The Ice House Read online

  She looked round at Butler. ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘A few hours. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.’ Again, that huffing sound through the scarf.

  She checked the rearview mirror; Martha was still in the back, curled up asleep. Delphine sniffed, then bent over and groped for the gun. Something went in her lower back. She straightened up and the funny looseness became a knifing pain in her spine.

  Butler glanced across. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing!’ She gritted her teeth and rode out the pain until it softened. All her medication was at home. Her pipe too. ‘Where are we?’

  Butler eased off the accelerator as he rounded a corner. ‘Home.’

  As she looked out the window, Delphine felt a creeping sense of familiarity. She pulled a handkerchief out of her coat pocket and wiped her clammy face. It was like she had seen this road in her dream.

  The realisation came by stealth. These fields. This slow bleeding dawn. She had seen it all before.

  They were heading to Alderberen Hall.

  The granite monster was smaller than she remembered. Less threatening, too – from its plinth above the gatehouse, the vesperi looked less like it was bearing down, more that it was standing firm, wings spread in an attitude of defiant resistance. In the weak morning light the stone was strangely bright. Her memories from childhood were of an ancient thing, crusted with blond lichen, weathered, foreboding. This statue looked like it had been power-washed.

  But it was there.

  The car idled before the wrought-iron gates. The last time she had passed them she had been thirteen. Part of her had always known she would return. That the Hall would return for her.

  Butler lowered the electric window. A rush of freezing air snapped her alert.

  There was a box on the gatehouse wall. Above it, a brass plaque was screwed into the stone. In an arty, serif font it read: SHaRD. Butler’s leather seat creaked as he leaned out of the window and pushed a square button beneath a speaker’s black grille.

  Delphine checked the pistol was still loaded, checked the safety was on. When she was out of sorts she liked to strip and clean guns and put them back together again. This one was probably the most challenging in her collection – lots of fiddly, irreplaceable parts. She hadn’t attempted it in years, and then only in the workshop. She probably didn’t have the coordination anymore, nor the grip strength, the eyesight, the steadiness of hand.

  She gripped the barrel, felt the vibration of the engine through her palms. A horrible, weightless anticipation built in the pit of her stomach. What was taking so long?

  ‘Should you press it ag—’

  ‘Hello?’

  Butler thrust his head towards the speaker. ‘Butler here. Returning with two guests.’

  A loud buzz from inside the walls. The gates hummed, shuddered and began to open.

  Fingers of crushing arthritic cramp were questing out from her collarbone, spreading from an old break. She was back. Dear God, she was back.

  Butler pushed back his hood, put the car into gear, and eased his foot up off the clutch.

  They rolled into the estate.

  This moment had played out in dreams – landscapes disfigured and rudely conjoined, various players from her life drafted in as dramatis personae. Sometimes she was in the car with Father or Algernon, sometimes her return was ever-deferred by mazy lanes or fog or towering walls. Mostly, she was already back, without noticing it: shelling peas in the library, floating supine across the burning lake. Walking from her bedroom back in the cottage to a room filled with stuffed hybrids and addressing her long-dead mother as if it were all very ordinary – as if the two rooms had always been connected, and she had never thought to step through.

  Flat grassland spread all around them, studded with Scots pines. The light was peach and crisp; she saw every blade of grass – its stark, variegated wetness.

  She felt the young Delphine riding in the car alongside her, bored, indignant. Unafraid of the rolling wilderness, laying claim to everything she saw with a colonial dispassion: that shall be mine, and that shall be mine, and that, and that . . . Utterly secure in the knowledge that the world was her birthright. Entitled. Combative. Strong.

  Presently, open grassland became coppice, the trees close and bare and brown, smothered in thick coats of ivy. Ferns lay sallow and shrivelled amongst wet black logs.

  The woods thinned out into two rows of pollarded beeches lining the road, their shocks of whip-thin branches casting long, raggedy shadows.

  Her breath caught: here was the lake.

