Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

Alan answered on the second ring. When I told him who I was, he didn’t say anything for a moment. I thought he was going to hang up. Then he said my name, but with the sort of upward lift at the end that suggests a question or a sense of surprise dangling at the end of it.

  ‘How are you?’ I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And the children?’

  ‘Well – hard to say. I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet. For any of us.’

  We ran out of words for a while. This was the nearest to a normal conversation we had had for thirteen years and we were both out of practice.

  ‘She changed her mind,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About you. About seeing you. I should have told you that yesterday.’

  ‘You had other things on your mind,’ I said.

  ‘Mary was drifting in and out at the end. When she was awake, she didn’t always recognize me. She was in a dream – that was the morphine, the nurse said. Once – it was the day before she died – she woke up and saw me by the bed. And she thought I was you.’

  We listened to each other’s breathing for a moment. Five minutes earlier, my head had been full to bursting with Sophia and what had happened yesterday evening. Now Mary had elbowed her way in and I didn’t want her there.

  ‘She was pleased to see you,’ Alan went on. ‘No, not exactly pleased. Anyway, strictly speaking, she didn’t see you, of course, she saw me. She – she was excited. She said your name several times and then she said, “It’s never too late. There’s always a next time.”’ Alan made a sound that resembled a snort. ‘The next time she surfaced, I was back to being me – I must say, I was rather relieved. They let her come home at the end. Did I tell you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, thinking of what I had overheard the women say in the car park at the crematorium. ‘How was she? At – at the end, I mean?’

  He said nothing for a while. When he next spoke it was as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘And what about you? How’s Beth?’

  ‘She’s in New York for a month or two. Work.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ Another pause. ‘I suppose I’d better go.’

  ‘Alan?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re pretty strong on local history, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well yes.’ He sounded surprised and I didn’t blame him. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And wasn’t your PhD something to do with the Middle Ages?’

  ‘Yes.’ Now he sounded suspicious. ‘The wool trade from 1350 to 1430, since you ask. But I really—’

  ‘I got lost on my way home and I came across some ruins. Somewhere near Southwold, I think. A few miles away. Just a couple of arches on a clifftop in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Dunwich?’ he said. ‘The mediaeval port that was washed away? A few bits of that are left.’

  ‘I don’t think it was Dunwich. It was near a place called Seawick End.’

  ‘Oh, Seawick. Yes.’

  Alan paused and we listened to each other’s breathing for a moment. I think we had both realized how strange this was: that the day after the funeral of his wife, my sister, we should be talking about an insignificant little ruin on the edge of the North Sea. But that’s what happened. On the other hand, if we hadn’t talked about that, or something equally irrelevant, we would have stopped talking altogether. I think we both realized that, too.

  I also think that, for both of us, it was a relief, a welcome diversion. For me, it was something else as well.

  ‘Seawick was much smaller than Dunwich,’ he said. ‘No charter or anything like that. Not much more than a large fishing village that coped with the trade Dunwich didn’t want to handle.’

  There was a rhythm to Alan’s voice now, a sense of purpose. He wasn’t just a history buff. He was also a teacher. He couldn’t resist an opportunity to instruct someone, whatever the subject. When I had first known him, it had irritated the hell out of me and led to my making bad jokes that made most of the family uncomfortable and Mary glow with rage.

  ‘It’s not even on the map now,’ he was saying. ‘The estuary was silting up by the fourteenth century when the currents changed. Then the town began to go when the sea advanced. There wasn’t much left by the end of the sixteenth century. Seawick End was outside the walls and there are still a few cottages there with some very old masonry and some quite interesting windows. But no one really knows how old they are – that’s the trouble with vernacular buildings. Even the windows can’t be taken as a guide – they probably would have salvaged stone frames from the old town and recycled them. We didn’t invent recycling.’ He chuckled as if he had produced a teacherly witticism just for me and shot off on a tangent. ‘I mean, look at St Albans Cathedral. All that Roman brick.’

