The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House (6 page)

I investigated his lopsided kitchen cabinets and discovered the rusting spear of a tin opener in the drawer. I worked it into the metal of the soup can until I’d made enough of a hole to be able to pour some of it into the aluminium saucepan I discovered in the lower cupboard.

The gas sputtered into a squirt of flame and then died. I growled and leaned against the rain-spattered windowsill. Nothing else for it, I thought, as I opened my purse,
pulled out a shilling and crouched down to slot it into the meter.

By the time Dockie returned, the soup was beginning to heat up nicely. He shuddered into one of the chairs at the pull-down table. ‘I’m making you soup,’ I said brightly. ‘I put one of my coins in the meter.’

‘Castaway House,’ he said. ‘I remember now. Helmstone, and Castaway House.’

‘Oh, good.’ I stirred the soup with a tarnished metal spoon. ‘It was just a shilling, you know.’

‘I stood at the wash basin. Right hand cold, left hand hot.’ He held his hands out before him. ‘I looked in the mirror, and I remembered.’

‘Remembered?’ I opened the cabinet and found a chipped cereal bowl.

‘I remembered the gentlemen’s facilities at Mulligan’s.’

I poured the bright orange liquid into the bowl.

‘I was there,’ he continued, ‘at the wash basin, looking in the mirror. A bright smear of graffiti on the wall behind. And that is when I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I had to go to Castaway House.’

I brought the bowl over to him. ‘Ta-da!’ I said, very proud of myself. ‘Go on, eat it while it’s hot.’

Dockie stared at the bowl. ‘And from there, I took a taxi to the ferry terminal. That, I remember most clearly now. A one-way ticket. The coach journey to London. And another afterwards, to here. I remember all that, you see.’

‘Good.’ I handed him the spoon. ‘If you don’t eat, I’m going to be cross.’

‘Oh.’ He frowned at the spoon and then dipped it into
the bowl and ladled soup through a gap in his beard into his mouth. It appeared to take him some time to swallow, and then he said in a croak, ‘I have a problem with my memory, you see.’

‘Mmm, I’d noticed.’

He put down his spoon. ‘My particular problem now is I cannot for the life of me remember
why
I thought it was a good idea to come here.’

‘You said you had a story to tell. That’s what you said yesterday.’

‘That,’ he said, ‘is what a four-day bender will do to one. One wakes up having apparently rented a room in a strange town. I am an absolute fool. A stupid old bloody fool.’

‘Well, you know …’ I shrugged. ‘Could happen to any of us.’

Dockie put the spoon into the soup again, raised it to his mouth and then lowered it. ‘Castaway House, you said?’

‘That’s right. You said you’d been here before.’

‘I know it.’ He prodded his head. ‘That name, it’s as if a flower were blooming in my brain. I know the name so well, and yet every time I search for its origin, it escapes me. Do you understand? It’s … I suppose one could say it’s like a dream that runs away the more one tries to think about it.’

‘You were talking about a newspaper or a magazine or something.’

‘Ah.’ He narrowed his eyes and then looked down at the overcoat he was still wearing, patting the pockets and taking things out, just as he’d done yesterday. I realized he was never going to eat the soup, and took it from him.
I left it on the side, just in case he fancied it later, as he laid upon the table the same collection of bus tickets, a grimy handkerchief, and the torn envelope containing the bundle of notes.

‘What on earth … ?’ He peeled through them and looked up at me. ‘This is Frank’s money. He left me all his savings in a strongbox when he died. To look after me in my dotage, he said. I must have brought the entire stock with me.’

‘You shouldn’t wave it around like that. People might take advantage.’

Dockie was tugging at his beard. ‘I’m filthy. I must have travelled like this. Where are my clothes? Good God, this is awful.’

An idea wormed its way into my brain. I’d made soup, and while that had been a good turn, it was more of an accidental one really. Now I had the chance to do something properly worthy, to be the person Star imagined I was. ‘I’ll buy you some,’ I said quickly, before I had the opportunity to change my mind.

