‘Where are you going?’
‘To see what else is the same.’
‘Mum might see you.’
‘You said she was downstairs.’
‘Yes, for now, but...’
He opened the door a crack and peered out at a galleried landing that he knew intimately. Near the far end the stairs began their descent. Half way down, at a square platform, they turned at a right-angle before continuing to the hall below. He knew without counting that there were twenty-six stairs, thirteen per flight. The painted sections of the half-paneled walls, which displayed pictures of various types and sizes, were a muted yellow. The walls below the landing of his house were the same pale green they’d been for years.
‘Well?’ Naia said as he closed the door.
‘The same.’
‘You mean like in a mirror?’
‘No, not like in a mirror. Nothing’s back to front. What do you think this is, Through the fucking Looking-Glass?’
‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said. ‘Wish I did. Yesterday was the first time you came here, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeh. Didn’t know you existed till then. Any of this.’
‘What do you have to do?’
‘Do?’
‘To get here. Make the Folly work.’ He shrugged. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Complicated, or you just don’t want to let me in on it?’
‘Take your pick.’
‘I might have thought you were a ghost, the way you vanished yesterday,’ she said. ‘If I believed in ghosts.’
‘Tell me what you saw.’
‘I saw you disappear.’
‘Describe it.’
‘The room went sort of unreal, then you went unreal too, then you kind of dissolved. A bit of snow came in, like you’d opened a door.’
‘What do you call this place?’ he asked.
‘I call it my room.’
‘The house.’
‘Withern Rise. Withern for short.’
‘Guess what mine’s called.’
She didn’t need to. ‘And outside? Is that the same too?’
He leant over the bed to peer out. ‘I’ve had this view all my life.’
‘Takes some believing,’ she said.
‘Don’t start that again.’
‘Well you have to admit…’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did you say your name was? Your first name.’
‘Alaric.’
‘I’ve heard that before,’ Naia said.
‘Of course. I told you last time.’
‘Before that.’
‘It was my great grandfather’s.’
‘That’s it. My great grandpa’s too.’
Alaric returned to the chair. ‘What’s yours?’
‘My what?’
‘Name.’
‘Naia. After my gran, Granny Bell. Her middle name.’
‘I had a Granny Bell too. Don’t think I ever knew her middle name.’
‘You might have if you’d inherited it. What are your parents called?’
‘My dad’s called Ivan.’
‘Ivan Underwood?’
‘Of course Ivan Underwood.’
‘Ditto. Couldn’t be brothers, could they? Secret brothers, unknown to one another, separated at birth?’
‘Brothers, with the same first and last name?’
‘Have you got a picture?’
‘Of my dad? Oh sure, I always carry a picture of my old man.’
‘Tell me what he looks like then.’
‘He’s my dad, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at him.’
‘So if he was in a room full of strangers, or a police line-up, you wouldn’t be able to pick him out?’
‘He’s about so-high,’ Alaric said. ‘Not fat but getting a bit of a gut…’ He floundered.
‘Eye color?’
‘Sort of greeny-grey. I think.’
‘Hair getting a bit thin on top?’
‘He doesn’t like to talk about it. Some grey at the sides, doesn’t mind that, thinks it makes him look distinguished.’
‘He’s wrong,’ Naia said. ‘What does he do?’
‘Do?’
‘For a living.’
‘He’s got a shop in Stone. Underwood’s Antiques.’
‘& Memorabilia
?’
‘& Memorabilia. Where is he now?’
‘He’s gone to the Collectors Fair in Bristol,’ Naia said.
‘Oh.’
‘Oh what?’
‘My dad gave Bristol a miss this year. Something more interesting on, in Newcastle.’
‘What’s in Newcastle that beats the Bristol Collectors Fair?’
‘Kate Faraday.’
Naia’s face lit up. ‘You’ve even got a Kate Faraday?’
‘Oh yes.’
