‘I’ve five minutes before the doctor arrives,’ said Mrs Hale as she came in behind me, setting to at the stove. ‘Come on, Rosie, chin up. That isn’t the attitude that won us the war.’
‘Is he all right?’ I mumbled as I stared, overwhelmed, at the mess.
Mrs Hale thrust a dish mop into my hand. ‘He had an awful night. Didn’t sleep a wink.’
‘Me neither,’ I said, taking a breath and searching for forks in the sink. ‘It was my landlady, you see –’
‘He’s convinced he saw a ghost,’ she continued, throwing bread under the grill and spooning more lard into the pan. ‘It’s his nerves, you know.’
I turned and stared at her. ‘That’s really odd,’ I said. ‘Because last night –’
‘I don’t know if I mentioned it to you,’ she continued, taking the milk from the fridge and sniffing it suspiciously, ‘but he was shell-shocked in the war. He was at a guest house in Southend when a bomb hit.’
‘Mmm,’ I said, frantically dumping plates in the water, bacon rind and all, and rinsing them clean. ‘But about this ghost –’
‘He was still in hospital when we got the news about Anthony. My youngest brother – he was in the Air Force. Shot down somewhere over the Mediterranean. Anyhow, we never recovered the body. It was the last straw for Father, as you can imagine, coming on top of the bomb blast. He changed overnight – almost never goes outside, you know. Scared of his own shadow.’
‘Mrs H.!’ Josie’s strident tones could be heard from somewhere in the stairwell. ‘Doctor’s here!’
Mrs Hale stuck her head through the curtain and called, over the heads of the seated guests, ‘I’ll be right up.’ Returning to the stove, she plucked out the toast and stuck it in the rack. ‘Now then, Rosie, will you be all right for a bit? I’ll be back as soon as I can. It’s Lizzie, you see: she thinks she’s helping, but she just makes things worse.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said weakly, thinking that in two and a half hours everything would be over.
‘Of course,’ she murmured as she left the room, ‘it’s the whole Robert Carver business that’s to blame.’
I whipped my head round. She was already pushing aside the beaded curtain. ‘Robert Carver?’ I said, and followed her out into the breakfast room. ‘What about Robert Carver?’
‘Hmm?’ She glanced back at me absently. ‘Oh, ignore me. I’m talking to myself.’
And, with that, she climbed the stairs up to the ground floor.
The second half of the morning passed as badly as the first. By the time all the guests had left, in varying degrees of bad humour, the kitchen and the breakfast room were a quagmire of dirty plates, burnt pans, knives on the floor, skewiff tablecloths, broken teacups and butter pressed into the floor tiles. I knew I should get on and clean the place, but instead I pulled out one of the chairs, sat down, and put my face in my arms on the table.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’
I peeled my face half an inch off the table and saw Josie’s violet-coloured nails tapping the door frame. Her nostrils flared as she took in the room, her lips twisting with satisfaction.
‘Don’t,’ I mumbled, returning my face to my arms. ‘Just don’t.’
She snorted, and I heard her heels clacking past me. ‘You stay there,’ she said, one nail pressing into the soft flesh of my upper arm.
I eased my head up further and rested my chin on one fist, twisting so I could see her. She battled with the beaded curtain and disappeared into the kitchen. ‘Christ on a bicycle,’ I heard her say. ‘You ain’t half got your work cut out here, eh?’
‘Thanks,’ I murmured. I heard her rattling pans in the kitchen. Louder, I said, ‘How’s Dr Feathers?’
‘Not long for this world, I wouldn’t wonder.’ The smell of lard frying in the pan returned to haunt me like last night’s whistling. ‘Mind you, he’s always seemed that way to me. He’ll prob’ly outlive us all.’ She cackled, faintly.
‘Mrs Hale said he’d been shell-shocked. In the war.’ I was thinking of Robert Carver, of course, but I didn’t know how to bring him up.
‘Straw that broke the camel’s back, if you like.’
I heard bacon sizzle and, despite myself, my stomach growled with hunger.
‘According to my mum,’ Josie continued, ‘he wasn’t the same after his wife left him back in the twenties.’
‘I thought she’d died.’ I gazed up at the tourist poster of Helmstone, much as the commercial traveller had done earlier. The artist had bleached white the promenade and printed a turquoise sea under a searing sun.
