House of Small Shadows

TWENTY-SIX

Catherine’s expectations about formal dining at the Red House were confirmed.

Feeling awkward and as breakable as the crystal she sipped from, she sat tense and uncomfortable on her chair, determined to make this the last meal she ate in the oppressive dining room. Because this was a feast to be endured within a thick, uncomfortable silence that made looking at each other across the table unbearable. Neither of her hosts appeared to have the strength to endure the meal, and she wished they hadn’t bothered with staging the performance.

The wall lights were not turned on. Four candles in holders, around which silver serpents were entwined, lit the table but only partially illumined the surrounding room. Catherine wanted to be enchanted, but the mournful silence and wretched faces of her companions made her feel so self-conscious she began to feel irrational and worried she might say something foolish.

From the little she could see there was something masculine about the dining room, a touch of its former master, with ruby-red and river-green wallpaper, designed with a miniature version of the geometric design she had seen elsewhere in the house. Dado rails remained along all of the walls. Oil paintings hung high from horizontal rods of polished brass, each picture depicting an age-darkened still life of rustic breads, grapes, game, fish, and birds with limp necks beside thin knives laid upon metal plates. A frieze around the top third of the walls featured a vine heavy with fruit.

But at least she’d had the foresight to change into the only dress she had packed. A decision she congratulated herself on as Edith had also dressed to eat. Her host’s ivory gown of embroidered silk concealed her entire body save her gloved hands and colourless face.

‘Ms Mason. It’s extraordinary to see such a fine gown still in existence, let alone being worn.’ This was the first time anyone had spoken since Catherine had been shown into the room, and her voice sounded phony and irritating within the grand space.

‘It belonged to my mother.’ Edith just about smiled, and what little of a smile appeared on her lipless mouth was an effort to maintain before she quickly returned to a preoccupation with a matter unshared. Her eyes were cloudy and her arms limp. If she leant any closer to the table, she’d be face down in her soup.

At least the food provided a temporary distraction from Edith. There was a delicious home-made vegetable soup, two small pheasants with new potatoes, a cheese soufflé, a plum pudding with fresh cream, a sweet white wine, and a burgundy.

The meal must have been prepared for Catherine, because Edith did no more than blow on a spoonful of soup and push at her pheasant with a heavy silver fork. Though at one point, Catherine suspected she had seen Edith pressing the side of a piece of bread with her tongue. But she never took a bite. Edith’s thin hands could barely support the weight of the cutlery, and it looked like she’d forgotten how to hold it. Perhaps Maude spooned food into her mouth when they were alone.

After her pretence of eating, and then an exaggerated dabbing at her mouth with a napkin, Edith finally closed her eyes and seemed to just switch herself off. She slept soundlessly with her head bowed, while Catherine nervously slipped tiny pieces of the food into her own mouth, trying not to clink the plate. She swallowed some of the food unchewed.

The coils of artificial hair on top of Edith’s head spoiled Catherine’s appetite before she reached the dessert. She suspected she could smell the piles of grey hair: a sickly floral perfume and the camphor of aged fabric kept from moths. She also wondered if a window was open because she detected an odour of damp in the room, like moist vegetation or cold, wet earth. Surreptitiously, she peered around her chair to trace the odour. The windows were all closed.

But she discovered that the mantelpiece above the great black marble fireplace displayed the source of the loud iron ticking. And she knew at a glance the clock was early eighteenth century. A timepiece set between four marble statues with a Greco-Roman theme. There was a bust of a man with a mean, arrogant face, perhaps a Roman emperor. This was set beside a sculpture of a muscular man being throttled by a serpent. Two willowy female figures, supine upon stone couches, faced each end of the room.

Mason and his sister, Violet, had probably eaten every meal here, year after year during their long occupancy of the Red House, sat at either end of the table like her and Edith were now. But had they been so silent, perhaps running out of things to say to each other?

Maude watched the charade in silence beside the serving trolley. Once she was satisfied Catherine had finished eating she cleared the table. But not a word was exchanged. The permanent expression of suppressed rage on Maude’s crumpled face was sufficient indication that any private discussion about the note from Catherine’s first visit would be unwelcome.

