THIRTY

Blue-black, the heavens pressed at the earth with an angry weight, as though night was too close to a summer sky and breaking through. A storm, anticipated by the warm motionless air. Occasional gaps in the funnelling hedgerow allowed Catherine glimpses of the sky, the fields. Above the pink and yellow flowers and the golden waves of the meadow, the air shimmered in a thick heat.

But the further she walked from the Red House the more her senses and her head, and so much more, began to clear. The bone-deep weariness and pallor that overwhelmed her in Mason’s workshop dissipated. She tugged the fragrant air into her lungs, and after running from the house without looking for the kitchen she longed for a bottle of water.

Her red Mini was like the sight of a familiar face after days amongst hostile strangers. Through the car windows the sight of her AA map, sunglasses, chewing gum in the coin holder, even the steering lock, hit her with a sudden awareness of modernity. An impulse to clamber into the car, drive away and return to a world that made sense, was wrestled down with reluctance.

She caught a whiff of the terrible chemical stink that hid traces of decay. It was in her hair, or on her skin, or caught within her clothing. Even outdoors she reeked of the Red House and its artful mutilations. She panicked at the idea of being tainted.

She desperately wanted a breeze to air her clothes of the stink. But the air did not move at all here, it never did during her visits. Was always still and heavy, weighted by expectation, or exhausted and snatching a reprieve after some mighty exertion that was soon to resume.

The more she looked at the great indigo sky and the waist-high meadow grasses, the more she felt too visible, but also insignificant, alien even, and defenceless, tense. Being physically free of the house only made her think of being inside it. Where she was manipulated. Prepared. Introduced to terrible things that weren’t right. Unnatural things that had no place or context beyond that huddle of spiny roofs and between those murder-red walls.

The horrid old women were trying to asphyxiate her with terror and nauseate her with disgust. She’d begun to hate them. Yes, they were horrifying her. Deliberately. All of what she had experienced had been staged. She was sure of it. They were hamming it up, even Edith was wearing costumes. Tricksters. How could they be bothered at their age? She’d thought as much while being sick into the horrid tin bath, with the plump bodies of flies crawling around the window. She was being tormented, unwound and rewound back to times and feelings she’d long tried to forget. But why? It felt horribly personal, and prescribed, if not inevitable. Either the world was unpleasant or she evoked its harms. She was never sure.

Or perhaps her hosts had lost the ability to behave in any other way, while her paranoia and anxiety had been kick-started by it. It was hard to tell. Here, the mad led the mad.

Edith had not wanted her to go outside for a walk. Had asked that she would remain inside and ‘accompany’ her to the stifling drawing room, to sit amidst the clutter of dead animals and their antics amongst the busy ornaments. Edith wanted her sealed inside like another doll added to her collection. ‘But we must do the fitting, dear. There is no time for strolls.’ The fitting. What was that? She hadn’t paused to ask.

‘And the pageant is nearly upon us. You must be correctly outfitted. It comes but once a year.’

In her haste to get into fresh air she’d also lacked the presence of mind to ask about this pageant. The will of Edith and the will of the house were terrible, tangible. A constriction against her thoughts. She’d been rejected by the present, was confined by the past. Totally enclosed. Her journey had taken a detour she had no control over. She felt as if she was being pulled back rapidly towards something she could not define, and wanted to see coming before she was lost.

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

Catherine stopped and held her head until her thoughts slowed down. She was too sensitive to such things. To everything.

She was paranoid. She had to remember that. She needed to reactivate the ritual of cognitive behavioural therapy exercises. To identify the seeds that grew to these elaborate conspiracies that she wove around her mind until she couldn’t move or function. Mike’s betrayal had paralysed her. He’d even brought her trances out of remission. That was the root of this.

But for God’s sake, don’t let your job contribute too. If you lose that you’ve got nothing.

Her bag and laptop were still inside the house, and she’d left her camera in the workshop too. The exhibits, the furniture, the grand interior, the catalogue, press release, the unsigned contract, the news story, the immediate elevation of her firm’s profile, Leonard, who had done so much for her, who had been so kind . . . all of these things twisted. They built into something like heartburn.

It was not possible to leave yet. She’d run from the unpleasant for so long she might never stop if she ran now. And where could she go if she left today? Back to her flat, and to work in house-clearances containing a few silver items, incomplete dinner sets, the occasional oil painting of a racehorse? After being exposed to the treasures of the Red House, it would be hard to get excited about a Napoleonic sword ever again.

An old house with a strange history, and occupants who were unstable refugees from another time. Elegant rags on half-forgotten bones. Little could prepare a person for them. But she should have been prepared. She had seen the mouse-infested warrens of two separate shut-in millionaires, one in Ludlow and one in Monmouth, who had not just died, but become desiccated upon the beds on which they expired, in rooms with sealed windows. Spaces so cluttered with rubbish they’d probably not been refreshed by natural light for decades.

And she was familiar with the apocryphal tales of her trade, the Turners, Constables and Bacons found in the attics of the deceased. Weirdness went with the territory. And this was her find, her moment. An opportunity. Not a trial she could run away from like London and university and school and her hometown, and everyone that she ever encountered in any of those places.

She needed to settle down. Survive today, maybe another day after that. But she would definitely drive home this evening, before they made another dreadful attempt at formal dining. She would go back and apologize for throwing up in M. H. Mason’s ethanol bath, and then return tomorrow morning with Leonard at her side, and actually begin the inventory. What she was here for, not a fitting or a pageant. And Edith would be made to understand that. Leonard would have to be firm with her. And she would return for as many other mornings as it took to complete the inventory and evaluation, but only with her boss.

In the village she would buy water. There had to be a shop. And she’d have a nice lunch with a glass of white wine in a pub to settle her nerves. A sit down, respite from the tension, the creeping about in the awful silence broken by what she could not see at night, and the stink of chemical formulas and death.

The village wasn’t far along the lane. Barely more than two miles. She’d walk in the fresh air. That would revive her.