by Aileen Izett
I held her steady while silent, racking grief coursed through her, I would have done anything, anything at all, to comfort her, but I was not her mother. I couldn’t love her like a mother. Like how our mother should have loved Tom and me, instead of leaving us to fend for each other.
Eveline slipped her hand beneath the covers and brought out the photograph. There was just enough room between us for her to smooth it out on the mattress. In faded monochrome, the young man smiled — the deep creases obliterating some of his image.
“It’s all my fault,” Eveline whispered.
She wiped her eyes with another handful of the toilet roll that I had got from the bathroom. “His bullet proves he was here.”
“At the château?”
She nodded. “Six years ago. It was the last time my parents heard from him.”
“So was he — you — related to the Kumonos?”
Her eyes flashed with disdain. “Of course not.”
Nothing, I realised with a heavy heart, was going to be easy.
Eveline looked about the room and I looked too, the beat of my heart pounding in my ears. I saw a heavy wardrobe, and a dressing table with an ornate gilt mirror so mottled with age it reflected nothing except the passage of time. An upright ironing board stood in front of the window which looked out over the woods. The door to the wardrobe was half-open. I could see a blue striped shirt with a red rose detail which had looked like a rag in Eveline’s hands the night before. It hung neatly from a hanger. I looked down at Eveline’s photo. I looked again at the wardrobe.
“You think that is his shirt?”
She nodded. “I cleaned the iron especially. The chain I found — that was his too. And now the bullet.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t know if I could trust you.”
“You had better,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel, “start at the beginning.”
Eveline looked directly at me. Her face was expressionless. When she eventually began to speak, her voice was devoid of emotion.
“I was sixteen and stupid. He was eight years older than me. He had no choice. He had to pretend to like them, but he hated them. We all did — well, I didn’t so much. I didn’t know. My parents protected me.”
She sat absolutely upright, without the prop of the pillow. She took a deep breath and continued.
“He came home one night covered in blood. I saw him. But it wasn’t serious. My parents told me later that it was just a bullet graze to the head. I was sworn to secrecy. The servants were sworn to secrecy. Next day, my parents heard that there had been an attempt on the General’s life. The sons didn’t come for him then, they invited him here, to the château a few weeks later.”
“Why?”
A bead of sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. The silence in the room washed around us.
“Because,” she said with great effort, “they would have lost face. My family were supposed to be part of what was called the inner circle.”
I reached for her hand. She tucked both her hands under the covers.
“How can that be your fault?”
Her voice changed. It became hard and clear.
“I disobeyed my parents. I told my best friend how my brother came back one night covered in blood.”
Her eyes full of misery, she looked as if she expected me to jump off the bed completely repulsed by what she had said. I didn’t understand.
Eveline gave a hollow laugh. “Her father was Minister of the Interior. I forgot. I was too busy being best friends.”
There was a tree in the middle of the room, and in the middle of the tree was a man, cowering. I shut my eyes and when I opened them, he was still there in the tree, except that that time, he was silently shaking the branches. Eveline was watching for my reaction. I didn’t have the courage to take the leap from my world into theirs.
“If he hadn’t gone with them,” she whispered. “My parents, me, we’d all have been dead then.”
“What happened to your parents?”
“When the new régime took over, they were executed as collaborators.”
“How did you escape?”
“They made me marry — a fat old man who lived in Paris. He prefers boys but he liked my hair so I chopped it off… Eventually he lost patience and left me here…”
“You see,” she said, her eyes swimming with tears, “I wanted to find my brother. If there was even a slight chance that he was alive, that he’d escaped, that maybe he’d left a message for me here…”
“I am sorry. So, so sorry.” What else could I have said? And I was, my heart was breaking for her.
“The bullet,” I said, after a while, watching the man in the tree, “it could have fallen out of his pocket. It doesn’t mean necessarily that he is dead.”
“No.” She shook her head.
The man in the tree disappeared as suddenly as he appeared.
“I mean,” I persisted, “this place wasn’t a prison.”
“You are stupid,” Eveline cried, pushing me with such force that I fell onto the floor. She watched me scrabble to my feet. “You can never say no to people like that! He was trapped! Like I’m trapped here with you!”
Her words rung around the room. For a second she looked as horrified as I felt. Then she rearranged her expression so that it was both smooth and distant.
“I want to be alone now,” she spat. “Get out.”
I closed the door on her and stood shaking, my hand on the doorknob.
In the hall, the light from the stained glass window cut across somnolent shadows, stretched out like cats in the afternoon heat. There was an unmoving calmness about the house as if nothing ever changed and everything stayed the same. It was an illusion. Everything had changed. The house was polluted. It had always been polluted.
I unlocked the drawer of the desk in the library. It was where I kept my passport and also, despite Tom having told me to chuck it, the passport I’d found. I hadn’t wanted the responsibility of junking it. Maybe I’d had an inkling even then, but I’d hardly given it a glance. I hadn’t wanted to know.
The passport was underneath building insurance documents which Tom had sent.
