Closed at Dusk (2 page)

‘Rubbish, dear. You're supposed to be cured.'

‘You don't get “cured” of ME. It lurks in the background. Big crowd today, Ruth?'

‘Not too bad. Just as well, because Doreen's not been much help to me in the tea-room. Been –
you
know.'

‘Psychic spells?'

Ruth shook her head and made a tight mouth. It was not supposed to be discussed in front of the highly strung little boy.

‘Did she hear something?' Rob asked, half fearful, half thrilled.

Doreen was the only person who had heard the terrible sounds of the Connemara mare trapped with her colt fifty years ago when the wooden foaling box behind the stables had burned down. It had not been rebuilt. Part of that end of the stables, hosed clean of ancient horse smells and painted, was now the tea-room, extended by a porch, with tables on the cobbles and flowers in tubs and hanging baskets. In the scullery store-room, Doreen, with the pretty china in the sink, claimed to have heard an echo of the dreadful screams.

‘She wouldn't have if she'd never been told about it.' Ruth tipped the scones off the baking tray and went to the short stairs that led down through winding rear passages to the tea-room.

Keith said darkly, ‘When she first heard it, she
hadn't
been told.'

‘That's nonsense.' Ruth gave Rob one of her best Ruth smiles, everything dimpling into comfortable curves, spaniel-brown eyes cushioned in crinkles.

That evening, after the chicken
kung po
, which was as weird as Rob had expected, he became nervous as it grew dark. He did not want to go up to his little cabin bedroom on the nursery floor.

‘There's nothing to be scared of.'

‘This house is too big.'

‘It hasn't grown. You've known it since you were born.'

‘I didn't know it was too big then.'

‘Come on.' Because he remembered his own childhood terrors, Keith said, ‘Let's go for a little tour and you'll see it's just its same old safe self.'

Delaying Rob's bedtime, they went all over the house with the dogs, switching on lights and leaving them on, so that The
Sanctuary seemed to blaze with life, as if the great house were full of excited people for Christmas.

Rob refused to go down to the basement, so they visited the larder and store-rooms and the serving pantry where the dumb waiter used to come up – ‘Is the door locked? Show me it's locked,' because something ghastly might come up from underground – and the china pantry with the endless dresser and cupboards, then through the warm garlic climate of the kitchen and into all the ground-floor rooms.

The long drawing-room ran from front to back of the house with a deep five-sided bay at each swelling turret, two fireplaces, and the piano covered in family pictures.

‘Pull the curtains.' Anything could be looking in from the dark outside: left-over visitors, robbers, kidnappers, wraiths of animals that had died here, Hardcastle from the mausoleum.

‘Not worth drawing curtains just to be pulled back in the morning.'

With a flourish of an imaginary tailcoat, Keith sat down on the piano stool, tapestried long ago by his grandmother Sylvia as an imprisoned girl, and played one of the songs he had intended for
Three Ring Circus
.

‘
Time gone by … played a game
.

I'd be leader. All would follow
.

Look round now. No one there
.

Fingers click on empty air
.

Life? It's hollow
.'

‘More, Keith.'

‘Only if you'll sing.' Rob shook his head. ‘Up then.' Keith pretended to bang the piano lid down on his own fingers, and cried like a clown, his eyes triangular behind the round glasses that were too big for his narrow face.

With the dogs going ahead, Charlotte hopping from stair to
stair, Corrie the labrador padding weightily, they explored some of the many bedrooms and bathrooms. When he could sidetrack Keith no longer, Rob followed him up to the nursery floor with the lagging tread of doom, because he knew he would not be allowed downstairs again.

‘All right now,' Keith told him. ‘Nothing ever happened up here.'

Where then? Where did something terrible happen downstairs
?

Keith would not bother with the bedrooms and the little nanny's kitchen and the playroom where Rob kept the box of pipes and joints that his grandfather had given him when the old boiler-house was demolished. Rob was interested in pipes. He was inventing a way to drain the path that crossed the marsh garden at the far end of the lake.

