by Aileen Izett
“I’ve got to go. Call you later.”
“Please,” he said. “I’ve no idea what’s going on — but please, take care.”
I ran back down the stairs, through the kitchen and through the archway. Greg was busy opening the last of the shutters — the room was the width of the château with windows on both sides.
The jumble of shapes under dust cloths looked like furniture. I hadn’t given any thought to what the room contained, if anything. I had just wanted it unlocked.
“She’s not a Kumono.”
“How do you know?” Greg wrested with the heavy bar across a pair of shutters.
I told him. He staggered backwards as the bar suddenly gave.
I looked around the room. Against the furthermost wall was a pointed triangular shape, draped in a dustsheet, the height of a small man or woman. I yanked off the cover. It hid an ironing board and an iron, the iron on the floor.
“They sure liked their ironing boards,” Greg said with a chuckle.
We pulled the dustsheets off heavy old armoires, chests of drawers, lots of bedsteads, bedside tables, chairs — all stacked around an enormous bit of furniture which could be either a wardrobe or a cupboard. We coughed and we sneezed. Our eyes watered horribly.
I took a rest for a couple of minutes and unlatched a window. The rush of fresh air was wonderful against my face. The light outside was tinged a sultry yellow and the topmost branches of the trees — which was the only bit of tree you could see from that low down in the château — were swaying.
Meanwhile Greg unhooked the rockers of a bamboo rocking chair from a chest of drawers and flopped into it, choking on another cloud of dust.
“Idiot,” I laughed.
“I’ll have to get some men in. To get all this upstairs.”
I crossed back over to the furniture and pulled open the top drawer of a chest of drawers. “Do you think all the keys that are missing for upstairs might be here, in a drawer?”
“Why? Who do you want to lock up? Eveline?” He tried to laugh which turned into a cough.
I was glad that Greg was sitting down. He wasn’t getting any younger. Nor was I for that matter, but he looked like a radish with his red face and shock of dusty hair. Greg gestured at the mountain of furniture.
“Who’d want to get rid of all this?”
“They didn’t. They stored it. They don’t seem to have ever got rid of anything.”
“When you think of the crap upstairs…” He shook his head.
Suddenly I understood why the bedrooms were left so bare. “They were going to renovate the place.”
Greg creaked merrily on the rocker, backwards and forwards, humming away to himself, something in his tune made me stop and listen. I dredged it up out of my memory: ‘Hickory, dickory, dock.’
“What do you think you’ll do with this room?” Greg asked.
The nursery rhyme had given me a brilliant idea. I should have thought of it earlier. I squinted, through the gloom.
“Playroom for Tom’s kids? If you painted these walls a primrose yellow and got rid of those lights…”
The lights were iron sconces with fake candles.
Greg heaved himself to his feet and, with a heavy tread, went to the switch beside the door. Half the room was immediately illuminated with a weak yellow light.
“Better?”
*
Like eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation, nothing good can come from opening the effects of others. I remember Philip’s mother, after we had been married ten years or so, asking me to fetch her cardigan from their bedroom. The four of us were in the sitting room, having the obligatory pre-dinner drinks. Philip’s mother, who had just had a hip replacement, had her leg stretched out across the chintz-covered sofa. I didn’t listen to her precise instructions as to which drawer exactly to open and pulled them all open in succession and found packed away in the bottom drawer, baby clothes — little matinée jackets, bootees, leggings — beautifully knitted little reproaches from a mother of an only child to the barren daughter-in-law.
“What took you so long?” Philip asked when I eventually made it downstairs again. I didn’t tell him. And I’d forgotten his mother’s cardigan. We started on a second round of IVF treatment a couple of days later. I wouldn’t look Philip’s mother in the eyes, not once, for the rest of that weekend. She knew. She never liked me. Not even Tom’s successes in business counted for much in mitigation.
*
We were like children, Greg and I, playing at finding treasure.
Greg played the game with gusto.
“You never know,” he winks at me, wrenching back a drawer. “Friend of mine found a diamond brooch once in the back of a desk he’d picked up in a job lot.”
“So did your friend sell it?”
“For a fortune.” There was more than a hint of disapproval in Greg’s tone.
I leant across the chest of drawers. I could see the top of his head and his little bald spot because he was squatting, investigating the bottommost drawer. I flicked his hair.
“You’re not telling me…” I teased.
Greg stood up. He grinned.
“I am actually. I would have done my best to find the owner. Otherwise it’s stealing, plain and simple. Why? What would you have done?”
“Kept it,” I said with a laugh. “Like I’ll keep anything we find here — although — ” Greg knew I was just fooling around, “I might, just might, split it with you.”
He had a lovely smile, Greg.
We arrived at the enormous wardrobe. Greg and I had shunted and sorted what furniture we could move — all the bedside tables in one place, chairs in another, tables in one corner, etc. It was all of very good quality, much better than a lot of the stuff upstairs.
We contemplated the wardrobe in silence. I caught my breath after all the heaving. The air smelt like burnt biscuit from crisped-up dust on the illuminated light bulbs. My hair was plastered against my scalp; like Greg’s, it was lank with sweat. The heat in a room which has been shut up, can bake you.
