The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House

by Lam, Stephanie

  ‘What on earth … ?’ He peeled through them and looked up at me. ‘This is Frank’s money. He left me all his savings in a strongbox when he died. To look after me in my dotage, he said. I must have brought the entire stock with me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t wave it around like that. People might take advantage.’

  Dockie was tugging at his beard. ‘I’m filthy. I must have travelled like this. Where are my clothes? Good God, this is awful.’

  An idea wormed its way into my brain. I’d made soup, and while that had been a good turn, it was more of an accidental one really. Now I had the chance to do something properly worthy, to be the person Star imagined I was. ‘I’ll buy you some,’ I said quickly, before I had the opportunity to change my mind.

  He blinked at me. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Clothes … and toiletries … and all those things you need.’ I was already imagining Bradley’s. I hadn’t had the money to go into Bradley’s for – well, for months. ‘Oh, you must let me. I’ll guess your size. It’ll be so exciting.’ I clapped my hands.

  He swallowed, and pulled at his disgusting overcoat. ‘Do I really look so terrible?’ he murmured. ‘Do I look like an indigent?’

  ‘Well …’ I peeled apart my thumb and forefinger. ‘Perhaps a little.’

  ‘Then …’ He blinked at me again. ‘You are right. I cannot go about like this.’

  ‘I’ll help you.’ I nodded. ‘You can trust me. I was Orchid Patrol Leader, you know. First Petwick Guides.’

  ‘Of course, of course. You remind me of …’ He frowned. ‘I cannot remember who you remind me of, but you are trustworthy. That, I know.’

  He flicked through the grubby wad of ten-bob and pound notes in the envelope. He muttered to himself and, I noticed with a giddy judder of excitement, added two fives to the collection before he held it out to me. ‘Will this be enough? I am not yet cognizant of the cost of goods in this part of the world.’

  I allowed the money to be crushed into my hands. ‘That’s … um … that’s f-fine.’ I hadn’t handled this much money in – well, maybe ever. ‘I’ll have to go after work tomorrow. I’ll come to you afterwards, okay? About midday. Guide’s honour.’

  He stumbled towards the bed and lay down full-length upon it, his badly laced boots still on his feet. ‘By the way,’ he mumbled, ‘might there be any Buckfast around the place? Indeed any tonic wine, to revive me, so to speak?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I said primly, although I opened and closed cupboard doors, just for show.

  ‘Then perhaps … I suppose you wouldn’t want to make a purchase at the nearest public house, would you?’

  I slammed one of the doors closed, and he added hurriedly, ‘It was just a thought. Anyway, my dear, what is your name?’

  His eyes were already shut. ‘Rosie,’ I said. ‘Rosie Churchill.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear Miss Churchill. My name –’

  ‘I know.’ I looked down at the rest of his money, spilling out of the torn envelope on the little table. ‘Your name’s Dockie.’

  ‘Correct. I was born, you see, on the docks.’

  There was a smudged square of paper on top of the pile of notes. As I looked closer, I saw it was a ruined photograph, sepia and almost obliterated by water or sunshine or just the passage of time.

  I glanced at Dockie, but his eyes were still closed. Only the top right-hand corner of the dog-eared photo was at all clear, and it showed the blur of an ear and the mildewed top of a round forehead. That was all, but the proportion of the features – the tiny ear against the smooth head – was enough to convince me that the photograph was of a baby.

  I eased the photo over. The back was a brown smudge, except for just one letter in the clear top left corner:

  b

  ‘Is this you?’ I asked Dockie, but for answer I received only the steady in and out of a gentle snore.

  I left the photograph on top of the pile of money and made my way out of the room into the dark of the passageway. As I pulled the door behind me, I realized I could hear someone crying.

  I walked as quickly as I could back to the staircase, embarrassed that I’d overheard another person’s misery. The sobs sounded like a woman’s, although I couldn’t be sure, and in any case I wasn’t certain which sex would be worse. The crying seemed to chase me up the staircase, and I felt I could still hear it in the fresher air of the main hallway, although that must have been my imagination.

