Читать книгу The Antique Dealer’s Daughter - Lorna Gray - Страница 11

This new morning began with company and friendliness, where yesterday had ended with loneliness and worries. The nearby shop – and by nearby I mean at the end of a heating two-mile walk to the bus stop and beyond – stood a few doors down from Mrs Winstone’s hairdresser in a sunken lane with sheep pasture beyond. The most sinister thing I encountered in that busy place while I made the sacrifice of funds and rations for the sake of the Colonel’s lunch was the welcome offered by the shopkeeper and her mildly mildewed husband and the collection of respectable mature ladies who used the shop as a waiting room for the doctor’s house next door. They seemed to take their slice of gossip as a kind of tithe on users of the public telephone.

Which meant in a way that it was perhaps fortunate that I failed to reach my cousin on the ward telephone at the hospital. If I had, I’d have unwittingly filled the assembled ears with enough gossip to keep their mouths working for the next few days at least. Instead, I only got to speak to a nurse, who wouldn’t even confirm that there was a Miss P Jones on the women’s ward at present. The most she would say was that the telephone trolley would be on the ward for the patients’ use at six o’clock this evening and I could try again then, which wasn’t terribly useful since sometime in the course of last night I had discovered the idea of achieving a different and more enjoyable kind of flight in the form of going down to join Phyllis today. It would be typical if it turned out that as I travelled down on the bus to Gloucester, she should be travelling up towards her home.

I’d left my suitcase at the Manor. It would save at least part of this long walk if I decided to make the trip anyway. It was a good job too because I knew I’d never have found the courage to climb back up out of the valley otherwise. The walk back to the village on its own seemed designed for exhaustion. It was hot already and a heat haze was casting mirages amongst the tall masts of the wireless station by that bus stop. Only one car passed me on the long lane and it was fortunate that I had about a mile’s warning before it came into view because, unbelievably, it nearly ran me over. It barrelled down into a dip between farm buildings like a rude black beast of a bull and sent a chip of stone flying up onto my ankle while I politely waited on the verge. Then it vanished around a bend and took the roar of its motor with it.

I thought I’d found it parked in the massive stone barn that flanked the Manor farmyard. No one was in the village again and the farmyard had renewed its camouflage of dereliction. I’d walked that way round to the Colonel’s kitchen door after doing my duty by knocking on Mr Winstone’s door first. He wasn’t there. No one spent their days at home here.

The long black nose of the enormous car was occupying the cusp between light and shade beneath the great gaping threshing doors of the barn. A touch to its bonnet proved that the engine was warm. Movement emerged from the depths within and it was Danny Hannis’s dog. He sauntered out from the left-hand wing of the barn. It was now that I saw that this great building was no longer dedicated to grain processing. Half of the space within was consumed by the unmistakeable profile of a shrouded steam engine. The other bay housed rusting hay rakes and implements and a very expensive modern grey tractor which looked similarly like it had already worked very hard for its keep.

There was no sign of the man but the dog was a curious soul. He supervised me as I abandoned this dark cathedral for farming technology. He was with me when I caught the distant murmur of a voice beyond the turn of the other barn; the older one that sagged beneath the weight of its years and ranged further up the hill to meet the Manor kitchen.

It wasn’t a happy voice. It was a low stutter of ‘m’s, like a moan. My first thought naturally enough was of Mr Winstone. My second was for that missing housekeeper.

There it was again, to my left behind a low door into this second barn. It was a low mumble like an injured soul might make, or a hostage, bound and gagged. It made me grasp another concept of horror. The one where a forgotten woman lay unheeded for days on end.

The cobbled space between house and barn was empty. So were the long terraces of the garden. There was no other sound of life here. Other than the dog, I mean. He was at my heels and the only sound he made was the faint click-click of claws on the cobbled ground.

It was the stuff nightmares are built on. I had to ease open the door into an ancient space. I had to wake to the guilt of knowing I’d meant to look last night for conclusive signs that the housekeeper really had left, only I’d been distracted by the way Freddy had appeared. The door was set on surprisingly well-oiled hinges between ancient walls several feet thick. Within was a long narrow stone-flagged passage that ran like a cave along the painted face of wood-panelled stalls and loose-boxes and pillars that supported a low hayloft. This barn had been a tithe barn in its former life – a vast storeroom for a medieval wealth of grain – but its recent job had been to house the Manor stables and, like the rest of this place, its grandeur stood as a monument to neglect after the loss of the son. A set of heavily bolted carriage doors stood at the far end as a bar to freedom and daylight. All the Manor buildings seemed to have issues with good light. The only light here came from about five unglazed slits spread along the barn’s length and the small open door by my side. Dust hung in the narrow beams of sun-shot air, waiting for a breeze.

Mrs Cooke the housekeeper wasn’t here. No one was, at least no person. The murmur came from a lonely goat living in quiet luxury in the stable that was tucked at the end of the row beneath the steps to the hayloft. I’d never met a goat before. This one had his own lancet window and he was a friendly beast, albeit slightly alarming when his head suddenly appeared at eye height, with his front feet hooked over the stable door. He was also rather too interested in the forgotten parcel of groceries in my hands. I left him with a promise to return later with the scraps.

