Page 94 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘You do, dear,’ Cecily said. She sounded exactly like Clem. The red hair was glorious on a girl and in all the Christmas candles she might have been something shined up from Byzantium. ‘But he’s been keeping it secret.’

I went through slowly, looking at the candles and the decorations. The man at the piano was dark and slight, with a grey tweed waistcoat and shoes with a Japanese manufacturer’s mark on the heels. He smiled at me. He was sitting to one side of the piano stool so there would be room.

‘Keita,’ I laughed. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Surprise.’ He finished the carol and let his hands drop into his lap, although he had hooked down the pedal and the sound resounded. ‘I heard about your brother; I’m sorry.’

‘You didn’t come all the way from Tokyo for that?’

‘Well, and it’s Christmas,’ he said awkwardly.

I smiled. I didn’t touch him, though I would have if I’d thought for a second he wouldn’t, Tokyo-ishly, take it as assault.

He was a changeable thing. He was a late bloomer just like I’d thought, and he was coming into himself more and more every time I saw him. He had been fragile as a young man, but he was in his thirties now and glowing. Nothing else about him had changed. He was still exactly the same pensive person he had been in China, and when I’d found him watching a cricket match at his school fifteen years ago.

There were women I didn’t know taking up all the chairs at the other end of the room, so I took a tray of tea things and made it on top of the piano. He closed the lid over the keys so we could use it as a counter. Once the tea was poured and cooling, I saw how he was looking at my wrist, which still had Raphael’s rosary wound around it. I rested the heel of my hand on the edge of the piano lid, the beads imprinting the underside of my arm. He didn’t tell me not to, although it was a nervous habit he must have noticed before.

‘Who are all these people?’ he said instead.

‘Apart from Minna and Cecily, no idea. Their friends.’

‘Why are they inviting people to your house?’

‘They invited themselves and then said it seemed empty. I think I might be Minna’s winter project. She’s worried that I’ll be upset about Charles. And apparently when you say in a moment of good-willed absentmindedness that you’ll be someone’s godfather, it turns out that you’re actually signing away all your worldly goods to her, including your house and any available Christmases. Actually I quite like all the noise,’ I admitted.

He smiled. ‘Me too. Listen, did I imagine that you’re going to Peru in June?’

I hadn’t told anyone, but that was no more a barrier for him now than it had been twenty-five years ago. ‘No, I am. Why?’

Somewhere upstairs, where they had renovated Dad’s study into a new, bigger parlour, Cecily had taken over the music. She played the violin and she had begun the same carol Keita had been playing, but she was pretending not to know all of it and, in the joking way musical people can, bridged the gaps with ‘Ode to Joy’. The fireplaces here and there lined up and I could hear people laughing through the chimney.

‘Could you send me some of the pollen from the forest? Only a vial.’ He paused. ‘I’m making some fireflies.’

I laughed. ‘To Tokyo?’

‘No, Knightsbridge, please.’ He gave me a piece of paper with an address on it. Filigree Street.

‘Holiday?’ I said.

‘No, to live. Not for very long, only a few years.’

‘Lovely,’ I said, and waited to see if he would say anything else, but he didn’t. For his country he was a tall man, and he held himself like one, but every so often there was a fragility around him when he was coming up to something that seemed especially insurmountable. I poured him some more tea and watched the moving steam catch his eye and tug him slowly into the present.

‘Is she playing “Ode to Joy”?’ he asked at last.

‘She is. She’s joking. She means you should go upstairs and say hello.’ They had met before. Minna had come on holiday to Japan once when Cecily was about four. Keita had taught her to read, in about two afternoons, with the efficiency of someone who didn’t like children and wanted a proper human being to talk to.

‘What?’

‘Keita? Joy?’ I said gently. He knew the translation of his own name but he still looked far away.

‘Oh, yes.’ He came back to himself properly. I saw him studying the possible recent future, the one with Cecily in it in full Christmas swing. He looked worried. ‘I’d rather not.’

I laughed. ‘Christmas spirit. It’s why you’re here, on you go. I’ll come up in a bit. I just want the last of the light.’ I motioned at Charles’s old study.

His black eyes caught on the door. I thought he smiled, as if there were an enormous surprise party waiting inside, but he turned away too quickly for me to be sure and when I leaned in round the edge of the door, nobody burst out from behind the ferns.

I’d been excavating for a month. Charles had kept everything, from old, irrelevant account books to octogenarian financial newspapers, but it all had to be gone through. An accountant from Truro had been helping me, because I’d never kept a proper ledger in my life and I had no idea how it worked, and I didn’t understand what bonds or trusts were, or how investment differed from gambling. What money I had, had come here, and what was left had gone to the bank in London, where the account was too little for them to bother asking me much. The India Office paid well, but well in modern terms; to fully restore a vast twelfth-century estate, created and then expanded in times when noblemen had been the equivalent to the millionaires of this century, was long work, and would have been even on the Prime Minister’s salary. I was happy doing it, though.