The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House

by Lam, Stephanie

  I am sure, then, that he was referring to something that happened many years ago. To what that is, I have no idea, any more than I know to whom it was he addressed those words. I wish I did! To think that this person is smugly comfortable somewhere, hoping that I hang … but it is no use speculating. I cannot think whom it may be, but if I ever find out, I will curse them to the end of their days.

  This, then, is the reason I have written to you – not just this letter, but this entire memoir, from the very day I arrived at Castaway to the day I left. I could not give two hoots if the entire population of the country thinks me guilty as hell, if even Uncle Edward is so convinced he refuses to stump up my bail money; what matters to me is that you know me to be innocent. This package you hold in your hands is the only way I can show you; everything in it is true, and when you have read it you will know me as well as, if not better than, I know myself. You may then judge for yourself what sort of a person I am, and see if this sort of person would have his cousin fall off a cliff and hush up his part in that.

  I love you, Clara. I love you to distraction, and I always will, and it is the thought of convincing you of my innocence that has kept me going throughout the long nights of coughing and the terrifying attacks on my lungs. Now this is finished, I can only hope that you read it and, even if you will not love me, then at least you will understand me.

  You may think it strange, but this summer at Castaway has been the happiest of my life. Now that autumn is here, and chilly grey clouds scud across the tiny window of my cell, I go there in my mind and wander the dark polished wood of its hallways, or drink a gin Martini in one of the shaded arbours in the garden. I like to think a piece of me will always remain there, watching the comings and goings of future inhabitants and hoping some of them, at least, experience the depths and heights of passion. Because I have realized that it is this, after all, that makes one feel alive, and to feel truly, properly alive, as opposed to simply existing … well, I would take that route now, every time, and run straight into a moonlit sea.

  Yours ever, and ever,

  Robert

  15

  1965

  After Mrs Bray had finished speaking, a silence descended on the terrace. I drifted on a tide of the past: a garden party in full bloom, candles lining the pathways and champagne spilling from tipsily held glasses. Then, later, a storm crashing into the cliff top and two men struggling on the edge. Robert and Alec, as Mrs Bray had called them. Two cousins who’d been in love with her, who had fought over her, one plunging into the frothing sea and the other, standing there and watching him fall.

  Overhead, a late-season bee buzzed lazily by the hydrangeas. I watched its looping gait around the unruly garden, circling a collapsing gazebo, as my eyes came to rest on Star. She was staring at the tea table, the sun haloing a brilliant circle on the top of her head. The light bounced off the hot metal of the table, and Mrs Bray took a sip of tea. Four cigarette ends lay crumpled in the ashtray, two apiece from Star and her grandmother. She had been speaking for almost an hour, and I thought of Dockie in his bedsit downstairs, waiting for me to telephone the woman he said was his wife.

  Dockie. Perhaps, perhaps, Alexander Bray. I tried to marry the two images together, of the young husband stumbling over a cliff edge at midnight, and the scratchy-faced old man with a voice like plum brandy.

  ‘And there you have it.’ Mrs Bray pulled a face at her tea. I supposed it was cold. She set it down in its saucer and nodded at the clippings I still held in my lap. ‘You hold the conclusion to that sorry episode in your hands.’

  I looked again at the topmost piece of newsprint and, oddly, found a tear in my eye for somebody I’d never met and never would.

  ‘CASTAWAY HOUSE’ SUSPECT

  DIES IN CUSTODY

  ------

  POLICE SAY NO FOUL PLAY

  SUSPECTED

  IT HAS come to our attention that Mr. Robert Carver, who was arrested by police in connection with the disappearance of his cousin Mr. Alexander Bray of Castaway House on September 2nd, has died while on remand.

  Mr. Carver, who had a long-standing health problem, was found dead in his cell last night. He had apparently suffered an attack of the lungs, which was so sudden that by the time the doctor was summoned Mr. Carver had already been dead for several minutes.

  Mr. Carver’s cousin Mr. Bray is still missing at sea. It is presumed that he fell from the cliff near his family home during a violent storm. Hopes for his survival have dwindled to almost nothing in recent weeks.

