Читать книгу Invisible - Jonathan Buckley - Страница 9

At a quarter past one, hearing the front door close, Stephanie gets up from her bed to make sure that her mother is leaving. Pushing a hand into the slats of the blind, she sees her mother reach into her handbag for her sunglasses. It’s the round black-rimmed shades today, the Jackie Onassis pair. Post-workout chic is this afternoon’s look: strappy sandals to make the most of the coral-pink toenails; freshly laundered skinny jeans; and the tight white T-shirt that Robert brought back from New York, which cost a sexily ludicrous amount of money and shows off the high-toned, caramel-coloured arms. It’s the look that suits her best and it’s obvious from her walk that she knows it, just as you can see in the springy movement of her wrist the pleasure she gets when she aims the key fob at the car and all the locks spring up obediently, like tiny servants standing to attention. With poise she steps up into the car, turning at the waist, twisting her hips, dipping her head, reaching for the door in one fluid sequence, like a piece of action that’s been rehearsed and rehearsed until it’s become instinctive. One peep in the mirror and the Jackies are raised upright and jammed into the hairband position. And then we’re off, off to the shops once again, to buy whatever’s needed for this evening’s meal and a bottle or two of whatever wine was the top tip in last Sunday’s supplement. After that, it’ll be a drive halfway across London to see Susie, who will tend her hair for the twentieth time this year. At five o’clock, if the traffic’s not too bad, she will be back, with an immaculate bob from which every strand of grey will have been eliminated by a dye the colour of plastic oak veneer, and an impulse buy on the passenger seat, a scented candle or an exquisite belt, in a tiny carrier bag that’s almost too nice to throw away.

She turns off the radio and wanders across the landing. From the doorway she surveys her parents’ bedroom. The bed has been tightly made and the pillows heaped in two pairs of three, all perfectly aligned and perfectly white. The net curtains hang in waves as regular as corrugated fibreglass. The red digits of the alarm clock blink beside the white plastic lamp and a book from which a green leather bookmark protrudes. And on Robert’s side, underneath the matching white plastic lamp, lies a book with a red leather bookmark. On the dressing table, to the side of the mirror, half a dozen perfume bottles stand on a circle of white lace, none of them touching, all as shiny as new. There’s not a fingermark, not a grain of dust to mar the gleam of the mirror. She looks around, seeking a blemish, an irregularity, but there’s none: not one stray sock, a single dropped coin, a mislaid hair-clip, nothing. She opens her mother’s wardrobe, and it’s like opening the storeroom of a clothes shop. Packed closely on the rail, the dresses and jackets and shirts hang in sheaths of plastic and white paper above a low wall of shoe boxes. In the centre of the rail there’s a small gap between the hangers, where a fat grey satin pouch of pot-pourri dangles on a blue satin ribbon, like the body of a dead bird tangled in a branch. Indifferently, going through the motions of searching the room, she opens the drawers of the pine chest: the deepest is full of jeans, all as clean as the day they were bought, folded in two piles, one for him, one for her; another contains nothing but white shirts and white tops; the top drawer is a fragrant nest of underwear, bras to the left side, knickers to the right, with subtle hues of cream and pink amid the undimmed whiteness. She shoves a hand into a wad of silk, striking the packets of pills that are hidden underneath. If she were to throw the packets away, or just mess things up a bit, it would be no worse than opening the letter, she thinks, and then the notion vanishes, and she feels tired again, that’s all.

Opening the kitchen door, she steps into warmth and brightness. Pouring through the wide glass doors, the sunlight makes the cork flooring look like untrodden sand. A luscious glow comes off a plywood chair, blurring the shape of it, and the empty glass vase by the draining board shines like a crystal block. Soaked in sunlight, the long zinc tabletop has the sheen of a dolphin’s wet flank. Sitting down at the table, she stares at the mottled skin of the metal, at the bright silver nicks and scratches, at the rings of wetness that have become blotches of variegated grey, like rain clouds. She forgets where she is, until the light suddenly goes and again she is in the kitchen of her father’s house. She unlocks the doors and slides them back. Standing on the terrace, she gasps the air in. She watches a plane as it traverses the whole span of the sky. A ring of red string has been strung around the relaid part of the lawn. In a corner of the garden a bank of new plants has appeared, hemmed by a crop of plastic identity tags, all of them perfectly upright.

In the bread bin there are three types of bread. She takes the biggest loaf and saws off two thick wedges. Under a dish in the fridge she finds a drooping Camembert, an overripe Stilton and something the colour of a block of urine. Behind the dish, wrapped in a coat of foil, there’s a roasted chicken, which she might have been told to leave alone, but she’s not sure. It’s the only edible thing she can see, so she tears a few strips off the breast and lays them between the unbuttered slices. On the work surface, between the oven and the rack of spices, a cookery book lies open at a recipe for Fillet of Beef with Red Wine, Anchovies, Garlic & Thyme. Two postcards inserted between other pages seem to mark the other courses on tonight’s menu: Pea, Mint & Avocado Salad, with Strawberries in Dark Syrup to finish. ‘Dear K & R,’ she reads, on the back of a picture of a colossal gold Buddha, ‘This is the life!! Our room is ENORMOUS and the people here are so lovely and friendly they make you feel like you're one of the family. Weather is glorious and the beach is to die for! John went diving this morning and has really caught the bug – says he’s going to do it every day. Too much like hard work if you ask me! London seems a million miles away…’ Mixed in her mouth, the chicken and bread have formed a stringy paste that tastes of nothing but saliva. She lifts the top slice off the sandwich and examines the strips of flesh. They remind her of dead mice in the biology lab.