  I ignored the allure of St Albans Cathedral. ‘But what about the arches I saw?’

  ‘They’re the remains of a leper house outside the town. Part of the chapel, if I remember rightly. Probably the western bays of the nave arcade, but don’t quote me on that. The chapel was intact until the nineteenth century – I’ve seen an engraving of it. It was dedicated to St Lazarus. The patron saint of lepers in the Middle Ages. Not the Lazarus that Christ raised from the dead, of course. The other one – with sores, you remember? Christ heals him.’

  I could almost hear the poor guy disintegrating on the other end of the line.

  ‘Alan,’ I said, ‘are there three arches or two? I can’t remember.’

  ‘Only two, I think. But I’ve a feeling there might have been three until quite recently, within living memory. There are photographs … there are some …’

  ‘When did they go down to two?’

  He showed no sign of curiosity about my persistence. ‘I’m not sure. Probably the big storm of 1953. Did you know, over three hundred people were killed in the storm, including some in Seawick End? It must have been terrible. Terrible, terrible …’

  There was another pause.

  Alan said, ‘It’s the silence, isn’t it? That’s the thing I didn’t expect. And one just has to fill it somehow and hope it all gets better. Though it’s hard to see how it could.’

  Then, at last, he began to cry.

  10

  Instant gratification. That’s the glory of the Internet, and perhaps its curse as well. You don’t have to wait.

  Still in my suit, I sat at the kitchen table and woke the laptop. It didn’t take me long to confirm the essential accuracy of Alan’s memory.

  Google Images even provided a series of pictures – among them, an eighteenth-century engraving of the ruined leper hospital by the sea, with the remains of other buildings still visible between it and the beach; a late nineteenth-century photograph that showed the ruin standing alone on the clifftop, with the cottage at the end of the line of three arches; and at least half a dozen colour photographs of the two arches as I had seen them only a few hours earlier, most of them with the fence in place. The Victorian photograph included a pair of tourists inspecting the ruins, while a woman in a long apron watched them from the doorway of the cottage.

  I knew leprosy was an infectious disease, which left disfiguring sores on the skin and, in the past, had aroused an almost superstitious dread in people. From somewhere in my memory I dredged up a picture of a woebegone man in rags, ringing a handbell and calling out ‘Unclean!’ to warn people of his approach.

  A bell?

  I had heard a bell last night. So had Sophia.

  The engraving of the leper hospital showed a little bell cote among the lost buildings beyond the chapel.

  Everyone knew the legend about Dunwich a few miles down the coast, about the church bells that still rang on stormy nights, swinging to and fro in the drowned steeples under the sea. There had been a leper house in Dunwich, too, the remains of which were still on dry land. There was an irony here: that leper hospitals, designed to house the unwanted and keep them at a safe distance from healthier members o
f society, should outlive the very towns they were built to serve.

  I typed ‘Storm 1953’ into the search engine. There were hundreds of results. I clicked on the link from the Meteorological Office and there it was.

  On the night of 31 January 1953, Britain had been struck by what the Met Office believed was the ‘worst national peacetime disaster’ ever to hit the country. The storms were caused by a combination of high spring tides and northerly gales. In some areas, waves nearly twenty feet high surged inland. In England, 307 people were killed, mainly in East Anglia, 30,000 people were evacuated and 24,000 properties were badly damaged.

  Almost certainly that was when the cottage and the third arch had gone. But had Sophia and Max been among the dead?

  What I needed was this: to find out whether Sophia was – or rather had been – real. Whether she had ever existed. And, most of all, whether or not I was mad.

  My mobile rang, the sound cutting like a saw into the silence of the house. I closed the laptop and picked up the phone.

  ‘At last. Where the hell have you been?’

  It was Beth. She had emailed, she said, left messages on both my mobile and landline, and emailed again. What did I think I was playing at?

