The Mystery of the Cupboard Read online

  Who can tell?

  When she was barely sixteen her suitors were already crowding our house. I remember them, callow young men, bringing her presents, fawning on her, while I silently watched… But I didn’t stay silent! Oh, no!

  After they’d gone, I would mimic them. Mercilessly! I would force Maria to laugh at their antics even when she had thought she admired them.

  “Oh, stop, Jessie, stop!” she’d cry, weeping with laughter. “You are a demon, you’ve caught him exactly with his funny walk and his lisp. Oh, stop it, I will never be able to look at him again!”

  She was my first audience. Those were my moments of fulfilment when I forgot my plainness and began to be an actress.

  But there was something else about me, and this I kept to myself. I knew things. I knew she was not going to marry any of these. I knew what would be. Oh, not everything! But certain flashes of future knowledge came to me, even as a child.

  I had a dream, I had it over and over again, of myself standing in a building that was half lit and half dark. I stood high, and many people faced me from below, and I could do as I pleased with them — make them laugh or cry or sing or cheer, at my will. It was a theatre of course, but I didn’t know it then — how could I? I had never seen one. My father thought a theatre was the devil’s own den.

  But as I grew up, I learnt about the world. Actors were not ‘respectable’ but they were much talked of… and I found out the meaning of my dream, and I knew my destiny.

  When I told our father I was going on the stage for a living, he told me - and meant it - that he would rather see me dead in my coffin. He refused to consider it. I was punished for dreaming of it.

  To actually do it meant leaving home, enduring disgrace, being cast out, abandoning all that was familiar and safe… It meant being poor, living alone, begging for jobs, mixing with every sort of person. Yet I did it. I am still proud of that. It took a lot of courage. Somehow I achieved my ambition, and my father — though he never forgave me — at least noticed me and came to know that I was not the little nobody-and-nothing he had always thought me.

  And Maria stood by me. Not openly, of course, but secretly.

  It was the first time she had ever deceived our parents or gone against her ‘good’ character. But she loved me and she visited me. No one knew. But it counted.

  When my chance came and I did my first ‘turn’ on the stage of the Hackney Empire music hall, she was there in the stalls. What courage! We both had to be brave that night. I remember her, sitting alone — well, unescorted, at a time when women didn’t go anywhere without a man — in her big hat and her pretty furs, laughing aloud as she used to laugh in our bedroom when I mocked her suitors, and she gave me confidence, more than the rest of the laughter.

  Because I knew that if I were not truly funny, she would not have laughed. She was my sister, but she wouldn’t pretend — she wanted me to give up and come home and be her poor little second-rate sister again. She wanted my talent to be for her alone.

  A debt was owed for those acts of loyalty and courage. How did you repay her, Jessica Charlotte?

  And that wasn’t all. When my Frederick was going to be born I had to go away to hide my shame, and I couldn’t work, and was destitute.

  It was then I came to this house for the first time. It was still a farmhouse then and the farmer’s wife was a relative of my young man. I will not name him… I have forgotten him! He wasn’t worthy to be remembered! But he made her take me in (it was the last thing he ever did for me) and Frederick was born here, here in this very room in this old house in the Hidden Valley — how rightly named! I was hiding at last, ashamed at last, I who had stood brazenly on a stage for men to look at, and sworn that I would never be ashamed. I was ashamed of my child, of my own son.

  Perhaps Fred felt it, even then, and that was why he never loved or forgave me.

  Maria, though she couldn’t come so far from home without arousing our parent’s suspicion, wrote to me secretly and sent me money. She understood by now about love, for she was in love with Matthew Darren. I was to meet him in time, and she would say, her face all a blaze of love: “Well? Can you mock him, can you turn me off him?” and I had to say “No”. He was above my mockery and my mimicry…

  I never saw a woman so fond as she was of him. But there was a long delay before they could be married because he was working in India, and our father would not allow her to go out there to that tropical climate that he said would kill her. The Old Queen was dead, and her son fat Edward too, before they were wed at last, and a year later Lottie was born.

