Fresh gorgeous air rushed through my misbuttoned clothes; the smells of coal smoke and mist and beery yeast sang in my nostrils. There was a sliver of moon; rags of cloud raced overhead; and Soho glistened as if a slime of black seaweed coated the stones. A homing instinct pulled me back to Ghyll. I had to assure myself it was real. I plunged around the crooked corner and there it was, slotted into its recess, a ripple of pale light down its roof scales—and my heart expanded so fast I had to lean against the wall, weak with gratitude.
As I crossed the cobbled courtyard, the decaying stone angel atop the fountain seemed to turn its head to watch me. I mounted the sagging steps and let myself in. The sepulchral entrance hall, its familiar, ammoniac odour. I drifted into the drawing room, where an underwatery light was sifting through the front windows. The flower was still there, on its moonlit table. The thing seemed to be sleeping, its nodding head crowned with golden petals. I extended a finger, stroked the curving stalk and furry down.
Master returns, Mrs. Deaker croaked behind me.
I spun around. The witch was sitting in that wingback by the doorway—yet again I had walked right past her. I almost giggled, I was so relieved to see her. Everything was just as I’d left it. Master returns, Mrs. Deaker whispered again, from his long travels.
I threw my hat on the sofa and let my stick fall to the rug with a dull whunk. Returned indeed. Do you live in that chair, Mrs. Deaker? She chuckled, whispered something to herself. Then she held out her hand to me. Help a lady up. Her skin was shockingly soft, but the bones and tendons gripped me with falcon strength. I hoisted her up, and as she swayed I caught a whiff of her fecund body. She staggered and put a hand on my chest, then looked up at me, her eyes like disks of ice, her tiny teeth bared in a new, suggestive smile. She chuckled again and murmured, Master, like a reproach. Her fingers were spider-walking down the front of my waistcoat.
I stepped back. For half a second, the prospect flashed through my mind—then I suppressed a shudder and made for the sideboard, poured a glass of acidic sherry and downed it. I brought Mrs. Deaker one and she accepted it, head inclined, teeth glistening. There is a surprise, she said. Oh? She nodded. Come.
She led me upstairs, holding forth the shaky oil lantern she carried around at night. I followed her up to the top floor, where my bedroom was, and when we got to the landing she glanced back at me, and I saw that she was afraid. Suddenly I was afraid. She turned and led me across the landing to the far end, to where the empty room was. It was just an empty room. At the door she lifted a finger to her lips and went, Shh.
The big velvet chaise longue had been pushed in from my bedroom. It lay under the window in the slanted ceiling, and the same underwatery light swam over the curling arm, where someone was asleep. I looked at Mrs. Deaker, then stepped into the room. It was Jeannie, her slim ivory arm thrown over her face. I tiptoed toward her and then stopped cold as the shadowy half of the chaise longue took shape. Something was wrong; there were too many limbs. I squinted. There was another body sleeping there too, sprawled the opposite way. A little girl, arm tossed off the edge and a leg thrown over Jeannie’s knees. I crept up. The girl’s face was turned away, and I could see only a tiny, opalescent ear, involuted like a seashell, a birthmark below it. I glanced at Jeannie and found her eyes open and fixed on me. I felt oddly guilty, as if caught in some furtive act. She lifted the little girl’s leg from her knees and slipped off the longue. On her bare feet, she reached and took hold of my finger, hanging at my side, and led me back to the doorway. Mrs. Deaker was waiting there with her lamp. Young missy, she whispered, and placed her old hand on top of Jeannie’s head. They both looked up at me.
In my bedroom I poured a gin and stood at the verandah doors. All at once I was suspicious of this homecoming. It was all wrong—I was being offered too much, too quickly; first Mrs. Deaker’s suggestive smile, and now this. There was a conspiratorial element in play. I turned to the bed and found Jeannie seated on the edge, bare shinned and feet dangling, watching me with cautious, sleep-ringed eyes. God, those shapely feet—I was struck by the longing to sink before them, press them to my senses. But I stood firm across the room, strangling my drink. Well, let’s hear it, then.
