‘For what? Thinking I’m an adulteress, or following me, or having far too much interest in your cousin’s wife than is appropriate?’ She stood up and ground out her cigarette in the ashtray.
Perhaps I could die right then and there, I thought. That would solve the crushing shame that was forcing me lower and lower in my chair. ‘I can only apologize,’ I said again.
‘Oh, grow up, you little boy.’ As she swished past me, the wool of her shawl brushed my neck. ‘Bye, Dotty. Sorry I couldn’t stay.’
‘That’s all right, my love.’ Dotty’s voice was as strained as my own. ‘And thanks for all the stuff. You shouldn’t, you know.’
‘I absolutely should.’ I heard the soft collapse of a cheek-to-cheek kiss, and then, like a subsiding storm, Mrs Bray was gone, clacking back over the cobbles, and I found that, once again, I was able to breathe.
Dotty whistled. ‘Ooh, you really upset her and no mistake. Like a tiger when she’s riled, ain’t she?’
‘To be honest,’ I winced again, ‘I’ve never seen her any other way.’
‘Ah, she’s a pussycat really.’ She leaned close to my cheek as she inspected the damage. ‘But then, I’ve known her since she was born. Can’t get away with nothing with old Dot.’ She laughed.
Despite myself, curiosity forced a question from my lips. ‘She grew up here?’
‘Princes Street girl, through and through.’ She turned her back to me and bent down, pulling apart a flimsy curtain that hid shelves of neatly stacked boxes. ‘That’s the main road, Princes Street. It’s what we call our area. You never been before?’
‘No.’ I coughed. ‘I – ah – I’m not from Helmstone.’
She turned to me with a roll of gauze, measured it with her eyes and ripped off a piece. ‘Well, me and Clare was neighbours, see. She grew up in that house there, across the yard.’ She nodded, and I turned to where the line of sagging washing half-obscured the doorstep where the little girl was still playing. ‘Her mum died when she was only a kid, so I used to keep an eye out, you know, what with her dad being such a useless idiot. Cor, she was a wild one though.’
‘Really?’ I wondered what Mrs Bray would make of Dotty spilling all her childhood secrets. I supposed she’d been so angry she’d stormed out without thinking of what the consequences might be. ‘I had no idea.’
Dotty prodded the wedge of gauze against my face. ‘Hold it there while I stick it down,’ she ordered, picking up my hand and placing it against the cotton. ‘Hard as nails, she was. But anyone would be, with her life. It’s either get on top or drown, and she got on top. Always said she was going to get away from this place, even when she was a littl’un. I must say, I never thought she’d come back, but she’s done good. Visits nearly every day, she does, and brings stuff. I mean, it ain’t charity, know what I mean? Cos I wouldn’t accept that. It’s like payment for all the times I fed her and that when she didn’t have nothing herself.’
She snipped off a tiny piece of tape and fixed the gauze in place.
‘I think she hates me,’ I muttered.
‘She probably ain’t even thought about you enough to hate you,’ said Dotty. ‘I’m sure she’s got other things on her mind.’
‘Well, this certainly won’t help,’ I said gloomily; and then, conscious of whom I was speaking to, ‘Sorry. I’ve taken far too much advantage of your good nature already.’
‘Oh, do be quiet, Mr … What’s your name?’
‘Carver,’ I said. ‘But call me Robert, please.’
‘Well, I’m Dotty. Dotty by name, dotty by nature.’ She cackled. ‘You staying up at the house, then?’
I nodded. ‘At my cousin’s request, I hasten to add.’
Dotty bit her lip and gathered the debris of her makeshift first aid into her palms. ‘I won’t go there. She’s invited me enough times, says she’d love to set the cat among the pigeons, have me up there for dinner, with all the servants yes-madaming me and all that, but I won’t go.’
‘Yes, I can imagine that might be rather … awkward.’
‘Not for that.’ She waved a hand. ‘Since you-know-what happened, I can’t help but think about it whenever she talks about the place. I mean, just hearing the name Castaway House and I remember all the stories and get the right heebie-jeebies.’
I frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
She looked at me. ‘You don’t?’
‘No. What happened at Castaway?’
