The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House

by Lam, Stephanie

  I took a breath, heavily excited, despite everything, at the thought of meeting Star’s grandmother. ‘All right,’ I snapped. ‘But it’s for you, not for her, all right?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘Just go downstairs and wait for her to come, say hello, that’s all. Tell her that – I don’t know, Star’s got the flu or something. If she finds out about the party and the drugs, she’ll have our guts for garters.’

  I left the flat in its uproar and climbed over the still-snogging couple on the stairs. I continued around the narrow well, along to the main part of the house and then down, all the way to the ground floor, marching to the front door and swinging it wide open.

  ‘About time too,’ snapped a sharp female voice, only the slightest bit crackly with age. ‘Unless you want me to catch pneumonia, I suppose.’

  I looked down at the woman standing under the portico. She was shorter than me, although she was wearing stilettos at the end of her thin, black-stockinged legs. Above that she had a sharply tailored suit, a dancer’s neck, and silver hair tied into a bun. Her eyebrows were plucked into two high arches, and below them were a pair of glittering eyes, which narrowed as they took me in now. ‘And who on earth are you?’ she snapped.

  ‘I’m Rosie Churchill,’ I said, blurry with drink and the dregs of the pill. ‘I live on the first floor.’

  ‘Then I take it you’re the advance guard.’ She nodded at the two cases resting at her feet. ‘You can bring these into the flat.’

  ‘Huh?’

  She ignored that, stepping on to the mat and walking along the hallway. At the door to the ground-floor flat, she turned. ‘I’m Mrs Bray,’ she said. ‘I own Castaway House.’ She plucked a key from her handbag and unlocked the door. ‘Chop-chop,’ she added, and as she disappeared I rolled my eyes, lifted the cases and followed her inside.

  Beyond the flat door was the tiny hall I had glimpsed the other day when Star had been cleaning it. To my right was a small bathroom, and ahead of me Mrs Bray had already opened the door into the bedroom and was walking through. ‘In here,’ she called. ‘On the chair will be fine.’

  French doors were washing the bedroom with pale moonlight. Beyond them I could see the glimmering glass of the conservatory windows, whose roof jutted out below our kitchen window. A brass bedstead dominated the room, with tulips at the tips of its posts, and above it hung an oil painting of a stormy seascape. There was also a writing desk, a polished Victorian-looking thing with keyholed compartments and a proper blotting pad, and beside it a white wicker chair with an old cushion, to which Mrs Bray was now pointing.

  I put the cases on top of each other on the chair, as she switched on a bedside lamp, whose base had been sculpted into the shape of an abstract female form. I saw that there was also, curiously, a much smaller bed, made up with a thin blanket, by the wall. I tried to stand upright but was finding it difficult, and so leaned casually against the edge of the door.

  Mrs Bray opened her handbag and rummaged through her purse. She plucked out a coin and held it to me. ‘For you, Miss Churchill,’ she said, and I took it, as surprised by her remembering my name as by the coin. ‘And I would like you to fetch my granddaughter, please.’

  She then turned her back to me and tugged closed the drapes covering the French windows.

  ‘She’s got the flu,’ I said, seeing her once more collapsed on the living-room floor with her dress round her waist. ‘She’s been in bed all day,’ I added lamely.

  ‘Flu!’ Mrs Bray twitched the end of one curtain to meet the other. ‘Hardly a reason not to meet one’s grandmother, when one’s grandmother has particularly requested such a thing.’

  ‘Well, you know, she’s really ill. Might be …’ I searched my brain for a suitable phenomenon. ‘Glandular fever.’

  Mrs Bray cleared her throat in a highly sceptical manner and then said with a slight concessionary tone to her voice, ‘I suppose I have arrived two days earlier than planned.’ She turned, looked me up and down and said, ‘In that case, you will have to do.’

  I frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘At the last moment, I have had to travel without my maid Louise. She has cancer, you see.’

