The Father's House (21 page)

“Once upon a time there was a princess whose name was Beauty,” she began. Her voice was shaky, and her ears were straining to listen for the slightest sound.

Paul sensed her distraction and took the book from her and studied the pictures.

“I can draw good pictures,” he said. “And I can read words.”

Aunt Sarah was far more anxious than she appeared. It was perfectly credible that Father Drax would take advantage of Father Copse's absence to damage his prospects. Her brow was furrowed as she pottered around the kitchen trying to think what he or his henchmen might do. The most obvious thing was that they might try and break in to get at the father's confidential files. In that case the children would be safe with her in the ground-floor flat. Nevertheless, she needed to check that all the upstairs windows were shut, and that the outer door to the lobby was locked and bolted.

She didn't want to frighten the children so she put her cleaning materials into the dumb waiter and pressed the button for the first floor, saying to Lucy, “I'll send these up now to save me carrying them, and then they'll all be ready for Monday morning.” She dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard. “I might as well take this up at the same time. It'll be handy to have everything up there.”

Before she went she disappeared down the hall, bolted the front door, top and bottom, and then popped into her bedroom to fetch her keys. Dropping them into her apron pocket she returned to the kitchen, fished one of them out again and unlocked the door to the lobby.

Lucy listened carefully. Aunt Sarah had locked her and Paul in, and was now testing the bolts on the outer door, sliding them in and out and in again. Then she started her usual grumbling journey up the stairs, clanking the vacuum cleaner behind her. She reached the top and pulled it up the last step with a thump. Lucy set Paul and the book down and went over to the door. She bent down and put her ear against it.

“What're you doing?” Paul asked, coming to join her.

They didn't see Thomas as he peeped through the kitchen window. Nor did Thomas see them.

Lucy put her finger to her lips and pressed her ear harder against the wood. A key turned on the first-floor landing. Sarah muttered something. Then the children heard her gasp.

“Save our souls!” she exclaimed loudly. “A flood!”

The vacuum thumped again. She must have dropped it, thought Lucy. Then there was a knocking sound as though it had fallen over, and a cry and a bang, and something, someone, came tumbling slowly and heavily down the stairs.

“Aunt Sarah,” called Lucy.

A groan came from the lobby. Lucy called again. There was no answer.

“Aunt Sarah what's happened? Are you alright?”

With her ear still pressed to the door she could hear Aunt Sarah breathing heavily.

Paul stood next to Lucy, listening. She tried the door handle, but of course it was locked.

“Aunt Sarah,” she called again, but there was still no answer. Aunt Sarah was trapped in the lobby and there was no way they could get at her.

Lucy knelt down and looked through the keyhole. All she could see was a bit of black metal. Then she realised she was looking at the key in the lock.

She jumped up and grabbed Paul's drawing paper from the table. He was too interested in keeping his ear to the door to object. Lucy made a quick mental review of George's written instructions. She pushed the paper under the door. It wasn't as big as a newspaper, but might do the trick if the key was heavy enough not to jump.

Scrabbling through the drawer next to the cooker she found a skewer. Then, on her knees, she started poking. The key fell with a heavy flop and she could feel its weight as she tugged the paper. She pulled it carefully towards her. It appeared from under the door, and she picked it up with an immense sense of achievement as well as relief. She mentally thanked George and his father who knew everything, and fervently hoped that he would get his reward in this world instead of the next.

She unlocked the door and peered out. Aunt Sarah lay at the bottom of the stairs. Lucy and Paul knelt beside her. The heavy breathing had stopped.

“Perhaps she's dead,” whispered Lucy.

Paul gazed intently at the fallen body.

“Where's the fire of the melting flesh?”

Aunt Sarah groaned.

“Oh, thank goodness!” cried Lucy. The relief was overwhelming.

Aunt Sarah groaned again

“Help me up.” Her voice was so faint they could only just hear her.

The children pulled at her arms and her shoulders and the back of her neck, but it was impossible to lift her. She lay still with her eyes closed, then rolled onto her side. With much gasping and grunting she managed to push herself up on one arm and onto her knees, and then onto the bottom stair, where she sat dazed with her back against the balustrade.

Lucy gathered her wits. She jumped to her feet.

“I'll phone for the good doctors.”

“No!” gasped Sarah, “Don't! Don't trust them. I'll be alright in a minute.” She managed to pull herself up and staggered to her feet. “I'll just go and lie down.”

Clutching at the wall, with the children optimistically poised to catch her, she dragged herself through the kitchen, down the hall, and into her room. She collapsed onto her bed. Her face was screwed up and she grabbed at her arm. The children hovered anxiously at the bedside.

“Shall I get you some water, or shall I make some tea?” asked Lucy her eyes huge with concern.

“Just let me sleep,” gasped Sarah, and closed her eyes. “It'll pass. I'll be better in a minute.”

They took her dressing gown down from behind the door and laid it over her, and then closed the curtains.

“Lucy,” she called faintly as they turned to leave the room. She squeezed her words out through the pain. “Whatever you do, don't call the good doctors. And don't stay here. Take Paul and run over to the Copse commune, and tell them what you told me today.”

She feebly touched the circle of daffodils that hung from the chain at her neck. “And take this chain off. It's too tight.”

Lucy gently eased the chain round until she found the fastener.

“Let me see you put it on. That's good. The chain is for you, and the circle of flowers is for Paul. Now go!”

The children tiptoed out and shut the door.

Paul was frightened. Lucy looked at the phone on the kitchen window sill. The good doctors' number was stuck on the wall to the side, and she mustn't ring them.

