The Echoing Stones (22 page)

“If only I’d watched over him better, if only I’d never taken my eyes off him!” sobbed Joyce; and: “If only everyone hadn’t watched over him all the time, if only he’d been left free to do his own thing!” sobbed Flora; and neither of them seemed to be noticing the contradiction. Which was just as well; it would have been a pity to start an argument at a time like this. Such a futile argument, too.

A second argument was only barely averted. It
concerned
the manner of Sir Humphrey’s death; Flora, predictably, having claimed that he had died a hero’s death, fighting for his Queen. Arnold had had to exert all his self-control to refrain from pointing out that he hadn’t died fighting at all, let alone for any Queen: he had merely been deluding himself.

And yet (Arnold reflected later) haven’t countless heroes throughout history died likewise in pursuance of a delusion? The early Christian martyrs? Antigone? Joan-of-Arc? Were their deaths any the less heroic, or less significant, for this reason? Nobody has the answer.

*

The day came, early in the following week, when Flora was finally leaving Emmerton Hall. The newly-reconstituted Trevor would be calling for her soon after lunch in a borrowed car, and Arnold sat with his daughter among her miscellaneous belongings, rammed into cardboard boxes and back-pack, waiting for the sound of wheels on gravel. The Tea Room, right now, was the least of his concerns. After all, the season was just about over. From the end of October, the place would be closed, and the problem of the Teas in abeyance. No, what was oppressing his spirit now was the realisation that in spite of their abrasive relationship and the endless arguments – perhaps even because of them? – he was going to miss his daughter to a quite surprising degree. And the saddest
part was that, in spite of the long hours they had inevitably spent in one another’s company, there was still no real understanding between them. Her way of looking at the world was still as incomprehensible and as irritating to him as it had ever been – and his, presumably, to her.

It was some minutes since either of them had spoken, except for brief and practical exchanges such as “Have you seen my Marty Flanagan tape?” and “Don’t you want to take your plastic egg-timer?” But now, during the uneasy last minutes, Flora suddenly looked up.

“You know something. Dad? I’ve
liked
being here!” There was a note of wonder in her voice, as if this fact had only just dawned on her: and then she added: “I might come back in the spring. For weekends, anyway. It depends.” And then, after yet another pause, “I might be pregnant again by then, who knows?” And she gave a little laugh, but a gentle, affectionate one this time, not at all like the hard, mocking one to which she so often treated him.

The surge of car-wheels on gravel brought further confidences to an end, and a few minutes later Arnold was standing at the main gates of the Estate watching the battered old Ford gathering speed towards the main road, carrying his only daughter towards – what? Happiness? Disaster? Poverty? Riches? A broken heart? A stable ongoing love affair?

“It depends,” she’d said; and “I might be pregnant again by then.”

Anything
might happen to her. Anything.

*

Had it always been like this for parents, watching a beloved child plunging headlong into the precarious, unpredictable world, apparently without a thought for its dangers, and without the smallest sense of needing any guidance through the uncharted maze of the future? Or was it that much worse for parents of today, because
they can do
nothing
?
Having surrendered all authority, having allowed “duty” to become a dirty word, and having given up every right to coerce, to command, or even to advise, they are left like Cassandra, aware of all the potential disasters that may lie ahead, yet without the power to warn.

But wait. Supposing he, a typically helpless modern parent, suddenly found himself magically endowed with all those Victorian powers to command, to coerce and to advise, how exactly would he use them? What would he order Flora to do right now? He shuddered to think of it. The responsibility, the awful burden of having to be right, would crush him into the ground.

No, it wouldn’t be easier. It would merely be hard in a different way. Perhaps there
isn’t
an easy way? Why should there be? When you bring a child into the world, no one offers you a money-back guarantee of satisfaction. You just have to be lucky. You knew that all along.

