The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (3 page)

Heather, exhausted, surveyed the result of her efforts for some time. She speculated that the cupboard would fetch a good sum at auction, four figures certainly, perhaps even five. The carving on the panel was, in its primitive way, remarkable. The faces of Adam and Eve were too worn to be very distinct; it was their attitudes that were so striking. Adam’s body was bent and tense, the arms held up as if to ward off an unseen assailant. The whole posture suggested extreme fear. Eve seemed merely transfixed, held from returning the apple to the tree by the gaze of the snake. As in some late medieval paintings that Heather had seen, the face of the serpent was not snakelike, but almost human. It was a powerful and interesting piece of work which Heather would have liked to see in a gallery, but not every day as she worked, planning wholesome Feng Shui for her clients.

Heather decided next to move in some of her reference books to put on the shelves. With this object she left the room. As she did so she heard a loud thump behind her, as of something falling heavily onto the carpet. She turned round and looked back into the room. Nothing had changed. The cupboard stood where it was. It was odd.

Two weeks passed without much happening. Heather moved her things into the room, which she now called her study, and arranged them according to the principles of Feng Shui. She could never settle things quite to her satisfaction, however, and the muniment cupboard, even in its new position, remained strangely intrusive. But the new house was, on the whole, a success, though one night the Billings’ youngest daughter Jessica, aged ten, woke up screaming that there was an old man in her room. Jessica was not prone to nightmares.

Three mornings after Jessica’s nightmare Heather went to her study. She had seen her husband off and taken Jessica to school (the two older children, Brad and Beth, boarded); the weekly shop was done, the meals planned, the house cleaned: she had earned some time for her own activities. The moment she entered the study she was conscious of something being wrong. Several seconds went by before she was able to recognise what was amiss, since everything seemed in good order; then she realised that the muniment cupboard was not where she had put it. It was back in its old position, and the architect’s drawing board which she had placed there was where she had put the cupboard: the two pieces of furniture had been neatly swapped round. Heather stood in the middle of the room. Having understood what had happened, her task now was to understand why. A practical joke? But who would want to play it? Brad and Beth were away. Jessica was too young and too meek to do anything like that. Her husband Jack lacked both the opportunity and the will. Who else was there? Burglars? But nothing had been stolen. As the minutes passed and she still could find no possible rational explanation, Heather’s heart began to thump; she was conscious of panic as a palpable physical sensation rising in her. She tried yoga breathing exercises to calm herself down, but her normally compliant body refused to obey. Her mouth was going dry; the racing blood in her veins made her feel giddy. She ran from the room and into the garden. The sun was shining and, in the lime tree’s shade, she regained some composure. From somewhere nearby she heard a soft laugh, but this did not worry her too much: it could easily have been a passer-by, though she did not care to verify this supposition.

That evening Heather made tentative enquiries of her daughter and her husband about the moving of the furniture. As she had feared, her questions were met with genuine bewilderment. Neither of them had ever been in her room, Jessica stating, with a decisiveness unusual for her, that she ‘never went into mum’s room’. Besides, Heather was forced to acknowledge that the cupboard was simply too heavy for Jessica to have moved on her own. She toyed briefly with paranoid notions of her husband and daughter being in some sort of conspiracy against her before psychological self-defence mechanisms shut off all speculation on the subject.

For some days Heather did not go into the room either, and when she did she half expected her whole experience to have been an illusion and to find the cupboard back where she had put it, but it was not. She spent the day going in and out of her study trying to ignore the cupboard, but it would not be ignored. By the evening she had conceived a hatred for the object more virulent and concentrated than she had felt for any living human being, even her first husband. She wanted to do it harm. She thought of taking it into the garden and burning it, but, apart from the difficulty of moving it, she did not want to provoke the suspicion of her neighbours. She did not want to be thought ‘queer’. Besides, to destroy the thing would be to admit defeat. She would sell it, as she had originally planned.

