But Geoffrey hated school. He hated the beatings and the other boys, and he held Gilbert responsible. His sullenness deepened into a cold resentment that cast a chill over the room whenever the two of them were in it, so that sometimes Jane despaired of what would come of him.
On that May afternoon, though, despair was far from Jane’s mind. Even so, she lowered her voice and wriggled down next to Gilbert.
‘I am happy but I think I may soon be happier still,’ she whispered and he raised an eyebrow.
‘How so?’
‘I think . . . I think I may be with child.’
Gilbert sat bolt upright. ‘What?’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ she said quickly, ‘but it has been a couple of months since . . . well, you know.’ She had been nauseous too, and her breasts felt tender. When she had whispered it to Annis, Annis had nodded sagely.
‘So it was with me with all my babes,’ she said.
‘But I have been so careful,’ Jane had protested. She made her own pessaries with the juice of mugwort and applied them diligently against conception. There were drinks she could try to loosen the child in her womb, she knew, but Jane couldn’t bring herself to do that.
A child. A child of her own. Jane was bursting at the thought of it, but she had wondered how Gilbert would take the news. He had three daughters already.
But she need not have worried. Gilbert snatched off his hat with a shout of laughter that made the girls look up from their daisy chains.
‘Sshh,’ said Jane. ‘I do not want anyone else to know.’
‘You will not be able to hide it forever, my love.’
‘I know, but I want to wait until I’m sure.’
Gilbert laid a tender hand on her belly. ‘Another child,’ he said wonderingly. ‘You will have to marry me now, Jane. The future of my son or daughter matters more than a promise, does it not?’
Jane hesitated, torn. It felt like a risk, like testing her good fortune too far, but Gilbert was right. She and Geoffrey were settled in London now. Robert had married again; the Holmwoods had given up the chase. Surely they were safe?
‘Yes,’ she said, and before she could stop him, Gilbert was on his feet with a triumphant shout.
‘What is it, Pappa?’ Sensing excitement, the girls ran up to him.
‘I am to marry again,’ he said. ‘What do you say to Jane as your new mamma?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ The girls squealed with delight and Jane laughed as they hugged her, but over Catherine’s shoulder she caught sight of Geoffrey, who had appeared silently as was his wont. He was staring back at her, white-faced, eyes blazing with rage.
Later, she tried to talk to him. ‘Mr Harrison will provide for you, Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘It is a great security for us.’
‘I don’t want him to provide for me,’ said Geoffrey tightly. ‘He doesn’t like me.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Jane weakly, knowing that it was. ‘And anyway, even if it was, what would that matter? You will be his son.’
‘But you are to have his child,’ said Geoffrey. ‘If it is a boy, he will have no use for me. I will still just be a butcher’s brat with a servant for a mother.’
Jane sucked in her breath, dismayed as always by the vitriol in his voice. What had she done for him to hate her so? She had tried so hard to care for him and provide for him, but nothing she did was ever good enough for Geoffrey. She could see Juliana in him often, in that restless discontent with his lot, the conviction that he was meant for grander things, that he was better than everyone around him.
Jane was glad she had never told him the truth about his parentage. As far as Geoffrey knew, his father had been a butcher in York and Jane his widow. She had hoped it would keep his expectations low, but Geoffrey took his lowly background as an affront. Jane dared not think how he would react if he learnt the truth, that he was base begotten by a lascivious tailor. Even more she feared his reaction if he discovered that she had taken him from his inheritance of Holme Hall and the house in Micklegate. She would never be able to explain Margaret and Robert’s depravity. She knew she had done the right thing, but Geoffrey would not see it that way.
She kept her voice steady as she faced Geoffrey. ‘I will not be a servant when I am married to Mr Harrison. He is a gentleman, and I will be his lady.’
‘Lady?’ Geoffrey spat. ‘Everyone knows you for his whore!’
Before she could stop herself, Jane’s hand lashed out and caught him a stinging slap on his cheek. It was little enough punishment compared to some of the beatings he had had, but Geoffrey reeled back, his eyes black and bitter, the imprint of her hand red on his face. ‘I hate you! I hate all of you!’ he said. ‘You will be sorry!’
