Technology
Fiction: A rising novelist travels to a remote island at the invitation of his reclusive mentor
The Furnivall mansion was in the stomach of the island. It rose from the bottom of a deep glen, gurning against the wind which assaulted its crenellated walls. Through the windscreen, I watched the mansion rise before us – turrets, arches, cornices, arranged in a recursive order. Every time I visited, it arrested my attention and so, my conversation with Lewis subsided while the mansion interrupted us with its language of angles. The longer I looked, the more I had to wrestle with its dimensions, giving up, starting again. It seemed to have been forged from a series of disparate elements, balancing each other in a grotesque symbiosis.
Many years before, Malcolm had moved with his family to this Hebridean island, so that he might better concentrate on his writing. It had taken three years to build the mansion, using sandstone from a neighbouring island and a few dozen craftsmen to whom Malcolm had passed his intricate design. Yet, the mansion also could very well have been created over time by deposits of living stone, forming pockets which became rooms, crystals that became windows. The essence of the place held the chaotic beauty of something grown.
The western face of the mansion had started to crumble, hunks of scarred stone sinking into the tangled weeds which grew tall about the walls. Like a body shutting down, it was bringing the life force to its centre, allowing its limbs to wilt away.
Lewis had grown up here with only his sister for company. I wondered, as he pulled the car into the drive, what a childhood in this place would have been like. What would it do to a mind, to live somewhere so solitary, to grow up in that intricate stack of empty rooms, surrounded by the encroaching wild?
A knock on the car window and the door opened. Mrs Gibson, the housekeeper, hoisted me from the seat and began to mutter to herself as Lewis left the car running and vaulted up the front steps. ‘I’m starving,’ he said, going inside without once looking back.
Exasperated, Mrs Gibson tugged at her long-lobed ears, which appeared to have grown longer since we’d last met. She was tall, imposing and increasingly haggard. “Lunch is being prepared inside,” she said. “I must get back so it doesn’t burn. I’m afraid I can’t show you to your room, but it’s made up. You remember –”
“Where are the other servants?”
She pulled at her ears again, then swept around the car, taking my valise from the boot, thrusting it at me, then leaning in through the driver’s door, turning off the engine.
I peered in through the passenger door. “Mrs Gibson?”
She checked through the windscreen to make sure Lewis had gone inside. Then, we faced each other over the gearstick. “Malcolm has fired all the house staff. It’s only me now.”
I looked at her in disbelief. The mansion had never been particularly well cared for, and now, to fire all the servants but Mrs Gibson … Something drastic must have happened. I began to understand why Lewis had been so guarded with me in the car. I searched Mrs Gibson’s face and whispered, “What?”
“I … I told him I couldn’t maintain it alone. He didn’t care.”
“He gave no reason?”
She leaned further over the gearstick, placed her red and calloused hand on the dashboard. “One of my girls followed him out to his writing shed. He caught her, and … and the next day, everyone was told to leave.”
The writing shed. Malcolm had only taken me there once, by a convoluted route which I struggled to remember. When inside, he’d watched my every move. I recalled the look on his face: wary and searching.
Sensing something, Mrs Gibson turned her head from me and looked to the mansion. She glanced down again, then began to brush at the dashboard with her hand, as if dusting it. There was a change in her demeanour – her movements were sharp, her expression severe.
I looked through the windscreen towards the mansion, saw Clara in the drawing-room window. She was auburn-haired, cold-eyed and broad-shouldered, having swum competitively since the age of seven. The kind of person whose presence could be felt through windows, over large distances and possibly even through walls. She was watching.
I remained there in stunned silence as Mrs Gibson closed the driver door and hurried back up the main steps. “The pheasant will get dry,” she said blackly.
I emerged from the car, looked again to the drawing room window.
Clara raised her closed fist, then unfurled her long fingers and gave a curt wave. Each action was slow, deliberate, muscular. She turned on her heel and left me reeling in the driveway. By now, the midday sun was high and cold, gazing down like a stone eye as I made my way, alone, into the Furnivall mansion. Standing in the main hall, I recalled how I’d felt like a stranger the first time I’d set foot in the mansion.
Malcolm and Anwen had given me a tour, sharing stories about the place, laughing at little inside jokes, allowing me into their world. It had been overwhelming to be welcomed in the Furnivall household – a warren of curious and historied rooms. Before, I had wrestled with its complexity; now I surrendered, allowed myself to be swallowed. It was like hearing a poem: one had to succumb to its logic to know it.
Though the pathways within were difficult to remember, I had started to draw a vague map of them in my mind. My room was on the first floor of the western wing, and the turning which led to it was signalled by a great stag skull hanging from the wall. I stopped beneath the pair of branching antlers and cast about. A spear of light came through the stained-glass window, shining down on the recessed alcoves in which there were chessboards, all in various states of play. Malcolm would often walk the corridors, setting compositions for himself. I recognised the Scandinavian opening on one of the boards and smiled. Every time I had played Malcolm, he’d beaten me with some variation on that opening – moving the queen out early and decimating my carefully arranged pieces. How like Malcolm, to ignore fundamentals and move the queen early.
I sat down at the chessboard, rested my finger on Malcolm’s queen. Since my last visit, a rough hide had formed about me, blunting all experience, keeping joy from coming in. But as I took the queen in my hand, held it tightly, I felt that hide start to flake away. From nothing, I had gained so much. There was happiness in my life; I had a job I loved and people who cared for me. It had taken twenty-nine years of life to find, but I had a family here. Anwen and Malcolm had welcomed me. A part of me still didn’t believe it: who was I to deserve this? But as I sat there, holding the chess piece, I allowed myself to imagine a world in which I released the past from my grip, let it spin away in the wind. A world in which I sold my poor childhood house in Edinburgh, realised that this was my new home. A home I deserved.
Excerpted with permission from The Lost Author, Chris Barkley, Vintage.
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