The landscape replicated the last one, a thing murky and dreary and endless, stirred and roiled by great spraying impacts, still and marshy in dismal pockets, but appearing agitated in others as
mud fell in waves from the black heavens. And as the dying rats sank, were engulfed and submerged in the mire, their eyes ran red. Catherine had to look away from the two blind and wretched
creatures that clawed at each other and wrenched their matted throats upwards as if to snatch at clean air amongst a copse of devastated, skeletal trees. Their expressions were impossibly, but
entirely, human.
‘Difficult to believe that it is not a portion of the Western Front brought home in a box. Though in one way it was. Inside my uncle’s mind. But my mother made the stage sets. The
filth and the dirt of the land are plaster and burlap. It’s built over a wire frame and painted to create an illusion.’
‘They’ve been here. All this time.’
In the darkness,
she wanted to add.
‘Nothing in this house has changed since my uncle passed. Even his shaving brush, his comb and glasses are still in the very same place and position they were in on his last
day.’
Catherine turned her horrified face to Edith, who nodded with satisfaction. ‘Even his razor still lies where it fell.’
‘But you—’
‘Followed his instructions? To the letter, my dear. It surprises you. I doubt you’ve encountered the same sense of duty and loyalty out there.’ Edith raised one hand as if to
dismiss the remainder of the entire world. ‘But in the Red House such qualities are cherished. I am his curator, dear. It was the last task he set me. Attending to his genius for all of my
life has been a great privilege. But I doubt you could understand. Though I can’t blame you for that.
‘And the tableaux were to remain in the everyday rooms of the ground floor upon his instructions. Besides the service rooms, each of the rooms down here contains his earliest works. There
is so much to see. To itemize. I hope you have the time, Miss Howard.’
‘Earliest works?’
‘He moved on to other things, dear. He came to look upon these as trifles. I believe only my mother’s powers of persuasion prevented him from destroying them all when England
declared war on Germany in 1939.’
Catherine stared up at the ceiling and again imagined the volumes of fragrant, preserved air, the near priceless treasures within each and every room. ‘Unchanged,’ she murmured.
‘The whole house has not changed.’
‘Why would we change it? And anyway it is forbidden.’
‘Forbidden?’
Edith never answered her. ‘Please take me back to the lift. I need to rest. Maude will show you out.’
‘Of course. Can I . . . Please, can I come back?’
‘I don’t know.’ Then as a teasing afterthought she said, ‘Maybe someone will contact you.’
‘Right. I’ll wait to hear. And thank you. I mean, for showing me.’ She could hardly organize her thoughts. They came in flashes, then derailed or vanished and she was again
looking down at a rat’s face in the mud, its jaws pulled apart in a scream. But if Edith was telling the truth, the entire building was a perfectly preserved Gothic Revival house from the
middle of Queen Victoria’s reign with all fittings intact. Perhaps the best example of such in all of England. And one filled with immaculate antiques and a million pounds’ worth of
Mason’s own work.
She couldn’t imagine
Glory
selling for less than two hundred thousand pounds at auction.
Gas Attack
would fetch half of that. And there were another two Great War
dioramas locked away on the ground floor of the house. There were the dolls too. His notorious puppets weren’t for sale, but she should at least see them and persuade Edith to exhibit if her
uncle’s skill in their creation was anything like his preservation of rats.
Again, she wondered why she was here, as if there had been a mistake and she had someone else’s identity and she should confess her status as imposter before it was all too late. She was
giddy and weightless from excitement or shock, but wasn’t sure which. Her clothes clung thin and cheap, everything about herself was inappropriate here. She was out of her depth. She
wasn’t a quick girl, she didn’t pounce on opportunities. She bit her lip. Stopped herself.
‘Ms Mason?’ she suddenly thought to ask, as she pushed the wheelchair through the dark passage to the reddish hue of the distant hall. ‘Who is the child?’
Edith stayed quiet for a while as if she hadn’t heard. ‘Child?’
‘Yes. At the window. I saw someone before I came inside.’