She caught his tone. ‘Don’t you like her?’ And his expression. ‘But Kate’s lovely.’
‘Oh, lovely.’
‘Wait,’ Naia said. ‘Your dad’s gone to Newcastle specially to see Kate? Mine’s never done that. They sometimes meet at the trade fairs because they’re both in the same line, but that’s all. Mum used to rib Dad about her. “Seeing the girlfriend, are we?”, stuff like that, and in the end he said that if she thought there was something going on he’d cut out the fairs altogether. Mum told him not to be sensitive and got him to invite her down after one of them.’
‘Kate came here?’
‘Last September, a weekend, then again just before Christmas. They really get along, her and Mum, write all the time.’ She slid off the bed and grabbed a heap of blue and green material on the floor that turned out to be a bag of sorts. On her knees she sifted through its contents. ‘So your dad’s bringing Kate down for a visit, is he? Decent of him to go all that way for her.’
‘She’s coming to stay,’ Alaric said.
Naia took a small plastic wallet from the bag. ‘How long for?’
‘She’s moving in.’
‘Moving in? What, as a lodger? Brilliant.’
‘With Dad. His room.’
She smirked at the perceived joke. ‘Sleeping with him, eh?’
‘Well she won’t be sleeping on the floor,’ he muttered.
She missed this, sat back, flipped open the wallet, held it out to him. He took it. Looked at its two small transparent pockets, one of which contained a photo of her father, the other one of her mother. It took him a while to find his voice. Then, very quietly: ‘Was your mother in an accident?’
‘Accident?’
‘Train derailment. Couple of years ago.’
‘Well, she was...’
She didn’t think about it much these days. Didn’t want to. That awful night; the call from Dad at the station while she was watching a video borrowed from Kirsty Rowan. She’d insisted that he come and pick her up, and they’d spent hours beside the track watching people being cut free and brought out. Then the dash to the hospital in the ambulance, and Dad pacing up and down, going in search of an update; coming back all serious and pale.
‘It doesn’t look good, Nai. They’re going to operate, but – I have to tell you this – they give her no more than a fifty-fifty chance.’
Fifty-fifty. Fifty-fifty. The phrase had gone round and round in her head for hours. Would she pull through? Could she? Every time a doctor or nurse approached, her heart skipped beats. Was this it? The news she dreaded? She shuddered at the thought of what might have happened.
‘She was lucky,’ she said.
‘Lucky?’
‘Could have died. Six did. She had an even chance. Touch and go.’
He looked again at the picture in the wallet. ‘Seven died in our accident.’
‘Seven?’
‘When were these taken?’
‘Last summer. Cornwall. Mum likes Cornwall. Seven?’
‘You haven’t said your mum’s name.’
‘Alex,’ Naia said. ‘Calls her
self Lexie sometimes.’
Alaric held the wallet up, face out. Laid a finger against one of the photos. ‘My mother,’ he said. ‘Also Alex, also Lexie. Taken more than a year after she died.’
He tossed the wallet to her. She was too slow, and missed it. It lay open in the space between them. When he went to the little side window that overlooked the south garden, she put the pictures away with haste, like evidence of a crime. Then, desperate to block out the unthinkable, she began prattling about how things had been after the accident, about her mother’s headaches, the chest pains that had taken so long to go away, how her dad had spent as much time as he could away from the shop, doing everything for her as if realizing what he’d so nearly lost.
‘He took her out quite a bit – both of us – to try and jolly her along, give her new things to look at, think about. She wasn’t herself for ages, very down, very negative, none of the old sparkle, but you should see our photo album, all the places we went to…’
A shutter came down in Alaric’s mind. He had his own memories of that year, and no photos. The day his mother died the home she’d made for the three of them had begun to die too. Colors had quickly dulled, as though switched off; cleaning and polishing had become a thing of the past; nothing was ever painted, repaired, tidied up. Flowers had ceased to cross the threshold. Before long his father put away most of the ornaments and bric-a-brac she’d collected over the years, reducing the number of reminders of her. Naia’s house, what he’d seen of it, still boasted all the things that his had lost, and more, much more.
