The Empty House Read online

  In Penzance there had been no wind, the air was milky and breathlessly warm. Here, there was a faint whining, a coolness. The broken washing line stirred in the breeze and the long grass at the top of the stone hedge lay flattened like a fur coat, stroked by a hand.

  And there was something else. Something was wrong. For a moment Virginia stared, trying to think what it was. And then Cara told her. “There’s smoke in the chimney,” said Cara.

  Virginia shivered, a frisson of unease, like a trickle of cold water ran down her spine. It was as though they had caught the house unawares, they had not been expected by the nameless, unimagined beings who normally occupied it.

  Cara felt her disquiet. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, of course not.” She sounded more robust than she felt. “I was just surprised. Let’s go and investigate.”

  They got out of the car, leaving the cases and groceries behind. Virginia manhandled the gate open and stood aside for the children to go through while she felt in her bag for the ring of keys.

  They went ahead of her, Nicholas running, to investigate what lay around the far corner of the house, but Cara trod cautiously as though trespassing, avoiding an old rag, a broken flower-pot, her hands held fastidiously, anxious not to be asked to touch anything.

  Together, they opened the front door. As it swung inwards Cara said, “Do you suppose it’s Gipsies?”

  “What’s Gipsies?”

  “Who’ve lit the fire.”

  “Let’s look…” The smell of mice and damp had gone. Instead the house felt fresh and warm, and when they stepped into the living-room they found it bright with firelight. The whole aspect of the house was changed by this, it was sullen and depressing no longer … on the contrary, quite cheerful. The hideous electric fire had somehow been disposed of, and a tall rush basket stood by the hearth, piled with a good supply of logs.

  What with the fire and the last of the afternoon sun filtering in through the west window, the room was very warm. Virginia went to open a window, and saw, through the open kitchen door, the bowl set on the table, piled with brown eggs, the white enamel milk pan. She went into the kitchen and stood in the middle of the floor and stared. Someone had been in and cleaned the place up, the sink was shining and the curtains laundered.

  Cara stole in behind her, still cautious. “It’s like fairies,” she said.

  “It’s not fairies,” said Virginia, smiling. “It’s Alice.”

  “Aunt Alice Lingard?”

  “Yes, isn’t she a dear? She pretended to be so disapproving about us coming to Bosithick and then she goes and does a thing like this. But that’s just like Alice. She’s very kind. We’ll have to go tomorrow and thank her. I’d ring up, only we haven’t got a telephone.”

  “I hate the telephone anyway. And I want to go and see her. I want to see the swimming pool.”

  “If you take your bathing-suit you can have a swim.”

  Cara stood staring up at her mother. Virginia thought she was still thinking about swimming and was surprised when she said, “How did she get in?”

  “Who?”

  “Aunt Alice. We’ve got the keys.”

  “Oh. Well. I expect she got a spare key from Mr. Williams. Something like that. Now what are we going to do first?”

  Nicholas appeared at the door. “I’m going to look all over the house and then I want some tea. I’m starving!”

  “Take Cara with you.”

  “I want to stay with you.”

  “No.” Virginia gave her a gentle push. “You go and tell me what you think of the rest of the house. Tell me if you don’t think it the funniest house you’ve ever seen in your life. And I’ll put the kettle on and we’ll boil some eggs, and after that we’ll bring all the stuff in from the car and see about unpacking and making the beds.”

  “Aren’t the beds even made?”

  “No, we’ve got to do it all. We’re really on our own now.”

  Somehow, by the end of the evening they had managed to attain a semblance of order, but finding the switch for the hot-water tank and the cupboard where the sheets were kept, and trying to decide who was going to sleep in which bed, all took a very long time. For supper Nicholas wanted baked beans on toast, but they couldn’t find a toaster and the grill on the cooker was fiercely temperamental, so he had baked beans on bread instead.

  “We need washing-up stuff and a mop, and tea and coffee…” Virginia searched for a piece of paper and a pencil and started, frantically, to make a list.

