I was planning to stop outside and tell her I wasn’t coming in, not just now, but I’d be back in a minute and I’d stay with her all night if I had to, but before I’d got a chance she was grabbed out of nowhere and hauled away through the door, and I could see from her mouth before she vanished she was screaming.
I didn’t bother going in after. I didn’t know how long I’d got so I pelted back down the main stairs and never mind the racket, and along the passage and in through the library door, and turned on the light and shut it behind me. I ran across to the chair she’d been reading to and tried to sit in it, only I couldn’t because there was something hard and lumpy on the seat, so I looked under the dust sheet and there was the stool I’d just seen only the shadow of when she was sitting on it to read. I pulled it out and sat in the chair, on top of the dust sheet.
I gave myself a moment to get my breath back, and then I pulled myself up tall as I could and said, “Go to the nursery. Go to the nursery now.”
I said it out loud, not shouting or anything, but slowly and carefully, as if everything in the world depended on it. If he wasn’t still sitting there after he’d let Adalina go it wouldn’t be any use—that’s why I’d been in such a tear—and even if he was I’d no way of knowing if he could hear me, but my idea was if I could say the words right inside him, right inside his head, maybe that’s how he’d hear them, the way Adalina and me could hear each other. In one of the books I’d read there’d been a bloke who’d heard his twin brother calling to him like that, and had gone and rescued him. I wasn’t sure if that kind of thing could truly happen, or if it was just an idea the writer had made up, but all I can tell you is I had this feeling, very strong, it was what I was supposed to do, so I did it.
I’d been meaning to give it three goes, but before I’d drawn breath to try again I felt—I’m not sure how I can describe this, but it was like the bit of air I was sitting in had given a sort of kick. Or you know when you’re coming downstairs and there’s one more step than you’d thought there was going to be, and before your foot bangs into the floor you get this kind of jolt inside you? Like that, but without me moving at all. No, that’s not it, either. But I did feel something, very sudden and strong, so I was pretty sure I’d gone and done it.
I didn’t bother saying my words again. I just ran back up to the nursery to see if anything happened. It was pretty well dark by now of course, so I left the door open with the light on in the passage.
It was the same bare empty room with the cupboard and the couple of chests. I opened the cupboard door and there was Adalina lying shuddering under the coat hangers, staring up at nothing. I knelt down and took her hand and was leaning in to get at her ear with my mouth when suddenly she screwed herself almost into a ball and cringed even further into the corner with her eyes wider still and staring out past me. She couldn’t see me of course because it was pitch dark in the cupboard for her, and she couldn’t see out either, but it was like there was some kind of monster in the room now, snuffling round after her blood.
When I managed to get my mouth against her ear to ask her what was going on all she did was lie there making herself as small as she could. In the end I did the only thing I could think of. She was wearing hard little leather boots, the sort that lace up crisscross on hooks running up in front of your ankle, so I grabbed her leg and banged her foot hard against the door. It was the door in her time, of course, so I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t hear the racket it made, but I knew when it hit because it stopped, sharp, where the door would have been.
I did that two or three times with Adalina trying to fight me off, which would only have added to the racket, and then she jerked her leg free and I was getting ready to grab it again when she cringed back with her arm over her face and then she sailed right out of the cupboard and up into the air. Whoever it was must have reached right through me to get hold of her. Her boot banged against the side of my head as she went past and knocked my specs off.
I scrabbled around and found them and looked to see what was up. She was floating in the air, lying a bit forward with her head turned sideways and her knees a bit up and her arms spread out and round. I got it at once. Someone was holding her on their arm and she’d got her head on their shoulder and her arms round their neck. I moved where I could see her face and she was crying, great heaving sobs that shook her through and through, not like the other crying I’d seen her do, when she was trying her best not to. She was letting it happen now, crying her heart out because she was allowed to because she was all right at last. (You’ll say this is silly, telling you that a twelve-year-old kid who didn’t know much about anything would have spotted something like that, but you’re wrong. Anybody could have seen it.)
After a bit she started floating to and fro because whoever it was was carrying her around comforting her, and when they crossed the light from the door I could just about see the shadow of him, or maybe I couldn’t. And then they floated off out of the room and along the passage and all the way down to the library, where he must have sat back down in his chair to judge by the way she settled. And now I could see the shadow of him, for sure, but very faint and misty so that I couldn’t have told you anything about him except he wasn’t as big as I’d expected. And maybe he had a beard.
She’d got her head against his chest and she was still sobbing, but quieter now. I’d have liked to have just squeezed her hand or something, by way of saying goodbye, but I didn’t want to come between them, so I turned out the light and went back up to the attics so I could be sure of being in bed before my grandmother came up to check on me.
