Cuckoo Song

Chapter 3. THE WRONG KIND OF ILL

Six days, came the laughter. Six days, it snickered like old paper in a draught. As Triss woke, however, the words melted once more and became nothing but the whisper of leaves against the window.

Triss’s eyes opened. Something scratchy was touching her cheek. She reached up, pulled the dead leaf out of her hair and stared at it. One by one, she recalled her actions the previous evening. Had she really climbed out of her window, gobbled windfalls and then stood on the banks of the Grimmer, feeling that it might speak to her? She picked her way through the memories with disbelief, like a householder surveying rubbish scattered by foxes overnight.

There were more dead leaves in her hair, so she hastily pulled them out and pushed them out through the window. Her muddy feet she wiped clean with a handkerchief. Her nightdress was grimy and grass-stained, but perhaps she could smuggle it into the laundry without anybody knowing.

Nobody saw me. Nobody knows what I did. And so if I don’t tell anyone, it’s like it didn’t happen. And I won’t do it again – I’m better this morning. I’ll get dressed and go down to breakfast, and everybody will say how much better I’m looking today… and that’ll make it true.

Sure enough, as she creaked her way down the stairs she was met with relief and joy in her mother’s voice.

‘Triss! You’re up! Oh, it’s so good to see you looking better…’

Hunger had finally broken Pen’s siege. She scraped her chair as far from the rest of the family as she could, and sat with her head bowed resentfully over the plate. She ate with all the good humour of a condemned prisoner.

Fresh eggs from the farm had been brought in and boiled, and now sat freckled in their cups beside the racks of toast. The pack of wolves that seemed to have taken over Triss’s stomach was still baying for food, but she managed to eat slowly and steadily, and stop when she had finished her share.

There. See? I’m better today.

They were going home after breakfast. Everything would be normal once they were home.

Back in her room Triss quickly piled her possessions into her little red travelling case and last of all stooped to pick up Angelina, her doll. Angelina was a fine, large, German-made doll, about the size of a human baby. Her bisque skin was not glossy like porcelain, but with a dull shine like real skin, and she had carefully painted lashes and gracefully curved brows. Her painted lips were parted to show tiny white teeth. Her curling hair was light brown, like Triss’s own, and she wore a green-and-white dress with an ivy-pattern print.

Triss’s mind performed an odd little twist, so that she seemed to see her possessions as a stranger might. An unfamiliar thought crept unbidden into her mind. It’s as if I’m still six years old. It’s as if I’m still the age I was when Sebastian died.

She stared down at Angelina with a slight squirming in her stomach, a tiny worm of shame and wonder.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked under her breath. ‘I’m eleven. Why do I still carry a doll around?’

And it was while these words were still hanging in the air that the doll moved in her hands.

The first things to shift were the eyes, the beautiful grey-green glass eyes. Slowly they swivelled, until their gaze was resting on Triss’s face. Then the tiny mouth moved, opened to speak.

‘What are you doing here?’ It was an echo of Triss’s words, uttered in tones of outrage and surprise, and in a voice as cold and musical as the clinking of cups. ‘Who do you think you are? This is my family.’

All the breath had left Triss’s lungs. Her whole body had frozen, otherwise the doll would doubtless have dropped from her hands. It’s a trick, she told herself frantically. Pen must have done this somehow, it’s a trick.

She felt the doll move in her grasp as it gripped at her sleeves with its delicate hands and hauled itself a little more upright, jutting its head forward to peer at her more closely. Its glass eyes seemed to come into proper focus, and then the doll flinched and started to shake. Its mouth fell open, emitting a low, eerie mewl of horror and fear.

‘No,’ it moaned, and then started to thrash, its voice rising to a wail. ‘You’re not right! Don’t touch me! Help! Help! Get her away from me!’ It flailed at her with tiny china fists, its scream rising to a single eerie note that went on and on like a siren. Through the window, Triss saw the house martins burst in terror from their nest in the eaves, and the wall plaster crack slightly, spitting powder into the air. The doll’s jaw dropped wider and its scream became ear-rending, until Triss was sure that everybody in the house and beyond must be stopping to stare and wonder.

‘Stop it! Stop it!’ She shook the doll, but to no avail. ‘Please!’ In panic she tried to smother the small screaming face with a fistful of woollen shawl, but it only muffled the sound a little. At last, in sheer desperation, she threw the doll across the room as hard as she could. It hit the wall head first with a crack like a gunshot, and the scream cut out, leaving a chilling silence.

