CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Birthday

 

 

YOU FIND RATIONAL reasons for unexplained events. I told myself that a rat had got caught in the cotton. The thread had snagged on some piece of furniture, and the rodent had run, tightening it. What else could it be? I always thought I had a logical mind, despite my mother telling people I had ‘too much imagination’. I never wanted to be the imaginative type. I need rational explanations and I seek practical solutions to problems. It was one of the things that first drew me to architecture.

But the explanation for this – although not the scientific one I sought – was already lodged in my mind like a burning needle:

There is someone living in the other side of the house, in those cramped little rooms full of cheap furniture. Someone who hides when I enter, but who wants to be let out. Someone with a desire, a thirst – for revenge or forgiveness or just to be heard. That’s why the chest of drawers was in place – to keep them in.

After I cleaned my cut index and middle fingers and put on a pair of plasters, I went upstairs for the keys. My plan was to explore the rooms once more. I unlocked the door in the kitchen and went round, keeping close to the entrance.

I failed to find the cotton reel. It had vanished. But a faint tracery of scarlet could be discerned, snaking its way across the floorboards. The chiming clocks reminded me that darkness had settled all around us now, and I suddenly needed to get back to the safety of the brightly lit side.

As she climbed into bed later, Bobbie watched me in puzzlement. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked, sounding very grown-up.

‘Of course,’ I told her. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I followed her eyes to my hand. ‘This – it was nothing, a silly accident. I’m just tired, that’s all.’

She didn’t look as if she believed me, but gave me a kiss and slid down into bed.

‘Does your mother usually read you a bedtime story?’

‘No, I’m too old for that,’ Bobbie said, pulling a face. ‘I prefer to read my own books.’

I saw the Kindle on her bedside table. ‘What have you got on that?’

‘I like short stories. I’ve got Robert Louis Stevenson and Guy de Maupassant.’

‘That sounds a bit adult.’

‘There’s Horrible Histories too. I read a lot when we’re in New York. Mummy’s always working and she doesn’t like me watching TV. She doesn’t let me go out by myself because she says New York is full of crazies.’

‘Well, it’s good that you read a lot, but you need real experiences too,’ I said. ‘We’ll take some trips. You can go wherever you want.’

‘I’d like that.’ With her hair brushed back from her forehead and her chin just over the blue coverlet, she seemed tiny and fragile. I gave her a kiss.

‘Tomorrow we’ll look at a map and see what there is to see. Good night, sweetie.’

‘Good night, Callie. Leave the night light on.’

 

 

WHEN MATEO RETURNED and saw the plasters on my fingers, I lied and told him it had been my fault, an accident while we were making the cards. I explained that we were organising a birthday party, and I made sure that Bobbie backed me up.

‘I wish you’d told me before you decided to make the invitations,’ he said. ‘I won’t be here on Saturday. I have to go to Paris. We have a stock shortage problem with the supermarkets.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘we’ll make it for the day after.’

‘I can’t get back until Monday night.’

‘But we have to hold it over the weekend, Mateo, she’s so excited about it, and it’s the only time her friends can come.’

‘There’s nothing I can do. Right now I’m in danger of losing a big order from Carrefour. I’m the only one in the department who can renegotiate the contract. Why don’t you go ahead with the party, and we’ll have another one when I get back? It’ll be mostly mothers anyway. I’ll give Bobbie a special day out.’

I agreed, but it was hard hiding my disappointment. I broke the news to Bobbie, and as she seemed happy with the idea of having two birthdays, I let it go. I didn’t exactly have a choice.

The Saturday of the party arrived. Rosita and I hung decorations of coloured crepe around the summerhouse until it looked like a giant cake, much to Jerardo’s disgust, and we tied red and white balloons on as many of the overhanging branches as we could reach. I kept the maze off-limits because Jerardo hadn’t got rid of the hornets’ nest yet, and we laid out coffee, iced lemonade and cakes on a trestle table, setting up games on the lawn.

I had removed the two plasters from my fingers. The cuts had not been deep, and had healed invisibly. Bobbie’s friends arrived bearing presents, accompanied by their mothers. It seemed that the husbands of Gaucia were in short supply when it came to children’s parties. Celestia turned up bearing the largest bottle of gin anyone had ever seen. Jordi looked in with a book of poetry wrapped in gold foil. Few of the mothers spoke any English, so they sat smiling indulgently at me as we cut cake and played Blind Man’s Bluff.

I was determined to keep the children occupied. Bobbie and I had written out a timetable of races – egg and spoon, sack, three-legged – funny old games we had culled from an ancient set of English children’s encyclopaedias in the attic, and a host of puzzles and catching games that seemed to delight the children. I imagined my great-grandmother must have once hosted similar parties, and the thought was comforting. One girl called Liana wore an elaborately frilly purple polka-dotted dress complete with a little mantilla, and seemed determined to beat Bobbie in every game. Soon the air of playful competition started to developed a mean edge.

The mothers sat in lawn chairs facing away from the house, looking down to the magnificent garden. They knew Jerardo but were loathe to compliment him for his handiwork; the old stories had left deep scars. Rosita served drinks and spoke only in Spanish, excluding me from the conversation.

We were lining up the children for a balloon-passing game when one mother called out ‘Liana?’ Everyone looked around, but she was nowhere in sight. It seemed we were missing one precocious little girl.

‘Perhaps she’s gone to the loo,’ said Celestia, disrespectfully flicking her cigarillo stub into the flowerbed. ‘Do you want me to go and look?’

‘No, it’s all right, you stay there. Tell her mother to search the garden.’ I went inside and walked to the foot of the stairs, listening. But for the clocks, the house was silent. Everyone else was outside. Rosita was still sitting with the other ladies.

