The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (11 page)

In some ways helping Adalina is the most important thing that ever happened to me. I did something all by myself with no one to help, and I got it right. It must have given me a lot of confidence I hadn't had before. For instance, do you imagine without it I'd have had the nerve to go and ask Mr. Glister for a job, all on my own? And since then I've made what I wanted of myself. People look at me and think
Poor lonely old man, no wife, no kids, no friends, just a grubby old bookshop and his cat to show for his sixty-five years
. They're dead wrong. OK, I'm getting on, but I'm not poor and I'm not lonely. If I could have my life over again with all my wishes coming true, this is how I'd have it, and one of the things I like about Tom and Mercury is that they can see this. Anyway, that's why the business with Adalina is important.

But against that, it was a very uncomfortable thing for a kid to deal with, after, all on his own. I didn't know what to make of it, and there wasn't anyone I could talk to about it. Certainly not my grandmother. She'd have called me a wicked liar, making up stories. And there wasn't anyone to talk to at school. So I suppose I felt I couldn't get on with my life if I was always thinking about it, and waiting for Adalina to show up, and knowing she wouldn't.

Bit by bit I put it away. I don't mean I forgot it, wiped it clean out, but I turned it from being something that had really happened to me into one of the stories I used to tell myself in which I had all sorts of adventures. I used to tell myself lots of stories, the way kids do, with me as the hero, but all the other ones came out of the books I'd been reading, and in them I knew about swordfighting and secret codes and driving fast cars and stuff. This one didn't come out of a book, and it had me doing just things a kid like me could have done. And then I read a lot more books and told myself a lot more stories and sort of buried it.

Suppose you'd asked me, anytime up till I went back to Theston with Tom and Mercury, about this girl from a different time, I'd have said it was just a story I used to tell myself, and I wouldn't have been lying. That's what I'd have believed. What's more I'd have been pretty hazy about it. I wouldn't have remembered it nearly as well as I can remember some of the stories in the books in the servants' hall.

You remember, for instance, how just after I'd come to Theston with Tom and Mercury, I stared and stared at that stool in the library? Now I'd seen that stool, solid, just the once, when I'd pulled it out from under the dust sheet so I could sit in the chair and speak inside Adalina's father's head, and even then I'd barely glanced at it. And I'd seen it too as a kind of shadow when Adalina was sitting on it to read aloud to her father. But I didn't make the connection, not with either time. All the same, something in me made me stare at it.

And then, why was I so keen to go up the back stairs that I returned to the kitchen to ask if I could? That's not like me. If something says “Private” I stay out of it. But I did ask, because something in me told me I had to go up that way, right up to the red baize door, and open it, and see what I found.

And I did, and that's where it all came back to me.

No, that's not right. Like I've said, I didn't get it all back in one go, all in its right order, like I've put it down here. In fact I'd just remembered seeing Adalina that first time on the other side of what I called the cave, when I heard some tourists coming chattering down from the top floor, so I went on up past them and had a look at the nursery.

They'd got it done up with a lot of stuff that could have been there in Adalina's time, toys, and a brass fender round the fireplace, and her dolls' house painted and tidied, and so on. The cupboard was there, with Adalina's sort of clothes in it, but they'd moved her bed into one of the little rooms. It was all very nice, but it didn't say anything special to me.

I went down and looked at the books at the end of the West Passage, and some of them were the same ones, but not
Kings and Queens
(I'm going to look out for a copy of that, now). Then I went down to the servants' hall and got myself a cup of tea and had a look at the guidebook, which I'd bought at the door.

