The Unseen (28 page)

‘I know. Nothing rings any bells, does it? Reading through
them? No family gossip or legends or anything she could be referring to? Or any idea who she might have been writing to?’

‘Come on, Leah – this was nearly sixty years before I was born! I never even met the woman. The only family scandal I know about was the fairy thing. Not much of a scandal even – a guy manages to convince a handful of people of the existence of fairies. And then they all change their minds again,’ he said, in brief summary.

‘I wish she’d dated the letters. Or we had the envelopes with a dated postmark on, or something. If this theosophist guy was around a lot that year, there’s a chance she could have been writing to him, I suppose. He could be the dead soldier – Robin Durrant. I need to find out more about him. Like what is a theosophist, anyway?’

‘Never heard of it. Some odd branch of religion or spiritualism, clearly. A lot of people believed in a lot of strange things back then. Like God, for example.’ He smiled.

‘You shouldn’t joke about that – you’d be amazed how sensitive people can be about it.’

‘Oh, I know. Bit of a double standard, I’ve always thought. Anyone can come to my door and tell me the error of my ways according to their particular deity, but if I stand up and say that there is no God, people get very huffy.’

‘Sounds as though you’re speaking from experience?’

‘My sister-in-law. Just one of the many facets of this whole bloody mess.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to talk about it?’

‘I don’t,’ he said, with a quick, agitated shrug. He glanced away, out of the kitchen window, and Leah took a good look at his face. Long, straight nose, thick hair peppered with grey. He had a gaunt look, slightly starving; his spine curved into a weary slouch, shoulders fixed high and back, the bones sharp and angular beneath his faded jumper. His eyes slipped out of focus all too easily, gliding past her into the middle distance as if helplessly chasing
thoughts that ran away with him. Suddenly, Leah saw how fragile he was – that he was stretched far too thin by life. She recognised the exhaustion dogging his every move – remembered it well from the long days of crisis after she’d left Ryan. It was there on the tip of her tongue:
I know how you feel
. Mark took a long breath and sighed sharply through his nose. ‘Are you hungry? Do you want some lunch?’ he asked.

‘Sure. Thanks.’

With Mark’s permission, Leah took herself on a tour of the house while he cracked eggs into a bowl and cut up mushrooms for an omelette. She climbed the wide staircase with a sense of growing excitement, a childish effervescence that made her smile to herself, made her breathe a little faster. Desiccated floorboards squealed beneath her feet, for if the ground floor was tainted with damp, upstairs the air was as dry as old bones; so dry it prickled the back of her throat, made the threat of a sneeze linger maddeningly at the top of her nose. She looked into the master bedroom, which had been Mark’s father’s room until relatively recently. Curtains with big sprays of fat roses, once red, now a rusty brown like dried blood. A wardrobe, dressing table and chest of drawers, all too small for the wide room. The bed had a massive mahogany headboard, and was covered in piles of dusty feather duvets and eiderdowns, pillows gone the orangey-yellow of beeswax with the sweat and grease of generations of sleeping heads. The smell of it was at once familiar, repugnant, and comforting somehow. Like a favourite garment, unwashed and worn long enough to echo exactly the shape and smell of the body. A clock radio flashed 00:00 in red LED digits, giving a faint electric buzz each time the numbers lit up. There was a Teasmaid at least thirty years old; a dusty trouser press; a collection of wire coat hangers bundled on a hook behind the door. Leah stared into every corner of this sad, neglected room, finding it at once depressing and exciting. She was spying, but on a world so quiet, so out of date that it bore no resemblance to life as she knew it.

Through a doorway in one wall was the en suite bathroom: a trail of blue-grey limescale in the bath, channelling a steady drip of water from tap to plughole; a splayed and dishevelled toothbrush in a chipped yellow mug that said
Rise ’n’ Shine!
in bold letters on the side; a razor furred with dried soap and traces of stubble. The carpet was dark with mildew around the sink and toilet pedestals; the lace curtains had moss growing along the hem, where the window did not shut properly and a small puddle of rain had found its way onto the sill. Leah pushed the window open slightly and peered out, over the back garden where the grass was knee-high, choppy and beige after the winter frosts. To the far left she could just see the high wall of a courtyard, and a selection of haphazard outbuildings, one of which had a gaping hole in its roof. Two fat wood pigeons huddled up to one another on the ridge tiles, their feathers fluffed against the rain.

