The Echoing Stones Page 2

  Arnold smiled, got up from the desk and walked to the window to get a wider view of his domain. Overseeing the grounds was no part of his official job – he was definitely indoor staff – but all the same, he liked to keep an eye on what they were up to – or not up to, more often. Now that the hose-pipe ban had been lifted, surely the sprinklers should be out, reviving the parched lawhs? That was Norris’ department, supervising the lawns and gardens, and Arnold had learned very early on that even the lightest word of advice from him – even the most tentative suggstion – would be taken by Hugh Norris as gross interference and insupportable presumption.

  Like the earwigs. All Arnold had done was casually to mention having noticed an increasing number of the creatures among the dahlias and Hugh Norris’ face had straightway blazed crimson with rage, right up into his balding scalp with its pale fringe of once gingery hair. He had actually shouted, within hearing of the tourists picnicking by the lake, and Arnold had duly cowered and cringed and apologised. See no earwigs, think no earwigs, mention no earwigs. So be it. Well, he didn’t want Norris complaining of him to Them, did he? He might lose his job.

  Appalling thought. That he had ever been accepted for the job still seemed to him a kind of a miracle, even after all these months. At his age and with no qualifications other than a lifelong interest in English history, nourished by the intensive perusal of the biographies of colourful characters scattered through the centuries, he had expected to find himself in hopeless competition for the job with younger, smarter, properly qualified candidates. People with history degrees, two languages, Intourist training. But he had been calculating, he realised now, without reference to the salary, which was miniscule. “Ludicrous!” had been Mildred’s word for it, when at last he’d nerved himself to tell her about it. Ludicrous, indeed, had the whole project seemed to her and there had been moments, he remembered, when he’d wondered uneasily if she might not be right?

  After he’d been accepted for the job, that is. Before that, sustained by an unacknowledged certainty that he’d never get it, he had allowed himself to revel in the prospect as in an ecstatic dream. And indeed there was a dream-like quality in the way the whole thing had come about – the strokes of luck involved, the bizarre coincidences.

  If they were coincidences? Or was it, rather, that something deep inside him had for many a long day been watching, watching, for just such a chance as this? Had been scanning the Situations Vacant pages of the evening paper, not idly, as he had supposed, and for lack of anything better to read as he stood crushed against the other commuters on the District Line, but with set purpose; his whole soul secretly poised to pounce on something – anything – which spelt OUT.

  It was coincidence, though, by any calculation, that the Stately Home advertising for a caretaker should be Emmerton Hall itself, a Tudor mansion situated not three miles away from the village where Arnold had been brought up. He knew it well. It had been in private hands then and going to rack and ruin for lack of money. The overgrown kitchen garden had been a Mecca for the small boys of the neighbourhood. The high wall of ancient red brick, warm and rough against your bare knees as you scrambled up and over it, all came back to him as he swayed rhythmically in the tube train as it trundled its way towards Wembley Park: the plump, rosy peaches which somehow still managed to ripen among the all-embracing bindweed: the purple, half-split plums littering the ground: the murmur of the wasps: and how the most wasp-ridden specimens were always the best and the sweetest. Oh, the taste of them! The hot, sweet scent, and the juice that trickled down your chin!

  By the time he reached home, his whole being was lit by a sort of joyous madness which he hadn’t experienced in years. Well, ever, as a matter of fact.

  *

  “Had a good day, dear?”

  “Yes, thank you, dear, not too bad.”

  As this was the sum total of their usual conservation on his return from work, it was no wonder that Mildred didn’t notice anything special about it: had no inkling of how good a day it had been, and did not bother to wonder why, having hung up his coat, he hurried straight to his desk and started to write a letter instead of switching on the T.V.

  At this stage, there was no need to tell Mildred anything. Well, why have a row when nothing was going to come of it anyway?

  But something did come of it; and from then on, decisions crowded in upon him thick and fast. It was when the question of early retirement from his present job came up that things were brought to a head. The new job at Emmerton Hall was to start in April, in time for the tourist season. His old job, in the Accounts Department of the Town Hall, which in the ordinary course of events would have continued for another four years, must now be jettisoned with almost indecent haste: no golden handshake for him, and certainly a much reduced pension. Mildred must be put in the picture and fast. It was only fair.

  “You see, dear,” he explained, “it’ll mean a drop in income, obviously, but with the free accommodation and our own home-grown vegetables …”

  At first, she didn’t seem to be taking it in.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “You don’t retire for another four years …”

  He sighed: started again: and this time, after a while, it did get through.

  “You mean retire?” she shrieked. “Retire now!” and he could see the panic in her eyes. That well-known panic which the word “retire” is apt to arouse in even the most contented of wives. Home for lunch. Home for tea. Home for mid-morning coffee. Round my feet all day, bored, restless, resenting my friends when they drop in for a chat.

  He hastened to allay these archetypal fears as best he could.

