The Crooked House Read online

  Upstairs, befuddled with a sleeping tablet she’d been given by the duty doctor, Esme had heard her aunt’s voice raised and knew it, from far off, although she couldn’t make sense of what they were saying. She hadn’t seen Polly – her mother’s sister – in a long time: seven or eight years. Her father would mutter about her record with men, her cats and her spinster humourlessness. They’d fallen out over something, and it was too far to come, from Cornwall to Essex – except in emergencies. A day later, Polly had won the right to have Esme in her care, through the grim determination that would be the hallmark of their years together.

  At home now in Alison’s top drawer, behind the folded bras and rolled knickers, was a scarf of her mother’s printed with scenes of Amalfi, orange trees and tumbling villages, real silk, gold and yellow. Polly had gone in to the house to get some of Alison’s things, and when they unpacked in Cornwall there it was, on the top of the pile. I didn’t know what to get, Polly had said, fierce. Just something of hers. Her drawer had been all turned out – but the policewoman said it would be all right to take it.

  By then the police had gone through everything, she supposed. Alison never knew, never asked, what happened to the rest of it. The pots and pans, the few bits of cheap jewellery, the tatty furniture. The house. As with everything, if she’d asked Polly would have answered her, but nothing was volunteered. And Alison didn’t want to know. She wanted to walk away from it, because every time she thought of anything – the china dish her mother would put her earrings in before bed, Joe’s posters, the twins’ ratty soft toys – she felt a commotion set up in her head, things asking to be seen, to be remembered. But she hung on to the scarf.

  Four years, Alison lived with her aunt. When she finished school she left for university in a northern city to study maths – to Polly’s bewilderment, Polly who like her mother was flustered by maths, which perhaps had been why Alison chose it although she also had a facility that must have passed down to her by some meandering quirk of genetics – and never came back. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Polly – she loved her, in her way – but it was just too tragic, the two of them tied together in the damp cottage. Alison had no intention of being tragic.

  * * *

  Alison had her back to the window display that featured mannequins bent over a table top; Kay had half an eye on it, eyes dancing.

  Almost a week had passed since Alison had taken the invitation off the mantelpiece, and she and Paul had barely seen each other. That night she’d got straight on the bus across the river and let herself in to her bedsit, trying to ignore the musty smell. A bulb had gone. The next day she phoned him from work and told him she was going away for the weekend but instead she bought cleaning products, things for dealing with limescale and stainless steel and tablets for putting down the loo. She unearthed dusty tights from under the bed and bleached the basin and threw away some broken crockery. She spent Sunday looking out of her window at the tree, tall with small luminous pale green leaves; in the autumn they would turn bright yellow. The sun came out and she cleaned the windows with vinegar – Polly must have taught her that trick. She didn’t think it had been her mother. She read novels until midnight, and the next day she was back at work.

  Have fun, was all Paul had said when she’d told him she’d be away for the weekend. She could hear the tension in the high pitch of her voice as she told the lie, but maybe he thought she was just sulking.

  ‘A cow,’ Alison repeated now. ‘Yes.’ Because she had met Morgan Carter, even though when she’d said as much to Paul she’d been on mumbling auto-pilot. In a pub, before the theatre one evening, by chance they’d sat down next to her at a crowded table and she’d immediately been all over Paul, a cloud of perfume and blond hair. With a man – possibly her husband-to-be although, it occurred to her only now, Paul had hardly seemed to know him – sitting next to her, a quiet type who’d let her get on with it. They must have even been introduced, for Alison to have the name in her head, though she couldn’t remember Morgan Carter addressing a word to her.

  ‘She’s one of Saunders’s exes, I believe,’ Kay said. Roy Saunders, the hectoring military historian, not at all the quiet type. Then, curiously, ‘Why d’you want to know?’

  ‘She’s getting married,’ said Alison, and half turned. The window display came into view. The mannequins were made of some hard white shiny material: strapped and bound in silk and lace, bent across the table top, they stared out into the street. ‘Paul’s going to be best man.’ Perhaps she’d appointed him. Morgan.

