A CRACK IN THE LINE
Michael Lawrence
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Volume One of
THE ALDOUS LEXICON
The Aldous Lexicon is a trilogy comprised of A Crack in the Line, Small Eternities and The Underwood See. Confusion could arise if the books are read out of sequence. The three volumes are set four months apart, in February, June and October 2005. The events take place in or around a late 19th century house called Withern Rise which overlooks a quiet stretch of English river in a county that no longer exists, officially. This is a real house: the author was born in it. The corner bedroom described in the books was his own room when he was a small boy. If you would like to know more about the trilogy, visit www.nakedebook.com.
Previously published in hardback and paperback in Great Britain and America.
Copyright Michael Lawrence 2011
Smashwords Edition
ISBN 978-0-9549381-3-0
Part One
LEXIE’S FOLLY
Day Seven
Day Six
Part Two
THE PARALLEL GRAVE
Day Five
Day Four
Part Three
FAMILY TREES
Day Three
Day Two
Day One
Part One
LEXIE’S FOLLY
DAY SEVEN
Day Seven / 1
Eight months short of their seventeenth birthday, Naia and Alaric were as alike as any two people of the opposite sex can be. They looked alike, they shared a history, memories. They had lived all their lives in the same house, occupied the same room. They had done the same things, had many of the same thoughts at the same instant. And yet.
And yet?
They had never met.
Hadn’t the faintest inkling of one another’s existence.
They knelt on their beds, at their windows – same bed, same window, invisible to one another – gazing out at the same water, trees, lifeless February sky. The landing stage below the slope of the garden was opaque with frost. The river toiled beneath shifting plates of ice. The first soft splodges of snow thumped the glass, clung for uneasy seconds before slithering downward. But while watching the snow strike their identical windows, their circumstances could not have been more different. The central heating for one thing. The central heating in both versions of the house had been installed the same hour eighteen years earlier, but while at Naia’s it was regularly serviced, at Alaric’s the system hadn’t been checked for almost three years, with the result that the boiler had packed up five days ago. Naia’s room, therefore, was snug and warm, while for Alaric, fully dressed but huddled within the fat cloak of his duvet, it felt as cold indoors as it looked out.
Then, suddenly, another difference: a movement, across the river from his window but not hers: a man, stepping from the cover of the bushes and trees on the opposite bank. Thin man, elderly, rather seedy-looking in a shapeless black overcoat, he simply stood there, staring at the house. Probably harmless, Alaric thought; some nosy old bastard with nothing better to do. But you never knew. Might be casing the joint. There’d been a lot of break-ins round here lately.
‘Al, I’m off now!’
His father’s voice, trying to sound light. They’d argued badly the night before. Things had got out of hand, ending with shouts, slammed doors, rages in separate rooms. The echo of the row filled the morning like bad air. Alaric waited for the call to be repeated before discarding the duvet and sidling out to glare down from the galleried landing. His father, in the hall below, smiled tautly up, keen not to part on bad terms.
‘Gotta go, son.’
He went down, face set in an unforgiving mask, no immediate plans to put their estrangement behind him. The house seemed to get colder the lower he went. His hostility also increased with every step. His father sensed this. ‘Al,’ he said when they stood together at the foot of the stairs, ‘try and see it from my point of view. I have a life too. And it won’t be easy for Kate either at first.’
Alaric ignored this. ‘You know what day it is?’
‘Day?’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’
Brief puzzlement, before: ‘Oh, I see. Yes. Course I know what day it is. But we’ve got to move on, Al.’
‘Well, you are, that’s for sure.’
His father glanced towards the front door along the hall, keen to be the other side of it. ‘Liney’ll be here soon,’ he said. ‘If you need anything, she’ll sort it.’
‘One thing I don’t need is a baby-sitter,’ Alaric said. ‘Specially her.’
‘And we’ve been over that too. You’re a minor. I’m still responsible for you by law.’ His father snatched up the overnight bag at his feet; then, with effort, softened his tone. ‘It’s only for a couple of days anyway.’ Attempted a smile. ‘Come and see me off?’
They walked to the front door, along the unlit hallway that ran through the centre of the house. Actually, they walked from the original front to the original back, the two main entranceways having been reversed in the nineteen thirties. In 1884, when the place was built, the river was a commercial and social highway and most visitors from beyond Eynesford and Stone came by boat. The river frontage was quietly impressive back then, the brickwork was brighter, there were painted shutters at the windows. The shutters were gone now, ivy scrambled haphazardly across the walls, a pair of somber yews guarded the porch.
