Chapter 14 The Empty Attic and the Distant Hours
THE EMPTY ATTIC AND THE DISTANT HOURS
“Our nurse used to carry a tallow candle when she took us to bed at night,” said Percy, starting up the final flight. “The glow would glance against the stones as we went and she’d sing that song about oranges and lemons. You know it, I’m sure: Here comes a candle to light you to bed.”
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head: yes, I knew it. A gray beard brushed my shoulder, sparking a wave of affection for my plain little shoebox bedroom at Mum and Dad’s. No webs there: just Mum’s biweekly dusting schedule and the reassuring whiff of disinfectant.
“There was no electricity in the house back then. Not until the midthirties, and then only half voltage. Father couldn’t abide all those wires. He was terrified of fire, and understandably so considering what happened to Mother.
“He devised a series of drills after that. He’d ring a bell, down on the lawn, and time us on his old stopwatch.
Shouting all the while that the place was about to go up like a mighty pyre.
” She laughed, that glass-cutting ack-ack, then stopped again suddenly when she reached the top step.
“Well,” she said, holding the key in the lock a moment before turning it. “Shall we?”
She pushed open the door and I almost fell backwards, bowled over by the flood of light that came rolling towards me. I blinked and squinted, gradually regaining my vision as the room’s contrasting shapes sharpened into view.
After the journey to reach it, the attic itself might have seemed an anticlimax.
It was very plain, with little of the Victorian nursery about it.
Indeed, unlike the rest of the house, in which rooms had been preserved as if the return of their inhabitants was imminent, the nursery was eerily empty.
It had the look of a room that had been scrubbed, whitewashed even.
There was no carpet, and the twin iron beds wore no covers, jutting out from the far wall each side of a disused fireplace.
There were no curtains, either, which accounted for the brightness, and the single set of shelves beneath one of the windows was naked of books and toys.
A single set of shelves beneath the attic window.
I needed nothing more to make me thrill.
I could almost see the young girl from the Mud Man’s prologue, woken in the night and drawn to the window; climbing quietly onto the top shelf and gazing out across her family’s estate, dreaming of the adventures she would one day have, utterly unaware of the horror that was about to claim her.
“This attic housed generation after generation of Blythe family children,” said Percy Blythe, her eyes making a slow sweep of the room. “Centuries of peas in a pod.”
She made no mention of the room’s bare state or its place in literary history and I didn’t press her.
Since the moment she’d turned the key and led me in, her spirits seemed to have sunk.
I wasn’t sure whether it was the nursery itself that was having such an enervating effect, or whether the increased light of the stark room simply allowed me to see her age writ clearly within the lines of her face.
Whatever the case, it seemed important to follow her lead.
“Forgive me,” she said finally. “I haven’t been upstairs in a time.
Everything seems … smaller than I remember. ”
That I understood. It was strange enough for me to lie down on my childhood bed and find that my feet had grown past the end, to look sideways and see the unfaded rectangle of wallpaper where Blondie had once been pasted and remember my nightly worship of Debbie Harry.
I could only imagine the dissonance for someone standing in a bedroom they’d outgrown some eighty years before.
“All three of you slept up here as children?”
“Not all of us, no. Not Juniper; not until later.” Percy’s mouth contorted a little, as if she’d tasted something bitter. “Her mother had one of the rooms off her own chamber converted to a nursery instead. She was young, unfamiliar with the way things were done. It wasn’t her fault.”
It seemed an odd choice of words and I wasn’t sure that I understood.
“Tradition in the house was that children were permitted to move downstairs to a single room when they turned thirteen, and although Saffy and I felt very important when our time finally came I must confess to missing the attic room. Saffy and I were used to sharing.”
“I suppose that’s common for twins.”
“Indeed.” An almost smile. “Come. I’ll show you the caretakers’ door.”
The mahogany cupboard stood quietly against the far wall, in a tiny boxlike room that opened out beyond the twin beds. The ceiling was so low that I had to duck to enter, and the fruity smell entrapped within the walls was almost suffocating.
