House of Small Shadows (22 page)

‘Out of the question. We don’t have much time to get you ready. I’m far too old to go through this again, and I do not have the time for your stubbornness. Everyone will be so
disappointed with your lack of enthusiasm.’

‘Everyone? I’ve been to the village. It’s empty.’

‘Empty?’ Edith turned her frowning face to Maude. ‘What does she mean?’

Maude stared at Catherine in disapproval tinged with pity.

‘Our local traditions take a great deal of time to prepare. And you are expected. It would be selfish, heartless, to disappoint us all. Don’t you think?’

‘Ma’am, please. I’ve been here two days and I still haven’t begun the valuation. There are other things I—’

‘There will be time enough to admire our things. After the pageant. Now come along, dear. I am not accustomed to repeating myself.’

‘Why do you need to measure my head?’

Catherine yawned, again. Sleep pulled at her edges and softening corners. Maude’s hard hands prompted her body to stay upright with short tugs and prods whenever she felt herself start to
lean. She was sick of apologizing. ‘Sorry’ when she swayed. ‘Sorry’ as she blinked herself back awake. ‘Sorry’ as she moved an arm to stifle a yawn.

Country air and the four miles she’d walked to and from the village had left her dead on her feet. The deep hot water of the bath she had taken in Edith’s own bathroom had been
preceeded by a bowl of mutton broth she’d wolfed down with a portion of home-made bread in the dining room. The medicine Maude spooned into her mouth for her chill had been bitter but
instantly warming. And now she’d stopped moving, her head and body felt heavy and she desperately wanted to sleep. In her dimming thoughts, she was concerned at how tired, at how unfit she
was, but a confrontation about skipping dinner and retiring early had to be risked. ‘I’m sorry, but . . . I’m so tired. And I need to—’

‘Not long now, dear.’ Edith turned her face to Maude, who fussed behind Catherine, and she urged the housekeeper to hurry with no more than a frown. ‘And then we shall get you
to bed. You need to rest after this morning’s foolish escapade.’ Edith’s voice softened, was almost soothing, as if Edith Mason was calmed by the sight of Catherine stood before
the long oval mirror, dressed in white like a daughter who was to be a bride.

And Catherine nearly thanked her host for granting her sleep. She would go to bed, have a nap, then resume . . . no, begin the valuation . . . No . . . she would leave later, tonight. Her
thoughts swam and sank without trace.

She had been escorted from the dining room to Edith’s own bathroom on the second floor, then collected again and returned to the utility floor. She’d felt like a patient in an old
hospital. So many stairs, doors to be unlocked, aprons and long skirts swishing, wheels turning.

And the one-piece dress she now wore had been waiting upon the wooden bust in Violet Mason’s ‘sewing room’. A place sealed behind a locked door close to M. H. Mason’s
workshop.

Wicker baskets overflowing with costumes lined one wall of the room, beneath shelves cluttered with paints and craft materials. Carpentry had not been beyond Violet Mason either. Unusual for a
woman of her time, but the vintage tools, and the bench still littered with twine and timber, buttons and cloth, revealed evidence that great labours had been undertaken in the room to support her
brother’s vision.

Catherine’s own vision swam. So she focussed on the dress, bowing her head to see the embroidered cotton. From the 1920s, she thought, with the elbow-length sleeves and no waist. Edith had
said, ‘Nothing else will fit you. My mother was petite. She carried me at the time she wore this.’

She had been too sleepy to be offended, though the insult helped to revive her enough to become aware of the dress’s scent. From the ancient gown wafted a fragrance of stale perfume
trapped in fine cloth, and of the wooden furniture that had stored the garment for decades. The fabric was unmarked, but had sallowed to an ivory tinge along the seams and at the edge of the lace
hems.

She disliked the transforming effect of the dress in the dark mirror. Bare-legged, her hair tousled where it had dried without styling, under dim coppery light from an overhead bulb, the dress
faded her sense of herself. But also distinguished her anew with a fresh identity, as though she existed in a photograph taken from an old cardboard box after a funeral, from a collection where the
bronze images of mustachioed men in uniform, and little girls in ribbons and white dresses, suddenly confronted the onlooker with a sense of origin, and an insignificance they had not considered
before.

