The House on the Strand (16 page)

"Of all the idiotic things to do—You might have known... And anyway, why couldn't you sleep?"

"Forget it, forget it, forget it."

I rose from the bed, seized armfuls of clothes and bore them through to the dressing-room, kicking the door to with my foot. She did not follow me. I heard her turn the taps off and get into the bath, slopping the water so that some of it ran into the overflow. The morning drifted on. Vita did not appear. I opened the bedroom door very softly just before one, and she was fast asleep on the bed, so I closed it again and lunched downstairs alone with the boys. They chatted away, perfectly content with a 'yes' or 'perhaps' from me, invariably undemanding when Vita was absent. It continued to rain steadily, and there was no question of cricket or the beach, so I drove them into Fowey and let them loose to buy ice-creams, peppermint rock, western paperbacks and jig-saw puzzles. The rain petered out about four, giving place to a lustre-less sky and a pallid, constipated sun, but this was enough for the boys, who rushed on to the Town Quay and demanded to be water-born. Anything to please, and postpone the moment of return, so I hired a small boat, powered by an outboard engine, and we chug-chugged up and down the harbour, the boys snatching at passing flotsam as we bobbed about, all of us soaked to the skin.

We arrived home about six o'clock, and the children rushed to sit down to the enormous spread of tea that the thoughtful Mrs. Collins had provided for them. I staggered into the library to pour myself a stiff whisky, only to find a revitalised Vita in possession, smiling, the furniture all moved around, the morning mood, thank heaven, a thing of the past.

"You know, darling," she said, I" think I'm going to like it here. Already it's beginning to look like home." I collapsed into an armchair, drink in hand, and watched through half-closed eyes as she pottered about the room rearranging Mrs. Collins brave efforts with the hydrangeas. My strategy henceforth would be to applaud everything, or, when occasion demanded silence, to stay mute, play each moment as it came by ear. I was on my second whisky, and off my guard, when the boys burst into the library.

"Hi, Dick," shouted Teddy, "what's this horrible thing?" He had got the embryo monkey in its jar. I leapt to my feet. "Christ!" I said. "What the hell have you been up to?"

I seized the jar from his hand and made for the door. I remembered only then that when I had gone out from the lab in the small hours, after taking my second dose, I hadn't pocketed the key but had left it in the lock.

"We weren't doing anything," said Teddy, aggrieved, "we were only looking through the empty rooms below." He turned to Vita. "There's a little dark room full of bottles, just like the stinks lab at school. Come and look, Mom, quick—there's something else in one of the jars like a dead kitten—"

I was out of the library in a flash, and down the small stairway in the hail leading to the basement. The door of the lab was wide open, and the light was on. I looked quickly around. Nothing had been touched except thejar holding the monkey. I switched off the light and stepped into the passage, locking the door behind me and pocketing the key.

As I did so the boys came running through the old kitchen, Vita at their heels. She looked concerned.

"What did they do?" she asked. "Have they broken something?"

"Luckily, no," I said. "It was my fault for leaving the door unlocked." She was peering over my shoulder down the passage. "What is through there anyway?" she asked. "That object Teddy brought up looked perfectly ghastly."

"I dare say," I answered. "It happens that this house belongs to a professor of biophysics, and he uses the small room behind there as a laboratory. If I ever catch either of the boys near that room again there'll be murder!"

They stalked off, muttering, and Vita turned to me. "I must say," she said, "I think it's rather extraordinary of the Professor to keep a room like that, with all sorts of scientific things in it, and not make certain it's kept properly locked."

"Now don't you start," I said. "I am responsible to Magnus, and I can assure you it won't happen again. If you had only come next week instead of turning up this morning at an unearthly hour, when nobody expected you, it would never have happened."

She stared at me, startled. "Why, you're shaking!" she said. "Anyone would think there were explosives in there."

"Perhaps there are," I said. "Anyway, let's hope those kids have learnt their lesson."

