The Echoing Stones (17 page)

Arnold had promised himself a good long sleep during his free time this afternoon to make up for his broken night; but it was not to be. The Magic and Witchcraft ladies who had undertaken to conduct the tour this afternoon had let him down. And at the very last moment. They’d got it down for
next
Thursday, not
this
Thursday, the one with the shrill voice protested when, with the crowds already gathering, he’d rung to ask why they hadn’t arrived? He’d got it all quite, quite wrong, the voice informed him, shriller than ever with the sheer Tightness of her case.
This
Thursday was their Bring and Buy Sale, hadn’t he had their notice?

As it happened, he hadn’t. Nor could he imagine what saleable commodities witches might be expected to Bring, let alone Buy. Toads, perhaps? Love-philtres? The R.S.P.C.A would be after them in respect of the first; the Drug Squad in respect of the second. Still, it wasn’t his problem. What
was
his problem was the guided tour, for which he had made no preparations, and for which he felt hopelessly disinclined, so weary was he, so stupid with lack of sleep.

Luckily, today’s crowd was an orderly one, noses in guide-books, and all earnestly trying to relate what they saw in front of them with what was portrayed on the printed page. Arnold knew he wasn’t being as helpful as he should be, he was hurrying them through, short-changing them in the matter of spicy little anecdotes. He even
missed out his well-rehearsed and ever-popular
demonstration
of the manner in which people of quality ate their meals in the sixteenth-century; with knife only, and using the left hand where nowadays we would use a fork.

Mercifully, there were no school parties. The worst he had to suffer was an amateur know-all agog to put him right about the probable date of Mary Tudor’s brief sojourn here; in the spring of 1551, or thereabouts, Arnold reckoned. It was debatable, he knew, but he felt an enormous disinclination to debate it with his balding, bespectacled interlocutor, with his sheafs of notes and his plethora of quotes from here, there and everywhere.

“You may well be right, Sir,” seemed the quickest way out of it; but of course the last thing his opponent wanted was this sort of quick and effortless victory. He wanted a long, slow one, allowing him to deploy his assembled
evidence
to best advantage, albeit to the mounting boredom of his fellow-tourists. In the end, there seemed no option but to let the man have his say, and to make up the lost time afterwards.

“Why ain’t the tortures working?” demanded an
outraged
small boy as Arnold tried to hustle the throng through and out of the dungeon in record time; and echoing the child’s complaint, the young woman who seemed to be his mother added:

“And what about the ghost? We had the ghost last time. A proper demonstration. It says on the notice PHANTOMETRY DEMONSTRATIONS DAILY.”

Needless to say, this was no part of the official guide. The Magic and Witchcraft ladies must have pinned up the notice the last time they were here. However, not wishing to find himself in trouble under the Trades Description Act, Arnold gave a brief and very flat précis of the standard legend – disappointing, obviously, to those who were thrilled by hauntings, and boring to those who
weren’t – and then shooed the whole lot of them, as briskly as politeness admitted, up the stone steps and out into the open air.

By the time he had cleared up the odd bits of litter and locked the heavy door, the Tea Room was already closing, and Flora arrived at the flat only a few minutes after he did, the usual plastic bag full of money swinging casually from her wrist. He had quite given up complaining about this. What was the use? By making a fuss about this sort of thing he had nothing to gain and everything to lose. For he had begun to realise that his daughter, despite her annoying ways, was fast becoming indispensable to him. If she were to walk out in a huff, where would he ever find another helper in the Tea Room so efficient, so hard-working, and so willing to receive such minimal remuneration?

Dropping the load of money carelessly on the floor, with a nerve-shattering din of clashing coins, Flora kicked her shoes off and threw herself onto the settee with a theatrical sigh of weariness. Well, to be fair, she might actually
be
weary. She’d had at least as broken a night as he had had; though of course she’d slept in in the morning until he didn’t know what time. After he’d gone out, anyway.