  In the sharp dawn light it was a gobbet of mercury. Land flowed down to make a depression and the lake filled it with sky. A short wooden jetty had rotted on its pilings and collapsed into the water. Brown reeds scruffed the far bank. She let her gaze linger on the water’s wrinkled skin, delaying the moment when she would glance up to the hill beyond, to the mound on which once stood the ice house.

  She already knew the ice house was gone. Martha and the other lanta had done dozens of recces in the years after Delphine had lived here. During the war the government took over the estate and used the grounds for training. God knows what the army would have done if they’d found a working threshold. But they didn’t seem to realise anything was there. Martha reported seeing secretaries hacking out memoranda on typewriters and soldiers doing manoeuvres in the woods, but the old ice house remained a buried, flooded wreck.

  And now, as she looked, she saw the hill was not even really a hill. A grassy mound, near the treeline, a few draggled wildflowers sheltering in its indented crest.

  It didn’t look like a place that had once harboured a portal to another world. A place that had claimed her father, and dear Henry. The sinkhole into which spiral fates inevitably twisted. It was a drab hummock. Unremarkable.

  She looked at Butler, just to see the bloom of his noseleaf, his teardrop eyes, the velveteen ears with their heart-shaped tragi. Here was weirdness, impossibility. Life grotesque and wondrous. Confirmation that she was not alone.

  He noticed her staring. The corner of his mouth fishhooked downwards.

  ‘What?’

  She blinked, looked away.

  The road trended gently downwards. They bore round to the right. She knew it; she felt the route in her sinews.

  At the end of a long, snaking road was a country house of dirty gold brick. Dark mullioned windows. Classical columns. Boxy east and west wings mirroring each other.

  Alderberen Hall.

  She breathed, but the sensation budding and fruiting in her chest was not excitement – it was closer to grief. The Hall looked wrong – everything was smaller, blander. Between the beeches rose the short black stubs of electric lamps.

  It was not her Hall.

  The east wing, yes, that was as she remembered, though the frames of the mullioned windows had been repainted, but as her gaze travelled west she could see the exact point where the masonry turned from old to new – the faded mustard stones becoming brighter, cleaner – where substantial sections had been rebuilt and restored. Chunks of the old west wing still stood – darker blotches of stonework staining the new flesh like psoriasis – but they only served to throw the repairs into greater contrast. The Hall was no longer symmetrical – its left side looked bulked-out, shiny, and the whole edifice seemed to slump under the weight of its scars.

  She really had believed they were going back. Back to the Alderberen Hall of her childhood. Back to crab sandwiches below stairs and cold cuts of goose and the smell of dried lavender in a pottery jug on the bedside table. Back to the rattle and scrape of foils on the lawn just after Thursday lunch (or in the music room if it was raining), to the odours of pipe smoke and floor wax, to the feel of bare feet passing from cold boards to plush Asian rugs. Back to long sleeps in thick eiderdown and fat white pillows, like being buried in a snowdrift, Mother and Daddy just a thin partition wall away, to dear Henry, impatient, slapping a powder of mud from his gamek
eeper’s jacket, never venturing upstairs, made uncomfortable even by his proximity to it, most at home underground.

  She had believed she would finally reach it – the vast, textured realm she had been keeping alive in her head. As if it were a doorway that had always been there, and she had stepped through.

  The Hall swelled. It bore down on her, a great wave.

  Butler let the car coast as they approached the forecourt. Gravel scroffled under tyres. A white van like the one they had bundled her into was parked in front of the stables, beside a Land Rover, a black estate car polished to a liquid shine, and two golf carts. The car crunched to a stop.

  Butler twisted the rearview mirror towards him. He produced a plastic comb from his pocket and began working it through the red-brown fur on his scalp and jowls with neat, vigorous little strokes. His ears trended from cherubic pink around the earhole to mushroom brown at the curving tips. She remembered her manners and looked away.

  ‘You might want to conceal the gun,’ he said. ‘Not the best way to make a first impression.’

  ‘You don’t know what impression I want to make,’ said Delphine. She looked into the back. ‘Martha? We’re here.’

  The leather seat swirled with blur. Barely discernible in the shifting air, a faint cobalt glow – two eyes with blueflame hearts. The belt unclipped.

