The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House

by Lam, Stephanie

  She laughed softly. ‘Hey, if you can’t go through life without devastating your mother at least once, then you’re not really normal.’

  I leaned on the pebble-dashed post. ‘The thing is, I didn’t have a choice, but of course I can’t explain that.’

  ‘Then I take it you haven’t told her about you and Harry?’

  I grimaced and looked away. ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ I muttered.

  ‘God, Rosie, I’m not judging you.’ I looked up; she was balancing the soles of her feet on the edge of the kerb. ‘Remember when I spoke to your mum on the telephone a couple of days ago? She said your stepfather had been coming by to see you. And I thought, Oh, God, not the chap in the Jag who’d shag a tree if it had tits? Plus that saucy note, of course. I worked it all out then.’

  ‘Well done, Miss Marple,’ I muttered. ‘Now you see what kind of a nice person I am.’

  ‘But you are.’ Star flung her arm out in a dramatic gesture. ‘He’s the filthy pervert.’

  I shook my head. ‘It was both our faults. Worse for me. I’m … you know … I should have known better.’

  ‘How old were you when it started?’

  ‘Seventeen,’ I mumbled. In the distance, I saw the bus rounding the corner.

  ‘Then he’s the one who should have known better.’ She put a hand to the post and swung on it. ‘I suppose he told you a load of lies, did he?’

  I wrinkled my nose. ‘I was an idiot.’

  The bus drew closer. Star stuck her arm out to hail it. ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘I was. I thought he really liked me, you know? That I was the one for him and he’d only married Mum by mistake. And all the time I was just … I was just …’

  ‘Just a challenge?’ suggested Star, and I nodded. The bus drew level and we climbed on to pay our fare back to Helmstone. Star threw the driver some coins, saying, ‘My treat, and no argument.’

  We settled at the rear of the bus against the rickety back of the seats. ‘The worst thing is,’ I said in a hushed tone, although as we moved off my voice was drowned by the rattling of the engine, ‘I didn’t even leave straight away after we … well, I mean, I didn’t … you know … that is, maybe we would have …’

  ‘Spit it out,’ said Star. ‘Which, by the way, I hope you did.’

  She chortled, and I wondered if I felt as she had an hour earlier when she’d accused me of not taking her problem with Johnny seriously enough. ‘I went into Mum’s bedroom to borrow her hair irons,’ I said crossly. ‘And in her drawer I found all these notes and cards – all from him.’

  Star dug in her bag for a cigarette. ‘You hadn’t realized they were having a full relationship, so to speak.’

  I blushed. ‘I was such a fool.’ As soon as I’d read Harry’s messages to my mother, the language in them, much dirtier than anything he’d ever written to me, all the things I’d witnessed and ignored slotted back into place. A memory of Harry pinching my mother’s bottom as she hung out the washing, of her squealing hysterically as they sat in the front seats of the car while I read a book in the back, of the muffled noises that came through the bedroom wall at night.

  If he’d professed love for her, I wouldn’t have minded: I’d have thought he was lying. But all the references to body parts and what he wanted to do to her where – I’d read them and flung them back, feeling sick at the thought of it: partly at the thought of my mum as a sexual being, partly at the thought of them together in bed, but mostly just because I’d been weaving a fantasy in my own head. I couldn’t even blame Harry for that. The illusion of the two of us as star-crossed lovers fractured as quickly as the time the cinema reel caught fire and melted Sean Connery’s face in Technicolor, right in front of us on the screen.

  ‘The thought of living in the same house as them,’ I said to Star, as we bounced up and down on the bad suspension while Petwick passed by, ‘I just couldn’t bear it. I got the bus, just like this, saw the notice in the window of Castaway, rented the room and went back home to tell Mum I was moving out.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Star. ‘That’s normal.’

  The whitewashed, crumbling houses of Helmstone began appearing and I felt, strangely, as if now I was really coming home.

  ‘And now Mum might have guessed,’ I said, as the bus trundled towards Duckett Lane, and I pulled the bell wire in the ceiling to stop it. ‘She asked me about Harry, and I had no idea what to say.’

