The Echoing Stones (20 page)

By the time he had finished his evening rounds, Arnold had heard from several sources that his ex-wife had been seen around this afternoon. Well, he thought of her as his ex-wife these days, though of course she wasn’t, she was still his actual wife, and at intervals – such as now – he made an effort to remember this. Because, of course, as his wife there were still all sorts of demands she could reasonably make on him, all sorts of problems that she might be expecting to discuss with him. In particular, right now, there was the new and pressing problem of their daughter’s pregnancy.

He wished, most fervently, that he hadn’t told Mildred anything about it, not yet, anyway. It had been a foolish, impulsive telephone call which he had regretted almost before he had put down the receiver, and which, in retrospect, he could only put down to shock. That, plus a sense of male helplessness in the face of so essentially female a problem. Obviously, Mildred would have to hear about it sooner or later; presumably Flora would tell her mother herself some time but what had possessed him to hasten the evil day?

Well, not
evil
exactly (he corrected himself inside his head). The
embarrassing
day would be nearer the mark. Embarrassing, because his own feelings were still so confused that he wouldn’t be able to argue effectively for one course or another. That argument with his wife would now be necessary he did not doubt. Whatever Mildred
had in mind, it would assuredly be something impractical, and he wanted to have something solid in his own head with which to counter it. He dreaded, particularly, that Mildred might be already in his flat waiting for him; and Flora with her, maybe, the two of them concocting some romantic and Utopian plan which would make him look heartless and insensitive when he pointed out the flaws in it. Or – just as likely – they would be deep into one of their mother-daughter squabbles about people having the right to do their own thing. Flora’s own thing, that is to say.

The October evening was drawing in, and as Arnold made his way along the terrace, deserted now, he became aware of footsteps behind him; clumsy, hurrying
footsteps
. Turning, he saw Joyce, coatless, hair in disarray, and running as fast as she could on heavy,
unaccustomed
legs.

“Arnold!” she panted as she lumbered within range. “My father! Sir Humphrey! – he’s gone again! He must have slipped out while Ida was on the telephone. Oh, he’s so cunning …!” Here she paused, getting her breath, and pushing damp hair from her forehead. Then: “So I just wondered … Has Flora …? Do you know if Flora …? Has she come out of the Teas yet?”

Arnold looked at his watch. “I should think so. They ought to have finished the clearing up by now. Come along – we’ll have a look.”

The Tea Room was locked up, dark and empty, as Arnold had surmised. The flat too was dark and empty when they arrived there. His fears about finding Mildred ensconced there, waiting for him, were after all unfounded; but of course this was no consolation to Joyce.

“What shall I
do
?” she kept saying, “Oh, what shall I
do
?” Arnold, realising that these questions were not actually addressed to him, but were a kind of appeal to
Fate, or to any heavenly power that might happen to be listening, strove not to feel irritated. Not even when the subsequent dialogue followed almost the exact same course, word for word, as the one they’d had once before when the tiresome old man had gone missing. Police – Social Workers – Old People’s Home – this nexus of escalating disaster still dominated her thinking, and put out of count all the ordinary, sensible procedures that Arnold would have wished to set in motion. They were on their own with the problem, and he must be the one to take charge.

“You go back home,” he urged. “He’ll be wandering back any minute now, you’ll see, and you don’t want him to find an empty house, do you? Meantime, I’ll try to track down Flora, and see if she knows anything. I’ll ring Pauline, or Tracey, and see what time she left the Tea Room, and whether she said anything to them about what she was doing next. Don’t worry, Joyce. I’m sure he’s all right. He’s got nine lives, that father of yours!”

An unfortunate expression, perhaps, to apply to an old man in his nineties. A life for each decade, and the ninth one just due? But Joyce did not seem to make the connection – and why should she, since there wasn’t one? She seemed only too willing to follow Arnold’s advice, and leave the rest of the problem to him.

*

Pauline was out and Tracey, summoned to the telephone by a small sister yelling at the top of her voice, “It’s for you, Trace! It’s that man who’s always cross about something!” was less than helpful.

Yes, Flora had left work early, she admitted, “But the money’s all right, Mr Walters, I locked it up in the till, and I’ve taken the key. I locked both of the outer doors, too.”