When Naia ran out of words, he turned from the window, into the room that was his, yet not. ‘I can show you where she’s buried,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The cemetery over the wall. Headstone with her name on it.’
It was all she could do not to clap her hands over her ears. But it was too late. She’d heard it. It was in her head. As good as imprinted.
‘Naia!’
They both went rigid at the sound of the voice, for different reasons. Naia bounded to the door, hurtled out, leant over the banister.
‘Where did all the bread go?’ her mother asked from the foot of the stairs.
‘I put it out for the birds like you told me to.’
‘I didn’t mean all of it. There was half a loaf there.’
‘Well you said you were going to be baking.’
‘Yes, but not for the birds, girl!’
A peeved Alex returned to her kitchen and Naia went back to her room. She closed the door. Alaric’s slippers were still on the sheet of wrapping paper, but he was gone.
Day Six / 5
All the way back – bedroom to garden to cold, cold River Room – his head rang with that voice. Her voice. It was still with him as he stood there, staring hopelessly about him. If his mother had lived, this room, and other rooms and parts of the house, would have been redecorated recently. A new dining suite would be on the way. There would be new pictures on the walls, new carpets and curtains. Anything that could be polished would have been polished, the windows would be clean, floors swept, carpets vacuumed. The heating would have been fixed, too. She wouldn’t have put up with this temperature for a minute.
But that wasn’t the way of it. Not here. Not for him.
The unfairness of it all induced a sob which could not have been more badly timed. ‘Oh, there you are,’ Liney said, looking round the door. ‘I thought you were upstair…’ She stopped. ‘What’s up? What’s the matter?’
He dashed furiously at his cheeks, but she was already striding toward him, arms outstretched, then slapping his head against her bony chest like a bundle of washing. He didn’t pull away, resist, do anything at all. His arms hung at his sides while he gulped more sobs, one after the other, like a big kid, unable to stop.
‘What is it, love, what is it?’ She’d never called him ‘love’ before. It didn’t sound right coming from her. ‘What is it?’ she asked again, soothing him energetically. ‘Come on, wha...?’ She broke off. ‘There’s snow on the carpet.’
She released him, unable to stare at floors and hug simultaneously. There was more snow on his socks than the floor, but she hadn’t noticed his feet yet. All other considerations paled alongside the problem of how to explain this. What reason could he possibly give for snow on his socks, indoors? And Liney saw them, and when she did her jaw dropped, literally dropped. Here it comes, he thought. But it didn’t. He was saved from interrogation by an unusual quirk in his aunt’s intelligence. If something puzzled Liney and a solution didn’t present itself in pretty short order, she didn’t niggle away at it; she shrugged it off; carried on as if it was beyond her comprehension and therefore not worth wasting mental energy on. This simple philosophy had served her well over the years.
‘Better take them off,’ she said. ‘You don’t want chilblains. I know all about chilblains. Martyr to chilblains, me.’
While he removed his socks, Liney did a lightning sweep of the room to try and establish what might have caused his distress (the snow-on-socks-puzzle having already been dismissed) and saw a picture on the sideboard, a photo of her sister that looked like it had been moved recently. All immediately fell into place.
‘What do I do with them?’ Alaric asked, holding the damp socks.
‘I’ll put them in the wash.’
She took them from him and draped them over the door handle to collect on her way out – which he knew wasn’t going to be right away when she looped her thumbs in the back pockets of her baggy dungarees and turned to the window.
‘I love the snow, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Always have. Alex loved it too. All that traipsing about in big boots and scarves and mittens. Rolling snowballs along the pavement till they were so massive you couldn’t push them any further. Do you do that?’
