by Nina Allan
It is in Princeton that Nick will make the discovery that will change his life. It is only on the plane over that he realises what has happened to his grandfather’s watch. He thinks of it, miles below him somewhere, beginning the next chapter of its story and no longer any part of his. For a moment he feels like crying. Then he takes Sallie’s hand and begins stroking her fingers. He knows Sallie is nervous of flying, though she would never admit it, least of all to him.
out - takes
DARK ROOM
They crossed at the traffic lights, and on Wimbledon Hill Road there were tall trees and fewer people. After ten minutes’ walking they reached the Common. There was a fine drizzle. The ground was soft underfoot and here and there were the muddy runnels left by car tyres. People were walking their dogs or pushing toddlers in buggies. Two pensioners were flying a kite. Lenny stood with Malcolm at the edge of the round pond. The surface was flat as a mirror, its colour the soft grey of clouds. At the margins of the water long grasses with flaxen seed heads quivered lightly in the breeze.
“There’s a car in the middle of the round pond,” said Malcolm. “Some kids shoved it in there one night about five years ago. It was a green Austin Allegro. The council never got round to fishing it out.” He had his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched against the breeze. There was a chill in the air and she wondered if he was cold. He was so thin, after all. He was probably more susceptible than most.
“Imagine what that would be like,” he said. “If you lived in the pond, I mean.”
Lenny laughed.
“It would be like a spaceship falling to Earth. Imagine how it would be written about and spoken of and stripped of its wonders.”
“Shall we go and get a coffee?” she said.
Malcolm asked for a latte. When it came he folded his hands around the cup as if to warm them and Lenny wondered about the scabs on his knuckles. He looked bruised all over somehow, as if he’d fallen down in the gutter. Perhaps he had. She knew nothing about Malcolm except what Ted had told her. That he had once been a brilliant student. That somehow he had gone off the rails.
“Why did you drop out of college?” she said suddenly. She wondered if it was all right to ask those sorts of questions or if talking about the past was liable to upset him. Ted had never said.
“I prefer London to Oxford,” he said. “You can do what you like here and nobody notices.” He took a sip of his coffee and it seemed to put the life back into him. He looked directly at her and drew a deep breath. “I wanted to write a book about Sylvester John,” he said. “But my tutor thought I was wasting my time and refused to give me a reference.”
She knew there was more to it than that. Ted had told her that Malcolm had gone missing for two days then turned up at the house filthy and incoherent. It turned out he had walked all the way from Oxford to London even though there was plenty of money in his account and he could easily have taken the train. He’d been in bed for six weeks afterwards with pneumonia.
Lenny had never heard of Sylvester John.
“Do you think you’ll go back?” she said.
“No,” he said. “I ended up hating the place.”
They wandered back up the High Street. Malcolm looked about himself constantly, like a tourist in a foreign country. Almost without thinking Lenny put her hand on his arm. She was afraid he might take fright at something and bolt like a startled horse.
Wimbledon Village specialised in the kind of pretty shops you might find in the more affluent market towns of Surrey and Hampshire. She found herself oddly delighted by the items on display, the soft fabrics and polished ornaments, the jade earrings, the hand-blown glass. In one of the windows there was an arrangement of commemorative mugs, not just the gaudy recent issues but hand-painted originals dating from before Queen Victoria. Quite suddenly she found herself wanting to go into the shop and buy something. It seemed to her that the mugs were more than just household utensils, they were coloured fragments of history you could hold in your hand. She knew she wanted to remember this day, standing there with Malcolm in front of that window, yet if someone had asked her why she would have found it hard to put into words. She hesitated then drew back, knowing how much Ted hated mass-produced pottery. It would be difficult to explain why she had bought it.
Her face was reflected next to Malcolm’s in the window. To anyone wandering past they would look like lovers. Malcolm pressed his fingers against the glass. He stared at the objects intently, as if he were trying to memorise them in a specific order.
He looked like he’d been travelling for days.
When they got back to the house she made supper. She served him a half-portion in a small dish, hoping that might make it easier for him to finish it. When he began to eat she felt a rush of pleasure she hadn’t anticipated. Later they went upstairs. His body was skinny and pale under his T-shirt. He had long fair eyelashes, the longest she’d ever seen on a man. His eyes were pale turquoise, reminding her of the clear faceted stone in a Victorian tiepin that had once belonged to her grandfather.
He seemed so fragile she felt nervous of touching him. He entered her easily but came too soon.
“Oh God,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He buried his face in her shoulder and stroked her cheek. She raised his hand to her lips, mouthing gently at the tender grazed flesh.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Let’s just lie here and talk.”
He sighed then kissed her mouth. They lay in silence for a while just holding each other then he opened his eyes and told her what he knew of Sylvester John. He said it had been reading John’s stories that had made him want to be a writer himself. Later they made love again and it was successful for both of them. She groaned at the moment of climax and bit his cheek. He gasped heavily and came, digging his fingers deep into the flesh of her shoulders. The bruises were still there after his death, two rows of penny-sized blotches the colour of mould. At around ten o’clock the phone rang. It was Ted. He was calling from the M5 services just south of Bristol.
