The Illustrated Child

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The Illustrated Child Page 24

by Polly Crosby


  It was exactly the same urn, down to the vine-like detail of the tap’s spout.

  ‘Do you remember the little doggy in Romilly and the Circus?’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘Tula,’ I said. He was a fawn-coloured poodle. In the story he had chased Monty round the ring.

  ‘That was my dog. He was a circus dog until he got too old, then he spent all his time lying on a little velvet pillow in my caravan like a prince. I think once when you were here, you fell asleep in his basket,’ she said, laughing.

  I smiled. There was so much of Lidiya’s life in the books. How often had Dad and I been here? How much had she meant to him?

  ‘I am glad you have seen us perform again,’ Lidiya said, peeling a false eyelash from above her eye. ‘It felt like Tobias was here with us too.’ She stiffened suddenly, and I turned to see a small man in a red overcoat standing at the door. Immediately I thought of the nasty-looking rat dressed as a ringmaster in Romilly and the Windmill, and I was amazed all over again at Dad’s ability to capture people’s characters.

  ‘Well, well, Romilly Kemp, I heard you had deigned to walk among us. And how did you enjoy my circus?’ His eyes were small and shrewd, watching me carefully. He lifted his top hat, revealing a huge shining pate ringed by dark, luscious hair. I could see Lidiya’s reflection in the urn. She was very still.

  ‘Very much, thank you,’ I said, and he smiled. ‘It was strange to come back without my dad though.’

  ‘Ah yes, the inimitable Tobias Kemp. I hear he is not all he once was.’ Noticing my expression, he added. ‘Gossip travels fast in the circus, my dear.’

  He lifted his leg onto Lidiya’s step, a move that felt possessive, as if he were coiling his way around the caravan, slowly contracting his grip. I noticed Lidiya move back imperceptibly.

  ‘Forgive my impertinence, Romilly, but your father fascinates me.’ His voice was something like a fox’s bark. ‘Most people are more fascinated by you, I think – the child who never grew up. But for me it’s all about him. For instance, how did he keep making those books when he knew his mind was dissolving into jelly?’

  I put my cup down, determined not to look away. ‘Did you know him, then?’ I asked.

  The man shifted position in the doorway. ‘Know him?’ He gave his barking laugh again. ‘I gave him permission to use my circus in his book. I met him many times.’ He said this reverentially, as if the man he was talking about was God and not my dad.

  ‘Roberto, I…’ Lidiya interrupted, but he cut her off, still staring at me.

  ‘Do you think on some level you were your father’s experiment?’ he said. His face remained expressionless.

  ‘I… I don’t know.’ I looked around the caravan, and my eyes settled on Dad’s book on the table from earlier, the familiar sight nourishing me. I looked back at the man, my head held a little higher. ‘Do you think I was an experiment?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. Of course, I think you are a work of art, Miss Kemp. You know, there will always be a place here for such a work of art, should you wish to be on display. Now if you’ll excuse me, there is work to be done. It was a hard crowd today,’ he said, looking pointedly at Lidiya, ‘farmers are extremely careful laughers.’ Then he slipped away into the noise of the night. I took a sip of tea, but it failed to warm me.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Lidiya spoke finally. She had relaxed her pose again and was running her finger around the rim of her cup. ‘It is his circus. Sometimes it feels as if he owns us performers too.’

  She lifted Romilly and the Circus down and opened it to the page where her doppelgänger galloped around the ring. I noticed there was a crease in the corner where it had been folded to mark the page.

  ‘It is so strange seeing one’s self in a book,’ she said, ‘it makes me feel like I am made up, somehow, like I am just the fabric of someone’s mind. I don’t know how you have coped with being in book after book. How do you know what is real anymore?’

  ‘I don’t know if I do,’ I said, pulling Romilly and the Picnic towards me and opening it up, the spine cracking. I flicked to the picture of the picnic by the lake. The rug was spread with all kinds of food: boiled eggs in eggcups, a flask of tea, three different kinds of cake. There was the urn, sending plumes of steam into the air. A minute mouse poked its nose out from behind a biscuit tin. Another was lifting a tiny salt cellar, sprinkling salt onto a pork pie. I marvelled at all the objects Dad had painted into his pictures. So many of them had meaning, so many belonged to the people that he loved.