Behind her image in the mirror, Edith’s bleached face hovered, disembodied from the avian form so tightly wrapped in a high-necked gown of black silk. Maude must have changed her mistress
while Catherine bathed in the cast-iron tub, filled with steaming green water and fragrant with salts she could not identify, that was waiting for her and most welcome after her meal. She wished
she was still inside the perfumed water now, soaking, dozing.

Her eyes closed. She tried to remember the bathroom to stay awake. It had a bath made no later than the 1880s. A tub mounted on ball feet. A unit with an old steel needle and spray shower fixed
around the enormous taps. She’d never seen one before. Carved mahogany cabinets on the walls. Tiles hand-painted with wildflowers. Like taking a bath in someone’s study.

Maude jerked her awake.

‘Sorry.’

Aches had crept into her spine and her skin was sensitive. The sun’s warmth had reached her too late and she had a chill. She’d never been good in the rain. The white noise of
anxiety and the exhaustion of London had permanently impaired her immune system. Maybe the terrible stench of the workshop and the hives had stayed inside her, too, poisoned her. But she had no
temperature. Her stomach was fine. She had difficulty swallowing, though. Her throat was hot and dry.

She needed to go home. Needed to be in her own bed, dosed with paracetamol. She wanted to call her mother.

Was she well enough to drive? Once she was in bed, after a few hours’ rest, maybe she could leave a note and slip away. And go home.

Before it was too late.

Where had that thought come from? She mustn’t let herself think like that. She’d been told. She knew what to do when she had thoughts like that.

The dress was removed, slipped over her head. She was quickly covered in a quilted dressing gown.

Maude helped her back to her room as if
she
was the old woman who needed care. And once Catherine was settled in bed, she noticed Maude’s eyes were wet with tears. It was the last
thing she saw before her eyes closed of their own accord, and her mind turned over and slid backwards into a bottomless and irresistible unconsciousness.

‘You’s comin’ up the big house wiv us, Caff?’

Catherine stood up in the wet den and started to cry.

Up on the hill of the special school, the boy with the painted wooden face held the hand of her best friend, Alice, who had been missing for three months. One lens of Alice’s glasses shone
in the grey light of late afternoon.

Catherine was forbidden to come here. She’d returned to remember Alice.

The last time she visited the den, that distant, bright time with sunlight bathing the ecstasy of finishing a school year, Alice went through the hole Catherine made in the green fence. In July.
It was September now, and only four months until Christmas.

Alice started down the grassy slope towards the new fence the council had built. ‘They’s callin’, Caff. Hear it?’

And that was exactly what Alice said to her as Catherine poured invisible tea into greening plastic teacups at the beginning of the summer on the very day Alice vanished. And precisely what
Catherine had told her parents when she arrived home, wet through and crying. It was also what she had told Alice’s mother and the police ladies and her nan.

Catherine had heard the call back then too, just like she heard it now. ‘Greensleeves’ from a distant ice-cream van. Coming out of those red-brick buildings with plywood over the
windows.

That first time, Alice said, ‘I’s going, Caff. Comin’?’ but nothing else. Splashing through the stream and scrabbling up the riverbank to the hole in the fence before
Catherine could stop her; up the grassy bank the little figure had climbed on her hands and knees, as Catherine stood motionless with fright behind the wire fence. She’d whispered for Alice
to come back. ‘Don’t, Alice. Don’t. We’re not supposed to. You’re not allowed to.’

But Alice had continued up the grass bank to the school where the air was going all wavy up there, over the black roofs, because the special schoolchildren were also moving up the far side of
the hill to the buildings. Alice hadn’t seen the ragged shapes intent on meeting her at the summit. And Alice never turned around once, or even seemed to hear Catherine, who stayed behind and
gripped the links of the fence.

When Alice disappeared from view amongst the buildings that the other children had reached first and hid within, Catherine wet herself in fright. It was the last time she saw Alice.

