Touch Not The Cat (12 page)

She sounded as if she meant it. Some tension that I hardly knew I had been feeling slackened in me.

"I doubt it. Certainly there's nothing to be done about the 'heirs male' inheritance; that's been built in ever since the place started. The really awkward 'tying up' that the old man did was the trust that stops even the heir from selling any of the unentailed property without the consent of the whole family.

Luckily, so far, we haven't fought much over it." I smiled. "And I don't see why we should start now. I expect Emory will do all right; he usually does."

"You don't sound as if you minded one bit."

"I don't believe I do. People like the Ashleys had a very good run for their money, after all."

She got up then to shift one of the logs in the fireplace, and I turned the subject with some compliment about the flowers, and the talk went off at a comfortable tangent to the garden, and the contrast between California and the cool temperate climate that we in Britain use as a daily basis for grumbling, but that produces the loveliest gardens in the world. . . . I listened with only half an ear; I was looking round the room, trying not to do it too obviously, to see if the T'ang horse was there, or the seal, or anything else which should have been in the locked part of the house. I saw none of them, but I knew that soon, and the sooner the better for her own sake as well as mine, I would have to tell her about the missing objects. I wondered a little desperately how in the world one broached such a subject. For a lunch guest, however much a part of the furnishings, to ask her hostess suddenly where the valuables were and who kept the keys to the rooms they had been removed from was one of those things that even Aunt Edna of the Problem Page would have found tricky. Well, I thought, it wasn't something that would improve with keeping. If you have to ask something, then ask.

"Mrs. Underhill, there's something I've been wondering about. Perhaps you can help me. The guide who took the party round told me that the rooms on the public side of the house— the ones you don't use—are always locked, and that she gives the keys back to you and your husband for safekeeping.

What happens if you're out, or away from home?"

"They're left with that nice Rob Granger. He has the other set, and he always keeps an eye on things if we're not here. He's hardly ever away, but if he is, he leaves keys at the Vicarage. Why do you ask? Don't you have keys yourself?"

"It's not that; I can get Rob's if I need them. It's just . . . Mrs. Underhill, I noticed something this morning that worried me—maybe I should say puzzled me, because I'm quite sure there'll be a simple reason for it." I hesitated, then plunged. "One or two small things that used to be in the li brary aren't there any more. I wondered if you knew where they'd been moved to."

She looked startled, and her cigarette froze still, halfway up to her mouth. "Miss Ashley, there's nothing been moved that I know of. What sort of things?"

"Small things, ornaments. I wondered if perhaps they'd been put in the strong-room for safekeeping."

She shook her head. I noticed how sharply the lipstick outlined her mouth, standing out blue-red against the creamy colourless skin. "Do you mean really valuable things?"

"Well, there's a little Chinese horse, in unglazed earthenware, a sort of biscuit colour, with a mended leg. It doesn't look much, but—"

"A Chinese horse? Unglazed biscuit? For heaven's sake, not a Tang horse?" She looked so horrified that I realized that, coming from America's West Coast, she probably knew far more about the value of Oriental ceramics than I did.

I said hastily: "Yes, but not a very good one; it was small, and it was damaged. Please don't look so worried! I just noticed that it had gone from the mantelpiece in the library, and there was a miniature gone from one of the showcases, just a little Victorian thing, and a piece of jade, a seal with a lion dog on it. You haven't seen them anywhere else, have you?"

"No, I have not. They're not in this part of the house, that's for sure. Miss Ashley, this is just awful!"

I saw with remorse that she had lost the remains of what colour she had. Her lips, under the paint, had puckered into fine, dry lines. I began to feel a bit like an executioner. "Look, please don't worry so, I only asked. The odds are that Mr. Emerson's put them away in the strong-room.

He may have decided they were too easily portable, with loads of people going through the rooms every day. I can ring him up and ask him. I should have done that before I bothered you.

Please forgive me."

"Well, of course, but—oh, here's Jeff. He might know something about it . . . Jeff, this is Miss Ashley. She's coming back to stay for a piece, and she'll be living in the cottage by the lake. Isn't that wonderful? But right now she's staying to lunch with us. Miss Ashley, this is Jeff, my husband."

