The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House

by Lam, Stephanie

  A hint of a blush spread across her cheeks. ‘I wish I’d never said anything.’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ I said, and her blush deepened. I squeezed her fingers and then left her making the tea. As I walked back out of the room towards the conservatory, an idiotic grin widened my face.

  The two doors of the conservatory had been propped open with stone flowerpots, letting a breeze in that rippled the neatly made bedcovers. There were two wicker chairs in the conservatory, and a glass-topped table. I walked through it, and out on to the open terrace that looked over the abandoned garden. There, Mrs Bray was seated at the ironwork table. As I came out she turned, held a hand to her forehead so she could see, and said, ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  I sat down opposite her. ‘I had a very strange night,’ I said.

  She switched her gaze straight through me. ‘Did you?’ she said archly, taking a pull on her cigarette. ‘I slept like a baby.’

  ‘I noticed.’ I ground my knuckles into my fist, determined not to be intimidated. ‘Somebody in the room was whistling in my ear.’

  ‘How odd,’ remarked Mrs Bray. ‘Are you sure you didn’t dream it?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep a wink,’ I snapped.

  ‘Until you took one of my pills.’ She eyed me thoughtfully. ‘You forgot to screw the lid back on. I do notice everything, you see.’

  I leaned forwards on the table. ‘Then you must have noticed the chest. The lid? It flew open by itself.’ She gazed, as if bored, in my direction, but I saw one eyelid flicker slightly. ‘You knew all this would happen, didn’t you? That’s why you wanted me to sleep in the flat.’

  Mrs Bray’s look could have put out a fire. Icily, she said, ‘You took the money, didn’t you?’

  My guts wobbled at that look, but all the same I growled, ‘Yes, and now I think I was bloody cheap at the price.’

  My landlady looked as if she was whipping up a retort, but there was a clanging sound from the conservatory and Star emerged on to the terrace, unsteadily holding a tray in two hands. She put it down between us, and tea slopped from the pot on to the saucers piled in front of it.

  ‘You don’t need to say.’ Star flung herself dramatically into a chair. ‘I know Louise would have done a better job.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that at all, my dear.’ Mrs Bray picked up the pot. ‘How’s your glandular fever?’

  ‘What?’ Star frowned. I widened my eyes at her and she nodded. ‘Oh. Oh. Yes. Much better. I think it’s just a touch of – um – tonsillitis.’

  Mrs Bray poured out cups of weak tea and handed them round. ‘The thing is, I’m so terribly ashamed that a grandchild of mine could be such an awful liar.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ said Star in an affronted tone. ‘I feel like death.’

  ‘Then you’re lucky you’ve such a good friend in Miss Churchill.’

  They both turned to look at me. I reddened, and looked out at the untidy heap of the garden, the ferns trailing over the broken paving stones, the hedges hiding what I knew from my view from above were bird-muck-spattered benches, the overgrown path leading to the abandoned pond and the stone storehouse. ‘We ought to tell her,’ I muttered.

  ‘Tell me what?’ Mrs Bray shifted slightly on her chair.

  ‘Oh, it’s ridiculous,’ said Star. ‘It’s just that Rosie’s met this old man, a bit gaga, you know. Says he’s lost his memory. He’s renting a room in the basement; moved in last week.’

  ‘Causing trouble, I suppose.’ Mrs Bray sniffed. ‘I presume Mr Clark can deal with it. It’s what I pay him for.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘You see, this morning I found Dockie – that’s what he calls himself – in one of the old arches on the beach, surrounded by all these dummies –’

  ‘Dummies?’ she said sharply. ‘What sort of dummies?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I shrugged and thought of the mannequin in the dirty robe, another in uniform. ‘I suppose like a waxworks.’

  ‘I see.’ Her lips twisted thoughtfully. ‘Continue.’

  ‘Um – well … He’s now saying he’s recovered his memory, and that he’s – er – well – that he’s your husband.’

  Mrs Bray stopped, in the middle of sipping her tea. Her eyes burned into mine. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘He told me his name was Alexander Bray and that you were his wife.’ I glanced at Star. ‘He’s downstairs now. In the basement.’

