The House on the Strand (35 page)

"Well, we mustn't keep you from enjoying your delightful new home," the lawyer said, when we had consumed a brief but hilarious lunch. "Willis and I can walk up to the station."

As we moved towards the door of the hotel I said to Willis, "I can't thank you enough for your evidence. What Magnus would have called a remarkable performance."

"It made its impact," he admitted, "though you had me somewhat shaken. I wasn't prepared for snow. Still, it goes to prove what my boss always said: the layman will accept anything if it is put forward in an authoritative enough fashion." He blinked at me behind his spectacles and added quietly, "You did make a clean sweep of all the jam-jars, I take it? Nothing left that could do you or anyone else any damage?"

"Buried," I replied, "under the debris of years."

"Good," he said. "We don't want any more disasters." He hesitated, as if he might have been going to say something else, but the lawyer and Vita were waiting for us by the hotel entrance, and the opportunity was lost. Farewells were said, hands shaken, and we all dispersed. As we made our way to the car-park Vita remarked in wifely fashion, "I noticed your hand recovered as soon as you reached the bar. Be that as it may, I intend to drive."

"You're welcome," I said, borrowing her country's curious phraseology, and, tilting my hat over my eye as I got into the car, I prepared myself for sleep. My conscience pricked me, though. I had lied to Willis. Bottles A and B were empty, true enough, but the contents of bottle C were still intact, and lay in my suitcase in the dressing-room.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE EFFECTS OF conviviality in the White Hart subsided after a couple of hours, leaving me in a truculent mood and determined to be master in my own house. The inquest was over, and despite my gaffe about the snow, or perhaps because of it, Magnus's good name remained untarnished. The police were satisfied, local interest would die down, and there was nothing more I had to fear except interference from my own wife. This must be dealt with, and speedily. The boys had gone off riding and were not yet home. I went to look for Vita and found her eventually, tape-measure in hand, standing on the landing outside the boys room. "You know," she said, "that lawyer was perfectly right. You could get half a dozen small apartments into this place —more if you used the basement too. We could borrow the money from Joe." She flicked the tape-measure back into its case and smiled. "Have you any better ideas? The Professor didn't leave you the money to keep up his house, and you haven't a job, unless you cross the ocean and Joe gives you one. So... How about being realistic for a change?" I turned and walked downstairs to the music-room. I expected her to follow me, and she did. I planted myself before the fireplace, the traditional spot sacrosanct from time immemorial to the master of the house, and said, "Get this straight. This is my house, and what I do with it is my affair. I don't want suggestions from you, lawyers, friends, or anyone else. I intend to live here, and if you don't care to live here with me you must make your own arrangements."

She lighted a cigarette and blew a great puff of smoke into the air. She had gone very white. "This is the showdown, is it?" she asked. "The ultimatum?"

"Call it what you like," I told her. "It's a statement of fact. Magnus has left me this house, and I propose to make a life for myself here, and for you and the boys if you want to share it. I can't speak plainer than that."

"You mean you have given up all idea of taking the directorship Joe offered you in New York?"

"I never had the idea. You had it for me."

"And how do you think we are going to live?

I haven't the slightest idea," I said, "and at the moment I don't care. Having worked in a publishing firm for over twenty years I know something about the game, and might even turn author myself. I could start by writing a history of this house."

"Good heavens!" She laughed, and extinguished her barely-lighted cigarette in the nearest ash-tray. "Well, it might keep you occupied if nothing else. And what would I do with myself in the meantime? Join the local sewing society or something?"

"You could do what other wives do, adapt."

"Darling, when I agreed to marry you and live in England you had a perfectly worth-while job in London. You've thrown it up for no reason at all, and now want to settle down here at the back of beyond, where neither of us knows a soul, hundreds of miles from all our friends. It's just not good enough."

We had reached an impasse; and I disliked being called darling when we were locked in argument instead of an embrace. Anyway, the situation bored me; I had said my say, and argument led nowhere. Besides, I had an intense desire to go up to the dressing-room and examine bottle C. If I remembered rightly, it looked slightly different from bottles A and B. Perhaps I ought to have given it to Willis to try out on his laboratory monkeys; but if I had taken him into my confidence he might never have sent it back.

