by Kim Kane
‘Not until after nursery tea, Miss Gertrude,’ said Anna in a sterner voice than usual, ‘but I’m anxious to have it all set up. It’s dreadfully important to your mother. Please do stay out of the way – no meddling and no eating.’
Gert nodded and directed Madeleine to the side of the room.
‘Where’s the best place to hide tonight, do you think?’ Madeleine whispered, looking about. For such a large space, there were remarkably few places to hide. ‘It’s all pretty exposed.’
‘Behind the curtains,’ said Gert.
‘But won’t we be visible from outside? What if your father walks by?’
Madeleine could just imagine Mr Williamson’s reaction if he saw them spying. After the grotto, he would be likely to drag them out by their plaits.
‘Not the curtains on the windows – the curtains under the window seat.’
Gert pointed towards the bay window, which nudged out onto the verandah behind it. This formed a little hexagonal nook, and an accompanying hexagonal seat was set beneath the windowpanes, looking rather like it had been cut with a Christmas cookie-cutter. A velvet curtain hung beneath the seat to the ground. Above were fattened cushions on which to sit and admire the view across the garden and down to the lake.
Just then, Nanny bossed her way into the room. ‘Girls, outside! I’m not sure what you are thinking of, but do not loiter around the cake. Miss Imogen is in the playhouse, and Miss Charlotte is playing with Millie.’
Nanny ushered them out into the sunless afternoon. Charlie was on the verandah. She hurled a stick at Millie on the grass, and she, Gert and Madeleine watched as Millie sprinted off hare-quick to retrieve it, returned the stick faithfully, refused to hand it over and gnawed on it instead.
Charlie sighed. ‘Come on, Gert and Madeleine, I think Millie’s had enough of this game for now. She’s rather like a wild man with a bone. Let’s play hide-and-seek instead – it’s so much better with more people. Besides, the other option is to play with Imo in the playhouse, and you know how bossy she is.’
Gert looked at Madeleine doubtfully, but Madeleine had some sympathy for Charlie. She remembered what it was like when Teddy and his friends had refused to play with her.
‘Okay,’ said Madeleine. ‘But only if you’ll be it first.’
Charlie sat down on the verandah floor with her back to the garden and began to count. Madeleine and Gert took one look at each other and ran.
‘. . . fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . .’
‘Not quite so fast, Charlie!’ yelled Gert over her shoulder. ‘Or you’ll need to count until a hundred at that pace.’
Although the garden no longer seemed as vast and mysterious as it had when Madeleine first arrived, she found it was still possible to look up and feel completely lost in parts of it. She followed Gert at first, then peeled off on her own.
‘. . . twenty-four,twenty-five,twenty-six,twenty-seven . . .’ Madeleine crept around a tangle of bushes covered in pale sprays of waxen flowers, their deep-pink centres heavy with scent. Daphne. As she rounded one end of the bushes, Madeleine spotted a band of threadbare grass at her feet. Following it, she ducked under the daphne’s canopy and found herself in a funnel of shiny foliage.
Madeleine crawled into the tunnel and lay propped on her elbows to rest. The light was splintered, green and peaceful through the boughs. It was a perfect hiding spot – she was almost completely concealed. Behind her, she heard a soft squeak, a breath, a sigh. Just as she turned to look, Gert and her petticoats came bumping inside.
Madeleine pressed her hands to her mouth to trap her giggles. Gert flapped her broad wrists towards Madeleine, motioning Madeleine onward. It gets bigger, she mouthed.
Madeleine wriggled forward. It was still too low to walk, so she crawled, the ground beneath her wet with composting leaves. She came to a bend, and beyond it a hollow space lined with low seats made from stone slabs covered with bright-green moss.
Madeleine stopped short. Her fingers gripped mulch. Gert, who had crawled up beside her, stopped too. Their eyes met. Neither of them breathed.
On a stone bench at the back of the hollow sat Elfriede and Mr Williamson. One arm was slung about the back of the bench behind Elfriede, hanging down behind her like the empty sleeve of a jacket. The other was harnessing her bare neck. Elfriede’s fingers were looped in his braces, and their heads were bent in whispering kisses. The knees of his pants were scabby with broken pieces of bracken, and the little mole under his eye jiggled. Even in the filtered green light of the hollow, he glowed golden.
