Nyctophobia (6 page)

We had purchased the house without seeing the small closed-off area at the back of the property. Although we had studied the floor plans together, the surveyor hadn’t managed to gain access, and neither of us had been able to visit the house again before flying back to London.

‘You can deal with this,’ he told me. ‘It will be good practice for you.’

I found Rosita emptying the oven, her face burnished to a coppery red by the flames. Above her, giant iron pans hung like instruments of torture. A lethal-looking
jamon
holder stood on the wooden worktop, its carving utensils still coated in shreds of dark meat.

‘Rosita, the servants’ section is sealed off and there are no keys on this ring.’

She set her trays down with a clatter. ‘Yes. I keep them.’

‘Why?’

‘I have always done so.’

‘Well, may I have them?’ I asked with some curtness.

‘The rooms never get any light, and there is no electricity, so there are rats. And the sinks – the taps never worked well. Sometimes there is standing water. It means there are – well, it is best to keep the doors shut.’

‘Then surely it’s time the rooms were aired and cleaned. When were they last used?’

Rosita had an evasive look in her eye that made me suspicious. ‘There have not been any servants here for many years,’ she said, clearly unhappy about being questioned in what she considered to be her domain.

I stood my ground. ‘Then I don’t understand what the problem is.’

‘There is no complete set of keys. I will have to find them.’

‘I’d like you to do so. I thought you were going to find a set for the surveyor.’

‘I thought I had some copies but I could not find them. The master keys were never properly labelled, and were put in different boxes.’

‘Well, I’ll need to get in there sooner or later, because I want to see what needs repairing.’

‘Nothing needs repairing,’ said Rosita firmly.

‘Senora Delgadillo, my husband and I bought the whole house, not part of it, and now we would like to see what we own.’

‘Very well,’ said Rosita finally. ‘I will speak to your husband about it.’

‘No, you can speak to me.’

Rosita sniffed in the subtlest of disapprovals, and continued with her work. I had an ominous feeling that this might turn into a battle of wills.

CHAPTER SIX

The Atrium

‘S
HE WON’T GIVE
them to me,’ I explained when I returned to the drawing room. ‘She’s been in charge of the place for so long that she thinks she owns it.’

Mateo laughed out loud.

‘I’m glad you think it’s funny.’

‘I’m sorry. This kind of attitude is so typical, if you were from here you’d appreciate it. Don’t worry, I have to talk to her about her wages anyway, I’ll sort it all out then.’

‘It’s your property. You have a right to know what’s behind those doors.’

‘I’m sure we’ll be disappointed. You heard the same as me; they’re not habitable because there’s no natural light. I’ll leave you to go and freshen up for a few minutes. Then we can make a proper tour of the rest, yes?’

He closed the door softly, leaving me alone.

Is he expecting me to change my clothes?
I wondered, scrubbing a mark from my old blue
Just Do It
Nike shirt. I couldn’t change who I was, but decided to make a bit of an effort to look more like the lady of the house, at least to start with. I wasn’t about to start creeping about the place in high-necked dresses and court shoes.

The shower was black-and-white tiled, with a battered tin head that pumped out a drenching waterfall. Outside, the temperature was rising into the high thirties, but the interior of the house remained pleasant and breezy.

Already my pale skin had freckled and was darkening to a smooth caramel. My chest had cleared its persistent passive-smoker cough and my recent nights at the coast had passed silent and uninterrupted. I had spent two weeks there, waiting for Mateo to conclude his business in the wineries of Jerez and Cadiz, so that we could travel to the house together.

I’m ready to start our life now,
I thought, discarding my jeans and selecting the kind of simple, old-fashioned dress I would never have thought of wearing in London.
Things are going to be different from here on in. I’ll make sure of that
.

As I unpacked, I took stock of the room. As in the drawing room, it was full of heavy dark
fin de siècle
furniture, with cushions the colour of bad meat, patterned maroon rugs, elaborate tiles and fussy cornicing, bookcases, sideboards, dropleaf tables, lots of hard, uncomfortable surfaces. Looking around, old words came to mind, words used to describe the finishes on old objects;
craquelure, patina, foxing.
Old school Spanish, I decided, pre-Franco, sturdy and built for generations to come. And yet there was also something paradoxically modern brought about by the pervasive light. Old buildings were usually repositories of shadows, dust and memories. This house had something I’d never seen before.

