There was a square of light on the flagstones of the Old Hall, this morning, when I came downstairs, and I found a young fox, standing in the middle, trembling, in the light from the leaded windows. I would have once told Jamie.
‘I would have once told Jamie.’
That is the last line. Why does it have that contorted phrasing? I would have once. Was there some estrangement between them?
And then there is the timing.
August.
The truth slaps me awake, as a whip of cold rain lashes the window, as the Cornish winter tries to get inside the house.
The last entry is August. There are no more notes after that.
Afternoon
Racing out of the Drawing Room, I make straight for the kitchen, down the chilly, shadowed corridors. Faces of venerable Kerthens stare at me as I fly, faces from the photos of mines, the bal maidens in their grimy aprons.
On on on.
In the kitchen cupboards I’ve got a folder containing all Nina’s letters: invoices and receipts, requests and demands for her restorers, upholsterers, the dyers and weavers. She liked stuff in hard copy: liked things written down on paper, not in emails. She wanted records to keep.
I’ve arranged all of this correspondence by date. Sitting down at the kitchen table, throwing open this second folder, it takes half a minute for me flick through the paperwork, and find what I seek.
The very latest of these items also dates to August.
August. Which is four months before she died.
This means Nina stopped restoring Carnhallow House in August. As I know from her notebook, her interest faded over that spring, and it diffused into a wider curiosity about the Kerthens, Carnhallow, wrecking and mining lore – as summer came along. And then it died completely. But why? The restoration of Carnhallow was, clearly, her passion. She loved it. At first.
And then she didn’t love it. And then she stopped. And she began to wonder if the Kerthens were, somehow, evil.
Four months later she had the accident, and drowned. Supposedly.
I am grimly excited now. Maybe I have not been imagining things. Where next?
Jamie’s room. The concept stings my conscience; I’ve never done this before. I so wanted to be a good stepmother. But it is the one place I haven’t looked properly. Therefore the one place that might contain the final answers.
The house waits. Looks at me in suspicion. Turning on lights as I go, I climb the chilly stairs. It is already 4 p.m. How did the day die so quickly into dark? And where is everyone? Perhaps Cassie is out shopping, with Jamie, after collecting him from David. Yet they usually return by three, these winter afternoons.
I know Cassie hates taking Jamie to his father: because she hates the extended trip to Truro, that gruelling drive along the winding, slippery, dangerous moorland roads, greasy with frost, then an hour on the windy A30.
Could they have had an accident? Rooted, here, on the grand staircase, I picture her car veering, hit by the raw winter winds, hurtling off the grey-green moors by Stithians. Then I see Jamie locked behind a car window, his mouth opening and closing mutely. The idea of anything happening to him is more distressing, maybe, than something happening to me.
Yet this is absurd. Presumably Cassie is waiting somewhere, lingering over flat whites in a Truro coffee shop, waiting for David to hand over Jamie. I would have heard if anything had happened. Someone would tell me. They wouldn’t completely ignore me, like I don’t even exist.
Would they?
The stairs are very dark, and very cold. I should have done this before. Now the freezing winter gloom grips the rooms and corridors. In the deepness of winter, Carnhallow Valley is a cold and lightless pool. A sump of frosty air. And the house is colder than anywhere else. Cold in its bones. Cold in the marrow.
I pace along the corridor, pretending I am not scared.
Jamie’s room.
My hand hesitates on the doorknob. A hard December wind is soughing, out there, raking through the oaks and rowans. Yet I can hear no cars, no voices, nothing else.
Twisting the handle, pushing the door, I step inside.
The room has an unexpected scent of Pears Soap. His father’s soap. I sometimes forget that Jamie is very much his father’s boy.
This room is also very tidy. My stepson might be increasingly solitary but Cassie keeps the squalor to a minimum. Schoolbooks are piled carefully on shelves, next to a brace of Harry Potter and C. S. Lewis. A football rocks from side to side in a corner. No it doesn’t. It is still.
