The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House

by Lam, Stephanie

  ‘I suppose that it’s my family background that concerns you,’ I said stiffly.

  ‘Oh no, no, Robert, you misunderstand me. We consider you to be a good connection. Especially now you have reassured me that you will – well, she has had a – I mean, I like to think we have given her a fairly decent upbringing, and as long as on your twenty-fifth … if that is certain …’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, with perhaps a sliver of a sense of how those girls last night may have felt. ‘It is certain.’

  He coughed. ‘Then we would like you to remain friends with our daughter, in order that she doesn’t … that she remains on the path that we consider appropriate.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, although I was not at all sure that I did.

  Feathers came towards my chair and leaned on the back of it. It rocked back and forth and he looked down at me. I smelled the whisky on his breath as he said, ‘Are you considering marriage? That’s what I would like to know.’

  I felt a headache coming on. ‘Er … well. Er … of course, I’m only nineteen,’ I began. ‘In the future, I – er …’

  ‘Yes, not now, obviously,’ he said. He let the chair go and it swayed, making me feel nauseous. ‘I’d expect you both to be at least twenty-one. But you’re an intelligent young man, Robert. You would be a good match. Yes, that would be fine.’

  ‘Would it?’ Now he had noted his approval, I was not sure I wanted it. I said quickly, ‘The inheritance due to me is – well, it’s not – that is … I would have to work as well if I wanted to support a family.’

  ‘Good. Can’t stand these idle layabouts, living off unearned incomes,’ he growled, and I suspected an unconscious aspersion here, cast at my cousin. ‘What are your plans, by the way?’

  ‘Well, I’m reading History.’ In truth, I had no idea what I would do after that, although Feathers was already nodding vigorously.

  ‘Good, good. And of course you’re bound to make excellent contacts at university. I can see you’re a hard worker, Robert. Also, if necessary, Mrs Feathers and I would be happy to support you in your future endeavours. As a loan, of course. Yes, I’m sure you have a glittering future ahead.’

  I had the sensation I was being drawn into some sort of agreement. ‘That’s very … very kind,’ I murmured.

  ‘Not at all.’ He grinned broadly and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘You are going to make our daughter very happy. Now, how about a drink to celebrate – another Scotch?’

  Thoroughly dazed, I left the doctor’s house half an hour later with my head whirling, under the impression that I had agreed to become engaged to his daughter without my actually having proposed at all. It was quite a magic trick; I wondered how he had done it.

  I supposed, I thought, woozy on the whisky as I meandered towards the railing and looked over at the ice-blue sea, that it did not really matter, as long as Lizzie was not brought into it. Without Lizzie, it had been merely a conversation between Dr Feathers and me.

  A breeze shook the air and whipped my thoughts back into shape. How could I decide an engagement with a girl’s father and not bring the girl into it? The arrangement sounded practically medieval. Perhaps Lizzie would not want to marry me; arrogantly, that thought had not occurred to me until this moment.

  Then I wondered if I wanted to marry Lizzie. I thought of her earlier on the balcony, with the fresh bloom in her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes, and remembered the idea that I would not mind very much being beholden to her. She was certainly attractive, intelligent, and not at all fast; surely three very desirable qualities in a future mate. That illicit kiss in the waxworks had intimated a deep passion beating within her wholesome bosom, and the idea of being the first to draw that out in the marital bed was very alluring indeed.

  Then, for some reason, I thought of Clara Bray. I saw her swaying on the wooden gate this afternoon, tears brimming her red eyes, as unattractive as I’d ever seen her and twice as beautiful. I thought of being married to her, of being able to hold her in the night, to kiss away her tears and be the one who could make everything all right.

  I tried to dash away the idiotic idea, but it kept returning. Alec and Clara were fundamentally unsuited, except that they were both impetuous fools. They’d long since fallen out of love, but I … but I …

  It was Dr Feathers’ Scotch that encouraged my thoughts forward, placing my feelings for Lizzie beside my feelings for Clara. There was no comparison, and they had only remained hidden from me for so long because I had decided that Mrs Bray was a spiteful witch and best given a wide berth.