Just to tidy up. In school the next day Mrs. Corcoran asked me what my grandmother had been on about in the post office. I mumbled and muddled until she got it into her head that I’d used the bit of copying I’d had to do as an excuse to get some reading in as well, instead of playing crib with my grandmother. After that I’d let on there was more copying I’d got to do so I could get off the crib most evenings and read my book instead. Mrs. Corcoran said I was a bad boy, lying like that, but I could see she wasn’t that cross because she liked having a kid in her class who really wanted to read proper books. A couple of days later she gave me a note for my grandmother, who read it and put it away in her pocket, and next evening she fetched Kings and Queens off the shelf and gave it to me and said Mrs. Corcoran had told her something about a misunderstanding, but even so it wasn’t all right because she still didn’t think I’d been straight with her, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as she’d thought so I could go back to reading, and if I was tired of playing crib with her then maybe some evenings I could read to her instead. (That was how I came to read Jane Eyre to her, like I told Mr. Glister.)
That was all right with me, but it meant that I wasn’t likely to be going up past the bad patch on the stairs same time as Adalina might be, and anyway I didn’t think Miss Tarrant would be staying on, so things would be different her time too. I didn’t look around for her either, being pretty sure I wasn’t going to see her again.
I put Kings and Queens back on the shelves in the West Passage, but next time I looked I found someone had moved a lot of the books around and it wasn’t there anymore.
9. Me, Cyril Batson
Now, if you don’t mind, we’ll go back to me today, and me standing by the red baize door on the stairs at Theston, remembering about Adalina. And maybe you’ll want to know why I didn’t put all that in where it belongs in the story, after the bit about Miss van Deering finding me in the library, and before all the stuff about Mr. Glister and getting my own bookshop and so on. So I’ll finish up with some explanations.
I’m not going to tell you I’d completely forgotten about Adalina all those years, the way you read about people completely forgetting horrible things that happened to them when they were kids, because they couldn’t bear to live with themselves remembering. No, it would be truer to say I’d just stopped thinking about it, and if you stop thinking about something every now and then,
then it begins to fade, if you know what I mean, and goes all misty and faint until maybe you lose it completely, until something happens that brings it into your mind, just a bit of it maybe, and you somehow can’t get hold of the rest of it, or else you can tease it out from that one bit until you can see it all clear and think about it. That’s what happened to me, going back to Theston. I’ll come to that in a minute.
In some ways helping Adalina is the most important thing that ever happened to me. I did something all by myself with no one to help, and I got it right. It must have given me a lot of confidence I hadn’t had before. For instance, do you imagine without it I’d have had the nerve to go and ask Mr. Glister for a job, all on my own? And since then I’ve made what I wanted of myself. People look at me and think Poor lonely old man, no wife, no kids, no friends, just a grubby old bookshop and his cat to show for his sixty-five years. They’re dead wrong. OK, I’m getting on, but I’m not poor and I’m not lonely. If I could have my life over again with all my wishes coming true, this is how I’d have it, and one of the things I like about Tom and Mercury is that they can see this. Anyway, that’s why the business with Adalina is important.
But against that, it was a very uncomfortable thing for a kid to deal with, after, all on his own. I didn’t know what to make of it, and there wasn’t anyone I could talk to about it. Certainly not my grandmother. She’d have called me a wicked liar, making up stories. And there wasn’t anyone to talk to at school. So I suppose I felt I couldn’t get on with my life if I was always thinking about it, and waiting for Adalina to show up, and knowing she wouldn’t.
Bit by bit I put it away. I don’t mean I forgot it, wiped it clean out, but I turned it from being something that had really happened to me into one of the stories I used to tell myself in which I had all sorts of adventures. I used to tell myself lots of stories, the way kids do, with me as the hero, but all the other ones came out of the books I’d been reading, and in them I knew about swordfighting and secret codes and driving fast cars and stuff. This one didn’t come out of a book, and it had me doing just things a kid like me could have done. And then I read a lot more books and told myself a lot more stories and sort of buried it.
Suppose you’d asked me, anytime up till I went back to Theston with Tom and Mercury, about this girl from a different time, I’d have said it was just a story I used to tell myself, and I wouldn’t have been lying. That’s what I’d have believed. What’s more I’d have been pretty hazy about it. I wouldn’t have remembered it nearly as well as I can remember some of the stories in the books in the servants’ hall.
You remember, for instance, how just after I’d come to Theston with Tom and Mercury, I stared and stared at that stool in the library? Now I’d seen that stool, solid, just the once, when I’d pulled it out from under the dust sheet so I could sit in the chair and speak inside Adalina’s father’s head, and even then I’d barely glanced at it. And I’d seen it too as a kind of shadow when Adalina was sitting on it to read aloud to her father. But I didn’t make the connection, not with either time. All the same, something in me made me stare at it.
And then, why was I so keen to go up the back stairs that I returned to the kitchen to ask if I could? That’s not like me. If something says “Private” I stay out of it. But I did ask, because something in me told me I had to go up that way, right up to the red baize door, and open it, and see what I found.
And I did, and that’s where it all came back to me.
No, that’s not right. Like I’ve said, I didn’t get it all back in one go, all in its right order, like I’ve put it down here. In fact I’d just remembered seeing Adalina that first time on the other side of what I called the cave, when I heard some tourists coming chattering down from the top floor, so I went on up past them and had a look at the nursery.
They’d got it done up with a lot of stuff that could have been there in Adalina’s time, toys, and a brass fender round the fireplace, and her dolls’ house painted and tidied, and so on. The cupboard was there, with Adalina’s sort of clothes in it, but they’d moved her bed into one of the little rooms. It was all very nice, but it didn’t say anything special to me.
