The Salt Road (3 page)

We reached the house twenty minutes later, having toiled through the clogged traffic of Hampstead Village. I hadn’t been back since I’d walked out of it at the age of eighteen, with any illusions I’d had about the benevolence of the world lying in tatters around me and with only the hundred quid I’d raided from my mother’s study to sustain me until my university grant came through. ‘Give me a couple of minutes, will you?’ I asked Eve, and left her sitting in the car on the driveway.

The house regarded me furtively through its shuttered windows. If it recognized me it gave no sign. But I remembered everything about it: the pattern of the creeper as it wound up around the eaves and how it turned to crimson in the autumn, then became plague-spotted and finally a sickly yellow before littering the garden with its annual death. I remembered the rhododendrons whose contorted branches hid the dens of my youth, and the smooth patches on the slate path up to the front door that had been worn by the passage of thousands of feet. It was a Georgian house and its proportions pleased the eye of the adult who regarded it now. As a child, it had seemed vast to me; now it seemed substantial but hardly enormous, impressive but not ostentatious, as if it had somehow shrunk over the course of the intervening years. I looked at it steadily, and knew that I would sell it. I did not even want to go inside. Too many memories waited for me, and not just in the box in the attic.

Instead, I took the path that led around the side of the house to the back garden and gazed at its familiar landscape, hardly breathing, as if to move or make a sound might frighten away the delicate shades that lived there still. I felt that if I were to slip past the screening cover of the dense yew hedge I would surprise my six-year-old self, barefoot and sun-browned, my hair braided in untidy squaw-plaits, victoriously flourishing my latest find: a slow-worm or a toad unceremoniously disinterred from the rockery. Or that if I closed my eyes I would hear the whoops and howls of our little band as we chased one another between the flowerbeds with spud-guns. But the only sound I heard was the alarm cry of a blackbird high up in the cedar tree, liquid and shrill.

I walked on, into my past.

The pond where I had lain on my belly for hours on end, spying on the lazy meanderings of the ornamental carp through the murky depths, was now matted with weed and overgrown with convolvulus and meadow grass. There was the rockery, now little more than a random pile of stones overrun with ground ivy, nettles and dandelions. My father had been no gardener even in his youth; it was my mother who had set about keeping nature at bay. Armed with long-handled loppers, her gardening gauntlets and a pair of secateurs, she seemed like a medieval knight going out to do battle with a small but annoying dragon. Clearly no one had done anything to the garden in years. Wandering through the long grass, I half expected to find the remains of my old wigwam: tatters of faded yellow cloth flapping from skeletal poles like a becalmed
Marie Celeste
, my old rag-rug and toys still scattered where they had been suddenly and mysteriously abandoned. I walked over to the spot where it had stood all those years ago, but there was not even the tell-tale crispy brown circle it left on the lawn when dismantled and packed away for the winter. It might never have existed; and neither might that laughing, bright-eyed child.

Dark clouds had gathered overhead and as I stood there, remembering, it began to rain. Sticking my hands deep into my coat pockets, I trudged back to Eve.

‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

I avoided the subject of the attic for as long as I could, though I kept catching Eve casting her eyes towards it every time we passed through the hall, with its winding baronial banister. By the end of three hours we had made a rough inventory of the contents of the house, concentrating on the furniture, the paintings and the more valuable artefacts my parents had collected from around the world. I could not bring myself to enter what had been my parents’ bedroom. My own room was along the corridor. Gingerly, I pushed open the door.

Everything was just as I had left it all those years ago, except that it was now rather dusty and faded. On the walls were posters for The Slits and Crass and The Rezillos, angry music for an angry girl; inside the wardrobe, a jumble of clothes that were probably back in fashion in the seedier streets around Camden. I closed the door. That was an era of my life I never wanted to return to, a chapter of a book I wished to leave closed for ever.

Back out in the corridor, I found that Eve had pulled the attic ladder down.

‘You know you’ve got to,’ she said gently.

I knew she was right. There was no avoiding it. Up I went.

