by Patrick Gale
Hugo screamed with laughter. “Granny swore!” he gasped, but all the men were diving around, scrabbling after dancing pearls.
She had caught a fistful of them, still on their string, but watching the men on all fours, like pigs, was so odd that she let these fall as well so that John shouted “Careful” at her. “Bedtime,” she said again. “Jiggedy jig.” And she steered Hugo, who was already in pajamas, into the bathroom to brush his teeth.
“I’m sorry I broke your pearls,” he said, as she saw him into his side of the double bed.
“Ssh,” she whispered. “You’ll wake Oscar. Don’t worry. It happens all the time, Granny losing her marbles. Happens all the time. Kiss.” He kissed her and she kissed him back. “Now. Say prayers. Gentle Jesus—”
“We don’t do prayers. God’s a myth.”
“Oh yes.” She stood with a grunt. “Sorry. Sleep tight.”
When she returned, John was back at the dining table, trying to thread pearls on a length of cotton from a small mending kit retained from some hotel visit. Will and Sandy were still on the floor, looking under furniture.
“How many should there be?” John asked. “Any idea?”
“Forty?” she suggested. “Fifty? I’ve never counted them.”
“The insurance probably says,” Will told them, standing up. “Now. Who wants a coffee and who wants mint tea? I’m sure this is the lot.”
“Tea, please,” she said and sat on the sofa thinking, Magic pearls. My magic pearls. No more magic.
Sandy was still on the floor, only now he had moved on to the door of the fourth bedroom, the locked one. “There are several more under here,” he said, maneuvering for a better view like a terrier at a rabbit hole. “If I could just see better …” He grabbed a table lamp, causing the room’s calm lighting to sway wildly askew, and pointed it under the door.
“Fifty-three,” John said. “That does sound like a curious number. Were there sixty, perhaps? Or seventy, even? How many times did they go round your neck?”
“Well if you can’t remember!” she snapped.
“Twice,” Will called out from the kitchen. “They went round twice but they didn’t hang lower than her second button and there wasn’t a clasp.”
Sandy tugged a sheet of paper from the children’s coloring pad. He slid it slowly under the door. “I think I can catch them,” he said. “Shit!” He jumped up. “Isn’t there a key for this?” He rattled the door.
“No,” John said.
“What’s in there anyway?”
“Bluebeard’s wives,” Frances murmured.
“All the landlord’s stuff presumably. Private things.”
Sandy rattled the door again and bumped the lock. “It would give easily,” he said. “It’s not bolted.”
“Do you think we should?” John asked. “How could we lock it again?”
“We shouldn’t,” Will said, rather vehemently, coming back. “We can get the landlord to open it for us.”
“But we don’t know who they are,” Frances said. “Didn’t it come through an agency, Sandy?”
“No. Yes.”
Will came to stand protectively beside the locked door. “That’s right. But we can ring the agents in the morning and get it fixed. Much the simplest way.”
“I haven’t been without them longer than a night since I had them restrung in 1970,” Frances said, remembering. “They get so personal. Maybe because they absorb your skin oils. Apparently they never look their best until they’ve been polished with weaning. I mean—”
“Tribal, really,” John said, not waiting for her correction. “Like decking your weddable daughters out in animal tusks to increase their value on the marriage market. Shame you’ve no granddaughter to leave them to. But the way society’s changing, it’ll probably be perfectly acceptable for Oscar to wear them by the time he’s twenty-one.”
“Why Oscar?” Will asked. “Why not Hugo?”
“He gets my gold cufflinks and signet ring, of course.”
“Far too much bother,” Sandy muttered, apparently uncomfortable with such chat, and he thudded harder on the door. With a slight complaint of splintering wood it flew open and the fourth bedroom was laid bare like a darkened stage set. Everyone fell silent and looked in.
The remaining pearls were on the floorboards where they had rolled up against the edge of a rug. Will crouched and quickly gathered them up. He made to shut the door again but Sandy stopped him. “Hang on,” he said. “We might as well have a look while it’s open.” He strode in and tugged back the shutters, letting in the garish light of the setting sun.