‘Died a few years ago. But they’d been separated for years; she went off and joined the Quakers, something like that. Never did get to the bottom of that story. Mrs H. don’t like to talk about it. Right then.’
She marched back inside the breakfast room and put down in front of me a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. ‘Get that inside you,’ she snapped. ‘Quickly now, before it goes cold.’
A tear sprang into my eye. ‘J-Josie …’ I began.
She flicked a glance at the clock over the tiled-in mantelpiece. ‘I got to get upstairs. Mrs H. says, when you’re finished, I’m to pay you your wages. But she wants all this cleaned up first.’ Josie patted her old-fashioned hairdo. ‘I saw you was looking peaky when you walked in this morning. Anyway, eat up, chop-chop.’
‘Thank you!’ I called, but she ignored me, carrying on up the carpeted stairs. I turned my attention to the bacon sandwich and thought I’d never eaten anything so delicious in my life.
Sometime later, I pulled off my apron and made my way to the lobby. There was a commotion going on behind the door of Dr Feathers’ room, but Josie was back at her desk, serenely reading her library book and smoking a cigarette as if nothing untoward was happening.
‘Is he all right?’ I said, as, distantly, I heard the old man shout, ‘It’s him, I tell you, it really is him!’
Josie glanced up at me. ‘I told you, he ain’t been all right since 1926.’ She snorted and twiddled the dial on the safe. ‘Mrs H. wanted me to check you’d cleaned up properly down there, but I ain’t doing them stairs again, so you’d best tell me the truth.’
I briefly shut my heavy eyelids. ‘It’s fine,’ I said, thinking of the grease spots still clinging to the tiles and the encrusted, unidentifiable scab of burned-on food on the cooker.
Josie raised one eyebrow. ‘Fine,’ she echoed, and dumped a collection of coins on the counter. ‘Mrs H. wants to give you an extra five bob for your trouble, you know.’
‘Oh, great,’ I said, thinking that five bob was nothing for all the work I’d done today.
‘And don’t you be sarky, young lady.’ Josie separated some of the money and pushed it across the counter towards me. ‘She’s a lot on her plate, has Mrs H.’
‘I know, her father,’ I muttered.
‘And this place.’ Josie rolled her eyes. ‘Nobody wants to come and stay here any more. It’s all day-trippers these days. I said to her, you know where you should have a hotel? Spain. That’s where they all want to go these days, all the moneyed lot. The middle classes. Hot weather, cheap food.’
‘I can’t see Mrs Hale in Spain,’ I said. ‘They live under a jackboot, don’t they?’
‘And they eat garlic.’ She sniffed. ‘But that’s where the living is now. Not these English seaside places; they’re rotting in their graves, you mark my words. Even twenty years ago this place was something – even during the war, when you couldn’t swim in the sea. Not now. I said to her, not even these Mods and Rockers want to come here; town ain’t even good enough to throw some deckchairs about in.’
From behind Dr Feathers’ door I heard a female voice – either Mrs Hale’s or her sister’s, say, ‘Now then, Father. You know what happened last time.’
‘Course,’ Josie was saying, ‘this road used to be the best address in town, back when my cousin Agnes was working next door.’
I stared at her. ‘Your cousin worked at Castaway House
?’
‘Didn’t I say?’ Josie picked up her cigarette and took a drag on it. ‘It was only for a year or so. She was parlourmaid; left after all that scandal, you know.’
‘What scandal?’ Vaguely, I remembered a pencil moustache and a purple headscarf: a couple on the front, muttering about long-finished occurrences I hadn’t had much interest in a week ago.
‘You know …’ She sighed and frowned. ‘What was his name? That fella.’
I took a breath. ‘Not …’ But I knew; of course, I knew. ‘Robert Carver?’
‘That’s the one.’ Josie clicked her fingers. ‘Robert Carver.’
I leaned across the counter. ‘What happened?’ I said urgently.
‘Well.’ Josie’s eyes flashed, at the pleasure of having a new audience. ‘According to my cousin –’
‘Rosie!’
