‘Secrets,’ she said. ‘Girls just love secrets. To hear them and to tell them. Old men have got lots of secrets. Things we wouldn’t even dream of. You don’t know anything about girls, do you?’
‘Don’t want to,’ he said haughtily. ‘Especially if they support Manchester United.’
She said, puzzled, ‘I don’t support any football team.’
‘That’s even worse.’
A week after their first meeting, Chloe again found Mr Grantham in the garden, contemplating nature. This time it took quite a while for her to get him to open up, but once he did Mr Grantham was even less reluctant than before to share his thoughts with her. She asked him at one point if he had gone to university, as she was thinking of doing that one day.
‘University? No, no, never went there.’ He almost chuckled. ‘We didn’t do things like that in them days. I went to a village school. Left at fourteen. Never took exams or anything like that. Went to work in a grocer’s, behind the counter. Just before I was twenty, the war came along, and I joined up.’ His eyes narrowed at this point. ‘I was engaged to a young woman called Susan then. She gave me a silver pocket-watch before I left for overseas, with her photo in the lid which covered the face. It was musical. Played Frère Jacques when you opened it.’
‘Oh, were you very much in love?’ Chloe recalled that his wife’s name had been Florrie. ‘You didn’t marry in the end?’
His mouth formed a thin bitter line.
‘No, no, we didn’t marry. I came home after the war, from POW camp in Germany, and she’d run off. Married a much older man than me. They’d moved away, so I never saw her again.’
‘Oh, how sad.’
Mr Grantham rallied. ‘Probably for the best.’ But he didn’t sound as if he meant it. ‘I met Florrie a little later. She was a good wife. We loved each other.’
‘What about the watch? Have you still got it?’
‘I think it’s up in the attic somewhere. I chucked it there when I heard Susan was married to another man. This was my parents’ house, you see. I’ve lived here almost all my life, except for India and Germany.’
‘Don’t you want the watch?’
He humphed. ‘I’m too old to go climbing around in dusty attics. Much too old now. Pity though.’ His eyes became distant. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that watch again. It would’ve hurt too much, earlier, but now – well, feelings get a bit dusty too, with time. I’ve not had a bad life, but I’ve been thinking more and more about how I cursed Susan for running away with that fellow Perkins. It sort of ruled my life for a few years and I got very bitter. Eventually I met Florrie and things came all right again, but it was a bit dark for a while. A bit dark. I’d like to make my peace with Susan’s memory now. Getting the watch back would help. I feel bad about chucking it aside like that.’ He gave Chloe a wry smile and nodded towards the heavens. ‘You never know who you’re going to meet up there, do you?’
‘I’ll ask the boys. They won’t mind having a look up there for you. Me too. I wouldn’t mind.’
‘You’re very kind.’
‘Rooting around in an old attic might be fun,’ said Chloe. ‘You never know what you’ll find.’
‘That’s very true. Treasure and trash, that’s what you’ll find in attics.’ He turned and stared into her eyes. ‘It would be nice to find treasure, wouldn’t it?’
Once Chloe had gone, Mr Grantham had a sudden flash of guilt. He liked Chloe. She was a nice girl. Since they had begun their infrequent conversations sprigs of apple blossom had begun to spring from the flinty beds of his thoughts. Should he warn her? He wanted to. But he just didn’t know.
What if harm should come to them? It hadn’t to him, but maybe he’d been lucky. Then again, you couldn’t live your life in perfect safety. That would be very dull and boring. You had to have some danger and excitement. That’s why boys bought motorbikes and girls backpacked around the world.
No, he wouldn’t warn them. Let them find out for themselves. They could always turn back, if they were too afraid to go on. It was that kind of place. It might make his old heart race and bang against his ribs to think about it, but theirs were stronger, stouter organs.
Later, while Dipa was preparing dinner in the kitchen, Chloe told Alex and Jordy about the ‘secrets’ she’d learned from Mr Grantham. Predictably, Jordy was a little scornful and said they weren’t exactly headline revelations. Equally as predictable was Alex, who was more interested in the pocket-watch than in any ancient love story.