  Mrs Bray glanced sharply towards the basement well jutting out below the rim of the terrace, as if a phantom might be about to rise up from it. Her teacup rattled uncontrollably on its saucer. She put it down with a clatter on the table and held a hand to her chest. Her face appeared to have lost all its colour. I wondered if we hadn’t just done something irredeemably awful.

  ‘It can’t be,’ she whispered. ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘We think he might be a crazed fan,’ said Star. She turned to me. ‘But then – didn’t Mrs Hale next door seem to recognize him just now?’

  ‘Please.’ Mrs Bray held up a hand to silence us. She got to her feet and walked unsteadily into the conservatory, her silhouette disappearing into the bedroom.

  ‘I thought she’d laugh,’ whispered Star, a slight look of horror on her face.

  I looked at the chair Mrs Bray had vacated, thinking hard. I pictured her going to the chest and lifting up the hinge, taking out the face-down photograph within. ‘Your grandfather – he is dead, isn’t he?’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s what I’ve always been told. Granny never talks about him. She doesn’t even keep photographs.’

  ‘Except the one in the chest.’

  Star looked up at me, her fingers to her mouth. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘That’s the … you’ll think I’m mad, but I call it the haunted chest. The lid of it won’t stay down. Even if you pull the catch closed.’

  ‘That happened to me last night,’ I said excitedly. ‘Scared me half to death.’

  ‘Maybe the photograph …’ began Star. ‘Perhaps my grandfather’s haunting her.’

  ‘How can he be haunting her if he’s alive?’

  Star motioned me to lower my voice. I turned. Mrs Bray had reappeared in the doorway to the conservatory, carrying her long cigarette holder. She walked slowly back to her chair, sat down and fitted a cigarette from her purse into the end of the holder. She handed me a silver block of a lighter, and I sparked up a flame for her. Her hands were still shaking. She looked at least ten years older.

  ‘I thought Grandfather was dead,’ said Star quietly.

  Mrs Bray looked at her with her coal-dark eyes. Eventually she said, ‘Your grandfather, my dear girl, was not Alexander Bray.’

  Star frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My husband was not your mother’s father. Clear?’ Mrs Bray looked swiftly at me and then back at Star. ‘You mustn’t tell your mother. She’ll be devastated at being a bastard. All her progeny ill-begotten. How many is it now? Five? Six?’

  ‘Five, just as it’s been for years,’ said Star. ‘So you mean you … that is …?’

  ‘Really, my dear, I thought you were a woman of the world,’ said Mrs Bray. ‘I imagined it wouldn’t take too long to work it out.’

  Star’s mouth hung open. ‘So who was he? My real grandfather?’

  The truth tumbled to my lips. ‘Robert Carver,’ I said, before I could help myself. ‘It’s Robert Carver, isn’t it?’

  Mrs Bray’s eyes flared. She expelled smoke into the sunshine and then nodded.

  Star turned to me. ‘You mean, the writing in your kitchen? And the picture? R. C.?’ She looked at her grandmother. ‘And you’re telling me now?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve had your secrets, my dear.’ Mrs Bray eyed Star thoughtfully. I saw Star’s cheeks bloom red. Mrs Bray waved her cigarette holder; a plume of smoke wafted towards the basement. ‘But anyway, with all this … Of course, the story was fairly famous at the time. It was in all the papers, you know; even the national press got hold of it. Not that anybo
dy knew I was expecting, thank goodness. Funny, how your mother never had an inkling. That’s partly why I had her grow up in France, where nobody gave a fig.’

  I took a breath. ‘The newspapers,’ I said, and they both looked at me. ‘When I first saw him, Dockie, he was talking about newspaper clippings, and how they’d set him off remembering. He said he’d put them somewhere safe.’ I frowned, as an odd image occurred to me: a clipped-together pile of receipts at the bottom of a bag, curiously yellowed with age.

  I scraped back my chair with a gasp.

  ‘I didn’t think,’ I muttered. ‘I was too distracted … oh, God.’ And I ran back through the conservatory and the bedroom to Mrs Bray’s sitting room, where this morning I’d dropped a flutter of what I’d imagined were shop receipts on to the floor.

