The Vanishment

JONATHAN AYCLIFFE - The Vanishment

Copyright © 1994 by Denis MacEoin/Daniel Easterman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For Beth and Morris, may they never vanish

Acknowledgments

Thanks, first and foremost, to the editorial skills of Patricia Parkin, who, as always, grasped the essentials and demonstrated them to me with tact and clarity; to Karen Solem and Katie Tso in distant New York, for fresh insights and a careful assessment of the text; to my wife, Beth, for listening to the story almost nightly as it developed, for nudging me gently in the right direction, and for being there; and to Lesley Johnson and Roderick Richards for their skillful research assistance.

Some memories linger. As often as not, the great ones flicker and fade, while the little cling to us so hard we can feel their hands on our rough skin. It is as though they are inhabited by ghosts, for like ghosts they will not leave us.

I remember nothing of the long drive down to Cornwall. Just a road like any other, the traffic thin for the time of year, sunlight during the day turning to darkness. Yes, I do remember that—it was dark when we arrived. A summer darkness, benign and reassuring. It was a July night—the fourth, the fifth; I forget exactly which—a warm night scented with flowers.

I had followed the road faithfully, and faltered only as we reached the village. The hand-drawn map sent to me by the solicitors would not hold true. The dimensions were all askew, and the scale was hopelessly inaccurate. We found a pub two steps down from the little church, and I stepped inside to inquire.

The place was full of people drinking, the locals in one comer, visitors in another: you could tell at a glance. And it was obvious to which group I belonged as I stepped through the door. It took a while, but in the end I got the attention of the landlord, a pale man in his fifties, not a native from the sound of him, ex-army or -navy, or so it seemed.

"That's your way," he said, coming outside to set me right. "The last turning on the left. Mile and a half, two miles. You can't miss it."

I could hear the sea already, a steady throbbing just on the edge of hearing. A lonely sound, coming to us as it did out of the darkness. As though, beyond the inland warmth, something cold lay in waiting.

"I expect we'll see more of you," I said. "We've booked the house for the next two months."

"I daresay," he said. And as I walked slowly back to the parked car: "Take care." I thought it queer then, or overly polite.

Sarah was waiting. She had her window down and was taking in great gulps of air, as though she hadn't breathed in months.

"Can you smell it?" she asked as I climbed back into my seat.

"What?"

"The sea. It's out there somewhere."

"I know. You can hear it if you listen hard."

And she did hear it. Her hand reached out to stop me restarting the engine, then she took my fingers in hers and held me very still.

"Everything's going to be all right, isn't it?" she whispered. In the darkness I nodded. I leaned in toward her, kissing her lightly on the cheek.

"I think we'll be happy here," I said.

She did not answer at once, but I felt her beside me, tense with excitement. I pictured her on our honeymoon, beside another sea, walking among flowers and laughing. That had been years ago. I caressed her hair lightly with my free hand.

She turned her face from the sea and kissed me, gently at first, then suddenly hard.

‘I love you," she whispered.

My hand touched her cheek. I kissed her again, carefully, and smiled, though I knew she could not see me.

"Like old times," I said.

I turned the key and we crept forward into the night.

Tredannack was the nearest village to the house. It had all the normal village conveniences: a pub, a church, a general store and post office, a craft-shop-cum-tearoom run by a young widow from Penzance. We passed through what there was of the place in about ten seconds, then found ourselves on the narrow, tree-bordered road that led to Petherick House.

Petherick House. It was a childhood dream come true. As a boy, I had been taken often to St. Ives for the holidays. My parents had been amateur painters and had gone there for summer schools several years in a row, taking me with them as extra baggage. But I had loved the town, with its winding, hilly streets and its bustling harbor. In the course of excursions into the countryside to paint or picnic, we had passed by Petherick House quite often. It had impressed itself on my boyish mind as a sort of haven, a hideaway that must be inhabited by beautiful and mysterious people, people who lived glamorous lives behind tall gates.

I forgot it later. From the age of thirteen, I never returned to St. Ives, and in time most memories of the place were wiped out. And then, the previous year, while passing by on my way to a writing weekend in a remote Cornish village, I saw Petherick House again and stopped. It was not memory that stopped me, for it was only as I drove away that all those earlier impressions came flooding back. No, something else had drawn my attention. Not the house itself so much as the view it commanded over the sea, and the woods and gardens that grew half-wild all about it. It had a deserted look. And when I looked at the weather-beaten nameplate high up on one gatepost, I remembered.

It was quite by chance—or so I thought—that Sarah decided a year later that she wanted to spend the summer in the West Country, in order to paint. We tried all the usual places, but it was already late, and we found ourselves unable to get a suitable property to rent. All the National Trust and English Heritage houses had been taken months before, the prettiest cottages had gone to the families who took them every year, the few available places had revealed their drawbacks after a little astute questioning—a caravan site next door, a factory at the bottom of the lane, year-round damp.

Property after property was crossed off our list as unavailable during July, or unbookable for a two-month stretch, or in some other way unsuitable. So it was that my thoughts returned with growing insistence to the image of that empty house standing like a beacon facing the sea. Childhood dreams returned to tell me that this was the very place.

An inquiry to the tourist board at St. Ives led me to the local library, and from there I was referred to a firm of solicitors in Fore Street. They acted as agents for the house's owner, a retired gentleman living in another part of the country; it was their function to keep his property in a state of good repair, both internally and externally, and to have it inspected at regular intervals for signs of damp, rats, or squatters.

