Convent School, just outside London.”

“When did your mother become a Catholic? Or was that another of her five-minute fads?”

“She didn’t become a Catholic. My father was a Catholic,” Catrin replied.

“You said
was
 –  your father
was
a Catholic – in the past tense.”

“That’s because my father’s dead, if you must know. He died when I was a baby. Now I really must go.”

Ella looked with irritation at the girl’s brimming eyes. She was like Kizzy, able to turn on the waterworks whenever it suited her.

She watched Catrin walk away through the long grass, pause near the old swing and put down her suitcase.

Catrin looked back at the house and there was something despondent in the droop of her shoulders, a fragility which would have brought a lump to Ella’s throat once upon a time.

She wasn’t a well child at all, by the look of her; there was a shocking thinness about her that wasn’t natural. Surely Kizzy would have noticed that something was clearly wrong with her own child? Then again, the feckless article only ever saw what she wanted to see.

Ella turned briskly away from the window, made her way to the telephone booth, found the address book and turned the dusty pages. With a trembling hand she dialled a London number and listened with bated breath. A few moments later a man answered and it was all Ella could do to keep her erratic breathing under control and not drop the telephone. He called loudly down the line. How awful it was to hear his voice after all these years. Ella, her throat tight with emotion, put down the telephone quietly. One thing was certain. Kizzy Grieve was playing silly buggers because Catrin Grieve’s father was most certainly not dead.

C
atrin was dismayed when she arrived at the station. It was deserted, the CLOSED sign hanging on the window of the ticket office. She made her way outside and down towards the village.

In an hour or so she would go back, buy a ticket and get the first train to Swansea and then on to London, forget all about stupid Shrimp’s Hotel, dead Aunt Alice and peculiar Aunt Ella.

The morning was already warm and the sky above Kilvenny was blue and cloudless. Rooks were circling above the castle, early bees busied themselves among the wild flowers, and butterflies hovered and dipped on currents of air.

Most of Kilvenny Castle lay in ruins but one wing still stood and the sun reflected off the latticed windows and a coil of smoke spiralled up from the enormous chimney and drifted away over the tall trees of Gwartney’s Wood beyond the castle’s high walls.

To kill time Catrin wandered aimlessly through the gardens, breathing in the smell of herbs and the fragrance of the small white roses that grew in profusion up the ancient walls. It was so good to get the stench of Shrimp’s Hotel out of her nostrils, to blow the musty smell of decay out of her hair.

The door to the castle was ajar and a key, the biggest key she had ever seen, had been left in the lock. She knocked on the door but the wood soaked up the sound made by her small fist. She’d need a hammer to make herself heard. Hopefully, whoever lived here had a telephone they would let her use and she could ring her school and warn them that she was on her way back.

The door rasped as she pushed it inwards, the old wood catching on the stone-flagged floor. She stepped hesitantly inside and called out. Her words echoed eerily in the silence. No one answered.

She was standing in a high-ceilinged room with a fireplace big enough to house a couple of carthorses and walls covered in battered shields and gloomy portraits of the long-since dead. There was an enormous table which would seat about twenty people, with high-backed chairs set round it.

She tiptoed across the flagged floor, made her way through a door to her right and along a dimly lit corridor past sleeping suits of armour and a stuffed bear wedged tightly between a bookcase and a hallstand hung with moth-eaten coats. There was a curious smell of dying flowers and burrowing woodworm, mingling with the sweet scent of rosemary and thyme.

She stepped through a doorway into an enormous kitchen. As she stood there a shaft of sunlight pierced through the high windows and she had to shield her eyes from the momentary brightness.

The room had a dreamlike feel to it, as though she had stepped unwittingly into a fairy story. Big pots and pans hung from nails hammered haphazardly into the thick walls. A bunch of oversized keys dangled from a brass ring above the range, and giant ladles and oversized spoons splayed out of an earthenware pot on the kitchen table. Everything was massive, as if it was a room waiting for a giant to return.

Feefifofum, I smell the blood of an Englishman
.

Catrin shivered in the cool air.

Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread
.

Nothing in the kitchen gave a clue to who lived here; it was more like a museum than a real kitchen. It wasn’t likely that she was going to find a telephone here, because everything was ancient.

At the sound of approaching footsteps out in the corridor, she held her breath and clenched her fists tightly at her sides as the kitchen door opened.

Tony Agosti, walking back from the chapel, noticed that the door to the castle was open, and made his way to the kitchen. When he opened the door he jumped with fright at the sight of the girl standing there.

The sunlight streaming through the windows cast a halo round her head and she looked like a figure from a religious painting or a ghost conjured up from another world. He blinked nervously and hurriedly made the sign of the cross.

This was no castle ghost. The girl had a mop of dark curly hair and deep blue eyes which looked too large for her small face, a face as pale as graveyard lilies. She reminded him of one of those incurably sick girls in an old-fashioned novel. She was the skinniest girl he’d ever seen, with legs like cocktail sticks and a skirt which swamped her.

“I’m sorry if I shouldn’t be here,” she said anxiously, taking a hesitant step towards him. “But I was hoping that whoever lives here would let me use the telephone – if they have one, that is.”