Alaric’s father unbolted the front door. When he opened it, a gust of snow scurried in. ‘I could do without this,’ he said. ‘Just hope it’s only local, that’s all.’ He scooped the bottle of milk from the step, handed it over like a parting gift, and flipped up the collar of his old brown bomber jacket. Part of the collar stayed down. Alaric didn’t tell him. ‘I’ll give you a ring when I get there. This evening sometime.’
The instant he was off the step, Alaric shut the door, but he remained just this side of it, listening for the creak of the garage doors, the forty-year-old Daimler growling to life, slow tires on gravel as it reversed out, and finally the deep-throated toot as the car plunged into the avenue of trees that swept all the way to the gate.
And then he was alone, in a house as cold and still as an empty church. He went through to the kitchen and put the bottle of milk in the fridge, cursing his life, his luck, his world. Before the morning was out his hyperactive aunt would be there, filling the place with her inane racket, and in a couple of days his father would return with his lousy fancy woman and nothing would ever be the same again.
He was right about that. After today nothing would be the same. But not because of anything his aunt or his father or Kate Faraday did.
Day Seven / 2
Alex handed Ivan his overcoat. He protested.
‘I can’t drive all that way in this bloody great thing.’
‘It’s cold out,’ she said.
‘I’ll be in the car. Which has a heater.’
‘It does, but you’ll freeze to death before it makes a difference. You can stop and take it off when you’re warm enough.’
‘Christ,’ he said, ‘this is like living with Mother.’
‘Your mother wouldn’t have put up with all this argument. Put it on.’
He put the coat on. She was buttoning him up before he’d got the second arm in. He shook her off.
‘Will you leave me alone, woman?’
‘You look a mess,’ she said.
‘I’m comfortable as a mess,’ he said. ‘I swear, if I dropped dead on the carpet right this minute you’d tidy me up before the undertakers got here.’
‘Goes without saying,’ Alex said. She leaned up the stairs. ‘Naia, break open the champagne, he’s off now!’
They waited for her to come down, then all three headed for the front door, side by side, Ivan in the middle as if being escorted off the premises. ‘Now what’s the procedure while I’m away?’ he asked.
‘Procedure?’ Alex said.
‘With strangers at the door.’
‘Er... don’t open it to them?’
‘Correct.’
‘How will we know if they’re strangers unless we open the door?’
‘Well, if you have to open it and they’re strangers,’ he said, ‘don’t let them in.’
‘Why would we, if they’re strangers?’
‘They might want to read the meters.’
‘So if these strangers are meter readers, we’re not to let them read them?’
‘What you do,’ he said, ‘is ask for their IDs, and if they don’t look genuine you shut the door on them.’
‘How will we know their IDs are genuine or not?’
He sighed. ‘Our nearest neighbor is not only too far away to hear your screams but stone deaf, and this is serious, all right?’
He unbolted and opened the door. A fistful of snow whirled in.
‘I could do without this. Just hope it’s only local, that’s all.’
‘According to last night’s Weather it’ll be bad everywhere today,’ Naia said brightly.
Ivan flipped his coat collar up. Part of it stayed down. Alex moved to straighten it. He warned her off with a raised eyebrow. ‘I’ll give you a ring tonight. Mid evening sometime.’
‘You’ll be there before that,’ Alex said.
‘I have to settle in.’
‘Go out on the town with your bit of stuff, you mean.’
‘I’ll tell her that’s what you call her.’
‘She knows.’
Ivan laughed, picked up the canvas holdall he’d dropped there earlier, kissed them both on the forehead, and walked to the garage, shoulders hunched against the whirling snow. Alex and Naia waited dutifully on the step, arms folded, as he released the padlock, pulled the big doors back, went inside. In a minute they heard the engine turn over. Gravel crunched as the silver Saab reversed in a tight semicircle.
‘Drive carefully!’
‘Don’t knock anyone innocent down!’
Wheels churned. The stripped trees and bushes that lined the drive provided silver flashes of the car’s departure all the way to the gate.
Alex plucked the two bottles of milk from the step. ‘I don’t like the look of this,’ she said, straightening up.
‘Look of what?’
‘The snow.’
‘Oh, I do,’ Naia said.
