by Sarah Rayne
The girl who was singing the lines was slender and small-boned. She looked about fifteen – the age Abi would have been now. This girl had a slightly unruly tumble of hair – was it Abi’s bright-leaf hair? Grown over the last two years to an almost pre-Raphaelite cascade?
Bea could see the white oblong of the sketchpad, but she was too far away to make out what the girl was drawing. Would it be the hazelnut chariot of Mab? Or the view of Tromloy from this part of the track?
The girl bent over her sketch, her hair falling forward. She put up a hand, then both hands, to push it back, with a slightly impatient gesture.
It was as if Bea had been dealt a blow across the eyes. In the clear morning light it was possible to see that the girl’s hands were badly scarred. The flesh was puckered, the skin drawn into ugly ridges and lumps. It was how hands would look if they had beaten frantically against burning iron, it was how fingers would distort if they had curled around blistering metal … Burn scars, thought Bea. Burn-damaged hands. That’s what would happen if you were trapped in a lump of burning metal, trying to claw your way out …
She was not aware of having made any sound, but she must have done so, because the girl turned suddenly, then scrambled to her feet, hugging the sketchbook to her chest. Her eyes darted down the path, as if about to run for cover.
Bea called out at once. ‘Don’t be frightened – I heard you reciting and I was interested. I’m … I’m Beatrice Drury. I live in Tromloy.’
She spoke instinctively, willing the girl to stay where she was, taking a step nearer.
‘Tromloy …?’ It was a half-question, and Bea said, eagerly, ‘Yes. The house just behind us.’
‘I came to look at it,’ said the girl, a bit uncertainly. ‘I was curious. Then I wanted to draw it. Tromloy means Tromlui. That’s the word for nightmare. But it isn’t a nightmare house at all, I don’t think.’
‘I don’t think it is, either.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m in your gardens aren’t I,’ said the girl, suddenly. ‘I probably shouldn’t be. Is it trespass or something?’
There was a soft Irish lilt overlaying the words. Someone who had lived here for any length of time would pick that up, though. Bea said, ‘I didn’t know that about Tromloy meaning nightmare.’ And please stay where you are, and please let me get a bit nearer so I can see you properly. She took another step, then said, ‘I had a daughter who liked that speech you were chanting. She loved it. I used to draw the images for her. The fairies’ chariot—’
‘And the joiner squirrel and the ambuscado?’ There was a sudden rush of eager delight in the soft voice. ‘I’ve tried to draw them as well.’
‘Have you? Would you let me see your sketch?’ said Bea.
‘I would. I don’t know if it’s any good. Some people say drawing is a waste of time, but it isn’t, is it?’
‘It certainly isn’t,’ said Bea at once. The voice was not so much like Abigail’s after all. Yes, but voices changed … She said, ‘I illustrate books – quite a lot of them are children’s books. For a living, I mean. It’s my job. So I definitely don’t think drawing is a waste of time.’ She waited to see if this would strike any chord of recognition with the girl, but it did not seem to.
The girl took a step nearer, and held out the sketchbook. Sunlight fell pitilessly across the scarred hands, and Bea suppressed a wince of pain, then put out her hand for the sketchbook.
The moment her fingers brushed against the girl’s, she knew with sick despair that it was not Abigail. How could it have been, anyway? There was a strong likeness, though – the colouring, the build. The girl belonged to the same generic type as Abi. It might almost be possible for Bea to have persuaded herself it could actually be Abi, but recognition is a deeper, more primeval emotion, and at that deep level, Bea knew that she had never met this girl before today.
Even so, she was drawn to her – the girl had Abigail’s love of that speech and she had tried to capture the images on paper. For that, if nothing else, Bea would have wanted to know her better.
The sketch of Tromloy was immature and the technique was faulty – as it would be if she had never had proper lessons. But that aside, it was extremely good. Bea turned some of the pages, seeing the other work. It was confident and also very imaginative.
‘These are very good indeed,’ said Beatrice. ‘In fact … I’m sorry, I don’t know your name?’
