He raised a finger in recognition of my entrance, but continued to peer down at the object, and so I looked round me at the stock, which was crammed onto the shelves, spilled out of drawers, displayed in glass cabinets. The floor was of uncovered oak boards, polished and worn by the passage of feet over years.
The lower shelves contained small leather bound books, boxes of various sizes with metal hasps, dulled by the same verdigris as the box being scrutinised, wooden trays with what looked like puzzles fitted into them, a couple of musical boxes. Higher up, I saw wooden cabinets with sets of narrow drawers, each labelled in the old Cyrillic alphabet which had not been used in the country for almost a century. A doll’s house stood on the floor beside me, its eaves and roof modelled on those of the buildings in the square, its front hanging half-off its single hinge. Beside it was a child-sized leather trunk, the leather rubbed and lifting here and there. I glanced at the old man but now he had set the box on a scrap of dark blue velvet set down on the counter and was peering at it even more intently through his eyeglass, I thought perhaps trying to make out some pattern or inscription.
I turned back to the doll’s house and trunk and as I did so, I heard a sound which at first I took to be the scratching of a mouse in the skirting somewhere – I hoped a mouse, and not a rat. It stopped and then, as I put out my hand to touch the front of the wooden house, started again, and though it was still very soft, I knew that it was not the noise made by any sort of rodent. I could not tell exactly where it originated – it seemed to be coming from the darkness somewhere, behind me, or to one side – I could not quite pin down the direction. It was a rustling of some kind – perhaps the sound made when the wind blows through branches or reeds, perhaps the movement of long grass. Yet it was not altogether like those sounds. It stopped again. I looked at the old man but he was crouching over his box, his narrow back half bent, shoulders hunched.
I waited. It came again. A soft, insistent, rustling sound. Like paper. Someone was rustling paper – perhaps sheets of tissue paper. I turned my head to one corner, then the other but the sound did not quite come from there, or there, or from anywhere.
Perhaps it was inside my own head.
The old man sat up abruptly, put down the eyeglass and looked directly at me. His eyes were the watery grey of the sea on a dull day, dilute and pale.
‘Good evening,’ he said in English. ‘Is it something special you look for, because in a moment, I close.’
‘Thank you, no. I was just interested to find a shop here and open at this time.’
‘Ah.’
‘You sell many different things. What do you call yourself?’
‘A restorer.’
‘But so am I!’
‘Toys?’
‘No, ancient buildings. Like those in this quarter. I’m an architectural conservator.’
He nodded.
‘Little is beyond repair but my job is more easy than yours.’
He gestured round. I had begun to notice that many of the objects on his shelves and even standing around the floor were old toys, mostly of wood, some painted elaborately, some simply carved. As well as the dolls’ house I had already seen, there were others, and then a fort, many soldiers in the original military uniforms of the country’s past, a wooden truck, a railway engine and many boxes of different sizes and shapes. A lot of them had clearly been gathering dust for years. I looked down at the cloth on which the miniature silver box was standing.
‘This has been chased by hand, the most expert hand.’ He offered the eyeglass for me to examine it. ‘The work of a fine craftsman. It was found on the dresser of a dolls’ house – but I think it was not a toy item. Please, look.’
I did so. There was some intricate patterning forming the border and in the centre, a night sky with moon and stars and clouds, with a swirl of movement suggesting a wild wind.
‘Certainly not a toy.’ I handed back the eyeglass. ‘Marvellous workmanship.’
‘This old part of Szargesti, were craftsmen who worked in silver many years past, special craftsmen who passed down their skill to younger ones. Now …’ he sighed. ‘Almost none left. Skills in danger of death. I do not have these skills. I am only repairer of toys. Please, look round. You have some children?’
I shook my head. I assumed that everything here was waiting for repair and not for sale but even old toys, like many other domestic artefacts, tell a conservator something about the times in which they were made and even of the buildings in which they belonged and I poked about a little more, finding treasures behind treasures. But I wondered how long some of them had been lying here and how much longer they would have to wait for the mender’s attention. And then I wondered if some of the children who had owned and played with them were now grown-up or even dead, the toys were so old-fashioned.
The old man let me look around, poke into corners, touch and even pick things up without taking any notice of me and I was at the very back of the shop, where it was even darker and dustier, when I heard it again. The faint rustling sound seemed to be coming from something close to me but when I turned, became softer as if it were moving away. I stood very still. The shop was quiet. I heard the rustling again, as if tissue paper were being scrumpled up or unfolded, and now I thought I could trace the sound to somewhere on the floor and quite close to my feet. I bent down but it was very dark and I saw nothing unusual, and there was no quick movement of a rodent scuttling away. It stopped. Started again, more softly. Stopped. I took a step or two forwards and my foot bumped up against something. I bent down. A cardboard box, about the size to contain a pair of boots, was just in front of me, the lid apparently tied on with stout string. It was as I put my hand out to touch it that I felt an iciness down my spine, and a sudden moment of fear. I was sure that I was remembering something but I had no idea what. Deep in my subconscious mind a cardboard box like this one had a place but in what way or from what stage of my life I did not know.
