The Haunt (12 page)

‘I’ll walk with you.’

‘Let me talk to them first. They’re sensitive about the things that happen here. I’m sure you can understand that.’

‘I shall want to know what happens.’

Charlie climbed over the gate and sprinted up the drive.

Nina was wearing the peacock-blue dress. A sign that she was prepared to be co-operative? The first thing she said was, ‘How did you get here?’

‘Does it matter? I’m here and it’s just the two of us,’ Charlie said warmly. ‘Like the old days.’

‘I don’t want to talk about the old days.’

‘They weren’t so bad, were they? We had good times.’

‘You don’t have to soften me up. I know you’re here for the bad old reason. Money.’

‘I don’t recollect ever asking you for money.’

‘You didn’t need to ask, you just never had any. It was as simple as that.’

She sounded like Felicia Soulsby. Nice, Charlie thought, to be able to dispose so easily of two seminal questions, sin and money. ‘This is a purely local situation. I have great expectations in Golders Green, but here they don’t believe in them.’

‘Cornish folk like to see the colour of your money.’

‘If I can’t get home I can’t raise the money and if I can’t raise the money I can’t get home.’ He tried to keep it light: when she saw the bill, it was going to get weighty. ‘You’re looking well, married life suits you.’

‘It didn’t suit you.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘You’ve shed ten years since we parted.’

‘I get more sleep.’ She looked at him with an old gleam in her eye. He said, ‘Where’s J.T.?’

‘Around.’

‘What’s he done with your portrait?’

‘Hidden it.’

‘Nina complaisant?’

‘It’s not a side of me he’s familiar with.’

She was serious. Charlie checked his grin, said, ‘If he’d paid me a decent price for it I wouldn’t be coming to you now,’ which was a mistake. Too late he bit his tongue. The old gleam became a flickering flame. She was going to make an emotional issue of it – the woman discounted. ‘I meant to give the picture to you both. I came with that intention because this is where it belongs – you married the house. He made me a derisory price and I’d like to go away and forget it.’

She came and put her arms round his neck and her lips to his ear: the old gleam used to progress from there. But now there was a change, a tensile strength in her arms. She nipped the lobe of his ear and blew into it. Deafened, he tried to detach himself. She tightened her grip, drew down his head
and sought his mouth. There was to be another price which he would gladly have paid under different circumstances. He said, ‘I never forgot you.’ She locked her fingers and made a rope of her arms: Nina commanding. He said, ‘Hadn’t we better go upstairs?’

They might have gone, and been caught
in flagrante
delicto,
and the outcome unnecessarily complicated had Charlie not caught sight of a glitter approaching along the drive. It vanished behind the yews: it could only be Felicia’s fun-glasses. ‘Someone’s coming—’

From the shadows J.T.’s bald pate emerged, steaming into the sunlight. Nina smoothed her hair, drew her dress up over her shoulder – Charlie didn’t remember pulling it down. He said urgently, ‘What about the bill?’

‘What bill?’

‘The garage repair bill on the car. You said get them to send it to you.’

She came close, cupped his chin in her hand. ‘Little boys mustn’t always get their own way.’

It was one of her well-remembered and most disliked ploys. Sometimes she turned it on them both, mimicking a little girl, piped and wheedled and pouted until he was forced to abandon whatever he had been trying seriously to discuss.

J.T., putting his head round the door, found them entwined. ‘There’s a woman waiting for you, Olssen.’

Nina hit Charlie on the nose.

*

Piper, making for a quiet corner in the garden, was unpleasantly surprised when Senga fell into step beside him. She
was smoking, the habit he regularly castigated in his column. She said, ‘Why does every other place-name here begin with TRE?’

‘TREOW is old English for tree.’

‘Tregony, Trelissick, Tregallow, Trewoon – they have to advertise?’

‘It’s an indication that this area was once extensively forested.’ He stopped before taking the path through the shrubbery. ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’

‘I like Brocéliande better.’

It gave him another, alarming, surprise to hear her speak a name which he had thought his own discovery.

She expelled twin plumes of smoke. ‘The sacred wood where dragons feared to tread. Where the Holy Grail was buried and Merlin, the first cult figure, was locked up in an oak tree by his lover.’