  ‘Very respectable,’ said Kay. ‘So will that be your first outing as official girlfriend?’

  ‘I’m not invited,’ said Alison.

  Kay raised her eyebrows. They looked in the window together, the mannequins staring moodily back, and in defiance Alison stepped up to the door and pushed it open. It was a week and she hadn’t spoken to him; he hadn’t phoned, and nor had she.

  ‘Like that, is it?’ said Kay. ‘Yeah. Morgan Carter. She’s not nice.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ said Alison.

  * * *

  The emergency services operator keeps repeating, ‘Address, please’: behind the mechanical question Esme can hear she is frightened herself. A young voice, female. ‘Is he still there?’ the woman blurts, once she’s taken down the address.

  ‘Creek House, there’s no number,’ Esme says, ‘it’s just down the end of the track, everyone knows.’ Only it’s two in the morning or something, there’ll be no one to ask directions of.

  The dark beyond the door seems crowded, whispering, as if there is an invisible mob pushing to get in to where she crouches, the phone pressed against her chest, under the coats hanging in the hall.

  She is looking at her father’s leg raised up towards his chest where he lies, face down, just inside the front door. There is a gun, a shotgun with a rusted stock and a long barrel, a thing Esme has never seen before, not this one, not any gun. Both hands reaching down to the trigger, one big blunt forefinger slipping off. Blood. She has positioned herself so she can’t see his face, on its side in the blood that soaked half the oval hall carpet. He is unshaven, stubble coming through half white against his reddened skin. A raw mark on the back of his neck. When they arrived at the crooked house his skin was smooth and tanned, he was slight and strong.

  ‘Is he still there?’

  ‘They’re all dead,’ says Esme.

  ‘Someone is coming,’ says the operator, urgently. ‘They’re on their way. Someone will be with you soon.’

  ‘They’re all dead.’

  They call for her when they come but she doesn’t answer.

  Stepping around him, not looking down, she hears something. The faintest wheeze, a bubbling in the membranes of the throat, and she flies through the front door, which bangs back as she passes through and catches her on the temple – but it doesn’t slow her down.

  ‘This one’s not dead,’ Esme hears them shouting inside the house, from where she is crouched on the edge of the mud behind it. She can’t move.

  Her father is alive, but he won’t ever speak again.

  The bruise the door left on her temple is still there a week later. As it fades she can’t recognise herself in the mirror: she stares, but in her aunt’s bathroom a stranger looks back at her from behind her eyes. Alison.

  Chapter Four

  In the underwear shop Kay was handling the merchandise, holding something up that dangled straps and buckles, more apparatus than lingerie.

  ‘Complicated,’ said Kay. ‘Isn’t it always? But he said he wanted you to come?’ She stroked a slip, dark-red satin and lace, wistful. Alison couldn’t imagine her in it, Kay who only ever wore clothes like school uniform to work. But what did Kay dream of? Who knew what anyone dreamed of, and just as well.

  Alison couldn’t begin to explain how complicated, not to Paul, not to Kay. She’d never told anyone, and she never would: she didn’t have to. It had been a decision made long ago, easily, it was the simple
st way. Her aunt had agreed: the therapist Alison had seen for three years in a Portakabin at the local hospital had been less easy with the decision, had asked her – they weren’t allowed to tell you, only to ask – if she thought there might come a time when she had to talk about it, a time when she had someone she could trust? For the sake of a quiet life Alison had pretended to agree, but she knew that time wouldn’t come, that there existed no such person. The therapist herself was a worn-down woman with an alcoholic’s face, puffed and red – even at sixteen Alison could see what listening to people’s horror stories had done to her.

  Alison had read the address on the stiff gold-edged card, and it had ballooned inside her, a horizon, houses popping up along a road, a whole landscape. St Peter’s on the Wall, and afterwards at The Laurels, Dyke End, Saltleigh. With Paul looking at her, puzzled, she’d had to close her eyes so he wouldn’t see. In the dark behind her eyelids she had felt sweat bead on her upper lip, terror mixed with queasy longing. She had felt for a moment as if she might actually be sick.

