The Whispering House, page 6
‘Not much. Or if we did, I’m afraid I can’t remember what we said. I just took a quick sketch and we parted, and a week or so later her photo was all over the local rag.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, no. I just …’
I thanked him, and went to the door to pick up my suitcase. I expressed my hope that Diana would be better soon – she made no reply – and suggested I’d better get going. Neither of them tried to stop me. One last look round the shadowy room, a quick glance at Cory’s grey eyes, and I was on my way, trundling my suitcase across the chequer-board floor. I thought about calling him into the hall and showing him the space where the portrait had hung – but what was the point? Suddenly I wasn’t especially keen to see it again, anyway.
The front door was wide open, and the rain was coming on wilder than ever, hissing into the gravel and sputtering over the edges of the gutters. I heard footsteps follow me out of the sitting room, and turned to look at him. The hall had been insubstantial before – all stillness and shadow – but it came alive as soon as Cory entered. He seemed larger and freer out here, touched by the stormy daylight, and I noticed how the rain had made his hair frizz and his skin gleam. I felt weedy and chilled in comparison.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. I wasn’t clear what he was apologising for, but I let it pass.
We stood looking out at the rain. I was going to be soaked through before I even reached the trees.
‘If you don’t mind waiting,’ he said, ‘I can try and find the picture I made of your sister?’
‘It’s OK.’
I should have said yes. Having failed to say yes I ought, in all politeness, to have made my final thank yous and goodbyes and gone away. Instead of which I stood and stared at the impossible fall of rain, as if I were waiting for someone to do something about it.
‘You could stay here for the night?’ Cory suggested. ‘We’re not exactly short of rooms.’
My hands shook, like they do when I drink too much strong coffee, so I stuck them in the back pockets of my jeans. There were so many sensible, Freya-ish answers ready and waiting on the tip of my tongue:
Thank you, but I’m booked into a guest house and I’ve already paid my deposit.
That’s so kind, but I suspect your mother will have other ideas.
Many thanks, but I was not brought up to accept overnight invitations from strange men.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, after a decent pause. ‘Are you sure?’
They think they’re whispering discreetly; they think the rain will disguise what they’re saying out there in the hall. Well, they’re wrong. The house is listening and Diana herself can hear – if not individual words then the tenor of them; the subterranean meanings of which her son and his flame-haired friend are themselves only half aware.
The sofa creaks beneath her as the pain takes another savage bite, but Cory doesn’t sense it the way he normally would. He doesn’t pop his head round the door and say, ‘Mum?’ He is too busy urging the girl to stay. It’s almost – almost – funny.
Once upon a time, Diana herself stood on the chequered floor of the hall, and a man bent over her saying, ‘Stay.’
The house was beautiful in those days, brimming with richness and light. It is beautiful now, but only on the outside, like a rosy-faced apple with a maggot inside. The man knew it would sway her, if anything would; he knew it was his only hope.
‘This house will belong to you, if you marry me,’ said Mr Byrne. ‘Just think about that.’
‘God, it’s like being in a Jane Austen novel,’ she quipped, but he looked blank and she remembered that he never read fiction.
Back in Kensington, amongst her friends, it was common knowledge how things stood. ‘Look at him,’ Diana would say, slit-eyed, through a cloud of cigarette smoke, and they would all turn dutifully to look him up and down. ‘He’s got no sense of humour and no culture, and he always wears a tie, and he manages to be good-looking without having any sex appeal whatsoever. Do you know what I mean?’ She would grimace and shudder, and all her friends would laugh and say yes, they knew exactly what she meant. He never said anything in his own defence, and it was hard to tell whether he minded her jibes or not. If he minded, why did he always show up to the next party, and the next, his tie more carefully knotted than ever?
Mr Byrne – her friends went by their Christian names, but he was always Mr Byrne – kept inviting her to stay at his ancestral home in Devon, and she kept saying no, until one day she felt especially rootless and bored and said yes.
