The Echoing Stones Read online

  It was a lovely evening. The August heat wave was not quite over and in the leafy coolness of this secluded walk Mildred leaned against the wooden back of her seat (“In Loving Memory of Eleanor Fishe,” it said), and drew in deep breaths of the soft evening air. She found herself hoping that Val would manage her full 6 circuits this time – perhaps even 7 – at something less than record speed, so that this pleasant interlude might go on and on.

  There was plenty to amuse an idle spectator. Dog-walkers, leads swinging loose from their hands, bleating instructions to their cavorting charges who lollopped, zig-zagging, drunk with freedom, from tree to tree. Toddlers, too, in push-chairs; their young mothers deep in gossip. Older children scuffing their shoes in the gravel, bored, dawdling behind their elders. And then the joggers, of course. Every now and then Mildred thought that one of them was Val returning and felt an obscure relief when it was not.

  She was startled by a man’s voice, close behind her.

  “May I sit here?” it politely enquired; and before she had collected her wits enough to say “Yes, of course,”, – which naturally she would have said, why ever not? – the stranger was already settling himself alongside her. Middle-aged he was, slightly balding, and dressed in so dark and neat a suit that she concluded he must be on his way home from work. No one would come out on a lovely summer evening dressed like that if they just meant to enjoy a stroll.

  “Lovely evening,” remarked her companion; and Mildred cautiously agreed. Not that she was minded to argue the point; her caution was due to her uncertainty about how to hold her own, how to think of the right sort of pleasantries to contribute to the sort of conversation that this was clearly going to be. Conversation with strangers had never been her forte; it was one more of the things she was no good at.

  Afterwards, she could have kicked herself for not remembering more clearly how the conversation developed; how it was that within a few minutes he had got her describing, in quite lively detail, her abortive sojourn at Emmerton Hall; the problems of the Tea Room, the loveliness of the grounds, the growing numbers of tourists, the difficulties of getting staff. She was on the point of confiding to him her reasons for walking out on it all when, with a thunder of heavy steps and a surge of displaced air, Val was upon them: large, flushed and panting, and radiating – Mildred could already tell – an all-embracing and non-specific disapproval of the companion Mildred seemed to have acquired in her absence.

  *

  “Letting yourself get picked up!” she scolded, after they reached home, though with a bit of a tooth-displaying smile on her face to indicate that this wasn’t meant to escalate into any sort of a quarrel. “Whatever did you think could come of it? A man like that?”

  Like what? And what had she thought would come of it? She hadn’t thought at all, that was the truth. Had just responded as best she could to a situation she found herself landed with. She tried, not very effectively, to explain to Val this unsatisfactory state of mind.

  “Mills, just listen to yourself! That’s the story of your life, isn’t it, ‘just responding to what you find yourself landed with!’ You must learn to take charge of your life. Learn to assert yourself. Decide what you want and make it happen! Like when that go-getting smoothie asked if he could sit by you, you should have asked yourself, Do I want him? And if not, you should have told him to go away. Don’t be such a victim!”

  When criticised, Mildred always found it difficult to assemble her thoughts clearly and, above all, quickly enough. Certainly not quickly enough on this occasion to halt the next bit of good that Val had in mind to do her.

  An Assertiveness Course. With the autumn term coming on, there’d be plenty of them starting up. Expensive, yes, but never had money been better spent. Why, Val herself had been on one of these Courses. Without it, she’d never have been able to make the break with Malcolm.

  “No tears! No mess! No recriminations. Just Wham, and he was gone. A clean cut. A surgical operation.”

  With sterilized instruments, presumably? And a general anaesthetic? Was that really the way life should be shaped?

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, with reference to the Assertiveness Course and knowing that she wouldn’t. Or, rather, that she already had thought about it during the few seconds while Val had been speaking and had decided against it. It would be just one more thing that she would turn out not to be any good at.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Twenty minutes? Righty-Oh, I’ll be there.”