‘You don’t have to drive all that way in it.’ Her mother shivered. ‘Remind me to go and shut the garage later.’
‘It could be half full by then.’
‘Nothing stopping you doing it.’
‘Forget I spoke.’
Alex kneed the door shut. ‘Any plans for the day? Such as... dare I ask... revision?’
‘Revision?’ Naia said. ‘Come on. The exams are way off.’
‘So they might be, but it’s half-term, why not make the most of it?’
‘I intend to – by not doing any revision.’
‘That’s not the attitude, Nai. You want to do well, don’t you?’
‘I will do well.’
‘Such confidence. But seeing as you’re unoccupied you can give me a hand.’
‘Oh yes, doing what?’
‘The house.’
‘Oh, God,’ Naia said, trooping after her to the kitchen.
Alex put the milk in the fridge. ‘I’ll start upstairs, you get going down here. You can use the new Dyson.’ She left the kitchen.
‘Sodding Dyson,’ Naia muttered.
‘Heard that,’ a voice came back from the hall.
‘Bloody Big Ears,’ Naia said.
‘And that.’
She sighed, envisaging a mind-numbing morning cleaning the house when she could be doing nothing much. She’d been looking forward to doing nothing much.
Day Seven / 3
It was known as the River Room because its French doors opened onto the lawn that descended to the landing stage and the water’s edge. This room was as far from the kitchen as it was possible to get without going upstairs, but it was a light room, light-filled on good days, so pleasant in summer that they used to take most of their evening meals here from April to late October, reserving the actual dining room, with its serving hatch from the kitchen, for the darker months. But that was then. These days the room wasn’t used in any season, on any occasion, and with the door always closed it smelt stale and musty. It was also colder than any other room in the house, or so it seemed to Alaric when he wandered in after his father’s departure.
He’d had no real intention of going in there; had simply veered towards the door in passing, and opened it: an impulse, perhaps born of the even greater silence of the house now that he was alone in it, or perhaps because his thoughts had turned to his mother, who’d spent so much time in there on fine spring evenings and summer afternoons. She had loved the smell of the river, the croaks and scuffles of the moorhens, the rustle and sway of the reeds and rushes below the lawn. He recalled her sitting at the open doors, drawing. Drawing was one of her quiet passions. Several of her pictures were on the walls in thin black frames, alongside posters from unvisited exhibitions and international art shows.
The furniture in the River Room was something of a hotchpotch: a plain 1920s dining suite, an Edwardian chaise longue covered in faded blue velvet, a rosewood sideboard on which stood an assortment of family photographs: Alaric at various stages of childhood; grandparents; Aunt Liney; a few other relatives, some of whom he hadn’t seen for years, if ever. One of the photos, taken about ten years ago, was of his mother on a beach in Pembrokeshire. She wore a black swimsuit and was nicely tanned. The ends of her short sandy hair were spiky with salt from a dip in the sea. She was trying to be serious for the camera, but her dancing eyes gave her away. It said so much about her, that picture. Outgoing, lively, quick to laugh. He picked the photo up, and everything came back in a rush; the good stuff first, then the rest, like a fist in the guts. He’d been trying not to put too much significance on the date, but he was making a poor job of it. His father had forgotten without trying, but not him, not him.
Two years. Two years ago today. His mother had gone to see an Edvard Munch retrospective at the Tate Modern. It was early evening, just starting to snow, when she phoned from the train to say that it should reach the station in about twenty minutes. Ten minutes after her call Dad had set off to meet her. Alaric had been waiting for him to go so he could watch some of the video material borrowed from (and co-starring) Garth Noy. He ran up to his room, snatched it from his school bag, jumped down the stairs three at a time, shoved the tape in the player. He was already well into the action as his father, having parked in the station forecourt, walked onto the platform to wait for the train along with others who’d come to meet relatives or friends. They were still waiting fifteen minutes later, with growing irritation, when the announcement came over the speakers that the train from King’s Cross had come off the tracks a couple of miles down the line. Later they were to learn that a single rail had been responsible for this. Already weakened by a ‘rolling contact fatigue crack’, the freezing conditions of recent weeks had made the rail so brittle that when the wheels of this particular train on this particular night reached it, the section had shattered like glass into more than three hundred pieces. In spite of its enormous bulk and weight, the engine had leapt into the air with a grinding roar, taking two of the carriages with it. Alaric’s mother was in one of the carriages. When his father called from the station, he’d just freeze-framed a particularly explicit scene on Noy’s home-made video. He snatched the phone distractedly, but when he heard the news his thumb twitched on the remote and the tape unfroze.
