House of Small Shadows (10 page)

No one ever asked what she saw when she was ‘out of it’. What she looked like seemed to be the most important thing to other people.

She could not slip away on command, though as a girl had wanted to. After a bad day at school, if she’d had a choice, she would have eagerly returned to wherever she went in a trance. In
trances she experienced a joy so intense it made her nose bleed and left her body drained.

The trances occurred when she was tired, and it was like going to sleep with her eyes open. Sometimes it occurred when in deep thought, but only when relaxed. It was the most at peace
she’d ever felt, being transported deep inside herself and far away from the world.

By her late teens the episodes almost never occurred. Then she was caught up in the ways of the world, and there was little sanctuary there. Anxiety, tension, despair aplenty, but little calm.
She was partly relieved the trances had either gone into remission, or that she had grown out of them. It was difficult enough to fit in wherever she found herself, without passing out and
dribbling through a gaping mouth. But part of her had come to secretly miss the condition too. It was the last thing that connected her to Alice. In the perpetual white noise of London anxiety, the
episodes never came to save her. Only being drunk enough to stop caring about anything had helped her there.

But now they had come back.

Catherine wiped the blood off her top lip with the back of her hand. The nausea soon vanished with the dizziness. Memory had briefly dulled the jabs of pain in her stomach that Mike had left
behind. Mike must have caused the relapse, so close to the place where it all began.

On Thursday someone delivered a letter to her flat by hand. They had gone by the time she scraped the latch off the front door and peered into the street she had not walked
upon since the previous Friday night. It was addressed to her, care of the Osberne office. Leonard must have sent it on to her.

The heavy linen envelope was sealed with red wax like a court summons from the nineteenth century.

Feeling leaden and sore, as if she’d pulled every muscle in her abdomen while crying intermittently for a week, she opened the envelope on the breakfast bar.

The letter was from Edith Mason. Written untidily by hand on antique stationery, it was more of a curt request than an invitation to begin the valuation of the contents of the Red House the
following day, Friday.

She’d only been away from the Red House for one week and her life had fallen apart. But she doubted even M. H. Mason and his rats could stitch it back together again.

Leonard sat beside her and held her hands. His touch was light, the palms of his hands dry. She didn’t know hands could be so dry. Maybe it was age. When she finally
stopped crying and looked up, she noticed her boss’s small grey eyes were moist.

‘This scoundrel. This, this . . . bastard. I’d like to give him a piece of my mind. And more.’

The notion of the thin old man in the wheelchair enacting some kind of chivalrous revenge on her behalf was ludicrous. Sniffing, she began to giggle, but laughing made her feel as if she were
also being unkind. ‘Look at me. What a mess. And bothering you with this. I’m sorry, Len.’ Outside the office, it was going dark. She’d only gone to work in the late
afternoon to explain to Leonard the real reason why she had been missing for a week.

‘Nonsense. Nothing to apologize for. I’m flattered, and very glad that you have confided in me. Though I don’t understand it. Is he blind? A congenital idiot? I mean, to let
you go? He’s a first-rate fool and I’d like to see him get his comeuppance. It would give me a great deal of pleasure to have a hand in it! Where does he live, Worcester you
say?’

‘Please, Leonard. Don’t even think it. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’re even willing to listen. I’m being pathetic. But please don’t get
involved.’

‘You are not pathetic. And we cannot account for the idiocy of others. My God, he’s looking a gift horse in the mouth. The way he has gone about this. It’s appalling. And not a
word since to ask after you?’

As she recounted the whole sorry tale from the previous week, Leonard had not said a word, just winced and sucked in his breath. But she could tell he was genuinely upset, as if his own daughter
had been jilted in a horrible fashion.

‘He doesn’t know what he wants. Thinks he does. Or did. He’s so directionless, listless, but then so angry. Like he’s still a teenager. But I couldn’t help being in
love with him.’

‘Then you’re better off out of it. And it sounds to me like you can count on his downfall, if it’ll make you feel any better. And so will she, I’m sure, whoever this
hussy is. Rest assured, my dear, justice has a peculiar way of making unexpected appearances. Any ideas who it might be?’

‘No idea.’