I looked up at the windows, sensing a difference.

What was it? Something had changed. Was it the angle of sunlight? A movement in the trees outside? Setting down my clothes, I walked to the window and looked out. A faint gust stirred the uppermost branches of the cork trees, fluttering the leaves. The window knocked slightly in its frame. I listened, and heard the smallest of movements, a shift of weight on a floorboard, a whispering displacement of air…

The clocks rang out, startling me.

One o’clock, time for luncheon. Not wishing to be late, I hurried from the room, my passage marked by chiming clocks. I felt like the heroine in an old novel.

There were timepieces everywhere, a matrix of measurements that included carriages, grandfathers, mantelpiece ceramics, shepherdess figurines with delicate inset dials, monstrous fat-legged ornamentals with convex fascias and high tinging ticks. They all appeared to have been wound and kept at the correct time. They weren’t just correct but meticulous in their regularity, so that even their second hands appeared to move together. The ticking calibrated the passing seconds as if marking off life itself. The sounds followed me from one room to the next, one
tick-tock
being replaced by a
clop-clop
, that was in turn replaced by a
din-din
or
crick-crick
, each mechanism dividing the hours into quarters, minutes, half minutes, seconds, and it seemed even the sunlight had been ordered to keep time.

Making my way down the staircase in search of the dining room, I took a wrong turn and found myself in the octagonal glass atrium, with doors that opened to an internal greenhouse. The tall ceiling led up to a turret filigreed with copper tracery, mostly stained-glass irises and poppies in the art nouveau style. It looked – wrong.

‘There you are,’ said Mateo, smiling at me from the door. ‘Rosita is waiting to serve. I guess the tour will have to wait until after we’ve eaten.’

I knew he was anxious to fatten me up. My mother had been only too happy to warn him. ‘Of course you know she was terribly anorexic, and then it was – what do you call that thing where you throw up after you’ve eaten, darling?
Bulimia
, that’s it. She had terrible breath and the acid ate the enamel off her teeth. Those are veneers, aren’t they, sweetie?’
Thanks, mother.
Mercifully, Anne was back in Vauxhall, over a thousand miles away, and she could damn well stay there.

I looked down at the long table and saw Serrano ham and
croquetas
,
empanadas
, hake filets, clams and
txangurro relleno
. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘she’s cooked for a dinner party of ten.’

‘Just eat what you can,’ Mateo coaxed gently. ‘Let Rosita see that you’re pleased with her cooking. Show your appreciation, and then you can change her menu to suit yourself.’

I picked my way around the plates, pushing the food about without actually eating it. An old trick; I was an expert in hiding the amount I consumed.

After, we walked through the house taking note of everything. All the rooms were perfectly symmetrical, even down to the arrangement of their furniture, and each had its own broad slice of sunlight, either reflected in from the huge front windows or bounced through the angled glass atrium via the internal panels. It was as if the architect had sought to import happiness by banishing the very idea of gloom.

When Mateo asked me about it, I explained, ‘The emperor Tiberius was so obsessed with light that he had a greenhouse constructed from sheets of selenite. He used to grow cucumbers that way. They were wheeled around in carts so that they could be kept in full sunlight all day long.’

‘I thought your degree was in Edwardian architecture.’

‘Yes, but you have to cover the entire history of buildings.’

‘So, what does the architect in you make of this place?’

‘I’ve only been here a short while. I haven’t seen all of it yet.’

‘All right. The part you’ve seen.’

‘Well, it looks like it was constructed between 1910 and 1915.’

‘Exactly right. 1912, but then you knew that from the report.’

