The House on the Strand (21 page)

"Here they come," yelled the boys, tearing down the steps, and I advanced through the french window like one facing up to mortar-shells. Vita, as a hostess, was magnificent: Kilmarth was transformed instantly into some American embassy overseas, lacking only a flagstaff bearing the Stars and Stripes. Food borne in by the willing and triumphant Mrs. Collins graced the dining-room table. Liquor flowed, cigarette smoke filled the air, we lunched at two and rose at half-past three. The boys, fobbed off with the promise of swimming later, vanished to play cricket in the orchard. The girls, disguised in uniform dark glasses, dragged lilos out of earshot to indulge in gossip. Bill and I installed ourselves on the patio intending, or so I hoped, to sleep, but sleep was intermittent; like all diplomats, he enjoyed hearing his own voice. He held forth on world policy and policy nearer home, and then, with elaborate unconcern and obviously briefed by Diana, touched on my future plans.

"I hear you're going into partnership with Joe," he said. "That's wonderful."

"It's not settled," I replied. "There's a lot still to be discussed."

"Oh, naturally," he said. "You can't just decide on a flick of a coin, but what an opportunity! His firm is on the crest of the wave right now, and you'd never regret it. Especially as I gather you've nothing really to lose this side. No special ties." I did not answer. I was determined not to be led into a lengthy discussion. "Of course, Vita would make a home anywhere," he went on. "She has the knack. And with an apartment in New York and a weekend place in the country, you'd lead a very full life together, with plenty of opportunities for travel thrown in."

I grunted, and tilted an old panama hat of Commander Lane's over my right eye, which was still bloodshot. Unremarked, so far, by Vita.

"Don't think I'm butting in," he said, lowering his voice, "but you know how the girls talk. You've got Vita worried. She told Diana you've blown cool over the idea of coming to the States, and she can't figure out why. Women always think the worst." He then launched into a long, and to my mind loaded, story about a girl he had met in Madrid when Diana was in the Bahamas with her parents. She was only nineteen, he said. "I was crazy about her. But of course we both knew it couldn't last. She had ajob in the Embassy there, and Diana was due back in London when her vacation was over. I was so wild about that kid I felt like cutting my throat when we said good-bye. However, I survived and so did she, and I haven't seen her since." I lit a cigarette to counteract the clouds of smoke from his blasted cigar. "If you think", I said, "that I've got a girl round the corner you couldn't be more wrong."

"Well, that's fine," he said, "just fine. I wouldn't blame you if you had, as long as you kept it quiet from Vita."

There was a long pause while he tried, I suppose, to think of another tactic, but he must have decided that discretion was the better part of valour, for he went on abruptly, "Didn't those boys say something about wanting to swim?"

We wandered off to find our wives. Their session was apparently still in full swing. Diana was one of those overripe blondes who are said to be grand fun at a party and a tigress in the home. I had no desire to try her out in either capacity. Vita told me she was the loyalest of friends, and I believed her. The session ceased immediately we appeared, and Diana changed down into second gear, her invariable custom at the approach of masculine company.

"You've got a tan, Dick," she said. "It suits you. Bill turns lobster red at the first touch of the sun."

"Sea air," I told her. Not synthetic like your own. She had a bottle of sun oil beside her with which she had been lubricating her lily-white legs.

"We're going down to the beach to swim," said Bill. "Rouse yourself pug-face, it will take off some of that surplus fat." The usual badinage ensued, the interplay of married couples before their kind. Lovers never did this, I thought; the game was played in silence, and was in consequence the more delightful.

Carrying towels and snorkels, we made the long trek to the beach. The tide was low, and to enter the water the intending swimmer had to pick his way over seaweed and uneven slabs of rock. It was an experience new to our guests, but they took it in good part, splashing about like dolphins in the shallows, proving my favourite maxim that it is always easier to entertain, albeit unwillingly, out-of-doors. The evening to come would be the real test of hospitality, and so it proved.