  I climbed up again towards our flat, jangling my key to shake off the sound. It had been a desperate kind of crying, and awful to hear. I’d done a bit of it in my time, of course, but always silently, under the covers, while Susan and Val were asleep.

  The kitchen door stood at a right angle to the bedroom door. I unlocked it, went in and closed it firmly, leaning my back against it and testing the silence for several seconds before verifying that the sobbing had been left behind.

  The kitchen was my preferred room of the two, perhaps because the other girls were always in the bedroom, filling in ‘What Type of Guy Is Your Man?’ quizzes in their magazines or talking about how disgustingly fat they were. And now, although I had the flat to myself, I still liked the kitchen, with its large table in the centre, its rickety dresser against the left-hand wall, the floor-to-ceiling larder that needed a stepladder to get to its highest reaches.

  I put my bag on the table and pulled out my purse. Dockie’s notes crackled from within; it occurred to me what a very good con artist I’d be. In fact, I could filch some of his money right now. There’d been a pair of sandals in the window of Lady Lucinda for months, with white straps and a thick brass buckle, which I envisioned would turn me into the perfect dolly. Before I’d left home I’d nagged Mum for weeks to get them for me for my birthday; now it had come and gone, and every penny I had was being spent on such boring essentials as food and rent.

  I sighed and put the notes he’d given me at the bottom of my bag, where I wouldn’t confuse them with my own. I was Rosie Churchill, and I was a good girl. I could be trusted.

  I walked to the two sash windows that overlooked the back of the house, pulled one open, just as I’d done two floors below, and looked out. The basement well that Dockie’s window gave on to was hidden from here by the old Victorian conservatory directly beneath me. The glass roof was covered in seagull droppings, and the paintwork was mouldering on the wood.

  I leaned out further, clinging on to the underside of the windowsill for support, raindrops spattering the back of my head. The conservatory led on to a cracked terrace, and beyond that a garden overgrown with tangles of weeds and bushes. Plants splayed dangerously across paths; grass pushed up in the gaps between uneven paving stones. In an enclosed area was a stone bench encrusted with more seagull muck, overhung with the branches from the tree behind. Towards the end of the garden an ivy-laced stone storeroom sat in one corner near an empty oblong pond, the concrete lined with green slicks of slime. A deckchair had been left out there, abandoned on its side, and its canvas innards rattled back and forth in the wind.

  The rain began pounding harder. I pulled myself back inside the room and remained by the window as the sky darkened further overhead. My fingers crept under the sill, tracing the grain in the wood, feeling ridges that had been gouged into it. The indentations curled, seemed linked together, and I realized eventually that they must be letters.

  I sank to my knees on the gritty lino and peered at the underside of the windowsill. I was right: words had been etched into the wood beneath the sill and filled in with ink. They were very small, and I had to twist my neck at an awkward angle in order to make them out. It was dark in here; I should switch the light on but I was afraid of losing my place, and so I squinted at the awkwardly formed letters until finally, finally, they became utterly clear:

  I straightened my neck, which clicked horribly. The words were a child’s game, perhaps, or a silly joke. All the same, I wondered who Robert Carver might be, and who had etched the m
ysterious message.

  Robert Carver. The name jumped into clarity. R. C.! Of course. I got to my feet, banged my head on the windowsill on the way up and staggered upright, clutching my scalp. It could be a coincidence, of course. They were fairly common initials – mine, for example – and this Robert Carver, innocent or not, might have nothing to do with the hesitant sketch made by the R. C. that I kept between the pages of an unread book.

  All the same, I had a feeling. I looked again at the inked-in scribble. It certainly could be forty years old, although I supposed there was no way of knowing for sure. I got up and paced the kitchen excitedly, almost ashamed at being so eager over something that had happened such an achingly long time ago. So Robert Carver had arrived here, I theorized, and at some point someone had thought it necessary to tell – well, not the world, but certainly the underside of the window – that he was innocent.

  But of what? That was the question. There were so many things a person could be innocent or guilty of – my crime, for one thing, although nobody would be scratching my name into wood in my defence.

