The Echoing Stones (10 page)

Where
was Flora? That was the gist of it. What had
happened
? Because she, Joyce, had come back from the cinema expecting to find her father asleep in bed, where she had left him, and Flora comfortably ensconced in the living-room, watching television. Instead of which she’d found the whole place empty. Flora was gone – and, much more worrying, the old man was gone too. His bed was rumpled and empty, and his dressing-gown gone from its hook on the door.

“I
never
let him go out after dark,
never
!” Joyce was
sounding quite frantic. “He wanders, you know, Arnold, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the evening is his worst time! Oh dear, I
told
her – I
told
your daughter to watch him carefully and see he didn’t slip out of bed and start wandering. He does, you know, sometimes, even after he’s had his pills. That’s why I never go out in the evening. I was so grateful when your daughter – she
seemed
to understand, but now …! Oh dear, whatever can I do? They’re not
there
by any chance are they, Arnold? At your place? Either of them …?”

They weren’t of course. Arnold was sure of that already, but obligingly he went to look and returned to the
telephone
with his negative report.

“The police?” he suggested tentatively. “Shall I ring them for you?” He must do
something
to help, especially as it was clearly his own daughter who was to blame for it all. “I’ll ask them if they’d …”

“No! Oh no!” Joyce sounded terrified. “Not the
police
! They’ll set the social workers onto me again, you’ve no idea! Besides, they won’t know where to look for him any better than I do. In fact they’ll know less, because at least I’ve got an idea of some of the places where he
likes
to go. He was the Curator here, you know, before he … and so he has a tremendous knowledge of the place, except that the knowledge is all gone. It rattles about in his head like dried peas, he can’t get hold of it.

“Listen, Arnold, I’ve though of a possibility. The Knot Garden. That’s where he might have been making for. He loves the Knot Garden, it was he who had it restored, you know, with all the original shapes of the beds. He did all the diagrams, worked out how it must have been. Arnold, could you possibly … I mean, it’s more on your side of the grounds, isn’t it, you can almost see it from one of your windows … and I daren’t go myself, he might come wandering back any minute, I’ve got to be here …”

There was no other option, obviously. Changing out
of his slippers, and reflecting briefly that it was at least a mercy that he had fallen asleep in his chair instead of in bed, and so was fully dressed already. He donned his raincoat – not that it was raining, but he needed something against the chill of the night air – and set off.

*

The Knot Garden was easy. Indeed, just by peering through the ornate iron-work gate, ice-cold against his forehead, he could see clearly that there was no one there. The moon, a little past the half, was just setting beyond the great cedar which dominated the stretch of lawn behind him, and under its grey, uncluttered light the flowers in the Knot Garden – some of them rather common-place by day, antirhinums and pansies and the like – took on a sort of grandeur, as an old black-and-white film sometimes does in contrast to its gaudy and somehow cheapened successor. Larger than life they looked, and somehow more significant, just as if they really did possess the powers – healing or otherwise – attributed to them by the wise women of four hundred years ago. Wise or foolish, according to how you took it, for they could be burned at the stake for seeing magical properties in things, and for speaking too freely about what they had seen.

Old Sir Humphrey loved the Knot Garden, Joyce had said. This was where he might be inclined to wander, if he could still find the way. Did he seek here the long-ago magic, whose healing powers might yet cross the centuries, and bring healing to his wrecked and shrunken brain?

Well, he wasn’t here now, that was plain. Where else might the poor creature have wandered? Turning away from the garden, Arnold scanned the pale, starlit stretches of park land which ended abruptly with the black line of the woods. From somewhere in that strip of darkness came the cry of an owl. And then another. Being woken by the owls during the short summer nights had been one of Mildred’s more low-key complaints; but now she wasn’t
here to complain any more. Besides, with the onset of autumn the owls would soon be falling silent anyway.

With a small sigh, whether for the inexorable passing of things or for the failure of tonight’s errand, Arnold padded back towards the house, first across the wet, silent grass, and then, with a faint scrunching sound, along the gravel; and it was as he passed the lighted window of his own sitting-room that he heard the telephone.

