Ancient Images (19 page)

    "I've told you, I don't remember!" he screamed, and replaced the receiver so clumsily that she heard its clatter for seconds before it was cut off.

    Sandy's mother waited for her to meet her eyes. "No luck?"

    "He denied Graham ever spoke to him."

    "Didn't we tell you your friend was mistaken? Perhaps now you'll let him and his film rest." The next moment she slapped her own face and walked rapidly to Sandy. "Don't listen to my doddering," she mumbled into Sandy's shoulder, "you trust your instincts as you always have," and then she gazed moistly at her. "Just don't you dare put yourself at any risk," she said.

    

    

    Less than two hours later, when a downpour met her on the motorway, Sandy remembered her mother's warning. The gray clouds nesting on the Lakeland mountains surged forward and began to lash the traffic, and the mountains above the road dissolved into cloud. The vehicles around her were reduced to drowning headlamps and the weeping wounds of taillights. Even when she dropped her speed to thirty miles an hour she didn't feel safe, but there was nowhere to pull over, no access road for miles. At least the other drivers were keeping their distance. For a while she was virtually alone except for distant struggling lights and a dark shape that seemed to dance between her and the lights, until she began to suffer an unpleasant notion that if she didn't increase her speed the blurred shape would launch itself at her rear window. Instead she slowed down even more to let the lights creep closer, reminding her of eyes, unable to blink. "Shut up," she told her imagination, and stared ahead at the wall of rain, which thinned and parted at last and let her accelerate over the flushed concrete under a bleary sun.

    Charlie Miles, the set designer Roger had called on her behalf, lived on a minor road above Derwentwater. By the time Sandy left the motorway the clouds were sailing like ghosts of mountains into the sky, unveiling slopes of granite and heather and gorse, crystalline with rain and rushing streams above roads that blazed silver. Sandy felt her senses flowering, feasting on the refreshed landscape.

    She had to assume that the unsignposted road onto which she eventually turned led to the set designer's house. As her route wound higher it gave her views of the lake, a giant section cut from a darker sky to fit the elaborately curving shore among the mountains. Sheep swerved away from her car and up the grassy slope, and then she met a bus full of pensioners. Rather than reverse almost a mile, she backed onto the soggy verge as a wizened little man with a large balding head and hands that seemed all knuckles emerged from a cottage beside the road and leaned on his gate to watch.

    While the bus struggled to maneuver past her he took out a pipe and puffed at it until it was lit to his satisfaction, then he strolled over to the bus and began to direct the proceedings. "Come on, come on, hey up, come on, hey up, hey up, come on…" The bus groaned by at last, and the oldster trotted over to Sandy, looking ferociously helpful. "Thanks," she said hastily, "I can manage."

    As soon as she restarted the car, the old man slouched along his path and slammed the cottage door. Feeling rather mean for having disappointed him, Sandy eased the vehicle onto the road. She came abreast of the cottage, and glanced at the gate, where a name was all but engulfed by moss. She had to brake and lean out of the window before she could be sure that the name was Miles.

    She turned the car, inching back and forth across the road six times, and parked beside the wall of the plot in front of the cottage, a garden planted with vegetables whose shoots glowed against the wet earth. She walked along the cracked path and knocked on the faded door. He made her wait before he jerked the door open and confronted her, his knuckly fingers drumming on his hips. "I thought you didn't need any help."

    "I didn't realize who you were."

    "That's supposed to make a difference, is it?"

    "It certainly does to me. I'm Sandy Allan. I was coming to interview you."

    He stared past her, wrinkling his nose, as if he were wondering if she'd hidden an accomplice somewhere near, then he stepped back so abruptly she thought he was going to shut the door in her face. "Let's be hearing from you, then," he said, and as soon as she opened her mouth: "Give a man a chance to sit down."

    The front room was small and bare. A chair stood by a folding table spread with an embroidered tablecloth, on which lay a sketchbook with a pencil threaded through its spiral binding. Two easy chairs faced the window, which overlooked the lake. Several brown oval photographs of an unsmiling couple Sandy took to be his parents stood on the rough mantelpiece. Open doors let her see into a stone- floored kitchen and a bedroom that looked fit for a monk. She only glanced toward them as she took the unoccupied chair, but Miles shook his head at her. "Trust a woman, hardly in the house before she's seeing what she would change."

    "I was just missing anything to do with films."

    "Then you're the only one here who is, because I want nothing to do with them."

    Could Graham have known better than to interview him, or was she in the wrong house? "You used to have, didn't you?" she said.

    "Long before you were born. Back when there were films to take a pride in."

    "So you're proud of the work you did."

    "Did you hear me say that? Is that anything like what I said? Your generation's fed on so much television and films that you've no time for words. Before we know it we'll be back where the pagans were, not wanting to write."

    "I take it you weren't satisfied with the films you were involved in."

    "Chuck me in the lake if I said that either." He took pity on her then, which was just as infuriating. "I was pleased with the Boadicea picture. I once read a Yankee magazine that praised my work on that. Only those were the days when a credit for set design meant something."

    "I think it still does."

    "Then it shouldn't," he cried in what sounded like triumph. "Some of my students took me to a film in Keswick last year and woke me up just in time for the end titles. It's a wonder if you can even find the set designer among the mob who get their names put up."

    "I suppose they feel their work deserves a credit too."

    "More like the unions would close the studios down otherwise, and no loss either if you ask me. Deserves a credit! My God, the carpet fitter got a mention, and the caterer, and the banker. It's a wonder they didn't have a credit for whoever bought the paper for the lavatory. If someone in the film fiddled with a radio there'd be a credit for the music they didn't even listen to, to make up a sound-track record for all the damn fools in the audience to buy. That's assuming they can read."

    "Some of us still can."

