Nyctophobia (29 page)

This is why Marcos built those other strange rooms which are denied the sunlight, to complete his cousin’s plans for the house and to cover over the evidence of his sins, so that he could say, see, this house is complete – how could such a thing have happened upon this spot when you know my ancestral home stands upon it!

But that, of course, was not the only reason, I know that now. It was for the family.

The question that most vexes me is this: of what practical purpose was that ritual? How was it intended to ensure lasting happiness for those of us living in this house? The answer continues to elude me. Francesco Condemaine remains an enigma; a man of faith and science, the two held in equal balance, what did he achieve? It is certain that our lives here have been happy beyond imagining, and continue to be so, but at what cost? It seems certain now that we owe this state to my ancestor, but at what expense to our own lives?

The passage raised more questions than it answered. Could Marcos Condemaine have added the rooms to hide his ancestor’s sin, whatever it was, only to accidentally create a haven for them? There was one fact of which I was sure: Amancio Lueches had never posted the letter to his wife. He couldn’t, because he had written it twenty-two years after she had died.

I was about to throw away the envelope when I realised that there was something else in it, and shook out a small sepia photograph of three children. On the back of the picture was handwritten:
Las Niñas, 1911
.

I had already placed the silver-framed photograph of Francesco Condemaine’s offspring inside the writing desk and didn’t need another, but I idly put the two pictures side by side for comparison.

They weren’t the same children.
Las Niñas.
The three in the photograph Jordi had found were all girls, slender and darker, dressed in little more than rags, and the date, 1911, was the year before Hyperion House was completed.

A sickening feeling crept over me as I began to suspect the truth about the nature of Francesco Condemaine’s happiness ritual.

‘Why else do you think the people of Gaucia shunned the owner of Hyperion House?’ said Alfonse, as if it should have been obvious to me from the outset. I had come to ask the only person I still knew who might be able to throw some light on the matter.

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t think it would help you to know – and it doesn’t, does it?’ He sat back in his rattan chair and considered the view from his chaotic studio. ‘The story is that Francesco and two other members of his society stole the children away one night and slaughtered them on the site of the house. It was all to fit some crack-brained theory about there having to be a balance between joy and misery. He believed there was no other way of guaranteeing his family’s future happiness.’

‘How do you know about this?’

The old artist’s eyes lost focus. ‘How does anyone know anything? Stories, rumours, gossip passed off as the gospel truth. Apparently Condemaine said that he and his pals had legitimately “purchased” the girls from a destitute family in order to give them better lives. Like all these stories, the reality was obviously somewhere in between.’

‘What about the parents? They allowed this?’

‘Who can say now? The mother was either a widow, a whore or married to a drunk.’

I could see it now. A virtually destitute woman coming home from long, backbreaking hours in the fields, only to find that her daughters’ beds were empty. Running into the street she sees a cabriolet, a landau or even perhaps a motor vehicle heading away into the night, and there is nothing she can do, no-one she can turn to.

And the fact that the men of the Hyperion Society had chosen little girls for their purpose suggested much worse –

‘You have to let go of all of these dusty old stories,’ said Alfonse, reaching out to place a hand on my knee. ‘None of it matters now.‘

‘It matters to me,’ I said, rising and leaving.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The Condition

I
’D THOUGHT THAT
the anomalies in my new life were not intended to be understood, that they were the price of my choice to remain here and be happy. Now I knew that wasn’t true; it was all just another trick of the house. It was embarrassing how easily and willingly I had been seduced. For all its sunlight and beauty, this was a tainted place that tainted others.

While I tried to work out what to do, I busied myself by turning to Mateo’s unopened mail. I was surprised to note that the top envelope was from the Santa Theresa hospital in Estepona. It took a few minutes to load the contents of the letter into iTranslate, but the gist was immediately clear.