‘Jessica. Jessica Cullen.’
She sat down again, watching intently as Bea leafed slowly through the sketches again, pausing to smile at a particularly vivid one of a woodland clearing with almost-cartoon faces in the trees and leaves, and a bewildered heroine-figure looking at them.
‘Well, Jessica Cullen, I think you’re very gifted, and I think if you have the chance to study art properly, you ought to do so.’
‘My aunts won’t allow that,’ said Jessica. ‘Uncle Tormod won’t let them allow it.’
This struck Bea as a curious statement, but she said, ‘You live with them, the aunts and your uncle?’
‘I do. It’s the house along from the church. It stands behind a brick wall, and it’s got those frowny kind of windows under the roof.’
‘I think I know the one.’ It would be the house where the timid, faded-beige ladies lived. ‘Have you always lived there?’
‘I don’t know. I forget things – I get confused.’ She turned to look towards Tromloy, suddenly. ‘Mrs Drury—’
‘Beatrice. In fact, Bea.’
‘Bea, does your house – Tromloy – does it have an old fire screen? About this big …’ The spoiled hands indicated. ‘Stuck all over with bits of old posters and newspaper cuttings and photographs? Faces of people from the past?’
Bea stared at her. Surely no one who had not been inside Tromloy could know about the fire screen? Or could they? The cottage had been empty for two years – anyone could have got in through the faulty window. Someone had actually done just that last night. This girl could certainly have done so, for all her appearance of being disingenuous.
Then Jessica said, ‘And there’s a room with a fireplace and a rocking chair. It’s got bronze and green material on it. There’s a picture on the wall …’ Her eyes narrowed in an effort of memory. ‘A man standing on a stage. He’s wearing really old-fashioned clothes. And he has woolly hair on each side of his face – like bunches of cotton wool.’
‘Mutton-chop whiskers,’ said Bea, in a half-whisper.
‘Is that what they’re called? And a waistcoat with a pattern on it.’
‘Yes. Brocade.’
Jessica Cullen was describing the photograph of the unknown performer in Abi’s room. It had been there when Bea and Niall bought the house, left behind, maybe simply forgotten, by previous owners. The photo was an old one – early twentieth century – and Bea had never known who the man was. She looked at this girl who might have known about the fire screen in the sitting room, but who could not possibly have known about the photograph unless she had been in Abigail’s bedroom.
She said, in a whisper, ‘You’ve been inside Tromloy, haven’t you?’
It seemed a long time before Jessica answered, but then she said, ‘I think I must have been. But I don’t remember when or why. I just have pictures of it in my head.’ A pause. ‘But Mrs Drury – Bea – I think that when I was there something dreadful happened.’
‘To you?’ This was the most unreal conversation anyone could possibly have. ‘Was that when you hurt your hands?’ said Bea, carefully.
‘I don’t remember. They’re burns, aren’t they?’ She looked at her hands as if they did not belong to her. ‘I think there was a fire, but I don’t know if it was in Tromloy. I can’t remember.’ She frowned, and a look of fear came into her eyes. ‘Sometimes, though, when I do try to remember, I think that something had to be got out of the fire.’
She looked at Bea as if for reassurance. There was no mistaking the panic in her voice, and Bea at once said, ‘I didn’t mean to pry, or frighten you.�
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‘No, it’s all right. But I must go now. I have to be back for lunch. My cousin Donal’s coming to stay, and he’ll be here this afternoon, and I’m supposed to help with things. He’s a priest, and they’re all very proud of him.’
Again, it was a curious way of putting it. Almost as if Jessica wanted to place herself outside the family circle. Bea said, ‘Yes, of course you must go back.’ She stood up. ‘But if you do come out this way again, you could walk up to the house if you felt like it.’
‘Come right up to the house? To Tromloy?’ Jessica’s eyes went beyond Bea to the house.
‘If you want to. I’m staying in Kilcarne for a while.’ Don’t force anything, thought Bea. If there’s to be anything else, let it come from her.
And it did. Jessica said, in a rush, ‘If I came to see the house, could I see your drawings? The illustrations for the books?’
