House of Shadows

by Pamela Hartshorne

‘Let that be a lesson to you, madam wife,’ Edmund said, easing himself off me at last to flop onto his back beside me, and it ended as it had begun, with laughter.

  Oliver tells the Vavasours that I am making good progress, and arranges to come back in another six weeks. I am grateful to him for not mentioning my ‘reverie’ to them, but I wonder if he would have been so sanguine if I had told him just how much Isabel dominates my thoughts.

  Find my son. Remember.

  I drift through the old rooms that I remember being new, searching for Kit, hoping for a sign that will tell me where he is and what Isabel wants me to do. The visitors talk in hushed voices as if the Hall is a church, oblivious to the way the air hums with the babble of voices long fallen silent. In the great chamber I stand by the bed, my head tipped to one side as I strain to catch an elusive memory above the shrill of danger. I wish I had some way of connecting directly with the past. There is still so much I don’t remember, so much I need to remember. The fabrics in the room are dull with age, their colours leached by centuries of sunlight and scrubbing. On the bed, the coverlet is made of a yellowing ivory silk embroidered with tiny flowers. The hangings are a heavy green and gilt, and the pelmet linking the four bedposts is fringed with gold tassels. They are old, but they are not what they were. The bed is the same, though. I recognize the carvings, and the feather bed still perches atop the mattress. Absently, I test its springiness by pressing on the cover, just as Judith did when she first came to Askerby. It is stiff and unyielding now, instead of the inviting luxuriousness that I remember.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  ‘Excuse me.’ Lost in my thoughts, I don’t at first realize that the sharp voice is addressing me. ‘Excuse me,’ comes again, more firmly, and I look round. A woman is glaring at me. She is lean and whippy, with short, grey hair and a thin face.

  ‘Yes?’ I say in surprise.

  ‘Can’t you read the notice?’ She points at the little plaque on the end of the bed. ‘It says “Do Not Touch”.’

  Over her shoulder I see the guide realize what is happening and get up from her seat to rescue me, but I lift a hand to say that I will deal with it myself.

  ‘So it does,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not me you should be apologizing to,’ she says, unmollified. ‘What do you think Lord and Lady Vavasour would think if they could see you poking at these lovely old fabrics? How long would they survive if everybody was like you and touched whatever they wanted? We should respect the past,’ she tells me sternly.

  Is she right? I wonder as I apologize meekly and slip out. Will the past crumble if we handle it? Maybe we need to take a proper hold of it, and look it straight in the face. If we always accord the past a respectful distance, how will we ever discover the truth of it?

  I send Matt Chandler a brief email, explaining that I have had an accident and lost my memory. I tell him that if he comes to Askerby, I won’t remember him, but I don’t tell him not to come. This is partly wilfulness: not only did Angie tell me to ignore Matt’s email, she told George, and George has told Fiona and Jasper, and all are adamant that I have nothing to do with Matt Chandler again.

  ‘Why on earth did you tell George that I’d heard from Matt?’ I ask Angie.

  ‘I thought he should know,’ she says, not even looking embarrassed.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with him!’

  ‘The Vavasours have a right to know if you’re thinking of taking Felix away.’

  ‘For God’s sake, it’s just an email from a friend! It’s not as if I’m planning to run away with him. I don’t even remember him! And anyway,’ I say, too cross to think about what I’m saying, ‘I’d have thought you would be delighted at the idea of me seeing this Matt again. George would soon forget me if I’m not here.’

  ‘George isn’t like that. He’s loyal.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong, anyway,’ I say. ‘He’s never said anything to me about how he feels – if he feels anything for me.’

  ‘Because he’s thoughtful. He’s giving you time to get over Michael’s death.’

  ‘If I slept with Matt Chandler, I obviously got over that some time ago,’ I say tartly, and Angie’s expression stills.

  ‘I think it would be better if you forgot about that.’

  I am irritated by her insistence that everybody else knows what’s best for me. I don’t remember everything, no, but I am not a child. I can make my own decisions. So no, I won’t do as they say and tell Matt not to come.