Dear Senor Torres,

I am concerned that you missed your follow-up appointments with our therapist to discuss the management of your condition. If you remember, at the end of our last session you agreed to the drawing-up of a
*
possibly timetable
*
(calendario) when we would resolve the outstanding issues and implications for your family.

Please get in touch with either myself or Senora Pachas at the earliest opportunity.

Sincerely,

Dr Javier Areces

I found Mateo in the garden, talking to Jerardo about one of the cork trees that had been damaged in the most recent storm. The gardener was angrily stoking a bonfire of dead branches. Mateo looked up, clearly taken aback by the look on my face.

‘Why did you stop seeing your doctor?’ I asked, cutting across him.

He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘What are you talking about?’

I held up the letter. ‘This. You’ve been for hospital tests three times in the last year.’ I turned over the page. ‘It doesn’t say why. You were supposed to see a therapist to talk through “the implications”? What implications?’

Mateo excused himself and took me to one side. ‘I didn’t want to alarm you. I was getting short of breath, particularly when I lifted heavy luggage at the airport. Areces took some scans and ran lots of tests. They decided I had something called acute unstable angina. It’s caused by a restriction in the supply of oxygenated blood to the heart. The symptoms develop rapidly and last up to about half an hour. He put me on glyceryl trinitrate, but I developed a resistance to it.’

‘Well, what does that mean? What are the implications?’

‘They offered me an arterial bypass graft.’ He pressed his finger over his heart. ‘You take a section of blood vessel from another part of the body and use it to re-route the flow of blood past the narrow section that’s in here.’

‘And what – you said no?’

‘I said I’d think about it and get back to them, and I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Partly because of where it is – there’s some risk involved. But it’s okay, I’m giving up the international flights. And I’m being careful – I always get a porter to take my case now, and I stay well away from hornets.’

‘Why hornets?’

‘Anaphylactic shock exacerbates the condition. I’d die within seconds if I was badly stung.’

I felt sick at the memory of him lying on the path, but was thankful that the nest had been destroyed. ‘You were supposed to attend further appointments.’

‘What’s the point? I know what they’re going to say – don’t exert yourself or suffer undue stress. I’m fine, really.’

‘Mateo, if the doctors think the operation could be a success, you should do it. I don’t know what Bobbie and I would do without you. I get frightened just thinking about it.’

‘That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you, Callie. I knew how you’d react!’ He held out his hand. ‘Please, let me have the letter.’

I resisted feebly, then finally handed him the page. He screwed it up and dropped it into the bonfire. ‘There, now. Don’t look at any more of the unanswered mail, okay? There’s a reason why I don’t answer them. I don’t want you to upset yourself. I want you to be happy.’

‘But what if you – ?’

‘What if I
what
? Drop dead in JFK airport? What do you want from me, Callie, certainty? Our lives have no certainty. You can’t quantify and predict everything, you can’t know which of the choices we make will turn out to be right or wrong, all you can do is make intelligent guesses and enjoy what there is. What if you had gone to the police about your father? What if you hadn’t had an abortion? What if we hadn’t met and moved here? Who knows what the shape of your life would be? We all make mistakes, we can’t do everything right.’

‘Don’t you see, Mateo, I never thought I would find any happiness, and then I met you and Bobbie and came to this house, and even with everything that’s happened since then I’m still here, because I know this is my only chance to be happy.’

‘Then you must know that nothing lasts forever, my love.’

There was a forlorn expression on his face that I had never seen before. Unable to bear looking in his eyes for a moment longer, I ran back to the house.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The Ghosts

T
HE BRANCHES HAD
elongated their shadows across the ceiling, and juddered back and forth in the wind. The rains were coming again.

When the storm hit, the ceiling turned into a glittering waterfall. I rose and watched the reflection of the rain sluicing down the windows. There was no point in trying to get to sleep. Even though Mateo had acted for my sake, I was unable to shake off the conviction that I had been repeatedly and deliberately lied to. It was as if I had been watching a play in which everyone had a carefully rehearsed part, performed for an audience of one.