  I pulled out a chair and sat down, thinking about home and everything I’d left behind, the Sunday joint Mum would be cooking in the oven now, Frank Sinatra playing on Two-Way Family Favourites, me perhaps upstairs, chewing on the end of a pencil, frowning over how to conjugate a string of French verbs.

  Rosie Churchill is innocent.

  Not any more, I thought to myself. Not any more. All the same, Star thought I was a nice person, and Dockie thought I was good; and perhaps if they did, then I could believe it. And just in case we weren’t all blown up by a nuclear bomb, maybe my future really would be space age and gleaming with concrete. I pulled my feet on to the chair, hugged my knees to my chest and imagined the disintegration of my past, wasting away like metal turned to rust by the relentless tide of the rain.

  4

  1924

  I woke to a soft knock, mumbled an answer and then drifted back into the warm smell of fresh toast and the morning light on my face. I had the sense of velvet curtains being drawn back, I heard the slide and clip of them; and as my eyes shifted open I saw a shadow leave the room and close the door behind itself.

  Beside me was a tray with buttered toast and a steaming pot of tea. All right, I thought, pulling myself to a seated position, this was all very ostentatious and unnecessary, but it certainly bested having to stumble downstairs for your first cup of the day. I sat up in bed, feeling rather like a roosting crow, in my nest at the top of the house. Perhaps in a moment I would wake up and be back in my tiny bedroom at home, with the noise of the milkman’s dray passing in the yard below and Elsie, my mother’s help, shouting across the wall to the neighbours.

  After a while I hauled myself out of bed, and washed and shaved in the bathroom below. Alec had said I might encounter his wife at breakfast. ‘I’m skipping the whole thing at the moment: the sight of her gives me indigestion,’ he’d said last night. She had been absent for dinner as, apparently, was usual at the moment, and it had been a relief to get drunk with Alec and consume Mrs Pennyworth’s excellent saddle of lamb without constraint.

  In the hall, the dining-room door stood ajar. I braced myself, took a breath and entered.

  It was a large-windowed, high-ceilinged room, with portraits of pastoral scenes hanging from the picture rails. The stench of the cigar Alec had smoked last night was gone, and in the brisk light from the sea the place appeared crisp and clean. There was a starched white cloth on the table, and at one end of it, reading a newspaper and eating a boiled egg, was Mrs Bray.

  She was wearing a similar gown to the one she had been wearing yesterday, draped over a sort of Chinese pyjama affair, which most likely were not pyjamas at all. She had also styled her hair and done something to her face, because the sallow demeanour of the day before was gone. A gold locket with some elaborate engraving hung round her neck. She did not bother to glance up when I came in, and continued reading as if I were not there at all.

  I was determined not to stoop to her level. ‘Good morning,’ I said, and was rewarded by a murmur from the parlourmaid, Agnes, who was placing cold meats on trivets that stood on the polished sideboard, but a silence from Mrs Bray. The stutter that had been the curse of my school life trampled my tongue for several seconds before I managed to say, ‘Is th-th-th-that coffee fresh?’

  Agnes picked up the pot. ‘I’ll be back immediate,’ she said, and left the room, leaving me alone with the witch. Previous trips to Lancaster Gate and various other relatives’ houses had instructed me with the breakfast-room modus operandi, and I sat down as far from Mrs Bray as possible, helping myself to slivers of bacon, a couple of eggs, two plump sausages and a spoonful of mushrooms.

  From the hallway, there came the faint sound of crockery smashing and a hurriedly hushed-up commotion. Mrs Bray shook her paper and looked at Scone as he entered, bringing the scent of fresh coffee before him. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘A broken teacup, madam.’ He set the coffee and toast on the table.

  Mrs Bray pulled a slice of toast from the rack. ‘I suppose that’s the girl again.’

  Scone nodded. ‘I shall dock her wages, of course.’

  She smeared jam on her toast, the flat of her blade crushing the bread. ‘Just tell her that if she can’t manage to hold a tray properly I’ll boot her all the way down to kitchen maid and she can bother Mrs Pennyworth instead.’