‘What’s that?’ Dad said. ‘Is there someone there?’
He ejected the video. ‘It’s the TV. What do you mean, accident?’
‘The train your mum’s on. I’m going down the line. Can’t just hang around here.’
‘I want to go too!’
His father came back for him, then drove to the scene at reckless speed, where the snow, though light, was falling steadily. The derailed train resembled the corpse of a gigantic snake, slewing up into the night. A billowing pall of smoke and dust hung over everything as rescue teams smashed carriage windows or tried to comfort those already released, who stood about in small shaken groups or sat alone, wrapped in blankets, watching. Relatives and other observers were told to keep back while firemen sawed and hacked at the twisted carriages. Arc lamps illuminated the scene, picking out every slow speck of falling dust and snow while TV cameras recorded and reporters interviewed survivors for the viewers at home. The night was laden with voices bellowing orders and shouting for assistance, the cries of young children and babies still inside the train, the snarl of electric saws, the thuds and crashes of massive hammers. Alaric had seen plenty of disasters and tragedies on television: motorway pileups, plane crashes, gutters running with the blood of murder victims, the carnage created by suicide bombers, earthquakes that left ragged orphans howling through rubble for dead parents. He’d grown up with such images, contained within the boundaries of screens – someone else’s world, someone else’s horror, entertainment of a kind – but this… this was personal. Every now and then another passenger was freed or helped out. Some walked away, with or without assistance. A number were carried off on stretchers. The faces of a few on the stretchers were covered.
‘Dad, that might be Mum under there!’
‘We’ll find out soon enough. Have to wait, it’s all we can do.’
‘But Dad…’
‘We have to wait, Al.’
A young priest was going round trying to comfort anxious relatives. Reaching Alaric and his father he enquired if they had someone on the train.
‘Wife and mother,’ Alaric’s father snapped dismissively.
‘They might not be among the…’ the priest said gently, unaware of the other’s contempt for all churches, all faiths.
An angry glare fixed on him. ‘They? One person. My wife, my son’s mother. And “might not be among the” what? The dead? Is that the word you can’t bring yourself to say?’
The priest wilted. ‘I’ll pray for her.’
‘Oh yes?’ Alaric’s father growled. ‘Who to? Look around you, mate. Haven’t you cottoned on yet? There’s no one at home up there.’
She was brought out around two am. Her face wasn’t covered, but her eyes were closed. Snowflakes on her cheeks, like tiny dissolving tears. When they spoke to her she didn’t hear. Nor did she show any sign of feeling them holding her hands in the ambulance. At the hospital she was whisked away and they were left in a corridor, fretting helplessly, unable to look at one another. They weren’t the only relatives waiting for news. One middle-aged couple had received theirs, and clung together, sobbing quietly. After some time Alaric’s father went in search of information. When he returned his face was ashen.
‘It doesn’t look good, Al. They’re going to operate, but – I have to tell you this – they give her no more than a fifty-fifty chance.’
A fifty-fifty chance. Fifty-fifty, fifty-fifty, the phrase had gone round and round in his head for the rest of the night. Afterwards, when it was all over, it returned to haunt him, with the inescapable question: if those were the odds why hadn’t she pulled through? She’d had an even chance. She might have lived.
But she hadn’t.
Pain, despair, month on month of empty, aching loneliness. Anger too, because she’d left him without warning, without even saying goodbye. He felt abandoned and betrayed – and ashamed for what he’d been up to at the time of the accident. A heady cocktail of bitterness, grief and guilt. Everyone said it would get better, and they were right, it did, but while all else slowly dissolved, the loss and the absence never quite went away, were always there, coloring, shading, distorting everything.
There were tears in his eyes as he returned the photo of his mother to its place on the sideboard. The tears hindered his judgment and the back of his hand nudged something. When he saw what it was, another memory rushed at him. Three and a half years ago, coming in from school, crossing the garden from the side gate. Mum had seen him through the kitchen window and rushed out, tugged him inside, showed him the dusty object on the battered old refectory table.
‘Look what I found in the attic!’
A bell-shaped glass dome, twelve inches tall, on a wooden base, it contained an elaborate arrangement of wax fruit, faded from prolonged exposure to direct sunlight in earlier decades.