When I was nine years old, my mother had told me that the world was not waiting to see what I did. That it would go on around me, without me, and nobody would care if I was there or not. After that I put it to the test a few times and thought that she was right – no matter how I behaved, nothing changed. Puberty altered all that. Suddenly everything had a consequence. I saw that life was a domino pattern waiting to be tumbled, one piece hitting the next, and that once it was set in motion there was no way to put the parts back in place.

I went down and boiled hot milk for cocoa, then sat drinking it in the kitchen that smelled of lavender and warm bread, watching the pair of them: Mateo sitting at the table, tapping at his iPad and frowning, Bobbie playing some kind of complicated card game that required her to lay out the pack according to the constellations. I listened to the wind and rain, and said nothing. Rosita came in and went out with some plates, a walk-on part in the unfolding dumb-play around me.

At one point the power glitched and the lights flickered out. Neither Mateo nor Bobbie even flinched. When the power came back they were in exactly the same positions, Mateo tapping away, Bobbie carefully laying down cards, as if they hadn’t noticed a thing.

‘Did you see that?’ I asked.

‘Hmm?’ Mateo looked up and studied me, then smiled vaguely. ‘No, what?’

Later he stayed downstairs watching a loud science fiction movie with Bobbie. I let him put her to bed, heard him turn off the TV, heard him head for the distant kitchen where I knew he would make one last
cortado
, heard his creak on the stairs and his clothes falling to the floor, felt his warm hands close over mine in bed.

And still I knew I had been lied to.

The next morning began with one of those glorious skies that set a blue luminescence over the world. By 8:00am it was already too hot for an autumn day, and the wind had fallen away, allowing the heat to settle across the landscape.

I sat at breakfast while Rosita served eggs,
tostadas
and coffee, as she always did on a Saturday, and I could feel the conspiracy of their smugness. I would do as I was told, and I could be kept in the dark just as much as those poor dead creatures in the other rooms. They would stay there, and we would stay here, and so long as nobody upset the order of things we’d just go on as before, as people always had in this house. This damned house.

I silently watched Bobbie engrossed in the buttering of her toast, carefully taking the butter all the way to the corners, something Rosita usually scolded her about because the Spanish never seemed to put butter on their bread while tomatoes were available. Mateo was in faded blue jeans, an Ajaxx T-shirt and Adidas trainers, his weekend uniform, every bit as graceful as his weekday suit. Bobbie had tied her hair in perfect braids.

‘Are you okay?’ Mateo asked solicitously. ‘You’re very quiet this morning.’

‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘I thought we’d all go into Gaucia today. To go as a family for a change.’

Mateo looked pained. ‘Oh honey, can’t you go? I promised Jerardo I’d give him a hand. Some more branches came down in the night and we need to get them clear of the paths. To be honest, I think the garden is getting a little too much for him.’

‘Then we should let him go and bring in some new help. He’s far past retirement age.’

‘We couldn’t do that, he’s always been here with the house. He’s spent most of his life here.’

‘I
forgot
, the house must come first. Well, he can carry on living here on the premises, like Senora Delgadillo.’

He gave me a strange look. ‘What’s got into you this morning?’

‘Forget it,’ I said, rubbing a patch of dry skin on my forehead. ‘I didn’t sleep well.’

‘I need to finish my essay,’ said Bobbie. ‘It has to be posted on Monday morning, remember?’

‘So it has,’ I said. ‘Well, there’s always something.’

Bobbie’s new school was giving her assignments that would bring her up to speed for the new term. I hadn’t been to the school and met the governors; Mateo had taken care of that. At least, that was what he had told me.

‘So, are you okay to go into Gaucia with Rosita?’ It felt as if Mateo was pushing me.

‘You never come with me anymore. I can’t remember the last time we all went together.’

‘I know I’ve been away a lot, but that’s finished now.’

‘What do you mean?’