House of the Lost

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The present

‘He did go back,’ said Petra. ‘He and Matthew both went back.’

Theo, whose mind was spinning, thought, So Matthew was here after all. He and his father spent all those winter nights in this house. Andrei had a love affair with my mother, and both of them talked to her about the agonies of those years. They poured out all the angst to her, perhaps they even had some of Mara’s diaries as well as her letters, and they read them to her and she listened. And I listened as well, without realizing it. That’s how I know it all.

It was remarkable he had no conscious memory of this time. But he did have a subconscious memory – he must have heard far more of what was said than anyone realized. And all these years later, because he had been in Fenn House in another monochrome winter, the memories had come to the surface. I knew Matthew, he thought. I talked to him and rode in a car with him and I watched him sketch things. Maybe I even saw him sketch those pictures in St Luke’s. The knowledge of this was so immense he felt as if his mind might implode.

After a moment, Petra said, ‘And, as I think Theo’s already realized from the likeness in that sketch, Charmery was a cuckoo in the nest. My own nest.’

She looked at Theo, and he pushed away the incredible knowledge concerning Matthew, and said, ‘Charmery was your daughter. Yours and Andrei’s.’ Saying it made it real, but it did not make it any more extraordinary.

‘Yes,’ said Petra, ‘Charmery was my daughter and his.’

His mother’s words spun crazily inside Theo’s head and for a dreadful few seconds he was aware of anger against her, because if she had told him the truth, then he and Charmery… No, I’m wrong, he thought. Helen told me a distorted version of the truth all those years ago – it wasn’t a father we shared, it was a mother, but Charmery and I really were half-brother and sister. We could never have been together.

‘You don’t need the details about the affair and I’m not giving them anyway,’ Petra was saying. ‘My dears, let’s face it, there’s nothing remotely attractive about a woman of my age confiding the details of a youthful love affair. But during that couple of months – Well, it was a shattering experience.’

‘Andrei went back to Romania?’ said Theo, relieved to hear his voice sounded reasonably normal.

‘Yes. I tried to talk him out of it. I think Michael tried as well, but we both knew he would go. And after he left, I discovered I was pregnant.’ She made a brief angry gesture. ‘At first I had no idea what to do. Your father had been dead for three months, Theo, and although I wasn’t especially conventional and I didn’t much mind having a child by myself, the family…’ She looked at Theo and Lesley. ‘The Kendals are loyal and honest, but let’s face it, dears, in the main they’re narrow and old-fashioned. Not you, Guff, dear, and not you, Lesley, either.’

‘Nancy,’ said Theo and Lesley together.

‘And one or two others,’ agreed Petra. ‘I was distraught at losing Andrei,’ she said, ‘but I’d had a brief letter saying he and Matthew had reached Resita and from there had gone on to Sister Teresa’s convent.’ She smiled. ‘The nuns were always prepared to help cheat Ceauşescu and the Securitate,’ she said. ‘Actually, I think one of them was imprisoned for a time. But even for them, the situation with Andrei was very high-risk: he was an enemy of the State and an escaped prisoner. As far as I was concerned – well, he would have been in appalling danger wherever he was, and his health was still precarious from the years in Jilava – I couldn’t hand him the responsibility, and certainly not the financial burden, of a child. I knew I’d have to make my own decisions about it.’

‘You could have told me,’ said Guff. ‘Whatever you decided, I’d have helped you.’

‘I know that, and I wished afterwards that I had told you,’ she said. ‘What I did was to go to the Kendal who wasn’t a Kendal – the one who, like me, had married into the family.’

‘Aunt Helen,’ said Lesley.

‘Yes. And we came up with a plan,’ said Petra. ‘If you think back, Guff, you remember that was the time Desmond went abroad.’

‘The unpronounceable country,’ said Guff, nodding. ‘He left a few weeks after John died.’

‘Yes. Desmond left the following January. In February I found out about the pregnancy. So Helen told everyone she was coming abroad with me for a few weeks – to help me recover from John’s death. We knew we’d have to be away for longer than a few weeks,’ said Petra, ‘but she was going to write to the family saying she was joining Desmond. I was going to let them think I was travelling around. We left England at the end of May – the longest I dared leave it before the pregnancy began to show – and went to Switzerland. I was able to keep in tenuous contact with Andrei from there.’

‘That was when I stayed with Lesley’s parents, and then with Guff?’ said Theo.

‘Yes.’

‘Did Desmond know the truth?’