Percy didn’t seem to notice, bending her wiry frame to pull at a low handle on the cupboard, creaking the mirrored door open.
“There it is. Right in there at the back.” She eyeballed me, hovering near the doorway, and her blade-thin brows drew down.
“But surely you can’t see; not from all the way over there? ”
Manners forbade me actually covering my nose so I took a deep breath, holding it as I moved quickly towards her. She stepped aside, indicating that I should come closer still.
Suppressing the image of Gretel at the witch’s oven, I climbed, waist-deep, into the cupboard. Through the grim darkness, I spotted the small door cut into the back. “Wow,” I said on the last of my breath. “There it is.”
“There it is,” came the voice from behind me.
The smell, now I had no choice but to breathe it, didn’t seem so bad and I was able to appreciate the Narnia thrill of a hidden doorway in the back of a cupboard. “So that’s where the caretakers get in and out.” My voice echoed around me.
“The caretakers perhaps,” said Percy wryly. “As to the mice, that’s another story. The little wretches have taken over; they don’t need a fancy door like that one.”
I climbed out, dusted myself off, and couldn’t help but notice the framed picture hanging on the facing wall. Not a picture: a page of religious script, I could see when I went a little closer. It had been behind me on the way in and I’d missed it. “What was this room?”
“This was our nurse’s room. When we were very small,” said Percy. “Back then it seemed like the nicest place on earth.” A smile flickered briefly before failing. “It’s little more than a closet, though, isn’t it?”
“A closet with a lovely outlook.” I’d drifted towards the nearby window. The only one, I noted, whose faded curtains remained.
I drew them to one side and was struck immediately by the number of heavy-duty locks that had been fitted to the window. My surprise must have shown because Percy said, “My father had concerns about security. An incident in his youth that had stuck with him.”
I nodded and peered through the window, experiencing, as I did so, a frisson of familiarity; I realized that it wasn’t for something I’d seen, but for something I’d read about and envisaged.
Directly below, skirting the footings of the castle and spanning twenty feet or so, was a swathe of grass, thick and lush, an entirely different green from that beyond. “There used to be a moat,” I said.
“Yes.” Percy was beside me now, holding the curtains aside. “One of my earliest memories is of being unable to sleep and hearing voices down there. It was a full moon and when I climbed up to look out of the window our mother was swimming on her back, laughing in the silvered light.”
“She was a keen swimmer,” I said, remembering what I’d read about her in Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst.
Percy nodded. “The circular pool was Daddy’s wedding gift to her, but she always preferred the moat, so a fellow was engaged to improve it for her. Daddy had it filled in when she died.”
“It must have reminded him of her.”
“Yes.” Her lips twitched, and I realized I was exploring her family’s tragedy in a rather thoughtless way. I pointed at a stone protrusion that cut into the moat’s petticoat and changed the subject. “Which room’s that? I don’t remember noticing a balcony.”
“It’s the library.”
“And over there? What’s that walled garden?”
“That’s not a garden.” She let the curtain fall closed again. “And we should be getting on.”
Her tone and her body had stiffened beside me.
I felt sure I’d offended her in some way but couldn’t think how.
After scrolling quickly over our recent conversation, I decided it was far more likely she was just upset by the press of old memories.
I said, softly, “It must be incredible to live in a castle that’s belonged to your family for so long. ”
“Yes,” she said. “It hasn’t always been easy.
There have been sacrifices. We’ve been forced to sell much of the estate, most recently the farmhouse, but we’ve managed to hold onto the castle.
” She very pointedly inspected the window frame, smoothed a piece of flaking paint.
Her voice, when she spoke, was wooded with the effort of keeping strong emotion at bay.
“It’s true what my sister said. I do love this house as others might love a person.
I always have.” A glance sideways. “I expect you find that rather peculiar.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t.”
Those scarlike eyebrows arched, dubious; but it was true.
I didn’t find it peculiar at all. The great heartbreak in my dad’s life was his separation from the home of his childhood.
It was a simple enough story: a small boy fed on fables of his family’s grand history, an adored and moneyed uncle who made promises, a deathbed change of heart.
