The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House

by Lam, Stephanie

  ‘Clara,’ Dockie murmured when he saw me, tugging at his beard. ‘Who is Clara?’

  Surely its being Star’s real name was just a crazy coincidence. I remembered that Ted the foreman had mentioned a similar name … but I must have got that wrong. I wished I’d been listening more carefully now.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Maybe if we try hard enough, we can get back that memory of yours.’

  He nodded at me and smiled, and we matched pace with each other as we walked down the hill towards town. I still glowed with the memory of Star’s touch, and the way she’d looked as she’d caressed my face, her pupils flaring black, almost eclipsing the violet of her eyes.

  8

  1924

  After my trip into the slums in the erroneous pursuit of Mrs Bray there followed several days of rain, and I spent the time either skulking in the library or staring at the screen in darkened rooms at the town’s various picture houses. Luckily, I had not seen my hostess once, and now that the weather had suddenly turned fine again, I received a message in the afternoon, delivered by Scone, that I was to meet Alec ‘in front of our beach hut’. When I questioned Scone further on where this might be, I was told that Mr Bray had assured him that Mr Carver would be able to find it without too much difficulty, being a ‘clever sort’.

  That was why five o’clock found me stumping along the beach, sand burrowing into my shoes, peering at each hut in turn at the holidaymakers slouched there in various states, from fully clothed to semi-naked. The sky was puffy with clouds, although that hadn’t stopped the London weekend hordes descending on Helmstone in their thousands. I tripped over feet and parasols, begged apologies, sweltering in my clothes yet feeling that familiar tug on my chest all the same, and I was thoroughly red-faced and annoyed by the time I heard a voice call, ‘Robert!’

  I turned. Alec was waving at me from further along the beach, where a larger line of chalets clung to the edges of the sand. A decked area was laid out in front, and outside one of them, its doors open to the sea, sat Alec on a wicker chair, a low table beside him upon which stood an ice bucket and two glasses. On the other side of the table, thoroughly filling out another wicker chair, was a fat young man.

  I slunk through sand towards them and breathed heavily. ‘What an awful day,’ I said. ‘Give me overcast and dull any time.’

  Alec shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘Honestly, Robert, anyone would think you were a hundred and three. Here, come and say hello. Bump, this is my cousin, Robert Carver. Robert, my old school coeval, Hugh Mason-Chambers.’

  The fat man leaned forwards and enveloped my hand in two plump sweaty ones. ‘How d’you do, Carver? Just call me Bump. Glad to meet you at last; Alec says you’ve been a real help with the old Hall of Fame.’

  ‘Not … not really,’ I said. ‘Just lent an artistic eye, I suppose.’

  ‘Heard the tableaux were your idea. Jolly good one.’ He twisted in his chair. ‘Sampson!’

  From nowhere appeared a man with sleek hair and an athletic build, a champagne flute in his hand. In one move he lifted the bottle from the bucket, poured a glass of fizzing liquid and handed it to me.

  We toasted the Hall of Fame’s success. Sampson disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived.

  ‘Damn good, ain’t he, my Jew?’ said Bump proudly, as if speaking of a grandchild. He bent out of his chair, holding his glass to where I stood awkwardly on the sand. ‘Anyhow, to future riches!’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ muttered Alec, and then, recovering his usual cheerful demeanour, added, ‘I mean, with Robert on board, it’s practically guaranteed.’

  I shifted under the weight of this extra responsibility. ‘When are you hoping to open?’

  ‘Not long now,’ said Bump airily. ‘Always a hiccup, isn’t there, Bray?’

  ‘Teething problems,’ said Alec. ‘Of course, it’s all her fault. If she’d helped us, as she was supposed to, we wouldn’t be behind at all.’

  A short silence followed. Bump turned his champagne flute round by the stem and studied the bubbles. I looked out to sea.

  Finally Bump coughed and said, ‘Coming out on the razz tonight, Carver?’ I turned towards him and he winked heavily. ‘Bray and I are painting the town red.’

  ‘But it’s the Featherses’ soirée,’ I said. ‘Or have you turned it down?’