She grabs the phone but puts it down before keying any numbers, because at the back of her mind there’s an incident involving her father, in a shop. She is walking behind him, carrying a wire basket with handles that are covered in red rubber that has split. He stops by a big freezer and opens the door, but he doesn’t take anything out for a long time, and then finally he holds out a big box of frozen fish fingers, for her to say yes or no. He rubbed her hair every time he put something into the basket. Holding the half-eaten sandwich in one hand, she stares at the floor, trying to remember more, but the sight of her lumpen feet prevents her from thinking. She throws the sandwich into the bin.

On the low oak table in the living room this month’s magazines are stacked in a block, with Vogue at the top. She scans the tapes on the shelves behind the television: the tedious rugby games and tedious Grand Prix races, the Indiana Jones collection, the Humphrey Bogart collection, the Woody Allen collection, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, none of them watched since the day they were bought. Her father’s flat, she recalls, felt more like an office than a place where someone lived. The carpet was too thin for a living room, and he had a desk by the window, with a computer on it, and a pile of letters. He brought her meal out on a tray. She ate it on her knees, watching a cartoon on the television. The radiator in the bathroom was dusty. When she went to the toilet she ran her finger down one of the indentations in the radiator, and her fingertip came away black. The bookshelf at which she is looking is filled with autobiographies: the life stories of film stars, TV personalities, rugby players, mountain climbers, politicians, racing drivers, criminals, soldiers, cricket players, businessmen, nobodies. There is not a smudge of dirt anywhere on the carpet. It is like a pond of cream, and it makes her feel sick to look at it.

In the bathroom mirror she looks at her face, a face in which she sees none of her mother’s features, except for the shape of the eyes, which are deeply set, like her mother’s, and quite wide apart, like hers, but darker. She looks into those eyes and they look without intent into hers. Discarding the shirt, she regards the protruberant collarbone, the scatter of moles below the neck, the heavy breasts, the swell of the belly. It is like looking through a window at somebody else. She turns her hands over, palms up, then back. The fingers do not taper like her mother’s and the knuckles are more bulbous. On her wrist hangs the bracelet that her father sent her. ‘Typical,’ her mother kept saying, appalled that he’d given his daughter something second-hand for Christmas. Cheap and ugly and thoughtless, her mother said it was – worse than the tokens he usually sent. But she knew right away that it wasn’t cheap, even if it was ugly. She kept it in a box under the bed, and at night she would sometimes take it from its case and examine the waves that ran round it, and the things shaped like seeds of corn, and the weird little boggle-eyed man with the boxer’s broken nose, wondering what had made her father buy it for her, where he had bought it, what its story was. One day, at school, she saw a similar thing in a history book. Perhaps it was after seeing the picture that she began to look at the bracelet carefully and see that it wasn’t ugly. And the fact that her mother despised the thing had become part of its attraction. She smiles at the half-naked girl in the mirror, remembering the evening she had worn it, at a dinner for that boozy old bastard Mr Girtin and his pointless wife. She was thinner then, and could jam the bracelet nearly up to her elbow, but when she passed a bowl to Mrs Girtin it slipped out of her sleeve and her mother saw it before she could shove it back. From the look her mother gave her anyone would have thought she’d let rip with a fart. Buttoning the shirt, she goes back into her parents’ bedroom. She sits on the bed, pummels a pillow on her lap, deposits the phone on the pillow, and dials.

Malcolm takes a call from reception, telling him that there’s a Stephanie Tindall for him on line two.

‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Stephanie?’ He hears a clumsiness in the pronunciation of her name, as though his mouth were recovering from an anaesthetic.

‘Hi,’ says his daughter.

‘My God,’ he responds, too theatrically. ‘It’s you.’

‘Yeah,’ she says coolly, and pauses, as if he had been the one who had phoned and she is waiting to hear what he wants.

‘This is – I’m –’

‘Surprised?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Yes. You sound surprised,’ she confirms. There is a shade of an accent in her voice, ‘yis’ rather than ‘yes’.

‘Surprised and very pleased,’ he says. He stretches out a foot to push the door shut. ‘I thought I’d hear from your mother first.’

Stephanie gives a small grunt, perhaps of amusement. ‘Well, it’s me.’

‘After all this time.’

‘All this time,’ she copies.

‘So, how are you?’

‘I’m OK. How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Good.’

Having waited for her to say more, he prompts: ‘You didn’t sound altogether OK in your letter.’

‘I’m OK,’ she repeats expressionlessly, and again does not continue.

He makes a non-committal sound, hoping that she will speak. ‘You’re not, are you? Not really,’ he says at last.

She sighs loudly, then tells him: ‘We don’t get on. You spoke to her. You must have got the picture.’

‘Well, no. I don’t understand the situation. If the problem –’

‘The problem is that she’s who she is and he’s who he is and I’m who I am.’

‘Robert.’

‘The dentist. Yes.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never met the man.’

‘What, never?’

‘Not ever.’

‘Count your blessings. I’m telling you. He’s dull. Dull dull dull.’

‘Dull isn’t so bad. One can live with dull. I don’t see why –’ ‘He’s worse than dull.

He’s dullness to the power of ten. Dullness de luxe. And she’s awful. They’re driving me mental.’