‘What?’ Beneath her in the heavy chair, the great powdered head turned to one side. ‘There is no child,’ she added as if Catherine had said something idiotic to someone
elderly and irritable, which she surmised she may have done. Particularly if it had been Edith at the window.
But it couldn’t have been
.
‘Climbing, I think—’
‘Climbing? What do you mean? There is only me here. And Maude. And as you can see . . .’ She opened the palms of her frail gloved hands as if to indicate the existence of the
wheelchair.
‘And in the room . . .’
‘What are you talking about? What room?’
They reached the hall. ‘The room with
Glory
. There was a noise. A sound. I thought—’
‘The bird? There are birds in all of our chimneys. We cannot get them out.’ Edith raised her little bell and began to shake it feebly.
Catherine reached down to help her.
‘Leave it!’
From deep inside the Red House a door opened and Catherine recognized the shuffle of Maude’s old, tired feet.
After Edith and her chair had been fitted into the stairlift by Maude, amidst protestations and much supervision that Catherine thought unnecessary, and once Edith and her
chair had begun a steady though noisy climb upwards, the ancient woman regarded Catherine one final time with her small red-rimmed eyes. ‘I will remind you not to mention what you have seen
inside this house. It is private. They are still our things. We do not want callers.’
Catherine couldn’t wait to get home and tell Mike. ‘Of course. The visit is confidential.’
Edith continued to stare at her with an unpleasant intensity. Catherine dropped her eyes to Maude who looked through Catherine. The housekeeper’s gaze was directed at the vestibule before
the front door.
‘Goodbye,’ Catherine called out to the diminutive figure of Edith Mason, trembling on its rattling ascent. There was no answer. ‘And thank you again.’
In silence, Maude showed Catherine to the front of the house. She’d wanted to flee for most of the time she had been inside the building, but now identified a frustrated desire to stay and
see more. She had been spoiled, but also teased.
At the threshold of the Red House, the housekeeper looked over her shoulder quickly, back towards the hall and the strained sounds of the stairlift. And without looking at Catherine, Maude
clutched one of her hands and pressed her mannish fingers into Catherine’s palm, to leave a piece of paper behind.
‘Oh no, you don’t have to . . .’ Catherine said to a closing, and then a shut door, thinking the housekeeper had tipped her like a tradesman. It wouldn’t have surprised
her if these two isolated and out-of-touch figures still observed such a custom, but when she bent over to chase the paper that had fluttered from her hand and come to rest on the tiles of the
porch, she could see that it wasn’t money. It was a crumpled piece of brown paper.
Beyond the thick door came the muted yet frantic peal of the handbell.
Catherine picked the paper up and straightened it out. It was spattered with what looked like grease. She turned it over. Written in pencil in stubby capitals were four words. DON’T NEVER
COME BACK.
Twice her wheels bumped across catseyes as if she had fallen asleep at the wheel. Late afternoon, but her journey home resembled a familiar route retraced in darkness. The
fugue of the great house’s interior remained thick inside her mind. Her place in the world felt odd too, as though she was returning to an old neighbourhood where she was no longer
remembered.
Beyond the meadows of the Red House the world suggested only the bland and temporary to her imagination. The city she returned to seemed predictable and disappointing. The British Museum had a
similar effect upon her heart, during all of those Sunday afternoons she spent there to escape the dismal rooms she’d rented in London.
Adjusting to the sight of dual carriageways, and their service stations, and garden centres near Worcester, required a conscious effort, that seemed more about regaining familiarity with the
terrain than her experience of the Red House should warrant.
The impact of the house’s strangeness and the incongruity of her place inside it combined uncomfortably with her memories of alienation as a child in Ellyll Fields. Feelings she
didn’t want stirred tugged at her heart again. Near Hereford, she even entertained the idea of never returning to Magbar Wood and the neighbouring Red House. She tried to think of excuses she
could make to Leonard. In a spurt of sickly panic that surged from a defensive instinct she’d been trained in therapy to repel, she briefly considered running somewhere new and not coming
back. But where was left?