“Old buildings and old families belong to one another,” she continued. “That’s as it’s always been. My family lives on in the stones of Milderhurst Castle and it’s my duty to keep them. It is not a task for outsiders.”
Her tone was searing; agreement seemed to be required. “You must feel as if they’re still around you”—as the words left my lips, I had a sudden image of my mum, kneeling by the dolls’ houses—“singing in the walls.”
A brow leaped half an inch. “What’s that?”
I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the last aloud.
“About the walls,” she pressed. “You said something just now, about the walls singing. What was it?”
“Just something my mother told me once”—I swallowed meekly—“about ancient walls that sing the distant hours.”
Pleasure spread across Percy’s face in stark and brilliant contrast to her usual dour expression. “My father wrote that. Your mother must have read his poetry.”
I was sincerely doubtful. Mum had never gone in much for reading, and certainly never for poems. “Possibly.”
“He used to tell us stories when we were small, tales of the past. He said that if he didn’t go carefully about the castle, sometimes the distant hours forgot to hide.
” As she warmed to recounting the memory Percy’s left hand drifted forth like the sail of a ship.
It was a curiously theatrical movement, out of character with her thus-far clipped and efficient manner.
Her way of speaking had altered, too: the short sentences had lengthened, the sharp tone softened.
“He would come upon them, playing out in the dark, deserted corridors. Think of all the people who’ve lived within these walls, he’d say, who’ve whispered their secrets, laid their betrayals … ”
“Do you hear them, too? The distant hours?”
Her eyes met mine, held them earnestly for just a moment. “Silly nonsense,” she said, breaking into her hairpin smile. “Ours are old stones, but they’re still just stones. They’ve no doubt seen a lot but they’re good at keeping secrets.”
Something crossed her face then, a little like pain: she was thinking of her father, I supposed, and her mother, the tunnel of time and voices that must chatter to her down the ages.
“No matter,” she said, more for her own sake than mine.
“It doesn’t do to brood on the past. Calculating the dead can make one feel quite alone. ”
“You must be glad to have your sisters.”
“Of course.”
“I’ve always imagined that siblings must be a great comfort.”
Another pause. “You haven’t any of your own?”
“No.” I smiled, shrugged lightly. “I’m a lonely only.”
“Is it lonely?” She considered me as if I were a rare specimen deserving of study. “I’ve always wondered.”
I thought of the great absence in my life, and then of the rare nights spent in company with my sleeping, snoring, muttering cousins, my guilty imaginings that I was one of them, that I belonged with somebody. “Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes it’s lonely.”
“Liberating, too, one would expect.”
I noticed for the first time a small vein quivering in her neck. “Liberating?”
“There’s none like a sister for remembering one’s ancient sins.
” She smiled at me then, but its warmth fell short of transforming her sentiment to humor.
She must have suspected as much, for she let the smile fall away, nodding towards the staircase.
“Come along,” she said. “Let’s go down. Careful, now.
Make sure you hold the rail. My uncle died on those stairs when he was just a boy. ”
“Oh, dear.” Hopelessly inadequate, but what else does one say? “How awful.”
“A great storm blew up one evening and he was frightened, or so the story goes. Lightning sliced open the sky and struck right by the lake. The boy cried out in terror, but before his nurse could reach him, he leaped from his bed and fled the room. Silly lad: he stumbled and fell, landed at the bottom like a rag doll. We used to imagine we heard him crying in the night sometimes, when the weather was particularly bad. He hides beneath the third step, you know. Waiting to trip someone up. Hoping for someone to join him.” She pivoted on the step below me, the fourth.
“Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Burchill?”
“I don’t know. Sort of.” My gran had seen ghosts.
A ghost, at any rate: my uncle Ed after he came off his motorbike in Australia.
“He didn’t realize he was dead,” she’d told me.
“My poor lamb. I held out my hand and told him it was all right, that he’d made it home and that we all loved him.
” I shivered, remembering, and, just before she turned, Percy Blythe’s face took on a cast of grim satisfaction.