  Delphine slipped the pistol into her jacket. Tout jour prest.

  Her lower lumbar felt brittle as meringue. She planted her stick in the gravel, and by way of a see-sawing motion managed to prise herself out of her seat.

  The air was crisp, her breath forming wisps. Beneath six classical columns, a concrete wheelchair ramp with metal handrails led to a pair of double doors.

  A solid high note sang from an electric motor and the doors began to part.

  A woman stepped from the house in a grey wool greatcoat, rubbing her palms. She looked around seventy, sinewy with a strong, prominent chin and long greying hair tied back in a plait. She was short, apparently of Indian extraction, with a wide brow, severe tortoiseshell eyes, quick, large hands and a senator’s nose. She was puckish, dignified and handsome.

  ‘Ah! Here she is!’ She strode up to Delphine and held out a hand. ‘Ms Rao.’

  Automatically, Delphine met the handshake. ‘Uh . . .’ She struggled to think what to say. She talked so rarely these days. The woman’s grip was clammy, burning. ‘Delphine Venner.’

  The woman pumped Delphine’s arm. ‘Delighted. Butler told me all about your exploits over the phone. Most impressive.’

  Delphine leaned on her stick. ‘I want to speak to whoever’s in charge.’

  Ms Rao clasped her hands behind her back. The greatcoat was a little large on her – with her big, red-trimmed lapels and twin rows of brass buttons, and gravel crunching under her boots, she made Delphine think of a Soviet general in the final days of the regime, inspecting the tatty remnants of his troops in a barracks on the Arctic Circle.

  ‘That’s me.’ She slipped her hands into the pockets and began bopping up and down to keep warm.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Ms Rao. I’m sorry – did I not say that already?’

  ‘And you’re . . . what? The estate manager?’

  ‘Manager, caretaker. Owner.’ She shrugged. ‘Whatever you like.’ She glanced about, frowning. ‘Butler mentioned you had a, uh . . . friend?’

  Delphine felt Martha close to her leg, blending with the car’s front hubcap. ‘Can you get me to Avalonia?’

  Ms Rao flashed Butler a look, raising her eyebrows and pursing her lips. A second later, the professional smile was back.

  ‘Let’s go inside, shall we?’ She swept her arm towards the double doors in a wide flourish. They whinnied open.

  Delphine hesitated. She looked from Ms Rao to Butler. The Hall loomed.

  She nodded.

  ‘Let’s.’

  Everything was familiar but wrong.

  The grand staircase had been fitted with stairlifts – one on either bannister. The chequerboard floor was gone, replaced with a smooth and intricate stone mosaic of an octagon with red roses at its points, encompassing an equilateral triangle, its summit pointing downwards, within which lay a large, glyphic impression of an eye.

  She strained against the peculiar discomfort of two superimposed sets of impressions. Everywhere she looked, memories asserted themselves violently, incoherently – she thought she heard a dinner gong, or the harpsichord; black shapes fluttered at the edges of her vision; she smelt peppery smoke. But none of it fitted. The doorways had been widened. They all had panels next to them with big green plastic buttons. The paintings were gone – instead there were framed photographs lit by electric lamps mounted on a steel bar that ran under the mezzanine. They appeared to show stages in the Hall’s restoration – a few were in black and white, and looked like they had been taken during the war. A feeling of smallness took hold. Woozy unease was flowing outwards from her belly, and her legs felt watery.

  She stabbed the rubber tip of her cane against the floor mosaic, seeing if she could jemmy up one of the ceramic tiles.

  Ms Rao’s boots echoed as she crossed the room. ‘I thought we could take breakfast in my office. That is, if you’re hungry?’

  ‘Coffee,’ said Delphine, focusing on the stylised rose at her feet.

  ‘That can be arranged.’

  ‘Good.’ Her guts griped. ‘Now if it’s all the same I need you to show me to the lavatory.’

  Delphine sat on the toilet, nauseous and out of breath.

