Читать книгу The Woman In The Mirror: A haunting gothic story of obsession, tinged with suspense - Rebecca James, Rebecca James - Страница 13

Chapter 5

Cornwall, 1947

Only when the captain moves to shake my hand does his face return to the light. It is a fine, distinguished face: the product of centuries of ancestral perfection. His eyes are blue and clear, startlingly bright in comparison with the rest of him. His hair is black and has grown out of its cut, longer and more dishevelled than is the fashion for gentlemen, and there is a faint shadow of, or prelude to, a beard, although that could be the gloom hitting him from beneath. The chin is striking, square and sharp, and his mouth is wide, the lips parted slightly, with a curl that could be mistaken for a sneer. It isn’t a kind mouth.

I notice all this before I notice the most obvious thing: his scars. I was warned about the captain’s war wounds, but I hadn’t known about his burns. His left cheek is pitted like fruit peel, the skin pulled tight towards the angle where his jaw meets his earlobe, where it melts into spilled candle wax.

His clear, blue eyes, as they meet mine, dare me to comment. For a shameful moment I am glad of his disfiguration, for if he were flawless I might not know how to speak. There is a scent about him, of tobacco and scorched wood.

‘Thank you, Tom,’ he says, ‘but I will show Miss Miller to her room.’

‘Very well, Captain.’

The mouth lifts then, but it isn’t quite a smile. Nonetheless I return it and follow him up to the landing. We make slow, awkward progress, and I see how much discomfort his leg causes him but also the pride that prevents him from admitting it.

‘Tell me,’ he starts, ‘what are your first impressions of Winterbourne?’

‘Well, I’ve only just arrived.’ We pass a glass case filled with stuffed birds: a hawk alights on a branch, wings wide, beak screaming. ‘But I should say what strikes me is that it’s very beautiful.’

‘Beautiful.’ The captain repeats the word, as if it’s foreign. ‘Winterbourne has been described as many things, but beautiful isn’t one of them.’

‘No? I’m surprised.’

‘It was built by a band of lunatics. Hardly the way to speak of one’s ancestors, but there’s the long and short of it. Too much money and too little discrimination. They thought they were recreating Notre-Dame, I’m sure. That families should be expected to live here, generations of us, hardly came into it. No – I’ve heard daunting, intimidating, bleak, desolate… but I’ve never heard beautiful.’

‘You don’t like your home, Captain?’

He gives a short, hollow laugh. ‘It isn’t a question of me not liking it. Rather the other way round.’

I frown, but before I can speak he stops at a door and draws a chain of keys from his pocket. It is necessary for him to lean against the wall to do this, wheezing slightly, and my instinct is to help him but I don’t. We are at the end of a passage. Looking back, the way we’ve come appears impossibly long, distortedly so, a carpeted corridor flickering in the glow of feeble bulbs. Ahead is a narrow staircase, presumably the servants’ access.

‘This is your room,’ he says, and the door creaks open.

The first thing I notice is the smell of age, a musty scent that seems to rise from the floorboards and seep from the walls. The atmosphere is deep, as weighty as the green velvet drapes that hang from the high window. There is a wooden four-poster bed, carved ornately in the Jacobean style, its quilts piled extravagantly. Chenille rugs adorn the boards beneath my feet, and behind me, on the wall we have stepped through, is an elaborate scenic mural depicting some dark, tangled foliage. Its pattern is dizzyingly complicated, impossible to follow one twisted vine without getting lost in the knots of the others.

‘Will this be adequate for you?’ says Jonathan de Grey. I nod. Of course it will be. It is, presumably, where his previous governess slept. She flits into my mind then vanishes just as quickly. I wonder about her sleeping here, watching the forest mural from her bed, trying to follow those creepers then unable to find her way out.

‘It’s lovely,’ I say. It isn’t true, just as perhaps ‘beautiful’ wasn’t quite true for Winterbourne. Just something people say to make things well. ‘I shall be very comfortable here.’ I go to the window, pull the curtains and flood the room with light. Already, it looks better. There is a little writing desk, a handsome wardrobe and an adjacent washing and dressing room. I think of my miserable lodgings in London and am once again amazed at the fortune that brought me here. All will be well.

‘I’ll leave you now,’ says the captain, stepping back. For a moment the daylight catches his features, the taut, pockmarked side of his face, and he shies from it like a creature of the night. ‘Mrs Yarrow will collect you shortly.’