‘Geoffrey, wait!’ Jane began, but he ran off, slamming the door behind him so hard the latch rattled and leaving her wracked with guilt and with fear, her palm still tingling where she had struck him.
Jane turned it upwards to look down at it, remembering the viciousness in Geoffrey’s eyes. You will be sorry. ‘Oh God, what have I done?’
‘You haven’t done anything. It’s okay, Roz. Come and sit down.’
He guided her over to the rickety bench where the shop assistants used to hunch over their fags. He remembered how they had huddled into their coats, sucking on their cigarettes with a kind of desperation, not talking. Sad men he had thought them at the time, socially awkward, trapped behind the counter in a model shop. Now he wondered whether their stammers and flickering eyes owed more to the house than their own inadequacies.
Roz’s face was eerily blank. She sat obediently but her hands were twisting in her lap. ‘I shouldn’t have hit him,’ she said. ‘He will punish me for that. He will bide his time, but he will not forget.’
A coldness breathed on Jeff’s back, making his shoulders twitch. He waved a hand in front of her face. ‘Wake up,’ he said. ‘Come on, Roz, wake up!’
Awareness flickered in her eyes, slow at first, and then to his relief her expression cleared. ‘Jeff?’ she said uncertainly.
He nodded. ‘Are you okay?’
She sucked in a long breath and looked around her at the yard. It was an uninspiring sight: wheelie bins, builders’ debris, flattened cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. Adrian’s car and an electrician’s van. Nothing out of the ordinary, but Jeff had the uncanny sense that Roz was seeing something else entirely.
‘She’s back,’ she said, and the strangeness in her voice made the hairs creep up on the back of Jeff’s neck. It reminded him of the way she had looked after the séance, but even as he frowned in concern a smile was spreading over her face and she placed a hand wonderingly on her stomach. ‘A child,’ she said.
Afraid that she might be drifting back into her trance, Jeff snapped his fingers in front of her. ‘Hey! Stay with me, Boo,’ he said. Was she pregnant? That might explain it. They said pregnant women behaved a bit strangely sometimes. Not that Jeff would know. ‘Do you need a doctor?’
Very slowly, Roz turned her head. The breeze was snatching at her hair and blowing it around her face and she held it back with one hand so she could look at him properly for the first time. Her eyes were devastatingly clear once more. ‘What did you call me?’
Jeff was caught unawares, pinned by the directness of her gaze. ‘What? When?’ he blustered. ‘Nothing.’
‘You called me Boo.’
‘Did I?’ It had just slipped out. He’d never been able to think of her as Rosalind. ‘It doesn’t mean nothing.’
There was a long pause. ‘You’re Mikey,’ said Roz.
‘I’m Jeff,’ he insisted, but even he could hear the lie and she shook her head.
‘You’re Mikey,’ she said again, and at the certainty in her voice he felt something unlock inside him. ‘You’re my brother.’
‘We should talk.’ Roz rubbed her arms. ‘It’s too cold out here, though. Let’s go inside.’
‘No!’ he said without thinking. ‘Not in the house.’
‘Why d
o you say that?’ she asked but he noted that she didn’t sound surprised.
‘I don’t know,’ said Jeff honestly.
They both turned to study the back of the house. The scaffolding was down at last and you could see how the structure of powerful beams had been restored. The plaster was beautifully rendered, the leaded windows winked in the light. Even this, the back of the house, was magnificent. No one could deny that the Holmwood Foundation had done a wonderful job.
‘There’s something wrong with that house,’ Jeff heard himself say, and Roz nodded slowly as if she understood.
‘I think so too.’
He looked at her. ‘You can feel it? The atmosphere?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said.
‘I can’t explain it, but I don’t think we should talk in there.’
They went instead to a little cafe near Micklegate Bar. They sat at a table with a checked plastic tablecloth and plastic flowers in a little vase. Roz ordered some fancy coffee they didn’t have, so settled for a filter instead. He had tea. ‘Strong and black,’ he told the waitress.
