16
Edward? Where are you? What in God’s name are you doing?’
‘Here. Over here.’
Dusk was rapidly gathering now, the sky still light on the horizon, but the land darkening. I had reached the churchyard and was clambering over the hassocks of thick grass and the prone gravestones, to reach the low stone wall. I could hear Leonora calling after me and then her footsteps coming down the path but I did not wait. I knew what I must do and she was no longer any part of it. I was acting alone and under the urging of something quite other.
I found what I thought was the nearest gravestone and then, to my surprise, the patch of soil that no grass had managed to invade. There were pine needles and a few small fir cones. It was hard and bone dry there and I had nothing with which to dig but my own bare hands. But I knelt down and started to scrabble away at the surface.
Leonora appeared beside me, breathing hard, as if she had been running, but more out of fear than exertion I knew.
‘Edward?’
‘I have to do this. I have to do it.’
‘Do what? Dig a hole? Find something down there?’
‘Both.’ I sat back on my heels. ‘But it’s hopeless; I can make no impression at all. I need a spade.’ And I remembered the feel of the small tin spade in my hands, the blunted, rusty edge with which I had dug into this same ground. I cannot have gone down far.
I got up and went round the side of the church, finding what I needed almost at once – the shed in which whoever maintained the churchyard and dug the occasional grave kept his things. The padlock was undone. I found what I needed easily enough, wondering how much it was used; Iyot Lock was a hamlet of so few houses – there cannot have been many burials.
Leonora had followed me, obviously not wanting to be alone, and now was beside the wall, looking down. I pushed the blade into the earth with all my strength but it was extremely hard ground and yielded little. I scraped away as best I could, and after a short time the soil loosened. There were some tree roots which must have spread in the many years since I was last here and which made my task harder but I did not have to go very deep before I bumped against something caught beneath one of them. It was not hard, but felt compressed. I threw down the space and knelt on the grass. Leonora was standing nearby, and as I glanced up I saw that she was looking with alarm at me, as if she feared I had gone mad.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, in a falsely cheerful voice, ‘I told you I would find it for you.’
‘Find what? What on earth are you doing, Edward, and should you be digging about in a churchyard? Isn’t that wickedness or illegal or some such thing? You could be digging up someone’s grave.’
‘I am,’ I said.
It seems insane indeed, now I look back, but at the time I was possessed by the need to find out if I was right, and get Leonora what my aunt had willed her. She was right, as she had screeched in the solicitor’s office, she had been cut out of the rest of the inheritance and only left the wretched doll in what was perhaps the one mean-spirited gesture our aunt had ever made. Her childhood behaviour over the birthday doll, her spoilt tantrum and violent rejection of it, when Kestrel had gone to buy it especially, to make up for disappointment, must have rankled for years – unless she had written her will shortly after it had all happened. Either way, she intended Leonora to be taught a lesson but I was not going to indulge in that sort of tit-for-tat gesture. I would tell Leonora that I planned to give her exactly half the money we eventually achieved.
This had all become some sort of game that had gone too far. I knew that well enough as I knelt on the ground and felt around with both my hands in the space under the tree root. I soon came upon a damp lump of something and gradually used my fingers to ease it away from the soil.
The white cardboard box had rotted away over the years and then adhered like clay to the contents, and as I took it in my hands, I could feel the shape beneath. It was a slimy grey mess.
It was also almost completely dark and I laid the object on the ground while I hastily covered the soil back over the shallow place I had cleared.
‘Come on, back to the house. I can’t see anything here.’
‘Edward, what have you done?’
‘I told you – I have retrieved your inheritance.’
I carried it carefully down the dark road back to Iyot House. It felt unpleasant, slimy and with clots of soil adhering to the wet mush of cardboard.
I do not know that I had thought particularly about the state the doll would be in after being buried for so long. Certainly the way the box had disintegrated was no surprise – the very fact that it was there at all was remarkable. If you had asked me I suppose I would have said the doll would be very dirty, perhaps unrecognisable as a doll, but undamaged – china or pot or plastic, whatever it was actually made of, would not have rotted like the box.
I went into the old kitchen, found a dust sheet and laid it on the deal table. Leonora seemed to be as intrigued as I was, though also distinctly alarmed.
‘How did you know where to look? What on earth was it doing buried there in the churchyard?’
I half remembered that something had happened to startle me and make me want the wretched thing out of the house but the details were hazy now.
‘I think I had a dream about it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
But now we were both looking at the filthy soil-coated object on the table. I found a bowl of cold water, an ancient cloth and a blunt kitchen knife and began to rinse and scrape away carefully.
‘I don’t know why you are doing this. Is it full of money?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘No, of course it isn’t. I don’t want it, can’t you understand Edward? This is a stupid game. For God’s sake, throw it in a bin and let’s get out of this awful house.’
All the same, she could not help watching me intently as I worked patiently away. It did not take me long to get rid of the wet sodden mush of soil and cardboard and then my fingers touched the hard object beneath. I emptied and re-filled the bowl of water and rinsed and re-rinsed. First the body of the china doll appeared, dirty but apparently intact.
