Nyctophobia (9 page)

‘I guess the family really did manage to protect their privacy. There was nothing about the original architect?’

‘I only know what Julia told me. The property had been posted on her website for over a year. Despite its grandeur, it’s not a very prepossessing building when you photograph it in harsh light, and there’s the problem of the location and the price, so they had virtually no interest. Then it reverted to the bank when the owner stopped his payments.’

‘Right now every bank in Spain is keen to dump their property,’ said Mateo. ‘Did I tell you there was a stipulation in the contract that wouldn’t allow them to lower the asking price? There’s other stuff as well. It turns out Rosita and Jerardo are still getting their salaries paid through a bequest in the will of the owner-before-last, and it’s not due to run out for another five years. How weird is that?’

‘It’s no different to France,’ I told him. ‘You buy a house and discover you also have a part-share in an onion field two miles away. I think it’s going to be very good for us, being here.’ The walls were angled in shafts of golden light, and it cheered me just to look at them. ‘And Bobbie. Rosita’s got her room ready. I can’t wait to get started on everything.’

‘Good, I was hoping you’d feel that way,’ said Mateo. ‘Why don’t we go into Gaucia tomorrow morning, and you can see what the village is like. There’s someone I want you to meet. It’ll be your last chance for some peace and quiet before Bobbie arrives. She’s very excited about seeing you again.’

‘I wish I’d been able to see more of her before the wedding,’ I said. With deliberate bad timing, Mateo’s ex-wife had whisked his daughter away to France before the celebrations, returning her only for the day.

‘Don’t worry, if I’d thought for a second that the two of you wouldn’t get on, I’d have brought her back to meet you again, but she’s a very easygoing child. There won’t be any problems.’ I found his confidence in me astonishing. It was one of the things I loved most about him.

The next morning we rose early and headed into Gaucia.

The tiny town was tucked into the base of the mountains and, according to my Dorling Kindersley guidebook, wasn’t famous for much; it produced raspberry-coloured gin and small plates of dried acorn-fed ham, and there were tiny, brightly coloured birds on all the telephone poles. The houses were whitewashed and shuttered against the searing heat, and had blue and yellow geckos painted on the walls, and were edged about by orange trees in earthenware pots. The wives washed their front steps and balconies first thing every morning, just as the wives of England once had. Wherever we walked I could hear someone talking or sweeping. Apart from that, the place was silent. Apart from a couple of vans parked outside shops, there were hardly any cars.

However, there were a couple of small tourist hotels here, and a few ex-pats. The Spanish children played ball games in the street and the English ones stayed inside on their Playstations. The local bar manager told us that by May it was usually so hot that you could cook an egg on the iron plate that covered the town fountain. The best hotel had eight rooms, there was a square where the older boys hung out and fishtailed their bicycles past the café, a church the English never attended except at Christmas, and a restaurant the locals wouldn’t use because the owner once cheated his neighbour in a game of cards. Everyone knew each other.

Celestia was a tall, elegant Englishwoman, a former artist’s agent in her early seventies who had passed most of her life in Marylebone. She had moved here to Gaucia because of a divorce, a devotion to bullfights and a passion for chain-smoking cigarillos. She knew everyone in town, including the man who had once robbed her house. She gave his children money to show that he had been forgiven, and her displays of largesse brought a certain amount of distant grave respect. She told me that she did not miss Marylebone in the slightest, because who in their right mind would, but she did on occasion miss England.

‘How do you two know each other?’ I asked as we sat together in the shaded town square drinking thick dark
cortados
and sharp orange juice.

‘Oh, I met Mateo’s mother centuries ago in London,’ said Celestia, delighting in spraying smoke everywhere. ‘She warned me against moving here. She said, ‘I’ll tell you what happens to people when they move to Spain. All they do is drink and read, drink and read, then they slowly fall apart. It ruins them. Drink and read. It’ll happen to you too. That’s what always happens.’’ She gave a throaty laugh. ‘God, I could think of a lot worse ways to go than that, couldn’t you? I sold up in Marylebone, had the name of a lover tattooed on my right buttock and grew my hair long, and now I sit here at Eduardo’s reading and drinking and watching the world go by.’

I liked her instantly. I thought,
if someone like her can reinvent herself, and just take off for another country without looking back, I should be fine.

