Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  So Max was ‘believed to have drowned’ while looking for the absconding pig. Sophia must have told Giles that. No one else could have done.

  The wine turned sour in my mouth. The alcohol made my head feel full of cotton wool.

  Sophia had told me a different story: that Max had gone to visit his new mistress, the widow in Seawick End. But, if Max had known anything about the pig’s escape before he set out from the cottage that night, surely he would have mentioned it to Sophia? Yet she had given me the impression that it was she who had discovered the pig was gone, and only recently, when she went to feed it – which presumably had been after Max’s departure.

  There was an inconsistency here. There were two possible explanations. Giles Morton’s version might not have been the strict truth: perhaps he had wanted to protect the reputations of the dead and the living, much like Alan’s version of Mary’s death.

  The alternative was that Sophia had lied to Giles, and presumably to everyone else, including the police and the coroner. And me.

  11

  The next morning I stopped for coffee in Woodbridge and bought a bunch of flowers. I also took the precaution of buying an Ordnance Survey map, which showed the leper hospital at Seawick as an insignificant black mark labelled ‘ruin’ in Gothic script.

  With the map, and in the daytime, I had no trouble in finding the turning off the A12. It was just beyond Pig City, its inhabitants now safely confined behind their boundary fence.

  Put British Pork on Your Fork, the sign said. Put British Pork on Your Fork.

  The slogan by the road repeated itself in my head as I drove towards Seawick End. The weather had improved – the wind had dropped during the night and the rain had petered away during the morning.

  The Mortons’ house was off a lane that ran parallel to the coast. The five-bar gate at the end of the drive had been propped open. A sign on the gate said ‘Lower Seawick Lodge’. I drove up to the front of the house. The Volvo was still there, but nearer the front door than it had been before, so presumably it had been mended.

  I parked the Honda beside it and went into the porch where I had stood dripping on the tiles the night before last. There was a stainless-steel dog bowl under the seat, half-full of water. If it had been there the other evening, I was sure I would have seen it – I distinctly remembered the torch beam gliding around the porch, and its beam would have been reflected back by the stainless steel.

  I rang the bell, waited, and then rang it again, this time for longer. There was no sign of movement in the hallway on the other side of the stained glass.

  Carrying the flowers, I walked around the house via the garages and into the yard at the back, in case they were in an outbuilding, unlikely though it seemed, and hadn’t heard the doorbell. But there was no trace of the two women there, either. Mrs Morton had looked too frail to be able to walk very far. Perhaps a neighbour had taken them shopping.

  I wandered down the garden – not with a particular purpose in mind, simply because I wanted to see the ruins again. I know it must sound ridiculous, but there seemed just the faintest possibility I had made a mistake – that I had got everything wrong. Perhaps, when I reached the far side of the field, I would see the three arches on the edge of the cliff, with the Leper House attached to them, just as it had been the other night. And perhaps Sophia would be waiting and she would explain everything.

  Foolish? Oh yes, I know it was.

  There were only two arches on the clifftop. There was also a small dog zigzagging across the field with manic energy.

  A woman was standing by the fence that kept people away from the ruins, looking out to sea. She was tall and heavy, and she wore a bright red jacket. Even at this distance, I knew it was Jane. She turned to call the dog to her.

  That’s when she saw me.

  The dog lost the rabbit or whatever else it was chasing. It stopped, raised a hind leg and scratched itself. While it was doing that, it caught sight of me as well and decided to investigate.

  ‘Molly!’ Jane bellowed, walking briskly towards us. ‘Here!’

  Molly careered towards me. Her tail was up like a feather. She barked, not with hostile intent but to make sure that Jane and I were alerted to the exciting news of each other’s presence.

  ‘Molly!’

  The dog faltered. She came to a stop about ten yards away from me. I crouched and held out my hand. She advanced slowly and sniffed my fingers.

  I stood up. Jane and I were now close enough to talk to each other.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To say thank you for the other evening. How’s Mrs Morton?’

  ‘She’s in hospital.’ Jane’s face flickered. It was as if the bony structure supporting it had briefly turned to liquid and then resolidified itself. ‘A chest infection. I’ve been with her all night.’ Her voice sounded angry. ‘My daughter’s with her now.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Is it serious?’

  ‘It’s always serious with someone her age,’ she snapped. ‘And once they put you in hospital anything can happen. She’s already confused. They keep calling her Sophia, which doesn’t help.’

  ‘Sophia?’ My skin crawled. ‘But I thought—’

  ‘Yes, I know. She’s called herself Christina ever since she came here. But her real name’s Sophia, so it’s on all the records and the nurses keep using it. They just don’t understand how it confuses her. It distresses her.’

  Molly lifted her head and barked. Then she was off again, her little legs a blur of motion heading up the field towards another invisible quarry.

  Sophia.

  I remembered the last words she had said to me: I don’t want to see you again. Ever.

  ‘Of course, her blindness makes it worse.’ Jane was staring away from me, looking down the coast to the celestial dome of the power station in the distance. ‘Nothing’s familiar. She’s lost her moorings. They don’t seem to be able to bring down the temperature … Half the time she doesn’t know where she is, or even when. At one point she was talking as if she were a young woman and Daddy was still alive. It’s so sad.’