‘She’s not awful. Stephanie. She can be difficult. I know she can be difficult. I can be difficult. We all can be. But I don’t think she’s –’

‘But you wouldn’t know, would you?’

‘Well, I think –’

‘No,’ she persists with the aggression of a prosecutor, ‘you wouldn’t know. More than ten years ago you two split up.’

‘Yes.’

‘And a lot can change in that time.’

‘Of course.’

‘You ought to try living here. It’s a police state. A cross between a police state and the Ideal Home Exhibition. That’s exactly what it is. Everything by the book. Everything in its place. All friends to be vetted, all homework to be signed off. Probably got my room bugged.’

‘Stephanie.’

‘Wouldn’t put it past her. She opens my letters –’

‘That wasn’t good. We had words about it.’

‘A fucking outrage is what it was.’

‘Stephanie, please.’

‘Please what?’

‘Don’t use language like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘No, come on. We’re talking about your mother. There’s no need –’

‘We’re talking about my mother and you’re starting to sound like her.’

‘No, just tone it down a little. I want to understand, but abusing her doesn’t help.’

‘It helps me,’ she retorts.

A silence fills the line between them. ‘So did you talk to her?’ he asks. ‘Did you talk to your mother about coming down here?’

‘Oh yeah. We had a talk, as recommended.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What did she say?’

‘It was brilliant. She wanted to know what I was doing writing to you, like I need official permission before putting pen to paper. So I wanted to know what she was doing snooping in my room, and since when has it been a crime to write to your own father? And then she throws a full-on berserk. “Robert is your father. This is your home. Why are you doing this?” Completely bonkers, chewing the carpet.’

‘She’ll calm down.’

‘Yeah. Sure. The day she’s buried.’

‘I think you should let her know that we’ve spoken.’

‘Oh yeah. And have her go ballistic again. Top idea.’

‘It’s best if she knows.’

‘It’s not going to happen. She’ll go totally mental.’

‘Tell a white lie. Say I phoned you.’

‘Won’t work. She’ll find out in the end. She’ll check the phone bill and see your number. She always checks the bill, every time. Like she’s worried I’m going to be spending all night on the blower to Mongolia or something.’

‘But –’

‘Look, I’m not going to say anything to her. There’s no point. I’m not doing it,’ she says, with such finality that their conversation stalls.

‘Perhaps I should ring her tonight?’

‘God, don’t do that. Friday night is social night. She wouldn’t want that ruined. This week’s special guest is Mr Dunne, the gum specialist. A man who’s devoted his life to gums.’

‘A valuable public service.’

‘And his wife’s an airhead. A Nazi airhead.’

‘A bit strong, Stephanie.’

‘No, really, she is. She opens her mouth: a torrent of crap comes out. Lesbians, the Irish, the French, students, anyone to the left of Pinochet – you name them, she hates them.’

‘You’ll be having a fun evening, then.’

‘Too right. I’m out to the movies.’

‘To see what?’

‘Dunno. Whatever’s on. Can’t be worse than Mr and Mrs Gums.’

‘I suppose not,’ he laughs insincerely. ‘Look, if she hasn’t phoned by Sunday evening, I’ll ring her, OK? Let’s not waste any more time. When would you like to come down, ideally?’

‘In about half an hour would suit me fine.’

‘Come on. When would be best?’

‘Whenever.’

‘All right. We’ll say as soon as possible, OK?’

‘Sure. Whatever. OK.’

‘Did you look at the brochure I sent?’

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

‘You’ll like the pool. You saw the picture?’

‘Yeah. It looked nice.’

‘And there’s a fantastic garden, with a tennis court. Do you play tennis?’

‘No. Haven’t got the build for swinging a racquet,’ she adds, with a mirthless chuckle.

‘Well, I can’t play tennis either,’ he says, then he notices the light for line one is flashing. ‘Sorry, Stephanie, can you hang on, just for a second? I have to take a call.’

‘No, you go,’ she tells him, perhaps taking offence at the interruption.

‘I’ll be just –’

‘It’s OK,’ she says impatiently. ‘I’ve got to scoot.’

‘One minute. There’s one –’

‘Really. I’ve got to go. See you.’ And then, as an afterthought, snatching the phone back from its cradle, she says airily: ‘Nice to talk.’ The light for line two goes dead, and then the light for line one.

He had imagined that something like joy would be what he would feel when he came to speak to Stephanie again, but instead what he feels is a light-headedness, and a measure of disappointment, not at her attitude towards him, but at her rancour towards her mother, a rancour that was audible in almost every word. He takes her letter from his pocket and reads a sentence or two, but it is irrelevant now, superseded by their conversation, a conversation he almost wishes had not happened, because it has tainted his anticipation of her arrival. Instantly brought closer to his daughter by the sound of her voice, he has been left somewhere that feels no closer at all.

He puts the letter back in his pocket and goes out of the office. About to enter the Randall Room, he sees Mr Morton seated in a wicker chair at the open door, alone, facing the garden, his face raised to receive the mildness of the breeze. He touches the door and Mr Morton turns his head.

The briefest expression of worry passes over the blind man’s brow and then comes a smile of comprehension. ‘Mr Caldecott,’ he says, raising a hand.

Arrested by the certainty with which Mr Morton has spoken his name, he stops at the table in the centre of the room. ‘Mr Morton. Could I bring you something?’ he asks. ‘Tea, perhaps? We have fresh scones and home-made preserves.’