She tightened her lips and shook her head. ‘Sorry, if you don’t know, I ain’t going to be the one to tell you. Not if you’re staying there.’
‘Come on.’ I smiled, and the gauze tightened on the wound. ‘Whatever it was, it must have been years ago.’
‘Only nine.’ She nodded sharply. ‘Not so long, really.’
‘Nine years ago? But that would have been … I mean, that was when my aunt and uncle owned the place.’
‘Well, of course it was,’ she snapped, and sighed. ‘Look, I’m sure you’ll find someone to tell you, if you’re desperate, but it ain’t going to be me.’
My interest was piqued, but Dotty’s voluble mouth had shut tighter than a clam. She dropped the scraps into the range and said, ‘So, now you’re here, you want Clare’s cup of tea? I didn’t even have time to put the kettle on before she rushed off.’
‘No, but thank you.’ I got to my feet, scraping the chair on the rough stone floor. ‘And I am so sorry for spoiling your afternoon.’
Dotty looked up at me, shaking her head. ‘The way you posh people talk: it’s like you all got sticks up your spines.’ She made the same shooing motion to me that she had done with the youths. ‘Come on, then, I’ll walk you out of here. Don’t want you getting lost and running into Teddy, eh? Not that he’s anything without his little gang around him.’
‘I … I assure you I’m not that posh,’ I said, attempting a laugh as I crossed the threshold and stood in the yard waiting for Dotty to emerge and shut the door. Across the way, a young expectant mother appeared behind the little girl. She was almost at her time, and she stared at me with unabashed curiosity. I tipped my hat and smiled at her daughter, who jumped up, unnerved, and clung to the woman. ‘Good afternoon.’
She nodded at me, her hands on the little girl’s shoulders. Dark shadows bagged under the woman’s eyes, and her cheeks had an old lady’s hollowness. Dotty waved to her as she crossed the yard. ‘I’ll be back in two ticks, Lorelei.’
Lorelei nodded herself into a semi-smile and then coughed, a sharp hacking sound I recognized only too well. I cast around inside my mind, wishing there was something I could do to help, but Dotty was already wheeling me back down the alleyway towards the street. ‘Poor cow,’ she said. ‘Won’t make old bones, that one.’
‘I know the problem.’ We walked swiftly back along the cobbles, Dotty waving and calling to most people she passed. ‘I nearly died myself last year.’
Dotty glanced at me sympathetically, and I felt uncomfortably aware that had I been born in Princes Street, I almost certainly would have died, if not from the bronchitis, then from the pneumonia that had followed.
‘I reckon them back-facing houses’re the worst,’ she said with a healthy sniff. ‘Cos you don’t get the fresh air, see. Mind you, I wouldn’t want to live in the front-facing ones, having to walk all that way round to the privy in the morning, not when you’re busting. All right, Sarah?’
A woman dragging a heavy-looking bucket along the street winked at Dotty. ‘Who’s the boyfriend?’
‘Hands off, he’s mine.’ Dotty put her arm through mine as we walked. ‘You don’t mind, do you, eh, Robert?’
I did not see that I had much choice in the matter, and so I merely shrugged and mumbled something off-hand.
‘By the way,’ I added, ‘I don’t want you to think that I … I mean, I come from a fairly humble background myself, nothing like my cousin’s. It’s just that my grandfather paid for me to be sent away to school. They pretty much
beat a demeanour into you from the age of eleven.’
‘Well, you coulda knocked me down with a feather when Clare comes back here with that la-di-da voice. Lessons, she had. Not just in speaking, but in all sorts. Books, history, French, all the stuff she says you need if you want to speak to the gentry. I mean, you wouldn’t know now, would you, to listen to her that she was born down here?’
‘You wouldn’t, no.’
‘So you two got something in common, eh?’ Dotty squeezed my arm. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll come round in the end.’
‘Hmm.’ I was not as confident as Dotty. Previously, Mrs Bray had hated me without good reason; now she had one, I could not see that she would relinquish her scorn.
We were almost at the end of Princes Street; the road was becoming wider and better maintained. The dwellings I had initially taken to be shabby seemed magnificent compared to the mean little roads I had now encountered.
