“Not exactly a hardship,” Priss said.
“Alice doesn’t like the country.”
“That’s not true, Rob.”
“It is true, but David does, so you’re making an effort. I, on the other hand, am just busy. But the country has its attractions, its areas of outstanding natural beauty. Now, Emma, wherever did you get that ravishing dress?”
He entwined his fingers, rested his chin on them, and batted his eyelashes at Em, and for all I had disliked him, he was the consummate host: opening bottles of wine, making sure people’s plates were full, but above all keeping the awkwardness at bay with conversation, asking questions and involving everyone. Alice and Priss had gone to school together, now Priss and Rob were in finance at the same company. Rob had introduced Priss to Zack who was on the DJ circuit, part-owned a club, and had released a record—Did awfully well in Luxembourg, didn’t it, Zack? He’s a god there. Has his own perfume range, Eau de Lucky Shit—and now the shooting parties. Alice was thinking of doing a course.
“What kind of course?” I asked.
Alice shrugged. “One that takes illiterate people.”
“Dyslexic, not illiterate, Al,” Rob said swiftly. “My father thinks dyslexia’s a made-up thing, but then as I often tell my sister, Dad’s an arsehole. We’re all lesser beings to him.”
Alice gave her brother a quick, grateful smile.
“What about you?” Marcus had turned to David.
“I’m working at an auction house,” and he named one of the famous fancy ones even I had heard of. “Just as a dogsbody really.”
“But you’re seeing if it’s for you, aren’t you?” Alice said. “Finding out which corner you might want to occupy before studying it. You know what the Japanese will pay for a rubbishy old oil painting. Then there’s all the furniture and pottery and jewelry, carpets even. As long as you specialize, as long as you become the go-to person for something and know all the right people, it’s a good line of work. Everyone says he has the eye for it.”
Em burst out laughing. In the candlelight, she was truly the lady from a painting, poised and graceful, her shoulders and throat as white as snow. “I can see it now, David. Traveling up and down the country charming old ladies into parting with their treasures for a song. In a van with your name painted on the side. Perhaps one day you’ll find the diamonds hidden in a box in someone’s attic.”
They knew about the diamonds, you could tell from their faces.
“David said you never found them. The ones that are supposed to be here somewhere,” Alice said.
“Andy’s wearing them,” Em said, which made them all spin in my direction. “The ones we used for the game.”
Rob leaned over to inspect them and for a second I felt his face close to the skin of my throat. “Fake,” he said. “A gentleman can always tell.”
A great oak root was burning in the hearth and above the conversation and chink of cutlery, one of the dogs would occasionally let out a deep groan. The talk circled the summer we had played the game, and then the real diamonds and Mortimer and the night they had been stolen—yes, so like tonight everyone agreed—and the rumors about Denford being a Nazi, or rather a fascist sympathizer, and what about the servants and couldn’t it have been an insurance job, all subjects on which I had nothing to add, nor did I feel much like reminiscing.
“Are you still in the row of cottages, next door to the old lady you were always talking about?” David directed the question at me.
“Mrs. East moved in with her son Ian in Bicester. She had a fall.”
“Are you still staying with your mum?”
Marcus touched my arm. “Andy’s mum died. Car accident.” And I tried to look the way you were supposed to look.
When we were done eating, we went into the library, the dogs padding after us. Priss inspected the fire proprietorially.
“I got it going while I was waiting for the crumble to come out of the oven.” She bent over it, pushing the burning logs around with a poker so that streams of sparks shot up the chimney. “I love a fire.” A blond lock had come free and she blew it away from her face. “David and Alice are moving in together. Her father has a flat in Victoria that he’s letting them have.” She crouched down further to stroke the little cocker, Goli, and gave me a sidelong glance. “It’s short for Goliath. Except she’s a girl of course.” Then, to me, “Would you really have killed that boy if they hadn’t taken him away? Zack says you had berserker eyes.”
