The Room Beyond (33 page)

‘And it really was so delicious. Thank you.’

The temperature had dropped just a little; a few goose-pimples had
risen up on her arms, but she couldn’t bear to drag herself inside just yet. Somewhere
behind her she could feel the presence of the little church beyond the cottage,
prodding up at the sky with its pointed steeple. She’d found it impossible to
pray there; it filled her with so much more warmth to look out like this in the
other direction instead, towards the fields. The horizon was her altar now, the
grass her pew.

‘Come now, let’s go in,’ urged Mrs Hubbard. ‘You’ll catch a chill
out here. Come and watch the boy sleep. He’s as peaceful as I’ve ever seen
him.’

A single lamp in the corridor was enough to fill the entire cottage
with a soft glow. She bent over the crib, stroking his feathery hair with her
fingertips.

‘I never thought I’d see him sleep like this. Not in his own home
anyway. We did the right thing, didn’t we?’

‘Oh yes Mrs White,’ and Mrs Hubbard smiled down from the other side
with a face so full of love and patience that it made her want to lean across
the crib and embrace the woman then and there.

‘You know, I’d very much like it if you started calling me Miranda. Formality
doesn’t really work out here and you’re the closest and dearest friend I’ve
ever had.’

Mrs Hubbard started slightly at the words and began to untie her
apron with hurried fingers.

‘Oh dear, have I embarrassed you? I hope not. And I’ve made you
cry!’

‘Not at all!’ She brushed her apron hurriedly across her eyes. ‘It
would be a pleasure to call you by your true name, Miranda. But you must do the
same as well. Please, call me Gladys.’

The baby sighed gently in his sleep, flexing his fingers in the air
before burrowing his head to one side against the pillow.

‘He’s our boy now, isn’t he, Gladys?’

‘I’d follow him to the ends of the earth. I think I already have!’

She laughed under her breath, reaching for Gladys’s hand across the
crib.

‘My little man! Our little man. Our Sebastian.’

Serena’s Story

‘I’m going to Sasha tonight.’

‘No, don’t please.’

Their voices were quite clear although I felt as if I was miles away
from them, on the other side of a mountain range, listening through the pure
air. I tried to force my eyelids apart.

‘Look, she’s stirring,’ said Eva. ‘I better leave you two together.’

‘Try to change your mind,’ came Seb’s low voice.

‘Why? What have I got to lose now?’ she yelped back and the image of
a lost wounded fox swam through my mind. ‘He’s already started talking to the
papers. They’ll have a field day with this and so will he... God knows what he
might tell them about Raphael now. If I go to him, just once, then maybe he’ll
leave my family alone, with all our pain. We need
some
privacy.’

I winced through the glare of the light and found her drawn face
staring right at me.

‘You know he won’t do that,’ Seb answered.

‘She’s awake now... I’ll see you later.’

I heard the muted click of a door closing. To my left I saw the
outline of windows with curtains on either side and a patch of sky. It looked
remarkably like my room.

‘Hello. You’re back.’

I turned my groaning neck to discover a blur sitting on the edge of
my bed. Slowly it turned into Seb.

‘What happened?’ I croaked.

‘It’s alright, you’re safe. I came when I heard all the noise and
got you out of there. You’ve been asleep for ages.’

I listened to the sound of my own breathing, calm and rhythmic like
waves, and then a sudden needle of fear clawed its way into my guts.

‘And Raphael?’ I whispered.

Seb’s face went dark. ‘No. He’s dead.’

My head began to throb. I felt Seb take my hand and kiss it softly
with his cool lips.

‘I want to be alone,’ I said, closing my eyes to him.

When he was gone I slowly eased my creaking body off the bed. Every
bone felt as if it had been removed and rearranged and I gripped the bedpost at
first to find my balance. My room looked sparse, all my belongings gone apart
from a few clothes flung onto a chair in the corner.

When I could feel the warm flow of blood moving around me again I
put the clothes on and ran my fingers through my dishevelled hair. In the
mirror my face looked hollow and pale and different somehow.

Downstairs the air felt silent but inhabited. I reached Arabella’s
office and her door was open, the Bacchanalian revellers urging me in. She was
in there, staring out of the window with her back to me, a large butterfly clip
clasped in her hair. She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of my step,
drank me in with swollen eyes and then turned her back on me again.

‘You know I knew it wasn’t normal, living here as we do, but I never
quite predicted this,’ she said in a quiet and considered voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured.

