23

‘ARE YOU SURE, Ajuba?’

It was Christmas Day and Mrs Derby was driving me back to Graylings. I had expressed the desire to spend the night with the Venuses as Mrs Derby, turning left through the open gates, drove past the Gatehouse. Now I nodded. Having Peter back made all the difference, I’d decided. I would feel safe with him under the same roof.

‘Well, if you’re sure, it’s OK by me,’ Mrs Derby replied.

I was excited. On my lap was a small duffel bag stuffed with pyjamas and a change of clothes. My presents were already under the tree: a scarf I had knitted for Peter, a basket woven for Isobel, a collection of horror stories for Polly, and for Theo a red woollen hat I had spent hours over: retrieving dropped stitches, and then dropping them all over again. Scarves, I had decided, were much easier to knit than hats.

The Derbys’ Rover came to a shuddering halt and Sarah Derby got out.

‘You don’t have to come in, Mrs Derby,’ I said, wanting to get rid of her so that Christmas with the Venuses could begin in typical high spirits. I wanted to dance to that Van Morrison song again, yelling out all the sha-la-la’s in the chorus. I wouldn’t feel comfortable dancing with Mrs Derby around.

It was no bother coming in with me, she replied. She wanted to thank the Venuses for their hospitality the night before. They had donated generously to the WWF, and generosity of spirit was not a trait Sarah Derby treated lightly. She believed a special thank you was in order, as well as the season’s greetings.

She followed me to the front door and I rang the doorbell. Usually I went straight inside, announcing my arrival with a shout before running up to Polly’s bedroom. That Christmas morning, because Mrs Derby was with me, I stared patiently at the circle of holly on the door waiting for it to draw back as Polly or Peter, whoever came first to lift the heavy latch, welcomed me inside.

It was a Christmas Day of unusual brightness, a surprisingly mild morning after a frosty night, and for once my hands weren’t encased in gloves. I slipped my fingers into my pockets, sticking them through the holes in the lining of my coat. Thankful that the chilblains on my toes were no longer itching, I stood on one foot, scraping a tickle at the back of my leg with the other. The winter sun bouncing off the windows of the house gave it a look of cleanliness that whetted my enthusiasm. Inside was the tall Christmas tree I had decorated with Polly and beneath it were the presents we had fingered longingly, day after day. I looked up at Mrs Derby, and, taking her nod for assent, turned the front-door handle.

As always the house was warm. Isobel hated the cold. Dumping my bag on the floor, I walked to the Christmas tree. The presents were still unopened as Polly had said they would be when I arrived. We were going to open them after brunch, Peter handing them out to us, one after the other.

Smiling at the eagerness on my face as my eyes wandered over the gifts, Sarah Derby asked: ‘Are some of those for you? Good for you, Ajuba!’ she chuckled, acknowledging my nod. ‘Where is everybody?’

The house was very quiet but I wasn’t perturbed. ‘Upstairs,’ I replied, knowing that the Venuses were late risers. ‘They never go to church. I’ll go and tell them you’re here.’

I ran up the stairs, calling Polly. No one replied. Undeterred, I ran into her bedroom.

She was stretched out on the bed, hiding beneath her dressing-gown, her face covered with a pillow.

‘Merry Christmas, lazybones. Polly?’

When she didn’t reply, I assumed she was playing True Murder. ‘Oh, you’re supposed to be dead, are you? Well, you can’t fool me.’

I leapt on the bed, pulling the pillow from Polly’s face. Then I screamed. I screamed, and in that instant my world stopped, as I tumbled into a gaping abyss that gulped me down.

‘Wake up!’ I cried, hitting her. ‘Polly wake up!’

She didn’t wake up. She was rigid and cold, lost in some distant arctic tundra. Her hands, half-clenched, were motionless, her feet frozen; her hair, its riot of curls spilling on linen, seemed as incongruous as blossoms of laburnum on snow. It was the first colour I registered: her hair, then her dressing-gown, scarlet and gold. And above us, leering in a parody of evil, the Bela Lugosi poster Theo had brought from Paris, which at the time had made us laugh uproariously.

The echo of our laughter receded. The scene, bruising the retinas of my eyes, revealed everything in an instant. On the floor between our beds, a pile of True Murder, a Walkman on top. On the chest of drawers, a glass, dregs of milk at the bottom; beside it Polly’s Mickey Mouse alarm clock and, discarded on my bed, the clothes she had worn the day before, a symphony of pink angora and corduroy. Staring down at her body, the zebras of the savannah in her favourite picture had stopped grazing. Alert to danger, scanning the horizon, they were moving, whinnying, as vultures circled the darkening sky, glided and swooped down. It was then that it started. The zebras stampeded, their hooves flinging dust in my face, filling the room with the scream of birds and a rushing, thunderous wind as the past and the present folded together and the floorboards of the rose room – the room I had slept in so often – split asunder. I didn’t want to see, but I had no choice, for the house, searing its memory of past events into my mind, demanded a witness.

