House of Fear Page 14

  “August?” This was April. “I don’t know,” I said, “I haven’t –”

  “Good,” she said. “You have now. Houseparty.”

  “What? Where?”

  “The Rectory, of course. Where do you think? There is only ever one house, and only ever one houseparty, and we are it.”

  “Mel, we can’t just keep on...”

  “Of course we can. We have to. This time it’s the garden, okay? I’ve already said, we’re all going.”

  That? Would be Mel, oh yes. Signing people up, making promises on our behalf, committing us all.

  And this would be us, oh yes, falling into line because she didn’t allow the option and neither did the situation. Mel and Rob, Mark and Catriona and Harriet and me: Charlie’s Angels, people used to call us. And now Charlie was dead and it was his mum who needed angels, and – well. Here we were, come August, all in a minivan together. One party, indivisible.

  The last time we’d done this we called it a painting-party, but we did a lot more than decorate. The Rectory was a classic Victorian pile; it had been Charlie’s home all his life and his parents’ for a decade before that, and I’m not sure any of them had ever thrown anything away. When we first visited, the house seemed comfortably, interestingly full; now, to an elderly widow with burdensome memories, it had become just another burden. Painting was our excuse; we were cheerfully ruthless, clearing rooms and filling skips, and if we all knew we were getting the house ready for the market, at least none of us actually had to say so.

  She would sell, she would move – but not yet, not this year. Which meant that we had time for this too, for a garden party.

  Charlie’s big old teddy bear was ours to keep, to share, to pass around. Today he hugged the gear lever, getting in the driver’s way and in everybody’s eyeline. Charlie’s absence was so explicit, so defined, it was almost a presence in itself. Of course he was the ghost in the machine: benevolent and grateful, or I thought so. Pleased to see his friends looking after his mum. How else should he feel?

  It was mid-afternoon when we pulled in to the Rectory driveway. There might no longer be a rector here, but the house still dwelt in the shadow of the church. Parishioners’ bones had made the bed beneath the gravel drive, where this stretch of land was salvaged from the mediaeval churchyard; the house declared its ecclesiastical interest from the frowning displeasure of its roofline to the iron-studded door and the stone steps that rose up to find it, both liberated from an earlier incarnation of St Jude’s itself.

  The woman waiting to greet us on the top step, she too might have stood for that same broken linkage, something taken away. Age had closed its fist on her since Charlie’s death; she was turning in on herself, harbouring her sorrows. Perhaps a move, a new home, would revive her – but in private, I thought she would dwindle even faster. Loss was something to lean on: what would she do without her morning visit to Charlie and her long-late husband, where they lay side by side just beyond the wall there, under the east window of the apse?

  Still. For now she was bird-bright, sharply pleased to see us: “Mel, dear, peacock blue? For your hair? I don’t know, I give up, I really do... Well, never mind. Give me a kiss and if you’ve had any more tattoos don’t show them to me, nasty disfiguring things... Catriona, put those bags down and leave them for the boys – yes, I know Mark’s just a long streak of water, but at least he has leverage, do you see?... I’ve put you all in the same rooms, of course. No, Rob, I didn’t make the beds, but you’ll find fresh linen waiting. I – oh.”

  Her abrupt silence came on sight of Charlie’s teddy. She held out her arms wordlessly; I handed him across and slipped by her into the cool height of the entrance-hall, my arms full of rucksack and my head full of memories.

  Sometimes I thought we shouldn’t keep coming back; sometimes I couldn’t imagine keeping away.

  Charlie had nabbed the attics long ago, for himself and his friends. Servants’ quarters and lumber rooms: as a kid he’d run riot up there. As a teenager – well. For his mother’s sake, discretion ruled.

  In his adulthood, we were the friends he brought. We’d seen him here often and often, drunk or stoned or on a caffeine high, drowsy or electric or giggling with lust. Sex always made Charlie laugh, it was part of that charm he worked, to draw us close and keep us. In his last days we’d moved him to a ground-floor room to save his mother trailing up and down stairs all day, but if his spirit lived on anywhere in this house, it was up here that we’d find it.