  I said, ‘I … I brought some flowers.’

  ‘What?’ She glanced at them, frowning, apparently registering their existence for the first time.

  ‘As a thank you. I hope your mother’s better soon. Please give her my good wishes. Shall I leave them in the porch on my way back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jane unbent enough to say thank you. I said goodbye and walked back the way I had come.

  In my memory I felt Mrs Morton’s fingers palpating my face, the tips dancing over the skin. A different way of knowing, I thought, not a different way of seeing. When Sophia had said goodbye, she also said that she would never see me again.

  Was that the first time Mrs Morton had touched my face? Had her ears and her fingers told her it was me? Was that why she wanted me to stay the night?

  Because otherwise everything would have to be different.

  I walked quickly back to the garden with the flowers in the crook of my arm. There hadn’t been any point in questioning Jane. Even if I could persuade her to talk to me, she wasn’t the one who had the answers. Besides, I didn’t want to think about the implications of what had happened. Not now.

  I wanted to go home. I wanted Beth to be waiting for me. I wanted everything to be normal. I wanted yesterday to be in the past and tomorrow in the future. I tried not to think of the alternative, a world where everything was forever floating in eternity, forever meaningless.

  A shivering fit seized me in the garden. I broke into a run. I followed the route I had taken on that first evening – round the side of the house to the gravel at the front.

  A third car was parked by the front door: a VW black Golf, streaked with mud. A sticker in the rear window caught my eye.

  Put British Pork on Your Fork.

  ‘No,’ I said aloud. ‘No!’

  I walked quickly to the Honda and opened
the driver’s door.

  ‘Hello? Can I help you?’

  The words were polite, but the tone was guarded, even challenging. They took me by surprise. I dropped the car key. I stooped to pick it up. I straightened.

  Mary was staring at me.

  My sister. Looking much as she had when I last saw her thirteen years ago. It was not possible. Hair cut shorter, clothes different. But it was Mary. There was no possible doubt. The same high cheekbones, the same dark eyebrows, the same way of looking at you as if she knew something about you that you didn’t.

  Mary was dead. Mary was dead.

  I staggered. I held on to the open door of the car for support.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. You … you must be Mrs Morton’s granddaughter. How is she?’

  ‘Not too good, I’m afraid. Very muddled.’

  The voice sounded similar to Mary’s, but it wasn’t hers. ‘I’ve just been talking to Jane,’ I said, the words spilling out of my mouth without my conscious volition. ‘Your mother? My car broke down the other night, you see, and they let me spend the night.’ I waved towards the apartment over the garage. ‘She’s in the field by the Leper House, by the way. With the dog.’

  ‘The Leper House? Gran was talking about that this morning. Not that she was making much sense. I think she’d had a bad dream or something.’

  I remembered that I still had the flowers in the crook of my arm. ‘For your grandmother,’ I said, holding them out.

  The car door was still between us. She came a step closer to take the flowers. Her fringe parted as she moved, exposing a triangle of her forehead above the dark eyebrows.

  That’s when I saw the squarish indentation, paler than the surrounding skin. It was identical to Mary’s scar, the one she would never let me forget that I had caused when I pushed her off the roof of the garden shed. When she goaded me into pushing her.

  I was terrified that Jane’s daughter would touch me. I dropped the flowers on the gravel. I got in the car, slammed the door and stabbed the button that locked everything.

  She stood there, staring at me. She made no move to pick up the flowers.

  I started the engine, reversed, pushed the gear into drive and slammed my foot on the accelerator. The car roared and leapt forward in a spray of gravel.

  At the gate I glanced in the rear-view mirror as I turned into the lane. The woman was still where I had left her, still watching me.

  The woman who both was and wasn’t my nasty little sister, Mary.

  12

  That evening I drank too much wine again. My head hurt and my thoughts rocked to and fro, like little boats on the North Sea, adrift without oars, sails or engines.

  Either I had imagined the whole thing and was therefore in urgent need of a psychiatrist. Or the laws of physics – and God knew what else – needed revision.

  For what if Max Wilhelm Kraus had been right, what if time were not straight and linear, but more like a crumpled ribbon or a tangle of string? What if, for example, in the right circumstances, you could step from one point in time to another far removed from it just as, in a game of Snakes and Ladders, if you land on a particular square it can throw you back on yourself or push you ahead? And what if time were composed of many strands, like a piece of string, and not just one?

  Did I really want to know if Max Wilhelm Kraus had been right?

  In theory, it was in my power to find out more about Mrs Morton, including perhaps whether she had been in Auschwitz and then lived in the Leper House with Max Wilhelm Kraus. I doubted, however, whether I could ever find out if she had been responsible for Max’s death, as he wandered along the clifftop to or from his lover in Seawick End. Nor would she be likely to tell me whether it had been she who had made love to me on a ruined sofa on the night that Max died.

  On the other hand, the date of Jane’s birth must be a matter of public record. That would give me the approximate date of her conception. A DNA test could establish whether or not there was a close relationship between us, assuming I could get hold of a sample from her.