Oh, well. He must go and give the flat a good clean-up, Flora’s hasty and impulsive preparations for departure having left everything in chaos. But at least she had called him “Dad” during those final minutes.
And
had said that she’d “liked being here”. Warmed through and through by these final exchanges, he turned and set off across the courtyard, where the October sunshine still lay along the South Wall, and the stones were still warm to the touch; and where the waters of the fountain were astir with dancing streaks of light.

*

Anything
might happen to Flora. Yes, indeed. But so might anything happen to him. Meantime, here he was, today, in the place he loved, and doing the job he loved. Luck had been with him, beyond his wildest expectation.

He stood for a moment, taking it all in: the battlements of the East Wing silhouetted against the shining blue … the mullioned windows … the ancient cobbles beneath
his feet: and once again the magic of the place engulfed him. Problems in the Tea Room? Harder problems than these had been tackled within these walls. The power and endurance of centuries were embedded in these stones, and he was partaking of them, just by living here. Yes, living here. The miracle had come about. He was
here,
in Emmerton Hall, it was his home. Going under this ancient Tudor arch, under the Tudor lions, he was going home.

Gordon pulled out yet another bundle of yellowing papers from Sir Humphrey’s desk, and untied the knotted string with which it was secured. It was good of Sir Humphrey’s daughter, Joyce, to be letting him have this total access to her deceased father’s papers – indeed, it was ironic in a way, because she seemed to feel that
he
was doing
her
a favour by taking over the sorting of this daunting quantity of material, the scholarly relics of so long and assiduously productive a life. A titanic task it was indeed going to be – and of course Joyce didn’t know that he had any personal motive for undertaking it. She didn’t realise – and he hadn’t chosen to enlighten her – that he, Gordon, was the very same person who, some while ago, had been urgently, vehemently requesting, by letter and by telephone, just this sort of access; which she, at that time, had just as vehemently denied him. “When my father has passed on, it will be a different matter,” she’d said, “but while he’s still with us, I cannot possibly give permission for this sort of thing; and that’s the end of the matter.”

And so, infuriatingly, it had proved to be. Gordon had had to grit his teeth and endure the sight of his own long-ago thesis printed almost word-for-word in a
prestigious
Ameirican historical journal, under Sir Humphrey’s name. Causing quite a gratifying stir, too, in the academic world. Lively controversy had been aroused by this
startling
assemblage of hitherto unregarded evidence to the
effect that the ill-starred Mary Tudor, the “Bloody Mary” of the history books, might indeed have borne a son, whose existence was instantly and frantically suppressed by the burgeoning Protestant forces who feared above all things a Catholic succession to the throne. With bitterness and frustration, Gordon looked back across the decades to the passionate and committed student he had once been. He remembered still the mounting excitement with which he had worked on this B. Litt. thesis, piecing together obscure and little-known scraps of evidence from contemporary records which, taken together, had seemed to him to provide a substantial measure of credibility to this maverick hypothesis of his concerning Queen Mary’s allegedly non-existent baby. In particular, he recalled the heady triumph with which he had deciphered some ancient records of the small village of Hedlington, and which turned out to include a brief reference to a certain Susan Snape, the childless wife of a poor corn-chandler, who had suddenly given birth to a baby boy “a great miracle, she beforehand having been in no wise great with child.” The date was right: the sudden change of fortune for this hitherto impoverished family was notably consistent with the possibility of bribery from high places.

This and much else had the young student pieced together in support of his theory. Drunk with excitement, he had handed in his startlingly original thesis to his revered supervisor, the famous Humphrey Penrose; and had been correspondingly shattered when the great man, far from being impressed, had rubbished the whole thing. “Peurile and contemptible nonsense,” he’d declared and “I don’t know how a serious B. Litt student could have the face to turn in such gibberish! And at the tax-payers’ expense, too! You should be ashamed!”

And ashamed he was. Shattered, humiliated, almost suicidal, he had burned the whole thing, notes and all,
in a gigantic bonfire; and assumed that Sir Humphrey had done much the same.