  ‘She won’t guess if she doesn’t want to know.’ Star swung up to standing and we walked the length of the bus. ‘But come on, you’re her daughter. She won’t blame you.’

  ‘Of course she will. I’ll have ruined everything. She’ll never speak to me again.’

  ‘Perhaps she’ll just kick him in the balls instead, and throw his things on to the street.’

  I snorted as we climbed off the bus on to the windy road. ‘Of course she won’t. She’s in love. And he’s a fantastic liar.’

  ‘I thought he was a slimy git from the first moment I clocked him.’ She flung an arm around my shoulder as we walked back, along the giant side wall of Castaway House and round to the front. ‘I said to myself, “Rosie can do better than that, surely.” ’

  ‘How wise you are,’ I said teasingly, nestling under her arm, feeling oddly safe in her embrace, as if nothing could harm me there.

  We walked along the path and up the steps to the front door. Once we were in the hallway Star said, ‘Listen, fancy popping upstairs for a cup of tea and a smoke?’

  I hesitated. Johnny might be there and I didn’t want to share Star with anybody, not right at that moment. ‘Come to mine,’ I said. ‘The girls’ll still be at work.’

  She looked down at me, and nodded. ‘Yeah. We don’t want anyone interrupting.’

  Her cheeks spun pink almost immediately, and I wondered why she’d be embarrassed. I continued up the stairs, around at the half-landing and then up to the kitchen door. I turned my key and let us both in.

  The place was as I’d left it, the remnants of my corned-beef sandwich still on a plate on the side, although it seemed as if everything had changed. I put my bag of clothes on a chair and filled the kettle at the sink. Star leaned against one of the window ledges and looked out at the garden. ‘Nice view from here,’ she observed. ‘It’s a bit depressing only being able to see the sky from those dormer windows upstairs.’

  ‘You’ve got the terrace,’ I said, plugging the lead back into the kettle and switching it on. She turned and shrugged a smile at me, and I added, ‘By the way, there’s something quite interesting down there, where your hands are.’

  Her cheeks bloomed pink again. ‘What’s that?’ she said, removing them.

  ‘Just there.’ I went over to her and took one of her hands. I moved it back below the windowsill, inching along the ridges and grooves scored into the wood. ‘Here. You feel it?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  I closed my fingers around hers and moved them over the words.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘yes, I can feel something.’

  ‘It says …’ I traced the letters with her, our fingers in tandem. ‘Robert Carver is innocent.’

  She frowned. ‘Robert Carver?’

  ‘Yes. Have a look.’ I pulled her down, and she came with me so we were sitting on the floor, our backs to the wall, peering up at the underside of the windowsill. I kept my hand around hers, and used it to point at the lettering. ‘There.’

  She shuffled herself closer to me and peered up, flapping her long lashes. ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Remember that sketch you gave me? The self-portrait. R. C.? I think this is him.’

  ‘R. C.’ She hugged her knees in towards her. ‘The same initials as yours. God, do you think so? Wasn’t that, like, absolutely ancient though?’

  ‘Forty-one years. And then …’ I paused, wondering whether I ought to share all this with her, if she’d laugh and say I was silly to even spend a second’s thought on a time way back in history. But she was waiting for me
to speak, and so I ploughed on and said, ‘And Mrs Hale next door – you know, my boss – her father gave me this book, a really old one, and inside it was all this … well, I’ll show you in a minute. It’s in my room …’ I trailed off, because Star looked as if she was somewhere else entirely.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘What’s in your room?’

  I shrugged. ‘Don’t worry. It’s not very interesting.’

  ‘No, no. It’s not that. I was just thinking that that name, Robert Carver, I’ve heard it before.’

  I sat up. ‘Really? Where?’

  She shook her head and frowned. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘You know Dockie?’ I said in a rush. ‘The old man from yesterday, the one who called you Clara?’

  ‘Oh yes. The crazy mystic. What about him?’

  ‘Well, we ended up in the Snooks, and then he decides he wants to go to the Blind Pig.’

  ‘God,’ said Star. ‘I’m surprised you came out alive.’

