The Echoing Stones (16 page)

All this was particularly unfortunate, because laid out on the flat surface of one of the old torture instruments (the rack, it must have been) – were the October accounts of his Department: the Accounts Department of the
Town Hall, that is, where he’d worked for most of his adult life. In his dream, he knew that his job was to check them and to get a report off to Head Office this very day. It was urgent, a top-priority job. Filled with the kind of anxiety that had intermittently dogged his accountancy days, Arnold abandoned the fruitless search for the light switches, pulled up his office chair (yes, somehow it was here in the dungeon) alongside the rack which seemed to be serving as a desk, and peered as best he could at the piles of close-typed papers. There was a dim grey light from somewhere; it was just enough for him to make out the headings, but the columns of figures, insofar as he could distinguish them, made no sense at all. His anxiety mounted; and now, between one moment and the next, it crossed some dark threshold in his brain, ceased to be mere anxiety, and became fear.

He could hear breathing. Very faint, but coming nearer. Someone was behind him. He could feel a light touch on the side of his neck, and then another. He was aware of a probing by long white fingers, though how he could know they were white just by the sense of touch he did not know: did not even wonder, as is the way of dreams. He knew now that he was to be strangled. The fingers that fluttered so lightly round his ears had in them a terrible secret strength as they prepared to home in on his windpipe.

And still he could not move. The paralysis of nightmare had invaded every limb, all his muscles were useless, still trapped in sleep. He was like a corpse being handled by a mortuary attendant: like a murder-victim whose assailant is making sure that he is really dead, that his breathing has quite stopped.

And then, at last, he was able to scream. In reality, of course, it was only a tiny whistle of a sound; but in that same moment the fingers ceased their probing, and he was awake, safe in bed.

He lay for a moment, sweating with relief, and waiting confidently for the fading of those last shreds of terror which a bad nightmare always leaves in its wake.

But the relief was short-lived. As he struggled into full wakefulness he became aware of a disturbance in the air, a rushing as of a small wind through the room. He struggled into a sitting position, switched on his bedside light, and looked round.

Everything seemed to be in order. All the same, the sense that something was amiss was heavy upon him, even now he was properly awake, and the first thing he checked on – for it was always on the edge of his awareness – was the bunch of Estate keys.

Yes, it was there all right: not merely under his pillow, but tucked well inside the pillow-case where no one could possibly get at it without waking him.

Without waking him? But he
had
woken, hadn’t he? Those dream-fingers – had they been wholly a dream? Or had someone, who knew where he kept the keys, been feeling for them?

Flora, of course! That tiresome, mischievous
unprincipled
daughter of his! Had
she
been attempting to purloin the keys in pursuance of some allegedly beneficent scheme which involved opening up some bit of the building at dead of night? She’d done this sort of thing before. He wouldn’t put it past her. He wouldn’t put
anything
past her. And she, undoubtedly, was the person most likely to know where he habitually hid the keys.

It was an outrage! Pulling on his dressing-gown he hurried across the passage and burst none too quietly into his daughter’s room: only to find that she wasn’t there. Well, she wouldn’t be, would she? And at this very moment, as he stood in the doorway hesitating, the telephone rang.

“Hullo, Dad?” As if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And calling him “Dad”, too. What could be the cause of
this unwontedly friendly and non-contentious tone? He longed to take it at face value, but how could you tell?

“Look, Dad, I hope I didn’t wake you (a somewhat vain hope, one would imagine, at 2.30 in the morning, but it’s the thought that counts). “The thing is, I thought I’d better just let you know that I won’t be back tonight. In case you’re worrying, I mean …”

What was at the back of this incomprehensibly
considerate
behaviour. He hated to find himself thinking on these lines, but how could he help it after all that had happened between them? He braced himself to listen with an open mind to the explanation that was about to follow; and indeed it turned out to be plausible enough. Joyce, apparently, had only just arrived home after her party – good for her! Living it up at last! – and had suggested that Flora should stay for the rest of the night on the settee in the living-room, it being already so late.