  With a resigned shrug of her shoulders, Joyce replaced the receiver and resumed her task of sorting the maps, the guides and the booklets back into their proper places. She added, in a wry aside to Arnold; “No peace for the wicked!”

  That was one of the things that was so restful about Joyce, the way she still used the out-dated slang redolent of Arnold’s own youth. Just before closing-time – 7.00 pm in the summer – it was Arnold’s task to come with his heavy bunch of keys to the main gate, ready to lock it when the last visitor had gone. Often, in the pursuance of this duty, he would find himself tempted to linger in Joyce’s kiosk while she cleared up for the night, and to chat with her about – well, anything, really: the weather; the visitors and their funny ways; and occasionally about Joyce’s senile old father, the care of whom seemed to occupy the whole of her evenings as well as the whole of her Monday day off. One would have thought that a life devoted exclusively to work and to ministering to a helpless old man would be depressing in the extreme; but Joyce made it seem like the most ordinary thing in the world, so brisk was she about it, so confident, so sure of what she had to do next.

  “Got to get my skates on!” she would say, sending yet another little nostalgic thrill through Arnold’s memories; and then off she would go, hurrying in her sensible shoes to relieve the sitter, already champing to be gone.

  Arnold wondered, sometimes, how it was that, in the throes of her harrowing and burdensome existence, Joyce contrived to remain so cheerful, so much at peace, in spite of all the stresses of her life. Was she pretending? Putting a brave face on an inner turmoil? Or could it be that stress, pushed beyond a certain threshold, actually creates around itself an area of enforced peace? An area within which the pressures are such that no choices are any longer possible and in which, therefore, anxiety no longer has any useful rôle to play.

  Sometimes – not often, because of course it was no business of his and, busy as he was, he had no intention of getting involved – sometimes, Arnold tried to picture what Joyce’s home life must be like, after she had locked up her kiosk and walked the quarter of a mile or so across the park to the cottage she shared with her ninety-year-old father, the once-famous historian, Sir Humphrey Penrose. To Arnold it was an abiding sadness that he had never known Sir Humphrey in his heyday when, a widely-acclaimed expert on the Tudor period, he had come here as Curator and had thrown his enormous energies and expertise into restoring the place to something like its original grandeur. At that time he must have been in his sixties, just retired from a distinguished academic career, still at the peak of his powers, with all his zest and creativity undiminished – and undiminished also, no doubt, his finely-honed skills at extracting funds from assorted reluctant sources. Arnold had read several of Sir Humphrey’s more popular books and had been particularly impressed by his passionately sympathetic biography of the much maligned Bloody Mary of the school history books. Arnold would have dearly loved to discuss with the author this controversial interpretation of Mary Tudor’s dark and chequered career – but, alas, he had left it too late, by some thirty years. The ninety-year-old wreck of a once brilliant brain could discuss nothing now; could not remember the beginning of even the simplest sentence by the time he reached the end of it. Once or twice since coming here Arnold had encountered the old man, strolling in the park in the care of his daughter, who clutched tightly to her father’s arm and guided him assiduously over and around even the tiniest unevenness of grass or pathway. But in spite of this, the picture was
not one to arouse pity, exactly. Tall and very straight-backed despite his years, Sir Humphrey was still a striking, almost an awe-inspiring figure, with his eagle nose, his hooded eyes and his splendid head of hair, white and luxuriant and seeming, somehow, to be blown eternally backwards from his forehead by some invisible wind, no matter how still the surrounding air,