We said how do you do and shook hands, and, like her, he said the right things about my father with that enviable American warmth and ease of manner. He was a big man, broad in body, and of heavy build, with the same look as his wife of physical health worked for and maintained at concert pitch. He had dark hair greying, and a broad face with slightly flattened features, oddly familiar, though for the moment I could not place them. The cheekbones were wide, with a slightly Slavic look, and the eyes were dark and very shrewd. The long mouth gave nothing away. He looked just what he was: a rich, clever man, a killer in business hours, and kindness itself in his time off.

Before I could stop her his wife had told him about the missing objects, and I was able to witness the Jekyll-into-Hyde transformation I had just guessed at. The pleasant smile vanished, the black brows snapped together, and hard dark eyes looked straight through my brain to scrape the back of my skull. Or that was what it felt like. "Tycoon" had not just been a joke word. In the business jungle of America, Jeffrey Underhill was one of the larger carnivores.

He didn't waste time on apologies or worry; he asked two or three questions, so smoothly that you hardly noticed they came barbed, and then said: "The first thing is to call the lawyer. I'll do that now. It seems to me very likely that he's taken some of the small things into safekeeping." He glanced at the clock on the mantel. "Cathy went to pick Emory up, didn't she? They're not back yet?"

"No," said his wife. "He called up to say he had to get the later train."

He nodded, and made for the door, but paused there with his back to the room, his head bent, as if thinking. Then he turned back to me. He still had that gloss of calm which politicians and high-ranking businessmen affect, but the next question came out that little bit too abruptly. "You only no ticed things missing from the library, that's right?"

"That's right. Though until I'd seen the T'ang horse was gone, I didn't really look. But, Mr.

Underhill, please—I didn't mean to start a thing like this. This is making me feel terrible. There's probably a perfectly simple explanation, and—"

"Sure there is. But the sooner we have it the better. I'll call this lawyer right away, even if it does spoil his lunch hour for him. But the point I was going to make was, would you like to go look around again on your own, and make a check? You might find the things somewhere else, or you might find more things missing. Either way, the sooner we get them tagged the better. It's barely a quarter of twelve. I doubt if my daughter and your cousin will be here much before one o'clock. What do you say?"

"Yes, I'd like to. Thank you."

"Fine. Now, Stephanie says you went around with the guided tour; that means you've no keys of your own. Right?" He crossed to a bureau which stood between two of the windows, took a small key from his vest pocket and unlocked it, pulled open a drawer and took out the big bunch of house keys. No, I could acquit Mr. Underhill of carelessness. He handed me the keys, said, "Fix me a martini, for God's sake," to his wife, and went out. One got the impression that the dust began to settle as soon as the door shut behind him.

My search, which was fruitless, finished at length in the big schoolroom of the nursery wing.

I don't quite know why I went there; I certainly never expected to find any clue to the missing objects, and I have no recollection of climbing the noisy lino-covered stairs to the third floor. It may be that I was still a little breathless at the Underhills' swift reaction to my inquiries; possibly it was just Jeffrey Underhill’s normal way, but I felt as if I had started a full-scale criminal investigation almost before I was sure that anything was really missing. Before I faced them again, I wanted time to think. I glanced at my watch. Still something short of twelve-thirty. I shut the schoolroom door behind me, crossed to the wide window seat, and sat down, looking down at the tops of the big beeches that edged the Pool.

The sun poured into the shabby room. Dust motes swarmed like a gauze filter, making a soft-focus dreamworld out of reality. The sun was bright as the suns one always remembers from childhood. The dusty, slightly stuffy smell of the unused schoolroom was the same as it had been ten, twelve, fourteen years ago. Beside me on the faded cushions of the window seat sat three old friends, grubby and grey with much loving: the Hippo family, Hippo, Pot, and Amos, whose names Francis had chosen, and which, as children, we had found excruciatingly funny. The old dappled rocking horse stood gathering dust; I had christened it Dawn, which my cousins thought sickeningly girlish, refusing to call it anything but Rocky. There were the desks, with their dried and crusted inkwells, where James and Emory, and later Francis and I, had sat learning to read and write and cipher before we went to school. A white-painted shelf still held the beloved storybooks, the Andrew Langs and the Arthur Ransomes and the C. S. Lewises, their battered covers containing each its bright autonomous world, those magical kingdoms one is made free of as a child, and thereafter owns all one's life.