  They were still scattered all over the place, and as I crawled about the room picking them up I wondered how I could have mistaken them, these newspaper clippings that were the key to Dockie’s soul, the story Frank had hidden from him all those years ago, the articles that had briefly fired the engine of his memory and sent him all the way here, to Castaway House.

  As I gathered them I scanned each one, and the news they contained stunned me. I piled them all into my hands, smoothing them flat again, and then hurried back on to the terrace, attempting to absorb the astonishing information within them. Mrs Bray and Star looked up as I came in. ‘He had these,’ I said, passing them over. ‘Is it true? What it says in there?’

  Mrs Bray spread a dry finger across the crackling newsprint. Her eyelashes fluttered as she nodded. She bit her lip, and if I hadn’t been so sure of the sort of person she was, I would have sworn she was holding back tears.

  ‘What do they say?’ asked Star, and Mrs Bray handed them to her. Star looked over them and murmured to herself, ‘Oh my God.’

  Her grandmother sighed. ‘I’m going to tell you,’ she said, her hand fluttering as she rested the cigarette holder on the ashtray. ‘I think it’s about time you knew what happened between my husband and Robert Carver. You need to know, after all, so we can decide what to do next.’

  ‘Can Rosie stay?’ asked Star.

  Mrs Bray looked at me, and I had the odd sensation that she understood me, more than anybody else ever had before. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She may.’

  Star handed the newspaper clippings back to me, and I folded them into my lap. Mrs Bray gripped the arms of her chair, as if preparing herself for an uncomfortable journey, and began to tell us a story.

  14

  1924

  I watched Clara Bray sleeping, as the dawn tipped salmon pink over the sky.

  She was naked, one arm slung over her face. I had pulled the curtains back a notch to be able to see her properly, and took her in, one inch at a time. It had been hot in the night, and she had pushed the covers down to her waist. The locket she wore round her neck dangled on the pillow. Its engraving, I had come to realize, was of a bird amid foliage, and was quite beautiful. I supported myself on one elbow and studied her small breasts, the soft swelling of her stomach. Our love-making was always dark-edged, of necessity; I knew her body by touch, but not by sight.

  Breathing gently, I eased the covers away from her waist and looked within, at the flat planes of her hip bones, and the mound of dark hair that continued to startle me with its raw beauty. The French photographs, passed round under the desks at school, had never shown me that.

  She snorted, and shifted in the bed, and I dropped the covers back and assumed a just-woken pose. I rolled sleepily around as she blinked awake, and smiled at her. I kissed her and she sighed.

  ‘Good morning,’ I whispered.

  ‘Wh-what time is it?’ she mumbled. She blinked again, and saw the sunrise curling through the gap in the velvet curtains. ‘Oh, fuck. Why didn’t you wake me?’

  She scrambled for her robe. ‘I’ve just woken,’ I lied, as her body disappeared inside its sheath of green silk. ‘It’s still early.’

  ‘Housemaids get up at five,’ she hissed. This had been the pattern of her moods: the daring night-time escapades up the stairs, the giving over of the future to the joy of the moment, and then afterwards, as her guilt set in, the foul temper and the paralysing fear. Never mind that Alec might have gone to her room in the night and found it empty – it was the morning after when she was afraid.

  ‘They probably know anyway,’ I murmured. ‘Servants know everything.’

  It was just as well that she was too wrapped up in herself to listen to me. ‘And the garden party,’ she muttered. ‘They’ll be waking me at seven.’

  She left without a backwards glance. I listened hard, but could not make out the creak of the stairs as she went down; she was practised, she said, from her years padding about backstage, but I wondered how many other stairs, in her previous life, she had crept down, leaving somebody behind, sleeping alone.

  I lay back on my pillows, working up a feeling of elation. I had obtained what I wanted: I had become Clara’s lover, and knew her as intimately as any man ever could, so I could not understand why a sense of triumph was so hard to come by. I took my nightshirt out from under my pillow and pulled it on, the better for decorum when Scone entered with my tea and toast, and then went to the window and hooked the curtains back, looking out at the garden, where I’d sat by the pond with Clara that day, never dreaming she would allow me to do to her all the things I had.

