Here there were dusty windows a plenty. I peered in at them, seeing the same tennis nets, bicycles and toboggans I had seen before. I passed a garden door, moved on, and saw deckchairs and luggage. I had seen all of these things from the corridor. Where was the room behind the locked one at the end of the offshoot?
And then it struck me. That short offshoot of corridor led to the outside wall. That door didn’t open onto a room. It opened onto this path and the grey light I had seen was filtering through these rhododendrons. I had just brushed away the very strings of cobweb I had seen through the keyhole. I went back and looked at the mossy bricks and, right enough, there were faint but unmistakable scratches there. Darkened now after a few weeks in the weather, but still clear. And the moss had been ripped out too and lay shrivelling.
I followed the path, navigating by the scraped bricks, until I came to a break in the shrubs. The path carried on but led only to the laundry yard and back into the house again. Through the gap in the rhododendrons, however, was the side lawn, rather neglected – no clock golf or croquet here – and shaded by spreading cedars. Was it my imagination, I wondered, or were there faint depressions in the grass? It was not the gardeners’ pride, this unused patch of lawn, being rather spongy with more of the moss and rather sparse under the cedars where the long needles had fallen and never been raked away, and I was almost sure that I could see the traces of two wheels – a sack barrow, perhaps – which had crossed it recently. I set off in pursuit of them.
Halfway over I began to fear that the traces were my imagination, nothing more. They disappeared completely for yards at a time and when I fancied I saw them again they were fainter than ever. I had almost given up when, under the massiest of the cedars in the densest shade, I saw a patch about six feet long where the brittle needles had snapped and sprung up at either end: a clear and undeniable imprint of two wheels, not my imagination at all. I skirted them carefully and then stood beyond them gazing ahead at where they could have been going.
I was near the edge of the grounds now and could see portions of the high grey garden wall between the trees and bushes which bordered them. Then, behind some sort of apple or cherry tree, its leaves just beginning to yellow, I saw what I had not realised I was looking for but realised now that I must have been: the smooth, rounded shape of a ridge tile. There was a roof over there, and where there is a roof there is a building below it and where there is a building there is somewhere to wheel a heavy object and try to hide it. I glanced about me but this was a desolate spot, away from the terrace and the sunshine, so I picked up my pace and made for the shadows.
It must have been an apple house at some time, I thought as I drew near. A tiny little place – a howf, as they call them in Perthshire – windowless but with slatted openings near the top, built against the wall. I rattled the door handle but of course it was locked. Even if it was not usually kept locked it would have been locked for the last month or so. For the signs were unmistakable here. There were snapped twigs and turned earth and a smear of mud on the lintel of the little door, and I rather thought the object had been badly handled in because the door paint was scraped too and the wood showed fresh and white underneath it. The flakes of paint were still scattered on the slab of sandstone set into the ground for a doorstep.
If only Alec were here. He could grab onto that branch and pull himself up. He could put a foot on the lintel and step over, holding onto the roof, and from there he could squint down through those slats and see what was in there.
I imagined the whole climb in my head, seeing Alec shinning up and shouting down. I imagined asking Hugh to do it for me. Would he be spurred to a second boyhood by the thought that Osborne was not beyond such antics, or would this be more of my silliness at which he would simply lift an eyebrow and turn away? Donald was far too frail still but what about Teddy? Thus finally, I shamed myself into action. My poor sickly sons were not to go climbing trees just because their mother was a ninny. I took off my gloves and laid my hands purposefully against the strongest-looking joint between the trunk and a branch.
‘Heave-ho!’ I said and set my foot against the bark to start scrambling.
I weighed considerably more than I did the last time I climbed a tree and my shoulders were aching when I had got myself up high enough to step over and stand on the door lintel. It looked much further away than it had when viewed from below, but I knew from jumping over burns that distances are deceptive when there is a six-foot drop or rushing cold water and probably I would step over the gap between branch and lintel without a thought if it was a gap between carpet and hearthrug, avoiding nothing more than a cold stone floor. I let go with one hand and stretched one leg over, feeling for a toehold. Something shifted, my foot slipped. For a minute I was hanging by one hand from the tree and then I got both feet back onto the crook of the branch, wrapped both arms tightly round the trunk and stayed there with my heart hammering. I looked down at what had fallen from above the door. Not a stone, not mortar, as I had first thought. I would have laughed if I had not been still so close to crying. It was a key.
When I retell the story of my discovery in the apple house, it is hard to decide what to suppress and what report. On the one hand, I am rather proud of the way I rubbed my hands together and climbed a tree – I do not judge the moments when I contemplated asking my son to take a deep breath through his pleurisy and do it for me as worth sharing – but on the other hand I wish I had thought to feel above the door for a key before I tore my stocking and scraped my cheek on the bark.
Besides, the end of the incident does overshadow whatever one would choose to tell of its beginning.
I found the courage to slither down from my perch in not many more minutes, with a locked door and a key to tempt me. The lock was stiff and the key rusty – I rather thought that whoever had recently opened the door had brought a second key with him and did not know about this one; certainly there had been no oiling for some time. I had to use both hands to get it to turn but, at length, turn it did and I opened the apple-house door with held breath and thumping blood.
It was there! Three feet square by four feet tall, made of wood like a barrel and just sitting there. Not at all, I saw, the new-fangled and dangerous equipment I had counted on finding. I breathed out and it was when I breathed in again, the first time with the door open, that the smell got to me. I retched and stumbled backwards with my hands over my face. That smell! It is conventional to say that an unpleasant odour hits one, but this did so much more. It entered me, it filled my nose and my lungs and my mouth, it made my eyes water, it got among the strands of my hair and the fibres of my clothes and I knew immediately that it would be many days before it left me, if it ever did. I feared immediately that I would dream of this smell as long as I lived.
I could not have entered the little apple house if my life hung from my doing so, but I stayed there with my arm over my face, breathing the smell through the wool of my coat, and tried to look again at what I had found instead of some harmful – fatal! – machinery. It was a crate, a container. I had been looking for clues about what had killed Mrs Addie. I had not found them. Instead – I could not deny it – I had found Mrs Addie herself.