‘How long are you staying at the house for?’ asked Dotty.
‘For the summer, hopefully. If – well, if everything works out for the best.’
She sighed. ‘Rather you than me, if you don’t mind my saying.’
I nodded. ‘The atmosphere has not been particularly … but it is good for my lungs, at least.’
She stopped. Ahead, a trolleybus thundered past the junction, and I knew I was nearly free.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Robert?’
‘What?’ The question was so unexpected it took me several seconds to understand it. ‘Er … no. No, not at all. Why?’
‘Castaway House.’ She narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips. ‘The way it’s stuck out on the end like that: lonely, watching the sea. I wouldn’t be surprised at more than a few restless souls up there.’
I tried not to laugh. ‘Well, I’ve never experienced anything supernatural, and I’ve never heard of anything untoward occurring there, either.’
She tossed her head. ‘Men never notice a blessed thing. But I tell you something: you won’t catch me within ten feet of it. And if I was you, I’d clear off as soon as I could. Full of nasty little secrets, that place; it’s cancerous, d’you know what I mean?’
I rather resented her implication that the house had been the cause of my aunt’s fatal illness, but Dotty had been so kind to me I felt I could say nothing but, ‘If you won’t tell me what this awful thing was that happened nine years ago, how can I make any sort of decision about staying or going?’
She shook her head, muttering, ‘Oh, ignore me. I’m just a mad old hag,’ and laughed, revealing blackened teeth that made her look exactly as she had described herself. ‘Go on, you’d best get yourself out of here while you still can.’
‘Thank you.’ I shook her hand, which surprised her rather. I felt the bones through her fingers.
‘You’re welcome.’ She watched me walk down the cobbles. At the end I turned to wave goodbye, but she had already disappeared behind the curve of the road.
I emerged at the busy thoroughfare and crossed on to the green, noticing for the first time how pleasant this place was. Two small boys played wooden soldiers on one of the benches, lining them up for battle, and I saw how healthy the children looked with their filled-out cheeks and clean caps. A pair of nursemaids on the adjoining bench murmured together, one pushing a lace-edged perambulator back and forth. Sunlight beamed warmly on to my shoulders, and I felt the mire of Princes Street shedding from me like a second skin, aware of the astonishing good fortune that I, unlike Dotty or Lorelei, was able to do so.
I had first thought of returning to the house, but the idea seemed to have lost its appeal. I headed towards the seafront, deciding that I might take in the Punch and Judy show after all: however evil Mr Punch was, at least one knew what one was getting with him. I attempted to dismiss the woman’s superstitious mutterings from my mind: surely what had happened nine years ago was of little consequence, or we in the family would have heard about it. In fact, that was probably why she had refused to divulge it, because secretly she knew that it was no doubt a rumour blown up to the status of a truth. Perhaps my uncle Edward had been accused of violence, I mused, thinking of his irascible temper, or my aunt Viviane had snubbed an important person at one of her many garden parties – that, I could imagine – who had then revenged themselves in slander.
Or perhaps Alec … and then I remembered the dinosaurs again, and Alec’s uncharacteristic gloom that day, talking of going to war as preferable to his current position. I would have been – yes, about ten years old, and so that was nine years ago, or thereabouts.
And of course, that was when he had spoken of the ‘other child’ his mother preferred, who, I now knew, had later turned out to be Clara Bray. I wondered if Mrs Bray had had anything to do with the mysterious incident. Although surely in that case Dotty would have mentioned the connection, if only to defend her surrogate daughter from possible denigration.
I realized that I was in danger of considering Mrs Bray in the worst possible light yet again, once more without a shred of proof. In any case, I should be devoting my attention to Lizzie, and I had not thought about her or our kiss for some time.
I continued on my journey towards the beach, deciding that if I could not find her there I would hunt her out at the Featherses’ house. I presumed she had run away on some misguided notion of shame; I would seek her out and reassure her that she had done nothing wrong. On balance, after all, I had behaved in the shoddier manner this afternoon, although I would never tell Lizzie of my misguided trip into Princes Street.