Madeleine didn’t want to stare, to spy, but she couldn’t look away. Her heart beat hard. Gert was crouched on all fours. She looked like she had been snap-frozen.
‘Schatz? Is that how I say it?’ Mr Williamson kissed Elfriede’s forehead and bubbled kisses along her cheekbone. Madeleine thought she might vomit.
‘Ah, Thomas, you tickle, your moustache,’ tinkled Elfriede.
‘. . . fifty-six . . . fifty-seven . . . fifty-eight . . . fifty-nine . . .’ Charlie’s numbers broke through the canopy as she came towards them.
Madeleine grabbed Gert and pushed backwards and backwards through the hooded bush, through snapped sticks and slimy moss, until she broke into the light, pulling Gert out behind her.
The two of them ran across the garden and into the empty tree. Safe within its walls, they huddled together, breathing in the smell of softened timber. Madeleine leant back and looked up the trunk at the sky, mute.
‘. . . ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. Coming-ready-or-not!’
Madeleine bit her nail, trying to crush the memory of golden skin, that flop of hair and those kisses. She could taste daphne and compost on her finger.
She looked at Gert and tried to think of something to say, of something to make it better; but in the cool, quiet privacy of the empty tree, Gert was crying. She looked baggy and desperate and sad, and there was nothing that Madeleine could do.
The girls re-entered the house quietly just before nursery tea. The house felt heavy, and Madeleine found her breaths were still coming short and shallow.
Aunt Hen was writing at a little desk tucked away in one corner of the drawing room, dipping her pen into an inkwell set into the desktop. There was a pile of envelopes beside her.
‘Are Mummy and Daddy in?’ Gert didn’t mention Elfriede.
‘I assume so,’ murmured Aunt Hen, sealing a letter with a great glob of deep-red wax and then pressing it with a round bronze seal. ‘But you heard the gong. Wash your hands for nursery tea. With Bella’s gathering on tonight, and Percy’s departure, everyone’s in a state.’
‘Will he be all right, Aunt Hen?’ Gert looked earnest.
‘Percy? I should think so. He comes from a strong, political people. I think it was very brave of him to go.’
Soon afterwards, the girls sat around a meal of grey mutton in a pool of water and fat. It was all salty and overcooked. Dessert was a heavy, bland pudding. Like the curtains and the wallpaper in this house, there was just too much heaviness and not enough bok choy.
Madeleine and Gert moved silently on to the nursery after they’d eaten. It wasn’t a comfy silence, a silence of friends – it was a slicing silence. A silence that seemed to divide the air between them.
Madeleine smoothed down her bedspread and sat on it. ‘Can we still go tonight?’ she asked. ‘Do you mind?’
Gert didn’t respond. Madeleine’s eyes pinched. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks. It’s useless, it’s useless. What the fig am I going to do?
She didn’t think she’d ever felt a loss this bruising and enormous. It was even bigger than the departure of her father all those years ago, for it was keeping him from her more definitively than any divorce ever could have – and not just him, but her mum, Teddy, Mum Crum, Nandi . . . everyone and everything.
While Madeleine was fairly sure the medium would not be able to whisk her back to the future, perhaps she could, and while there was a chance
, even a very slim one, it was worth fighting for – but it was hard to explain to Gert why she needed to leave her and get home so desperately, especially when Gert was feeling so sad.
Madeleine climbed into her bed, her body leaden, defeated.
Some hours later, the nursery clock chimed. Just seconds later, the air was animated by the sound of hooves echoing about the garden like gunfire.
Madeleine went to the nursery’s little window and looked down. Below her, carriages and cars rolled in, and women with hats as big as birthday cakes rolled out.
‘We’re going,’ whispered Gert, standing beside Madeleine in bare feet.
‘We’re what?’
‘I am not going to do nothing. I am not going to just sit up here and sulk. Daddy thinks Mummy’s Friends of the Spirit World meetings are rubbish, and so we are going. It’s the only thing to do. Blow it.’
