Convalescence Page 5

  I was staring hard at his face, looking for the lie, but couldn’t detect one. He was wearing a frown of concern, and his eyes were moist, as if he too was fighting back the tears.

  “What say you and I start again from the beginning?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I’d like that.”

  He seemed to relax and he let his breath out slowly. “Splendid,” he said. “Splendid. You found the library then?” he said, switching tack. “Did you find anything to read?”

  The sudden change of subject threw me for a moment. I wasn’t sure if I should have been looking in the steamer trunk or not, so I said nothing.

  “I believe there’re some old Eagle annuals there. Dan Dare, Storm Nelson? Are those the kind of things you like?”

  I nodded again. “Yes, I get the Eagle every week at home—” I pulled myself up short. That was something else in my life that I would have to get used to doing without.

  A flash of pain flared in his eyes as he made the same realization. “Yes, well,” he said. “Things move on. I’ll tell you what, there’s a newsagent in the village. Perhaps I can arrange to have your comic sent here. Would you like that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I would. Thank you.”

  He patted my knee. “Good. Splendid. I’ll make a telephone call and make the arrangements.”

  I couldn’t delay voicing the question in my mind any longer. “Why?” I asked. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  He stood up and stared down at me. “Because you’re family, James. My brother’s only boy.”

  “But you and Dad didn’t get on,” I blurted out.

  Again I saw the wince of pain creasing the corners of his eyes. “A matter of deep regret,” he said, “that I’ll carry with me until the day I die. You being here, living under my roof, will ease that regret somewhat.”

  “Why did you and he fall out?”

  Uncle Thomas gave a small, rueful smile. “Because we’re adults, James. And adults can sometimes be incredibly stupid.” The smile widened. “Anyway, enough of this. Clean yourself up and come down to dinner when you’re ready. I’ll be joining you this evening.”

  And with that he walked to the door and let himself out of my room.

  I sat there for a long moment, trying to make some sense of what had just happened, but the answer eluded me. I would just have to see what happened next.

  What happened next was that the damned droning started again.

  My uncle had not been gone five minutes when it started. This time I didn’t hesitate. I leapt from the bed, rushed out of the room and sprinted along the landing to the corridor. For some reason I was feeling incredibly angry, furious that I had no answer to what this was all about.

  I yanked open the door at the end of the corridor and ran into the room. As before, the record was making lazy revolutions on the gramophone.

  I snatched the record from the turntable and snapped the shellac across my knee, tossing the broken pieces to the floor.

  “What do you want from me?” I yelled and waited for some kind of response.

  When none came, I scoured the room with my gaze.

  “Show yourself!”

  I’m not sure what I was expecting, but the gramophone starting again wasn’t it.

  As I stared, the handle started to turn, winding the machine. The turntable began to rotate and the sound wafted out of the grille, this time without the need of a record.

  “Help me, James.”

  I heard the voice again, whispering inches away from my ear.

  As before, I spun around to the sound of the voice. “Who are you? How do you want me to help you?”

  And then I noticed the mist.

  At first it was a small eddy hovering inches from the floor, but then it seemed to grow, drifting upwards and forming a small column. Gradually, as if being shaped by invisible hands, the column began to resemble a form—a body of sorts, with limbs and a round ball of mist fashioning a head.

  As the invisible sculptor continued to work, features of a face were beginning to emerge, and I watched, mesmerized, as an eye, a nose and a mouth took shape.

  Time seemed to be suspended, just hanging there, not moving on, until I was staring at the mist-created figure of a boy dressed in some kind of school uniform with short trousers and a blazer. He looked to be about my age and had fair hair with a fringe that swooped down to cover one side of his face. His mouth was opening and closing, as if he was talking to me, but I heard nothing but the drone of the gramophone.

  There seemed to be no malice in the one eye I could see, just a desperate sadness, a kind of inconsolable grief.

  “Who are you?” I said again. “How can I help you?”

  His mouth opened and closed again.

  “Lost…so cold…”

  The words floated through the air between us, as distant and crackly as the music from the old 78 rpm record.

  “So cold.”

  I took a step towards him.

  His arm came up and a pale hand swept the gull’s wing of hair away from his face.

  It was then I cried out—it was almost a scream—because underneath the hair was a swollen mass of puffy, black-and-purple flesh, the other eye hidden by the swelling.

  His lips formed the words again—“Help me.”

  “James!” I spun round to see Mrs. Rogers, standing in the doorway, arms crossed. “What are you doing in here?”

  Confused, I turned back to the mist figure, but it had gone. There was nothing there. I glanced across to the gramophone, but its turntable was still, its brown-felt cover thick with dust, and the room was silent, with just Mrs. Rogers’s words hanging in the air like an accusation.

  “He was there.” I pointed across the room to where the mist-boy had been standing. “Right there. And he wanted me to help him.”