  Little Lottie. My sweet, adorable niece. My little girl whom I wronged. There can be no forgiveness!

  I am crying… Let me rest. I can write no more for the present.

  5

  Family Stuff

  “Gilly.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “Sorry to interrupt. What are you doing anyway?”

  “Homework,” said Gillon virtuously.

  “You’re not - are you really?”

  “If I don’t I’m seriously stitched up. It’s last week’s. Pit Bull’ll tear me to pieces.”

  “Ah.” Mr Pitt was indeed fiercer than Mr Butcher.

  “What did you want?” asked Gillon.

  “Just to ask you something. You know the cupboard.”

  “The precious cupboard, taking up space in the bank safe! Yeah?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  Gillon was silent for a long moment. Too long. Then he said, “I told you at the time. Found it in the alley behind our old house. Our old-old house, the one before last.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Gillon sat at his desk without turning, but there was something about the back of his neck that told Omri he was right.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. Tell me where you got it really.”

  Gillon turned on his swivel chair. “Listen—” he began. Then he stopped, frowned, and said, “What’s up with you? You look funny.”

  “Funny how?”

  “I dunno, as if you were zonked out. Look, so what if I made up about the alley? I didn’t pretend I’d paid for it. I said I’d found it, and that was true. I thought the alley would make it more sort of — interesting.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well. I found it in our basement. Among a whole lot of stuff. Most of it was just junk. Ask me, that cupboard was junk too, only you were gone on secret drawers and boxes and stuff and I thought you might think it was a bit of fun. I was skint at the time, it was the best I could do for a birthday present for you. I didn’t expect you to go crazy over it.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “Mum’s, I suppose. All the junk that collects in our houses is hers.”

  “And did you ask her - you know, if you could have it to give me?”

  “Well, no. I didn’t think she’d miss it. And she never recognized it, did she? She never knew she had it.”

  This was evidently true. His mother hadn’t flickered an eyelid when Omri had unwrapped Gillon’s present. It was because she had such a lot of stuff, half of it just bunged down in the cellar (or, in the next house, in the attic) without much sorting. His mother just couldn’t throw anything away — when they’d moved here, to this much smaller house with no attics or cellars, she’d stored all her ‘family stuff’, as she called it, in the outbuilding that had once been a pigsty.

  Family stuff…

  He went to look for his mother, and found her feeding the hens. She looked so countrified, scattering the corn with great sweeps of her arm like the sower-of-seed in the picture, Omri would have laughed if he hadn’t been feeling so solemn.

  “Mum.”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “You know all your family stuff.”

  “Oh, don’t talk about it! I really must sort it out one of these days.” She’d been saying that at intervals for as long as Omri could remember.

  “Where did it come from?”<
br />
  “My grandmother mostly.”

  “Her name was Maria, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Granny Marie I used to call her.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Oh, not till I was grown-up. Adiel was a baby. I have a photo somewhere of her, holding him in her arms. She was really old — well into her eighties.”

  So Maria was not waiting for her sister on the Other Side. Jessica Charlotte herself would have had a long wait - nearly twenty years - for the chance to explain. Explain what?

  Omri had had to stop reading the notebook for the moment. He felt too wound up. The story was too — too strong for him to take in much at a time. That poor old lady, dying alone like that, feeling so bad… Now, getting himself ready to read on, he was doing some investigating.

  “What about your grandfather?”

  “Matt. Poor Matt. Well, I never knew him. He died long before my time, when my mother was only a child.”

  “Lottie…”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he die — abroad?”

  His mother looked at him curiously. “No. He spent years in the colonies as an administrator, but — no. He died in London, in an accident. Terribly sad. Granny Marie never got over it. Just think of losing your husband, and then your only daughter in the bombing…”

  “She had you.”