  “I’ll be tremendously busy,” he reassured her, “all day long. There’ll be a lot to see to, looking after the exhibits … the house … and I suppose the paper-work, too. There’s always a lot of paper-work to any job. And then I’ll be taking the visitors round – guided tours – all that sort of thing. And it’ll be your job, too, Mildred. It’s not just for me, we’ll be in it together. They particularly wanted a married couple …”

  “You mean they’ll expect me to do the teas, unpaid!” wailed Mildred; and as that was exactly what they did expect, Arnold was momentarily at a loss for an answer. He tried another tack. All the interesting people they were going to meet. A Tudor mansion – small as these mansions went, but exceptionally well-preserved: a show place. All sorts of celebrities would come to visit, from all over the world. Why, Prince Charles might turn up! And Princess Di! Eating Mildred’s cakes … telling her they were delicious …

  She was softening, just a little. Arnold siezed the moment, laid his hand on her shoulder – and this was quite something, they weren’t a demonstrative couple – and began to plead with her,

  “You see, dear, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” he began, and in the moment of saying it, it became true. He had always wanted something like this to happen, but until that moment on the Underground, it had never really occurred to him to think about what he wanted. His lifelong job had been a demanding one, though not very interesting, and it hadn’t left any scope for wanting.

  Well, he won her round – Prince Charles and Princess Di had helped – and by the beginning of March their home had been put on the market and the move was under way. By the end of March the business was completed and they were installed in the small flat in the West Wing that went with the job, Daffodils were everywhere; the place was not yet open to the public, and when Mildred complained of the draughts that came whistling along the old stone corridors, he could remind her that summer was coming. March is a good month that way. Whatever goes wrong in March, you can always say truthfully that summer is coming.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Well, summer had come, of course, and now it was nearly gone and Mildred with it.

  Arnold sighed. Turning back to the little rose-wood desk which was one of the few bits of furniture here that Mildred had really liked, he picked up the abortive draft of his Lonely H
earts advertisement, crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into the waste-paper basket. Who on earth was going to seek acquaintance with so half-hearted and lack-lustre a suitor? It was just money down the drain – a lot of money, too, he’d learned that they charged £30.00 for each introduction. And even if some woman did turn out to be so undemanding as to think that Arnold might do (why was she so undemanding? what was wrong with her that she set her sights so low?) then, once acquainted, yet further inadequacies would have to be revealed. Not only was he 61, slightly below medium height, and with an avowed dislike of all those activities – theatres, travel and the rest – which people seeking partners appear to enjoy most, but he wasn’t much good in bed, either. Not hopeless; just not much good. A low sex-drive – something like that. Secretly, he thought that Mildred wasn’t much good either, but of course he’d never told her so. Why make things worse when you could just as easily – well, a lot more easily – leave them as they are? You might have thought that the joint possession of so compatible a failing might have enabled them to get on singularly well together; and so, in any other age, it might have done. But not nowadays. Who nowadays dares to admit to – let alone accuse a partner of – a low sex-drive? When every magazine you ever pick up, every advice column in every newspaper, takes for granted heroic levels of lust as the human norm and warns readers only against the psychological dangers of repressing these all-consuming and non-stop passions. Where did these articles leave such as Arnold, failed sex-level candidates, whose passions fell so far below pass-mark as never to need any repressing?

  And maybe it was even worse for Mildred, because she actually read these magazines instead of just glancing through them. Maybe she believed everything they told her about the heights of passion to which she was entitled, and which she could have attained, if, if, if … If it hadn’t been for Arnold, in fact.

  Oh, well. Maybe it hadn’t been all that bad. No worse, perhaps, than for many another couple of closet inadequates who also don’t talk about it. And at least they’d managed to produce Flora, who’d been an amazing, an incredible joy to both of them – a revelation, really, of what joy could be.

  Well, for her first six years she’d done just that, with her flaxen curls, her enchanting smile and her cheeky little ways. And even later – up to the age of about ten or eleven, perhaps, the joys had still – more or less – outweighed the anxieties. It was only as she moved into her teens that the anxiety-joy ratio had tipped so disastrously in the wrong direction; so that now, in their twentieth year of parenthood, the joy had finally been blotted out by worry – constant, non-stop, unrelieved worry. Flora’s increasingly erratic and unsatisfactory life-style had become an ever-darkening shadow over her parents’ lives, an ever-present threat to their peace of mind, like the wings of a great black bird-of-prey eternally hovering. Any news of their daughter’s doings in that sordid squat off the Fulham Road had become something to be dreaded. Even more to be dreaded were her occasional visits home.

  Not that he and Mildred had ever admitted to this dread, even to each other – particularly not to each other. On the contrary, news of an impending visit from their daughter was still greeted with a desperate facade of pleasure.

  “Oh, good, Flora’s coming next weekend,” one of them would say brightly, turning from the telephone, sick with dread; and “Oh, good,” the other would answer, choking back panic. Because the pain of seeing their once gorgeous little girl, skinny with dieting – or was it drugs? – out of a job, needing money – it was too much. And, on top of that, biting the hand that fed her; because, of course, Arnold always did give her the sum demanded – arrears of rent, or whatever – and straightaway she would stuff the cheque into her shoulder-bag with scarcely a “thank you” and almost without a break in her litany of complaints and criticisms of her parents’ home: her mother’s cooking; the net curtains; the fitted carpet in the bathroom; the awful décor; the pretentious ornaments; the ghastly furniture; and, above all, the awful boredom and monotony of her parents’ lives.

