House of the Lost

CHAPTER SIX

Theo had been almost twenty-one, at the end of his third year at Cambridge, and Charmery was seventeen, still at school, but already making plans for what she would do when she left.

‘But it doesn’t sound as if she’ll need to do anything, if she doesn’t want to,’ said Theo to his mother who drove him to Melbray at the end of June. Theo was spending the whole of the summer there; Petra would stay for one night, then go off again.

‘Won’t she want to try for university? Or at least get a job?’ said Petra, concentrating on the road.

‘She says not. She says her father will give her an allowance and she’ll probably get herself a flat somewhere trendy like Chelsea or Holland Park. I suppose,’ said Theo thoughtfully, ‘the allowance will be quite generous. Uncle Desmond and Aunt Helen are very well off, aren’t they?’

‘I hope so,’ said Petra rather wryly. ‘Helen certainly spends enough to give that impression – remember the party they gave for the millennium?’

‘Nancy had to be decanted into a taxi at two a.m.,’ said Theo, grinning at the memory.

‘The legend is that Desmond made a lot of money a few years ago when he was attached to the Treasury.’

‘The unpronounceable Middle-European state,’ said Theo, smiling, because the elder Kendals still occasionally planted a gentle jibe about Desmond’s months in some exotic country, just emerged from communism and needing help with its new monetary policy. Great-aunt Emily Kendal, who was Theo’s godmother and who liked to regard herself as the matriarch of the family, was fond of saying it was Desmond’s sole claim to fame. ‘He never lets anyone forget about it,’ she said.

‘Wherever it was that Desmond went, I think he did get some huge fee for the work,’ said Petra. ‘But I wouldn’t like to say whether there’s any of the money left.’ She frowned, then said, ‘I wonder if Charmery will turn into a kind of It-girl. A bit of modelling, a bit of publicity work. Travel and smart parties and getting her name in minor gossip columns.’

For once Petra sounded bitter, which was unlike her. Theo said, ‘What an aimless existence. I should think she’d want to work properly. It’s far better – far more satisfying – to be paid honest coinage for working—’

‘Oh God, next you’ll be quoting Karl Marx at me.’

‘What’s wrong with Marx?’ demanded Theo.

Petra glanced at him, and said, warmly, ‘D’you know, you’re a constant delight to me.’

‘Lot of slop,’ said Theo, which was a family saying, generally used if someone appeared in danger of getting emotional or over-demonstrative. The Kendals, en masse, were not great on being emotional or demonstrative.

It had been an oppressively hot summer but there was an unsettled feeling that had nothing to do with the weather. Looking back, Theo thought it had been the summer of endings: Charmery, seventeen, was approaching the end of her school life, and Theo was facing his final Cambridge year that September. Even Lesley, who was fourteen, had left her school for a new one that had a better art department.

Despite the thunderstorms, the clans, as Desmond said, had gathered in force that year. Desmond himself came and went at intervals, pleading pressure of business, sometimes bringing sheaves of paperwork with him, and shutting himself away in the small room off the hall which Helen had designated as the study, but which was not much more than a general dumping ground for things people could not be bothered with.

Guff was at Fenn as he was most summers, although this year he was calling it the summer solstice because he had recently become interested in ancient religions. He had met a young lady who was instructing him in the history of the druids, he said. There was still an Order of Druids in existence it appeared, and he was hoping to accompany them to their midsummer’s vigil at Stonehenge, although some kind of endowment was apparently required before he would actually be allowed to join the Order itself.

‘She drove him here and spent the night,’ said Helen, after the high priestess of druidism had left next morning.

‘Just don’t tell me which bed she actually ended up in,’ said Nancy.

‘I gave her the spare bed in Lesley’s room,’ said Helen, to which Nancy said that was as maybe, but there had been a suspicious amount of creaking of landing floorboards around midnight.

‘Oh, Guff’s encounters are never physical.’

‘I should think not at his age,’ said Nancy tartly.

Nancy herself was at Fenn House that summer because Helen had invited Great-aunt Emily, and Nancy was going to help with her. She was very good with elderly people, said Nancy, and did not hear Aunt Emily telling Charmery and Theo if she had known that old bat Nancy was coming she would have gone to Frinton-on-Sea instead.

But even though it had been a peculiar summer, what with Guff’s druidism and Nancy’s bossiness and Great-aunt Emily’s bluntness, and what with Lesley’s two small brothers turning the lawn into a football pitch, there were no quarrels. The Kendals did not go in for quarrels any more than they went in for emotions. They sniped a bit and grumbled a bit, but in the main they were civilized and polite to one another.

‘I love them all madly,’ Charmery said to Theo one Sunday afternoon towards the end of that summer. ‘Of course I do. But don’t you sometimes just want to run away from them, as far as possible?’