He showed her every room, from attic to cellar, in his efforts to persuade her. She longed to say something cutting, but it wasn’t so easy without her friends there to egg her on, and anyway, Byrne Hall had rendered her speechless. The Georgians and Victorians on the walls, the antique books, the furniture, the gardens, the woods, the views, the sheer scale of the place. They meandered from room to room – she in her gypsy dress and sandals, he with his jacket and tie and his hand on the small of her back – and as she took it all in she made rapid calculations in her head.
On the one hand, she disliked Mr Byrne.
On the other hand, she didn’t like anyone much. Or rather, she liked people en masse, at parties, and she liked the way she saw herself through their eyes, but she didn’t like anyone in particular. There was a general idea, amongst her friends and the world at large, that Love was the be-all and end-all of life, but she took this to be a cliché.
‘What you’ve never known, you’ll never miss,’ as one of her nannies used to say – she forgets which; there were several.
‘All right!’ Diana said it with a little shrug. ‘I’ll marry you.’
She tried to move past him into the garden – she wanted to see those roses again – but Mr Byrne blocked her way and kissed her. Her mouth hurt afterwards, and she could feel the imprint of his fingers on her arms long after he’d let go, but she made a decision not to mind. She owed him something in return, she supposed.
Cory and the girl are still talking in the hall. He has asked her to stay overnight, and she has hummed and hawed and said yes, and now they are both wondering what exactly she’s said yes to, whilst pretending that they’re not wondering anything of the sort. Diana listens, grey-faced, struck by the accommodating softness of their voices.
6
Hi Dad, all well but slight change of plan – I’m staying at Byrne Hall!! Long story but I’ll give you a ring tomorrow. Hope the fish pie worked out OK. Lots of love F xxxxx
Mine was a first-floor bedroom at the front of the house, large and sparsely furnished, with two sash windows that overlooked the sea. There was a four-poster bed without any curtains, and a wooden chair where I’d draped my wet things. That was all. It was eerily close to the room I’d created in my imagination, albeit without the dusty shafts of sunlight. At first I sat politely on the edge of the mattress, waiting for Cory to return with sheets and blankets – but he didn’t come.
My stomach rumbled as I paced the room, the floorboards wobbling and yielding against my bare feet. It must have been over an hour since he’d gone. I’d changed into a dry sundress, but I could still smell the rain in my hair and on my arms.
Hi Tom, hope you’re OK. I read Dad’s article before I left and spent most of the morning feeling cross with him and worrying about you.
I clicked my tongue impatiently and pressed delete. I couldn’t think what to say to Tom – how to act and sound – a problem I’d never experienced before. It hurt to think of him being hurt, and why should I put up with that? There ought to be a way of deleting awkward conversations from your mind. There ought to be a way of erasing the memory of particular people, and starting life all over again without them.
If my life were to begin right here, right now, I would make it a thing of such simplicity and promise. Such coherence.
I opened the blinds and wished Cory would come. The ragged edges of the sky had merged darkly with the sea and it looked later than it was. I sat on the chair for a while, leafing through my notebooks, but my old poems were as exhausted as my thoughts. I wished my breath didn’t smell stale. I got my sponge-bag out and smeared a blob of toothpaste round the inside of my mouth, though I wasn’t convinced it would help.
The corridor was entirely dark. I hesitated, but Cory had been gone for ages and there was nothing wrong with going to find him. I wasn’t being nosey. He might need a hand, carrying pillows and things.
I felt my way along the landing in what I thought was the direction of the stairs, but I wasn’t sure. I turned back after a moment, but couldn’t remember which was my room, so I changed my mind again and carried on.
Their whispered argument blended so well with the house that I almost missed it. I stopped just in time, clamping my hands over my mouth to muffle the sound of my own breathing. Diana was doing most of the talking. I couldn’t catch much, but I knew she was upset by the way her voice kept rising in high-pitched spikes.
‘Shh,’ Cory kept saying. ‘Shh.’
‘Darling, you of all people should see—’
‘Oh, don’t give me that!’ Cory’s voice was heated. ‘Since when have you been superstitious?’
