Dolly (3 page)

By this time, Kestrel was long married and living at Iyot House, though she did not have children of her own and had detached herself from her feuding sisters, but had never stopped feeling guilt that she had not somehow succeeded in uniting them.

And then, in the flurry of less than three months, Dora had met and married George Cayley, a local widower almost thirty years her senior. A year later
she had produced her small, frail son, Edward. Two years later both she and George were dead.

Kestrel inherited Iyot House from her own husband after a short marriage. At first she had disliked it and the expanse of dun-coloured fens, their watery aspect and huge oppressive skies, the isolation and lack of friends, the oddness of the villagers. In time, though, she grew used to it and found some sort of spirit half-hidden there. She had people to stay in the spring and summer and for the rest of the year was happy with her own company and her painstaking work as a botanical illustrator.

From Violet there came the occasional, erratic postcard which rarely mentioned her daughter Leonora but she heard nothing of her orphaned nephew until a letter had come asking if he might spend the summer at Iyot House. In some desperation she wrote to Violet.

‘They are cousins after all and he will need a companion.’

It was settled.

Edward Cayley,’ he wrote in the steamed-up train window. ‘Edward Laurence Cayley.’ Then rubbed it out with his sleeve.

He had been driven from the house by his half-brother’s business chauffeur and hurried across the concourse of Liverpool Street as if he must be bundled out of sight as quickly as possible. The driver carried his case; he carried a small hold-all. The station smelled of smoke, which tasted on his tongue and caught the back of his throat. His hold-all and suitcase had labels tied on with his name and the station to which he was travelling. He was put in charge of the guard, inspected, turned round, and then put into the van.

‘Two hours.’ The guard had several missing teeth and the rest were brown.

After that, there was nothing. No one looked at or spoke to him, he had nothing to eat or drink. The train steamed on. He saw cows and churches, fields and houses, dykes and people on bicycles. He did not think and he did not feel, he simply accepted, having learned that accepting was the best and safest way.

He was neither happy nor unhappy: he was a frozen child, as he had been since he had arrived at the house of a half-brother who neither loved nor wanted him but who, with his wife, had looked after him dutifully, without fault or favour.

He was a pale, fair, thin boy, small for his age but fit and wiry now and with a sensitive and intelligent face. He was liked. It was taken for granted that he would find his way easily in life, that excuses would never need to be made for him.

But, looking out at the cows and sheep and churches and dykes and people on bicycles, he was unaware of any of this. He wrapped himself in a bubble of unknowing.

Leonora van Vorst travelled alone from Geneva the same day, with her name on a badge pinned to her coat and a brown suitcase covered in shipping line
labels, thrown from porter to porter and, finally, to the driver of a hire car which was to take her from Dover to Iyot Lock. To anyone watching her follow the last porter with her case on his shoulder and her round overnight bag in his left hand, across the dock from the boat, she looked small, solemn and lost, but within herself, she was tall, confident and superior. She had money inside her glove for the last tip. The driver loaded her cases and pinched her cheek, feeling sorry for what he thought of as ‘the little mite’. Leonora frowned and climbed into the back of the car without speaking. She was self-possessed, calm, haughty, and without any sense that there was such a thing as love, or vulnerability.

The car sped east and after only a few miles she began to feel sick, but fearing to mention it, and seem weak, she closed her eyes and imagined a sheet of smooth black paper, as her mother had once taught her, and eventually the nausea faded and she slept. Through the rear mirror the driver saw a white-faced child with a halo of red hair spread behind her on the back of the seat, lips pinched together and an expression he could not exactly make out, partly of detachment, partly of something like defiance.

How do you do?’ The boy put out his hand, Aunt …’ But his voice wavered on the ‘Kestrel.’

‘Lord, I’m not your aunt. You’d better come in.’ Mrs Mullen looked down at the boy’s bags, both small. The taxi had already turned and started down the long straight road twelve miles back to the station.

‘Well, pick them up.’ She had no intention of waiting on two children.

‘Oh. Yes.’