I turned. At the entranceway to the Bella Vista was Star, colt-legged and ashen-faced. As she shuffled towards me I saw her hair was sticking up around her head, and she had a stippling pattern of spots across her forehead.
I rolled my eyes and turned back to Josie. ‘Never mind her,’ I said. ‘I want to know what happened with Robert Carver.’
‘Listen, Rosie.’ Star put a hand on my arm and I looked at it, surprised she wanted to be so close to me, after everything she’d told me last night. Despite myself, a flash of memory returned: me, with my lips to her neck, and the moan as she surrendered.
‘D’you mind?’ I said, as coldly as I could. ‘I was in the middle of something.’
‘It’s important.’ Her voice stuck on a frog in her throat. ‘Please.’
‘You two get on,’ said Josie. ‘I’m off to see if Dr F.’s gone mad.’
‘Wait, Josie!’
But she lifted the flap of the counter and walked towards the door, opening it without knocking. Faintly, I heard her say, ‘Now. How about a nice cup of tea?’
I glared at Star, although a small part of my brain was very pleased that she looked so sorry for herself. ‘What d’you want?’
She lowered her eyes. ‘I can’t remember saying what I said last night.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘But I’ve been told a hundred times what it was.’
‘Yes. I thought that was considerate, in front of all your friends.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ She steadied herself on Josie’s desk. ‘Really, you must believe me, I’m so sorry.’
‘No, it’s fine.’ I snatched up my bag. ‘It’s better to know what you actually think of me. At least I’m aware. Anyway, I must go. Bye.’
‘Wait.’ Her hand hovered an inch from my arm. ‘Don’t go. I’m … I’m doing this all wrong.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said, although I did care, and my stomach was collapsing all over again at the memory of her assault on me.
‘But listen, there’s something else. Someone’s been asking for you.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘Who?’
‘This chap. Knocked the whole place awake this morning. Granny answered the door to give him short shrift, and he said he’d come for Rosie Churchill at Castaway House. He works on the seafront.’
Although a large part of me wanted to walk away from her right now, I was intrigued. ‘Who was he?’
‘He cleans the seafront in the mornings. He said there’s an old man who’s got into one of the abandoned arches and won’t leave. Apparently he told them that the only person he’d speak to was you.’
I breathed out. ‘Dockie,’ I said. So he hadn’t left Helmstone after all last night. ‘The man from the basement.’
‘He was wondering if you’d go down and have a word with him.’ She looked at me with red-veined eyes.
I eyed her sourly. ‘Thanks for the message,’ I said coolly, and I walked past her, along the lobby, and down the stairs to the street. I turned left and was annoyed to see Star still trailing along in my wake. ‘No need for you to come,’ I snapped, looking away and seeing the back of Lizzie’s curly-haired head and her large body in the frame of the Bella Vista’s ground-floor window.
‘I’d like to.’ She bit her lip. ‘If that’s all right.’
I wondered what her game was. ‘It’s a free country.’
Star was babbling away as we walked downhill. ‘It’s so great you stayed the night with Granny,’ she was saying. ‘She never sleeps alone in the house; it’s one of her things. I told her there’s no need to keep coming, but she says she wants the house to know it still belongs to her. She’s a bit odd like that. So thank you.’
‘I owed a favour to Johnny,’ I said shortly. ‘And she paid me five guineas.’
‘Come on, Rosie. I can’t bear this.’
I stopped and faced her. I had never seen Star looking so miserable. ‘I don’t know what the matter is,’ I said. ‘You’ve told me what you think of me. What else is there to say?’
‘But I don’t think that. Of course I don’t.’ She ran a hand through her hair. ‘I mean, I saw you kissing Geoff –’
‘That was nothing,’ I snapped, blushing. I’d been trying to forget about that, and my less-than-perfect behaviour last night. ‘Anyway, you walked away from me. In the bathroom. And then you told everyone I’d tried to molest you.’
‘Of course I walked away from you!’ she said heatedly. ‘I was shit-scared.’
‘Of me?’ I said sarcastically, although I felt I was starting to understand her, and the fears that ran a wild river through her mind.
‘Not of you.’ She leaned against the railing hanging over the angle of the promenade. ‘I need to tell you something.’
I formed another glob of sarcasm on my tongue, but was unable to flick it out. I sighed. ‘Go on then.’
