Advent Page 15

  He found her simple certainty that Auntie Gwen was about to show up almost more peculiar than anything else about her, but he wasn’t going to spoil her improved mood by mentioning it, so, ‘No,’ he said. ‘Course not.’ He wished he felt the same way. Some guardedness in Tristram Uren’s manner had made him as certain as he could be that the old man wasn’t telling them something. And it was obvious to Gav that he’d been waiting for them to get back. He kept thinking of the kid Horace and his weird story, his incomprehensible fidgety nervousness.

  Singing?

  But Marina was affected by none of this, and he was determined not to puncture her cheerfulness again. She wasn’t worried, so why should he be? What was there to be worried about? He tried to make himself stop thinking about it.

  It was surprisingly easy. As soon as Marina began conducting him behind the house’s doors, along its crooked passages, up its stairs, it became impossible to wonder about anything else.

  Gavin had unconsciously assumed that there was a real house hidden out of sight somewhere behind the historic façade. A private family home, where he’d see the fitted carpets, the electric sockets, the radiators, the TV. But the house grew darker and stranger and colder the further Marina led him into it. Its bones and joints kept appearing, the things he’d thought houses always kept out of sight. It was almost like the building was determined to prove to him that it concealed nothing. He saw great slabs of swelling wood embedded in the ceilings or branching from the eaves. He saw bare patches of grey stone anchoring places where walls met, and crosses and curves of iron studding those walls like giant rivets. The walls themselves were uneven, like landscapes – contours of stone behind whitewashed plaster. Except where the rooms had been panelled in dark wood, there were no smooth planes anywhere, no neat, flat, anonymous surfaces behind which all those things that made up a proper house could be hiding, the wires and pipes, the invisible water and heat and light. Everything was in plain sight, rough, used-looking and – most of all – nakedly ancient. Every door was a gate of wood. He could see the nails that held them together, each one a little different from the others. They creaked. He saw and heard the rings of metal that formed their hinges turning as she opened them. Each wall advertised its solidity; Gav kept reaching out his fingers to touch the stipples in the whitewash, the seams of the panelling, the knots in the wood, astonished at how explicit they all were. Even the glass in the windows was visible, full of minuscule waves and bubbles.

  Above all the house was old, old with that sense of foreignness, forgottenness, that he’d caught as a smell the moment he’d stepped inside, old like the sounds of a dead language. It wasn’t anything like a museum. Next to this, all the historic houses he could remember being dragged around were just like costume dramas on the telly. There was no pretence here, no masquerade. As Marina guided him through its dim passages and its mysteriously purposeless rooms, he felt like a visitor from another world. The idea that she actually lived here – that she sat in the strange-shaped chairs with the uneven legs, that she looked out of the distorting windows or warmed herself at the blackened fireplaces, that she kept things in the massive chests like sarcophagi – was simply inconceivable. But he knew better than to say so; he of all people knew better than that. He was never going to gape and blurt out But there’s no electricity! But there’s no taps! But what do you do all day! He followed, and listened, and tried his best to think of this impossible place as her home.

  ‘Gwen says there probably isn’t another house like it in the world.’ Marina had stopped by the top of the stairs. A pair of keyhole-shaped windows looked out towards the headland and the sea. Adjacent was a niche in the wall that looked like it had once been a window too, but was now closed up and filled, like much of the house, with books. A lot of them were children’s books with gaudy covers, looking startlingly unlikely in this setting.

  ‘I’d say she’s probably right.’

  ‘What do you think? Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Incredible. Must have stayed like this for hundreds of years.’

  ‘Bits of it are older and bits are newer, actually. We haven’t got to the oldest bit yet.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’ He chose his words carefully, remembering that a lot of what was obvious to him wasn’t obvious to her. ‘Even the new bits must be way older than most houses. Like Aunt Gwen’s house. A lot of people would say that was quite old, but it’s nothing compared to this.’

  ‘Oh. Well, that’s because people have been living here for longer. Come and see my room.’