  ‘I’ve always been fond of this picture,’ Lidiya said, stroking the china plates, tracing the tiny rose pattern on their surface. ‘So very British. I have never been for a real picnic – it is something I think one can only do with a real Englishman. I always wanted to sit in the sun by the water and eat tiny sandwiches and slices of the best Victoria sponge. One day I will. I will wear a hat, a huge floppy hat to shade my skin from the sun.’ The expression on her face was unreadable.

  ‘Your father promised me a picnic, you know,’ she said, closing the book. ‘I thought he meant a real one – he and I, sitting by a lake, but now I look back, I think he was meaning this picture. When I am sad I look at it, and then I am not so sad anymore. After all, this picnic goes on forever, a real picnic lasts for only a few hours.’

  I didn’t know what to say to this. In my embarrassment I rummaged in my bag, looking for something to change the subject, and my fingers touched the bell. I placed it on the table, where it rolled slowly, its tiny peal barely audible over the samovar’s hiss.

  ‘Montgomery’s bell,’ Lidiya said, lifting it up and putting it to her ear to listen to its chime. ‘This would fetch a lot of money, you know. And the feather too,’ she said, realisation dawning.

  She stood up and went into her bedroom, coming back with the feather in her hands. ‘You gave this back to me, but I cannot accept. It is too precious, it is worth too much money. Please, you must take it back.’ She tried to push it into my hands, but I pushed it back, closing her fingers around it.

  ‘No, Lidiya, it’s yours, please.’

  She nodded, looking down at it, stroking the sparse barbs into place, then opened the drawer by the table and tucked the feather inside.

  The bell was still on the table. My reflection frowned back at me, tiny and distorted.

  ‘Perhaps each item is linked to someone I know,’ I said slowly, trying to work it out. ‘I mean, the bell belonged to Monty…’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Lidiya said.

  ‘But I won’t be able to find out for a long while. It’s my birthday today: I have to wait a year before it will open again.’

  ‘Many happy returns,’ Lidiya said. She slid off her seat and went to the little kitchenette that ran down one side of the caravan. When she came back, she was carrying a cupcake, the kind they sold before the performances, and on top she had placed a lit candle. She passed it to me and I blew the flame out. She cut it in two and passed me the bigger half. It was bright pink and very sweet: a poor imitation of Beatrice’s Victoria sponge from my last birthday, but the gesture was so well meant that I found it hard to swallow.

  ‘You could try to guess the other objects in the box,’ Lidiya said between mouthfuls. ‘Who else is important to you, and what have they given you in the past?’

  She was looking at the picture of the picnic again. Her face had a faraway, sad look.

  ‘I wonder what will be next,’ she said, tapping the bell so that it rolled across the book. ‘These must be the key, the key to it all.’

  Lidiya made me up a bed on the sofa of her caravan. The circus went to bed late, and it had been dark for several hours before I climbed between the sheets.

  ‘Lidiya,’ I asked, my stomach churning at the question, not sure I dare ask it, ‘can I stay here?’

  ‘You are staying, silly girl.’ She patted the sheet around me. It was a hot night and the caravan door and windows were open. People walked past, chatting in a language I didn’t recognise. I
caught a glimpse of a clown, his arm around a girl in a leotard followed by two tiny dogs dressed as elephants.

  ‘I mean stay forever.’

  Lidiya sat on the edge of the bed with a sigh. ‘I am not your mother, Romilly,’ she said.

  ‘I know you’re not. It’s just, you feel like family. Sometimes it feels like I’ve blocked out a huge part of my life before moving to Braër, including you, and I can’t work out if you’re familiar to me because of the books, or because of the memories I have of you from when I was little. But this place—’ I looked around the caravan, breathing in the herby scent of the tea we had drunk earlier, ‘—it feels like… home.’ I pushed myself up on my elbows, searching her face. ‘I could look after the horses. I’m strong, and good at cooking and cleaning. Maybe one day I could ride in the ring?’

