‘Well, I did know it,’ said the cabbie, slow in the pleasure of his own irony. ‘There’s not much going on down there now.’
‘No, I know.’
‘They’ll have the wreckers’ balls down there, any day now.’ And he looked at Rob in the mirror as he slid into his seat, doubtless toying with some dismal joke.
‘Let’s see if we can get there first,’ said Rob. He leant coaxingly forward and saw his own eyes and nose in the mirror, in surreal isolation.
They turned and headed out north again, up through the most densely congested junctions of Harrow-on-the-Hill, the driver’s courtesy extending to any number of undecided road-crossers, reversing delivery-vans and anxious would-be joiners from side-roads; he was a great letter-in. Then in the leafy residential streets and avenues of the Weald his vaguely smiling dawdle on the brink of third gear suggested almost that he didn’t know where he was going. He started joking about something Rob seemed to have missed, Rob said ‘Sorry?’ and then saw he was talking on his phone, deploring something with a friend, laughing, the loud unguarded half of a conversation in which Rob’s needs seemed to shrink even further, the mere transient ticking of the fare. Above the pavements the tall horse-chestnuts were dropping their leaves, the oaks just beginning to rust and wither. So many of the big old houses had come down, their long gardens built over. There was a low wall with a sloped coping, the railings gone, a broken and leaning board fence behind. ‘Just a minute, Andy,’ said the driver, and set Rob down with a pleasant nod as he gave the change, a faint retroactive suggestion they’d had a nice time together.
Rob picked his way past the black puddles in the ruts of the drive. The house was set fifty yards back from the road, though its privacy had long been surrendered – on either side new developments looked in over the boundary walls. It was one of those big red-brick villas, of the 1880s perhaps, with gables and a turret, a lot of timber and tile-hanging, and very high ground-floor rooms that would take a fortune to furnish and heat, and so easily (Rob had seen them all over London) turned bleak and barely habitable in their latter-day lives. Now there were holes in the steep slate roof, small bushes seeded in the gutters, stripes of moss and slime down the walls. A JCB was backed up under the trees, and beside it a blue Focus presumably belonging to Debbie.
The front door was boarded up, and Rob made his way round to the side. There was a smell of smoke, cutting and toxic, not the good autumn-leaf smell. The ground sloped down, so that the broken veranda along the side of the house rose up to shoulder height. Then there was the round turret, and then a high brick wall with a door on to a tiny yard, the service entrance, the door here wide open – Rob slipped into the house through a dark scullery with huge tin sinks, a dim kitchen with a gas range, broken chairs, nothing worth salvaging. The floor was gritty underfoot, and there was a penetrating smell of raw damp – then he pushed open a fire-door into what must have been the dining-room and there was the smell of smoke again. He saw the awful wiring and boxing-in – the old house had been too disfigured thirty years before for any real sense of marvelment or discovery. He wrote it off. Into the hall – fire-doors again concealing the stairs, but light through double doors on to a room on the garden side of the house. He heard a child’s voice, the carefree note with its little edge of determination.
‘Are you Debbie?’ Out on the lawn, a shrubby tangle trampled back, a red-faced woman in jeans and a T-shirt was picking up items around the smouldering bonfire and throwing them on top – some old magazines caught, doubtfully, a moment of flame curling outwards as they slithered back down.
‘Don’t get too close, now’ – a boy of six or seven, red-faced too in his small anorak, bringing random things forward, a cardboard box, a handful of grass and twigs that fell back over his feet as he tossed it.
Debbie didn’t know who Rob was: he saw the curbing of curiosity, her provisional stance of responsibility for what was going on. ‘Raymond sent me down, I’m Rob.’
‘Oh, yes, right,’ said Debbie. ‘I was just about to call him, we’re nearly done.’
Rob looked into the fire, which seemed dense and half-digested, colour still showing in old floor-mats, were they? – that the fire had given up on, pink edges of a blackened curtain. ‘How long’s it been burning?’
‘What was it, Jack, day before yesterday?’
But the boy ran off at this to find something else to burn. Rob disguised his anxiety, picked up a stick and flipped some loose bits of wood back into the pyre. He had the almost absurd idea that other items might still be lying unconsumed at the bottom of it all; he saw them raking it out with a sense of excitement and purpose greater than that of the burning – already it seemed a story. ‘Raymond said you’d cleared the strong-room?’
Debbie had a wary eye out for the child. ‘Yes, that can go on, my love.’ Though little Jack had his own caprices and changes of mind.
‘I’m saving this one, Mummy.’
‘Well, all right…’ Debbie said, with a glance at Rob, the mime of patience. ‘Sorry… yes’ – he saw she was neither for him nor against him. ‘We got all that out on Monday – it was just old papers, account books.’ She snubbed her nose as she nodded. ‘Rubbish, no use to anyone.’
Rob looked round at the house rearing behind them, the curved flight of broken stone steps he had come down into the garden; and down which Harry Hewitt must have come a thousand times, and his beloved Hubert, now and then perhaps, before the Great War, having motored over in the Straker with his sister Daphne for protection.
‘Mind if I have a look round?’
‘Help yourself. Electric’s off, though – you won’t see much.’ She told him where the strong-room was, beyond the TV room, was it? – well, all the functions were muddled up. He wondered if he really wanted to go in.
‘Mum? Mum?’ Jack holding a wicker basket aloft in both hands.
‘No, that can go on – god, it’s Victorian, some of this stuff!’ – with a first look of humorous collusion with Rob. Jack had his own pile of salvage, items he was pointedly saving from the flames, and another pile of things to be gleefully thrown on. Sometimes an item was moved from one pile to the other with the proper arbitrariness of fate.
Back through the french doors into the sitting-room – with a shadowy hole in the walclass="underline" a fireplace Hector had rescued, perhaps. Through the door on the left into the TV room, lit up as if underwater by a small bramble-covered window; and beyond this a short passage, almost dark, with a white-painted door on the right standing open to reveal the black steel door of the strong-room immediately behind it, also just ajar. Rob’s curiosity was as much about the secret room as its contents, when he gripped the handle. He supposed a collector needed such a place, perhaps Hewitt was a hoarder who took more pleasure in possession than display. Well, it had kept one secret pretty closely, for ninety years. He wondered when he’d copied the letters out – as they arrived, or when he was grieving, or much later, in a painful search for lost feelings? With a wary murmur Rob slid his foot forward over the threshold, breathed the smell, unlike the rest of the place, dry wood. Then he thought of his phone, snapped it open and shone its faint spy’s light in front of him. The space was only an arm’s reach deep, slatted wooden shelves on three sides, like an airing-cupboard. A stone floor, a bulb hanging above. The phone’s light dimmed unwastefully and went out: he lit it again, ran it quickly round. Debbie had left nothing, except something whiteish on the floor, under the shelf on the left, a piece of newspaper. Rob picked it up, a sheet of the Daily Telegraph, and uncrumpled it: November 6, 1948. When the light went again, he stood for a moment, daring himself, in the near dark, testing the emptiness and the quickly stifled echo; then he got out. And puzzling vaguely over it as he came back into the relative brightness of the sitting-room, he realized from the stiffened folds that the page of the Telegraph had been used to wrap some square object, it was a wholly random survival, of no interest in itself. He took it out to throw on to the fire.