He blinked at me. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Clothes … and toiletries … and all those things you need.’ I was already imagining Bradley’s. I hadn’t had the money to go into Bradley’s for – well, for
months
. ‘Oh, you must let me. I’ll guess your size. It’ll be so exciting.’ I clapped my hands.

He swallowed, and pulled at his disgusting overcoat. ‘Do I really look so terrible?’ he murmured. ‘Do I look like an indigent?’

‘Well …’ I peeled apart my thumb and forefinger. ‘Perhaps a little.’

‘Then …’ He blinked at me again. ‘You are right. I cannot go about like this.’

‘I’ll help you.’ I nodded. ‘You can trust me. I was Orchid Patrol Leader, you know. First Petwick Guides.’

‘Of course, of course. You remind me of …’ He frowned. ‘I cannot remember who you remind me of, but you are trustworthy. That, I know.’

He flicked through the grubby wad of ten-bob and pound notes in the envelope. He muttered to himself and, I noticed with a giddy judder of excitement, added two fives to the collection before he held it out to me. ‘Will this be enough? I am not yet cognizant of the cost of goods in this part of the world.’

I allowed the money to be crushed into my hands. ‘That’s … um … that’s f-fine.’ I hadn’t handled this much money in – well, maybe ever. ‘I’ll have to go after work tomorrow. I’ll come to you afterwards, okay? About midday. Guide’s honour.’

He stumbled towards the bed and lay down full-length upon it, his badly laced boots still on his feet. ‘By the way,’ he mumbled, ‘might there be any Buckfast around the place? Indeed any tonic wine, to revive me, so to speak?’

‘I don’t think
that’s
a good idea,’ I said primly, although I opened and closed cupboard doors, just for show.

‘Then perhaps … I suppose you wouldn’t want to make a purchase at the nearest public house, would you?’

I slammed one of the doors closed, and he added hurriedly, ‘It was just a thought. Anyway, my dear, what is your name?’

His eyes were already shut. ‘Rosie,’ I said. ‘Rosie Churchill.’

‘Thank you, my dear Miss Churchill. My name –’

‘I know.’ I looked down at the rest of his money, spilling out of the torn envelope on the little table. ‘Your name’s Dockie.’

‘Correct. I was born, you see, on the docks.’

There was a smudged square of paper on top of the pile of notes. As I looked closer, I saw it was a ruined photograph, sepia and almost obliterated by water or sunshine or just the passage of time.

I glanced at Dockie, but his eyes were still closed. Only the top right-hand corner of the dog-eared photo was at all clear, and it showed the blur of an ear and the mildewed top of a round forehead. That was all, but the proportion of the features – the tiny ear against the smooth head – was enough to convince me that the photograph was of a baby.

I eased the photo over. The back was a brown smudge, except for just one letter in the clear top left corner:

b

‘Is this you?’ I asked Dockie, but for answer I received only the steady in and out of a gentle snore.

I left the photograph on top of the pile of money and made my way out of the room into the dark of the passageway. As I pulled the door behind me, I realized I could hear someone crying.

I walked as quickly as I could back to the staircase, embarrassed that I’d overheard another person’s misery. The sobs sounded like a woman’s, although I couldn’t be
sure, and in any case I wasn’t certain which sex would be worse. The crying seemed to chase me up the staircase, and I felt I could still hear it in the fresher air of the main hallway, although that must have been my imagination.

I climbed up again towards our flat, jangling my key to shake off the sound. It had been a desperate kind of crying, and awful to hear. I’d done a bit of it in my time, of course, but always silently, under the covers, while Susan and Val were asleep.

The kitchen door stood at a right angle to the bedroom door. I unlocked it, went in and closed it firmly, leaning my back against it and testing the silence for several seconds before verifying that the sobbing had been left behind.

The kitchen was my preferred room of the two, perhaps because the other girls were always in the bedroom, filling in ‘What Type of Guy Is Your Man?’ quizzes in their magazines or talking about how disgustingly fat they were. And now, although I had the flat to myself, I still liked the kitchen, with its large table in the centre, its rickety dresser against the left-hand wall, the floor-to-ceiling larder that needed a stepladder to get to its highest reaches.

