The Possession of Mr Cave (9 page)

Ah yes, the balcony scene.

Now, I could often tell the type of customer entering the
shop from the sound of the bell as they opened the door. A
brisk ting would normally signify a browsing tourist, with no
intention of making a purchase, while a more lethargic sound
would often indicate a more serious buyer, who opens the
door with the slow caution of a poker player lowering his
hand. I suppose doorbells, like all objects, gain personalities
over time. You get to know them, and they to know you,
and they communicate their knowledge as best they can.

We were back home. You were upstairs with your headache
and I was out in the hallway, straining my ears to try and tell
what you were doing. Then I heard it. The bell. So low and
sombre it might have been announcing the dead.

I sped into the shop and he was there, Denny, staring straight
at me with those brooding eyes. He held a grubby little package
in his hands. A belated birthday present, I suppose. Something
crudely wrapped in cheap blue paper.

'Espryin,' he said.

I confess I was exhausted from the previous night, but I
had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. What, or
who, was this Espryin? A magician? A Dacian god? A password
for a secret sect?

'I'm sorry?'

And he said it again, this time with the requisite pauses: 'Is
Bry in?'

Shakespeare was mistaken. A rose by any other name is not
as sweet.

'No,' I said. 'Bryony is out. Bryony is away. Bryony is far,
far away.'

'Where?' He was not one for taking hints, this boy.

'I have not the faintest idea.'

He looked around the shop, as if I might have been keeping
you locked up inside one of the cabinets.

'D'you know when she's back?'

'No. I do not.'

The truth, Bryony, is that I hated him. I hated his arrogance.
This boy who had watched your brother die without
shedding a tear. This boy who stood there, with his overdeveloped
body and his underdeveloped mind, imagining he
had a right to exist on your plane. This boy who probably
had never even heard of Brahms or Handel or Mendelssohn,
this primitive with a dream so many miles above his station.
To be with you – a girl who appreciated art and music and
literature, who could talk easily on a million subjects, who
could have had her pick of any boy in the land.

There was a sound, from upstairs. Had you dropped something?
Or had you heard the boy come into the shop and made
the noise on purpose? Either way, the effect was the same.

He looked up to the ceiling, in the direction of your
room. I looked at his neck, with the preposterous Adam's
apple. A thick, muscular neck, but one that could still be
cut like butter.

'I want you to go,' I told him in a low voice. 'Bryony's not
here, and if she was I can assure you she would have no interest
in seeing you.'

'What?'

'Look at you,' I said, too fatigued to hold my tongue.
'Look at you. Look at you. Just look. What on this earth
makes you think you are worthy of my daughter? You are
preying on a weakened mind. Do you understand that? You
stood back and let her brother die and now, in her grief, she
is too confused to understand what kind of creature you are.
I am grateful for what you did at the stables. Of course I
am. Any father would be. But don't think for one moment
that I don't understand your motives. Save the girl and then
steal the girl. That was your plan, wasn't it? Wasn't it?'

There was a violence inside him. He wanted to hurt me.
I could see that. His jaw clenched, holding back his primal
impulse.

'No,' he said. 'There were no plan. Ah just heard a noise,
that's all. When ah was out running. She sounded like she
were in trouble.'

'Just leave,' I told him. 'Just leave and don't return. Just
leave. If you care about my daughter at all you will leave her
alone.'

He breathed deep, and then gave the smallest of nods before
leaving the shop. As he left, and as I saw him walk past the
window, I felt the darkness creep over me again. I closed my
eyes and shook it away. 'Tiredness,' I told myself. 'I'm tired,
that's all. It's not him. It's not him.'

Then I heard something. A noise, coming from the rear of
the house. A kind of tapping. Pebbles against a window.

'Higgins?' I enquired, but the cat's blank eyes indicated his
lack of knowledge.

Walking out of the shop, towards the stockroom, I saw
Denny outside. He was in the backyard, staring up towards
your room. You were there, a weary Juliet, leaning out of
the window.