*

It was
all
right
! Father was safe home again, had just walked in this very minute, and Flora with him! No, Joyce didn’t know yet what had happened, but anyway, here he was, he hadn’t come to any harm, wasn’t it wonderful? Her relief was such that she seemed not to have got around to reproaching the sitter for her flagrant neglect of duty. It was
all
right
. That was the main thing.

Gordon had been wonderful. Seeing Mildred stumbling across the car-park towards him with tear-stained cheeks and hair dishevelled, he had shown himself strong,
protective
and resourceful, the way one wants the man in one’s life to be when things go wrong. Instead of telling her what a nuisance she was being, which was obviously the case, he had taken her arm and led her briskly back along the way she had come, and had swiftly identified the skull as what it was: a sheep’s skull, a keepsake, probably from someone’s fell-walking holiday.

Arnold’s? Flora’s? Who could tell? And, if a keepsake, then why keep it in such a bizarre place? Again, who could tell?

“You’d be surprised, the things people do,” Gordon remarked, and it seemed to Mildred, in her distraught state, that this was a nugget of profoundest wisdom.

*

“You mean he didn’t
do
anything? He didn’t take it to the police? Or make any enquiries?” Val was clearly piqued by her friend’s inordinate praise of her escort in today’s adventure, and was flailing around to find something amiss in the man’s behaviour. Too gallant to be true, if one was to believe Mildred’s account; there
must
be a catch in it; and it quickly dawned on her what the catch was. He should have
done
something. What sort of a man is it who just leaves a skull staring up at him from a pillow, and does absolutely nothing?

What sort indeed. It seemed to Mildred that the
occurrence
was altogether too unusual to permit of any sort of generalisation as to the kind of man who would do this about it, as compared with the kind of man who would do that. So she reverted to Val’s first and surely unjustified criticism.

“Why the
police
?” she enquired. “It was only a sheep’s skull after all. Some sort of practical joke. I don’t know why I was so silly!”

“Oh,
Mills,
you’re doing it again! Putting yourself down! Why do you assume that if something crazy happens, it must mean that
you’ve
been silly! Perhaps someone else was silly? How about that?”

Mildred shook her head weakly, somewhat bemused by this new twist of the argument. The thing that lay behind it, though, was crystal clear. Val simply didn’t want to hear any more about how marvellous Gordon was: she’d had enough. So Mildred dropped the subject, and told Val instead about Flora and the Tea Room. Flora was a safe subject. Val always listened with real sympathy and concern to Mildred’s problems with her daughter, and often had something quite helpful to say about the matter in hand. And even when she hadn’t – when the problem seemed to be beyond human aid (well, beyond parental aid, anyway) – she still showed herself interested and concerned, never administering the sort of snubs and put-downs which tended to mar the heart-to-heart talks about such men as cropped up in any of her friends’ lives. Sure enough, on this occasion she listened attentively to Mildred’s account of the unexpected encounter with her daughter; and (apart from a brief aside to the effect that if Flora had been a boy she would never have been expected to help in the Tea Room at all) expressed eager interest and sympathy.

Mildred was grateful. After the traumas of the
afternoon
, what she needed most was a sympathetic ear.
Although Gordon had been so sensible and reassuring about the sheep skull, he hadn’t seemed to want to
discuss
it further. To burden him with her mother-daughter problems
as
well
as the skull seemed a bit much for a first outing with a new man.

Besides, there’d been plenty else to talk about during the drive home. Gordon had shown a most flattering interest in all she could tell him about the problems of working at Emmerton Hall, the daily routines to be observed – and especially with Arnold being as punctiliously conscientious as he was about every detail.

However, flattering though Gordon’s interest might be, it left her nagging anxieties about Flora unappeased; and so now, closeted with her friend in the cosy lamp-lit sitting-room, she was greatly relieved to be able to pour out her fears and worries without reserve. What was Flora
doing
at Emmerton Hall? What was she up to? And helping, too! Flora
never
helped. What could be the matter with the girl?

