The thirteenth tale (28 page)

We stepped gingerly through the debris of rotting food on the
floor if the old nursery, stirring clouds of flies up into the air as we
passed. Charlie had been living like an animal. Dirty plates covered with mold
were on the floor, on the mantelpiece, on chairs and on the table. The bedroom
door was ajar. With the end of the battering ram he still had in his hand, John
nudged the door cautiously, and a startled rat came scurrying out over our
feet. It was a gruesome scene. More flies, more decomposing food and worse: The
man had been ill. A pile of dried, fly-spotted vomit encrusted the rug on the
floor. On the table by the ed was a heap of bloody handkerchiefs and the
Missus’s old darning needle.

The bed was empty. Just crumpled, filthy sheets stained with
blood id other human vileness.

We did not speak. We tried not to breathe, and when, of
necessity, we inhaled through our mouths, the sick, repugnant air caught in our
throats and made us retch. Yet we had not had the worst of it. There was one
more room. John had to steel himself to open the door to the bathroom. Even
before the door was fully open, we sensed the horror of it. Before it snagged
in my nostrils, my skin seemed to smell it, and a cold sweat bloomed all over
my body. The toilet was bad enough. The lid was down but could not quite
contain the overflowing mess it was supposed to cover. But that was nothing.
For in the bath—John took a sharp step back and would have stepped on me if I had
not, at the same moment, taken two steps back myself. In the bath was a dark
swill of bodily effluence, the stink of which sent John and me racing to the
door, back through the rat droppings and the flies, out into the corridor, down
the stairs and out of doors.

I was sick. On the green grass, my pile of yellow vomit looked
fresh and clean and sweet.

‘All right,“ said John, and he patted my back with a hand that
was still trembling.

The Missus, having followed at her own hurried shuffle,
approached us across the lawn, questions all over her face. What could we tell
her?

We had found Charlie’s blood. We had found Charlie’s shit,
Charlie’s piss and Charlie’s vomit. But Charlie himself?

‘He’s not there,“ we told her. ”He’s gone.“

I returned to my room, thinking about the story. It was curious
in more than one respect. There was Charlie’s disappearance, of course, which
was an interesting turn of events. It left me thinking about the almanacs and
that curious abbreviation: ldd. But there was more. Did she know I had noticed?
I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.

In my room, on a tray next to the ham sandwiches, I found a
large brown envelope.

Mr. Lomax, the solicitor, had replied to my letter by return of
post. Attached to his brief but kindly note were copies of Hester’s contract,
which I glanced at and put aside, a letter of recommendation from a Lady Blake
in Naples, who wrote positively of Hester’s gifts, and, most interesting of
all, a letter accepting the offer of employment, written by the miracle worker
herself.

Dear Dr. Maudsley,

Thank you for the offer of work you have kindly made to me.

I shall be pleased to take up the post at Angelfield on the 19th
April as you suggest.

I have made inquiries and gather that the trains run only to
Banbury. Perhaps you would advise me how I can best make my way to Angelfield
from there. I shall arrive at Banbury Station at half past ten.

Yours sincerely, Hester Barrow

There was firmness in Hester’s sturdy capitals, consistency in
the slant of the letters, a sense of smooth flow in the moderate loops of the
g’s and the m’s. The letter size was small enough for economy of ink and paper,
yet large enough for clarity. There were no embellishments. No elaborate curls,
flounces or flourishes. The beauty of the orthography came from the sense of
order, balance and proportion that governed each and every letter. It was a
good, clean hand. It was Hester herself, made word.

In the top right-hand corner was an address in London.

Good, I thought. I can find you now.

I reached for paper, and before I began my transcription, wrote
a letter to the genealogist Father had recommended. It was a longish letter: I
had to introduce myself, for he would doubtless be unaware Mr. Lea even had a
daughter; I had to touch lightly on the matter of the almanacs to justify my
claim on his time; I had to enumerate everything I knew about Hester: Naples,
London, Angelfield. But the gist of my letter was simple: Find her.