She made to turn, but didn’t quite. He didn’t quite answer either. It had never occurred to him before but this peculiar excuse for an aunt must know things about his mother that no one else did. She was already at school when his mother was born. They’d played together, shared rooms, holidays, visits to relatives, upsets and illnesses, all sorts of little pains and pleasures.
‘Didn’t get much snow on the beach where we grew up,’ Liney went on. ‘Hastings Old Town, just above the fishermen’s cottages. The sea was our doorstep. Dad had a little boat with an outboard motor. He took us out all the time. Well, me some of the time, Lexie a lot. She was the apple of his eye. I felt quite pushed out sometimes. He never really wanted me.’ She said this very matter-of-factly, glancing over her shoulder at him. ‘Born out of wedlock.’
‘So was I,’ Alaric said. ‘Mum and Dad didn’t get married till almost a year after I was born.’
‘Ah, yes, but things were different in the early Sixties. Three or four years later it wasn’t so end-of-the-world, and by the 1990s it was virtually compulsory. My dad was a bit of a throwback in any case. Not such a throwback that he couldn’t have his wicked way with an innocent eighteen year old, mind, and arrange for the result to be disposed of when he put her in the club.’
‘Disposed of?’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you about such things.’
‘It’s OKAY.’ He managed not to sound too interested.
Liney turned back to the window; leant so close to it that her nose very nearly rested on it.
‘Mum told me much later. Much later. Probably thought that at twenty-eight I could just about handle it. She overestimated me. To learn out of the blue that your father wanted you terminated… hard to take at any age, I reckon. He almost got his way too. Booked her into a clinic in Brighton, it was all set, but at the very last minute, for one of the few times in her life, Mum stood up to him. Refused to go through with it. I was that close – that close! – to not being here today, yesterday, or any of the past forty-something exhilarating years.’
He was only half listening. He was thinking about all the stuff she must know about his mother. Stuff he’d never heard.
‘What was she like?’ he asked.
Again Liney half turned. ‘Who?’
‘Mum. When she was young.’
‘How young?’
‘My age? Bit older?’
‘You mean was she special in some way? Out of the ordinary?’
‘No…’ But he did.
Liney turned all the way round. Leant against the table, facing him.
‘My kid sister was as clever as custard. Always. From the start. Not in the mathematical genius sense, but she was always designing things, devising things, making things – amazing things. Gifted isn’t the word. She could have done so much. Been anything she wanted. And you know what she wanted to be?’
‘What?’
‘Just what she was. I swear she hadn’t an ambition in the world, that girl, which was a mite frustrating for an incompetent like me who longed to see her name in lights. She wasn’t just more talented than anyone has a right to be either: she had all the boys after her too. They used to troop up the path in droves hoping for a smile or wave or the touch of her hand. Your grandpa had to beat them off with a putter. Even those he allowed over the doormat sloped off with broken hearts in pretty short order.’
‘Why?’
‘Lexie didn’t see the point of boys. Most men either, when she was older. Very selective gal. I have no idea what she saw in your father. She could have had her pick of anything in trousers, while I, the shambolic big sister, couldn’t have got a blind date with Jabba the Hutt. I would have killed to have Alex’s charms and talents.’ She pushed herself away from the table. ‘Tell you something, though, Alaric.’ Suddenly her eyes were very bright. ‘I don’t half miss her.’
She went to the door, and was about to go when he said, ‘What was it you wanted?’
She turned. ‘When?’
‘You came in for something.’
‘Oh yes. I wanted to ask if there’s anything you don’t eat. Seeing as I’m resident chef for a couple of days, it’s as well that I know what you won’t touch with a bargepole before I put it in a pie.’
‘I eat most things,’ he said.
‘Good, that’s easy. Tonight, I thought we’d have cat’s kidneys and parsnips. Okay with you?’
‘I can’t wait.’
Liney plucked his snowy socks from the door handle and slung them over her shoulder. ‘Poor lad thinks I’m joking,’ she said, and left him.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 4