Figures of Fear: An anthology (19 page)

The morning that his rejection letter from
Vanity Fair
arrived in the post, his girlfriend Sam called him to say that she was sorry, but she was leaving him for a Nigerian actor called Osibi with tribal scars on his face.

‘He understands my
aura
,’ she said, as if that explained everything, and put the phone down. He hadn’t been to the Isle of Wight since he was eight. All he could remember was catching tiny green crabs in a bucket and peeing in the sea. But when his university friend Richard Buller had offered him this small research job at Osborne House, he had realized that it was just what he needed. Although the island was only a twenty-minute ferry journey away from Portsmouth, and was actually in sight of the mainland, it was strangely dislocated from the rest of England. It didn’t just belong in the sixties, it belonged in some version of the sixties that had never happened anywhere else, except within the imaginations of retired folk who wore beige cardigans and lived in pebble-dashed bungalows called ‘Meadhurst’, as well as a few hippies with odd burring accents and mongrels on the end of a string. A community with a tenuous grip on reality.

But Michael badly needed to convalesce, and to concentrate on something other than his stalled ambitions and his lacerated emotions, and the Isle of Wight was the very best place to do it.

Queen Victoria had fallen in love with the island’s detachment, too. She had had Osborne House built between 1845–51 as a country retreat where she and her family could be free from state ceremonial duties. It was a huge, sand-coloured building with two Italian-style
campanile
. It was surrounded by woods and gardens, most of them planted and laid out by Prince Albert himself, and to the east, it looked along a broad stretch of open land directly to the sea.

Usually, Osborne was filled with shuffling lines of white-haired sightseers, but it was off-season now, and Michael almost felt that the house belonged to him alone. There was a home for retired servicemen in the Household Wing, and occasionally one of them would wheel past him and raise a walking stick in salute, but sometimes he could go for days on end and see nobody at all except a distant gardener tending a fire.

Some days, bored with his work, he would wander from one room to another, each of them overwhelmingly decorated in high Victorian Gothic, with gilded and moulded ceilings and gilt-encrusted furniture and chandeliers made to look like giant convolvuluses climbing out of a basket. He found the Durbar Room especially overbearing. It was the state banqueting room, designed in the Indian style by Rudyard Kipling’s father Lockwood and a craftsman from Lahore, Bal Ram Singh. It had a deeply coffered ceiling, like the inside of a temple, and for some reason Michael always felt uneasy there, as if he were intruding on a culture that was not his own; as if he should take off his shoes.

It echoed, because it was empty of furniture, but it had strange dead places where it didn’t echo at all.

Michael liked Albert’s writing rooms, though, where he was usually allowed to work. It was a modest size, with Adam green walls and early Renaissance paintings on the wall, as well as a portrait of Albert and his brother Ernest. Albert’s presence was still remarkably strong. Everything around had been invented by him or designed by him, from Queen Victoria’s shower to the fastidious engraving of Osborne House on his notepaper, of which there was still a great deal left.

Sometimes Michael found himself talking to Albert as if he knew him.

‘God, you made a bloody fuss over that
magnolia grandiflora
, didn’t you, Bertie? And those myrtles. And all that special Kentish mulch.’

It especially amused him when he found out that Albert’s idea of hands-on garden ‘planting’ involved him standing on top of one of the
campanile
, directing his gardeners by semaphore.

It was mid-December, and by three o’clock in the afternoon it was starting to grow dark. Michael decided to call it a day and go into Cowes to do some shopping. He didn’t need much: bread, milk and a newspaper. He packed up his laptop, but as he did so he was sure he heard that sobbing sound again, and this time it was very much clearer.

He listened for a while, and then he called out, ‘Hallo? Is anybody there?’

There was no reply, but the sobbing persisted. He walked across the swirly patterned carpet to the door which led to the Queen’s sitting room. This had a semicircular bay with tall windows that led to a balcony. There were no lights on, and the only illumination came from the pearly coloured fog outside.

‘Hallo?’ Michael repeated, but now the sobbing seemed to have stopped.