After we had parted, a week or so ago, Jeannie said she had gone home to find her sister Dorie alone in the flat. For two days their da did not return. Then a well-dressed elderly lady arrived claiming to be their da’s auntie, explaining that he had written to her, that he’d gotten into some trouble, and would she look after the girls, in her own house, until he was able to fetch them? Somehow she convinced Jeannie and her sister to climb into the waiting carriage downstairs, and off they went to the west, arriving at a large house in some obscure square. That’s when Jeannie had a terrible presentiment. It was not a real house. It looked like a dummy house, she said. As the driver helped them down to the kerb, she managed to kick him in the shins and grab Dorie and run off and hide behind some rubbish bins.
What’d you think it was? This dummy house?
A girlie shop, Jeannie said, obviously. They set ’em up in posh places like that, get girls in the same as they nearly got us. Girls locked in cages, I’ve heard, men can do ’em through the bars if they fancy. You don’t believe me? You never heard of a girlie shop?
I’ve heard of them.
Jeannie braved my scrutiny for another moment, daring me to disbelieve her. Then she looked down at her hands in her lap. I drained my gin, dropped the glass on the rug, and approached her slowly. Her flesh tensed as she felt me coming, but she did not look up until I was standing over her, breathing heavy now, vine-ripe desire coagulating from my crux to the root of my tongue. She lifted her face—determined, even faintly defiant. Yet when she met my eyes, an uneasy doubt fell across her defiance, as if she had seen something looming behind me. I caught a dark glimpse of movement to my left and turned, to the giant mirror banked against the wall. For a moment it seemed like a doorway into another room, another dimension, where my pallid stunted double stood, reaching a stealthy hand toward the bed. I looked at my own hand. It was rising, fingers poised to take a strand of Jeannie’s hair. As if I were the reflection. I jerked my hand back. My brain was thudding.
You’d better get back to bed.
Next morning I staggered onto the rotting verandah and retched a torrent of gin and undigested scraps over the railing, spattering the stones far below. I swayed there in the warm breeze, head awhirl. What had I eaten last night? I couldn’t remember a thing from the moment Jeannie had left my room. A total blank. Exploring my sour mouth with my tongue, I fetched a bit of something from my molar which I spat into my hand. A slimy thread of grey gristle. Disgustedly I wiped it on the rail and yanked my gown shut and lurched across the top-floor landing to the empty room. The door was ajar.
It was empty. Just the chaise longue, a blanket draped neatly over the back. A shaft of sunlight angled through the window onto the floor. I could smell the girls on the air like cooling bread.
The three of them were downstairs in the kitchen. The table was set for four. Jeannie and Dorie sat across from each other while Mrs. Deaker worked the stove. Coffee, crackling grease; my stomach rolled with nausea. They all looked at me, in the doorway, as I peered blearily at little Dorie perched on the big wooden chair. I was sure I had seen her before, in a painting somewhere, this breathtaking child with white-golden hair and feline green eyes. Jeannie gave her a stern, meaningful nod and the little girl sighed and hopped dutifully off her chair and came around the table to me. She made a little curtsey, murmured, overpolitely, Sir. Then she reached for my hand, huge and wormed with veins, and took it with her perfect miniature fingers. I watched dizzily as she bent and just barely kissed the back of it. Then she ran to her chair and climbed on again. Mrs. Deaker was eying me, holding a black twisted spatula. Good morning, Master. Breakfast is served.
The egg yolks were intact. The rashers weren’t burnt, and the bread fried just brown. I watched Mrs. Deaker daintily cutting her egg up
with knife and fork. I felt sick, and mistrustful, and yet strangely moved by all the production, on my behalf it seemed. There was even fresh cream for the coffee in a little blue jar. The ladies ate in comfortable silence, as if having breakfast together was something we did every morning. Dorie ripped off bits of rasher with her fingers and dabbed them in the yolk, examining the ceiling with bright interest as she chewed. I could see a birthmark under her exquisite ear, a larger brown dollop on her throat. What was she doing in my house? Hadn’t I just been thinking that everything was becoming too big, too complex, that we needed to scale our lives down? I glanced at Jeannie and found her watching me intently, as if reading my thoughts. Was I really expected to believe their da had tried to sell them off to a girlie shop? Did it matter? She had come here—to me—for my help.
Jeannie carried the plates to the sink and started the washing up, while Mrs. Deaker sat across the table with her spotted hands regally crossed. When I met her gaze, she lifted her silvery eyebrows and, like an echo, I heard her whisper, You’ll see. I scraped back my chair and stood, unsteadily. Well, I announced, that was delicious. I believe I need a nap.
Jeannie had turned with a dripping dish in her hand. When you’re done.