“I should make it back by midnight,” he said. “But don’t bother waiting up.”
* * *
Three weeks after the funeral Lenny landed a new commission. She took a studio at the top of a house in Kensal Rise, a large attic room with a galley kitchen at one end and a shower room and toilet at the other. The day after she moved in Ted phoned and asked her to come back.
He sounded angry but was probably just upset. They’d been together for almost five years. She’d known Malcolm for less than three weeks. She hadn’t told Ted what had happened between them. She didn’t see what good it would do.
“It wouldn’t work,” she said. “You’ll see that in time.”
He swore at her and put the phone down. A minute later he rang back to apologise.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I understand.” They talked about trivial matters, trying to smooth things over. Near the end of their conversation he asked if they could meet for a drink.
“Let’s do that,” she said. “That would be nice.”
Later she put on her jacket and took a bus down to Ladbroke Grove. She browsed the tatty parade of shops just south of the Westway, admiring their eclectic range of imported merchandise. One shop sold fabric by the yard: cheap ginghams, oilcloth, Indian cotton, outlandish fifties florals. She sifted through the remainder bin, selecting a yard of pink silk, some gold netting, a scrap of grey velvet. The next shop along was a junk shop that specialised in second-hand airport paperbacks and the unwanted leftovers from local house clearances. On the table outside there was a stack of 7” singles and a shoebox full of old photographs. One showed a boy on a beach. Wispy strands of hair clung wetly to the nape of his neck and something in the tilt of his head, the stark angularity of his shoulder blades reminded her immediately of Malcolm. She bought the photograph for fifty pence and then walked home. Buses swept by on the Harrow Road, loading the summer twilight with the reek of diesel. She laid her bag against he
r chest and held it close.
* * *
The couple who had commissioned the doll’s house were called Bentall. They were both freelance translators and lived in a narrow mews cottage close to Blackheath Park. Natasha Bentall opened the door. She was slim and quite young, still in her early forties. She had pale skin and smooth dark hair. She took Lenny through into the living room. There were several antique clocks and a large marine aquarium. When Frank Bentall joined them Lenny realised belatedly that the Bentalls were brother and sister. She blushed without knowing why.
They gave her tea in a china mug and showed her a photograph of their godchild.
“We want the doll’s house to be something truly special,” said Frank Bentall. “Something she can treasure all her life.”
They said the design should be left completely up to her. Lenny thanked them and closed her notebook. She wondered what might be the best way to bring up the subject of money but here again the Bentalls made it easy for her. They had a cheque already written out for half the amount. Lenny’s pulse quickened when she saw it. It would cover the rent on the flat for the next four months.
* * *
Malcolm had first come across Sylvester John’s work when he was twelve, in a book of short stories he’d borrowed from the local library. He was drawn to the book because the cover blurb described it as a collection of ghost stories. John’s language was descriptive yet uncomplicated, easy for a child to understand. Malcolm liked the stories so much he asked his parents to give him a copy of the book for Christmas. He read it again and again, wondering if he too might be able to write such stories, though it was some years before he dared to try. He wrote his first weird tale when he was sixteen. He decided to set it in Brighton, because he had been there once on holiday and loved it. There had been a puppet show on the pier, a man who walked on stilts, the lilting, grinding lament of the hurdy-gurdy. The memory of the town was simultaneously gratifying and painful. It seemed as good a place to write about as any.
In the hours following Malcolm’s death Lenny had gone to his room and removed all his Sylvester John books from beside his bed. She had also taken the file of notes that contained photocopies of the few reviews of John’s work Malcolm had managed to unearth as well as colour snapshots of John’s birthplace and details of his biography.
Sylvester John had been born in Ludlow, the only son of an army captain and a Sunday school teacher. He had died at Kensal Green, less than a mile from where Lenny was now living. He had published three novels, as well as the apocryphal diary called Darkroom Journal and numerous short stories in magazines she had never heard of, such as London Gothic and Capital Bizarre.
For the last twenty years of his life he had lived at the house in Kensal Green, a modest Victorian villa in one of the long terraces close to the station. It would have been a poor neighbourhood then, although in recent years the area had undergone radical gentrification. The ground floor of the house was home to a private medical consultancy. The two upper floors, where John had lived, still appeared to be a separate address.
Lenny photographed the house from all angles, then made enlarged drawings from the photographs, accentuating the most prominent architectural details. Finally she transferred the drawings to graph paper, reducing the templates to scale, one foot to the inch.
Ted was a potter. He made tall baluster jugs and loosely thrown wide rimmed bowls. His pieces had clean outlines and no decoration. He had a deep respect for traditional Japanese pottery, a love of the tenmoku and celadon glazes that fired to a liquid shine. For Ted the beauty of a thing was very much tied up with its usefulness.
He had never said as much to Lenny but she had always known he found her work frivolous. He had once asked her why she didn’t retrain as an architect.
She had tried to explain to him that she had no wish to design real buildings, that what she wanted was to realise dreams.