‘Thank you, but no, I don’t think I will,’ says Mr Morton. ‘Later, possibly. For now, this will suffice,’ he says, gesturing towards the garden.

‘Another very pleasant day,’ he comments, preparing to withdraw.

‘Indeed,’ Mr Morton agrees. His fingers play chords on the tape recorder that lies in his lap.

‘We have some tapes you could borrow, if you’d like. Some Mozart symphonies, a bit of Haydn. We use them as background music at receptions. I don’t know if that’s your taste –’

‘Very kind of you,’ says Mr Morton. ‘I may take you up on that offer later. Perhaps this evening.’

He retreats a pace. ‘I’ll let you enjoy the afternoon in peace, then,’ he says, but as he reaches the door he hears the wicker crack. Turning round, he sees that Mr Morton has twisted in the seat to face him, as if suddenly remembering something he had intended to say. ‘If it’s not any trouble, a spot of Mozart would be welcome,’ he says.

When he returns with the tape, Mr Morton’s demeanour has changed. His face, turned down towards the machine in his lap, betrays a darkening mood, a distractedness like that of a reader whose book has led him to a dispiriting thought. ‘Very kind,’ Mr Morton repeats, and there is a sense of absence in the smile with which he takes the cassette.

‘Is there anything else I could get you?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Well, if you think of anything, there’s a bell here,’ he tells him, placing on an adjacent table the small brass bell he has brought from the reception desk. ‘There’ll be somebody right outside all afternoon, in the hall.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll leave you to Mozart and the weather,’ he says, but he remains by Mr Morton’s chair, looking at the cassette, which the blind man is holding as if it were an object of unknown purpose.

Mr Morton adjusts his posture, grasping the arms of the chair to straighten his back, blinking at the garden, like someone mustering his concentration at the recommencement of a concert. ‘Please don’t let me detain you, Mr Caldecott,’ he says, and the request in his voice is unmistakable.

‘I’m not exactly rushed off my feet.’

Mr Morton’s lower lip presses outward and he tilts back his head. ‘To tell you the truth, if you could spare me a couple of minutes, there are a few things I’d like to ask you.’

‘By all means,’ he says, pulling a chair closer.

Mr Morton bends his head right back and turns to left and right, as if taking the measure of the space around him. ‘We’re in the room with the paintings, yes?’

‘We are. The Randall Room.’

‘The Randall Room. The greenhouse,’ Mr Morton remarks, with a nod of amusement. ‘The friend who made the booking for me, he saw a picture of it on a website,’ he explains. ‘He said it made him think of a mad millionaire’s greenhouse.’

‘Yes, yes. I suppose it could be.’

‘The ceiling feels high.’

‘It is. Twenty feet.’

‘And there’s a chandelier? A large chandelier? Behind us?’

‘There is.’

‘OK,’ says Mr Morton, and the skin round his eyes tightens.

‘You knew there was a chandelier?’

‘I had an idea. When you walk underneath it, you can tell there’s something hanging above you. And the breeze is making something scrape up there.’

‘It is?’

‘Yes. Listen,’ says Mr Morton, lifting a forefinger like a conductor preparing to give a musician his cue.’

He listens, and hears nothing but the leaves shuffling in the wind.

‘There, you heard that?’

‘I heard something,’ he equivocates, and Mr Morton lowers his hand, gratified.

‘Now, this room,’ Mr Morton goes on. ‘A ballroom, would that be right?’

‘It was the Assembly Room, when the hotel opened.’

‘Which was?’

‘At the end of the eighteenth century. It was called the Angel, originally. Concerts were held here, and dances. Then, when the Angel became the Oak –’

‘Which was?’

‘1870. Then the new owner, Walter Davenport Croombe, he converted the Assembly Room into a winter garden and commissioned the paintings.’

‘From Randall.’

‘From Randall, precisely. William Joshua Forster Randall of Devizes.’

‘Not a name I know.’

‘I don’t think his fame ever extended much beyond the county.’

‘And what about the paintings? What do they depict?’

‘There’s a wedding in the country on one wall, and workers in the fields on the other side, sowing seed and tending livestock. The third wall is a landscape, with herds of cows and a lake, and distant mountains above the door.’

‘And the style? How do the people look?’

‘Modern folk in medieval costume. Ladies in conical headdresses, men in colourful stockings, with Victorian whiskers. The peasants are all impossibly healthy looking. We had an art teacher staying here, a couple of years ago. She said that Randall’s work was just an anthology of Pre-Raphaelite quotations. A bit of Millais, a bit of Rossetti, a bit of Burne-Jones.’

‘I don’t have a very clear idea of what that might mean, I’m afraid.’

‘No, of course. I’m sorry.’

‘No need. For all you know, I might once have been an aficionado of Burne-Jones. Do you like Mr Randall’s work?’

‘It’s not great art, I know that much, but I like what it does for the room. Gives it a certain gaiety.’

‘OK.’

‘And I like it because it has a story.’

‘Excellent,’ says Mr Morton, laying his hands on the arms of the chair to denote attentiveness.

‘Quite a long story.’

‘All the better,’ Mr Morton laughs, smacking the wicker arms. ‘I have an insatiable appetite for stories. So please, take as long as you like.’

‘OK. Well, our Mr Randall was something of a ladies’ man in his youth, until well into his forties, it appears. Then, finally, he was enticed to the altar by Elizabeth Drummond, the sole offspring of a local magistrate. Croombe commissioned these paintings seven or eight years later. Though then in his fifties, Randall was still a handsome man, slim and with a roguish glint to his eye. His self-portrait is in the wedding procession. He appears as a friar, walking next to a somewhat muscular nun.’

