2006 - Wildcat Moon (3 page)

The rocking horse creaked fearfully.

The dying embers of the nursery fire glowed behind the fireguard and a stray spark drifted away up the chimney.

The tigers were on the move now. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing to attention and her heart thumped noisily against her flannelette nightgown.

She heard them climbing up the steps from the dark, cobwebby cellars, then the jingle of ladles and spoons as they squeezed through the kitchen…Now the pad of their velvet paws on the worn hallway carpet.

Moving past the drawing room where tempers are frayed.

Where Papa is shouting at Mama.

“The child needs to be here with her mother.”

“She needs to go to school and have friends of her own age.” Mama now, pleading.

“School! Don’t talk to me of school! No child of mine will ever set foot in a damned school.”

“I’ve written to the headmistress of Nanskelly School, an excellent gills’ school. She could go each day in the car.”

“You had no business to make plans for her without consulting me. She will
never ever
go to school, so get that into your thick head. I will not have her mixing with God knows who and being corrupted.”

“It’s a school, for goodness sake, not a house of correction.”

“She’s doing perfectly well here and here she stays. She has everything mat a child needs.”

“She needs more freedom, more company, more time to be a child. I need more freedom too. We can’t be kept shut up here for ever…”

“Oh, my sweet darling, I think you can.”

“You can’t know what it’s like for us cooped up in this mausoleum of a house. You’re never here.”

“I have business to attend to as well you know.”

“And we all know what sort of business that is!”

“I won’t listen to another word of your ranting. I have already engaged another governess. She will arrive tomorrow. I have arranged for a car to fetch her from the station.”

“I sometimes think that these governesses of yours are really here to keep an eye on me rather than Ronully.”

“Nanny Bea does a good enough job on that score.”

“One day, I swear to God that I’ll leave here.”

“And if you do you know the consequences. You will lose the child and never see her again and you will be, amongst other things, penniless.”

Romilly pulled the bedclothes up over her head and covered her ears with her hands.

The tigers were getting nearer now. They always came when people got angry.

Closer and closer they came. Eyes bright with hunger. Whiskers twitching. Coming stealthily up the stairs.

At the top of the stairs.

They were outside the nursery door now. Their agitated breath rasping, breath thick with the smell of stale blood.

If they pushed against the door it Would open with a soft click. She imagined their sharp claws, ripping through the blankets. The feel of their huge teeth as they sank into her, goose-pimpled skin. The spurt of red blood splattering the white, starched sheets.

She held her breath until the blood pumped noisily inside her ears and her lungs felt like balloons that might pop at any moment.

The tigers were moving away now.

Restless. Hungry.

Pawing at Nanny Bea’s door in the room next to the nursery.

Nanny Bea was too old and tough to eat.

Silence again.

In Nanny Bea’s room milk bubbled over onto the hotplate ring and hissed. She heard Nanny Bea shuffling across the room in her tartan slippers, cursing softly so as not to wake Romilly.

Romilly heard the cap of the bottle removed and the sound of liquid pouring. Nanny Bea’s nightcap. A full mug of brandy laced with hot milk.

Away in Rhoskilly village the church clock chimed mournfully.

She heard the dick of the tiger claws on the bare boards in the attic rooms above her head.

Prowling. Growling. Pacing.

Downstairs a glass is smashed.

Footsteps cross the hallway. The front door is opened and wind rushes into the house and rattles the loose antlers of the stag’s head that hangs on the wall.

The front door bangs shut. Angry heels grinding into the gravel. A car door opens and slams. Roars away down the drive.

She can hear the low rumble of the tigers’ empty bellies echoing through the house.

The grinding of gears as the car moves on.

Then silence.

Out on the landing the stuffed brown bear at the top of the stairs yawns and closes its glazed eyes. She heard the click of his yellow teeth as they knocked together.

Down in the smoky drawing room Mama winds up the gramophone. Now that Papa has gone the elephant’s foot pouffe begins to tap out a tune:

To Bombay a travelling circus came
,

They brought an intelligent elephant

And Nelly was her name
.