I switched off the basement lights and walked upstairs. I was shaking, and small wonder. A nightmare of possibilities crowded my mind. They might have opened the bottles containing the drug, they might have poured the contents into the medicine-glass, they might even have emptied the bottles into the sink. I must never again let that key out of my sight. I kept touching it in my pocket. Perhaps I could get an impression made of it, and keep both; it would be safer. I went into the music-room and stood there, staring at nothing, thrusting my finger-tip into the little hole in the key.

Vita had gone upstairs to the bedroom. Presently, I heard the tell-tale click of the telephone from the bell in the hall. It meant she was speaking from the extension upstairs. I went and washed my hands in the downstairs lavatory, and then wandered into the library. I could still hear Vita talking from the bedroom overhead. Listening to conversations on the telephone is not a habit of mine, but now some furtive instinct made me cross to the instrument in the library and pick up the receiver.

"...So I just don't know what to make of it," Vita was saying. "I've never heard him speak sharply to the boys before. They're quite upset. He doesn't look awfully well. Very hollow-eyed. He says he's been sleeping badly."

"High time you got down there," came the answer. I recognised the drawl; it was her friend Diana. "A husband on the loose is a husband on the prowl, I've told you so before. I've had experience with Bill."

"Oh, Bill," said Vita. "We all know Bill can't be trusted out of your sight. Well, I don't know... Let's hope it will be fine and we can all be out a lot. I believe he's arranged to hire some boat."

"That sounds healthy enough."

"Yes... Well, let's hope that Professor of his hasn't been putting Dick up to something. I don't trust that man. Never have, and never will. And I know he dislikes me."

"I can guess why that is," laughed Diana.

"Oh, don't be idiotic. He may be like that, but Dick certainly isn't. Very much the reverse."

"Maybe that's his attraction for the Professor," said Diana. I replaced the receiver very gently. The trouble was, with women, they had one-track minds, and to their narrow view everything male, be it man, dog, fish or slug, pursued but a single course, and that the dreary road to copulation. I sometimes wondered if they ever thought of anything else.

Vita and her friend Diana nattered on for at least another fifteen minutes, and when she came downstairs, fortified by feminine advice, she made no reference to my scene in the basement, but, humming gaily and wearing an apron of bizarre design—it looked as if it had apples and serpents all over it—set about cooking us steaks for supper heaped about with parsley butter.

"Early bed for all," she announced as the boys, heavy-eyed and silent, yawned their way through the meal—the seven-hour journey in the car and the jaunt in the harbour was catching up with them. After supper she installed herself on the sofa in the library, and set about mending the rents in my trousers torn in the valley. I sat down at Magnus's desk murmuring something about unpaid bills, but in reality looking once agaln through the Lay Subsidy Roll for Tywardreath Parish for 1327. Julian Polpey was there, Henry Trefrengy, Geoffrey Lampetho. The names had meant nothing when I first read through the list, but they could have registered unconsciously in my mind. The figures might still be phantom figures that I had followed to the valley, passing the farms that still bore their names today.

I noticed an unopened letter on my desk. It was the one the postman had given me that morning; in my flurry at the family's arrival I had laid it down. It was just a scrap, typewritten, from the research student in London.

'Professor Lane thought you might like this note on Sir John Carminowe,' it read. 'He was the second son of Sir Roger Carminowe of Carminowe. Enrolled in the military 1323. Became a knight 1324. Summoned to attend Great Council at Westminster. Appointed Keeper of Tremerton and Restormel castles April 27th, 1331, and on October 12th of the same year keeper of the King's forests, parks, woods and warrens, etc., and of the King's game in the county of Cornwall, so that he had to answer yearly for the profit of the pannage and herbage within the said forests, parks and woods, by the hand of the steward there, and deputy keepers under him.'

The student had written in brackets, 'Copied from Calendar of Fine Rolls 5th year Edward III.' He had added a further note beneath, 'October 24th. Patent Rolls, for same year (1331), mentions a licence for Joanna, late wife of Henry de Champernoune, tenant-in-chief to marry whomsoever she will of the King's allegiance. Pay fine of 10 marks.'