  I loved her. I loved Clara Bray, and it was as useless a notion as any that I’d ever had. I loved her because she was wilful and brave and honest and tigerish. Maybe I had loved her since the first time I’d seen her, pale-faced and foul-mouthed on the first-floor landing, and now I was being tipsy and maudlin, which was no help to anyone. Best to think of Lizzie, with whom the future was solid and bright and who, after all, liked me a great deal better than Clara Bray currently did, despite her recent thawing.

  I turned back towards Castaway House and, as I did so, I saw Dr Feathers watching me from his office window on the ground floor. He smiled and waved, and I waved back, and as I climbed the steps to home, looking forward to a night of innocent dreaming about Clara’s red lips, I had the strange, distinct impression that I was not engaged to Lizzie Feathers at all, but to her father instead.

  11

  1965

  I pulled the plug and let the water swirl out of the bathtub. In the steam blurring the cracked mirror over the wash basin I wrote my name.

  From the other side of the frosted glass door, shapes moved past and bottles clanked. I heard the rumble of a joke, a swishy giggle in response, and thought that the party must have begun.

  My name was already fading. I smeared Star’s name beneath mine and drew a swaggering heart around the pair of us. I saw my moon-sick reflection in the smears, and wondered what the hell I’d become.

  Star had been inside and around me for a whole day; I’d been grinning like a fool all morning in the kitchen of the Bella Vista, even as Mrs Hale had talked of how, if bookings didn’t look up, she’d have to think of letting me go. I’d spent the afternoon anticipating the party, resisting the urge to go up beforehand, my insides giddy with nerves.

  I knew I was being idiotic. I knew this wasn’t real, not in any proper sense. She was a girl and I was a girl, and therefore this was no more than a silly crush – a pash, as they said in the boarding-school stories I’d devoured as a kid. And we were a hundred miles from those tales of mannish women in serge suits preying on young girls; we were just Star and Rosie, kissing under a windowsill, sharing pieces of our past.

  I tied my robe around my waist and unlocked the bathroom door. The hallway was clear, and so I padded up the gritty stairs and let myself back into the flat. I spent a lot of fruitless time trying to iron my hair straight, and then dressed in front of the sputtering gas fire, hitching fresh stockings to my suspender belt and sliding on my wool dress with the angular red and grey stripes as, in the kitchen next door, Susan and Val made cocoa and smoked and gossiped about their day at work.

  I wondered what Star would be wearing tonight, how she’d have done her make-up. I wondered if she’d notice the work I’d done on my eyes, the thick black lines and the glued-on lashes. I wondered if I’d be able to speak to her on her own. I caught myself grinning once more, in the looming gilt mirror, and tried to clamp it down into something cool and aloof. It didn’t work.

  I checked the time on my alarm clock. I’d decided on ten o’clock, or just past, so it wouldn’t seem as if I’d been waiting for that particular hour. I wanted to see Star before she was drunk, but arriving too early would seem overkeen. I was sitting on my bed, kicking my heels against the post, a chill rattling through the gap in the panes, when I remembered the promise I’d made to myself.

  I threw myself backwards on to the bed, eyes closed. Perhaps I should just go straight to the party. H
e wasn’t expecting me, after all. Yet at the same time, I thought of Dockie alone in the basement, and of how I hadn’t seen him yesterday, too wrapped up in shreds of Star to worry about an old man. I also needed to square things, for myself if not for him.

  I plucked from my purse the roll of notes Mum had given me yesterday. I counted out forty bob and added another five shillings of my own. Then I took the stairs all the way down. Dockie’s door was ajar, and as I pushed it further open I saw that he wasn’t inside.

  There was still evidence of him in the room: the overcoat slung across the chair, a half-drunk cup of tea on the side. The awful reek I’d experienced the first time I’d visited him had been replaced by the acidic scent of tomato soup, still open in its giant tin on the side.