‘Elizabeth.’

‘Precisely. Now, when Randall was here, a rumour began to spread that he had become involved with a local farmer’s daughter, a girl by the name of Lily Corbin, who was around twenty at the time. Tongues started wagging when Randall included a portrait of Lily in his painting: she’s a serving girl at the banquet table. Not only that. The friar – Randall – is holding a book in his left hand, and if you continue a line from the index finger of that hand it leads you straight to Lily. For some people this was a clear sign that something was going on. Elizabeth certainly thought something was going on, because one afternoon she stormed in here, accused her husband of being a heartless adulterer and a corrupter of young women, and proceeded to stab him with a knife she’d taken from the kitchen. It’s said that as Randall staggered back some blood from his hand got onto the wet plaster, and that he later disguised the stains by painting a bank of poppies around them. There was something of a scandal, and Randall’s wife never let him out of her sight after that. Every day she followed him to the winter garden, and sat in the middle of the room all day long. As for Lily, she protested that nothing improper had occurred between herself and Mr Randall. She always insisted on their innocence, but the taint of sin remained with her, and she never married.

‘Now, our night porter, Mr Naylor, his father was a grocer down in the town, and Jack, Mr Naylor, used to go with him when he made deliveries to the outlying villages. This was after the war. One of their customers was an old lady who lived in a cottage on what had once been her parents’ farm. And of course this old lady was Miss Corbin. Some Sundays, Jack and his mother would cycle out to visit her. Jack would play outside while the women chatted in the kitchen. By this time Lily lived almost entirely on the ground floor of her cottage. She had her bed in the parlour, and her bathroom was downstairs. But one day there was a rainstorm and water started dripping through the ceiling of the landing. It was Jack who noticed the water coming through, and he took a bucket from the outhouse and went up the stairs to put it under the leak. Being just eight or nine years old, an inquisitive age, he couldn’t resist having a look around. He pushed at a door, and what he found was a dusty, cobwebbed room that had nothing in it – nothing, that is, except pictures. Dozens and dozens of pictures. Leaning against the wall there were paintings that had gone baggy in their frames. Albums full of drawings were heaped on the floorboards, with loose sheets of paper strewn all over the place.

‘That night Jack told his mother what he’d seen. It was through Jack’s mother that we learned more about Randall’s last years. It was known that Randall had returned to the Oak towards the end of his life, in 1895, after Croombe had installed electric lights in the hotel. The new lighting caused a sensation, but it didn’t flatter the paintings, Croombe thought. On the contrary; the colours looked wan and flat. He made enquiries, and discovered that Randall was still alive, living in Bristol, still painting, but Elizabeth had died a decade before and he was alone now. He was almost penniless, and in poor health, so when Croombe invited him to the Oak to retouch the murals, it was like a gift from heaven. He came back, spent a month as Croombe’s guest, worked on his paintings, and then returned to Bristol.’

Mr Morton has eased himself lower in the chair. His eyes have been closed for some time, but from small movements of his lips it had been clear for a while that he was attending to every phrase. Now, however, there is no sign that he is listening. He may even be asleep.

He leans gradually towards the blind man, who now sits up and faces him, frowning. ‘Is that the end?’ asks Mr Morton.

‘Not quite,’ he replies, backing off, like a shoplifter accosted on the point of pocketing something.

‘I thought not. Go on,’ Mr Morton commands, reclining again.

‘Well, that was the story that everyone knew: that Randall did the job, went home to Bristol and died there,’ he continues. ‘In fact, Randall took a detour on his way home. He went in search of Lily Corbin, and found her living at the farm where she had been living when he first came to the Oak, though now she was in the cottage that used to be occupied by the herdsman. As Lily told it, she answered a knock on her door late one afternoon, and there was her younger brother, Alfred, standing in the drizzle beside a bedraggled old man, whom he shoved towards her as if he were some vagrant he’d found thieving from the henhouse. Alfred said the old man’s name was Mr Barlow, but she’d recognised him straight away. She wasn’t going to say anything, however, not with her brother there, because her family had always blamed her for the affair with the painter. It was because of the affair that nobody had ever wanted to marry her. And when she got him inside, out of the rain, she didn’t have a chance to say anything, because before she could get a word in Randall launched into a great speech about his love for her, how her face and voice had haunted him every morning and every night for these past twenty years and more, how he had reproached himself for his cowardice in not leaving his wife. He was a beggar now, he said, not merely in appearance but in his heart as well. He knelt at her feet on the cold stone floor of her kitchen, pouring out his heart while rainwater dripped from his straggly hair. He looked ridiculous, she thought, and he was talking nonsense. Perhaps he had indeed fallen in love with her in the course of that summer month, when they had walked along the river together. Certainly she had fallen in love with him. It was the one time in her life, that month, that she had been as happy as she had been as a child, but it was too many years ago. Her heart had withered. He told her that he had been back to the room where he had painted her portrait, that he had repainted the face of one of the shepherdesses, to make her the twin of the beautiful serving girl. He had painted a lily by her feet, in honour of her, as a sign of his love. She was no longer the beautiful serving girl, she pointed out, but he told her that she was wrong, and started quoting poetry at her. She looked at William as he knelt in a little puddle on the floor of her freezing kitchen, and what she saw was not the man she had loved when she was twenty, but a man she did not know, a lonely and fearful old man, and she felt pity for him.