  Bare narrow steps, mean chilly rooms: it was odd how welcome we’d always felt here. There were more comfortable guest rooms below, but these were ours. Sloping ceilings and faded wallpaper closed around us like enveloping arms, familiar and homely. Voices echoed down the corridor: the loan of a charging cable, a demand for the bathroom, an offer of jelly babies and a shot of vodka...

  Voices echoed in my head, too, more intimately; shadows flickered in the corners of my eyes. My room had been Charlie’s room, still was.

  By the time we trooped downstairs, we were settled enough already to sweep up our hostess and usher her outside, despite all her efforts to distract us with tea and scones, homemade jam and cream and conversation.

  “It’s the garden we came for, Mrs P. We’ve only got a couple of weeks, and it’s a lot of work. We’d best take a look at it, at least...”

  The front of the house was no concern of ours: trees and shrubs and grass that a neighbour kept trim on her behalf. At the back, though, was a great walled kitchen-garden that must once have fed the Rectory, and half the parish besides. Now it was rank and derelict. She struggled just to turn the key in the lock of the gate: “We always meant to tackle this, but my husband died, the silly man, and Lord knows I’m no gardener. Charlie promised to take it on, but you know what he was like, always another grand plan that never came to anything. And then he got sick himself” – and died himself, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to say that – “so...”

  So we had to lend a shoulder, to drive the gate open against the rust of hinges and the drifts of time: and beyond was a jungle contained, a wilderness in a bottle, nature rampant within boundaries.

  A greenhouse ran all the length of the south-facing wall, not quite an orangerie but the next best thing, steam pipes for winter warmth and the skeletons of fruit trees espaliered against the brickwork. Time or wind or some more deliberate hand had shattered half the glass: no matter. There were six of us, and we’d all fixed broken windows in the past. We could fix this. Beyond the greenhouse, it was only growth. Growth could be uprooted, earth turned over.

  “The sleep of reason breeds triffids,” Rob said, surveying six-foot stems that seemed to be surveying him back. Unflatteringly.

  “But with his nails he’ll dig them up again. When he wakes.” That was Mel, the smallest of us and the most confident. “Don’t worry, pet. I’ll wake you. Tomorrow. We’ll get a start tomorrow. Not right now. Right now is back to the house for scones and cream, right, Mrs P...?”

  Later we drifted out again, cool glasses in our hands and the low evening light to draw us, Mrs P chasing us out of the kitchen, Harriet wanting a smoke and all of us wanting something we couldn’t find in the house, something more.

  “I really can’t see Charlie in a garden.” That was Harry, blowing smoke-rings into the breeze. “Well, doing this, of course: getting high on gin and dope and company. But not, you know, not gardening.”

  “No, of course not,” Cat said. “Even his mum knows he never would have done it. He wouldn’t have wanted to. It was his secret garden when he was a kid; you remember he showed us where he used to get over the wall?”

  Showed us and led us, or some of us, one of us, me. I didn’t say so. It had been our own private place, his and mine, when we wanted to escape the party, but the others didn’t need to know that now.

  “He would’ve kept it that way,” Cat went on, “for himself, for his own pleasure, something guarded in his heart; Charlie always wanted things he
didn’t have to share...”

  Her voice faltered then, and she glanced at me. I just smiled back at her, all grown up, invulnerable.

  Undergrowth and overgrowth tangled around our legs like something conscious and deliberate, wanting to keep us out or maybe just wanting to keep us.

  Rob said, “What we need, we need men with scythes.”

  Mel snorted under his arm. “Give you men scythes, soon enough we’d have men without feet.”

  “We could get in a rotovator, then?”

  “No, we can’t. We don’t want to bequeath Mrs P nothing more than a ploughed field. There must still be paths and beds under all this, that we can restore. Proper Victorian kitchen garden, I want to leave behind us when we’re done.”

  “In two weeks? Mel, you’re dreaming...”

  Even so, we went from the garden to the garden shed, to see what survived in the shape of tools and equipment. I was last out through the gate, leaving it open behind me, deliberately standing wide.