‘I know Aunt Kestrel would have wanted you to have it in as near perfect condition as we can get it, Leonora!’
She was transfixed by the sight. ‘I remember it,’ she said after a moment. ‘It’s coming back to me – that awful night. I remember expecting it to be something so special, so beautiful, and this hideous china baby came out of the box.’
‘Do you remember what kind of a doll you had wanted? I drew a picture of it for you.’
She told me, though some of the detail was inaccurate, but the bridal princess came to life as she spoke.
I was anxious not to damage this doll, so I worked even more slowly as I got most of the outer dirt away and then I carried it to the tap and rinsed it under a trickle of water. If I had stopped to think how ridiculous I must have looked – how oddly we were both behaving indeed, perhaps I would not have gone on. I wish now that indeed I had not, that I had left the doll covered and buried under the earth in its sorry grave. But it was too late for that.
‘There,’ I said at last. ‘Let us see your treasure, Leonora!’ I spoke in a light and jocular tone, the last time I was to do so that night and for many others.
I carried the doll, still wet but clean, to the table and laid it down directly under the light. I had pushed all the rubbish into a bin so there was now just the scrubbed, pale wooden table top and the doll lying on it.
We both looked. And then Leonora’s hand flew to her mouth as she made a dreadful low sound, not a cry, not a wail, hardly a human sound but something almost animal.
I looked into the face of the doll and then I too saw what she had seen.
When we had both looked at it last we were children and the doll was a baby doll, with staring bright blue eyes, a painted rosebud mouth and a smooth china face, neck, arms, legs and body. It was an artificial-lookin
g thing but it was as like a human baby as any doll can ever be.
Now, we both stared in horror at the thing on table in front of us. It was not a baby, but a wizened old woman, a crone, with a few wisps of twisted greasy grey hair, a mouth slightly open to reveal a single black tooth, and the face gnarled and wrinkled like a tree trunk, with lines and pockmarks. It was sallow, the eyes were sunken and the lids creased with age, the lips thin and hard.
I let out a small cry, and then said, ‘But of course. This isn’t your doll. Someone has changed it for this hideous thing.’
‘How’ Leonora asked in a whisper, ‘When? Why? Whoever knew it had been buried there?’
I would have tried to come up with a thousand explanations but I could not even begin. For as I looked at the dreadful, aged doll, I realised that the crack in the skull and the hollow beneath it, which had come when Leonora had hurled it at the wall, were exactly the same, still jagged like a broken egg, though dirty round the edges from being in the earth.
This was not a replacement doll, put there by someone – though God knows who – with a sick sense of humour. This was the first doll, the bland-faced baby. The crack in its skull was exactly as it had been, I was sure of that. The body was the same size and shape though oddly crooked and with chicken-claw hands and feet and a yellow, loose-skinned neck. This was the doll Aunt Kestrel had given Leonora. It was the same doll.
But the doll had grown old.
I managed to find some brandy in Aunt Kestrel’s old sitting-room cupboard, and poured us both a generous glassful. After that, I locked up the house, leaving everything as it was, and drove Leonora back to Cold Eeyle and the hotel, for she was in no state to do anything for herself. She sat beside me shaking and occasionally letting out a little cry, after which her body would give a long convulsive shudder. I insisted that a doctor be called out, as she was in the early stages of pregnancy, and stayed until he had left, saying that she needed sleep and peace but that she and the child were essentially unharmed.
I spent a terrible night, full of nightmares in which dolls, old ones and young ones mixed together, came at me out of thick fog, alternately laughing and crying. I woke at six and went straight out, driving fast to Iyot House through a drear, cold morning.
The doll which had grown old was where we had left it, on the kitchen table, and still old and wizened, like a witch from a fairy tale. I had half expected to find that it had all been some dreadful illusion and that the doll was still a baby, just filthy and distorted by having been buried in the damp earth for so long.
But the earth had done nothing to the doll, other than ruining its cardboard coffin. The doll was a crone, looking a hundred years old or a thousand, ancient and repulsive.
I did as I had done before, went alone to the churchyard and buried it, this time wrapped in an old piece of sheeting. I dug as deep as I could and replaced the earth firmly on top. When I had finished I felt a sense of release. Whatever had happened, the wretched, hideous thing would never emerge again and there was an end.
But she had power to haunt me. I dreamed of the aged doll for many nights, many months. I worried over what had happened and how. Sometimes, I half convinced myself that we had both imagined it, Leonora and I, for, of course, an inanimate object, a doll made of pot, could not age. The dirt and soil, added to years in the damp ground, had changed the features – that was quite understandable.
In the end, the image faded from my mind and reason took over.
Leonora disappeared from my life once more, though I heard in a roundabout way that she had returned to the Far East and her hotelier husband.
As for me, I was about to pack up Iyot House and put it up for sale, when I was asked to go abroad myself, to do a special job for a foreign government and it was such a major and exciting challenge that the house in the fens and everything to do with it went from my mind.