    "Watch out you don't get hunted down for knowing too much, then. There was a newspaper in this film where the headline had nothing to do with what was under it, and don't tell me they would have put that in if they thought anyone had the brains to notice."

    "I've seen newspapers like that in films from fifty years ago."

    "Exactly. That's when folk started being robbed of their intelligence," he said, and beamed at her. "I enjoyed that argument. You'll have to come again."

    He cocked his head toward the window, and she wondered if she'd sat through all this only to leave herself no time to question him. "Are you expecting someone?"

    "Should I be?"

    "I thought maybe your students."

    "Not today, and never here. One of them runs me into town to teach. I can still teach art, even with these hands." He displayed his swollen knuckles and then hid his hands between his thighs. "Your turn to talk. Tell me what you came all this way for."

    "To ask you about the last film you designed for Giles Spence."

    "That damned thing? It was more bloody trouble than it was worth. It's a wonder it was made at all. What do you know about it?"

    "As you say, it was dogged with problems."

    "As I say?" He seemed about to lecture her again, but instead he went on: "Half the problems were of Giles' own making, if you ask me. I sometimes think he was behind the things that were supposed to have happened at the studio- trying to get his cast in the proper mood."

    "Then from what I've heard he went too far."

    "If you know so much about it I don't know what you expect
me
to tell you. I wasn't even there for most of the production."

    "Might you have kept any sketches you made?"

    "For that film? No chance, as my students say. I was glad to get out of the studio the last time, after Giles called me back. I've never liked that kind of film since."

    Surely this gave the lie to his skepticism. "What was it about the film you didn't like?"

    "I'd rather not discuss it, thank you very much. The whole damned lot of them, Spence and everyone he'd implicated, were close to wetting themselves the last time I was there. Nobody should be that nervous just over making a film."

    Sandy felt she was getting nowhere. "You said Spence called you back."

    "That's what I said," he agreed impatiently, and then his grimace relaxed. "Come to think, I do remember something I can show you, if it's of any interest to you. Pass me that pad."

    Sandy went to the table and gave him the sketchbook. When he flipped it open, she saw that it was blank. He tugged the pencil out of the binding and began to sketch, wincing at his arthritic clumsiness or the pain of sketching, glancing up at the window so often that she thought the light must be troubling him: whatever he was drawing, it certainly wasn't the view. Without warning he heaved himself to his feet, almost dropping the sketchbook, and clung to the edge of the table. "Don't let me see you," he warned.

    Sandy pressed her hands over her racing heart. "What's wrong?"

    "Some damned animal getting in my vegetables. A sheep, it must have been. Didn't you see it look in the window?"

    Sandy had been intent on trying to make out what he was attempting to sketch. "No," she said.

    He stared at her as if she had called him a liar. "Well, there it is," he said, flinging the sketchbook on the table. "That's the best I can do for you."

    Sandy glanced out of the window, beyond which she could see nothing intruding on the view of lake and grassy slopes except her car, and then she examined the sketch. She hadn't realized he had finished it. Was it meant to show a mass of vegetation in the shape of a face? If so, what kind of face? All she could identify was the tongue that bulged thirstily from the jagged mouth, unless the tongue was a swollen root, and the stalks that curled upward from the eyes to form horns above the low forehead. She couldn't bring herself to ask what the sketch was meant to represent when the drawing of it had caused him so much pain, but she thought of a question that sounded less cruel. "Can you tell me the significance of this?"

    "It's the last thing Giles asked me to design for his film. It was supposed to be the Karloff character's coat of arms."

    Sandy remembered something Denzil Eames had told her. "That would be after Spence had done some last-minute research."

    Miles laughed brusquely. "Is that what you call it?"

    "Wouldn't you?"

    "Giles would have. He wouldn't have wanted any of us to know where he'd been or what he might be dragging us into." Miles turned toward the window. Sandy wondered nervously if he'd heard movement in his garden, but he seemed to be gazing at his memories. "I only heard about it later from his wife, after he ran his car into a tree up at Toonderfield. I'd known her for years. I designed the sets for a play she was in, and she introduced me to Giles when he started making pictures."

    "You were saying about his research," Sandy prompted.

    Miles glanced at her so resentfully she wished she hadn't broken in on him. He thumped the sketch with the tip of one forefinger. "Seen enough of this?"

    "I think so."

    "Good riddance to it, then." Before she could protest, he tore the sheet from the pad, ripped it up and threw the crumpled pieces into a wastebasket. "You may as well know I've never forgiven him for that."

    "For what? I don't understand."

    "For making me put that in his film just so he could get his own back. Believe me, if we'd known what he was up to, he'd have been left without a cast or crew."

    "But what
was
he up to?"

    "Haven't I just said? Getting his own back."

    She was afraid Miles' impatience would cut her off from the truth, and then she realized it wasn't impatience that was making him less than forthcoming. "Keep this under your hat," he muttered. "I can't have the word getting round that
I
was a party to it, not at my age, even if I didn't know what I was doing. I won't have the life I've made here spoiled now. I'm naming no names, and I wouldn't tell you this much if I thought there was any chance of the film ever coming to light." He glanced out of the window as a wind crept away through the grass, and put one hand over his mouth while he said, "When Giles took time off he went to see the fellow who'd attacked the film in the House of Lords before we'd even started filming. And when he came back he wanted me to add what I just showed you to the set, and you'll have to find out why for yourself."

    

    

    The library in Keswick was closed for the day. In any case, it looked too small to stock reports of the proceedings of the Houses of Parliament. Sandy drove through the narrow streets, past houses fat and gray as pigeons, until she found a parking space by a telephone box. Hikers wearing their holiday homes on their backs tramped by as she tried to make her calls. It was hardly surprising that she felt overheard.