  ‘Oh.’ I formed my face into the appropriate expression. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I. I was forced to carry my own cases from Paris.’ Mrs Bray sniffed. ‘One has porters, of course, but it’s not the same any more, when one has to wait by the side of the train for twenty minutes until a scruffy oik condescends to appear.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I murmured, as if scruffy oiks were likewise the bane of my own life. I thought of all the times I’d imagined what I’d say to the landlord if I ever met him, about how for two pounds a week the gaps in my windows could at least be fixed, but, faced with Mrs Bray, all I wanted to do, oddly enough, was agree with her.

  She sniffed again and looked once more in her purse. ‘Five pounds,’ she announced. ‘Is that agreeable?’

  I felt I’d missed some important part of the conversation. ‘Agreeable?’

  ‘As my employee is indisposed – if one could call my granddaughter an employee, seeing as she employs herself as little as possible at my expense. I shall pay you five pounds, Miss Churchill, and not a penny more.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ I began, trying to focus on Mrs Bray, ‘that I don’t quite understand.’

  She looked away from me and folded her arms across her chest. ‘Then you haven’t been told. What I need, the reason I will pay you five pounds, is – well, I’ll say it bluntly. Somebody to spend the night in the flat with me.’

  My left temple had begun to throb. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Mrs Bray indicated the small bed. ‘This is where Louise usually sleeps. My granddaughter was to have been here. You, of course, may move this into the sitting room.’ As I stared at it, struck dumb, she added, ‘You can leave as soon as it is light.’

  I swallowed on my dry throat. ‘B-but … why?’

  She walked to the mirror that stood opposite the bed and surveyed herself in it, tweaking at a loose hair from her tightly wound bun. ‘I never sleep in this flat alone. Call it an old lady’s eccentricity, if you like.’ Her reflected eyes found mine, and she added, ‘My granddaughter writes to me every week. I’ve heard all about the things the pair of you have been getting up to. I think she regards you as extremely wholesome. And now I have met you, I can see that she’s correct.’

  I thought of my fingers at Star’s collarbone and my lips on her neck. I swallowed hard. ‘Um … thank you.’

  She turned towards me and tightened her lips. ‘Five guineas then,’ she said, ‘and that’s all the English money I have, so take it or leave it.’

  I thought of what five guineas could buy. ‘I’ll take it,’ I said rapidly.

  ‘Good.’ She looked me up and down. ‘I suggest you retrieve your night-time belongings now. Knock three times on the door when you come down, and I shall let you in.’

  I ran back up to my room as fast as my wobbly legs would take me. Five guineas just to go to sleep: it was too good to be true. I supposed she wanted a bodyguard, what with all the suspicious characters renting rooms at Castaway House. Not that I’d be much good in a fight, but I’d probably be quicker in a tussle than poor old Louise.

  Susan and Val were both asleep in their beds, Val curled up around a giant soft elephant, and Susan on her back, her face tilted to the orange street light like the Lady of Shalott. I pulled the cardboard box out of the Bradley’s bag; pieces of paper crackled beneath the box, no doubt all the receipts from the shop. I gathered my nightdress, a change of clothes, my sponge bag and alarm clock and stuffed them all on top. As I left the room I felt an odd twinge of fear, as if I really were venturing into the unknown and not just one floor down.

  The hallway was very quiet. There was no indication that any sort of party was going on upstairs at all. I wondered if Star was still unconscious, and hoped viciously that she was. I hoped she woke in severe pain. I knocked on the door, bitin
g down hard on my lip, which was still wobbling at the memory of the things she’d said. I would never, ever think of her again.

  Mrs Bray let me in. She had switched on the fancy three-bar electric fire that stood inside the fireplace, and it was warming from orange to red. ‘Not a patch on the real thing,’ she said crisply. ‘But one can’t spend a fortune getting the chimneys cleaned for the odd chilly evening, can one? The bed folds up, by the way. I believe the mattress is fairly light. Louise usually manages, and she’s fifty-three.’

  I spent a hazy amount of time dismantling the bed and releasing the locks, as Mrs Bray offered no help whatsoever and spent her time unbuckling her case and hanging her clothes in the wardrobe. I heaved the bed into the next room and stopped just inside the doorway to catch my breath.