The bed boasts a big blue Chelsea duvet cover; a picture of some famous footballer I cannot name is tacked neatly to the wall. This could be the room of any eight-year-old boy: it is not obviously the room of Jamie Kerthen, heir to Carnhallow House.
What might I find here? I am looking for something that jars, something that is abnormal. And I don’t have to look that hard. It is, surely, the photos. How many eight-year-old boys have photos of their mums in silver frames? Very few, but Jamie Kerthen does. The idea is heartbreaking, and it is also agitating. A clue.
Stepping closer to the desk, with its smartphone cable and computer games, I tilt the first image.
This photo was taken in southern France, I suspect: it looks too warm and palmy for Cornwall. Here is a Mediterranean light. Mother and son are standing on a beach. Nina looks young, happy, sunburned – she’s in a bikini, but I can see tan lines from the straps of a summer dress. Jamie is next to her, small and vulnerable, in blue checked shorts, yet content to feel his mother’s arm draped around his narrow shoulders.
He is sunburned too, and looks about five years old. The two of them, mother and child, are staring at the camera with giddy smiles, I presume David is behind the camera. The wellbeing and contentment is palpable, this is a happy holiday, deftly captured in one image. Later I imagine them having plates of mussels and frites, Jamie playing beach football with local kids. Grilled seafood. Chilled rosé wine. Laughter.
Nina’s figure is enviable.
The second photo, angled on the same desk, is newer. I take it up. To me this looks like a photo taken in Carnhallow gardens.
Ladies Wood beyond is red and gold, so this must be a fine day in maybe mid or late October. The bloody clusters of rowan-berries can be seen. It is sunny, but apparently cold: Nina is in a luxurious coat. There is no contact this time, no languid arm draped around Jamie’s shoulders. He is in a raincoat, sloping close to his mum, without touching. Jamie looks about six. So this, I deduce, is a photo from the autumn before she died. A couple of months before she died.
If she died.
I look closer.
Her smile is faked. I know a faked smile when I see one. I am a photographer. Few people can convincingly fake a smile – the eyes always give it away – and Nina has failed here. Her mouth curves up but her eyes are cold. And her stance is stiff. And distanced.
Maybe scared?
I drop the photo on the bed: like it is giving me an electric shock. My fingers tingle.
Nina doesn’t want to be in this photo. She doesn’t want to touch her son. She is pretending. She either dislikes her son. Or she is scared of him.
What happened between them? Why did she stop restoring the house, then start to mistrust, or dislike, her own child, at the same time, the last summer before the accident?
Penguins. Now it comes back to me. Jamie wrote about penguins in those letters. And what else did he write?
I remember that crossed out line.
I loved you just as much as daddy, I am sorry
The ideas run away with me. Perhaps Jamie showed signs of strangeness or animosity then, too. Rejecting his own mother. Favouring his father. But why would he do that?
I am reaching for the next photo – when I hear it. A noise that paralyses me, sends sharp, anxious pains to my fingertips. It is the weary creak of a door, downstairs. An internal door. Where no wind blows. Someone is coming. If it was Cassie, or Jamie, or Juliet, I would have heard cars outsid
e, chatter, the bang of a big door and someone coming in.
And now I hear a voice. Calling up.
‘Jamie?’
The voice is young. And it belongs to a woman. It isn’t Cassie.
Evening
I have to go down. But I am momentously frightened. Memories assail me, memories of my father downstairs. Shouting my name. My little Rachel. Where is she? Comin’ upstairs for ya.
The cinema screen of my memories comes alive, flickering with images of me: aged ten or eleven, foetal in my dark bedroom, pretending to be asleep, hoping he won’t come in. He always comes in.
You little bitch!
I have to fight this, fight the fear inside, and the fear outside. I grip my hands into defiant fists and take deep cold breaths, then I step through the door of Jamie’s room, I talk – I shout out – into the swallowing silence. ‘Hello?’
There is no reply.
‘Hello?’
The dark windows mock me, the moon looks through the yews and the oaks, mute and inscrutable.