Her dress laced up the back; I tore the knot and yanked the strings open, peeled the garment down to the bedroom floor. Later, with her nimble leg hooked over my shoulder, I smeared my lips up her throat, her chin, mashing them into her lips. She pressed back with her tongue, and electricity jolted through this wet, new contact; our first true kiss. Angrily, thirstily we sucked at each other, clicking teeth. Afterward she lay turned away on her side, a curve of light tracing her contour. I touched my lower lip and brought away a dab of blood.
Your da. Where do you think he is?
Her skin tightened. She shrugged a shoulder. Jeannie, I said, and she rolled over toward me. Her fingers played with the satin edge of the pillowcase. Do you want us to go? No. I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay. But I want to know if that da of yours is going to change his mind and come looking for you. He doesn’t know where you live, Jeannie said. Are you sure of that? She shrugged again. As sure as I can be. Anyhow, he’s not in London, like I said, he’s gone off. He hates it here, he’s always saying so, how he wants the country and all that. Now’s his chance.
And that’s it? You never see him again?
She slid her eyes up to me. I fingered a strand of hair away from her forehead. He won’t forget about you. You should know that. He’ll try to find you eventually. He’ll want to say he’s sorry. I let my finger rest on Jeannie’s cheek. Father had this door, at the far end of his study. It opened into a winding stairwell. At the foot of the stairs was another door. Very small. Like a tiny cupboard inside. Knees to your chest. The chokey, Father called it. He’d put us in there. Like a kind of training. For endurance, he’d say. Sometimes he’d make us take whisky first. Or cocaine. Have you ever had cocaine? Jeannie solemnly shook her head. That’s good. I looked away, out the verandah door, at the dull white sky. The last time, he left us in there two whole days. Carlton got us out in the end. Carlton was the butler. He got all the men in the house together, and they broke down the study door. Like a mutiny. I’d’ve liked to see that.
My eyelids were heavy. I let them close. A rushing in my ears—I could hear Father shouting, throwing and smashing things, but muffled, faraway. Don’t worry, I murmured. We’re all safe now.
But I didn’t believe that. When I woke later, Jeannie was gone, and the verandah door was groaning on its hinges in the wind, rapping the curlicued desk chair. I’d had a dream about Ghyll the way it used to be, hundreds of years ago in its glory days, when a happy, innocent family had lived here, oblivious to its doom. I had carried from the dream a realisation, a kind of dire prophecy. But as I swung my eyes around the bedroom, I couldn’t remember what it was. Things were changing. Evolving in complexity. While Jekyll had been planning his dinner party all this last week—while I’d been stuck inside fretting over Utterson and Poole—my life here had been metamorphosing into something almost unrecognisable. This farce of family life, in which I had my role to play. I did not trust it. I was no father, no great provider. And yet—it seemed as if I was changing as well, evolving from within. I did not feel like myself, not like my own self at all.
I wandered down from the eerily quiet top floors and into the drawing room, where I could hear voices. Mrs. Deaker and Jeannie were seated on the sofa and Dorie on the floor, with the flowerpot on the low table between them. They were playing a game, taking turns speaking to the flower. Dorie was whispering into its face with both hands cupping her mouth. Mrs. Deaker glanced up and saw me in the doorway, and then the girls were looking at me too. I went to the sideboard and trembled sherry into a glass. Doris, Mrs. Deaker said, perhaps Master would like to say something to Mr. Sun?
I turned and found the little girl clutching the flowerpot in both hands. Doris, said Mrs. Deaker, why don’t you let him try? It’s Master’s flower, after all. The girl continued to give me her cold, sulky glare until Jeannie said, Dorie, a note of warning in her voice, and the girl shoved the pot across the table to the edge, where Jeannie stopped it before it toppled off. A small silence. Very well, I said, examining the flower. It seemed to be flourishing, actually. The golden petals crowned its earthy upturned face like a mane. Its head was slightly cocked, as if asking a question.
You have to talk to him, Dorie said, in that same obnoxious way Jeannie did when a thing struck her as especially obvious. I smiled at the little girl. But I am talking to him. I’m talking with my mind. That’s the only way he can hear you. Her eyes screwed to slits. This way, I whispered, I can hear him too. I can hear him right now, in fact. How interesting. Want to know what he’s saying about you?