“Boy-friend trouble,” Val diagnosed promptly. “Some rat’s let her down, and taken the roof over her head with him. It’s always happening. I only hope she realises how lucky she is, she’s got out before he’s got his claws into her. Good for her!”

Was it good? Mildred tried to recall, albeit dimly, the features of the latest scruffy, unemployed individual who had seemed to be sharing Flora’s bed, and probably her earnings, too, such as they were. He had seemed to Mildred’s admittedly out-dated eyes feeble rather than predatory, and certainly not equipped with claws. His name – what was it? It began with a “T” – a bit of a fancy name … Trev, that was it. Trev Something. Or perhaps not, none of them seemed to have surnames these days.

“Not that her father will be any different,” Val was continuing. “He’ll push her around just as much as any other man. Well, he obviously does, doesn’t he? Using
her as a skivvy! But I wouldn’t worry too much, Mills. After all, he’s only a father, she doesn’t have to take any notice of him. She can walk out when she wants. She’ll be turning up here, I wouldn’t be surprised. Look, how about a game of Scrabble?”

Fighting down the sense of shrinking terror which always assailed her these days when she thought about her daughter, Mildred tried to concentrate on the game; but with no great success. It seemed that, while “Pot-pourri” can count (just) as an English word, “Pourri” by itself can’t; and Mildred, humbly accepting defeat at the hands of Val and the Chambers Dictionary combined, altered her offering to “pour”, which carried a minimal score, and contributed its mite to the resounding defeat for Mildred with which the game (as usual) ended.

“Never mind, Mills, it’s only a game.” But the
superficially
soothing words came unconvincingly from the lips of one to whom almost nothing was only a game; and Val clattered the little black-and white squares back into their bag with irritable haste. It wasn’t that Val didn’t like winning; she did, she loved it, but she liked to win against a worthy opponent. Mildred’s incompetence almost amounted to an insult to a player of Val’s stature.

Which was more than usually unfortunate, because Mildred had been waiting all evening for the perfect moment at which to broach with her friend a project which was not only daring, but which would inevitably demand Val’s active cooperation. The perfect moment having so far failed to materialise (as it so often does) Mildred now had to make do with the distinctly sub-perfect time which was all that was left at this fag-end of the evening. Hanging her head in a most un-assertive manner, and mumbling into the bright lid of the Scrabble set, she managed to get out the words:

“I hope you don’t mind, Val, but I … I’ve invited
Gordon to dinner next Wednesday. I thought – I mean – since it’s your Assertiveness night, you won’t be needing the kitchen, you won’t be in till late. So I thought it would be all right …”

She hadn’t, of course, thought any such thing, but it did seem the best thing to think, in the circumstances. With eyes still lowered she waited for Val’s protests: about it being
her
house, not Mildred’s: about not wanting Mildred messing about in the kitchen while she was out: about the fact that Mildred was supposed to come to the Wednesday Assertiveness Class too, since she hadn’t been assertive enough to refuse it in the first place.

All this was true; and only after the silence had lasted for several seconds did Mildred’s nerve crack, and she ventured to raise her eyes.

To her amazement, Val was smiling. “What fun!” she cried. “A super idea! I’ll be fascinated to meet this
super-duper
paragon of yours! I’ll ring up the Assertiveness people first thing tomorrow and tell them I must cancel. And I’ll take the afternoon off at the office, too, let’s do the thing properly! What do you think? – roast duck? Or poached salmon with béchamel sause? Avocado pears to start with, of course, I’ve got a marvellous recipe for the dressing …”

Her father’s reproaches on the following morning made little impact. Flora’s remorse was perfunctory, and laced with impatience.