It was really interesting, because they'd got a set of photographs taken of the house just about the right time, which was how they'd managed to get all the rooms looking right. The one of the library even showed the stool Adalina used when she was reading to her dad, standing beside his chair. And it said that the house had one of the earliest lot of electric lights put in in England, and the system had lasted almost as far as the First World War, so the lights we'd had when I was a kid must have been the second lot, and that was why Adalina moved the switches sideways to turn the lights on. I'd remembered her doing that before I read about it in the guidebook, by the way, in case you're thinking perhaps I've made the whole thing up without realizing. I should have said I'd been remembering bits and pieces like that all the time I'd been poking around upstairs, and they were still coming back, any old order, while I was sitting there drinking my tea.

There was one thing in the guidebook that shook me, though I don't suppose it's going to surprise you much. They'd got a history of the house and who'd lived there. Miss van Deering's grandfather had made a pile of money from chemical dyes, and he'd bought it in 1856, and her father had carried on with the business but he'd been a book collector too, and he'd had two sons but they'd both been killed in the First World War, so it had been his daughter who inherited, and she'd left it to the National Trust when she'd died. Not until 1978, that had been. The guidebook gave her full name. Adalina van Deering.

Like I say, you'll have got this long ago, I shouldn't wonder. I never did, not till I saw it in the guidebook. You may think it's obvious, but I tell you it wasn't. Apart from looks, they couldn't have been more different, Adalina and Miss van Deering. Adalina was troubled and unhappy and uncertain and not at all comfortable with herself, but Miss van Deering was just the opposite, like a cat in the sun, like I've said, apart from the moment when she found me reading
Ivanhoe
in the library and was so put out.

That was when she recognized me, I should think. It might have been something to do with the way the light fell on my face from the reading lamp under the desk, being like the light she was seeing me by when she met me on the stairs that first time. But I was wearing the wrong specs, so she told my grandmother to get me some new ones and gave her the money. And she told me I could borrow the books at the end of the West Passage and she made sure
Kings and Queens
was there for me to find. But that would have been after she'd got over the shock of finding me and realizing I was the boy who'd done her a good turn all those years back. Up till then, I think, she'd done what I did, like putting it away in a drawer and pretty well forgetting it was there. I'm good as certain she hadn't been waiting all that time for me to show up, or she wouldn't have gone on like she did, for instance giving us a smile in church before it all happened and looking the other way after. So it was a shock all right, having it come back and hit her in the library that night, and that's why she'd spoken like that, gasping, and only just able to get her words out.

She wasn't much of a reader, she said. Dyslexia, we'd call that now.

So why hadn't she said anything to me after, never even thanked me? Why had she tried not to notice me, looked the other way? Maybe you think it was mean of her, but I don't blame her. Think of it from her point of view: You've had this really bad time when you were a kid with your governess putting you in a cupboard when you're scared of the dark, and being shut in. Claustrophobia, it's called. And maybe you think you're going mad like your mother did, and imagining things, imagining this boy who comes out of nowhere to help you, only he can't be real, because only you can see him, and he can walk through doors, and so on. But provided you can carry on imagining he's there, things aren't so bad, because somehow you can imagine him reading in your ear the book you can't read for yourself, and you can imagine him holding your hand when you're shut in the cupboard, and you can even imagine him stopping you jumping out of the linen room window the night things got so awful that your dad cottoned on there was something bad going on in the nursery, and came up and found out. And after that you didn't need the boy anymore, so you stopped imagining him.

So it's a hell of a shock when forty years and more later he shows up for real, and you know he's real because he's your cook's grandson and you aren't imagining
her
. So he must have been real all along, but that isn't what you want. It isn't how you've got your world sorted out now, so comfortable. You've got to go along with it, though, and see that he's got the right specs, and put
Kings and Queens
on the shelf for him. But as soon as it's all over you want to go back to where you were before and turn him back into something you just imagined. So you don't say anything to him, in case he takes advantage of it and you've got to have more and more to do with him so he stays real and won't go away. You don't even look at him if you can help it.

I must say, I don't blame her.