I put my bag on the table and pulled out my purse. Dockie’s notes crackled from within; it occurred to me what a very good con artist I’d be. In fact, I could filch some of his money right now. There’d been a pair of sandals in the window of Lady Lucinda for months, with white straps and a thick brass buckle, which I envisioned would turn me into the perfect dolly. Before I’d left home I’d nagged Mum for weeks to get them for me for my birthday; now it had come and gone, and every penny
I had was being spent on such boring essentials as food and rent.

I sighed and put the notes he’d given me at the bottom of my bag, where I wouldn’t confuse them with my own. I was Rosie Churchill, and I was a good girl. I could be trusted.

I walked to the two sash windows that overlooked the back of the house, pulled one open, just as I’d done two floors below, and looked out. The basement well that Dockie’s window gave on to was hidden from here by the old Victorian conservatory directly beneath me. The glass roof was covered in seagull droppings, and the paintwork was mouldering on the wood.

I leaned out further, clinging on to the underside of the windowsill for support, raindrops spattering the back of my head. The conservatory led on to a cracked terrace, and beyond that a garden overgrown with tangles of weeds and bushes. Plants splayed dangerously across paths; grass pushed up in the gaps between uneven paving stones. In an enclosed area was a stone bench encrusted with more seagull muck, overhung with the branches from the tree behind. Towards the end of the garden an ivy-laced stone storeroom sat in one corner near an empty oblong pond, the concrete lined with green slicks of slime. A deckchair had been left out there, abandoned on its side, and its canvas innards rattled back and forth in the wind.

The rain began pounding harder. I pulled myself back inside the room and remained by the window as the sky darkened further overhead. My fingers crept under the sill, tracing the grain in the wood, feeling ridges that had
been gouged into it. The indentations curled, seemed linked together, and I realized eventually that they must be letters.

I sank to my knees on the gritty lino and peered at the underside of the windowsill. I was right: words had been etched into the wood beneath the sill and filled in with ink. They were very small, and I had to twist my neck at an awkward angle in order to make them out. It was dark in here; I should switch the light on but I was afraid of losing my place, and so I squinted at the awkwardly formed letters until finally, finally, they became utterly clear:

I straightened my neck, which clicked horribly. The words were a child’s game, perhaps, or a silly joke. All the same, I wondered who Robert Carver might be, and who had etched the mysterious message.

Robert Carver. The name jumped into clarity.
R. C.!
Of course. I got to my feet, banged my head on the windowsill on the way up and staggered upright, clutching my scalp. It could be a coincidence, of course. They were fairly common initials – mine, for example – and this Robert Carver, innocent or not, might have nothing to do with the hesitant sketch made by the R. C. that I kept between the pages of an unread book.

All the same, I had a feeling. I looked again at the inked-in scribble. It certainly could be forty years old, although I supposed there was no way of knowing for
sure. I got up and paced the kitchen excitedly, almost ashamed at being so eager over something that had happened such an achingly long time ago. So Robert Carver had arrived here, I theorized, and at some point someone had thought it necessary to tell – well, not the world, but certainly the underside of the window – that he was innocent.

But of what? That was the question. There were so many things a person could be innocent or guilty of – my crime, for one thing, although nobody would be scratching my name into wood in my defence.

I pulled out a chair and sat down, thinking about home and everything I’d left behind, the Sunday joint Mum would be cooking in the oven now, Frank Sinatra playing on
Two-Way Family Favourites
, me perhaps upstairs, chewing on the end of a pencil, frowning over how to conjugate a string of French verbs.

Rosie Churchill is innocent.

Not any more, I thought to myself. Not any more. All the same, Star thought I was a nice person, and Dockie thought I was good; and perhaps if they did, then I could believe it. And just in case we weren’t all blown up by a nuclear bomb, maybe my future really would be space age and gleaming with concrete. I pulled my feet on to the chair, hugged my knees to my chest and imagined the disintegration of my past, wasting away like metal turned to rust by the relentless tide of the rain.