AFTER CHARLIE

Miss Winter did not comment on my communications with her
solicitor, though I am certain she was informed, just as I am certain the
documents I requested would never have been sent to me without her consent. I
wondered whether she might consider it cheating, whether this was the “jumping
about in the story” she so disapproved of, but on the day I received the set of
letters from Mr. Lomax and sent my request for help to the genealogist, she
said not a word but only picked up her story where she had left it, as though
none of these postal exchanges of information were happening.

Charlie was the second loss. The third if you count Isabelle,
though to all practical purposes we had lost her two years before, and so she
hardly counts.

John was more affected by Charlie’s disappearance than by
Hester’s. Charlie might have been a recluse, an eccentric, a hermit, but he was
the master of the house. Four times a year, at the sixth or seventh time of
asking, he would scrawl his mark on a paper and the bank would release funds to
keep the household ticking over. And now he was gone. What would become of the
household? What would they do for money?

John had a few dreadful days. He insisted on cleaning up the
nursery quarters—“It’ll make us all ill otherwise”—and when he could bear the
smell no longer, he sat on the steps outside, drawing in the clean air like a
man saved from drowning. In the evening he took long baths, using up a whole
bar of soap, scrubbing his skin till it glowed pink. He even soaped the inside
of his nostrils.

And he cooked. We’d noticed how the Missus lost track of herself
halfway through preparing a meal. The vegetables would boil to a mush, then
burn on the bottom of the pan. The house was never without the smell of
carbonized food. Then one day we found John in the kitchen. The hands that we
knew dirty, pulling potatoes from the ground, were now rinsing the
yellow-skinned vegetables in water, peeling them, rattling pan lids at the
stove. We ate good meat or fish with plenty of vegetables, drank strong, hot
tea. The Missus sat in her chair in the corner of the kitchen, with no apparent
sense that these used to be her tasks. After the washing up, when night fell,
the two of them sat talking over the kitchen table. His concerns were always
the same. What would they do? How could they survive? What would become of us
all?

‘Don’t worry, he’ll come out,“ the Missus said.

Come out? John sighed and shook his head. He’d heard this
before. “He’s not there, Missus. He’s gone, have you forgotten already?”

‘Gone!“ She shook her head and laughed as if he’d made a joke.

At the moment she first learned the fact of Charlie’s departure,
it had brushed her consciousness momentarily but had not found a place to
settle there. The passages, corridors and stairwells in her mind, that
connected her thoughts but also held them apart, had been undermined. Picking
up one end of a trail of thought, she followed it through holes in walls,
slipped into tunnels that opened beneath her feet, came to vague, semipuzzled
halts: Wasn’t there something… ? Hadn’t she been… ? Thinking of Charlie locked
in the nursery, crazed with grief for love of his dead sister, she fell through
a trapdoor in time, without even realizing it, into the thought of his father,
newly bereaved, locked in the library to grieve for his lost wife.

‘I know how to get him out of there,“ she said with a wink.
”I’ll take the infant to him. That’ll do the trick. In fact, I’ll go and look
in on the baby now.“

John didn’t explain to her again that Isabelle had died, for it
would only bring on grief-stricken surprise and a demand to know how and why.
“An asylum?” she would exclaim, astonished. “But why didn’t anyone tell me Miss
Isabelle was in an asylum? To think of the girl’s poor father! How he dotes on
her! It will be the death of him.” And she would lose herself for hours in the
shattered corridors of the past, grieving over tragedies long gone as though
they had happened only yesterday, and heedless of today’s sorrows. John had
been through it half a dozen times and hadn’t the heart to go through it again.

Slowly the Missus raised herself out of her chair and, putting
one foot painfully in front of the other, shuffled out of the room to see to
the baby who, in the years her memory had lost, had grown up, married, had
twins and died. John didn’t stop her. She would forget where she was going
before she even reached the stairs. But behind her back he put his head in his
hands and sighed.

