FORTY-THREE

When Catherine awoke with a gasp, she was still propped up in the middle of the bed, inside Edith’s room, with a row of plump cushions supporting her back.

The back of her eyes felt bruised and she was nauseous. All of the muscles in her legs ached, her feet were terribly sore. She was ill, exhausted, fatigued by going in and out of shock, still drugged, but she had only passed out from sheer exhaustion. And for no more than a few seconds before some inner alarm jolted her awake.

About the room, the lights still burned and the house remained perfumed with the sweet scent of roses. Though the room had taken on a new aspect. All of its dimensions and accoutrements were as she remembered before she nodded off, but the air had changed. Had become delicate.

The alteration might have been imperceptible were her situation not so desperate, but she identified a lessening of the density and pressure of the room’s atmosphere. It was also no longer warm and airless. The space she occupied felt softer and flimsier, cooler. Perhaps it was her imagination, and despite her physical discomforts, she no longer felt so heavy, but was marginally more buoyant, or even insubstantial, upon the bedding.

Catherine climbed off the bed and approached the door. She glanced up at the dolls and refused to engage with a sense that they appeared happier. Beneath the bottom of the door a hint of white light had appeared on the floorboards.

Making as little noise as possible she turned the key in the well-crafted lock. The key turned and issued the merest click. Catherine inched the door open. And blinked in sunlight.

On the landing, and at the end of the corridor, the curtains and shutters had been opened and the corridor was flooded with strong unseasonal sunlight. Down below, she received an impression that the heavy front doors had been cast aside as she slept, and that each and every arched window on the ground floor had been thrown wide to welcome the light, as well as the crisp warm air and its scents: a bouquet of freshly cut grass and crowded flower beds sweet with pollen.

From above, the scarlet glower of the stained glass had been replaced by a pinkish hue that tinted the air in a way she thought enchanting. She couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few seconds, of that she was almost certain, but somehow she had woken in daylight.

The great perfumed house seemed joyous at her waking, keen to show itself as a place of luxury and discernment, as she had once hoped it would be; a peaceful magnificence that guarded the beauty and craftsmanship of an age she had studied and admired her whole adult life. It was no longer a place of small shadows and a murderer’s light. The stench of death had left its rooms. It was making a new declaration of intent: This is a house you would not wish to leave, and you could only dream of a return to a house on the borderland of wonders.

She visualized the dusty lane that she must run down to get away. Restraining her desire to rush madly for the front doors, she descended the stairs slowly, her eyes everywhere, especially up the stairwell to spot small faces that might peer down. There were none. Then her scrutiny turned to the ground floor where a lumpen figure, with a thatch of white hair, might be ready to welcome her with a fleshing tool, or worse. But Maude was nowhere to be seen either.

Catherine paused in the hall as her nerves cried for her to delay no longer, and to rush at the front doors before they were closed and locked upon her as they had been the night before.

The light outside the Red House was near blinding. Here was the first sunlit and cloudless day of summer, but one that burned stronger than any she had known.

The arched doorframe resembled a planetary eclipse, as if some great star moved through the firmament. The light that entered the building infused her, began to open a receptivity to a sense of beauty and hope she had received but glimmers of before. It was irresistible. Childlike excitement fizzed awake and tingled in every cell of her body. A broad comprehension of something significant that remained indefinable, tried to spread through her with the warmth and light. True meaning was within her grasp and an anticipation of the revelation shortened her breath. A sense of something her conscious mind resisted by trying to confront and understand.

When she looked into the light her mind had never been so clear, so awake, so vital. Every sense and nerve ending stretched to its euphoric pinnacle.

She shielded her eyes as she took a few steps closer to the entrance. Through the glare she could see a cultivated front garden, and beyond the garden wall a great ocean of meadowland stretching to the shore of distant, pleasingly rounded hills that shimmered in a nourishing heat.

You could walk forever in that direction, but you would return here.

