House of Small Shadows

NINE

Under an overhead light, suspended from a black chain that dropped from a plaster ceiling rose, the great display case was raised from the ground to the height of an average table. It must have been six metres long, four wide and one deep.

About the tableau, the walls were papered with the medieval design she had seen elsewhere on the unpanelled walls of the Red House, in a rich burgundy colour that sucked at the natural light. There was a high wooden skirting board and a long cornice around the room’s edges, a simple iron fireplace, and one plain wooden stool at the head of the case, but nothing else. No other furniture or decoration was allowed to impede or distract the viewer’s horrified fascination of what M. H. Mason had created and displayed in his home.

Catherine remained speechless long enough for Edith to visibly enjoy her mute gawping. Perhaps that was why Maude never spoke, and why Edith spent her life surrounded by a silent and captive audience of rodents and woodland animals. Other personalities just interfered.

‘It often took my uncle years to finish a tableau. This one took ten, and one year of planning before he skinned the first rat.’

Catherine was still unable to respond.

‘There are six hundred and twenty-three individual figures inside the case. The dogs caught them all. Dogs taught not to mutilate their prey. And there haven’t been rats at the Red House in decades. Perhaps they still remember.’ Edith grinned at her own jest. ‘My uncle became so proficient, he could set up a rat in sixteen hours. But he planned the pose of each one to the minutest detail before he made the first incision. The legs of rats are terribly thin and they were the most difficult parts of the animals to position, but he became expert. And they were all individually measured for their uniforms by my mother.’

Catherine wheeled Edith before her along one side of the great wooden case. After a series of darting glances that made her dizzy, she still failed to comprehend the complexity of the diorama.

The viewing pane offered a window into hell. ‘I don’t understand… why has no one seen this?’ The wheels of the chair squeaked, the floor groaned, the sound felt as unwelcome as her voice inside the space, as if the room had been asleep.

Edith smiled. ‘Oh they did, once. But you are privileged, Miss Howard. You are the first person, outside of this family, to see Glory in seventy years. Though many wished to, once they’d heard of its existence from the few that actually did see it. That was before my uncle realized the futility of the piece as a warning. It was once displayed in Worcester before the Second World War, but only briefly. He hoped it might act as a deterrent to another grand slaughter. But he wasn’t happy with the reactions to his work. The papers called him unpatriotic and cruel. Someone wrote that he was deranged, dear. Schoolboys loved it for the wrong reasons. So my uncle brought it home. It divides into ten cases. I declined every request to see it once it came into my care, on my uncle’s instructions, until people forgot about it. Now, I have little choice. But my uncle understands.’

‘He…’ But Catherine soon lost her train of thought, and also failed to ask Edith what might have caused the disturbance in the room she had just floundered through in the dark. It had been paramount in her mind after she’d opened the blinds. But before Glory one could think of nothing else.

‘You must understand, my uncle came home from the front a changed man. His experiences in the Great War devastated him. He may have enlisted as a non-combatant, but he went to the front line to be with his men. And to give them what little comfort was available in horrors we cannot imagine. He saw such sights… things. He lost his faith. Not just in God. But in men. In society. In humanity. His loss of faith was colossal. You could say it was total. A terrible burden to endure for a chaplain.’

‘Chaplain? He was… ’

‘A man of God, yes. The village was once his parish. He became a chaplain in the thirty-eighth Welsh Division. A private project. There were lots of them at the time. But he volunteered in 1915, not long after his two younger brothers. They were beloved to him and he hoped to take care of them.’

Edith sighed, and raised eyebrows neatly drawn upon her alabaster forehead. ‘Harold, the youngest, fell at Mametz Wood. In 1916. Not long after they arrived. It was one of the battles of the Somme. Their division was then engaged in the third battle of Ypres and Lewis fell at Pilkem one year after Harold. Poor Lewis was gassed.’

And all of the rats in the mud were Mason’s recovery, or a meticulous continuation of the nightmare. Catherine gazed again at what she had, at first, thought were little men, because so lifelike were their postures upon their hind legs, so animate and human were their expressions of terror and pain and despair and shock, and so convincing were their little uniforms and weapons, as was their suffering in the soil, that for a few seconds she was sure she had been looking at a crowd of tiny men mired in one of hell’s inner circles.

The black landscape itself was so convincing, wet and churned and colourless, she imagined she could smell it through the glass. The sides of the case were painted with photographic precision to continue the vision of trenches, torn wire, shell blasts, mine craters, thick smoke and splintered trees, as if to infinity in every direction.

It was the most animate she had seen Edith too. The spiky and hostile persona she’d endured unto the threshold of this room appeared to have retreated at this chance to hold forth about her uncle, a man cherished in her long memory. ‘After Lewis was killed, my uncle was invalided out with enteric fever and dysentery. He’d been suffering from both for some time. My mother said it wasn’t the fever, but heartbreak that brought him home that first time. And he could have sat out the war, but he returned to his company and to action as soon as he was well enough. To continue his duty. My mother told me, when I was old enough to understand, that he was determined to die at the front. So that he could be with his brothers.

‘But he was chosen to live, my dear. He came home again in 1918, wounded this time. At the Battle of Cambrai. When his division captured Villers-Outreaux my uncle suffered a terrible head wound from shrapnel. It disfigured him. But may have saved his life.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Catherine swallowed the emotion that had come into her throat. ‘It’s…’ she didn’t know what to say. ‘It’s a terrible and sad story.’ And it was odd, because in the Red House, it felt like she had just heard recent news. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Should such things be forgotten? My uncle didn’t think so. He wouldn’t allow himself to. After the war he lived here in seclusion with his sister. My mother, Violet. She brought him back to the world. Because they had work to do. They did everything together. I suppose you will have to itemize them all?’

‘Yes.’

‘It cannot be dismantled. That is our only stipulation. It must remain intact.’

‘Of course. Who would even think of it?’ But many would, as well she knew. If there was not a sole buyer at the right price, each of the ten sections, or worse, would need to be sold off piecemeal. The diorama was magnificent, but it was also dreadful, and she struggled to imagine anyone who would want to look at it for long. A museum might be interested, though their best hope would be an art gallery. Because that’s what it was, it was art. Edith was right, M. H. Mason had been an artist. And a very great one to have affected her so profoundly. She thought she could have stood in the room for one entire day and still not have seen half the detail inside the case.

‘Time for one more. And that will be sufficient for one afternoon.’

‘There’s another?’

‘There are four.’