  There were the two square windows that looked out on to the street, their curtains open. A pair of elegant wooden art-deco-style leather-upholstered chairs flanked the vast fireplace, which had a rather impressive dragon’s head in plaster hanging over the mantelpiece. Upon the mantelpiece I saw that Mrs Bray had placed five pound notes and five shillings. Despite containing tongs and a scuttle and all the other implements of fire-making I’d only read about in books, there was, just as in the bedroom, only an electric fire in the hearth. The items had all been badly cleaned – by Star, I presumed: white licks of polish smeared the handle of the poker, and the dragon’s head was grey with ingrained dirt.

  In the corner was a tiny kitchenette, and on the other side was a small dining table covered with a lace cloth, four spindly legged chairs and a mahogany sideboard. I pulled the bed over to the sideboard and cranked it out once more, turning it upright and locking it steady. As I straightened, I saw that above the sideboard, on the wall, were three framed poster bills.

  They were old screen-prints advertising long-forgotten plays at London theatres I’d never heard of. I looked from one to the other, finding eventually one name that linked them all: Clara Fortescue.

  ‘My glory years.’

  I jumped; I hadn’t realized Mrs Bray was behind me. She drew a triangle between the three posters, from her name in small case as part of the chorus line in Golden Lilies, rising to an ‘Introducing’ part as the ‘Ingénue’ in Zing-Zing! and then taking pride of place as ‘Maria’ in Maria Gets Married.

  ‘Fortescue was my stage name. I thought it sounded appropriate.’

  I could see she had been an actress now, from looking at her long neck, and the poise with which she held herself. She reached past me and picked up a small, oval-framed photograph on the dresser.

  ‘That’s me, playing Maria.’

  The picture was poor quality, but I made out a pretty girl in heavy make-up, clutching a paper rose. It explained why Dockie may have known her name: I supposed he’d been a fan. Perhaps he’d never visited Castaway House at all. Susan claimed to know all about the interior of Paul McCartney’s London flat just from reading about it in magazines.

  I dragged in the mattress and bedding, as Mrs Bray fitted a cigarette into an obscenely long holder that she had produced from somewhere, and lit it from the gas ring in the kitchenette. Despite my avowal of a few minutes earlier, I remembered my conversation with Star yesterday, sitting on the kitchen floor, and I found the question that had been itching inside me for several minutes rolling back to the surface.

  ‘By the way, I was just wondering,’ I gasped, as I stretched the sheet back over the mattress, ‘if you’d ever known anybody named Robert Carver.’

  ‘What?’

  I turned, holding a pair of pillows. Mrs Bray had paused, in the middle of tipping the end of her ridiculously long cigarette into an ashtray on the mantelpiece.

  ‘There’s a name scrawled on the windowsill upstairs.’ There was an odd expression in Mrs Bray’s eyes, and I hesitated to tell her exactly what was written there. ‘And – well, it’s sort of complicated, but I think he might have been here in the twenties. I was just wondering if you –’

  ‘I don’t wish to discuss it,’ snapped Mrs Bray. ‘And if you don’t mind using the bathroom now, I’d like to go to bed. I take a sleeping tablet, so I shan’t wake up.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’ I began, but she was already walking away from me. By the time I hurried past her to use the bathroom, she was at her dressing table cold-creaming her face, and barely glanced at me at all. In her warm, modern, seashell-pink bathroom, my eyes flicked rapidly around my sallow reflection, yearning to know more about Robert Carver, aching for it, and frustrated that there was no more knowing to be had.

  Back in the sitting room, I closed the door behind me and pulled the curtains closed. I had never slept anywhere so stuffed full of old, valuable things – at least, I assumed they were valuable from all the decorative flourishes that served no useful purpose. I investigated the bookshelf and the sideboard, the sculpture beneath the elaborate lamp, the nailed studs and odd Chinese patterns on the wooden chest near the window. The lock on it dangled loose, inviting further investigation, and I lifted the lid gently and swung it over.

  A cloud of dust puffed out of the entirely plain interior. The chest appeared to be full of old letters and documents, and at the very top was a face-down, heavy-looking photograph frame. Curiosity impelled me; I picked it up with both hands and turned it over.

