The Book of Lost Things(11)

David’s relations with Rose were not good. While he tried always to be polite, as his father had asked him to be, he did not like her, and he resented the fact that she was now part of his world. It was not merely that she had taken, or was trying to take, the place of his mother, although that was bad enough. Her attempts to cook meals that he liked for dinner, despite the pressures of rationing, irritated him. She wanted David to like her, and that made him dislike her even more.

But David believed that her presence also distracted his father from the memory of David’s mother. He was forgetting about her already, so tied up was he with Rose and their new baby. Little Georgie was a demanding child. He cried a lot and always seemed to be ailing, so that the local doctor was a regular visitor to the house. His father and Rose doted on him, even as he deprived them of sleep almost every night, leaving them both short-tempered and weary. The result was that David was increasingly left to his own devices, which made him both grateful for the freedom offered by Georgie and resentful of the lack of attention to his own needs. In any case, it gave him more time to read, and that was no bad thing.

But as David’s fascination with the old books grew, so did his desire to find out more about their former owner, for they had clearly belonged to someone who was just like him. He had at last found a name, Jonathan Tulvey, written inside the covers of two of the books, and he was curious to learn something about him.

So it was that one day David swallowed his dislike of Rose and went down to the kitchen, where she was working. Mrs. Briggs, the housekeeper and wife of Mr. Briggs, the gardener, was visiting her sister in Eastbourne, so Rose was taking care of the chores for the day. From outside came the clucking of hens in the chicken run. David had helped Mr. Briggs to feed them earlier, and to check the vegetable garden for damage from rabbits and the run for any holes that might allow a fox to enter. The week before, Mr. Briggs had trapped and killed a fox near the house using a snare. The fox had almost been decapitated by the trap, and David had said something about feeling sorry for it. Mr. Briggs had scolded him, pointing out that one fox would kill every hen they had if he managed to get into the run, but David had still been troubled by the sight of the dead animal, its tongue caught between its small, sharp teeth, its fur torn from where it had tried to bite itself free from the snare.

David made himself a glass of Borwick’s lemon barley before sitting at the head of the table and asking Rose how she was. Rose stopped washing the dishes and turned around to speak with him, her face bright with pleasure and surprise. David had planned to try very hard to be nice in the hope of finding out more from her, but Rose, unused to any conversation with him that did not center on food or bedtime, or that was not conducted in surly monosyllables, immediately embraced the chance to build bridges between them, so David’s acting abilities were not stretched very far. She dried her hands on a dishcloth and took a seat beside him.

“I’m fine, thank you,” she said. “A little tired, what with Georgie and all, but that will pass. It’s been a little strange this last while. I’m sure you feel the same way, the four of us all thrown together suddenly like this. I’m glad that you’re here, though. This house is too big for one person, but my parents wanted to keep it in the family. It was… important to them.”

“Why?” asked David. He tried to keep himself from sounding too interested. He didn’t want Rose to realize that the only reason he was talking with her was to find out more about the house, and particularly his room and the books that it contained.

“Well,” she said, “this house has been in our family for a very long time. My grandparents built it, and lived in it with their children. They hoped that it would stay in the family, and that there would always be children living in it.”

“Did they own the books in my room?” asked David.

“Some of them,” said Rose. “Others belonged to their children: my father, his sister, and—”

She paused for a moment.

“Jonathan?” suggested David, and Rose nodded. She looked sad.

“Yes. Jonathan. Where did you learn his name?”

“It was written in some of the books. I was wondering who he was.”

“He was my uncle, my father’s older brother, although I never met him. Your room was once his bedroom, and a lot of those books were his. I’m sorry if you don’t like them. I thought it would be such a nice room for you. I know it’s a little dark, but it had all those shelves and, of course, the books. I should have been more thoughtful.”

David looked puzzled. “But why? I do like it, and I like the books too.”

Rose turned away. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” said David. “Please tell me.”

Rose relented.

“Jonathan disappeared. He was only fourteen. It was a long time ago, and my grandparents kept his room exactly as it had always been, because they hoped that he would come back to them. He never did. Another child disappeared with him, a little girl. Her name was Anna, and she was the daughter of one of my grandfather’s friends. He and his wife died in a fire, and my grandfather took Anna to live with his family instead. Anna was seven. My grandfather thought it would be good for Jonathan to have a little sister and for Anna to have a big brother to take care of her. Anyway, they must have wandered off and, oh, I don’t know, something happened to them and they were never seen again. It was just very, very sad. They searched for them for so long. They looked in the woods and the river, and they asked after them in all of the nearby towns. They even went to London and placed drawings and descriptions of them anywhere that they could, but nobody ever came forward to say that they had seen them.