  And I admit, it is curiosity as well as bolshiness that makes me respond to him. Askerby is a self-absorbed world. There are the visitors and social events, and the Vavasours put on a fine show of being involved in the community, but the truth is that they’re not really interested in anything else that goes on in the world. As August passes, I feel increasingly trapped here (or is it Isabel who feels that?), and it’s one of the reasons I insist on sending Felix to the village school over Fiona and Jasper’s objections. They want him to go to a private school in York, and offer to pay the fees (‘It’s got a wonderful reputation’) but it seems to me ridiculous to drive all that way every day just because they’re afraid Felix will pick up a Yorkshire accent. They don’t say this is why, but I know it is true, for all they dress it up in an insistence on the importance of education and opportunity.

  ‘He’s only four,’ I remind them. ‘We don’t need to worry about his A-level results just yet. It’s more important that he learns how to get on with other kids,’ I say. ‘It’s too isolated here. We’re incredibly lucky to have a school in the village at all. We should support it, and not just by handing out prizes at sports day.’

  When September comes, I am vindicated by the fact that Felix loves school, and is eager to see his new friends every morning. Walking to and from school soon becomes part of our routine. I can do it easily now, and on the way back I often drop in at the Lodge to say hello to Dosia.

  The rest of the day drags, if I am honest. There is no cooking to do, no housework, and once Felix is at school, I have all day to myself. I should be grateful I have life so easy, I know, but I can’t ride and I can’t remember enough to work, and I’m going slowly—

  I catch up my thoughts before I think ‘mad’. Is that all Isabel’s memories are? A sign that I don’t have enough to do? Is sitting around feeling frustrated at everything I still can’t remember really the limit of my capabilities? No wonder I’m getting maudlin. I need a job, I decide, and I think again about what Angie said about getting back to work on the family history. It would be a start.

  I haven’t found much of interest in the books in the library, and after some prodding, Jasper produces an archive of family papers. When I open the first of the boxes, I am appalled. Letters, diaries, old photographs, bills, newspaper cuttings, scrap-books and diaries are all jumbled in together.

  My first task is to sort them into date order. Joanna volunteers to help me. I haven’t spent much time with her before, but I am glad of the company as much as anything else. I don’t feel Isabel so strongly when there is someone else there, and Joanna keeps that terrible sense of urgency at bay.

  Our hands are soon filthy. ‘I can’t believe nobody’s done this before,’ I say, gingerly opening a letter to a nineteenth-century Vavasour. It turned out to be a sad letter from an Elizabeth Vavasour, writing about the death of her son in Brazil, of all places. You see that we are in the dark about everything, except the one terrible fact that we have lost our dear Horace. My throat constricted with sadness when I read her brave attempts to find consolation in the fact that he had died in the arms of a friend so far from home. ‘I thought a family like this would be interested in its own history.’

  ‘We know our history,’ Joanna says. ‘It’s in every guidebook.’

  ‘Yes, and it sounds like it was written in the thirties,’ I say, making a face. ‘It’s horribly dated.’ I have read the guidebook that sells for £3.50 in the Visitor Centre in search of clues for Kit, but I have learn
t nothing I don’t already know. The history makes much of Edmund’s grandfather, a merchant who made a fortune in York and turned his son into a gentleman, but Edmund himself only gets a mention for his tomb, and the story jumps briskly on to the eighteenth century, when the second son of one of the Lord Vavasours rediscovered his ancestor’s mercantile spirit and travelled out to India with the East India Company. Other than that, the Vavasours are remarkable for their lack of ambition. Perhaps most of them were content to stay safely tucked away from stirring events at Askerby. Or perhaps they were afraid to leave.

  ‘We’ve got the facts,’ Joanna says with a shrug. ‘They don’t need to be changed. We know the truth.’

  It’s a Monday and the house is closed to visitors, so we’re in the library. I pull a scrapbook out of the box and turn the pages carefully. On the verge of crumbling into dust, dried flowers are pressed between its pages, along with ticket stubs, poems painstakingly copied out and illustrated, and a mass of newspaper cuttings: births, marriages and deaths of people who must have meant something to the compiler of the scrapbook, book reviews, a letter about a swarm of bees attacking a man in Regent Street, a report on a lecture at the Royal Institution on Dogs and the Problems Connected to Them.