The attic store-rooms were safely shut away behind a locked door at the end of the white-painted nursery corridor. The turret wing and passage where servants used to sleep was now closed off as a flat for the head gardener and his wife. But the housemaid's closet …

‘Just open the door a tiny bit, Keith.'

‘I won't.'

‘I won't go to bed.' Rob sat down on the floor with his legs stuck out.

‘Damn you, Robert.'

‘Please.'

‘Brat.' Keith opened the door with a swift flourish and switched on the light before Rob would open his eyes to risk a look at Flusher.

In the innocent room of ironing boards and drying rails and the dressing-up trunk and blankets stored on shelves with ski clothes, Flusher was a dreadful thing. It squatted in a corner by the sink, a very old, round toilet bowl with no seat but a porcelain draining board set into each side. Above it, a pull
chain hung from a high cistern with embossed lettering: ‘The Flusher, patent 1882'.

Why were all the children bewitched by this ugly relic of chamber-pot days and nights?

‘Were you?' Rob asked Keith.

‘Of course. We all were. Partly for a joke, like you.'

It wasn't a joke.

The cabin had been fitted up for a bygone naval cadet, to make him feel at home when he came on leave. It was just big enough for the high bunk with drawers underneath and a shallow fitted cupboard and shelves.

Kneeling on the pillow, Rob looked out of the window which had two bars, like all the windows on this floor. Oblongs of light lay on the circle of drive and the grass beyond. One of them lit up the crouching stone bulldog on top of the square pillar in the boundary wall.

‘Lie down, Rob.'

‘I can't. I'll get cot death.'

‘What on earth are you talking about?'

‘A boy at school's brother died of it. You lie down to sleep and then you die.'

‘Boloney.' Keith switched off the corridor light, to make Rob yell out, ‘You said you'd leave it on!' Keith switched it on again and went downstairs, laughing like Dracula.

Struggling out from beneath the limp weights of Charlotte and Corrie, Rob knelt again at the window and saw the oblongs of light go out one by one, and the bulldog disappear into thick darkness. Whatever had been waiting out there beyond the light drew closer. Rob wriggled back into the tunnel of bedclothes and listened for Keith's bare footsteps coming up the stairs. They came at last, pad, pad, wearily.
What if it wasn't Keith
? The footsteps passed his door. The labrador snored. Keith's bedroom door opened and shut, and his music started quietly.

When Rob's mother Tessa arrived from London, she found him in the kitchen, dropping lemon biscuit dough neatly on to baking trays for Ruth.

‘Where you been, where have you been?' He dropped the spoon on the floor and ran to Tessa.

‘You know I've been at a conference.'

‘I thought you would never come!'

‘No you didn't,' Ruth said. ‘You told me she was coming this morning.'

Rob did not feel shamed. It was only a ritual. He went out with his mother to find where Keith was working.

None of the gardeners had seen him for the last hour. They shrugged their shoulders and went on with what they were doing. Keith worked in spurts, for apprentice wages. He was a bit of a joke to them.

‘Let's try the hidden garden.' Tessa made the playful secret face that used to be only for Rob and his father, and now was only for Rob. They raced the dogs along the lake, and went round its narrow end where it met the little Lynn river, cutting under the road from the village.

On a low green mound the miniature temple of the Egyptian cat-goddess Bastet stood blazing white in the sun against its semi-circle of dwarf cypresses. ‘
Remember Gigi
.' There was a new card pinned inside one of the fluted wooden pillars among the
faded photographs and curling
in memoriams
to visitors' cats.

Behind the aromatic cypresses they took the path between the giant beeches to a low doorway in a wall so overhung with honeysuckle and wisteria and crimson glory vine that you could not see the bricks. Standing upright again – Rob had ducked unnecessarily with his mother – they were in a charming little closed garden of odd-shaped flower beds and grass paths that rambled without pattern between box edgings. White seats fitted into corners. There was a sundial that said, ‘Never Too Late for Delight', a goldfish pond with yellow iris, and a tiny thatched summer house. Pottery models of small animals sat or prowled among the flowers and bushes. Stone lizards and frogs rested along the rim of the pond.