  The frame was silver-plated, now blackened with age. Behind the glass was a studio portrait of a young man and woman posing in front of a velvet backcloth, beside a velvet-draped table. There were more ripples of velvet decorating the floor. Perhaps it had been the in-thing at the time, but from this distance of years it looked as if they were trapped in a giant curtain.

  I recognized Mrs Bray from her photograph on the sideboard, although here her hair was cut into a severe bob, and she had decorated herself with strings of beads and a shimmering dress, slashed into half-diamonds at the ends. She tilted her head to the camera with a confident, knowing look, and I thought her resemblance to Star was in the power she knew she wielded.

  I supposed that the man beside her must be Star’s long-dead grandfather, easily handsome in an old-fashioned way. He wore a stiff-collared evening suit with an almost feminine arched eyebrow that suggested all this was just for show. There was a familiarity about him I couldn’t quite place, although perhaps that was just the way he allowed a hint of a smile to play around his lips, inviting the looker into secret confidences.

  Beneath the photograph were piles of dusty-looking envelopes and documents, which I was reluctant to disturb and which seemed to have been left there for years. I was about to return the frame to its position, when I noticed that one of the envelopes beneath it – a package really – had the words Mrs. Alexander Bray inscribed upon it in an old-style copperplate hand, with the address of Castaway House below the name.

  There was something that hooked my attention in that package, but at first I was unsure what that something might be. I lifted up the heavy edge of it with one finger, squinting at the gummed-down underside, and I realized it had never been opened.

  Odd, but then no doubt Mrs Alexander Bray had had a good reason not to open it. I looked at the photograph one last time before I returned it, fresh with the knowledge of the name of the man who was looking out at me: Alexander – Alex for short, perhaps. It seemed to fit his debonair manner.

  I closed the lid, washed the dust off my hands at the tiny sink in the kitchenette and wound my alarm clock, pushing the hammer back into position and trying not to notice how few hours I had left before I had to go to work. I climbed on to the horribly thin mattress, and every twisting metal sinew of the bed base pressed into me as I leaned towards the lamp to switch it off. The moon had disappeared from this side of the house, and the street light outside was extinguished by the floor-to-ceiling curtains, thicker than the drapes upstairs. I pulled my dressing gown over the blanket to keep me warm, but I hardly needed it, away from my usual damp spot beside the window, and I wriggled my toes in the luxury of the unaccustomed heat. I was glad now that I
’d taken only a fraction of that pill as, slowly, the events of the evening slid from my conscious mind and I found myself dropping deeper and deeper into sleep.

  … And then, quite suddenly, I woke.

  I lay still, disorientated by the darkness, wondering for a crazy second if I was back in Petwick with next door’s dog howling at the moon and Harry snoring in the bedroom behind the wall. I remained motionless as the night filtered back to me, and, as the metal coils of the truckle bed dug into my spine, I remembered I was in the ground-floor flat and that I was being paid five guineas to sleep here.

  The usual sounds of the night were absent: Susan and Val’s rhythmic breathing and farting, the creaks of an insomniac tenant walking across the floorboards overhead, the bored young man who rode his moped around the hill in a constant loop. I wondered what had woken me: perhaps only a dream, although all memory of it had been lost in the sudden coming-to of my conscious mind.

  I turned on to my side, hunching the blanket and the dressing gown over my shoulders. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. I was almost on the edge of it, teetering over the cliff into blackness, when somebody breathed, quite sharply, into my ear.

  My eyes sprang open. I could see nothing but vague shadows looming against the curtains: the menace of a fireplace, the humps of the two chairs. There was silence, but for the steady tick of my clock. Gradually, my heartbeat slowed as I realized my drifting brain had played a trick on me and, finally, I allowed my eyelids to drop.

  A sharp crack echoed throughout the room.

  I fought with the covers and scrambled to a sitting position, my heart hammering. ‘Who’s there?’ I said, my voice emerging as a whisper. I swallowed. ‘Who’s there?’

  There was no answer. My heart skittered into my stomach. I screwed up my courage to crawl across the blanket towards the lamp and turn it on. I looked around, wide awake now, wishing the lamp were brighter and didn’t thrust shadowy pools across the ceiling.