One dark night she slipped her iron chain

And off she ran to Hindustan

And was never seen again!

Perhaps one dark night she and Mama will slip their iron chains, run away to Hindustan and never be seen again.

She lay listening to the moaning of the wind in the chimneys, the far-off crash of the sea on the rocks and the wildcats howling over in the filthy place they called the Skallies. Papa said the Skallies was a blot on the landscape and if he had dynamite he’d like to blow it to Kingdom Come. It was a place not fit for man or beast It was dirty and dangerous and full of mad people who didn’t wash behind their ears and didn’t know their place.

Romilly and Mama had never been allowed anywhere near there.

She dosed her eyes, heard the soft purring of the tigers, sleeping now like giant pussycats curled up among the junk in the attics. Resting their enormous heads on piles of mouldy theatre programmes, old diaries and journals with pages the colour of saffron cakes.

Downstairs the music continued and Mama laughed loudly then sang along:

The head of the herd was calling far far away
;

They met one night in the silverlight

On the road to Mandalay
…

In the tiny bar of the Pilchard Inn Nan Abelson threw a log on to the fire and watched as a flurry of sparks escaped up the chimney.

She pulled her old grey cardigan doser around her shoulders and stood looking into the heart of the fire.

The flames danced wildly and the embers glowed with a fierce intensity.

She thought of how she’d loved to sit and stare into the fire for hours when she was a child. She used to watch the pictures in the embers, to breathe in the smells of the different woods: olive and pine; apple and oak.

For a moment she allowed a chink of long-buried memory to bubble to the surface.

She pictured the little house in Bizier…herself as a child carrying armfuls of kindling along the path from the woodshed. Mama standing at the stove in the kitchen, turning to look at her and smiling that sweet lopsided smile. The sound of Papa humming cheerfully in his workshop for the last time.

She closed her eyes, willed herself to stop the memory. It did no good resurrecting the past. The past was done and dusted. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Only the pain remained.

She stirred herself, tried to shrug off the feeling of uneasiness that was growing in the pit of her stomach.

“Another pint of your best when you’re ready, Nan. A man could die of thirst while you’re staring into that fire.”

Walter Grimble’s voice dragged her back from her unsettling thoughts. She went back behind the bar and expertly pulled a pint without looking once at Walter Grimble. She knew, though, that his bloodshot eyes were on her, looking her up and down as though she were a piece of tripe on the butcher’s block.

Nan Abelson despised Walter Grimble. He had a leery eye and a nasty temper and he treated his wife and little Archie something rotten.

“It’s blowing up real rough out there, Nan. You could do with a good man to keep you warm tonight,” Walter said, leaning further over the counter to get a look at her legs.

Nan ignored him, plonked a glass pot down on the worn counter and turned away quickly.

Walter Grimble slurped the froth off his pint greedily and belched loudly. He thought that it was unusual for Nan not to give a sharp retort; perhaps she was sickening for something. He caught sight of her reflection in an old mirror on the back of the bar and for a moment he was sure that he saw a tear wind its way down her flushed cheek. It wasn’t like Nan to show any emotion. She was a handsome woman but as hard as bloody nails where men were concerned. Something must have got into her tonight, though, to bring a tear to her eye; maybe she did have a heart beneath that shabby cardigan after all.

Nan Abelson was feeling rattled. She’d felt that way ever since old Benjamin Tregantle had passed away, as if the balance had somehow gone out of the Skallies and the world wasn’t such a safe place any more. Maybe she’d got too complacent over the years since she’d come here, stopped being afraid. She needed to keep her ears and eyes open now, be on her guard, especially with old Benjamin gone. She swallowed hard, tried to stem the tears that were never far away. She was missing Benjamin something terrible. She could hardly bear to look at the Grandfather chair where he’d always sat dose to the fire.

No one sat there now.

Walter Grimble had plonked his fat behind there the same night as they’d heard the news of Benjamin’s drowning, but she wasn’t having any of that.

“You can move your arse right now. No one sits there. That seat’s reserved,” she’d said, surprised at the intensity of her own anger.