Catherine had run and fallen, run and fallen, all the way home. Then shut herself inside her room and stayed there until Alice’s mum came round.

But today Alice was back. And coming closer to the green fence, while the boy with the painted wooden face stayed up on the hill and watched from the distance. And it really was Alice, with the
same tangled hair, the pale bespectacled face. Only Alice was happy now.

‘There’s nice kids up there, Caff. There’s Margaret and Annie and all them others. Nice kids. Like us. Come away, come away wiv us, Caff. They’s got nice fings to eat.
Ladies in dresses, and flowers. They’s got mices fightin’ battles. Cats is princesses. Foxes wear hats. Them puppet shows from olden times. Everyfing. Always sunny there, Caff.
There’s a rabbit that talks and a monkey in a dress. Better than down ’ere.’

Catherine came awake and gasped for air. And some of the dream came out with her, then dissolved and left her thinking of being taken for tests, seeing specialists, being
diagnosed as a slow learner. A Mongol, a retard, a thicky.

The bullying at the second school was worse than the first, mainly because the tormenting skills of infants hadn’t sufficiently developed in junior school. She remembered feeling so sick
with nerves each morning for the best part of two years that she could barely eat and spent most of her playtimes and dinner breaks hidden in various parts of the small school.

As a child she prayed and wished and prayed, until she gave herself headaches, that the children of the special school would come back and take her away like they did Alice. She’d had her
chance when Alice came back for her that afternoon in September, and she’d just relived it in her sleep as clearly as the day it happened. She’d even remembered all of the words.

Had she been asleep or was it another trance? Consciousness had withdrawn so far inside her, the external world was still blurred.

These weren’t memories, she urgently reminded herself. These were childhood fantasies constructed to explain the abduction of Alice. Her friend had never said anything about the Red House
on the day she imagined the little girl had come back for her. Or had she? She didn’t know.

The time the boy with the wooden face came into the playground to save her, and the reason why all the children suddenly stopped bullying her, as well as the belief that the teachers were
frightened of her, was not real either. None of it.

She felt nauseous in the darkness of the room, as if her brain had just slipped sideways. The slide had been accompanied by a fear of falling, and had jolted her back to the world. Her chin was
wet with what she guessed was blood. Thick vestiges of the trance were unclear, but stayed trapped behind her eyes.

Moving into a sitting position hurt her back, her neck, and she suffered a sense of overbalancing. Either that or the room tilted and the bed moved along the floor. She could not see her hands,
arms, or the bed in the darkness.

Her skin shivered inside the long gown provided at her bedside. Accepting the nightdress had felt like dependence, or even sublimation. Another item she had been too tired to resist. The ancient
garment was ruffled into wet creases along her spine.

The bed she’d awoken in was also dampened by sweat gone cold. Her eyes had been open for some time, too, but she had not been awake. A sense of her jaw being active lingered around her
mouth. She must have been talking or crying in her trance.

The bitter, chalky residue left by Maude’s tonic for her chill grew stronger on her tongue. She swallowed and her throat burned. The room stank of wet wood and unclean air.

She groped about the bedside table for the lamp, for the water Maude provided. Her fingertips found the glass and she guzzled the stale liquid, but she could not fit her other hand under the
lampshade to find the switch and couldn’t see what she was doing. Her fumbling bumped her phone, which fell off the bedside table and thumped the rug below. As the handset bounced the small
screen lit up, casting a pale-green glow over the bed.

Faint underwater light bathed a dense black shape at the foot of her bed, upright, but poised as if to lean over. Either that or it had just retracted from reaching for her.

Her phone settled on its front and smothered the frail light of the screen, leaving her inside a greater darkness than before. Catherine dropped the glass onto the bedspread.

She couldn’t breathe for fright. Her limbs had seized. Beside the thump of a heart that felt too big for her chest, she could think of nothing but the presence at the foot of her bed, one
that must have stood inches from her feet as she slept.

Kicking at the sheets she twisted onto her knees, upsetting the glass, which fell and rolled off the mattress to the rug, and onto the wooden floorboards. Around her skull the sound of the
rolling glass circled, as if it were inside her head grinding through her panic.