  I looked behind the doorway. There was the paper bag from Bradley’s, discreetly nestled by the skirting board. I looked inside and saw that my stolen shoes were still in their cardboard box, wrapped in tissue. I picked up the whole thing and put my forty-five shillings on the table. I hoped I wouldn’t have to explain. Surely, with Dockie, I wouldn’t have to explain.

  His envelope was also on the table, with its photograph on top, the one he’d been clutching, wrapped in a blanket on the docks, when Frank had found him. I peered at the shape of a sepia ear, the blur of a baby’s forehead, wishing I’d brought Mum’s photograph yesterday to compare. They could be the same – possibly, just possibly. And yet, if they were, what then? What on earth could link old Dockie to my mother? I couldn’t think about this right now, not with my head full of Star and my stomach filmy with anticipation.

  I put the photograph back and left the room. As I was passing the bathroom at the end of the corridor I noticed a grizzled, military-type man in a crisp blue shirt leaning on the edge of the wash basin, observing himself in the plastic-edged mirror.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said and he turned, startled. ‘You haven’t seen the gentleman in Flat Four, have you?’

  ‘Rosie,’ he croaked, and I realized with a shudder of surprise that it was Dockie, wearing a shirt the salesgirl had picked out for me in Bradley’s. His mouth, naked without its beard or moustache, seemed to tremble uncertainly in the quavering electric light.

  I touched my own chin in sympathy. ‘Gosh,’ I said eventually. ‘You look … younger.’

  He fingered his new short haircut. ‘There was a place,’ he wheezed, ‘in the Snooks. Gas lamps, brass fittings, cut-throat razor in a leather case, something for the weekend, sir. Smell of hair oil. I knew I had been there before.’

  ‘They did all that to you?’

  He nodded. ‘I would pay a hundred pounds to have them put it all back again.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  He stumbled past me and returned to his room. I followed him, leaving the bathroom light buzzing, as he walked to his bed and sat heavily down, putting his face in his hands. I thought of the party beginning upstairs, the booze being consumed, the dancing and the laughter, and my five-past-ten arrival time disintegrating. Pulling out the chair, I sat down opposite him and said, ‘What’s the matter?’

  He shook his head. After a while he shifted his hands and looked at me through the bars of his fingers. ‘Oh, Rosie,’ he murmured. ‘Sweet Rosie. My saviour. You understand, don’t you, how difficult it can be when the past returns?’

  ‘Um … well, yes. That is, I suppose so.’

  He sighed heavily. ‘I was starting to remember it all, you see. Pieces of my childhood. Sunlight on a meadow, chasing a butterfly with a net; and my mother – my mother’s voice calling me to come back, lemonade in a stone jug and I, running far away.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said softly. ‘Remembering your childhood, that would be difficult.’

  ‘And then as the hair fell from me, I looked at the face in the mirror.’ He gestured to it, as if all the answers were there, and got to his feet impatiently. ‘And I wish I never had.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Frank told me, you see.’ He was looking around the room; finally, he pulled the coat from the back of the chair upon which I was sitting. ‘Frank, that great weasel, spoke some truth. He said to me, “Dockie,” he said, “the reason you have no memory is because you wish to have no memory.” ’

  He dragged the coat around himself.

  ‘Look, don’t go anywhere,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk about this. Maybe I can help.’

  He turned to me, his breath beery, his mouth twitching. ‘Nobody can help me,’ he hissed. ‘You see, Rosie, I have begun to remember. As I looked in the mirror I recognized the face that looked back, and I knew one great fact: that I was a bad person.’

  He snatched up the pile of money and the envelope, whirled to the door, grasped the handle and stepped out into the passageway.

  ‘But you can’t know!’ I said, hurrying after him as he stuffed the money into a deep pocket. ‘Not if you don’t remember properly.’

  ‘I was a bad person!’ He strode up the stairs to the main hallway, and I trotted up too, the bag of shoes still swinging from my wrist. ‘You see, Rosie, I remember all this. These flagstones here – black and white – I remember them. This banister end, curled just so. There was a mirror there, where that telephone is, and a mahogany stand. There was a table in the centre, always with a vase of flowers in the middle, on a lace mat. This is what I remember.’

  ‘And what about …?’