Theo looked at her. She was wearing her big 1920s-style straw hat, and she had tucked a vivid pink Charmian rose into the band which ought to have clashed with her bronze hair but somehow did not. The hat shaded her eyes, deepening their colour almost to jade, casting light shadows over her high cheekbones. She had on a thin silk skirt and a white cotton top – simple but probably expensive – and her bare arms and legs were tanned. He wondered if he would ever stop feeling this overwhelming surge of love and desire every time he saw her. But when she said this about running away from the family, he said, very lightly, ‘I often want to run away from them. Shall we do it together, right away?’

There was no knowing how she would answer which was why he had kept his tone flippant, but she looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, let’s. Where shall we go?’

‘To the river?’ Theo’s heart had performed a double somersault. ‘The boathouse?’

The boathouse was a bit of a joke because the river frontage was supposed to be the house’s main attraction. Desmond always said ruefully that it had added thousands to the purchase price and when he was declared bankrupt they could all blame the River Chet. In practice, the boathouse was hardly ever used although there was a rather battered rowing boat moored in its leaky gloom. Charmery kept suggesting to her father that he buy a motor launch, and Helen got leaflets about boat furniture and cabin fridges so they could drink chilled wine on deck, but Nancy and Great-aunt Emily said it was a waste of time. ‘In high summer the river smells like a sewage farm,’ said Aunt Emily. ‘I don’t care if Desmond buys the Queen Mary, I’m staying on dry land, thank you.’

Guff had taken the rowing boat on the river a couple of years ago. He had been interested in photography that summer and wanted to capture dappled river banks and weeping willow trailing into the water. There was a very nice young person in his local photographic shop who had been advising him on what cameras he should buy. Lesley had gone with Guff to help carry the light meters and flash attachments which he had bought from the young person’s shop, but unfortunately they had capsized the boat, the cameras had sunk irretrievably, and Guff had to be fished out and given rum toddies to ward off a cold.

The river did not smell like a sewage farm today. As Charmery and Theo went along the rather uneven garden path towards the boathouse, and down the mossy steps there was only the scent of roses and of the lavender from the little herb garden lying on the warm afternoon like a drug.

‘All the perfumes of Arabia,’ said Theo, who had been studying the Elizabethans that term. ‘So perfumed that the winds were love-sick.’

‘If you’re going to start waxing poetical I warn you I shall counter it with “’Twas on the good ship Venus”.’

‘Dear me, what do they teach children at schools these days, I wonder?’

‘You needn’t play the po-faced older cousin, because you taught me that one,’ said Charmery, and grinned. Somehow their hands had linked, and the feel of her fingers against Theo’s palm was the strongest aphrodisiac in the world.

The boathouse was dim and secret. There was the faint lapping sound of water and soft green waterlight rippled on the walls.

‘It’s an enchanted cave,’ said Charmery, pausing in the doorway with delight.

‘It’s very old,’ said Theo. ‘That’s one of the things that always intrigues me about it. It was here long before Fenn House was built. My mamma once told me there’s a local legend that people used to see will o’ the wisps dancing across this part of the river like human fireflies. They’d beckon to you, but if you followed them they led you to a watery grave.’

‘We should have brought a bottle of cider or something,’ said Charmery. ‘We could have cooled the bottle in the river like they do on films. Except the river’s too muddy, isn’t it? We’d probably catch typhoid or dysentery. Let’s sit down – preferably not on the floor, those planks look disgusting.’

But Theo spread his cotton sweater on the planks and Charmery sat down, then pretended to shiver at the cool miasma from the river so that it was the most natural thing in the world for Theo to put his arm round her for warmth. She pulled off the straw sunhat and a swathe of her hair tumbled loose, brushing against his face. The sheer intimacy of this was like the igniting of a touch-paper, and Theo’s long pent-up desire exploded like a thousand sky rockets. Before he knew it, he had pulled her to him and was kissing her with such desperate urgency that she half flinched.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Theo, releasing her at once. ‘I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t hurt you, did I?’

‘No, but I wouldn’t care if you did.’ The soft radiance of the boathouse reflected in her eyes. ‘Kiss me again, Theo. Do it so hard I faint.’

This time, when she freed her lips, she said, ‘Why did you never do this before?’

‘Did you want me to?’

‘God, yes. For about a year now.’

‘A whole year wasted,’ said Theo, and then somehow they were lying on the planks, and the dank wood of the boathouse floor no longer mattered. Her body was pressing against him and his mind was spinning with the ecstasy. But I can’t, he thought. I daren’t. She’s only seventeen, she’s my cousin… ‘Oh God, Charmery, we must stop.’

‘No! Don’t stop.’

She pushed aside the thin skirt she was wearing and he realized with a fresh surge of desire that she was naked beneath it. When his hand slid between her thighs she shivered with delight, and he felt her hand reach for him.