‘Hello? Hello?’
Again, no response. I wonder if this woman, downstairs, can tell how scared I am.
All the lights are still on, out here on the landing: yet somehow they do not entirely dispel the dark. Because the house is being invaded by the blackness, and by the cold; the black frigid waters trapped in Morvellan are rising up to engulf us, coming up the shafts, flooding into the basements, then climbing the stairs, creeping and inexorable.
‘Who is this?’
I can hear footfalls, not far away. Someone is crossing the hall, downstairs. Heading for the kitchen. Down the long corridor. Or walking towards the Old Hall.
Gathering the last of my bravery, I run to the banisters and look down. There. No. But I hear more movement, very obvious now.
Courage is my only option. Running down the stairs, I strain to see – but, as I do, distracted, not looking where I am going – I catch my foot in the carpets, the stupid rucked carpets, the carpets she laid – and I fall. I slam forward, barking my head against the fine wooden banisters, so pretty and grand. Then I fall further, cracking my knee on the bottom step, turning an ankle. Down to the floor. Down down down, head over feet, tumbling like a stunt artist.
Down. And out.
I yelp in reflex at the pain, turning myself over. That hurt: but I don’t care. All I want to know is whether it hurt my daughter? Panting, with the shock of the fall, I reach down and touch the curve of my faintly swollen stomach. I sense nothing, no horrible damage, no bleeding, my baby is apparently OK. But that was a frightening fall. I could have snapped a leg, or a neck. I could have killed myself and my baby.
And now I want to stay still. Lying quiet on the polished floorboards. Pretend I didn’t hear or see anything, let her go away. Curl up and hide. Let the shadows leave the great house.
I am sorry for disturbing you.
Carnhallow is silent. I lie here, dazed, on my stupid back, staring at the carved plasterwork of the ceiling. I think I am perhaps concussed. Everything is swimmy.
The house is looking down at me, curious, and derisive. See, she can’t even walk down the steps. She has visions. She sees faces through windows. It’s happening all over again. Look at her. Look at her. It’s time she did herself in.
‘No!’
I actually talked to the house. I shouted that out. I am talking to the voices. Again.
A pain begins in my ankle, like a prologue. I wonder if I have broken it. As I look up, estimating the agony, the plasterwork on the ceiling melts into patterns, which spin, like a turning kaleidoscope. My vision is blurred. I look to my right, trying to focus, still lying on the floor.
I am staring at Nina Kerthen.
Jamie’s dead mother stands at the end of the corridor that leads to the Old Hall, the corridor which always fades into darkness. There is enough light to make out her face.
She gazes at me from the dark, her mouth slightly open, as if she is attempting to speak, but failing. This is surely Nina Kerthen two years older, a little different, but with Nina Kerthen’s hair, and her eyes, and her elegant neck. This is the same woman I saw on the bus.
I can hear another Christmas song from the distant radio. I left it on in the Drawing Room.
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you
The music fades and ebbs, my mind ebbs and fades. The lady in the darkness is still there. Not moving. Gazing. Half-smiling. Then at last she moves, forward, coming out of the shadows. Slowly walking towards me. She has one arm extended. I think I see bleeding at the fingertips, her face is pale as fresh snow. She is going to touch me, to touch me, to touch me, with her soft, blooded fingers. Touch my skin, stroke my face.
I close my eyes, filled with horror. She is surely very close, her one hand extended, her fingertips bleeding. This is the test. I count the terrible seconds, my eyes shut very hard.
I could have been someone,
Well so could anyone
I open my eyes.
The woman has gone. The ghost. The woman. Has gone. And now I know. I am hallucinating. There is no other answer. It is happening again.
I am seeing things. And hearing things.
And so the confessions cascade, the walls of denial are falling. Surely David was right. He is, he is. I have imagined it all. Everything. This proves it.
I have been piecing together my own lost family: out of madness and memories. Even my little girl is here, too. And why not? After all, as Juliet says: the dead are always with us.