‘I am not addicted to fantasy fiction.’

‘It had a bad reputation. Saints, sorcerers, lunatics and pilgrims went into the trees and never came out. Wolves and wild boars made short work of them. People said the way through the wood was the way from earth to heaven. You can interpret that any way you like.’

Piper had been impelled by a hypothesis encountered in a magazine article: ‘If one accepts that the land-mass was not always fragmented as it is now, the primordial forests could have extended from Brittany to Bodmin Moor.’ The concept of the enchanted woods seemed to promise new perception in his counselling. He said, ‘In point of fact there’s a place called Greatwood only a few miles away.’

‘And fifty million years ago London was all trees. Lest we forget, we’ve got St John’s Wood, Kenwood, Chorley Wood, Hinchley Wood, Wood Green, Wormwood Scrubs …’

Piper planned to extol the calmative influence of trees, was already facing the problem of how to invoke their therapeutic properties in high-rise flats and supermarkets.

He said bleakly, ‘The theory is ecologically sound.’

‘Oh sure. Did you know there are still bits of the old forest at Paimpont in Brittany, just off the N24? They’ve got a training camp there: the French exercise their tanks and armoured cars in what’s left of it.’

He had begun his piece: ‘There can be no sight more pleasing and healing to the troubled spirit than the natural rhythm of great trees bending to the breeze …’

She said, ‘You know I’ll have to raise that business of the little girls.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You were tutoring backward children at the time.’ His heart missed several valuable beats, then hammered on his ribs. ‘Amanda, Rosealeen and Sue. Three little girls. Remember?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It rated front pages of the tabloids. Blew over, though, didn’t it?’

‘It was total slander. I would never harm a child, by word or deed. I received a public apology from the newspapers concerned.’

‘My remit is to explore the myth of the Agony Uncle. Whether I explode it or not is up to me. Of course kids are
such liars and little girls are the worst. I might leave you with the benefit of the doubt if it made for an intriguing ending.’

He said between his teeth, ‘How dare you! Any such inference would be libellous!’

She grinned, unabashed. ‘I dare because my editor specialises in investigative journalism, pulling the wool off people’s eyes. His idea is a searchlight on cult figures, anyone who has caught the popular fancy, or a significant section of it – yours is highly significant. You’re down to the bottom layer – the born losers who look to you to sort them out. So we’ll begin the series with you and work through the media, the glitterati, the royals, and end with one or two of the more charismatic serial killers.’

‘I am not a cult figure!’

‘In character assessments you can’t neglect the libido. It’s the first thing you look at. Your name’s not really Piper, is it?’

‘Piper is a
nom
de
plume.
Anonymity is essential for the role of confidant.’

‘The reclusive, solitary type, fascinating to women – they long to draw you out.’

‘I was not aware—’

‘Oh come on! Our eligible spinster, Miss Gascoigne, is already in your toils.’

Piper’s heart sank. Or was it his stomach turning? He had been nervous about this girl from the beginning – he was deeply alarmed now. Her skin, covered with pale gold confetti marks, effectively modified any change of expression.
With such an advantage she was not to be underestimated. He said stiffly, ‘I have a wife and child.’

She laughed. ‘You won’t get away with that. Your boy, Sam, loves to talk. Lonely people do.’

*

It was one of the days Mildred thought of as having holes in them, holes in time. Looking into the window of the antiques shop known as Grandma’s Tidy the holes were visible between warming pans and stuffed birds and the case of ammonites. It meant that she was made aware of lapsing. There were a few things she had done – walking to the village, looking round the church, buying postcards and a cake of unperfumed soap. She planned to take coffee at eleven, leaving time for a visit to the castle before lunch. It had become necessary to justify how she spent her time, something she did not have to do while at home. As yet it was barely ten-thirty. Half an hour to fill if she kept to her plan of walking up to the castle after coffee.

The last time she had stood looking through the window-sockets at the view she had experienced a compulsion to think herself back into the past and had succeeded to a certain extent, though the past was comparatively recent and the history her own. She had recalled, with painful clarity, the moment at her father’s funeral when he had made his final gesture of rejection.