For his birthday one year she had organised a trip to Amsterdam. She had taken him to the Rijksmuseum to see the famous doll’s house of Petronella Oortman, a seventeenth-century merchant’s wife who had spent as much money fulfilling her fantasy as it would have cost her to buy a second home. Ted seemed briefly diverted but quickly bored. He seemed relieved when they were back outside again, and set quickly to planning a walk along the canals.
There were many ways of building a doll’s house. As well as the more traditional designs, there were houses with interlocking chambers and secret doors. The furnishings in such houses were kept to a minimum so as not to obstruct the hidden mechanisms that brought them to life. Lenny had once seen a doll’s house with no furniture whatsoever, an Oriental piece of unknown provenance that had been part of an exhibition at the V&A. The China House, as it was called, was normally kept locked behind glass, but Lenny had applied for a study permit, allowing her to examine it in the presence of a museum attendant. It was hardly a house at all, more a series of interconnected spaces that might loosely have been described as rooms. The number of chambers that could be accessed seemed to depend on the order in which they were viewed. When she tried to open a ‘locked’ room the whole mechanism jammed, and she was forced to close all the compartments and start again.
She purchased a folder of slide transparencies of the China House, also the museum’s booklet on Chinese puzzle boxes. The booklet stated that boxes by the most renowned makers were highly desirable, and often sold for inflated prices. The specialist collectors displayed their acquisitions proudly, even though there were some boxes that resisted all attempts to open them.
Lenny decided to model the room layout for the Bentalls’ doll’s house on John’s descriptions of Martin Newland’s house in Darkroom Journal. She began by making a stencil for the living room wallpaper, drawing the pattern freehand and then transferring it to graph paper, exactly as she had done with the plans for the house itself. It was a pattern of fleurs-de-lys, parchment yellow against an off-white background. She traced the finished design onto lining paper and completed it in watercolour.
The next time Ted rang she agreed to meet him for a drink at The Mason’s Arms. Ted was already there when she arrived.
He told her he’d started seeing someone.
“Her name’s Ruth Dawson,” he said. “She works at Lycett’s. I thought you should know.”
Lycett’s was the artists’ suppliers where he bought the raw oxides and pigments he used in his glazes. She had a vague memory of Ruth Dawson as tall and rangy, a pleasant open face scattered with freckles.
She felt an upsurge of relief, as if she’d been released from some onerous task.
“I’m pleased for you, Teddy,” she said. They talked politely for a while about other things. As soon as she’d finished her drink Lenny got up to leave.
“I’ve been reading that book Mal was writing about,” she said as she was going. “Did you ever have a look at it?”
“Horror stories, weren’t they?” Ted said. “Not really my thing.”
Lenny walked home, making a detour that took her straight past Sylvester John’s house on Ashburnham Road. The ground floor lay in darkness but lights were burning in the upstairs windows. There was a smell of wood smoke and honeysuckle. She imagined John returning home in the evening from one of his walks in Kensal Green Cemetery or from visiting the shabby shops he frequented on the borders of Maida Vale: the stationer’s that stocked the notebooks he liked, blue feint with a marbled grey cover, the tiny basement store that sold antique maps and glass paperweights.
She wondered if John had shared the flat with anyone, a friend perhaps, or a lover. Malcolm’s notes hadn’t said.
* * *
The Evening Standard’s review of Darkroom Journal had described Sylvester John as ‘the English Lovecraft’. Lenny had tried reading one of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories but could see no connection between his ornate archaic prose and John’s language, which tended to be plain and simple, leaving nothing concealed.
She noticed also that whereas Lovecraft�
�s characters were often highly educated eccentrics, John wrote about the kind of people you might easily meet and chat to in the street. The narrator of Darkroom Journal, Martin Newland, was a sales rep for a greetings card company. His adversary, Harold Phelps, was a pest-control officer for Westminster City Council.
The novel didn’t have chapter headings, just a series of dated entries such as you might find in an ordinary diary. For the first two-dozen pages or so, the events of Darkroom Journal seemed unremarkable. Martin Newland described his home, his neighbours, his various excursions to the firm’s clients in Liverpool and Manchester in exhaustive detail. As one of the business’s chief representatives, Newland earned good money and had developed a taste for expensive antiques. John revealed only gradually that Newland was able to travel between dimensions, and what he actually dealt in was fiends, or petty devils: semi-aquatic woodlouse-like creatures that swarmed and bred in the cellars of Ladbroke Grove.
Lenny was particularly impressed by John’s knowledge and love of beautiful objects. When it came to furnishing the Bentalls’ doll’s house, his descriptions of Newland’s collectables were invaluable.
Her friend Lucy came for supper and Lenny was eager to show her how the project was going. Lucy was most impressed by the doll’s house furniture. She particularly admired the long case clock Lenny had made, which looked like an antique timepiece but was actually battery-powered. The case was made from rosewood, which Lenny had waxed and stripped repeatedly until it began to acquire the patina of age. The design of the marquetry had been taken straight from Darkroom Journal and featured the rare Sicilian Ladder Orchid, a flower so seldom seen it was thought extinct.
“The detail is incredible,” said Lucy. “I don’t know how you find the patience.”