She was proud of herself, had used her initiative, done the right thing. Ought to be congratulated, but Arnold
didn’t bother, and so no wonder her answers to his subsequent questions were a trifle terse. “No, I haven’t a clue, Mr Walters. No, she didn’t say. Only that her mother had turned up. Oh, and Mr Walters (here a gleeful note had come into the girl’s voice) “her mother’s boyfriend has been here too, I saw him. He’s been mooching around all afternoon, did you know that? He comes a lot, doesn’t he?” Here she paused, hoping, presumably to get some sort of reaction from him; and when none came she reverted to her former brusque manner. “No, Mr Walters, I don’t
know
. No, she didn’t say anything about Sir Humphrey, why should she? And if you don’t mind, Mr Walters, I can’t keep talking any longer, I’ve got to …”

Arnold couldn’t be bothered to feel snubbed, not by a chit like that. He went on to ring Joyce with his tiresomely negative report, and as many cheering words as he could think of. Sincere words, too, for he truly did feel that the old nuisance would turn up all right.

“So just stay where you are, Joyce,” he reiterated, “and I’ll go and search the grounds. It’s lucky there’s a good moon tonight.”

*

There was, too. A full moon, a harvest moon, the huge disk just rising above the Eastern battlements, casting black zig-zag shadows across the courtyard and glinting on the still waters of the fountain. The plume of spray was always turned off at closing time, when the visitors were gone, in a not very effective effort to conserve water, so the pool was flat as glass in the pale, silvery light. Not a fish was stirring, and the circle of bright water, like a still-photograph of itself, gave a dream-like quality to the scene, and Arnold passed on under the archway with a curious sense of moving into the unknown. Which was strange, because the route he was taking – across the terrace and through the park – wasn’t unknown to him
at all, far from it. It had been part of his daily life for months. It must be the moonlight which made it seem so unreal. Moonlight can have that effect, especially perhaps the harvest moon.

The grass was wet underfoot, and the whole expanse of the park looked grey, sucked bare of colour and yet luminous, especially where a thin whitish mist hovered low over the long grass which bordered the woodland.

No owls tonight: the season of bird cries was coming to an end, though when Arnold stepped under the trees a harsh yattering shriek and a frightened flutter of wings told him that the woodland life was not entirely sleeping. He’d intended for some time now to study the bird life in this part of the country and learn to identify the various songs and cries: had, indeed, got so far as to buy one of the pamphlets on the subject from Joyce’s kiosk, but hadn’t so far found the time to read it properly.

A little way into the wood he paused, as the patterned light at his feet gave way to a thicker darkness. This was the point at which to decide whether or not to use his torch, and thus risk alerting his quarry to his approach.

If Sir Humphrey
was
somewhere here – and Arnold had a powerful hunch that this would be the old man’s chosen direction – then would he welcome Arnold’s intrusion? If he was already lost, hopelessly confused, forgetful of why he had come and where he was, then he might be grateful – might he not? – for torchlight, and a kindly guide to escort him home. On the other hand … Arnold had a sudden vision of the fierce, eagle face, the pale shining eyes: and he knew beyond doubt that whatever else had died and shrivelled and grown inoperative in that old, disintegrating brain, pride still remained, an unquenchable bright core, holding the fort undaunted against the relentless oncoming of the dark.

No, he would not be grateful.

And, of course, Flora might be with him. In pursuance
of her blithely-held belief that the mad are entitled to just as much freedom as the sane, she might well have aided and abetted this escapade tonight. (“If he chooses to go for a walk in the woods, why
shouldn’t
he go for a walk in the woods? Just because he doesn’t choose to remember the things that other people think he ought to remember, is that a crime? A crime worse than murder, to be punished by life-imprisonment?”)

This old familiar argument had been bandied back and forth often enough between himself and his daughter, he felt he knew it by heart. He knew exactly what they would both say. That’s all very well, Flora, but don’t you realise how terribly worrying it is for poor Joyce not to know where he is or what he is doing? And why, Arnold, is it more important for Joyce not to be worried than it is for Sir Humphrey to have his freedom?

And so on. No agreement was ever going to be reached. But by this time, picking his way along the narrowing and ever more winding path, he at least came to one decision: he would use the torch. Let Sir Hmphrey make what he liked of it. Switching it on, he continued on his way, the beam of light illuminating brilliantly the small circle of damp leaves into which he was about to tread, but reducing all else by contrast to total, impenetrable blackness. The faint grey outlines of huge tree-trunks, the pale, ongoing line of the path amid the dark blur of surrounding vegetation - all vanished in favour of this small, dazzling, step-by-step bit of illumination. However, this was the safer option, he felt. There might be some obstacle on the path over which he might otherwise stumble and hurt himself quite badly.

