The Many Lives of John Stone

  “Bong Tom?”

  “Oh, the tortoise. I’ll show you later. He’s a big fellow—but you don’t have to be scared of him. John brought him back from his travels.”

  What opinion had Martha formed of her? Did she seem the sort of person who’d be scared of a tortoise? “Oh, I don’t let myself be scared of anything.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Martha over her shoulder. “You were always bold.” And before Spark could ask her what she meant, Martha started back for the house.

  * * *

  When Spark pulls the sleeve of her T-shirt to her nose there’s a whiff of mold. She is beginning to regret not bringing more changes of clothes, for she’s uncomfortable asking Martha about the laundry arrangements. As far as she can see, there is no washing machine, which is worrying. Surely the wringer in the scullery is for decorative purposes only? It had better be—she’s never washed anything by hand in her life.

  “Come here, you varmint!”

  Spark springs up. Jacob is running across the lawn toward a flower bed on the opposite side of the fountain. Her eyes open wide in surprise. The tortoise Martha mentioned is of the giant variety and has waded into a herbaceous border in full bloom. It’s huge—the length and height of a Labrador but twice as wide. It is demolishing the flowers. Jacob clambers on top of it, though it’s a struggle to stretch his legs that wide.

  “Martha! Martha!” Jacob shouts.

  Spark thinks this probably isn’t the moment to introduce herself. She looks on in awe at the tortoise’s prehistoric face, his wrinkled stalk of a neck, the four stiff legs protruding out of the shell at improbable angles. It is as though once, long ago, he had tried on this carapace by accident and could never slip out of it again. Martha appears from the back of the house, wiping her hands on her apron. When she spots Jacob astride the animal, trying to wrench him away from his prized plants, she watches, hands on hips. “For the love of Michael! Why do you always have to do that? He’s not a horse!”

  Jacob dismounts, and the tortoise, losing interest in the plant of his own accord, lumbers away, like some arthritic old general, following the path that leads to the front of the house. He vanishes around the corner, a bright green leaf stuck to his back foot.

  Martha tells Jacob she’ll tempt him back to his pen with some baby carrots and beetroot, not that she hasn’t got enough to do this morning. Spark volunteers to lay the trail for her. “Why, thank you,” Martha says. “If you’re sure you can spare the time—”

  “It’s not every day you get to meet a giant tortoise!”

  “Then come with me to the kitchen and we can find some scraps for him. Something red. The old fellow can never resist anything red.”

  “Someone left the pen open,” complains Jacob. Now that he is no longer scowling at the tortoise, he is scowling at Spark.

  “Well, I’m sorry, I’m sure,” says Martha. “I’ve been at sixes and sevens all day—I don’t know what’s got into me.”

  “I do,” says Jacob.

  Spark looks from one to the other and decides that if no one else is going to do it, she had better introduce herself. “Pleased to meet you, Jacob. I’m Spark.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Martha gives him a sharp look. “Jacob, will you help Spark get Bontemps in his pen when she’s tempted him back to the orchard? Well, will you?”

  Jacob gives a curt nod and retreats to his green domain. He whistles for his dog, who presently limps into view under the yew arch that leads to the kitchen garden and, beyond it, the orchard.

  * * *

  Spark walks backward, talking to the giant tortoise, coaxing him, throwing slices of red apple, beetroot, and carrot onto the grass. She crouches down next to him and observes his strong, beak-like jaws open wide and snap shut. “You are one messy eater,” she says. His shell gleams like polished hide; his sturdy legs seem to be covered in dragon skin. Occasionally he swivels his pewter eyes and looks right at her, and they seem to convey such a wry view of the world it delights her. By the time she has got to the pen she has dared stroke his leathery neck, which he tolerates, at least, though she cannot tell if he likes it. Jacob has appeared out of nowhere and is already holding open the door of the pen. For a moment Spark fears he’s going to lock her inside the chicken-wire cage too. She steps out quickly and Jacob clangs the gate shut.

