Purveyor of Enchantment Read online

  The Purveyor of Enchantment

  MARIKA COBBOLD

  To my parents with love and gratitude

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Acknowledgment

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  One

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Clementine whispered to Mr Scott, ‘but I never was very good at carpentry.’ She looked out from the attic window, into the night. Below, lit by moonlight, lay the rope-ladder, draped across a rose bush, no use to anyone.

  Mr Scott just shrugged his shoulders, sinking down onto the chair by the desk. As he sat, a heavy loose-limbed man, the chair sagged, pushing the spring which pierced through the bottom of the chair right down to the floorboards.

  They had heard the sound of glass breaking some minutes after going upstairs to look at Mr Scott’s books on African legends. Then a door had slammed shut.

  ‘What on earth!’ Mr Scott had turned from the large trunk in the corner of the room, a battered book in his hand.

  ‘Shush,’ Clementine placed her finger across her plump lips, smearing it with raspberry-red lipstick. She tiptoed across the room to close the door, her heart beating so fast that she thought any minute now it would spring right out of her chest and across the room all on its own.

  ‘I think someone’s broken in,’ she whispered, and it was then her gaze fell on the rope-ladder that she herself had given to Mr Scott some weeks earlier in case of fire or some other emergency just like this one. From down below came the sound of china crashing to the floor. Mr Scott flinched and his old face seemed to drop off its bones.

  ‘I’ll climb down the ladder and run for help. The curtains are all drawn so he won’t spot me.’ She had gathered up the coiled ladder from the floor and looped it onto the hooks in the window-sill, the very same hooks she had put there herself, and then she had watched as they slipped from the wood as easily as if they had been oiled, falling to the ground with the ladder.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ she mumbled, her large hands flapping. ‘This simply wasn’t meant to happen.’ And it was all her fault. Who was it who had introduced Derek Fletcher, in his guise as plumber, into Mr Scott’s house, although he fitted to a tee the description of the man wanted in the latest Aldringham burglary? Who was it who had prattled on about the importance of security, only to install a rope-ladder which turned out to be no more use than a shredded parachute? And who had insisted, in spite of the lateness of the hour, that they go up to Mr Scott’s attic study to search for his books on African legends? Clementine, Clementine, Clementine.

  She turned away from the window with a last look at the rope-ladder below. ‘It’s a terrible shock when something you’ve always expected to happen actually happens,’ she whispered, tears welling up in her eyes.

  Mr Scott leant towards her, taking her hand and giving it a little squeeze. The loose flesh on his jaw quivered as it set in a determined clench. ‘I’ve been in much worse scrapes than this. Whoever it is down there won’t come up this far, I’m sure of it. He’ll grab what he can from downstairs and then he’ll be gone, you’ll see.’

  Clementine tried to look reassured. It was the least she could do, but her heart was pounding as hard as ever.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Mr Scott whispered, nodding towards the wing chair in the corner of the room.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Clementine’s knuckles whitened as she clasped the dusty brocade of the armrest. ‘Was that a door?’

  ‘Now there’s no need to panic,’ Mr Scott’s voice was barely audible. ‘I’m sure we’re quite safe up here in our little tower. Anyway, I’m expecting Nathaniel back any time now.’

  Nathaniel. The pale face and green eyes of Mr Scott’s only son appeared before her. Mr Scott spoke again in the same crackling whisper.

  ‘Maybe this is not the time, or maybe it is precisely the time, to ask you why, when you loved my son and he loved you, you abandoned him?’

  ‘A life lived in fear is a life half lived,’ Ophelia proclaimed. She stood in the middle of the small sitting-room, a red and white china elephant in her hand, her eyes fixed on Clementine. ‘Turning the house into a fortress is just ridiculous. We’ll end up burning alive instead, unable to get out. That’s what happens when people install all these bars and locks.’ She gave the elephant a long look. ‘This is revolting. Give it to a white elephant stall or something.’