All very sensible, very rational. Arnold rang off, greatly relieved that his unhappy suspicions had been proved quite unfounded. Joyce’s cottage was a good ten minutes’ walk away from here across the dark grounds, and so Flora’s telephone call proved conclusively that she couldn’t have triggered-off the nightmare from which he had woken barely five minutes ago. Those searching fingers must have been just part of the dream, as unreal as all the rest of it.

He turned away from the telephone, weak with relief: and found himself face-to-face with a tall, gaunt figure standing silently in the doorway.

That Sir Humphrey Penrose was mad Arnold had never doubted; but he would never have guessed it now from the sight of the upright, commanding figure that stood before him. Dressed in a robe of dark velvet edged with ermine, as became a high-ranking Tudor nobleman on ceremonial occasions, he appeared not only sane, but calm, authoritative and full of purpose. Beneath his jewelled cap his silvery eyes flashed and sparkled in the lamplight as he began to move, slowly and with immense dignity, in Arnold’s direction. Strangely, Arnold did not feel fear exactly; more a sort of incredulous awe. He felt, for that moment, in the presence of greatness.

But only for that moment. As the old man moved nearer, his robe swinging as he walked, the flapping legs of a pair of pyjamas were revealed, and a pair of down-at-heel bedroom slippers.

At the sight of these, fear returned to Arnold with a rush. The grandeur was gone: the calm, authoritative confidence was cancelled out. This was indeed a madman, a senile old fool who had been childishly dressing-up as a sixteenth-century nobleman, and – yes – with a sword at his side. A real sword. The light glinted from the razor-sharp blade as the trembling old hand rested upon the jewelled handle. Extracted from the Armoury? From some long-hoarded collection of his own up at the cottage? At that moment, this seemed to matter little. What mattered at the moment was that this dangerous
and serviceable weapon was in the hands of a madman, suffering from who knew what delusions and fantasies?

“For Flora, it may be just a game of play-acting,” Joyce had anxiously observed on one occasion, “but for
him
it’s a deadly reality”; and Arnold had little doubt that she was right. Was the old man even now taking his imaginary part in some desperate enterprise belonging to that
blood-stained
epoch of plots and counter-plots, of conspiracies, persecutions and murders which lay between the death of the boy King Edward VI, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth? Was he even now surrounded by enemies, by informers, by treacherous, turn-coat conspirators? And if so, was Arnold one of them?

You have to humour madmen, so the received wisdom goes. You have to placate them by going along with their fantasies; but how do you do this when you don’t know what the fantasy is about? Or what rôle in it has been allotted to you? Briefly, and with unprecedented fervour, Arnold wished that Flora was here, with her alleged empathy with the old man, her familiarity with his twisted thought processes. She might be able to talk him down, get him to lay that dangerous weapon aside; persuade him that her father
wasn’t
a heretic, or a lackey of the Council, or whatever it was that Sir Humphrey was imagining him to be.

The sword flashed, slicing the air, and Arnold sprang away involuntarily. It was bad policy, he knew, to show fear, but there had been no time to think. How strong the old man was! As if demonstrating his power, his superior swordmanship, he flourished the weapon a few times in front of him, and then laid it down carefully, lovingly, on the small rosewood table, and for several moments stood contemplating its shining length.

Then he looked up, a bemused look coming into his eyes.

“My glasses!” he complained. “They’re always taking
my glasses. Why can’t they leave my things alone?” and he pushed impatiently at the sword as if it was impeding his search: “My glasses … My reading glasses? Why can’t they leave my things alone?”

Was this the moment to intervene? Warily, Arnold ventured to step forward and take Sir Humphrey’s arm. “Come along,” he said. “You must go home now. That’s where your glasses will be. I’ll help you.”