Madeleine gave Gert a hug.
‘Sorry,’ Gert sniffed. ‘I’ve been a monster.’
‘Don’t be silly – it’s been a perfectly horrid day.’
‘Perfectly horrid?’ Gert smiled. ‘What happened to the worst ever? You’re starting to speak like one of us.’
Madeleine hugged her again.
‘Now run!’ hissed Gert. ‘If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to get under the window seat before Anna ushers the guests inside, or we’ll have no chance.’
The girls managed to skid down the servants’ staircase and hurl themselves beneath the window seat’s skirting just in the nick of time. The material was still swinging slightly as the first of the now hatless women entered the drawing room and helped themselves to cups of tea by the fireplace. From this position, the girls could see the side of the card table, which had been set up just in front of the window seat, as well as the lines of empty chairs to their right.
‘How do they get hair to stay like that?’ whispered Madeleine as she peered out into the room from beneath the skirting. The curled hair artfully heaped upon various women’s heads looked like wigs.
‘Tongs and irons,’ Gert whispered back. ‘And they bulk it up with horsehair pads.’
Mrs Williamson was there, in a dress the colour of cooked spinach, introducing Elfriede to the visitors.
‘Oh, I am terribly interested,’ Elfriede was saying in her singsong voice, ‘and terribly grateful to be included. My darling cousin and her family have been so generous.’
Everyone was looking at her, fascinated, and Madeleine wondered if they’d be just as interested in a foreigner if she were ugly. She watched Elfriede – watched Elfriede pretend – for another few minutes; then she dropped the skirting back to the ground, erasing Elfriede from her sight. It was all such an act.
Beneath the window seat, the two girls could lie down quite comfortably on their tummies so long as they kept their knees bent, feet just brushing the back of the bench. Their heads were almost touching.
Gert lifted the skirt up a smidge again, then gripped Madeleine’s hand and squeezed it. In the crack beneath the material and the floor, two square-toed shoes bloomed into view, the soles worn down deeply on each side. Maroon stockings caught on thin ankles. There was a snag in one, just above the tongue on one shoe, but the stocking hadn’t run yet.
Next to the shoes, a carpet bag with a black leather handle dropped to the floor. Madeleine watched as two ropey hands pulled a rock, a candle, matches, salt in a little silver shaker, a flower, and a copy of the Bible without a spine from the bag, quickly and neatly. The fingers on the hands were threaded with rings, like quoits pegs.
Finally, Madeleine watched the ringed hand pull a large glass sphere about the size of a tennis ball from the bag.
‘It’s a crystal ball! This is classic stuff,’ Madeleine whispered to Gert. Through the crystal, she had caught a wavering glimpse of the seats in front of the card table filling with guests, the whole view strangely shrunken through the ball.
Teddy and Raj would love this, Madeleine thought. They were obsessed with spirits. Teddy said that there really was such a thing as spirits, including spirits who communicated with their loved ones via their computers after they’d died – especially in America.
Madeleine angled her head so she could look upwards into the room. The clairvoyant’s head was bandaged in what looked like cheap sari silk. She turned sideways towards her bag again, flashing pale-blue eyes as clear as glass with a striking dark-grey ring around each iris. She had no eyelashes, and her eyebrows were drawn in two lines of thin dark pencil just beneath her turban. Her skin was as dry and lined as a Cruskit cracker.
The woman had placed everything from the bag in a row on the table, alongside the memento mori photographs Anna had laid out earlier. She lit the candle with the exaggerated strike of a match.
Madeleine could hear the clipping sound of shoes on parquetry as the last of the guests took their spots. The woman sat down calmly in the chair that had been provided for her behind the card table, like a child with all the answers in the front row of a classroom.
There was an exchange of nods between the medium and a tall woman in the audience (bobbing bun and bobbing turban), and then the tall woman stepped up to the table too.
‘Good evening, and welcome to the Friends of the Spirit World’s monthly gathering. We are very grateful to our hostess, a most dedicated member, Mrs Isabelle Williamson, for providing us with such a gracious venue here at Lyrebird Muse this evening.’