A young man called Medawar spoke to me on the telephone: the senior partner who normally dealt with the house was away, but he had authority to art in his absence. It seemed that Petherick House was not normally rented, but the owner had given the firm a very free hand, and he could see no reason not to let me have it. He named a rent which I found perfectly reasonable, and I at once agreed to his terms. That afternoon I forwarded the whole two months' rent to St. Ives, receiving in return a key and the rough map of which I have spoken.

The house was, strictly speaking, conspicuously larger than our modest needs demanded. It had seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a host of cupboards, cubbyholes, and closets. However, any disadvantage occasioned by its size was well compensated for by several factors. For one thing, there was that modest rent. For another, the house was well off the beaten track, hence out of the range of tourists and picnickers. Not only that, but it was remote enough even from its own village to allow us the measure of privacy we craved.

We had both brought work, even though the declared object of the two-month break was to unwind. Sarah was looking forward to painting in watercolors for the first time in years, I had hopes of starting work on the collection of short stories I had promised my publishers three years earlier and somehow never found time to write. Solitude would help us relax, a little work in the mornings would prevent us getting on one another’s nerves. That was how we had planned things.

* * *

The village vanished behind a bend in the road, and we were swallowed up at once by the salt-scented darkness. Glancing in the mirror, I could see nothing behind, as though Tredannack had been no more than a dream. On either side of the road, tall trees fenced us in, abetted by thick low hedges and firmly shut gates. I drove slowly in a low gear, for the road turned like a bent corkscrew, now left, now right. We had come to a very great darkness, to a place without light of any kind, save for the momentary flash of our headlights as we swept past.

The beginning of solitude is often like that, like the shutting off of all sensation as you enter the deep sea and are parted from light and sound. Had I known then what darkness, what deep waters we were entering, I should have turned round and driven back in search of light forever.

The road seemed to go on for miles, far more than the one or two the landlord at the inn had predicted. I began to think that after all, I had made a wrong turn on leaving the village and must now be headed in quite the wrong direction. There were no other cars. There was no sign of life anywhere.

I had almost decided to stop and turn around when, without warning, the sign leaped out at me from the hedgerow: a square white board bearing black painted letters stained by the sea air.
Petherick House
.

"Here we are," I said, predictably.

Sarah just nodded. She had been quiet ever since we left the village. As though silenced by our entry into the dark. I knew better than to probe her mood.

My key fitted the lock on the barred gate. Beyond it lay a flagged driveway speckled with weeds. I drove slowly down it, my headlights picking out rhododendrons and magnolias, their shiny leaves glistening in the light as though wet. They were past their flowering now. But there was a smell of chamomile in the air, and tamarisk. And beyond that the sea, pressing on us harder here.

It was with us the moment we opened the car doors. We could hear it, darkly working away somewhere out in the darkness, falling and grinding. We stepped out, stiff-limbed, trying to get our bearings. The house had shown itself to us only in patches caught by the headlights on our approach. Small mullioned windows, a heavy doorway, weathered stone, flashes of ivy against old brick, stone steps flanked by little lions, their faces much worn down.

"Look," said Sarah, clutching my arm and turning me to what she had seen. I saw nothing but the night.

"Wait," she whispered.

Moments later it came again, sheet lightning far out at sea. And this time a roll of thunder, very remote, barely audible. We watched for a while, delighted by the opening and shutting of the sky. But soon the storm passed on northward, out past the horizon, leaving only occasional flickers past the rim of dark water.

"Let's go in," I said. Sarah was still clutching my arm. She leaned against me, warm now, content. She was thinking of bright light above the waves, and I was on edge, fearful of a change in the weather, for I dislike storms.

Entering an unknown house in the dark is never easy. Doing so awakens old fears, the trepidation natural to all contact with the unpredictable. I had had the foresight to bring a flashlight, and this I used to light my way for the minute or so it took to open the door and find the light switch.

Above my head, a brass temple lantern sprang into life, casting a yellow glow on a long, unfurnished hallway. Closed doors to the left and, on the right, a plain wooden staircase whose upper half was in darkness. I shivered and took a step inside. The floor had been laid with quarry tiles on which three thin rugs had been spread in a weak concession to comfort.

Sarah followed, rubbing her hands together.

"They might have laid on some heat," she complained.

"It isn't winter," I reminded her.

"All the same. It might as well be winter. It's ice-cold in here. Those stone walls. And the sea so close. We'll have to air the bed, it's bound to be damp."

We brought our essential bags inside, leaving the rest locked in the trunk for the morning. I started exploring, switching on lights as I went. There was a meter beneath the stairs that took one-pound coins, placed there, I guessed, for the convenience of anyone who had work to do in the house. I fed it as far as it would go, to be sure we would not suddenly be deprived of light or warmth. There was a central heating system of sorts, pretty antiquated, and a hot-water tank in the kitchen.

The downstairs rooms consisted of a drawing room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a little library with shelves but no books, which latter I at once appropriated for my own use as a study. The furnishings were of that tasteless breed common to unused properties, disparate items picked up in country sales, the castoffs of widows and children come into a trivial inheritance, no two pieces quite matching, nothing worth coveting, much less stealing. Much of the furniture seemed to date from the forties or fifties, yet it had a quaintly pristine look, as though the house had been a museum.