I stood up hastily and as I did so, the rustling began again. It was coming from inside the box.
But I did not have a chance to try to trace the source of the sound, even if I was sure that I wanted to do so, because the old man unnerved me by saying:
‘You are looking for a doll I think.’
I opened my mouth to say that I was not, had just been drawn into the shop out of curiosity, but I realised that was not true.
‘Look there.’
I looked. In a cabinet just above my head was the doll, the exact, the same doll, which Leonora had yearned for all those years ago, the doll she had described in such detail and which I had tried to draw for her as some sort of compensation.
The Indian Princess, in her rich garments, shining jewels, sequins, beads, embroidery, sparkling with gold and silver, ruby and emerald, pearl and diamond, was sitting on some sort of velvet chair with a high, crested back, her face bland and serene, her veil sprinkled with silver and gold suns, moons and stars. She was not a doll for a child, not a doll to be played with, dressed and undressed, fed and pushed about in an old pram, she was far too fine, too regal, too formal. But I knew that this was the doll my cousin had yearned for so desperately and that I had no choice but to buy it – it had been placed here for just that reason. Even as the thought flashed across my mind, I was almost embarrassed, it was so ridiculous, and yet some part of me believed that it was true.
The old man was still tapping away calmly, smiling a little.
‘Are your dolls for sale?’
‘You wish to buy that one.’ It was not a question.
He glanced at me, the very centres of his eyes steel-bright, fixed and all-seeing.
Now, he had come round the counter and was unlocking the cabinet. A shiver rippled down my back as he reached inside and took hold of the Indian Princess. He did not ask me if this was the one I wanted, simply took it down, locked the cabinet again and then laid the doll on the counter.
‘I have the exact box.’ He retreated into the shadows where I
could just make out a door that stood ajar. My back was icy cold now. The shop was very quiet and somewhere in that quietness, I heard the rustling sound again.
He came back with the doll, boxed, lidded, tied with string and handed it over to me. I paid him and fled, out into the alley under the tallow light of the gas lamp, the coffin-like box under my arm. Through the window, I could make out the old man, behind the counter. He did not look up.
When I got back to the hotel, I pushed the doll under the bed in my room and went down to the cheerful bar, with its red shaded lamps and buzz of talk, and had a couple of brandies to try to rid myself of the unpleasant chill through my body, and a general sense of malaise. Gradually, I calmed. I began to try to work out why I had heard the rustling sound and what it had meant, but soon gave up. It could not have had anything to do with any of the similar sounds I had heard before. I was in another country, a different place.
I went to bed, fortified by the brandy, and was on the very cusp of sleep when I sat straight up, my heart thumping in my chest. The rustling sound had started up again and as I listened in horror, I realised that it was coming from close to hand. I lay down again and then it was louder. I sat up, and it faded.
Either the rustling was in my own head – or rather, in my ears, some sort of tinnitus – or it was coming from underneath the bed.
That night my dreams were full of cascading images of dolls, broken, damaged, buried, covered in dirt, labelled, lying on shelves, being hammered and glued and tapped. In the middle of it all, the memory of Leonora’s twisted and angry face as she hurled the unwanted doll at the fireplace, and floating somewhere behind, the old man with the gimlet eyes.
I woke in a sweat around dawn and pulled the box from under the bed where I had left it, the string still carefully knotted. I did not want it in my sight, but I was sure that if I disposed of the doll I would have cause to regret it and first thing the next morning I took it to the post office. I had addressed it to myself in London but changed my mind at the last moment, and sent it instead to Iyot House. The reasons were mainly practical yet I was also sending the doll there because it seemed right and where it naturally belonged.
I felt relief when it was out of my hands. I had kept it and yet I had not.
18
Some months passed, during which I heard via an announcement in The Times that Leonora had given birth to a daughter. I returned to England, but for the next year or so I was constantly travelling between London and Szargesti, absorbed in my work and I gave thought to little else.
And then I received a letter from the solicitor, telling me that Leonora wished to be in touch with me urgently. She had written via Iyot House but received no reply. Might he forward my address to her?
By the time I did receive a letter, I was married, I had finished my work in Szargesti, and embarked on a new project connected with English cathedrals. Leonora was far from my mind.
Dear Edward
I write to you from the depths of despair. I am unsure how much you know of what has happened to me since we last met. Briefly, I have a daughter, who is now two years old, and named Frederica, after her father and my beloved husband, Frederic, who died very suddenly. We were in Switzerland. In short, he has left me penniless; the hotels are on the verge of bankruptcy thanks to bad advice. I did not know a thing. How could I have known when Frederic protected me from everything? And now my daughter has a grave illness.
I have nowhere to go, nowhere to live. I am staying with friends out of their kindness and pity but that must come to an end.
In short, I am throwing myself on your generosity and asking if you would allow me to have Iyot House in which to live, though God knows I hate the place and would not want to set foot inside it again, if this were not my only possible home. Perhaps we could make it habitable.
If you have already disposed of it then I ask if you could share some of the proceeds with me so that I can buy a place in which my sick child and I can live.