‘No!’ I screamed. ‘Not again, not again.’ I didn’t want to feel such murderous rage again. I pleaded, but the house, disregarding my protests, dragged me to a place where I saw Isobel, sodden with alcohol, disembodied, a receptacle empty of everything but pain.

What had Peter done to her? What had he done to her?

I watch petrified as, suspended in time, drained of reason, Isobel opens a bathroom cabinet. Emptying a bottle of painkillers, she clenches them in her fist, pouring a glass of water. Carrying the load into her bedroom, she relinquishes the tablets, lying down on the bed.

‘No, Isobel,’ I beg her. ‘Please don’t. Stay with me. I’ll look after you, I promise. I’ll look after you and make you happy again.’

For a moment, I think that Isobel can see me. She pauses, looking straight at me as the house, pregnant with emotions that have lain dormant for years, clamours to speak to us. The house, swaying, grows dim as at gloaming, when dusk deepens into night and time trembles. I cling to Isobel’s hand, terrified of what is to come, while the past, cradling the house in a sigh, relives its story.

Where is Peter? Where has he gone? If he were here, he could prevent this happening. I try to call his name out loud but my voice has gone.

The house is slowly opening up. A shape emerges by the dressing-table mirror. I begin to make out a face that resembles mine: the face Isobel drew that summer. It is dark as molasses dripping over a Benin bronze. It inches closer to Isobel.

‘Mama? Is that you, Mama?’

If it is my mother, she doesn’t hear me. She is talking to Isobel, saying: ‘Your daughter, think of your daughter.’ And Isobel, overwhelmed by a void Peter has breached within her, stumbles into the rose room.

I run after her, begging her to stop, clutching at her clothes to halt her progress. But I can’t stop her. There is no substance here to cling to, no logic to twist to turn events around. My will is as nothing to what is unfolding before my eyes.

I see a rose washbasin in the room I am standing in – Polly’s room. Miss Edith’s room. Olivia Fielding is pouring hot water into the basin and washing her hands. I hear Miss Edith’s screams, and I see the first of them, a boy, born dead, in Miss Fielding’s arms. A moment later there is the lusty wail of the second. A girl, Miss Fielding says, carrying her to the washbasin. Then the crying stops. Life is snuffed out as easily as drowning a farmyard kitten.

And then I am with Isobel again in the same room, flames cowling her face as she glares at her sleeping child. She is standing by Polly’s bed as she did that night in the summer. Beside her is Miss Fielding, a Spanish shawl flung over a shoulder.

The house is confiding its secrets, revealing itself one last time as it urges Isobel on. The woman standing sentinel nods and, picking up a pillow from my bed, Isobel falls on Polly.

The pillow stifles her breathing, silences her screams. Though Polly struggles and kicks, with Isobel’s arms embracing her, death is delivered as a final gift to my friend. Polly will never feel the pain of a woman discarded, contemptible even to herself.

The struggle over, Isobel covers her with the dressing-gown. In the tussle it has fallen to the floor.

She returns to her room and downs the pills. Then she remembers. Opening the drawer of her bedside table, she pulls out a string of pearls. Isobel kisses the cold stones, trailing them between her fingers: a gift from a father to his daughter.

Far better never to have been born than to witness horror such as this.

‘No!’ I screamed. ‘Wake up, Polly! Wake up!’

I had woken my mother in Lewisham, so I could do it again. I would give Polly my life; my breath.

I heard someone rushing up the stairs and suddenly felt myself being pulled away. I had been hitting her body, shaking her in a futile attempt to revive her.

‘Oh my God!’

‘She’s playing, Mrs Derby,’ I cried, unable to accept what my eyes had seen. ‘She’s playing True Murder. Tell her to stop, Mrs Derby. Polly, wake up. Wake up!’ I shrieked.

Mrs Derby dragged me yelling and kicking from the room. As she shut the door, and leaned against it, I heard a high-pitched wail that came again and again. It was the cry of a trapped animal yelping in terror, a creature in acute distress.

Mrs Derby held me tightly. And when I realised that the screams were coming from me, I felt Mrs Derby’s tears on my cheek. She was crying too. ‘Ajuba . . . I’m so sorry, Ajuba,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Suddenly the noise stopped and I was still. I was carried downstairs, and when I started shaking, Mrs Derby wrapped me in a blanket.

I can’t remember what happened next. My memory is clouded with patches of darkness, suggesting that I lost consciousness. What I do remember is that over the next few days I wouldn’t allow Mrs Derby out of my sight; and that on Christmas Day itself, I had held onto her hand, a capsized child clinging to the wreckage of my childhood.

I was clutching Mrs Derby when she called the police. Later on, emerging from a spell of darkness, I recognised the muffled sound of adults discussing disaster. They were whispering; murmuring. I expect they had found Isobel’s body. People were walking up and down the staircase, talking in hushed tones. Then a man’s voice said rather loudly, ‘Poor little bugger,’ and taking my arm, Archie Whittaker the school doctor, stuck a needle in it. There was dandruff around the collar of his jacket; I remember thinking that it looked like a sprinkling of dirty snow.