House of Small Shadows

TEN

You can’t sell them, she wanted to shout. They must be exhibited, in a place where everyone can see them. Otherwise the auction catalogue would be the only record of M. H. Mason’s intact collection, and his work could be scattered throughout the world to never come back together, after over half a century undisturbed inside the Red House.

‘I… I just can’t believe it.’ The next room featured a gas attack. And it seemed all of the creator’s wrath, grief and anguish at young Lewis’s death had been invested into the one hundred rats, dressed in muddied khaki, that rolled and choked and kicked and bled in the communication trench, while all around their position the air sparked with shell bursts and was strewn with fetid vapours.

The landscape replicated the last one, a thing murky and dreary and endless, stirred and roiled by great spraying impacts, still and marshy in dismal pockets, but appearing agitated in others as mud fell in waves from the black heavens. And as the dying rats sank, were engulfed and submerged in the mire, their eyes ran red. Catherine had to look away from the two blind and wretched creatures that clawed at each other and wrenched their matted throats upwards as if to snatch at clean air amongst a copse of devastated, skeletal trees. Their expressions were impossibly, but entirely, human.

‘Difficult to believe that it is not a portion of the Western Front brought home in a box. Though in one way it was. Inside my uncle’s mind. But my mother made the stage sets. The filth and the dirt of the land are plaster and burlap. It’s built over a wire frame and painted to create an illusion.’

‘They’ve been here. All this time.’ In the darkness, she wanted to add.

‘Nothing in this house has changed since my uncle passed. Even his shaving brush, his comb and glasses are still in the very same place and position they were in on his last day.’

Catherine turned her horrified face to Edith, who nodded with satisfaction. ‘Even his razor still lies where it fell.’

‘But you—’

‘Followed his instructions? To the letter, my dear. It surprises you. I doubt you’ve encountered the same sense of duty and loyalty out there.’ Edith raised one hand as if to dismiss the remainder of the entire world. ‘But in the Red House such qualities are cherished. I am his curator, dear. It was the last task he set me. Attending to his genius for all of my life has been a great privilege. But I doubt you could understand. Though I can’t blame you for that.

‘And the tableaux were to remain in the everyday rooms of the ground floor upon his instructions. Besides the service rooms, each of the rooms down here contains his earliest works. There is so much to see. To itemize. I hope you have the time, Miss Howard.’

‘Earliest works?’

‘He moved on to other things, dear. He came to look upon these as trifles. I believe only my mother’s powers of persuasion prevented him from destroying them all when England declared war on Germany in 1939.’

Catherine stared up at the ceiling and again imagined the volumes of fragrant, preserved air, the near priceless treasures within each and every room. ‘Unchanged,’ she murmured. ‘The whole house has not changed.’

‘Why would we change it? And anyway it is forbidden.’

‘Forbidden?’

Edith never answered her. ‘Please take me back to the lift. I need to rest. Maude will show you out.’

‘Of course. Can I… Please, can I come back?’

‘I don’t know.’ Then as a teasing afterthought she said, ‘Maybe someone will contact you.’

‘Right. I’ll wait to hear. And thank you. I mean, for showing me.’ She could hardly organize her thoughts. They came in flashes, then derailed or vanished and she was again looking down at a rat’s face in the mud, its jaws pulled apart in a scream. But if Edith was telling the truth, the entire building was a perfectly preserved Gothic Revival house from the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign with all fittings intact. Perhaps the best example of such in all of England. And one filled with immaculate antiques and a million pounds’ worth of Mason’s own work.

She couldn’t imagine Glory selling for less than two hundred thousand pounds at auction. Gas Attack would fetch half of that. And there were another two Great War dioramas locked away on the ground floor of the house. There were the dolls too. His notorious puppets weren’t for sale, but she should at least see them and persuade Edith to exhibit if her uncle’s skill in their creation was anything like his preservation of rats.

Again, she wondered why she was here, as if there had been a mistake and she had someone else’s identity and she should confess her status as imposter before it was all too late. She was giddy and weightless from excitement or shock, but wasn’t sure which. Her clothes clung thin and cheap, everything about herself was inappropriate here. She was out of her depth. She wasn’t a quick girl, she didn’t pounce on opportunities. She bit her lip. Stopped herself.

‘Ms Mason?’ she suddenly thought to ask, as she pushed the wheelchair through the dark passage to the reddish hue of the distant hall. ‘Who is the child?’

Edith stayed quiet for a while as if she hadn’t heard. ‘Child?’

‘Yes. At the window. I saw someone before I came inside.’

‘What?’ Beneath her in the heavy chair, the great powdered head turned to one side. ‘There is no child,’ she added as if Catherine had said something idiotic to someone elderly and irritable, which she surmised she may have done. Particularly if it had been Edith at the window. But it couldn’t have been.

‘Climbing, I think—’

‘Climbing? What do you mean? There is only me here. And Maude. And as you can see…’ She opened the palms of her frail gloved hands as if to indicate the existence of the wheelchair.

‘And in the room…’

‘What are you talking about? What room?’

They reached the hall. ‘The room with Glory. There was a noise. A sound. I thought—’

‘The bird? There are birds in all of our chimneys. We cannot get them out.’ Edith raised her little bell and began to shake it feebly.

Catherine reached down to help her.

‘Leave it!’

From deep inside the Red House a door opened and Catherine recognized the shuffle of Maude’s old, tired feet.

After Edith and her chair had been fitted into the stairlift by Maude, amidst protestations and much supervision that Catherine thought unnecessary, and once Edith and her chair had begun a steady though noisy climb upwards, the ancient woman regarded Catherine one final time with her small red-rimmed eyes. ‘I will remind you not to mention what you have seen inside this house. It is private. They are still our things. We do not want callers.’

Catherine couldn’t wait to get home and tell Mike. ‘Of course. The visit is confidential.’

Edith continued to stare at her with an unpleasant intensity. Catherine dropped her eyes to Maude who looked through Catherine. The housekeeper’s gaze was directed at the vestibule before the front door.

‘Goodbye,’ Catherine called out to the diminutive figure of Edith Mason, trembling on its rattling ascent. There was no answer. ‘And thank you again.’

In silence, Maude showed Catherine to the front of the house. She’d wanted to flee for most of the time she had been inside the building, but now identified a frustrated desire to stay and see more. She had been spoiled, but also teased.

At the threshold of the Red House, the housekeeper looked over her shoulder quickly, back towards the hall and the strained sounds of the stairlift. And without looking at Catherine, Maude clutched one of her hands and pressed her mannish fingers into Catherine’s palm, to leave a piece of paper behind.

‘Oh no, you don’t have to…’ Catherine said to a closing, and then a shut door, thinking the housekeeper had tipped her like a tradesman. It wouldn’t have surprised her if these two isolated and out-of-touch figures still observed such a custom, but when she bent over to chase the paper that had fluttered from her hand and come to rest on the tiles of the porch, she could see that it wasn’t money. It was a crumpled piece of brown paper.

Beyond the thick door came the muted yet frantic peal of the handbell.

Catherine picked the paper up and straightened it out. It was spattered with what looked like grease. She turned it over. Written in pencil in stubby capitals were four words. DON’T NEVER COME BACK.