Dorie appraised me for another moment. Then she stood and picked up a feather duster from the sofa and drifted over to the windows, humming under her breath.
That afternoon I spent inspecting the outside of Ghyll. If I was actually meant to protect these precious gems in my draughty fortress, I wanted to see how secure the house really was. I locked the front door and tried to jimmy and force it open. I peered through the brass letterbox into the slot of entrance hall, then jammed my hand in until it stuck at the meat of my thumb. I edged down the slender alleyway alongside of the house, to the skewed cobbled lane beneath my verandah where the bits of my vomit were drying on the uneven stones. A rusted drainpipe scaled the house to my balcony high above, and I tugged at it, wondering if it could be climbed. As I backed away blinking flakes of rust from my eyes, I felt something against my legs and found a mangy tabby cat grinding itself against my shins with a contented rumble. I shooed the beggar off and turned to Ghyll’s unused back door, which was down a few disintegrating steps from the street. The lock felt flimsy, as if a good shoulder shove would break it. I returned to the front of the house and went through the kitchen to the steps that descended into the storage cellar, which this back door opened into, and I pushed an ancient chest through the dust to brace against it. Wiping cobwebs from my face, I slumped down on the chest. I had accomplished nothing, of course. Whatever was coming, it wouldn’t sneak into my life by this back door or shimmy up the drainpipe to my balcony. But what else could I do? The threat was too diffuse and indefinable. And the house was rather larger than I’d realised.
Over those next few days I was to become aware of all the empty space within Ghyll. After breakfast Mrs. Deaker would take the girls exploring, into the middle floors between the ground level and my upper bedroom landing, to play their peculiar games. The silence seeped like a lethal gas from the walls, making me skittish, hypersensitive to every squeak and groan. I would search them out in my stockings, so that I might observe them undetected. In the desolate parlour on the second floor, I spied them sitting in a triangle on the threadbare carpet, holding their hands up to an imaginary fire in the centre, eyes closed, swaying, a coven of witches. In a barren bedroom on the third floor I found D
orie lying on the boards, hands crossed over her chest, playing dead, while Jeannie and Mrs. Deaker stood at the head of the grave delivering her eulogy, trying to make her laugh. These games unnerved me. I didn’t like to see these empty cells of my house, places where a person might hide, might live, slinking about unsuspected. As if to prove it, the ladies would sometimes simply disappear, vanishing for hours into some nightmare version of hide-and-seek in which everyone was hiding and no one seeking. Except me. I would creep from floor to floor, opening stray wardrobes and cabinets, yanking curtains aside, peering into crooked closets, and once even pressing my pounding ear to the floorboards when I heard a rustle from under there. In the second-floor parlour I stared at a picture on the wall, a silvery beachscape by moonlight with a distinct black figure far away. I squinted at this figure, struck by the mad fancy that one of them was hiding inside the picture. I turned away and did not let myself examine the beachscape again for fear the figure might have moved. Yet where were their impossible hiding places? Where was I not seeking?
Then I remembered the storage cellar and spent a fruitless hour poking amongst the abandoned cobwebs and clutter of lumber and broken furniture, headboards and chairs and a lady’s gilded vanity table left behind by that grand family when they’d fled this place. I checked inside the ancient chest bracing the back door, then clumped back upstairs to the kitchen. I longed to escape this stifling house. It had been days since I’d been out for a proper ramble. Yet I didn’t like the idea of leaving the ladies alone. In the cellar I had torn through a sticky spider web, and I was swiping it from my face as I crossed the kitchen when I heard a bump, a knock, and I froze. The noise had come from the sink. The pipes? My eyes moved down from the spigot and ceramic basin and took in the drain-cupboard door underneath. A white wooden door with a black knob. My throat went dry. I lowered myself to a squat before it, reached for the knob. It stuck at first, then screeched open—and I gaped at Dorie curled up inside hugging her knees behind the looping U-bend of iron drainpipe. Shut it! she hissed at me. I’m hiding! But I could only stare, agog. Father’s chokey. It was here in my house, lurking behind the drain-cupboard door. Had Dorie been hiding in here all along? Shut it, shut it! she hissed again. I’m hiding! She reached out to grab at the door, and I saw Father hunkered outside the dark frame, outlined against the light of his study behind him. The light thinned as he closed us in, thinned to a strip, a few golden grains. The cupboard door squeaked into place and I scrabbled back over the kitchen floor.
Hyde Page 12