Leah continued her tour, drifting from room to room on soft feet as if she might disturb somebody; but none of the other rooms seemed to have been occupied in years. They were full of random items of furniture and junk – one bedroom contained three commode chairs and a shop window mannequin – and crumpled cardboard boxes of books and magazines and blankets and toys and kitchen oddments. The attic bedrooms appeared to have been used as storage space for decades. Boxes and trunks stood in lopsided piles in all three of them. Leah picked her way to one of the dormer windows and peered out at the view. On the window sill, a dusty old fruit box held a stack of pictures in frames, most of which had lost their glass. Leah brushed some mummified flies aside, and flicked through them. Bleached watercolours; a small print of Charles I; another of kittens playing with wool; an embroidery sampler, the motto so faded she could hardly read it, with a small striped cat arching its back amidst flowers in one corner; a sepia picture of the house, with the caption
Cold Ash Holt Rectory, 1928
typed neatly along the bottom. Leah drew this photo out, and took it down to show Mark.

The downstairs was better furnished, and better equipped, but it all had an air of long neglect that made Leah slightly sad – gave her a feeling of nostalgia, as though she herself missed the people who had once lived here as much as the house itself appeared to. A door that seemed to go down into the cellars was locked, and Leah left off rattling the handle with a tug of regret. She went back to the kitchen, where Mark had turned on a tinny radio and the lunchtime news was filling the room. His back was to her, at the stove, gently frying the omelette with a meditative air. Leah slid onto her stool, and he looked around as her knee knocked the counter.

‘I don’t suppose you know the property features writer? I suppose the place should go on the market. For a while I’d hoped Dad might come back to it, but he’s not going to. The sooner we all accept that, the better,’ he said absently, as if she’d never left the room.

‘The property features writer? Like I said, I don’t work for a paper. I’m freelance,’ Leah reminded him carefully. His moods seemed to chase across him like clouds on a windy day, and they consumed him. Even now, with his back to her, tension seemed to radiate from him. Leah shuffled Hester Canning’s letters and put the old photo of the house to one side, at a loss for something to say.

‘What’s wrong with your father? Is he ill?’ she asked, before she could stop herself. Mark glanced at her again, as if trying to read her face, to judge her worth. A heartbeat later his eyes softened, and his face fell into the tired lines she was becoming familiar with.

‘He’s in a care home. For the elderly.’ Leah studied him, trying to guess his age and therefore how old his father might be. Mark caught her scrutiny and smiled a tiny, bitter smile. ‘He’s seventy years old, in case you’re wondering. But he has early-onset dementia.’

‘Oh. I’m … really sorry to hear that.’

‘It’s wretched. It’s a wretched, awful thing to happen to a good, kind man; and it’s completely unfair. Which is how life is, I suppose. The last time I went to see him, he didn’t recognise me at
all,’ Mark said, in a monotone, as he came over to the island with the frying pan and served the omelette onto two plates.

‘Thank you,’ Leah murmured.

‘Don’t mention it.’ He sat down opposite her and started to shovel the eggs into his mouth as if she wasn’t even there, his gaze far away again, jaw working mechanically. Leah picked up her fork and began to eat slowly. He’d scorched the bottom of the omelette, and the mushrooms hadn’t cooked through, sitting hard and dry inside the folds of egg. She picked at it politely, trying to keep a smile from her lips as she watched Mark chew and chew at his raw mushrooms, his attention finally returning to the room, and to her. ‘This is bloody awful,’ he said at last, and Leah smiled ruefully, nodding her head. ‘Come on, let’s go to the pub.’

After a better lunch of sandwiches and beer, they walked out into the water meadows. The rain had cleared and left the sky china blue, with fat white clouds bowling above their heads as they made their way along a footpath that ran beside a lake, away from the canal. The ground squelched beneath their boots, the turf seeming to bounce as if floating on liquid.

‘These lakes probably weren’t here when Hester wrote the letters, and the fairy pictures were taken,’ Mark told her, marching along with his hands thrust into his pockets.

‘How come?’