  ‘I had a breakdown on the way back from the funeral,’ I said, wondering whether the word could be more properly applied to me rather than the car. ‘Just a puncture, but it was in the middle of nowhere and I couldn’t find a landline. There was no mobile coverage.’

  I gave her a carefully edited version of what had happened and then listened to a detailed and, I have to say, accurate analysis of my selfishness and incompetence. I asked about her work and she asked about the funeral.

  After a while she said, ‘They want me to stay here for longer.’

  ‘How much longer?’

  ‘Another two months. Initially.’

  ‘Do you want to do it?’

  ‘In one way, yes – it would almost certainly mean promotion in the New Year. But what about us? That’s the real question.’

  ‘We’d manage.’ I made an effort. ‘I know this is important to you.’

  ‘So are you. Idiot. But we can’t go on like this, can we? We’re neither one thing nor the other. If we’re going to have a future, we’ve got to work at it, haven’t we? Both of us. Otherwise we might as well call it a day.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘I’ve an idea,’ Beth said. ‘If I stay on, why don’t you come over and join me? You love New York.’

  ‘Let me think about it,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Idiot,’ she said again, and broke the connection.

  I’m not proud of it. I was torn between two women – my wife, who was as real as could be, despite being three thousand miles away, and Sophia, who didn’t exist. It doesn’t say much for my decency or my intelligence.

  What complicated the issue far beyond love, lust or fear was the simple fact that Sophia wasn’t – couldn’t be – real. I couldn’t smell her on my skin any more. There was nothing to show she had ever existed.

  So this wasn’t just about Beth and Sophia. That’s what I tell myself. It was about whether I had gone mad.

  It was dark now. I had a shower. I put on fresh clothes. I cooked a meal and opened a bottle of wine. After three glasses I phoned Alan again. I let the phone ring for a long time. Finally he picked up.

  ‘Yes?’ It didn’t sound like Alan’s voice, but like that of a stranger with a bad cold.

  ‘It’s me. I know this must seem a bit strange, but can I ask you something?’

  ‘I’m very busy.’

  I ignored that. ‘Suppose I wanted to find out more about Seawick and the Great Storm. How would I do it?’

  ‘Why would you want to?’ He sounded aggrieved. ‘You’re not interested in history.’

  ‘I don’t know. I just do. Sorry – how are you? And Matthew and Alice?’

  He brushed aside my belated attempt to behave like a human being. ‘There must be a local history society. They’ll put you on the track. Try the library. Or look at the back file of the local paper. That would tell you what it was like at the time.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Mary’s death seems to have made everything strange. I wish things had been different.’

  Alan said nothing.

  ‘Anyway, I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I hope—’

  ‘So am I!’ he shouted. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Listen. I heard something at the funeral. Something that suggested Mary found a way to … to hurry things up. Is that true?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He cleared his throat. ‘She may – just possibly – have taken a little more than she should. But if she did, it was an accident. The morphine confused her. Perhaps it was for the best …’ He paused and the teacher in him came to his rescue. ‘You’ve tried googling Seawick and the Great Storm, I take it?’

  It took me all of two minutes to power up the laptop and search for ‘Seawick Storm 1953’. I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me earlier to do something so blindingly obvious. On the second page, there was an Amazon link. I clicked on it and found myself looking at an entry for a title in the Kindle store: Seawick Past and Present by Giles Morton.

  The surname brought me up short. The hairs lifted on the back of my forearm. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Ten to one, Giles was the husband of Christina and the father of Jane, the man whose raincoat I had worn. Either that or a brother or father or something.

  The book’s cover image was based on the nineteenth-century photograph I had already seen. It showed the three arches of the leper hospital’s chapel, with the cottage tacked on the end nearer the cliff. In another moment I had bought the e-book for less than the price of a cup of coffee and downloaded it to the laptop. It was a reissue of a little history Morton had published at his own expense in 1989. He mentioned in the foreword that he lived in the nearest house to the ruins of the Seawick leper hospital.