‘Its called a shade,’ his mother said. ‘Victorian, Edwardian, not sure which, one or the other. Back then, no respectable parlor or drawing-room was complete without one on the sideboard or mantelpiece. Mostly you only find them in museums these days.’
‘All full of ancient fruit?’
‘Fruit, seashells, artificial flowers, stuffed animals and birds.’ He pulled a face. She laughed. ‘Yes, I’d have given the dead wildlife a miss myself, but some of the others were quite tasteful. This one must have looked rather good in its day. I’d love to know if it was bought off the shelf or created by the lady of the house.’
‘Which lady, which house?’
His mother turned the shade over. On the round base there was a small yellow-brown label, and faint handwriting. He could just make out Elvira Underwood, 1905.
‘Wife of Withern’s original owner,’ she said. ‘He lived here till he died.’
‘It can’t have been in the attic all that time,’ Alaric said. ‘There were no Underwoods here for quite a few years.’
‘There weren’t, no. Maybe it was left in the attic by your great gran when she sold up in 1947 and the new owners didn’t get around to chucking it. Or it could have been put up there by Grandpa Rayner when he eventually bought the place back.’
‘You’re not thinking of putting it on show, are you?’
‘I am.’
‘But it’s so…’ He screwed his face up again.
‘Well, the fruit’s had it,’ she conceded. ‘But the glass and the base are still intact. I thought I might put something of my own inside it.’
‘Like what?’
‘Dunno yet. Thinking of making something. Something that’ll last.’
Construction of the new centerpiece for the old shade took much of her free time that autumn. She worked in secret, behind the closed door of her little studio (a wooden shed) next to the garage. All that Alaric knew was that she was cutting or carving something out of a lump of wood from the recently pollarded oak in the south garden: the Family Tree as it was known. Sometimes he saw her darting about outside taking pictures. She took a lot of pictures. When the work was finished she again ushered him into the kitchen and stood him before the table. She had draped a tea towel over the shade, and only when she was satisfied that he was ready did she whip the cover off, with a dramatic cry of: ‘Behold! Lexie’s Folly!’
The jaded wax fruit had been replaced by a meticulously crafted replica of the house. Faithful to the original in every noticeable detail, there was nothing remotely ‘cute’ about the Withern Rise inside the glass dome. It was the building in miniature, without refinement or embellishment. Wherever there was a chipped brick or broken drainpipe on the actual house, there was a chipped brick and broken drainpipe on the model. Even the grey slates on the three roofs, from which four tall chimneys rose, were individually etched and painted to look like real slates. The main reference for the roof had been the aerial photo, taken five or six years earlier, that hung in the hall. Alaric noticed that one of the little chimneys was slightly skewed, as on the real roof, and there was even a crack in a small side window that corresponded with a crack in the south-facing box room window. As for the ivy, it too was carved, but it looked as alive as the ivy that clung to the walls of the house itself.
‘What did you call it?’ he asked.
‘Lexie’s Folly.’
‘Folly?’
‘A building or ruin of no practical use, built for fun, or on a whim, or to commemorate something. What’s the verdict?’
‘It’s not bad,’ he said, which, coming from him, was praise indeed.
His mother smiled, broadly. ‘No, it’s not, is it? I’m rather pleased with it myself.’
She put the Folly on the sideboard in the River Room, where he soon got as used to it as to any other ornament. Since her death he’d never looked at, his visits to that room being infrequent to say the least. He was only looking at it now because he’d knocked it accidentally, but at once he was marveling at the detail all over again, the skill of the hand that had carved and colored it. Dusty as it was, the glass dome managed to reflect the snow falling across the windows of the room, and he found that if he squatted down and gazed at the little house with half closed eyes it was like looking at the real house in a snowstorm. His imagination put lights in the minuscule windows, warmth in the rooms behind them, and there grew in him an intense longing for the Withern Rise after which his mother had so painstakingly fashioned this exquisite replica. Withern as it was when she was with them. When they were a family.
At some point while his mind’s eye wandered through the perfect little house, he put his hands on the dome. When he felt a tingling in his palms he thought nothing of it, but he couldn’t ignore the pain that seared through him seconds later. His hands flew from the Folly, but if anything the pain intensified, doubling him over. The worst of it lasted less than half a minute, but was so acute that when it began to recede he remained hunched over, eyes shut, fearing its return. Then something touched his cheek. Something damp, very cold. He opened his eyes. He was standing on grass, beneath boughs and branches, through which tiny flakes of snow drifted.