  A tinkling bell sounds from the direction of the house. “Luncheon,” he says and aims a large gob of spittle an inch from her foot. Spark takes a step backward, offended. He continues to stare at the grassy spot on the ground.

  “Last time you were here you caused Martha grief.”

  The anger in his voice goes deep. Spark is unnerved. “Did I? I can’t remember.”

  “You know what people say about leopards.”

  She finishes off the saying in her head. What spots does she have that she can’t change? Who does he think she is? Jacob walks back to the house without waiting for her. Spark stares after him, recovers herself, and follows in his footsteps.

  In the kitchen, a fat, golden-crusted pie sits steaming in the center of the table. Spark cannot face being alone with Martha and Jacob and excuses herself, saying that she is not hungry. Martha looks crestfallen; Jacob bristles. Spark says she’s sorry and flees the kitchen. Now she sits in the malodorous archive room in the dark. For a while she feels like the little girl Jacob has implied that she still is. She wants to go home. What can she have done that was so bad? She was five! One tear rolls down her cheek, which is all she allows herself: She refuses to give Jacob the satisfaction. You stand up to bullies. It’s only fear you should be frightened of. Then she switches on the light and resumes the work she is being paid to do. Half an hour later, Martha arrives with a covered tray—in case Spark regains her appetite, she says—and places it carefully on the floor between piles of manuscripts. When Martha gets up Spark has the impression she is about to hug her, but she changes her mind at the last moment. Instead Martha touches her cheek with the crook of her finger. “Don’t you fret about Jacob. His bark’s worse than his bite.” After Martha has gone, Spark wolfs down her chicken pie and feels more cheerful. She has a friend.

  Water Mill

  Taking a break, midafternoon, Spark sits on the edge of the still fountain and decides that this is not the sort of house you buy, this is the kind of house you inherit. She cools one hand in the light-spangled water and watches a solitary fish glide in and out of the feathery weeds. It’s a ghostly white. It must be the same one—she knows koi carp live for years. She still can’t remember its name, though.

  It’s good to be out of the archive room. Its location, right at the center of the house, is strange: It is accessible only from the tomb-like corridor next to John Stone’s study. You’d think the whole building had been built around this one airless, circular room. And, try as she might, Spark cannot decipher a single word of the manuscripts. It would be great if they contained something exciting, some dark secret, but she supposes they’ll turn out to be something dull.

  She looks up at the house, shading her eyes from the sun. The colors are honeyed: all golden stone and soft red brick. Some kind of tree has been trained up between the diamond-paned windows. It has dark, glossy leaves and waxy, saucer-shaped flowers whose marzipan fragrance drifts on the warm air. A sudden, gusting wind sweeps into a crescendo, blasting through the circular rampart of tall trees that shields Stowney House from the marsh. All around, a million fluttering leaves glint silver against cloudless blue. Strangely, here, close to the house, the air is almost still. She feels the tension release from her shoulders, her back, her stomach; she feels warm and safe, as if nothing bad could happen to her here. It is as if this house has a tender spirit.

  Slipping her phone from her pocket, she switches to video mode and points the lens at the fountain—at the garlanded river god and those invisible mysteries at which he stares—and then, in a long sweep, captures the gardens, the back of the house, and the tall stained glass window, whose soft
colors—violet, red, and gold—stream across the floor of the entrance hall. In a minute she might walk up to the orchard to get a few shots of the tortoise: close-ups of its shell—which she is sure that Martha must polish—and its extraterrestrial face.

  Something prompts her to flick through her photographs until she finds the image of John Stone and the street woman in New York. She frowns at it, still intrigued, and wonders if she had sensed, all those months ago, a connection of some kind. Had she not witnessed that scene, would she have put herself forward like she did? Would she be here now?