  Perhaps my sense of anticlimax was due to the way that, if she did not fall asleep first, she leaped out of bed the minute the deed was done, leaving me in the soggy cool of the bedclothes and the sense of having been discarded in some way. Maybe I felt some residual guilt over deceiving Alec, although consciously I knew that their marriage was over in all but name. My robe was hanging over the chair; I pulled it on, put my hand in its pocket and found the newly familiar square metal tin, shaking out a cigarette. I lit it, standing by the window. The smoke smothered my lungs, but once I had inhaled a few times they adjusted, and I enjoyed the way the tobacco curdled my brain. I leaned my forehead against the cool of the pane.

  Beyond the garden wall, on the other side of the lane, the fields that stretched to the cliff were about to be built upon. Much of the grass had already been churned over into uneven furrows of dried, caked earth, and canes had been stuck into the ground all the way along to the end of the field. Bungalows, according to the local gossip, to house the town’s expanding population, stretching all the way from here to Shanker along the coast.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Come in,’ I said, and the smoke and the tiredness lifted my voice to a pre-pubescent squeak. I coughed, a nasty taste in my mouth.

  Agnes entered with my tray. She was looking at the bed, and jumped when she saw me by the window. ‘Oh! I didn’t know you was up.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful sunrise,’ I said, indicating the window and trying to hide my own shock – not only that it was Agnes, and not Scone, who had nearly caught me in a state of déshabillé, but that it must also be later than I’d thought. Clara had done well to leave when she had. ‘Seems a shame to waste it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, disinterestedly, placing my tray on the stand, and I realized that sunrise to Agnes would be associated with hard work. ‘Mr Scone was busy, so I said I’d take up your morning tray. He said all right, seeing as how I been so trustworthy.’

  ‘Well, naturally,’ I said, wondering if it should not be more the case that I was the trustworthy one. ‘By the way, have you found another position?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not yet. It’s all right. I can afford to take my time. My mum’ll take me in for a bit. There’s a bit more money now my brother’s working.’

  ‘It’s such a shame,’ I mused. ‘After all that bother before, to then have to leave anyway.’

  ‘Oh no. It’s much better this way. Mrs Bray’s written us all good references. I’m going to go for head housemaid.’ She glanced at the door, adding in a low voice, ‘And somewhere I won’t have to wear a cap.’


  ‘I see,’ I said. I had overheard the female servants grumbling before about the cap situation; I expected they saw it as a mark of their servitude.

  ‘By the way, sir, the reason I asked if I could take your tray up, is – well …’ She looked again at the door, one ear cocked for noise. ‘D’you remember you was asking about Sally that time?’

  ‘Oh!’ I said, startled. The events of the past few weeks had pushed all thoughts of other people from my mind. Since Clara had begun entwining her feet with mine under the table, digging her toes into the hollow of my ankle as the servants moved implacably around, the idea of the missing parlourmaid had vanished just as the girl herself had. ‘I mean, I do, vaguely.’

  She jerked a hand into her apron pocket and brought out what had been a small oblong of paper, torn in two. ‘I don’t know if you’re still interested,’ she said quietly, ‘but see, Harriet was cleaning out the library yesterday, and she found this in the waste-paper bin. She comes to me and says, “That Sally that done a runner, wasn’t her surname Trent?” And I says, “Yes it was,” and she gives me this and asks, what do I think then?’

  I took the torn pieces from her. Since the imminent sale of Castaway had been announced, and with it the fact that all the servants were to be let go, there had been a looser atmosphere to the house. I had heard uproarious laughter bubbling up from the kitchen, and the indiscreet passing on of gossip had been much more pronounced. Thankfully, I had neither heard nor seen evidence yet that they knew about Clara and me, no stifled giggles or sidelong glances. Perhaps, despite my statement of earlier, Clara’s whipcrack speed at stealing in and out of my bed had indeed fooled everybody.

  It seemed as if the torn scraps had once formed an envelope – empty, but with Alec’s name on the front, and on the back a return address: Mrs. B. Trent, Draker’s Farm, Petwick Lane, Petwick.

  I looked at it. ‘Are you sure this is Sally’s mother’s address?’

  ‘I’m sure that’s Sally’s surname, and I think she talked about growing up on a farm.’ Agnes frowned. ‘I know it’s not very useful, but you was asking me if we’d heard from her, and I did say if I could help you out I would.’