I thought then of Mrs Bray growing up across the yard from Dotty, a grimy little kid, who no doubt had never played with dolls on the step the way Lorelei’s daughter did. All the same, I growled to myself as I strode along; just because she had grown up poor hardly made her any less of a cold-hearted bitch. What of it, that her regular disappearances were to bring food to her old neighbours? It meant nothing. She was still obnoxious, and sewer-mouthed, and everything a decent woman was not. In such a way I attempted to boil up my usual hatred of her, but found it harder to come by right now.
It would be all right, I mused as I walked seawards. After a few days I would be able to properly despise her again; and, as the gulls wheeled and called overhead, this thought comforted me slightly, while alongside me, in my mind’s eye, trotted a dirt-encrusted, motherless little girl, growing armour plating round where her heart ought to be.
7
1965
I dozed slowly into Tuesday morning, luxuriating under my heap of blankets and coats, as the girls rushed around the flat, Val spooning fruit yoghurt into her mouth, Susan fastening her stockings to her suspender belt, la-la-ing along to Radio Luxembourg on her transistor, which was balanced at a specific angle on her chest of drawers to catch the intermittent crackle.
After they’d gone I stretched myself properly awake and lay in bed with the curtains peeled apart a fraction, watching the sunlight struggling to pierce the clouds, and trying to prepare myself mentally for doing what I knew I had to do. I planned my outfit in my mind: perhaps my prim pinafore dress and a long-sleeved blouse. Nothing too exciting; nothing too provocative.
I dressed in front of the hissing gas fire, searching for my clothes on the free standing rail amidst Susan’s nylon dresses, and then buckled my plain black shoes, picked up the paper bag from its hiding place under my bed and left the house. I planned my little speech as I shivered along the seafront road, and how I would enter and exit with my head held high, as classy as Julie Christie and twice as unreachable.
‘All right, darlin’?’
I was shaken from my reverie by the builders overhead, who were climbing the carapace of the Majestic Arcade like monkeys. One was leaning over the railing, winking at me. I ignored them, as I usually did, and was rewarded with cries of ‘Frosty knickers!’ and ‘Give us a smile, then!’
Directly across the road, beside the promenade, was the fun park. The closed kiosk stood a little self-consciously out on t
he end. Some kid had written in large black ink over the faded drawings of lollies Anne Watson is a Slag. The lad who worked the dodgems was still there, hanging half off one of the poles, talking to someone. As I neared the end of the arcade I saw that it was Johnny, in his bespoke suit and neatly brushed-forward hair.
‘I don’t half fancy a coupla grapefruit.’ Without meaning to, I looked up and saw one of the labourers clutch his hands to his chest, guffawing.
‘Oh, shut up,’ I said, conscious all the same of my breasts inside my bra, joggling as I walked.
‘I’m only having a laugh, love. Lost yer sense of humour?’
‘Sod off,’ I muttered, but quietly, thinking of the further gauntlet I still had to run.
I walked as far as the little harbour and the black points of the fish-smoking towers. A couple of old men in sou’westers were sat on three-legged stools beside one of the boats, complaining in loud voices. One of them had a pipe clamped between his teeth, and I thought that if I squinted this could be two hundred years ago, so little did things seem to have changed in this particular corner of the world.
I turned up Regency Road, away from the seafront, and headed towards the green, where the dribbling fountain stood and the old ladies gathered on the benches with their shopping trolleys. To my right, across the street, was a ten-foot-high fence that stretched across a dusty, uneven road. Behind the fence a huge placard had been erected. The same artist who had depicted the shiny new arcade had also done some work here, although this time the people had been drawn in full colour: a husband and wife with gleaming copper hair, and two freckle-faced children, all looking up in wonder, open-mouthed, at the magnificence stretching above them. The sign banded below them read PRINCES STREET ESTATE: A Brand-New Helmstone for a Brand-New Age.
There was a gate set into the fence; I opened it and went through.
Behind the placard was a broad expanse of dusty brown earth, and springing up at regular intervals were semi-constructed blocks of flats rising like stubby fingers from the rocky ground. Like the Majestic, they were surrounded by frames of scaffolding, except for one, completed and gracing the clouds at its peak. The building seemed all windows to me, broken up with plain slates of concrete, and its height took my breath away.
The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House Page 13