  Her eye is caught by a wonderful sight: A vast number of honking geese pass over the sunlit, swaying treetops in a perfect V formation. Spark switches back to video mode and starts to raise her hands, preparing to press the record button. At that instant, John Stone himself appears at the front door. He walks toward her, captured on her tiny screen. Spark obeys an impulse to continue recording—to own the moment, to show Mum, actually she’s not quite sure why. He is just as she remembered; his face has got this comfortable, lived-in quality to it; he has such an easy way with him. John Stone coughs gently, clearly amused that she doesn’t appear to have noticed him.

  “Spark! Hello at last. Welcome to Stowney House.”

  Spark stands up hurriedly. “Hello, Mr. Stone—”

  “Call me John.” He shakes her hand briefly and motions for her to sit back down. “We’re living in the twenty-first century, after all.”

  Spark nods, although if she were honest, she’d rather not. “All right—John.”

  “I’m sorry I was not able to greet you on your arrival—I hope Martha and Jacob have been looking after you—”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, they have.”

  “So, tell me how you’re getting on.”

  “Good—I think.”

  “Could you understand my notes about the dates?”

  “Yes—I think I’ve got the hang of it now. I still can’t make out any of the writing—”

  “You wouldn’t: there’s a trick, which I’ll show you next week. The manuscripts were written using a cipher.” John Stone sits down next to her on the edge of the fountain. “You picked my favorite spot.”

  “Do you ever switch the fountain on?”

  “Ah, now that’s a sore point, I’m afraid. Jacob has diverted the water supply for his vegetables.”

  “Couldn’t you divert it back sometimes?”

  John Stone laughs. “I thought you’d met Jacob—one must choose one’s battles!”

  The wind roars through the tall trees that seem to Spark to guard Stowney House; it is a sound that puts her in mind of the sea. “It’s so beautiful here,” she says.

  “I’m happy it pleases you. This house is unique. And her charms become increasingly difficult to resist. Martha tells me you helped recapture our tortoise.”

  “He’s massive! How old is he?”

  “We think he could be a hundred and seventy years old.”

  “A hundred and seventy! That’s incredible!”

  “He was sired by a tortoise who was kept on the island of Saint Helena while Napoleon Bonaparte was held prisoner there.”

  “How long has Tom been at Stowney House?”

  “I don’t recollect—a long time. Actually his name isn’t Tom: It’s Bontemps. A French name. Bon—good. Temps—time or weather—”

  “I should have known that,” says Spark. “I sat my French A-Level exam only a couple of weeks ago.”

  John Stone smiles at her. “You’ve nothing to prove here. As it happens, Bontemps is named after several generations of valets de chambre who served the kings of France. They prided themselves on being men you could rely on.”

  “And is the tortoise reliable?”

  “I suppose he is!”

  John Stone leans over to pluck a daisy from the lawn and drops it in the water; the flower floats on the sparkling surface and Spark sees the carp swim up to inspect it. Disappointed, it disappears with an impatient swish of its tail.

  “Does the fish have a name?”

  “If it does, I don’t recall it.”

  John Stone’s hand rests on the sun-warmed rim of the carved stone basin. When he shifts position, a ray of sunshine bounces off the golden signet ring he wears on his little finger. Spark tries to work out what is engraved on it and decides that it is a tree. It appears to be studded with minute diamonds that lie, like fruit, in its branches. When she looks up again, John Stone meets her gaze. Spark feels as if she is made of glass and he can see straight through her. He doesn’t offer to tell her about his ring.

  “Dan and I had hamsters when we were little. They were always dying on us—we must have had seven or eight. We still had to have funerals for each one of them, though. Our backyard is concreted over, but we have an old water trough that Mum filled with flowers. It got to the point when she couldn’t plant her geraniums without digging up a hamster skeleton. We should have kept a tortoise instead.”

  Her story provokes a rich laugh. “How right you are—creatures who insist on dying on you are certainly best avoided!”