  It slammed shut at my back, almost before I was safely through.

  Everyone turned to stare; I just shrugged. Maybe I’d tugged it loose after all and a gust of wind had caught it, or its own momentum carried it on. Maybe it just liked to be closed at night.

  Maybe I hadn’t really felt any sense of animus behind me, and it was just imagination feeding on twilight and absence at the end of a strange day.

  Next morning we were up astonishingly early, fed and coffee’d and outside before the sun had risen above the high garden wall. Armed with spades and shears and a single instruction from Mel: “Hack and slay. No quarter.”

  All day we did that. We started out cheerful, pleased with ourselves, amused by our own industry; banter died slowly in the sunlight, and by day’s end we were a grim crew at a laborious task.

  Mrs P came out with a tray in the last of the light: “Enough now, you’ve done enough for one day. I can’t believe the difference already. Girls, you can use my bathroom to clean up, leave the other for the boys; but I thought you’d be glad of a glass of – oh, dear Lord,” she broke off, looking at me. “What in the world have you been doing to yourself?”

  “Your garden hates me,” I said, shrugging. “Don’t worry, it’s only scratches. Thorns, mostly.” I was wearing my scars with pride, stripped to the waist and now suddenly wishing that I wasn’t. She’d seen me in less, but not streaked with blood.

  “This wasn’t a thorn,” she said, taking my hand irresistibly, frowning at where the ball of the thumb was torn open.

  “No, that was a nail on an old rotting bit of wood, buried in the leaf-litter.”

  “A nail? You should see someone about that. I’ll call Dr Farjeon...”

  “No need,” I said. “He gave us all tetanus boosters when we were nursing Charlie.” She knew that; we’d made her have one too.

  “Well, mind you wash it out properly, and disinfect it too. Have Rob dress it for you, you’ll only make a mess if you try to do it yourself.”

  “Yes, ma’am...”

  After dinner, Cat sprawled on the sofa with her feet in Mark’s lap. Mel said, “I’ll play martyr tonight, if someone else does it tomorrow. One of us has to keep Mrs P company, and those two will be asleep in ten minutes, you know they will.”

  I did know it. And I knew her too, how tired she was, how determined not to admit it. I was weary and sore myself, but even so I headed off with Rob and Harriet because somebody had to, this was what we did. What Charlie had taught us, the pattern he’d set. However we spent the days here, evenings we wound up down at the Blue Boar. Even when he was sick and we were nursing, there was a pub shift. That mattered to him, and so we did it; and now? Well, now it mattered to us, apparently, because it had mattered to him. Or else for some deeper reason, pattern recognition, something.

  We sat in the old settle below the window, and I drank Guinness because I’d given blood that day; and the others teased me about being clumsy or unlucky or just a lousy gardener; and we did our duty by Charlie until the landlord grew bored with us, threw us out, closed up at our backs.

  We rambled back along the lane, three abreast and daring the world to send traffic at us, defying it, staring it down. And came crunching up the Rectory drive at last, unaccountably safe, feeling wonderfully protected; and Harry said, “Anyone up for a joint in the garden before bed?”

  “Not me,” Rob said quickly. “Mel needs rescue.”

  I was fairly sure that he’d find Mel fast asleep; I was fairly sure, too, that he just wanted to join her. Emulate her. I could have done the same myself, but Harry needed to smoke, the dope was her excuse for the tobacco, and leaving her alone would only rub her face in it.

  So I heaved the garden gate open and the two of us went through, to squat on an upturned wheelbarrow and survey our handiwork by moonlight.

  “I hope Charlie doesn’t mind,” she said slowly.

  “Mind what, that we’re helping his mum?”

  “That we’re helping her leave, maybe – but I was thinking about this.” A waft of a glowing red end, to indicate the ruin that we’d wreaked. “This was his playground, and he always kept it private. We went everywhere together, but he never brought us in here.”

  He brought me. I didn’t say so, of course; only, “I don’t think he’d mind. I really – ow!”