But he hadn’t. He couldn’t have because now, nearly thirty years later, here was the despised and rejected thesis turning up nearly word-for-word in a prestigious historical journal under Sir Humphrey’s prestigious name.

When Gordon had first come across this article, a few weeks ago, his initial reaction had been one of incredulity; but gradually, as it dawned on him what must have happened, incredulity was replaced by rage, by frustration, by a towering sense of injustice, hardly softened at all by the passage of years since he had written the thing. He could see how the delay must have come about. This highly contentious article had probably dismayed some previous editor so that he had put it in cold-storage, from whence it had recently been resurrected by his successor, a more flamboyant, up-and-coming sort of person, delighting in maverick ideas and controversy; and with an eye, too, for which kinds of maverick idea were going to attract the attention of the media, as this one was already beginning to do. And all under the name of Sir Humphrey Penrose, without the smallest acknowledgement of the work of the despised B. Litt. student of long ago.

Fame, prestige, common justice, all slipping through his fingers … Gordon almost groaned aloud as he contemplated the mountains of paper, the dozens – perhaps hundreds – of files still to be gone through. Somewhere, there would have to be the correspondence between Sir Humphrey and an editor. Somewhere, too, there would be a copy of Gordon’s original thesis, with the odd correction here and there in his own handwriting, as well as his signature. Three copies had had to be submitted, he remembered; and if Sir Humphrey had been planning his dastardly trick right from the beginning,
he would surely have kept at least one of these copies, to be secretly referred to as required.

Had it, though, been quite as cold-blooded as this? Was it perhaps just as likely that Sir Humphrey, at some much later date, had come across the offending thesis tucked away somewhere, and had been struck for the first time by its originality, its audacious ingenuity, and the intriguing plausibility of some bits of the assembled evidence? All this, of course, long after the undistinguished B.Litt. student had disappeared from the academic scene, and could thus be safely ignored.

Which way had it been? The only brain which had once known the answer lay now deep beneath the wet winter grass of Emmerton churchyard.

Gordon hadn’t attended the funeral, and he suspected that Joyce was still a little bit sore that he hadn’t “bothered” to do so. Of course, she hadn’t realised that it wasn’t actually a question of “bothering”. His reasons for staying away had been more subtle than that, and difficult to explain.

For it seemed to him that Sir Humphrey’s death was an occasion not for grieving, but for rejoicing. It had come, had it not, at exactly the right time, and in exactly the right way: painless, instantaneous, and at a moment of great, albeit imaginary, glory. What better death could the old man have looked for? What, if he had lived on, would have been his future? Ever-increasing feebleness,
ever-worsening
physical deterioration, and an ever-darkening mind awash with ever weirder fantasies, spiralling down and down towards some dark and final nightmare from which he would experience no awakening.

So how could Gordon have gone to the funeral and pretended to mourn? Nothing but good had come of the old man’s death; good for the daughter, Joyce, who now at last was free to live a life of her own: supremely good for the old man himself.

A good death if ever there was one. Good, and right, and to the benefit of absolutely everyone.

Well, everyone, that is, except perhaps for poor little Mildred who had had such a nasty fright. When he, Gordon, had made his way into the dungeon to intervene decisively in that ridiculous fantasy-fight, he’d had no idea at all that Mildred was in there too. It had given him the shock of his life. Well, she’d had the shock of her life, too, poor soul, and though he’d done his utmost to calm her, it remained a horrid experience.

Still, she’d get over it, of course she would, he’d try and help her to do so, to blunt the vividness of those frightening memories. Make it up to her in some way.

Why, even for her it might turn out to be all for the best. All for the best for everyone. Nothing but good had come from Sir Humphrey Penrose’s death. This was a fact that he couldn’t repeat to himself too often.

The butt end of the eighteenth-century pistol which he’d brought down on Sir Humphrey’s head had indeed been the murder weapon, but somehow he hadn’t felt like a murderer, even in the moment of striking the blow. He’d felt more like an angel of mercy, doing good.