“Had a good day, Flora?” Chat about the Tea Room seemed a safer subject than any post-mortem about last night’s traumas. Surely by now, Flora must have realised that the old man really was mad, and that all her amateur efforts to alleviate his condition by encouraging his
delusions
were worse then useless. Downright dangerous, in fact. For him, Arnold, to hammer in this lesson would assuredly be counter-prodictive. Flora was no fool. Far better to leave her to assess for herself the implications of last night’s events. Since when has “I told you so!” engendered any useful dialogue?

“I told you so!” exclaimed Flora, brushing aside her
father’s tactful query about her day for the red-herring that it was. “I told Joyce, too, over and over again – I told both of you that these tranquillisers and things were damaging him, and last night you saw it for yourselves! He was so confused, he couldn’t even remember what he’d come to the flat for! I only hope Joyce has learned her lesson!”

She probably had. She was probably, right now, ringing up the doctor to ask if she might increase the dose of tranquillisers, in view of her father’s exceptionally disturbed state?

Such are the diametrically opposite lessons which can be learned from precisely the same data. For a moment, Arnold felt a huge hopelessness, not just about himself and his daughter, but about the whole wrangling,
disputatious
world. In spite of his resolution not to make matters worse by starting an argument, he could not resist taking a stand on the side of common sense. He pointed out, in careful and reasoned terms, some of the facts that Flora seemed to be ignoring. Such as that Sir Humphrey’s mental deterioration had long pre-dated the administration of the tranquillisers; and, most importantly, that this medication was not designed merely to make him less troublesome to his attendants, but was for his own protection.

“You see, Flora, if his fantasies were just simply inside his head: if he just sat about harmlessly dreaming of unreal situations, there might be no harm in encouraging him. But it’s not like that. He’s more and more beginning to act out his fantasies, and it’s going to get him into terrible trouble one of these days. Do you realise that was a real sword he was brandishing last night? He could have killed someone. He really believes that he is surrounded by conspirators who are plotting to destroy him. He truly thinks that he is living in the sixteenth century.”

“How do you know he isn’t?” snapped Flora – just to annoy her father, surely? “How do you know he isn’t experiencing an altered state of consciousness in which the time dimension curves back upon itself – a sort of U-bend in the space-time continuum …”

Another bloody book! It’s quite untrue that the new generation of school-leavers are growing up illiterate. On the contrary, they seem to have an inordinate greed for poly-syllabic nonsense on the printed page. Because it wasn’t just Flora. It couldn’t be. Publishing houses expect to make big money, they need a readership
running
into hundreds of thousands, not just Flora. Young people all over the world must be absorbing this kind of gobbledygook. Attending exorbitantly expensive seminars on it, sitting at the feet of gurus who – terrifying thought – might actually believe what their own voices were saying.

So no, it wasn’t just Flora, It was a whole generation. And that made it worse. No, it didn’t, it made it better, because it meant that his daughter wasn’t herself crazy. You don’t need to be crazy to follow a crazy fashion. Look at crinolines; just about the craziest and most impractical garment ever designed, and yet the women who wore it were neither crazy nor impractical. On the contrary, they had made a shrewd and entirely sane assessment of the strength of society’s demands, and the practical advantages that would accrue from adapting to them; and likewise the penalties they would incur by failing to do so. In the same way, Flora must be conscious of a need to go along with the cult crazes of her peers.

“Did you ever see ‘Time-Warp?’” she was asking him – knowing, surely, that he hadn’t. “There was this young lawyer, you see, who believed that he should have inherited an enormous fortune from his grandfather. He – the young lawyer – had been reading up all about it,
and had come to the conclusion that his grandfather had been swindled out of this fortune by a crooked business partner. If only the grandfather had had proper legal advice, the fraud would have been exposed, and he’d have got his money, and thus would have passed it on to his descendants. So he thought to himself – the young lawyer did – he thought, if only
I’d
been there to advise him! Next thing, through the intensity of this thought, he found himself in a time-warp, he’d gone back nearly a hundred years, and so was able to conduct the grandfather’s lawsuit with complete success. The crooked partner was exposed and given a long prison sentence, and the grandfather got the money.