  I flicked through the rest of the cuttings, heading backwards in time, from ‘CASTAWAY HOUSE’ DISAPPEARANCE: ARREST IS MADE going all the way to SEARCH FOR MISSING MAN CONTINUES.

  ‘It’s awful.’ Star spoke for the first time in an age, and I was reminded that it was her grandfather, her real grandfather, who had died in prison.

  ‘Are … are you sure?’ I said cautiously, thinking of the scrawling under the windowsill, the proclamation of innocence. ‘Are you quite sure it was him? Who pushed your husband off the cliff, I mean? I know he was arrested, but all the same …’

  I expected her to snap at me, but instead she settled her hands in her lap and said, ‘It was him. I’m not saying it was deliberate; I think it was probably an accident. After all, there’s nobody else it could have been.’

  ‘But … but …’ Mrs Bray’s eyes scorched mine, and I lapsed into silence. I was being idiotic, after all, to decide on somebody’s innocence based on no more than a hurried self-portrait and some words scratched into a windowsill. And yet I still couldn’t quite believe that Robert Carver had done what he was supposed to have done.

  ‘Anyhow, it was my fault.’ Mrs Bray nodded sharply. ‘Two cousins who had a perfectly wonderful relationship, and I broke the whole thing for no other reason than my own selfish needs. I thought I was being so clever, you see. I thought I understood how the world worked, and all the time I was just a child, stamping her foot because she couldn’t get her way.’

  ‘I can see now why you’ve never got on with Mother,’ said Star quietly. ‘Seeing as her father was … well, you know.’

  ‘I think we’re just very different. But they do have similarities, which is … unfortunate. However, it’s because of your mother that I now own all of this.’ She trailed a taloned hand towards the glass-paned conservatory, the peeling walls, the cracked window frames, the attic roof. Her lips twisted into an odd smile. ‘But then, I’d always been convinced that Castaway would be mine, one day.’

  ‘Didn’t you inherit it?’ asked Star.

  She nodded. ‘Only because my father-in-law bought the house outright, to prevent it being sold. You see, when I discovered I was going to have a baby, I threw myself at his feet, said it was Alec’s child, naturally. He was a broken man by then; he left me the house in his will, in order to provide for his grandchild.’ She blinked, vulture-like, at the peeling frames. ‘Unfortunately, financial considerations meant I had to turn it into flats. Perhaps one day it will be whole again. Perhaps when you inherit it, my dear.’ She looked at Star, who seemed taken aback.

  ‘Oh, not for years yet, Granny, surely.’

  ‘Well, I’m not leaving it to your mother. She’ll turn it into some sort of dreadful charity or something.’ She sniffed at me, her eyes snapping as if she’d forgotten, momentarily, that I was there. ‘You probably think I’m a cold bitch.’

  ‘Oh!’ I grimaced. ‘I don’t know why you care what I think.’

  ‘I don’t know why either. There must be something about you, Miss Churchill.’ She frowned as she thought. ‘Purity, perhaps.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Star, and I eyed her sceptically, but she was nodding.

  ‘Well, for what it’s worth,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you’re a cold bitch. I think you did what you had to do to survive.’

  Mrs Bray inclined her head, as if in acknowledgement of the truth of that statement, and then said, ‘He wrote to me, you know. From prison. Just before he died. A huge
wad of notes about what had happened, what he had and hadn’t done. It arrived the day after his death was announced. I couldn’t bear to read it; sealed it all back up again. It’s still around, somewhere.’

  An idea rolled like a marble in my mind. ‘Could it be in the chest? The one in the sitting room?’

  ‘Oh, it is!’ squealed Star. ‘I’ve seen it. Yes. When I was cleaning. An unopened packet. Years old.’

  ‘Then it’s him,’ I said in a whisper.

  ‘Who’s him?’ Star frowned at me.

  ‘Robert. Robert Carver.’ I looked at Mrs Bray with some trepidation. ‘That’s why the lid’s always open. He wants you to look inside.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ snapped Mrs Bray. ‘It’s a faulty lid.’

  ‘And the whistling?’ I looked at her, saw the quiver in her eyelid again. ‘And the reason you won’t sleep alone?’

  She sighed. ‘I thought,’ she said in an old, tired voice. ‘I thought it was Alec. Blaming me for what I’d done. Cursing me. Being the same annoying shit he’d been when he was alive.’

