‘A holiday? After the fuss she made about my going away last time, I would have thought the last thing she would do would be to send me an a holiday now. And with Christmas only a few weeks away, too!“
Poor Judith. She hated deceit and was no good at subterfuge.
It was the obvious place. So when he disappeared, I had gone there again. I squeezed through the brambles and hanging growth that masked the entrance into air sweet with rottenness, and there, in the gloom, I found him. Slumped in a corner, gun by his side, face half blown away. I recognized the other half, despite the maggots. It was Charlie, all right.
‘Won’t see me?“
He was the first of my ghosts.
Whatever it was that Judith knew, Dr. Clifton knew it, too.
‘Whereabouts in Cambridge is your father’s shop?“ he wanted to know, and ”Does he deal in medical history at all?“ I answered him briefly, more concerned with my own questions than his, and after a time his attempts at small talk came to an end. As we drove into Harrow-gate, the atmosphere in the car was heavy with Miss Winter’s oppressive silence.
‘I know how to get him out of there,“ she said with a wink. ”I’ll take the infant to him. That’ll do the trick. In fact, I’ll go and look in on the baby now.“
For if Charlie did not return, who would authorize the withdrawals from the bank? John knew obscurely that the solicitor would have to be involved if Charlie’s disappearance was prolonged, but yet… His reluctance was natural. At Angelfield they had lived with their backs to the world for years. Hester had been the one outsider to enter their world, and look what had happened there! Besides, he had an innate mistrust of solicitors. John had no specific charge against Mr. Lomax, who gave every appearance of being a decent, sensible chap, yet he could not find it in himself to confide the household’s difficulty to a member of a profession that made its living from having its nose in other people’s private affairs. And besides, if Charlie’s absence became public knowledge, as his strangeness already was, would the solicitor be content to put his sign on Charlie’s bank papers, just so that John and the Missus could continue to pay the grocery bills? No. He knew enough about solicitors to know that it would not be as simple as that. John frowned as he envisaged Mr. Lomax in the house, opening doors, rummaging through cupboards, casting his eye into every dark corner and carefully cultivated shadow of the Angelfield world. There would be no end to it.
Slowly the Missus raised herself out of her chair and, putting one foot painfully in front of the other, shuffled out of the room to see to the baby who, in the years her memory had lost, had grown up, married, had twins and died. John didn’t stop her. She would forget where she was going before she even reached the stairs. But behind her back he put his head in his hands and sighed.
What to do? About Charlie, about the Missus, about everything? It was John’s constant preoccupation. At the end of a week, the nursery was clean and a plan of sorts had arisen out of the evenings of deliberation. No reports of Charlie had been received, from near or far. No one had seen him go, and no one outside the house knew he was gone. Given his hermitlike habits, no one was likely to discover his absence, either. Was he under any kind of obligation, John wondered, to inform anyone—the doctor? the solicitor?—of Charlie’s disappearance? Over and over he turned the question in his mind, and each time he found the answer to be no. A man had the perfect right to leave his home if he so chose, and to go without telling his employees his destination. There was no benefit John could see in telling the doctor, whose previous intervention in the household had brought nothing but ill, and as for the solicitor…
Miss Winter did not comment on my communications with her solicitor, though I am certain she was informed, just as I am certain the documents I requested would never have been sent to me without her consent. I wondered whether she might consider it cheating, whether this was the “jumping about in the story” she so disapproved of, but on the day I received the set of letters from Mr. Lomax and sent my request for help to the genealogist, she said not a word but only picked up her story where she had left it, as though none of these postal exchanges of information were happening.
‘I can do my own packing.“ Annoyance made me curt.
It was a self-comforting pretense at conversation; he’d given up expecting straightforward answers from the Missus. But the habit of talking to her was too long in him to be given up lightly. So he continued to sit across the table in the kitchen, sharing his thoughts, his dreams, his worries with her. And when she answered—random, rambling drifts of words—he puzzled over her pronouncements, trying to find the connection between her answer and his question. But the labyrinth inside her head was too complex for him to navigate, and the thread that led her from one word to the next had slipped through her fingers in the darkness.