‘Yes, of course. We could talk about your own work as well.’
Jessica thought about this, then said, ‘I could come one afternoon. I’d like that.’
‘Shall I phone your aunts to – well, to introduce myself to them?’ It had occurred to Beatrice that inviting a young girl into her home like this might seem a bit questionable – even slightly sinister. ‘Perhaps that would be a good thing to do,’ said Bea. ‘Give me the number, and I’ll call them this evening.’
‘No, don’t do that. They don’t like it when the phone rings, especially in the evening. They say it disturbs my uncle. He’s not very well – he hasn’t been very well for years. And if he’s disturbed there’s a row and he shouts, and Aunt Nuala gets upset and Aunt Morna gets cross. I could come tomorrow or the day after, though. The aunts know I go out on most days. Sketching or reading or just walking.’
‘No school?’
‘I have lessons at home. My uncle was once a teacher, and my cousin Donal’s got some kind of qualification. They don’t think I should go to an ordinary school.’ There was a note of wistfulness in her voice.
Bea said, ‘If you can come to Tromloy the day after tomorrow that’ll give me time to bake a cake and we’ll have it with a cup of tea.’
The girl smiled suddenly, transforming her entire face. ‘I will,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ And then she was gone, running lightly down the uneven ground, her hair lifting as she did so. Bea watched her, seeing her go through the trees. Branches from the trees blew downwards for a moment, partly hiding the small figure, then she was gone altogether.
Bea walked back up to the house. At one level she was not entirely sure she had actually met Jessica Cullen today. Had she somehow entered into a state of mind where she was trying to surround herself with people linked to Abigail’s death? Last night there had been a man she had half-believed, half-pretended was Maxim Volf. She still had no idea how much of a wild pretence that had been. And today there was a girl who had sung Abi’s poetry. A girl whose hands had been burned as if they had clutched desperately at blazing metal in an effort to escape …
Had Jessica been a manifestation of Bea’s own wish fulfilment – formed out of echoes and sadness? Had Bea projected a patchwork of her memories on to the air – getting some of them exactly right, but missing the target with others because the memories had inevitably begun to fade and blur a bit? The psychiatrists would have had a field day with that last theory.
It was all absurd. Maxim Volf had existed and he might even have been the man who had got into Tromloy last night. Jessica Cullen existed as well – Bea even knew, more or less, where she lived. And there were two aunts and an overbearing uncle. So Jessica was real, and she was coming to Tromloy in two days.
Letting herself back into the house, Bea faced the two disconcerting facts about Jessica Cullen. The first was that she had known about Tromloy. She had described the cushions in Abi’s room and the fire screen and she had known about the photo of the Victorian actor.
The second fact was a much harder one to face, because it had dug a spike into a wound that was, and probably always would be, raw.
A fire, Jessica had said. A fire … ‘When I do try to remember, I think that something had to be got out of the fire,’ she had said, her eyes wide and staring at something terrible.
Was it conceivable that Jessica Cullen had been there when Abi died?
The power had been restored to Tromloy, and Bea made a cup of tea, then heated some soup for an early lunch. After this, she spent a couple of hours adding the smoky-eyed heroine to the book illustration. It was starting to look good, although the heroine had turned out to have tumbling, slightly pre-Raphaelite hair the colour of autumn leaves, long enough to lift in a gentle breeze when she ran …
She had no idea whether Jessica would actually turn up as promised, but there was still time this afternoon to drive out to the little market town midway between Kilcarne and Galway City to buy the ingredients for what had been Abigail’s favourite chocolate fudge cake.
The road leading out of Kilcarne to the small market town eight miles to the west seldom had much heavy traffic. It was open to rolling countryside for most of the way, and whenever they drove along this road Niall would spin stories about the people in the houses that dotted the roadside. Most were small, the majority had peat turfs stacked against their walls in readiness for the winter, and most were unremarkable. But Niall had conjured up entire and wildly imaginative histories and family lineages for the supposed occupants of these houses. When Abi was a bit older she had joined in, adding her own twists to the stories. Bea could not spin stories out of nothing, but she could spin pictures, and in the evenings in Tromloy, she would draw the characters Niall had conjured up. Abi had loved that – she had given the people names, writing them under the sketches. One day, she said, they would write their own book; she and Dad would make up the story, and Mum could illustrate it. This was one of the things Bea tried not to remember.
