Page 40 of Happily Ever After
I made myself a sandwich, being careful to avoid anything that looked as though Mrs Compton had had a hand in its manufacture, and wondered how, when she could cook such wonderful meals on Oswald days, she managed to churn out such utter slop the rest of the month. Then I took my sandwich for a walk around the downstairs rooms for no other reason than I didn’t know what to do with myself.
The sun continued to shine, and the rooms continued in their peeling paint and emptiness. The Master strolled along slightly behind me, like a small, round chaperone, cocking his head when I opened each door as though querying why I couldpossiblywant to go into the Morning Room or the Drawing Room when there were no comfortable fires to sit in front of. I tweaked a few cupboards in case Oswald’s diaries had migrated from the library, but found nothing more interesting than about forty thousand back copies of theRadio Timesfrom the 1970s and loads of disused biros. Still eating, I trudged upstairs, with half a mind to get changed and go into the library to see if there was a Netflix account set up on the computer while nobody was around to see me watching it, but I only got as far as the top of the stairs when The Master took off. As though he’d been bitten by something, he leaped into the air and ran full pelt the length of the landing that ran away from my room and across the top of the house towards Lady Tanith’s wing, with a yowl that sounded like pain.
‘Master? Puss?’ I called, walking in the direction he’d gone, but cautiously. I didn’t know this part of the house, which was strictly Lady Tanith’s territory and, as she was terrifying enough in the public rooms, I had never wanted to encounter her one-to-one in her private suite. I had a vague fear that it might be full of bodies, or, even worse, living people kept chained up.
‘Puss? Are you all right?’ I stopped, but everything was quiet. Great. It would just be my luck for the cat to have some kind of fit and drop dead on my watch. A distant yowl set me off again, walking an interminable corridor, where the few windows gave a view over the high, far hills where the bracken was turning to flame and the sky met the land so sharply that it was almost audible. This side of the house looked out towards the moorland rather than the domesticated garden view of the wing that Hugo and I occupied; the panelling was older and covered with the drill holes of woodworm, the curtains more sun bleached and tattered. Lady Tanith was clearly dedicated to keeping everything here exactly as Oswald would have known it, to the extent of not so much as replacing a light bulb.
Another corner, a closer yowl and I was standing surrounded by doors, while the cat writhed on the carpet.
‘Are you all right? What’s the matter?’ I bent down towards The Master. He was trying to hook a paw under the nearest door, alternately pressing his nose to the gap and prodding a clawed foot into the space. ‘Is it a rat? Or a mouse? Oh, please not a rat…’ Hugo was terrified of rats. Not because of their essential rodenty nature, but because he was afraid one would get into his clothing collection and chew holes. It was one reason that he was happy to give The Master the run of the house – the other, of course, being that his mother wanted the cat to have the run of the house, and he was not going to stand up against her any time soon.
‘Is there something in there?’ I asked the cat.
In answer, he lay on his side and poked the paw further in.
I tried the door. It wasn’t locked, to my surprise, and opened onto a small and narrow staircase of the kind that servants used to access the attic rooms without being visible to the household in general. The Master shot up the stairs as though he were being summoned by magic and I, aware of some vague duty of care to the cat, followed him.
The attics were huge. A big, rambling space, split into smaller rooms littered with boxes, broken vases, big hats, old board games, almost anything one could shove up into an attic. Huge beams arched above my head and occasionally demarcated the floor into sections as I padded after the cat, who had vanished except for an occasionally sighted twitch of dark tail and a spooky screeching.
Gosh, the space was big. I looked around, trying to get my bearings. Tiny windows in the eaves gave me glimpses of bits of sky or treetops, none of which was much good for ascertaining my position, and the boarded floor, which was remarkably free from dust, gave no clues either. I had to look for landmarks among the junk as I went, and when I turned left at the same broken hat stand twice, I gave up and resigned myself to being lost.
‘Puss! Master, comeon.’ I hoped the cat knew where he was. Presumably, he’d also know how to get out of here, if I could only find him. ‘Puss?’
A muffled miaow. I rounded another corner and saw a chocolate tail and paws squeezing their way through a narrow gap between two beams. Hoping for a shortcut, or at least, not anestof rats, I followed him.
