The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray
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thought his manner was designed to carry meaning for me, I don’t know why. Well, actually, I did know why; I just didn’t like it. It struck me that this steady release of information was the Captain’s way of exerting control over me and this scene, and the idea was deeply, unreasonably offensive. I didn’t want to be cast in a passive role here. Not even when the act itself might have been intended to assure me that he believed that my nervousness belonged to something more complicated than the guilt of being caught red-handed meeting his burglar. The Captain might have been exposing our secret to the policeman purely to reduce the threat I might pose if he should prove to have been wrong about me. But it was more likely that the Captain thought the threat to me was unmanageable enough that I needed to be sheltered by someone like him; someone like an experienced soldier who would choose for me which decisive action to take. Any minute now and he’d be telling me not to worry again.
I approached as the policeman asked him seriously, ‘Really?’ PC Rathbone drew out his notebook again and licked the tip of his pencil. ‘Can you describe the car?’
The Captain had heard my tread on the step and was gracious enough to step aside slightly to allow me to join them in the gloom of Aunt Edna’s coat-rack. There seemed to be some expectation that I would answer. Both the men fixed their gazes upon me. But when I drew a hesitant breath, the Captain recounted crisply, ‘Black paintwork. A Ford perhaps, but I shouldn’t think it was locally owned since there aren’t many cars of any sort round here and the driver is dressed like a neat little businessman. Aged about forty, sorry, fifty.’ A nod to me. ‘He called at the Manor earlier. Apparently he picked up one of Miss Sutton’s bags and gave her a fright and now he’s just turned up here.’
He was, I noticed, continuing the theme of making light of the loss of my things and I didn’t like that either.
But I didn’t do anything about it. I stood there, hugging myself and mute, in my cousin’s hallway while PC Rathbone swelled complacently. ‘Perhaps this little chap called here to make his apologies and saw my machine outside and took fright himself?’
The policeman’s lower lip was puckering in an enquiring sort of way. I felt compelled to say in a voice made tight and rapid by something that came close to temper, ‘Perhaps. But you should know that the man wasn’t all that little and he really had no reason to take my case.’
It was then that I saw the expression behind the Captain’s eyes quite suddenly. He’d been hiding it before behind his calm assertion of command over these proceedings. I knew now this had simply been his own natural urge to establish order here while he calculated how far my ongoing hostility implied my efforts towards secrecy were indicative of a separate, deeper complication. And his urge to take charge was contradicted by his appreciation for my protection of his father. I added nothing more and watched him read the faint slackening of my lips.
There was the barest flicker of recognition in that hazel gaze. Then the Captain waited as the policeman jotted down a few notes. As the last line was written and the notebook snapped shut, the man from the Manor added, ‘You’ll naturally be adding this house to your round later, won’t you, Constable?’
The notebook was put away in a breast pocket. ‘Naturally,’ agreed the policeman. Then he dragged his helmet from under his arm and set it upon his curly crown. He stepped neatly past the Captain and then me and out onto the path. He turned back momentarily on the threshold. ‘By the way,’ he asked. ‘Did this man take anything else from the Manor?’
I felt the Captain’s hesitation behind me like a whisper in my mind. I felt compelled to say, ‘I expect Captain Langton hasn’t had time to look properly yet.’
And then PC Rathbone was passing through my gate and settling himself onto his motorcycle. He wasn’t really interested in any of this anyway. The Captain didn’t leave. And hostility didn’t quite go either. Now that the tricky business of managing the rival impulses of protectiveness and truth to a policeman was over, this other part of my experience at the Manor still wanted something from me, even if it wasn’t a guilty confession. I felt it with the same insistence that had made a strange bald man briefly linger with me on the staircase there. That time the man had abruptly changed his mind and left, clipping my ear with my own suitcase as he went. This man didn’t move. I watched the policeman go and then I carefully avoided acknowledging that the Captain was in turn scrutinising me. Unexpectedly, there was doubt here still and a sense that he was finding the contrast between my withdrawal now and my almost naïve helpfulness on the telephone very hard to read.
It made me deliberately voice what needed to be said. With my eyes still on the now empty trackway, I observed, ‘You told the policeman about our visitor.’
The Captain laughed. Contemplating the same view that captivated me, he said, ‘I’m not a lunatic. I might well have begged you to help me keep my father away from official notice but I was hardly likely to disregard the news that this man has now taken to calling at your house.’
His friendliness was my cue to shut the door and put an end to all that tension and I moved to do it, only to realise it would leave us together in a very intimate setting. Too intimate. I’d expected my unease to go with the policeman only it hadn’t, or at least distrust had changed into a very different kind of nervousness. It was because I suspected that, for him, friendliness was just another way to take charge. Which was a very unkind thing to think but still it most definitely felt too close to be shut up with him in here in this tiny house with its tiny rooms and even smaller kitchen, waiting for him to smoothly lead me towards hearing whatever he’d come here to say. So instead I stood there with my hand on the open door and I told him, ‘No, perhaps you weren’t. But you might have made more of the theft of my baggage.’
‘I was thinking you might yourself.’
This was said more coolly. It drew my gaze at last. His expression was bold, clear. It wasn’t an accusation but he meant me to answer the question that hung over my behaviour. He proved it when he remarked, ‘You stepped in when the policeman asked that last awkward question.’ A deeper intensity of interest that carried the faintest of concessions towards real gratitude. ‘Why did you do that?’
I replied rather coldly, ‘It strikes me that I ought to be asking you to explain what was taken, since I’ve obviously saved you from having to lie to a policeman. Only I don’t want to know. I can state quite firmly that I really don’t. If it is the sort of thing you couldn’t tell the policeman I don’t think I should know either.’
For a moment the Captain was actually disconcerted. It clearly grated to have his integrity questioned. ‘Don’t say it like that. Please. My idea of the seriousness of what I stepped into an hour ago escalated the moment that fellow turned up at your garden gate and I don’t know why I didn’t tell PC Rathbone. It’s in part this damned sense this place gives that one careless word will cause my father a whole deal of fuss. But,’ he added, ‘at least this particular oversight is easily remedied. Thanks to you I will be able to tell the man later.’
I believed him, I didn’t know why. The Captain had been urging concealment from the start but all the same I believed him when he said this place was the sort to fix shackles upon a person. Only in my mind the ties of his sense of duty and the history of this place had more the appearance of a snare. There was still the impulse to shed the lot and be rude by ushering him away to his car.
I felt beneath my fingertips the rough pitting of a scrape in the old oak of the front door. In a voice that was certainly softer if not yet ready to move beyond that to true warmth, I asked, ‘Why did you come to see me? You didn’t know I was set for an interview with the police, did you, so it can’t have been because you wanted to act as a censor upon what I said in my statement? And you can’t have known the burglar was about to knock on my door.’
He told me plainly, ‘It was the fact you took the trouble to make up a plate of bread and salad stuff for me on your way out. Is that a terrible thing to say?’
My expression made him laugh. ‘Obviously it is,’ he remarked, still smiling a little. ‘Well, the long and the short of it is, I’d had a terrible night followed by an even stranger morning