The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray
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that you would agree to do without forcing a person to ask first.
I moved past her into the hallway. She rose to follow me and seeing her afresh in a different light I was startled to perceive the faint sheen of moisture on her skin. There was an energy to her movement that had nothing to do with her endlessly shifting humour. She had that look of exhaustion where she was growing so tired of her lot that she was coming out the other side. She was very glad I’d offered to come with her. It hadn’t been temper before. I’d mistaken it. This energy came from the unpleasantness of being horribly spooked by her night-time prowling and the release of finally admitting it.
I found the torch as I struggled into my shoes. It was jammed inside a large and genuine Grecian urn that stood beside the elephant’s foot umbrella stand in the hall. The umbrella stand was inevitably a mark of the old lady’s taste, but the urn might just have been my cousin’s. Phyllis’s war had been a rather different experience from mine.
Having lingered silently beside me for the past five minutes while I searched, Mrs Abbey abruptly spied a different object of interest. My suitcase was standing at the foot of the stairs where I had left it many hours before. She asked in a curiously strong voice, ‘Have we driven you away?’
I didn’t quite trust myself to reply. It was too complicated. So instead I blew out the last of the lamps and stepped out into the surprisingly well-defined landscape beneath a starlit night in August. My companion took the torch from my hand and waited while I fumbled with the key. It was an enormous thing and I had a vague suspicion my aunt had taken it, lock and door and all, from a church somewhere. I only hoped the church had been a more willing participant in the transaction than the elephant who had supplied the umbrella stand.
The night air seemed to revive Mrs Abbey. I heard the increase in the rate of her breathing while I struggled to turn the key. With the sort of embarrassed haste that, in my experience, is commonly used when one has just found a lost object in one’s own pocket after initiating an extensive communal search, I heard Mrs Abbey say, ‘You know, I don’t really need you to come with me at all. I’m bothering you unnecessarily. I’ll just borrow the torch, if I may, and return it tomorrow if I catch you before you go. Otherwise, I’ll leave it for Miss Jones. Goodnight. I’ll be quite safe, and thank you for the company tonight.’
She left me standing there so swiftly that I didn’t even have time to formulate a protest. Or perhaps I was relieved to believe her and let her go. The garden gate clanged shut and then I briefly saw her shadow as a darker shape against the white streak of the stone track. There was a brief flash from the torch as she found the path beside the ford and then the light was extinguished long before her shape was swallowed by the scrubby woodland at the base of the hill. Wood smoke that wasn’t from my stove hung in a silver mist on the silent valley air. The idea of darkness in this desolate place really took on a very different quality compared to the sooty gloom I had known in Putney.
Closer by, something rustled in the dry stalks of the bean plant behind me. It made me shiver and step back in through that heavy door very rapidly indeed. What, I wondered, had she been so afraid was waiting for her out there that she’d come to find me, only to abruptly change her mind? Because she had been afraid for a while there, I knew she had. It had been the only feeling she had shared, but it had been genuine. And then the feeling had passed for her with a suddenness that had carried its own kind of violence.
I bolted the door and checked all the windows. This house was wonderfully secure. No intruders would be working their way in here except in the same manner as the one who had lately stepped in after knocking on the front door. I shut out her visit like I shut out the night. It was, however, impossible to shut out the overwhelming sense that I had just escaped something, only I didn’t know whether the relief had really been hers.
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.