Ancient Images (18 page)

    Was he someone else who'd been distracted by intruders on the set of the film, or at least by the director's paranoia? "I was Mr. Karloff," he said loosely. "I fell off the tower."

    She had to go on, even if it disturbed him. "What did you see at the window?"

    His gaze began to rove again, so desperately she wished she hadn't asked. He stared at the walls and the quilt, and his hands began to pluck at the latter as if he wanted to tear the images of flowers off the cover. He stared past her, and she glanced nervously out of the window. The only figure in sight would be out of his, an old woman on a lawn chair, reading a book printed so large that Sandy could read it at that distance if she strained her eyes. When she turned to the stuntman, his gaze had quietened and was back in the sky. "The dogs," he mumbled like a last trace of an answer.

    "What about dogs, Mr. Tomlinson?"

    "Mr. Lugosi. He was worried about the dogs."

    "Oh, his pets," Sandy remembered. "He couldn't bring them to England because of the quarantine regulations."

    For the first and only time, Tomlinson looked directly at her. His face quivered with strain, whether to call a memory to mind or to fend it off she couldn't tell. The quivering spread to his lips, which fell open. By the time he finished speaking, his gaze had drifted back to the sky, and neither Sandy nor the nurse was able to provoke any further response. "Not his dogs," he said windily. "The dogs he saw and I did. The dogs with a man's face, and things growing in their eyes."

    Only her sense of the absurd let Sandy approach the reception desk at the hotel. She'd already canceled one booking today, and now she was going to cancel another. She told the receptionist that unexpectedly she had to visit her parents. It wasn't quite a lie, more a way of making herself seem less unreliable. She'd meant to visit them soon anyway, she told herself. They lived less than an hour away from her route to the Lakes. She wanted to make her peace with them if she could, but wouldn't she also welcome the chance to be safe with her family while she tried to think over the last few weeks? Once she admitted that to herself, she was so uncertain of her motives that she didn't call her parents before she set out from Birmingham.

    She drove out of a bunch of lorries on the motorway and sped north for an hour. As soon as she grew used to the speed, a song began to run through her head: "D'ye ken John Peel in his coat so gray?" She'd left Tomlinson singing that line over and over almost tunelessly as he smiled at the sky and feebly tweaked the quilt. The song was part of the score of the film, but knowing that didn't help her dislodge it from her brain. It had been too bloodthirsty for her taste when she was a child, and now the tune dredged up lines which she was perhaps remembering inaccurately but which still made her uncomfortable: "… from the chase to a view, from a view to a death in the morning…", "… and the cry of his hounds would awaken the dead…" and one she had never understood: "D'ye ken that bitch whose tongue is death?" Sounds like another case of blaming the female, she thought, but the thought didn't help much. When she reached the division of the motorways, she followed the route to Liverpool.

    She cruised through the town for a few minutes. Many of the buildings she remembered from her childhood had been ousted by anonymous shopping malls, and she felt so disoriented that she headed for the tunnel at once, though driving under the river made her claustrophobic. Midway she glimpsed a figure emerging from the subterranean wall onto the walkway alongside the road. He must have been a workman, and of course he wasn't chasing her; he must have gone down on all fours to examine something. She was glad to be back on the motorway beyond the toll booths and racing, however briefly, before she turned off toward the sea.

    Beyond Hoylake the houses and their grounds grew larger, more aloof. At West Kirby the peninsula rose to show a panorama of the Irish Sea beyond an obelisk. A tanker gleamed on the horizon and eased itself down over the edge of the world. Sandy took the road opposite the obelisk, toward the farms and the common. Her parents lived just out of sight of the sea. She parked outside the small detached white house, and was opening her door when her mother ran to her along the garden path.

