Unhallowed Ground (6 page)

No vases. No lamps. No personal trinkets, ornaments, photographs, floor cushions. No, not even a clock to mark the passing of life.

No life.

What did she want from him, dammit, a note? I must put up with it. I’m here now and I don’t have to stay long. This is what she wanted, wasn’t it? Punishment, harsh and severe?

The door to the staircase creaked uneasily, otherwise the house was utterly hushed. With Lola lopping a long behind her, Georgie climbed the threadbare stairs and arrived straight in a bedroom which must have belonged to Stephen. The bed was bare, the mattress rolled up to expose the springs, and a folded candlewick counterpane. She moved it slightly, the single stained pillow was striped and uncased. A simple rug lay beside the bed, and thin unlined curtains hung from tiny windows that looked out back and front. Other than these, and one small chest of drawers, the room was empty. No mirror. No bedside table. No bedside light.

Oh, did you die here at night, Stephen, in this very room? Night after night, is this where you lay in your drink-induced unconsciousness? Did your bloodshot eyes stare at this very ceiling, or were you too pissed to get this far? Did you lose your fight with gravity and collapse downstairs in the chair by the fire?

Mutely wallpapered with a garden trellis design, the second bedroom connected to Stephen’s but was more the size of a boxroom. Here there was no furniture at all, no curtains at the tiny windows, not even a shade on the light bulb, but there were myriad paint stains on the floor, vivid stains of the colours an artist might use, not for house decoration. So this is where he must have worked. The smell of oils mingled in here with mouse droppings and old fruit. Georgie touched the paint smears gently with the tip of her boot and thought that the colours she saw on the floor were the nearest she might ever get…

She pictured him then, her stereotyped fantasy brother, wild-eyed and manic in his smock and hand-sewn boots. A rude and intolerant man with the kind of passionate energy she’d always wished she had possessed, brawling in the local pubs, a bottle to his lips, a man with a flaring temper, not interested in pleasing anyone. Not concerned with the importance of image.

A wolf of a man who howled at the night, but honest, at one with the world, which he would see as wonderful, miraculous, awesome, astounding, outrageous. Impatient with the small comforts and boring inconsequential with which Georgie seemed to surround herself.

A few confrontations with the media probably would have amused him. Disgrace would have ricocheted off him.

She pursed her lips. How pathetic he would think his sister, frightened and furtive, with nowhere to put her passion. She was angry with Stephen. Terribly angry. And morbidly miserable.

To fight the depression and the feeling of let-down after she’d found the courage to come here, she retraced her steps, passed through the kitchen, unbolted and unlatched the back door, seeking the woodshed with a flickering torch. She had no need, for the light in the small stone building went on and she busied herself with armfuls of kindling, followed by a washing basket of logs. She pressed the button her neighbour had mentioned and heard the whirring water pump. Eureka! She sat before the fire place on the cold thin carpet, breathing heavily as she arranged and lit it. The comfort which came with the instant warmth might be the fire or her satisfaction—perhaps the combination of both.

What an overwhelming relief.

Georgie shivered as the warmth returned to her hands and feet, burning. She shared the rug with Lola, who sat beside her and watched the flames, the same glazed look on their faces. She would sort out some food in a minute.

But what sort of man would chose to spend his life here, hidden away from the world and contented with the most meagre of comforts, without the reassurance of family roots or possessions, not even a radio, TV or books? But his paintings, his easels, his brushes, where were all those?
Where was Stephen?
Most people leave at least some ghost of themselves behind, and Helen had suggested, quite reasonably, that Georgie might find the brother she’d lost.

But this was the home of a squatter. Abandoned save for the most basic essentials. As long as she sat by the fire and wondered, noticing every bulge in the wall, every nail, every empty socket, she began to realize with growing concern that he had never lived this way at all. She knew without doubt that somebody had been here before her and taken his things.

Hey, what’s going on? Because you don’t knock nails in your walls unless you’re going to hang something on them. You don’t paint carefully round your sockets unless you intend to plug something in. And what was that aerial socket doing poking out of the skirting?

