broken backs, a doll's house.
Two doors opened off the landing, on my right: a bathroom nearest the corridor. Bare board floor, porcelain washstand; an imposing claw-footed bathtub, darkly stained, with a greyish bath towel carelessly draped over the side. In the wall cabinet above the basin, a clutter of dried-up lipsticks, tubes, bottles, hairpins. Everything metal was heavily corroded, the labels unreadable.
I tried the other door. Not a closet, but yet more stairs, angling up to the left. I checked the door to make sure I couldn't be trapped, and clambered up. Two drab attic bedrooms, each with a single metal-framed bedstead; flock mattresses and pillows, tinder-brown with age, but no bedding. Plain wooden furniture, washstands with white china jugs and basins, bare boards. The windows were set like skylights into the sloping ceilings. Nothing in any of the cupboards.
BACK ON THE LANDING, THE SENSE OF FAMILIARITY TUGGED at me again. Through the tall slit window in the stairwell I caught a blurred glimpse of the ruined summerhouse far below. The stairs came up on my right, with a railed balcony above the stairwell, extending about twelve feet to a dead end below the left-hand window. There was only one other door, immediately to my left, in the panelled wall that formed the other side of the balcony. Though there was nothing on the wall, I could see several slightly paler rectangles where pictures had once hung. The nearest of these was also the largest, at least five feet high and perhaps half as wide, just to the right of the door.
Pictures. The absence of pictures, or more precisely, portraits. That was what had troubled me in the downstairs rooms. The balcony was not the only place from which pictures had been removed. On several of the walls downstairs I had seen, without paying much attention, the outlines, and sometimes the empty hooks, where pictures had once hung, some of them very large indeed. A few small prints, mostly still lifes or rural scenes, remained. But so far no portraits, no photographs; not a single image of a human face.
I tried the handle of the door. Locked.
Like the door to the studio in
Phyllis, Beatrice. Almost the same sound.
But that couldn't be right, because the typescript was dated December 1925, two years before Anne was born. Viola couldn't have known, then, that she would have two granddaughters. Or that her son and his wife would be killed in an accident. Miss Hamish had forgotten to mention when, or even what sort of accident; she must have assumed I knew.
The date could be wrong. But the story was set in 1925, seven years after the end of the Great War. And if she had been writing after the accident, Viola wouldn't, surely, have exploited her granddaughters' situation so closely. I already knew enough about her to feel certain of that.
And she absolutely couldn't have known that, four years after her death, her eldest granddaughter would become engaged to a man called Hugh Montfort.
Only I didn't know how the story ended. Or how many pages were missing. I had searched the house in Mawson all over again, even taken up the carpet in my mothers room, without finding anything more.
What if this door opened on to Henry St Clair's pictures, 'The Drowned Man' on its lectern, the polished wooden cube with the carved rosette? What would I do then?
My concentration was broken by a faint rhythmic sound which seemed, as I became aware of it, to have been going on for some time. As I turned, a board creaked, and the noise ceased instantly. Birds or mice, no doubt-the walls must be full of them-but it had sounded unpleasantly like a nib scratching across stiff paper. Somewhere close by.
Suddenly I was stumbling down the rear stairs, glancing over my shoulder and trying not to run, all the way down to the massive black-painted door to the courtyard. None of the keys looked remotely large enough. Then I saw that the tongue, or whatever that part of the lock was called, was plainly retracted. Which was odd because I had-or thought I had-a clear memory of standing here a couple of hours ago and noticing that the door was locked. Jet lag, presumably. I dragged back the equally massive bolts and hauled the door open, letting in the scents of flowering creeper and warm stone.
THE COURTYARD WAS ABOUT FIFTEEN FEET DEEP, AND PERhaps twice as wide; it was hard to tell because the surrounding wilderness encroached on every side. I crunched over dead twigs and leaf litter, past a rotting bench and several stone ornaments, cracked and flaking and pitted with lichen, to the path I had seen from above, hoping to find a way through to the boundary wall, wherever that might be.
The path, gravel with a stone border, had once been fairly wide, but the nettles had advanced so far that I had to clear the way with a fallen branch to avoid being stung. As I descended towards the wreck of the gazebo, I felt an odd prickle of recognition. It was a common enough structure: a wooden octagon, six or seven feet across, like a miniature bandstand, with a waist-high railing and entrances on opposite sides. Most of the roof had collapsed, leaving only a few corroded sheets of metal attached to the remnants of the frame. Traces of dark green paint still clung to the fallen sections.
Prompted by that elusive sense of recognition, I went on slashing and trampling the nettles until, at the cost of a filthy, sweat-soaked shirt and several painful weals, I had cleared a narrow circle around the gazebo. The slope here was quite steep, so that the entrance nearest the house was level with the path, whereas the one on the far side was at least two feet above the ground, with steps leading up to it. Wooden seats, enclosed like window- boxes, had been built around the sides.
As I was clearing away the debris of the fallen roof, I discovered that the middle sections of the seats on both sides of the gazebo were hinged. The lid on the right would not budge; the other one came up with a shriek of frozen hinges. Pale, bloated spiders scuttled away from the light. In the cavity below was a crumbling picnic hamper, black with dirt and mould and swathed in cobwebs. I used a stick to prise open the lid; apart from more dirt and spiders, all it contained was another, smaller box: an old-fashioned metal cashbox, I thought, about eight inches by ten, not very deep, with a handle in the centre of the lid. The rivets were so corroded that the latch came away in my hand.
Inside was a thick buff envelope, containing not jewels or banknotes, or the tide deeds to Staplefield, but a mouldy paperbound volume.
The Pavilion
OF ALL PLACES IN THE WORLD, ROSalind Forster's favourite was Staplefield, a modest country house on the edge of St Leonard's Forest in Sussex, and the home, for much of the year, of her best friend Caroline Temple. Rosalind sometimes thought that wherever Caroline lived would seem the most desirable of all places, but there was no denying the beauty of Staplefield, with its light, airy rooms looking out over meadows and wooded hills to the south, and the sweep of the forest at its back. The two girls had been fast friends ever since their first meeting in town five years earlier, when Rosalind was fifteen and Caroline a year younger; they had been drawn together by a preference for solitude, strange as that may sound, over what usually passed for the delights of society, but were never happier than in each others company. Both were only children, and both had recently lost beloved fathers- George Forster and Walter Temple had died within the same year-and their shared grief had further strengthened the bond between them.
Seeing them side by side you could almost have taken them for sisters, even though Caroline was fair and delicately featured, whilst Rosalind's complexion was quite dark, almost olive. They had a way of walking unconsciously in step, and of addressing one another, at times, as much through a shared language of gestures and