‘Yes, almost from the beginning. Helen had to tell him. But I trusted him,’ said Petra. ‘My idea was to stay away from the family for the rest of the pregnancy, and then fudge the dates of the child’s birth – tell everyone it was born earlier than it actually was, so it would appear to be John’s. It was only a couple of months,’ she said. ‘I was going to say the child was born in July – actually the birth was September.’ She paused again, and Theo saw the sadness in her eyes. ‘But shortly before the birth I became quite ill. Helen found a Swiss clinic and I was taken into it and was there right up to the birth. She paid for everything, but I was beyond knowing or caring. After the birth I was very ill indeed. I never grasped the medical technicalities, but I don’t think I was expected to live.’ She looked at Theo. ‘I remember clinging on to the thought of you, telling myself I couldn’t die because I couldn’t possibly leave you on your own,’ she said. ‘I think that was what kept me alive. And when finally I did begin to recover—’

Lesley said, ‘You decided to give the child to Helen?’

‘No! Never that,’ said Petra. ‘I thought the child had died,’ she said, with angry pain in her voice. ‘That’s what Helen told me. Stillborn, she said. She came and went between the pension and the clinic, and said she had dealt with all the formalities and I didn’t need to do anything. I was still weak and pretty emotional about losing the child – as I believed – and I didn’t question anything.’

Stillborn. The word twisted a deep pain into Theo’s mind and, as he looked at his mother, he thought how curious that both she and Charmery should have borne the pain of a dead child. He wondered if he would ever tell Petra what had happened between himself and Charmery and about the small, lost David, and knew in the same heartbeat that he could not cause her so much pain.

‘But the doctors in the clinic would have known the child had lived?’ Lesley was saying.

‘By then I had been moved to a sort of convalescent place,’ said Petra. ‘It was way up in the mountains, one of the German-speaking areas. I don’t think any of them knew the truth. None of them had much English and my knowledge of German was almost nonexistent. Helen acted as interpreter – she wasn’t fluent, but she had some quite good school German. It’s possible she told the convalescent place that the child really had died. I never knew, though. When I had recovered a bit more, she came home, letting everyone believe she had been with Desmond all along. I followed later. But if you remember,’ she said, looking across at Guff, ‘I was only in England for a couple of weeks. I didn’t see Helen, and the only one of the family I saw was you. I collected Theo from your house and went back to Romania with him to be with Andrei. Travelling there was difficult, but it wasn’t impossible. And Mikhail still had contacts in the October Group who could oil the wheels a bit. I never asked questions about that,’ she said with a sudden grin.

Theo was staring at her. ‘I went with you to Romania?’ he said at last.

‘Yes. You weren’t quite five. I told you it was a holiday before you started school. I tried to make it sound like an adventure – something from a book.’

‘Where did we stay?’

‘In Andrei’s old house,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember any of it? Not even Wilma? She was a kind of housekeeper – a dear motherly soul. She had known Matthew’s mother from childhood.’ Petra smiled. ‘Wilma had no English at all, and I only had a few phrases of Romanian picked up from Andrei and Matthew, but we managed to communicate somehow. She made a great fuss of you,’ she said to Theo. ‘She gave you a room all to yourself at the very top of the house. She said it was Matthew’s room when he was small.’

‘And it had a view towards smudgy mountains, and, on the horizon, an old, crouching house with a sinister legend,’ said Theo softly. Dear God, he thought, not only have I met Matthew, I’ve slept in his bedroom – that room I wrote about. I saw the view he saw – the Black House and the Carpathian Mountains in the far distance. ‘I don’t remember any of it,’ he said aloud. ‘How long were we there?’

‘Only about a week. That’s probably why you don’t remember. And maybe it was fixed in your mind as being an adventure in a book. I might have overdone that. I’d meant to stay there much longer, but conditions were far worse than I realized. There was hardly any food and electricity was switched off for hours at a time. The people were so downtrodden, it broke my heart. I saw I’d made a massive mistake in taking you, and I wanted to get you back to England and safety. But before we left I went out to the convent to Andrei. You stayed with Wilma for a couple of days. The nuns were so kind to me, I remember.’

And, thought Theo, while you were there someone took a photo of you with the nuns as a little record of the English lady’s visit. Then years later someone at that convent – perhaps Sister Teresa, even – sent the photo to St Luke’s for their centenary book.

‘So you came home properly then,’ said Lesley.

‘Yes. And it was to find that while I’d been gone Helen had apparently given birth to a child,’ she said rather dryly.

‘And that child was Charmery,’ said Theo.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you guess she was your own baby?’ said Guff.

‘Not absolutely at once. At first I was suspicious because it was a whopping great coincidence, but I dismissed it. But then I put things together and challenged Helen and she admitted it. What she had done was to simply come home with the child, letting everyone think Charmery was born while she was with Desmond. She told them all she had kept the months of pregnancy a secret because the doctors feared a miscarriage, and she hadn’t wanted to tempt Providence by telling anyone except Desmond. Really, of course,’ said Petra, ‘she had to wait to be sure she could actually get Charmery from me. The dates were a bit askew, but I think she said it had been a premature birth.’

‘And Desmond went along with all that?’ said Theo.

‘He believed Helen took Charmery with my knowledge and my permission. Theo, what’s wrong?’

Out of the tangle of complex emotions and memories, Theo said, ‘But Desmond was infertile.’