‘Best not to know. It won’t do you any good. And she’ll never be your equal. He’ll realize it too late. This is on him, not you.’

Catherine nodded. ‘I seem to bring it out in people—’ She stopped. Hearing her own paranoia out loud made her feel pitiful, even ashamed. ‘I don’t know why I am
ever surprised.’

‘Now stop that. You are a beautiful and gifted young woman. Special. Unique. I don’t deal in anything else, my girl, and wouldn’t with a partner in this firm. Not everyone can
see how exceptional you are. But there are plenty who can.’

Catherine looked at Leonard. His eyes had clouded and he looked past her, into the distance. ‘We’ve both seen enough of it. Exclusion. Mockery. Hurtful things. I know. I know.’
Leonard cleared his throat.

Now Catherine felt selfish and foolish, and even more childish, if that were possible. Here was a man in a wheelchair, disabled for all of a life he’d turned into a success. But nothing
would have been easy for him. Perhaps that is why he still traded on the fringes, amongst the misfits and outcasts, where he’d also been manoeuvred. And had he ever known love?

‘The only defence,’ he no more than whispered, ‘is finding others. Like minds. And belonging.’ He turned to her and smiled. ‘Like us, kitten. Like it or not
you’re stuck with me. We’re cut from the same cloth.’

‘A pair of nutters.’

‘That’s one word for it. Now, let’s get that dinner I owe you.’

‘You don’t. My treat. It’s the least I can do for putting you through this.’

‘Nonsense. And maybe we should postpone your trip to the Red House. I’m not sure Edith is a fitting antidote to what you’ve just been put through.’

‘No. I want this. For us. For the business. It’s too good. I won’t let
him
wreck it.’

‘You look pale, dear. And long in the face. Anything the matter?’ Edith said as Catherine wheeled her through the utility corridor. For today’s visit, Edith
wore a tweed skirt and jacket, trimmed with leather, that looked to have been designed for outdoors as well as having the canny ability to pass as contemporary, and of quality. But so wizened was
the elderly woman the clothes might have been handed out by a charity in the Blitz. Her skeletal hands were concealed again, this time inside a fur muff.

‘No. I’d rather not—’

‘Because you left here quite elated with what you discovered under our roof. You wished to return and I granted your wish. We have enough of our own troubles here without you bringing more
to us.’

What could she say to that? What could be said to anyone so determined and self-involved? She’d never felt more insubstantial in her life. She was merely to be picked up and dropped,
invited and then insulted. She was bobbing flotsam and it was dangerous to consider herself anything else.

Merely crossing the threshold of her flat that morning had required a mighty exertion. And she now wondered if she had come here as an attempt to start rebuilding herself and to show Mike what
he had lost, or whether she had nowhere else to go and she could do nothing but follow instructions and mimic her former self.

Why not just sit still upon a mantel in peaceful repose like a preserved rat?

Catherine stopped her thoughts because they were giving her
that
expression in a white face already aching with misery. She intuited that it would not be beneficial to let Edith see her
face like that. At least she’d remembered not to wear make-up.

‘Stop here.’ Edith turned inside the wheelchair and looked up at the wall of the hall. ‘That was taken in the garden.’

Squinting in the faint rouged light, reaching up and onto her toes, Catherine followed Edith’s gaze to a dim brownish photograph of a woman in a long dress. ‘Family, Miss Howard.
Family are everything. Why go into the world and try and prove otherwise? I bet you wish you hadn’t.’

‘Pardon?’

‘My mother, Violet Mason. A genius in her own right. You know why? I will tell you. She had the foresight to sublimate her own talent to assist her brother’s vision. She was the
background and foreground painter of his tableaux, dear. She was also his seamstress, costumer and set builder. For the entire duration of his vocation. There is no shame in serving something
greater than you ever will be yourself.’

Even in the dimness and against the dark panels of the wall, Violet Mason was an unappealing sight. A thin, severe face that looked to have never smiled, glared from behind a patterned veil and
from underneath the wide brim of a Watteau hat. The full crown was piled high with black roses, and the hat’s size and the cottage-loaf hairstyle both dwarfed and accentuated the narrow face
grimacing below. The thin mouth and small eyes suggested a suppressed rage that was unnerving to look at, even in the thinnest light. A high-necked blouse, reinforced by bone, functioned like a
pedestal to mount the horrible head, to support it. In the background of the picture, dark foliage blurred into sepia and shadow as if the very world was fading and disintegrating around the
formidable woman.