"Why don't you take your tape-measure", I suggested, "and think up some bright ideas for curtains and carpets, and send them to Bill and Diana for their opinion in Ireland?"

I did not mean to be sarcastic. She could do what she liked, within reason, with Magnus's furnishings and bachelor taste. Rearranging rooms was one of her favourite things: it kept her happy for hours.

My effort to appease rebounded. Her eyes filled, and she said, "You know I'd live anywhere if only I thought you loved me still."

I can take anger any day and feel justified in returning blow for blow.

Not unhappiness, not tears. I held out my arms and she came at once, clinging to me for comfort like a wounded child.

"You've changed so these last weeks," she told me. "I hardly recognise you."

"I haven't changed," I said. "I do love you. Of course I love you." Truth is the hardest thing to put across, to other people, to oneself as well. I did love Vita, for moments shared during months and years, for all those ups and downs of married life that can be precious, exasperating, monotonous, and dear. I had learnt to accept her faults, and she mine. Too often, wrangling, the insults hurled were never meant. Too frequently, used to each other's company, we had left the sweeter things unsaid. The trouble was, some inner core within had been untouched, lain dormant, waiting to be stirred. I could not share with her or anyone the secrets of my dangerous new world. Magnus, yes, but Magnus was a man, and dead. Vita was no Medea with whom I could gather the enchanted herbs.

"Darling," I said, "try and bear with me. It's a moment of transition for me, not a parting of the ways. I just can't see ahead. It's like standing on a spit of shore with an incoming tide, waiting to take the plunge. I can't explain."

"I'll take any plunge you want, if you'll take me with you," she answered.

"I know," I said, "I know..."

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, the temporarily blotched features oddly touching, making me feel the more inadequate.

"What's the time? I shall have to pick up the boys," she said.

"No, we'll go together," I told her, glad of an excuse to prolong the entente, to justify myself not only in her eyes but in my own as well. Cheerfulness broke in; the atmosphere, that had been so heavy with resentment and unspoken bitterness, cleared and we were almost normal again. That night I returned from self-banishment in the dressing-room, not without regret, but I felt it politic; besides, the divan bed was hard.

The weather was fine, and the weekend passed with sailing, swimming, picnics with the boys, and as I resumed my role of husband, stepfather, master of the house, I planned in secret for the week ahead. I must have one day to myself alone. Vita herself, in all innocence, supplied the opportunity.

"Did you know Mrs. Collins has a daughter in Bude?" she said on Monday morning. "I told her we'd take her over there one day this week, drop her off with the daughter, and pick her up again later in the afternoon. So how about it? The boys are keen to go, and so am I." I pretended to damp the idea. "Awful lot of traffic," I said. "The roads will be jammed. And Bude packed with tourists."

"We don't mind that," said Vita. "We can make an early start, and it's only about 50 miles."

I assumed the look of a hard-pressed family man with a back-log of work on hand he was given no time to clear. "If you don't mind, I'd rather you left me out of it. Bude on a mid-August afternoon is not my idea of a perfect way of life."

"O.K... O.K... We'll have more fun without you."

We settled for Wednesday. No tradesmen called that day, so it suited me. If they left at half-past ten and picked up Mrs. Collins again around five o'clock, they'd be home by seven at the latest.

Wednesday dawned fine, luckily, and I saw the party off in the Buick soon after half-past ten, knowing that I had at least eight hours ahead of me, hours for experiment and recovery too. I went up to the dressing-room and took bottle C out of my suitcase. It was the same stuff all right, or appeared to be, but there was a brownish sediment at the bottom, like cough-mixture put away after the winter and forgotten until the cold weather comes again. I took out the stopper and smelt the contents: they had no more colour and smell than stale water—less, in fact. I poured four measures into the top of the walking-stick, and then decided to screw it up for future use, and pour a fresh dose into the medicine-glass, which was still lying on a shelf with the jars in the old laundry.

It was an odd sensation, standing there once more, knowing that the basement all around me and the house above were empty of their present occupants, Vita, the boys, while waiting in the shadows were possibly the people of my secret world.