  ‘He tried to persuade you?’ Kay’s eyes were watchful behind the slip’s lace, which she was holding up like a veil for the lower part of her face like a desert bride.

  He had tried very hard: he might even have thought he’d succeeded. She’d kept her eyes closed and could feel him stroking her hair gently, as if she was an animal that needed calming, where they stood beside the mantelpiece.

  ‘She’ll have written the guest list a year ago,’ he said easily at her ear. His lips were on her cheek, just brushing it. ‘She’ll have got some underling to write the cards.’ Then he stepped back and Alison opened her eyes, smiled carefully.

  ‘But still,’ she said. ‘You know. It’s embarrassing, it’s … I don’t want you to ask her if you can bring me. They have seating plans, all that, I’m sure they need to keep numbers down. Why not just leave it?’ She shifted, disguising a tremble. ‘It’s just a wedding. One day in our lives.’ He wasn’t smiling, though. Was he testing her, was she the kind of shrill woman who’d set up a complaint about not being invited? She could get through that test.

  ‘I won’t even need to ask her,’ he said. ‘She’ll be mortified. She knows we’re together.’ He had set the card back on the mantelpiece, and Alison, still naked from bed, had wrapped her arms around herself. Mortified? From what she remembered of the woman they’d met in the pub, it seemed unlikely.

  ‘I mean it, Paul,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’ He didn’t answer; she had gathered her things and gone to work. A week ago.

  Now Kay was looking at her.

  ‘Cow,’ she pronounced. ‘Like I said. She obviously did it on purpose, to cause trouble. She’s met you, right?’ Alison frowned, nodding. Kay shrugged. ‘You’re competition.’

  Alison frowned more fiercely, pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said sharply. ‘Have you seen her? I’m not competition.’ Kay just laughed.

  ‘She’s done it too,’ she said. ‘Hasn’t she, though?’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Caused trouble between you.’ She dropped the dark satin into Alison’s hands and for a moment its cool, slippery weight stirred up a thought of Paul, a desire to see him. ‘Are you going to let her do that?’

  The saleswoman stepped up smartly as if on cue, a haughty foreign girl with high-arched eyebrows and breasts cantilevered under her uniform, barely containing her impatience. ‘You try this, madam?’ she said.

  * * *

  She left it another day, though – and she didn’t phone him even then. Instead, after work, she wandered through the scuffed institutional corridors of his department, past students not much younger than herself, when she knew his teaching would have finished for the day. Of course, Paul might not be there, it was that kind of job, not a nine to five. But he was there, glasses on, frowning down at a sheaf of papers. He pushed the chair back and smiled, delighted. Not triumphant – if he’d given her any indication that he’d been playing a game with her, she’d have been out of there without pausing for breath. But he just looked relieved and happy, sitting there in his shirtsleeves, and then he was grabbing his jacket with one hand, her arm with the other.

  It was warm out, and the streets were swarming with workers just released and in high spirits. The trees were in full leaf as they walked through one square and then another. Paul talked about nothing, about his weekend – he’d walked by the river, seen an old friend – about his students. Not pausing until they reached a corner she hadn’t known existed, up an alley that led nowhere, a tiny French-looking bar no more than a hole in the wall with some wicker brasserie chairs and two zinc tables.

  He knew a lot of places. Paul had been born in London. He’d told her once, a rare moment, in some restaurant after more wine than they usually drank, that when he finished school and came back to the city to attend university and saw the crowds and the secret streets he could disappear into, it was like life starting. She had just nodded, not telling him, That’s just how I felt.

  He sat her at one of the tables and went inside.

  Alone on the pavement Alison tried to go over what she’d planned to say if the wedding came up, but it evaporated. Perhaps he wouldn’t mention it at all, she decided. She was wrong. He emerged holding two glasses and Alison realised she’d been holding her breath.

  ‘Morgan says she couldn’t bear it if you didn’t come,’ he said, setting the glass down in front of her. It was champagne. She sat very still; it was as if her thought processes had slowed, she needed to get out of this. There was a clamour in her head, No, no, no, no. She put the glass to her lips, drank. All right, she told herself, as it hit. Alcohol on an empty stomach: the best kind, Kay would say. Calm down. Pretend it’s no big deal.