Please reply c/o the poste restante address and tell me urgently what you can do. We are cousins, after all,
Affectionately
Leonora.
I had done nothing about Iyot House and after I told my wife the gist of the story she agreed at once that, of course, Leonora and her daughter should live there for as long as they wished.
‘It’s been locked up for years. I don’t know what state it will be in and it was never the most – welcoming of houses anyway.’
‘But surely you can get people to go in and make sure it is clean and that there hasn’t been any damage … that the place isn’t flooded? Then she can make the best of it … Anything other than being homeless.’
I agreed but wondered as I did so if Leonora had told me the full truth, if she had indeed been left literally penniless and without the means to put a roof over her head. Her letter was melodramatic and slightly hysterical, entirely in character. Catherine chided me with heartlessness when I tried to explain and perhaps she was right. But then, she did not know Leonora.
Nevertheless, I wrote and said that she could have the house, that I would put anything to rights before she arrived, and would come to see her when I could manage it.
I had to travel to Cambridge a few days later, and I arranged to make a detour via Iyot House. It was September, the weather golden, the corn ripe in the fields, the vast skies blue with mare’s tail clouds streaked high. At this time of year the area is so open, so fresh-faced, with nothing hidden for miles, everything was spread out before me as I drove. It is still an isolated place. No one has developed new housing clusters and the villages and hamlets remain quite self-contained, not spreading, not even seeming to relate to one another. Apart from some drainage, square miles had not changed since I was an eight-year-old boy being driven from the railway station on my first visit to Iyot House. I remembered how I had felt – interested and alert to my surroundings, and yet also lonely and apprehensive, determined but fearful. And when I had first glimpsed the place, I had shivered, though I had not known why. It was as though nothing was exactly as it seemed to be, like a place in a story, there were other dimensions, shadows, secrets, the walls seemed to be very slightly crooked. I was not an especially imaginative child, so I was even more aware of what I felt.
The house smelled of dust and emptiness but not, to my surprise, of damp or mould, and although everything seemed a little more faded and neglected, there was no interior damage. I pulled up some of the blinds and opened a couple of windows. A bird had fallen down one of the chimneys and its body lay in the empty fireplace, grass sprouted on window ledges. But the place was just habitable, if I found someone to clean and reorder it. Leonora would at least have a roof over her head for however long she and the child needed it.
I had noticed that the box I had sent from Szargesti was in the porch, tucked safely out of the weather. I took it inside and decided that I would place it upstairs in the small room off the main bedroom which Leonora might well choose for her daughter. The attics were too far away and lonely for a small child.
I put the box on the shelf, hesitating about whether to take the doll out and display it, or leave it as a surprise. In the end I removed all the outer wrapping and string, but left the box closed, so that the little girl could have the fun of opening it.
19
I have written this account in a reasonably calm, even detached frame of mind. I have remembered that first strange childhood visit to Iyot House in some detail without anxiety and although it distressed me a little to recall the unpleasantness over the doll with the aged face, its burial and exhumation, and Leonora’s violent tempers, I have written with a steady hand. Events were peculiar, strange things happened, and yet I have looked back steadily and without falling prey to superstitions and night terrors. I have always believed that the odd happenings could be put down to coincidence or perhaps the effects of mood and atmosphere. I suppose I believed myself to be a rational man.
But reason does not help me
now that I come to the climax of the story, and as I remember and as I write, I feel as if there is no ground beneath my feet, that I might disintegrate at any moment, that my flesh will dissolve. I feel afraid but I do not know of what. I feel helpless and at the mercy of strange events and forces which not only can I not explain away but in which I do not believe.
Yet what happened, happened, all of it, and the end lies in the beginning, in our childhood. But the blame is not mine, the blame is all Leonora’s.
Work preoccupied me and then Catherine and I took a trip to New York, so that I was not in touch with Leonora until she had been living in Iyot House for some weeks.
It was one day in December when I had finished some more work in Cambridge earlier than I had expected, and I decided to drive across to Iyot House and either beg a bed for the night there or carry on to the inn at Cold Eeyle. I tried to telephone my cousin in advance but there was no reply and so I simply set off. It was early dusk and the sun was flame and ruby red in the clearest of skies as I went towards the fens. Once off the trunk roads, it was as quiet as ever. There were few lock keeper’s cottages occupied now – that had been the one major change since my boyhood – but here and there a light glowed through windows, and the glint of these or of the low sun touched the black deep slow-running waters in river and dyke. The church at Iyot Lock stood out as a beacon in the flat landscape for miles ahead, the last of the sun touching its gilded flying angels on all four corners of the tower.
It was beautiful and seemed so serene an aspect that I was moved and felt happier to be coming here than ever before. So much of what we imagine is a product of an ill mood, a restless night, indigestion, or the vagaries of the weather and I began to feel certain that all the previous events at Iyot House had been caused by one or other of these, or by other equally fleeting outside circumstances. Empty houses breed fantasies, bleak landscapes lend themselves to fearful imaginings. Only lie awake on a windy night and hear a branch tap-tap-tapping on a casement to understand at once what I mean.