I haul myself on to my elbows. A lot of me hurts, yet my mind is oddly clear. I can see further, now, so much further. A chilling sea mist has thinned away. For the moment.
Crouching, then standing, I test my ankle: not broken, maybe sprained: the pain throbs angrily in the bone. I gaze down that corridor that leads to the Old Hall. I could follow her, but I know I will find nothing. There is no one else here. For reasons I can guess, I am seeing the images of dead mothers, and dead children. But why is it happening now?
I limp down the antique hallway.
The kitchen greets me with brightness: like a fake smile, too white and cheerful. Slumping into a chair, I rub my ankle. It hurts but my anxiety hurts more. My unborn daughter. And now, as I touch my stomach, protective and frightened, it comes to me. I have to call my sister. I have to know how much I am repeating things.
Sliding my mobile from my pocket I scroll to the number. Sinead. I haven’t used this number in years. I’m not even certain it will work.
The December winds chuck the last twigs of autumn at the kitchen windows, like the weather is bored with waiting for snow – as I key the digits.
The number rings for eight, nine, ten seconds, until I am sure it will click to voicemail. Then it answers.
‘Yes.’
It’s her. My sadness dilates, until it reaches my hands, which tremble. My broken family.
‘Sinead, it’s me, it’s Rachel.’
A significant silence. I wonder where she is? Drinking a takeaway coffee in a break, at the hospital? In a car, picking up her kids from the childminder’s? I don’t know her life any more. At last she answers. ‘What do you want?’
The coldness kills. I restrain the urge to sob, for me, for my family, for the past, and say, ‘Sinead, I know what you think. I know you hate me.’
Her sigh is curt. ‘Rachel, I don’t hate you. I just don’t want to talk to you.’
‘I need your help, Sinead. I think it’s happening again.’
Another, briefer silence.
‘I heard you got married, some rich guy?’
‘Wait – no – wait—’
‘Rob told me. Billionaire lawyer or summat. Well done. Happy Christmas. You’ve got money again. You always liked money.’
‘I gave it to Mum! It was for her!’
‘Look. I’ve got to get back to work – I’m on lates – some of us have proper jobs—’
‘Sinead, please, please please please, I need
your help.’
She snorts; but she doesn’t put the phone down. ‘OK. You’ve got three minutes. What is it?’
I rush on, before she changes her mind. ‘I’m worried that it’s happening again, the breakdown, the episodes, everything, but – but I don’t know, because I don’t know what I was like the first time, because I was in that state. Only you and Mum really know it, really remember.’
‘Two minutes.’
‘Sinead, please.’ I gaze, helpless, at the black kitchen windows. Where has the moon gone? Perhaps it has taken itself to the mines, to look at itself, a white face in black water. ‘Please?’
‘You were all over the place. Hallucinating. Seeing things. Cracked. By the end you started cutting yourself.’
I close my eyes, clutching the phone in my whitened fingers. ‘Yes. I remember the cutting, I don’t really remember the visions.’
‘Well, you had them all right, Rache. You used to lash out, hear voices.’
‘I heard things?’
Her voice is still cold. ‘Yep. Commands. Do this do that. Y’know.’
So it is true, I am hearing things again, I have been hearing things all along. Imagining it all.
‘But why should it come back now?’ The fear inside me is a trapped animal, fighting its way out of my chest. ‘The doctors said, they said it was only a temporary thing, a brief schizo episode. A reaction to what happened, what I did. It would never happen again. That’s what they said.’
A pause. Winds from the sea, a rattling door.
‘Sorry. No idea why it should come back.’ Her tone softens. ‘Look, Rachel, I’m sorry you’re in trouble, I don’t hate you. It’s all too painful, that’s all, and I’m getting on with my life. The boys, my job, y’know. And I have to go.’
‘You really can’t think of any reason why the …’ I can hardly use the words, ‘why the madness might return? You’re a nurse, you’ve done mental health training, haven’t you?’
The Fire Child Page 21