The green cover with the embossed lion looked new. The passport had hardly been used.
It belonged to a young man with glasses. It was quite possible that it was Eveline’s brother and also, conversely, not. Eveline’s photograph was so indistinct. The man’s name was Zachary. His surname I couldn’t have begun to pronounce.
I knocked on Eveline’s door, the passport in my hand.
“Leave me alone!” A shout.
I put the passport back. I locked the drawer and hid the key in a little cloisonné pot on the mantelpiece.
Greg came into the kitchen whilst I was rummaging around the back of the cupboard looking for something to make for supper. My emotions were in turmoil.
“How is she?”
I told him about the brother.
For a couple of minutes, Greg didn’t say anything. He focussed on the dresser, looking at the stuff that was on it, as if he had never seen any of it before.
“I wouldn’t show her the passport this evening,” he said eventually. “She has had enough for one day.”
He changed the subject. “I’ve been up in the woods, looking for her diamonds.” He hesitated and then he said in rush: “Thing is, when the lightning struck I pulled her up so hard off the ground, that the bag could have fallen out then. I was that frightened. I feel so guilty now.”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. I was close to tears.
“I feel guilty too. Of course I am sorry about the brother but another part of me is angry — I don’t want or need complications.”
I surprised myself with my honesty.
Greg, thank God, didn’t judge me. He gripped me roughly by the arms. “I understand,” he said. “But you can’t hide from what is happening in the world outside.” He shook his head. “What
that girl has been through…”
“I know,” I said. “Of course I know.”
He made coffee for both of us, hot and strong.
“Has she told you yet where the diamonds are from?” he asked.
“Husband? I don’t know, I’m just guessing.”
“She’s married?” He was incredulous. “That’s a good one. Well, I suppose anything is possible.” He started to laugh. I laughed with him, though tension had made all the muscles in my back hurt.
Greg disappeared through the archway and I opened a can of haricot beans and a jar of sauerkraut. I tossed them in the saucepan together. The gas took five attempts to light.
I persuaded Eveline to come downstairs. She came because she could see that I wasn’t in the mood to take any nonsense. She sat at the table.
“There’s some salami in the fridge, could you get it for me?”
Eveline rose slowly from her seat. She didn’t like even the merest hint of being ordered around. No wonder her husband had abandoned her, I remember thinking viciously. She must have been completely impossible to live with on a daily basis. She gave me the salami. She watched me slice it with the one sharp kitchen knife.
She looked up as I handed her a plate of meat, sauerkraut and heated beans. “I can’t talk anymore,” she whispered. “I’ve done enough talking.”
Greg came back into the kitchen.
“I’ll stay the night again, if you don’t mind,” he said, addressing me but with his eyes on Eveline, sitting at the table, head bent over her plate and eating.
“There’s really no need,” I said.
“Just to be sure,” he said, still watching Eveline.
I was glad that Greg was staying.
Chapter 29
Greg shook me by the shoulder, jolting me awake. I was having a hideous dream where a faceless, naked man was wandering through the corridors of the château, crying out for his clothes and searching for me. Every time I tried to call out to him, darkness rose in my throat.
Greg’s eyes were bleary with sleep in the cold dawn light.
“You alright?” His breath smelt. “Tom’s downstairs. Could’ve woken the bloody dead.”
“Who?” I could taste bile in my mouth.
“Tom. Your brother. That’s what he told me.”
“Tom!” I was overjoyed. It was such a relief to see him. Despite our rows over the phone, it meant that he cared enough to come and see me. That my suspicions were groundless. That together, we could sort everything out.
He looked very small from two floors up, dwarfed by the hall. His face, with a huge smile, tilted upwards as I ran down the stairs.
“Thank God you’re okay Sis. I came as soon as I could.” He pressed me close to him. I could smell coffee and London on him, warm and fuggy.
“You could have told me you were coming.”
“I didn’t know.” There was a twinkle in his eye. “I’d fully intended to go home and then, what the hell I thought, I’ll go and see my sister and the cab driver was game. Seriously, Sis, I’ve been out of my mind with worry with that mad woman running around. Is she still here?”
“You took a taxi?” I was flabbergasted. “All the way? Wasn’t the plane available?” His company had a private jet.
“Never you mind,” he grinned. He stretched out his arms, folded me in again. “I’m here now.”
“Eveline’s not mad.”
“Eveline?” Tom put his hands on my shoulders, searching my face. “That’s a bit strange.”
“I haven’t found out her real name.”
Tom cocked his head and laughed. “Honestly Sis, everything with you comes back to Dad.”
It wasn’t deliberate — her name simply hadn’t come up when we had talked.
If it wasn’t for the smile in his eyes, I’d have been worried. He looked grey: grey and drawn and crumpled after a long night sitting in the back of a taxi in a suit with a very bad case of dandruff, except that it was not dandruff. It was psoriasis.
“She’s very troubled,” I said eventually. “With good reason.”
Tom was looking around, as if he couldn’t quite comprehend his surroundings.