He sent a gust of wind which plucked her wreath from its privileged place on his coffin and bowled it across the churchyard. One of the undertaker’s men went in pursuit. It was a pretty wreath of red carnations and yellow roses,
bearing her message: ‘In loving memory …’ She had tried loving, it was her duty and he was the only one she owed it to, she had tried, had
wanted.

The wreath came to a halt beside the standpipe where people filled their vases. As the undertaker reached for it, it rolled gently into a puddle. By the time he brought it to the grave, muddied and battered, her father’s coffin had been lowered out of sight.

She had come to, her chin on the crumbling stone of the castle wall, and tears in her eyes. A darkening over the sea which had been mirror-bright did not reassure her as to the time factor. How long had she remained propped in that undignified position?

Grandma’s Tidy promised a happy medium: no need to ponder on the ammonites, their past was unthinkable. She went in, determined not to be prevailed on to buy anything she did not want.

At first glance it seemed there was nothing she, or anyone of normal disposition would want: moose’s heads, African voodoo dolls, glass walking sticks, a garishly painted ship’s figurehead built to – literally – breast the waves. Mildred averted her eyes, and so doing caught sight of something which caused her heart to leap and sink simultaneously: a collection of medals displayed on dark blue velvet in a glass case.

She went close. They reminded her how little she needed reminding, how close to the surface of her thoughts he still was. In years nobody had come closer yet stayed so distant. She was brought face to face with the fact, and
what it entailed. The hole in the day filled with the knowledge.

‘Can I help you?’ The shopkeeper was at her side. ‘Are you interested in gongs?’

‘Gongs?’

‘Allow me.’ He depressed a catch on the lid of the display case. ‘These range from the Crimea to the Falklands. A truly representative collection. Here’s a genuine Iron Cross Second Class with the original ribbon and swastika – the swastika must be removed if the medal is worn now. Here’s an Air Crew Europe Star: the silver rose means service as the crew of fighter planes during the Battle of Britain. The Victoria Cross is an excellent replica. You can read the words “For Valour” under the lion and the crown.’

‘I have some medals at home. They were my father’s.’

He looked at her, adjusting to the fact that she was not a likely customer. ‘You want to sell?’

‘I would never part with them.’

The shopkeeper snapped the case shut, an impatient sound.

Mildred said, ‘May I look around?’

‘Be my guest.’ He went and leaned against the counter, watching. She pretended interest, picking up things for a closer look, careful to let him see her put them down again. Moving towards the door, preparing her escape, she took up a small, heavy brass object. ‘What’s this?’

‘A fly.’

‘Yes, I see. It’s well made, such detail.’

‘Should be. They have plenty to copy where that comes
from.’ He bared his teeth which were younger than he was. ‘Genuine Benares paperweight. Four quid. Three-fifty to you.’

‘Thank you.’ She put it down. ‘I’ll think about it.’

He watched her cross the road. She could feel him watching; he had nothing much else to do.

‘Aren’t you the lady from the Bellechasse?’ said the waitress in the café, bringing coffee in a pretty china cup and pot to match. ‘How do you find it?’

‘Very satisfactory, such nice people.’

‘Any little upsets?’

‘How do you mean?’

The waitress smiled. ‘You may be lucky – with the weather.’

At half-past eleven Mildred left the café to walk up to the castle. Sun and sea breeze restored her spirits. Sense, she told herself, was more important than sensibility. The man designated her father was dead, leaving her his kitbag containing his dirty socks, a packet of strong mints probably intended to relieve stomach pains which she had not known he suffered from, and some metal discs engraved with commendations for meritorious deeds which he had never spoken of. No word of love, no tender gesture to remember him by.

Sense was a series of negative responses. Perhaps the answer to everything was nothing. At that point sensibility took over and she was afraid of nothingness, the extent of it, of its engulfing herself.

The castle, knocked about a bit, was still
some
thing, after
five hundred years. From the ramparts she watched a man ploughing, pursued by gulls. The way they rose up, whirled and sank, reminded her of Piper’s paper-storm and how she had cried ‘I am so sorry!’ and he had consoled her, ‘It has allowed us to get acquainted.’