Emily Winslow - The Whole World

Then I remembered the girls. They’d been through the boxes on my desk, in an innocent, curious way, and had admired it. Aahana said she’d always wanted a great key like it-like something out of The Count of Monte Cristo. I’d told her that great keys come with big old houses, and that this wasn’t for her. I remember putting it back inside and closing the lid. Aahana was usually a good child, but apparently not always.

Past the closed bedroom doors, all quiet now, down the carpeted stairs and into the cramped kitchen. The stove-top espresso maker was still full of this morning’s grounds and filled the room with an incense-like sharpness. Through the patio door at the back I could see the girls’ replica Chateau d’If, made of crates and scrap lumber.

The cardboard box making one end of the structure was mouldy and sagging from repeated damp, but the main part of it was grand, if precarious. It also had only a tiny opening, possibly to keep out adults, but mostly, I suspected, to heighten the dramatic prison effect. They were dramatic girls.

I probed with my hand, banging on the outside first to frighten spiders. On a nail inside the entry hung my key.

I cycled out of town on Barton Road.

I switched off my headlamp where there were streetlights, to conserve the battery for the dark stretches, which were utterly black. The route took me down curvy lanes, past the lit church towers of Haslingfield and Fowlmere, and over the moderately busy A505. The repetition of pedalling dulled my anxiety. I panted in exertion instead of panic. Suddenly the steeply banked single track I was on spilled out into an expensive cluster of new-build homes. There, in the last, weak glint from my weakening bicycle light, was a sign for Dovecote.

I tried to remember it, to calibrate my expectations. I knew the version in my mind, exaggerated over the years, would be less than accurate. Would the driveway stretch as long as it had appeared to me then, would the main house loom as massive and solid? Up till then, my experience with buildings of that size had all been school-related, all shared space. That Dovecote was owned by a single person had thrilled me. I used to fantasise about being one of those boarders whose parents didn’t bring them home for school holidays. I knew it didn’t work this way, but I imagined they got to roam the school grounds, and camp out on their own in the empty classrooms. I wanted to run up and down the stairs, and yell to hear the echo. In my memory of that fantasy, I’m slamming doors. It doesn’t feel angry, it just feels strong. Does everybody want to do that?

Lesley Harter had bought Dovecote to convert it into a hotel. To celebrate her purchase, she’d held a garden party on the grounds, avoiding the interior of the manor house, which had been in need of major renovations. I was nineteen then. I came with my family. I told a story that had happened to me just weeks before:

I’d been accused of stealing a woman’s purse in a crowd. A policeman had detained me but could find no evidence that I was the thief. I’d felt confident of my honesty, and never feared they would take me.

Everyone who heard it laughed. No one ranted on the unfairness of the accusation, because they had all felt it: I was unassailable. No authority would ever believe I had done it. It was a fine adventure-that was all.

But Lesley took me aside and said, seriously, “Nick, you’re a good boy. But if you’re ever in actual trouble, you can always come here. All right? It’s yours if you need it.” She gave me a key to Dovecote. “It may be a mess of reconstruction for the next few years, but it’s a place to go.” Her security code, she said, was the year Hatshepsut became Egypt ’s first female pharaoh. I looked up the numbers when I got back to our family house, in a history almanac that had been kept in the bedside table of my old room ever since I was a little boy. I wasn’t surprised that it was still there. It’s amazing to me now what I’d taken for granted.

The sign ahead of me didn’t indicate whether Dovecote had yet become a hotel. For all I knew, Lesley might have sold the place. There could be a conference going on, or a wedding. But I didn’t really think so, just as I didn’t really think Lesley was changed. Lesley, who wasn’t fragile. Lesley, with whom no carefulness was required. I wanted to hold something durable, something that wouldn’t shatter if I dropped it.

I was certain that nothing had altered while I’d been looking the other direction, except that the cars had gone, full of party guests, leaving just a few special people or none. I felt I was nineteen, fresh from the hands of the police. I felt free.

Gates put a stop to my fantasy. Two expanses of chain-link fencing abutted sharp holly hedge on both sides. Pulling on the obstruction did little more than rattle the chain and padlock holding them together. I pressed my face up against the fence: There was a tarp-covered hill to one side, probably earth from digging foundations or a pool; and an incongruous temporary building on the other side of the drive, presumably a site office for builders. But the manor house beyond appeared whole. I know Lesley had planned only interior renovations for it; the more drastic work must be aimed at the outbuildings. I saw no cars. But there-a light in a window!

Richard had once said to me, dead earnest: “Don’t rush.” Meaning, I think, everything. Don’t rush with women, don’t rush away, don’t rush into.

I abandoned my bicycle, threw my bag over the fence, and scrambled to join it, squeezing my hands and feet into the many tight little squares until I was high enough to jump down the other side. I thudded onto the drive and skidded till I rolled backward, gravel digging into my palms.

My new vantage point allowed me to see that the light had been a reflection of the moon off glass. The house was fully black inside.

I tilted my head back and closed my eyes.

Bloody idiot, I thought. Light rain dotted my jeans. This wasn’t the first grand gesture of my life that had been completely ill-advised.

I remembered the flu I’d had as a child: the closed room, the pulled curtains, the piles of bedclothes on top of me.

We were still in London then. I’d read The Velveteen Rabbit, set in the old days of scarlet fever, and had got it into my head that anything I touched while ill would be burned. So I stayed away from all my things. I refused to have any toys or books in the bed with me, which Mum and Marie didn’t understand. I had learned the word “stoic” in my Greek history phase, and applied it.

One night, while a vaporiser puffed damp white air toward the bed where I slept, one of them tucked my cuddly lion next to my head on the pillow. In the morning I woke up nose to nose with it; some of my saliva had dribbled onto its mane. I screamed out loud, over and over again, a “horrible” scream Mum says when she tells this story. I thought I’d killed it, that it would have to be burnt up because it had touched me. I screamed and screamed and wouldn’t touch my mother when she came for me. I’d become convinced in that moment that I could ruin anything. I yelled until she and Marie stayed at the edges of the room, pressed into the walls by my noisy threats. I was the captain of my own ghost ship, and all I could do to save them was to warn them off.

Marie and Mum had looked so shocked at me those years ago. I’d gone suddenly wild, suddenly vicious. Eventually they left the room; otherwise I wouldn’t have calmed down. They didn’t know why I was upset, so they couldn’t explain the truth to me. They called for a doctor to come, which he did, and I let him examine me because, if I didn’t, Mum would have tried to help him. I’d rather he died than she, so I submitted.