Parked outside her flat in Worcester, getting out of the car was like waking from a deep sleep only to leave part of herself inside a dream. A physical reassembly of herself seemed necessary
before she could climb out of the car. Inside her flat, finding affection for her furniture and belongings was a struggle.
She had been uncomfortable and struck dumb in either shock or wonderment for the entire duration of her visit to the Mason house, but had left eager to return and see more. Until Maude gave her
the note. The note was the trigger.
She left the note inside her bag. She didn’t want to see the handwriting again. It was bully writing. Blunt, direct, designed to upset, unnerve, and linger long after the perpetrators had
fled the scene. She’d show it to Edith. Or should she not?
The note could be nothing more than territorial spite directed at an imposter. Maybe she had been a glaring and awful reminder of
out there,
a thing creeping inside to cheat an old
lady. Or was the note a warning? But of what? A ninety-three-year-old woman?
You don’t have time for this now.
Catherine identified the cognitive root of where the imagined persecution bled. Some days everything was a trip-wire to set off paranoia. She derailed the irrational train of thought before it
left the platform to shriek though her mind at InterCity speed.
An auction fraught with pressure, expectation, and a high profile she might be unequal to awaited, as well as her having to manage a difficult character. There was no escaping that. The note
from Maude didn’t help matters, and visiting the Red House was hardly a common experience. So it was natural to feel strange, disorientated.
That’s all it is. Relax. See things as
they actually are.
Mike didn’t like her in this mood either. He found her ‘exhausting’. The last therapist’s exercises worked if she made an effort. But only the excitement involved in
getting ready to meet Mike succeeded in finally acclimatizing her to the world she’d stepped entirely away from, on the lane before the great house of M. H. Mason.
Joan Baez on the stereo, a glass of chilled chardonnay on the dressing table. The pencil skirt and satin blouse from Karen Millen, new stockings with seams from Agent Provocateur that Mike had
given her for her birthday, all made her feel a bit vintage. And she realized that through her outfit she might even be trying to catch a tendril of what had curled out of the Red House behind
her.
The place wasn’t even remotely sexy, though it possessed mystery and elegance in abundance. But the professional opportunity the auction offered was sexy. Very sexy. If she could keep that
at the forefront of her mind, she’d get through this job. And she gleefully imagined the outraged faces of her ex-colleagues, the bitches back at Handle With Care in Soho. If Edith hired her,
the auction would make a few Sunday broadsheets, lifestyle magazines, and the national broadcast news channels. Handle With Care would crawl to her on their knees to produce a documentary about
Mason’s treasures. Catherine Howard, the misfit the quick girls hounded out of her job, and the city, would smile at them from a wreath of glossy pages, and as a talking head from local
television studios.
Lost Treasures of M. H. Mason: War Hero, Taxidermist Extraordinaire, Puppeteer. Represented by Valuer and Auctioneer, Catherine Howard of Osbernes. The Red House. The
Treasures of . . .
She’d have the rooms of the Red House lit properly for the catalogue. Best to capture them in that setting. Mike could do the photos. God knew he needed the work, as well as cheering up.
She also had catalogue copy to consider; the press release was even more of a priority. She’d get up early on Saturday and make a start. No, she’d start on a draft of a contract first.
If she could pull this off, there would be a new car in her future, and she could buy her own flat in the development for young professionals, overlooking the river, or maybe take a house in
Hallow.
Don’t get ahead of yourself.
She checked her outfit in the full-length mirror at the end of her bed. She looked good.
Was the beauty spot too much?
Edith would be aghast at the sight of her scarlet
Kiss me
lipstick, and Maude would probably grimace at the intensity of the colour against the pale skin of her face.
Jam tarts,
that’s what girls were called who wore make-up at her
secondary school in Worcester. At least the lipstick was red. She let her hair flop down and was reminded of a doll.
‘You wouldn’t believe it. If she’ll give us permission to photograph it, room by room, you could have an exhibition. It could be the book you’ve always
wanted to do. And the kittens! Did I tell you about the kittens?’
Is he even listening?