Yes, he said, he wouldn’t mind helping Chloe look for the watch. ‘Those old watches with real brass works,’ he said reverently, ‘are ten times more interesting than modern watches. Digital watches are the worst, but the ones which try to look like old watches are just as bad. All they’ve got inside ’em is a chip. Just that. A rotten old computer chip. But just think of all the engineering that went into making an old watch! All those cogs and wheels, the hair spring, levers and – and,’ he said almost darkly, ‘there’s a thing called an escapement. If you didn’t have that, the whole works would go out of balance and tell the wrong time.’
Jordy stared at his normally quiet step-brother and said wonderingly, ‘Once you wind him up he just goes on and on, doesn’t he?’
‘Are you being unkind?’ asked Dipa, entering the room with a steaming dish of potatoes. ‘What’s all that about? Nelson, stop threading through my ankles or I’ll drop this dish.’
Nelson continued weaving awkwardly between her legs and then toppled over when he caught the edge of the carpet. He was a cat who refused to acknowledge that he had only three legs. Giving the carpet an aggrieved look, he jumped up into Dipa’s chair.
‘No, I’m not being unkind – at least I didn’t mean to be,’ said Jordy. ‘We were just talking about …’ he caught Chloe’s warning look just in time ‘about old-fashioned pocket-watches. Alex seems to think they’re cool. He thinks wrist-watches are naff.’
Dipa placed the dish on a mat on the table and stepped back to look at her youngest child.
‘Well, that’s because he’d look so smart in a waistcoat, wouldn’t you, Alex? With a shiny silver watch-chain dangling from the pocket.’
‘Nobody in this house understands me,’ Alex sighed. ‘It’s the works of a watch I like, not the watch itself. Wrist-watches are OK. But I know Jordy likes his because it looks snazzy on him and because it tells him the time to a hundredth of a second, even at ten fathoms under water. He likes it because of how it looks and what it does and what it’s capable of doing at the bottom of the ocean, though what use that is to him I’ll never know. I like watches because of how they’re made and what’s inside the case.’
Chloe said, ‘And I couldn’t care less about any of it. Can we eat now?’
Dipa returned to the kitchen to get the rest of the meal and Alex said, ‘Shall we all look for it? The watch, I mean?’
‘I’m going to,’ said Chloe.
‘Oh, all right,’ Jordy agreed, not wanting to be left out. ‘I’ll come too, but I warn you,’ he twisted his face into a mask, ‘it’s horrible up there!’
CHAPTER 2
Crossing the Threshold
The three of them didn’t discuss why they didn’t let Ben and Dipa know they wanted to search the attic. It wasn’t that each of them didn’t think about it. Chloe certainly did. Jordy did too. (And who knew what was in Alex’s head?) But for some reason, unknown even to themselves, none of them mentioned it. Not that it was anything their parents would have objected to. They simply kept it secret. They deliberately waited for a Saturday morning when Dipa was working and Ben was going out to do the shopping. Chloe asked Jordy to go with her. Alex, however, was engrossed in making another kite and said he wouldn’t join them after all.
‘What’s that?’ Ben had asked, coming into the kitchen and catching the end of the conversation. ‘You lot going to the cinema?’
‘We might do later,’ Jordy had said. ‘Is it all right?’
‘What about
lunch?’ Ben had asked. ‘Are you going to eat thin air?’
‘We’ll grab a bite in town,’ Jordy had said, and knowing Ben was disapproving of hamburgers added, ‘from the Italian sandwich bar.’
Once Ben had gone Chloe and Jordy found themselves at the trapdoor of the attic, climbing through, armed with torches. Once more the dust and dead air assailed Jordy’s nostrils, but this time he wasn’t so worried by it. He had a means of light with him and he had Chloe. Still, once he was standing on boards inside, shining the torch into the recesses of the attic, a strange feeling came over him. It was as if they were trespassing on the sacred burial ground of another culture. There was the sense, not of being watched, but of being felt by something or someone. The first step he took he walked into a cobweb and covered his face with sticky threads.
‘Urrgh!’ he grunted.
‘What’s wrong?’ Chloe was whispering for some reason. ‘Step in a cow pat?’