I took a cigarette from Peter and went to smoke it outside, my breath billowing like smoke. More snow had fallen and for as far as the eye could see the ground was pristine, luminous, and still beneath the moon, so that the courtyard and the rose garden seemed like a stage set.
After the wine at dinner, the cold air with the cigarette made my head spin. I took hold of Marcus to keep steady and he removed the cigarette from my hand and flicked it into a flower bed. David and Em were in the doorway watching us. As though I were an actress, and for the first time in a long time, I huddled in against Marcus and kissed him, feeling his body first tense in shock and then soften.
But I slept alone. I went up first and took the room with the window that looked over the courtyard, and before I threw off my clothes and the necklace and crawled into the icy bed, I know I locked the door. I heard the others come to bed and later slow footsteps in the corridor that seemed to reach my door and go no further, but I ceased to know what was dream and what was real and my sleep became seamless. And yet, when I awoke in the bright light of morning, the necklace was gone.
* * *
They were sitting round the kitchen table, all of them, drinking coffee and scarfing toast and eggs, and I had the unpleasant feeling that after I had gone to bed they’d all become the best of friends without me. It seemed horribly certain that I’d been the subject of conversation, of gentle mocking, at which Peter, Em, and Marcus had laughed, guiltily no doubt, but laughed none the less.
“Missing something?” Peter asked, and then, seeing my face. “Fuck, give her a coffee.”
“Rob drank every last drop of brandy, didn’t you, Rob? And now he’s vile,” Priss said.
“I am vile. Vile.” And as though to prove it, Rob shot up, white-faced, and went outside. The dogs followed him out and when he came back in, wiping his lips, he said gravely, “I strongly advise you not to accept any kisses from Goli this morning.”
“So who took them?” But I already had an idea. Em tiptoeing in on her little feet.
“We came up with it last night. You were in the right room, after all.”
“I heard footsteps, but no one came in.”
“It was this morning at six. I crept in. I was sure you were going to wake up, my heart was hammering so loud. I’m not surprised Mortimer had a heart attack.”
“They want to play,” David said. “We agreed last night, Em was to get the necklace and hide it if she could.”
“And I did. I did everything just right. I went everywhere it says he went.” Her face wrinkled. “It was ever so odd. I think it was the oddest thing I’ve ever done, like painting on the most giant of canvases. And it was so quiet.” Seeing me soften, she said, “I mean, with all of us looking we might find the real ones. It’s not impossible. It’s as close as we’ll ever get. With the snow and everything, don’t you see?”
I did, and already I could see the appeal, but I didn’t want to show that I was keen, that they had won, so instead I walked over to the door that Rob had left open and looked out.
“Just one thing missing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“A corpse on that bench out there.”
“Early days,” said Rob. “Early days.”
* * *
“Got any skates, Rob?” Priss asked, but the question wasn’t meant seriously, for while the ice on the lake was thick enough—so thick that when I picked up a stone, a fist-sized rock, and launched it with all my strength at the cold rink, it merely bounced, skittered,
and then slowed to a sliding halt out in the middle—there were ominous black patches, lacunae in the cloud of ice suggestive of the dark and freezing depths beneath. Goli wove her way down to the edge of the lake and rested one clawed paw and then the other on the ice, before creeping backward, hackles raised.
“Of course, you could give the game away, Em. They are your oldest friends after all,” Alice was saying.
“No cheating,” Marcus said.
“Are you quite sure about that?” Alice’s voice had an edge to it and in response Marcus flushed.
“Maybe you want to check our bags when we leave, Alice. If you think we can’t be trusted—”
Rob stepped between us.
“Calm down, Andy. Alice didn’t mean anything. Let’s all play nicely now.” He turned to Zack. “I’m really not capable of doing this straight. I’ll need a line of your coke. Chop, chop. There’s a fellow.”
“Didn’t bring any, old chap.”
“Liar!”
“Does the person that finds them get to keep them?” Priss asked. We all looked at Em.