What to do? About Charlie, about the Missus, about everything?
It was John’s constant preoccupation. At the end of a week, the nursery was
clean and a plan of sorts had arisen out of the evenings of deliberation. No
reports of Charlie had been received, from near or far. No one had seen him go,
and no one outside the house knew he was gone. Given his hermitlike habits, no
one was likely to discover his absence, either. Was he under any kind of
obligation, John wondered, to inform anyone—the doctor? the solicitor?—of
Charlie’s disappearance? Over and over he turned the question in his mind, and
each time he found the answer to be no. A man had the perfect right to leave
his home if he so chose, and to go without telling his employees his
destination. There was no benefit John could see in telling the doctor, whose
previous intervention in the household had brought nothing but ill, and as for
the solicitor…

Here John’s thinking out loud grew slower and more complicated.

For if Charlie did not return, who would authorize the withdrawals
from the bank? John knew obscurely that the solicitor would have to be involved
if Charlie’s disappearance was prolonged, but yet… His reluctance was natural.
At Angelfield they had lived with their backs to the world for years. Hester
had been the one outsider to enter their world, and look what had happened
there! Besides, he had an innate mistrust of solicitors. John had no specific
charge against Mr. Lomax, who gave every appearance of being a decent, sensible
chap, yet he could not find it in himself to confide the household’s difficulty
to a member of a profession that made its living from having its nose in other
people’s private affairs. And besides, if Charlie’s absence became public
knowledge, as his strangeness already was, would the solicitor be content to
put his sign on Charlie’s bank papers, just so that John and the Missus could
continue to pay the grocery bills? No. He knew enough about solicitors to know
that it would not be as simple as that. John frowned as he envisaged Mr. Lomax
in the house, opening doors, rummaging through cupboards, casting his eye into
every dark corner and carefully cultivated shadow of the Angelfield world.
There would be no end to it.

And then the solicitor would need to come to the house only once
to see the Missus wasn’t right. He would insist on the doctor being called in.
And the same would happen to the Missus as had happened to Isabelle. She would
be taken away. How could that do any good?

No. They had just got rid of one outsider; it was no time to
invite in another. Much safer to deal with private things privately. Which
meant, now that things were as they were, by himself.

There was no urgency. The most recent withdrawal had been only a
few weeks earlier, so they were not entirely without money. Also, Hester had
gone without collecting her wages, so that cash was available if she did not
write for it and things got desperate. There was no need to pay for a lot of
food, since there were vegetables and fruit to feed an army in the garden, and
the woods were full of grouse and pheasant. And if it came to it, if there was
an emergency, a calamity (John hardly knew what he meant by this—was what they
had already suffered not a calamity? Was it possible that worse should be in
store? Somehow he thought so), then he knew someone who would have a few
discreet cases of claret out of the cellar and give him a bob or two in return.

‘We’ll be all right for a bit,“ he told the Missus, over a
cigarette, one night in the kitchen. ”Probably manage four months if we’re
careful. Don’t know what we’ll do then. We’ll have to see.“

It was a self-comforting pretense at conversation; he’d given up
expecting straightforward answers from the Missus. But the habit of talking to
her was too long in him to be given up lightly. So he continued to sit across
the table in the kitchen, sharing his thoughts, his dreams, his worries with
her. And when she answered—random, rambling drifts of words—he puzzled over her
pronouncements, trying to find the connection between her answer and his
question. But the labyrinth inside her head was too complex for him to
navigate, and the thread that led her from one word to the next had slipped
through her fingers in the darkness.

He kept food coming from the kitchen garden. He cooked; he cut
up meat on the Missus’s plate and put tiny forkfuls in her mouth. He poured out
her cold cups of tea and made fresh ones. He was no carpenter, but he nailed
fresh boards over rotten ones here and there, kept the saucepans emptied in the
main rooms and stood in the attic, looking at the holes in the roof and
scratching his head. “We’ll have to get that sorted,” he would say with an air
of decision, but it wasn’t raining much, and it wasn’t snowing, and it was a
job that could wait. There was so much else to do. He washed sheets and
clothes. They dried stiff and sticky with the residue of soap flakes. He
skinned rabbits and plucked pheasants and roasted them. He did the washing up
and cleaned he sink. He knew what needed to be done. He had seen the Missus do
it a hundred times.