  How else could I explain the fact that Mrs Morton’s granddaughter could have been the identical twin of my dead sister?

  ‘It’s never too late,’ Mary had told Alan, believing him to be me, whom she hated. ‘There’s always a next time.’

  The words had not been an attempt at reconciliation. They had been a curse. As a child, Mary had brought down the wrath of our parents on my head when she lured me into pushing her off the shed roof. Now she had given me a lover who was both younger than me and nearly half a century older. She had given me a daughter who was old enough to be my mother and a granddaughter who wasn’t much younger than I was.

  I thought about what it would mean if this were not a hallucination – if I found proof or the next best thing to it in the shape of a DNA match. That we are other people’s ghosts?

  So was I a ghost to Sophia, just as she was to me?

  It was nearly midnight. I splashed cold water on my face. I turned on the laptop and called Beth on Skype.

  ‘You look awful,’ she said.

  ‘I feel awful.’

  ‘Why? What have you been doing?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘About what you said about staying longer in New York. I think you should.’

  She stared at me from the other side of the Atlantic. Seven o’clock in Manhattan. Another time in another world.

  ‘I think I should come over.’

  ‘Great.’ Beth’s face lit up: not a figure of speech, that was what it really looked like. ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as I can. Tomorrow, if I can get a flight.’

  ‘But what about your work?’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure? Really sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Idiot,’ she said. ‘Dear idiot.’

  THE SCRATCH

  1

  The first time I saw Jack was when Gerald brought him from the station. We thought it might be easier for Jack that way. We didn’t know what to expect, and nor did he. Jack had been seven or eight when Gerald had last seen him. Gerald appeared to have almost no memories of the meeting.

  ‘Jack was just a boy,’ Gerald said. ‘He was trying to make something out of Lego.’

  ‘But you must have some idea what he was like.’

  ‘Clare, I just can’t remember. OK?’ He hesitated, frowning. ‘I think it was some sort of spaceship, though. Star Wars? The Lego, I mean.’

  The more I questioned him, the less certain Gerald became even of that.

  When they arrived, I was standing at the landing window looking down on the top garden and the gate. Most of the house faced the other way, towards the Forest, but from the landing window you could see the lane, with more cottages beyond and the piece of waste ground where we and our neighbours parked our cars. I wasn’t exactly waiting for them but I had gone up to our room to change my skirt. We used to make the run to the station so often that I knew, almost instinctively, when they were due. On my way downstairs I paused by the window.

  So yes, I suppose that in a way I was waiting. On some level I must have wanted to see Jack before he saw me.

  Cannop was with me. He was sprawling on the windowsill, a favourite spot of his in the late afternoon because it caught the sun. He was lying to the left of the big blue ginger jar that stood there. The jar had a domed lid with one of those squat Chinese lions to guard the contents.

  He was dozing, as usual – I read somewhere that cats spend most of their lives asleep. But when the car drew up outside, he lifted his head and stared. He liked to monitor our comings and goings.

  Gerald was the first out of the car. Then the passenger door opened and Jack got out. He stood there for a moment, looking about him, while Gerald opened the tailgate of the car and took out a large grey backpack.

  Jack wasn’t what I had expected – you could say in that respect he began as he continued. One of
the few things I knew about him was that he had been in the army, and that had made me think he would probably be a beefy young man, perhaps with a closely shaven head and tattoos on his forearms. Instead he was thin, perhaps medium height or a little less, with dark, curly hair. When he turned towards Gerald, the sun caught the rims of the gold-rimmed glasses he wore. The glasses made him look almost scholarly. And fragile. That at least I had been expecting: the fragility. One of the other things I knew was that he hadn’t been well.

  There was a thump as Cannop jumped from the sill to the floor. I glanced over my shoulder and saw him trickling down the stairs like an articulated shadow. When I turned back to the window, Gerald was opening the gate, standing back so Jack could go first.

  Jack was looking up at the house. He seemed to be looking directly at the landing window. I felt foolish and even guilty, which was ridiculous. Why shouldn’t I look out of my own window?

  I took a step away and followed Cannop down the stairs. I wondered if Jack had seen me and, if so, what he had seen. A glimpse of a white face. A blur behind the glass. Something and nothing.

  The heart of the house was the kitchen, which was at the back. When I stood at the sink I looked down the garden, past the strip of tussocky grass we called the lawn, past the fruit trees and the old pigsty, to the irregular line of the stone wall at the end. (Neither the house nor the garden had many straight lines in it.) A copper beech grew there beside the gate into the Forest. In the corner, built into the wall, was the Hovel.

  Jack stood at the window looking out at all this while I was making the tea. After the initial flurry of greetings, he hadn’t said much beyond yes or no.

  ‘I saw Jenny and Chris at the station,’ Gerald said, opening the cupboard door. ‘Off to Italy next week.’ He was talking more loudly than usual, as he did when he felt awkward. ‘They’ve a house just outside Florence. Didn’t your parents have a place there once, Jack? In Italy, I mean.’