  ‘I told you she’d be mortified,’ Paul said, looking at her earnestly. He sat back in the wicker chair. ‘She gave the list to some company months ago, like I said. It’s not like we see each other much, she had no idea.’ The barest trace of a sidelong glance to look for her reaction.

  She smiled, straining not to show what she felt. ‘That’s nice of her,’ she said, sipping.

  Thinking, Isn’t there a form of words? Plus one. Then reminding herself, she didn’t want to have been invited. She didn’t care what message Morgan Carter wanted to send. The wedding was in a month, at the end of June; there wasn’t a detail she had forgotten from that gold-edged invitation. There would be time to think of something.

  And with that thought, with the memory of the silhouette of the church on the marsh, something else entered the equation too, swimming in on the champagne. A kind of exhilaration, a kind of bravado: I could do it. I could go back. I could show them. And a kind of longing, because Esme was there, buried somewhere, or wandering on the marsh; Esme who’d swum in the grey salt estuary warmed over the mud, who’d played hide and seek with her sisters between beached dinghies. Alison felt hard, turned to stone, when she remembered that girl.

  ‘So, you’ll come?’ said Paul, his hand out on the table, fingers at the stem of his untouched glass. He’s trying, she thought with a kind of wonder, he’s trying to hold on to me, he wants to play it right. And if I say no? It occurred to her that he had probably already made his decision. He was like her – or like she’d been before she met him: a solitary. He’d walk away. It was how Paul was made. It was, she realised, why she kept coming back, knocking on his door. She felt sick, all over again.

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ she found herself saying. ‘Yes.’ He raised his glass to her empty one then, and the champagne-euphoria drained out of her system as quickly as it had arrived. Too late.

  * * *

  ‘Did you know your father had a gun?’

  She’d shaken her head, no. No, no, no. Her father was a joiner and cabinet-maker, he had a workshop in part of an old sail-loft in the village, it was neat and cosy. A whole wall of tools, some bright, some dull: rawls and gouges, chisels and adzes, he told her the names. She remembered the feel of their worn handles, h
ung in size order, another wall of little drawers, stacked rough lengths of wood, maple and ash and oak, just ordinary-looking until he turned them into something else. A cabinet with bottles of tints and varnishes. Her father humming, dreaming. No gun.

  Joe didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps, he wanted to be in a band, always off at some gig, hitching home at two in the morning. It was Esme who’d sit in the workshop with her dad when she came home from school – or at least she did at the beginning.

  The policewoman talked to her in the front room of the foster family’s house. She could still remember the swirled carpet, the layered net at the windows and the smell of their kitchen. Not a bad smell, just different, someone else’s cooking: they had a microwave and shiny red units. They’d bought fish and chips, the first night, the anxious foster parents and Aunt Polly at the table between the red cupboards, watching Esme eat. She hadn’t got even halfway through it although it had always been her favourite. The batter like glue in her throat. Polly kept her coat on and her bag on her knee as if they were about to leave, although the police didn’t let them go for a week.

  ‘In the pub he was asking for a gun, for rats, apparently.’ The policewoman’s voice was soft, concerned. ‘Do you remember there being rats?’

  Uncertainly Esme nodded. ‘Mum and Dad had a row about the rats,’ she said. ‘She wanted to call someone. An inspector.’ She’d never seen them, though she’d heard her father tell her mother that one had been in the bin when he’d taken the lid off. ‘He didn’t want an inspector.’

  ‘That was all the row was about?’ The policewoman’s voice made her feel sick, suddenly. She held still.

  At the beginning, when Esme would come into the workshop, down the path from the bus stop, past the little marina, with the salt wind off the marshes in her face after a day in stifling classrooms, there would be something taking shape in the little wood-lined room. The sail-lofts were tall, on stilts for the spring tide to come up under them, steps up to windowless rooms, one above the other, her father’s the first. She remembered a table with different kinds of wood in the top, and her mother coming down to see it when it was finished, running her hand over it, standing close to him.