He walked cautiously into the room and looked around. In the centre were two desks where Victoria and Albert had sat side by side. Both desks were cluttered with framed portraits and memorabilia. On the side of the Queen’s desk were three electric bell-pulls: one to summon Miss Skerret, her dresser; another to call for a page; and a third to bring in Prince Albert’s personal attendant. Michael pulled each one of them in turn, but of course nobody came.

Except that he heard someone walking across the Queen’s dressing room, next door. There was no mistaking it. A quick, furtive rustling sound.

He opened the door and he was just in time to see a black figure disappearing through the door into the Queen’s bedroom. At least he thought it was a figure. It could have been nothing more than a shadow.

He hesitated for a moment, and then he went into the bedroom. There was nobody there. But as he walked around the high-canopied bed, he saw that one side of the pale, embroidered bedspread had been rumpled, as if somebody had been sitting on it. On the bedhead hung a pocket for the Prince Consort’s watch, and a posthumous portrait of him, which Victoria had kept in every residence, so that she could touch his dear dead face before she slept.

Michael straightened the bedcover. He didn’t know why. He looked into the corridor outside the bedroom just to make sure that there was nobody there. He even went out into the stairwell, where two flights of marble stairs led down to the floor below. A distorted, echoing voice reached up to him, and footsteps, but when he looked over the cast-iron railings he saw that it was only one of the cleaners.

He walked to the main entrance to catch the bus. The fog was much thicker now, and all the myrtle and laurel bushes hunched in the gloom. The only sound was the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel path, and the mournful cry of foghorns from the Solent.

He was passing the red-brick wall around the kitchen garden when he thought he heard somebody else’s footsteps. He stopped, and listened, but there was nothing but silence. It must have been the echo of his own footsteps against the wall.

He walked a little further, and he thought he heard the footsteps again, off to the right, toward the little octagonal summer house where Victoria’s children sometimes used to have their supper. He glimpsed a triangular black shape disappearing behind the summer house, so quickly that he couldn’t be sure what it was. A dog? A badger? Or somebody trailing a black sack behind them?

‘Hallo?’ he called, uncertainly. There was no reply, only the lost and distant moan of the Portsmouth ferry. ‘Hallo?’ he called again.

He circled around to the front of the summer house. It was so dark that at first he couldn’t see if there was anyone there. He approached it cautiously, and saw that the doors were five or six inches ajar. He had never seen them open before: the public wasn’t allowed inside. Maybe it was a squatter, or a drunk, or somebody who needed some shelter for the night.

He climbed the first two steps and then he stopped, his skin prickling like nettle rash.

There
was
someone there. A small figure dressed in black, with a black hood over her head, and a face as pale as a lamp. Michael couldn’t see her very well. She seemed to be blurry, like a figure seen through greasy glass. She didn’t appear to be frightened of him, though. She stood still and silent, and he couldn’t even tell if she was aware of his presence or not. But there was something about her that seriously unsettled him. Some coldness. But it was more than coldness. It was an aura of complete self-possession, as if she were unafraid of anything, or anybody.

‘Are you – do you need some help?’ he asked her. She didn’t reply. It was hard for him to say how old she was. Pretty old, he guessed, by her small, stooped figure. But she could have been a dwarf, or a little child, or something else altogether.

‘Are you lost? I can help you find your way out of here.’

‘Not lost,’ she said, in a small, dry voice. ‘
Lost
.’

‘This is off-season. They don’t have visitors here till Easter.’

‘
Who
has no visitors?’

‘They. The English Heritage people.’

There was a long pause – so long that Michael wondered if she were ever going to speak again.

‘Lost,’ she repeated. ‘I expected to find him here.’

‘I’m sorry. You expected to find
who
here?’

‘This
is
the year 2000, isn’t it?’ she asked him.

‘That’s right. December sixteenth, 2000.’

‘And the world has made many great advances, in the past hundred years? In science, in medicine, in saving human lives?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Michael, ‘I don’t understand.’