“I think they should,” David said carefully. “Finders keepers to make it more interesting.”
“What if we find the real ones, Rob?”
“Finders keepers,” said Rob. “Same if I find Zack’s coke while searching for the necklace in his bag. Finders keepers start to finish. My money is on Peter, of course. We don’t know what he’s capable of, you see.”
The tour had been for Priss and Zack, who didn’t know the layout of the grounds.
“How do we start?”
In the end, we went back inside, to the room where I had slept.
“Can we have a clue, Em?”
She shook her head. “They’re somewhere clever.”
“You have to lie on the bed, Andy,” Peter said.
So I did. I got up on the mattress and lay back feigning sleep while the others stood around me in a circle.
“Go on,” Zack said.
So I raised by arms and stretched them out while miming a yawn, and then, rolling over, I reached out a hand for the bedside table, groped at its surface, drew myself up, and then howled, howled loud enough to shake the windowpanes.
“My necklace, it’s gone. Someone has stolen my diamonds!”
* * *
On the first-floor landing, Peter and I barged at one another, grappling for the cupboard handles.
“No, you don’t!” he cried. I shoved him with my hip. There was a brief scuffle.
Between gasps I said, “She’s not put it somewhere she’s used before. It’s somewhere new.”
“How can you tell?”
“She’s too pleased with herself.” This was true. Her face was inscrutable but there was a smile to Em’s movements; the secret hiding place was giving her pleasure. Another thought occurred to me. “Anyway, what’s up with Rob? What’s with the You don’t know what he’s capable of shit?”
He backed away. “Because Rob is a fucking cunt, Andy.”
In the laundry I found Priss elbow-deep in a box of washing powder and she raised her eyebrows at me. Alice I spotted through the window out in the rose garden walking with purpose toward the outbuildings. In the library, Em sat resplendent in one of the armchairs, a book in her hands, her feet resting on a tapestry-bedecked footstool.
“You’ve a hole in your sock,” I told her. She did not look up, or meet my gaze, but her lips twitched.
I wandered, not quite aimlessly, occasionally spying one of the others in a passageway ahead or rooting through a set of drawers. Zack peered out at me from beneath a bed. From the tiny staircase window to the attic, I saw Rob falling down in the snow and then struggling up, even from a distance comically enraged, a murderous blue-anoraked ant, shaking his fists at the sky as he went down again.
I met David at the bottom of the stairs.
“No luck?” When I did not respond, he went on, “Always the quality of the silence with you. I mean anyone can do silence, but you really make them talk.” As if he knew me, as though he could say always about me. I shrugged, not trusting my voice. “It’s not so bad, is it? You’re here. I’m here. All grown up. It isn’t so bad, is it, Andy? What were we going to do? We were eighteen. We had nothing. No money. I was in trouble with the police. Half the time, I didn’t know if you actually liked me or were just trying to—”
“Well, I’m glad to see you got your problems sorted. Found yourself an heiress and everything.”
I heard someone coming up the stairs behind me and not wanting to be found there, I made to move off.
“So I’m damned to beasts?” he said.
“Yes, that’s about it.”
“Well fuck you too.”
“You’re her pet. Their pet.”
“Good to see you’ve still got Marcus in a death grip.”
* * *
Gradually, we drifted outside. I left through the library. Rob was there and drinking again.
“Em won’t let me search her person,” he said. “I’m giving up.”
The others seemed, if anything, keener. I saw Priss and Zack kicking up piles of snow, the spray of crystals flying outward from their feet and landing with little thuds; Peter and David passing one another in the courtyard without speaking; Marcus heading toward the front of the manor.
“Think you’ll find them in the fountain?”
He shrugged and I wondered how I’d pissed him off this time. We went on, an hour more, maybe longer. There would be more snow. The sun was visible only as a glare through thick white cloud. In the west it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the Downs began. The cold had seeped into my feet, but my cheeks were burning. I stamped and then took off toward the near edge of the lake.