She did not know how a boy of eight should look but Edward Cayley seemed thin, his knee-caps protruding awkwardly from bony little legs. His hair
was freshly cut, too short, leaving a fringe of bristle on his neck.

‘Put them down there.’

‘Yes.’

They stood in the dimness of the hall staring at one another in silence for a full minute, Mrs Mullen struck by an unfamiliar sympathy for a child who was not like the few children she had known, who had been sturdy, loud, greedy, grubby and disrespectful. That was how village children were. Edward Cayley was the opposite of all those things and though she did not yet know about his appetite, no boy so thin, and pale as a peeled willow, could surely be a big eater.

Edward looked at Mrs Mullen, and then at his own feet, knowing that staring round a strange house was impolite. He could think of nothing to say, though he wondered who the woman was and where his Aunt Kestrel was, while knowing that the behaviour of adults was generally inexplicable.

The house smelled strange, half of living, breathing smells, half of age and damp.

‘Wait there.’

‘Yes.’

The woman disappeared into the dimness and a door bumped softly shut. He waited. All he knew
was that Aunt Kestrel was related to the dead mother he did not remember and that he was stay with her at Iyot for some weeks of this summer. He supposed that was enough.

In her dressing room, Kestrel adjusted her necklace, wondered if she should change it for another, put up her hands to the clasp and froze. The boy was here, and she was anxious. She had seen him once, as a baby of a month old, she did not know what he would be like and she was unused to children, but she was not innately hostile to them like Mrs Mullen. She wanted to make the boy comfortable, for him to talk to her, find entertainment, not be homesick or bored and now that he was here, her nerve failed her. But at least he would not be lonely.

The house was silent. Mrs Mullen had announced Edward’s arrival and then disappeared. Aunt Kestrel, as she must now think of herself, replaced the necklace and went downstairs.

They had lunch in the dining room, he and the aunt, and he sat quiet, pale and watchful, eating everything he was offered quite slowly, made nervous by the room itself, with its heavy red curtains held back by brass rods, and large portraits of men with
horses and dogs and women with hats and distant children.

‘Are you enjoying your lunch? Is there anything else you would like?’ He sensed with surprise that his aunt was as nervous as he was, and far more anxious to please. His own wish was more negative – not to annoy anyone, not to provoke irritation, not to be chastised, not to break anything. He had been warned so many times about the breaking of objects, of china and ornaments and even windows, that he was in a state of suspended terror, passing by the dresser with its huge dishes, small tables with glass paperweights and gilded figurines.

‘Is your drink too strong?’

‘It’s very nice, thank you.’

It was lemon squash diluted so much that the water was barely tinted.

‘Do you like lamb chop?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘And how was your train journey? Were you properly looked after?’

‘Yes, thank you. I travelled in the guard’s van with the guard.’

‘Quite right. But was that uncomfortable?’

It had been. He had been forced to sit on someone’s leather trunk, next to cardboard boxes of live
chicks which chirped and rustled about and then went still, until they were put out onto a station platform somewhere. But the guard had shared a chocolate bar with him and told him stories about famous railway murders and ghosts in tunnels.

‘It was very nice, thank you.’

He looked up from his plate at Aunt Kestrel just as she looked straight at him. They took one another in. She looked old to him, with a tweedy skirt and a buttoned blouse, and several rings on her left hand, but her face was soft and not at all unkind.

To her, the boy was alarmingly like his mother in profile, with the same long straight nose and small mouth, but his full face was like no one she recognised. He was nervous, polite and private, his true thoughts and feelings all his own and kept hidden. His manner deterred any questions other than those about the food and drink and his journey.

‘Your cousin Leonora will come tomorrow. Have you met her before?’

He shook his head, his mouth full of pears and custard.

‘I thought not. She is your Aunt Violet’s only child – Violet and your mother were sisters and … well, and I was sister to them both, of course. But older. Much older.’

He said nothing.

‘So you are quite close in age. I hope you’ll get on.’

He did not know what to say, having no sense at all of what it might be like to spend a whole summer with a girl cousin he had never seen.