He saw me. He saw my watching eyes as I stood in the
hallway and then he went, taking that scruffy parcel with
him. What had he said? What had he arranged? Of course,
you gave me no answers. You kept your secrets, as I kept
mine, but I was going to know everything. Yes, indeed. Which
is why, that very evening (while you were sleeping off the
night before) I went into the attic to find the item that would
help the most.

The vulgar plastic of the baby monitor was caked in dust
after nearly fifteen years spent in a box in the attic. So strange,
that of all those old and treasured objects we had on the
premises, this was the one possession I only had to touch
for the tears to fall.

Instantly, it came back to me. That hellish day all those
years ago. The break-in. Those three sets of eyes, bulging with
mad anger as they stared out from balaclavas. My selfish panic
as one of our intruders picked up the nearest item – an Ebenezer
Coker candlestick – and threatened to test the solidity of my
skull if I wouldn't tell them the location of the inkstands. An
impossible task, of course.

'Where the —— are they?'

'They were sold yesterday. Both of them. They're currently
thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic on their way to a silverware
collector in Massachusetts.'

'You're ———– lying,' said another of them. He wore a
bomber jacket. The holes in his balaclava revealed pale skin,
intense dark eyes, and the fringe of a black moustache. 'What
kind of ——– do you take us for?'

'He's not lying,' said your mother.

I remember the silent despair of our exchanged glance.
Only five minutes before she had been with you and Reuben.
She had only come downstairs to the shop because I had
wanted help in preparing for the miniatures fair I was going
to the next day.

She had been worn out. Reuben had been hard to settle.
She had just switched the baby monitor on when we both
turned sharply at the sound of smashed glass.

I see her standing there. Her long dark hair pulled back in
a loose ponytail, the sleeves of her baggy blue shirt rolled to
the elbows. She was a strong and fearless kind, your mother.
A hands-on, wade-in type. Qualities she had inherited from
Cynthia, but minus the theatrics.

Despite the despair I could see in her face, her voice tried
to sound calm. 'The inkwells are gone,' she told them.

Behaviour breeds behaviour, she had always told me. One
acts calm, one creates calm.

'You can search the whole shop,' I added. 'I assure you
they're not here.'

This was the truth, but I wished it wasn't. Oh, Bryony, I
wished I could have handed the inkwells over. Truly, I would
have done it in an instant. I would have handed them the
Holy Grail if I'd had it. But the inkwells were gone.

I know I have never told the full story of what happened
next but now I am compelled to do so. I must walk through
this raging fire that exists in my memory, the fire that has
burned for years in my soul, a fire that has devoured us all.
Now, I must tend to those flames.

A week before the break-in there had been an article in the
York Daily Record
about my miraculous find at a car-boot sale
in Wakefield. This was back when I would stalk into such low
hunting grounds. I found a kind of predatory thrill venturing
onto those car parks and school fields, the thrill of a wolf
walking into a flock of ill-guarded sheep.

The silver inkstands, though, had been completely
unexpected. Toby jugs and the odd piece of broken furniture
were more typical pickings. To find these matching
treasures – their panels decorated with the most exquisite
engravings (urns, horses, Bacchic heads) perched atop beautifully
crafted lion-paw feet – had almost caused me to
collapse on the spot. Below the arms and motto I found all
my hopes confirmed: '
William Elliot. London, 1819
.' Of
course, my good Christian upbringing made me point out
to the seller – a trollish lady with a Birmingham accent –
that these items might be worth considerably more than the
eighty pounds at which she had priced them. She doubled
the figure and I rounded it up to two hundred, and she
smiled as though I was an imbecile. A day later I had them
tested with a dab of nitric acid and valued at twenty-five
thousand pounds apiece.

'They're ———– here somewhere. What about that box?'

While the Coker candlestick hovered above my head, one
of the other intruders pulled out a cardboard box from under
a table.

'"The possession of Mr Cave",' he said, as he read my
handwriting. The box was full of small items I was planning
to take to the miniatures fair at the Railway Museum the
following day.

The contents of the box were tipped onto the floor and,
when no sign of any inkstands appeared among the snuff
boxes and scent bottles, the intruders became more desperate.
They looked at each other, wondering what to do. And then
the man who had been waiting silently by the door stepped
forward, signalling for the one with the candlestick to stand
aside. He came closer, whistling an ominous G flat.