Bill had brought his own bottle of bourbon (a gift to the house), and I cleared the fridge of ice so that he could consume it on the rocks. The muscadet which we drank with supper, on top of the bourbon, made too rich a mixture, and with the dish-washer throbbing away in the kitchen we staggered into the music-room after dinner considerably the worse for wear. I did not have to worry about my bloodshot eye. Both Bill's looked as if he had been stung by bees, while our wives had the high flush of barmaids lounging in some disreputable sailors joint.

I went over to the gramophone and put on a stack of records—the choice did not matter, so long as the sound served the purpose of keeping the party quiet. Vita was a moderate drinker as a general rule, but when she had had one too many I found her embarrassing. Her voice took on a strident tone, or alternatively turned silky sweet. Tonight the sweetness was for Bill, who, nothing loath, lolled beside her on one sofa, while Diana, patting the empty place next to her on the second, pulled me to it with a meaning smile.

I realised, with distaste, that these manoeuvres had been worked out by the two women earlier on, and we were set for one of those frightful evenings of swapping partners, not for the ultimate act itself but as a preliminary try-out, like a curtain-raiser before a two-act play. I could not have been more bored. The only thing I wanted to do was to go to bed, and, by God, to go alone.

"Talk to me, Dick," said Diana, so close that I had to turn my head sideways like a ventriloquist's doll. "I want to know all about your brilliant friend Professor Lane."

"A detailed account of his work?" I asked. "There was a very informative article about certain aspects of it in the Biochemical Journal a few years ago. I've probably got a copy in the flat in London. You must read it some time."

"Don't be idiotic. You know perfectly well I wouldn't understand a word. I want to know what he's like as a man. What are his hobbies, who are his friends?"

Hobbies... I considered the word. It conjured a vision of an absent-minded buffer chasing butterflies.

"I don't think he has any hobbies", I told her, "beyond his work. He's fond of music, particularly church music, Gregorian chants and plainsong."

"Is that what you have in common, a liking for music?"

"It started that way. We happened to meet in the same pew one evening at King's College when a carol service was in progress. In point of fact we had not gone for the carols but to stare at one particular choir-boy with a golden aureole of hair like the infant Samuel. But though the meeting was accidental it was the first of many. Not that my tastes inclined to choir-boys, but the combination of holy innocence with adeste fideles and a halo of curls was so aesthetically pleasing to our twenty years that we were subsequently enraptured for several days."

"Teddy told me there was a room locked up in the basement here full of monkeys heads," she said. "How deliciously creepy."

"One monkey's head, to be exact," I replied, "and a number of other specimens in jars. Highly toxic, and not to be disturbed."

"You hear that, Bill?" said Vita from the opposite sofa. I noticed, with aversion, that he had his arm round her and her head was on his shoulder. "This house is built on dynamite. One false movement, and we'd be blown sky high."

"Any movement?" queried Bill, with an offensive wink at me. "What happens if we get a little closer? If dynamite sends us both up to the floor above it's O.K. by me, but I'd best ask Dick's permission first."

"Dick's staying right here," said Diana, "and should the monkey's head explode you two can rise, and Dick and I'll descend. That way we'll all be happy, but in different worlds. Isn't that so, Dick?"

"Oh, absolutely," I agreed. "And in any event I've had enough of this particular world. So if you three like to triple-up on one piece of furniture, go ahead and enjoy yourselves. There's a quarter of bourbon left in the bottle, and it's all yours. I'm for bed." I got up and left the room. Now that I had broken up the foursome the petting party would automatically stop, and they would all three sit for another hour or more solemnly discussing the various facets of my character, how I had or had not changed, what could be done about me, what the future held.

I undressed, plunged my head into cold water, flung the curtains wide, climbed into bed and fell instantly asleep.

