The Lamorna Wink (3 page)

But, then, it would be quite impossible to capture the atmosphere, the slight menace, the rather edgy romanticism that the place stirred in him. He told himself he was being overimaginative. It did no good.

Architecturally, the house wasn't especially imposing. It was Georgian, built of gray stone that worked as a kind of camouflage, making it fade into the land and woods around it. It sat on a cliff, a craggy rock-strewn promontory above the sea. It had been this setting that particularly appealed to him, as it surely would to anyone with an ounce of romance in him. The whole prospect—house, woods, rocks, sea—looked drained of color, which added to the romance. If a grim-faced chatelaine in black to her ankles had opened the heavy oak door, it would have added even more. Melrose was fully prepared to be swept away.

But it was Esther Laburnum of Aspry and Aspry who swept back the double doors to the largest of the reception rooms (there were three) with a flourish, saying, “There!” in a pleased-as-punch tone suggesting she had just worked some sleight of hand and had called up a fully furnished room, right down to the pictures on the wall.

Three of the walls were papered in a serene gray and the fourth, with a fireplace at its center, was given over to shelves for books and niches in which were displayed various pieces of sculpture: Etruscan heads, marble busts. A mahogany sideboard, flanked by walnut armchairs, sat beneath a portrait of an undistinguished old man with a churlish look that said he'd sooner be anywhere at all other than sitting for his portrait. The hound at his feet sported a similar look.

Except for the sculpture, nothing else suggested any interest in the exotic; the room was as English as English could be. Easy chairs and sofa were covered in linen and chintz, patterns of bluebells or intertwining ivy and hollyhocks. One of the chairs was drawn up to a kidney-shaped writing table with marquetry inlay. Against one wall between long windows was a campaign chest, a fine example of its kind.

“Isn't it lovely?” trumpeted Esther Laburnum. She was a large woman with a boisterous voice, the sort that carries through a restaurant and condemns the other diners to hearing its business.

The room looked so lived-in, thought Melrose. It was as if the occupants, hearing the approach of Mrs. Laburnum's Jaguar, had decided to run and hide.

“Is the rest of the house this comfortably furnished?” When she assured him it was, Melrose said, “But the owners have left so many of their personal belongings behind.” He nodded toward the portraits and pictures.

Esther Laburnum agreed but said the house was on the market when she'd joined Aspry and Aspry. It had been on the market for some time now, and she hadn't known the owners. She was new to the area. “In any event, the owners are apparently open to letting it or selling it or some combination of both. I mean, if you'd want to let it for a while to see how you get on.”

They walked from the living room to the dining room, in which stood a twin-pedestaled dining room table and two sideboards opposite each other on facing walls. If he pulled out drawers and opened cabinet doors, he bet he would find silver, napkins, china.

From there they went to the rest of the house and the study (or, as Esther Laburnum called it, the “snuggery” or “snug”). Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined three walls. In front of one a refectory table of English oak stood upon a carpet that Melrose thought he recognized as Turkestan (a payoff of those countless hours spent being taught antiques by Marshall Trueblood). Against the fourth wall sat a large desk, its top covered with the tools of writing: letters, accounts, journals.

It was a smallish and clearly much-used room. One could almost sense the impress of bodies against the stuffed armchairs. “Snuggery” here was rightly applied. With the fireplace alight, especially on days such as this one (rain-lashed, wind-lashed, he thought in melodramatic terms), snug is what he felt. Melrose walked around checking the many leather-bound or gaudily jacketed newer books; it was quite a library, one appealing to diverse tastes. One end of the refectory table held another half-dozen small silver-framed pictures.

“Are these the family?” he asked her, picking up first one and then another.

“I expect so. Would you look at that fireplace mantel! What carving!”

Melrose followed his own line of thought. “I don't understand why people would go off and leave behind such personal things. One ordinarily tucks them safely away in a locked cupboard or trunk or some such place. One doesn't leave them out.” He sounded quarrelsome, as if such behavior shouldn't be condoned.