  Alec closed his eyes. ‘Bugger. Completely slipped my mind.’ He opened them again and winked at Bump. ‘Robert wouldn’t have forgotten. He’s taken a fancy to one of the Feathers girls. How is all that going, then? Does she defy her pure and innocent appearance?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, attempting to sound shocked. Bump and Alec roared with laughter.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ hooted Bump. ‘You go to the pictures and spend the entire night with your hand creeping up her arm, and by the time you get anywhere interesting she does a sort of wriggle and you’re back to square one.’

  This was not exactly the truth, but I was certainly not about to tell him that after my and Lizzie’s secret kiss beside Rudolph Valentino, and our eventual red-faced conversation afterwards, pretending that nothing had ever happened, she had been the one inching closer to me at the cinema. Strangely enough, for some reason I had found myself actually watching the films, and had been almost annoyed that Lizzie’s fingers were fluttering inside my palm.

  I had by now taken a thorough dislike to Bump, and so I merely drank my champagne as if the idea of discussing a lady’s behaviour was far beneath my dignity. I cast about for a new topic of conversation. ‘Is the chalet yours?’ I said to Alec, who was busy winking and smirking at Bump.

  ‘Er … rented.’ He burped and put his hand over his mouth, a second too late. ‘Clara usually moons about in here, flicking paint on her dreadful canvases, but when she heard Bump was coming down she took off.’

  ‘Can’t stand me,’ said Bump, attempting to look rueful. ‘No doubt I’m a bad influence.’

  ‘You do your best,’ said Alec, and they smirked again.

  ‘She paints?’ I said, squinting at the grey interior of the hut, trying to see canvases. ‘I didn’t know she painted.’

  ‘If you can call it that.’ He made a humphing sound. ‘I call it daubing.’

  ‘No harm in having a little hobby.’ Bump nodded. ‘For the ladies. Men, though. Let me tell you, I’ve met a number of male artists. Bunch of pansies, the lot of them.’

  Alec coughed and glanced at me. ‘Of course, Robert’s an artist.’

  Bump glanced at me with distaste. ‘Yes. I’d forgotten that.’

  I put my glass down on the table. ‘Thank you for the champagne,’ I said, and then, to Alec, ‘I must get back and change for dinner.’

  Alec groaned as if the effort of even thinking about dinner at the Featherses’ was too much for him. ‘What time do we have to be there?’

  ‘Seven, for eight,’ I said.

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘I’ll be there at five to.’

  ‘Blow them out,’ roared Bump. ‘They sound like a lot of bloody bores anyway.’

  I left them as Bump called for Sampson to pour more champagne, and wound my way back up the hill. I sincerely hoped I’d never have to meet Alec’s business partner again: he was just the sort of boy I’d hated at school, always trying to screw one’s head into the ground during rugby, flicking one’s backside with a wet flannel in the changing rooms, the kind who thought knowledge and learning were seditious weapons best avoided at all costs.

  A couple of hours later I left Castaway, alone. The evening air held a pleasant little breeze, and I ran up the steps of the Featherses’ house wishing I’d had further to walk to get there. The parlourmaid Doris, dressed in black for the occasion, opened the door and led me into the hallway. It was much narrower than Castaway’s, although every time I had been here I had had the sense of life spilling over itself behind the closed doorways.

  In fact, as I stood in the hallway a door there burst open and a young boy I had never seen before ran towards me, bran
dishing a wooden sword, a sticky ring of something round his mouth. ‘Ngah,’ he snarled at me. ‘You go away now.’

  Doris groaned. A buxom woman in a starched uniform leaned over the upstairs railing and said, ‘You little devil! I’m going to smack you so hard, you won’t see next week!’

  The child looked momentarily distressed and then turned tail and ran towards the servants’ stairs at the end of the hallway.

  ‘You wait there!’ we heard, as the nanny ran down. ‘I’ll skin the hide off him,’ she muttered at us, before making away after the boy.

  ‘Sorry about that, sir.’ Doris headed for the staircase and I followed her. ‘If you’d like to come this way. Some of them are already here, you know. Arrived too early,’ she added with a sneer.

  From the basement, I heard a distant squawk.

  ‘Was that the youngest Feathers I saw?’ I asked.