‘Randall came to his senses, and learned to content himself with pity. He vacated his home in Bristol and went to live on the upper floor of Lily Corbin’s cottage, while she lived below. When Randall fell ill with pneumonia, nearly two years after he’d moved into the cottage, she nursed him until he died. In his will he left her everything, though there wasn’t much to leave, except the pictures he’d painted in her house. She stored them in the room in which Randall had worked and slept, and rarely looked at them, she said.

‘By the time that Jack and his mother were visiting Lily, the hotel had fallen into disrepair and was boarded up. During the war it was used as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen, having gone out of business in the 1920s. Randall’s paintings were whitewashed over and this room became a ward. In 1945 the Oak was boarded up again, so when Jack came up here, to take a look at the pictures he’d heard Lily talk about, the garden was wild and had started to invade the building. Vines were creeping across the walls and there was grass coming up through the floor. Armed with a torch, Jack would slip in here and try to find the portraits of Lily. Some faces could be seen through the veil of whitewash, but not many, and the whole room had grown a coat of fungus and moss. It was like a magic grotto, with the sun shining through the cracks between the boards, and the painted people lurking underneath the greenery and mould. He’d shine his torch across the walls, trying to find Lily, but he never saw any shepherdess and the only serving girl he could see looked nothing like the old lady at the farm. He described the serving girl to her, but she couldn’t say if he’d found her, because she’d never seen the room herself. All she knew was that the friar’s forefinger was pointing at her, so Jack went looking for the friar, but he couldn’t see him either. It wasn’t until long after Lily had died, when the Oak reopened and this room was restored, that he knew for a fact which of the girls had been Lily. And of course it turned out to be the serving girl he’d picked out with his torch.’

Mr Morton opens his eyes, blinking as if emerging from a daydream. ‘So she must have been in her nineties, when Jack was a boy?’

‘A month short of her hundredth birthday when she died in 1949. The farm was down on the Bath Road, a couple of miles from here. There’s a supermarket on the site now, and a DIY superstore.’

Facing the glass wall, Mr Morton raises his eyebrows as though at a screen on which a film had just been shown. ‘Quite a tale,’ he comments.

‘One I’ve told many times, as you’ll have gathered. But not always at such length. Sorry. I went on a bit.’

‘Not at all. Not at all,’ Mr Morton assures him. A smile begins to form and then melts, and his expression settles into thoughtful composure as he ponders the tale of Randall and Lily Corbin and Jack Naylor.

‘I’ll leave you to your music.’

His lips form an unspoken word, then he says: ‘Not music. Homework.’ Smiling, he places the machine on the arm of the chair. With a finger poised above the Play button, he asks: ‘Would you like to hear?’

‘By all means,’ he replies, and a woman’s voice comes out of the machine, speaking Italian. In a wistful lilt the voice recites four or five lines that sound like poetry, lines in which can be heard words that must mean ‘sun’ and ‘herb’ and ‘rose’.

Mr Morton turns off the tape and smiles in the way one would smile at a souvenir that has awakened ambivalent memories. ‘“La donzelletta vien dalla campagna, | In sul calar del sole,”’ he repeats. ‘“Col suo fascio dell’erba, e reca in mano| Un mazzolin di rose e di viole,| Onde, siccome suole,| Ornare ella si appresta | Dimani, al dì di festa, il petto e il crine.”’ Solemnly, holding the recorder between his palms, he translates: ‘“The girl strolls homeward from the fields|As the sun is setting, | With a sheaf of grass and, in her hand, | A posy of roses and violets | With which, tomorrow, | As every Sunday, she will adorn | Her bodice and her hair.” A poem,’ he explains, ‘by Giacomo Leopardi,’ and continues, intuiting the response: ‘An Italian poet, a great poet, but in Britain hardly known. Hence my vainglorious mission to translate his poems into English.’

‘You’re a translator?’

‘But not of poetry. More prosaic material, usually: essays, sleeve notes, memoirs, guidebooks, brochures, anything that’ll pay the bills. Leopardi is a private project.’

‘No one’s translated him before?’

‘There’s always room for more. Not that my versions will be better than anyone else’s. They’ll miss the target too, but differently. I miss, we all miss, but every missed shot is useful. Like arrows peppering the bull’s-eye. The poem is the shape in the middle,’ says Mr Morton, his fingers forming a circle of arrow shafts in the air.

‘What were the lines again?’

Evidently expecting the request, Mr Morton repeats promptly, with exactly the same intonation as before, ‘“La donzelletta vien dalla campagna, | In sul calar del sole, | Col suo fascio dell’erba, e reca in mano | Un mazzolin di rose e di viole, | Onde, siccome suole, | Ornare ella si appresta | Dimani, al dì di festa, il petto e il crine.”’ He rewinds the tape and plays it again, and the female voice recites the words, the same words, but in her voice they are changed, sounding not like a report, as they sounded when Mr Morton spoke them, but rather like a confession whispered in the dark, to herself.

‘Beautiful,’ he responds, and Mr Morton nods, gravely, as if this were not a fatuous thing to have said. ‘When was he born?’

‘Around the same time as your hotel. Born 1798, died 1837.’

‘A short life.’