The dog left me at the kitchen door. Alone again in the dry stillness inside I laid out my collection of salad stuff and wondered just how exactly I expected this meagre fare to do for the squire’s lunch. Then I remembered that the note my cousin’s friend’s had added to her letter had included the name of the woman who would sell me eggs. It seemed that someone lived by day in this place after all. She was tiny and crabbed and the luxurious cluster of eggs she unearthed in a vacant cowshed behind the steward’s house was a far cry from the paltry one egg allowance Putney residents had enjoyed each week provided that they were in stock. Our transaction was also mildly illegal but I was hardly going to complain, particularly when she was kind enough to give me butter and half a loaf of bread for the Colonel’s lunch too.

Phyllis’s letters were always a source of information. Apart from the recent missive that was presently lodged in my suitcase and bore the crucial invitation to visit and directions to her door, I also had the memory of a hundred or so more that spanned the years and had come from various corners of the world. She was, as implied by my father’s use of the unattractive term spinster, an unmarried woman of independent habits. But I didn’t think she entirely warranted the term when she was in fact only thirty-one and, besides, I thought it a terrible way to summarise the contribution made by a woman who belonged to that generation of intellectuals who were recruited immediately in 1939 to lend their expertise to the various specialist branches of the War Office. Phyllis had been called up to do something very interesting with maps; her background was in geography.

My letters to her were the childish musings of a girl penned during the quiet times at the chemists. Phyllis’s bold and witty replies were invariably written from obscure locations made even more obscure by the heavy hand of the censors, until they said only that she was well and that the weather was fair – meaning Scotland, I thought – or bracing – perhaps Shetland – or enjoyably temperate, which I took to mean somewhere hot and therefore foreign. The impressive Grecian vases nestling amongst her mother’s clutter in the hall told their own story about where that might have been.

Unfortunately, I had neither my cousin nor one of her letters to guide me now. I was setting the hardboiled eggs to cool in a fresh pan of cold water – indoor taps in this kitchen, of course, presumably drawing spring water from a delightfully hygienic cistern – when I heard a clunk from the depths of the house. It manifested itself into a clatter from the floor above, followed by the bang of a door slamming at the front of the house. It reverberated along the passage and into the dining room and from there to me in the kitchen. It even made me cast an anxious glance out through the window in case a sudden squall had blown in, which it hadn’t, and then it made me recollect my suitcase left any old how by the kitchen table, as if I were expecting the Colonel to invite me to stay.

I moved to retrieve it and found it wasn’t there. But someone was indeed at the front of the house. Scurrying through the gloom of the dining room and then the passage, I learned that the bang had been a door being flung open. I’d assumed it had been the sound of it blowing shut. The distinction mattered because now I found the weighty front door thrown wide, letting in sunlight and flies, and a man heading up the stairs.

He was a short man in a dark suit and he had a suitcase in his hand. My suitcase.

He was oblivious to me. He seemed intent on marching upwards two steps at a time. There was a car outside, black and ordinary, like a cab the Colonel might have taken from his solicitor’s office. I reached the curving scroll at the foot of the banister as the driver’s foot disappeared out of sight.

I called some form of surprise up at him and set foot upon the stairs, I believe because I thought he was a respectable cab driver taking the passenger’s bags to his room and he had somehow managed to confuse my bags for the Colonel’s and it was my duty to correct the mistake. Only then the nature of the man’s gait changed. Before it had been confident, decisive. Now, at the sound of my voice, he snapped round and charged with a clatter of footfalls back into view again. I heard his breathing. Rapid and light and not very friendly at all. There was a rush and a thump and a lasting impression of the beautiful plasterwork on the ceiling as I reeled for the banister. I thought for a moment he must have launched off the top step and landed on me. Then I thought he must have bolted blind straight past and caught me with the case. Finally I realised he hadn’t done either and had the sudden cringing discovery that the man was beside me.

This space was light. White walls, white plasterwork and blinding sunlit glass. The tan case swung above me at about the height that might batter my head. There was a moment when a hand caught in my hair. Then it let me go with a suddenness that shocked almost as much as the impact had, leaving me to discover pain beneath my arm that would later reveal itself as a vivid bruise and also to taste the unpleasantness of a cut lip where I had bitten it while clutching painfully at the solid support of the wooden rail.

There was a crash below as he charged out through the door and missed his step, to turn an ankle where the stone flags met gravel. Then there was a roar as an engine kicked into life. I twisted there, hanging from my wooden anchor, catching my breath, and watched as a battered black Ford veered unevenly away up the curve of the drive towards the lane. I thought he turned right at the end, downhill.

I did nothing. The only thing I could state and did state later with any confidence was that this imposter’s bald head was most definitely a long way removed from Mr Winstone’s lean attacker.