Mrs. Laburnum answered with no more than an uninterested “Um,” leaving Melrose to peruse this little hoard of pictures and pursue his little mystery. There were four or five people represented here, all informally caught on film. The core group appeared to consist of a fortyish couple, very handsome; an elderly man who looked like the one in the portrait—yes, there was a trace of that squinty look; a pretty little girl of perhaps six or seven; and a little boy, probably a year or so younger, shown with his father on a sailboat. Several other pictures were taken aboard this boat. Melrose wondered how well off they were; judging by this house and the size of the boat, very. One or the other of these four was in the other photos with relations and friends. The grand-parents seemed to be represented wholly by the old man.

Rarely did Melrose envy other people, for at home he was surrounded by friends more or less like him—unmarried, childless, unattached, really—and if anyone in his circle was to be envied it was he himself, with his manor house, his land, his money. What struck him about the family in these snapshots was that they seemed so hugely happy. Even the old man finally dropped the bad-humored look. Their smiles were not the camera's but their own. Melrose envied them no end.

“Lovely little family, aren't they?”

He had forgotten Esther Laburnum in his absorption in the pictures.

“So sad about the children. I believe they drowned.”

“Drowned?” Melrose took this awful news almost as he would a personal loss.

“It was all extremely sad. It happened—oh, five years ago. What must have made it worse for them—the parents—was that they were out when it happened. I wasn't here then.” She had already told him this a couple of times. It was as if she were trying to dissociate herself from the house and its owners. “Would you like to see the upstairs now?”

He told her he would. Yet he hated leaving the father and mother to the hellish knowledge that they hadn't been around to save their children. Obediently, Melrose followed Esther Laburnum (in whom he detected now an impatience to get the house “viewed” and out of here).

There were five bedrooms, none of which Melrose lingered in, but just glanced around standing at the door. He saw some more framed photographs in the master bedroom and would have liked to have a look at them, but with the agent at his heels like a terrier, he didn't.

One room facing the sea intrigued him. It was entirely empty except for a grand piano. Sheet music sat on the piano stand and lay on the floor, as if a breeze had drifted it there. Yet he detected no drafts; indeed, the house was amazingly tight, given its age and size.

“I
believe
he was a musician; I
believe
he wrote music.”

Melrose heard the emphasis on “believe,” as if she didn't want to take the responsibility for supplying incorrect data. He walked over to look at the music on the piano stand. He agreed with her. “This looks newly composed—was, I mean, before they left.” Melrose played no instrument, but he could read music and could pick out tunes with one finger. He sat down at the piano and did so, painstakingly. It ended right in the middle of a bar on the second page. It was as if the composer had been temporarily called away.

“I don't want to hurry you, Mr. Plant. But I dare-say you do want to have a look outside at the grounds.”

What he really wanted was for her to go away and leave him here, trying to pick out this music and to hear a whole orchestra supplying the background in his head.

He rose and followed her.

 

The day was uneven, uncertain. Intermittently, rain stopped and started, becoming more gauzy and misty as the afternoon wore on. Each time it stopped, weak sunlight tossed a veil of light across the gravel, barred by the density of the woodland. The light would have to be stronger to see through those branches.

Melrose was drawn by the rasp of the water and stood on the rocky promontory looking down at the sharp collapse of water spewing against stone. A stairway had been fashioned from the cliff and led down to the sea. Light glimmered on the wet stones. Melrose stood there looking and feeling he was getting down to the bedrock of existence. Unbidden, a few lines of poetry came to him about a woman looking out to sea:
Ever stood she, prospect impressed.
Who had written it, Hardy? Perhaps he'd find the poem in Seabourne's library. He was pulled from this reflection by a voice fluting at his elbow.

“There are steps going down to the sea. Right down there, see?”

Melrose turned away from the stark display, which had suited his mood far more than the voice of Esther Laburnum. “Yes, I saw them.”