“It’s a long old way, London to the South of France.” Tired as he was and even with a sore, red skin, he was one of those extraordinarily attractive people with a face where nothing quite matched. Even Tom’s eyes were different colours: one green, one brown. I thought he was one of the most handsome men alive.
“I thought you were going to New York.”
He waved a hand airily. “Cancelled.”
“And the cabbie?”
“Hightailing it back to London. His wife gave him an earful when she realised how long he was going to be.”
“Have you brought anything with you?”
Tom gestured at the small valise by the door.
“How long can you stay?”
All his attention was focused on the window behind the stairs. He squeezed my hand. His hand felt flaky and tender. I took care not to squeeze back.
“It’s fantastic.”
“You should have seen the state it was in.”
A single ray of light from the early morning sun spilt through the leaded glass, reaching almost to our feet across the black oak of the stairs and the stone flagged floor. The colours glistened, alive with the light. Tom shook his head.
“Magnificent,” he murmured. “Quite magnificent.”
“I mended it,” I said. “That panel there.”
He squeezed my hand again. My heart burst with pride.
It was difficult to be angry with someone who had rushed all the way from London just to make sure that I was okay.
“It’s a gem, Sis,” he kept shaking his head in disbelief, “an absolute gem.”
I knew what he meant. The proportions were beautiful. The vistas from the windows — of a winding avenue, an ornamental lily pond, a ruin of a chapel beyond and blue hills in the distance — were idyllic. If you knew no better, it was an Englishman’s dream of a château.
Tom was full of wonderment, like a little boy who had to reach out and touch, checking that what he was seeing was, indeed, real. He rubbed his finger along the window frames as I pointed out where they were treated for woodworm. His hands brushed over the carved detail on the architraves as I demonstrated how Greg and I rehung rickety doors. His fingers stroked the freshly painted walls as I extolled the particular brand of paint that we’d used. “You’ve done a wonderful job.” He gave me a quick hug, his unshaven cheek grazing mine.
He didn’t mention the Kumonos. Neither did I. I was enjoying the moment; basking in his appreciation.
Tom strode ahead.
“That’s Eveline’s room,” I warned, when he put his hand on the handle of her door, “she’ll be asleep.”
“Did she find the diamonds she lost?”
“No.”
“And this is the bathroom,” he pressed open the other door across from Eveline’s room.
“How did you guess?
“Easy,” he said blithely, taking a cursory look behind the door. “You sent over plans, remember?”
As Tom marched purposefully through the house, the tremulous morning light got stronger — but still, he retained his childhood habit of switching on every light and just like I did when we were children, I switched them off, always the older, more responsible sibling.
We went up to the second floor.
We looked in on the other bathroom. Tom roared with laughter at the avocado with shell-shaped gilt taps and handles.
“Where is Greg by the way?” He shaded his eyes, pretending to search the corridor.
“Back at the caravan, I expect.”
But I knocked on the door to the gym just in case.
“Wow!” Tom’s gasp of astonishment was just what I’d been expecting. The sleek, black, contoured shapes looked amazing in a wainscoted room. Greg’s mattress, where he’d slept until rudely awoken by Tom, was by the exercise bike.
; Tom walked amongst the equipment. You could pump your shoulders, arms, legs in every which way according to the instructions fixed to the sides of the machines. There were fifteen in total, all in a circle, facing each other.
“How are Samantha and the children?”
He didn’t hear me. He was too preoccupied, fiddling with the chest press equipment.
“They must have been pretty serious on keeping fit.” For the first time, he spoke of the Kumonos.
“The floor can bear the load. Greg checked.”
Tom stepped up onto the treadmill. He used the back of his sleeve to wipe the dust off the console. I had never seen him so out of shape. Tom caught me looking critically at him.
“What?” he asked teasingly.
I bent to flick the switch. The treadmill rumbled into action, forcing Tom to stride along at a lolloping slow pace.
“You’ve had all summer to tell me about the Kumonos.”
Tom fiddled with a control. His legs started to move faster.
“I wasn’t going to tell you over the phone, was I?”
“Not even when I told you about the passport? Surely then was the right time?” I reached across him and turn the control almost to maximum. Tom had to concentrate to keep his feet from slipping off the rubber strip. His belly wobbled like blancmange, behind his pink shirt.
“What passport?” he grabbed hold of the rail. His face was bright red. “I can’t do this, I’m sorry.”
He turned the control anti-clockwise. Slowly his feet returned to a walking pace. “I’m too tired.”
“The one I found at the back of a drawer. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
The machine came to a halt. Tom delved into a trouser pocket and wiped his face with a screwed-up tissue. “Honestly, I’ve had other stuff on my mind. Things have been pretty tough.”
“You should have told me.”
“I thought you wouldn’t want to know about the Kumonos. It would spoil the house for you.”
He stepped off the treadmill, unsteady for a second.
“Haven’t you been happy here?” He sounded so wistful.
“There is something about…”
“The Kumonos are dead, buried and history,” he interrupted me. “This house — thanks to you — lives on.”