3. Samantha at the Park

The next time Samantha awoke it was broad daylight outside, and the dawn song of birds was long over. She felt as if she had slept for weeks. And the realization that she had already spent twelve or thirteen hours, uninvited, in somebody else’s house sent her scurrying into her clothes, to tiptoe along the corridor, sponge bag in hand, in search of the bathroom and a meeting with her hostess.

The bathroom and lavatory were as shabby as the rest of the house. Long streaks of rust decorated the bath and washbasin as if nothing else had ever come out of the taps. Samantha dared not pull the heavy chain dangling from the cistern, for fear of the noise.

Having brushed her hair and cleaned her teeth she descended the stairs with some dignity, in the manner of a visitor arriving for breakfast, a little late, to meet her aunt. As she passed along the landing below, tiptoeing in spite of herself, towards the twin heads of the curving banisters, an extraordinary sound came to her ears.

Inside one of the doors on the landing someone was … moaning? … groaning? … retching? … singing? … dying? No. Somebody was snoring.

The bedroom door was ajar. Open, almost. As Samantha came abreast of it she could see the whole of the room inside.

It was much bigger than any of the rooms upstairs. Long windows overlooked the Park and far away beyond the Park, where the small pink houses of the estate were half hidden behind a belt of trees. In the middle of the Park lay the various puddles of the marsh pools, twinkling in the morning sun.

Vast monuments of bedroom furniture lined the room like tombs of ancestors. Against the wall was pushed an enormous bed, and inside the bed someone lay asleep. Asleep and snoring.

Samantha had seen her Aunt Daisy Clandorris very occasionally in the distance, usually driving a car in the opposite direction. It had been difficult to think of her as a relation – more as a possession, too exclusive to use.

Furtively sliding through the doorway, Samantha stood nearer than she had ever stood before to her mother’s and Aunt Lily’s rich sister who had married Sir Ernest Clandorris, and what had happened to him no one ever knew. He had gone off exploring to South America, people vaguely told her, and nobody had ever heard of him again. Anyway, all the Park and the house and the grounds were Lady Clandorris’s, and she had become so grand and snobbish that she didn’t want to know anybody at Filley Green, least of all her sister Lily.

When the Church Council asked her if they could have the Annual Church Bazaar in the Park she said they couldn’t, and when it was suggested that she should open the grounds on a Sunday in aid of the Nursing Association she said she would think it over, but put it right out of her mind and never mentioned it again.

‘Thinks herself the Grand Lady all right!’ said Filley Green. Lady Clandorris did not even use the village shop, but drove herself ten miles to the nearest town, or did without.

And here she lay on her back in her bedroom, making a noise like a combine harvester, quite unaware that her only niece, her dead sister Gertie’s daughter, was standing and looking at her, halfway in and halfway out of the room.

Samantha stood for some while, looking at her aunt with great curiosity, and wondering how and when to introduce herself.

Since the snoring went on and on, showing no signs of abating or turning into any kind of awareness, she turned away, deciding that what she was most in need of was a cup of tea.

She walked deliberately down the stairs into the hall, thinking about the rat, but this morning the whole house felt quite different, as if some of the joy and beauty of May had seeped in through the cracks of the windows (the door was closed and bolted now) and had spread itself in sheets across the furniture and the faded rugs on the floor.

Arriving in the hall Samantha found her way to the kitchen. There was no electric stove – there was no electricity at all – she saw that at a glance. But under the window, beside a stone sink, stood a paraffin stove with a single wick, and Samantha was not long in discovering a match and setting the wick alight. While the battered tin kettle boiled she explored the kitchen and scullery, opening every door till she knew just where the larder was, and the coalhouse and the pantry, and a dark, damp, flight of stairs that could only lead down to a damp, dark and distant cellar.

Opening cupboards, Samantha found cups and saucers, some very beautiful and foreign, some much more modern and ugly from the outdoor stall in the town market. As she put tea into the teapot from a very old tea caddy, she thought she heard a sound at the cellar door. The kettle was boiling, so she rushed to take it off the stove before looking behind her, and when she did nobody seemed to be there. But instinct made her cross the room to shut the door to the cellar and when she did so she noticed a peculiar impression on the top of the cellar steps. A damp, rather smudgy footprint … a pair of footprints, like the front, or back, paws of a small animal.

Not a very small animal either, nor a big animal. Just an animal.

Or was it an animal? Only two paws – and the paws were sprawled outwards. Could they be webbed? Not that rat again, shuddered Samantha, but the footprints were not in the least like a rat’s paws.

A sudden draught blew the door to. When Samantha opened it again the teapot in her hand slopped splashes of tea on to the footprints, blotting them out. She shut the door firmly and filled her cup. No sound came from upstairs or below.

Samantha drank a second cup of tea with plenty of sugar in it, and climbed the stairs with a tray, very neatly laid. She made no effort to tread quietly, but walked with a firm and confident tread into Lady Clandorris’s bedroom, barely pausing to knock on the door.

‘Good morning, Aunt Daisy!’ said Samantha standing at the bedside, tray in hand. ‘I am your sister Gertie’s girl, Samantha, and my Aunt Lily sent me to live with you. Would you like a cup of tea?’