I have heard of people with a morbid fear of attics. There are countless tales of ghosts and mad folk lurking in the hidden, dark spaces of our houses: all good psychological symbols for the Self and the Other, for the dark side of our personalities that we fear, for the irrational part of the world that we cannot understand and so feel threatened by. It was not the attic that made my hands shake on the ladder. I had no fear of ghosts, as such. I’d scared the kids at school half to death with stories of vengeful spirits and the walking dead. I had no idea where I got such stories from, except that as a child I seemed to be possessed of a ghoulish imagination and a strong stomach. When next door’s terrier was run over in the road and I saw its guts spilling out on to the tarmac like great fat white worms, I didn’t run away and cry but stood there, gripped by my own fascination. Who knew a dog’s body contained such things? I elaborated my next ghost story with these gruesome details and Katie Knox was sick in a rosebush. But since then I’d spent a very long time suppressing my overactive imagination, straitjacketing it into the world that accountants and other such grown-ups inhabit. My fear as I went up into that dark, cobwebby space was of giving the dead power over me in the form of things that would prey on my mind rather than on my body.

At the top of the ladder I reached for the flashlight that my father stowed to the right of the hatch; and there it was, in the same place it had always been. The memory of the last time I had been up here jangled at the edge of my consciousness and I pushed it away into the dark place it had come up from. I clicked the switch and a beam of light swept over the attic space. Boxes. Boxes everywhere.

What had I expected? A solitary box sitting in the middle of a great void, waiting just for me?

I climbed up over the edge and walked the boarded floor in search of the one with my name on it. I’ll say this for my father: he was organized. I supposed I had inherited that trait from him. I wondered, scanning the neat labelling and the clarity of his archiving, whether he had known he was going to die, and, if so, for how long? There were boxes of books, by subject; boxes of shoes; boxes of archaeological records; boxes of old papers.

At last I found it. I had probably passed it two or three times, as it was a lot smaller than I’d been expecting; perhaps I’d been influenced by Eve’s ghoulish suggestion about it containing the remains of my mother. I crouched down.
Isabelle
, it said on the top in my father’s striking italic scrawl. The paper on which this had been written was yellow with age, and the ink was faded. I wondered just how long the box had been sitting there. It had been carefully closed with packing tape so that I could not simply rip into it then and there, tip whatever it contained over the floor and walk away. I picked it up. It was light, but as it tilted something inside shifted position and fell to the other side of the box with a dull thud.

What on earth could have made a noise like that? I stared at the box as if it might contain a skull, or a withered hand. Oh, stop it, Iz, I told myself firmly, and tucked the thing under my arm. It was hard descending the ladder with one hand, but I managed it without mishap. Eve eyed the box greedily. ‘Go on, then, open it.’

I shook my head. ‘Not now. Not here.’

3

London encompasses a vast space, covering well over fifteen hundred square kilometres. Into that space the best part of eight million people are jammed: in Victorian and Edwardian terraces, in seventies council blocks, in modern steel-and-glass towers, sprawling out into endless suburbs. In the past twenty years I had bought and sold flats all over London, forever on the move, forever moving west. I never stayed in one place for long, loving each new property for a year or two, then feeling restless, unsettled. Once I had finished renovating and redecorating and moved my focus outward to the world again, I felt uncomfortable. No matter where I was, no matter how attractive the area or how pleasant the neighbours, I never felt as if I fitted in. Each time I had itchy feet, I would find myself looking in estate agent windows and know that the time had come again to up sticks and move on. I was lucky: the property market moved with me, onward and upward. In the process I managed to trade up from a bedsitter in Nunhead with mushrooms growing between its bathroom tiles, to a one-bedroomed apartment in Brockley, to smarter two- and three-bedroomed Victorian conversion flats in Battersea and Wandsworth, to a mews house tucked away in the backstreets of Chelsea; and had finally ended up in a substantial property in the far south-west of the city, about as far away from my parents’ house as you could be while still remaining in London.

