The Echoing Stones (7 page)

But actually it’s not like that at all, Arnold reflected. The reason that parents of previous generations were possessive was not that they were more selfish than we are, but quite simply because children in those days were some
use.
They were an asset in the home, not a liability. They helped, they lent a hand; by and large they expected to do what their parents told them. No wonder the parents wanted to hang onto them. Who wouldn’t?

And it was at this point, just as if she had been listening to her father’s unspoken thoughts, that Flora suddenly burst into speech.

“Look, Arnold,” she said (did she know how very much he’d have preferred to be addressed as “Dad”?) “Look, I want to know where I stand. Now that you and Mildred have chosen to bust our family into smithereens, what happens to
me
? Where am I supposed to live?”

“Well, Flora dear …” He paused, trying to think how to put it. “We thought – well, naturally we thought – that you’d be living away from home. After all, you’ve been on your own for nearly three years. Moving out and going to live in a squat was your idea, not ours …”

“You mean you want me to
go
on
living in a squat for ever? Is that it? Is that how you want me to spend the rest of my life?”

There was no way of saying the right thing. So he might as well say the wrong thing. Bringing his fist down on the table so that the Fancies jumped on their plate and his cooling tea slopped into its saucer, he found himself giving the girl a piece of his mind, as he hadn’t dared to do in several years. He had forgotten how satisfying it was.

“Now, listen to me, Flora. I’m not putting up with this, do you understand? You’re saying everything you can think of to hurt me, you don’t give a damn whether any
of it is true or not, you just want it to hurt. And it does. I hope you’re satisfied! I don’t know what you came here for, but whatever it was, you’re not getting it. It’s obvious you’re in some sort of trouble, and so you deserve to be! See if I care!”

Both Pauline and Tracey were by now hovering nearer and nearer, thrilled to the core, their trays of tea cooling in suddenly arrested transit. Mysteriously empowered by his own recent outburst, Arnold sharply ordered them to go about thier business; and – amazingly – they did.

Equally amazingly, the filial sneer had been wholly wiped from Flora’s face, and she was staring at her father, not exactly with respect, but with a sort of detached wonder, rather as if he was a total stranger who had sat down uninvited at her table and started making this extraordinary scene. He waited for her to pull herself out of shock and explode with outrage and indignation: instead of which, all she did was to lean across the table, pick up his neglected cup, and pour back into it the tea which had slopped into the saucer.

“Why don’t you drink it? You’re letting it get cold,” she observed; and straight away, against all reason, all justice, he felt the anger drain out of him, exactly as if she had apologised. Which she hadn’t.

Or had she? Certainly, she had done something, for the chilly awkwardness between them had thawed to the extent that Arnold found himself suggesting that she might like to be shown round the grounds before closing-time? And she found herself acquiescing.

By the time they left the Tea Room, conversation had become almost easy. Arnold had already agreed that, yes, since Mildred had left, there was no reason why Flora shouldn’t stay for a night or two, sleeping in Mildred’s bed and “getting herself sorted out” as she put it. Arnold warily refrained from asking any questions about what this “sorting out” process might entail. “You might have phoned, though,” he couldn’t help remarking; at which she shrugged dismissively.

“What for?” she demanded. “Just to give you a chance to say No?”

Which he wouldn’t have done, and she knew it. He decided to drop the subject before it escalated into one of their pointless and uncomfortable wrangles.

*

The crowds were thinning out now, and the slanting rays of the evening sun lay across the lawns in a final wash of gold, against which the great trees stood out in ever-deepening contrast, gathering into themselves intimations of the coming dark. Crossing the eastern slope of the park towards the lake, their long, ludicrous shadows cavorting ahead of them, father and daughter indulged in desultory conversation – still somewhat stilted and laced with unease, but much, much better that the arid silences and hostile bickering which had characterised the earlier part of the afternoon. Flora wasn’t much interested in the history of the place – well, he hadn’t thought she
would be – but she liked the deer, and regretted that they hadn’t thought to bring any spare goodies from the Tea Room with which to feed them.

Much as he wished to humour the girl, to keep things pleasant between them, Arnold had to scotch this notion in no uncertain terms.

“Feeding the deer is forbidden,” he pointed out. “Didn’t you see the notice just inside the entrance? You see …”

“
Forbidden
!” She laughed, and once more it was the harsh, mocking laugh that always made his heart sink. “What a spoil-sport you are, Arnold! Well, all right, maybe it’s not
you
, maybe it’s
Them
, but how you can bear to work for such life-destroying people I’ll never … Yes, I
have
seen all their horrible notices. Everything that’s fun seems to be forbidden! Feeding the deer … Bathing in the lake … Ball-games on the lawn! I think it’s wicked, a great expensive place like this, costing millions of pounds which could have been given to the homeless, and then not even letting people enjoy themselves! It’s mean! It’s evil!”

