Page 7 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘There’s another house next to that, big valley garden. Glendurgan.’

‘They’ve a full staff. So does Trelissick.’

‘I’ll write to Kew, they know us. And some of the colleges at Oxford would take people, I imagine.’

He nodded and made an abrupt study of the floor, and I regretted having mentioned Oxford. He had gone to Christ Church College to read classics for three years in a beautiful set of rooms that overlooked the grounds and the almost-tame deer herds there. I’d gone to a naval academy in Bristol.

‘This parsonage,’ I said. ‘Spare room?’

‘I don’t know, I hardly made specific enquiries.’

‘Yours when you want if there is. No interior slugs, no sprouting doors, it’ll be lovely. I might buy some chickens. Parsons do things like chicken competitions, don’t they? You can’t be a parson without prize bantams.’

‘You sound like an Irishman,’ he said, but he didn’t say no. ‘I’ll see you at seven.’ He hesitated in the doorway. ‘No one’s moved that statue, Merrick.’

I sat down, not wanting to loom, but I watched him go. He had an uneven walk because the polio had damaged his left leg more than his right, and there was something unsteady about it; there were always fractional moments where his weight swung just too far to the left and he looked like he should be falling.

After a while, I went out to the statue.

It had used to hold a candle when I was small and, having lit it, you had to make a wish. I took a candle from inside one of the greenhouse lamps and balanced it in the statue’s open palm. I hoped more than wished not to go mad, and not to be seeing things, and that it had been the gardeners after all, or even Charles doing his best to convince me to get me out of the house and save his pride before he had to fold and say we couldn’t afford to stay.

The statue closed its hand around the candle. It didn’t otherwise move and I stood still for a long time, trying to tell if the motion was something I’d imagined after the fact, or if I had seen it. I shut my eyes and opened them again. But the statue was the same. I tried to move its fingers, but there was no give to them whatever and no sign that they had ever been intended to move. I leaned back in to take the India Office letter from its pot. I brought it with me when I went to town. The ride did me good. Being exhausted wasn’t the same as being mad, and I was exhausted, had been for months. The loss of work, of the use of one leg, and the old independence from home and all its mould-ering difficulties – none of that had done my mind any good. I was at two-thirds capacity, at best. It was amazing I hadn’t started seeing things before.

I got a tight feeling in my chest whenever I went to the greenhouse after that, but the statue stayed where I’d left it.

FOUR

It was a few weeks later that I found the door to the greenhouse already propped open one morning and the vapour from the sprinklers curling out into the cold. The lamps were on too, though hazy, because the glass walls had been made nearly opaque by condensation. The sun didn’t reach over the trees until midday and it was still murky otherwise. I stopped shy of it.

Crockery chinked inside. Gulliver lifted her head and trotted through, nudging the door further open. It bumped into the frame again behind her. I heard a voice say something to her, a man’s voice, but too quietly for me to make out the words or whether I knew the owner.

It was much warmer inside than out. The air was heavy with the smell of damp ferns. I’d put in a clockwork misting system last year, but I’d almost forgotten about it; it took time to set it going and at some point I’d given up. It kept a fine spray in the air near the door for about ten minutes every hour. Someone had turned it on. The stove, further inside, was lit and strong; the light was coming towards me, through the ferns, which cast piano-key shadows in the vapour as it spun.

‘Come and sit down, the coffee’s ready.’

I pushed aside one of the ferns with the knuckle of my middle finger. The smell of coffee met me over the woodsmoke. At the wobbly workbench, Clem grinned and burst to his feet to hug me. It was like being folded into a rainbow. He had bright red hair, so he had never suited dark colours, and instead all his waistcoats were purple or green, with peacock lining or tartan, and his ties were always done in fantastic paisley embroidery, and his handkerchief never matched. He smelled of smoke and green. Where I’d lost it, he had put on weight; solid, broad, middle-aged weight. He was nearly twice my size. I had a sudden, weird realigning of perspective. Near Charles, who was so frail, I was big and clunky, but I felt fragile now, for all Clem was shorter. It must have shown too, because his gold eyebrows went right up. At any distance they were invisible and he always looked good-naturedly surprised.

‘Merrick, old man, you look absolutely awful. Charles hasn’t been withholding food, has he?’

‘No – no,’ I said, then laughed when I realised his wife was here too. She was almost his opposite and together they were like a pair of pheasants, the cock all bright and showy and the hen modest and brown. There were blonde streaks in her hair and she was tanned. ‘Minna, it’s lovely to . . . I’m sorry there aren’t better chairs . . .’

‘I’m happy to perch,’ she said cheerfully. ‘In fact I could sit on Gulliver, couldn’t I? She’s quite spacious.’

Gulliver snuffled at her, tail wagging interestedly. Her fur had puffed up almost at once in the humidity and she was nearly spherical now.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. I nearly said that I’d thought the statue had invited itself in and made some coffee.

‘Fishing you out, old man. Consider yourself fished. And, er, playing with your clockwork. Sorry,’ he added as a new puff of mist came from the nozzle next to me.

Clem and I had met in the Navy and bonded over a mutual interest in Peru, but we had lost touch after I went to the East India Company and he went off to be an expeditionary for the Royal Geographical Society. I hadn’t thought of him or expected to see him again. He was Sir Clements Markham, in fact, and I had never been wholly convinced that we might really be friends. But when I came back from China in such a mess, he had arrived a few days later. I don’t know how he heard I’d been injured, or how he even knew I was in England, but he’d burst into the house and announced he would be looking after me until I was upright again. And he had, cut short only when he was called off on an archeological expedition to some Incan ruins a month later.

He pulled the last stool out from under the bench, moved the old flowerpots, and put me on it. Sitting took me into the heat of the open stove. It was lovely. Minna smiled to say hello. Her eyes were dark and so she tended to sparkle even when she wasn’t meaning to. Clem kissed the top of my head. ‘You’ll like this, it’s proper coffee.’

‘Do you take sugar, Em?’ said Minna.

I tried to remember. I hadn’t had coffee for years. It was expensive. ‘No, I don’t think so. When did you get in?’

‘Oh, only about twenty minutes ago,’ Clem said. ‘Couldn’t face going up to the house and talking to Charles, though. One of the gardeners said you’d be down here. Got lost twice,’ he added. He was a geographer and losing his way was a novelty. ‘And the house looked pretty chilly, what with the . . . enormous holes in the roof and the wall?’