  The skin around Mrs. Rogers’s eyes tightened slightly, and then she was smiling. “Come back to your room, Jimmy. I think you need to lie down.”

  She came across, wrapped her arm around my shoulders and guided me towards the door, but before she could propel me through it and back out into the corridor, I stole a glance backwards. The room was empty, the dust on the floor undisturbed, apart from our footprints.

  “But I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I do,” she said. “Your Miss Holt warned me something like this might happen.”

  “Something like what?” I said. “And she’s not my Miss Holt.”

  “The hallucinations,” Mrs. Rogers said. “It’s part and parcel of your illness and everything you’ve been through.”

  Her voice was kind, reasonable.

  “But I know I saw him,” I said.

  “Yes, I’m sure you did,” she said condescendingly. “Now let’s get you back to your room.” She tightened her grip on my shoulders and urged me forward.

  Amy was already in the dining room when I came down to dinner, but there was no sign yet of my uncle and Mrs. Rogers. I took my seat at the table and Amy came over and laid a napkin across my knees.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said quietly as her head lowered.

  She turned to face me. “You can talk to me,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Not here and not now,” I said. “Can we talk in private?”

  She shrugged. “Sure. Come to my room later. We can talk in there.” She fell silent as Mrs. Rogers entered the dining room.

  I nodded my head slightly to show Amy that I understood, and she went back to the kitchen to fetch the first course.

  Uncle Thomas joined us a few minutes later. He sat down at the head of the table and launched into a series of anecdotes about his time as a professional cricketer.

  The evening passed quickly. My uncle was an excellent raconteur with a seemingly endless supply of witty, self-deprecating stories
centered mostly around his playing life. Though towards the end of the meal the subject shifted to his time in the diamond mines of South Africa, and those stories were just as amusing and gave a fascinating insight into a world I had only read about in my comics.

  Throughout it all, Mrs. Rogers sat quietly, smiling at my uncle’s recollections but adding none of her own.

  When Amy came back to the dining room to clear the crockery, Mrs. Rogers had already left the room, leaving Uncle Thomas and me alone.

  My uncle got to his feet. “Come on, James, what say you and I take a walk before bedtime?”

  “A walk…” I said uncertainly.

  “Yes, why not? It won’t be dark for another hour. I’ll take you down and show you the lake…well, it’s more a big pond, to be fair, but it does have a few fish—perch and chub, and a couple of reasonably sized pike. Do you fish, James?”

  I had tried it once a couple of years ago. Dad had taken me with him to the River Lea where he was a member of an angling club but, to be quite honest, I found the whole experience deadly dull.

  “No,” I said in answer to my uncle’s question.

  “Neither do I,” he said. “Bores the pants off me, if I’m honest, but people have told me it’s pretty good down at the pond. Come along.”

  We left the house via the French doors and walked across the lawn, past the summerhouse, towards the trees.

  At the tree line Uncle Thomas veered off to the right and strode down a path that I hadn’t noticed before.

  I had to run to keep up with him.

  Within a few minutes the path petered out, and we were standing before a circular body of water about fifty feet across.

  Trees surrounded the pond—willows mostly—their lush green crowns bowing down and skimming the surface of the water. Midges hung in small clouds, and a couple of dragonflies darted about between the bulrushes that peppered the bank.

  To my surprise, my uncle stopped by a small patch of grass and sat down, crossing his legs like a boy scout around a campfire. He patted the grass beside him, and I sat down as well.

  “When I was younger I used to come here all the time, just to sit and watch the dragonflies.”

  “It’s very peaceful,” I said.

  He was nodding his head. “Yes, it is. A great place to come to sit and just think.”

  We lapsed into silence. Overhead, birds had begun their evening chorus, an echo of the cacophony they performed at dawn. A blackbird sounded a strident, insistent cry.

  At the sound Uncle Thomas looked up at the trees. “It knows we’re here. It’s calling out to warn the others. They look after their own, blackbirds.”

  I wanted to say to him “Is that why you asked me to come down here?”, but I didn’t, and the moment passed.

  “Have you lived here long?” I said after another long, contemplative silence.

  “About twenty years, I suppose. I bought the place when I came back from South Africa. I needed somewhere to put down some roots, and this place fitted the bill. Very green and peaceful after those years in the Transvaal.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  He glanced round at me. “I was homesick, truth be told. I’d gone out to South Africa as a very young man to make my fortune. By the age of forty I’d done that. Oh, it was hard work, sometimes working up to eighteen hours a day in, quite frankly, pretty grim conditions. It didn’t leave much time for what you could call a social life. I hung on for a few more years, but things were changing out there politically and socially, so I sold up my stake in the mine to DeBeers and headed home. It was probably the best thing I ever did.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Not at all. I came home, bought this place and settled down. When Mrs. Rogers eventually came to fill the position of housekeeper and brought her young son, Hugh, with her, it finally gave me what I’d been craving during those hot and dusty days in South Africa, a family of sorts. Those were happy times at the manor. The days were filled with laughter. There were always new adventures to be had. Hughie kept me on my toes, I can tell you.”