  ‘It wasn’t so bad,’ I mused, thinking of how the saloon bar at lunchtime had been only semi-menacing, with its round Formica-covered tables and its seats upholstered in the sort of rough blue nylon that would give you an electric shock if you touched metal after you’d sat down. Dockie had bought me half a shandy and we sat at one of the tables, as silent people nursing stouts and bitters looked up at us incuriously and then returned to the serious business of getting plastered.

  For a long time Dockie, too, stared into his pint, and then he looked up at me and said, ‘Frank rescued me, you know.’

  I nodded slowly, wondering where this was going. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Frank. My saviour. He found me in an old corner of the docks, behind a stack of pallets, wrapped only in a blanket that felt like glass, with a wound in my head. Frank, it was, who saved my life, who took me to his house, put me in his bed as I babbled nothing but nonsense at him. He fed me soup and bought me clothes – just the same as you, Rosie, just the same as you.’

  I blushed. ‘It was nothing.’

  Dockie relaxed into the rhythm of his story, as if the words had been arranged in his head for a long time. ‘At the beginning, you see, my body would not do as my brain commanded. He washed me. Changed the dressing on my head hourly. Soothed me when I screamed gobbledegook. Until slowly I mended, as much as I was able to. It was Frank who brought me from death’s door. If he had found me an hour later, he said, I could well have already been dead. I owe him everything.’

  Dockie nodded at me. I nodded back, and cupped my half-pint glass in my hands. I wondered what Frank had looked like. I imagined a quiet bear of a man, the sort who could snap a neck but whom nobody notices until he actually does so. ‘Didn’t he think about taking you to hospital?’

  ‘There was no need. He took better care of me than any of those nurses could. Little better than sadists in caps, he called them. No. Frank nurtured me, there in his small house, for weeks. Months. And when I was well enough he found me work, working for him. He had a business, supplying the shipbrokers. I swept and cleaned and mended; I was weak at first, and useless, but I learned, I became strong, and Frank was very proud of me, so he said, very proud.’

  There was something rather unsettling in this tale of Dockie’s that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. ‘He sounds very … altruistic,’ I said.

  ‘Left me everything when he died.’ Dockie blinked. ‘Debts swallowed his business and his house, but he left me his cashbox, piled high with notes.’

  ‘So he was like a father?’

  Dockie frowned. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘But he did try to help you to find your real family, didn’t he?’

  ‘He did.’ Dockie nodded. ‘He put advertisements in the newspapers, went to the police, even in England, as he surmised from my accent that that was my country of origin. But there was nothing. Eventually he concluded that I had been gone from home a long time, too long for anyone to miss me, that I had been working on some foreign ship, far-distant from its native port, and had tumbled, or been pushed, into the ocean. From there, he theorized that I had been picked up by smugglers who had robbed me of my clothes and left me for dead on the docks.’

  ‘Sounds as if he thought of everything.’ I sipped my bittersweet shandy.

  ‘And then, one day, I found a hidden compartment in the cash box.’ His eyes flickered. ‘A pile of clippings cut from a newspaper.’

  ‘Oh, you mean … the ones you were talking about before?’

  ‘I believe so.’ He leaned across the table towards me. ‘I cannot, my dear Rosie, I cannot remember what was in those clippings, but I knew when I read them that Frank had betrayed me.’

  ‘Betrayed you? How?’

  He shook his head. ‘I do not know. But I was angry – so angry I embarked on my bender, and it was after then that I decided I had to come here, to Castaway House.’

  ‘If only you could find them, eh?’ I thought of the name he’d mentioned earlier. ‘What about this Clara?’

  He frowned. ‘Clara?’

  ‘When we were outside the house. You looked at Star – my friend – and you said, Clara.’

  ‘I had forgotten that.’ He tapped the back of his head; grey hairs flew about. ‘Yes, of course. Of course.’

  He leaned his head against a glass case containing a model ship, and appeared to drift into a world of his own. A faint smile played on his lips.

  ‘Dockie?’ I said eventually. ‘Who’s Clara?’

  ‘She is …’ he coughed creakily. ‘I can picture her. I can see her, as clearly as I can see you. Dark hair, red lips. But as to who she is … that, I have no idea.’

  I gave up. It was probably not important, anyway. I had spilled beer on the table; I mopped it up inadequately with the mats advertising tobacco. ‘You say Castaway is the key to yourself?’