But after a few steps, the old man jerked his arm away.

“What’s this place? Where are you taking me?” he demanded, his voice suddenly clear and authoritative: and then: “You’ve hidden them! I know it. The Lady of the Bedchamber warned me of this trickery. You have hidden them under the pillow!”

Not the reading glasses, surely. He must be talking now about the keys. The bemused old brain had reverted to the real purpose of the intrusion: to steal the keys. Why not make him admit it?

“What have I hidden under the pillow?” Arnold demanded. Just because he’s mad, I don’t have to let him make a monkey of me. As soon as he admits that it’s the keys he’s after, I’ll give him a piece of my mind. And Flora too – the Lady of the Bedchamber – indeed! I’m damn sure she’s at the back of it all.

But the old man made no reference to any keys. He merely stared stupidly: and now Arnold realised that his failure to answer wasn’t due to any reluctance to admit to the attempted theft; it was because he had forgotten what he had come for.

What a pathetic end to a burglary. What could Flora be thinking of, aiding an abetting these crazy escapades? As she obviously must have done; how else could her befuddled protegé have learned that Arnold kept the keys under his pillow at night? Or even have found his way to the flat at all through the dark, autumnal garden?

Flora, almost in tears at the injustice of these accusations, denied everything.

“I didn’t even know he was
out
!” she protested. “I didn’t hear a thing. I’d settled him in bed, and I was downstairs watching television – well, I suppose I don’t have to stand at his bedside and watch him every minute of the time, do I?”

“Of course you don’t, dear,” Joyce interrupted placatingly. “It’s not your fault. He must have crept out quietly, he does that sometimes, he’s very cunning. Your father doesn’t quite understand how sly old people can get, once they become senile.”

“He’s
not
senile!” Flora snapped; and Joyce looked pained. Had she not just been taking the girl’s side in the argument? The discussion of the night’s adventure was fast deteriorating into all-against-all bickering: and no wonder, it being four in the morning, and none of them having had any sleep – unless you count Arnold’s brief interlude of nightmare.

By now, some sort of picture of the sequence of events had been hammered out between them. Joyce, still dressed in her black sateen evening dress with touches of cream lace around neck and shoulder, had little to contribute, not having arrived home until nearly two in the morning. Not exactly “living it up” as Flora had surmised, but having inadvertently got herself trapped in a situation which more experienced party-goers are
at pains to avoid: the trap that is, of gratefully accepting the offer of a lift from some fellow-guest who then, as the evening goes on, becomes either so inebriated or so full of
joie
de
vivre,
or both, as to delay his or her departure far into the small hours.

“And it seemed so rude, just to go off without her,” Joyce lamented. “After she’d made such a kind offer, I mean. And anyway, it’s nearly three miles, and the last bus gone long ago. And besides, she seemed just about to go all the time. I mean, she’d fetched her coat from the bedroom and said what a lovely party it had been – all that sort of thing – and then kept getting into conversation with yet another person about yet another marriage break-up. You know how it is.”

Arnold didn’t, of course. Being a car-driver himself, he was more familiar with the other side of the coin – the wearisome rounding-up of his allotted passengers and dragging them away from their drinking and chattering at what seemed to him a reasonable hour.

Still, he saw the point, and certainly Joyce was being abjectly apologetic about it all.

“I feel awful. I never meant Flora to have to stay so late. I told her I’d be back by midnight at the latest, didn’t I, Flora? It’s all my fault, It’s entirely my fault. If I’d been back by midnight, none of it would have happened!”

It would, actually. That is to say, the aspect of the night’s doings which seemed to Arnold to be most
reprehensible
would have been unchanged. It had happened well before midnight, and Flora wasn’t even apologising for it. On the contrary, she seemed to be glorying in her bit of mischief-making – or her good-Samaritan act, if you chose to look at it that way.