Triss walked over to Angelina. Tump, thump, thump went her heart, like a policeman beating at a criminal’s door. She turned the doll over with her foot. Angelina’s face was cracked from one side to the other. Her mouth was still open, as were her eyes.

Triss dropped to her knees. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered uselessly. ‘I… I didn’t mean to…’

She would be found kneeling over Angelina like a murderer over a corpse. Panicking, she pulled a couple of logs out of the basket by the hearth, pushed the broken doll into the basket’s base and piled the wood back on top. Perhaps nobody would find her until after the family had left.

The door opened unexpectedly, just as Triss was straightening again. She spun around guiltily, mouth dry. Somebody had come to investigate the terrible screaming, of course they had. What explanation could she possibly give them?

‘Are you nearly ready?’ Her father wore his coat and driving gloves.

Triss nodded mutely.

He glanced towards the window. ‘Birds have been making quite a racket this morning, haven’t they?’

Out in the sunshine, waiting while Father cranked the car, Triss kept her hands stuffed deep in her pockets so nobody would see them shaking.

She was surrounded by love on all sides, and she had never felt so utterly alone. She could tell nobody what had just happened. Indeed, the longer she stayed silent, the harder it was to speak. And what could she have said anyway?

Angelina moved and spoke and screamed. And I killed her.

That didn’t happen that didn’t happen that didn’t happen…

But if it didn’t… then it was all in my head. Which means there’s something wrong with me. It means I’m really, badly ill.

Ordinary ill was fine, comforting even. But this was the wrong kind of ill. She didn’t want to be ill in her mind. Even thinking about it was like gazing down into dark water with no bottom. If she ran to her parents with a sick brain, they would not react with kindness and comics and new pills and ‘don’t overstrain yourself till you’re stronger’. They would be solemn and worried and let doctors tell them what to do. I don’t want to be taken away and hypnotized or have holes drilled in my head…

So Triss stood in silence by the car, hunched in the golden light of the morning, and felt like a monster. Every time her parents went into the house to retrieve one last thing, she tensed. Please don’t look in the log basket. Please let’s go, let’s just go…

She jumped out of her skin when a loud screaming became audible inside the house.

‘I’ve found her!’ It was her father’s voice, sounding strained and at his temper’s edge. Triss’s heart lurched. But it was not Angelina that her father carried out into the daylight. It was Pen, sobbing, roaring and doing her best to stamp her heels into his kneecaps. ‘She tried to hide in the attic.’

‘I’m not coming!’ It was hard to make out Pen’s words. Her tantrums were seldom a matter of pouting and foot-stamping. Instead she screamed herself hoarse, a few half-comprehensible words lost in the tornado of her rage. ‘… see she’s lying… can’t make me sit with her… hate you all!’

Triss slipped into the back seat through one door, and Pen was bundled in next to her through the opposite door. Once there, Pen curled herself into a tight, hostile ball, flinched up against the door so as to be as far from Triss as possible.

She thinks I’m pretending to be ill, thought Triss limply. Pretending, so I can get everybody’s attention. The attention that she wants. I wish she was right. Triss’s father climbed into the driver’s seat, and pressed the starter motor button. There was a whine, then the main engine chuckled and purred. At last, at long last, they were on their way.

The family car was a mint-green Sunbeam with a wet-leaf glossiness, a purr of an engine and headlights that looked like round, expectant eyes. The day was bright, so the hood was pulled down, leaving the whole family exposed to sun and sky. With a relief almost painful, Triss saw the cottage recede behind them, and then they were buzzing down lane after lane at a giddy thirty miles an hour. Triss’s hair whipped around her face, and as the scene of her crime receded behind her the knots in her stomach started to loosen. Perhaps illnesses could be left behind, just like small, badly concealed china corpses.

Hills reared under them like bad-tempered beach donkeys, and the road twisted as if trying to throw them. Drystone walls wriggled, rose and fell on either side. Then a white-painted sign tore past. Oxford that way, 85 miles, Ellchester this way, 20 miles.

Triss leaned her cheek against the cool wooden panelling inside the car door, clinging to the sense of familiarity.

I’m safe. I’m going home to Ellchester.

The first thing anybody noticed on the approach to Ellchester was the Three Maidens.

The most impressive of the trio of bridges spanned the width of the Ell estuary in one long elegant stride, its smooth arc and sandy-gold paint visible for miles against the glittering blue of the water. The second bridge cut a lofty line across and over the city itself, supported by three of Ellchester’s eight hills, one of which was now capped with a pyramid-shaped building in dull pink stone, the city’s soon-to-be-completed railway station. The last stretched out to join the rising slope of the valley on the other side. Between them, they held aloft the recently constructed railway line.

