The House on the Strand (33 page)

"Only your will to live," he said. "If you keep that, you keep all things. And your children too."

"Go quickly", she said, "before I change my mind."

As we left the room I heard her lock the door, and looking at Roger I wondered if he knew what he had done, urging her to risk her life and her future in an escapade that must surely fail. The house had grown silent. We walked along the passage to the hall and found it empty, except for the two children and the dogs. Joanna was pirouetting before the looking-glass, her long hair dressed in braids with a ribbon threaded through it which had, a short time before, been on Sybell's head; while Margaret sat astride a bench, her father's conical hat upon her head and his long whip in her hand. She looked at Roger severely when he entered.

"Observe now," she said, "I am obliged to make do with a bench for a horse and borrowed plumage for equipment. I'll not remind you of your failings again, my master."

"Nor shall you have to," he told her. "I know my duty. Where is your father?"

"He's above," answered the child. "He cut his finger severing the otter's paw, and Sybell is dressing it for him."

"He'll not thank you to disturb him," said Joanna. "He likes to sleep before he dines, and Sybell sings to him. It makes him drop off the sooner and wake with better appetite. Or so he says."

"I do not doubt it," replied Roger. "In that event, please thank Sir Oliver for me and bid him goodnight. Your mother is tired and does not wish to see anyone. Perhaps you will tell him so?"

"I may," said Joanna, "if I remember."

"I'll tell him," said Margaret, "and wake him too, if he does not descend by six o'clock. Last night we dined at seven, and I can't abide late hours."

Roger wished them both goodnight and, opening the hall-door, stepped outside, closing it softly behind him. He stole round to the back of the house and listened. There were sounds coming from the kitchen quarters, but windows and doors were fastened tight, and the shutters barred. The hounds were yelping from outbuildings in the rear. It would be dark within half an hour or even less; already the copse below the field was dim, shrouded by the pall of snow, and the opposite hills were bleak and bare under the grey sky. The tracks we had made ascending to the house were almost blotted out by the fresh-fallen snow, but beside them were new prints, closer together, like those of a child who, hurrying for shelter, runs like a dancer upon her toes. Roger covered them with his own long stride, disturbing the ground, kicking the snow in front of him as he walked rapidly downhill towards the copse; and now if anyone should venture forth before darkness came they would see nothing but the tracks he had made himself, and those would be blotted too within the hour.

She was waiting for us by the entrance to the wood, carrying her pet squirrel, her cloak drawn close around her and her hood fastened under her chin. But her long gown, which she had tried to fasten up under the belted cloak, had slipped down again below her ankles and hung about her feet like a dripping valance. She was smiling, the smile her daughter Margaret would have worn had she too set forth on some adventure, with the promise of a pony at the end of it instead of a bleak unknown.

"I dressed my pillow in my night-attire", she said, "and heaped the covers over it. It may fool them for a while, should they break down the door."

"Give me your hand," he said. "Disregard your skirts and let them trail. Bess will find warm clothes for you at home."

She laughed and put her hand in his, and as she did so I felt as if it were in mine as well, and that the pair of us were lifting, dragging her through the fallen snow, and he was no longer a steward bound in the service of another woman and I a phantom from a later world, but both of us were men sharing a common purpose and a common love that neither of us, in his time or mine, would ever dare make plain.

When we came to the river and the rotten bridge that lay half-broken in mid-stream he said to her, "You must trust me once again and let me carry you across, as I would your daughter."

"But if you let me fall", she answered, "I will not clout you about the head, as Margaret would."

He laughed, and bore her safely to the other side, once more soaking himself nearly to the waist. We went on walking through the little line of stunted, shrouded trees, the silence all about us no longer ominous, as it had been when I walked alone, but hushed with a sort of magic, and a strange excitement too.

"The snow will be thicker in the valley around Treverran," he said, "and if Ric Treverran should see us he might not hold his tongue. Have you breath enough left to strike out into the open and climb the hill to the track above? Robbie awaits me there with the ponies. You shall choose which of us you please to ride behind. I am the more cautious."