The idea made her more cheerful than she had been for days and she went at once to the telephone in the sitting room to ring Gilchrist’s, the local auctioneers. A frustrating time followed. She had wrong numbers, crossed lines, interference, engaged signals. In the end she went into the garden with her mobile phone, and got straight through to Gilchrist’s on it. Mr Gilchrist would come the very next morning to look at her muniment cupboard.

As she walked back into the house the telephone rang. It was someone who wanted to book her for a Feng Shui consultancy. Heather put her off quite abruptly. Clients were rare, but she could concentrate on nothing until she had solved her own little Feng Shui problem.

Despite this, it would have been a most satisfactory day for Heather had it not been for something that happened that evening which disturbed her more than anything that had previously occurred. And yet it was so apparently trivial.

She was sitting in the drawing room enjoying a drink with her husband before dinner. Jessica, having had tea, had gone upstairs to her room to do homework. Suddenly they heard her scream. Jack and Heather rushed upstairs to find Jessica standing in the doorway of her room. She seemed rigid, transfixed. In her hand she held a small piece of card. It was as if she wanted to get rid of it but somehow couldn’t. (Like Eve and the apple on the panel, thought Heather.) As soon as Jessica saw her parents the spell was broken, she dropped the card and rushed sobbing into her mother’s arms.

It was some time before Jessica was able to explain coherently what had happened. She had gone upstairs and, on the chest of drawers by the door, she had seen this card. Jack picked it up and examined it. It was an old fashioned sepia portrait photograph, the back of which was made up as a postcard, dating from the 1920s. The picture showed the head and shoulders of a respectable, commonplace looking man in his thirties. The features were regular, if heavy, and might have been thought handsome, but for a blank, sexless quality about them. The lips, a little too thin, were smiling primly; the eyes were partially concealed behind small round spectacles. He wore a stiff little turned down collar and a suit of some heavy tweed material. Certainly there was nothing in this image to excite fear, apart from its inexplicable appearance.

‘But why did you scream, darling?’ asked Heather.

‘Because it was
him,
’ sobbed Jessica. ‘The old man I saw in my room that night.’

‘He doesn’t look all that old to me,’ said Jack.

‘No, but it
was
him. It was!’

Heather turned the postcard over to the blank side. Very faintly in pencil was written: ‘Ignatius Abney M.A. 1926’. That night Jessica slept in her parents’ room.

The following morning, after delivering Jessica to school, Heather went into her study. Her mind no longer balked at the improbable events which had taken place; she was filled with determination. Her first task was to empty the cupboard of the few items of hers which it contained, mostly envelopes and writing paper. She opened the panel. There in one of the pigeon holes was her stationary. The other pigeon holes were stuffed with Abney’s pamphlets. There had been none there when she had put her things in: she was sure of it. Heather suppressed a scream; but she was now so near winning a victory that she was able to summon up reserves of strength. She went to fetch a cardboard box which she filled with the pamphlets.

Having done so she felt easy enough to be able to satisfy a reluctant curiosity. She picked up one or two of the pamphlets and looked through them. They seemed dull, nonsensical things full of strange symbols and unexplained terms. Idly she flipped open a copy of
Eugenius: or the True Cult of the Race Soul
and read:

‘Racial Purity is to be preserved not only physically, in the Blood, but also spiritually, in the Culture. Thus a White Aryan can no more practise Obeah or Voodoo, than the Negro can seek initiation into the Rites of Saturn or Pan, let alone perform the Greater Ritual of Abre-Melin. There are some Filthy Dabblers who would fuse and meld magical systems, who fall for the hot embraces of Shiva while running after the slant-eyed blandishments of Pu Yi; but I have seen these
Eclectomaniacs
(as I call them) confounded and fall into the Pit.’

Heather shuddered and shut the booklet. She had read enough to know Ignatius Abney, and the knowledge did her no good. Those dreadful capital letters spoke all too eloquently of the man. She remembered his face from the photograph and could see the prim smile of satisfaction as he coined the word
eclectomaniac.