  He was moving along the hallway to the front door.

  ‘… The story you had to tell?’ I gabbled. ‘The truth?’

  ‘The truth!’ He jabbed at his head. ‘The truth is that I no longer want to remember. The truth is that I wish it would all smash to pieces.’

  ‘What about Clara? And Robert Carver?’ I said softly, as his hand rested on the door catch, unfastened so that people could come into the party as they liked.

  ‘Never mind all that!’ He flung the door open.

  I thought of what Star had told me yesterday. ‘I know who Clara is, and she’s coming here on Saturday. She owns the house. Dockie, listen! She’s your landlady.’

  ‘It’s finished.’

  He was already out on the porch. As I got to the doorway, he was hurrying down the steps; I saw that it was raining, yet again. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Where I should have gone the minute I arrived.’ He glared at the downwards slope of the hill. ‘Back to Dublin.’

  ‘But … but …’

  ‘I thank you, Rosie, for your kindness.’ He lifted a hand in farewell, as the rain slicked his newly short hair flat against his head. ‘Go inside. It’s raining.’

  And then he continued down the path, turned left at the gateway and headed down the hill towards town. He had gone a few yards when he looked back at me and called, ‘There is something of yours in the room, I believe.’

  I held up the bag weakly. ‘I’ve got it,’ I said, but he had already disappeared from view. ‘I’ve paid you back,’ I added to the driving rain, before going back inside the house and kicking the door closed.

  I remained in the hallway for several minutes, even after the light timed itself off. I stood in the dark beside the telephone stand, not even sure why I should be so upset. This was the business of a drunk old stranger; it had nothing to do with me. And yet I was frustrated, with him for running away, and with the whole tangled skein of wool the thing had become, and here I was, left holding the knotted ball with no idea even of where to begin.

  And then from somewhere, either upstairs or downstairs or from within the walls themselves, the whistling started again. ‘Oh, shut up,’ I snapped, and, galvanized into action, I pushed on the light.

  The telephone jumped back into life, and I noticed the blackboard above it. There was another message for me – I must have missed it earlier, while I was having my bath – and it made my blood run cold in my veins.

  It said:

  Rozy. Call your Mum. About harry.

  I grabbed the duster and spat on it, wiping off the message so there was nothing left but chalk
dust. As I was rubbing viciously, a bundle of chattering young people barged into the hall through the open front door. ‘Top floor,’ called one, herding a pressed and perfumed quartet up the stairs, and as they passed me, giving me curious glances, I saw that the person at the back of the line, the one doing the herding, was Adam, the boy from the dodgems.

  He nudged me as he went past. ‘It’s you!’

  I watched him go, an odd shiver of excitement in my veins. I didn’t have to worry about Dockie any more: he had gone, heading for the railway station in the rain, waiting at the platform for the up-train to London, flapping at his head to erase his returning memories.

  In the bedroom, I pulled the shoes from the box and changed into them, admiring the way they showed off my calves. Susan and Val had sneered at the idea of the party, saying it would be full of low-lifes, but I privately thought this was because they hadn’t been invited. I picked up my cheap bottle of gin and went upstairs. As I travelled through the house, the faint sound of jangling pianos and guitars became louder, and by the time I reached the back stairs, ska music was blaring down them at full volume. Outside the open front door, on the narrow curve of the staircase, two young people were necking, ignoring everyone who had to climb over them to get into the flat.

  In the bedroom there was a circle of people on the floor, one lying on all the coats heaped on the bed, smoking pot silently, all of them strangers. They nodded at me, and I continued along the corridor towards the song blasting from the Dansette’s speakers.

  The sitting room was dark, lit by a few leaking candles and glowing cigarette ends. The sofa had been pushed to one side and a few people were dancing in the middle of the room; the rest were leaning against the walls, drinking beer or snogging against the misplaced fridge, the kitchen units, and on the disembowelled armchair.

  Then I saw Star. She was climbing out on to the roof terrace, being helped up by several friends, in her black and white op-art dress with the zip running down the front, laughing raucously. I reached her just as she was half in, half out of the window.