  There was a pause. ‘He is alive,’ I said quietly.

  Mrs Bray’s lips folded in on themselves. She placed one hand to her throat. I thought she was struggling to speak, but then from beneath the collar of her dogtooth jacket she pulled free a gold locket dangling round her neck on a chain. ‘He gave me this on the day he proposed,’ she said in a soft croak.

  ‘What’s inside it?’ asked Star, and Mrs Bray stretched her hands behind her neck and, in a surprisingly agile movement, unhooked the chain. Star received it in her palms and studied the engraving, as I leaned over her shoulder. It was of flowers and leaves, with a small bird at its centre.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I murmured.

  Star gently opened the clasp. Pinned beneath an oval of glass, on a bed of blue paper, was a twist of blond hair.

  ‘You say he’s alive,’ sniffed Mrs Bray, somewhat sourly. ‘To be honest, I’d rather he were dead.’

  Star shifted the locket from one palm to the other. ‘You can’t mean that, Granny.’

  ‘I certainly can. Better dead than being alive for forty years and never once letting me know.’

  A tear glimmered in the corner of her eye. ‘He says he lost his memory,’ I said. ‘Perhaps when he fell from the cliff.’

  ‘Bully for him. If only I’d been so lucky.’ She dashed away the tear.

  Star leaned across the table and folded the locket back into her grandmother’s hand. ‘He thinks you’re in Paris,’ she said softly. ‘You don’t have to see him if you don’t want to.’

  Mrs Bray swallowed. ‘I may be many things, my dear, but I am not a coward. I shall speak to this man, and if he is … I can hardly say it. If he does turn out to be my long-lost husband, then … do you know, I cannot imagine what I shall do then?’

  ‘Have a stiff drink,’ I suggested, and saw a glimmer of a smile play about her lips.

  ‘Miss Churchill,’ she said in her usual, brisk voice. ‘You ought to fetch this man immediately. Before he forgets who he is once more.’

  I stood up, and Star made to move too, but Mrs Bray said to her, ‘I’d like you to stay here.’ In an awkward tone, she added, ‘I’d rather not be on my own until he comes.’

  ‘Okay.’ Star hovered, halfway to standing. ‘I’ll just see Rosie out.’

  Mrs Bray nodded a reluctant assent, and I followed Star back into the glare of the conservatory and then the gloom of the bedroom. She took my hand and made a movement with her head. ‘This way.’

  She led me through to the sitting room, still in uproar from the night’s adventures. The blanket from the truckle bed had been kicked on to the floor; my belongings were scattered across the rug from where I’d emptied out the Bradley’s bag. I half expected the lid of the chest to be wide open again, but it was firmly closed, the catch still connected.

  Star let go of my hand and sat cross-legged in front of the chest. She eased open the catch and swung the lid back. A puff of dust flew out, just as before. The photograph was still on top, face-down, and she lifted it out and wiped its glass with her sleeve. She prodded the young form of Alexander Bray and said, ‘What do you think?’

  I bent over her, looked past the velvet swags and the old-fashioned clothes, in towards the angle of his jaw and the set of his eyes. I placed Dockie’s worn-out face over the top, removed the red veins that contoured his nose, the leathered texture of his skin, the weary lines to his mouth, and nodded. ‘It’s him.’

  For several seconds we both looked silently at the beautiful, oblivious couple in the velvet studio, and then Star said with a sigh, ‘I suppose I ought to prepare Granny; tell her that he really is her husband.’

  ‘You should show her this as well.’ Dropping to my knees, I searched through the dusty files until I found the thick envelope at the bottom. Lifting it free, I gave it to Star, who snatched it from me.

  ‘This is it,’ she said in a whisper, turning it over. ‘That’s why his name was familiar. I saw this before, when I was cleaning.’

  On the reverse of the envelope was a scratchy brown indentation, inscribed with the same hand that had written the address. It said: Sender: Mr. R. Carver Esq., Marstone H. M. P.

  I fingered the package. ‘He wants this to be read,’ I said. ‘That’s what all this is about; not a punishment. A plea.’

