Details and directions reeled off as if she’s a tour guide reading from some internal map.
“Right then, Macduff,” Colin says, uncertainly. “You’d better lead on.”
“We’re under the stairs now,” Grace says, pointing to the change in the shape of the roof and easing open the door.
They emerge from beneath the staircase into a hallway tiled with terracotta and cream coloured terrazzo. They make their way to the centre of the huge, echoing space, all wood panelling and plaster relief.
“This is the main part of the house,” she says, cricking her neck to look up into the high vaulted ceiling and the upturned iceberg of a chandelier dangling like a giant’s earring. “It’s like a central hub. You access all the rooms down here from this point.”
Colin counts the number of doors leading off the hallway. Six in total, all identical, all closed.
“Okay, Smarty. What have we got here?”
Grace turns herself in a lazy circle, arm extended to point at each door, her voice floating away into the hollow emptiness.
“Dining room, sitting room, study, library, music room, all empty. That one is locked, no key. Want to be the man again and go check?”
“No thanks, I’ll take yer word for it.” Colin shivers. “I dinna ken we should be in here. The feel of this place is makin’ ma hair stand on end.” He runs his hand over the newel post, makes a face and wipes a grimy smear down his pants. “Filthy.”
“So would you be if nobody had cleaned you for over fifty years.”
“Ye want ta go upstairs?”
“Might as well. There’s nothing down here but mice and cockroaches. Can you manage the stairs?”
Colin looks up them, grimaces. “It’s been a while.”
“Keep to the edges and hold onto the banister and if you need to rest, rest. Okay?”
“Aye.”
The mountainous stairs are a struggle for Colin and he has to use the handrail for support as he hauls himself up step by step. Grace waits patiently for him at the half landing where the staircase divides into two shorter flights.
“You okay?” she says when he finally makes it, out of breath and limping.
“Aye, no bad,” he says. “Just give me a minute.”
She gives him five before asking, “Left or right?”
Colin looks in both directions as if trying to weigh up which side seems the least threatening. Both wings are as dark and as dingy as the other. “Where did ye find the body?”
Grace points up the left hand staircase. “Up there. Third room on the left.”
“We’ll go right then,” he says.
They take the right hand flight and twelve tortuous steps later reach a long, wood panelled gallery.
“There’s half a dozen rooms in this wing, three on each side,” Grace says. “If we start at the far end we can work our way back here.”
They are halfway along the hallway on the return journey when Grace realises she can no longer hear Colin trailing in her footsteps. She turns to see him leaning heavily against the panelled wainscot, rubbing at his left leg as if trying to massage away a cramp.
“You’ve had enough,” she says. “We should go. There’s nothing here worth you hurting yourself for.”
He pushes himself off the wall. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not. You’re in pain.”
“I’ve come this far, I can carry on,” he says. “We have to keep going.”
“Why? There’s nothing here.”
“Only because you haven’t found it yet.”
“Found what? I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”
“Don’t know … or don’t want to?”
“I don’t know what–”
“Have you considered that you might have been brought here for a reason?” Colin says. “That there might be something your subconscious is telling you that you need to do, or something that you need to find. It certainly seems to think it’s something important, and if it thinks I need to be here with you to provide some kind of moral support, possibly something painful. Look on this as some kind of test. There is something here that’s been hidden away for a long time, Grace, buried deep down, almost forgotten but not quite, something you hoped never to have to face again, but now the time has come to dig it out and give it another good hard look and see how you handle it.”
Not a trace of the Aberdonian Colin McLeod in that exchange. Just pure … Malcolm Pettit.
“Fit’s the ma’er wi you?” says Colin, at Grace staring up at him open mouthed.
She blinks, closes her mouth, swallows hard.
He didn’t even know what he was saying.
“Nothing. Shall we crack on?”
Chapter 22
They continue to explore the maze of rooms, each one as empty as the last, each one successively gloomier as the end-of-day light weakens, diffused through a mesh of cobwebs over the windows, their footsteps and voices echoing off bare floorboards. When they have finished the right side, they cross to the left.
Over here is exactly as Grace expects it to be. The hole in the ceiling of the gallery is still there, as are the pigeons and their pile of poop. She stops outside the room in which at the Larches proper she found the dead body, and backs away.
“D’ye want me ta go look?” says Colin.
She nods stiffly, eyes closed. “Please.”
She hears the sound of the door opening, Colin’s irregular footsteps clacking on the bare boards, followed by a period of quiet. What has he found? Before she can summon the courage to look and ask, she hears the door closing again.
“It’s alright,” he says. “It’s jest as empty as the rest of them. No bodies.”
“I’ve had enough,” she says, her gut still stirring with disquiet at Colin’s Pettitesque reasoning for them being there. “Let’s go before it gets completely dark.”
“This is the last door,” says Colin, reaching for the handle. “Ye canna stop before the last one.”
This room looks just like the others, gloomy, cold and empty. Except for one thing. Sitting squarely in the centre of the room is a box. No ordinary box though, it is an old fashioned steamer trunk, a portmanteau, and a well travelled one at that if the battered appearance and scuffed corners are anything to go by. Every inch of it is covered in yellowed labels, colourful mementoes of ports of call perhaps.