“I took him for a little walk, that was all! It didn’t do him the slightest harm, even Joyce herself admits that it didn’t! In fact it did him good, he really enjoyed himself out there, he loved being under the sky instead of cooped up indoors. It’s awful the way Joyce keeps him, like a prisoner, under lock and key. I mean,
literally
under lock and key. Do you know she locks him in his bedroom whenever she has to go out and leave him alone? It’s awful!”

Clearly, Flora’s free-floating compassion had switched during the evening from the plight of the trapped carer to that of the trapped recipient of this caring. Trying to sound as if he hadn’t noticed this turn-around – because where would that get him? – Arnold attempted to extract from the girl a straightforward account of what had actually happened last night? With a shrug of her shoulders to indicate that the matter really didn’t merit all this attention, she complied, albeit rather sulkily.

“I still don’t see it was any big deal, I can’t understand why Joyce had to throw fits about it, ringing you up and everything. All that happened was, I was sitting there watching some grotty kind of a quiz show on the telly, when I heard a thumping and a bumping upstairs, and I knew he’d got out of bed. Well, why not? He has to go to
the loo, doesn’t he, even if he
is
dotty. But then I heard the thumping and the bumping on the stairs, and there he was, his pyjamas all anyhow and his hair on end, and looking a lot taller than I’d remembered. Where was his breakfast, he asked me? He’d got to be at the office by nine, he said, so could I hurry it up. Just coffee would do, he said, coffee and a piece of toast. Well, why not? It was no skin off
my
nose. So I went out into the kitchen – Joyce had shown me where everything was, even the egg-whisk, for God’s sake – what was I going to need an egg-whisk for? Well, by the time I’d got it all ready, the smell of the coffee and everything, I quite fancied it myself, and so we had it together. At least, I did, he didn’t really have anything. He didn’t seem interested any more once he had it in front of him; and soon he was on again about this nine o’clock office thing. So I thought, well, let’s go along with it, see what happens.

“‘Oughtn’t you to get dressed?’ I asked him, ‘if you’re going to the office; but he didn’t seem to understand, so in the end I just helped him on with his dressing-gown, and made him put on his slippers, and off we went.

“Oh, Arnold, you should have seen him! Out there under the stars, with the air and the darkness all around, he went quite mad! And I don’t mean what you mean by mad, I mean mad with joy, like a child, laughing and waving his arms about and kind of skipping and scuffling along the gravel in his slippers. I asked him which way he wanted to go – well,
I
didn’t mind, did I? – and he seemed surprised I should ask. ‘To the office, of course,’ he said, and kind of sobered up, walking along quite briskly, and saying he was afraid we were going to be late. After a bit we came to a door – no, I’ve no idea
what
door it was, it may have
been
the office for all I know – but anyway, he was terribly upset because it was locked and he hadn’t got the keys. He felt about in all his pockets – his pyjamas and dressing-gown – but of course there was nothing there.
‘We must go back for them,’ he said, and we turned around, but somehow we didn’t go back to Joyce’s, we set off down towards the lake. By now he seemed quite happy again, he’d forgotten all about the keys, and he was telling me all sorts of things about history as we walked along. Honestly, Arnold, he’s not mad at all, it’s all nonsense about him being senile. He’s got a wonderful mind, quite crammed with knowledge. You know Bloody Mary, who’s supposed to have been so wicked, burning Protestants at the stake and everything? Well, apparently she wasn’t like that at all, she hated them being burnt. At heart she was a very kind lady, and what’s more he’s descended from her, Sir Humphrey is! Isn’t that exciting? He’s got all sorts of ancient documents proving it, he’s been researching it for for years, and now he knows for certain …”

“But Mary Tudor didn’t have any children,” Arnold couldn’t help interrupting. “No one can be descended from her –” but even while he was still speaking, he could have kicked himself. He’d done it again! Just as his daughter was, for once, talking to him in a friendly, natural way about something that really interested her, he had to spoil it all by interrupting, putting her right! Already he could see the closed, hostile look spreading across her face; the familiar, sarcastic tone was back in her voice.