There was such an obstacle; and in spite of the
torch-beam
highlighting it, he did nearly stumble. Certainly he staggered, and grabbed for support at the invisible foliage alongside. Although his hand was bleeding quite badly from the throny shrub at which he had happened
to clutch, he never noticed the sticky, tickling wetness as he gazed dumbfounded into the circle of torchlight, at the very centre of which, floodlit like some famous work of art, the white skull stared up at him.

The sheep’s skull again. The wretched “Charlie”.
Somehow,
at this their second encounter, Arnold had been slower to identify the thing, and so the shock, right through to his very bones, had lasted longer, by several seconds. He was still trembling when he set off once more along the path, filled now with foreboding, and with a shapeless, ill-directed anger. Ill-directed, because he could not imagine, yet, exactly what it was he had to be angry
about
;
though he knew well enough who he had to be angry
with.
Flora. With her ill-digested, second-hand and pseudo-revolutionary theories, she was encouraging a helpless, senile old man to get himself into every kind of disastrous trouble, sooner or later endangering his own life, and very likely that of others. Freedom for the mad demands eternal vigilance from the sane – and it was just this vigilance that Flora was eternally trying to circumvent.

And then he saw her … running towards him across the moonlit glade that opened up ahead, and calling to him in a soft, loving voice such as he hadn’t heard from her in years.

“Oh, thank goodness …! I was beginning to be afraid …” and then, as the dazzle of his torch swung away from her eyes, she recognised him, and her voice changed as if by some horrible fairy spell turning words into toads.

“Oh … you! … You …! What have you
done
to him? Where
is
he? You’ve locked him up again, just when …” and now, disconcertingly, she burst into tears, and flung herself to the ground all among the damp leaves, and with the moonlight patterning her slender figure through the tracery of foliage above. Her anorak,
a gaudy emerald green by day, looked pale as chalk under the broken silvery light.

Arnold lowered himself onto the soft damp ground beside her, and felt his own anger draining away under the impact of her tears. Flora almost never cried, not in his presence, anyway. He began talking, almost at random, trying to convince her that he had seen nothing of Sir Humphrey, had no idea of where he was, or what this was all about. What
was
it all about, anyway.

The story revealed by Flora, between sobs, was roughly what Arnold had feared it would be. Once again she had been irresponsibly aiding and abetting the old man in his absurd fantasies, even to the point of promising to help him rescue the non-existent infant heir to the non-existent Tudor throne. The two of them were to bring the imaginary child, after dark, to this woodland glade, where a party of horsemen would be gathered ready to escort them to safety in some distant castle. From which, presumbaly, some sort of uprising would be organised in favour of this rightful heir. At this point, the scenario became vague, and gave way to Flora’s immediate rage and frustration at having been foiled at the very outset of this absurd pantomime by the absence of the leading man – Sir Humphrey himself just when the imaginary episode was about to begin.

Apparently, what had happened was this. Flora had gone to the cottage, as she quite often did after finishing work at the Tea Room, to offer to take the old man for an evening stroll. Usually, Joyce was only too glad to accept this offer, but this time she’d said No, not just now, her father hadn’t been very well and was resting. “Looking back,” said Flora, sitting up, cross-legged now, and sifting damp dead leaves through restless fingers, “looking back, I think I must have been out of my mind to have let it go at that. I ought to have challenged her then and there, and insisted on coming in and seeing him for myself. But like
a fool I took her word for it and went off, meaning to come back later. But when I
did
come back later, it was too late. He’d vanished. I heard the commotion about it before I even got to the cottage – Ida and Joyce were rushing in and out looking for him, blaming each other: ‘But I was only on the telephone for two minutes’ … ‘You know very well the front door must
never
be left unlocked’ – that sort of thing. It was a laugh, really it was – or at least I thought it was at the time. Aha, he’s given them the slip, I thought, good for him! and of course I took for granted he’d come here on his own without waiting for me. But when I got here, and there was no sign of him … and I waited and waited … and it got dark … and then
you
turned up! I’m sorry I was such a pig, Arnold, but it was so disappointing when it turned out to be just you. And now I don’t know what to do. No one knows where he is – what can have happened? He was so certain that tonight was the night because it had all been arranged for the night of the full moon. The horsemen had been alerted, they would be there waiting …”