The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House (30 page)

There was a second of stunned inaction, and then my contagion was forgotten as a flurry of girls thronged past me and knelt down beside Star, pulling her dress back down over her thighs, cooing, rapping out orders to the men in the room. ‘Go and get Johnny.’ ‘Don’t just stand there Geoff, get her a glass of water.’ ‘Come on, Star, can you hear me? Star-baby? Star?’

I remained frozen and forgotten in the middle of the sitting room. I was vaguely aware of a commotion: Johnny was searched for, Johnny could not be found, and without Johnny nothing could be done about Star. As people pushed past me I gradually came back into myself, turned and, as fast as I could, walked away, past the silent record player, past Johnny’s bedroom, the bathroom, Star’s room.

I was almost at the door when Johnny, coming back into the flat, collided into me with a face like fury. ‘I need Star,’ he muttered. ‘Where is she?’

I ignored him, but one of the girls, the ribbon in her hair sliding towards her neck, said in a tone of barely held panic, tugging on his sleeve, ‘She’s collapsed, she’s unconscious, you’ve got to come.’

‘Oi!’ Johnny said, shaking her off. ‘Mind that. She’ll be all right; she’s just taken too much shit.’

‘Yes, but she won’t wake up!’

‘Okay, okay, I’m coming.’ He sighed, and turned to me. ‘You wouldn’t do us a favour, Rosie, would you?’

I snorted. ‘No.’

‘What?’ He looked at me disbelievingly. ‘You owe me big time.’

I sighed. ‘Not
her
. I’m doing nothing for
her
.’

‘Eh?’ He shook his head impatiently. ‘I don’t need none of these girlie dramas right now. Listen, the landlord’s about to turn up.’

‘Landlord?’

‘Landlady, I mean.’ He fluttered his eyelids and leaned in towards me. ‘Star’s grandmother. The formidable Mrs Bray.’

Despite my fury, I hesitated in my march towards the door. ‘What, now?’

He nodded. ‘Supposed to be coming day after tomorrow. Decides she’s going to arrive two days early, in the middle of the night, would you believe it? Just telephoned from the station; says she’s getting a taxi and can she be met at the door.’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘And now Star’s gone down, I’m high as the damn clouds, and if she don’t get met there’ll be hell to pay.’

Mrs Bray.
Clara
Bray. I’d been wondering what she was like, and now she’d arrived at just the wrong time. ‘I’ve taken stuff too,’ I said.

Johnny squinted at me. ‘Nah, you’re all right,’ he said. ‘Remember, you owe me a favour from yesterday. Never mind that I saved you from an unsavoury sexual experience.’

‘
Johnny
,’ whined the girl. ‘You’ve got to come and help.’

‘Bloody hell, what am I, her soddin’ nurse? Ain’t my fault she’s a loose cannon. Go on, Rosie, it won’t take you two minutes.’

I took a breath, heavily excited, despite everything, at
the thought of meeting Star’s grandmother. ‘All right,’ I snapped. ‘But it’s for
you
, not for
her
, all right?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘Just go downstairs and wait for her to come, say hello, that’s all. Tell her that – I don’t know, Star’s got the flu or something. If she finds out about the party and the drugs, she’ll have our guts for garters.’

I left the flat in its uproar and climbed over the still-snogging couple on the stairs. I continued around the narrow well, along to the main part of the house and then down, all the way to the ground floor, marching to the front door and swinging it wide open.

‘About time too,’ snapped a sharp female voice, only the slightest bit crackly with age. ‘Unless you want me to catch pneumonia, I suppose.’

I looked down at the woman standing under the portico. She was shorter than me, although she was wearing stilettos at the end of her thin, black-stockinged legs. Above that she had a sharply tailored suit, a dancer’s neck, and silver hair tied into a bun. Her eyebrows were plucked into two high arches, and below them were a pair of glittering eyes, which narrowed as they took me in now. ‘And who on earth are you?’ she snapped.

‘I’m Rosie Churchill,’ I said, blurry with drink and the dregs of the pill. ‘I live on the first floor.’

‘Then I take it you’re the advance guard.’ She nodded at the two cases resting at her feet. ‘You can bring these into the flat.’

‘Huh?’

She ignored that, stepping on to the mat and walking along the hallway. At the door to the ground-floor flat,
she turned. ‘I’m Mrs Bray,’ she said. ‘I own Castaway House.’ She plucked a key from her handbag and unlocked the door. ‘Chop-chop,’ she added, and as she disappeared I rolled my eyes, lifted the cases and followed her inside.