She laughed softly. ‘Oh it’s not your fault. It’s this stinking
goddam place. That ghost, thing, whatever you care to call it, feeds off fear. And
my Raphael had plenty of that.’

‘So you’re awake at last then!’ bellowed a voice I barely recognized.

I jumped and turned to find Edward looming in the doorway, red
cheeked and glowering like a drunk.

‘Now get out,’ he spat. ‘Hurry up, your things are downstairs.’

I tried to back away from him. ‘Can I at least say goodbye to Beth?’

‘No you certainly cannot!’

‘The girl’s done nothing wrong,’ said Arabella, calmly.

Edwards’s fists curled up into punches. ‘Oh no. No! Only lead my son
to his death. And who let her in this house in the first bloody place?’

He grasped me by the shoulders, forcing me out of the room.

‘It’s not my fault!’ I yelled as he pushed me forwards down the
stairs.

‘I never want to see you in my house again. Do I make myself clear?’

My face felt livid. ‘You don’t understand! He tried to... to...’

A small face from somewhere between the banisters blinked back at me
like a scared shadow.

‘Beth!’

‘There is no Beth,’ snapped Edward’s voice. ‘Take your things and
get out of my house.’

A rectangle of light appeared as the front door swung open. Edward
forced me through it, his knuckles firmly wedged into my spine and then my bags
followed, one by one, strewn like pieces of rubbish across the pavement.

The door slammed shut again behind me, black and glossy and
impenetrable. I lowered myself slowly onto the step. A box of art pencils had
exploded from one of the bags. They lay around my feet, flashing their bright
colours up at me from the grey stone. I picked them up carefully and put them
away.

‘Are you alright?’

I looked up to find Robert staring down at me from the pavement. He
was wearing a long grey coat, his hands thrust deeply in his pockets.

‘I’ve been thrown out of your house.’

‘I can see. I did try to warn you.’

‘Yes, I wish I’d listened. I... I don’t know what to say.’

He looked away for a moment, squinting into the cold air. ‘My
father’s very angry,’ he murmured, his voice wavering. ‘He’s blaming
everyone
at the moment. Sorry. Can I help you?’

I raised myself to my feet and we glanced up at the house together. A
curtain twitched in an upstairs window, Eva’s room.

‘Yes you can,’ I said quietly. ‘There’s one small thing that I can
do for your family, if you’ll let me. I need you to get something for me first
though, from Raphael’s room. Would it be possible, do you think?’

The card Sasha had given me was for an address in Bloomsbury called The
Machen Institute. I plunged headlong between the buses along Tottenham Court
Road and then into the quieter back streets.

The Machen Institute was an austere thirties building squashed
between two much nicer Victorian ones. I hurried up the three flights of stairs
to Sasha’s office. His door was at the end of a musty corridor:
Sasha
Apostol
it said on a yellowing piece of card in a metal frame.

When I knocked his face appeared from behind the door with a
clinical little smile.

‘Ah, you’ve made it. Come in. I have to say that your phone call was
most unexpected in light of recent fascinating events. I thought you would be
needed by the family. Please, take a seat if you can find one.’

He was wearing his usual tweed suit and a mismatched checked shirt
underneath which had seen better days. He’d also oiled his hair into thick
shiny strands across his head.

‘I’ve stopped working for the Hartreves. You won’t be seeing me at
the house again.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘That surprises and saddens me. I have much
to tell you that you would find interesting, I think.’

‘And for what in return?’

He didn’t reply but turned instead to a pile of papers on his desk,
rifling through them with purposeful fingers.

The office was crammed with bookshelves on all sides. I squeezed
myself between two piles of dictionaries onto a small sofa by the window and
scoured the room for a hiding place.

The bookcase to my right jutted out from the wall quite a bit. I
craned my neck and discovered a good three inch gap above the old skirting
board between the bookcase and the wall.

‘Here, take a look at this,’ he said, suddenly brandishing a piece
of paper and thrusting it into my hand. ‘Walter Balanchine, shortly before his
death in 1939. This image actually appeared alongside his obituary. He was in
his mid-eighties.’

It was a photocopy of a black and white photograph. The man in it
had little more than a skull of a face and long wispy white hair. His deep-set
eyes were fixed far away, as if he were peering at the horizon. It was an ugly,
yet perversely beautiful face, something from a different world or an ancient
era even.

‘Who was he, exactly?’ I asked.