  The room was big, white, clean and cold, with plastic handrails, an emergency pull-cord, and enough space to manoeuvre a wheelchair. She thought it might have been the old equipment room, for storing archery targets and foils and masks, and the plywood sawhorses Mr Propp made residents jump over during wakefulness drills.

  An extractor fan whirred somewhere behind her head. On a corner shelf, a little battery-operated air freshener periodically spritzed a tangy, mediciney sandalwood mist. She slid her fingers into her hair, gazed down at her capillary-threaded, puckered knees, and exhaled.

  She had expected to weep. That seemed like the sensible thing to do, given the circumstances. Bleed the radiators. Regain equilibrium.

  She felt as if thumbs were digging into her temples. Her tummy would be griping for hours. Her ankles were swollen. Her collarbone throbbed. She could feel bruises all up her hip. Her wrist, at least, felt better. She could close her fingers.

  She flushed the toilet, then turned both taps on.

  ‘Right, you can turn around now. I’m done.’

  The metal towel rail fluxed as a hidden Martha turned to face her. Delphine squirted her hands with slimy, purple liquid soap that smelt of cough medicine. The water was near-scalding, which was almost a relief. Steam condensed on the mirror.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, keeping her voice low beneath the roar of the taps, ‘if anything happens to me I want you to make a run for it, understand? Don’t wait.’

  Martha rapped twice on the towel rail – clunk clunk.

  No.

  ‘Martha – I mean it.’ Delphine took a comb from her back pocket and wetted it under the stream. ‘It’s my fault we’re here.’

  Mauve blotches were all up the left side of her face from where she had fallen. Her flesh hung sallow and mottled. She looked as if she were wearing a facepack made out of tapioca. She combed her hair flat. Stupid, self-indulgent girl. What was all this grumbling going to achieve? You wanted this, didn’t you? Well? Didn’t you? Now you’ve got it. So you’d better bloody lump it.

  She adjusted her collar, smoothed down the creases in her waistcoat. Come on, now. Calm, assertive command. Works on dogs, works on people.

  She stepped out into a corridor that smelt of gloss paint. Pale sunlight was bleeding through the southern windows onto potted yuccas and art prints behind glass. Ms Rao was waiting.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said.

  A wood-burning stove sat in the fireplace, the gaps
either side stacked with split ash logs. Small ginger flames licked at a glass panel smutted with soot. Ms Rao adjusted the vent and straightened up.

  ‘There.’ She wore a dark maroon suit jacket with a silk blouse and a skirt cut just above the knee. Without her bulky coat, it was apparent that one of her shoulders hung lower than the other. It lent her an arrogant cant, half surly prizefighter, half libertine.

  Delphine sat in a plush velvet wingchair of curlicued mahogany. The room felt naggingly familiar, as though it rhymed with something in her memory, but she couldn’t quite place it. She was tired. Things had been moved around. On a pine desk were two plasma screen monitors, a black plastic keyboard and a mouse. The opposite wall was taken up by tall, glass-fronted bookshelves that reached the ceiling, full of big leather tomes.

  The east wing had mostly survived the fire. Wait. Could this be the room she once escaped by scrambling up the chimney? She remembered the fireplace as a grand, imposing thing. This one looked rather pokey. She couldn’t have fitted up that, could she?

  Behind a beige stitched-leather pouffe, she could just make out the swirling outline of Martha.

  ‘Well?’ said Delphine.

  Ms Rao hiked up the sleeve of her blouse and checked her wristwatch, chunky silver with a brown leather strap.

  ‘Rounds are just finishing,’ she said. There was a knock at the door. ‘It’s open!’

  A breakfast trolley jankled into the room, pushed by a bullman with tawny hair and splayed horns. Delphine gripped the arm of her chair. A harka.

  Her brain immediately processed him as someone in costume. He was about her height, but very heavily built. He had big dark eyes with large lashes, and a white-pink snout. His nostrils expanded when he inhaled, exposing moist interiors lined with pale hairs. He wore a necklace of coloured wooden beads and a loose, long-sleeved T-shirt. From the legs of his cotton trousers, his hooves left indents in the pile rug. Ms Rao did not look up from her desk.