  There were clothes on the floor, and bits and pieces scattered everywhere else – scruffy-looking stuffed animals with a faintly tragic homemade air, scratchy clothes in muted colours, chess pieces, paper and pencils and playing cards and trading cards and kids’ magazines. There was a rocking horse, its paint worn away in places to the bare wood. Apart from those things the room was as comprehensively unlike a teenage girl’s room as Gavin could have imagined, not that he’d ever been in one. The bed, for a start, was a four-poster. It had heavy drapes of dark green. There was a large tub of stained metal – maybe copper – resting on a rug in one corner, a porcelain jug beside it, and a folding screen painted with crude flowers leaning against the wall nearby. Despite everything he’d seen so far, Gav refused for a long time to admit to himself that the tub really was a bath.

  ‘I painted that myself,’ she said. He realised she meant the screen, and made complimentary noises. ‘Well, Gwen helped. We had to make the paints together and work out the mixes for the colours, but I did all the actual flowers.’

  ‘They’re lovely.’

  ‘I might try the fireplace next.’ Like almost every other room he’d seen, Marina’s had a big fireplace with an iron grate and a heap of ash and a basket of scabby logs, obviously used every day. Well, how else would they keep the place warm? Its surround was of reddish wood carved into bunches of berries and leaves. ‘I was going to do reds and browns for autumn. What do you think?’

  ‘Erm. Nice.’

  ‘Gwen and I draw a lot.’ She gestured shyly at the paper on the floor.

  Course you do, he thought. What else is there for you to do? Thirteen years living like it was still the Dark Ages. No wonder she was a bit different.

  ‘Daddy’s rooms are just next door but we shouldn’t go in there without asking. I’ll show you the best bit next. I saved it for last.’

  Timbers in the floor popped softly as they passed. Centuries of traffic had worn the wood glossy, and where the daylight fell on it from deep-set windows it shone as if they were skimming through puddles of dark water. The passage turned an angle and up a couple of irregular steps, gained a higher ceiling and ended in a doorway of arched stone.

  ‘You go first,’ Marina said.

  He pushed at the door rather nervously and stepped through onto the gallery of a high-vaulted hall flooded with chilly winter light. Huge beams of blackened oak spanned the ceiling at his eye level, still bearing the contours of the trees they’d been hewn from half a millennium ago. To his left was a whitewashed wall with three tall latticed windows that looked like they ought to be in a church. The gallery ran round the other three walls, a simple course of wood railed with thick posts and resting on the ends of beams that stuck out from the wall, except at the end where he and Marina had come in: here it was stone, carved in columns and arches.

  ‘This is the oldest bit,’ she said, unnecessarily.

  Gavin had never seen a room like it. It was grand, but its grandeur was crude, almost primitive. He looked down over the balcony and saw a massive long table, high-backed chairs, a stone floor. Between pieces of furniture Gav had no names for, unexpected things leaned against the walls: a very old bicycle, a wooden ladder, a pair of brooms, an easel, a guitar.

  ‘We don’t play in here much in the winter. The big windows make it too cold.’ Marina leaned over beside him, her arms propped on the pitted stone. ‘But in the summer you can do all sort
s of stuff. We got sheets once and made a longhouse under the table. Or we have races on top. This summer Gwen and I got enough paper to cover the whole of it and we invented our own world and drew a map. I might be able to find that. I could show you.’

  ‘Sounds good.’ He’d never seen a less likely setting for playing kids’ games. And the prospect of hanging out with a thirteen-year-old girl who still wanted to play house wasn’t exactly his idea of what to do with his unexpected week away from home, but he remembered his new determination to keep her happy. ‘Oh, and you know what? This must be the best house ever for playing hide-and-seek.’

  ‘Oh yes! I haven’t done that for years. Gwen and I know everywhere now, but you could try and find me. That reminds me, I have to show you the hidden door.’

  ‘I might have guessed there’d be one.’

  She led him round the gallery. It was narrower on the long side of the room, only its low railing of wooden posts guarding the drop. Gav stuck tight to the wall. He almost bumped into her when she stopped abruptly, pointing across the room to the far side. ‘See, if you look over there from here, you’d never— Oh!’