“You can guess, can you, Arnold, how it ends? The young lawyer comes triumphantly back into his own time all agog to claim his inheritance – only to find that he doesn’t exist. His father hadn’t been born, you see, because he hadn’t actually been the grandfather’s son at all. The crooked partner had been the wife’s lover all the time, and so of course when he was clapped into prison the love affair came to an end, and so …”

Arnold listened patiently right to the end. Fictional accounts of time-travel have been two-a-penny ever since H.G.Wells, he pointed out, but fiction after all is only fiction …

“I
know
it’s only a story,” Flora admitted handsomely, “but that doesn’t prove that it’s nonsense, does it? There could be a germ of truth in the idea that by thinking a thought with sufficient intensity, a person just might be able to put himself outside the time dimension, and so be able to reach back into the past and alter something …”

“And thus run the risk of finding that he doesn’t exist!” retorted Arnold. “In fact, it wouldn’t merely be a risk, it would be a virtual certainty. Look at what they call The Butterfly Effect. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil
can cause a tornado in Japan, which is what the weather people tell us, then tinkering about with even the smallest trifle in the past would be liable to wipe away the whole of the present including ourselves.”

If he had hoped that Flora would be impressed by her father’s acquaintance with so trendy an idea as The Butterfly Effect, he was to be disappointed. She ignored his intervention, and continued with her own train of thought.

“There is a theory,” she pointed out – and Arnold, to his annoyance, knew that there was – “That there are an infinite number of parallel universes, in each of which anything that
didn’t
happen in our universe,
did
happen in one of the others, if you see what I mean. According to that theory, the baby which Mary Tudor didn’t have in
our
universe, she
will
have had in one of the others. It’s just a matter of bringing the two universes into contact, and almost anything becomes possible. Look, Arnold, I can’t stay and argue any more,” (the cheek of it!) “I’ve got to make some more scones for tomorrow. You know what it’s like on Saturdays. And the weather forecasters threaten sunshine, too! They’ll be here in their thousands.”

Sighing, she heaved herself off the settee, slid her feet into their espadrils and moved slowly to the door. Half way out of the room she paused, and half-turned towards him.

“I’m pregnant,” she informed him. “Did I tell you?”

Of course she hadn’t. She knew she hadn’t. But at least she seemed embarrassed. As she should be.

She stayed hovering in the doorway, still with her back half-turned, but waiting for him to say something.

But what? His immediate, uncensored feeling had been a rush of unfocused resentment – a “Why-should-
this-happen
-to-me?” sort of feeling, quickly to be succeeded by the realisation that it wasn’t happening to him, it
was happening to Flora; at which point anger against the young man in the case took over, whoever he might be. The scruffy, good-for-nothing Trev, presumably. A good-for-nothing name, if ever there was one.

None of this, of course, added up to the appropriate thing for a father to say in response to such a confession. Whatever he said, it was going to be the wrong thing: he knew this already. It would turn out to be just the sort of thing someone of his generation
would
say.

“What do you want to do?” was the best he could manage; and Flora turned slowly back into the room, and moved towards him.

“Do? Well, I don’t know. Nothing much. Stay here, I suppose. Go on helping with the teas. All that.”

One puzzle was cleared up, anyway; the girl’s motive in coming here and working so assiduously at an ill-paid and surely uncongenial job. She wanted a roof over her head. Somewhere where she could look after her baby and not be turned out. Simple, and wholly understandable motives. And she had turned to
him
in her trouble. At this thought, the rush of wamth and joy that filled his being momentarily obliterated all other considerations.

But not for long. Outrage returned, and anger. This bloody Trevor! What did he think he was up to,
abandoning
Flora like this! As he so conspicuously had. But Arnold knew he must restrain himself, force himself to be terribly, terribly tactful. Demanding the intentions of the caddish lout would get him to worse than nowhere, and would justly bring down on his head accusations of being typical of his generation.

“Does Trevor know?” was the nearest he dared get to the multifarious questions he would like to have asked.