He could hear the little figure breathing, but no vapour came out of her nostrils, not like his. ‘We
have
found a cure for the typhoid fever?’

‘Well, yes, as far as I know.’

‘And has the way been found to galvanize the dead?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Has the way been discovered to restore the human heartbeat through electrical shock?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Then where is he? I was assured that he would be here.’

Michael said, ‘I think we’d better find somebody to help you.’

‘I don’t require help,’ she said, in obvious distress. ‘I just want
him
.’

‘If I knew who you were talking about …’ Michael began.

She stepped through the five-inch gap in the doors without opening them any wider. Even outside, her face was white and indistinct. ‘I … was assured,’ she said. ‘I was
assured
that by the end of the twentieth century, all diseases would have been cured, and that the deceased could be cured of those diseases from which they had expired, and brought back to life.’

Michael tried to take hold of her elbow, but his hand seemed to pass through it like a velvet curtain. He was beginning to feel ser-iously alarmed now, and the fog didn’t help, nor the utter silence. Even the foghorns seemed to have stopped.

‘Listen, why don’t you come back to the house? Perhaps we can call somebody for you? A daughter, maybe? Do you have any daughters?’

‘I have to stay here. I can’t go anywhere until I find him. He
must
be here. I was assured.’

‘Who assured you?’

‘Abdul Karim, my
Munshi
. He said that he could foretell everything that would happen in the future. He said that people would be able to send their spirits flying around the world while their bodies remained in bed. He said that we would all be able to cure our loved ones, and bring them back to life, just the way they were. Living, breathing, laughing. The way that Albert used to laugh!’

‘
Albert?
’ said Michael. ‘You’ve come here, expecting to find
Albert
? Albert died one hundred and thirty-nine years ago.’

She looked up at him, and he could feel the cold electricity of disapproval. ‘The Prince Consort built this house. His heart was here, and this is where Abdul Karim promised me that he and I would one day be reunited.’

‘Reunited?’ said Michael, shaking his head. ‘You and Albert are going to be
reunited
?’

‘Don’t you understand who I am?’ she demanded. ‘Has a hundred years erased my memory so completely?’

‘I know who you are,’ said Michael reassuringly. ‘You’re Queen Victoria, that’s who you are. Now, why don’t you let me walk you back to the main gate and you and me can talk on the bus up to Cowes.’

The small woman said nothing. But then she lowered her head and uttered a single sob of anguish, and turned around. She passed back through the doors of the summer house, and into the darkness of the summer house itself.

Michael followed her, flinging the doors open wider. The summer house was empty. He went all the way around it, feeling the walls, looking for any way in which the woman could have escaped. In the end he stood in the middle of it, his hand clamped over his mouth, wondering if he were starting to go mad.

Abdul Karim had come to Osborne in 1887 – first as a servant, and then as Queen Victoria’s personal Indian Secretary. There was a fine painting of him in the Durbar Corridor. He was suave, handsome, with hooded eyes and a neatly trimmed beard and moustache. Michael stared at his picture for a long time; but Abdul Karim had his eyes averted, and always would.

That evening, back in his room at the top of the Household Wing, Michael combed the Internet for all the information that he could find about Queen Victoria and her Indian servants. There was very little about Abdul Karim, even though he had been a minor celebrity in his time. But there was one book:
Queen Victoria’s Mystic
, by Charles Lutterworth, brought out in a limited edition in 1987 by the Vectis Press – a small specialist publisher with an address in West Cowes.

Michael didn’t sleep well that night. He kept seeing the summer house doors opening, and a pale lamp-like face watching from the darkness within. At 3.20 in the morning, his bedroom door opened, and he sat bolt upright in bed, his heart clamped with alarm. He went cautiously over to the door and opened it wider, and looked out, and he thought he saw a small dark shadow disappearing down the end of the corridor.

He closed his door and locked it. He lay back in his cold, sweat-tangled bed but he couldn’t sleep any more. Dawn found him sitting by the window, looking out across the woods and the first grey haze of light across the Solent.