Frannie had two Sambucas with her coffee, and was pleasantly drunk as they left the restaurant shortly after one; she felt on safer ground with him now. As she fumbled with the seat-belt she was vaguely aware that it was she who had done most of the drinking tonight. She had not even noticed whether Seb Holland was still there or had left.
Oliver dropped her home and escorted her down the steps to her front door. She hoped he would not make an advance because she would find it hard to resist him if he did, and she wanted it to be special when they made love, and she was too drunk for it to be like that now. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ she said.
‘I – ought to get back – it’s pretty late.’ He looked awkward suddenly. ‘I was wondering – Edward’s coming back tomorrow – this is his last weekend at home before he goes back to school.’ In the haze of the street-lighting Frannie could see that he was blushing, and wasn’t sure what was coming next. ‘If – if you’re
not doing anything, would you – like to come down to the country for the weekend? He took a bit of a shine to you at King’s Cross.’
She tried to think of the implications, but her heart overruled everything. There was a party tomorrow that she was not particularly looking forward to, and she was meant to be going to her parents for Sunday lunch, but had already been thinking of ducking out of that. After the fracas of last Sunday, she could do without seeing her parents for a few weeks. ‘I’d love to,’ she said.
He looked really pleased. ‘How about if I pick you up at about ten?’
‘Do I need to bring anything?’
‘Some wellies. I don’t know what the forecast is. We’re very informal. And swimming gear.’
‘I’ll be ready at ten.’
He held her gaze for a moment, gave her a light peck on the cheek, walked back up the steps, and stood waiting until she was safely inside.
As she closed the front door and pressed the latch, she felt as if she had been scooped up and put on a pedestal. Her emotions came to the surface so that her earlier fears were buried by a glow of pleasure and a sense of anticipation. The very word
country
conjured an image in her mind of a ramshackle farmhouse, with a flagstone floor and log fire, acres of fields and woods. She could see them taking long walks, maybe having lunch in a pub garden. Lazing around a swimming-pool, with sheep on the far side of the fence. The boy had taken ‘a shine’ to her. Edward. She was pleased about that, rather flattered.
She went through into the kitchen, switched on the light and stared at Oliver’s flowers in the sink, then hunted for something suitable to put them in. She
remembered a plain white vase with a green ceramic bow which she had been given a couple of birthdays ago by Meredith Minns, and retrieved it from behind a stack of bowls.
She carefully arranged the flowers in the vase, feeling wide awake and almost deliriously happy, then carried it through into her bedroom and placed it in the centre of the mantelpiece, spreading out the white and peach carnations, the yellow and orange lilies, smelling their scents in turn, then standing back to admire them.
It was after two when Frannie went to bed, and she set her alarm for eight. After she switched the light out she lay awake for a long time, her brain buzzing.
When she eventually slept, she sank into a sinister dream in which she was running through dark empty streets in a city. Ahead of her she could see Jonathan Mountjoy, silhouetted against a high-rise building. But although he was not moving and she was sprinting, she was not getting any nearer. Footsteps were clacking down an alley. Someone was running towards him holding a gun. She tried to scream at him, to warn him, but her voice would not work. She could see the gun pointing at him, the wild, shaky hand holding it. ‘Jonathannnnnnnnn!’
The shot woke her with a start.
People were screaming. The sirens of the police and the ambulance were wailing. Then she realized it was a real siren, somewhere in the distance. But the shot had been here, in this room. A bang, or a slap.
Someone in here.
A deep chill of fear spread through her. For a moment she was too scared to move. Then slowly she put out her hand, groping for the light switch. Snapped it on.
The darkness leapt back into the walls. She stared around with frightened eyes. Only an eerie silence filled the room. Nothing moved, nothing breathed, but something was wrong. Shadows from the lamp lay across the ceiling; a fly sat directly above her. She stared at her prints on the walls; at the wardrobe. Her throat was parched, her mouth dry. She stared at the mantelpiece. The mantelpiece where she had carefully put the vase with the flowers.
The vase was still there but there were no flowers in it.