Petra stared at him. ‘He was, as a matter of fact. But how on earth did you know?’

‘Charmery found out,’ said Theo. ‘She challenged her mother.’

‘And Helen told her she had an affair with your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘And therefore the two of you were half-brother and sister?’

‘Yes,’ said Theo, staring at her.

‘Oh, Theo,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry you found out about it in that twisted way.’ She studied him for a moment. ‘Was it a problem for you?’

Theo returned the stare. ‘No,’ he said at last.

‘Helen and John never had an affair, of course,’ said Petra. ‘That was Helen’s back-up story. Desmond’s infertility was the one weakness in her plan. She didn’t think anyone knew about it, but it was just possible it might come out some day. If it did, she was going to say she had a brief fling with John just before he died.’

‘Did you mind about that?’ said Lesley.

‘Yes, I did. I was furious,’ said Petra. ‘But when I thought about it properly, I saw it didn’t really matter so much. It seemed to belong to another life.’

‘When did you find out the truth?’ asked Guff.

‘Shortly after Charmery’s first birthday. I confronted Helen with it. She broke down and begged me not to do anything or tell anyone. She sobbed for hours and clung to me and pleaded with me not to take Charmery away. She said she had wanted a child more than anything in the world, and she had been devastated – very nearly suicidal – when Desmond’s infertility was confirmed.’ She spread her hands. ‘What could I do? I couldn’t bring myself to suddenly take a small child from two people she believed were her parents. Helen had registered Charmery’s birth in Switzerland. She had stated she and Desmond were the parents. It would have been exhausting and cruel to Charmery as well as Helen to break it all apart. Charmery was aware of the world around her. So I agreed to let the lie stand. But it was an extraordinary sensation to know the child I’d secretly mourned was alive and growing up, and that I knew her so well,’ said Petra. ‘I’d bought birthday presents for her, and taken her out with Theo. But the really curious thing,’ she said, ‘is that after I knew, I always found it difficult to stay in this house when Charmery was here. Silly, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ said Theo, leaning forward to take her hand.

‘I didn’t want Helen and Desmond to buy Fenn – there were too many memories and they weren’t all good ones. But Helen had come down here with me right at the start and she fell in love with the place. She said she and Desmond would renovate it and extend it for family summers and holidays. She said I wouldn’t recognize it when it was all finished. It would be like a different house. But it never was,’ she said. ‘For me it always meant Andrei and the start of that huge deception over Charmery.’ She looked at Theo. ‘I never really came to grips with my feelings for Charmery,’ she said. ‘I could never equate her with the baby I thought had died in the Swiss clinic.’

Theo said, ‘All those times you were travelling – when I was at school – were you with Andrei?’

‘Most of the time.’

‘Helping him look for Elisabeth?’

Petra turned to look at him. ‘So you know about Elisabeth, do you?’ she said.

‘Some. Not all. Not everything.’

‘I expect you’ll explain it to me shortly,’ she said. ‘But Elisabeth was the main reason for Andrei’s return to Romania. The need to know what had happened to her – even if he found she had died – absolutely consumed him.’

‘Did he find her?’

‘In the end he did,’ she said, ‘but it was a long search. Years. By the end of 1989 Romania was a boiling cauldron. Ceauşescu was losing all touch with reality by then. He seemed to have no understanding of the violent hatred and suffering that was all around him.’

‘You were there?’ said Theo, incredulously. ‘You were in the revolution?’

‘I was there when it started,’ she said. ‘Andrei, Matthew and I had gone to Bucharest to try to locate some prison records. Andrei knew someone who was prepared to let him see the lists of political prisoners – I think there was a bribe involved. It was the eighteenth of December. My last day in Romania, because I was coming home to be with you for Christmas. But when it all began – when the rebels defied the curfew and ran through the streets singing the outlawed national songs, it was impossible not to be swept along by it. The whole city – probably the whole country – was sizzling with violence and anger and defiance. Oh God, they hated Ceauşescu by then, those poor people.’ She stopped, her eyes huge and dark and no one spoke. ‘We went out into the streets,’ said Petra. ‘We knew it was courting danger of the most extreme kind to go out, but it was impossible to stay indoors. We saw the crowds, and we went through the streets, the three of us holding hands so we wouldn’t become separated. Everyone knew, then, that Ceauşescu and his wife would soon be deposed. No one knew how, or who would do it, but it was impossible to be in that seething mass of people and believe anything else. I remember them chanting “Noi suntem poporul” – “We are the people”. Later they were shouting that Ceauşescu would fall. I guessed that if he did, huge numbers of political prisoners would be released. And that meant Andrei might finally find Elisabeth.’

‘Did you think it would mean losing him?’ said Theo.

‘Yes, but it no longer mattered. I had known, almost from the first meeting, that for Andrei, Elisabeth was more important than anything I could ever give him. Finding her was his driving passion.’