Advent (23 page)

 
Gav hung back as Marina slid out of her weird shoes and trotted down the dim hall. The presence of another person instantly made him want to avoid having to make any sort of conversation.

 
‘Where did you get to? Caleb said you were coming straight back.’

 
‘I wanted to show Gavin the lookout. Sorry.’

 
‘As long as you’re here now.’

 
‘What’s wrong? Where’s Caleb?’

 
‘Wrong? Goodness me, nothing.’ Her father touched her shoulder. Gav thought he didn’t sound very convincing, but perhaps that was just his manner. ‘Caleb has gone out for a while.’

 
‘Where’s he gone?’

 
‘I’m not certain. Would you like anything to drink, Gavin?’

 
‘Oh, um—’

 
‘I would,’ Marina announced.

 
She took him through to the kitchen. He looked around more thoughtfully this time, now that he felt less like an intruder. In almost every detail the room failed to correspond to any meaning of the word ‘kitchen’ he recognised. There was no fridge. There was no cooker. There were no right angles at all, no ambience of whiteness and stainless steel and order. There was no kettle or toaster. There were no spaces in which such things could have gone, or sockets to which they could have been attached. There weren’t even any lights, he realised. In the high and vaulted ceiling, narrow iron-framed windows opened by arrangements of pulleys and dangling ropes. Their sooty panes grimed the already grey daylight. Marina ducked through an arched opening and returned with a bottle of some sort of juice. She’d pulled the sleeves of her sweater over her hands, as if the bottle were hot to the touch. She got a couple of glasses down from a shelf and twisted off the cap, still with muffled fingers.

 
They went back to the table where he’d sat before. The fire had been stoked into a big, raw, crackling thing, for heat rather than show. He thought he recognised the drink as elderflower juice, in some cloudy and bitter version, slightly unpleasant in the way expensive organic things always were. It wasn’t hot, of course.

 
‘Are you hungry?’

 
He was, but he remembered the peculiar stuff in the teapot and shook his head, promising himself handfuls of Auntie Gwen’s biscuits later on.

 
‘Daddy?’

 
Her father was still out in the hall, by the big window at the foot of the stairs. ‘Yes, my love?’

 
‘Have you found out when Gwenny’s coming yet?’

 
‘Not yet.’

 
‘Oh.’ An unhappy little sigh. Gav recognised the signs by now – the droop of her head, the wrinkle of her thin eyebrows – and tried to think of a way to change the subject, but Mr Uren continued, coming into the room.

 
‘There’s a good chance that Reverend Jeffrey will track her down soon.’ The reassurance was directed at both of them. ‘It sounds as if she was looking for him for some reason. That’s probably where she went, up to the village. I’m sure something’ – and he gestured vaguely with the hand that wasn’t holding the stick – ‘must have held her up.’

 
‘I told you she wasn’t here,’ Marina murmured to Gav, leaning across the table.

 
‘It hardly excuses her failure to meet your train, Gavin, but no doubt she’ll tell the whole story when she arrives.’

 
‘No problem,’ Gav said. ‘Least I got here.’

 
Mr Uren nodded pensively. ‘Perhaps you should stay in the house until she comes. She’ll be anxious to see you as soon as she arrives.’

 
Gav was sure her father had another reason for his suggestion, though he couldn’t have said why. Maybe it was just that he’d spoken a little more firmly than usual. Marina, of course, didn’t notice anything.

 
‘Oh yes. Yes. I was going to show Gavin around later, but we should stay in, shouldn’t we?’

 
‘I think so.’ He smiled half-heartedly. ‘We’ll find you some lunch in a while. I shall read quietly in my study and keep out of your way.’ Gav cheered up at once. ‘Come and get me if you need me.’

 
‘All right, Daddy. Caleb thought we should stay indoors too.’

 
Something unreadable flickered over Mr Uren’s expression, a deepening of the shadows of his face. ‘He has a habit of caution, but . . . Never mind.’ He picked up a book from the edge of the table. His hand was deeply wrinkled, an old man’s hand. Much more like a grandfather than a father, Gav thought. He was certainly old enough.

 
‘You don’t mind staying here till Gwen comes, do you?’ Marina asked him, as her father left the room through a door on the far side. ‘I was going to show you around the house anyway.’

 
He found her simple certainty that Auntie Gwen was about to show up almost more peculiar than anything else about her, but he wasn’t going to spoil her improved mood by mentioning it, so, ‘No,’ he said. ‘Course not.’ He wished he felt the same way. Some guardedness in Tristram Uren’s manner had made him as certain as he could be that the old man wasn’t telling them something. And it was obvious to Gav that he’d been waiting for them to get back. He kept thinking of the kid Horace and his weird story, his incomprehensible fidgety nervousness.

 
Singing?

 
But Marina was affected by none of this, and he was determined not to puncture her cheerfulness again. She wasn’t worried, so why should he be? What was there to be worried about? He tried to make himself stop thinking about it.

 
It was surprisingly easy. As soon as Marina began conducting him behind the house’s doors, along its crooked passages, up its stairs, it became impossible to wonder about anything else.

