‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s been in here in a very long time,’ he said over his shoulder to Hope, his eyes adjusting to the opaque interior.
‘Is it safe, do you think?’ she asked, from the doorway.
‘I’d keep hold of Annelise,’ he replied. ‘Don’t put her down or she’ll end up as black as coal.’
Together they moved further into the outhouse. ‘Oh look,’ exclaimed Hope, ‘there’s the old croquet set we used to play with.’
‘Better still, look over there, there’s Giddy-Up Jack, our old rocking horse. Do you remember how we’d both get on it and that foul old nanny would shout at us for making too much noise?’
Hope shuddered. ‘What a witch Nanny Finch was. Heaven only knows what on earth Father thought he was doing when he employed her.’
‘I suppose he didn’t have much say in it; he would simply have asked the agency to supply yet another nanny. After all, we did get through them at an alarming rate.’
Kit pushed aside a shabby wrought-iron table and a couple of chairs and ran a hand over the dusty back of the rocking horse. ‘What say you we clean him up for Annelise to play on?
‘I’d say that might be a tall order, given the state he’s in. He might even be riddled with woodworm.’
‘Think positively, Hope, think positively.’ He cleared a path through the piles of junk, wondering why their father had bothered to keep any of it. Or had it been a case of out of sight, out of mind? Not unlike his attitude toward his children, perhaps. He began pulling the old rocking horse with its peeling paintwork towards the door. Behind it lurked another childhood treasure. ‘Guess what?’ he said. ‘I’ve found our old toy donkey and cart, and unbelievably the cart has the wooden skittles in it we used to try and juggle with. Do you remember?’
‘I do. I also remember you and Allegra coming to blows over them and her hurling the skittles, one after another, from your bedroom window.’
‘She had quite a throw, if I recall rightly,’ he said with a laugh.
But there was no laughter in Hope’s expression. She pursed her lips and frowned. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive her for what happened yesterday. I just can’t credit that anyone could be so thoughtlessly irresponsible. Did it not cross her mind for one second what the consequences could be? But then when did Allegra ever think about the consequences of her actions? She really hasn’t changed, has she? Still the same self-absorbed narcissist with a chip on her shoulder.’
Not wanting his sister to get herself worked up again – he’d heard quite enough on the subject of their cousin – Kit said, ‘The important thing is Annelise didn’t come to any harm. Come on, let’s see if we can clean these toys up so she has something to play with.’
As if understanding him, the little girl kicked her feet excitedly against Hope and pointed happily at Giddy-Up Jack.
‘I think we’ll take it that she’s in agreement with me,’ Kit said with a smile.
He soon had the toys out on the lawn in front of the outhouse. With a stiff bristle brush he’d found hanging on a hook on the back of the door, he attacked the rocking horse, brushing away the cobwebs and dust, before using a handkerchief from his pocket to give it a final rub-down. ‘There,’ he said, thoroughly pleased with himself. ‘Let’s see if Annelise wants to go for a ride.’
Hope settled her carefully on the saddle of the wooden horse and wrapped her small hands around the worn leather of the reins. When she had the horse gently rocking, the little girl beamed with delight, her blue eyes wide.
‘If only her parents could see her looking so happy,’ murmured Hope, a supporting hand resting protectively on Annelise’s back.
‘Have you heard from them at all?’ asked Kit.
‘No. I sent a letter a few days ago, but I’m not convinced it will ever reach Otto and Sabine. I’m equally certain that any letters they try to send out of the country will be destroyed by the authorities. The Nazis don’t want the rest of the world to know just what they’re doing to the Jews, how they’re restricting what they can and cannot do. I never thought I’d say this, and it goes against everything Dieter and I believed in, but the sooner we go to war with Germany, the better.’
At the serious intensity of her expression, Kit put his arm around his sister. It was, he noted the first time he had done so in a very long time. And in that moment, as she relaxed imperceptibly against him, he wanted to believe that the fierce anger of her grief that had isolated her these last two years was beginning to ease. Perhaps now it was directed towards a new target – Germany – and she was no longer taking it out on those around her. Or herself, for that matter.
With this thought came the realisation that Kit was actually enjoying himself being back at Island House. The weight of dread that had accompanied him on the train in response to Roddy’s telegram had gone, and in its place was a burgeoning sense of optimism.
On the face of it, his father’s will had seemed a final and cruel act of disregard for anyone’s feelings but his own, as if forcing the family to come together under the one roof and pitting them against each other had been planned to give him some sort of twisted satisfaction. But in all honesty, Kit could see no reason why Jack would have wanted to do that, not when, if all that Roddy and Romily said was true, he had at last found happiness.
When he thought about it, Kit could not recall a time when he had seen his father genuinely happy. It was a thought that had never occurred to him before. Was that because he had been too preoccupied with his own feelings? He was about to voice this idea to Hope, to explore it further, when he thought better of it. He didn’t want to say anything that might disrupt her mood – a mood that was so precariously balanced – and so he contented himself with enjoying the tentative renewal of the closeness they had once shared. For which he found himself thanking his father. If nothing else, this enforced time together at Island House was proving to be a positive experience for Kit, and hopefully for his sister too.
Or was it the lull before the storm?
Chapter Thirty-One
Arthur was at the top of the house in the stuffy heat of the attic. For the last five minutes, having taken a break from his own bit of poking about in the past, he’d been observing Kit and Hope down in the garden doing much the same thing in the outhouse, unearthing an assortment of their old toys.
Many a time as a boy he had retreated up here, both to escape his family and to spy on them from the window if they were in the area to the side of the house that led to the kitchen garden. They each had had their own not-so-secret place where they went to be alone – Hope to the glasshouse, Kit wandering the woods and meadows, Allegra to the boathouse and he to the attic – and rarely had they breached the invisible barrier each had erected to safeguard their privacy. Even Arthur, wanting to avoid the threat of retaliation, had chosen to respect the unwritten rule, wanting no one to infiltrate his personal kingdom. Only Allegra had seen fit to flout it, and all hell had broken out when he’d found her up here one day hunting through his boyhood treasures – his stamp and coin collections, his chemistry set and model aeroplanes, and the rat he’d been dissecting. He’d tied her to a chair and, penknife in hand, threatened to dissect her unless she swore never to come up to the attic again.
He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, then, moving away from the window, which he’d just opened, returned to the task in hand. It really was extraordinary what the old man had stored up here – side tables, wardrobes, vases, lamps, rugs, ornaments, tennis racquets too warped ever to be of use, a split cricket bat, a train set in its box, any number of umbrellas, a pair of stout walking boots, pictures, blankets, books, a gramophone player with a selection of records, a set of golf clubs, and countless box files of yellowed papers and documents. For the love of God, why the hell hadn’t the stupid man ever thrown anything away?