I went down and looked at the books at the end of the West Passage, and some of them were the same ones, but not Kings and Queens (I’m going to look out for a copy of that, now). Then I went down to the servants’ hall and got myself a cup of tea and had a look at the guidebook, which I’d bought at the door.
It was really interesting, because they’d got a set of photographs taken of the house just about the right time, which was how they’d managed to get all the rooms looking right. The one of the library even showed the stool Adalina used when she was reading to her dad, standing beside his chair. And it said that the house had one of the earliest lot of electric lights put in in England, and the system had lasted almost as far as the First World War, so the lights we’d had when I was a kid must have been the second lot, and that was why Adalina moved the switches sideways to turn the lights on. I’d remembered her doing that before I read about it in the guidebook, by the way, in case you’re thinking perhaps I’ve made the whole thing up without realizing. I should have said I’d been remembering bits and pieces like that all the time I’d been poking around upstairs, and they were still coming back, any old order, while I was sitting there drinking my tea.
There was one thing in the guidebook that shook me, though I don’t suppose it’s going to surprise you much. They’d got a history of the house and who’d lived there. Miss van Deering’s grandfather had made a pile of money from chemical dyes, and he’d bought it in 1856, and her father had carried on with the business but he’d been a book collector too, and he’d had two sons but they’d both been killed in the First World War, so it had been his daughter who inherited, and she’d left it to the National Trust when she’d died. Not until 1978, that had been. The guidebook gave her full name. Adalina van Deering.
Like I say, you’ll have got this long ago, I shouldn’t wonder. I never did, not till I saw it in the guidebook. You may think it’s obvious, but I tell you it wasn’t. Apart from looks, they couldn’t have been more different, Adalina and Miss van Deering. Adalina was troubled and unhappy and uncertain and not at all comfortable with herself, but Miss van Deering was just the opposite, like a cat in the sun, like I’ve said, apart from the moment when she found me reading Ivanhoe in the library and was so put out.
That was when she recognized me, I should think. It might have been something to do with the way the light fell on my face from the reading lamp under the desk, being like the light she was seeing me by when she met me on the stairs that first time. But I was wearing the wrong specs, so she told my grandmother to get me some new ones and gave her the money. And she told me I could borrow the books at the end of the West Passage and she made sure Kings and Queens was there for me to find. But that would have been after she’d got over the shock of finding me and realizing I was the boy who’d done her a good turn all those years back. Up till then, I think, she’d done what I did, like putting it away in a drawer and pretty well forgetting it was there. I’m good as certain she hadn’t been waiting all that time for me to show up, or she wouldn’t have gone on like she did, for instance giving us a smile in church before it all happened and looking the other way after. So it was a shock all right, having it come back and hit her in the library that night, and that’s why she’d spoken like that, gasping, and only just able to get her words out.
She wasn’t much of a reader, she said. Dyslexia, we’d call that now.
So why hadn’t she said anything to me after, never even thanked me? Why had she tried not to notice me, looked the other way? Maybe you think it was mean of her, but I don’t blame her. Think of it from her point of view: You’ve had this really bad time when you were a kid with your governess putting you in a cupboard when you’re scared of the dark, and being shut in. Claustrophobia, it’s called. And maybe you think you’re going mad like your mother did, and
imagining things, imagining this boy who comes out of nowhere to help you, only he can’t be real, because only you can see him, and he can walk through doors, and so on. But provided you can carry on imagining he’s there, things aren’t so bad, because somehow you can imagine him reading in your ear the book you can’t read for yourself, and you can imagine him holding your hand when you’re shut in the cupboard, and you can even imagine him stopping you jumping out of the linen room window the night things got so awful that your dad cottoned on there was something bad going on in the nursery, and came up and found out. And after that you didn’t need the boy anymore, so you stopped imagining him.
So it’s a hell of a shock when forty years and more later he shows up for real, and you know he’s real because he’s your cook’s grandson and you aren’t imagining her. So he must have been real all along, but that isn’t what you want. It isn’t how you’ve got your world sorted out now, so comfortable. You’ve got to go along with it, though, and see that he’s got the right specs, and put Kings and Queens on the shelf for him. But as soon as it’s all over you want to go back to where you were before and turn him back into something you just imagined. So you don’t say anything to him, in case he takes advantage of it and you’ve got to have more and more to do with him so he stays real and won’t go away. You don’t even look at him if you can help it.
I must say, I don’t blame her.
All the same, I think she felt a bit ashamed of herself about that. Did you notice anything funny about the letter the lawyer sent me to tell me she was sending me the books? Apart from it being so sharp, I mean, when the books themselves were so downright generous? It was what he called her. “Miss van Deering of Theston Manor.” Not her first name. That isn’t the way lawyers go on. I’ve seen a few letters from lawyers, and they always tell you the first name to show they’re talking about Mr. Cyril Batson and not some other Mr. Batson. I think she’d actually told him not to let on her name was Adalina, in case I made the connection, which she must have guessed I hadn’t or I’d have said something, surely.
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Page 8