‘They’re flooded gravel pits, for the most part. There are still some gravel works around here, even today. It was big business at one point.’ He sniffed – the cold breeze was making both their noses run, and had brought a flush of colour to his cheeks, a shine to his eyes that made him look more alive.

‘I suppose it would have been more open, too – less footpaths and fields and more common land and water meadow?’ she asked. Mark shrugged.

‘Yes, I’d have thought so. Here’s a bit of the river. It weaves in and out of the canal all the way along here – between Newbury and
Reading. Sometimes the river and the canal are the same thing, sometimes they’re separate. And all the way along there are these little streams and tributaries and lakes.’

‘I suppose the chances of the tree in the picture still being there are …’

‘Slim to nil, I’d say. It looks like an old tree in the photos, and if it was old a hundred years ago … well, even if it wasn’t chopped down to make way for something, it would have come down of its own accord,’ Mark said. He stopped to consult the photos again. In the study at his father’s house, they had found an original copy of a pamphlet written by his great-grandfather, Albert Canning, about the pictures and the circumstances of their production. In it were the two pictures Leah had seen online, and a couple more besides, in which the thin figure was less distinct. ‘Well, there are rows of tall trees like that here and there all along the canal and the river braids.’ He glanced up at her and shrugged one shoulder. ‘We’ll never know if we’re looking at the exact ones, but those over there are as like them as any, and there’s a hollow in front of this bit of the river, just like in the picture. It’s as good a guess as any,’ he said, handing Leah the pamphlet and gazing around at the landscape.

Leah studied the picture hard again and then looked up. Mark was right – the landscape was as similar to the picture as any they had seen that morning. The sun seemed preternaturally bright after so many wet days, and she shielded her eyes with the pamphlet. The stream by their feet was quick and clear, cutting through the cropped turf with keen efficiency as it hurried by. On its bottom were brown and orange pebbles, chips of grey and white flint and knots of green weed that streamed with the current. The short grass was peppered with pellets of sheep and rabbit shit, and the hedgerow beyond was pocked with burrows and rodent diggings. Suddenly it was spring, as though all it took was the sun to shine for Leah to see it. Dandelions with fat yellow manes; the little white daisies of childhood; tiny purple blooms with hairy leaves that she
did not recognise. She crouched and picked up a stick from the ground, throwing it into the stream and watching it whisk away. On the other bank, a startled pheasant bolted away from them, legs pedalling comically. Leah smiled and took a deep breath. The breeze was damp and cool, and tasted of earthy minerals, soft rainwater; but the sun on the top of her head had warmth – a wonderful glow of heat she hadn’t felt since the September before. She tried to imagine the eerie light of the photograph, settled over the bright scene in front of her. Had the photographer used a filter of some kind? It didn’t appear to be misty, exactly, but there was some kind of unfamiliar, pallid glow, softening all the outlines just slightly, just enough to allow doubt to creep in. Doubt, or belief. Leah took another deep breath, all the way to the bottom of her lungs.

‘God! It’s nice to see a blue sky, isn’t it?’ she exclaimed, standing up again and wiping her hands on the seat of her jeans. She turned to Mark and found him watching her with an odd, wide-eyed intensity. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied. He shook his head and the look was gone, the old troubled scowl back in its place. ‘I used to come here and play with my cousins as a kid. In summer we used to swim – not right here, a bit further along where there’s a big bend in the river and the water is slower. It was freezing.’ He shuddered at the thought. ‘Bone-achingly cold, every time. But I had to go in, of course. Couldn’t be the one left out.’ Leah put her hands in her back pockets and turned in a circle, surveying their surroundings. ‘What do you want to do now?’ Mark asked. He sounded genuinely interested, and slightly resigned; as if entirely at her disposal. She looked across at him, squinting in the sunshine, and realised that he didn’t have anything else to do. Small wonder, then, that he was such a prisoner to his moods and memories.

‘I don’t know,’ she confessed. After all, she admitted to herself, the fairy pictures might have nothing at all to do with what Hester Canning had been writing about. ‘Let’s walk on a bit – make the
most of the fact that it’s not pouring down. Then I wouldn’t mind having a better look through the books in the study, if you don’t mind? There might be something in there about theosophy, or this Robin Durrant guy.’