The door closes and I am alone. Gradually the captain’s footsteps cease, and against the silence my ears tune into quieter sounds: sounds sewn into the building. I hear a soft tapping, most likely the flick of a branch at the window, but when I look out the wild trees are distant. I travel from one surface to another, the foot of the bed, the top of the wardrobe; I smile, as if the tapping is playing with me, a silly parlour game. It sounds louder at the desk so I open the drawer. Abruptly, the tapping stops – it was a draught behind the wall, or a mouse scratching at wood. Inside is a clock, small and round, 1920s, silver. The time reads twenty-five minutes to three, but the second hand isn’t working. There is an engraving on the back:

L. Until the end of time.

I remove the clock and put it on the table. I’ll see later if it can’t be fixed.

From the window, the view is tremendous. I must be on the westernmost gable because the sea appears huge and immediate, with no cliffs to separate us, as if it is washing right up to Winterbourne’s walls; or we could be on the Polcreath tower light, rising straight up out of the ocean, its root chalky with salt and seaweed. The water is dark, perfectly still closer to shore but in the distance little white crests jump and retreat on its surface. The sky is frozen white and copper, like a Turner painting, dashed with smears of dirty raincloud. I met a former lighthouse keeper, once, during the war. His house had been blown to dust in a bad Blitz. As I held his hand and waited for the ambulance to arrive, he told me of his time, years before, on a remote Atlantic outpost, and that he could never be afraid of the sea, no matter how it churned or roared. ‘The sea’s my friend,’ he assured me, his face blackened with ash. ‘If I fell into it, it would toss me back up. The sea would never take me.’ He missed the water like a lost love, he said; even through the noise and fury of war it called to him, calling him back to its lonely perfection. ‘It’s all right,’ he’d kept saying, as I told him he would find safety and a way to rebuild his life, ‘this wasn’t my life anyway. My life is out on the water,’ and he’d wept for a loss he could not express.

I consider if this sea will become my friend, looking at it every day, and it looking at me. So different from the rush and noise of London, which, once peace was declared, people told me would be a welcome diversion. Everyone was grieving, everyone was spent; everyone had known terrible things and faced terrible truths. But the city pumped on like an unstoppable heart, whisking us up with it, forcing us to go on even if some days we felt like lying down in the middle of the street and closing our eyes and never waking again. Carry on, carry on, that was the message throughout the war. What about after it ended? Carry on, they said, carry on. It was hard for me to carry on. There are some things from which you cannot carry on. Some things hurt too much. Things we did. Things we let happen. I close my eyes, unwilling to remember. A grasping hand, swirling hair, and her eyes, her eyes…

I am about to go and find Mrs Yarrow, whom I assume to be the cook, when something catches my eye that I didn’t notice before.

It is a painting, hanging in the shadow of the dark green curtain and no bigger than a place mat on a dining table. The frame, too, is large, so that the print inside is really quite small and delicate, and I have to lean in to see what it portrays.

It’s a little farm scene, a barn surrounded by hay bales and a grey band of sea just visible in the distance. A cow chews on a tuft of grass. Milking pails lie abandoned. A cluster of dark firs borders a simple cottage, its chimney smoking and a full moon hovering over its roof. The landscape is curiously recognisable as that around Winterbourne: we are here, in this place, at some distant, irretrievable point in the past. The moors are unmistakable, their wild desolation, the colour of the earth.

Perhaps it’s instinctive to look for a human face in these things, because I do, but even though I am looking it still comes as a surprise to me when I see her. She is merely a detail, an impression, not really a person; it’s more the feeling of her, looking out at the window, looking right back at me. Her head must be the size of a farthing, if that, with a wisp of dark hair and two green eyes. The artist has made a point of her eyes, the brightest colour in the picture. I think of the girl peering out at me, just as, a moment before, I was peering out at the sea from my own window. I think of us peering at each other, and for an instant the effect is unsettling, because it really appears that she is seeing me, and I her. Not really a person. Not really.

‘Miss Miller?’ There is a knock at the door.

I tie the curtain back, obscuring the print, and go to answer it.

*

I don’t realise I am hungry until Mrs Yarrow puts soup and a sandwich in front of me, a doorstop of cheese and ham. I remember sharing my butter ration with Mrs Wilson at Quakers Oatley after her husband died, and what another world London seems.

Mrs Yarrow fusses about me like a mother, fetching milk, then a pudding of lemon meringue pie with gingerbread biscuits. I haven’t eaten so much in months.

‘Well, I’ve had practice,’ she says, when I compliment her on her cooking. ‘I’ve worked here for the captain for twenty years, and practice makes perfect, as they say.’ She has a West Country burr, is plump and pink-cheeked, and her frizzy brown hair escapes in soft tendrils from her cap. She sits opposite me, her hands in her lap.

‘Are we pleased to have you joining us, miss,’ she says, with such visible relief that it seems almost inappropriate.

‘I’m pleased to be here.’