“At a little before ten,” she explained, “just when
Family
Fortunes
was coming to an end, Sir Humphrey (who had gone to bed well before nine) came stumbling into the living-room in a great state of distress. Something
was going on in the dungeon, he declared, he’d heard a child crying. He’d known all along that that was where the child was imprisoned, and tonight was the only chance to save him, while the guards were at their merry-making.

“He seemed to have got Joyce’s party mixed up in his mind with some party the guards had gone to. Well, of course, there aren’t any guards there now, I know that – he must have been half asleep and kind of dreaming – but anyway, he was so terribly upset. And of course there
might
have been a child somewhere, lost or something, he might
really
have heard a child crying – and so I thought the only thing to do was to go and look, and set his mind at rest. It was a job to get him even to put some warm clothes on, he was in such a frantic state, but anyway, we managed it, and off we went.

“The dungeon, when we got there, was all dark and silent. I crawled along by the parapet to peer through that bit of grating, but of course it was pitch dark, I couldn’t see a thing. It was all dead quiet, I was quite sure there was no one in there, and I told him so. But he still wasn’t satisfied. We must go inside, he insisted, we must explore the whole place properly, every corner; he was sure that the baby was hidden there.

“‘There are secret places down there,’ he whispered, ‘that no one knows about, only
I
know. I’ve
got
to get in, I’ve
got
to!’

“That meant the keys, of course; and I thought that even you, Arnold, would let us borrow them for a few minutes when you saw how distressed he was. But when we got to the flat, you were in the
bath,
for God’s sake; and so I thought the simplest thing – I mean, it would save a lot of aggro – if I just borrowed them for a few minutes, and then put them back before you noticed. I knew where you kept them – under your pillow. But – Bloody hell! – they weren’t there! You’d even taken them into the bloody bathroom with you – I couldn’t believe
it! How paranoid can you get? I was just going to bang on the bathroom door and ask you what-the-hell, when I suddenly noticed that Sir Humphrey was smiling. He’d flopped down on the bed and was looking utterly peaceful and relaxed, as if nothing had happened.

“‘What baby?’ he asked me, he seemed to have forgotten the whole thing. It must have been just a dream he’d had after all. And can you wonder, after all those rotten pills they stuff down him. He was terribly tired and sleepy by this time, it was all I could do to get him off your bed and out of the flat. Though he was better once we got outside. He loves the stars, you know, and they were very bright tonight. A huge very brilliant one was just coming up over the trees; he said it was Sirius, and I daresay it was. He knows so much, you know, his head is full of thousands of fascinating facts. He has a strange kind of wisdom …”

Just above the trees. At eleven o’clock at night in early October. It probably was Sirius. The old man had been right, had even remembered the name correctly. The shattered fragments of a once-powerful intellect still jarred and rattled against the bones of his skull, locking and interlocking more or less at random: sometimes making contact, sometimes passing one another like ships in the dark night of his mind.

A strange kind of wisdom, Flora had called it. A bloody nuisance others, less enchanted, might have felt to be a more apt description, particularly those who had been deprived of a night’s sleep by the old man’s antics. Thank goodness he was back in his own bed now, and asleep by all accounts; Joyce had been up to check on him only a few minutes ago, and had come down, yawning, to report that all was well.

“Just one of his turns,” she explained, her face smudged with tiredness and with the remaining traces of rarely-used and inexpertly applied eye-shadow. “It won’t happen again, not tonight anyway. He’ll be as good as gold for
several days now, you’ll see. I’m terribly sorry, Flora, it had to happen while you were here. What a piece of rotten luck!”

Was
it merely rotten luck, Arnold wondered? Or had Flora, in her superior wisdom and psychiatric insight, omitted to give him the regular sleeping-pill that had been prescribed for him by his unregenerate, non-holistic, non-alternative doctor?

They would never know; and Arnold for one had no intention of finding out. Not now, anyway. All he wanted now was to go home and try to get at least an hour or two of sleep before the day’s work began.