So... Sir John had got what he wanted and Otto Bodrugan had lost, while Joanna, in anticipation of Sir John's wife dying, had a marriage licence handy in some bottom drawer. I filed the paper with the Lay Subsidy Roll, and getting up from the desk went to the bookshelves, where I rembered seeing the numerous volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, legacy of Commander Lane. I pulled out Volume 8, and turned to Edward III. Vita stretched herself on the sofa, yawning, her repeated sighs following one another in swift succession. "Well, I don't know about you", she said, "but I'm off to bed."

"I'll be up in a moment," I told her.

"Still hard at work for your Professor?" she asked. "Take that volume to the light, you'll ruin your eyes."

I did not answer.

Edward III (1312-1377), king of England, eldest son of Edward II and Isabella of France, was born at Windsor on the 13th of November 1312... On the 13th of January 1327 parliament recognised him as king, and he was crowned on the 29th of the same month. For the next four years Isabella and her paramour Mortimer governed in his name, though nominally his guardian was Henry, Earl of Lancaster. In the summer of 1327 he took part in an abortive campaign against the Scots, and was married to Philippa at York on the 24th of January 1328. On the 5th of June 1330 his eldest child, Edward the Black Prince, was born.

Nothing there about a rebellion. But here was the clue.

Soon after, Edward made a successful effort to throw off his degrading dependence on his mother and Mortimer. In October 1330 he entered Nottingham Castle by night, through a subterranean passage, and took Mortimer prisoner. On the 29th of November the execution of the favourite at Tyburn completed the young king's emancipation. Edward discreetly drew a veil over his mother's relations with Mortimer, and treated her with every respect. There is no truth in the stories that henceforth he kept her in honourable confinement, but her political influence was at an end.

Bodrugan's too, what he possessed in Cornwall. Sir John, only a year later appointed Keeper of Tremerton and Restormel castles, a good King's man, was in command, with Roger, playing it safe, imposing silence on his valley friends, the October night forgotten. I wondered what had happened after that meeting at Polpey's farm when Isolda risked so much to warn her lover; whether Bodrugan, brooding on what might-have-been, returned to his estates and thought about his love, and whether she, when her husband Oliver was absent, met him perhaps in secret. I had been standing beside them both less than twenty-four hours ago. Six centuries ago...

I put the volume back on the shelf, switched off the lights and went upstairs. Vita was already in bed, the curtains pulled back so that when she sat up she could look through the wide windows to the sea.

"This room is heaven," she said. "Imagine what it will be like with a full moon. Darling, I'm going to love it here, I promise you, and it's so wonderful to be together again."

I stood for a moment at the window, staring out across the bay. Roger, from his sleeping-quarters above the original kitchen, had the same dark expanse of sea and sky for company, and as I turned away, towards the bed, I remembered Magnus's mocking remark on the telephone the day before, "I was only about to suggest, dear boy, that moving between two worlds can act as a stimulant." It was not true—in fact, the contrary.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE NEXT DAY being Sunday, Vita announced her intention over breakfast of taking the boys to church. She did this sort of thing from time to time during the holidays. Two or three weeks would go by with never a mention of devotional duty, and then suddenly, without giving any reason, and generally when they were otherwise happily employed, she would burst into their room saying, "Come on, now, I'll give you just five minutes to get ready."

"Ready? What for?" they would query, looking up from fitting together a model aeroplane or something momentarily engrossing their attention.

"Church, of course," she would answer, sweeping from the room again, deaf to their wails of protestation. It was always a let-out for me. Pleading my Catholic upbringing, I would lie late in bed, reading the Sunday papers. Today, despite sunshine flooding our room as we awoke, and the beaming smile of Mrs. Collins as she bore in our tray of toast and coffee, Vita looked preoccupied, and said she had had a restless night. I at once felt guilty, having slept like a log myself, and I thought how this thing of how well or how badly one had slept was really the great test of marital relationship; if one partner came off poorly during the night hours the other was immediately to blame, and the following day would come apart in consequence.

This particular Sunday was to be no exception to the rule, and when the boys came into the bedroom to say good morning dressed in jeans and tee-shirts, she immediately exploded.

"Off with those things at once and into your flannel suits! she said. Have you forgotten it's Sunday? We're going to church."