Beyond the flat door was the tiny hall I had glimpsed the other day when Star had been cleaning it. To my right was a small bathroom, and ahead of me Mrs Bray had already opened the door into the bedroom and was walking through. ‘In here,’ she called. ‘On the chair will be fine.’

French doors were washing the bedroom with pale moonlight. Beyond them I could see the glimmering glass of the conservatory windows, whose roof jutted out below our kitchen window. A brass bedstead dominated the room, with tulips at the tips of its posts, and above it hung an oil painting of a stormy seascape. There was also a writing desk, a polished Victorian-looking thing with keyholed compartments and a proper blotting pad, and beside it a white wicker chair with an old cushion, to which Mrs Bray was now pointing.

I put the cases on top of each other on the chair, as she switched on a bedside lamp, whose base had been sculpted into the shape of an abstract female form. I saw that there was also, curiously, a much smaller bed, made up with a thin blanket, by the wall. I tried to stand upright but was finding it difficult, and so leaned casually against the edge of the door.

Mrs Bray opened her handbag and rummaged through her purse. She plucked out a coin and held it to me. ‘For you, Miss Churchill,’ she said, and I took it, as surprised by
her remembering my name as by the coin. ‘And I would like you to fetch my granddaughter, please.’

She then turned her back to me and tugged closed the drapes covering the French windows.

‘She’s got the flu,’ I said, seeing her once more collapsed on the living-room floor with her dress round her waist. ‘She’s been in bed all day,’ I added lamely.

‘Flu!’ Mrs Bray twitched the end of one curtain to meet the other. ‘Hardly a reason not to meet one’s grandmother, when one’s grandmother has particularly requested such a thing.’

‘Well, you know, she’s really ill. Might be …’ I searched my brain for a suitable phenomenon. ‘Glandular fever.’

Mrs Bray cleared her throat in a highly sceptical manner and then said with a slight concessionary tone to her voice, ‘I suppose I have arrived two days earlier than planned.’ She turned, looked me up and down and said, ‘In that case, you will have to do.’

I frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘At the last moment, I have had to travel without my maid Louise. She has cancer, you see.’

‘Oh.’ I formed my face into the appropriate expression. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘So am I. I was forced to carry my own cases from Paris.’ Mrs Bray sniffed. ‘One has porters, of course, but it’s not the same any more, when one has to wait by the side of the train for twenty minutes until a scruffy oik condescends to appear.’

‘Mmm,’ I murmured, as if scruffy oiks were likewise the bane of my own life. I thought of all the times I’d
imagined what I’d say to the landlord if I ever met him, about how for two pounds a week the gaps in my windows could at least be fixed, but, faced with Mrs Bray, all I wanted to do, oddly enough, was agree with her.

She sniffed again and looked once more in her purse. ‘Five pounds,’ she announced. ‘Is that agreeable?’

I felt I’d missed some important part of the conversation. ‘Agreeable?’

‘As my employee is indisposed – if one could call my granddaughter an employee, seeing as she employs herself as little as possible at my expense. I shall pay you five pounds, Miss Churchill, and not a penny more.’

‘I’m afraid,’ I began, trying to focus on Mrs Bray, ‘that I don’t quite understand.’

She looked away from me and folded her arms across her chest. ‘Then you haven’t been told. What I need, the reason I will pay you five pounds, is – well, I’ll say it bluntly. Somebody to spend the night in the flat with me.’

My left temple had begun to throb. ‘I beg your pardon?’

Mrs Bray indicated the small bed. ‘This is where Louise usually sleeps. My granddaughter was to have been here. You, of course, may move this into the sitting room.’ As I stared at it, struck dumb, she added, ‘You can leave as soon as it is light.’

I swallowed on my dry throat. ‘B-but … why?’

She walked to the mirror that stood opposite the bed and surveyed herself in it, tweaking at a loose hair from her tightly wound bun. ‘I never sleep in this flat alone. Call it an old lady’s eccentricity, if you like.’ Her reflected eyes found mine, and she added, ‘My granddaughter writes to me every week. I’ve heard all about the things the pair of
you have been getting up to. I think she regards you as extremely wholesome. And now I have met you, I can see that she’s correct.’

I thought of my fingers at Star’s collarbone and my lips on her neck. I swallowed hard. ‘Um … thank you.’