Could Edith’s behaviour truly be an elaborate ploy for attention, as Leonard had suggested? Tonight the woman seemed barely able to tolerate her presence. Or perhaps the compulsion to be judgemental and controlling was a role the woman barely had the strength for at this hour.

Coming back had been a dreadful error. She should have kept on driving. She needed familiarity, warmth, support, and suffered a sudden fear that a last chance had been missed and now it would be too late to leave. She had to say something. Speaking might force a resolution she was desperate for, because tomorrow and the day after were at risk of being whittled away just like today.

‘Ms Mason?’

It took a few seconds for Edith to look up. ‘My uncle never tolerated chatter at the dinner table.’ She almost spat the word ‘chatter’ at Catherine and her dark gums and thin teeth were briefly exposed in a grimace.

‘Sorry.’

‘But as you have begun, you may finish. What is it?’

Catherine cleared her throat. ‘The dolls I viewed in Green Willow.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well… they… I don’t think I have seen a finer private collection. Ever.’

Some warmth returned to Edith’s little reddish eyes. ‘Thank you. They were gifts from my mother and uncle. They spoiled me.’

‘You were loved. Cherished. I can see that.’

‘The dolls were not for playing with.’ Edith added this refrain with such sadness that Catherine instantly forgave her for being unpleasant. In a heartbeat she saw how lonely and afraid Edith was. She had been left behind. And how could she estimate the damage inflicted upon Edith as a child, by a mad uncle and mother, as Leonard suspected? The force of her recrimination and shame for thinking badly of her host surprised her.

‘You have a kind heart, Miss Howard.’

‘Catherine, please.’

‘I will address you as I see fit. But you are quite right to assume that I wait here alone.’

‘I…’ Had she spoken out loud? Or had her expression communicated more than she would wish to a woman unaccustomed to conversation?

‘But not for much longer.’ Edith spoke to the table’s surface.

Catherine’s courage to continue the conversation deserted her.

‘You must make allowances for those who live so long. Whose role is unexceptional. My time is almost done. My use was what it was, I fear, and no more. So take them. It won’t matter much, I suspect, if I am no longer here for their safe keeping. They must now watch over other children as they sleep. Only innocence can give them life. Please make sure they are well looked after.’

Flushing with embarrassment before more evidence of the woman’s decline, Catherine decided she’d be better off if she just gave up trying to understand anything Edith said to her. It was hopeless. ‘The dolls. I think a private collector, or even a museum, would be—’

Edith waved her napkin with irritation. ‘I have no interest in these other places.’

‘But if I may begin the inventory with them. They are a speciality of mine.’

‘Because to you they also live. I knew it immediately. Your presence here is not ideal, but at least the vulgarity and coarseness we have encountered in others is mostly absent in you.’

She wanted to be flattered, but it was the ‘mostly’ that spoiled the moment.

‘So take it all. I don’t know why I cling. The house seems to wish it all comes to you.’

All. The word boomed inside her.

‘But before you begin, you must see where my uncle worked. I’ve decided to let you in there tomorrow.’ The smile disappeared from a face that looked dead in a moment of unwavering candlelight. ‘I know you wish it. I am too old, and have been here too long, for you to hide things from me.’

Catherine tried to change the subject. ‘If it is all right with you, ma’am, if you can tell me what it is you want included in the inventory, I’ll restrict my work to those areas of the house. I don’t want to trouble you any more than I have already.’

‘Don’t be impatient. Nothing infuriates me more than impetuousness. We won’t be rushed, Miss Howard. All that is here, all who are here, are part of the Red House. This is a curious house that has known many times and lives. But nothing of it is indivisible. All must be understood in its proper and rightful context, and to begin with, in the places my uncle worked and brought such strange life to this house. Nothing has value unless it is considered properly. By degrees. And in the correct sequence. Don’t you agree?’

‘Yes,’ Catherine said automatically, but had no idea what Edith had actually asked her. She glanced at Maude, but looked away just as quickly from the housekeeper’s face because it stared with a barely contained malice at Edith. Catherine suspected the couple had been chastened by something she was not privy to. There was no warmth between them. They were as indifferent to each other as strangers. What bound them together, and motivated Maude to continue with the fatiguing care required by an elderly invalid, was mystifying.