“How we will ever get this upstairs…” Greg shook his head.
It was a beautiful piece of walnut, with a curlicued top and curlicued legs. It had two doors and a deep drawer beneath.
“Never mind that now,” I said. “Let’s see what’s inside — if anything.”
So far we had found nothing of any interest — only dead insects and discarded clouds of hair, the sort which comes off a comb. We had both forgotten that we set out looking for keys for the doors upstairs. We were on the hunt for a pot of gold.
Greg twisted a gilt handle. Nothing. He tried the two together.
“Locked?”
“It’s the doors, they’re stuck. Let’s leave it.”
“Let’s just see what’s inside. Go on Greg.”
He struck a pose and flexed his biceps, making the mermaid tattoo flick her tail.
“Superman himself to the rescue. What do you think’s in here?”
“I don’t know — a body?” I was giggling like a schoolgirl.
He staggered with the effort of yanking back the doors. I just managed to avoid being hit on the nose.
“Hells bells,” Greg was totally bemused. “Why would you…”
I rushed round to take a look.
Chapter 21
“Clothes. Just clothes.” I laughed with relief.
“Why down here and not up there?” Greg jerked his head towards the ceiling.
We were looking at a cupboard with shelves: eight shelves laden with clothing — neatly arranged into piles for underwear, t-shirts, shirts, and trousers.
How I wish we had just left the cupboard, as he’d suggested. All I can think is that the intuition — my intuition — which I’d deliberately kept dampened down because I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to think — had finally sparked into life.
We started with the bottom shelf, intending to work our way upwards. At first we just tossed the clothes onto th
e floor but by the second shelf — maybe because they had been so beautifully pressed — we shook out the clothes and laid them carefully on the heap we had made on the floor.
They didn’t have the sickly sweet scent of the clothes that I had cleared from the cupboards upstairs. They smelt of mothballs.
The clothes came in all shapes and sizes. Their storage puzzled me. It seemed so frugal and so different to the excesses we had found upstairs. Still though, old underwear was as repulsive as old underwear always is.
Greg tried on a particularly florid shirt of red roses on a blue striped background. He pranced about, the sleeves flapping over his wrists, making me laugh.
“For a much taller man than you, you nit.”
He stopped short, as if struck by a thunderbolt. “It’s all men’s have you noticed?”
Of course I’d noticed. I’d noticed by the third pair of y-fronts. In fact I would have been very surprised if any of the clothing had been female.
So we went on. Greg stood on a chair and started to clear the second shelf from the top. He handed me one folded item at a time. We were caught up in a cycle of sound and silence: the rasp of Greg’s rough fingers on the cloth; the flap it made as I shook it out; the soft flop as it hit the heap. It was soothing, mindless activity.
“Hallo Princess,” Greg said softly.
Eveline was standing in the doorway, quite still.
“Look what we’ve found,” I said inanely. She was holding herself with a rigidity that I found disturbing. The expression on her face was unreadable.
I braced myself as she hurtled towards me, arms outstretched. For a moment I thought that she wanted to give me a hug.
She came to a halt in front of the pile of clothes. She dropped to her knees and she buried her face in them. She looked as if she was praying and so mad, that I laughed — that horrible involuntary laughter which comes from fright. Greg caught my eyes, rolled his, lifted his index finger to his forehead and started to twist it, pretending that what we were witnessing wasn’t alarming.
The laughter died in my throat. Greg remained rooted, standing on the chair. Eveline started to scrabble through the shirts and trousers with such an urgency, it was as if she thought that someone might be suffocating under the weight of the clothes.
Greg didn’t exist. I didn’t exist.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do for the best. I was totally and utterly panicked, staring at her burrowing through the mound.
“Eveline,” I said, but nothing came out of my mouth. I cleared my throat. I looked at Greg. He looked at me, looking as helpless as I felt.
“Eveline.”
She didn’t hear me.
I took a step towards the kneeling figure with the flailing arms. I was close enough to smell her light, sweet fragrance, so utterly different to the miasma of mothball around us. I put out my hand tentatively. I grasped an arm as it moved upwards. I held it down. She shook me off and launched across the carpet.
Greg jumped off the chair.
She picked up the blue striped shirt that Greg had been fooling around with earlier. She fell forward, clutching it to her breast. A low keening rose out of her crouched form. The sound brought tears to my eyes.
I bent over her. I wanted to hug her, hold her, tell her that everything would be okay — that we could sort out whatever it was, no matter what it was.
She started upwards, crashing her head against my jaw. The impact was so unexpected, I cried out. Tears that I’d been keeping at bay, ran down my face. Greg started forward, hand out to grab her.
“No, Greg. Don’t.”
She laid the shirt on the floor. She arranged the sleeves so that they stretched out, across the carpet. She smoothed out the material, like she was trying to get rid of the creases. The shirt had loose cuffs with buttonholes instead of buttons. Eveline aligned the buttonholes. All she needed was cufflinks.
I realised then — or I had a glimmer of understanding. I couldn’t think further than that, so I acted.
I moved away from Greg. I stepped out across the short distance between me and Eveline.