‘I can pack a case for you, if it would help?“ she offered. She smiled apologetically, knowing I knew she was hiding something.
From time to time he spent half an hour in the topiary garden, but le could not enjoy it. The pleasure of being there was overshadowed by worry about what might be going on indoors, in his absence. And besides, to do it properly required more time than he was able to give it. In the end, the only part of the garden that he kept up was the kitchen garden and the rest he let go.
Though Judith blushed, she was not forthcoming with any more information. Something wasn’t right. I was being shifted out of the way.
There was no urgency. The most recent withdrawal had been only a few weeks earlier, so they were not entirely without money. Also, Hester had gone without collecting her wages, so that cash was available if she did not write for it and things got desperate. There was no need to pay for a lot of food, since there were vegetables and fruit to feed an army in the garden, and the woods were full of grouse and pheasant. And if it came to it, if there was an emergency, a calamity (John hardly knew what he meant by this—was what they had already suffered not a calamity? Was it possible that worse should be in store? Somehow he thought so), then he knew someone who would have a few discreet cases of claret out of the cellar and give him a bob or two in return.
‘It’s Maurice’s day off, but Dr. Clifton will run you to the station.“
At the moment she first learned the fact of Charlie’s departure, it had brushed her consciousness momentarily but had not found a place to settle there. The passages, corridors and stairwells in her mind, that connected her thoughts but also held them apart, had been undermined. Picking up one end of a trail of thought, she followed it through holes in walls, slipped into tunnels that opened beneath her feet, came to vague, semipuzzled halts: Wasn’t there something… ? Hadn’t she been… ? Thinking of Charlie locked in the nursery, crazed with grief for love of his dead sister, she fell through a trapdoor in time, without even realizing it, into the thought of his father, newly bereaved, locked in the library to grieve for his lost wife.
And then the solicitor would need to come to the house only once to see the Missus wasn’t right. He would insist on the doctor being called in. And the same would happen to the Missus as had happened to Isabelle. She would be taken away. How could that do any good?
‘And Miss Winter? I’d like a quick word with her. Before I go.“
John didn’t explain to her again that Isabelle had died, for it would only bring on grief-stricken surprise and a demand to know how and why. “An asylum?” she would exclaim, astonished. “But why didn’t anyone tell me Miss Isabelle was in an asylum? To think of the girl’s poor father! How he dotes on her! It will be the death of him.” And she would lose herself for hours in the shattered corridors of the past, grieving over tragedies long gone as though they had happened only yesterday, and heedless of today’s sorrows. John had been through it half a dozen times and hadn’t the heart to go through it again.
Charlie was the second loss. The third if you count Isabelle, though to all practical purposes we had lost her two years before, and so she hardly counts.
He kept food coming from the kitchen garden. He cooked; he cut up meat on the Missus’s plate and put tiny forkfuls in her mouth. He poured out her cold cups of tea and made fresh ones. He was no carpenter, but he nailed fresh boards over rotten ones here and there, kept the saucepans emptied in the main rooms and stood in the attic, looking at the holes in the roof and scratching his head. “We’ll have to get that sorted,” he would say with an air of decision, but it wasn’t raining much, and it wasn’t snowing, and it was a job that could wait. There was so much else to do. He washed sheets and clothes. They dried stiff and sticky with the residue of soap flakes. He skinned rabbits and plucked pheasants and roasted them. He did the washing up and cleaned he sink. He knew what needed to be done. He had seen the Missus do it a hundred times.
It seemed to me that the doctor’s car was forever in Miss Winter’s drive. When I first arrived in Yorkshire he would call every third day, then it became every other day, then every day and now he was coming to the house twice a day. I studied Miss Winter carefully. I knew the facts. Miss Winter was ill. Miss Winter was dying. All the same, when she was telling me her story she seemed to draw on a well of strength that was unaffected by age and illness. I explained the paradox by telling myself it was the very constancy of the doctor’s attention that was sustaining her.