“There’s no telephone in here, lovely girl. A couple of carrier pigeons hanging about in the garden, maybe, but nothing as up-to-date as a telephone. There’s no problem your being in here, mind. Mr Gwartney from the library won’t mind one little bit.”

“Does he live here?” she asked.

“No, no one’s lived here for years.”

“But the door was open and there was a key in the lock.”

“Aye, Dan Gwartney is the caretaker of the castle. He keeps an eye on the place, lights the fires now and again to keep the rooms aired. The gardens are always open during the day for people to wander in and take a look round, but hardly any bugger sets foot in Kilvenny now. Gone to the dogs, we have, the last few years.”

“I should like to look round properly but I’m afraid I won’t have time. I’m catching a train soon.”

Tony Agosti looked at her curiously. “That’ll be the ghost train, will it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She eyed him warily. She didn’t like to hear talk of ghosts while she was standing in the cool kitchen alone with a strange man.

“Well, there’s no trains out of Kilvenny now until next week.”

She looked at him with dismay. “But there must be. I arrived here by train yesterday.”

Tony grinned. “That was the late train. Like I said, there’ll be no more trains until next week. Very few people travel here these days, and if they do they don’t tend to stay long.”

Catrin’s face paled.

“I was supposed to be staying at Shrimp’s Hotel for the summer,” she said.

“Were you, by God? No one stays up there any more.”

“I know that now, but I didn’t before I came.” Her voice was impatient.

Tony Agosti thought that the girl was a peculiar little thing, very English and proper, old-fashioned-looking and a bit lah-di-dah in her speech. Little girls of her age didn’t usually travel about the country staying in hotels on their own. Not in Wales, anyhow.

“Shrimp’s has been closed for years,” he said. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

Catrin shook her head and bit her trembling lip.

“Ella Grieve, the owner, shut herself up years ago and never comes out.”

“Does no one ever go there?” Catrin said.

“Not any more. There was a niece who used to stay there –  damn, now, she was a beautiful girl, like a film star or a model.”

Catrin bristled. A model for toby jugs, maybe. Why did everyone talk about her mother’s looks and how beautiful she was? They didn’t know her, didn’t know what she was like on the inside. If they did they wouldn’t go on and on about her all the time.

As he stood there looking at this defiant little girl, Tony had a sudden vision of Kizzy Grieve running down the steps to the beach, her long, silky hair streaming behind her.

She had stumbled, lost her shoe and stopped to retrieve it, a shiny black shoe reflecting the last of the sun’s rays. He remembered the golden brown of her slender calf against the hem of her red dress. Her perfume on the warm evening air as she stood looking up at him earnestly, her mascara smudged and her beautiful face stained with recent tears, her mouth opening to speak.

“Beauty isn’t everything, you know,” Catrin snapped.

Tony looked up from his reverie and was taken aback to see the anger in the girl’s face, her eyes bright with fury.

“No, no of course it’s not.”

“Who was she, anyhow?” Catrin asked disingenuously.

“She was called Kizzy. She was Ella’s niece and she used to live here with her mother.”

“Here in Kilvenny?”

“Right here in Kilvenny Castle.”

Catrin looked at him with disbelief. Why hadn’t her mother ever told her this? How was it possible for strangers to know more about her own family than she did? None of it made sense. Kizzy had hardly ever mentioned her parents and never once said that she’d grown up in a castle in Wales.

“When did she stop coming here?”

“Let me see, now. Her mother, Hester, got married again and moved away. Kizzy was sent off to one of those boarding schools, like orphanages for rich people, I always think. She used to come back here in the holidays, though.”

“And stay here in the castle all alone?”

“No. No, she stayed up at Shrimp’s. She found the castle too gloomy for her by half. She liked the home comforts of Shrimp’s – hot water, proper baths, good food and all that.”

Catrin tried to suppress a smile. Kizzy would have hated living in this dark old place with its rickety windows and cold stone floors. Kizzy hated history and all old things; she liked everything to be spanking new and usually expensive.

Catrin thought Kilvenny Castle was beautiful, full of atmosphere and bursting with history.

“And she stopped coming here altogether?”

“She went away one summer and never came back,” he said sadly.

Catrin eyed him suspiciously. He was probably another man who had fallen for her mother’s sickly charms – men never seemed able to see through her.

“Did you go up to Shrimp’s yesterday?” Tony asked with interest.

Catrin nodded.

“Did Ella Grieve let you in?”

“She did, as it happens.”

Tony stared at her with incredulity. “You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I stayed there the night.”

“Are you staying there again tonight?”

“
No!
”

“So what will you do now?”

“I’m trying to get hold of my school. I’m hoping they’ll send someone down here to pick me up as soon as they can.”

“Is there anyone else you could ring? Your mother, maybe?”

“My mother is away on holiday.”

“I suppose you’d best ring from my place. I’m Tony Agosti, by the way. I keep the Café Romana just over the road.” He held out his hand to her and she shook it shyly.

Her hand was cold, as cold as a corpse.

“Well, come on, then, or my norma will be wondering where I’ve got to.”

“What’s a norma?” Catrin asked.

“The same as a granny, only harder work,” he said with a warm smile.

“I suppose I ought to tell you my name. I’m Catrin Grieve: Ella Grieve is my great-aunt and Kizzy is my mother.”