“Don’t,” Will said. “Someone might see.”
“Not at this hour,” Sandy said. “And they’re hardly likely to be passing anyway.”
“I like that.” Frances admired a pale stone sculpture. It appeared to be of a face pressing through a veil. “And those. Look!” There were other sculptures, huddling together on a table in the shadows. There were books, stacked two deep on the shelves, and a colorful, Hockneyish painting of two young men on a sofa, one dark, one fair, the dark one holding a chisel and hammer, the fair one a violin. There were framed photographs propped here and there on the shelves. Two of them showed the same dark-haired young man. In one he was still a teenager, posed and composed. In the other he was older, laughing, at a wedding apparently, with another slightly older man who looked familiar. “I know him,” she said, pointing at the familiar one.
“How could you possibly?” John said. “Don’t touch anything, for God’s sake.”
While Sandy looked at the book titles and Will looked at the photographs, she sat on the bed and chuckled. “Sandy could sleep in here,” she said. “Now that we’ve got the door open. They’d never know.”
“Oh no. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sandy said quickly.
“Why not?” she asked. “You’re the one that broke in.”
“It’s private,” he said. “This is obviously a very private room. All his life is tucked away in here. It wouldn’t feel right.”
“My God!” Will exclaimed so suddenly that she was startled. “This was my room!”
“What?” Sandy asked.
“It was, wasn’t it?” He turned to Frances, turned on her rather. “This is the house we came to before and this was my room. I didn’t get it in the other room because the windows are the wrong way round and it confused me. But here, with the one window out to sea and one looking up at the cliff path … I remember sleeping in here.” Uncertainty clouded his expression. “I’m sure I do.”
“It could have been any number of houses,” John said quietly. “The whole bay was practically built in this period and in this style.”
“No, but on the beach like this!” Will laughed. “My God. This was it!”
Frances stood and left the room. “You can’t possibly remember,” she said. “You were much too little. Sandy’s right. It’s private. We should shut it up again. And where’s my tea?”
She felt better once the shutters were drawn again and the door closed, but Will’s sudden enthusiasm had started a process in her memory she could not interrupt. This had been the house. She knew he was right. The changed name, the tarmac on the drive, the golf course, the new colors and garden, the French windows where there used to be a door, the shutters where curtains had hung, together had composed smokescreen enough for her to ignore what she knew. But Will’s insistence and awful enthusiasm were a merciless current clearing the air. The events were still not there, not entirely, but every room in the building, and the view from every window, now glittered with an unwelcome familiarity and she was living in a near-constant state of déjà vu that was almost nauseating in its refusal to resolve into clear understanding and unbroken recollection.
John sensed her discomfort as they were going to bed. He thought it was about the pearls, of course, and she played up to that to reassure him, fretting about the cost of having them restrung and her stupidity in allowing the boy to break th
em. He held her in the crook of his arm, like a child, and ran his fingers in slow repeated strokes through her hair, which he knew always soothed her. He fell asleep first. He had walked miles that morning, apparently, and been on the edge of a nap all afternoon. Before he slept, however, he mumbled, “It’s not the house. He’s quite wrong.”
She could not sleep, and his body gave off the heat it had absorbed all day and became uncomfortable to lie against. She extricated herself as gently as stiffness would allow and went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. She knew the way well enough now to get there without lights and once there the fridge gave illumination enough. She could see light coming from under the fourth bedroom’s door. She poured her milk, shut the fridge and stood there sipping, feeling the cool air about her hot legs. In a while Will emerged. She opened the fridge again to let him see she was there and he came across.
“I’d left something in there,” he said guiltily. He had shorts on and nothing else. “Can’t you sleep either?”
“No,” she said. “Have milk. It helps.”
He pulled a funny face. “I’m going out for some air,” he said. “Maybe Sandy will have stopped snoring when I get back. Night.”
“Night.”