‘Cory, I’m begging you, I’m ordering you—’
‘No. You don’t get to order me anymore.’ He struggled to soften his voice. ‘You’re ill. Stop fretting.’
In shrinking back against the wall, I banged my shoulder against a switch, and a dull light washed along the landing. Diana’s mouth slackened when she saw me, and Cory jumped. His arms were full of blankets and pillows.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping, I was just … I couldn’t find the light switch.’
One of the pillows fell to the floor, so I picked it up, and Cory deposited the rest of the bedding in my arms.
‘My mother’s tired,’ he said. ‘She’s not well. Give me two minutes to get her settled.’
I nodded.
Diana shrank when Cory touched her arm. He glanced at me over her head, his smile a little clownish, as if he were trying to make light of a sad situation. I couldn’t help liking that look, and the tentative way it made an ‘us’ out of him and me.
‘Come on,’ he said – addressing her but watching me.
I stood with the bundle of bed-clothes in my arms as Cory steered his mother away. The further they got from the landing light, the more they seemed to merge with one another, so that by the time they started up the stairs to the second floor they’d become a single creature, hunched and improbable, with four ill-matched legs and two heads.
‘Goodnight!’ I called as an afterthought, but neither of them seemed to hear me.
‘So, your father,’ Cory said. ‘Would that be Robert Lyell? The art critic?’
I’d switched the light on, and my bedroom had become a harsh patchwork of yellow light and black shadow, with no in-between shades. I was unfolding a blanket and Cory was shrugging a pillowcase over a pillow.
‘The art critic,’ I echoed, struggling to throw the blanket over the bed. ‘Yes, that’s right, he writes for the London Globe. How did you know?’
Cory shoved awkwardly at the pillow. ‘I just remember, from when your sister was all over the news.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’
I’d been getting on all right with the bed-making until Cory came in and I lost the knack. I couldn’t get the blanket straight, and even when I did I kept fidgeting with it – tucking in corners that were already tucked and smoothing out non-existent wrinkles. I’d started hating my dress as well, the same way I hated my childish suitcase. The dress was cheap and shabby, with its crumples and its ditsy flowers, and every time I bent down it rode up and showed the backs of my knees.
Cory tossed the pillow on to the bed and picked up one of my notebooks from the chair – the orange exercise book I’d been leafing through before I went to find him. I made a faint gesture of protest as he smoothed his hand over the cover, but when he apologised and offered to hand it over, I didn’t take it away.
‘They’re just poems,’ I said. ‘I wrote them ages ago, years ago, before Stella died. I thought if I re-read them it might get me going again, but I don’t know. They all seem so thin and corny.’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s the same with me and my paintings. It’s like they were done by a different person.’
His thumb rifled the page corners and I itched to take the book back.
‘Will you let me look inside?’ he said. ‘Please? I’ll let you laugh at my old paintings.’
No, I thought. But if I said no, a veil would fall between us – he would be suitably courteous and contrite, and I’d never get to know what I’d lost.
‘OK.’
I turned away and finished making the bed, while Cory turned the pages.
‘I was very much into abstract nouns at one point,’ I said, in the hope that he couldn’t listen to me prattle and read at the same time. ‘Lone Despair weeps on her sunless isle, and stuff like that …’
I hoped he had found ‘Lone Despair’, or similar, because although it was a terrible poem, it was also fairly impersonal. Please God, let there not be any Tom poems in the orange exercise book.
‘Who’s Tom?’ he said.
I gave up on the bed and leapt across the room, so that I could read over his shoulder.
‘Oh no, no, no!’ I reached round and prised the book out of his hands. ‘Tom’s just a family friend,’ I said. ‘My parents were friends with his parents. He’s a curator at the Wingate Gallery.’
‘A family friend? Really?’
I suppose I looked surprised, or uncomprehending, because Cory added in an undertone, ‘I’m only teasing you.’
Teasing is such a light word, and so lightly meant, but it was the word I took, and turned over, and thought about most that evening. I’d forgotten what it was like to tease or be teased, but from the moment Cory said it I wanted to remember.