  I wonder if the lecturer covered the problem of a dog that thinks you’re a ghost. Pippin hasn’t come into the library, but I know she will be lurking outside, waiting to see where I go next.

  I close the scrapbook. Intriguing as it is, it is not the kind of material I am imagining for the new display. ‘Don’t you think it would be interesting to include more everyday stuff in the display? Not just the official history, but other people who have lived and worked on the estate over the years.’

  Joanna looks wary. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking about someone like Dosia,’ I say. ‘How many years has she been at the Lodge? She must have seen so many changes. And there must be other people in the village who can give a different perspective on the history.’

  ‘I thought you were doing a family history?’ Joanna says abruptly.

  ‘I was thinking of it more like a history of Askerby,’ I say. ‘It’s not just the Vavasours who live here.’

  Joanna doesn’t like the idea. She wants a neat family tree with portraits. She thinks that all people want to know is which Lord Vavasour died when, and the name of the son who succeeded him. The more she tries to discourage me from including ‘ordinary’ people, the more determined I am to make them part of the display.

  The next day, when I have dropped Felix at school, I knock at the Lodge door and ask Dosia if she has any photographs.

  ‘Of course, of course!’ Some days Dosia tires easily and drifts off in the middle of a conversation, but she is sprightly today, and her face is bright with pleasure. She takes me over to the old writing desk by her chair. Her hands are unsteady and I help her unlock the desk and lower the table. The desk is stuffed with papers, leaflets, newspaper cuttings, bills, postcards and letters from the days when people still wrote them. I recognize the thin blue airmail paper that my parents used to use when they wrote to me, and another sliver of memory slides into place.

  ‘There should be an envelope . . .’ Dosia clicks her tongue as she hunts slowly through the desk, but eventually she gives a triumphant exclamation and I help her pull out a tatty brown envelope that is, indeed, stuffed with photographs when I peer inside.

  We shake the contents onto the dining table that is pushed against the wall. Most of the pictures are in black and white, but there are some faded shots from the seventies and eighties where the colour has leached and blurred.

  We look through the photos together. Dosia’s fragile hands shake as she picks each one up and examines it, but she smiles as she remembers. She shows me her two sons dressed in cowboy costumes, pointing guns at the camera, and another picture with their hair slicked back, tidy in jumpers, ties, and long socks and shorts. They look glum, as if they’re about to go to church.

  ‘This is Marek.’ She touches his face gently and sighs. ‘And this is Peter.’ Peter’s strange features are unmistakable but I don’t like to say so.

  ‘Marek was Angie’s father?’

  ‘That’s right.’ We find some photos of Angie, with Marek as a toddler, a serious little girl, her blonde hair clipped back, and another when she was a teenager, and in every one she is startlingly neat.

  I laugh as I point this out to Dosia, who studies her granddaughter. ‘Yes,’ she agrees after a moment. ‘She was always careful.’

  ‘It doesn’t look as if she was a rebellious teenager,’ I say. I wonder if I was?

  Dosia shakes her head and her hand trembles as she lays down the photographs. Angie always knew what she wanted.’

  I pick up the photo of the two boys again. Marek has an edgy look to him, as if at any moment he might explode into a roaring temper. He looks just like his father. In contrast, Peter is fair. Marek scowls at the camera; Peter always seems to be smiling. He must have got his sunny nature from Dosia. Adam looks morose in every photo except for the one we find at the bottom of the pile.

  ‘Oh, this is a great picture!’ I exclaim. It shows two young men in flying gear. Their arms are slung around each other’s neck and they are wearing identical cocky grins. I recognize Ralph Vavasour at once, but have to do a double take for Adam, who is unrecognizable from the sullen man who looms in the photos with his wife and children.

  ‘That was taken during the war,’ Dosia says.

  ‘Your husband was a very good-looking man.’

  Her eyes are on the photo. ‘Oh, yes, Ralph was always so handsome.’ Her voice wavers reminiscently and a smile warms her face. ‘Like a golden god.’

  I hesitate. Is she more confused than she seems? But with his dark, brooding looks, there’s no way Adam Kaczka could ever have been described as golden. She must have misheard me.

  ‘I meant Adam,’ I say carefully, pointing at him.