Carefully, picking his words as one might pick one’s way across a polluted, litter-strewn beach, he tried to explain to her the solid, sensible reasons for these prohibitions. With hundreds of people coming every week, there have to be rules. Without them, the deer would become ill from over-feeding … the grass would be trampled into bare earth … people might get drowned among the hidden weeds and the treacherous depths and shallows of the lake …

“And why
shouldn’t
they get drowned, if that’s a risk they choose to take? What business is it of yours? They choose to take a risk of being killed on the roads, don’t they, driving down here? Why aren’t there notices forbidding people to drive cars?”

Why indeed? But since the topic was clearly going to lead to one of those dreaded father-daughter altercations,
Arnold hurriedly let it drop. It was almost time, anyway, to be getting back to the main gates, which had to be locked at 7.00.

“Why at
7.00
?” his companion pressed him, as they made their way back towards the house. “What’s special about 7.00? Why shouldn’t people stay as long as they like? They’ve paid enough to get in, goodness knows, without you short-changing them on the total experience. Why shouldn’t they watch the sun go down? And the moon come up? That sort of thing?”

Arnold increased his pace. He had no intention of getting into this argument, and as soon as they reached the main gates he handed his daughter over to Joyce, just as he was accustomed to do with the lost children. After the briefest of introductions, he left them to it, and set about his duties of getting the last stragglers out of the place; of checking that there was no one left straying around inside the house and then, finally, locking the main gates with the great iron key which clanged so satisfyingly inside the lock as it turned.

*

He discovered, to his relief, that Joyce and his daughter had been getting on quite well in his absence, and as he and Flora made their way back to the flat he found the girl full of sympathy for the older woman’s plight.

“She can’t go out
at
all
,” she exclaimed, “not in the evenings – not on her day off – not
ever
! She’s a
prisoner
, just as much as all those wax people from whenever it was were prisoners! All the time she’s not actually at work, she has to be looking after her old father! Did you know he’s got Alzheimer’s Disease?”

“Well, not exactly,” Arnold responded. “It’s senile dementia that Sir Humphrey’s got, not Alzheimers. Though of course that’s just as …”

“It’s
not
senile dementia! It’s Alzheimer’s! His doctor’s lying if he says it isn’t!”

Without further comment, Arnold unlocked the front door of his flat, and ushered her in. It was pointless to
continue
the argument, or to point out to her that Alzheimer’s Disease had been definded by Doctor Alzheimer himself as senile dementia setting in before the age of sixty, and therefore someone of ninety couldn’t by definition fall victim to it. Extraordinary the way every single subject of conversation between himself and his daughter ended in acrimonious and entirely pointless dispute. The only way to avert this unhappy outcome was for him unilaterally to abandon his side of the argument and let the subject drop; and this he now proceded to do.

It seemed that this self-restraint on his part was to be rewarded, for it came about that the two of them managed to spend a relatively peaceful evening watching Flora’s favourite programmes on the television, which mercifully came thick and fast, this being a Saturday evening.

He had been afraid that she was going to insist on watching these noisy and incomprehensible gyrations far into the night; but no. At an unwontedly early hour, and of her own accord, Flora opted for going to bed. She was flaked out, she declared, because she’d had almost no sleep at all the last two nights, on account of all the hassles.

Naturally he did not venture to press her for details, though in fact he was curious to know what these hassles consisted of. What sort of fracas could there possibly be that could have any noticeable impact on an environment already so raucous, so disorderly, so fraught with
quarrelling
voices, thunderous footsteps and slamming doors?

He would never find out, of course, and when he thought about it he realised that this might well be a blessing. The troubles you don’t know about haven’t any real power to hurt; not like the ones you
do
know about. To understand all is to have all to worry about: and who wants
that
?

It was bright morning when Arnold woke, and he knew at once that something was wrong. An unfamiliar draught of cold air was playing around his face, and full of shapeless anxieties he jerked himself into a sitting position. Had he overslept? Had someone come to call him? A quick glance at his watch reassured him that this could not be so. It was barely 7.00 am, and though the daylight was bright through the cracks in the curtains, the sun was not yet properly risen. A renewed blast of chilly air got him out of bed in haste and not even pausing to put on his dressing-gown, he fairly raced across his bedroom and out into the passage. Surely he hadn’t been careless enough – mad enough – to have left the outer door of the flat swinging open last night?