‘It’s about … remember a few days ago, when we were talking about secrets?’ She glanced in my direction to see that I did. ‘I had this friend last year, you see. She was part of our gang.’
‘Gill?’ I said, and she looked up, surprised. ‘Johnny said you’d had a row. And Geoff …’ But I didn’t want to mention what Geoff had implied.
‘It wasn’t a row. We … well, we did things together.’ She peered up at me. ‘Do you understand?’
I attempted a cool nod, while her last sentence ran hot rings through my mind. Did things together. Did things. Together. ‘Um … I mean … Yes.’ I felt myself blushing. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘I’m telling you because I owe you. If anyone found out …’ She shuddered. ‘As it was, they started saying things. Suspecting. We couldn’t handle it; neither of us could. She moved away, up to London. The next week I got together with Johnny, and I thought that was the end of it.’
I thought of Gill; I wondered what she looked like, and what they’d done together. An obscure, unpleasant sensation – jealousy, maybe – wriggled through my gut. I smiled as if I was used to hearing such revelations. ‘So why are you scared now?’
‘Because you moved in. And …’ She turned her huge eyes on me. ‘And we were friends. And I knew that … that to you it was all just a funny game. You were kissing Geoff, and I thought you would tell everyone about us, and I’ve been so scared, Rosie, of you finding out the truth.’
I frowned at her. ‘What, the truth about you and Gill?’
‘No,’ she said, almost wearily. ‘The truth that … that I think … For God’s sake, I think I’m in love with you, all right?’
She turned and moved rapidly down the hill, clamping her arms across her chest, and I stared, stunned, before chasing after her.
‘Wait!’
‘It’s okay.’ She was at the kerb, looking left and right before hurrying across the road. ‘You don’t have to say anything. I owed you an explanation. That’s all.’
‘Star –’
‘It’s this way.’ She pointed across the road. ‘He’s just down here, beside the pier, apparently. The chap said he’d be looking out for us.’
‘Listen to me.’
But she was already darting beside a coach parked on the promenade. I followed
her, and found myself in the middle of a rambunctious works outing, a driver in a braided cap attempting to herd them all. ‘Four o’clock!’ he was bawling. ‘And if any of you sods’re late, I’m leaving you here!’
The crowd laughed and heckled him. ‘Don’t have too many pints of mild, Jack!’ shouted one, a plump blonde woman in lashings of make-up. When she saw us she yelled backwards, ‘Out the way for the girlies, you lot!’ She turned to me and winked.
I weaved hurriedly after Star through the bunch of people as they argued with each other about whether they ought to go straight to the pub when it opened or down to the fun park first. ‘I want a donkey ride!’ called one, to hoots of laughter. By the time I emerged, Star was walking down the steps to the concrete walkway running alongside the abandoned arches built into the promenade wall.
‘Please wait,’ I called, but she was already talking to a man wearing overalls leaning against the seafront wall and smoking. She pointed at me as I approached, refusing to meet my gaze.
‘You Rosie?’ The man put out his cigarette on the wall behind. ‘Friend of yours, is he, this fella?’
‘Um … yes, sort of.’ I didn’t care about Dockie right now. I cared only about what Star had just said to me.
He indicated the rusted lock hanging loose from the door. ‘Kids broke in a while ago, coming in to get up to all sorts. That’s how he got in. Thing is, kids’re all gone by morning, but this old fella’s still here.’ The man shrugged. ‘I told him I’d call the police, but he ain’t bothered. Just said he won’t leave till he’s spoken to you.’
‘I’ll be off then,’ murmured Star, toeing herself backwards, away from us.
‘No.’ I glared at her. ‘Wait for me.’
She allowed the sunlight to pepper her lashes until, finally, her eyes met mine. Her tongue fumbled on syllables. ‘D-d-d …’ she began, and I wondered how I’d never noticed her stutter before. Finally, she shrugged and said a simple ‘Okay’, before heading towards the horizon.
I watched her go, my heart somersaulting in my ribs as the man squeaked open the door for me. ‘Be careful in there, all right?’
‘Careful?’ I said vaguely, my head still with Star and her hunched form padding across the sand. I watched her as I stepped across the threshold of the arch.
The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House Page 33