‘So this is how you feel and this is how you behave when you’re being passionate,’ she said suddenly. ‘Isn’t this weird? We know each other so well, but we don’t know any of this about each other. You’re a different person all of a sudden. You’re not the cousin I’ve known since I was small.’

‘You’re different as well,’ said Theo, but this was not true, because this was a Charmery he knew very well indeed from all the fantasies and dreams over the years. But five minutes later – five minutes of breathless and increasingly urgent passion – he sat up and said tersely, ‘Charmery, we really must stop. Apart from anything else, someone might come in.’

‘No one ever comes down here. Anyhow, I don’t care if the whole family stands in the boat and watches us. Put your hand back… Oh God, Theo, that’s such bliss…’

‘This is something I’ve dreamed about for so long – but I don’t want to do anything you’ll regret afterwards.’

‘I won’t regret anything. Not with you. Will you regret anything?’

‘God, no! I’ve wanted to make love to you since you were about fourteen,’ said Theo.

‘Perv.’

‘Lolita.’

They smiled at one another.

‘Our thoughts fit, don’t they?’ she said. ‘We understand each other without needing explanations.’

‘Yes.’ Theo stared down at her, wanting to print her face on his memory, wanting to fix the moment so that he could keep it for ever.

Her hand slid inside his jeans, at first tentatively as if she was not sure about what she was doing. Theo gasped, and Charmery took her hand away at once. ‘I’m sorry – isn’t that all right?’

‘It’s so incredibly all right that you’d better stop or I might lose control altogether.’

‘Please lose control,’ she said at once, her eyes glowing. ‘I’d love that.’

‘But you might hate me afterwards.’

‘Shouldn’t that be my line? But I’ll never hate you. And don’t you feel this is the right time for us?’

‘The inevitable step forward?’

‘Yes. Only – have you got something we can use?’

‘Not right this minute.’

‘I thought all university students went round with a permanent erection and a pocket stuffed with condoms,’ she said, and Theo blinked with surprise at how worldly and grown-up she suddenly sounded.

‘Not all the time we don’t.’ He hesitated, and she leaned forward and began to kiss him, and Theo, tumbling helplessly into the whirling, desperate ecstasy all over again, thought: It will be all right. I can’t break the mood to go back up to the house and ferret around for a condom – I’m not even sure if I’ve got any. Just this once, it will be all right. I think I’ll be able to stop in time.

She tasted like sunlight and summer, and her fingers were like velvet and her skin felt like silk… Several layers down he was thinking he would have to exercise iron control and be so gentle, because she would never have done this before.

But she had.

The way she was twining her legs round him, pulling him in deeper and moving with the smoothness of practice, were the unmistakable products of experience. He shouldn’t have been surprised: Charmery was beautiful and unusual and any man seeing her would instantly want to have her.

He was in no position to criticize; he had not been as wildly promiscuous as some of his friends and fellow students, but he had not lived the life of a monk either. He had been seventeen himself when he lost his virginity at the end of his final school term, and he had had several girlfriends at Cambridge. All of them had been intelligent and attractive and companionable, and with two of them things might easily have developed into something lasting and good. The fact that they had not was quite simply because they were not Charmery.

Afterwards he propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her. Her hair was tumbling over the timbers of the landing stage and she was smiling at him.

‘So,’ she said, ‘finally and at last, we’ve done it.’

‘Finally and at last and for ever,’ said Theo, managing to beat down the stabs of jealousy that someone else had been first with her.

‘You stopped in time, didn’t you?’ she said, suddenly. ‘I mean – you withdrew in time?’

‘It was a bit of a close thing,’ said Theo, aware it had been more than close. ‘What happens now? When my finals are over and I’ve got a job, we could—’

‘No,’ she said at once. ‘No, don’t let’s do all that undying devotion, love for ever stuff.’ She pulled her skirt back in place, and put the sunhat back on to hide the disarray of her hair. ‘Not yet anyway. Let’s just go back to the house and be ordinary again.’

It was absurd to feel as if she had dealt him a blow, just as it had been absurd to assume she had not had boyfriends. Theo could not recall her ever mentioning any, but that didn’t mean anything; she could be very secretive at times. But he had always visualized the time after making love to her as deeply intimate and sweet – as a time when they might even glance at a shared future.

But she had said, ‘Not yet’, so Theo managed to match her tone. ‘OK,’ he said lightly. ‘But are you all right?’

‘What an unoriginal question. Still, at least you didn’t say “How was it for you.” Of course I’m all right.’ She brushed the dust from her skirt. ‘What I am,’ she said, ‘is absolutely starving.’