No, of course he hadn’t. It was properly locked and bolted just as it always was at night; and he recalled, now, the actual moment of locking it, with Flora hovering at his heels, jeering, and asking what he was so scared of that he had to double-lock everything in sight? And then hide the keys behind his bed-head, for Heaven’s sake!

“By the time they’ve got around to murdering you in your bed, they won’t
need
the keys,” she’d pointed out. “They’ll already have got in without them. It’s potty! The whole set-up here is crazy …”

With which parting shot, she’d taken herself off to bed, and he’d finished the locking-up in peace, including the hiding of the keys. It wasn’t a question of being murdered
in his bed or not; it was a question of no one being able to get at them without waking him.

And still the dawn breeze stirred and teased along the passage, from some source as yet unidentified. Shivering in his thin cotton pyjamas, he embarked on a quick survey of his small domain, and came almost at once upon the cause of the mystery. Sitting cross-legged and very straight-backed in the middle of her bedroom floor, eyes closed, Flora was breathing deeply and mystically of the cold air which swirled in through her wide-opened sash-window. She must have carefully unscrewed the metal brackets which normally prevented it being opened further than three or four inches … no, she hadn’t even unscrewed them, she had merely wrenched them from their moorings with some clumsy tool or other, splintering the woodwork in the process.

“Flora!” he cried, careless now of whether he was causing a row or whether he wasn’t. “What on earth do you think you’re doing? These ground-floor windows must
never
be …”

For several seconds she neither moved nor spoke, and her eyes remained peacefully closed.

Meditating
, he realised angrily. Flora’s meditation
sessions
always irritated him. It was just one more way – or so it seemed to him – of putting her parents in the wrong.

“What funny, bustling little ants you are!” her tranquil pose seemed to be saying. “Just look at you, always running around in little circles, obsessed with trivialities such as whether I’m going to pay back the £200 you lent me! See how untroubled
I
am about it, how superior to such sordid material considerations!”

Or something like that. “
Flora
!” he shouted again, even more peremptorily. “Close that window at once! Now I’ll have to fix the brackets back on again – and I haven’t even got any proper tools …” As it dawned on him that he would probably have to apply to Norris, the self-appointed
keeper of the tools for the estate, for even so much as a screw-driver, his voice rose by yet another few decibels: “How did you get them off, anyway?”

Slowly, and with exaggerated peacefulness, Flora’s eyes opened.

“With a knife,” she said. “It was the first thing I did. I had to. I can’t bear to sleep at night without a window open.”

How this predeliction tallied with the foetid environs of the squat it was hard to imagine. Not that it mattered. She was only trying to upset him; and, indeed, succeeding.

“You mean you’ve had that window open
all
night
? On the ground floor? Do you realise I’m responsible for this place at night? If anything should get stolen …”

“You mean like that pre-historic T.V. set of yours? I’ll envy the burglar who gets that, I really will. And if you’re bothered about all that stuff in the show-rooms, then forget it. There’s no way a burglar could get from here into the main building even if he
did
get through my window.”

This was true. And, actually, no one
had
got in. No harm had been done. All the same …

“I can’t allow it, Flora. It’s not safe. It’s not safe for
you,
come to that, sleeping right under an open window, on the ground floor.
Anyone
could get in.”

“You mean a rapist?” she mocked. “What a mind you’ve got, Arnold! What sort of a rapist would bother to come all this way, to the back of beyond, when he can have his pick of victims just travelling up and down on Southern Region? Or in the Fulham Road, come to that. I guess I have more rapists passing my window in a single night than have set foot in this stately home of yours in all the hundreds of years since it was built.”

She paused, then laughed that hard, horrid laugh of hers.

“Poor old Arnold! Listen, if you’re
really
worried about
my virginity, such as it is, then I’d better have Charlie with me at night. Hadn’t I?”

Charlie? Who was Charlie? Arnold’s heart sank. He sounded like extra work, anyway. Work and bother and argument. Arnold posed a few cautious questions, hoping for some clue to the identity of the prospective visitor, but Flora merely laughed again, and more loudly. Her laughter, indeed, seemed quite out of proportion to the humour of the situation, whatever it might be, and Arnold quickly gave up trying to understand. He had work to do. Time was getting on, and Sunday was liable to be quite as busy as Saturday, though of course the later opening helped. It was not yet clear whether the Witchcraft ladies, who had been such a success yesterday, were willing to come again this afternoon. He must be prepared, if necessary, to take the guided tour himself. He prayed that Pauline and Tracey would arrive punctually and apply themselves to their duties conscientiously and without supervision.