Less than forty minutes after we had speeded away from Hampstead we were back in Barnes, having gone from one overpriced middle-class village to another. Both areas reeked of money, old money and new; and for a few sickening seconds, as I drew the Mercedes into the drive, I hated my own version of my parents’ house almost as much as I had the original.

I said nothing of this to Eve: she wouldn’t have understood even if I could have put it into words. Eve loved things, loved them in a visceral, sensual way, as if they filled the void in her life that should have been filled by a husband and kids. She’d had two husbands, but had never been able to have children. I wondered sometimes if I filled part of that void as well, for she could be bossy with me when I was being slower off the mark than she liked, as if she was playing the mother she had never been and I her child.

I cleared the table and set the box on top of it. It looked ridiculously out of place amongst the shining stainless steel and polished granite of the kitchen: a piece of old rubbish salvaged from the street. I ran a sharp knife down the top seam and watched the paper and packing tape part.
Isa
, it said on one side of the cut, and
belle
on the other.

Eve and I craned our necks over it. Inside, at first glance there appeared to be just a load of dusty old papers. I took them out carefully: they looked fragile enough to disintegrate in my hands. The first sheet was small and a pale green in colour – my mother would have called it ‘eau de nil’. It had been folded and refolded many times. On one side there were odd-looking squiggles, impossible to make out since the ink was so old. I turned it over and found an indistinct heading. Something
Maroc
… Whatever came next was lost in the fold. It looked as if it might once have been an official document of some kind, for I found a couple of words that appeared to have been printed. I picked out
provi …
and a word that began
hegir
… But whatever else had been written or printed on it had vanished over time, evaporating inside the box. For a moment it occurred to me that by opening it I had allowed this information to escape, that somehow it was in the air around us, invisible but full of meaning. Fanciful nonsense! I passed the thin green note to Eve. ‘Not much help.’

She turned it over; held it up to the light, squinting hard. ‘
Maroc
: that’s Morocco in French, isn’t it?’ she said after a while. ‘And is that a stamp?’

In the bottom corner there was a small, embossed-looking rectangle. It bore a faint image, but even under the brightest of the halogen bulbs we couldn’t tell what it was. I put it aside. Next was a sheaf of typed papers, brown at the edges, the printing obviously that of a manual typewriter, since missing serifs and filled spaces appeared in the same letters each time, and occasionally a full stop had punched a hole right through the paper. My father had always had a heavy hand when typing.

Notes regarding the gravesite near Abalessa
, read the heading across the top of the page. I scanned it, frowning, taking in the phrases
confused jumble of stones, otherwise known as a
redjem
and
commonly found in the Sahara
. At the bottom of the first page the word
skeleton
leapt out at me. Gingerly, I picked up the article, turned the page and quoted aloud to Eve:
According to witnesses, the skeleton of the desert queen had been wrapped in red leather embellished with gold leaf. She lay with her knees bent towards her chest upon the decayed fragments of a wooden bier secured with braided cords of coloured leather and cloth. Her head had been covered by a white veil and three ostrich feathers; two emeralds hung from her earlobes, nine gold bracelets were upon one arm and eight silver bracelets on the other. Around her ankles, neck and waist were scattered beads of carnelian, agate and amazonite …
I skipped a bit and then continued:
Professors Maurice Reygasse and Gautiers of the Ethnographical Museum believe this site to have contained the remains of the legendary queen Tin Hinan
.

‘Wow,’ said Eve. ‘What fabulous stuff.’ She closed her eyes. ‘You can almost smell the desert, can’t you? Treasure and a legendary Saharan queen. It’s like something out of
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
! But what’s it got to do with you?’

I shrugged, feeling a bit sick. ‘I haven’t the least idea. From the tone of the notes it doesn’t even sound as if Dad was the one who excavated the site.’ I put the papers aside: it was like going back in time, seeing their punched-out o’s and feeling the impression made by the typewriter keys on the reverse side. It was some sort of message to me, a message from beyond the grave – both the Saharan queen’s and my father’s. The skin on the back of my neck tingled as if hairs were rising one by one.