  Ah, Adam . . .’ Dosia’s smile fades. ‘Yes, he was handsome, too.’ There is a bleak undercurrent to the frail voice.

  I think about golden, glittering Ralph Vavasour, driving Dosia up to Askerby. Why didn’t Adam go with them? He was a good-looking man, but he was always going to be overshadowed by Ralph’s dazzling charm. It was Ralph who worried about Dosia, Ralph who wanted her to be safe at Askerby. And who could blame Dosia, finding herself alone in a strange country in the middle of a war, for being swept off her feet by a hero?

  Did she and Ralph have an affair?

  Dosia wasn’t beautiful like Margaret, but there is a sweetness to her that Margaret clearly never had. The photos of her give a sense of warmth. She is always smiling, and the children lean trustingly into her. One lovely picture shows her in a garden, her hand shielding her eyes against the sun, smiling directly at the camera.

  ‘I like this one. It’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it was taken out in the garden right there.’ Her gaze drifts to the window. ‘Ralph brought a camera one day. He was so bossy! Stand here, stand there, look at the camera! He used to take lots of pictures but then he got married . . .’ She falls silent, remembering. ‘Well, it was a long time ago.’

  Her expression is so unguarded and so sad that I feel as if I have stumbled on a private moment, and I make a show of looking through the other pictures. I find one of more children, sitting in the garden, drinking juice and squinting at the camera. It always seems to be sunny, but perhaps that was the only time the camera came out.

  ‘Who is this?’ I ask after a moment, pointing at a fair boy. He reminds me of Felix.

  Dosia peers at it. ‘Is it Michael?’ she says. ‘Such a dear boy.’

  ‘I don’t think it can be Michael,’ I say. These children look as if they belong to a more distant time. ‘Could it be Jasper?’

  Something crosses her face, so fleeting that I can’t catch it. ‘Perhaps. Jasper and Joanna, they came to play sometimes, when Margaret wasn’t there. Joanna and Marek were the sam
e age.’

  ‘Really? Which one is Joanna?’

  When Dosia points, I don’t recognize Joanna at all in the bright, laughing child hanging around Marek’s neck. ‘Joanna loved Marek,’ Dosia says. ‘I always wondered if the two of them might . . . well, Margaret wouldn’t have had it, I know, but Joanna found someone even more unsuitable after Marek married Doreen.’ She sighs. ‘Two unhappy marriages instead of one happy unsuitable one. But who’s to say Marek and Joanna would have been happy? You never can tell.’

  ‘No.’ I think of Margaret and Ralph’s wedding photo, the fairy-tale glamour of it. ‘No, you never can.’

  I can’t help it; my eyes keep going back to Peter. His face is strange, yes, but once your eye adjusts to the skewed features, it is his smile you see instead. Is it possible he is Ralph’s son? He has fair hair, but then so did Dosia. It doesn’t mean anything. Trying to appear casual, I sift through the photos again, wondering if there are any that might show the colour of his eyes.

  I think I am being discreet, but Dosia is sharper than she seems. ‘Peter . . . he had a good heart,’ she says when I stop at one picture of him, ‘but nobody looked past his face to see it.’

  ‘And yet we’re always told that appearances are deceiving,’ I say. ‘Why do we never believe it?’

  Dosia looks down at Peter. ‘We see what we want to see.’

  If Ralph and Dosia had an affair, no wonder Adam took to drink, I think. It must have seemed as if Ralph had everything, even Adam’s wife. But why then would he have come back to Askerby? Unless he didn’t have a choice?

  ‘Poor Peter,’ Dosia says sadly. ‘Poor boy. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t his fault.’

  I am longing to ask Dosia how it happened and how she felt, but if it is a secret, it is hers to tell or not tell. It would not be kind to trick it out of her, or take advantage of her age and confusion.

  Besides, how would I know if she was telling the truth? How would she know what the truth is now? I remember what Oliver Raine told me: how even the most vivid of memories can turn out to be false. The photos Dosia is looking through seem incontrovertible: we can say that Marek was in the garden at the same time as Jasper and Joanna and Peter, but what brought them there, how they felt, what happened afterwards, all that is lost now, or so filtered through their individual memories and overwritten by later memories that the truth can never be told.