  “So why did he leave?”

  A cloud suddenly passed over my uncle’s eyes, obliterating the sparkle that had settled in them as he’d reminisced. He got to his feet. “Time to get back,” he said abruptly and strode down the path to the house.

  Again, I had to run to keep up with him.

  We walked back to the house in silence.

  Mrs. Rogers was waiting by the kitchen door when we arrived back, and she quickly claimed custody of me, shooing me into the kitchen to give me my evening dose of tablets.

  Uncle Thomas, apart from a curt “good night, James”, left the kitchen and went back to his rooms in the west wing, leaving me to regret my question to him. I’d obviously touched a nerve.

  I tapped on Amy’s door.

  “Come in.”

  I pushed the door open and entered her bedroom.

  She was sitting in bed, the covers up to her knees, dressed in a cotton nightdress with a flower print, her curly hair loose, tumbling to her shoulders. She looked young, little more than a child.

  “Pull up a chair,” she said, “and tell me what it is you wanted to talk to me about.”

  I fetched the chair from the dressing table and placed it at her bedside. Now I was here, I didn’t quite know where to begin.

  “Well?” she said after a few minutes of me rehearsing questions in my mind.

  I realized I was going to have to start at the beginning. “Ever since I got here, I’ve been hearing and seeing things,” I started, and stopped again.

  She leaned forward in the bed, bringing her legs out from under the covers and wrapping her arms around her knees. “Go on,” she said. “I’m all ears.”

  I started at the beginning, telling her about the crying and finding the room at the end of the corridor.

  “That’s the old boy’s dormitory,” she said.

  “The old what?”

  “Dormitory,” she said.

  I looked puzzled.

  She sighed. “I told you I grew up at the orphanage, right?”

  “St. Joseph’s, yes.”

  “Well a few times a year, during the summer, a group of kids from St. Joseph’s were invited by your uncle to spend the week here—a summer vacation, if you like. I was lucky enough to come here a couple of times.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  “Well, as I said, he was on the board of governors, and it was always during the summer holidays when Hughie was off from school. I think Mr. Bentley saw it as a way to keep his nephew amused. Hughie was away at boarding school during term time, and I don’t think your uncle much liked the idea of Hughie mooching around here, kicking his heels, so we were shipped in as entertainment for him.”

  “Didn’t you mind?”

  “You have to be kidding,” she said. “I don’t know about other orphanages, but St. Joseph’s wasn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute kind of place. The nuns were very kind…mostly…but there’s not a lot in the way of entertainment. Chapel every day is all well and good, but a girl can only pray so much before she runs out of things to pray for. In the end it’s just like reciting a shopping list for things you know you never have a chance of getting,” she said wistfully.

  Suddenly she brightened. “We did have a television, but that was limited to one hour a day before supper, and we all had to watch it together, crammed into the refectory, so the chance of coming here and having a couple of weeks to run wild was an enormous treat.”

  “I can see that it would be,” I said, realizing just how fortunate I’d been to be raised in a loving family.

  “Anyway, carry on. What else have you heard?”

  I told her about the gramophone.

  That produced a warm smile of remembrance. “I remember that old record player. Some of th
e younger children used to play with it. There used to be a big box of 78s. There were lots of children’s records—‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’, that sort of thing. It was a bit of a pain, though, especially when they used to set it going first thing in the morning when you were still asleep. Why is it that small children wake up so early? Anyway, carry on.”

  “But don’t you think it strange that the gramophone was playing in an empty room, with no one to set it going.”

  “Perhaps there’s a ghost,” she said.

  I looked at her, startled, but then I saw the twinkle in her eyes.

  “You’re joshing me,” I said, slightly hurt that she wasn’t taking me seriously.

  She knew she’d hurt my feelings. “Sorry,” she said. “Tell your story. I won’t utter a sound.” She made a zipping motion across her lips.

  “No,” I said. “I’m telling you, just so you can reassure me that I’m not going barmy.”

  So then I told her about the mist-boy, and I watched the smile fade from her eyes.

  “This boy…describe him,” she said. Her voice was low, and there was an edge of urgency about it.

  “He was about my size, my age.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Fair, and he had a fringe that kind of swept down over one eye.”

  Her face had gone pale. “Did he say anything to you?”

  “Kind of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you sometimes see it at the cinema when the film goes out of synch. The actor’s lips move but the sound comes out a second later.”

  “So what did he say?”

  “He seemed to know my name. He said, ‘Help me. Help me, James’.”

  Amy gave a long sigh and almost jumped from the bed, crossing to the window and opening it wide. I heard her take a couple of long breaths.

  “What is it, Amy? Do you know who the boy could have been?”

  She turned back to face me. She had tears running down her cheeks. She nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “It sounds like Michael.”