    She hugged Sandy and kissed her and called past her, almost deafening her: "See, I told you it was Sandra's car. Didn't I tell you this morning I could feel we were going to have a visitor?" She touched Sandy's ear and grimaced apologetically, the wrinkles around her large brown eyes and at the corners of her wide dry lips multiplying, before another smile fluttered across her broad face. "I knew it was going to be you," she whispered, "but there's no use trying to persuade your father."

    He came to the front door and peered over his reading glasses, and ducked his head to his hand as always to remove the glasses. Because Sandy remembered him as reading throughout her childhood, to himself or to her, his topheavy face with its pale blue eyes blinking at the low sun looked unprotected; his small ears seemed to have nothing to do now that the heavy earpieces weren't hooked over them. He screwed up his eyes and limped forward, and gave her a hug that smelled of tweed and pipe tobacco and a hint of rosin. "This is a treat. We were hoping to hear from you. You'll be staying, won't you? As long as you like."

    "I thought overnight, if it isn't too much trouble," Sandy told her mother.

    "How could you ever be too much trouble? You know your room is only the guest room when you aren't here. Where will you be off tomorrow?"

    "Up to the Lakes."

    "The good old Lakes. Your father and I stayed there once for a dirty weekend," Sandy's mother cried, and glanced about in case the neighbors had heard.

    "We hadn't realized you were due for a holiday," Sandy's father said, "or is this work?"

    "They've given me time off to recover."

    "We discovered just the other week that two of your father's quartet were gay," her mother said before the silence could grow awkward. "They told us halfway through a Mozart recital. We were flattered they felt they could tell us."

    Her father gave Sandy another squeeze and stepped back. "Carry your bags, miss."

    "You settle yourself in, Sandra, and then we'll have a drink and a chat before we go out for dinner."

    Her father dropped her cases at the foot of the bed and waited until Sandy said, "I'll be down in a few minutes." She kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the counterpane she and her mother had made together one Christmas. The room still felt like hers, with the furniture and floral wallpaper and curtains that she'd chosen as a teenager, and being in it still felt like taking a breather. Today her parents were more emotionally overwhelming than ever, though perhaps by displaying their broadmindedness they were trying to convey obliquely that they were prepared to forget last week's disagreement. She seemed hardly to have lain on the bed when her father called, "What drink will you have?" She sighed and shouted her preference, and soon she went downstairs.

    Her mother was waiting to show her the work she was doing in the botanical gardens at Ness, sketches of rare plants in all their seasons. Sandy sat on a Queen Anne chair in the front room, which was moderately full of elegantly carved furniture whose lines seemed to be developed by the silvery Oriental patterns of the wallpaper, and sipped her gin while she admired the sketchbook. "That one was a little swine," her mother said as Sandy reached the last drawing. "I just hope your London shops won't think the book is too provincial when it's done at last."

    "I'll make sure every one of them stocks it. I'm looking forward to being able to say it's by my mother."

    "Yes," her mother said, so tentatively that Sandy wondered what she wasn't saying.

    "Here's to it," her father said, elevating his Martini.

    The three of them clinked glasses. "And to the Liverpool Philharmonic," Sandy said.

    "Long may they let me saw," her father said. "Which reminds me, I must buy some rosin."

    "Colophony prevents cacophony," Sandy said for him.

    "How old were you when you learned that? Too young to stay up for a concert, I remember. Lord, how many things we bury in our memories to be revived to brighten our declining years."

    "If you two are declining, the rest of the country may as well bury itself."

    "I suppose there's some life in us yet, right enough. Here's to yours."

    "Amen," her mother cried, and paused. "Someone in your line of business was asking to be remembered to you, Sandra."

    "Who was that?"

    "An old boyfriend of yours. Can't you guess? Why, Ian whatever his name was, who escorted you to one of your father's concerts. I should have thought you would know he's in television now."

    "Quite a few people are, you know. He wasn't really what I'd call a boyfriend. I never realized someone wearing so much after-shave could be so unshaven. I bore the scars for weeks."

