The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House (36 page)

‘You’d better get dressed,’ she said, and, feeling as if I was a being landed from another planet, I extricated my legs from those of the collapsed chairs and staggered to my feet. Clara turned her back as I dressed, unsteadily, breathing hard. The hut stank of our act of love; I could hardly stand upright in it.

She turned to me as I was doing up the buttons on my shirt. She shook her head. ‘Let’s hope Scone went to bed as I told him to,’ she said, looking at me, and I mumbled, ‘I love you.’

‘Oh, do be quiet.’ She touched my nose.

She opened the door of the hut and looked out. I saw the pale silver of sunrise tinting the eastern sky. ‘I love you,’ I said once more, to her back.

She looked at the ruined chairs. ‘I’ll have to damage the lock. Kids are always breaking into the huts.’ She shook her head. ‘And you’re not going to tell me you love me again, all right?’

‘But I do love you,’ I said dumbly. ‘I worship you.’

She sighed. ‘This has been lovely,’ she said. ‘But it’s not going to happen again. Do you understand that?’

I nodded.

She smiled, and looked at my shirt and refastened my buttons. I felt her fingers at my throat and my spirit soared.

‘You’ve a wonderful girl in Lizzie,’ she said. ‘And I want you to think about her. Will you do that? For me?’

‘All right.’ I could think about Lizzie. Thinking about Lizzie meant nothing to me any more.

‘Good. Then we’ll go up the hill, you’ll go to your bedroom, sleep, and in the morning we’ll have breakfast as normal. All right?’

‘Of course,’ I said. In a few hours I would see her again. I hardly cared under what circumstances.

‘Then I’ll remember this night with great pleasure,’ she said, smiling. ‘Now, will you be a dear and break the lock on the door?’

I did as she asked. I was her pack animal, her beast of burden; I would have done anything for her. Together, we walked up the steps towards the seafront road, she slightly behind me, cautiously looking left and right.

‘Wait.’

Her fingers touched my back. I stopped, just below the
level of the road, and peered along the street. I saw, in the distance, a figure shambling along towards us. His gait was unmistakable, and my soaring spirit splattered into a muddy puddle.

We hovered, my heart pounding, as Alec approached our hiding place. He was drunk; that much could be seen even from so far away, but it did not mean he would not see us. I felt sordid now, and idiotic, abusive of my cousin, who had never shown me anything but love and friendship. Clara had had her own reasons for making her husband a cuckold; I had none but my own witless desire.

Alec appeared to be shouting at some unknown adversary. ‘… I was never good enough for you, eh?’ came the tail end of his cry, carried on the breeze towards us.

Clara’s shame radiated from the bent top of her head. I wondered if we could explain ourselves away, but then I thought of the broken lock on the beach-hut door, and the collapsed wicker chairs, and the stench that must still permeate the tiny room. I shuddered, seeing Alec’s hurt and my disgrace and, worse, what would happen to Clara if she was found out; and I knew she was right and that this must be the only time, and if we escaped with this I vowed I would not even look at her again. Perhaps, I thought, we could creep down the steps now, but he was almost upon us and he might catch some movement with the corner of his eye. In fact, were he just to cast his glance a little over, he would see us in plain view: two cringing lovers biting their lips.

As he got closer I realized that Alec’s opponent existed only in his inebriate mind. ‘Can’t bear it … Mother …’ I heard him say, banging his fist on the rail. A sob broke
from his throat. ‘… Not my fault … Castaway … It’s not …’

He was upon us now, and I held my breath. ‘Not Sally …’ he slurred. ‘… Mustn’t mention Sally. I’m not listening, Mother, d’you hear? Not listening.’

And then he was moving past us and was gone.

We waited, without moving, for a long time. When Clara did look up at me, her face was cold and set. I knew that when we did finally start to walk towards the house, when we could be quite sure Alec was lying unconscious on his bed, we would not talk about this. We would not talk about anything.

Her flinty, coal-edged eyes pierced mine, and their message was clear: that even though she may have allowed me to love her, briefly, I was only at the threshold of understanding Clara Bray. I also knew that if she had her way, I never would get to know her at all.