What am I doing here? I should be indoors, not –
Walls, a ceiling, furniture formed about him. The tree, the grass, the garden vanished. He fell backwards – with shock, perhaps – onto the River Room floor. He sensed shapes, colors, odors that weren’t quite right, but before he could investigate or assimilate any of this he heard a voice outside, and then the door was opening and someone was coming in. A girl of his own age, who squawked when she saw him, and jumped back. Stared at him with an expression of horror identical to his own.
Day Seven / 4
Whatever Naia might have expected upon entering that room, it was not a stranger crouching on the floor. She fell back against the door, closing it without meaning to, stammering ‘Who… who?’, and heard the same garbled enquiry from him. Trying to compose herself, assume some sort of control, she demanded to know what he was doing in their house, and again heard him utter the same words, at the same instant. It was he who broke the copycat pattern, jumping to his feet.
‘Whatever you’re after, you broke into the wrong house. We haven’t got anything worth taking.’
Naia glanced at the French doors. They were closed. Didn’t look as if they’d been forced.
‘How did you get in?’
He didn’t take his eyes off her. Didn’t dare. She’d looked towards the French doors. Why? In the hope that he too would look so she could hit him with something? There was something in the hand at her side. He daren’t look at it directly, but it could be a weapon of some sort.
‘Ten seconds,’ he said, trying to sound bolder than he felt. ‘If you’re still here after that I’m picking up the phone.’
There was no phone in the River Room, but a threat of some sort seemed in order. Unfortunately, the girl didn’t seem intimidated.
‘Pick up the phone?’ she said. ‘If there was one, who would you call?’
‘The fairies at the bottom of the garden, who do you think?’ he snapped, and even as he said it he wanted to kick himself. The fairies at the bottom of the garden?
Naia laughed. ‘Tell you what. You call the fairies, I’ll call my mum, then we can all have a nice chat till the police get here.’
He wilted at that, visibly wilted, which was gratifying. Keen to capitalize on her advantage, she tossed aside the lethal vacuum cleaner part she’d brought in with her and folded her arms, hoping he would take her for a force to be reckoned with. Straight talk now, straight talk.
‘You don’t deserve it,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to be generous. Slip out through those doors and I won’t tell anyone you’ve been here. But stay, keep arguing with me, and I fetch my mother. That’s the deal.’
Oh, it was straight all right. Straight out of a TV cop show. But it seemed to do the job. The boy looked bemused, very bemused – or worried, hard to tell which. His silence gave her a chance to look him over, and it was then she noticed that he wore slippers, not shoes, and that he wore nothing over his sweater.
‘Where’s your coat?’ she asked. ‘You can’t have come out without a coat, day like this.’ She looked around. No sign. ‘Did you take it off in another room? Which room? Have you already turned that one over?’
He might or might not have attempted some sort of explanation had a floorboard not creaked overhead. He jumped as though slapped.
‘What’s that?’
‘My mum. Didn’t believe me, did you? Thought I was alone.’
‘What’s your mum doing upstairs?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual. Clearing up after my dad, making the beds…’
‘Making the beds? She’s got no right to make the beds.’
‘No right? She’ll love that. Hang on, I’ll give her a shout, you can tell her in person.’
She opened the door and was about to lean out when he leapt forward and spun her away. He slammed the door; jammed himself between it and her, wild-eyed, agitated almost to the point of twitching.
‘Not too keen on meeting my mum, are you?’ Naia said.
‘All I want is for you to go,’ he said. ‘We might have a big house, but look around you, we’re not rich or anything.’
She bit back a sarcastic retort, sensing an impasse. Asked his name instead. His eyes narrowed.
‘My name? What’s my name to you?’
‘Your name’s nothing to me,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to give you a break, that’s all.’
‘The only break I want from you is the door shut behind you. My old man’ll be back any minute, then you’ll be right in it.’
She folded her arms, determinedly unfazed. ‘Yes, of course. And the name?’
‘Jesus,’ he growled.
‘Jesus? I think I’ve heard of you. But shouldn’t you have a beard?’
‘It’s Alaric.’
‘Alaric? What’s that?’
‘My name. Alaric Underwood. Now get the hell out of here.’
Naia’s eyebrows rose. ‘Underwood?’
‘Oh, heard it before, have we?’
