The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (6 page)

Then I went and stared at the stool a bit more—I couldn't help it—and pulled myself away and went to look at the rest of the house. The other rooms were just as grand. There was a ballroom, even. But they didn't mean anything special to me. They'd done the office, where Miss van Deering used to be during the day, to look like the kind of room you could have used to run the estate from, so there wasn't anything there that reminded me of her.

That was all the rooms on the ground floor, so I went on down to the kitchen. This was a good bit more different than what I remembered. For a start they'd taken out the Aga my grandmother had used to cook on, and put in a big old black range instead. And the room was fresh-painted and a lot cleaner, and they were making out someone was cooking for twenty and more in the house, and servants too, so they'd got the huge scrubbed deal table all covered with doings instead of the corner my grandmother had for just her and me and Miss van Deering. The kitchen didn't do anything for me, much, make me feel strange or sad or bothered I mean. It was just a place I'd spent a good deal of time in when I was a kid.

They'd turned the servants' hall into the tea room so they'd taken out the old bookcase. I was sorry about that. I think I could have told you the story in each and every one of those books, after all those years. I wasn't ready for tea yet, so I explored back the other way along the corridor past the kitchen and found they'd barred the old back stairs off with one of those ropes, so I went back to the kitchen and found the lady who was there to keep an eye on things and told her about me living in Theston during the war and how I'd gone up those stairs every night to go to bed and would it be all right if I did it now? She was really interested and took me along and unhooked the rope for me, so up I went, twisting to and fro on the steep wooden flights, seeing it all by daylight, which I'd never done before because of the blackout, till I got to the red baize door we'd used to get through for the last bit. It was still there.

Now the next part is slightly complicated, but I'll try and make it clear. The door was right bang on the stairs, where they twisted back to carry on up. You pushed it, and there was a little landing to give it room to open, and then three more stairs ahead of you and then a short corridor. If you went along there and turned right you came out onto the gallery above the main hall (which I told you about before) and if you turned left you got to some of the grand bedrooms, but my grandmother and me never used to do either of those, because the stairs to the next floor went up from an opening in the left side of this short corridor.

There was a light on the back stairs, with its switch that side of the door, and a light on these other stairs with its switch just up round the corner. The door was on a spring, so you couldn't leave it open, with the back stair light still on for you to see by while you went up the three steps and got the other light on before you went back and turned the first one off. You had to do it in the dark. Instead of banisters there was a bit of rope fastened to the wall by those last three steps.

Now, if you'd asked me about all this anytime between then and now I could have told you, because I remembered it perfectly well. I could have told you too that I'd never liked doing it, and how some nights my grandmother would find me still there when she was coming up to bed after the news, with the smell of her red-currant wine on her breath, and tell me I was a stupid great baby minding a bit of darkness. I don't know whether it was worse in summer, when there was just enough light coming from somewhere in spite of the blackout for you to make out this dark sort of cave in the left-hand wall where anything might be lurking, or in winter when it was pitch, pitch black and you simply knew it was there. I don't think I was more than ordinarily afraid of the dark. I think any kid might have felt much the same, climbing those stairs alone in that huge old empty house.

What I couldn't have told you was what it was
like
. I couldn't have told myself.

5. Adalina

It was the rope that did it. The moment I was through the door my left hand took hold of it without me looking or thinking. Then it was like what I was saying about driving along the road up the hill and realizing that we were coming to Theston, the same kind of shock, or jolt, only far, far stronger. This time I thought my heart was going to conk. The rope felt so exactly the same as it did fifty-plus years ago, very dry and soft, as if it had had flour sifted onto it, which it hadn't, of course. It didn't feel like real rope, the sort my father used to keep a bit of by his chair with a knot in the end and pretend he'd larrup me with it if I didn't behave. It felt cobwebby, loose, like a bit of something alive. And I used to stand there holding it, looking at the black cave in the wall along the corridor, nerving myself to let the door go and feel my way up the steps in the dark, and on along the wall, and round the corner to where the next switch was. And something else, I didn't know what.

So now I stood in the same place, remembering the old sick, stupid terror that had sometimes stuck me there until my grandmother had come up and found me, like I've said. There was no blackout now, and good strong daylight shining across the end of the passage from the dome over the main stairs, and more daylight coming down the staircase on the left, but none of that made any difference, any more than it had made a difference to me right back then, knowing perfectly well that there couldn't be anything horrible waiting for me round the corner where the switch was.

I heard my lungs empty themselves right out in a great sigh. That was the sigh I used to give when I'd actually made it round the corner in the dark and found the switch, and the light came on, and of course there was nothing there. But once, once, I had sighed like that standing where I was standing now, at the bottom of the three steps, holding the red baize door open, with the light still on behind me. Because by that light I had seen that this time there
was
something there.

Not up round the corner—I couldn't have seen that. Opposite me, a pale, thin shape, hovering just where the other passage crossed over, with the dark cave opening between it and me. My heart belted against my rib cage and my mouth opened to yell, but nothing came out. I stood there, stuck, staring.

So did the thing. It had a mouth, and eyes, in a white face, with a white sort of dress below. And then my mind took hold and I made out it was only a girl.

That's when I'd sighed, the selfsame sigh I'd just given now, standing in the selfsame place. It had to be a girl Miss van Deering had staying, someone I hadn't been told about. (No, my grandmother hadn't cooked any extra supper, but I didn't think of that right away.) What's more, she was as scared as I was. It would be a bad place, that cave in the wall, whichever way round you came to it, specially if the house was strange to you. But at the same time it made it all right for me, having someone else there.

“It's OK,” I said. “I'll do the light. You wait there.”