  Clementine looked up from the box she was unpacking. ‘Now a child would say, “But you can’t, it’s a red and white elephant.” ’

  Ophelia raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘What I’m saying is, this isn’t New York City, it’s Aldringham. Ease up. Even an old lady like Aunt Elvira didn’t go in for all that kind of stuff.’

  Clementine lifted a cornflower-blue glass paper-weight up to the reading lamp, twisting it this way and that, admiring the shards of colour thrown out into the light. ‘Well there you are,’ she said; ‘I’m not so like her after all.’

  ‘To my beloved great niece, Clementine Hope, in whom I see myself, I leave my cottage in Aldringham,’ Elvira Madox’s will had read.

  It was a wonderful thing to inherit a house, especially for a divorcee on a limited income, Clementine was aware of that. But it was a shock to find oneself described as the mirror image of a woman commonly referred to as ‘poor old Aunt Elvira’. In fact, Clementine thought now, her great aunt had probably been known as poor old Elvira even as a tiny child in pigtails.

  ‘How could she think I was like her?’ she complained. ‘I’m totally different. My life has been totally different. I ask you, what similarities are there?’

  Ophelia was rummaging through the boxes, searching for a hammer, and with a little grunt of satisfaction she sat back on her heels and contemplated Clementine. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what springs to mind is that you’re both dead.’

  Clementine blinked against the light as she looked across the room at her sister. Sister; everyone had preferred that they dropped the half. ‘You haven’t lost a father, children, you’ve gained a little sister,’ Grace, Clementine’s stepmother, had dimpled when the nine-year-old Clementine had first seen the newborn Ophelia. Clementine’s father had stood by looking proud. At the time, Clementine had not felt that she needed a sister. There were four children already: Roger Junior, Juliet, Timothy and Clementine. They were an expense as it was, always needing new shoes at the same time and not fitting comfortably into a normal car. And now there was another one.

  But they all came to love Ophelia, and here Clementine was, about to share her house with her. Right now though, she was feeling hurt.

  ‘I’ve lived a quiet life, I admit,’ she said, ‘but so have lots of people. You don’t find them accused of being like Aunt Elvira.’

  ‘And you don’t find them inheriting her house either, so stop whinging.’

  Clementine had to admire the way Ophelia said things so straight. She, personally, wrapped her sentences in so many layers of excuses and explanations, sub-clauses and nervous little laughs, it was hard, sometimes to find the meaning in what she said. She unwrapped a Staffordshire shepherdess from its newspaper parcel and, dropping the paper back into the box, she walked across to the fireplace. The mantelpiece was already crowded with Aunt Elvira’s Be
atrix Potter figures.

  ‘Now there’s a difference for a start,’ she said, giving Tom Kitten a little shove to the back of the shelf and putting the shepherdess in his place. ‘Aunt Elvira was mad about Beatrix Potter ornaments, and I’m not.’

  Ophelia did not reply, she was busy banging a picture hook into the wall by the south-facing window. ‘I thought this would be a good place for my still life,’ she said instead. ‘That’s all right isn’t it?’

  I hate that still life, Clementine thought. Everything in it is dead; dead and brown. ‘You know when you’re little,’ she said, ‘and you wonder what the inside of a cloud must be like . . .?’

  ‘Nope,’ Ophelia said. She hung the picture on the hook and stepped back to admire the effect.

  ‘You’ve never wondered what the inside of a cloud looks like?’

  Ophelia shook her head. ‘Just go and sit in some steam.’

  ‘I never thought about it in that way,’ Clementine admitted. ‘Anyway, I thought I’d like this house to be just how I imagined it.’

  Ophelia turned from her picture to face Clementine, arms crossed over her child-like chest. Clementine looked back at her with all the nervous admiration of a tall woman with a generous bosom for everything that was dainty and fragile.

  ‘You imagined the inside of a cloud as a two-storey cottage with a double-aspect sitting-room and north-facing kitchen?’ Ophelia wanted to know.