I was glad we didn’t eat in the kitchen: it was a big, cold, loveless barn of a room. ‘We don’t cook much,’ Cory explained, when he saw my shiver. ‘Mum doesn’t have any appetite, and when it’s only me …’ The plastic shopping bags were by the door waiting to be unloaded, so Cory emptied everything on to the kitchen table and we cobbled together a picnic from sliced bread, peanut butter, tortilla chips, KitKats, under-ripe bananas and a bottle of white wine.
‘All right?’ said Cory, as he heaped everything on to a tray and added a couple of glasses.
‘Very all right.’
‘We’ll take it to my room. It’s nicer in there.’
‘Your room, as in your studio?’ I wanted him to remember his promise to show me some of his artwork.
‘Yeah, well.’ Cory laughed, a little sadly. ‘Former studio.’
When I first saw Cory’s room, I thought of those Arabian Nights tales where genies whisk palaces from one corner of the globe and set them down in another. I suppose you might call it a cheap effect if you were being detached about it. Light two dozen candles and place them in clusters around a large, untidy room – which is what we did, with a box of matches each, once Cory had set the tray down on the floor – and of course the shadows will come to life, and the dirt will turn to gold dust, and the bare plaster will look as if it’s been gilded. I didn’t want to be detached, though. I fell for it willingly.
‘Look at this place!’ I said. ‘It’s waiting. It’s waiting for you to take up art again, and bring it back to life.’
‘Do you think?’
‘I do!’
Aside from a few oddments of furniture, every single object in the room was art-related: leggy easels, rolls of canvas, jars of brushes, boxes overflowing with masking tape and mannequins, bulldog clips and string; even the floorboards were streaked and freckled with paint. I wondered how long it had been since he touched them; beneath the flattering glow of the candlelight the place felt sad and neglected. It didn’t smell of inspiration – by which I mean it didn’t smell of oily rags, or paint, or turpentine, or coffee, or glue. There was a fuzz of dust along the top of every canvas, and here and there the candle flames picked out a spider’s web, stretching like a mesh of copper wire from one picture frame to the next.
We spread a rug on the floor and threw cushions on top. There was a midnight enchantment in the air, though it can’t have been late, and it reminded me of when Stella and I were little, and we made dens out of our duvets when we were supposed to be asleep. Cory sat cross-legged in the middle of the rug and I knelt opposite, pulling my dress as low as it would go over my knees.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘have something to eat while I open the wine.’ His voice had gone quiet, as if we were doing something illicit; risking discovery at any moment.
‘So,’ he whispered, passing me a full glass. ‘You were telling me about your dad, and poetry-writing, and Tom.’
‘Was I?’
Oh Lord, what exactly had he gleaned from that orange exercise book? I couldn’t see his expression. The nearest candle was guttering, and the shadows round his mouth and eyes flickered so rapidly that his face altered half a dozen times a second. One moment his smile was light and jokey, the next it was tender, or serious, or searching.
‘Honestly, Cory …’ I wanted to be cross, but I found myself laughing instead. ‘Don’t take those poems seriously. I know they sound febrile, but I wrote them a long time ago. Tom isn’t – wasn’t …’
Cory was watching me, waiting; I wasn’t used to such interest and encouragement when I talked. I twisted my glass by the stem, mesmerised by the way the candlelight glanced off the liquid: now flashing, now glowing, now fading to nothing.
‘I was a little bit in love with Tom, once,’ I confessed. ‘Stella and I both had a thing for him when we were in our teens. He’s about five years older than me, and we’d known him since we were small, but he got married and his wife left him after only a few months, and it made him seem so, I don’t know …’
I petered out. The whole thing was dark and complicated all those years ago when Dad let Tom sleep on our sofa, and we lay awake listening to the murmur of voices downstairs. Tom on the phone, Tom talking to Dad, Tom talking to himself. More than once, we heard him cry. It seemed silly now to have desired him so much, just because someone else had made him suffer. It was adolescent.
