‘It won’t take me very long,’ I said. ‘Two hours, maybe.’
She left me then, a slim figure in jeans, her movements quick and decisive. She was younger than I had expected and somehow disturbing, an impression that stayed with me as I got down to the job of listing the contents. Normally I dealt with the agricultural side, and it was some time since I had handled this sort of a sale. I had never liked it. Almost always there is some female member of the family hanging possessively around as you prepare the catalogue, and either they are emotionally upset at the loss of familiar things that have become dear to them over the years or else they are there as predators, trying to figure out just how much it is going to cost them to get their hands on old Aunt So-and-So’s cherished table, desk, commode, whatever it is. Here it was somewhat different in that, except for the carvings and some of the pictures, the contents were mostly functional and not items anyone could become greatly attached to. But all the time I was working on the inventory I was conscious of the presence of that young woman in the house, and it was a strangely disconcerting presence.
She made hardly a sound, and yet all the time I was working steadily round the downstair rooms, I was aware of her being there in the house with me. And the house itself, it had an unpleasantly sombre atmosphere, so that I found myself thinking about the man who was the cause of the sale, the man who had been ill here and was now in a home. It was as though something of his personality still lingered, or else the pain of his suffering. This brooding presence, this sense of something hanging over the house — it was in such startling contrast to the happy brilliance of the day outside. And in every room there were those bizarre carvings.
I was in the dining room when I heard the clatter of the loft ladder. I had the cutlery out on the table, all of it EPNS and badly worn, and I stood there wondering what it was she had hidden up there. But there was no sound of movement, everything very still, and I got back to the inventory, anxious only to get out of the house, back into the sunshine.
By the time I started upstairs she was in the kitchen and the loft ladder was back in place. The larger of the two bedrooms had obviously been her brother’s. There was a swing table, and the bed had an invalid rest against the headboard. The hospital aroma of sickness and medicine still lingered. There were no wood carvings in that room, but the pictures on the wall attracted my attention. They were bright primitive paintings of palms and flat calm seas, also faded photographs of ships that looked like small trading schooners taken against towering jungle-covered mountains. The room seemed different then, my mood changing as I realised that the sick man belonged to a world I only knew in my imagination. The pictures, those carvings — the South West Pacific, she had said. Of course, the carvings were like the designs on some of the Papua New Guinea stamps. I no longer felt depressed, only curious that the family should have abandoned such a colourful world for England and this wretched little house, which now had an exotic feel to it, wild relics of a dead past cocooned in an almost suburban wrapping.
I had moved to the smaller bedroom and was staring at a large wooden mask hanging on the wall above the bed when her voice startled me: ‘I thought you might like some refreshment, Mr Slingsby.’ I turned to find her standing in the doorway, a tray of tea in her hands, some books under her arm, and for the first time I saw her clearly, illumined by the sunlight pouring through the window. The hair and the freckles really did match, and her eyes, which were large and brown and slightly prominent, were fixed on me in a most disturbing way. She was no longer dressed in jeans. She had changed into a cotton frock, green and quite plain, her small breasts thrusting at it in a very demanding way.
‘Thank you,’ I said quickly. ‘Some tea would be great.’ I was staring at her, conscious of her figure, everything about her. Conscious, too, of the effect she was having on me. It wasn’t just her youth, or even the protruding breasts, that extraordinary cap of brilliantly coloured hair now catching the sun. It was something much more powerful, a deep current passing between us, so that I just stood there watching her as she crossed to the dressing table, put down the tray and laid the books carefully beside it.
‘Milk?’ she asked, and I nodded, feeling overwhelmed and at the same time a little ridiculous at being dumbfounded by something I’d never experienced before.
In an effort to pull myself together, I said, ‘This is your bedroom, is it?’
‘Yes.’ She had turned and was smiling at me, the full lips turned up at the corners, a glint of laughter in her eyes. ‘You’re wondering how I can go to bed with that dreadful face hanging over me.’ The smile broadened, a flash of long, very white teeth. ‘You must think my taste very odd, but I’ve lived with them all my life. They remind me of the world I used to know.’ She turned her head, staring out of the window towards the sea. ‘It made life more bearable.’ Her voice, intense and tinged with nostalgia, was husky, barely above a whisper. Then she seemed to collect herself, bending quickly to pour the tea. ‘Do sit down. It’s very hot and you haven’t stopped-’ She stood for a moment, the cup in her hand, staring out of the window. ‘You can see the sea up here. It’s the only room in the house that looks out to the sea. Sugar?’
I shook my head, looking round for somewhere to sit other than the bed. There was nowhere except the dressing-table stool. She handed me my cup and, having poured her own, perched herself on the broad window ledge. Seeing her there against the light, she seemed like something caged in and on the verge of flight, her hair in the sunlight red-bronze, like a burnished helmet. There was a long silence as she sat there drinking her tea and staring out of the window.
‘I had a bathe before I came here,’ I said. ‘It must be nice living so close to the sea.’
She nodded abstractedly. ‘I used to swim, once. But my father was a sick man, and then Tim came back. I never had time after that.’ And she added almost harshly, ‘My brother was paralysed, you see.’ There was another silence. Then she said very quickly, ‘It’s been a long time and now he’s dying.’
I thought perhaps she wanted to talk about it, and almost without thinking I asked her what he was dying of.
‘Sorcery.’ She said it so quietly, so matter-of-factly, that I thought for a moment I must have misheard her. But then she added, still in the same tone of voice as though she were talking about something as common as cancer. ‘As a kiap — a patrol officer — he had a lot of experience of that sort of thing. Of course, the doctor says it’s the effect of the accident, some sort of stroke following the spinal injury. But I told him it wasn’t that.’ She gave a nervous little giggle. ‘It was really very funny, his face. Sorcery! Dammit, the silly little man thought I was out of my mind. He started prescribing sleeping pills, pain killers, all that rubbish. Not that it mattered, no doctor’s going to cure him of sorcery or enter that on a death certificate, is he? Not here in England. But that’s what it’ll be. Tim’s had a death wish put on him, and he knows it.’
I stared down at my inventory, feeling confused and wondering to what extent she was suffering from shock. ‘He was a patrol officer, you say,’ I heard myself murmur. ‘Was he in the Army then?’
‘No, not the Army. Civil Administration. In the Goroka District. He was very badly injured and invalided home.’ She hesitated, but before I could ask her where Goroka was, she said, ‘It’s been a long time, and now … ’ She shrugged. ‘With him gone, I feel a little lost.’ Again that effort to collect herself. ‘You’re just about through now, aren’t you? This is the last room.’