Everyone agreed that before the Three Maidens were built, Ellchester had been ‘in a decline’, which seemed to mean a slow, sorry sort of collapse like a sandcastle in the rain.

Then Piers Crescent had come forward with his plans for the Three Maidens, and shown that, in spite of the intervening estuary and awkward hills, the railway could be brought to Ellchester. Everybody called the bridges ‘a miracle of engineering’. They had changed everything and brought money to the city, and now his was one of the best-known and most popular names in Ellchester.

Triss never saw the Three Maidens hove into view without feeling a surge of pride. As the Sunbeam turned on to the broad highway that ran alongside the gleaming expanse of the Ell towards the hunchbacked, grey-tiled mass of Ellchester, she craned forward until she could see the river-bridge’s arch. Today, however, the surge of warmth was followed by a bitter aftertaste, as she remembered the overheard conversation and the newspaper article. If somebody was trying to frighten her father, did it have anything to do with his work?

Triss’s father did not steer into the busy, hillocky heart of Ellchester, with its maze of bridges and zigzag steps. Instead he drove into the quieter districts, where grand three-storey houses were arranged in squares, each with a little park in the centre. The Sunbeam pulled up in one such square in front of one such house, and on the back seat Triss let out her breath slowly. Home.

As she followed the rest of her family through the front door Triss felt her heart sink. She had expected everything to click back into place once she was home. The crowded hatstand, the waxed parquet floor and the twilight-yellow Chinese-style wallpaper were familiar, or felt as if they should be, but the click did not come.

‘Oh, now, who did that?’ Triss’s mother pointed at at some little flakes of earth on the smooth, clean floor. ‘Which one of you forgot to brush their feet? Pen?’

‘Why are you looking at me?’ exploded Pen. Her glance of incandescent rage, however, was darted at Triss, not her mother. ‘Why does everybody always think it’s me?’ She thundered away up the stairs and a door could be heard slamming with shattering force.

Their mother sighed. ‘Because it always is, Pen,’ she muttered wearily, pinching at the bridge of her nose.

‘Margaret will take care of the floors when she comes in tomorrow,’ said her husband, placing a reassuring hand on his wife’s shoulder. Margaret was the ‘woman who did’ for the Crescents, coming in to clean for a few hours each morning.

‘Oh – I must warn Margaret that we have returned early,’ their mother said with an exhausted air. ‘And find Cook and tell her that we are home after all and will need her. I had told her that she could take a few days off while we were away – if she has gone to see her sister in Chesterfield, I do not know what we will do. I must make sure that Donovan girl has moved out, and send letters to the recruitment agency, asking them for another governess. And if I do not send word to the butcher and baker, there will be no deliveries tomorrow.’

Triss’s recollections stirred. The ‘Donovan girl’ was Miss Donovan, the Crescent daughters’ last governess, who had just been turned away for being ‘flighty’. Triss’s mother had given previous governesses notice for ‘dumb insolence’, for being ‘too confident’ or for taking the girls out to museums or parks where Triss might catch a chill. Triss no longer bothered much with the governesses. If she let herself like them, or care about their lessons, it was a wrench when they left.

‘Celeste,’ Triss’s father murmured in a quiet and deliberately even voice, ‘perhaps first of all you could look to see whether any new letters arrived for us while we were away.’

Triss’s mother cast a puzzled look towards the empty basket where the family’s post was always kept, and then realization seemed to dawn in her spring-blue eyes. She wet her lips, then turned to Triss with a warm, soft smile.

‘Darling, why don’t you run upstairs, unpack your things and then lie down for a while?’

The very picture of meekness, Triss nodded and headed up the stairs. As she stepped out into the landing and passed out of her parents’ view, however, she halted. It was happening again. A conversation was waiting to be had behind her back.

Chewing her lip, she opened the nearest door and then closed it again, so that it would sound as if she had withdrawn into her room. Leaning against the wall she waited, and sure enough was soon rewarded with the sound of voices.

‘Piers, do you mean those letters? I thought we agreed not to read anything else sent by that man—’

‘I know, but right now we need to understand whether he was the one that attacked Triss. If he is trying to bully me, then perhaps there will be a letter from the man himself, instead of the usual. If he has written to us with demands or threats, at least then we will know.’

Hearing steps on the stairs, Triss turned to flee, and felt panic creeping into her soul like cold water into her socks.

Which room is mine?

There was no time to lose, however. The steps were reaching the head of the stairs. Triss jerked open the nearest door and slipped within, closing it quickly but quietly behind her.