“Aye, aye.” Colin strides over to the box and squats down beside it, his damaged knees cracking like pistol shots. “Something interesting here.” He runs his hand over it. “Looks like it’s from the twenties or thirties. Someone certainly has racked up the air – or rather sea – miles with this beauty.” He brushes away a layer of accumulated dust and cobwebs and frowns. “Odd.”
“What’s the matter?”
“These labels,” he says. “At first I thought they were travel stickers, you know the sort, the ones with the names of the places the traveller visited.”
“And aren’t they?”
“No. See fer yerself.”
Curious, Grace edges forward until she too can read them. They don’t detail the traveller’s trips to exotic places like Istanbul or Cairo or Hong Kong, instead they carry an odd collection of words, one to each label, printed in bold capitals – child, lover, spouse, parent, cook, cleaner, nanny, whore, doormat.
“Why would anyone put those there?” Colin asks. “Doesn’t make any sense.”
It does to Grace. Before she can stop him Colin takes hold of the lock, presses two buttons with his thumbs, releasing the centre catch which pops open with a soft click.
“Not locked,” he says.
He eases open the lid and folds it back on itself, creating two identically sized boxes joined in the centre by a pair of sturdy hinges. Both matching sides are lined with newspaper, old and yellowed and fragile, and are seemingly empty. But not quite. In the box making up the base half of the trunk lies a solitary item - a rough notebook with a blue paper cover.
Gr
ace feels a knot tighten in her stomach. It looks very much like the one she keeps buried at the back of her underwear drawer. The one in which she writes her most heartfelt, deepest thoughts. The one she hasn’t seen for … actually, she can’t remember the last time she saw it. Could it be hers? She picks it up.
“What’s that?” says Colin.
The cover looks the same, feels the same, smells the same. She opens it to see lines of neat, even, precise handwriting covering the page. It matches hers, down to the last curlicue. The margins are decorated with elaborate doodles of rabbits, birds and unsmiling smiley faces. Without a doubt, this is her work.
“It’s my book,” she says. “The journal I was told I should keep to record all my feelings and fears.”
“Fit’s it deein’ here?”
“I think this might be what we’ve been looking for.”
“Can I see it?”
“It’s just meaningless scribble.” She drops the book back into the trunk. “We can go now.”
Colin retrieves it. “I want to see.” He turns each page slowly and carefully. “Nice handwriting,” he says. “Mine’s like a spider’s had a few drams, dipped its feet in ink and staggered over the page looking for the lav.”
She snatches the book from him. “Put it back, Colin. It’s nothing.”
Colin grabs it back. “If it’s nothing, you won’t mind me reading it, will ye? And don’t ye think I’ve deserved the right to see what all this to’ing and fro’ing has been about?”
She shrugs. “Fine. Suit yourself. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She makes a derogatory twirling of her fingers by her temple, the universal sign for crazy, and goes to stand at the window, arms crossed over her breasts, hands cupping her shoulders.
Colin reconnects both sides of the trunk, making himself a seat, and lowers himself onto it, his back to the window so that the fading light falls over his shoulder staining the page a dull pink. He begins to read, and as he works his way down the lines, Grace’s words sound in his head as if she is reading aloud to him.
“Once upon a time, an ambitious young traveller set out into the world, her only possession, a brand new trunk. Both of them were clean and smart, eager and ready to embark on a journey, a cruise through life. The trunk was filled with all the nice things the traveller would need on the trip, all bright and crisp and unsullied, along with a goodly measure of hope and ambition and expectation of a safe and happy journey, and all goes well until the first of life’s ports is reached and the first of many labels picked up – the word on it… adult.
Naively the traveller affixed this singular label to the trunk with a sense of pride in displaying it, but as the years and the travelling went on, more and more labels were added, each boldly declaring the stage of the journey reached - wife, mother, carer, gardener, chauffeuse, seamstress, laundress, cleaner, chief cook and bottle washer, and not always one at a time.
Sometimes they come a whole cluster at once. All too soon the original label, the trunk itself, is no longer visible, buried, smothered… as if it never existed at all.”
Colin glances round at Grace. She hasn’t moved, arms still folded around herself, staring out through the cobwebby glass to the garden of stones beyond. He reads on:
“So what became of the freedom loving traveller and her trusty trunk? When the time comes, if it ever does, that she is free to strip away all those labels, to lift the lid and get a glimpse inside the old box, what will she find?
The dreamer in her says that once freed from its suffocating mantle, the box will still be intact, still serviceable, waiting be refilled with shiny new things to embark on a brand new voyage while there is still time, ready to offer her a second chance.
The realist in her, however, knows better.
The realist knows that nothing remains. Below that myriad of identifiers, piled one atop another, overlapping, touching, smothering, the trunk no longer exists, rotted away and leaving nothing behind but a bare metal skeleton held together with cobwebs surrounding an empty space where life, love and hope used to be, until, deprived of light and air and warmth, they withered away and died, dreams and desires; heart and soul crushed and ground to a dust fine enough to blow away in the first breeze; a space in which now lodges detritus of no value or use to anyone.