    "He seemed quite polite and musical to me. Anyway, he's grown a beard now, and he's working for the BBC. He'll be moving back to Liverpool now that they've opened their dockland studio."

    "Good luck to him."

    "I wish you were staying long enough for us to show you round dockland. It's a real little village now, you know. Lovely shops and restaurants, and independent television have a studio there too."

    "We'll go next time, but I hope you won't be disappointed if it doesn't tempt me back from London."

    "If you've made your mind up in advance there's no point in showing you at all."

    She was angry with herself for being scrutable rather than with Sandy, and so her tone was only faintly injured when she asked Sandy her news. The conversation had become equable by the time the family went out for dinner. They drove along the peninsula to Parkgate and ate at Mr. Chau's, where colored lights swam in a fountain in the middle of the restaurant and vegetables were shaped like dragons. Halfway through the main courses Sandy's father said "How are Tracy and Hepburn?"

    Her mother chewed furiously, and said "Bogart and Bacall" as soon as she could.

    "They're feeding the weeds, I'm afraid. They were run over last week."

    Her mother reached for her hand. "No wonder you don't know what to do with yourself with all this death around you."

    "I do, honestly. Don't fret."

    "Well, perhaps you do. I can understand your wanting to go up somewhere by yourself. You can see all the way to Wales if you go up on the common, you know, if it's only solitude you're going to the Lakes for."

    "I want to do a bit of research as well."

    "For what?"

    Lying wouldn't be fair to herself or to them. "About the film Graham Nolan was going to revive."

    "You do what you think is right," her mother said, so heavily that all her remarks during the rest of the meal felt like the same veiled accusation. As soon as Sandy was home she escaped upstairs, pleading a headache, and lay on her bed, hearing her father's placatory murmur in the living room. It seemed that coming home wouldn't let her ponder after all, but surely the truth was that she didn't need to: Tommy Hoddle's nerves had got the better of him, and Leslie Tomlinson was senile; both encounters had disturbed her, but what was the point of looking for connections where none could exist? What she needed before she continued her search was a good night's rest. She awoke once, remembering her mother's suggestion that she was surrounded by death. She blinked at the walls and the curtains, between which a gap glimmered. She wasn't surrounded by death but by flowers, she thought drowsily, and went back to sleep.

    

    

    In the morning she awoke to see her mother tiptoeing out of her room after setting down a mug of coffee on the bedside table. The sight of her mother in her dressing gown, her gray hair trailing over the collar, made Sandy long to stay at least until they had reached a better understanding.

    She glanced at the clock, and saw that it was already later than she had planned to leave. She struggled out of bed and stumbled with her coffee to the bathroom, and was in the shower when her mother rapped on the door. "I'm making your breakfast," she called.

    In that case, Sandy knew, she would be at least thirty minutes. Sandy was downstairs in half that time. "May I use the phone?"

    "Of course," her parents said in unison, so amiably that she felt a twinge of guilt for using it to carry on her search. All the same, she should try to set up an interview for tomorrow, since the composer who had scored the film lived just across the Scottish border. She dialed and heard the ringing cease. "Neville Vine?"

    Her father gave the name a wry glance that stopped short of recognition. A voice that sounded shivery with age demanded, "Who wants him?"

    "My name's Sandy Allan. I'm from Metropolitan Television. I wanted to ask Mr. Vine about one of his scores."

    "Television? I want nothing to do with them," he declared, more shakily than ever, "nor with anyone who has."

    "You did talk to a friend of mine, I believe. Graham Nolan."

    "Never heard of him."

    "It might have been a year ago or more. He would have asked you about a film you wrote the music for,
Tower
of
Fear."

    "I can't help you."

    Vine's voice had grown so shrill that she was afraid he was about to cut her off. "Would you be prepared to talk to someone else who was asking me for information about the film? He isn't connected with television. He's writing a book."

    "No use. I don't know anything about the picture."

    "But you did write the score for it, didn't you? Surely you could-was