  Cara chimed in, “… And soap for the bathroom and stuff to clean the bath with, because it’s got a horrid dirty mark.”

  “And a bucket and spade,” said Nicholas.

  “And we’ll have to get a fridge,” said Cara. “We haven’t got anywhere to keep our food and it’ll all grow a blue beard if we let it just lie about.”

  Virginia said, “Perhaps we could borrow a meat-safe,” and then remembered who had offered to lend her one, and frowned down at her shopping list and hastily changed the subject.

  When the little water tank finally heated up, they had baths in the gimcrack bathroom, Nicholas and Cara going in together, and then Virginia swiftly before the water went cold. In dressing-gowns, by firelight, they made cocoa …

  “There isn’t even a television.”

  “Or a wireless.”

  “Or a clock,” said Nicholas cheerfully.

  Virginia smiled and looked at her watch. “If you really want to know, it’s ten past nine.”

  “Ten past nine! We should be in bed ages ago.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she told them.

  “Doesn’t matter? Nanny would be furious!”

  Virginia leaned back in her chair, stretched out her legs and wriggled her bare toes at the heat of the fire.

  “I know,” she said.

  After they were in bed, after she had kissed them, and left the door open on the landing and showed them how the light worked, she left them, and went down the narrow passage and up the two steps that led to the Tower Room.

  It was cold. She sat by the window and looked out across the still, shadowed fields, and saw that the peaceful sea had turned pearly in the dusk, and the sky in the afterglow of sunset was streaked in long scarves of coral. Clouds were gathered in the west. They lay, piled beyond the horizon, threaded with shafts of gold and pink light, but gradually even these last shreds of light filtered away, and the clouds turned black, and in the east a little new moon, like an eyelash, floated up into the sky.

  One by one lights started to twinkle out across the soft darkness, along the whole length of the coast, from farm-houses, and cottages and barns. Here, a window burned square and yellow. There a light bobbed across a rick yard. A pair of headlights tunnelled up a lane, and headed out on to the main road towards Lanyon, and Virginia wondered if it was Eustace Philips, making for Lanyon and The Mermaid’s Arms, and she wondered if he would come and see how they were getting along, or whether he would be taciturn and sulky and wait for Virginia to produce some sort of an olive branch. She told herself that it would be worth doing even this, if it were only for the satisfaction of seeing his face when he realized how well she and Cara and Nicholas were managing for themselves.

  But next day it was different.

  In the night the wind had got up, and the dark clouds which last evening had lain banked on the horizon, were blown inland, bringing with them a dark and drenching rain. The sound of gutters trickling and dripping, the rattle of raindrops against the glass of the window-pane were the sounds which woke Virginia up. Her bedroom was so gloomy that she had to turn on the lamp before she could read her watch. Eight o’clock.

  She got of bed and went and shut the window. The floor-boards beneath her feet were quite wet. The rain curtained everything, and she could see no more than a few yards. It was like being in a ship, marooned in a sea of rain. She hoped the children would not wake up for hours.

  She dressed in trousers and her thickest jersey and we
nt downstairs and found that the rain had come down the chimney and effectively put out the fire, and the room felt damp and chilly. There were matches, but no firelighters; wood, but no kindling. She pulled on a raincoat and went out into the rain and across to the sagging garden shed, and found a hatchet, blunt with age and misuse. On the stone front doorstep, and at considerable personal danger to herself, she chopped a log into kindling, then took some paper which had been wrapped in with their groceries, and kindled a little fire. The sticks snapped and crackled, the smoke, after one or two surly billows into the room, ran sweetly up the chimney. She piled on logs and left the fire to burn.

  Cara appeared when she was cooking breakfast.

  “Mummy!”

  “Hallo, my love.” She bent to kiss her. Cara wore sky blue shorts, a yellow tee shirt, an inadequate little cardigan. “Are you warm enough?”