‘Short and miserable. He was never a happy man, but he had a lot to be unhappy about. With Leopardi you get the full panoply of romantic suffering: poor health, unrequited love – though I have to say that he tended to fall in love after the event, as it were, or with women he knew would not reciprocate. I think his infatuations were essentially literary. There’s something artificial about them, something willed. For his poetry he needed to be unloved. And women weren’t the worst of his troubles.’

‘The worst being –?’

‘His body.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘His appearance was unprepossessing, to say the least. In Naples he was nicknamed “o ranavuottolo”, the little toad. He was very small, with a large head, and his upper body was badly twisted. His digestive system didn’t function properly. He was asthmatic. He had chronic bronchitis. The deformity of his spine and ribcage was so bad that it damaged his lungs and heart. Fatally damaged them. And as if that weren’t enough,’ Mr Morton goes on, ‘he was raised in a moribund little town, in thrall to the pious tyranny of his mother. Imagine this,’ he enjoins. ‘Giacomo is barely four years old. An infant. He enters the great room of the Palazzo Leopardi, the salone. In the centre there is a huge table, decked in red velvet. Giacomo crosses the room. He pulls himself up to peep over the top of the table. And what does he discover? The body of his little brother, laid out on a velvet bed. And how does his mother comfort him? She tells him that she is rejoicing in the boy’s death. She is rejoicing because his death has sent another soul to the ranks of the blessed.’ Incredulous, indignant, Mr Morton cites other instances of the Contessa’s pitiless devotion to God, of her severity towards Giacomo and towards her husband, the proud and ineffectual and kindly Count Monaldo, who once gave his trousers to a beggar and hobbled home wrapped in his cloak, terrified lest his wife discover his act of charity, and towards her daughter, Paolina, who was forbidden to meet her penfriends when they came to Recanati from Bologna, because her mother regarded friendship as a contamination of one’s love of the Almighty. ‘And yet,’ Mr Morton sighs, raising his hands, acceding to the argument of an imaginary opponent, ‘when Giacomo at last escapes from the prison of Recanati he is no happier. For the first time in his life he is free of his family. He is free of the backwater in which it was his misfortune to be born. For six days his carriage rumbles across Italy, and what does he do? He reads his books, barely glancing out of the window.’ He shakes his head with indulgent perplexity, as if he were a travelling companion of Leopardi, observing the eccentric young man seated opposite him. ‘Giacomo goes to Rome,’ he continues, ‘and finds the big city no more to his liking than life in the provinces. Unimpressed by the great monuments, unmoved by its ruins, irked by the people he has to mix with, he claims to find pleasure only in one small corner of the city, one tiny enclave of pleasurable misery: the tomb of Torquato Tasso, in the church of Sant’Onofrio, where he wept for the poor mad poet. In Pisa too he finds a refuge from the vexations of city life, not a chapel or a tomb on this occasion, but a simple lane, a spot that becomes dear to him because – wait for it – it reminds him of Recanati, his birthplace, the town in which he had passed his youth, a period he has now come to regard as his single fleeting episode of true contentment. An impossible person. Precious and self-centred. A dilettante. An inveterate adolescent,’ Mr Morton pronounces, pausing to flop his hands apart in exasperation. ‘And yet, and yet. Adolescents are very often right. And his voice is wonderful. Wonderful,’ he repeats, his eyes following a scribble in the air, as though tracking the flight of a butterfly. ‘So simple, so clear.’

He listens, a little unnerved by Mr Morton’s flittering gaze and by the urgency of his speech. ‘Like a fantastically wealthy man who has taken a vow of poverty,’ says Mr Morton, but the disturbance created by Stephanie, which had abated for as long as the story of Lily and William Randall lasted, has returned now, and become so obtrusive that the voice of his daughter and the voice of Mr Morton are clashing, the one extolling the virtues of an unknown poet, the other berating a woman he no longer knows. Over Mr Morton’s shoulder he looks askance at the garden, weakly ashamed of his inattention, and then, not without a sense of relief, he hears a third voice, calling his name from the doorway, telling him that Mr Grenville is on the phone again. ‘If you’ll excuse me?’ he says, standing up.

Mr Morton too stands up, and shakes his hand firmly. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

Leaving the Randall Room, he looks back and sees Mr Morton on the garden terrace, with his feet widely parted and his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back, like a man on a sea wall, taking the brunt of the wind. And that night, after supper, when he goes out into the garden, he sees Mr Morton standing by the hornbeam hedge, in exactly the same stance.

Becoming aware of his presence, Mr Morton turns and dips his head, once, as if greeting him for the resumption of the afternoon’s conversation. ‘I heard an owl,’ he grins.

‘Really?’ Side by side, arms crossed, they listen together. ‘I hear the road.’

‘Wait.’ Patiently Mr Morton waits, his eyes wide open in the moonlight. ‘There,’ he whispers, remaining perfectly still, as though the bird were so near that any movement might scare it.

‘Didn’t hear a thing.’

‘In that direction,’ Mr Morton tells him, pointing towards the town. ‘There,’ he whispers again.

‘Nothing but lorries, I’m afraid.’

‘Try closing your eyes.’

‘They were closed.’

‘Ah.’

‘I always hear the road. I have a grudge against it. The beginning of the end, the day they finished the bypass. It ruined the view, to say nothing of the din.’

‘The end of what?’

‘Of the Oak. It’s closing.’

‘When?’