PART FOUR
17
I was to spend three or four months in the city of Szargesti, a once-handsome place in the old Eastern Europe. It had an old and beautiful centre, but much of that had been demolished during the 1970s, to make way for wide roads on which only presidential and official cars could travel, vast, ugly new civic buildings and a monstrous presidential palace. The Old Town was medieval, and had once housed a jewellery quarter, book-binders and small printers, leather workers, and various tradesmen who kept the ancient buildings upright. Many had been wood and lathe, with astonishing painted panels on their façades. There had been a cathedral and other old churches, as well as a synagogue, for a large section of the original population of Szargesti had been Jewish. The place had been vandalised and the demolition had proceeded in a brutal and haphazard fashion, alongside the hurried erection of a new civic centre. But the Prague Spring had come to Szargesti, the president had been exiled, many of his cronies executed, and both demolition and building had come to an abrupt halt. Huge craters stood in the middle of streets, blocks of flats were left half in ruins, the machinery which had been pulling them down left rusting in their midst. It was a testament to grand designs and the lust for power of ignorant men. I am an adviser on the conservation of ancient buildings and sometimes, on whole areas, as in the case of Szargesti. My task was to identify and catalogue what was left, photograph it and make certain that nothing else was destroyed, and then to give the city advice on how to shore up, preserve, rebuild with care.
I knew that the Old Town, with its medieval buildings – houses, shops, workshops – was the most important area and in urgent need of conservation and repair. I had quickly come to love the place, with its small, intimate squares, narrow cobbled alleyways, beautiful, often ramshackle four-storey buildings with their neglected but still beautiful frescoes and wall paintings. The best way of getting to know a place is simply to wander and this is almost all I did for the first couple of weeks, taking dozens of photographs. Every evening I returned to my hotel to make copious notes, but after I had come to know the city a little better I would often stay out late, find a café in the back streets, drink a beer or a coffee and watch what little street life there was. People were still uncertain, ground down by years of a brutal dictatorship and most of them kept safely inside their homes after dark. But one warm summer evening I went into the Old Town and a square I had chanced upon earlier in the day, and which had some of the most beautiful and undamaged houses I had so far discovered. It would once have housed traders and craftsmen in precious metals whose workshops were situated beneath their houses. On the corner I passed an old stone water trough with an elaborately carved iron tap stood beside it. Horses would have drunk here, but the water had probably also been carried away in buckets, for use in smelting.
Now, the heavy wooden doors and iron shutters of the workshops were closed and some were padlocked, and those padlocks were rusty and broken. Many of the upper rooms had gaping dark spaces where windows had fallen out. There was a small café with a few tables on the cobbles. The barman appeared the moment I sat down, brought my drink and a small dish of smoked sausage, but then returned to the doorway and watched me until I began to feel uneasy. I had no need to be, I knew, and I tried to enjoy the quietness, the last of the sunshine and the way the shadows lengthened, slipping across the cobbles towards me. The old women who had been sitting on a bench chatting, left. The tobacconist came out with a long pole and rattled down his shutters. The beer was good. The sausage tasted of woodsmoke.
I continued to feel uneasy and strangely restless, alone in the darkening square. So far as I knew, only the waiter was looking at me but I had the odd sense that there were others, watching from the blanked-out windows and hidden corners. I have always believed that places with a long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air, just as I have been in many a cathedral all over the world and sensed the impress of centuries of prayers and devotions. Places are often filled with their own pasts and exude a sense of them, an atmosphere of gre
at good or great evil, which can be picked up by anyone sensitive to their surroundings. Even a dog’s hackles can rise in places reputed to be haunted. I am not an especially credulous man but I believe in these things because I have experienced them. I am not afraid of the dark and it was not the evening shadows that were making me nervous now. Certainly I had no fear of potential attackers or of spies leftover from the city’s past. Thank God those days were over and Szargesti was struggling to come to terms with the new freedoms.
I finished my beer and got up.
The air was still warm and the stars were beginning to brighten in the silky sky as I walked slowly round the square, where the cobbles gave way to stone paving. Every window was dark and shuttered. The only sound was that of my own footsteps.
Here and there an old stable door stood ajar, revealing cobbles on which straw was still scattered though the horses had long gone. I passed a music shop, a cobbler’s, and one tiny frontage displaying pens and parchment. All were locked up, and dark. Then, in the middle of the narrowest, dimmest alley, where the walls of the houses bulged across almost to meet one another, I saw a yellowish light coming from one of the windows and nearing it, I found a curious shop.
The window was dusty, making it difficult to see much of what was inside but I could make out shelves and an ancient counter. No attempt had been made to display goods attractively – the window held a jumble of objects piled together. I put my hand on the latch and at once heard the ring of an old-fashioned bell.
A very small old man was behind the mahogany counter, his skin paper pale and almost transparent over the bones of his cheeks and skull. He had tufts of yellow-white hair, yellow-white eyebrows and a jeweller’s glass screwed into one eye, with which he was examining a round silver box, dulled and stained with verdigris.