What is more, if you have a large open fire like this you are forced to own some sort of poker, and a basket in which to carry the logs.

If someone had stripped Stephen’s cottage after his death, then who? And why hadn’t she been told? And where did they put his paintings?

You could easily go mad living here, sitting, listening to the cold north wind. She unwrapped a Kit-Kat and ate it. This was all wrong, nothing like she’d imagined. She should not be worrying about the minutiae of life, she should be celebrating her newfound solitude.

But who the devil…?

The solicitor must have the answers, Georgie told herself, fighting down her concern. That’s if it doesn’t snow again. That’s if she could get out in the morning.

T
HAT FIRST FATAL NIGHT
she stayed at Furze Pen, as she heated up her tin of baked beans, grated a little cheese and rattled the grill to hurry it up, Georgina thought about Stephen. He was always disappearing.

She still remembered the shock she’d felt on being told she had a brother. She’d been lying to the girls at school—she lied about everything in those days, lying came almost more naturally than telling the truth—finding it so intolerable to be a boring only child, no-one to blame or admire or laugh at as most of the others did. She prayed that her parents might divorce so she could be more interesting. She’d found an awful old picture of Daddy when he’d been a boy, dated and faded, a brown and pink carefully posed picture with a rubber plant setting the scene. How had she ever believed she could really get away with her lie? Her father’s hair was slick to his head, stuck there with varnish, and that wide brow, those round staring eyes, that touch of colour they’d applied to the cheeks to give the figure some semblance of life. Well, they stopped taking photos like that years ago.

She had packed it at the beginning of term, hidden it away in the cheesy-smelling newspaper at the bottom of her school trunk, ashamed of it as well as of what she was doing. So pathetic. She’d been writing to this imaginary brother for a couple of terms now. ‘Tom is at Cambridge,’ she bragged to Gloria Butts, her catty, slant-eyed friend who came from a family of six. ‘I went to the student ball in the hols.’

Well, other people made up boyfriends so why should she be denied a brother?

‘Why does he never write back?’

‘Oh, Tom’s always been like that. He doesn’t have time for writing, he’s so busy playing rugby and rowing…’

‘So why doesn’t he come to visit?’

‘
He is coming.
After half-term.’

Why had she compounded the lie, knowing she had trapped herself in a net which would lead to more complications and eventually, probably, the most humiliating exposure? The fear of that alone was dangerous and exciting. And what is more she kept up the bluff until it wasn’t just Tom who was coming but a group of his friends as well. ‘They’ll take me out for the day, I should think. Lunch at a pub by the river. Maybe a ride in a punt.’ Those who believed her were impressed, those who did not nudged one another. She would have given everything she owned, even her right arm, in order to make this dream come true. The photograph of Tom she kept on the locker beside her bed, third by the door in the spartan dorm, next to the compulsory double-framed parents and the family pet. And if there was some vague resemblance to Daddy, well, why not, the boy in the gilt frame was his son, so no-one should find fault with that.

Half-term. Georgie’s bags were packed and she waited at the large double doors in the hall for Mummy to come and collect her, hanging around with her friends, all of them eager to be gone before embarrassing introductions, dreading those awful stilted questions which other people’s mothers ask. Ashamed of their families.

‘You’ve forgotten your dressing gown, it’s waiting at the end of your bed,’ announced Miss Hiller, the matron, at the very moment Mummy came rushing from the car. Kisses. Too many kisses, and fussing, and ‘I’ll come with you darling, I’ve forgotten what your dormitory looks like…’

‘Please don’t bother, Mummy.’ But Georgie was anxious to keep Mummy in tow, to stop her loitering round her friends.

‘What on earth is this quaint old picture of Daddy doing beside your bed?’

Gloria Butts looked up, she must have forgotten something, too, her eyes were slyer than ever but her voice dripped sweetly when she said, ‘Well, Mrs Southwell. How strange. Georgie told everyone that was her brother.’

‘How very peculiar, darling. What a very odd thing to do.’

Driving away, Georgie looked back to see Gloria Butts in deep and giggly conversation with Hannah Murphy, watching the back of the car as it went.