And stopped.
And stared.
And guessed what the noises in the ceiling had been.
In a secret corner, under a small window, stood a table. On that table, in a rather terrifying parody of a religious setting, there were some candles standing in front of some photographs, which were propped against the wall.
I went closer. One photograph was quite large, a black and white shot of what had evidently been a wedding, although the way the paper had been cut in half told me that the bride had been excised with a pair of scissors, leaving the groom alone and handsome in his morning suit, smiling at the camera. It was Oswald. Younger than his portrait and showing the immaculate bone structure that Hugo had inherited, he stood among similarly besuited guests, none of whom were visible as more than mannequins of elegance.
All the other pictures were of Oswald too: Oswald fishing, Oswald astride a large, bow-fronted horse, Oswald sitting on a fence with a small child. In pride of place, right in the centre of the table and resting on a pile of books which had Oswald’s name printed on the front in gold embossing and various pretentious titles, was a colour photograph of Oswald, looking rather ill-at-ease, standing next to a radiant, and much younger, Lady Tanith.
The footsteps I’d been hearing and putting down to ghosts, or the even more unbelievable concept of Mrs Compton cleaning, must be Lady Tanith’s visits to what I was trying not to think of as an altar to Oswald. Ghosts might have been preferable.
Oh boy. I turned sharply and began to tiptoe my way back, between the beams, down the attic and as far away from the shrine to Oswald Dawe as I could go. At some point in my retreat, The Master caught up with me, a deceased rodent of some variety in his jaws and a contented look on his little furry face, but I was too horrified even to be repulsed.
Lady Tanith was bonkers. Absolutely and totally quacking round the pond. I’d thought she’d limited herself to the enormous painting and some misty memories, but no, she’d gone fullMisery. I’d half expected to find Oswald’s corpse in there, desiccated and withered on the table, covered in flowers.
The cat and I found, by some miracle, the tiny staircase down to the main house and I ran down almost without touching the treads, slamming the door shut behind me, as though the resultant draught could take the memory of what I’d seen from my mind.The pictures. The way she’d cut Caroline out of her own wedding photograph. The candles. The books.
I flew along the landing to my room, hurled myself onto the bed and pulled the pillow over my head.She’d set up a shrine to Oswald in the attic.There wasn’t enough urrrggghh in the world to cover how I felt about that. Lady Tanith must visit it regularly; there were no cobwebs anywhere on the table or pictures, and the noises above my head, although irregular, came pretty often.
From the other side of my room there was the sound of The Master eating his prey, with a disgusting amount of crunching. I groaned and pulled the pillow harder over my ears to try to block it out. To try to block outeverything, the bone-chewing, the thought of that memorial table…
Then something odd happened. Which, given what had gone before, made it very odd indeed.
I began to feel sorry for Lady Tanith.
Oh, not hugely sorry, not yet. But the tiniest corner of pity crept into my heart when I thought of her, up there in the attic, alone at night, with Oswald’s pictures. And I thought how dreadful it was that they had had such a deep involvement that it had impacted her so hard when he died. She’d been cheated of her promised happy ending, left with nothing but the booby prize of Oswald’s son, when she’d been so desperately in love with his father, who had loved her, left her and never come back.
Obviously, she was still an absolute cow, and this kind of hero-worship was only one step from gibbering madness, but, even so. She must have suffered so much, waiting for her beloved to come back, and hearing of his death. No wonder she was desperate to find his diaries. She wanted to relive those happy times, when Oswald had been hers, even if only for short periods. Oswald himself must have suffered too, torn between his duty to his languishing wife and his love for the vibrant, energetic Lady Tanith. No wonder she had become his muse. No wonder he hadn’t known which way to turn.
Ihadto find those diaries. Not for me, well, maybe a little bit for me, so I wouldn’t get thrown out of Templewood with winter coming, but for Lady Tanith’s peace of mind. To reunite her, in however small a way, with Oswald. To let her read through his notes, hopefully some of his wonderful memories of his time with her, then she could publish and show the public – however many of them were interested – that their love had been true and inspirational to his work.