I switched off the light behind me and let go of the door. That meant it was pitch dark so I couldn't see her anymore, but I still didn't mind. Using the rope and the wall, I felt my way up and round the corner and slid my hand about till I got to the switch. It was always a bit further than you thought. The light came on and she was still there, still sort of hovering.

“It's all right,” I said. “Nothing nasty waiting. Come along.”

She didn't seem to hear me so I went back and gave her my hand to hold. She took it and held it tight. Hers was small and skinny and colder than mine, but it was alive all right. I mean she wasn't some kind of ghost, in case that's what you're thinking. I'd never thought she was, after those first couple of moments.

Soon as she was on the stairs she put out her other hand and groped around the switch as if she couldn't see it and when she got it she tried to turn it on again, only the wrong way, side to side instead of up and down. And then she let go of my hand and hurried up the stairs. She took me by surprise so she was a bit ahead of me when I got to the top and she was already doing the switches. There were three of them on a sort of panel by the first door. The top one did the far end of the passage, the middle one did the place where the attic stairs went up, and the bottom one did the light on the stairs we'd just come up by. She did all three, side to side again, so the lights didn't change of course. She didn't seem to mind. She turned and said something to me, too quiet to hear but it looked like just thank you, and ran off down into the dark.

I switched the lights on to watch where she went to. She stopped halfway along to turn off the middle light, only it didn't go out, and then ran on almost to the end. That light didn't go out either when she switched it off. She paused, pulling herself together, put out her hand to open a door, and walked quietly through.

I was bothered by the business with the switches and the lights—not scared, exactly, but feeling there was something wrong, something that didn't make sense—and I didn't want to leave it like that so I kept the lights on and crept along to the end of the passage, which I wasn't supposed to, and listened at the door she'd gone through. I knew it was the right one because it had the switches by it, and anyway it was the last door that side and there weren't any others for some way back.

I couldn't hear anything, and when I switched the light off I could see there wasn't any light coming under the door, so with my heart starting to hammer again I slowly turned the handle and gave the door a push. It was locked, but when they did that they usually left the key somewhere handy, so I hunted around and found half a dozen keys in a china pot on a shelf back down the corridor. Most of the doors along here had numbers on them, like in a hotel, and the keys had labels to match, but the door I'd tried hadn't got a number and there was just this one key labeled “Nursery.” I took that back and tried again. The lock made a sort of screech, but nobody called out or anything, so I carried on and opened the door a couple of inches. It was dark inside, and still no one said anything so I pushed it wide open, till I could see in by the light in the corridor.

There wasn't anyone there. What's more, there hadn't been, not for a long time. It was a large L-shaped room with two windows over on the far side, which had never been blacked out. It was pretty well empty with just a huge old cupboard and a couple of chests. The floor was bare boards. The reason there'd not been more doors this side of the corridor was that this room had three other rooms opening off it, one in the bit left by the L and the other two on the other side, which was the end of the house so they could have windows of their own. They hadn't been blacked out either, and there was still a last bit of daylight left, just enough to see by. With my heart still hammering away I crept in and looked around. One of the rooms was empty, and the second one had only an old bathtub hanging on the wall, the sort you have to fill out of jugs, but the one right in the corner had a child's bed in it and a big old dolls' house. The girl I'd seen wasn't anywhere. I even looked in the cupboard, which had shelves on one side and a lot of old clothes hangers on a rail on the other. The chests were full of old blankets.

By now I was really bothered and pretty scared, but I still didn't think the girl could have been any kind of ghost. I'd held her living hand in mine, hadn't I? I'd felt how hard she'd gripped, still trembling a bit from being afraid of what might have been waiting for her on the stairs. I certainly wasn't afraid of
her
. But anyway I knew I'd be in trouble if my grandmother came up and found me poking around where I wasn't supposed to be, so I went back out and lit my candle and switched the lights out and went on up to bed.

It would have been school as usual next day, and I must have spent a bit of time working out what to do. My problem was getting to that place on the stairs at the right time, and the day before I must have been going to bed early—I don't remember why. Anyway, come teatime I told my grandmother I'd got a headache, and after I'd done the dishes I made out it was worse and I wanted to go to bed. It meant her missing her crib, but to make up she could start her nightcap early, not having me in the room.

Mind you, I'd nothing to go on to tell me the girl was going to show up again same time, there on the stairs. It was only the way she'd hurried up the stairs and then run along the corridor, made me think she might be afraid of being late for something, and even then it could have been just that one night, not regular. I'd got to give it a try, though. There wasn't anything else. So twenty past eight I was up at the red baize door waiting and hoping, and not too soon either, because it can't have been a couple of minutes before she came creeping round the corner and stopped. And she must have been expecting me too, because she came along and put her hand in mine before I'd finished finding the switch. And yes, it was a real hand again, small, and somehow bony and pudgy together, but not shivering like it had the night before.

We both had to do the light again, but she wasn't in a hurry this time and she hung on to my hand all the way up the stairs, so her arm was touching mine and it was as real as her hand. Maybe she was thinking about the same kind of thing because she gave me a squeeze as if she was making sure, and when I squeezed back she smiled. When I'd first seen her I'd thought she was some sort of ghost so I'd made her thin and spooky, but really she was a bit fat, and not what anyone would call pretty, with dark hair done into pigtails and a piggy sort of face.

“What's your name?” I asked her.

She looked puzzled and said something back, but so quiet I couldn't hear she was making any sound at all, but I knew she'd been asking me what I'd said. OK, I'd whispered, but not that soft, so I tried putting my mouth right against her ear before I said it again. This time she jumped and looked really surprised, and then reached up and put her mouth right against my ear.