  “Good evening,” Arnold had said, uneasily, at the first of these encounters, and the old man had come to a sharp standstill, pulling Joyce to a halt beside him and had mumbled something. Not a reply, Arnold felt – and in any case replies to a remark like “Good evening” are pretty limited. The unintelligible words seemed to be framed more as a question, but not one that called for any answer. Nor did the gaze of those pale, silvery eyes seem to convey any message, intense though it was, and somehow disconcerting. One expects the eyes of the very old to be faded, bloodshot; and to see this torch-bright sparkle flashing out from the ancient face, so vivid and yet so empty of sense, gave Arnold a nasty little flicker of unease. One assumes that behind senility there lies nothing but a dim and muddled emptiness, but is this always necessarily so? He would have liked to have talked to Joyce about this, and to have learned, perhaps, that relics of the old brilliant mind were still lodged somewhere in the worn-out brain – but it never seemed the right time to raise so delicate a subject. Not that Joyce made any secret of her father’s condition, she talked about it quite freely, but always on a practical day-to-day level – how to fit in the weekend shopping with the comings and goings of the sitter, that sort of thing.

  Oh, well. One of these days. Certainly, there was no time for prolonged conversation this evening. Joyce was in a hurry to get back and relieve the sitter and Arnold himself had by no means finished his evening rounds, checking that all was in order and every last visitor safely off the premises.

  Back in his own quarters, Arnold paused to review his schedule for the evening. His final round of the main building must be completed before dark, but there was still plenty of time. The last of the sunshine still slanted in through the window of the room that had been Mildred’s, the one with the big brass bed; and outside the tops of the trees were still swathed in golden light. There was time enough, in fact, for a spot of supper. After his long, busy afternoon his mouth watered when he thought of the gammon steak tucked away in the fridge. There were two cold boiled potatoes, too and the remains of some fried onions, it could all go under the grill together. Delicious!

  By the time his meal was over the daylight was fading fast. It was time to set about his evening rounds, making sure that the showrooms were safely locked and shuttered, the lights switched off, and the electrical devices, like the working-model of the water-wheel, were un-plugged at the wall. By now, the shadows would be longer and greyer in the great silent rooms and Arnold had to admit to himself that he found it a tiny bit scarey, parading entirely on his own up and down the ancient, echoing stairways and through the vast darkening rooms where his footsteps seemed, sometimes, like an intrusion from another world: so much so that he had found himself more than once going on tiptoe over the dark oaken floors. It was only since Mildred had left him that he had felt like this. Though she had never dreamed of accompanying him on his evening rounds – after the traumas in the Tea Room all she wanted to do in the evenings was to put her feet up – nevertheless, she had been there. He hadn’t been the only living soul in the whole rambling, gigantic edifice.

  It was ridiculous; of course it was. Even if there had been anything to fear – an unlikely attempt at a break-in, for instance – what could Mildred have done to avert it?

  Really, he must take himself in hand. This was part of his job, the job he had chosen and which he loved. There was some risk attached to absolutely everything you ever did. Look at all those humdrum years of commuting on the London Underground, and it was the merest chance that he hadn’t happened to be at Kings Cross at the time of the fire …

  *

  It took the best part of an hour to get right round and some of the tasks – the fixing of the great wooden shutters against the main windows, for instance – were quite heavy. He shouldn’t be having to do them on his own, not really. Gus, the night watchman, should be helping, but of course Gus wasn’t here, hadn’t been for months. Whether he was still on the payroll Arnold couldn’t guess and he didn’t dare ask as the question might stir up awkward enquiries from Them about who, actually, was in the building at night? They would then learn not only that Gus wasn’t, but that Mildred wasn’t either, and where would that leave Arnold and his career as a caretaking couple?

  And anyway, no harm was being done. The exhibits weren’t at risk in Arnold’s sole charge; he was perfectly capable of being careful for two. Extra careful, as a matter of fact, because he was the one who loved the exhibits. He paid far more attention to his duties, he felt sure, than that Gus could ever have done, hunched up in that over-heated cubby-hole of his with his tins of beer and his Racing News. Not even reading it, asleep mostly, so far as Arnold had been able to ascertain; but anyway it was weeks since there’d been any sign of the fellow. Whether the man had been sacked, taken ill, or dropped dead, Arnold had no idea. Good riddance, anyway.