But if she was not permitted to begin the inventory the following morning, and was manoeuvred into another digression involving M. H. Mason’s grotesque hobbies, she would force the issue. She was prepared to leave empty-handed, save clutching a handful of stories no one would ever believe. And then Leonard could try his hand here. And she would prepare her excuses to avoid any more meals before tomorrow too. Regardless of Edith’s decline, she knew her own mental state made it unhealthy for her to remain in this environment.

‘You have time, dear. And there is much to understand.’ Edith’s voice had softened, was almost wheedling. She also grinned in what looked like triumph as if the woman had won some war of wills Catherine would only understand later. ‘Now you are with us, there is less to distract you from this exceptional opportunity. There is more for you right here, than you ever found out there. I sense you are a young woman accustomed to disappointment.’ Edith slowly moved her head in the direction of the window behind her chair. ‘Out there.’

Was Edith now, impossibly, referring to her break-up with Mike? Had Leonard said something to Edith before she arrived? No, he’d only written Edith one letter, and that was before she split with Mike. Besides Leonard, she’d only told her parents about the break-up. The news worried them, but also wearied them. Or was Edith even hinting something of her flight from London, the incident, maybe her childhood, everything. The idea stunned her, baffled her into silence.

No, she was being paranoid. Edith could not possibly know about Mike, or anything of her life out there. ‘Oh really. Why do you say that?’

‘We keep to ourselves, but we are not blind, dear. Your eyes are full of a broken heart.’

We? Leonard must have said—

‘I never went in for all that. My mother did once. Must have done, though she never discussed it with me. I never knew my father. But I had my uncle. He introduced me to other things. More rewarding pursuits.’ Edith grinned her yellow grin. ‘There are other things one can love. A different kind of love maybe, but love all the same. A more enduring love. One perhaps that is everlasting.’

‘Today,’ Catherine said to deflect Edith’s uncomfortable taunts, or her investigation, or whatever it was. ‘This afternoon…’

Maude removed the serving platters as if the meeting was adjourned and nothing Catherine could say would be of any consequence.

‘Thank you, Maude. The food was wonderful.’ Maude didn’t look at her to acknowledge the compliment. Edith’s eyes closed again.

‘Earlier, I saw someone in the garden.’

Maude dropped a steel serving spoon upon the trolley. The sound electrified the darkness.

Edith raised her head. ‘Perhaps you were mistaken.’

Their attention felt like an exciting luxury. ‘No. There was a man in white. He was definitely in the garden.’

What followed between the two women was quick, but not quick enough to evade her notice. Despite the void and coldness between them, Edith and Maude exchanged a glance. One of fearful acknowledgement rather than surprise.

‘I think he was a bee-keeper. He was trying to get my attention.’

Maude turned and continued to busy herself with the dishes, her back to her employer. And it was Edith’s turn to stare at the back of Maude’s head with loathing. ‘A friend of Maude’s who used to tend the honeybees. But who is forbidden to enter the garden.’ The housekeeper retreated across the dining room, the serving trolley rattling before her.

Edith cramped her face into an expression of disgust. ‘I don’t feel at all well. Her soup never agrees with me. She puts something in it. Will you take me to my room? I wish to retire. Maude will undress me.’

‘Of course.’ Catherine stood up, buoyant with guilty relief that she had diverted the hostility away from herself and on to Maude. ‘If I may, I’d like to start early tomorrow, with the dolls if that’s OK.’

Edith ignored her and had already dipped her head to rest.

Only once Edith was propped up amongst the pillows, still fully dressed, did Catherine relax her shoulders and straighten her spine. Moving the unresponsive figure up to the second floor and through the house had taken all of her concentration and strength.

Once she had mastered the stairlift, she found the building so poorly lit she felt she was in danger of wheeling the woman into crevasses of darkness. And only as Catherine turned to leave, giving the wall of dolls at the foot of Edith’s bed a look of longing, did Edith speak.

She circled Catherine’s wrist with her hard fingers which felt terribly cold through the silk of her gloves. The sudden contact made Catherine start, and turn in time to glimpse the hand retreat like a crab to Edith’s lap. ‘I would offer you the library, or the games room. But I am poor company this evening. It would be better to go to your room.’

‘Yes. Of course. I have a good—’

‘And to stay there.’ Edith closed her old eyes, as if she had turned herself off again. And fell soundlessly asleep.