  “No,” said Cara. Her fine, straight hair was bunched into a slide, her spectacles were crooked. Virginia straightened them. “Go and put on some more clothes, then. Breakfast isn’t ready yet.”

  “But there isn’t anything else. In my suitcase, I mean. Nanny didn’t pack anything else.”

  “I don’t believe it!” They gazed at each other. “You mean no jeans or raincoats or gum-boots.”

  Cara shook her head. “I suppose she thought it was going to be hot.”

  “Yes, I suppose she did,” said Virginia mildly, mentally cursing Nanny. “But you’d have thought she knew enough about packing to put a raincoat in.”

  “Well, we’ve sort of got raincoats, but not proper ones.”

  She looked so worried that Virginia smiled. “Don’t worry.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “We’ll have to go and buy you both some clothes.”

  “Today?”

  “Why not? We can’t do anything else in weather like this.”

  “How about seeing Aunt Alice and swimming in her pool?”

  “We’ll keep that for a finer day. She won’t mind. She’ll understand.”

  They drove through the downpour to Penzance. At the top of the hill the mist was thick and grey, swirling in the wind, parting momentarily to allow a glimpse of the road ahead, and then closing in once more so that Virginia could scarcely see the end of the bonnet.

  Penzance was awash with rain, traffic and disconsolate holiday-makers, prevented by the weather from their usual daily ploy of sitting on the promenade or the beach. They clogged the pavements, stood in shop doorways, aimlessly surged round the counters of shops, looking for something to buy. Behind the steamy windows of cafés and ice-cream shops they could be seen, packed in at little tables, slowly sipping, licking, munching; spinning it out, making it last, so that as to postpone the inevitable moment when they had to go out into the rain again.

  Virginia drove around for ten minutes before she found a place to leave the car. In the rain they searched the choked streets until they came to a shop where fishermen’s oilskins were for sale, and huge thigh-length rubber boots and lanterns and rope, and they went in and she bought jeans for Cara and Nicholas, and dark blue Guernseys, and black oilskins and sou’westers which obliterated the children like candle-snuffers. The children put on the new oilskins and the sou’westers, then and there, but the rest of the clothes were tied up in a brown paper parcel. Virginia took the parcel and paid the bill, and with the children, stiff as robots in their new coats, blinded by the brims of the hats, she went out into the street again.

  It still poured. “Let’s go home now,” said Cara.

  “Well, while we’re here, we may as well get some fish or some meat or a chicken. And we haven’t any potatoes or carrots or peas. There may be a supermarket.”

  “I want a bucket and spade,” said Nicholas.

  Virginia pretended not to hear. They found the supermarket, and joined the herd-like crowds, queuing and choosing, waiting and paying, packing the parcels into carriers, lugging them out of the shop.

  The gutters gurgled, water streamed from drainpipes.

  “Cara, can you really carry that?”

  “Yes…” said Cara, dragged down to one side by the weight of the carrier.

  “Give half of it to Nicholas.”

  “I want a bucket and spade,” said Nicholas.

  But Virginia had run out of money. She was about to tell him that he would have to wait until the next shopping expedition, but he turned up his face under the brim of the sou’wester, and his mouth was mutinous, but his eyes huge and beginning to brim with tears. “I want a bucket and spade.”

  “Well, we’ll buy you one. But first I’ll have to find a bank and cash a cheque and get more money.”

  The tears, as if by magic, vanished. “I saw a bank!”

  They found the bank, filled with queuing customers.

  The children made their way to a leather bench and sat, exhausted, like two little old people, their chins sunk into their chests, and their legs stuck out in front of them, regardless of whom they might trip up. Virginia waited in a queue, then produced her bank card and wrote her cheque.

  “On holiday?” asked the young cashier. Virginia wondered how he could still be good-tempered at the end of such a morning.

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll clear up by tomorrow, you’ll see.”

  “I hope so.”