‘Liana?’ I called. There was only ticking. ‘Liana?’ I waited, my head cocked on one side, listening carefully. There was something like the scuff of a shoe, a drag, then a thump.

I opened the door to the drawing room but found it empty. ‘Liana?’ I listened again.

There came a sudden thin, terrible scream of pain from behind the connecting door in the kitchen. I tried the handle but knew it was locked. I ran upstairs to get the keys, and as I passed the staircase window overlooking the lawn I saw Rosita and Liana’s mother heading for the house.

Grabbing the keyring from its hiding place in my sweater drawer, I took the stairs two at a time back down, just as the women entered the reception hall.

‘It’s all right, I’ve got them.’ I held up the keys to Rosita, hoping that she wouldn’t realise I had brought them from upstairs.

‘Please, give them to me,’ said Rosita as we headed for the kitchen.

‘No, I know which one it is.’ I found the key quickly and stood before the door, twisting it in the lock. Liana’s mother was calling to her. The terrified girl was crying steadily now, a thin continuous wail of distress.

As the door creaked open she fell out into our arms. The hem of her frilly dress was torn and there was a vivid red scratch up her leg that had bloodied her white stocking. Some drops of blood had dripped onto her white shoes, too, staining them scarlet. The girl cried to her mother, speaking rapidly in Spanish, and pushed her way outside.

Her mother turned angrily to me. ‘She says she got lost coming back from the toilet, that something grabbed at her and tried to hurt her. She says the other people in the house tried to hurt her.’ She ran on to look after her little darling.

Rosita touched my arm. ‘The doors were locked, weren’t they?’ she asked. ‘Senora Torres, the doors were locked.’

‘Of course they were,’ I cried, confused. ‘She’s lying. She had to have got in some other way.’

Rosita looked me in the eye. ‘Do you want to go out there and tell her mother that little Liana is lying?’

‘No, of course not, but it’s just not possible that she got in through the door. You saw me – I had to unlock it! We should go and see how she is.’

The mothers made a big fuss of the girl, changing her white stockings for a fresh pair. The scratch on her leg was not deep, but it ran raggedly from her ankle to her thigh and looked much nastier than it was, especially to a little girl as vain and imperious as Liana. After it had been bathed we gave her extra cake and lemonade, and soon the child was playing with the others again at the bottom of the garden, but the mood had altered. She was using her ordeal to exercise control over the other children.

‘Don’t worry about it, darling,’ said Celestia, trying to comfort me. ‘The mothers around here have nothing else to do but dote too much on their children. If you ask me, she got lost and snagged those ridiculous clothes of hers on one of your more baroque pieces of furniture.’

‘But I don’t know how she got into the back of the house. We keep the servants’ quarters locked.’

‘Then let’s have a look.’ Celestia rose to her full imposing height and walked around the house, searching for the room’s corresponding window. ‘What’s this?’ she said, waving her cigarillo in the direction of a small grey wooden panel set beneath the window, half-hidden behind the flowering border. I had never noticed it before. Squatting before it, I pushed at the board and found that it swung inwards. ‘A dog-flap,’ I said, surprised.

‘You see, darling, there’s an explanation for everything. She wriggled inside, it was dark, she got caught up on something with a sharp edge and couldn’t find her way back out. Let’s go and repair the damage, otherwise the fair ladies of Gaucia will turn this into a drama they can feed on for months to come. And whatever you do, stop apologising. It makes you too English.’

We rejoined the group, but something had changed now. Liana was still limping in an exaggerated fashion, and dropped out of the games with a dramatic wince of pain, clearly enjoying the experience of having pulled the attention away from the birthday girl to herself. The party broke up soon afterwards.

‘They’ll never come back,’ I said miserably. ‘I know it. They’ll think the house is cursed or something.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Celestia. ‘But they might use it as an excuse if you upset them in the future. That’s the way it works around here. All information is put to work. They have long memories when it comes to storing knowledge they can use. But that can sometimes work in your favour, too. Come on, let’s show them we’re made of stronger stuff. Let’s have a drink.’

After everyone had left, including Celestia, who cadged a lift with the last of the mothers, being too tipsy to drive herself, Rosita and I tidied up the garden in the dying light.

‘Did you explain to them about the dog-flap?’ I asked, stacking up the paper cups.

Rosita’s face was grim. ‘Yes, but they did not believe me.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘They don’t like the house. The Condemaine family – it goes back a long way.’

‘Let me guess. The civil war.’

‘Yes. The last members of the family, and some of the families in the village – well, they took different sides.’

‘Even now, in the twenty-first century – it’s ridiculous that they should remember such things.’

‘Perhaps to you. But for many people in this region it was a matter of life and death. People were lost, many were betrayed. It changed everything.’ It seemed a glass of sherry had loosened Rosita’s tongue. As she rose with an armful of streamers and paper plates she asked, ‘Senora Torres, are you sure the doors were locked?’

‘Of course I’m sure – why?

‘Come, I will show you.’

She led the way back to the window. Setting the party paraphernalia down, she lowered herself onto her knees on the path. ‘Look.’ She reached behind the plants and pushed at the wooden flap, stretching in as far as she could, knocking on something. ‘The last owner had a dog, but when it died Jerardo bricked up the inside to try and stop the rats from getting in. He never got round to removing the flap at the front.’

‘So Liana couldn’t have got into the back of the house this way.’

‘Not, it’s not possible.’

‘But all four of the doors were locked,’ I said. ‘I know because I tested them all before the party started. Somebody must have opened one from the inside.’

‘There was nobody inside,’ said Rosita firmly.

I looked back at the shuttered window just as a cloud dimmed the sun, and a chill traced its path across my neck and shoulders.