“That’s enough now,” I said, kneeling in front of her. I folded my arms around her shoulders and bend her head to my chest. It was her sweat and my sweat. My tears dropped on her hair. I felt her breath on my skin and her heart beating against mine. For a moment, her head leant against my breast.
Carefully, she folded the shirt. She stood up, the shirt pressed to her chest. Greg and I watched her walk out the door, head erect, totally poised — leaving in her wake a tumult of clothes.
I started to follow.
“Leave her be.” Greg righted the chair.
“Why? I can’t just let…”
“It’s not you she needs.”
“No. It’s her mother, her parents, her family.”
“We don’t know if she has any family.” Greg was back on the chair and peering into the topmost shelf.
“I thought I saw…” he started, pulling out sweatshirts. “Here we are.”
He drew out a plain white cardboard box, long and low, the sort that shirts come in. The contents slipped and rattled inside.
It was a set of house keys with a car key and a pair of black, heavy-rimmed glasses with prescription lens.
Greg shoved the box back in the wardrobe. “Christ,” he said, “this place.”
The possible connection — the explanation for Eveline’s behaviour — suddenly came to me.
“The young man in Eveline’s photograph. Wasn’t he wearing glasses just like those?”
Greg wiped the sweat from his forehead. He started to laugh. “This is completely bloody bonkers. We’re going mad.”
Chapter 22
Down in the furniture repository, we’d started out looking for the keys to the doors in the rest of the château. We hadn’t found them. I’d discovered something far more important; the key to Eveline. And it was the photograph of the young man. I was certain of it.
While Greg stayed in the kitchen, slumped in a chair and silent, I went up the stairs. There was a sense of desolation in Eveline’s room, but no Eveline. I sat down on her bed.
I cried. The first proper tears I’d shed in France. What had happened for them to be apart?
Eventually I dried my eyes and shut the door to her room. I looked in the salon and library. I opened the front door and stood on the steps and shouted “Eveline!” I tossed the name out, with all my strength. The air was empty of sound except for a woman shouting down in the village and when I listened harder, I heard a few dead leaves scratching across the gravel and a rose stem scraping against a windowpane. As I passed through the dining room I noticed the red light blinking on the answering machine. I ignored it, thinking that it was Philip, earlier.
Greg was standing in front of the range, the kettle in his hand when I got back to the kitchen. He had a confidence about him, which he hadn’t had half-an-hour before.
“You can’t find her?”
I shook my head.
He handed me a lukewarm mug of tea. “She's mad,” he said dismissively.
I told him what I thought; that Eveline was looking for the man whose shirt we found. That the keys and glasses were his. That the passport I discovered was his.
“He was here,” I said firmly. “And she never heard from him again.”
“So?” Greg shrugged his shoulders. “He did a runner. Didn’t want to tell her to her face that it was over.”
“She wouldn’t pursue someone who’d dumped her like that. It’s just not her style.”
“How do you know? I mean, seriously, what do you know?”
I sipped my tea. Greg was right. I knew very little about Eveline and very little about the château — but I could find out about the house. She had offered to help, after all.
Greg tried to dissuade me from going to Valerie’s.
“You’re crazy to go now. Look at the sky.”
A storm was rising. “I'm not waiting a moment
longer.”
“She’s a two-faced busybody.”
“Good. Then she’ll be able to tell me what it was like here with the Kumono sons.”
Greg followed me to the hall. “So you’re off to see Mrs Nosy. Her second name is Parker. Valerie Parker.” His shout of laughter was forced.
“Did anyone ever tell you about your jokes?” I tried to be equally as light-hearted.
He offered to come with me.
“No. Stay and look after Eveline. Please.”
“What if I can’t find her?”
“Please. I’m worried for her.”
“So am I,” he said softly. “Poor little girl.”
Eveline was sitting waiting for me in the car. No, she wasn’t. It was a shadow and a rather portly one at that and when I got a little nearer, I realised that it was the shape of the laurel next to the car. Black clouds were banking up behind the woods.
I got to Valerie’s just in time. There was a streak of lightening and a rumble of thunder as I arrived. Through her glass front door, I could see right through the house and into the garden where Valerie was standing with her back to the house and her head upturned to the sky. She was quite still. She could have been a statue. She was like the rest of the world, holding its breath, waiting for rain. She turned around as soon as I rat-a-tat-tatted.
“I thought it might be you,” she said, as she let me in. “The door’s always open by the way. There was something in your voice this morning…” She had an irritating habit of letting her sentences trail away.
I thought I’d been terribly matter-of-fact.
“There was a sense of…” and she paused and her eyes glanced over me. I felt very uncomfortable. “of unease.” She had a brilliant, welcoming smile. “Come in.”
Valerie was so small and light, she made me feel very ungainly, ducking under the bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling.
“As you can see,” she said. “I live very simply.”
She caught my look of incomprehension.
“I live to nature’s rhythm. Radio, TV, internet — they get in the way.”
She was a Luddite. “I miss the telly,” I told her.
I squeezed myself between table and chair and sat down. Valerie cleared the table of baskets of yet more cut herbs and offered me peppermint, apple, rosehip, lemon balm.