  The red bucket and the blue spade was their final purchase. Laden, they walked the long way back to the car, and for some reason it was all uphill. Nicholas, banging the bucket with the spade as though it were a drum, trailed behind. More than once Virginia had to turn and wait for him, exhort him to get a move on. Finally, she lost her patience. “Oh, Nicholas, do hurry,” and a passing woman heard the suppressed irritation in her voice, and glanced back, her face full of disapproval at such a disagreeable and short-tempered mother.

  And that was after only one morning.

  It still rained. They came at last to the car, and loaded the boot with parcels, and pulled off their dripping raincoats and stuffed them into the boot, and then scrambled into the car and slammed the door, thankful beyond words to be at last sitting down and out of the rain.

  “Now,” said Nicholas, still banging the bucket with the spade, “do you know what I want?”

  Virginia looked at her watch. It was nearly one o’clock. “Something to eat?” she guessed.

  What I would like would be to go back to Wheal House and know that Mrs. Jilkes had lunch ready and waiting, and there would be a cheerful fire in the drawing-room, and lots of new magazines and newspapers and nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon except read them.

  “Yes, that. But something else as well.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got to guess. I’ll give you three guesses.”

  “Well.” She thought. “You want to go to the loo?”

  “No. At least not yet.”

  “You want … a drink of water?”

  “No.”

  “Give in.”

  “I want to go to a beach this afternoon and dig. With my new bucket and spade.”

  The young man in the bank proved to be quite correct in his weather forecast. That evening, the wind swung around to the north, and the shredded clouds were sent bowling away, over the moors. At first small patches of sky appeared, and then these grew larger and brighter and at last the evening sun broke through, to set, triumphantly, in a welter of glorious pinks and reds.

  “Red Sky At Night, Shepherd’s Delight,” said Cara as they went to bed. “That means it’s going to be a lovely day tomorrow.”

  It was.

  “I want to go to the beach today and dig with my bucket and spade,” said Nicholas.

  “You will,” Virginia told him firmly. “But first we have to go and see Aunt Alice Lingard, otherwise she’ll think we’re the rudest, most ungrateful people she’s ever known.”

  “Why?” said Nicholas.

  “Because she got the house all ready for us and we haven’t even said thank you … finish up y
our egg, Nicholas, it’s getting all cold.”

  “I wish I could have cornflakes.”

  “We’ll buy cornflakes,” said Virginia, and Cara got the pencil and the shopping list and they wrote Cornflakes underneath Steel Wool, Peanut Butter and Caster Sugar, Splits, Jellies, Soap Powder and Cheese. Virginia had never done so much shopping in her life.

  She sent them off to play while she did the breakfast dishes and went upstairs to make the beds. The children’s room was awash with clothes. Virginia had always imagined they were neat and tidy, but realized now that it had simply been Nanny, who moved along behind them, picking up and putting away everything that they dropped. She gathered up the clothes, not knowing if they were dirty or clean, took a sock from the top of the chest of drawers, and carefully did not touch a crumpled paper bag with two sticky sweets in the corner.

  There was also a big pigskin folder of photographs. This belonged to Cara, and had been packed by Nanny, with what intention Virginia could only guess. One side of the folder was taken up with a selection of small photographs, many of which had been taken by Cara herself, and arranged with more affection than artistry. The front of the house, rather crooked; the dogs, the farm men on the tractor; an aerial view of Kirkton, and a picture postcard or two. On the other side was an impressive studio portrait of Anthony, a head and shoulders, all lighting and angles, so that his hair looked white blond, and his jaw very square and determined. The photographer’s impression was of a strong man, but Virginia knew the narrowed eyes, and the weak, handsome mouth. And she saw the striped collar of the Turnbull and Asher shirt, the discreetly patterned silk of the Italian tie, and she remembered how clothes had mattered to Anthony; just as his car was important, and the furnishings of his house and his manner of living. Virginia had always imagined that these were subsidiary considerations, and took their shape from the character of the individual. But with Anthony Keile it was the other way round, and he had invariably given the highest priority to the smallest details, as though realizing that they were the props behind his image, and without them his inadequate personality would crumble.