All the same, I think she felt a bit ashamed of herself about that. Did you notice anything funny about the letter the lawyer sent me to tell me she was sending me the books? Apart from it being so sharp, I mean, when the books themselves were so downright generous? It was what he called her. “Miss van Deering of Theston Manor.” Not her first name. That isn't the way lawyers go on. I've seen a few letters from lawyers, and they always tell you the first name to show they're talking about Mr. Cyril Batson and not some other Mr. Batson. I think she'd actually told him not to let on her name was Adalina, in case I made the connection, which she must have guessed I hadn't or I'd have said something, surely.

So that's that, and I've almost done. I had a few more cups of tea in the servants' hall while I thought it all out, and then I wandered around a bit more checking this and that. One interesting thing was a little room they'd set aside for the history of the house, and there was a photograph of Adalina and her dad, only she was grown up now and she was pushing him round the garden in a wheelchair. You could see the likeness both ways, back to the Adalina I'd known, and forward to Miss van Deering. She'd have been twenty-something then, but already she had that look of having her world the way she wanted it. Oh yes, and he did have a beard.

I was back in the servants' hall by the time Tom and Mercury came for me. They realized somehow that I didn't feel like talking, so they left me alone and let me sit on the outside when we drove home. That's another thing they're good at. I don't know if I'm going to tell them the story, though. Not that they'd laugh at me, but for the moment all I feel like is getting it all down here so it can't go away, and then putting it in a drawer and, maybe me, maybe somebody else finding it again one day.

C
HECKERS

At last the car stopped. Its doors opened and jarred shut. Voices spoke briefly. Huddled in the stifling dark of the boot, Dave waited. He heard the sound of something being dragged, the creak of hinges, a quiet thud. A little later the click of a key in the boot lock, and the lid was raised.

He began to sit up but a hand grabbed him by the throat and jammed him back. The figure that leaned over him in the dimness had no face. The head was a bag with eye and mouth slits. The place smelt of musty hay, or straw. He tried to speak, to protest, but the hand, hard as timber, tightened on his throat. There was a sharp pain beneath his earlobe.

“No speak,” said a level voice. “No noise.”

A hand came into view between him and the masked face, holding a stubby knife.

“Understand?” said the voice.

“Yes,” Dave whispered.

The hand relaxed its grip but did not let go.

“Your name?” said the voice.

“Dave Doggony.”

“Your father rich man? American?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“Man at Principessa Hotel no your father?”

“No. That's my stepfather, Chris.”

“He rich man?”

“No. Not specially.”

“Your father address?”

Dave gave it, spelling it out while another man wrote it down.

“OK,” said the voice. “We wait. Four hour.”

The hand loosed its grip and rose to close the boot lid.

“Please,” whispered Dave. “I need a pee. Er …
gabinetti
.”

He was jerked to a sitting position and a bag was thrust over his head and a drawstring tightened round his neck. He was lifted clear of the boot, set on his feet and pushed a few paces and held still.

“OK,” said the voice.

He unzipped his fly and peed. They turned him, pushed him back to the car, and lifted him into the boot. They removed the bag and closed the boot lid, leaving a slit for the air to come through. After that all he dared do was lie and wait. When one position became too uncomfortable to bear he moved as carefully as he was able to, trying to make no noise. He felt sick with fear, unable to feel or think. At the slightest sound—the scrape of a match as one of the men lit a cigarette—his heart raced and sweat broke out all over him, so that his clothes were soaked. At other times, in spite of the heat, he was shivering uncontrollably. Apart from his little gold cross on the chain round his neck they had taken everything from him, including his watch. Time meant nothing.

At long last he heard the door of the place being dragged open, and then closed. There was a plopping sound and a new smell, animal manure, fresh, a horse or something. More time passed. The lid was opened. The bag was thrust over his head. He was lifted, taken to pee again, brought back and lifted not into the boot but laid stomach down across the back of the horse, where his wrists and ankles were lashed to the girth strap or something, so that the leather cut into his forearms. When they led the animal out he realized that it was now dark, but they left the bag on his head all the same.