And he had seen the look in her eye and moved without a word.

She glanced briefly across at Walter Grimble, barely able to keep the look of scorn off her face.

Cocky bugger that he was. He’d never be a quarter of the man old Benjamin had been, not as long as he had a hole in his fat arse. However cold she got in the nights it wouldn’t be him she’d like to cuddle up to. God knows why Martha had ever married him. Martha Grimble would be a good-looking woman if she wasn’t so worn out all the time fetching and carrying for that lazy lump. She must have been drunk or out of her mind when she’d agreed to many that old fartpot.

“Ill not be hanging about long, Nan,” Charlie Payne called out from his seat over near the window. “Ill have one more and then be off; going to be a rough old night tonight and a fair bit of damage done, I’ll wager.”

“We’ve had some bad storms here in the Skallies but one of the worst I ever remember was the night they buried Charles Greswode, from Killivray House,” Freddie Rayne said.

Nan smiled across at the two Payne brothers. They were identical twins who had lived in the Skallies all their lives and made their living by fishing, as their ancestors had done before them. Folk said there’d been Paynes living in the Peapods as far back as anyone could remember.

“That were a few years back,” Nan said. “Before my time.”

“Bloody old lunatic that Charles Greswode’s father was,” Freddie Payne remarked, putting down his glass.

“He were a horrible man. Went off to foreign parts, came back here to live while his brother were abroad. Asked the locals in one Christmas Eve for mince pies and punch…” Charlie added.

“That was nice of him,” Nan said. “No one gets invited in there these days. Like bloody hermits they are. Never see them out and about like normal folk.”

Charlie Payne began to laugh, blowing foam from his pint all over his whiskers.

“What’s tickled your fancy, Charlie?”

“I were just thinking, it weren’t that nice for that young kid from up Rhoskilly.”

“Why’s that then?” said Nan with a broad grin.

“Well, while they was in Killivray this kid slipped away from everyone else and went snooping about upstairs.”

“And?”

“He come face to face with a live tiger on the landing!”

“Never!”

“In a terrible state he was. Cacked his pants on the spot, had to be taken home to change and his mother give him a right pasting.”

“Don’t tell your bloody lies, Charlie Payne.”

“No, honest to God, Nan. Greswode kept all sorts of creatures in there. Me and Freddie weren’t born then but they reckon it was like a bloody menagerie.”

“He had pythons as well,” Freddie Payne added with enthusiasm.

“Thirty foot long some of ‘em was,” Charlie said.

“You can remember hearing about when that kid seen the tiger, can’t you, Billy?” Charlie called out across the bar.

“I can. The nosy little bugger could have been killed. I heard that a servant got between him and the beast and saved his bacon. Some black fellow that Greswode brought back with him from his travels. Couldn’t get hardly anyone local to work for him, not after that scullery maid got bit by a monkey.”

“Now, what the hell was that black fellow called? Funny-sounding name he had, Rory Obory or something like that”

“I can’t remember his name after all this time. They reckon those tigers were beautiful though,” Billy mused shaking his head.

“There was lions as well,” Freddie said.

“No, there weren’t no bloody lions, you add yards on, you do. There was monkeys, though, and a bear.”

“Whatever happened to them all?” asked Nan.

Charlie Payne took a long draught of beer then continued, “Well, out of the blue Greswode married some big piece of goods from up the line and they had a son, Charles. She wouldn’t let him keep his pets so he had to get rid of them all.”

“What did he do with them?”

“Had some of them shot and then stuffed. They reckon that’s why that black fellow did what he did.”

“What did he do?” Nan was fascinated.

“Topped himself,” Charlie said.

“That’s terrible.”

“Grew up with them tigers and they was like family to him, I suppose. Blew his brains out in the wobbly chapel years later.”

“Our old mother always reckoned he was having a bit of a thing with Gwennie and when he done himself in that’s when she went all peculiar.”

“Do you think that’s what happened to her?” Nan asked.

“No, they say she were always a bit unusual, high-spirited, even as a kid. A bit of a wild thing she was,” Freddie chipped in.