The woman coughed. Her voice was school-prefect perfect, and it bumped around the crowded room politely. She nodded at Mrs Williamson and then angled her body towards the card table.
‘We are most fortunate to have Madame Blanche du Boisier here as our guest of honour this evening.’
The woman pronounced du Boisier like she had a mouth full of bubblegum.
‘For those not familiar with Madame du Boisier’s work, she is a medium of some repute, who has had substantial success engaging spirits, and we are thrilled to welcome her to the Friends of the Spirit World for what I hope will be the first of many sessions with our little group.’
She coughed, and then continued.
‘Now I understand that Mrs Williamson’s charming cousin, Frau von Fürstenburg, and Mr Williamson’s sister, Miss Henrietta Williamson, will take the places of Mr and Mrs Angus King, who are unfortunately unable to join us this evening. We are comfortable, however, that this will not disturb the sensitivity of our usual little gathering, and I do hope you have taken the opportunity to ask Frau von Fürstenburg about her own experiences of spiritualism on the Continent.’
The woman looked at Elfriede and smiled, as did everyone else in the room, nodding and murmuring at the happy timing of her visit.
The words washed over Madeleine like notices at a school assembly, until at last the maroon stockings of Madame Blanche du Boisier straightened as she stood.
‘Good evening. I am hoping that we will have some form of manifestation from the spirit world this evening.’
Her voice was as soft and sticky as marshmallow.
‘Remember that these manifestations come in many forms. I have been privileged, in the past, to experience smells, voices and even touch – indeed from the left-hand side, which is most common. Of course, a spirit may be present and yet remain unknown to us. There are signs, however. When a candle flame burns blue, or a dog is agitated, it is likely a ghost is present.’
‘Where is Millie when you need her?’ whispered Gert.
‘I have lit this candle,’ Madame du Boisier went on, ‘to be our guide. I have also brought quartz, for in my experience I have found our spirit friends to be very responsive to this mineral. Are we all comfortable?’
Madame du Boisier paused.
‘Please join hands with your neighbour, with the little finger of each hand touching that of the person on either side of you. In the centre of the table, we will place the crystal ball. We will place the quartz on the Bible, together with a lily – the flower of death – to beckon good spirits. We have placed th
e saltcellar here, as salt thrown into a candle flame will drive away spirits should we need to.’
The room swelled with gentle laughter, releasing tension like a skewer in a cake. Madame du Boisier stomped one square-toed shoe.
‘Do not laugh. Do not speak. The dead cannot laugh, and it offends them.’
Her head had an actor’s tilt to it. She held her nose up to the ceiling and sniffed. She then moved her arms right up above her ears, moving and moving her hands in a circular motion as she swayed from the knee like a serpent.
She stomped, her feet square on the floor again. ‘We have a stranger in the room. I can feel a presence very strongly.’ She reached out and waved her arms about the candle flame. It burnt bright and yellow.
Gert gripped Madeleine’s hand.
‘A stranger from a distant land. A land where the sun is veiled and communication is furious and altogether strange, and men may be seen in one form and again in another.’
Gert’s fingernails bit into Madeleine’s wrist.
Oh man, thought Madeleine. It’s coded like a riddle, but she knows about email. She knows about TV. Thank goodness. Can she get me back?
Madame du Boisier sat back down in her seat with a thud – as if someone had pushed her.
‘I sense this person. Yes, yes, I sense this person.’
She sat very tall in her seat now, and began thrashing her arms about again, breathing in and out over the crystal ball, her mouth hanging open.
‘It is you.’ She stood and pointed. ‘You – you sir, you with the finger-moustache. Yes, I see it now. Born of the Raj.’
Another woman squealed. ‘How did you know?’
Madame du Boisier stood again, taller with confidence. ‘He is born of the Raj, serving our Queen and country. And yet despite his foreign birth, he seeks friendship here, and a new life.’
‘Definitely not me,’ whispered Madeleine.
‘He has come to seek his wife, who was born here, and who died in childbirth. Tessa? Tessa, is it? I hear her now. Tessa, is it you?’