Words and tone came like a blow. Had this just been an adventure for her? Something intriguing and new to while away the afternoon because the family were exasperating her or she was bored? After all his years of hoping and planning and dreaming…? Only moments earlier, she had said, ‘Our thoughts fit,’ but it seemed they had not fitted enough for her to sense how he felt about her – how he had ached for today. But he clung to that ‘Not yet’, and said, ‘I’m quite hungry as well. Let’s go and raid the larder.’

‘People don’t raid larders these days. You sound like something out of a 1940s children’s adventure story.’

‘Enid Blyton? Famous Five go Shagging?’ said Theo.

‘You’re so vulgar I don’t know how you stand yourself.’

They walked back to the house, but this time the width of the garden path was between them.

She left Fenn House four days later.

‘Final school year ahead,’ she said, standing among the piled-up luggage in the hall, and kissing him with a light cousinly kiss that anyone could have witnessed. ‘A levels and all kinds of tedium. But we’ll be together when it’s my half term, of course.’

‘Do you want to be?’ Theo could not believe she was going to leave without any further acknowledgement of what had happened.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Come to Cambridge for a weekend before that,’ said Theo, a bit desperately.

‘Yes, if I can. But I can’t talk now. Pa’s bringing the car up to the door in about half a minute, and he’ll get impatient if I’m not there.’

‘But promise to try?’

‘Of course I promise.’ She glanced round to make sure no one was in earshot, then said softly, ‘It’s all right, Theo. Really, it is. I do love you. One day we’ll talk about it properly.’

‘Soon?’

‘Yes.’ Her hand came out to curl round his, holding it tightly for a moment. ‘Promise you won’t say anything to my parents, though – not even a hint. Not yet,’ she said again.

‘All right.’

‘Good.’ She glanced towards the half-open door, and Theo heard the car. ‘It’s only seven weeks to half term anyway,’ she said, and with that, and with the elusive promise contained in ‘Not yet’, he had to be content.

He left Melbray three days later because he could not bear Fenn House without her.

‘Revision for next term,’ he said to Charmery’s mother and Aunt Emily.

‘Work hard, but remember to play hard, as well,’ said Aunt Emily, who was planning to buy a new outfit for his graduation. Guff had discarded the Druid female and had now met a sweet young thing who ran a little boutique in the Brompton Road and was going to advise Aunt Emily on what to wear for the occasion. When Theo said there might not even be a graduation ceremony for him because at the moment there was more chance of ignominious failure than a degree of any kind, Aunt Emily said, ‘Nonsense’. She and Guff were going to sit in the front row where they could applaud Theo enthusiastically.

Back at Cambridge he wrote to Charmery several times – he did not dare email because she would be using the school computer which was not likely to be very private. He tried phoning, but her phone was nearly always on voicemail, and on the rare occasion he did get her, she always seemed in a hurry. There was a class she should be at, she said, or a sixth-form meeting. She was sorry if he kept getting voicemail, but there was a rule about not having phones switched on between 8.30 a.m. and 6 p.m.

‘Really tedious, but I’ve only got another couple of terms of it,’ she said, and Theo tried not to think that this new gushing way of speaking struck an unpleasantly false note. ‘It’s lovely to hear you, but I’ll have to dash because it’s the debating society in ten minutes and I’m one of tonight’s speakers.’

‘But I’ll see you at Fenn in October?’

‘Yes, of course.’

I’ve lost her, thought Theo bleakly, and it’s my own fault. I should never have let that afternoon in the boathouse happen. But she was as eager as I was. She was loving and warm and we were so close.

He tried to compose sonnets to her – paeons of praise to her beauty, and burning words of love and longing. Unfortunately, his first attempt was unpleasantly lewd, the second sounded like a reproving head teacher and the third had the dubious rhythm and scansion of a limerick. All three endeavours were crossly consigned to the bin in screwed-up balls, which was highly suitable since Theo’s own life at the moment seemed to be screwed-up and ballsed-up and might as well be thrown into the bin or down the loo and flushed into the Cam.

He reminded himself she was still very young. Perhaps in another year? Or two years. Oh God, two years is a lifetime, thought Theo. I’ll feel like some medieval knight serving seven years for his lady. It had better not be bloody seven years, though, or I’ll forget what to do in bed. I’ll bet when Lancelot stopped riding around on quests and finally got it together with Guinevere he wasn’t exactly a tiger in the sack.

On the crest of this last thought, he returned to composition, and at white-hot speed wrote a satirical sketch for the Footlights in which Lancelot had to embark on a new crusade, not in search of the Holy Grail this time, but of the Round Table equivalent of Viagra, blaming his sorry state on his long enforced celibacy. The sketch was performed with gusto, and caused considerable mirth among the students. Theo, fêted and congratulated after the show, told himself he could one day recover from Charmery and there might even be a life to be lived that did not contain her. He did not believe it, though. He did not think anyone who had loved her would ever recover from her.