  Spark grins, pleased to have amused John Stone. “There was that giant tortoise—Lonesome George—did you hear about him? I think he was a type of Galapagos tortoise. The very last of his kind.” She reaches for her phone to look for a picture before she remembers there’s no Internet. Her nail catches in the back pocket of her jeans where the phone is slowly wearing a hole. “They tried mating him with other types of giant tortoises but he refused to have anything to do with them. And then, not so long ago, he died. So, no more Lonesome Georges. Isn’t that incredibly sad? The very, very last one.”

  When she looks up John Stone does, indeed, look incredibly sad. He changes the subject, telling her that after she has finished cleaning and shelving the manuscripts he’ll teach her the cipher. She might even like to have a go at transcribing some of them. But all in good time.

  “The important thing,” says John Stone, “is that you start to feel at home here, find your feet. It’s such a pleasure to see someone young at Stowney House. If anything bothers you, anything at all, I want you to say. Will you do that for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And is there anything that you need?”

  “No—Martha’s gone to so much trouble—”

  John Stone gives her a searching look. “Sometimes you may have to be patient with my friends. We haven’t entertained a lot of guests here of late.”

  My friends, she notes. Not housekeeper, not gardener. Friends. Life at Stowney House is not how she’d imagined it to be.

  “Incidentally,” John Stone continues, “I think you were trying to use your phone just now. I’m afraid there’s no reception here.” Spark doesn’t say that she’d worked that out within minutes of arriving. “And I’m afraid we have no landline, either. Stowney House remains disconnected from the world. Though if you walk a couple of hundred yards up the road you can usually get a weak signal.”

  Spark has already discovered that, too. “Do you like being cut off from everything?” she asks.

  “I suppose I do. At Stowney House the world may enter only at my say-so. I suspect you feel differently.”

  Spark nods. “I can’t stop checking for texts. It feels wrong! Like I’m no longer a part of the world.”

  This appeals to John Stone. “Like I’m no longer a part of the world!” he repeats. “Does a thing have less value if we experience it alone?”

  “Isn’t it good to feel a part of something bigger? Mostly I hate to feel cut off from people—but not always. Like when I’m taking photographs and then it’s as if I’m on the outside looking in.”

  John Stone nods. “Interesting . . . though even if the photographer might feel alone, what a photograph does, above all, is freeze a moment in time—a first encounter between two people, for example—and make something that is unique and personal available for all the world to see. One incident could be reproduced an infinite number of times through a lens that inevita
bly distorts. I can scarcely imagine, now, a world before photography existed, but there is a part of me that feels that such intimate moments preserve their value and meaning precisely by not being shared with those who did not experience them.”

  A feeling of mild guilt washes over Spark and she lowers her gaze. Her employer is not talking about her videoing him, is he? Surely not—she would have been able to tell if he’d noticed. And it’s not as if she’s about to share it with the world.

  From the house comes the sound of Martha singing. She must be doing something that demands attention because she starts, trails off, starts, and stops again.

  “Your arrival has put Martha in a good mood!”

  Spark hesitates, then says: “Can I ask you something?”

  “Ask me whatever you like!”

  “When I first came here—when I was little—did I do anything to upset Martha? Jacob seems angry with me.”

  “Ah. What you must understand about Jacob is that he is utterly devoted to Martha. With Jacob, everything follows from this simple fact. A long time ago, when I first met them both, Martha helped Jacob through a particularly difficult period of his life.”

  Spark pictures Jacob as an alcoholic or drug addict, plucked off the streets by John Stone. Maybe that’s what was he was doing in New York; he does work for a charity, after all. Yes, there is something about Jacob that reminds her of a feral dog—cowed yet ferocious at the same time.

  “Your visits made Martha happy,” continues John Stone, “and I believe she became very sad when they stopped. It’s not for me to tell you her story, but Martha used to be a mother, and your arrival . . . created conflicting emotions in her.”

  “I see. . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Being likeable isn’t a fault. Nor is liking children when you’ve lost your own.”

  “So I didn’t actually do anything bad?”

  “No!” he laughs. “How could you? You were so young. Of course, there was the incident at the water mill. Martha hurt her shoulder—not badly—when she rescued you—”