When I had swallowed the dose I went and sat in the old kitchen, expectant and alert as a theatre-goer who has just slipped into his stall before the curtain rises on the eagerly awaited third act of a play. In this case either the players were on strike or the management at fault, for the curtain of my private theatre never rose, the scene remained unchanged. I sat down there in the basement for an hour, and nothing happened. I went out on to the patio, thinking the fresh air might do the trick, but time stayed obstinately at Wednesday morning in mid-August; I might have swallowed a draught from the kitchen tap for all the effect bottle C had upon mind or stomach. At twelve o'clock I returned to the lab and poured a few more drops into the medicine-glass. This had done the trick once before, and without any ill-effect.

I returned to the patio and stayed until after one o'clock, but still nothing happened, so I went upstairs and had some lunch. It must mean that the contents of bottle C had lost their strength, or Magnus had somehow missed out on the special ingredients and bottle C was worthless. If this was so, I had made my last trip. The curtain had risen on my journey across the Treesmill stream in the snow, only to fall by the railway tunnel at the close of the third act. I had come to journey's end.

The realisation was so devastating that I felt stunned. I had lost not only Magnus but the other world. It lay here, all around me, but out of reach. The people of that world would travel on in time without me, and I must keep to my own course, fulfilling God only knew what monotonous day-by-day. The link between the centuries had gone. I went down to the basement once more and out into the patio, thinking that by walking on the stone flags and touching the walls some force would come through to me, that Roger's face would look out at me from the hatch-door to the boiler-room, or Robbie would emerge from the stables under the loft leading his pony. I knew they must be there, and I could not see them. Isolda too, waiting for the snows to melt. The house was inhabited not by the dead but by the living, and I was the restless wanderer, I was the ghost.

This urge to see, to listen, to move amongst them was so intense that it became intolerable; it was as though my brain had been set alight by some tremendous fire. I could not rest. I could not set myself to any humdrum task in the house or garden; the whole day had gone to waste, and what had promised to be hours of magic were slipping by unused. I got out the car and drove to Tywardreath, the sight of the solid parish church a mockery to my mood. It had no right to be there in its present form. I wanted to sweep it away, leaving only the south aisle and the Priory chapel, see the Priory walls enclosing the churchyard. I drove aimiessly to the lay-by at the top of the hill beyond the Treesmill turning and parked, thinking that, if I waiked down the road and crossed the fields to the Gratten, memory of what I had once seen would fill the vacuum.

I stood by the car, reaching for a cigarette, but it had not touched my lips before a jolt shook me from head to foot, as though I had stepped on a live cable. There was no serene transition from present to past but a sensation of pain, with flashes before my eyes and thunder in my ears. This is it, I thought. I'm going to die. Then the flashes cleared, the thunder died away, and there was a mass of people lining the summit of the hill where I stood, crowding and pressing towards a building across the road. More people came from the direction of Tywardreath, men, women, children, some walking, some running. The building was the magnet, irregular in shape, with leaded windows, and what appeared to be a small chapel beside it. I had seen the village once before, at Martinmas, but that was from the green beyond the Priory walls. Now there were no booths, no travelling musicians, no slaughtered beasts. The air was crisp and cold, the ditches banked with frozen snow that had turned grey and hard from lying during weeks. Small puddles in the road had turned to craters of sheeted ice, and the ploughlands across the ditches were black with frost. Men, women and children alike were wrapped and hooded against the cold, their features sharp like the beaks of birds, and the mood I sensed was neither jocular nor gay but somehow predatory, the mob mood of people bent upon a spectacle that might turn sour. I drew nearer to the building, and saw that a covered chariot was drawn up by the chapel entrance, with servants standing by the horses' heads. I recognised the Champernoune coat-of-arms, and the servants too, while Roger himself stood within the chapel porch, his arms folded. The door of the main building was shut, but as I stood there watching it opened, and a man, better dressed than those lining the route, emerged with a companion. I knew them both, for I had seen them last on the night when Otto Bodrugan had urged them to join in his rebellion against the King: they were Julian Polpey and Henry Trefrengy. They came down the pathway, and threading their way through the crowd paused near to where I stood.