The room beyond was dim, illuminated only by the little sunlight soaking through the thick amber curtains. The air smelt tired, like old clothes packed away for a special occasion that had never come.

Triss held her breath and pressed her ear to the door. Outside she could hear footsteps striding along the landing, heavy steps that she easily identified as belonging to her father. Soon she could hear the muffled sounds of him talking in the study, using his loud, careful telephone voice. The telephone was a relatively recent addition to the house, and still jarred with its newness and brashly insistent bell. Sometimes it seemed that Triss’s father felt he had to overbear it with force of personality, in case it had a mind to take over the house.

Triss felt a slow wash of relief. He didn’t hear me. But where am I? This isn’t my room. This is too big to be my room.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, and with a wash of alarm she realized how badly she had mistaken her way.

Oh no – not here! I’m not supposed to be here!

She knew the room now, of course. Nothing had changed since she had last seen it. Nothing had been moved.

The bed was made, with clean sheets. The dinted surface of the desk had been dusted and polished. A telescope moped in a corner, its tripod folded in like the legs of a dead crane fly. The top shelf held books on Arctic exploration, astronomy and fighter planes, with a cluster of peeling green-and-yellow detective novels at the end. On the bottom shelf a series of photographs had been carefully arranged edge to edge. As her eye glided across, boy became youth became man, the last photo showing him in a military uniform, his face wearing the slightly tense expression of one who is waiting his moment to ask something very important.

Sebastian.

Occasionally Triss had been brought in to see this room, as if it was a sick relative. Entering without permission, on the other hand, would be the worst kind of trespass, almost a blasphemy.

Triss knew she should leave at once, but found herself overwhelmed by a guilty fascination. She moved further into the room.

The bedroom had a churchy feel. You could tell that this was a sacred place full of rules you might break. Sebastian was a lot like church, with everyone solemnly knowing what they were meant to feel and when.

We will now consider mercy. We will now pity the poor. We will now forgive our enemies.

We all loved Sebastian very much. We are all very sad he has gone. We all remember him daily.

But do I? Triss ran a curious fingertip over the glass of the uniformed photo. It left no smudge of dust on her finger. Do I love him? Am I sad? Do I remember him?

Triss did have a strong but unfocused sense that everything had once been better, and that everyone had once been happier. Sebastian was tied in her mind to that betterness and happiness.

She remembered laughing. Sebastian had said the sort of things nobody else dared say, and it had made her laugh.

Now, however, Sebastian was their other, special sibling, the one who needed his possessions carried for him even more than she did. The one that said nothing during family discussions, but whose absence left eddies and whorls in what other people said.

If Triss were found here, even she would be in trouble. She might have special privileges for loitering near death’s door, but Sebastian had passed through it and so outranked her.

The atmosphere was so overpowering that it took Triss a second to realize that she could now hear her mother’s distinctive, rapid step climbing the stairs. The landing outside creaked, and then to her horror Triss saw the doorknob turn.

Mother’s coming in here!

There was only one place to hide. Triss dropped to the floor and scrambled under the bed even as the door opened.

I don’t do things like this, Triss thought helplessly as she watched her mother’s silk-stockinged ankles and buckled shoes come into view. I don’t sneak into places and hide and spy. And yet she stayed still as a mouse and watched as her mother lit the gas, seated herself at the desk and unlocked the drawer.

Peering from under the tasselled counterpane, Triss could see her mother carefully pull the desk drawer open a mere half an inch. Immediately the crack bristled with paper corners, as if a host of envelopes had been crammed in by force and were in a hurry to burst out. Her mother’s mouth tightened, and her hand made a nervous motion as if the envelopes were hot and she was afraid to touch them. Then she clenched her jaw, tweaked out one envelope and ripped it open.

Nothing happened in her mother’s face. Nothing happened, except that Triss had a feeling that staying expressionless was taking a lot of effort.

Triss was too far away to make out the words on the letter, but she was struck by the whiteness of the paper. It looked clean, crisp and new, in a room where nothing was supposed to be clean, crisp or new.

Her mother’s hands were shaking. At last she made a sound of utter misery, somewhere between a moan and gulp, and crammed both letter and envelope back with its fellows before forcing the drawer shut and shakily locking it.

Letters. Sebastian’s desk was full of recently arrived letters. Her mother had gone to see if any new ones had arrived. But why would they appear in Sebastian’s desk? Who would put them there? And how could they get into the house and sneak themselves into a locked desk?

The scene was like a dream, nonsensical but drenched with ominous and unfathomed meaning, full of the familiar turned alien. All of a sudden the entire world seemed to be the Wrong Kind of Ill.