House of the Lost (50 page)

River mist drifted into the lanes, like wisps of thin gauze as they walked. It clung to the skeletal trees, turning the landscape monochrome, and Matthew was entranced. He had already made several rough studies of the area and had begun a detailed sketch of St Luke’s. There was a small general-purpose shop in Melbray that could provide a framing service, and Matthew was hoping to present the finished sketch to the nuns on Christmas Day.

They were on their way home on one of these afternoons, nearing Fenn House, when a young woman with dark hair came walking out of the mist towards them.

Matthew thought, afterwards, that it was about as romantic an appearance as you could get. She seemed simply to materialize out of the mist and for a moment all the old legends – the tales Mara’s grandmother used to tell of wood sprites and forest naiads – rushed into his mind. Then he saw she was not a wood sprite, at all, she was an ordinary human being, wearing a long woollen coat with a deep hood framing her face, and a scarf wrapped round her throat. A small boy was at her side – he had her dark hair and eyes – and Matthew remembered the sisters mentioning a young widow being at Fenn House.

The English were notoriously reserved, but the lane was narrow and the mist created its own intimacy. Matthew smiled at the woman and said, ‘Good afternoon.’

She returned the smile. Her cheekbones and her eyes slanted when she smiled.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it a frightful day. So cold, I’ll be glad to get indoors.’

This remarking on the weather was something the English did a lot. It was extraordinary how it broke the ice.

Andrei said, ‘A day for a warm fire and a hot drink.’

They were about to continue along the lane but the woman said, ‘You’re the two gentlemen from St Luke’s, am I right?’

‘We are staying there for a few weeks. The nuns are very kind,’ said Matthew.

‘Your English is very good,’ she said, and Matthew felt absurdly pleased.

‘We find it difficult, but we think we are learning,’ said Andrei.

‘It’s a hybrid language,’ she said. ‘We’re a mongrel lot in this country. We speak a mixture of odds and ends of a dozen different tongues.’ She made to walk on again, then turned back. ‘I’m at Fenn House, just along the drive there. It gets awfully lonely there for Theo and me. If you feel like calling some afternoon for that warm fire and hot drink, you’d be very welcome.’

Matthew looked at her with delight, because a drink by a fire with a wood sprite was not something to pass up. He glanced at his father questioningly, expecting him to frame a polite refusal.

Andrei was staring at the woman with an expression in his eyes Matthew had never seen before. He said, ‘We should like that very much.’

It was astonishing how the light came back into Andrei’s eyes during those visits to Fenn House. It was a slightly shabby place but Matthew liked it, he thought it had something of the quality of the house they had left in their own village. Then he thought it was not the house, it was the woman living in it who created the warm atmosphere. Petra Kendal had been at Fenn House for nearly a month. ‘It’s very quiet,’ she said. ‘Peaceful. I’m supposed to be in need of quiet and peace because I’m meant to be sunk in grief and misery.’

‘Aren’t you sunk in it?’ said Andrei, and Matthew was aware of faint surprise because his father was not usually so direct or so intimate with people. Petra did not seem to mind.

‘My husband died in a car crash eight weeks ago,’ she said. ‘He was charming and clever and fun to be married to. But he wasn’t very reliable – in a number of ways he wasn’t reliable.’ She looked at Andrei who nodded slightly and Matthew had the impression that some silent understanding passed between them.

‘His family thought I would like to be on my own. They think it’s what people do after a bereavement. And it was easier to do what they expected – they’re trying to be kind – so I agreed to rent a house for a couple of months.’

‘And you found this one.’

‘Yes.’ She looked about her. ‘I quite like it, but I’d like to think that one day someone will buy it to live in. Not just to let out for holidays, but to be a real home. It needs people – children.’