  Where she was pointing, on the opposite side of the gallery from where they’d come in, the wall was hung with tapestries, though age and soot had obliterated all but vestiges of whatever scenes they’d once displayed. A break in the fabric appeared as a dark slit, and out of that slit poked the edge of a door.

  ‘It’s open,’ said Marina, puzzled.

  ‘Ah. Yeah, but I can see how usually it’d be hidden behind those things. Cool. Even now you can only just see it.’

  ‘But someone must have gone through.’

  ‘Well, yeah, presumably.’

  ‘No one usually goes in there.’

  ‘Where’s it go?’

  ‘I suppose it’s fine to look,’ she said, out loud but to herself. ‘If it’s open anyway.’

  He followed her around, concentrating on not looking down. She stopped by the gap, pinching her lip. The door behind the tapestries was slightly ajar. A dry and dusty smell leaked out of it.

  ‘So,’ Gav said, wondering why Marina was now so uncertain, having been so excited about showing him everything else, ‘what’s in there that’s so secret?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s not very interesting, just piles of old books and things. Not storybooks. Stuff nobody uses any more.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s just that Gwen and I were exploring in there once and Daddy came along and got a bit cross. He said it wasn’t a good place to be poking around. Perhaps we should ask him before we look.’

  ‘We’re not going to poke around, are we?’ He wasn’t going to let meek Marina take over from happy Marina, not if he could help it. ‘You’re only showing me. Come on then.’ He reached over her shoulder to push the tapestry back. It was much heavier than he’d expected. Half the weight was probably dust.

  ‘Well, all right. It’s only for a moment anyway. There isn’t much to see.’

  But there was.

  Everywhere else she’d shown him, there really hadn’t been much to see, in the literal sense. The house long predated the Age of Stuff; it was spare, rich only in emptiness. This room was piled with clutter. The door opened onto a rickety landing at the top of a small, steep flight of stairs, built into the room almost like a scaffold. They’d come in right under the ceiling. All around them, reaching down nearly to the floor, were tall cases like old-fashioned library shelves, and all the shelves were loaded with heavy leather-bound things too big to be called books. Ledgers, he thought, though he didn’t know what it properly meant. Each one bore a label, a scrap of paper marked by antique handwriting in faded ink.

  Every other room he’d seen had felt too big for what it contained, but this was the opposite. Though the ceiling was high enough to accommodate the staircase, and the outside wall wide enough for two tall windows, it was crammed, like an attic or a closet. The layer of dust was visible as a soft chalky fur. The windows were different too: sash windows, the only ones Gav had seen, and probably, he guessed, the only rectangles he’d seen either. The whole room was squarer, more organised even in its untidiness, a little more familiar. Clearly not as old as the rest of the house, despite dust and mouldering paper. It made him think of an old-fashioned bank, the kind prowled by sinister black-suited men with fob watches and whiskery sideburns. There were wooden desks with lots of drawers built into them, their brass handles speckled with tarnish. On the walls above the desks were big maps, printed, their palette faded pinks and greens and browns. On and around and between the desks was an extraordinary variety of boxes, everything from plain cardboard packing boxes to toolboxes and clunky ribbed suitcases and coloured gift boxes from shops whose names he was sure he’d not have recognised even if he wiped away enough dust to read them clearly. There were lots of framed pictures stacked on the floor, leaning face to face. This, at last, was what he expected an old house to look like: crowded and outdated and quietly desolate, full of unwanted things lapsing slowly into oblivion.

  Marina sneezed.

  ‘Bless you.’

  ‘Thank you. It tickles my nose.’

  ‘Hey, look.’ He pointed at the stairs below them.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Someone went down the stairs. See? Look at the way the dust is scuffed.’

  ‘Oh, you’re right.’

  ‘Where does that door go?’ Gav pointed down across the room.

  ‘That one? It comes out in the stables. Where there used to be horses. They were rebuilt at the same time as this room. Sort of stuck onto the side.’