‘I can see the family resemblance, Ms Mason.’

‘And here. You can see her with my uncle.’

Catherine pushed the wheelchair forward. The misted effect used in the picture’s development, and the dour tones of what was a staged formal portrait, did not detract from the catastrophic
head injury the man must have suffered at the front. The silhouette of the side of Mason’s face, partially turned away from the camera, was uneven. A fraction of the forehead was missing. No
wonder he’d shunned the world. The other half of his face was perfect, proud, handsome, generously moustached, but sad.

Beside the vast wooden chair he sat upon, that looked to have been carved decoratively on the high back and along one visible arm, his sister stood beside him. From behind a spotted net, that
was triangular from the wide brim of the elaborate hat to her pointed chin, her black eyes were stern with either disapproval or malice. Catherine was tempted to believe the veil was a form of
protection for the viewer, and she had never seen such a tiny waist, probably pinched by an S-bend corset. Folds of white satin formed the corsage of her blouse, ending at her belted waist. A long
skirt, and the lower embroidered corsage, fell to a tiny foot inside a pointed boot. Curiously, the Masons both wore white kid-skin gloves.

The painted background behind the two figures broiled like storm clouds and suggested a seething absence of solid matter. She’d never seen anything like that in a photograph from the same
period, which must have been the 1920s or even 1930s, though here were the stylings of the late Victorian era. Typically, the family portraits she had seen from that time were set before painted
depictions of English gardens or Italian vistas. But this background had been chosen for a reason she didn’t understand, and one she found herself unwilling to dwell upon. But she did notice
that the backdrop also featured what looked like tiny bright stars. Or maybe they were blemishes in the photographic paper.

Before passing into the unlit passageway of the ground floor that led to the rooms displaying Mason’s dioramas, they passed a selection of other photographs that Edith did not draw
Catherine’s attention to. But she looked up at them as they passed by and she caught glimpses of two tall figures dressed in black against lighter backgrounds, but surrounded by a group of
what she thought were children.

‘Stop here!’ Edith commanded from her chair in the barely lit passage. ‘This one, I think. This is the right one, yes, I’m quite sure. Now, if you would be so kind . . .
The door is unlocked.’

The thin teacup rattled against the saucer Catherine had perched upon her lap. From her chair in the drawing room, Edith watched Catherine’s nervous fingers with either
pride or pleasure.

‘What is the point of art, Miss Howard, if it does not move us?’ Edith said with a sly smile.

As before, Horatio the dog stared at Catherine with a wet sympathetic eye. The other animals of the silent, stuffed menagerie waited patiently upon their perches for her response to what she had
just seen.

‘It’s . . . extraordinary.’

Edith nodded her head slowly. ‘The very word.’

And it certainly was a word for accurately describing what she had just seen in two of the ground-floor rooms set aside to display M. H. Mason’s early works. Catherine believed she’d
just seen at least one thousand dead rats, imbued with human characteristics and apparel down to the minute detail of their uniforms and facial expressions and postures. One diorama depicted
nothing as living. No-man’s-land, strewn with shell craters, demolished trenches, blackened tree stumps and rats. Dead rats. Rats that had looked so similar to small lifeless men in filthy
khaki, she had been forced to lean over the glass display case to make sure they were, in fact, rats. They had no tails. Some of them were only bones inside hairless grey skin.

The second piece had affected her so much she even thought, for a moment, that she could hear the crackle of rifle retorts, the far-off thunder of artillery and the muffled thumps of exploding
ordnance in wet mud. That case had featured a long weary line of men –
no, they were rats –
walking abreast of each other from a trench and into a pitted horizon wreathed in
white smoke. It was called ‘Ten Men Standing at Reveille’. Edith commented only once, to say her uncle had watched three hundred men reduced to ten left standing, in less than six
minutes, at the Battle of Bapaume.