  He nodded.

  I nodded too. ‘Then I suppose it was a very long time ago that you were here.’

  ‘Exactly so.’

  ‘Perhaps twenty, thirty years?’

  ‘Or longer.’ He squinted at the opposite wall. ‘I have no idea of even the date Frank found me on the docks. We celebrated the day every year: the third of September – but as to the anniversary, Frank said that was unimportant, and, you see, he laid out for me the limits of my world.’

  ‘Forty years, even.’ I calculated a date, and a thought occurred to me. I leaned across the table. ‘Actually, I don’t suppose the name Robert Carver rings any bells, does it?’

  Dockie stared. ‘Robert … Carver,’ he said slowly.

  ‘It probably doesn’t, but he was staying in the house, you see, around that time, and …’

  ‘Robert Carver.’ He repeated the name. ‘Robert Carver.’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘I know it, I know it.’ He lifted his pint, tipped his head back and finished it. ‘Oh, God, I know it.’

  ‘Then who is he?’ I said excitedly, feeling as if I was on the brink of something huge.

  He sighed, drifting once more on the vague shapes of his past. ‘I will remember. A universe is exploding in my brain.’ He nodded. ‘Everything shall return.’

  He lumbered up to the bar to buy himself another pint with a whisky chaser, and from there his speech became more and more fragmented. He rambled about odd people he’d known in Dublin throughout his life – Frank, a cat he’d made friends with – until he seemed to need me no longer. He was just another one of the Blind Pig’s waifs and strays mumbling contentedly in a corner, with the red-faced, dirty-aproned landlord on a stool behind the bar keeping a bleary eye on them all.

  I recounted all this to Star, who was silent for some time, drumming her fingers on her hunched-up knees. ‘It’s funny,’ she said finally, and then lapsed again into silence.

  ‘What’s funny?’ I prompted her.

  She stole a quick glance at me, and I sensed her assessing me. ‘The thing is, Rosie … the thing is … people do say I resemble my grandmother.’

  ‘Okay. Who’s your
grandmother?’

  ‘I mean, not only resemble. We also have the same name. She’s called Clara too.’

  ‘Clara?’

  Dark hair, red lips.

  ‘I was named after my grandmother, you see – back when my mother was still speaking to her – only I couldn’t pronounce Clara very well, and it usually came out as Star. Hence the nickname.’

  ‘But why … how on earth would Dockie have known your grandmother?’

  ‘Well …’ And here she glanced at me again, and she took a breath and said in a rush, ‘My grandmother used to live here.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘That is … my grandfather too. They owned Castaway House.’

  I laughed, but she was nodding, serious. ‘What, the entire building?’

  Star nodded. ‘It used to be pretty grand, you know.’

  ‘So perhaps …’ I turned to Star excitedly. ‘Your grandmother met Dockie when he came here, and that’s why he remembers her. And he met Robert Carver too.’

  ‘Exactly. I mean, that would explain why he called me Clara.’ She shrugged. ‘People say I look like her, when she was young.’

  ‘And your grandparents – they’re still alive?’

  ‘Only my grandmother. My grandfather died years ago.’ Star put her chin on to her knees. ‘Granny lives in Paris now. She’s more French than English, these days.’

  I nudged her shoulder with mine, because I knew how much it meant to Star, to let me into the secret places of her life. ‘I’d like to meet her.’

  ‘You will.’ Star took another breath. ‘She’s coming here on Saturday.’

  ‘This Saturday?’

  ‘She’s coming here because – well, you see, she still owns the house.’

  ‘Hold on.’ The cogs of my brain slowly turned. ‘Are you saying that the landlord is your grandmother?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked down at her lap.

  I thought of all Johnny’s threats over the rent, Star’s evasions. ‘And the flat on the ground floor?’

  ‘That’s hers. It’s where she stays when she visits.’

  ‘But … but you …’

  ‘Look, I didn’t want anyone to know, all right?’ Star slid a glance towards me. ‘It’s the reason I’m living here, so I can keep an eye on the place for her, collect the rent, that sort of thing. She gives me an allowance, you see.’