"Then I choose Robbie," she said. "Tonight I bid farewell to caution, and for ever."

We turned left and began to climb the hill out of the valley, the river behind us, the snow reaching above the knees of my companions with every step, making progress laborious and slow.

"Wait," he said, letting go her hand, "there may be a drift ahead before we strike the path," and he plunged upwards, sweeping the snow aside with both his hands, so that for a moment, as he walked on alone to higher ground, I was left with her, and could stare for a brief instant at the small, pale, resolute face beneath the hood.

"All's well," he called. "The snow is firmer here. I'll come and fetch you." I watched him turn and advance, half-sliding down the slope towards her, and it seemed to me suddenly that two men were moving there, not one, and both of them were holding out their hands to help her climb. It must be Robbie, having heard his brother's voice, who had come down from the track above.

Some instinct warned me not to move, not to climb, but to let her go alone and grasp their hands. She went from me and I lost sight of her, and of Roger, and of the third shadowy figure too, in a sudden great pall of snow that blotted all of them from sight. I stood there, shaking, the strands of wire between me and the line, and it was not snow that blanketed the opposite hills and the high bank, but the grey canvas hangings looped to the wagons of the goods-train as it rattled and lumbered through the tunnel.

CHAPTER TWENTY

SELF-PRESERVATION is common to all living things, linked perhaps to that older brain which Magnus said forms part of our natural inheritance. Certainly in my own case instinct transmitted a danger signal: had it not done so I should have died as he did, through the same cause. I remember stumbling blindly away from the railway embankment to the protection of the passage-way where the cattle had sheltered, and I heard the wagons thunder over my head as they passed down the line into the valley. Then I crossed a hedge and found myself in a field behind Little Treverran, home of the wood-worker, and so on to the field where I had left the car.

There was no nausea, no vertigo, the instinct to awake had spared me this as well as my life, but as I sat huddled behind the wheel, still shaking all over, I wondered whether, had Magnus and I ventured forth together on that Friday night, there would have been what the reporters like to term a double tragedy. Or would both of us have survived? It would never now be proved; the opportunity for us to wander together in another time had gone for ever. One thing I knew, which no one else would ever know, and that was why he had died. He had stretched out his hand to help Isolda in the snow. If instinct had warned him otherwise he had disregarded it, unlike myself, and therefore showed the greater courage.

It was after half-past seven when I started the car, and as I drove over the water-splash I still did not know how far I had walked during the excursion to the other world, or which farm or former site had proved to be Tregest. Somehow it no longer mattered. Isolda had escaped, and on that winter's night of 1332, or 33, perhaps even later, had been bound for Kilmarth; whether she reached it or not I might discover. Not now, nor tomorrow, but one day... My immediate purpose must be to conserve my strength and mental alertness for the inquest, and above all watch out for the after-effects of the drug. It would not do to appear in Court with a couple of bloodshot eyes and an inexplicable sweating sickness, especially with Doctor Powell's experienced eye upon me. I had no desire for food, and when I arrived home at about half-past eight, having parked the car at the top of the hill to while away the time, I called to Vita that we had all dined early at the hotel in Liskeard, and I was dead-beat and wanted to go to bed. She and the boys were eating in the kitchen, and I went straight upstairs without disturbing them, and put away the walking-stick in the dressing-room cupboard. I knew now, to the fullest extent, what it felt like to lead what is called a double life. The walking-stick, the bottles locked in the suitcase, were like keys to some woman's flat, to be used when opportunity offered; but more tempting still, and more insidious, was the secret knowledge that the woman herself might be under my own roof even now, tonight, in her own time.