Celestia apparently had a better connection with the locals than any of the other ex-pats. Eduardo doted on her and I suspected that he undercharged her, just to make sure there was someone always sitting outside his cafe. The ladies of Gaucia acknowledged her in the scorching streets as they passed each other on the way to the bakery, even though they clearly thought she was mad. If the English wanted to live in Spain, why not choose a town caressed by Atlantic breezes, like Cadiz? Why burn up here, spending half their lives behind thick, cool walls or bobbing about in swimming pools like greased ducks?

‘I’d have loved to have been in London for the Diamond Jubilee,’ Celestia confided. ‘The Queen has always been in my life, right from when I was little. But I do love it here. The
guiris
, those ghastly straw-hatted tourists in blazers who come and sit in the square of a summer morning, rustling their out-of-date English newspapers and drinking beer all day, they don’t stay long. Mercifully the budget airline passengers are a good sixty kilometres away, frying themselves in oil at the coast. I first came here with my parents when I was ten. I never dreamed I’d one day move here.’

I saw my new neighbour through a cloud of pale blue smoke, puffing away, filling her ashtray and topping up our glasses, and could not imagine her as a little girl. ‘You’ll have to come and visit my little house,’ Celestia instructed. ‘You can see Africa from my upstairs rooms. It’s dark and cool there, and my garden has a small pool you can use whenever you like.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ I told her. ‘And you must come and visit us at Hyperion House.’

‘Thank you. I had a feeling I might drop dead before I ever got to be invited inside that place. Mateo, you’re a very bad boy.’ She arched an admonishing eyebrow at him. ‘You should have told me you were buying Hyperion House. I could have warned you off it.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

Celestia airily waved the question aside. ‘Well, I suppose it’s not the house so much as the past owners. They have a bit of a history with the simple folk here.’

I looked at Mateo. ‘Is there anything I should know about?’

‘No, I’m sure you’ll be a new broom. I daresay you’ll eventually hear stories though.’

‘What kind of stories?’

‘Screams in the night, bloodshed, suicides, prayers and madness. The usual sort of thing for this region.’ Celestia raised her carafe. ‘Top up?’

CHAPTER TEN

The Window

T
HE YELLOW TAXI
got as far as the gates, but Jerardo would not allow the driver inside. I was slowly coming to realise that there was a territorial line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I had to go down to the edge of the property and help Bobbie bring up her bags.

‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘I can manage.’ The red nylon holdall was almost as tall as she was. Bobbie was small and dark and had her father’s deep-set caramel eyes. I had only seen her mother that one time, at Sandy’s party, but it was clear who she took after.

‘Don’t be silly, let me help you.’ I grabbed the bag and lifted it. ‘What have you got in here? It weighs a ton.’

‘Course books, mostly,’ Bobbie told me. She was wearing a ridiculously old-fashioned outfit for an almost-nine-year-old, a round straw hat and a skirt of tiny brown flowers with a shapeless grey-green top, the sort of clothes a certain kind of New York mother would dress her child in. I knew I’d have to take her shopping. ‘I guess Dad explained I have to be educated at home until I can move to big school. We get tablets when I go there.’

‘Tablets?’ I must have looked alarmed because she started laughing.

‘Electronic ones.’ She had the precise tone of a privately educated English girl but there was a trace of an American accent beneath it, betraying the fact that she’d been moved around. ‘Are you going to be here all the time?’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Mummy says you won’t make it through the first winter.’

‘Does she now? We’ll have to prove her wrong, won’t we? My full name is Calico, but you can call me Callie. That’s what friends always call me. Your full name’s Roberta, isn’t it?’

‘I only get called that when I’ve done something wrong. Everyone calls me Bobbie.’

‘Then I’ll have to make sure I never call you Roberta.’

‘Dad says there’s a teacher coming.’

‘Yes, she’s called Julieta, but she doesn’t start until Monday, so we have time to get to know each other.’ We walked side by side up the drive, the sharp morning sun beating hard on our bare necks.

‘I’ve seen pictures of the house.’

‘Did Daddy show them to you?’

‘No, it was on the website. You know, the agency. They’ve taken it down now that it’s been sold. I like computers. I want to work in IT when I’m older. Mum doesn’t think it’s a job for a girl.’