She sat bolt upright. The flowers lay strewn across the floor, as if they had been hurled there by someone or something in a rage.
Oliver turned up shortly after ten, wearing a rugger shirt, baggy red trousers and ancient laced yachting shoes; he carried Frannie’s bag to an elderly mud-caked Range Rover.
‘What happened? Did you put the Renault in a grow-bag?’ she asked.
He laughed. ‘I just use the Renault for hacking around London; it’s so clapped out I don’t think it would survive a long journey.’
The interior of the Range Rover was as cluttered and untidy as his Renault, with the addition of crumpled rugs and an assortment of chewed rings and rubber bones on the rear seat. ‘Captain Kirk’s,’ he said by the way of explanation.
‘Captain Kirk?’
‘Edward’s dog; he treats this bus as his kennel.’
They drove south out of London, through traffic that was heavy and slow at first, but which thinned out on the motorway. The sun beat down ahead of them out of a cloudless sky. Frannie had on a checked shirt, with a thin jumper slung around her shoulders, white cotton trousers and trainers, and she felt cool and comfortable in her clothes. Her thoughts were less comfortable and she felt tired, her eyes sandpapery from the fitful sleep she had had.
The flowers churned in her mind. She had checked the flat, but the windows were shut, the front door was locked and no one could have been in. She had put them back in the vase and in the morning they were still there, and she had begun to wonder seriously
whether it had simply been a dream. Or just a household accident to which she’d overreacted.
She asked Oliver more about his farm, trying to build up a picture of it. He told her his manager and younger brother, Charles, was a very committed Green, and the farm was now almost completely organic. They were building up large herds of organically reared cattle and sheep, although both were fraught with problems, and he explained some of them. She learned also that Charles was divorced and had custody at the weekends of his son, Tristram, who was the same age as Edward.
Oliver was not a driver she would have liked to have been following, she thought. He drove well if a bit fast most of the time, but occasionally, when he talked about something that particularly excited him, he would go for several miles oblivious of an indicator he’d left flashing, or forgetting to change up into top gear so that the engine raced, maddeningly. Several times she had been quite convinced he was not going to stop for a red light, and had found herself jabbing her foot down.
Now, cruising on the motorway, everything had settled down. The windows were open and air billowed through the car, batting strands of Frannie’s hair across her face, and she lounged back in her seat, beginning to relax, surveying the scenery through her sunglasses.
As London receded, the disconcerting memory of her sleepless night receded with it. The weekend ahead was full of promise and she was determined to enjoy herself. Her return journey seemed a hundred years away, and she wondered whether she and Oliver would have become lovers by then.
The friends with whom Edward had been staying in France were catching a ferry to Dover this morning
and would be dropping him home around midday. The accident on the powerboat had clearly distressed Oliver; he had not talked about the boy very much, yet she had the feeling that Edward had a strong influence on him. She realized how very little she really knew about Oliver. Their conversations had all been about their subjects, their views on life, and they had talked only very sketchily about their families. She had not been able to draw him back on to the topic of his wife’s death and she was curious to know both how she had died, and what the coincidences were that had distressed him so much. But she did not want to be morbid.
The silhouette of the South Downs, like a huge barrier wedged across the horizon, drew closer, and a few miles on they turned eastwards off the motorway, on to a busy country road. They drove into a heavy stench of manure, but even that she found refreshing after the cloying, greasy air of London.
‘Where does Edward go to school?’ she asked.
‘A place called Stowell Park. A prep school about ten miles away. It’s easy for picking him up at weekends.’
‘Does he board?’
‘Yes.’
‘He doesn’t mind?’
‘No. That’s what he wants to do.’
Through an opening in a hedgerow she glimpsed a flurry of activity at a car-boot sale. ‘Did you board?’ she asked.
‘Yes, from the time I was seven.’
‘How did you find it?’
‘I hated it. I loathed school altogether.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t do what I wanted, I
suppose. And I didn’t care about team games.’ He smiled and scratched his ear. ‘I was only interested in mathematics and aeroplanes as a child. We could only do one afternoon a week of gliding, and that was in summer, and I used to think the maths teachers were a load of bozos.’ He smiled again. ‘I don’t think I was very well adjusted to school. Did you like it?’