  “Yes. And I loved her. But we were very hard up — Matt’s pension was pitifully small. We rented a little house in the East End, and Granny Marie had to work until she was quite old - it was a hard life for her, but she never let me feel it. I had a very happy childhood, thanks to her.”

  Omri went back upstairs. Gillon met him at the top.

  “Don’t you want to watch TV? Rats to homework, there’s a great film on.”

  “No, thanks,” said Omri. “I’m busy.”

  He piled the bricks against his doors again and went to the window. The sun was sinking behind the hills in front of the house. There was one special hill with a little crown of trees that grew in a cluster, in odd shapes — all spready and twisted. Omri wanted to go up there one day to see what they were like close to. With school and everything, and the thatching, there hadn’t been much time to explore.

  Now when he looked at the view he thought of Jessica Charlotte, looking at the same one. Which had been her bedroom? Not this one. Gillon’s. He felt sure of it. He’d found the box and the notebook at the gable end of the house. She must have hidden it in the eaves outside her window — the last window of the longhouse.

  He unearthed the cashbox from its hiding place and looked at it again. The coin slot was bunged up with some hard red stuff. Omri thought it might be sealing wax, he’d seen it on documents in museums. Ordinary people used to seal their letters with it in the old days. Why would she seal it? To keep the damp out, of course.

  He shook the box gently, trying to guess what was in it. There were a number of things in there, but they seemed to be wrapped because they slid about whisperingly; they didn’t rattle. Of course he could break it open… But he didn’t want to. She’d sealed and locked and hidden it, for him — for someone in the family with a mind more open — to find in years to come. When he had read the rest of the notebook, he would know whether she wanted him to open it and how it could be done.

  He put the box away again, and with a strange, solemn feeling of destiny — yes, destiny, this was meant to happen - he pulled his desk chair close to the window and opened the notebook at the place where he had left off.

  After Frederick was born, I had to work. It was not merely to fulfil my ambition and my talent then. I had a hungry baby with no father to feed him - so I had to do whatever came to hand.

  I won’t recount everything I did in those years to earn money. On the stage, off the stage… It was a strange life. One week I would be topping the bill at some provincial music hall, the crowd at my feet, the stage-door johnnies bringing me flowers and sweets and trinkets and making much of me. The next I might be behind a bar in some city pub, joking with the customers and pretending to drink the drinks they bought me but secretly pocketing their money and wetting my lips with the cold tea I kept under the bar…

  Once I scrubbed the steps… No matter. Let the past bury its dead. Frederick, who spent his babyhood in a Moses basket under many theatrical dressing tables, grew up to hate the business… but he grew straight and strong and with a will of iron. I thought I had cause to be satisfied with him, at least. Little did I know what a strange man my child would grow into.

  And Maria?

  My lucky, spoilt sister married her Matthew at last and had Lottie. Charlotte she was christened, not after me, of course — the family black sheep — but after our grandmother. But I was there! I crept into the church at Maria’s secret bidding, in my sober Sunday clothes with a big-brimmed hat pulled well down so no one would know me. Father and Mother were both dead by then, and our other relatives hadn’t seen me for ten hard, ageing years… I hid behind a pillar and pretended I was holding the baby, that she was my godchild… A godmother! Me! What nonsense. But all the best parts of my life have been make-believe.

  And I looked at Matthew. Maria’s Matthew.

  Matthew stood by the font, tall as a soldier. Handsome, and generous, and good. I could have loved him myself — I did love him, not least because he didn’t cast me out. Of course he never acknowledged me publicly, but he never forbade me to come to their house to visit Maria and Lottie. When no one else was there.

  Of course I never brought Frederick. That would never have done! Maria never knew Frederick. Never asked about him. She played the game called ‘It-Never-Happened’.

  Those were happy days. I played with my little niece and came to love her then. Beautiful, sweetest Lottie, my namesake, my darling.