Roz pleated a paper napkin while they waited for their drinks. ‘Well, this is awkward,’ she said at last, mustering a smile. ‘Where do we begin?’
Jeff shrugged. He didn’t have a clue. Calling her Boo had been a mistake. He should have been more careful. She would never have known otherwise. He couldn’t decide whether he was glad or sorry now that she did.
‘The thing is, I can’t believe it really,’ said Roz. ‘You’re my brother.’
‘Half-brother,’ he said.
She lifted her head from the napkin and stared at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me who you were?’
Jeff rested his hands on his thighs. He could feel the coarse fabric of the overall under his fingers. On the other side of the table, Roz was looking elegant in soft wool trousers, some kind of silky top and what he was prepared to bet was a cashmere cardigan. Her hair was tousled by the wind, but gold gleamed at her ears and round her throat, and she wore a sapphire and diamond ring next to her wedding ring. She looked classy, sophisticated, rich. Nobody looking at them together would guess that she was his sister.
‘You live in a different world to me,’ he said, nodding at her clothes. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to know. You’re the fancy events director from London. I’m the caretaker from prison.’
‘You’re my brother,’ she said again as if that was all that was important and irritation flashed through him at her naivety. Did she really think that made a difference?
‘You’d never shown any interest in me before,’ he said, unable to keep the resentment from his voice. ‘Why would I think you’d be interested in meeting me now?’
‘I didn’t even know you existed until a few months ago,’ Roz protested. ‘Aunt Sue told me that my entire family died in a car crash. I knew that I’d had half-sisters but she never said anything about a brother. I’m sorry. It was only when she died that I discovered the truth.’
Jeff felt sick. All those years, waiting for her to remember him, to forgive him, and she hadn’t even known of his existence. That bitch, Aunt Sue. She had never liked him.
‘That sounds like Aunt Sue,’ he said evenly. ‘Let’s sweep anything difficult under the carpet and pretend nastiness doesn’t exist. They told me she’d washed her hands of me, but I didn’t think she’d go as far as pretending I’d never existed.’
Roz pinched an end of the pleated napkin and spread the other into a fan. ‘Aunt Sue was very good to me.’
‘I’m sure she was.’ Jeff’s mouth twisted with bitterness. ‘She always wanted a daughter. She was jealous of our mother. Sue and Keith couldn’t have children. I used to hear her crying about it sometimes with Mum. I’ll bet she couldn’t wait to adopt you.’
‘She did want a child,’ said Roz. ‘She told me that. But she wouldn’t have killed her sister to get what she wanted.’
Unlike you. The words throbbed unspoken in the air.
‘She should have told you about me.’ Jeff could feel the old resentment clogging his throat, making the muscles in his neck bunch.
‘Perhaps,’ said Roz. ‘She was . . . bitter,’ she went on carefully, trying to be fair. ‘She adored my mother – our mother,’ she corrected herself. ‘She couldn’t forgive you for what happened.’
‘And you?’ Jeff heard himself ask in a harsh voice.
She smoothed out the napkin she had just pleated so carefully. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember my mother, my father, my sisters, you. I don’t remember anything from before I went to live with Aunt Sue and Uncle Keith.’
‘But you were five,’ Jeff said. ‘You must remember something.’
‘I don’t. Apparently it’s quite common for small children to deal with trauma by blocking out memories. All I know about what happened that night is what other people have told me.’
She paused, leaning back in her chair as the waitress brought over their drinks and set them down. When she had gone, Roz lifted her cup and cradled her hands around it without drinking it.
‘The other day I went to Millingham Road,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even know where it was, but somehow I was there. I didn’t recognize the house at all but when I looked at the shed I felt . . . something. Not a proper memory, more of an impression: being cold and frightened, feeling abandoned.’
Jeff’s face twitched. He knew how that felt.
Roz set down her cup. ‘What happened that night, Mikey?’
‘Jeff,’ he said automatically. ‘I’m not Mikey any more. My name’s Jeff.’
‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.
‘I don’t know!’ The words were wrenched out of him. He had been asked that so many times, and nobody ever believed him. He took a sip of tea to steady himself. This, after all, was a familiar story. ‘They said I planned it very carefully. They said I stole some petrol from the lawnmower and doused some paper in a wastepaper basket. They said I laid a trail out of the bedroom and set fire to it.’ He looked across the checked plastic cloth to Roz. ‘They said I burned my mother and the rest of the family to death because I was angry about being smacked for being rude.’
‘They said? What do you say?’
‘I remember standing in the garden and watching the house burn.’ It had been the strangest sensation, as if he was outside himself, looking at himself with his face lifted to the fire. He had been filled with a sense of exultation. The fire had been beautiful, he remembered that. So pure, so fierce, its flames spearing the darkness.
Another image was coming back to him, dredged up from the depths of his memory. ‘You were there. A fireman was carrying you up the garden and I remember feeling puzzled. I didn’t understand what he was doing with you or what was happening . . .’ He trailed off. ‘I’d forgotten that,’ he said after a moment. ‘The rest of it, laying the fire, all of that . . . I’ve got no memory of that at all.’
‘I read some of the reports,’ said Roz carefully. ‘They said that when they asked you why you’d done it, all you’d say was that it wasn’t you. That someone else had set fire to the house.’
‘They decided it was a form of early onset schizophrenia,’ Jeff agreed.
‘Is that how it felt to you?’
He turned his cup round and round in its saucer. ‘What else could it have been?’
Roz didn’t answer immediately. She was studying her own coffee, perfectly groomed brows drawn together, working something out in her own mind.
‘You said you thought there was something wrong with Holmwood House?’
Jeff was thrown by the change of subject. He’d been expecting her to bang away with the why, why, why questions he could never answer. ‘It’s just a feeling.’
‘You hear the train, don’t you?’
He was struggling to keep up with the way her thoughts jumped around. ‘Train?’
‘The model railway in the great hall.’
‘There’s no model railway there now
.’
‘I know, but I hear it anyway,’ she said. ‘And I think you do too.’
He hesitated. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘I met someone who used to live in Millingham Road. She remembered us. She said you were a quiet boy until you started spending a lot of time in a model shop. I think it was the model shop that’s now part of Holmwood House. You used to come here, didn’t you?’
‘What if I did?’ He felt as if she were prodding him into a corner, into a place he didn’t want to go, and he shifted in his chair. His chest felt tight and a headache was jabbing behind his eye.
Roz cast a quick glance and then leant forward over the table. ‘I think Holmwood House is haunted,’ she said.
Chapter Eighteen
Jeff tried a laugh but it didn’t really work. He could feel it dropping away with his smile. He moistened his lips. ‘Oh, come on. Is this because of that silly séance?’
‘What happened in the model shop, Mi– . . . Jeff?’
‘Nothing. It was just a shop.’
‘But there was a model railway, wasn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ he said grudgingly. ‘There was a big track in the middle of the shop. It had tunnels and bridges and stations, all properly painted. There were fields with animals in them and a little town and a road with toy cars on it.’ He stopped himself, embarrassed by the detail of his memory. ‘I was fascinated by it,’ he admitted, ‘but it wasn’t creepy or anything.’
The power he had felt in there, the crisp certainty that he could do whatever he wanted, take whatever he wanted . . . that hadn’t been creepy. That had been cool.
Looking down at that tiny, perfectly functioning world, he had felt like a giant. With one blow of his hands, he could destroy it all. In the model shop, Mikey wasn’t a pathetic loser, the way his father had always said he was. In the model shop, he was strong. He could take on every one of the bullies at school. He could look after his mother all by himself so she didn’t need Patrick Acclam or his stupid, giggling daughters.
‘I used to cycle there on a Saturday morning,’ he told Roz. ‘I loved it in there. If you went all the way to the back, it was like being in a hidden, secret world. I felt different in there,’ he admitted. ‘Like I was a different boy altogether.’
The Edge of Dark Page 30