Good, good, good.

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you!” said Val; and Mildred promised that she wouldn’t. Since Gordon had made his startling offer of a vacant room at the top of his house, rent-free in return for help with his research, she had been asking advice from all and sundry, even including Joyce, at Emmerton Hall.

“Better safe than sorry,” Joyce had advised; but Mildred hadn’t been so sure. It is all too possible in this world to be both safe
and
sorry. She’d seen it happen.

“It’s just that he’s awfully rushed at the moment,” she now explained to Val. “He’s working on his book about tapestries, and now something urgent has cropped up about some American journal that he’s involved with; and so he really does need some help. It won’t involve anything I can’t do, not word-processing or anything like that. I’ll just be filing things. And answering the telphone. And helping with the Index – putting things in alphabetical order – you know. And I
do
know the alphabet!” she finished defiantly, tossing her head.

“Pity you don’t know something about men, too,” Val warned. “Research Assistant,” indeed! You know what will happen, don’t you? Once you’re living there, on the premises, you’ll find yourself doing
everything
: shopping; cleaning; cooking lunch; sewing on buttons; watering the house-plants …”

It sounded lovely, just the sort of life that Mildred enjoyed most; but she didn’t quite dare say so.

“And then there’s
sex
,” Val continued relentlessly. “He either will or he won’t, and either way you’re going to be dead embarrassed. I know you. And it’s not as if he loves you.”

No, he probably didn’t. But need that involve saying “No” to
everything
?
It was obvious that Gordon liked her – found her good company in some sort of a way – enjoyed having her around. If one is no sort of a
femme
fatale,
and never has been, should one not grasp with both hands such tepid passions as one is capable of inspiring? But how to explain this to Val, with all her theories about being your own person, and not being
used,
and all the rest of it?

In the end, no explanation was necessary. Suddenly, after a long and inconclusive debate about the pros and cons of the project, Val gave her friend a quick, surprising hug, and wished her lots of luck with the new venture.

“It seems crazy to me,” she averred, with a wry smile and shaking her head, “but since you’re so set on it, Mills, I suppose you’ll have to give it a try. After all, if it all goes wrong, you can always come back here and weep on Auntie Val’s shoulder, can’t you?”

Which was nice. Not that Mildred had any serious expectation of her new venture ending in tears. She knew already that she was going to avoid trouble, and probably tears too, by going along with whatever was expected of her.

But she could hardly confess this to Val. Why spoil so warm and affectionate a parting from her friend by provoking yet another dissertation on Assertiveness?

Besides, there was something else she couldn’t confess to Val. She had only recently, with much hesitation, confessed it to herself. It concerned that moment in the dungeon when she’d at last ventured to open her eyes. In that fraction of a second before the lights went out, she had seen Sir Humphrey’s body and how it was lying, face down and several feet away from the rack. But when he
had been officially found, he had been lying face up, and with the injured back of his head in contact with the iron frame of the rack, a clear indication that this was the way he had so unfortunately fallen.

Only Mildred, in all the world, knew that this was not the case; and why should she say anything? What’s done is done, and why look for trouble? People who look for trouble find it; this was one of the things she had learned during her quiet and unadventurous life.

She had read somewhere – or maybe heard it on the radio – that less than a third of murders and homicides are ever solved. This must mean that at least two thirds of all murderers are right now leading ordinary, inconspicuous lives somewhere or other. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They can’t all be solitaries; most of them will have a woman in their lives; which means that hundreds and hundreds of women must be living unremarked and probably comfortably enough with some murderer. Why shouldn’t Mildred be one of them?

Mildred thought of all the things she couldn’t do: couldn’t type, couldn’t drive, couldn’t programme a computer, couldn’t operate a word-processor. But this was something she felt quite sure she could do – live comfortably, uncritically and at peace with a man who had once committed murder.