‘A mystic, a visionary, a madman. At the age of seven he was
arrested by the police for purportedly turning a local publican into a rat; at
twelve years old he had a stall in Limehouse selling miraculous cures for
anything from gout to gangrene. In adulthood he acquired clients from across
the country and, indeed, from all over the world: pitiful and lonely souls who
leaned upon him like children and lived in awe of his miraculous abilities. Lord
Stephen Hartreve was one of them.’

‘Was Balanchine famous?’

‘In a sense. The Victorians craved spirituality in many forms as the
nineteenth century wore on. Darwin, among others, had done his best to upend
religion and men like Balanchine offered hope to the disenchanted... But now,’
and he paused, dragging his palm across his oily head. ‘Enough of my chattering
and time for you to tell me something.’

He sat down and pulled his chair up close.

‘What do you want to know?’ I asked.

‘Why don’t we start with that book you found in Druid Manor? Where
did you come across it exactly?’

‘In the library.’

He breathed deeply. ‘The great library itself! And who took you
there?’

‘No one.’

‘I don’t believe you. You would never have found it on your own. Was
it young Beth? It must have been, tell me.’

‘Why are you so interested in Beth?’

He strummed his fingers slowly across his thigh. ‘Surely over these
past months you’ve come to realize that Beth is... not quite normal for a child
of her age?’

‘That sounds a little dramatic. She’s very bright of course, her
head is bursting with thoughts and ideas like any young child.’

‘Thoughts and ideas! Ha! Listen to me. I know everything there is to
know about the Hartreve family and that child has told me things that...’ he
stopped himself.

‘That what? What are you trying to say?’

He gave a low laugh. ‘Things that she couldn’t possibly have
invented.’

The air hung between us like a heavy velvet curtain.

‘You know, the introduction to Balanchine’s book was very
interesting,’ I said, breaking the silence. ‘Haunting really. It was about a
little girl called Miranda.’

‘Miranda? Really? What did it say about her?’

‘Oh, she had a terrible childhood. She poisoned her mother by
mistake and was punished for it for so long that an awful thing began to happen
to her.’

‘And what was that? Tell me.’

‘No, not yet. You tell me about Beth first.’

He jumped from his chair, frustration flexing through his fingers. ‘This
is a silly game, a stupid game that you are playing!’ he snapped, wiping his
forehead with his sleeve. ‘Alright... She sees things, hears voices.’

‘What sort of voices?’

‘Voices of the past, if you must know.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You don’t believe me?’ he laughed loudly.

‘No. Why should I?’

I glared at him and his nose flared up into a snarl. He snatched at
a file on his desk and tore another piece of paper from it.

‘Take a look at this. You’ll recognize Balanchine to the right. It’s
a satirized image of him with a young companion, drawn around 1910.’

The cartoon depicted the two men walking shoulder to shoulder along
an urban street. There was a caption underneath:
Beauty and the Beast
. Balanchine
had been sketched with a grimacing scowl, devil horns and the pointed end of a
serpent’s tale poking out from beneath his cloak. His companion was a young
sharp-suited man about town, with fashionably floppy hair and a face I knew
better than my own.

The image swam before my eyes. I wanted to touch it, draw my finger
across the lovely face and yet my hand flinched back at the same time. Sasha
leaned in close; the acrid smell of his sweaty skin in my nostrils.

‘That young man you see in the picture was believed to be the
illegitimate grandson of Lord Stephen Hartreve. He was brought up almost in
seclusion at Druid Manor, but as a young adult returned to what was once his
mother’s home, by then resided in by some cousins: 36 Marguerite Avenue. London
loved him of course and soon the idle tongues of friends and family told the
world that this was the son of the notorious beauty Lucinda Hartreve.’

‘What happened to him?’

My voice sounded small and bruised.

‘Ah, now I was hoping that this was something you could tell me!’

He waited but I made no answer.

‘One day,’ he continued. ‘Not a year after the young man’s arrival
in London, he simply vanished and no one has seen him for a hundred years until
I showed this picture to young Beth. She must have been three at the time, no
more. “That’s Sebastian,” she told me in that little voice of hers. “He’s
always here. He’s funny!” I already had my suspicions of course; Arabella,
stupid miserable woman that she is, was simply a treasure trove of information
in those early days, but it was the child who confirmed it all. Oh! And when
she looked deep into my eyes, such a sweet innocent voice came out of her.’