Jan Siegel - Prospero’s Children

‘But the sniffing is outside the house,’ Fern said thoughtfully, ‘and it wants to get in.’

For a minute Will stopped eating and stared at her. She contemplated telling him about the boulder but decided against it; he was only twelve, and the light had been poor, she might have been mistaken. ‘I’m imagining things,’ she said, suddenly impatient with her own credulity. ‘It’s the Yorkshire landscape. Overexposure to nature is bad for city-dwellers. We need to get back to the bright lights of reality.’

‘The lights are man-made,’ Will pointed out. ‘Electricity and neon. Only the stars are real.’

And then: ‘What’s that awful smell?’

‘Damn,’ said Fern. ‘Now I’ve burnt the toast.’

They drove back to London after lunch at the local pub, where surly rustics eyed them sidelong and thick Yorkshire accents made the language barrier almost insurmountable. ‘Interesting house,’ Robin said in the car. ‘Must go through all that stuff some time. Quite a collection. Didn’t see the figurehead, did you, Fern? You ought to have a look. She’s pretty impressive. Next time we’re there—’

‘We really have to sell, Daddy,’ Fern interrupted resolutely. ‘We don’t need the house and we’re not likely to use it very much. It’ll be far too expensive to maintain just as a storehouse for marine antiquities.’

‘Of course. Of course.’ Robin’s agreement was too quick and too hearty. ‘Just a thought. We’ll go back in the summer, sort out, tidy up, sell later. No hurry. Market’s still picking up. Best to wait a bit. Invest some time and effort in the place: makes good business sense. James’ll approve. He’s all for investment.’ James was his accountant.

Fern’s grip tightened on the AA Road Atlas.

‘We’ve got to go back,’ Will insisted. ‘The house-spirit will be waiting for us.’

Fern was not entirely sure he was joking.

II

The summer holidays had arrived before they found time to return to Yarrowdale. Robin was seeing a fair amount of Alison Redmond, apparently in the course of literary collaboration; but Fern did not perceive any reason for undue anxiety. Although they dined out together almost every week he never brought her home, and in his daughter’s experience serious intentions always involved getting on terms with the children. On her own terrain, she could demolish all invaders: her sweet, aloof smile quelled both patronage and gush, camaraderie wilted in the face of her perfect manners, domestic aspirants blenched at her competent management and delectable cuisine. As a child, she had used a cultivated artlessness to undermine overconfidence; when she grew older, she honed her conversational skills at the dinner table until she knew to a nicety how to wrong-foot her opponents and expose, as if by accident, pretension, bossiness, self-importance—even when such defects were not really there. Will, an indifferent ally, usually left her a clear field. Robin was the charming, helpless type of man who invariably attracted forceful women wanting to mould him to suit their own inclinations, an ambition that would only work as long as he was unaware of it. Once these plans had been revealed, resistance would set in, and Fern, who had been moulding him for years, knew she had won another unobtrusive skirmish. She wanted her father to marry again eventually, but only to someone who would make him comfortable, whose authority would be gentle, who would refrain from pushing him down roads he did not wish to travel. She had almost decided in favour of Abigail Markham, a thirtysomething Sloane currently employed by Robin’s publicity department in a low-key capacity, who combined a certain serenity of outlook with a pleasant scattiness over dress and social engagements. But Robin’s penchant for her company seemed to have abated under Alison’s influence. Fern, keeping a routine eye on him, trusted the friendship would not outlast the germination of the book.

Attending a party at the gallery with her father, she noticed Alison greeting him with an extra inch of smile and a sideways glitter of her pale eyes. She wore several clinging, drooping, fluttering garments of some vague shade between beige and taupe which echoed the dark fairness of her hair, and her overfull mouth was painted a deep red so that it blossomed like a rampant peony against the whiteness of her skin. There was a bizarre fascination in her sidelong gaze, the point-edged smile that never came close to laughter, the sinuous fingers that punctuated her every gesture, the rippling motion of the material that wrapped her body, as fluid and as neutral as water. And her strange, dull, endless hair, veined with hues of shadow, enfolding her like a cloak: Fern wondered what treatment had made it grow so long—too long, surely, for European locks—and what had leeched the colours of life from its waving masses. It might almost have provided her with a mantle of invisibility, effective by dusk and dark, hiding her from wary eyes as she stole abroad on some unspecified but nefarious business. ‘Nonsense,’ Fern scolded herself. ‘What is the matter with me? I’m seeing too many ghosts lately. This is the West End, this is an art gallery, this is a room full of people drinking cheap champagne and chattering about the decline of the image. There are no spectres here.’ In passing, she glanced at one of the champagne bottles. Long after, she knew that should have warned her, evidence rather than intuition: the champagne was not cheap. She had been attending and sometimes assisting at such parties since she was fourteen and she knew quite well that no normal person wastes good drink on a crowd.

‘And what do you think of the pictures tonight, Fernanda?’ The voice at her side caught her unawares. For the second time.

‘It’s a bit difficult to study them properly with so many people around,’ she said after a moment, mentally putting herself on guard. She had not noticed the pictures yet.

‘Of course,’ Javier Holt responded smoothly. ‘The problem with a private view is that it isn’t private and nobody gets to view anything.’ His face looked like a mask, she thought, a perfect mask of some seamless metal with topaz eyes and hair of spun steel. The focus of her apprehension shifted. At least Alison Redmond was a living hazard, whereas Javier Holt appeared dead, suavely, immaculately dead, and the spark that animated him might have come from elsewhere, controlled by a pressing of buttons, a turning of wheels.

‘You seemed very intent nonetheless,’ he went on. ‘If not the pictures, what were you studying?’

‘People,’ said Fern coolly. ‘You have an interesting selection here.’

He smiled automatically. ‘Anyone in particular?’ He obviously knew who had claimed her attention.

‘Alison,’ said Fern with a pose of candour, a hint of defiance.

‘Naturally. Your father seems very taken with her. She is a most unusual woman.’

‘She moves like water,’ Fern said, ‘like a twisting stream, all bright deceptive reflections, hidden currents, dangerous little eddies. She might be very shallow, she might be very deep. She’s much too unusual for my father.’

‘I am sure she knows that,’ Javier responded with that faint mockery in his tone.

Fern was not entirely reassured.

It was something of a relief to be leaving for Yorkshire. Fern’s two closest friends were going on holiday early and although she would miss London it was hot enough for the country to have its attractions. Robin might spend part of the week in the metropolis on business but long weekends at Dale House, rifling among the hotch-potch of Ned Capel’s collection, would provide both distance and distraction from urban perils. He evidently anticipated the visit with a brand of schoolboy pleasure which even exceeded Will’s. Fern found it more difficult to analyse her own emotions when she saw Yarrowdale again: there was no obvious surge of gladness, rather a feeling of acknowledgement, a falling-into-place of her life’s pattern, as if she had returned to somewhere she was meant to be after a careless and unscheduled absence. The grim façade of the house seemed to relax a little; recognition peered out of the empty windows. She went up to her room and, with a doubt bordering on fear, scanned the hillside for that strange-shaped boulder. It was there in its place, a silent Watcher, maintaining surveillance through all weathers, unmoving as the rock it resembled. But it is a rock, Fern reminded herself, afraid to find she was no longer afraid; it was never gone; I imagined that.