  Lidiya put her hand to my face, smoothing the hair from my forehead. ‘And what about your father?’ she said lightly. ‘What about your house?’

  I looked down at the blanket tucked around me, focusing on the crocheted squares.

  ‘You have too many threads joining you to this part of the world to go travelling with us right now,’ she said. ‘One day you will realise this, and then you will be free to make that decision. But not now. Now, you sleep.’ She got up and went through to her bedroom.

  ‘Lidiya?’ I called again. She appeared in the doorway, looking exasperated.

  ‘Was there a panther here, when I came with Dad? Did it escape?’

  ‘We have never used wild animals,’ she said, ‘never. Now sleep.’

  That night, lying in an unfamiliar bed, I dreamt I was watching the performance again, with Dad by my side. We were sat high at the back, eating toffee apples, but as I tried to eat mine it turned to gold.

  ‘Lovely treasure, this,’ Dad said, holding his golden apple so it glittered in the light and biting down on it until his teeth fell out, one by one.

  Twenty-Six

  The next morning, I woke to the murmur of the hushed voice from my dreams. Even here, away from Braër, it was following me. I ought to feel scared, but the familiar sound comforted me in this unfamiliar bed, and I lay, listening as it chattered away.

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying,’ I whispered, conscious that Lidiya was asleep on the other side of the paper-thin wall. The voice paused in its chatter, and I could hear its breathing, little gasps of air that made my own breathing stutter for a moment. Then it began again, the same words, the same sounds. I tried to capture the trail as it evaporated into the air: it felt like a magical language, something half remembered, a mixture of English and a whispering, powerful spell, but it disappeared before I could make sense of it.

  I got up quietly and, tiptoeing to Lidiya’s room, peeked inside. She was still asleep, a dark mask over her eyes. Quietly I packed my rucksack. I pulled open the drawer she had put the feather in, listening all the time for any noise from her bedroom. The feather wasn’t there. Disappointed, I let myself out of the caravan.

  The sky was a clear deep blue above, but below the hill all was a sea of golden mist. Nobody was up. A horse whinnied from somewhere behind the caravans. I set off down the hill, plunging into the mist, watching it dissolve at my touch.

  The bus took me further away from home, through countryside that became so flat I could see for miles. Long dykes ran alongside the road, stretching away into the distance, and swathes of green fields surrounded us on all sides.

  This time, the bus dropped me a mile from where I wanted to be, and I stumbled across fields, through woodland and along footpaths, the map growing ever more creased in my hands as I bent and studied it.

  I saw the church’s tower long before I reached it. It was an old church, almost a ruin. Trees and saplings had grown up around it so that it felt like it was growing too, sprouting shoots in numerous places, ivy trailing through cracks in the stonework. There were few gravestones remaining. Some had been moved and were propped in a line against a far wall. Others were leaning at dangerous angles, lichened and worn soft from years of weather. I found Beatrice’s immediately: the stone stood out, polished and neat, so very like Beatrice herself.

  I hadn’t wanted to go to Bea’s funeral, and Dad had agreed, saying it was better to celebrate her life by toasting her with the Meissen tea-set rather than attending a dreary church service.

  The words on the gravestone were very simple.

  BEATRICE ARCHER

  1917–1992

  At the top of the headstone were two tiny hares facing each other, their long ears pointing upwards, their little noses almost touching, and below them, the simple phrase, Beloved Grandmother.

  The soft mound of earth was covered in little blue flowers – forget-me-nots, I realised – their perfume rising in the warm slants of sunlight that dappled over the grave. It was a peaceful, happy place, and I sat down, content just to be there.

  Eventually, when the sun had moved so far that it was blocked from view by the church’s tower, I pulled myself up, my joints cold and stiff.

  Leaving home had given me the distance I needed to see things clearly, but I couldn’t solve the treasure hunt just by going away. If, like Lidiya and I had discussed, the objects in the box were linked to the people I knew, then I needed to be in my own beloved Braër to be able to put all of Dad’s clues together.

  It was time to go home.