**

Mr Gilchrist was the youngest partner in the firm of Gilchrist Auctioneers, a great grandson of its founder. He was in his early thirties, chubby, personable, ex-public school and a furniture enthusiast. He admired the muniment cupboard enormously. Yes, early seventeenth, possibly even late sixteenth century, and the carving was remarkable: it would excite great interest. There must be a photograph in the catalogue, of course. He would ring up some dealers he knew in London. After examining the carving again he turned to Heather and asked her if he might ask why she was selling the piece.

‘Oh, not that we need the money. No. It just doesn’t go with anything here. Not our style.’

Gilchrist nodded. In his brief passage through the house he had seen no other piece of antique furniture. It was all modern or reproduction, all colour co-ordinated: expensive, insipidly tasteful, not his style. He asked where the cupboard had come from and Heather told him that it had come with the house and had belonged to a man called Abney. Gilchrist reacted; he knew the name. Heather pressed him for further information.

It was evidently an often-told family story and it had all happened just after the war when his grandfather was head of the firm. On Abney’s death Gilchrist’s Auctioneers had been called in to clear Lime House. It contained some fine antique furniture and a remarkable collection of books and pictures, some of which, for reasons of decency, had to be sold privately. It had been a splendid opportunity, but, in the event, it caused the firm nothing but problems, the difficulty being that old Abney had died leaving everything to his housekeeper. Unfortunately she had also died at roughly the same time. They had both been discovered lying in their separate rooms some days after their death by anxious neighbours. Post mortems could not determine for certain which one of them had perished first; and Abney’s will had stated that, in the event of the housekeeper predeceasing him, the estate was to be divided up among his cousins. Relatives of the two deceased descended on Cheltenham; there were lawyers involved and unpleasant scenes in the auction rooms. Lots had to be withdrawn, and generally, in Mr Gilchrist’s phrase, ‘all hell broke loose’. The Gilchrists had not forgotten the Abney Sale.

Mr Gilchrist left Lime House not quite so eager to sell the muniment cupboard as he had been. He wished he did not know it was an Abney piece, but he had been compelled to ask about its provenance. The reason was that, as he was examining the carving of Adam and Eve he had noticed that the head of the serpent bore a crude but distinct resemblance to his would-be client, Heather Billing.

In the end Gilchrist’s sent a letter declining to sell the muniment cupboard, giving as the rather vague reason for their refusal ‘certain unresolved questions as to the provenance’. But by this time Heather had lost all interest in the thing as she was in the throes of a move. Jack had been posted to Stolz’s Hong Kong office. It was not exactly a promotion, but it had its attractions. There being no call for a Western Feng Shui expert in Hong Kong, Heather began to study the healing powers of crystals. She sometimes called herself an ‘eclectomaniac’ and was thought very witty for doing so.

**

Lime Tree House went up for sale and was bought for considerably below the asking price by the Pearmains, who had enjoyed a reversal of fortune. Before he left Stolz Mr Pearmain had taken copies of the disputed overseas accounts and these incriminating papers formed the basis of his subsequent employment tribunal claim for constructive dismissal. Stolz International tried desperately to negotiate an out-of-court settlement with their former employee but, once he had been persuaded by his wife that this was the right thing to do, Mr Pearmain exhibited the same irritating and dogged determination to see the matter through as he had all those months ago when he had first tried to raise the issue internally. This unswerving integrity was highly praised by the tribunal chairman when awarding Pearmain record compensation and resulted in his being recruited by a new government agency to lead an initiative against offshore corporate fraud.

Pearmain’s new position involved a great deal of travel but provided commensurate financial reward. Alice had made the repurchase of Lime House her condition for his acceptance of the job. It would compensate for his frequent absences from home. Alice was pleased but not surprised to find that the Billings had decided to leave the muniment cupboard behind. It was there in her little office where it always had been. She patted it, not perhaps affectionately, but with respect, and studied that strangely evocative relief panel of Adam and Eve. Then she noticed something she had not noticed before: the head of the serpent looked strangely like the head of their new cat, Peter, who had that morning sharpened his claws on the muniment cupboard’s bulbous legs. It was the last time he did it, though, and the last time he went into the room. Thereafter Peter sharpened his claws on the lime tree in the garden.