  “Oh, God, sorry, was that me?”

  She shifted the joint conspicuously to her other hand, but I shook my head. “Not a spark. Something, though. A mosquito, maybe.”

  “In Surrey...?”

  I shrugged, and peeled my hand carefully away from my neck, where I’d slapped at the sting of it. There was something on my fingers, sure, and my skin was burning. I didn’t really think it was a mosquito. I thought maybe a plant had spat venom at me, like a cobra. I didn’t think they had venom-spitting plants in Surrey, any more than I thought they had mosquitoes, but still: that was how it seemed, a packet of poison hurled at me from the dark.

  Days passed, and it wasn’t just me. People cut themselves on rusty tools, dropped bricks on sandalled feet, had to be untangled from rampant briars. At first we mocked our own clumsiness; then we joked about the garden poltergeist; then we stopped joking.

  Actually, we pretty much stopped talking about it at all. Silence indicates denial, rejection, no consent at all. We turned away from what was unbearable and sought refuge in refusal. If we didn’t admit it, of course it wasn’t happening.

  If it wasn’t happening, then of course it couldn’t be happening worst to me. I might limp on both feet simultaneously, I might carry blood into the shower and bruises out at the end of every day, but still: no acknowledgement meant no surrender.

  And still the work got done. Relentlessly, grimly, enduringly. We stripped the jungle back to stubble, found old brick ways and borders laid between. Dug and turned the earth, washed down the brick, brought order rising out of chaos.

  And still...

  “You put that down,” said Mel, gently and firmly taking a spade away from me. “You’ll only lose a toe, you know you will, and I like you whole. Besides, I’ve got another job for you.”

  So I spent the morning measuring panes of glass in the greenhouse and counting how many were broken, counting back to be sure; and then driving to town and finding a glazier and waiting while he cut what we needed.

  Back at the Rectory, I set to work picking out the clinging shards and scraping down old putty. Mel saw me at it and came over frowning, but I forestalled her. “Look,” I said, “teeny-tiny panes, they’re barely larger than my hand. What harm can I do myself with these?”

  It was meant to be rhetorical, but for a moment I thought she’d tell me anyway. In the end she just said, “Wear gloves,” and stomped away.

  That became my job, then, restoring the greenhouse. I scraped and sanded and painted woodwork, I swept and scrubbed and whitewashed the interior, but mostly I reglazed the frame. Little by little, pane by pane: painstaking work, it suited my mood and my skills together.
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  I did wear gloves, despite the heat. Stripped down else to shorts and Factor 50, the only other protection I clung to was my shades. With the sun behind me I worked in my own shadow, but I’d have been blinded none the less by the fierce light jagging off a thousand panes of glass all around me.

  My back to the sun, to the garden, to my friends. I could hear them, of course, call and response, and the soft murmurs of private conversation. I could turn and join in, take a break any time...

  I could do, but mostly I didn’t. I worked in a kind of deliberate isolation, an exaggeration of the determined mood that had settled on us all. They didn’t talk much; I barely said a word from dawn until dusk. They worked harder than they’d planned to, paused less often, found less fun than they had hoped for; I was reluctant to stop at all. Even at dinner or in the pub, it felt as though I faced a different direction.

  At night, my room – well, it had been Charlie’s. It still was Charlie’s, though we had taken everything we could away from it. Mrs P had offered me another when he was sick, and again after he died; but this was the room I’d always slept in, with him or without him. It would be worse than refusal, it would be betrayal to leave him now.

  So I spent my nights in his absence, and my days in the ruin of his playground, scouring that as we had scoured this. Painting him over, washing him away. It would have been a wonder if I hadn’t seen him, at least in my mind’s eye.

  In fact I saw him reflected: little shimmers of movement, moments of stillness, in all those many panes of glass. I might have mistaken his figure for anyone’s, for Rob or Mark or Cat as they worked in the garden behind me – but that would have been deliberate, a denial too far. Pattern recognition: we can’t turn our backs on that. Besides, sometimes he was just too small, smaller than Mel, even: a child still, a child in his garden.