“You have to be careful on them. The rocks are slippery.”

“I hadn't intended to go down there.” He picked up a thin stone and pitched it over, as people will do when they come upon water. He wondered why and picked up another.

“They must have slipped; that's what I heard.”

His pitching arm froze and he looked at her. “Who slipped?”

“Didn't I tell you? The children. They found them down there.” She sighed. “Isn't it terrible? Can you imagine such a thing?”

“I cannot. No.” He stood on the edge of the cliff and tried to. He tried to fathom the grief of the mother and father. Having no children, he found it difficult; still, he could imagine himself receiving such news about a friend—say Vivian, say Richard Jury—and imagine trying to live in a world where they no longer were. Even though all of this was indeed his imagining, he was surprised that the sense of loss could cause him pain. But it did. “How old were they when this happened?”

“I'm not sure.”

Nor did she seem moved to guess. Esther Laburnum, who at the beginning of their voyage round this house had been talkative enough to be annoying, seemed to have decided to clam up completely. Melrose sighed. That was always the way of it: people holding forth until you could have swooned in boredom and then stitching their lips shut when it came to something so fascinating it could hold a deaf man in thrall. Well, perhaps she thought the tragic accidents would jeopardize a sale. Or perhaps her silence was owing to her growing desire to leave and show others round other properties.

“Was that why the owners left?”

“It might have been.”

Blood out of a stone. Melrose wanted to shake her. “How long has the house been empty?”

“Four years, about.” She had her day-planner open, consulting something. “No, I'm wrong. There was somebody rented the place about two years ago. Decorators, they called themselves.”

Esther Laburnum sniffed and Melrose smiled and turned his attention back to the sea. Standing there, looking down, he could have slipped into a fugue state. It was too much, wasn't it? The house, the sea, the rocks, the stairs, the boy, the girl. Too much. He disliked the thought, but he couldn't help it: The place was irresistible. Had he not been set on taking it, at least renting it, the story of the family would have hooked him for certain. He looked back at the house again, gray and windswept, and thought he'd been right before: It was like a film set. The girl in the white dress could come rushing out across the grass straight to the cliff's edge. Ah, it was all too movie perfect.

They stood, staring down at the rocks. Or at least he stared; a glance in the agent's direction showed him she was looking at her watch. There was always a clock or a watch. Melrose wanted to see the inside again, the photographs, the portraits. He suggested they return to the house.

As if on cue, the sky darkened; the rain, which had stopped, now began to drizzle. Given the house, Melrose wondered if it should be seen in any weather but wind and rain.

“
Melrose!
”

If anyone could drag one from the haunts of memory and romance, it was that voice. He turned to see Agatha timorously making her way toward him. He had better get away from the cliff's edge before she got any closer. But she had stopped; he, naturally, was to breech the gap; she would walk no farther; if he wanted to speak to her,
he
must take the lead. Well, of course, he didn't want to speak to her, but he moved forward in spite of that, being a gentleman.

“Melrose!” she called again, as if they were on opposite ends of King's Cross Station.

The car she had come in was Cornwall Cabs, driven—much to his surprise—by the same lad who had served them in the tearoom. Melrose wondered how many times the boy changed hats in a day. Right now the one he wore was a cap pushed back slightly at a jaunty angle. He was leaning against the car, and when he looked at Melrose, he smiled ruefully and gave a dramatic shrug.
What could I do, mate?

Agatha demanded, “Melrose, what on earth do you think you're doing?”

He didn't bother asking how she knew he was here. All roads led to Rome except for hers, which led to Melrose. Maybe she'd planted some sort of electronic bug on him so she could track his movements. Melrose introduced Agatha to Esther Laburnum, who was put to the task of answering Agatha's questions. The agent told Melrose she had an appointment in Bletchley and had to leave. She handed over one of her cards. Then the two women, of nearly the same age, moved down the gravel, talking all the while.