“Oh, well, naturally an expert like
you
must know better!” she sneered. “After all, Sir Humphrey is only a famous historian who has written no end of books about the Tudor period and has umpteen letters after his name! Nothing, of course, compared with
your
qualifications!”

For a moment, truth hung in the balance, as Arnold weighed it against his relationship with his daughter. Was
any
relationship worth the sacrifice of truth? The denial of a known fact for the sake of peace?

“Queen Mary
thought
she was having a baby at one time,” he explained. “She wished very much to have one,
as an heir to the English throne; but it turned out to be all a mistake – pseudo-pregnancy, it’s called. And that’s a fact. You can read about it anywhere – in all the books …”

“Read about it! That’s all
you’ve
done, isn’t it – you’ve read a few books! Sir Humphrey has researched it properly, from the original sources. When did
you
ever look at an original source? Oh, Arnold, if you’d heard him …! We were down in the wood by that time – he just loves the wood. You’ve no idea how huge the trees look at night, we were right underneath them, and he was so thrilled to find someone who listened to what he was saying. He stood there, under this great oak, explaining it all, and even in the dark his eyes were shining. This pseudo-pregnancy business, it was all a lie made up by the Protestants who wanted to put Elizabeth on the throne. The last thing they wanted was for Mary to have a baby, and a boy too, who would be brought up as a Catholic. They
hated
the Catholics. So they had it snatched away from her the moment it was born. They bribed the midwife to pretend that none of it had happened, and that Mary had never been pregnant at all …”

She rattled on, and this time Arnold didn’t interrupt. The old man’s delusion was surely a harmless one, and if it made him happy in his old age …

“By the time we got back,” she was continuing, “he seemed twenty years younger, really he did. You should have seen him – so full of life, and talking away! It had done him so much good, honestly it had, Arnold. Getting out of the house … having someone really
listen
to him – take him seriously …”

This indeed sounded entirely plausible, Arnold only hoped that Joyce would see it that way, too.

Mercifully, she did. When, later in the morning, he dropped in at Joyce’s kiosk to apologise for his daughter’s share in last night’s alarms, Joyce seemed as friendly as ever, and wholly forgiving.

“Of course, she should have left me a note before going off like that; but there, she’s only young. She didn’t think. Besides, she hadn’t thought they’d be out that long, she reckoned they’d be back before I was. And I daresay they would have been, too, if I hadn’t managed to catch the bus straight away. My goodness, that
was
a piece of luck! You can wait the best part of forty minutes for that bus, especially at night. I was specially thankful because I’d been a bit on edge all evening, wondering how Father was getting on. He can be very funny, you know, with anyone new, that’s why I hardly ever leave him in the evenings. But your Flora – she’s wonderful. She seems to have perked him up no end, given him a new lease of life, you might say. This morning he’s been at his papers again for the first time in I don’t know how long. I quite thought he was past all that, but when I left after breakfast, there he was at his desk, just like the old days, sorting through the notes for the book he was working on before he – before he got – well, you know. There he was, mulling them over, arranging them in piles, as if he really knew what he was doing. I was so glad. Often when I leave he’s just sitting in his chair, staring at nothing, and doesn’t even notice that I’m going. Ida tells me she often can’t rouse him even for his lunch. I’m really grateful to your daughter, Arnold, and I’m sure she’s right. He
does
need to get out more, and to meet other people besides me and Ida. But it’s difficult, you see. He can be – well – funny, sometimes …

Arnold felt mightily relieved. His trouble-making
daughter
hadn’t, after all, caused trouble in this quarter; quite the reverse. Apparently Flora had now volunteered to drop in whenever she had time and to take the old man for a little walk, giving Joyce a chance to “get on with things”. Like washing the kitchen floor, for instance, without Father padding in and out, carrying wet footsteps all over the house. Like reading the whole of the Letter
Page in the
Daily
Mail
without being interrupted. These are the sort of delights that can become the height of ambition for anyone in Joyce’s position, rivalling even a trip to the cinema as liberators of the soul.