'Now, Mr Cave,' he said, after the whistle. He was more
well spoken than the others, but somehow his voice contained
a deeper terror. 'You have a choice. A pair of fractured skulls
or a pair of inkstands. It is your call.'

'No, please, no, we're telling the truth,' your mother said.
Her calm was beginning to crack as her eyes darted between
the three men.

It was at this point that Reuben began to cry. I remember
your mother's words as she looked over at the baby monitor,
its white plastic as obvious in the room of old objects as an
open eye on a corpse. 'Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet.' I remember
her pleading stare, as though Reuben could see her through
the tiny black holes of the speaker.

The intruders looked to the ceiling.

'No,' your mother said. 'They're not upstairs. The inkstands,
I mean. They're not upstairs.'

'Where's the babby, Mr Cave?' said the one with the candlestick.

'Sorry?' I managed.

'The babby.'

Babby. Infinite terror in the violated world.

The well-spoken one met my eyes again.

'What's it going to take, Mr Cave? Would you really swap
the life of your baby for fifty thousand pounds.'

Of course, he was bluffing. He was not going to go upstairs
and order one of his thugs to beat our babies to death with
a candlestick holder. I knew it, and prayed for your mother
to know it too.

My prayer went unheeded.

'Do something, Terence,' she said. That whisper haunts
me still. You see, Bryony, I did nothing. Nothing at all, for
those crucial seconds. The man in front of me, the well-spoken
man with the low whistle, nodded for the other two
to head upstairs.

Your mother ran to block their path. Her hands gripped
the door frame on both sides of her. 'Leave my children
alone,' she said. There was fury as well as fear in her now.
Wild eyes and a flash of teeth. The animal instinct to protect.
'Leave them alone.'

I stood there, rooted, thinking too fast and acting too slow.
Every possible action I envisaged ended in a violence I knew
I couldn't allow to happen.

But, of course, the violence happened anyway.

A gloved hand reached for her, as though her head was a
vase on a shelf, a precious object to be vandalised. It was the
one with the moustache and dark eyes. He flung her out of
his way and she travelled halfway across the room. Her whole
self – this infinite mass of emotions and experience – all useless
against such physical force.

We had a pine mule chest, at that time, in the middle of
the shop. Your mother hadn't wanted it. She doubted we'd
ever get a return on the eleven hundred pounds we bought it
for. It was me who had insisted, believing it would be a helpful
item in terms of display. Indeed, we kept all manner of objects
upon it – figures, glassware, a couple of jardinières – although
few people had shown much interest in the chest itself.

She caught her head on one of the top corners, a hard piece
of wood cut into a sharp right angle that hung out from the
body of the chest. She slid and landed and lay there on the
floor, her sleeves rolled up for a task she'd never finish. I knew
he had killed her, and all their eyes knew it too, filled with a
terror so different from my own.

There was a siren.

Mr Nair, the Pakistani gentleman who used to own the
newsagent's, had heard them smash the window and had telephoned
the police.

The intruders fled and were caught within a minute. I learned
that later. At the time I knew little at all. I had fallen into
shock, apparently. I couldn't speak to anyone that evening –
not the police, not the ambulance people, not even Cynthia
(it was left to a rather wonderful lady officer to make that call).

I remember, at one point, being with you two. You and
your brother. I remember you were still asleep, still deaf to his
continuing cries. I remember holding my hands to my ears,
desperately trying to close out the sound, a sound that seemed
to be responsible for everything. I wished for dreadful things,
that evening. Terrible exchanges of fate. For days, weeks,
months afterwards I did not trust myself around him. There
would be times when he would cry and I would know that
he was crying because he hated me, because he had an evil
inside him that resented his life and everyone else's. There
would be times when I would have to telephone Cynthia for
her to come round and I would shut myself away in the attic,
or I would crouch behind the counter, scared of my own dark
capabilities. One night I even called her at the theatre. I called
during the interval and she had to leave the Tennessee Williams
play she was in. Oh, they were terrible times.