  You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that this last complaint would have been silenced by the news of her father’s extraordinary, and surely courageous new venture: chucking up his safe and boring job; plunging, at his age, into the unknown. “Good for you, Dad!” you’d think she might have said, at least with surprise, at least with a spark of grudging admiration.

  But not a bit of it.

  “You must be crazy! You must be starting Alzheimers!” was her first comment, followed closely by: “And what about me!”

  Well, what about her? Arnold was quite thrown by the question – as, doubtless, was Mildred, though, as always, she was keeping a low profile. Their daughter had been living away from home for nearly three years now and had shown every sign of hating every moment of the time she occasionally spent under her parents’ roof. How could it possibly matter to her whether this despised and hated home was uprooted or not?

  “Of course it matters to me!” she’d screamed. “It’s my home, for God’s sake …!” and had even – astonishingly – burst into tears. Real tears, Arnold could swear it hadn’t been put on.

  “It’s not fair!” she’d sobbed – sounding, for one second, so like her old six-year-old self, that for a moment Arnold’s heart melted utterly and he yearned to take her in his arms and comfort her. No, not her, not this alien, hostile young woman, but the other one, the loving, enchanting little child who was gone for ever.

  “It’s not fair!” she repeated, her voice rising to a shriek. “You should have consulted me!”

  Ridiculous! The demand went beyond all reason, but Arnold had tried, all the same, to appeal to reason, to make the girl see sense. Had she, he enquired, consulted them about what she did with her life? About dropping out of Art College? About moving into that sordid, unsavoury squat full of unwashed milk-bottles and slinking figures in dirty jeans and dark glasses appearing wordlessly through doors and up and down the carpetless, unlit stairs?

  But Flora had only sobbed the louder.

  “That’s different!” she wailed; and of course it was. For parents to interfere in their grown-up children’s lives is absolutely taboo these days; but there are no rules at all about how much grown-up children are entitled to interfere with their parents’ lives.

  “It’s not fair!” Arnold had felt inclined to protest in his turn, but of course he didn’t. This phrase, too, is the prerogative of children, not parents.

  *

  Oh, well, it was all over now. The old home had been sold up, the move completed, and Flora was settled back in the Fulham squat and in no dire trouble – well, presumably this was the case, he hadn’t heard from her in weeks, which was always a good sign.

  And as to Mildred – well, Mildred had upped and left him. Three weeks ago she’d gone, marching out with the barest minimum of her belongings and telling him in a voice hoarse from a whole night of crying and recriminations, that he was impossible.

  Well, she could be right. But of one thing Arnold felt certain. It wasn’t he, himself, with all his multifarious failings that had driven her away: It was the Teas.

  And in a way, he couldn’t blame her. He wondered, now, whether he might not have handled the problem more tactfully – more lovingly, perhaps one should say? Because she had tried, she really had, and for the first few weeks things had seemed to be going quite surprisingly well. Arnold had from the beginning been acutely aware of the fact that it was he who had dragged her into this venture: had wheedled and badgered and pleaded until at last, probably from sheer weariness, she had given in and reluctantly acquiesced in his plans. Against this background, it was really something of a marvel that, in the beginning, she had settled in as well as she had. Indeed, once the die had been cast, and their own dull little suburban house had found a buyer, Mildred had thrown herself into the practicalities of the move with commendable zest. She had seemed to enjoy the arranging of their own favourite bits of furniture among the sparse but elegant pieces that went with t
he flat. The flat had been contrived from the newer part of the West Wing, on the ground floor, and had been really quite skilfully modernised. The old walls were still there, and the deep windows looking out onto the park, but central heating had been installed, and modern plumbing, and even fitted carpets. No wonder that Mildred, who had been visualising something like a medieval dungeon, with dripping stone walls and a single high barred window, had been pleasantly surprised. She had really enjoyed fixing new curtains and a new, matching bedspread for the old-fashioned brass bed. Not that they were going to sleep in it – not both of them, anyway – but Mildred liked its style and the fact that the flower-patterned bedspread now matched the curtains. She had always liked matching fabrics – this was one of the things that Flora had railed at most bitterly in their old home.

  They had had nearly a month to get settled in their new home before the place was opened to the public. After that, the Visitors began to arrive and the organising of the Teas began to loom large in Mildred’s daily programme.

  It hadn’t been too bad, to begin with. It happened that April was cold and blustery that year and not many people ventured on outings such as this. Mildred quite enjoyed baking enough scones each morning for the dozen or so customers who were likely to turn up. With jam and real butter, they were delicious, and earned much praise, which Mildred greatly enjoyed. It was a new experience to her, being fulsomely complimented on her cooking, Arnold having been (as he realised now) sadly sparing of compliments during their long years together. She enjoyed, too, the adding up of the small profits which accrued from the exercise, and to a percentage of which they were entitled. By the middle of May, Mildred was already talking grandly of branching out into Cream Teas. But it was then, alas, that the blow fell.