 
Gavin had unconsciously assumed that there was a real house hidden out of sight somewhere behind the historic façade. A private family home, where he’d see the fitted carpets, the electric sockets, the radiators, the TV. But the house grew darker and stranger and colder the further Marina led him into it. Its bones and joints kept appearing, the things he’d thought houses always kept out of sight. It was almost like the building was determined to prove to him that it concealed nothing. He saw great slabs of swelling wood embedded in the ceilings or branching from the eaves. He saw bare patches of grey stone anchoring places where walls met, and crosses and curves of iron studding those walls like giant rivets. The walls themselves were uneven, like landscapes – contours of stone behind whitewashed plaster. Except where the rooms had been panelled in dark wood, there were no smooth planes anywhere, no neat, flat, anonymous surfaces behind which all those things that made up a proper house could be hiding, the wires and pipes, the invisible water and heat and light. Everything was in plain sight, rough, used-looking and – most of all – nakedly ancient. Every door was a gate of wood. He could see the nails that held them together, each one a little different from the others. They creaked. He saw and heard the rings of metal that formed their hinges turning as she opened them. Each wall advertised its solidity; Gav kept reaching out his fingers to touch the stipples in the whitewash, the seams of the panelling, the knots in the wood, astonished at how explicit they all were. Even the glass in the windows was visible, full of minuscule waves and bubbles.

 
Above all the house was
old
, old with that sense of foreignness, forgottenness, that he’d caught as a smell the moment he’d stepped inside, old like the sounds of a dead language. It wasn’t anything like a museum. Next to this, all the historic houses he could remember being dragged around were just like costume dramas on the telly. There was no pretence here, no masquerade. As Marina guided him through its dim passages and its mysteriously purposeless rooms, he felt like a visitor from another world. The idea that she actually lived here – that she sat in the strange-shaped chairs with the uneven legs, that she looked out of the distorting windows or warmed herself at the blackened fireplaces, that she kept things in the massive chests like sarcophagi – was simply inconceivable. But he knew better than to say so; he of all people knew better than that. He was never going to gape and blurt out
But there’s no electricity! But there’s no taps! But what do you do all day!
He followed, and listened, and tried his best to think of this impossible place as her home.

 
‘Gwen says there probably isn’t another house like it in the world.’ Marina had stopped by the top of the stairs. A pair of keyhole-shaped windows looked out towards the headland and the sea. Adjacent was a niche in the wall that looked like it had once been a window too, but was now closed up and filled, like much of the house, with books. A lot of them were children’s books with gaudy covers, looking startlingly unlikely in this setting.

 
‘I’d say she’s probably right.’

 
‘What do you think? Do you like it?’

 
‘It’s . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Incredible. Must have stayed like this for hundreds of years.’

 
‘Bits of it are older and bits are newer, actually. We haven’t got to the oldest bit yet.’

 
‘Yeah, but . . .’ He chose his words carefully, remembering that a lot of what was obvious to him wasn’t obvious to her. ‘Even the new bits must be way older than most houses. Like Aunt Gwen’s house. A lot of people would say that was quite old, but it’s nothing compared to this.’

 
‘Oh. Well, that’s because people have been living here for longer. Come and see my room.’

 
There were clothes on the floor, and bits and pieces scattered everywhere else – scruffy-looking stuffed animals with a faintly tragic homemade air, scratchy clothes in muted colours, chess pieces, paper and pencils and playing cards and trading cards and kids’ magazines. There was a rocking horse, its paint worn away in places to the bare wood. Apart from those things the room was as comprehensively unlike a teenage girl’s room as Gavin could have imagined, not that he’d ever been in one. The bed, for a start, was a four-poster. It had heavy drapes of dark green. There was a large tub of stained metal – maybe copper – resting on a rug in one corner, a porcelain jug beside it, and a folding screen painted with crude flowers leaning against the wall nearby. Despite everything he’d seen so far, Gav refused for a long time to admit to himself that the tub really was a bath.

 
‘I painted that myself,’ she said. He realised she meant the screen, and made complimentary noises. ‘Well, Gwen helped. We had to make the paints together and work out the mixes for the colours, but I did all the actual flowers.’

 
‘They’re lovely.’

 
‘I might try the fireplace next.’ Like almost every other room he’d seen, Marina’s had a big fireplace with an iron grate and a heap of ash and a basket of scabby logs, obviously used every day. Well, how else would they keep the place warm? Its surround was of reddish wood carved into bunches of berries and leaves. ‘I was going to do reds and browns for autumn. What do you think?’

 
‘Erm. Nice.’

 
‘Gwen and I draw a lot.’ She gestured shyly at the paper on the floor.

 
Course you do, he thought. What else is there for you to do? Thirteen years living like it was still the Dark Ages. No wonder she was a bit different.

 
‘Daddy’s rooms are just next door but we shouldn’t go in there without asking. I’ll show you the best bit next. I saved it for last.’

 
Timbers in the floor popped softly as they passed. Centuries of traffic had worn the wood glossy, and where the daylight fell on it from deep-set windows it shone as if they were skimming through puddles of dark water. The passage turned an angle and up a couple of irregular steps, gained a higher ceiling and ended in a doorway of arched stone.

 
‘You go first,’ Marina said.

 
He pushed at the door rather nervously and stepped through onto the gallery of a high-vaulted hall flooded with chilly winter light. Huge beams of blackened oak spanned the ceiling at his eye level, still bearing the contours of the trees they’d been hewn from half a millennium ago. To his left was a whitewashed wall with three tall latticed windows that looked like they ought to be in a church. The gallery ran round the other three walls, a simple course of wood railed with thick posts and resting on the ends of beams that stuck out from the wall, except at the end where he and Marina had come in: here it was stone, carved in columns and arches.