  ‘Not entirely,’ Clementine admitted. ‘More sort of cosy and light and softly focused; but not brown and dead.’

  ‘Who’s talking brown and dead? Anyway, you just have to get rid of some of this junk.’ Ophelia gesticulated at the cluttered corners of the room. ‘All those papers that sit in heaps everywhere, they’ll have to go for a start.’ She nodded towards the cardboard boxes stacked on the rosewood table by the window.

  ‘No, absolutely not.’ Clementine hurried across the room and put her large hand protectively on a baby-blue folder. ‘These are Aunt Elvira’s fairy tales. I can’t throw them away. They’re our childhood. Well, mine.’

  ‘It’s just notes, reams and reams of notes that never came to anything. She never wrote the stories down, you know that. She was just like you, grabbing at any excuse not to get on with things.’ Ophelia had a knack of putting the fool into other people’s gold. Clementine was beginning to regret having offered her lodgings.

  ‘I have plans for those notes,’ she said. ‘Unlike Aunt Elvira I will do something with them.’

  ‘What?’ Ophelia asked.

  Now there was a question. Clementine gathered her hair in a twist, piling it on top of her head before letting it cascade loose down her back again. It was like smoking a pipe, she thought, having long hair: it bought you time while you fiddled. ‘Do we know that Nero really did fiddle while Rome burnt?’ she said. ‘Or did he simply fiddle with something? I don’t suppose it matters, the thing being that he didn’t help.’

  She knew the kind of look Ophelia would be giving her, right then, so she looked in the opposite direction, out at North Street, contemplating the view that would soon be as familiar as the sight of her own face in the mirror. ‘I intend to publish six volumes of fairy tales, one for each continent and with each story retold my way, showing its relevance to life today,’ she said, turning back to Ophelia.

  Ophelia looked surprised. So did Clementine. ‘Well,’ Ophelia said finally, ‘that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

  Clementine should, in truth, have said, ‘Me too,’ but there was Ophelia, so young, so sure, so fair, so elfin. And there was Clementine, so, well, so middle-aged, so big, so vaguely brown and sure of nothing but her own uncertainties.

  She was about to say, ‘I might well travel,’ before remembering that Aunt Elvira had been quite a traveller herself, so she decided to quit while she was ahead. Returning to the box, she fished out the last package, the portrait of herself set in a heavy silver-plated frame, which Aunt Elvira had given Clementine and Gustaf as a wedding present. At least, Clementine thought, unwrapping the picture, we don’t look the least alike. Elvira was smiling that slightly buck-toothed smile at the world which never seemed to smile back.

  ‘No, not a bit alike,’ Clementine muttered. Elvira’s hair was dark and curly; Clementine’s was light brown and wavy. Elvira’s eyes were hazel; Clementine’s were dark brown. Elvira’s nose was large and hooked; Clementine’s nose might be a little wide perhaps, but no-one could call it big, not really. She wandered across to the grand piano that took up a good quarter of the room, and popped Aunt Elvira down on the black lacquered surface. She gave Elvira one last look. Elvira peeped back a little nervously.

  Elvira Madox had gone through life like a last-minute substitute, born in 1903 in place of a brother who had died. The brother had been a perfect child, as beautiful as only those who live in the memory can be. But Elvira would have palled even against a less formidable rival than the tiny waxen baby who had died when his hands were still like starfish and his eyes were the dark blue of a northern summer night. Elvira was not a pretty little girl. She grew up big-boned and given to clumsiness. She would rush up and embrace her mother with such indelicate abandon that the poor woman had to steady herself against the wall and rearrange her dress. She would play with the puppy and step on its long ears. When she admired the cranberry glass vase her mother had been given for Christmas, she picked it up and held it between her large hands, twisting and turning it in the light, misting the pink glass with her excited breaths, only to put it back down on the edge of the bureau where it tottered before falling to the floor and breaking into myriads of pink slivers. Slivers that caught the light from the tree and the tears that rained down from Elvira’s flushed cheeks.