‘The building is – unusual.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s brick-built and on a hill, backed by cliffs, south-facing. There aren’t many houses like this in the countryside, and the ones that exist have a specific purpose.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re art studios or museums or designed for growing plants. This one’s different. It seems too urban somehow. Not at all self-sufficient. I expected to find the remains of a mill on the property, something used to grind maize or corn. The land is very barren, but someone was determined to grow a full garden, not a vegetable garden but one for looking at and strolling in, a flower garden. It doesn’t make sense. Come with me.’

Taking his hand, I led him to the heart of the house, the atrium with its crystalline cupola. The colours were almost painful to the eye. Here grew pink blossoming agaves and palms, flowering succulents of every description, their budded stems flushed and fleshy, glistening with nectar. In the middle sat wide ochre rattan chairs and a long table piled with magazines, arranged on the shining red floor tiles.

We stood in the centre of the octagonal tiled floor and looked up at passing birds. ‘This is odd. The glass turret was obviously added at a later date. See the welded joins?’

‘What do they suggest?’ asked Mateo.

‘It was a private house, but I think it also had another purpose. At a guess I’d have said it was an observatory.’

Mateo grinned broadly. ‘I knew you’d get it. The original architect was an astronomer.’

‘What happened to the telescope?’

‘What happened was the civil war. This area was Republican. Franco’s Nationalists occupied the house and tore out the telescope, presumably for scrap. Nobody knows what became of it. The building was used as a strategic outpost because of its view. The furniture was placed in storage, and the soldiers who lived here damaged everything else. The couple who took it over bankrupted themselves repairing it.’

‘So the telescope was housed where this atrium is now. How did you find that out?’

‘My lawyer told me his great-grandfather had a photograph of the observatory. They used to drive past it before the war on their way to the coast. They could see the telescope sticking out.’

I pointed upwards, to a pair of perpendicular metal shafts that appeared to have no purpose. ‘Those are the remains of the old steel struts that held it in place. The design looks English, a bit like a very small version of the one in Greenwich Park.’

‘Anything else?’

‘It was a smart move to turn it into a sort of greenhouse, but it sticks out. I haven’t seen everything yet. But there
is
another anomaly. We failed architects like anomalies.’

‘Where?’

‘Back here.’ I took his hand and led him out into the hallway, to the locked door set in its end. ‘I can tell you that if these are servants’ quarters, they aren’t where they should be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s a house built for a leisured class, so naturally they would have servants. But there would normally be passageways running down the sides of the dining and drawing rooms to the kitchen. Instead, the only access has been placed at the rear of the house. There’s no way of unobtrusively delivering hot food or admitting callers. A house built to accommodate servants is like a theatre. The stages are the rooms used by the owners and their guests, and the backstage area is for the staff, who would have slept on in the smallest bedrooms on the uppermost floor. Between the two you have narrow side-corridors, so that servants can pop up unobtrusively, without having to use the main staircase. But here, the rear of the house was apparently given over to them. As far as I can tell, that’s a unique arrangement. It must have been done for a specific purpose.’

‘Maybe you’ve just found your project. I know how keen you are to start working again. Think you’d be able to write about it?’

‘I’d only be able to do it if I could research the history of Hyperion, which is bound to be in Spanish, of course.’

‘You said you wanted to learn. Here’s your chance. Besides, something like this might keep you busy through the winter months. That’s if Bobbie doesn’t wear you out first. She’s excellent at keeping herself amused – she’s never been much for making friends of her own age – but she has a good line in asking awkward questions. Meanwhile, you still have a while to acclimatize yourself before she arrives.’

My face must have betrayed my feelings, because he asked me if something was wrong. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be much of a mother,’ I admitted.

‘You don’t have to be. She already has a mother in New York. What she really needs is a friend. You know how much I have to travel. It’s seven kilometres to the nearest village and you don’t drive so you’re going to be here –’

‘I’m going to learn –’

‘Let me finish. Bobbie has a dispensation that allows her to be taught at home, but it’s not renewable beyond the end of October. The school is insisting that she boards so that she can catch up on the official curriculum. I’ve found a tutor, but she can only do ten hours a week. You’ll have to fill in the gaps for a while, just until she can start at her new school. It shouldn’t be too taxing for you.’