‘I don’t know how much longer the captain could have coped. Things have been…testing.’

‘Since my predecessor left?’

Mrs Yarrow nods. ‘I’ve been in charge of the children. As you can imagine, I have my hands full enough with the daily running of things. It was really too much. But none of us wants to let the captain down.’

‘Of course not.’

‘It will be good for the children to have proper care.’ Mrs Yarrow shifts in her seat; she has the manner of somebody loose-tongued trying not to tell a secret. ‘All this up and down, here and gone, no consistency, miss, that’s the problem.’

‘It must have been confusing for them.’ I sip my tea.

‘Yes. Confusing. That’s it.’

‘And to have lost their poor mother, as well.’

‘Oh, yes, miss. That were quite a thing.’

I want to ask again after Mrs de Grey; I want her to tell me. But Mrs Yarrow has reddened and her eyes have fallen to her lap. She looks afraid.

‘I must say I feel fond of the twins already,’ I say instead. ‘To be so young and to go through so much.’

‘Ah, but the young are strong,’ says Mrs Yarrow. ‘Stronger than I, in any case. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them.’

She sees me gazing up at the kitchen shelves, at the soup tureens and jelly moulds coated in dust, at the giant mixing bowls and tarnished ladles, at the china plates and casseroles and long-unused tea sets with their chipped edges and mismatched saucers. The space is cavernous, great wooden worktops and a central island around which we sit, but it’s draughty now in the early evening and its size only summons the buzz and activity that’s missing. Once, this would have been the hub of the house. Today, it’s a graveyard: a ghost of times gone by. I wonder if Mrs de Grey cooked here, her hands dusted with flour and her babies crawling round her skirts. Or perhaps she cut a remote figure, closeted away with her thoughts, wringing her fingers, which I picture as studded with jewels. I know how treacherous thoughts can be. That if you are left alone with them for too long, they can turn against you.

‘It was strange how the war brought Winterbourne back to us,’ says Mrs Yarrow, brightening. ‘When we had the children here – the evacuees – it was like old times. Voices everywhere, running feet, excitement. You wouldn’t have recognised this place.’ She gestures about her. ‘We had littluns piled all round this table, sticking their fingers into cake mix, playing hide and seek in the tower, getting up to mischief with the bell box. Bells were ringing all through the house, miss, and we soon found out why! That was just after the twins came along. Madam used to complain that she couldn’t get any sleep because of the noise. She’d go upstairs to lie down in the day, while I took the babes, and she couldn’t rest for all the shrieking. But, now they’ve gone, it does seem quiet, doesn’t it?’ Mrs Yarrow shakes her head, as if at a fond memory. ‘I still think I hear them sometimes, isn’t that a funny thing? It’s a trick of Winterbourne, lots of creaks and knocks where the wind gets in. And the twins, of course, they can cause a racket – they can make enough noise for twenty children. You’ll have your hands full with them, miss.’

‘By all accounts they’re well behaved.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ agrees Mrs Yarrow, wholeheartedly, as if in swift correction of having spoken out of turn. She slips a finger beneath the elastic of her cap and scratches her head.‘I mean only that they’re tiring for a woman my age. Do you have children, miss?’ The question is so abrupt and unexpected that I glance away.

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. I didn’t suppose you would, in accepting this station.’

‘You’re right. One day, perhaps.’ I force a smile. It takes an enormous effort of will, but I must manage it because she returns it easily, our awkwardness forgotten.

‘Well,’ I say, changing the subject, ‘I expect you’ll be a veritable mine of information and knowledge for me over the coming days.’

Mrs Yarrow nods. ‘Of course, I’d be delighted. Although,’ she lowers her voice, ‘between you and me, I confess I’m thinking about moving on.’

‘You are?’

‘It’s early days. But I’m getting too long in the tooth for this, miss. Since the last girl left…’ She swallows, an audible, dry contraction. Is it my imagination, or has the cook turned pale, her skin appearing waxen in the fading light, her brow heavy and her eyes deep with some unfathomable terror? ‘It hasn’t been easy. Looking after the children hasn’t been easy. It’s better if I have a fresh start, somewhere new. The captain won’t like it, but he’ll have you. You’ll be the woman of this house next, miss. And you’ll like it. Winterbourne is a special place, a very special place.’

At once, there is clamour from the staircase, a storm of battering, hurrying footsteps like the ack-ack gunfire of home, and Mrs Yarrow forgets her worried turn, straightens and smiles, smoothing her apron as if about to curtsey to the king.

‘Speak of the devils,’ she says, ‘here they come now. Would you like to come and meet them, miss? Edmund and Constance de Grey. They’ve been so looking forward to this.’