‘In three weeks.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘No. The website does rather fudge the issue. Can’t be seen to be advertising failure,’ he says, apologetically, and within a minute he is complaining about the lackadaisical stewardship of the Beltram Group. ‘Things took a turn for the worse in the year the bypass was cut. It costs money, a lot of money, to maintain a hotel of this type, but they just let it drift. The foot and mouth outbreak was the nail in the coffin. Now they’re selling up, to a London property developer, who’s going to turn the Oak into a rural getaway for overstressed high-flyers on a members-only basis. There’ll be a cinema and a gym and a sauna. Aromatherapy, yoga, massage, manicure, pedicure. A room full of video games. And the pool, apparently, is going to be wired up so the burned-out whizz-kids can float to the soothing sounds of tropical surf or a rainforest or the wind in the trees, relayed from microphones in the garden.’

And soon he is leading Mr Morton down the flight of steps below the dining room, along the corridor, past the boiler room and the laundry. Nearing the angle where the corridor turns and slopes downward, he attempts half a dozen steps with his eyes shut, guided by memory and the report of their footsteps on the concrete floor. At the foot of the ramp he unfastens the cabinet and turns the bakelite dials inside, while Mr Morton, raising his face into the dim radiance of the 40-watt bulb, inhales deeply, as if the bulb were an exotic flower from which a bewitching perfume is falling. With a push of his back he opens the door, putting out a hand to help Mr Morton over the raised wooden strip on the threshold.

Some of the lanterns are still quivering into life, sending flashes across the turquoise tiles. In the pool, hemispheres of blue light shine like fantastic sea anemones and at the farther end of the pool there is a vein of turbulence, a colourless plait, where fresh water flows from the pipe, creating an infinitesimal swell that expires before it can reach the mid-point of the pool, where the wall lanterns are reflected as if in a block of quartz. It has always delighted him, this place, especially at night, when it’s absolutely quiet and still, and you emerge from the dingy corridor into this subterranean cave, with its glistening walls and the dark blue ceiling that curves above the water like a night-coloured tent. He imagines bringing Stephanie here at night, then he presents the room to Mr Morton. ‘This is another of Walter Davenport Croombe’s improvements,’ he tells him. ‘When the Oak opened for business there was a little pavilion in the grounds, in which guests and visitors could drink the water that was pumped up from the spring farther down the valley. Croombe, on one of his tours of the Continent, came across Europe’s first indoor thermal swimming pool, at a hotel called the Quellenhof. Five years later the Oak had its pool. A bigger shaft was sunk into the hill and machines were made in Bristol to draw the water and filter it, and to raise the temperature a little. To take the spartan edge off it.’

Crouching by the side of the pool, Mr Morton dabbles a hand in the water. A low wave travels slowly across the pool and on the opposite shore it spills into the gutter, lifting into view a small dark object, a leaf it looks like. ‘Invigorating,’ Mr Morton remarks, stirring his hand.

Jostled by the succession of wavelets, the object in the gutter rises and falls. ‘Will you excuse me for a second?’ he asks. ‘There’s a bench here, behind you, beside the door,’ he says, rapping the wood. He walks round the pool and kneels on the floor above the spot where the piece of debris is caught. Leaning out, he peers along the gutter and sees the corpse of a mouse. ‘I just have to fetch something,’ he calls to Mr Morton. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

Mr Caldecott’s voice rebounds from a roof that sounds low. Amplified by the space, the footsteps of Mr Caldecott move to the left, on the opposite side of the pool, and at a distance of fifteen yards or so they stop, whereupon a heavy door closes with a thump like a slack bass drum. Edward shakes the water from his hands. The air smells like an autumn morning. He drags his hand through the water to listen to the lick of the wave he has set in motion. Touching a wet finger to his tongue he tastes limescale faintly, and something else, a subtle and unpleasant ingredient that he cannot identify. He tries to match the taste in his memory, but his search is encumbered by tiredness and by the thoughts that are pressing upon him. While Mr Caldecott talked in the garden he had recalled the sullenness with which he had spoken to his mother. In his fingers he could feel the trembling of his mother’s hand and he can feel it now, as he hears the pitying cadence of her voice, pronouncing his name, and then he hears what Claudia said to him this evening. ‘Your sense isn’t my sense,’ she said, as though acknowledging a difference she had striven to overcome. ‘For me there is one thing more important than all, and I thought for you it was the same. But it is not the same. I misunderstood,’ she admitted, and he was surprised to feel angry with her. ‘You are a German inside an Englishman’s skin,’ she told him. ‘Wearing an Italian suit,’ he joked, but she did not think that was funny. He hears his father saying ‘You know best, son,’ saying it with a sadness that may be misremembered, and he tightens his hand, as though to steady his mother’s. Then the door opens and Mr Caldecott is back. Something light strikes the water, followed by a sprinkling of droplets.

Malcolm teases the dead mouse into the net. Its body, belly to the mesh, bends like a piece of soft mud. He looks across at Mr Morton: he is running his fingers over a section of the wall, with his cheek almost brushing the tiles, as if he were listening for something behind them. It is nearly half past ten. Stephanie will be coming home from the cinema about now.

‘What’s this?’ Mr Morton calls.

‘A medallion of carnations, white and tomato-red, on a turquoise background, with a frame of tulips. A Turkish theme,’ he explains, and he describes for Mr Morton the decoration of the walls and the star-scattered ceiling. ‘Shall we go out this way?’ he suggests, then he puts a hand under Mr Morton’s elbow to lead him back up to the ground floor, past the drinking fountain with the marble lattice, and the side room that houses the copper tubs in which guests could lie for hours in the restorative water.