I lay in bed, my hands behind my head, wondering how Robbie and the wild-haired sister Bess received their unexpected visitor. First warm clothes for Isolda, and food before the smoky hearth, the youngsters tongue-tied in her presence, Roger playing host; then groping her way to bed up that ladder to one of the straw-filled mattresses, hearing the cattle moving and stamping in the byre beneath her. Sleep might come early, through exhaustion, but it would more likely be late, because of the strangeness of everything about her, and because she would be thinking about her children, wondering whether she would see them again. I shut my eyes, trying to picture that dark, cold loft. It would correspond in position, surely, to the small back bedroom above the basement, used in other days by Mrs. Lane's unfortunate cook, and filled today with discarded trunks and cardboard boxes. How near to Roger in the kitchen below, how unattainable, both then and now!

"Darling—"

It was Vita bending over me, fantasy and confusion combining to make her other than she was, and when I pulled her down beside me it was not the living woman and my wife whom I held but the phantom one I sought and who I knew, in reality and the present, never could respond. Presently, when I opened my eyes—for I must have dozed off for a while—she was sitting on the stool before the dressing-table, smothering her face with cream.

"Well," she said smiling, looking at me in the glass, "if that's the way you celebrate your inheritance of this place I'm all for it." The towel, wrapped turban-fashion round her head, and the mask of cream gave her a clown-like appearance, and suddenly I felt revolted by the puppet world in which I found myself, and desired no part of it, neither now, nor tomorrow, nor at any time. I wanted to vomit. I got out of bed and said, "I'm going to sleep in the dressing-room."

She stared at me, her eyes like holes in the mask. "What on earth's the matter? she said. What have I done?"

"You've done nothing," I told her. "I want to sleep alone." I went through the bathroom to the dressing-room and she followed me, the silly shift she wore in bed flouncing round her knees, grotesquely ill-suited to the turban; and it struck me for the first time that the varnish on her finger-nails made her hands like claws.

"I don't believe you've been with those men at all," she said. "You left them in Liskeard and have been drinking at some pub. That's it, isn't it?"

"No," I answered.

"Something's happened, all the same. You've been somewhere else, you're not telling me the truth; everything you say and do is one long lie. You lied about the laboratory to the lawyer and that Willis man, you lied to the police about the way the Professor died. For God's sake what's behind it? Did you have some secret pact between you both that he would kill himself and you knew about it all the time?"

I put my hands on her shoulders and began to push her out of the room. "I've not been drinking. There was no suicide pact. Magnus died accidentally, walking into a goods train as it was going into a tunnel. I stood by the line an hour ago and nearly did the same. That's the truth, and if you won't accept it it's just too bad. I can't make you." She stumbled against the bathroom door, and as she turned to look at me I saw a new expression on her face, not anger, but amazement, and disgust as well.

"You went and stood there again", she said, "by the place where he was killed? You deliberately went and stood there and watched a train go by that might have killed you too?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll tell you what I think. I think it's unhealthy, morbid, crazy, and the worst thing about it is that you were capable, after such an experience, of coming here and making love to me. That I'll never forgive, or forget. So for heaven's sake sleep in the dressing-room. I prefer it that way."

She slammed the bathroom door, and I knew this time it was not another of her gestures, made on impulse, but something fundamental, springing from the core of innermost feeling shocked beyond measure. I understood, even honoured her for it, and was torn by a strange, inarticulate pity, but there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do. We met next morning not as husband and wife on edge after yet one more marital tiff, but as strangers who, through force of circumstance, were obliged to share a common roof— dress, eat, walk from room to room, make plans for the day, exchange pleasantries with the children, who were bred of her body and not mine, thus making the division yet more complete. I sensed her profound unhappiness, was aware of every sigh, every dragging step, every weary inflexion in her voice, and the boys, sharp like little animals to the atmospheric change of mood, watched both of us with gimlet eyes.

"Is it true", asked Teddy warily, catching me alone, "that the Professor has left the house to you?"

"It is," I answered. "Unexpected, but very kind of him."

"Will it mean we shall come here every holidays?"

"I don't know, it depends on Vita," I said.

He began fiddling with things on tables, picking them up and putting them back again, then kicking aimlessly at the backs of chairs.