‘Very funny. There are spiders up here.’
Chloe said, ‘Don’t try to scare me. I’m not worried about spiders.’
‘I am,’ said a deep voice behind her, sending a shock wave through her. ‘I don’t like ’em.’
It was Alex, who had changed his mind after he’d accidentally snapped the spine of his home-made kite.
‘Don’t do that!’ she hissed at him. ‘You made me jump.’
‘Nearly gave me a heart attack,’ said Jordy, his voice coming out of the darkness.
Alex shone his torch around the rafters. The beam found some hanging flimsy cobwebs, grey as old bread. ‘They’re dead,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t mind dead ones.’
The three of them split up, each searching separate corners of the attic, ducking and weaving under rafters and stepping over beams. Jordy’s area contained the water tank and when he shone his torch in there he was disgusted by the dead insects floating on the surface. ‘We drink this stuff,’ he called to the others. ‘It’s filthy.’
‘No we don’t,’ corrected Alex, ‘unless you drink your own bathwater. That tank feeds the boiler.’
‘All right, I wash in it. It’s still filthy.’
They rooted around in the odds and ends that were up there, kicked aside old cardboard boxes, gingerly lifted clumps of dirty clothes with their torches. They were looking for that glint of old silver which would perhaps tell them they had found the treasure they were looking for. Now that they were up there, Jordy actually felt they were on a wild-goose chase. The watch could be anywhere, if it was there at all. Who could trust an old man’s memory? Mr Grantham might have thought he’d thrown it up there, all those decades ago, but maybe he threw it somewhere else? Or maybe the watch didn’t exist at all?
A beam of light came near him, as he turned over a cardboard box full of clothes with his toe. A woman’s mouldy hat lay flattened beneath it, the ribbon around the crown a sort of pale yellow colour.
‘Where’s Alex?’ asked Chloe, the person behind the light. ‘I can’t find him.’
Jordy shone his torch around the attic, finding different shapes, but none of them belonging to Alex.
‘Alex?’ called Jordy. ‘Alex?’
No answer. Suddenly his torch caught some bright shining eyes that looked up at him balefully. Jordy jumped back, alarmed. Then a familiar sound came from the creature who owned the eyes.
‘Nelson! What are you doing up here? How did you get up those steps?’ He stroked the cat’s back then said, ‘Did Alex go down again, d’you think? Maybe he got bored?’
Chloe replied, ‘No, he’d have said something. One minute he was just here, to my left, and the next moment he’d vanished.’
‘Which way was he going?’
Jordy was suddenly afraid that his step-brother might have hit his head on a beam and was lying unconscious somewhere. Vivid tales of people with concussion had been his bedtime stories from his paramedic father. You needed to get someone with concussion to hospital as soon as possible. He didn’t want to alarm Chloe though, so he said, ‘Could be at the back there, in that patch of darkness. You go back down to the flat, I’ll have a look.’
‘No,’ she replied sharply. ‘I want to look too.’
Like seasoned aircraft pilots they did a square search of the attic to the edge of the floor boards. The unboarded part went out into the darkness. Jordy decided to go further, but had to tread on beams. One wrong step and his foot could go through the ceiling into the flat below. Chloe followed him. They had to concentrate on hopping from one rough beam to the next. Strangely enough, after a long spell of doing this athletic dance between beams, still having to crouch because of the rafters, they came to some more boarding.
Jordy stepped on to it with relief. His legs were beginning to ache.
‘Our attic must continue into next door’s attic,’ he called back to Chloe. ‘There can’t be any wall between the two houses up here.’ His torch light streaked into the darkness ahead.
Chloe came up alongside him. ‘Perhaps that’s how they built houses in those days.’
‘What days?’
‘When it was built – Victorian times.’
She shone her torch beam alongside Jordy’s, then called out, ‘Alex? Are you in there?’
A faint reply came to them, seemingly from a distant place, like a whisper on the still air.
‘Was that him?’ asked Jordy.
‘I don’t know. Let’s go on a bit.’
‘Could have been a bird or a bat or something.’
Chloe was scornful. ‘A bat? Bats don’t yell.’