The realist knows - the journeying is over. There will be no second chance.”
There is a long pause before he closes the notebook, gets up and joins her by the window.
“I think that’s possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever read. Do ye really feel that way? That yer whole life so far has been a pointless waste o’ time and effort, and ye ken the rest of it will be too, so why bother going on?”
“When you look back over your shoulder at the road you’ve just travelled,” she says, “and all you can see are shattered dreams, dead hope and strangled ambition, and then you turn and look ahead and can only see more of the same and know that no matter what you do, however hard you try, nothing’s ever going to change, can you think of any logical reason to bother taking one more step?”
“Fer God’s sake, Grace!”
She takes the notebook, flicks the pages until she finds what she wants, and reads the few lines of purple ink out loud.
“We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we are not alone. I’ve never known real love and have never had any true friends apart from Alec and Den, so it stands to reason that when my life is over, it will be as if I have never lived, leaving nothing behind of any worth, not a footprint, a shadow, not so much as a dirty stain on the face of the world.”
Colin is staring at her, open mouthed. “I don’t know what to say to that.”
She closes the book, shutting the words back inside. “You don’t need to say a thing.” She tosses the book into the trunk and slams the lid closed, the crash echoing around the empty room. She takes Colin’s hand and tugs him towards the door. “Let’s get out of here. I need some fresh air.”
At the bottom of the stairs, in the vast tiled hall, Grace stops and cocks her head. “Listen,” she says. “Can you hear that? It sounds like a clock chiming, or a bell.”
Colin listens too. “I canna hear anything. Grace! Wait!”
But she is already on the move, like a terrier tracking a rabbit, ears tuned to the sound, she sets off in search of it, trotting down the servants’ steps, along the short corridor and through the kitchen, leaving Colin to keep up as best he can, calling out for her to stop.
The sound, a rhythmic two tone bing bong, is getting clearer, drawing her to it, to the back door, now closed although she feels sure they left it open when they came in. She grabs the handle and wrenches the door open – to find Alec standing on the doormat, grinning at her, a manicured finger pressed against the doorbell.
“I thought you were out,” he said, holding up a stiff white envelope. “I was going to leave you this.”
She recoils, falls against the door jamb, her face carrying an expression of such utter confusion that Alec drops his grin and puts out a hand to steady her.
“You okay darlin’. You look like you’ve just seen–”
She doesn’t hear the rest of his hackneyed observation of having seen a ghost, because darkness has already risen up, engulfed her and dropped her to the carpet in a dead faint.
When the world swims back into focus, Grace is laid out on the couch with Alec patting her hand and pressing a cold wet cloth to her forehead.
“Oh, thank God. I thought … what happened? Are you sick? Do you need a doctor?” He gives her a sideways look. “Have you taken anything?”
She removes the damp tea towel he has pressed into service as a cold compress. “No. I’m fine.” She puts out her hand. “Help me sit up.”
Once she is upright and Alec has packed her in place with scatter cushions in case she topples over and shatters like a crystal vase, he goes to put on the kettle to make t
ea. Within five minutes, both of them are cradling steaming mugs.
“Want to tell me what happened?” Alec says, blowing on his brew.
Grace rolls her neck, feeling it crackle. “I missed lunch. Blood sugar got a bit low, and when I stood up too quickly to answer the door, blam. Sorry.”
“I know you want to look gorgeous in your bridesmaid’s dress, but you do know that starving yourself is not the way to diet, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t–”
“Not that you need to, you’re skinny enough already. I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s pencil.”
“I’m not dieting!”
He gets up. “I’m going to make you some toast.”
“I’m out of bread.”
“Banana then?”
“Nope.”
“Chocolate?”
“I wish.”
“Give me your cup.” He takes her mug of tea to the kitchen area, clatters about in the cupboards and drawers, and then brings it back. “Drink that. I’ve put extra sugar in it.”
“You know I don’t take–”
“Drink-it.”
“Yes Mother.”
Grace takes a sip of her tea. It is tooth jarringly sweet and she barely stops herself from spitting it out. Alec sits beside her on the sofa again.
“So … tell me all about the new man in your life,” he says. “You know, the one who’s kept you too busy to troll round and see us for weeks, or even send us a text or an email, forcing me to deliver all the wedding details in person.”
Grace chokes on her tea and stares at him wide eyed as she coughs and splutters.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, there’s nobody –”
Alec gives her his best affronted matron look. “Don’t you play coy with me, darling’. You forget, I can read you like a book. There’s definitely a man at the bottom of all…oh, I seeee.” A wink, and a knowing nod at a supposed revelation. “You’ve been keeping him under wraps until you’ve sussed him out properly, haven’t you? You want to make sure you haven’t hooked yourself another Connor.” He taps the side of his nose. “Very wise.” He jiggles in his seat. “So, come on. Tell all. Whoever he is, he must be a real doll if you call out his name as you fold up and fall gracefully at my perfectly shod lallies. Oh… Colin! Thud! Give me all the gory details right now. How did you meet? What does he look like? What does he do? Does he have a nice bum?”
In The Garden Of Stones Page 15