  ‘Master Anthony. Runs Nanny Woods ragged, poor thing.’ This last was said with some malicious amusement in her voice, and I suspected the two did not get on.

  The first time I had visited Lizzie at home, I had been struck by how the Featherses’ house was a perfect reverse copy of my cousin’s, only smaller. Now I had got to know it a little better, I almost preferred it. The drawing room here, at the top of the first flight of stairs, had a permanently opened door – unlike at Castaway, where Mrs Bray had claimed it for her own – and Doris led me inside.

  A few people were dotted about the drawing room, murmuring politely to one another. A gramophone player in the corner cranked out an inoffensive tune. I looked round for Lizzie, but saw only Dr Feathers, who approached with his arms drawn wide as if to embrace me.

  ‘Mr Carver! How good of you to be so punctual. A highly underrated virtue, if I may say so myself. Elizabeth and the other girls will be down shortly; there have been tears today because I am only permitting Lizzie to stay for the dinner. Girls, Mr Carver, cause one nothing but trouble. Tamsin! Tamsin! Mr Carver is here.’

  I shook Mrs Feathers’ ghost-like hand. She was a pale, faded woman – if one were asked to describe her as a colour, she would have been beige. I had wondered before how on earth she could put up with Dr Feathers’ monologues without wanting to strike him on the head with the poker. However, I had come to realize immediately that had she ever had any life in her the good doctor had long ago bled it dry.

  ‘Wonderful to see you again, Mr Carver,’ she said in a voice like autumn leaves. ‘Lizzie says such nice things about you.’

  ‘Yes. Good of you to take her on,’ said Feathers. ‘She was moping about the house like a lost soul for months after the Frederick Sponder episode.’

  ‘Honestly, Father!’ said a sharp voice behind him. He turned and Maddie stood there, her brows knotted. ‘You … you can’t …’ However, here her nerve failed her and she trailed off before turning and stomping across the room.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Feathers weakly, as I wondered of what exactly the Frederick Sponder episode had consisted. ‘I don’t know what’s got into her recently.’

  ‘She’s fifteen,’ muttered Dr Feathers. ‘That’s explanation enough.’

  And then Lizzie was in the room, her hair arranged in a complicated sort of chignon, and her eyes flashed when she saw me, and I was utterly relieved that we were over that awkward kiss a week ago. ‘Good evening, Robert,’ she said demurely, and I sensed the snare of her gaze even as I looked away.

  ‘Ah! You’re here! Good. Now, Lizzie, I want you to circulate. Talk to our guests. Don’t stick to Mr Carver like a stray puppy all night. Get you a drink, Carver? You look like a Scotch man to me.’ Before I could refute that, he was waving a tumbler of the hideous stuff over towards me.

  Lizzie bent her head towards me. ‘Must go,’ she whispered. ‘Sorry. Doctor’s orders.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I whispered back. ‘I’ve plenty to amuse myself with here.’

  I walked to the floor-length window, from where I could see mist wreathing the waves. The guests were, I imagined, the great and good of Helmstone: the promised mayor, a few town councillors, probably a headmaster or two, plus the inevitable spare women. There was a clump of them by the other window, wreathed in flowers and perfume; I observed that they seemed rather jolly to be spinsters, and were knocking back their sundowners with gossipy abandon. I smiled genially to hide my disapproval at the sight of them larking about.

  I had a sudden thought of Mother and Father in the dining room with the oilcloth on the table and the doily dead centre, the mantelpiece with the jade figurine that Mother had been given on her seventeenth birthday. We weren’t a noisy household; even as a child I’d been tamed and quietened, but I felt all the same that they might be missing my presence, for without me all they had in common was their deepest, most heartfelt desire not ever to make a fuss. I presumed this was because of all the fuss that had occurred when they’d eloped together twenty years ago. They’d been retreating from it ever since.

  ‘How d’you like the parents’ collection, then?’

  I turned, startled. Madeleine Feathers was standing next to me, her hands behind her back, rather in the manner of her father, nodding at the wall of paintings that I had been unconsciously staring at.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Very – um – very … I’m sorry, I hadn’t even paid them any attention.’

  Maddie laughed. ‘Come and have a look. Do you think this is proper hostess behaviour? Mother says if I’m good I may even be allowed to stay to dinner next time.’