At last she knew in her heart that everything Dorothy had told her was true. The abductions were true, and the disposals were true, and it was true that they were carried out by the good doctors, and Aunt Sarah must have known about everything all along. When she said the red-headed girl was a tenant, she was lying!

If there was one person Lucy had trusted more than anyone in the world, it was Aunt Sarah. With her she had felt secure. She closed her eyes briefly and took deep breaths. Paul was anxiously stroking her hand, and she looked down at his upturned face. Her world might be shattered, but she would make sure his wasn't. She would never, ever let him down.

“I want you to remember all your life, that whatever happens, you can trust me.” she said.

He nodded his head vigorously.

“Do you know what that means?”

“Yes. You'll look after me.”

“That's right,” she said, and hugged him tight.

Thomas was in the tree with his field glasses fixed on the first-floor window. He let them drop onto the cord round his neck, and spoke into his mobile phone.

“It's all clear,” he said. “He's definitely gone, and the downstairs lot seem to be out too. I couldn't see anyone in the kitchen. The old lady must have taken the kids over to Copse House.” He relaxed back into the tree, and rolled himself a cigarette.

Lucy's mind was working rapidly. If she took Paul to Copse House the aunts would call the good doctors who would say that Aunt Sarah was no further use to the Holy Cause and dispose of her. She decided that on this occasion Aunt Sarah must be disobeyed. Together, she and Paul would look after her when she woke, and help her get better. As soon as she was well again they would escape, and Lucy would pretend she was sixteen and find a job in the outside world, and look after Paul. But to find a job she would have to exist, and to exist she had to find Father Copse's record of her birth. She might have to change it to show she was sixteen, but she'd worry about that later. Never again would she have an opportunity like this.

“Come, Paul,” she said, taking his hand and leading him to the lobby. “Let's go upstairs. We'll let Aunt Sarah have a sleep, and she might feel better when she wakes up.”

They crept up the stairs. The vacuum cleaner lay halfway down and they left it where it was. The big mahogany door stood open. Lucy stopped to listen, but there wasn't a sound. “Come on,” she whispered, and they stepped inside the father's flat.

Lucy and Paul entered the room tentatively. They looked around at the plush sofas and colourful rugs, and gold-framed paintings. It was very different from their own apartment on the ground floor with its sparse furniture and bare floorboards. Lucy tiptoed forward and touched a highly-polished dining table. She looked down onto it and could see her face. Paul let go of her hand and took a flying leap into a big leather armchair. He snuggled down inside it and gave Lucy a huge smile.

“Comfy,” he said.

They saw the hole in the ceiling and stepped round white lumps on the carpet.

“It's all wet,” said Paul, bending down to pat the carpet with his hand.

“That's what Aunt Sarah was saying before she fell. She said, ‘It's a flood.'”

Lucy wandered up to the far end of the room and found the dumb waiter. She stretched over the sideboard and opened it up, and there was Aunt Sarah's cleaning box! “Look. We're right above our kitchen,” she said.

She pulled the box out onto the sideboard. It was strange how the inside of the dumb waiter looked just the same here as it did in the kitchen even though it was in such a different world. It was just a big shelf with walls. Lucy shut the two little doors and checked the electric buttons on the wall next to it. There were up and down buttons just like in the kitchen. There was a passageway to her left leading towards the front of the house. Bedrooms, she guessed. She'd leave them till later.

David's warning was temporarily forgotten as they wandered round the room, touching the curtains and stroking the furniture, taking pleasure in the silky textures and smooth surfaces. In one corner stood a giant television set, and between the door and the fireplace there was a small table with a computer on it and a telephone. Lucy pressed a button next to the fire and the hearth filled with flames which lapped magically around and through a tasteful arrangement of logs. The warmth was immediate. Lucy rubbed her hands in front of it and then pressed the button again. The flames vanished. What an amazing luxury! The father must have come to some sort of arrangement with the Magnifico to be allowed to be comfortable. Imagine having something like this in the downstairs flat. She could just see herself and Paul sitting in front of it reading their books, and Aunt Sarah in her big chair working her way through her mending basket.

She looked around and spotted the desk under the window facing the big lime tree and suddenly remembered why they were here. If she wanted to find her existence there was work to be done, and the most obvious starting point was the desk.

It was a large desk made of some sort of red-coloured wood, with a leather top embossed with gold. Lucy pulled open the drawers. Her pulse quickened. There were notebooks and address books, and documents with figures and calculations. She turned over the pages and spread out the loose papers, but there was nothing that looked like birth records.

She found a key in the top drawer, and looked around for a keyhole to fit it into. It didn't fit any of the other drawers but – and Lucy held her breath – it slid easily into a cabinet nearby. The cabinet was full of files.

Hardly daring to hope, she checked the labels on the backs of the files – ‘Bank', ‘Car', ‘Housekeeping', ‘Commune', ‘BWD'. The light outside was beginning to fade, and she took the ‘Commune' file to the desk under the window. It was divided into sections headed ‘Aunts', ‘Mothers', ‘Children'.

She went straight to the Children section. Most of the names were of children she knew from the Copse commune. Their details were set out like reports recorded in alphabetical order as at 30 September of each year. There was:
Adam, mother Diana, conduct good, non-academic, tendency to cry easily, unlikely to make strong father material, could be useful practical worker or craftsman;
and
Betty, mother Elizabeth, well-behaved so far, no sign of any particular talent, healthy
. And so on.

Lucy continued reading. She was so fascinated that for a while she forgot what she was looking for. Then she realised. Her own name wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere in the file. Nor was Paul's.