  I flicked to the end of the book. It had all the hallmarks of a retirement project – rambling, overlong and frequently speculative. The last section was called ‘The Great Storm and Afterwards’. This part of the coast had been severely battered. The wind had joined forces with a viciously powerful incoming tide. The water had poured up the creek where Seawick End was, rising to the roofs of the houses and drowning four people. I wondered if one of them had been Max’s mistress.

  The waves had also savaged the cliffs nearby, scooping out their bases until they collapsed into the sea. The wind tore down trees and stripped off roofs. Morton wrote that he had even feared for the safety of his own house, despite its being in a sheltered place on higher ground a quarter of a mile away from the sea, but the only damage he suffered was the loss of a diseased oak that had stood near the seaward boundary of his garden.

  The leper hospital had not been so fortunate. A section of cliff to the north had disintegrated at some point in the early hours of 1 February, bringing down with it the cottage known locally as the Leper House and the eastern bay of what was left of the former chapel’s nave arcade. Fortunately, Morton said, the cottage had been standing empty since the previous autumn, since the death of the last tenant.

  This sentence brought me up with a jolt. I went back to the previous chapter with a sort of eager reluctance – I was desperate to discover what had happened to Sophia, yet terrified of what I might find.

  There was no mention of her at all. Only of Max.

  ‘Max Wilhelm Kraus, the distinguished German philosopher.’

  Giles wrote that he had come across Max in a displaced persons camp after the war. The two men had become friendly and, a few years later, Giles had offered him the cottage so he could write a book in peace. Max was believed to have fallen from the cliff one stormy night in November 1952. He had almost certainly been washed out to sea by the tide and his body had never been recovered. The poor fellow had been looking for a pig that had escaped, Giles wrote. The pig hadn’t been found, either.

  I went back to Google. M
ax Wilhelm Kraus had an entry in Wikipedia. There was a photograph of a dark, handsome man in a double-breasted suit. His hair was greased back. He had a flower in his lapel and he was smoking a cigarette in a holder. He had been born in Salzburg in 1910, but the family had moved to Berlin soon afterwards, where his father had worked as a jurist and where Max had studied philosophy.

  Max was interested in conceptions of time, it appeared, and, in particular, in alternatives to the standard linear model of time as a straight line moving from past to present, present to future. An influential pre-war essay of his had savaged Kant’s theory that time, space and causality were creations of the human mind: tools to help us understand the world rather than objective characteristics of it.

  I understood all this, more or less, but the next paragraph soon lost me with its discussion of Max’s own theories: of time as a spiral or a compressed ribbon, and of multiple times woven together in an enormous, multidimensional cat’s cradle of interconnected times.

  During the war a weak heart had kept him out of the army. He worked as a clerk at a government ministry in a department concerned with housing. His mother had been Jewish, however, and as a student he had briefly been a member of the Communist Party. In 1944 the Gestapo caught up with him. His philosophical views were considered dangerously subversive, designed to undermine morale. They put him in Auschwitz, but he survived. Afterwards, he had come to England and lived in East Anglia, where he was writing a book at the time of his death.

  Whatever the entry told you about the philosophy of Max Wilhelm Kraus, it told you very little about the man – I remembered the muddle of books and papers on the floor of the cottage. I remembered the whisky, the ashtray covered in cigarette ends and the squalor. I remembered the bruise on Sophia’s face.

  I also remembered the blue-grey tattoo I glimpsed on her arm, although it was hard to be sure of anything in the lamplight.

  Finally, I remembered that only one Nazi concentration camp had tattooed its prisoners, its victims. Auschwitz. Had Sophia been there too? Was that where they had met?

  They lived in the Leper House, these two displaced persons, fragments of the human flotsam that flooded over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. They had washed up on the coast of Suffolk and lived in a place built for the unwanted.