Below the shelves was the cupboard to which, prompted by Leslie Oker, my bookseller friend from Ashbury, I had, before going abroad, transferred some of our nursery treasures from the open shelves. There was a steadily growing interest, he had told me, in the work of illustrators like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac and Kay Neilson; and I myself, looking through Christie's catalogues, had seen prices ranging into the hundreds for the scarcer volumes. So I had locked the books out of sight, and hidden the key. Small beer, perhaps, compared with T'ang horses and jade, but there was love to be reckoned with as well.

T'ang horses and jade. Valuable books? Not dreaming at all now, but right back on the spot with my problem, I crossed to the cupboard and tried the door. It was not locked. With a jerk of sudden apprehension, I pulled the door open.

The books were all there, just as I had left them.

As I relaxed, I realized how falsely keyed up I had been: to be as valuable as the ones I had seen in Christie's catalogue, they would have had to be the "deluxe" editions, signed by the artist and limited to a few hundred copies; not the nursery editions we had had, read and re-read until the pages showed the handling, and the covers were dented and soiled. These were not objects of value, but only of love.

I pulled out the nearest. It was
Grimm's Fairy Tales,
and the drawings were so familiar that my own imaginary concept of the stories was little more than an extension of these pictures. There was the Goosegirl with poor Falada, over whom I had wept as a child; Hansel and Grethel with the dreadful old witch; the Princess dreaming on the rock among the yesty waves, with the Dragon's long head on her lap . . .

"The Princess and the Dragon." I swung round as if that underhung jaw had bitten me, and stared up at the schoolroom wall, where, dark on the faded wallpaper, two empty oblongs showed. Two pictures had once hung there, original illustrations by Rackham, one from Lamb's
Tales,
and the other this very drawing from Grimm, "The Princess and the Dragon." A great-aunt of mine had bought them for a few pounds when they were first exhibited, and given them to me when I was a child. I had taken them down from the walls and locked them with the books, away from dust and damage. Now, both cupboard and wall were bare of them. And this time I had not miscalculated. They were the real thing, irreplaceable, and worth the kind of money that few people could afford to lose. Certainly not me.

I still remember the rush of anger I felt. I slammed the cupboard door shut, got to my feet, and went back to the window. I pushed it open and leaned out. As I did so I thought I heard a car turn into the driveway. That would be Emory and Cathy, I supposed, but I made no move to go downstairs. I needed a little longer to myself before I faced the company and heard what Mr. Underhill had to tell me.

I knew as well as if he had already said it, that Mr. Emerson would know nothing about the missing treasures.

The sun was blazing full from the south. I shut my eyes. The scent of the garden came floating, sweet and calming as sunlight on water. I opened them again, and watched the water itself below me.

The bullrushes were still, inseparable from their reflections; the willows trailed their hair in the water; the irises were budding. The pen swan slept on her nest, head under wing, the cygnets beside her. The cob floated near with all wing set, in full beauty.

Lover?

I'm here. What is it?

I hardly knew that I had called to him, until the response came, quickly and warmly, like a hand clasping another that reaches out blindly for comfort. Call and reply, as clear and easy as if they had been formulated in words—clearer, for words confuse as often as they explain. Between long-familiar lovers the language of the body needs no speech; with us, our minds had for so long dwelt familiarly the one with the other that the exchange of thought was as telling and as swift as a glance between intimates across a crowded room.

But to describe it, words must serve.

What is it?

Things have disappeared. The horse has gone from the library.

The what?
For once it came with a catch of puzzlement.
I thought you said the horse had
gone from the library.