New visitors fancied, when they found this pleasance, that they had stumbled on a secret place which was private to the family and their friends. ‘Well, but the door's open and there's no one about …' They sat in the summer house and on the white seats, and felt crafty and privileged. They did not know about the real hidden garden between the angle of the coach-house wall and the high hedge of rhododendrons, where the family had their own flower garden and swimming pool and comfortable furniture on suntrap flagstones. Because of the late May heatwave, Tessa's father had filled the pool early this year. She and Rob eventually found Keith there, in the cold blue water.

For looking after Rob for two days, Tessa had brought her cousin a beautiful peach-coloured shirt and a volume, bound in soft leather, of Rimbaud's poems.

‘Was the Beast all right?'

‘Divine.' Keith hung on the edge of the pool and tried to lick Tessa's wet toes. The small nails were varnished cherries.

‘He can be an awful pest.' She laughed down at Keith. ‘Always wanting attention and calling. It can drive you mad.'

‘Oh, no, he didn't do that.' Keith tilted back his head and squinted at Rob along the side of his bony nose.

Rob had put on his swimming trunks in the pool house. He did a spectacular jump into the shallow end. ‘Race you a width,' he gasped at the surface.

‘Too cold. Going back to work.' Keith tried to pull himself up, failed, and climbed out by the steps. He picked up his towel, and Tessa went with him to the door that led to the private walk behind the stables.

‘Mummy – stay! Stay here and watch me swim – Mummy!' Rob took in water, and choked. But his mother was only standing laughing in the arched gateway, calling something to Keith as he went towards the house.

Rob had his mother to himself for two days before anyone else arrived. They did things that Tessa used to do here when she was a child, visiting Grandmother Sylvia. In the mornings before the visitors came, they waded in the marsh and rolled down the banks of the terraced lawns. She rowed him in the blue dinghy under the humped wooden bridge to the front of Walter Cobb's empty tomb, set into a high overgrown bank of the lake.

‘I won't look.' Rob turned his head away. He did not mind seeing the mausoleum from the other side of the lake, but staring close up, you might see the heavy doors bulge and buckle, and the desperate spirits of hell burst out and blaze down the broken marble steps to set the lake on fire.

‘There's nothing there, silly,' Tessa said. ‘It's a good place.'

‘
She put him there
.'

‘For love. Your great-great-great-grandfather. She buried him here for love, with a statue of his favourite dog above, to guard him. Like Charlotte guards us.'

Tessa's rag-bag mongrel was in the bow of the boat, small
blunt head up, ears out sideways, short legs braced. Since she left Rex a year ago, Charlotte and Rob were the best things in Tessa's life. Rex had broken her heart, but she had never lost her buoyant optimism. By nature impulsive and disordered, she did not tie herself to future plans, but embraced whatever came along. She was at the moment a personnel counsellor with Maddox Management, a consultancy which ran seminars for business and professional staff. The sessions she conducted were lively and stimulating. Thanks to some inspired training with the great Dr Oscar Ferullo, she was equipped to help men and women improve working relationships. Their private lives might be a mess, but then so was Tessa's.

She tied up the boat for their picnic, and when visitors began to straggle into the gardens, they went back to the house.

Rob ran with his head ducked, as if he were naked. Tessa walked, and waved and smiled at people and said hullo. Some were pleased to see one of the family. Some were baffled, wondering about this friendly young woman in shorts, with her caramel hair gathered randomly on top of her head.

Tessa and Rob went down to the lodge cottage where Ruth's mother Agnes lived with Ruth's grandmother, Mary Trout, who was almost ninety. Troutie, as she had been to the family for as long as anyone could remember, sat in her big old fusty chair beside the window, so that she could observe cars and walkers going up and down the drive.

Starting at The Sanctuary as a fourteen-year-old under-maid before the First War, she had progressed to being nurse to Tessa's father and his brother and sister, and later cook and everything else to their mother. After Sylvia Taylor died and her son William restored the house and opened up the gardens, he wanted his beloved Troutie to help Ruth to start the tearoom. Non-feudal Agnes urged her to break free, but Troutie
simply expanded her output of victoria sponges and bakewell tarts while her wrists and back held out, and continued to hobble up to the big house to mend clothes and polish silver for as long as she could walk.