The Empty Frame. Ann Pilling

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      Somebody was crying, a sound with which Magnus was all too familiar. His mother had cried all the time after his father had walked out, and children had always cried in the Homes where he had been temporarily dumped when they first discovered how ill his mother was. Now, when babies cried in supermarkets and their mothers took no notice, he couldn’t stand it; he had to run away. This terror of crying seemed to be connected to an invisible main cable that went right down through the middle of him. If it were activated he felt he might die. Magnus did not understand this part of himself; all he knew was that any kind of crying was painful for him. He only ever cried in secret.

      The crying was that of a woman. She had a low voice, quite deep, and she was sobbing. There were no words. He sat up in bed and his hands met warm fur. Arthur was doing his rounds, first Floss, then Sam, now him.

      Magnus could just see the shape of his little head. His ears were pricked up and his fat little tail was erect and quivering. His fur was a stiff bush and he was making a curious sound, not a mew and certainly not a purr, but a kind of throaty growl, the sound of a beast that is suspicious and uncertain, possibly afraid. The low sobbing went on, though fainter now and already fading away. But the cat did not stay with Magnus. It shot off the duvet, plunged through the open door and vanished into the darkness.

      It was cold in the turret room now, cold and chilly like the Great Hall, and Magnus’s duvet felt clammy and damp. It had been hot when they’d switched their lamps off and they’d all flung their bedding aside, to get cool. The cold he now felt was like mist, in fact he could see a sort of mist in the room, lit up by some faint light. The source of this light was a mystery to him because all was dark outside; perhaps the mist had its own light. He watched it. It was like a fine piece of gauze, or a wisp of cloud, wreathing round upon itself, unfolding and refolding until, like a square of silk in the hands of a magician, it vanished into thin air leaving a coldness that was even more intense than before.

      He listened again for the crying noise. It was so faint now it was no more than a sad little whisper; it had almost become part of the dissolving misty cloud. But the woman had not gone away altogether. He could still hear her, though only very faintly, and she was still in distress. Magnus decided that he must try to find her. He had to stop that crying.

      But first he felt under his pillow where he always kept two things: a green army torch and a heavy black clasp knife. These things were secret treasures and absolutely nobody knew about them but him and Father Godless, who had given them to him long ago, or so it felt to Magnus.

      It was awful that “Uncle Robert”, which was what Magnus had called the kind old priest, should have had the surname “Godless” – though the old man had laughed about it. Magnus would have changed it, like people sometimes do when their name is Shufflebottom, or Smellie. He’d got to know the old man while staying with his first foster family, after they had taken him away from his mother. He was one of the priests in the church they went to. He lived in an old people’s home, now, near London, but he sometimes wrote to Magnus, and occasionally sent him presents.

      He’d given him the torch because he knew Magnus got scared in the dark and he’d given him a little Bible, too, with tiny print and a red silk marker. He’d called it “the sword of the spirit which is the word of God”. But he was a very practical old man so he’d also given him the knife. This knife, like the torch and the Bible, had accompanied him on dangerous missions in the war when he’d been a soldier.

      Magnus got up and felt for his dressing gown. It lay ready on his bed because he sometimes got up in the night, to go to the lavatory and, in this turret block, the main bathroom was four floors down. He liked his dressing gown. Floss’s mum and dad had given it to him. He liked its bold red and blue stripes and he liked its deep pockets. Into one of these he now slid his clasp knife and into the other the little red Bible, because he was scared. The gold cross stamped deep into the front of it might give him some protection. You could wave crosses at vampires and it was supposed to shrivel them up.

      He slipped through the door and made his way down the stone spiral of stairs. Each landing was lit by a small spotlight, but in between the floors there was a deep darkness. His heart bumped as he picked his way down the smooth cold treads, his ears strained for the sound of the weeping voice. He could still hear it, though it was very faint now, and it seemed to come and go as if the troubled woman was wandering about, all over this rambling place, coming near to him and then withdrawing when she did not find what she sought.

      He knew where he was going and he made his way unerringly down the twisting stairs then out into the low arched entrance hall where Cousin M had greeted them. This was dimly lit by an occasional spotlight, and he could see now that there were lights in some of the flowerbeds. Through curious low windows, the shape of half-closed eyes, he could see lawns manicured with light-dark stripes where the mower had gone up and down, and the glint of shifting water and the great trees standing like silent sentinels.

      The door to the Great Hall where Cousin M had fed them was ajar, but only a crack. Magnus pushed at it and the vast slab of whorled timber, many centimetres thick and patterned with marvellous iron traceries, swung open silently. Then it gave a single, sharp creak, a sound not particularly loud but deafening in the vast room hung with its rows of gilded portraits. At the table, by the fire where they had eaten their sandwiches, a man sat in front of a chessboard. At the creak of the hinges he turned his head sharply and, seeing the small boy in the doorway, got abruptly to his feet, sending two of the chess pieces rolling across the floor. He touched a bank of switches by the fireplace and lights came on everywhere. Magnus was terrified but he stood his ground as the elderly man, who walked with a slight limp, strode purposefully towards him.

      It was his first meeting with Colonel Stickley, the mysterious relative of Cousin M’s who had gone off to bed without greeting them. Magnus never forgot that moment, the tall spindly figure limping across the cold chequered floor, the sudden harsh light after the reassuring darkness, and what that light revealed – row upon row of faces, priests and soldiers, men in university robes posed self-importantly over open books, women in wimples, children playing with cats and dogs and with curious toys, such as you only ever saw in museums. So many faces looking down upon the modern man and the modern boy, each from their own little corner in the greater sweep of history. But the face he had come to see was not among them. The huge gold frame, containing cruel Lady Alice of the thin white hands, was empty. He found himself looking up at a blank black rectangle.

      Did the Colonel see? Magnus could not decide because, instantly, the old man had interposed his own tall, stooping figure between the boy and the painting, had bent down and thrust his whiskery face at him. “Humph! What’s this? Are you sleepwalking or something?”

      Magnus, smelling pipe smoke and whisky, suddenly burst into tears. The crying of the woman which had brought him here had most definitely ceased now, and the painting was most definitely blank. These two things belonged together, of that he felt certain. But how they belonged he did not understand. She had looked so cruel, the Lady Alice Neale. It could surely not have been Lady Alice that wept. But where had she gone to, slipping out of her gilded frame and leaving the canvas empty? None of it made sense. He suddenly felt bewildered and lost, and he very much wanted to go back to bed.

      The Colonel looked down at the snivelling boy, inspecting him through small round spectacles as, Magnus felt, one might scrutinise some botanical specimen under glass. Then, very awkwardly and stiffly, he stretched out his hand and laid it lightly on the boy’s shoulder. “Stay there young man,” he said, then he went round the hall switching off all the main lights. Magnus could hear him talking to himself, he seemed to be complaining about Maude. “Mad woman, my cousin. What did she want to put you up there for, four floors up? I told her not to but the woman wouldn’t listen. It’s not civilised. No wonder you lost your bearings. Come on, I’ll have you in bed in two shakes СКАЧАТЬ