He kissed her cheek sweetly enough but there was a tension between them that smelled sourly of deceit. She waited until his bare feet had padded the length of the veranda. She heard the click of the latch as he passed through the gate to the beach then she went forward to watch through the French windows, keeping back so the moonlight would not catch on her nightdress to betray her.
There he was, quite clearly, walking along the top of the beach, oddly purposeful for a man wearing nothing but shorts. Then she saw to her astonishment that he was making toward the encampment and the home of the sad young man. There were no lights on there. It was far too late. The dog barked once, startled awake perhaps, and he froze like a burglar. It barked again and he turned and was walking, running almost, back to the beach. He did not see a light come on in the trailer.
Frances hurried back to her room. John was still sound asleep. She sat in the armchair, watching him. Sometimes now sleep came more easily when she was not lying flat on her back. She heard Will come in, heard him pad across to the bathroom and then back to his bed. She heard, quite distinctly, a burst of Sandy’s snoring as their bedroom door opened and closed. She sat on, and felt haunted by truths whose significance danced beyond her grasp.
BEACHCOMBER
John was not good at running the house on his own. Not that it took much running, and a cleaner came twice a week. The plumbing and heating system was shared with the prison, so was maintained by prison work parties, and he ate all his meals with the men, supper included, if there was no family at home to dine with him. Frances teased him that he had always been looked after by institutions and could not fend for himself. This was not strictly true. Had he remained a bachelor, he would have spent the money he saved thereby on laundry bills and membership of a club.
The things he was hopeless at were the small touches that made this barracks of a house feel intimate. Frances effected them without thinking, much as she ate or breathed, drawing curtains, turning on table lamps, bringing in flowers from the garden, playing soft music. He had watched her often enough, these were all things he could do, but it took a certain confidence to do them on one’s own. Besides, it would have felt self-indulgent and he had far more important business on his mind. As a result, he would suddenly become aware that he was sitting at night with the windows still naked, in a room rendered flat and harsh by a single overhead light source. Or rather he would notice the phenomena and be dimly aware of the cause but preferred to view the physical discomfort as a symptom of Frances’s absence rather than as a sign of any dereliction on his part.
When she said how smelly and cold the telephone box was, he could truthfully say, “It’s pretty wretched here, too,” and felt closer to her. In much the same way, when she asked how things were at his end, he slightly exaggerated their badness. He did not mention that it had been gloriously sunny or that one of the officers’ wives had brought him round a remarkably good Lancashire hotpot which he had heated up with some beans from the garden that he had gathered himself. Instead, he spoke of how the search for Farmer was now concentrated on the seaports and airports and was drawing humiliating blanks. He spoke of the restlessness of the prisoners, made worse by the heat and their being confined as punishment for the disturbance on the night Farmer broke out.
“Well come back,” she said. “You’re still on holiday. What more can you do there?”
“I have to be here until they catch him,” he sighed, trying to be patient. “Or at least draw some concrete leads as to his whereabouts.”
“He’s hardly dangerous.”
“He robbed a post office, darling, and raped the postmistress.”
“She was probably some puritanical busybody.”
“Frances!”
“I was joking. But it doesn’t mean he’ll do it again.”
“Since when were you a criminologist?”
“The pips …”
“Give me the number.”
“Penfasser 452.”
He started to call her back then froze, finger on the dial. There had been a noise on the stairs.
It was an old house, hatchet-faced mid-Victorian with fanciful castellations, and was full of old timbers so that it creaked like a ship. In the summer however, with no heating on, the noises were rarer and more particular. There was one board on the curving staircase that squawked like a hen when trodden on. It was unmistakable.
He went to his study door. Night had fallen since he came in and the rest of the house was in darkness. To reach the staircase light switch he had to leave the carpet of light spilling out from the study and grope by memory across three yards of pitch black. He thought of Julian and his way of diving on to his mattress from several feet away so as to avoid the grasp of the blue-handed troll who lurked under the bed.