I was dreaming, I thought.

I couldn’t be sure. I was in the sea, with the full moon turning the waves from black to white. My face was sticky from dried salt, my hair was stuck tight to my head, and there, a short distance away, a girl was drifting, lifting an arm to wave.

It was Star, of course. I swam towards her, the tide pushing against me, but I knew I was a strong swimmer, that I could beat the crush of the sea, and so I forced myself onwards. ‘Come here!’ she was calling. ‘It’s lovely. It’s beautiful.’

‘Wait for me,’ I said, my voice odd, enclosed as if I were in a cupboard. Her white arm was beside me, and I grasped at it, lifting her clear.

It wasn’t Star. It was Mrs Bray – a younger Mrs Bray, an image from a photograph, with sharp dark hair and all-seeing eyes, a tilted chin and a beaded dress. She was wrapped in a velvet curtain, which was dragging her down under the surface of the sea.

I made a huge effort and pulled her shoulders up towards mine, freeing her of the velvet cage. I thought I heard her laughing, but when I finally brought her near to me, her neck lolled back and I realized that the eyes were seeing nothing at all, because she was dead. She’d been
long dead: her face had that green, sour look, and her limbs were withered from the relentless pound of the salt in the sea.

A great sense of desolation overcame me. It was horrible, awful. ‘It’s all gone wrong,’ I tried to cry, but my lips were gummed closed by the water, and the more I tried to move them, the more they stuck fast.

And then there came a great battering, clanging sound, on and on and on, and I groped my way out of murderous sleep into the dim half-light of a strange room, and the sound of my alarm clock’s hammer bashing the bell over and over again.

My limbs were as mummified as my lips had been in my dream. The blankets seemed to be pressing down on me, restricting even the tiniest movement. I creaked an elbow upwards, pushed aside the top sheet, freed my hand, groped along the floor towards the demented sound, found the switch and, at last, stilled the awful noise.

I lay for a while, coming to, remembering where I was: Mrs Bray’s sitting room, flat on a thin mattress, the steel coils underneath poking up and misshaping my flesh. I gazed at the unfamiliar shapes of the furniture and finally remembered what had happened last night: the slam of the chest cracking open, the whistling in my ear, and the sleeping pill I’d taken from her bottle by the bed that had dragged me down into the groggy sleep I was now trying to wake up from.

My tongue felt thick with fur, my throat was parched, and there was another hammer in my head using my brain as a bell. I supposed this was what people meant by a hangover. My eyes were sandy with grit; I felt sleep
struggling to claim me again. With a huge effort, I padded my hand on the floor, found the clock and pulled it upright.

It was half past six.

Bugger
, said the voice in my pounded brain. I had exactly zero minutes before I was supposed to be at work, and Mrs Hale had been talking yesterday about letting me go. I threw back the suffocating covers, collapsed on to the floor, pulled myself upright once more and staggered towards the bathroom.

Mrs Bray was still asleep, breathing lightly. Unlike me, she seemed perfectly at ease inside the cocoon of her drug; make-up-less, her face had taken on an innocent look. She had a certain resemblance to those sculptures of royal ladies I’d seen on cathedral tombs, lying in marble over their casket, serene in death, as unlike the lolling body of my dream as could be.

I dressed in the grey light whispering over the tops of the curtains, my hangover creasing out any fear of the shadows. I fumbled my way into stockings and dress, switched my greasy hair into a ponytail and gulped down a cup of tepid water from the sink. I picked up the Bradley’s bag that I’d crammed my belongings into last night, and it tore, sending the scrappy, oddly yellowing receipts from inside fluttering across the floor. I sighed, kicked the bag under the bed and heaped my clothes on top of the covers, intending to pick them up later.

As I stood there, a voice behind me whispered in my ear,

‘
Rosie
.’

My guts vaulted. I turned, and there was Star behind
me, still in her clothes of last night, as pale as a drowned girl flung up by the sea. She put a hand out and supported herself on the counter of the kitchenette.

‘Huh,’ she added, and I turned back in silent fury to pick up my handbag as she mumbled, ‘I’ve been chucking up for hours. I want to die.’