No. They had just got rid of one outsider; it was no time to invite in another. Much safer to deal with private things privately. Which meant, now that things were as they were, byhimself.
Once we got used to it, there was a certain comfort in our new existence. The wine cellar proved a substantial and discreet source of household finance, and as time went by, our way of life began to feel sustainable. Better really if Charlie were just to stay absent. Unfound and unreturning, neither dead nor alive, he could do no harm to anyone.
‘We’ll be all right for a bit,“ he told the Missus, over a cigarette, one night in the kitchen. ”Probably manage four months if we’re careful. Don’t know what we’ll do then. We’ll have to see.“
And he cooked. We’d noticed how the Missus lost track of herself halfway through preparing a meal. The vegetables would boil to a mush, then burn on the bottom of the pan. The house was never without the smell of carbonized food. Then one day we found John in the kitchen. The hands that we knew dirty, pulling potatoes from the ground, were now rinsing the yellow-skinned vegetables in water, peeling them, rattling pan lids at the stove. We ate good meat or fish with plenty of vegetables, drank strong, hot tea. The Missus sat in her chair in the corner of the kitchen, with no apparent sense that these used to be her tasks. After the washing up, when night fell, the two of them sat talking over the kitchen table. His concerns were always the same. What would they do? How could they survive? What would become of us all?
I walked back to Angelfield. And I didn’t tell. We were better off as we were. And anyway, it couldn’t make any difference to him, could it?
Where to find comfort?
John had a few dreadful days. He insisted on cleaning up the nursery quarters—“It’ll make us all ill otherwise”—and when he could bear the smell no longer, he sat on the steps outside, drawing in the clean air like a man saved from drowning. In the evening he took long baths, using up a whole bar of soap, scrubbing his skin till it glowed pink. He even soaped the inside of his nostrils.
‘Gone!“ She shook her head and laughed as if he’d made a joke.
And yet in ways invisible to my eyes, she must have been weakening quite seriously. For what else could explain Judith’s unexpected announcement one morning? Quite out of the blue she told me that Miss Winter was too unwell to meet me. That for a day or two she would be unable to engage in our interviews. That with nothing to do here, I may as well take a short holiday.
So I kept my knowledge to myself.
I backed out of the doorway, not caring about the nettles and the thorns. I couldn’t wait to get away from the sight of him. But his image stayed with me and, though I ran, it seemed impossible to escape his hollow, one-eyed stare.
Come out? John sighed and shook his head. He’d heard this before. “He’s not there, Missus. He’s gone, have you forgotten already?”
John was more affected by Charlie’s disappearance than by Hester’s. Charlie might have been a recluse, an eccentric, a hermit, but he was the master of the house. Four times a year, at the sixth or seventh time of asking, he would scrawl his mark on a paper and the bank would release funds to keep the household ticking over. And now he was gone. What would become of the household? What would they do for money?
There was a house I knew. A simple little house in the woods. I had stolen food there once or twice. That was where I went. By the window I hid, getting my breath back, knowing I was close to ordinary life. And when I had stopped gasping for air, I stood looking in, at a woman in her chair, knitting. Though she didn’t know I was there, her presence soothed me, like a kind grandmother in a fairy tale.
‘Don’t worry, he’ll come out,“ the Missus said.
In the woods there was a hovel. Unused for a hundred years, overgrown with thorns and surrounded by nettles, it was where Charlie and Isabelle used to go. After Isabelle was taken to the asylum, Charlie went there still; I knew, because I had seen him there, sniveling, scratching love letters on his bones with that old needle.
I watched her, cleansing my eyes, until the vision of Charlie’s body had faded and my heartbeat returned to normal.
Here John’s thinking out loud grew slower and more complicated.
‘Miss Winter? I’m afraid she…“
“Can’t see you.” Relief flooded her face and sincerity rang out in her voice as at last she was able to say something true. “Believe me, Miss Lea. She just can’t.”