The moon awakened me. It came through a chink of the curtains, which Vita had drawn, and sent a shaft of light on to my pillow. She lay on her own side of the bed and was snoring, a thing she rarely did, and with her mouth wide open. It must have been that last quarter of bourbon. I glanced at my watch: it was half-past three. I got out of bed, went through to the dressing-room, and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater. I stood at the head of the stairs and listened at the guest-room door. Not a sound. Silence, too, along the passage where the boys slept. I went downstairs, down the back way to the basement, and so to the lab. I was peffectly sober, cool and collected, neither elated nor depressed; I have never felt more normal in my life. I was determined to take a trip, and that was that. Pour four measures in the flask, get the car out of the garage, coast downhill to Treesmill valley, park the car, and walk to the Gratten. The moon was bright, and when it paled in the western sky the dawn would come. If time played tricks with me and the trip lasted until breakfast, what did it matter? I would return when I was ready to return. And Vita and her friends could lump it. On such a night... a rendezvous with whom? The world of today asleep, and my world not awakened, or not as yet, until the drug possessed me.

Tywardreath was a ghost village as I skirted it, but in my secret time I knew I traversed the green, and the Priory stood conspicuous though aloof behind stone walls. I crept down the Treesmill road and the moonlight flooded the valley, shining on the grey-lidded hutches of the mink-farm on the further side. I parked the car close to the ditch, and climbed the gate across the field. Then I made my way to the pit near the quarry which I knew formed the site of part of the original hall, and in the darkness there, close to a tree-stump, in a square patch of moonlight, swallowed the contents of the flask.

Nothing happened at first, except a humming in my ears which I had not experienced before. I leant against the bank and waited. Something stirred, a rabbit, perhaps, in the hedge, and the humming in my ears increased. A piece of corrugated iron behind me in the quarry rattled and fell. The humming became universal, part of the world around me, changing from the sound in my own ears to the rattle of the casement in the great hail, and the roaring of the wind without. The rain was teeming down from a grey sky, failing slantwise across the parchment panes, and moving forward I looked out and saw that the water in the estuary below was turbulent and high, short-crested seas racing with the tide. What trees there were on the opposite slopes bent in unison, the autumn leaves scattering with the force of the wind, and a flock of starlings flying north formed into a clamouring mass and disappeared. I was not alone. Roger was by my side, peering down into the creek also, his face concerned, and when a greater draught of wind rattled the casement he fastened it tight, shaking his head and murmuring, "Pray God he does not venture here in this."

I glanced round, and saw that a curtain had been drawn across the hall, dividing it in two, and voices came from behind it. I followed Roger as he crossed the hall and drew the curtain aside. I thought for a moment that time had played another trick, taking me into a past I had witnessed already, for there was a pallet bed against one wail, with someone lying on it, while Joanna Champernoune was seated at the foot, and the monk Jean close to the pillow. But drawing closer I saw that the sick man was not her husband but his namesake, Henry Bodrugan, Otto's eldest son and her own nephew, and standing well withdrawn, with his handkerchief covering his mouth, was Sir John Carminowe. The young man, evidently in a high fever, kept trying to raise himself, calling for his father, as the monk wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to ease him back on to his pillow.

"Impossible to leave him here, with the servants at Trelawn and no one to care for him," said Joanna. "And even if we tried to move him there we could not do so before nightfall, in such a gale. Whereas we could have him beneath your own roof, at Bockenod, within an hour."

"I dare not risk it," said Sir John. "If it should prove to be smallpox, as the monk fears, none of my family have had it."

"There is no other course but to leave him here in Roger's care." He looked at the steward, his eyes apprehensive above the handkerchief, and I thought what a poor figure he must cut before Joanna, showing such fear that he might catch the disease himself. Gone was the cocksure bearing I had seen at the Bishop's reception. He had increased in weight, and his hair was turning grey. Roger, respectful as ever before his masters, inclined his head, but I noticed a look of scorn in his lowered eyes.

"I am willing to do whatever my lady commands me," he said. "I had smallpox as a child, my father died of it. My lady's nephew is young and strong, he should recover. Nor can we be certain yet of the disease. Many a fever starts in the same fashion. In twenty-four hours he could be himself once more."

Joanna rose from her chair and approached the bed. She still wore her widow's headdress, and I remembered the note scribbled by the student at the Public Record Office from the Patent Rolls dated October, 1331: Licence for Joan late the wife of Henry de Champernoune to marry whomsoever she will of the King's allegiance. If Sir John was still her choice of suitor, then the marriage had not yet taken place.