‘Why did you tell them that, darling? Why on earth did you tell all your friends that Daddy was your brother?’

It was painful to speak about something so deep and shameful, a secret need which she couldn’t express and certainly could not discuss with Mummy. She did not want her mother to know, and Mummy, despite the questions, did not want to know either.

Scarlet-faced Georgie changed the subject. ‘Is Daddy home?’

‘Yes, and he’s looking forward to seeing you.’

‘I could have spent the weekend with Daisy.’ It was half a threat, half a plea.

‘You spent your last half-term with Daisy. You can’t always be at Daisy’s. And why don’t you bring your friends home for a change?’

She hated her mother then, she’d refuse to discuss the photograph. But Sylvia Southwell, unperturbed, clicked on her indicator, peered right and left at the junction and pressed on. Then she announced very coolly, ‘You had no need to invent a brother, Georgina, because you already have one.’

She stared at her mother, startled and embarrassed, not liking the guarded tone in her voice. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You had to know one day, I suppose. Daddy and I both knew that, but it has always been so difficult to judge the right time. It was always important we waited until you were old enough to understand.’ In the heat of the freezing-cold moment Sylvia’s perfume cloyed the silence.

The spray on the road rose like steam. The wheels hissed along. Georgie’s legs were stuck to the seat and she let them stay stuck, shifting them only a little, she liked the oozings of her own skin. On a layer below the perfume, on a subterranean layer deep down, her mother’s fur coat smelled of stale cupboards and formal outings, disliked places and difficult times.

Sylvia Southwell gave a short laugh. ‘His name is Stephen.’ She closed her lips round the statement. ‘Or we christened him Stephen, Lord knows what he calls himself now.’

Georgie stared rigidly before her. She did not comment, afraid of this secret they were sharing. To her, Mummy was a stranger. She played more games with her mother than she ever played with her friends. Aloof and unapproachable, the only place where Sylvia unbent was on the telephone, as if the wires distanced her from the words she was speaking. But if Georgie approached this human face a spare hand would come up, and a frown, as if to say, ‘Stop right there. Don’t come any nearer, you are too real. Don’t you dare come near and disconnect me.’

Off the phone and Georgie knew that Sylvia spoke about nothing real.

‘He is twenty-one years older than you. He left home at sixteen.’ But she spoke in the tone of voice she used for the ill-bred and the vulgar.

And Georgie was eleven, so that meant Stephen was now thirty-two. Not even exciting, not a dashing young man with which to impress her friends but an adult, a fully grown man, more of an embarrassment. With a toe-curling name like Stephen. She stared angrily out of the window. Her mother had shared the secret but not given her daughter her wish. And that would explain why Georgie’s parents were so much older than everyone else’s. But why had they waited so long to have her? Twenty-one years was a gap too wide. But she supposed they only wanted one child, and they waited until they lost that one before deciding to try for another. This made sense. Sylvia Southwell did not like children.

She cast around in her mind then, searching for all the clues she had missed—pages torn from a photograph al
bum, old tin cars buried in the garden, careless references to times and events, the sudden frown, the unexpected silence covered by a cough. But she could remember none of these things. They had covered the secret absolutely and not one glint of it remained.

‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? What did he do?’

Sylvia’s words were beaten out harshly like twangs on a musical triangle. ‘He caused Daddy and me all sorts of terrible grief, and when he left home it was merely the end of a long and anguished period for us. From the beginning he was a difficult child, we lost him long before he went.’

‘Don’t you ever hear from him?’

Sylvia’s lips tightened. She changed gear with a black-gloved hand and Georgie saw the bulge in her sleeve where she kept her white lace handkerchief. Mummy was always immaculate, with her pearl stud earrings, black patent leather bag and shoes, a shade too perfect perhaps? She must have been pretty once, before she got lines on her face, with her slim figure and her gracious smile, with her brown hair shot with expensive gold. ‘We are grateful for his continuing silence.’

‘And you never tried to find him?’

‘We heard once, from an acquaintance, that he was an artist living in London doing quite well for himself. That he lived alone and had no interest in contacting us or renewing the relationship.’