  I arrived at Braër starving, last night’s meagre supper long ago in my memory. I ran across the road from the bus stop, vaulting the side gate and grabbing the tiny bud of a new pear off the tree as I went. Biting into it, my teeth punctured the hard skin, the expected sweetness painful in its absence. I spat out the hard, grainy flesh, my stomach twisting from hunger.

  As I crossed the bridge to the back door, something made me stop. I turned around, looking at the garden, trying to understand what had changed.

  The bank of the moat, usually green and verdant, was a swathe of blue, just like the flowers on Bea’s grave, and I remembered the tiny forget-me-not plant she had given me all those years ago. Over the years it had grown and spread, covering the bank in a blanket of blue and yellow.

  I looked around at the rest of the garden with fresh eyes, as if by leaving Braër I was able to see it all anew. The beech tree was lying across the garden as it usually did, but something about it, too, was different. I approached it cautiously. Along its length, a thin crack had opened up, as if its spine had finally dissolved. Hastily, I checked that the money was still safely hidden away, and then I stepped back and gazed at the tree. It no longer looked alive. It was a skeleton, a collection of bones enclosing dark shadows, and the joy I had felt on seeing Bea’s flowers trickled away. I looked up at the sky, where years ago the tree used to stand. The gap there was huge and yawning, and terrible in its blankness, and I turned and walked swiftly to the house.

  Inside, I ignored the smell of the dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen sink, and stepped over a pile of cat sick, drying on the carpet. I found Dad where I had left him yesterday morning, lying in bed. The sharp smell of urine drifted up from the sodden sheets beneath him.

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ I said.

  He lifted his head and smiled at me. ‘Hello, daughter-mine,’ he said. He had slowed down so much in the last few weeks, even his voice lagged, like a pocket watch whose spring has unwound beyond repair.

  I cleaned him up and brought him tea in one of Mum’s china cups. The teacup trembled in its saucer as he took it from me. I noticed how bulbous his knuckles were, how thin his wrist was before his pyjama sleeve slipped down, covering it from view. I was conscious of my messy hair and my unwashed smell, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘You two always look after me, don’t you,’ he said, warmth in his voice. He sipped his tea, unaware he had said anything unusual, his cracked lips lifting at the edges in a smile. At one point he stilled, looking at something over my shoulder, his cup coming to a stop in mid-air, then he blinked and focussed back at me, smiling again, the rattle of the
teacup shrill in the quiet room.

  When I finally had a moment to unpack my rucksack, something right at the bottom tickled my fingers. I upended the bag onto my bed, and among the underwear and old toffee apple sticks, the pink feather that I had given Lidiya fell out onto the quilt.

  I picked it up, trying to work out when she had slipped it back into my bag without me noticing. I thought of the wooden box; what clues might be in there? Downstairs, the one person I loved above all was barely surviving, his brain shutting down in fits and starts, with no way of telling me what this was all about, even if he wanted to.

  I thought about Braër, wandering its rooms in my mind, trying to think where my dad might have left clues, intentionally or not. And then it came to me: the one place I had never set foot in. I went to the window and looked out. Dad’s painting shed stood, half covered by the branches of the weeping willow, leaning precariously into the boggy ground.

  I went downstairs quietly, not wanting Dad to hear where I was going. In the garden I took a spade that was leaning up against the cart shed, and I stood in the shifting morning light, studying the shed. The moatwater was uneasy today, rippling and fractious behind me, reflecting my mood.

  When I was younger, the shed had been painted in garish stripes of red and yellow, but the paint, applied by my dad in a fit of enthusiasm, had been meant for indoor walls and as such had run and dissolved over the years. Small specks of gold and crimson still clung to crevices on the weathered boards, giving the shed a freckled appearance. As I approached it, I lifted my hand automatically to my own freckles, smattered across my skin, and onto the mole on my left cheek.

  The picture of the circus tent that had been nailed above the door had come partly away, swinging round so that it was upside down, like a macabre ship. The key to the padlock had been lost a long time ago, but it didn’t matter since the door had rotted around the metal loop that held it in place. The only reason the door didn’t hang open was the great slick of muddy ground that enveloped the bottom half of it.

 

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