‘Yes, most of the time, I loved it. Particularly history, and the classics. I used to long in the holidays for term to start. People probably thought I was an awful swot.’
‘And they all thought I was a lazy bugger who didn’t like being prodded. They were probably right.’
‘And Edward really enjoys it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, then he went silent for a while.
They drove along a bypass, past an old town built over a hill; at the top she could see the ramparts of a castle.
‘Lewes,’ he said. ‘County town of Sussex.’
‘Where Simon de Montfort defeated and captured Henry the Third in 1264.’
He glanced at her quizzically.
‘Once the home town of Gideon Mantèll, who discovered the dinosaur,’ she added. ‘Originally a Saxon stronghold then a Cluniac priory.’
‘Smart alec!’
She grinned.
They drove through a deep cut in the Downs and along a wide, flat valley for a couple of miles, then slowed and turned into a lane that wound up a steady gradient, bounded on both sides by overgrown verges. As they drove down a dip, she saw a tarpaulin of mist suspended over a boggy field. They passed a 30mph speed-limit sign, then another sign that was partly obscured by a cluster of tall nettles:
MESTON. PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY.
The lane levelled out. There was an elegant Sussex flint farmhouse ahead on the left, and she wondered if he was going to turn in there, but he drove on, without glancing at it, into a small, unspoilt-looking village of flint houses. They passed an old-fashioned village store, a pub called the Sherfield Arms and a Norman church that Frannie thought looked interesting.
The lane climbed steeply out of the village, bounded on the right by a continuous brick wall, beyond which she could see thick, mature trees in a rather grand, sweeping park, and on the left by a railed field. Oliver changed down a gear, and as they rounded a bend, Frannie noticed something odd rising above the brow of the hill ahead. It looked like a giant bird suspended in mid flight. As they got closer she could see that it was one of a pair of massive carved stone wyverns on top of brick gate pillars.
Oliver slowed and indicated. A white sign with black lettering, on a weighted pedestal, said:
MESTON HALL. OPEN TODAY
. 10a.m. – 5p.m.
Frannie looked at Oliver but his expression told her nothing. The wyverns towered above them, menacing creatures with snarling faces and scaly tails. He turned in through the gates and drove down a formal drive, walled on either side by tall yew hedges, towards a handsome flint stable-block. There was an archway through the centre of it, above which a gold clock face was housed in a domed Venetian cupola. The hands said 11.40.
They drove through the arch, and came out into a junction flanked by more yew hedges and with signs pointing in various directions:
CHAPEL. TEA ROOM. CAR PARK. HOUSE. GARDENS. FARM
. Another, on a freestanding plinth, said:
THE MARQUESS OF SHERFIELD REGRETS ANY INCONVENIENCE TO VISITORS DURING NECESSARY BUILDING REPAIRS.
Uncertainty welled inside her; she wondered if Oliver was playing a game on her. He followed the drive in the direction labelled
HOUSE
and
CAR PARK,
and as they rounded the end of a hedge, the house suddenly appeared in front of them.
It was a red brick Elizabethan stately home, as large as many of the great houses she had visited with her parents when she was a child, built in a fold on the hilltop and dominating the entire valley.
The architecture was romantic and imperious: brick chimneys that rose majestically into the sky, banks of tall, mullioned windows with Gothic dripstones, the baronial front door in its own crenellated tower. A gravel drive ran in front of the façade, separating it from a formal, stone-balustraded lawn below which the park swept away down into the valley.
‘Is that it?’
He nodded with a guilty schoolboy smile.
The road ahead was marked
NO VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT
. To the right was a ticket hut, with a wooden bridge beyond that spanned a ditch into a sloping field containing a massive gnarled oak and half a dozen cars parked haphazardly. In spite of its grandeur, the house had a forlorn air of neglect about it. The grounds also, as if it was a struggle to keep them up, and probably a losing battle.