‘Well, sounds might get distorted up here. There are all sorts of things like roofing insulation, tanks and water pipes and things. You hear all kinds of noises in the plumbing, don’t you? Anyway, aren’t we trespassing? I mean, we must have other people’s homes under our feet now. What if someone comes up and catches us? Won’t we get into a row?’
Chloe considered this. They were one house in a terraced row of houses. Without a doubt they had crossed over from their own home into someone else’s. Perhaps the whole row had just one attic between them, without any walls between. Did that make sense? She thought it did.
‘We need to find Alex,’ said Chloe logically. ‘He might be hurt.’
They moved on, more easily now there were boards under their feet. The deeper they went into the attic, the more the darkness seemed to close around them. Then suddenly they came upon an area where there was a skylight, but high above. When they took stock and stared at their surroundings, they found the edges of the attic had moved back and back, leaving a huge space between. Above them the roof itself went up to dizzying heights. In front and behind, there was no beginning and no end. They were still in that triangular shape of the inside of a roof, but the apex was somewhere high above their heads, while the lower angles on either side had moved beyond the range of their vision.
‘Wha—where are we? It’s grown a bit,’ said Jordy. ‘The attic. It’s become – I don’t know – maybe we’re in a bigger house, at the end of the row? Is there a big house there? I can’t remember.’ He peered into the dimness. ‘I can’t see the corners. And where’s the roof?’
Chloe sneezed violently, making him jump.
‘Sorry,’ she said croakily. ‘Dust up my nose.’
She looked above at a forest of stout rafters, criss-crossing this way and that. A bewildering maze of angled roof timbers, with gloom filling the spaces between. Every so often there was a main support for the roof, a thick roughly hewn wooden pillar that shouldered the architecture above it.
A very big building, certainly. A manor house, perhaps? Or a vicarage? Or maybe even a church? She could see great beams curving overhead, like the flying buttresses of a cathedral. No, there was a skylight there, high above the beams, like a square sun above the network of lumber, its sharp shaft of light penetrating right down to the floor beneath. You wouldn’t have a skylight in a cathedral roof. In the sunbeam it threw down danced those bright specks which her mother used to call ‘angel
dust’.
Chloe said in awed tones, ‘Where are we?’
‘It’s massive, isn’t it?’ He looked back into the darkness from which they had come. ‘We could get lost up here. You remember that story of the kid who climbed into the trunk during a game of hide-and-seek, and the lid locked shut behind him? They found him a hundred years later, just the dried-out bones covered in dusty rags …’
‘Don’t!’ warned Chloe, knowing Jordy was trying to scare her. ‘Stop it now.’
Jordy said gleefully, ‘Nobody ever found him.’
Chloe ignored him. ‘Where’s Alex?’ she said, in a tone which registered her frustration with her brother. ‘He’s always sliding off somewhere.’
‘I’m here,’ said a voice behind them, making both her and Jordy jump again.
‘Why did you run off?’ cried Chloe, rounding on her younger brother. ‘How did you get there?’
Alex looked annoyed and surprised. ‘It was you two who went off. I just followed your torch lights. You were a long way ahead of me. I had to run to keep up with you in places.’
Jordy said wearily, ‘Oh, come on, Alex.’
‘No, I’m telling the truth,’ cut in Alex, sounding angry. ‘It seemed like you were trying to get away from me.’
Chloe flushed. ‘That’s not true and you know it.’
Alex was sulky. ‘Well, that’s how it seemed to me.’
Jordy said, ‘Let’s all calm down. We’ve found each other now. No, we weren’t trying to get away from you, Alex. We were looking for you. Chloe was worried about you. She thought you might have banged your head on a rafter or something. I don’t understand how you got behind us, because we searched the attic – our attic, that is – before we set out. Now we’re somewhere in this much bigger attic …’ He looked up, to see two birds – or birdlike creatures – glide from one rafter to another.
‘It is big, isn’t it?’ Alex murmured, looking up and around him. ‘It’s giant size. Maybe we’ve shrunk? That’s what’s happened.’
Chloe said, ‘Don’t be silly.’
Attica Page 2