Em had always been convinced the necklace was there, at the bottom among the reeds and mud. I imagined her, that morning, the stars still peeping out, tramping through the snow like a heroine from a Russian novel, standing at the lake’s edge, sheltered from the wind by the roof of the little temple, while we slept in our beds.
I scanned the lake, registering the ice, the desiccated reeds, rotten or hollow, the churned snow from where we’d walked that morning. When I looked up, I saw David, almost directly opposite me on the other side of the lake. He was making with firm purpose toward the temple, moving eagerly, with quick sure steps, like a fox on its way to an unlocked chicken coop. The hood of his coat was pulled back and I could see a rim of forest green at his neck and the flush of color in his cheeks. My eyes moved back to the temple and then to David, from David to the temple. And then, of course, I knew where the necklace was, as though I had peered through a window into his mind. Somewhere clever? Who was cleverer than Athena, goddess of wisdom?
There was no way to catch him up, not even at a sprint, and at the prospect of defeat, I let out a bellow, so that David stopped and turned. Over at the house, I sensed the others pause in what they were doing. David was smiling at me across the lake. He was a hundred meters or so from the temple, and so was I, only the sheet of ice lay between me and the necklace. The stone I had thrown earlier was still lying out in the middle where white met black.
Marcus shouted as I took off running. The snow lay in drifts on the banks of the lake and at each stride I went in up to the knee, then I half stumbled, half leapt, out onto the frozen ice. My heels met the ungiving surface and I slid forward, waving my hands, until I reached a patch where the ice was rimed with frost and my shoes gained purchase. Managing to upright myself, I bounded forward, back in control and gathering speed. David was still frozen at the lake’s far side but at the touch of my glance, he began to run and then we were both racing toward the temple and to where I was convinced the necklace was hidden.
The black patches lay ahead, but I was not thinking of them; I was not conscious of thinking of anything at all. It is odd to say it, but I was happy: my feet skimming over the ice, beneath me the dark depths of the lake, and then far down in the cold mud the slumbering fishes. I was aware of my
body, flying forward, legs scissoring, my breath as it sawed in and out. The woods and hills were a blur. Yes, I was happy, possibly happier than I had been in years, even as I heard the ice crack and felt the faintest shift beneath my feet. My heart moved a little in my chest, and after that first lurch, I felt it beating against the bones of my rib cage and everything started going faster: my feet, the blurring at the edges of my vision, the air rushing into my lungs.
There was a second crack, somewhere behind me. It sounded like a shot, not like the guns yesterday, but a pistol shot, and beneath my feet the ice dipped a little, just a small movement, and when I looked down a little water was rolling onto the ice, but I couldn’t see the break. David was closer now, running flat out, his feet sending up flurries. We were converging, but I could not tell who would get there first. My feet were barely touching the surface. I was hurtling forward, now over the black ice. But I was always on thin ice, always waiting for the grasping embrace of the permanent cold, the always dark. At least now I was running.
My luck was in. The ice held, and then I was nearing the far bank. I was going to win. David had lost ground.
The bank ahead was steep. I jumped, landing in snow that was deep under a thin crust and I floundered, losing my footing, but pushing on, David only a few meters away. I might have still beaten him, but at my next step my foot kept on going and I felt my ankle roll over to one side and then a nauseating stab of pain. I struggled up, snow pouring from me, but my ankle wouldn’t take my weight, so I could only hop and then hobble forward.
David trotted up the temple steps and over to the head of Athena. For a second, he looked puzzled. The necklace wasn’t there. Not on the plinth, not around the statue’s neck. His fingers traveled over her face, over the blind stone eyes, and then they nipped in and plucked something from the dark open mouth. The necklace came out black with leaf mold and dirt.
David turned to face me, rubbing the necklace between his palms. He was breathing hard too, and we stood there looking at one another.
Before the Ruins Page 14