Long Lankin (39 page)

Only partly lit by the thin sheets of sunlight that pierced the spaces between the thick curtains, I saw Mimi’s little outline under the blankets of a vast wooden bed with, at its head and foot, heavily carved panels of fruits and curling leaves.

In the half-darkness, Mimi looked tiny, pale, and fragile as bone china. One hand, with Sid loosely cradled in it, rested on the bedspread, embroidered with so many scattered flowers it looked as if she were lying in a meadow. I brushed her fingers gently with the back of my own, leaned over, and kissed her soft hair.

“I’ll get you home, Mimi,” I whispered. “Honest. Soon as Auntie gets back, I’ll tell her we’re going, even if I’ve got to carry you all the way to London myself. I’ll look after you, keep you safe.”

She stirred a little and closed her hand around Sid.

I sat with Mimi until I heard Finn’s bark of greeting. Auntie must have returned.

As I made my way back along the landing, I heard another noise from below, from the direction of the kitchen. I leaned over the rail and listened, then crept down a few stairs. Taking each tread one by one, I moved farther down still, until I reached the bottom and stood in the hall, uncertain what I should do.

It was dreadful sobbing, terrible to hear, the sound of a shattered heart.

I tiptoed along the hall and peeped through the crack between the open kitchen door and its frame.

Auntie Ida was sitting at the big table, holding her head in her hands, clutching a sodden handkerchief, her whole body racked and shuddering. Finn sat looking up at her, whining, putting a paw on her knee then bringing it down and shifting on his back legs.

I still didn’t know what to do and had just decided to creep away and not let on that I’d heard anything when Finn got up, padded over to me, and whimpered. I tried to shoo him away quietly, but he gave a soft bark and I knew I had to come out from behind the door.

Auntie Ida looked over with bloodshot eyes, swollen and streaming. Her mouth trembled; her hair hung down in wet strings. She turned away, but the tears and the noise kept coming.

I moved towards the table. In front of Auntie lay an old book, the open pages wet with teardrops. I looked down. It was
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. We’d read some of it at school.

“Can — can I help, Auntie Ida? Is it something I’ve done?”

“No — no,” she sobbed at last, groping for the words. “It — it isn’t you, Cora.”

“Shall I make a cup of tea?” I went to the big stone sink and filled up the kettle.

“There are lots — lots of things I should have told you,” she said in the end, mopping her eyes.

“I probably know most of them.” I lit the stove and put the kettle on to boil. “I know about Long Lankin, Auntie.”

She stared at the open book for quite a while. I stood against her shoulder and looked, too.

“Cora —” said Auntie at last, tears beginning to spill from her eyes again. “Cora, I saw my little — my little boy this morning — Edward — I saw him. . . .”

“What?”

“Down — down at the church. I — I’ve begun to go there again, and — and sometimes the children come, and other times they don’t come,” she sobbed. “I go because I hope I’ll see him, but if I do, it’s terrible, because he’s neither dead nor alive. He still knows me. He — he calls out to me, Cora, he calls —‘Mummy!’— but I can’t — I can’t reach him.” A horrible rattle left her throat. Her shoulders shook, and the pitiful crying began again.

“But even — even if I knew how to set him free,” she was weeping, the words running into each other, “but even if I knew how, even if I was able to do it, then I would never see him again. He would be lost to me forever. And — and the worst thing is — he fills me with fear — my own little boy — he frightens me — there’s only a bit of the real him left — but I can’t stop wanting to see him — even though he’s become — I don’t know what he’s become —”

I warmed the teapot and spooned in some fresh tea leaves.

“I thought — I thought it had all finished when the great flood came. How could it have gone on? How could Lankin have survived, being afraid of the water? Then — then, when Mimi said she saw the man in the graveyard, I went — I went down to see if I — if I could still see my son . . . and it took me a long time. . . . If he hadn’t come to me first . . . I — I don’t know which is my brother Tom, because the longer the children are with him, the more like him — the more like him they become. But my son — his eyes . . . his little eyes . . . Yet he still knows me, he knows me, Cora . . . even now that I’m getting old.”

I took down two cups and saucers from the dresser, found a jug of yesterday’s milk in the pantry, and poured out the tea. We sat down opposite each other at the table and stirred in a lot of sugar. Auntie Ida dabbed her eyes and blew her nose with the same soaking handkerchief.

“I’ll have to get another,” she said.