‘All the more reason to do it, I say. You’ll have to teach me. I don’t know how to use my new laptop yet. Your father just bought it for me, and it’s very complicated. I want to be able to Skype him when he’s away, but I haven’t been able to set it up.’

Bobbie flashed a grin full of painful-looking metal braces. ‘I can do that for you, easy peasy.’

‘Do those things hurt?’

She shrugged. ‘Mum made me get them. She wanted to straighten my hair, too, but I stopped her.’

‘Good job too. You can be yourself here. I hope you’re hungry. I have a feeling there’s going to be a huge welcoming meal for you.’

‘Have you found the maze yet?’

‘No, I didn’t know there was one.’

‘Yes, it’s in the back of the garden behind the trees. It’s made of beech-hedge and it’s very difficult to get out of. It has a little wooden house in the middle that you can turn around to confuse people.’

‘You know more about the house than I do. How did you find out about it?’

‘The gardener showed it to Daddy. Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No, he must have forgotten.’

‘What are you going to do while I have lessons?’

‘I’m going to write a book about the house.’

‘Maybe I can help you with it. Are you going to get it published?’

‘I certainly hope so.’

‘Have I got a bedroom near you?’

‘It’s right next door, and it’s lovely and sunny. Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s get Mrs Delgadillo to make us some lemonade to sharpen up your appetite.’

‘You must call her Senora,’ warned Bobbie. ‘And you can’t use her first name to her face. Daddy told me she doesn’t like it.’

‘Did he? Well I’m in charge as well, you know,’ I said cheerfully, ‘so we’ll see about that.’

There was still so much to take stock of in the house that I had not even thought about getting the former servants’ quarters unlocked. After helping Bobbie to unpack her clothes, I left her with her father for a while and went downstairs. Slipping outside, I walked around the perimeter of the house. I had no plan or purpose, other than to fill in time before lunch, so I went looking for the maze.

Mazes are always disappointing to adults, unless they have hidden meanings. Some of the bigger ones do. When they’re seen from above they can reveal symbols which are hidden at ground level. I know way too much about mazes. The most famous ones are probably the medieval Christian pavement labyrinths. The hedge maze at Hever Castle is designed to be appreciated from the battlements. They’re usually made of yew or beech, and people tend to think they’re exclusively English, but I’d seen videos of a really maddening one in Seville, where the hedges are grown to adult height. Unfortunately ours was low and threadbare, with an octagonal wooden house at its centre which could be turned on its axis to face any direction. I could hear a buzzing inside it.

There was no lock that I could see, so I climbed the three steps and pulled at the door handle.

I found myself faced with a single room about seven feet high, and just one small square window. The little house was empty except for a bag of fertiliser, a shovel, some flowerpots and a large grey papery sack hanging from the rafters. As soon as I saw this, I realised I had been hearing it ever since I drew close. The air near the rafters was dark with hornets. One landed on the joist near my right hand, a great black insect with feathery feelers and an acid-yellow hieroglyph on its jointed, shiny back. There were a great many types, and this one looked particularly lethal. I knew that its stinger would be engorged with poison. As it crept forward, it seemed to me that the spike quivered with the anticipation of entering flesh…

‘Jerardo!’ I called, fleeing the maze-house. He was standing at the end of the hedge watching me with bemusement. ‘Please can you get rid of the hornets’ nest in there? My husband hates them.’

He looked back over my shoulder, to where the hornets were pouring in and out of the dark doorway on an insect freeway, and shrugged hopelessly.

‘Just find a way to get it down, please, and burn it.’

He shook his head violently, as if nothing could ever be disturbed in the house. But this was where I drew the line. ‘I mean it,’ I told him, ‘I want you to remove it. Get someone in to help you if you have to. They only use their nests once, so if you get rid of it they won’t come back to the same spot. Wait.’ I dug out my cellphone and thumbed open the calendar, picking a day. I turned the screen to show him. ‘Do it on this morning, will you? Mr Torres will still be away in Madrid. I don’t want him to be anywhere near here when you do it. I’ll arrange to have the doors and windows shut, and I’ll keep Bobbie inside. But I want it done. You’d better write down the date.’ For a horrible moment it occurred to me that he might not be able to write, but he finally nodded and stumped off to his shed to make a note.