There was a child with them, of course: Petra’s son, Theo. He was small and rather silent and appeared perfectly accepting of the two visitors who came to see his mother. He was a self-contained child, apparently happy to amuse himself with books and pictures for hours on end. If they called in the afternoon Matthew always sought Theo out. He liked the boy’s quick intelligence and the way he listened when Matthew tried to describe his own home. He was not sure how much Theo understood – often Matthew had to search for an English word to convey a meaning and often he did not know the right word – but he thought they coped pretty well. If he and his father walked along the lane after supper at St Luke’s Theo would be in bed, and Petra would brew coffee and give them smoky Irish whisky, which neither of them had ever tasted.

‘We learn the customs of your country,’ said Andrei.

It was during those comfortable evenings that Andrei began to talk about Romania and Jilava. His English was more reliable now, and some of his former trick of making a subject interesting to a listener, was coming back. Petra listened with the absorption that was one of her attractions, curled in a deep old armchair with the curtains drawn against the night and the fire crackling in the hearth. Quite soon Matthew was going to ask if he could draw her like this, with the firelight painting fingers of colour in her hair, her eyes serious and sympathetic.

‘How did you survive?’ she asked once.

‘People do survive,’ said Andrei. ‘There are some remarkable accounts – some of the prisoners kept diaries in Jilava and Pitesti. A friend of Matthew’s did that.’ Matthew noticed he did not specify Mara’s name or say she, too, was at St Luke’s.

Petra said, ‘I’m glad you did, Andrei,’ and somehow she had put out a hand to him at the exact same moment he had put out a hand to her. Matthew saw the expression on his father’s face: love, warmth, gratitude. He looked at Petra, and knew he would not draw her in that earlier, serious mood; he would draw her like this, looking at his father with light in her eyes and longing in the curve of her lips.

There had to be a good twenty years between them – Matthew guessed Petra to be about twenty-eight; his father was nearing fifty. But seeing them together, he knew it would not have mattered if there had been thirty or fifty years. The spark, once ignited, flared up like a skyrocket, and realizing this, he stopped accompanying his father on most of the walks to Fenn House. He was working on a series of sketches, he said. Or he had promised to help Mara with some cataloguing – she was becoming interested in St Luke’s small library – or he was going somewhere with Michael. He and his father were becoming used to calling Mikhail by the anglicized version of his name by this time, although he noticed that if Mara was ever with them, she stuck stubbornly to Mikhail, almost as if it made a private bond with her brother.

Occasionally, though, Matthew went with his father to Fenn House, and saw how healing it was for Andrei to be with Petra Kendal. Several times Michael joined them, and Petra cooked supper for them – huge English meals. It was still a delight to be able to see all the good food available in the shops, and to enjoy eating it after the years of deprivation. Petra introduced them to English dishes – wonderful casseroles and roast meats, and once Andrei cooked fish ciorba for them all, which had been one of Wilma’s favourite dishes.

Michael talked a bit about Mara – once or twice he read out the letters she had written from Debreczen, translating as he went, Petra eagerly suggesting English words when he was stuck. Occasionally they went into Norwich to see the city, travelling in Petra’s car, the small Theo wedged on the back seat, fascinatedly watching Matthew make quick light sketches of the countryside they passed through.

‘Am I being very wicked?’ said Andrei to Matthew one day, shortly after Christmas. ‘Is this such a terrible sin I’m committing?’ They were in the small bedroom they shared at the convent, ready for the evening meal.

‘No, of course it isn’t wicked,’ said Matthew, surprised. ‘She’s bringing you back to life.’

‘Your mother . . .’ began Andrei, then turned away, staring through the window at the dark gardens.

‘Is dead,’ said Matthew, wishing this did not sound quite so hard. ‘She’d want you to find happiness, wouldn’t she? After so many years . . . she’d be pleased for you.’

Andrei remained where he was, not looking at Matthew. After a moment, he said, ‘I don’t think Elisabeth is dead. She was a member of the October Group, and was arrested for plotting against the social order – what was called a category three prisoner. That usually carried a sentence of anything up to fifteen years, under a severe regime. Matthew, I did absolutely everything I could to find her, and everything I could think of to draw attention to the plight of people like her, but I never succeeded. She’s still somewhere in one of those prisons – one of the houses of the lost.’