  ‘Well, it looks like whoever it was went out that way. See the bar?’ A thick post of wood had been leaned up against the boxes. The brackets where it normally rested across the door were obvious.

  ‘I see. It must have been Caleb. He lives in rooms at the top of the stables. He likes it better than being in the house.’

  Gav wasn’t surprised. ‘Ah right. Can we go down?’

  She sneezed again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘I suppose so. If you want to.’

  ‘Just quickly.’ Gav could make more sense of this room than anywhere else he’d been, abandoned though it was. He could guess what it had been before it became merely a place to forget things in. The ledgers must be records of some sort, and the maps looked like they might be charts of Pendurra. Perhaps the history of the house was stored here.

  Marina stayed on the landing while he went down the stairs.

  ‘What are you doing? We mustn’t poke around, remember.’

  ‘No poking. Got it. I just want to have a look at these maps. Is that OK?’

  ‘All right.’

  He squeezed round a stack of things like small shipping crates from the age of tea clippers. He was about to lean over the elaborate desk built into one side of the room to wipe the glass on one of the maps when a small gleam caught his eye. He bent down.

  ‘Hey, Marina?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think Caleb opened one of these drawers.’

  The brass of a handle shone out dully through finger-wide furrows in the dust. Someone had obviously lifted that handle, presumably the same person who’d made the prints on the stairs.

  ‘Oh,’ Marina said, without much interest, and sneezed again.

  ‘Bless you.’

  The racks of drawers filled most of the space under the desk. Like the ledgers, they were labelled: strips of paper inserted into neat metal slots, handwritten in a slanted curly script that made Gav think of top hats and horse-drawn carriages. A filing cabinet, from before there were filing cabinets. Records of parts of the estate maybe, judging by the labels. Their careful writing was still legible. Higher Wood, South West Wood, Menakey Hide. Johnston’s Acres. East Pasture. Guneal Acres.

  Squatting, Gavin went very still.

  Beech Copse. Spring Acres.

  The next one down, where the dust on the handle had been brushed away: Joshua Acres.

  Joshua
Acres.

  Something clicked in his head. Then, one after another like dominoes, a whole array of things fell into place together.

  ‘Gavin?’

  He opened the drawer. There was nothing inside. He knew there wouldn’t be, not now. He pushed it shut again and stood up.

  ‘What is it?’

  He felt as if he’d been walking around all morning with his eyes half closed, wilfully ignoring the worried looks around him, the things unsaid, the missing person.

  ‘It wasn’t Caleb,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who came here. It wasn’t Caleb. It was Auntie Gwen.’

  ‘No,’ she said, with a shake of her head. ‘It can’t have been.’

  ‘This is the old office, isn’t it?’

  ‘What? Yes, it is.’

  ‘Where you said your dad hid the key to the chapel. You said something about it. Someone tried to get into the chapel, so your dad hid the key. In here.’

  ‘Yes. Do you mean—’

  ‘Hang on.’ He scrunched his eyes shut, trying to concentrate. ‘When your dad found you and Aunt Gwen in here, and didn’t like it. When was that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Less than a month. Not very long. Why?’

  ‘OK. Did— Do you know where your dad put that key?’

  ‘The key to the chapel?’ She was beginning to sound nervy.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Auntie Gwen’s senseless scribbled list, the one he’d seen his name on when he’d put his mug of tea down on it: key chap Joshua Acres. It was the thing that had been nagging at his memory all along, ever since Horace had stammered out his mishmash of a story. Key chap. Nothing to do with a person. The key to the chapel.

  ‘I told you. In here.’

  ‘Did Aunt Gwen know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That the key was in here?’

  ‘I—’ He saw her starting to panic.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, feigning a calm he didn’t feel. ‘No big deal. I’m just wondering.’

  ‘She did say something about it. I remember. When she and I came exploring in here, she said no wonder Daddy had hidden the chapel key here because it was such a good place, no one could ever find anything. She was joking about the mess.’ She sniffed and wiped her nose. ‘Is that why Daddy got angry? We weren’t looking for anything, we just thought it would be a fun place to explore. I think we should leave now.’