  ‘Very good, madam.’ He left the room, presumably to give poor Agnes a dressing down on his mistress’s behalf. I wondered what bad luck had led the mite to serve in such a graceless household, but I forbore to comment and instead managed to eat my extremely delicious bacon, which melted under my tongue in a way it never did at home.

  After a while, however, I sensed I was being watched, and looked up. Mrs Bray was drinking her coffee, appraising me. ‘I see you’re not on the train back to the hinterland yet,’ she said. Her blood-tinted nails tapped her china cup.

  The bacon caught in my throat. I swallowed it with difficulty. ‘My health requires me to stay.’

  She rested her elbows on the arms of her chair. ‘Very good. I suppose I should feel guilty now for upsetting the poor invalid.’

  I speared a mushroom. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘You didn’t upset me in the slightest.’

  She put her head to one side and surveyed me. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’re so grateful to be in these fabled rooms that you’ll put up with anything.’

  I felt myself turning purple but tried to keep my voice low as I said, ‘I never much notice my surroundings, to be honest.’

  ‘Oh, come on now.’ She leaned her chin on her hand. ‘The first time I saw the inside of Castaway I nearly wet myself. Do you know, Mr Carver, you and I have a lot in common. We’re both outcasts, after all.’

  I glared at her. In my lap, my napkin was scrunched in my fist. ‘I don’t believe I’m an outcast,’ I said. ‘And I wouldn’t presume to speak on your behalf.’

  She widened her eyes. ‘But Alec’s told me all about it. How your mother was cut off from the family fortune because she got herself up the duff by a minor official. Still, I’m sure it was a thrilling romance, wasn’t it? And all worth it in the end.’

  Irony gleamed coolly in her gaze. I squeezed my fork with my left hand, longing to plunge it into that delicate white forearm which was turned towards me now.

  ‘She loves goading people,’ Alec had said last night. ‘And she’s bloody good at it. Likes nothing better than to set the cat among the pigeons.’

  I forced myself to breathe steadily and, keeping my voice at a calm pitch, said, ‘As thrilling a romance as yours with Alec, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we’ve certainly had our thrills all right.’

  She stood up, her gown swirling about her, snatched up her newspaper and left the room. I stared at the buttery mushrooms, my heart beating fast, my breath scratchy in my throat, ashamed but relieved that I had survived the skirmis
h; and if there were to be more – well then, I would be ready.

  Slowly, my heartbeat returned to normal. I ate the rest of my breakfast in peace, looking out of the bay windows at the cobalt-blue sky, and I thought of the sketchbook and pencils in my case. A different maid came back to clear the dishes, and curiosity got the better of me. I said humorously, ‘Cup broken earlier, was it?’

  ‘Sorry about that, sir. It was the parlourmaid.’

  ‘Agnes?’ I ventured, and she nodded. ‘A new job for her, isn’t it?’

  ‘New for all of us,’ said the maid. ‘Since Sally disappeared so sudden the lot of us’ve been moved about. One of those things, sir.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  The maid nodded. ‘No note or nothing. Just vanished. I mean, it’s not on, is it? Well, she won’t get a reference like that, is what I say.’

  She bundled the napkins inside the tablecloth and left the room. I supposed that servants were often prone to disappearing; I certainly would have been unable to stand working in this house for more than five minutes. I went back upstairs to collect the leather bag containing the tools of my hobby, thankfully avoiding Mrs Bray, and thought no more about it.

  The sun was rising to a warm pitch by the time I left the house. I walked down the hill to the promenade, turned a sharp right and followed it along, under the cliff towards the pier, slotting my coin into the turnstile and walking along the planks. Below me, a few families were starting to set up camp on the sand, unpacking their luggage of parasols, blankets and picnics.

  I walked to the very end, passing elderly ladies and gentlemen on their morning perambulations. I settled on the furthest view, facing to sea, and took out my book. I had watercolour sketches inside, painted during my year of recuperation: the view over the rooftops from my bedroom window, the brightly coloured barges on the canal. I flipped to a new blank page, possibilities darting about as always, rested it on the rail and, pulling out a ready-sharpened pencil, attempted a rough sketch of gulls bobbing on the waves.