Matthew felt as if he had been picked up and flung over the edge of a cliff. There was a rushing in his ears, like a cataract of water, and he felt as if the room was spinning round him. After a moment, he heard himself say, ‘But you told me—’

‘I told you what I thought was the easiest thing for you to accept,’ said Andrei. He turned to face Matthew and Matthew saw that all the old ghosts – the ghosts he had been daring to hope Petra had vanquished – were back in his father’s eyes.

‘And you never found her?’

‘No. I spent ten years trying to find her – all those years when you were growing up I tried to get inside the prisons, to find a lead. In the end – Well, in the end, I attracted too much attention, and you know what happened.’ He stopped, and then said, ‘She might really be dead now.’

‘But she might not.’

‘No. That’s why one day soon I’ll have to go back to find out.’

The present

‘He did go back,’ said Petra. ‘He and Matthew both went back.’

Theo, whose mind was spinning, thought, So Matthew was here after all. He and his father spent all those winter nights in this house. Andrei had a love affair with my mother, and both of them talked to her about the agonies of those years. They poured out all the angst to her, perhaps they even had some of Mara’s diaries as well as her letters, and they read them to her and she listened. And I listened as well, without realizing it. That’s how I know it all.

It was remarkable he had no conscious memory of this time. But he did have a subconscious memory – he must have heard far more of what was said than anyone realized. And all these years later, because he had been in Fenn House in another monochrome winter, the memories had come to the surface. I knew Matthew, he thought. I talked to him and rode in a car with him and I watched him sketch things. Maybe I even saw him sketch those pictures in St Luke’s. The knowledge of this was so immense he felt as if his mind might implode.

After a moment, Petra said, ‘And, as I think Theo’s already realized from the likeness in that sketch, Charmery was a cuckoo in the nest. My own nest.’

She looked at Theo, and he pushed away the incredible knowledge concerning Matthew, and said, ‘Charmery was your daughter. Yours and Andrei’s.’ Saying it made it real, but it did not make it any more extraordinary.

‘Yes,’ said Petra, ‘Charmery was my daughter and his.’

His mother’s words spun crazily inside Theo’s head and for a dreadful few seconds he was aware of anger against her, because if she had told him the truth, then he and Charmery . . . No, I’m wrong, he thought. Helen told me a distorted version of the truth all those years ago – it wasn’t a father we shared, it was a mother, but Charmery and I really were half-brother and sister. We could never have been together.

‘You don’t need the details about the affair and I’m not giving them anyway,’ Petra was saying. ‘My dears, let’s face it, there’s nothing remotely attractive about a woman of my age confiding the details of a youthful love affair. But during that couple of months – Well, it was a shattering experience.’

‘Andrei went back to Romania?’ said Theo, relieved to hear his voice sounded reasonably normal.

‘Yes. I tried to talk him out of it. I think Michael tried as well, but we both knew he would go. And after he left, I discovered I was pregnant.’ She made a brief angry gesture. ‘At first I had no idea what to do. Your father had been dead for three months, Theo, and although I wasn’t especially conventional and I didn’t much mind having a child by myself, the family . . .’ She looked at Theo and Lesley. ‘The Kendals are loyal and honest, but let’s face it, dears, in the main they’re narrow and old-fashioned. Not you, Guff, dear, and not you, Lesley, either.’

‘Nancy,’ said Theo and Lesley together.

‘And one or two others,’ agreed Petra. ‘I was distraught at losing Andrei,’ she said, ‘but I’d had a brief letter saying he and Matthew had reached Resita and from there had gone on to Sister Teresa’s convent.’ She smiled. ‘The nuns were always prepared to help cheat Ceau
escu and the Securitate,’ she said. ‘Actually, I think one of them was imprisoned for a time. But even for them, the situation with Andrei was very high-risk: he was an enemy of the State and an escaped prisoner. As far as I was concerned – well, he would have been in appalling danger wherever he was, and his health was still precarious from the years in Jilava – I couldn’t hand him the responsibility, and certainly not the financial burden, of a child. I knew I’d have to make my own decisions about it.’