The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray
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I’d meant to look last night for conclusive signs that the housekeeper really had left, only I’d been distracted by the way Freddy had appeared. The door was set on surprisingly well-oiled hinges between ancient walls several feet thick. Within was a long narrow stone-flagged passage that ran like a cave along the painted face of wood-panelled stalls and loose-boxes and pillars that supported a low hayloft. This barn had been a tithe barn in its former life – a vast storeroom for a medieval wealth of grain – but its recent job had been to house the Manor stables and, like the rest of this place, its grandeur stood as a monument to neglect after the loss of the son. A set of heavily bolted carriage doors stood at the far end as a bar to freedom and daylight. All the Manor buildings seemed to have issues with good light. The only light here came from about five unglazed slits spread along the barn’s length and the small open door by my side. Dust hung in the narrow beams of sun-shot air, waiting for a breeze.
Mrs Cooke the housekeeper wasn’t here. No one was, at least no person. The murmur came from a lonely goat living in quiet luxury in the stable that was tucked at the end of the row beneath the steps to the hayloft. I’d never met a goat before. This one had his own lancet window and he was a friendly beast, albeit slightly alarming when his head suddenly appeared at eye height, with his front feet hooked over the stable door. He was also rather too interested in the forgotten parcel of groceries in my hands. I left him with a promise to return later with the scraps.
The dog left me at the kitchen door. Alone again in the dry stillness inside I laid out my collection of salad stuff and wondered just how exactly I expected this meagre fare to do for the squire’s lunch. Then I remembered that the note my cousin’s friend’s had added to her letter had included the name of the woman who would sell me eggs. It seemed that someone lived by day in this place after all. She was tiny and crabbed and the luxurious cluster of eggs she unearthed in a vacant cowshed behind the steward’s house was a far cry from the paltry one egg allowance Putney residents had enjoyed each week provided that they were in stock. Our transaction was also mildly illegal but I was hardly going to complain, particularly when she was kind enough to give me butter and half a loaf of bread for the Colonel’s lunch too.
Phyllis’s letters were always a source of information. Apart from the recent missive that was presently lodged in my suitcase and bore the crucial invitation to visit and directions to her door, I also had the memory of a hundred or so more that spanned the years and had come from various corners of the world. She was, as implied by my father’s use of the unattractive term spinster, an unmarried woman of independent habits. But I didn’t think she entirely warranted the term when she was in fact only thirty-one and, besides, I thought it a terrible way to summarise the contribution made by a woman who belonged to that generation of intellectuals who were recruited immediately in 1939 to lend their expertise to the various specialist branches of the War Office. Phyllis had been called up to do something very interesting with maps; her background was in geography.
My letters to her were the childish musings of a girl penned during the quiet times at the chemists. Phyllis’s bold and witty replies were invariably written from obscure locations made even more obscure by the heavy hand of the censors, until they said only that she was well and that the weather was fair – meaning Scotland, I thought – or bracing – perhaps Shetland – or enjoyably temperate, which I took to mean somewhere hot and therefore foreign. The impressive Grecian vases nestling amongst her mother’s clutter in the hall told their own story about where that might have been.
Unfortunately, I had neither my cousin nor one of her letters to guide me now. I was setting the hardboiled eggs to cool in a fresh pan of cold water – indoor taps in this kitchen, of course, presumably drawing spring water from a delightfully hygienic cistern – when I heard a clunk from the depths of the house. It manifested itself into a clatter from the floor above, followed by the bang of a door slamming at the front of the house. It reverberated along the passage and into the dining room and from there to me in the kitchen. It even made me cast an anxious glance out through the window in case a sudden squall had blown in, which it hadn’t, and then it made me recollect my suitcase left any old how by the kitchen table, as if I were expecting the Colonel to invite me to stay.
I moved to retrieve it and found it wasn’t there. But someone was indeed at the front of the house. Scurrying through the gloom of the dining room and then the passage, I learned that the bang had been a door being flung open. I’d assumed it had been the sound of it blowing shut. The distinction mattered because now I found the weighty front door thrown wide, letting in sunlight and flies, and a man heading up the stairs.
He was a short man in a dark suit and he had a suitcase in his hand. My suitcase.
He was oblivious to me. He seemed intent on marching upwards two steps at a time. There was a car outside, black and ordinary, like a cab the Colonel might have taken from his solicitor’s office. I reached the curving scroll at the foot of the banister as the driver’s foot disappeared out of sight.
I called some form of surprise up at him and set foot upon the stairs, I believe because I thought he was a respectable cab driver taking the passenger’s bags to his room and he had somehow managed to confuse my bags for the Colonel’s and it was my duty to correct the mistake. Only then the nature of the man’s gait changed. Before it had been confident, decisive. Now, at the sound of my voice, he snapped round and charged with a clatter of footfalls back into view again. I heard his breathing. Rapid and light and not very friendly at all. There was a rush and a thump and a lasting impression of the beautiful plasterwork on the ceiling as I reeled for the banister. I thought for a moment he must have launched off the top step and landed on me. Then I thought he must have bolted blind straight past and caught me with the case. Finally I realised he hadn’t done either and had the sudden cringing discovery that the man was beside me.
This space was light. White walls, white plasterwork and blinding sunlit glass. The tan case swung above me at about the height that might batter my head. There was a moment when a hand caught in my hair. Then it let me go with a suddenness that shocked almost as much as the impact had, leaving me to discover pain beneath my arm that would later reveal itself as a vivid bruise and also to taste the unpleasantness of a cut lip where I had bitten it while clutching painfully at the solid support of the wooden rail.
There was a crash below as he charged out through the door and missed his step, to turn an ankle where the stone flags met gravel. Then there was a roar as an engine kicked into life. I twisted there, hanging from my wooden anchor, catching my breath, and watched as a battered black Ford veered unevenly away up the curve of the drive towards the lane. I thought he turned right at the end, downhill.
I did nothing. The only thing I could state and did state later with any confidence was that this imposter’s bald head was most definitely a long way removed from Mr Winstone’s lean attacker.
It was easy to trace where he had been. He’d allowed himself some time, I think, to search the house before our encounter in the stairwell. The evidence implied he must have been on the point of leaving until some sudden recollection drew him to race back inside with the bang that had brought me scurrying. It occurred to me that perhaps he had left some telltale mark behind, made some error that would allow us to identify him, and that was why he had dashed back in – in a determined effort to retrieve it.
If so, it wasn’t in any of the downstairs rooms. He’d left doors swinging into the little room that opened from the wall beside the little table with the lamp on it – a library – and also the study where the telephone stood. At the swift glance I cast in through the door of each, the shelves of the library were untouched, but perhaps the bottles on the drinks trolley in the study were fewer than they had been. He had, of course, also made a thorough tour of the kitchen and helped himself to my suitcase.
The door of the kitchen was probably how he had got in. I’d bolted the front door firmly as I’d left with Freddy last night and it showed no signs of a forced entry now. I bolted it firmly once more and crept upstairs. I know why I went stealthily, as if I were myself a burglar.