“Hello?” he said foolishly as he went. It was always a mistake to talk aloud in an empty house; the silence that followed invariably had the effect of making the emptiness close in around one. He flicked all the switches on the panel for good measure, causing the familiar hall and stairs to spring back into place. There was nobody, of course. Perhaps it was the heat after all, but the heat of the day rather than the heat of the water pipes. As if to prove this, a staircase floorboard squawked again, with no one on it. He turned back to the study, thinking again of Julian and of how he relished the sinister little poem about reluctantly climbing the stair to meet a man who wasn’t there. He hastily rang Frances back.
He fibbed to her, explaining the delay as being caused by a routine call on the internal telephone. It would not do for her to think he suffered night fears as much as their child. “Tell me about you,” he pleaded. “Take my mind off all this.”
But she was on holiday so had nothing much to tell; an old church, more surfing, fish and chips again. “And how about our visitors? Have you warmed to them?”
“They’re fine,” she said, then talked for five minutes about Skip, how funny she was once you dug through her defenses, not bright but funny and original, and how she was teasing Julian a little, which was probably good for him, and how good it was for both of them not to be only children for a change.
“And Bill?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said. “He’s all right. He’s working on his novel so we haven’t talked much.”
The front door closed. He had not heard it open.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Bartlett, probably. Coming in to check on me.”
“Why didn’t he ring the bell?”
“Oh. They’re all jumpy as hell after all this excitement,” John said, relieved now that he was telling her. “Me too, for that matter. I’d better go and see what he wanted.”
“I’d better go too,” she said. “It’s rude to stay away like this too long and Jul
ian will worry if he wakes up again and I’m not there. He had another of those wretched dreams tonight.”
He told her they would speak tomorrow or the next day and not to worry about ringing to check up on him. He would be fine.
“Bye, darling,” she said.
No sooner had Frances hung up than he used the internal line to ring the gatehouse where Bartlett should have been on night duty. There was no reply so he let himself out and walked down the drive and around to the gatehouse where he met Bartlett returning from replacing a broken light bulb.
“Something wrong, Bartlett? You might have rung the bell first. That was a private call I was taking.”
“I don’t understand, sir,” Bartlett said, visibly shocked. “I haven’t been near the house. I saw you go out five minutes ago.”
“How could you have?” John snapped. “I’ve been in the study on the phone to my wife.”
“Well obviously I only thought I did. A cab arrived, which we reckoned a bit odd at this hour but, well, you know … Then you came out of the house, well the person I thought was you. You had your hat and coat on. But you said good evening and not to wait up and you got into the cab and—”
“Quickly man! Which cab? Which firm?”
“A Luxicab, sir. Black one.”
“Did you hear where he asked to go?”
“No, sir. He didn’t say, sir. But he had a big briefcase under his arm.”
“Very well. Thank you, Bartlett. I’ll deal with this now. Not a word to anyone else just yet. Stay where you are for now but the police will want a statement from you later.”
Bartlett paused in the gatehouse doorway, dull face bright with expectation. “Was it Farmer, sir?”
“Of course not, Bartlett. If he’s got any sense he’ll be on a banana boat by now.”
“Yes sir. Night sir.”
John alerted Scotland Yard, because of the remote possibility that Bartlett was right and it had been Farmer. Then he discovered how much the intruder had taken and had to call in the local police, as the victim of what looked like a routine burglary. Not only had the intruder helped himself to an overcoat and hat but to John’s second-best tweed suit, shirts, socks, underwear and razor. He had also snatched John’s wallet, which had still contained a wad of cash taken out for holiday expenses which he had meant to leave for Frances and had forgotten, some silver, a painting and, to stuff in what he could not wear, a briefcase consigned to Frances’s jumble sale heap on account of a broken handle. The silver was nothing special. Neither was the painting hugely valuable—the old gilt frame was worth more than the picture—but it was a cherished one. A study of a sow and piglets, school of Morland, in need of a good clean. His father had given it to him to take to university. It had gone on to travel with him in the war and therefore been one of his few remaining links with his dead family to have escaped the incendiary bomb that destroyed the other heirlooms.