  Lovingly, delicately, he began his final task, that of shrouding the waxwork figures in dust-sheets for the night. He began at the far end of the table, with poor little Lady Jane Grey, her white, waxen hand for ever poised, on the eve of her death, over the newly-translated Protestant Bible; and to his dismay Arnold found that his own hand was very slightly trembling as he tweaked the dust-sheet into position over the silent figure. Reaching back across four and a half centuries of wars and conspiracies and revolutions is perhaps a disturbing action for anybody’s hand.

  Ridiculous, all the same. He wasn’t going to give in to it. He set himself to drape the other figures in a brisk and business-like manner, with no nonsense. All the same, you couldn’t quite keep emotion out of it, so alive the figures looked in the half-light, as they submitted so quietly to being enshrouded. He felt, for one foolish moment, that he ought to apologise to them.

  The mere thought that it would be possible to do this, to speak aloud to them in the echoing great hall, filled him with extraordinary panic, and it was all he could do not to turn tail and run; along the whole length of the gallery, the great oak doors swinging shut behind him, and then down, down the spiral stairs, round and round, down and down …

  But of course he did nothing of the sort. He kept his dignity, moved at a measured pace through the remainder of his tasks, and left the building in good order, locking the doors behind him. By the time he had crossed the moonlit terrace and reached his own little flat his breathing and his heart-rate had quite returned to normal and he settled down to enjoy the remainder of the evening in the deep, comfortable arm-chair alongside his hi-fi set, the curtains drawn against the night, and his reading-lamp throwing its soft light into every corner.

  This was the time of day when he both missed Mildred and didn’t miss her. He didn’t miss the blow-by-blow account of the day’s disasters in the Tea Room: nor did he miss the tearful reproaches for ever having brought her here in the first place; But he did miss her physical presence. Not that they shared a bed here, or had ever even thought of doing so, any more than they had at home, for many a long year. Quite soon after their arrival at Emmerton Hall Mildred had laid claim to the room with the big brass bed, not because it was a double bed, oh no, but because the counterpane matched the cretonne curtains, and she liked that. Arnold had acquiesced most willingly because it meant absolutely nothing to him, and also it was nice to have her pleased about something. He still thought of it as her room, even now she was gone, and now and then during the long quiet evenings he would glance into it and feel quite lonesome. Well, it was lonesome, wasn’t it? There was always this feeling of being the last man left alive in the huge empty building, whispering with history and the voices of the dead.

  He’d soon get used to being alone, of course; already had got u
sed to it, in a manner of speaking, and at eleven o’clock, after listening peacefully to a Brahms concert on the radio, he prepared for bed with almost no qualms at all. He had quite got over that neurotic checking and re-checking of window-latches and locks which had plagued him for the first few nights after Mildred left him. Half a dozen times an evening he would creep into her room to make sure he had fixed the safety-catches on her windows, although he knew perfectly well that he had done so.

  Stupid! Thank goodness he was over that sort of silliness! He treated himself tonight to a long, luxurious bath, and as he lay in bed afterwards, relaxed and soothed, he mused on how amazed the one-time inhabitants of these walls would have been to think that the day would come when a hot bath could be achieved by the mere turn of a tap!

  Or would they? Since, for them, the same could be achieved by the mere summoning of the appropriate servants, would they feel that anything much had changed?

  *

  He woke, with nerve-jangling suddenness, to the sound of the telephone screaming at him across the room. For a moment he thought he must have overslept, had failed to unlock the main gates at opening-time, and the visitors would all be milling about outside, trying to get in … and he was already out of bed and shuffling into his slippers before he realised that this could not be so. No gleam of daylight showed through the holes high up in the shutters; and when he switched on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch, he saw that it was not yet a quarter to three. The relief at this discovery was short-lived; for something must be up. Was it the police? Had the alarm gone off at the local police-station, indicating an intruder at Emmerton Hall? And was it all going to be Arnold’s fault? … Stumbling across the room still muzzy with sleep, he snatched up the receiver. “Hullo?” he said; and then recovering his professional manner: “Emmerton Hall, Caretaker’s Office. Can I help you?”