  Graceless was the adjective most often affixed to Elvira. She never married. Once a young man employed at her father’s linen factory, the very same young man who had come up with the slogan, ‘Madox Fine Linens: wraps you from cradle to grave!’ stood ready to propose when the dinner bell sounded. Later in life he drew much laughter when recalling how he was once, quite literally, saved by the bell.

  Graceless Elvira became a teacher at an undistinguished girls’ school in Hampstead. She lived in a small flat in Highgate, and every working day, Saturdays included, she taught English and History to young charges whose minds were as resolutely empty as their purses were full.

  Every year she removed her savings from the local branch of Lloyds Bank and then she travelled, and on those travels – Bargain Breaks, Super Saver Deals, Back of the Bus with Shabby Single Room kind of holidays – she collected fairy tales the way other people might collect pottery donkeys or Spanish flamenco dolls. On her infrequent visits to her brother, George, and his family in Aldringham, she would tell the children her stories and to them she was no longer big-boned, graceless Elvira, but a purveyor of enchantment.

  But the children grew as children will, and soon they saw Elvira through grown-up eyes. She continued to visit, but the visits grew shorter and even less frequent now that there was no-one to listen to her stories, only adults with barely polite smiles stretched across their impatience. Then the oldest boy, Roger, married and had children of his own. Once more, Elvira would be greeted by whoops of delight as she arrived with her old suitcase filled with ill-assorted gifts: a dried sea urchin, a free sample of Chanel No. 5, a crocheted doll. Again she would tell the fairy tales to children sitting spell-bound at her feet.

  Those children too grew up and they grew faster, it seemed to Elvira, than any other children before them. The time came for her to retire from teaching, and she bought a little cottage in Aldringham to be ready for the new children. But while she waited, her stories, like old bank notes in a biscuit tin, began to lose their value. ‘But I’ve seen Sleeping Beauty on video,’ Juliet’s boy squirmed. ‘Do you know which is the fiercest of the gladiators? I do.’

  Elvira’s death some months ago, in the first week of February surprised everyone but her immediate family; few had realized that she was
still alive.

  And that, Clementine thought, was the woman who saw herself in me.

  Two

  Clementine looked at her watch, trying to tell the time by the pale moonlight shining in through the attic window.

  ‘Do you think it is Derek Fletcher down there?’ she asked in a voice so quiet that Mr Scott had to ask her to repeat what she was saying. ‘He does fit the description of the man in the paper, the man who burgled and beat that poor old woman in East Street. And he’s been to the house so he knows the layout and what kind of things you’ve got.’

  Mr Scott just shrugged his shoulders. At least we’ve been introduced to Derek Fletcher, Clementine thought. He was an acquaintance, however casual. The thought was oddly comforting, like being scared alone out on the streets at night and feeling happier at the sight of another human being approaching; just as comforting and just as illogical.

  Clementine looked towards the door, listening. How stupid she had been. She leapt from the chair. There was a perfectly good lock on that door and she had not thought to use it.

  ‘Don’t,’ Mr Scott hissed, but it was too late, she had turned the key.

  ‘What do you mean don’t?’

  ‘It jams. We’re locked in.’

  Clementine tried to turn the key but Mr Scott was right, it was jammed tight.

  ‘But that’s good,’ she whispered. ‘He won’t be able to get in, unless he breaks the door down.’

  ‘I’ve got my heart pills downstairs in the bedroom.’ Mr Scott’s voice barely reached her across the room.

  ‘Oh Lord, I’m sorry.’ Clementine fiddled with the lock, trying to turn the key, but it would not budge, not one millimetre. She prayed that Nathaniel would not be long. But what if he did return while the intruder was still in the house? He might be attacked. Clementine buried her head in her hands. It was a while later that Mr Scott spoke again.

  ‘I haven’t asked you about what happened between you and Nathaniel before, as I have a horror of interfering in other people’s lives. However, in a situation such as this, one might be forgiven the odd transgression.’