Dan Vyleta - Smoke

At last the final plate is cleared away. Lady Naylor stands. Charlie and Thomas quickly scramble to their feet.

“Thorpe will see you back,” she announces. She gestures behind them. Thorpe, the butler, proves to be already in the room, having appeared from God knows where. His face is the perfect façade of lifelong service: so devoid of expression that one must assume his total indifference towards all matters grave and light. Certainly towards the comfort of guests.

“Please let him know if you require anything else.”

Lady Naylor shakes both of their hands again, again holding Thomas’s eyes for the fraction of a moment, then takes her daughter’s arm and walks away.

“Good night,” Charlie calls after them, too late to elicit an answer.

“This way, if you please.”

The butler escorts them like a jailer. Back in their room, Thorpe hands over custody to the great clock whose ornate hands will keep measure of their sentence. It is barely seven o’clock. Dinner is finished, they have been sent back to their room.

It feels worse than school.

ф

“What do you make of them, then?”

Charlie thinks about his answer. Why not? They have time to spare.

“The mother is all perfume and charm. And the daughter—”

“Tar soap and prayer books!”

They laugh but there is no mirth to it. The room already feels small to them, the two beds narrow and far too soft. They have opened the veranda doors and sit there freezing, facing the rain-dark night. Letting the wind in.

Just to feel alive.

“Did you recognise her?” Charlie asks, getting up and inspecting the bookshelf. There is an incomplete encyclopaedia, volumes Aa to Pe; a Bible; a chess game in a wooden box; playing cards; dust. “Lady Naylor, I mean. You looked like you might have.”

Thomas begins to shake his head, then shrugs.

“I’m not sure.”

“A distant memory? From childhood?”

“No, it’s not that. Something else.” He searches for it, pulls a face at not being able to put his finger on the feeling. “She reminds me of someone. Her face, her bearing. Someone at school, I think.”

“One of the teachers?”

“Perhaps.”

They sit for a while, get up, open the door on the draughty silence of the corridor, close it again, step out onto the veranda, get wet. No sound travels through the night. They have been abandoned even by the peripatetic pheasant. Whatever lights may be burning within the house are blocked by curtains and blinds.

Thomas closes the veranda door at last, flops onto the bed.

“It’s not how I imagined it. Coming here. I thought there’d be, I don’t know. Some sort of confrontation. Another dentist’s chair. Or maybe the opposite. My uncle explaining the world to us. Confiding secrets.” He scowls at his own naïveté. “Some kind of adventure in any case. But it looks like he has some other plan in mind. They’ll bore us to death.”

“Perhaps we are to serve as bad examples to his daughter.” Charlie rouses himself from their gloom, walks back over to the bookshelf. “Chess then? Or draughts?”

But Thomas is too disconsolate to answer.

ф

He wakes not an hour after they’ve gone to bed. It’s not a dream that wakes Thomas but a thought. He knows where he knows her from.

Lady Naylor.

He leaves the room in his nightshirt. His clothes are piled onto the chair, and there is a dressing gown hanging off a hook somewhere, but he does not want to wake Charlie by rummaging around.

The corridor carpet is soft under Thomas’s feet. He asks himself what it is he is searching for. Proof, he supposes; something that will turn conviction into fact. It isn’t clear what can furnish such proof. All the same: staying in the room, staring wide-awake into the darkness, alone with his thought — it is impossible. He walks slowly, shivering. After a while he realises it is not from the cold.

The house isn’t totally dark. Here and there some embers are smouldering in fireplaces. In the dining room, a gas lamp has been left burning, turned very low. In the kitchen, a shimmer of light has fought its way up from the cellar, the servants’ quarters, and carries along with it the soft, high giggle of one of the girls. He stops for a moment, savouring it: tiles underfoot now, vivid with cold.

Out in the front hall, Thomas locates the great spiral staircase. Its bannister is a sweeping black curve, reassuring to his touch. Upstairs he finds another light, brighter than the others: it draws a tidy white line underneath a door. He stands in front of it and listens; raises a fist to knock, then stops himself and turns the handle. He might be walking into Livia’s bedroom; into a toilet busy with an occupant. But to knock and don the role of supplicant (for what is a knock, if not an invitation to be turned away) is not palatable to him. Not now. The taste of his Smoke is so bitter in his mouth, he does not need to look down his nightshirt to know he is showing.

The room is a lady’s study, large and well appointed. It has no occupant but its owner is disclosed by the patterned wallpaper of purple and gold, too playful to be a man’s, too opulent to be the daughter’s. The desk confirms it, ornate rosewood inlaid with other, lighter woods. A letter opener catches Thomas’s eye, the brass blade shaped like a dagger, and heavy enough to serve as a weapon. He picks it up, sits down, insolent now, his eyes on the wall with its two dozen paintings, hung close together, crowding the wall. Sits looking at them, unseeing; Smoke rising like a mist in front of his face.

It isn’t long before the door opens and its owner enters the room. Lady Naylor appears unsurprised to find him there.

“Thomas! I am glad you are enjoying my art.”

His voice finds a timbre he recognises as his father’s, gravel rasping under heavy boots. It’s years since he has heard it, and never in himself.

“I was looking for your cutthroat, milady. And your fake whiskers. I was lying awake, trying to fathom what you did with the dead woman’s Soot.”

“Ah. So you did recognise me.” Lady Naylor is wearing a silk dressing gown; its rich colour sets off her dark hair. She looks at him intently, then drops into a chair on the far side of the desk; smoothes the fabric over her thighs. “Did you know already at dinner?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. But it was hard to believe.”

She laughs: it’s a brief laugh, almost a cough, but there is genuine humour to it all the same.

“Well, I’m relieved,” she goes on. “A boy who wears such a perfect mask of composure — no, I confess I did not like the thought.” She shakes her head, still laughing, with her eyes now rather than her voice. “And I was so very sure you knew right away. You see, I recognised you at once. Under the scaffold. You looked just as you did when you were a child. The same eyes, the same cast of the chin. Belligerent. And the face you made! Frightful! I was sure you would start screaming my name and accuse me in front of the whole mob. But then you didn’t tell anyone. Not even at school. I had you watched, you understand, worried that you’d be sullying my name. It cost me some sleep. In the end I decided to invite you here and have it out in the open.”

Thomas does not trust himself to respond. He sees her again, in men’s clothing, the hair hidden underneath a cap. The face dirty, looking boyish in its feminine grace but also old. He flinches when she gets up and draws to the wall.

“I trust you have been admiring my paintings. Fascinating, are they not?”

He shrugs, trying to fathom her, the letter opener clutched so tight it is hurting his hand.

“You don’t think so. Well, look again. Trust me, Thomas, you have never seen any pictures like these before. Tell me: what do pictures usually show?”