  ‘You’re doing a marvellous job,’ I said, and allowed her to lead me over to the wall. I had been in the drawing room a few times since my arrival next door, and yet I had always felt rather constrained from looking round the room. I took the opportunity to have a good peruse now I was here in company. There were various portraits of, I assumed, the Feathers brood, framed in the usual velvet, including one of Lizzie and Maddie as young girls, holding white feathers in their palms, which struck me as almost grisly in its mawkish symbolism. There were others, possibly of deceased household pets, and one, at the edge, that seemed not to fit at all.

  It was of a sunrise over the sea, a common enough subject, but the splashes of vermilion and ochre on the churning waves suggested anger, as if the brushstrokes had flicked over the canvas again, again, again.

  ‘What do you think of this one?’ asked Maddie. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not one of ours, so you may give your true opinion.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I frowned in mock-seriousness, as if I were conversing at the Royal Academy. The painting did have something about it, and so I said, ‘Rather undisciplined, but it has a certain wild passion, don’t you think?’

  Maddie chuckled. ‘Can you guess who did it?’

  I peered at the signature and, as I did so, a voice over my shoulder purred, ‘Admiring my painting, Mr Carver?’

  Maddie blushed. I turned to Mrs Bray and said, hoping she hadn’t heard me earlier, ‘It’s very nice.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Nice?’

  I saw that Alec was behind her, swaying slightly as he surveyed the room.

  ‘Would you get me a gin and tonic?’ she rapped out to him, and he sighed heavily, put his hands in his pockets and lumbered across the room to the drinks table.

  She looked like a sharp-toothed carnivore in that sheath of a dress she was wearing, along with her scarlet lips and glittering eyelashes, and her perfume smelled of crushed cigarettes.

  ‘So tell me, Mr Carver, have you been back to Princes Street lately?’

  I had been expecting something like this, but felt wrong-footed all the same. ‘N-n-no,’ I said. ‘Of-of c-course not.’

  ‘Strange. I thought you might have formed an attachment to the place.’ There was a mischievous slant to her voice I had not heard before. ‘You were quite the talk of the area, you know. Everybody thinks you’re desperately in love with me.’

  I did not mind her teasing. It meant, I presumed, that she could not be as furious as she had been before. The gong sounded, and so befo
re she was stitched back to Alec’s side I said, ‘I’m n-n-not a spy.’

  She widened her eyes. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘As you accu-accus … said I was.’ For some unknown reason, my speech was splintering as badly as it ever had done in my first nightmare years of school. ‘N-Nobody in the family’s asked me to rep-p-port back to them. About you, I m-mean.’

  She nodded. A servant held out a silver tray with a drink clinking ice upon it, and she took it and raised it towards Alec, who was hovering at the other end of the room. ‘All right. I believe you.’

  The turnaround stunned me. ‘R-really?’

  Past us, people began drifting down to the dining room. I saw Lizzie make her way across the room.

  Mrs Bray sipped her drink through a straw. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d therefore surmise that the only reason for your following me is that you were sexually attracted to me and, as you despise yourself for that, you have convinced yourself that I’m a blatant little slut who deserves everything she gets.’

  ‘Then,’ I snapped, ‘it’s just as well you do know better, isn’t it?’

  Mrs Bray smiled round her straw and flicked her eyes leftwards. ‘Elizabeth!’ she exclaimed. ‘How lovely to see you. I’m so glad you’ve been entertaining our cousin. Alec and I have been far too busy, and I’m afraid we’ve quite neglected our duties.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s been fun.’ Lizzie gave Mrs Bray a cow-eyed look. ‘I love your dress by the way,’ she added, as she blushed a deep crimson.

  ‘You are a sweetie. You must come round sometime, and we can have a jolly girls’ chat in the garden.’ She shone her teeth at me. ‘Anyway, I’ll allow you two to go down. I believe my husband’s coming this way. Ah. Here he is.’

  And nobody would know, I thought, as I descended the stairs next to Lizzie, the frosty silence that reigned at home. True, Alec and his wife hardly said a word to each other the entire evening, but as they were placed at opposite ends of the dining table this went unnoticed, except by me.