  ‘I’ll take it to her.’ Star brushed off the dust and held it against her chest. From her sitting position, she looked up at me, and I saw a new, vulnerable light in her eyes.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ I whispered, lifting her chin and turning her face towards mine. Dipping my head towards hers, I kissed her on the lips, Robert Carver’s letter pressed between us like a ghost.

  I left her there cross-legged on the floor, and staggered, giddy and hungover and a hundred per cent alive, out of the flat and down towards the basement. The world was opening up before me; I felt a sort of soaring delight, a feeling that I could go down any path, take any life that appealed to me, and I marched down the passageway, entered Dockie’s room and realized that he had disappeared.

  I walked into the empty room. Sheets and blankets were curled into a ball at the end of the bed. The bright sunlight of the garden barely penetrated the highest corner of the basement yard. Dockie was not there.

  I shivered in the sudden chill and headed back down the corridor. I looked into the bathroom, but there was no sign of him. A cracked slice of soap rested on the side of the tub, and shavings decorated the wash basin. A rubber shower hose was lying on the floor like a subdued beast. The mousetrap was empty.

  I ran up the stairs to the hallway. I wondered where I would go, if I were him, and realized I had no idea who he really was. I pulled open the main door and trotted down to the pavement, walking past the Bella Vista before hesitating inside a plank of sunshine and looking both ways.

  ‘Rosie!’

  I turned. Mrs Hale was coming down the path next door, hair askew from its bun, cardigan buttoned up lopsidedly, one stocking wrinkling around her ankle like the jowls of a dog. She came up to me and put a hand on my arm. ‘That man …’ she said breathlessly. ‘Oh, Rosie, I’m all in a flap. You see, he looks so much like … at least, it may not be, but my father’s convinced of it, ever since he saw him last night. Thought he was a ghost, but of course he’s not, and then you were here with him, and … I suppose you have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘He’s Alexander Bray, who fell off the cliff forty years ago, and he’s been missing ever since.’

  Mrs Hale clutched my arm tightly. ‘That’s impossible,’ she croaked.

  ‘He lost his memory.’ I tried to release her grip on my arm, but she was too strong. ‘But listen, I need to find him. He’s gone off somewhere, and he’s confused enough as it is.’

  ‘But … but …’ Mrs Hale opened and closed her mouth several times. ‘Has he said anything? About … about the past?’

  ‘Not much. Not yet
.’ I frowned at her. ‘What do you mean, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘I was just wondering. Goodness … what a shock. What an utter shock.’

  And then a memory of this morning slivered back to me. ‘Earlier, in the kitchen,’ I began, ‘you mentioned Robert Carver. You said the reason your father was upset was the whole Robert Carver business.’

  ‘Did I say that?’ She tucked an escaping strand of hair back behind her ear. ‘I was in such a state, I’d no idea what I was saying. He’d been awake all night, you see, yelling the place down about ghosts and so on.’

  ‘But Robert Carver,’ I insisted. ‘You knew him, didn’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘He was Lizzie’s beau, for a few months. He became … part of the family, almost. He was wonderful. I was quite in love with him, you see. He had no idea of course; I was only a child to him.’

  ‘And then he was arrested for murder,’ I said.

  She looked at me sharply, and nodded. ‘It was such a shock. For me.’

  There was a strange cadence to the way she’d said that, and I peered at her. ‘You thought he was innocent, then?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ she murmured. ‘Of course I did.’

  I looked up and down the hill. ‘Dockie will remember – Mr Bray, I mean. Now his memory’s returned, he’ll be able to tell us who pushed him off the cliff.’

  ‘Oh, Lord …’ Mrs Hale put a hand to her eyes. ‘He will, he will.’

  It was such a shock, she’d said. For me.

  For me. And an idea crept like a thief into my mind.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’ I said. ‘You know who tried to kill Mr Bray, and it wasn’t Robert. Robert Carver was innocent.’

  She grasped my sleeve. Urgently, she said, ‘I didn’t know at the time. Not for years afterwards. I mean, I believed he hadn’t done it, but I had no idea of the truth. I wouldn’t have let him die in prison, Rosie. You must understand that. By the time I found out, it was all too late.’

  I faced her, my breath tight in my lungs. ‘Then who was it?’