“I’ll go.” I left the kitchen to fetch one from the pile of clean laundry in the outhouse. When I returned, more tears were running down Auntie’s cheeks. She looked old and worn out, shredded into pieces.

“I’ve — I’ve seen the children, Auntie Ida,” I said. “I think I’ve seen Mum’s little sister, Anne.”

“Yes, I’ve seen her, and all the others, all the others. . . . I used to go and see my brother Tom all the time when I was a little girl — it was as if he had never gone — as if he were just in a different place — and it made me feel better because, Cora, when he was taken — when he disappeared —”

She covered her eyes with the fresh handkerchief and groaned, and the groan was so laden with misgiving and regret that I found helpless tears pricking my own eyes at the sound.

“When he disappeared — Roland — my big brother, Roland, and my sister, Agnes — Roland, and Agnes — and me —” she said, taking the handkerchief from her face and pulling it around in her hands. “Cora, we were — we were hiding from him — we were teasing him. We could hear him running around the house looking for us. We were hiding — hiding in the priest’s hole. Roland said some woman had shown him where it was, but we thought he was pretending about the woman and had just come across it himself. Sometimes — sometimes Roland would disappear for a long time. He would go into the dark places in the house, places where Agnes and Tom and me would never go. We went inside the hole, but we thought it was funny to hide from Tom. We were . . . laughing at him, laughing at him crying and calling for us.

“Our parents were up in town. We had hardly any house servants here. They were frightened of what they saw and heard and couldn’t bear the doors and windows always having to be kept locked. None of them ever stayed for long, and Mother could never get anyone from the village to work for us.

“Our old nurse, Joan, was fast asleep as usual. It was so hot that day, and she was almost completely deaf. She never noticed anything that went on. But there was a new maid-of-all-work from Hilsea only started a couple of days before — she must have opened the back door to let in some air — she probably thought the whole business of locking the doors was nonsense, as most strangers do — we were used to a stifling house — we just thought that was how houses were.

“We were hidden away in the priest’s hole, squashed together, laughing, when Tom screamed — it was terrible — we tried to get out but we couldn’t work the hidden doors — they’re so old. There are two doors, one after the other, and we couldn’t get the first one open again. We were trapped for what seemed like hours, banging and banging on the panelling and shouting, exhausted, before Roland managed to release it, but we were too late — too late.”

Auntie sat there, wringing and unwringing the soaking handkerchief.

“Then, some time later, I let it slip to my mother that I used to go and see Tom in the churchyard and that maybe she’d like to go down and talk to him and it might make her feel better. Her fury was unimaginable, like nothing I’d ever seen. She had the most appalling temper.

“My father felt — he felt guilty — for Tom. He felt he should have taken his family away from this house, but . . . somehow he couldn’t do it. I think I understand that now.

“Then, when — when Roland was killed in April 1918, Father spent most of the rest of his life, which wasn’t long, staying at his London club, and then Agnes ran away with Jack Swift. Eventually Mother died as well, in the house in Onslow Gardens. Everyone — everyone left.”

It was ages before Auntie could speak again; then, when she did, I could hardly hear her. I don’t think she could bear to say it.

“It’s all my fault — all of it — my neglect. I left Susan and Anne in the house alone. If I’d told Susan
why
she had to keep the door locked, instead of losing my temper with her, she wouldn’t have opened it, and Anne would have been all right. We had a land girl, Vera, staying here just before it happened. I lost my temper with her as well. She was so fond of Annie. She would have watched her, if I had just explained, but I didn’t expect anyone to believe me. . . . If I had just told her to keep Annie safe when the tide went out, to guard her when the mud went dry. . . .”

Auntie Ida wiped her face and got up out of the chair. She swayed a little, waited a few seconds, then went over to the dresser and opened the right-hand drawer. It was stuffed full of old bills and letters. Auntie shuffled through them. Creased brown envelopes, pieces of paper, and yellowing postcards spilled out of the drawer and drifted down to the floor. She found the letter she was searching for and didn’t bother to pick up the scattered things or even close the drawer.

The address is written in a child’s hand. A painstaking effort to be neat.

My fingers shake as I remove the folded page from its envelope. I remember thinking, when it arrived all those years ago, that the small splash marks all over the cheap lined paper were careless smudges. They irritated me at the time. Now I run my eyes down the letter and I see that they are teardrops.

With an anguished heart, I hand the letter to Cora.