‘What would you like to do now? Do you have a rest after lunch? I’m afraid I’m not used to – to what children … boys … do. Have you brought any books to read or do you play with … Or you could go into the garden.’

He followed her into the hall. ‘But I expect you’d like to see your room and so on now.’

‘Thank you.’

Mrs Mullen appeared from behind a baize-covered door.

‘I’ll take him up then shall I?’

He did not want her to but could not have said and they all three stood about uncertainly for a moment.

‘Well, perhaps I should … you carry on with the dining room, Mrs Mullen.’

He noted the name.

‘Pick those up then,’ Mrs Mullen said, pointing to his bags, the small one and the very small.

‘Yes.’

Edward picked them up and followed his aunt to the stairs.

At what time should you go up?’

Edward looked up from the solitaire board. Aunt Kestrel had unlocked a cupboard in the drawing room, whose blinds were pulled down all day as well as at night, and found the solitaire, a shove ha’penny board and a pile of jigsaw puzzles which he taken up to the attics. He examined the glass marbles again. They were wonderful colours, deep sea green, brilliant blue, blood red, and clear glass enclosing swirls of misty grey. The board was carved out of rosewood with green velvet covering the underside.

‘Do you have something to eat first, or …’

‘I have milk and two biscuits at seven and then I go to bed.’

‘Of course, these are the holidays; I daresay rules should be stretched. When would you like to go up?’

The idea that he could choose his own time, that routine was not made of iron but could be broken, was not only new but alarming.

‘I am quite tired,’ he said, moving a blue marble over a clear glass one, to leave only seven on the board. His aunt had shown him how to play and as it had been raining, he had done so, sitting beside the window, for most of the afternoon. Seven was the smallest number he had got down to without being unable to move again.

‘You have had a rather dull day.’

‘It has been very nice, thank you.’

Kestrel was taken aback again by the opaque politeness of the child.

‘You will have more fun when Leonora arrives. And this miserable rain. We don’t get a lot of rain at Iyot but we do get wind. Wind and skies.’

He thought everyone had sky, or skies, but perhaps this was not the case. He didn’t ask.

‘Five!’ he said under his breath, removing another blue.

‘Excellent.’

Mrs Mullen brought in a small glass of milk and two garibaldi biscuits on a lacquer tray.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said, stopping in the doorway. ‘I have had a very nice day.’

His earnest, unformed face stayed with Kestrel for a long time after he had gone. He was her own flesh and blood, he was part of her. She did not know him, as she had not known Dora after she had grown up and married, and yet she felt connected to him and his words touched her deeply, his vulnerability impressed itself on her so that she felt suddenly afraid on his behalf and had an urge to protect him. But he had gone, his footsteps mounting the stairs carefully until they went away to the fourth flight and the attics.

Once he was there, Edward put his milk and the hated garibaldi biscuits carefully on the table beside his bed, and went to look out of the window. It was very high. The sky was huge and full of sagging leaden clouds, making the night seem closer than it was by the clock. Ragged jackdaws whirled about on the wind like scraps of torn burned paper. He could see the church tower, the churchyard, the road, and the flat acres of fen with deep dykes criss-crossing them. A small stone bridge. A brick cottage beside a lock, though he did not yet know that was what it was called.

He drank the milk in small sips and wondered
what he could do with the biscuits that he could not have swallowed any more than he could have swallowed a live spider. In the end, he opened the cupboard in the wall. It was completely empty. He broke off a corner of the biscuit and crumbled it onto the plate, and climbed up and put the rest far back on the highest shelf he could reach. Perhaps mice would find it. He was not afraid of mice.

And then, as he turned round, he felt something strange, like a rustle of chill across his face, or someone blowing towards him. It was soundless but something in the cupboard caught his eye and he thought that the paper lining the shelves had lifted slightly, as if the movement of air had caught that too.

He went back to the window but it was closed tightly, and the latch was across. It was the same with the window on the other side. He touched the door but it was closed firmly and it did not move. The room was still again.