  But my life was hard. I never told Maria how hard, and of course she never visited me in my sordid lodgings… She was so happy, she didn’t want to know anything unpleasant about my life and I never told her. But as I watched her, growing more beautiful and more beloved in wifehood and motherhood, the old bitterness raised its head again. Once more, all I had were crumbs from her table. Crumbs of happiness spilled from her overflowing life.

  And one day as I sat in her elegant parlour, playing with Lottie who was then about five, Maria said, very casually but as if she had been preparing it for a long time, “Of course, Jessie, when Lottie is a bit more grownup, it won’t do for you to see so much of her. Matt’s a good Christian but there is a limit to tolerance.”

  I felt her words like a knife. I would be a bad influence! That’s what she was saying! That I would contaminate Lottie’s life!

  I put Lottie, who had been on my knee, down very carefully and stood up. My sister must have seen in my eyes how deeply wounded I was, for she said quickly, “Come along now, darling, don’t take me up like that! I don’t mean now. I just wanted to - to get you used to the idea that one day—”

  I should have followed my impulse, and left then, and never come back. But I couldn’t. Frederick was already showing signs of the hostility to me that would pain me so much when he was a man, and I needed this other home, I needed Maria and her crumbs of love. I needed Lottie. I needed the glimpses I got of Matthew… Crumbs indeed. But I was so hungry!

  Yet the iron entered my soul. A deep bitterness about the differences between us. My idea — my terrible, wicked idea — came to me soon afterwards, when the shadow of her words about Lottie was still darkening my heart.

  No excuses, I said. No excuses! Tell the tale.

  We were in Maria’s boudoir. (Yes! She had one — a room all to herself, for her to dress in and do her hair and entertain her friends, and be herself, a room of feminine fancies and personal things, where even Matthew did not come without a knock!) And she was showing me her jewellery.

  It was kept in a special jewel case — a piece of barefaced luxury that Matthew had bought her on their wedding trip to Florence, in Italy. It was red leather tooled in gold, lined with red satin,
with little trays that lifted apart on delicate hinges. And at every level were the tokens of Matthew’s love for her, and our mother’s, for Mama had left all her pretty things to Maria. I in my disgrace had been left nothing.

  There was plenty there that I would have liked: a pearl necklace, two gold lockets, an emerald bracelet, even a fine diamond pin — Mama’s wedding present from Papa that she had once said should come to me. But then, in the bottom, I saw them. A pair of earrings.

  Beautiful! Oh, yes, they were. But more than that. They held my eyes like buttons in button-holes.

  They were aquamarines, like two tear-shaped drops of sea-water. Not our grey sea, no, but like the seas of the south that I had seen paintings of, blue-green, clear, without a flaw. They hung from two gold hooks.

  And I wanted them. I wanted them! To me they suddenly stood for all Maria had, and that I had not, all she wanted to shut me out from when my Lottie would be older. Not least her purity — my sister was pure as a perfect jewel.

  I made up my mind in that single instant that those earrings would be mine. And I knew clearly that there was only one way that could happen. I would steal them.

  That night when his mother came to kiss him in bed, as she always did, Omri pulled her to sit down beside him.

  “Mum, why was your grandmother so poor?”

  “As I told you - my grandfather’s pension—”

  “Yeah, but - you told me ages ago that your grandmother had a jewel case. You know the key - you said it belonged to a jewel case she’d got from Italy.”

  “Yes, that’s right. A red leather one.”

  “Well, I mean - a jewel case usually has some jewels in it.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean! Well, it was stolen.”

  “Stolen!”

  “Yes. There was a burglary. Oh, long before I was born - sometime after Matt died. They used to have a lot of lovely things. She told me about her silver tea service and her things they’d had, wedding presents, things her parents left her… It was all stolen. And there was no insurance. She’d stopped paying the premiums after Matthew died. So she lost all her valuables. She had to sell the Clapham Common house and rent a little slummy one. And get a job. Which was no joke for a woman who’d never worked.”