The road was the one along which Niall and Abigail had driven on that last day. Had they talked about that pipe-dream book, that castle-in-the-air story they were one day going to write? Had Niall spun more tales about the people in the houses? For a bittersweet moment, Bea could see the two of them together in the car: Niall’s dark head occasionally half turning to look at his daughter, his eyes full of that amused indulgence they had once held for Bea. Abi would have been exuberantly pointing things out, her bright hair shiny in the autumn sunlight …
Tears blurred Bea’s eyes for a moment, but they did not blur the figure outside the greystone cottage that stood by itself on a wedge of land overlooking the road. He was wearing a long dark coat, the collar turned up. The tears had not blurred memory, either. It was the man who had been in Tromloy – the man who had been in Abigail’s room. He was bending over the small heap of peat as if adding to it, or perhaps collecting some of it to take indoors.
Without realizing it, Bea slowed down, almost to a stop, and stared up at the house and the figure. She had a sudden picture of the man sitting by a glowing fire in that little cottage, his eyes in the spoiled face unreadable. Would he be reading or listening to music, or watching television? Somehow it was difficult to associate him with anything so prosaic as television. She would allow him a row of well-thumbed books, and music, though. Mozart? No, something much darker. Mahler. Wagner. The books would be what were usually loftily referred to as literary …
And this was a ridiculous way to think, because the man probably read whodunits and chick-lit, and listened to heavy metal or rap. Still, if you were going to have an encounter with a real-life Phantom of the Opera character, you might as well ascribe to him a few of the more scholarly tastes. If there were to be a villain prowling around, Bea would prefer him to be an erudite villain. Not that the man was a villain. Not that he was likely to prowl into her life a second time, either. And even if he did, she would not want to talk to him. The impulse to attack the man who had failed to save Abi had weakened, but the bitterness was still there. It was just that the man she had met in Tromloy was nothing like she had imag
ined him.
The cottage was small, but it looked quite solid, and the bit of land around it was well tended. There were curtains at the windows and an impression of warmth and safety in the rooms beyond. It was absurd and illogical to have the sudden thought that none of those rooms would have a mirror, and to find the thought painful.
But at least he’s not a complete tramp, thought Bea, accelerating. He lives like an ordinary person in a house with walls and a roof. He might materialize and dematerialize in the night like smoke, but this is an ordinary house.
She glanced in the driving mirror. The man was still standing there, stacking the peat turfs. Bea did not think he had noticed her.
That night, prompted by an impulse that might have come from anywhere, Beatrice decided to sleep in Abigail’s bedroom. There was a brief flinching sensation at the memory of the man who had hidden in this room, and how he had been sitting in Abi’s rocking chair. ‘The house has helped me,’ he had said. But how often had he been in here? How often had he been in this room? Slept in the bed even?
It was an absurd notion, of course. If he had indeed been the man who had tried to rescue Abi and Niall, it was possible that he had come out here to find some kind of healing for his failure to save two people from a bad death. It was slightly bizarre, but Bea could believe it.
The bed was perfectly all right – untouched, as far as she could make out. To dispel any disturbing ideas, she got into it and pulled the duvet around her.
In direct sightline of the bed was the old photograph. Studying it in the dimness, Bea thought it looked more as if the setting was a music hall rather than a theatre, and the man looked as if he might be a singer. Whoever and whatever he had been, there was something rather endearing about him; a kind of pleased eagerness, as if he was always expecting life to serve up something wonderful. Niall had always meant to see if the man could be traced – there was a name on the back, he had said – but he had never got round to doing so. This was typical of him. He had been so full of promises and plans and schemes, but none of them had ever been developed or realized.