‘Good.’ Her words of last night bounced from floor to ceiling and back into my head.
Disgusting dyke. Tried to touch me up. Pervert
.

She seemed too gone even to comprehend what I was saying. She trudged towards the bed, kicking her shoes off, and climbed under the covers, my belongings on top rippling under the wave of her body. She curled up against the pillow.

‘I never want to see you again,’ I hissed, and was rewarded with slow, heavy snores.

I was in an even fouler mood now, as I left her sleeping and marched past Mrs Bray into the hallway. Not only that, but I could see she wouldn’t wake for anything, not a slammed-back chest or an eerie whistling. Bitch.

Outside, I shivered under the frosty blue sky and hurried up the entrance towards the Bella Vista.

‘You’re fifteen minutes late,’ snapped Josie as I walked, feeling like death, towards the basement stairs. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t give you the old heave-ho.’

‘I’ve had a bad night.’

‘You’re young. You wouldn’t know a bad night if it slapped you round the face.’ She sucked archly on the end of her cigarette. ‘Tell you about my back trouble, did I?’

I grunted, and went down the stairs to the kitchen. There were already a couple of guests sitting in the breakfast
room when I arrived, the commercial traveller sort, one filling in his newspaper crossword in pencil, the other smoking an unfiltered cigarette and staring at the ancient, Riviera-type poster of Helmstone in a dazed sort of gloom.

I knew Mrs Hale was going to skin the hide off me; it was now twelve minutes to seven, and I opened my mouth as I pushed aside the beaded curtain, ready with my tale of the demanding landlady and the truckle bed, the spooky occurrences, the sleeping pill still trudging through my brain.

‘Rosie!’ Mrs Hale turned from the stove. ‘Thank goodness you’re here.’

‘Yes, well, I’ve had a terrible night,’ I began, pulling my apron from the hook before she could tell me not to bother.

‘Mmm. Now then.’ She headed past me towards the curtain. ‘You’re going to have to run the ship until I get back.’

‘What?’ I paused, in the midst of tying my apron strings.

‘I have to go and see Father. He’s in a terrible state. You’ll be all right, won’t you? Both the gentlemen just want the regular breakfast with tea; you know where everything is by now. You can leave the washing-up until after I come back.’ She frowned. ‘Although I don’t think we’ve enough cups, so you’re going to have to do those as you go. Well then, I’ll see you in a while.’

And before I even had time to breathe out, she was gone.

‘What?’ I said to the empty space. ‘What?’ But there was only the rattle of chairs being pulled out, and when
I peeked through the beaded curtain I saw that there were more people in the breakfast room: a retired couple looking round expectantly, bright with morning. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the teapot shelf, the world still swirling merrily from behind my shut lids. Through the other side of the curtain I heard a woman call out, ‘Excuse me! Is anyone coming to take our order? We’ve a train to catch, you know.’

I opened my eyes, switched on the electric grill, pulled the frying pan from its hook, set it on the stove and reached for Mrs Hale’s tub of lard. I had a feeling it was going to be a long morning.

Sometime later Mrs Hale came back to quell the angry chorus of hotel guests demanding their breakfasts. She found me in the kitchen, slapping broken fried eggs on to two plates. ‘I’ll take those out,’ she said, swooping down. I heard her trilling to the guests about the ‘new girl’ and how she, Mrs Hale, had had to tend to her aged father, and, as I smelled the aroma of burned toast yet again, and pulled out the grill pan to throw the charred squares into the pig bin, I heard the guests laughing themselves into being good sports about the whole thing. Then I realized the hot-water urn had run out of water, so I ran to the sink to fill jug after jug to pour into it, and I knew it was going to be another fifteen minutes before we had hot water for tea, so I set the kettle to boil as well and looked around at the bomb crater of the kitchen – plates tipped into the sink, still covered in bacon rind and baked beans; used teacups precariously balanced on top of each other; two broken eggs splattered on to the floor with a dish cloth dropped on top so I wouldn’t slip up on them; the
cutlery tray running dangerously low – and I saw it was only eight o’clock, and wanted to burst into tears.