The raised eyebrows knitted together into a frown. ‘Look, if you’ve been put up to this by one of my so-called friends...’
‘Friends? I don’t know any of your lousy fr…’
Like her he trailed off, but for a very different reason. He’d caught something in the mirror on the wall behind her and was staring at it, and from it back at her, then at the mirror again.
‘What?’ Naia said.
He didn’t answer. Didn’t seem capable of answering. She glanced over her shoulder, leant sideways to try and see what he was gaping at, and saw half of her face next to his in the glass. She pulled back for a better perspective, and caught her breath. Turned back to him.
‘You said your name’s Underwood.’
‘Yes…’
‘You were kidding, right?’
He tore his gaze from the mirror. ‘Why would I kid about my name?’
‘Because it’s mine too. But you knew that. You must have. You’ve got some scam going here.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘Well, one of us is.’
She leaned forward. Gripped his chin. He jerked his head back. She reached again. This time he let her. She tilted his jaw to view his face from various angles.
‘Same eyes,’ she said. ‘Same nose, hair color, everything.’
He was about to respond when a drawer closed sharply in the room above. His eyes flew to the ceiling like startled birds. Something else now. A piece of furniture being dragged. Alarmed all over again, he groped behind him for the support he knew to be there – and found nothing. He turned to look.
‘Where’s the table? The chairs?’
‘We got rid of them,’ Naia said.
‘You what?’
‘New dining suite coming. You mean you didn’t know? But I thought you lived here.’
He stared about him. The faded blue covering of the chaise had been replaced by lush red velvet. The curtains were also red, also velvet, very unlike the old beige ones that should be hanging there. And there was a new carpet and lampshade, a vase of flowers on the windowsill. The rosewood sideboard was still in place, but it was a long time since he’d seen it gleaming like that, and among the framed photos on it there were some that he didn’t recognize. And the room. It was warm. Warm! If he’d failed to notice anything else, how could he not have noticed that?
His eyes darted about, trying to take in everything at once. There were pictures on the walls that he knew and pictures that he did not. Among the latter was a group of black-and-white prints of the New York skyline at night, desert sandscapes, gnarled and twisted trees. On another wall there was a large print that he knew very well. It showed a young woman, naked, bent over a free-standing wash basin next to a window with a splintered shutter, a water jug and a pestle and mortar on the uneven flagstones near her feet. He knew every detail of this image: the way the light from the window splashed the girl’s shoulders; the contours of her calves and buttocks; the hint of profiled breast. The date on the photo, 1949, had struck him almost as much as the model herself when he first saw it, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her even when he realized that she must have been born some years before either of his grandmothers, and would now be getting on for eighty, or dead. His mother had bought the print a couple of months before the accident that had taken her life. She’d been looking for just the right frame for it. Hadn’t managed it. But here it was, on the wall, handsomely framed in dark old oak.
Alaric whirled round. ‘This isn’t my house!’
Naia clapped her hands lightly. ‘At last!’
He turned his back on her. She didn’t exist. He wouldn’t let her. None of this existed. He sought something familiar; found it on the sideboard; rushed at the Folly; placed his hands around the dome; closed his eyes to shut out this bright false room. Somewhere behind him the girl was lobbing questions at him, but he found her easy to ignore, and then she fell silent, the air turned cold, very cold, and there was nothing between his hands. He opened his eyes. He was in the south garden, under the old oak.
‘Not here!’ he shouted.
A small pause, as if of consideration, then four walls, a floor, a ceiling formed about him, bringing with them familiar furniture in its proper, uncared-for condition. The Folly on the dusty sideboard was the first thing he saw as the chill loneliness of the real River Room enveloped him, and he sank to his knees in abject relief.
Day Seven / 5
He was in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. Liney. Last person he needed right now. Apart from the fact that he had a lot to think about all of a sudden, once he let her in she would take over the house and his life until Dad came home with Kate, whereupon she would impose herself instead. It was tempting to delay phase one of this dismal future by pretending he wasn’t in and hoping she would turn around and drive back the way she’d come, but he knew that Liney, being Liney, would either camp out on the step until someone turned up, or break in.
The first thing she said after greeting him and stepping inside was: ‘My God, haven’t you people heard of heating?’
‘The boiler’s broken,’ he said.
‘What? You mean there’s no heat at all?’
‘No.’
‘Well, can’t it be fixed?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But it’s the middle of February!’
‘Yes.’
‘And snowing!’
‘I know.’