She paused on the threshold. This world outside was lit by a great white sun, one that complemented the vista as if her own eyes were covered with a camera’s soft filters. It was like she was in the same building as yesterday, but somewhere else too. If she were to walk down the lane she would arrive at the village and the church. Any further in that direction and all would be unrecognizable. She sensed this, but didn’t know how.

She turned and looked behind her. Beyond the hall and at the far end of the utility corridor, the distant back door of the Red House was now open. The doorway was a rectangle that issued an even more intense light into the building. Light that flooded the previously unlit passage.

The dazzling rear doorway briefly flickered as someone moved across it. From the aperture she heard the distant clink of cutlery upon china. Above the fragrance of the flowers wafted the aroma of warm cakes and fresh bread. She smelled hot sweet tea and the refreshing zest of chilled summer wines. Her mouth watered. She drank deep of the breeze that refreshed her face like a plunge into transparent seawater on a stifling day.

Her face was wet with tears.

She crossed the hall and walked towards the back door. Out there were her answers. The lump in her throat was the most tangible and solid part of her weightless body and its effortless drift towards that square of light.

She covered the distance quickly, between rose-tinted walls. Proud doors were shut on wonders that would surely overwhelm her if she entered any room. She approached the light of the garden without fear and near burst through the portal that beckoned her with such urgency.

So verdant was the garden, the sun’s reflection on the lawn made her shield her eyes. She’d never seen land so fertile. Intensely green foliage and grass, sprayed with orange, buttercup and purple flowers rendered her breathless at the beauty she surveyed.

Behind the glinting panes of the greenhouse came the suggestions of great waxy tropical plants. The garden furniture was as white as a cricket pavilion in a dream. The wood of the theatre gleamed between velvet wings and below a watercolour backdrop Monet might have painted. Beyond the trees that bordered the garden’s far boundary she caught glimpses of a vast English meadow that shimmered in the heat.

The bee-keeper raised his gloved hand and waved from behind a trellis, from which roses both entwined and burst red, white and pink. Behind the mesh of his hood she could see no face, she was too far away. But the gentle grandfatherly ease with which he moved amongst the indistinct hives faded her memory of the unpleasant thing she had so recently seen in the same outfit.

Seated at the wrought-iron table, its paint so brilliant a white it made her squint, the two women, dressed from throat to foot in black gowns, sat within the shade of a tree. Veils had been unfurled from wide-brimmed hats, and obscured the blanched faces they had turned towards her. Their pale hands matched the china of their raised teacups. A third chair was drawn back from the table.

There was no surprise or tension in the posture of the three people in the garden. They were casually waiting for her to join them.

Catherine turned to face the presence she sensed behind her, deep within the Red House. And started at the sight of the three figures stood where the utility corridor met the hall.

There was no mistaking the thick limbs and stocky torso of Maude. Even from a distance, the mannish face beneath the thick hair, cut so crudely and unstyled, expressed such a longstanding dissatisfaction with a housekeeper’s lot that her patient resignation seemed to have passed into weariness. How was that possible on such a day as this?

Catherine’s interest moved to the housekeeper’s two small companions. They stood on either side of Maude and each of the children had one hand enclosed within the housekeeper’s thick fingers.

The disabled boy with the wooden face and thick black wig was dressed in the same dated suit he had worn the last time Catherine had seen him so vividly, when she was a child, and his thin legs were still encased by a scaffold of calliper. He raised his free hand into the air, as he had done when Catherine was only a child who peered through a wire fence at the derelict and vandalized school for special children. The little raised hand and its fingers were either closed, moulded or carven. The face on the tiny wooden head that confronted her across the distance between them was painted on. It smiled sadly under the encroach of the unruly hair.

On the other side of Maude, light glinted off the thick lenses in the plastic frames of the little girl’s glasses. One eye looked unusual at a distance, and Catherine guessed the eye socket was filled with gauze and the lens of her glasses was still covered in sticking plaster, as it had been when Alice was six, the last time Catherine had seen her childhood friend. The only other feature that struck her, and with a suddenness that made her scalp chill, was Alice’s teeth. And she hoped their exposure formed part of a friendly smile.