‘I’ve five minutes before the doctor arrives,’ said Mrs Hale as she came in behind me, setting to at the stove. ‘Come on, Rosie, chin up. That isn’t the attitude that won us the war.’

‘Is he all right?’ I mumbled as I stared, overwhelmed, at the mess.

Mrs Hale thrust a dish mop into my hand. ‘He had an awful night. Didn’t sleep a wink.’

‘Me neither,’ I said, taking a breath and searching for forks in the sink. ‘It was my landlady, you see –’

‘He’s convinced he saw a ghost,’ she continued, throwing bread under the grill and spooning more lard into the pan. ‘It’s his nerves, you know.’

I turned and stared at her. ‘That’s really odd,’ I said. ‘Because last night –’

‘I don’t know if I mentioned it to you,’ she continued, taking the milk from the fridge and sniffing it suspiciously, ‘but he was shell-shocked in the war. He was at a guest house in Southend when a bomb hit.’

‘Mmm,’ I said, frantically dumping plates in the water, bacon rind and all, and rinsing them clean. ‘But about this ghost –’

‘He was still in hospital when we got the news about Anthony. My youngest brother – he was in the Air Force. Shot down somewhere over the Mediterranean. Anyhow, we never recovered the body. It was the last straw for Father, as you can imagine, coming on top of the bomb blast. He changed overnight – almost never goes outside, you know. Scared of his own shadow.’

‘Mrs H.!’ Josie’s strident tones could be heard from somewhere in the stairwell. ‘Doctor’s here!’

Mrs Hale stuck her head through the curtain and called, over the heads of the seated guests, ‘I’ll be right up.’ Returning to the stove, she plucked out the toast and stuck it in the rack. ‘Now then, Rosie, will you be all right for a bit? I’ll be back as soon as I can. It’s Lizzie, you see: she thinks she’s helping, but she just makes things worse.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said weakly, thinking that in two and a half hours everything would be over.

‘Of course,’ she murmured as she left the room, ‘it’s the whole Robert Carver business that’s to blame.’

I whipped my head round. She was already pushing aside the beaded curtain. ‘Robert Carver?’ I said, and followed her out into the breakfast room. ‘What about Robert Carver?’

‘Hmm?’ She glanced back at me absently. ‘Oh, ignore me. I’m talking to myself.’

And, with that, she climbed the stairs up to the ground floor.

The second half of the morning passed as badly as the first. By the time all the guests had left, in varying degrees of bad humour, the kitchen and the breakfast room were a quagmire of dirty plates, burnt pans, knives on the floor, skewiff tablecloths, broken teacups and butter pressed into the floor tiles. I knew I should get on and clean the place, but instead I pulled out one of the chairs, sat down, and put my face in my arms on the table.

‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’

I peeled my face half an inch off the table and saw Josie’s violet-coloured nails tapping the door frame. Her
nostrils flared as she took in the room, her lips twisting with satisfaction.

‘Don’t,’ I mumbled, returning my face to my arms. ‘Just don’t.’

She snorted, and I heard her heels clacking past me. ‘You stay there,’ she said, one nail pressing into the soft flesh of my upper arm.

I eased my head up further and rested my chin on one fist, twisting so I could see her. She battled with the beaded curtain and disappeared into the kitchen. ‘Christ on a bicycle,’ I heard her say. ‘You ain’t half got your work cut out here, eh?’

‘Thanks,’ I murmured. I heard her rattling pans in the kitchen. Louder, I said, ‘How’s Dr Feathers?’

‘Not long for this world, I wouldn’t wonder.’ The smell of lard frying in the pan returned to haunt me like last night’s whistling. ‘Mind you, he’s always seemed that way to me. He’ll prob’ly outlive us all.’ She cackled, faintly.

‘Mrs Hale said he’d been shell-shocked. In the war.’ I was thinking of Robert Carver, of course, but I didn’t know how to bring him up.

‘Straw that broke the camel’s back, if you like.’

I heard bacon sizzle and, despite myself, my stomach growled with hunger.

‘According to my mum,’ Josie continued, ‘he wasn’t the same after his wife left him back in the twenties.’