She turned towards me and tightened her lips. ‘Five guineas then,’ she said, ‘and that’s all the English money I have, so take it or leave it.’

I thought of what five guineas could buy. ‘I’ll take it,’ I said rapidly.

‘Good.’ She looked me up and down. ‘I suggest you retrieve your night-time belongings now. Knock three times on the door when you come down, and I shall let you in.’

I ran back up to my room as fast as my wobbly legs would take me. Five guineas just to go to sleep: it was too good to be true. I supposed she wanted a bodyguard, what with all the suspicious characters renting rooms at Castaway House. Not that I’d be much good in a fight, but I’d probably be quicker in a tussle than poor old Louise.

Susan and Val were both asleep in their beds, Val curled up around a giant soft elephant, and Susan on her back, her face tilted to the orange street light like the Lady of Shalott. I pulled the cardboard box out of the Bradley’s bag; pieces of paper crackled beneath the box, no doubt all the receipts from the shop. I gathered my nightdress, a change of clothes, my sponge bag and alarm clock and stuffed them all on top. As I left the room I felt an odd twinge of fear, as if I really were venturing into the unknown and not just one floor down.

The hallway was very quiet. There was no indication that
any sort of party was going on upstairs at all. I wondered if Star was still unconscious, and hoped viciously that she was. I hoped she woke in severe pain. I knocked on the door, biting down hard on my lip, which was still wobbling at the memory of the things she’d said. I would never, ever think of her again.

Mrs Bray let me in. She had switched on the fancy three-bar electric fire that stood inside the fireplace, and it was warming from orange to red. ‘Not a patch on the real thing,’ she said crisply. ‘But one can’t spend a fortune getting the chimneys cleaned for the odd chilly evening, can one? The bed folds up, by the way. I believe the mattress is fairly light. Louise usually manages, and she’s fifty-three.’

I spent a hazy amount of time dismantling the bed and releasing the locks, as Mrs Bray offered no help whatsoever and spent her time unbuckling her case and hanging her clothes in the wardrobe. I heaved the bed into the next room and stopped just inside the doorway to catch my breath.

There were the two square windows that looked out on to the street, their curtains open. A pair of elegant wooden art-deco-style leather-upholstered chairs flanked the vast fireplace, which had a rather impressive dragon’s head in plaster hanging over the mantelpiece. Upon the mantelpiece I saw that Mrs Bray had placed five pound notes and five shillings. Despite containing tongs and a scuttle and all the other implements of fire-making I’d only read about in books, there was, just as in the bedroom, only an electric fire in the hearth. The items had all been badly cleaned – by Star, I presumed: white licks of polish
smeared the handle of the poker, and the dragon’s head was grey with ingrained dirt.

In the corner was a tiny kitchenette, and on the other side was a small dining table covered with a lace cloth, four spindly legged chairs and a mahogany sideboard. I pulled the bed over to the sideboard and cranked it out once more, turning it upright and locking it steady. As I straightened, I saw that above the sideboard, on the wall, were three framed poster bills.

They were old screen-prints advertising long-forgotten plays at London theatres I’d never heard of. I looked from one to the other, finding eventually one name that linked them all:
Clara Fortescue
.

‘My glory years.’

I jumped; I hadn’t realized Mrs Bray was behind me. She drew a triangle between the three posters, from her name in small case as part of the chorus line in
Golden Lilies
, rising to an ‘Introducing’ part as the ‘Ingénue’ in
Zing-Zing!
and then taking pride of place as ‘Maria’ in
Maria Gets Married
.

‘Fortescue was my stage name. I thought it sounded appropriate.’

I could see she had been an actress now, from looking at her long neck, and the poise with which she held herself. She reached past me and picked up a small, oval-framed photograph on the dresser.

‘That’s me, playing Maria.’

The picture was poor quality, but I made out a pretty girl in heavy make-up, clutching a paper rose. It explained why Dockie may have known her name: I supposed he’d been a fan. Perhaps he’d never visited Castaway House at
all. Susan claimed to know all about the interior of Paul McCartney’s London flat just from reading about it in magazines.

I dragged in the mattress and bedding, as Mrs Bray fitted a cigarette into an obscenely long holder that she had produced from somewhere, and lit it from the gas ring in the kitchenette. Despite my avowal of a few minutes earlier, I remembered my conversation with Star yesterday, sitting on the kitchen floor, and I found the question that had been itching inside me for several minutes rolling back to the surface.