Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

‘Chaplain? He was… ’

‘A man of God, yes. The village was once his parish. He became a chaplain in the thirty-eighth Welsh Division. A private project. There were lots of them at the time. But he volunteered in 1915, not long after his two younger brothers. They were beloved to him and he hoped to take care of them.’

Edith sighed, and raised eyebrows neatly drawn upon her alabaster forehead. ‘Harold, the youngest, fell at Mametz Wood. In 1916. Not long after they arrived. It was one of the battles of the Somme. Their division was then engaged in the third battle of Ypres and Lewis fell at Pilkem one year after Harold. Poor Lewis was gassed.’

And all of the rats in the mud were Mason’s recovery, or a meticulous continuation of the nightmare. Catherine gazed again at what she had, at first, thought were little men, because so lifelike were their postures upon their hind legs, so animate and human were their expressions of terror and pain and despair and shock, and so convincing were their little uniforms and weapons, as was their suffering in the soil, that for a few seconds she was sure she had been looking at a crowd of tiny men mired in one of hell’s inner circles.

The black landscape itself was so convincing, wet and churned and colourless, she imagined she could smell it through the glass. The sides of the case were painted with photographic precision to continue the vision of trenches, torn wire, shell blasts, mine craters, thick smoke and splintered trees, as if to infinity in every direction.

It was the most animate she had seen Edith too. The spiky and hostile persona she’d endured unto the threshold of this room appeared to have retreated at this chance to hold forth about her uncle, a man cherished in her long memory. ‘After Lewis was killed, my uncle was invalided out with enteric fever and dysentery. He’d been suffering from both for some time. My mother said it wasn’t the fever, but heartbreak that brought him home that first time. And he could have sat out the war, but he returned to his company and to action as soon as he was well enough. To continue his duty. My mother told me, when I was old enough to understand, that he was determined to die at the front. So that he could be with his brothers.

‘But he was chosen to live, my dear. He came home again in 1918, wounded this time. At the Battle of Cambrai. When his division captured Villers-Outreaux my uncle suffered a terrible head wound from shrapnel. It disfigured him. But may have saved his life.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Catherine swallowed the emotion that had come into her throat. ‘It’s…’ she didn’t know what to say. ‘It’s a terrible and sad story.’ And it was odd, because in the Red House, it felt like she had just heard recent news. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Should such things be forgotten? My uncle didn’t think so. He wouldn’t allow himself to. After the war he lived here in seclusion with his sister. My mother, Violet. She brought him back to the world. Because they had work to do. They did everything together. I suppose you will have to itemize them all?’

‘Yes.’

‘It cannot be dismantled. That is our only stipulation. It must remain intact.’

‘Of course. Who would even think of it?’ But many would, as well she knew. If there was not a sole buyer at the right price, each of the ten sections, or worse, would need to be sold off piecemeal. The diorama was magnificent, but it was also dreadful, and she struggled to imagine anyone who would want to look at it for long. A museum might be interested, though their best hope would be an art gallery. Because that’s what it was, it was art. Edith was right, M. H. Mason had been an artist. And a very great one to have affected her so profoundly. She thought she could have stood in the room for one entire day and still not have seen half the detail inside the case.

‘Time for one more. And that will be sufficient for one afternoon.’

‘There’s another?’

‘There are four.’

You can’t sell them , she wanted to shout. They must be exhibited, in a place where everyone can see them . Otherwise the auction catalogue would be the only record of M. H. Mason’s intact collection, and his work could be scattered throughout the world to never come back together, after over half a century undisturbed inside the Red House.

‘I… I just can’t believe it.’ The next room featured a gas attack. And it seemed all of the creator’s wrath, grief and anguish at young Lewis’s death had been invested into the one hundred rats, dressed in muddied khaki, that rolled and choked and kicked and bled in the communication trench, while all around their position the air sparked with shell bursts and was strewn with fetid vapours.

The landscape replicated the last one, a thing murky and dreary and endless, stirred and roiled by great spraying impacts, still and marshy in dismal pockets, but appearing agitated in others as mud fell in waves from the black heavens. And as the dying rats sank, were engulfed and submerged in the mire, their eyes ran red. Catherine had to look away from the two blind and wretched creatures that clawed at each other and wrenched their matted throats upwards as if to snatch at clean air amongst a copse of devastated, skeletal trees. Their expressions were impossibly, but entirely, human.

‘Difficult to believe that it is not a portion of the Western Front brought home in a box. Though in one way it was. Inside my uncle’s mind. But my mother made the stage sets. The filth and the dirt of the land are plaster and burlap. It’s built over a wire frame and painted to create an illusion.’

‘They’ve been here. All this time.’ In the darkness, she wanted to add.

‘Nothing in this house has changed since my uncle passed. Even his shaving brush, his comb and glasses are still in the very same place and position they were in on his last day.’

Catherine turned her horrified face to Edith, who nodded with satisfaction. ‘Even his razor still lies where it fell.’

‘But you—’

‘Followed his instructions? To the letter, my dear. It surprises you. I doubt you’ve encountered the same sense of duty and loyalty out there.’ Edith raised one hand as if to dismiss the remainder of the entire world. ‘But in the Red House such qualities are cherished. I am his curator, dear. It was the last task he set me. Attending to his genius for all of my life has been a great privilege. But I doubt you could understand. Though I can’t blame you for that.

‘And the tableaux were to remain in the everyday rooms of the ground floor upon his instructions. Besides the service rooms, each of the rooms down here contains his earliest works. There is so much to see. To itemize. I hope you have the time, Miss Howard.’

‘Earliest works?’

‘He moved on to other things, dear. He came to look upon these as trifles. I believe only my mother’s powers of persuasion prevented him from destroying them all when England declared war on Germany in 1939.’

Catherine stared up at the ceiling and again imagined the volumes of fragrant, preserved air, the near priceless treasures within each and every room. ‘Unchanged,’ she murmured. ‘The whole house has not changed.’

‘Why would we change it? And anyway it is forbidden.’

‘Forbidden?’

Edith never answered her. ‘Please take me back to the lift. I need to rest. Maude will show you out.’

‘Of course. Can I… Please, can I come back?’

‘I don’t know.’ Then as a teasing afterthought she said, ‘Maybe someone will contact you.’

‘Right. I’ll wait to hear. And thank you. I mean, for showing me.’ She could hardly organize her thoughts. They came in flashes, then derailed or vanished and she was again looking down at a rat’s face in the mud, its jaws pulled apart in a scream. But if Edith was telling the truth, the entire building was a perfectly preserved Gothic Revival house from the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign with all fittings intact. Perhaps the best example of such in all of England. And one filled with immaculate antiques and a million pounds’ worth of Mason’s own work.