“Tompkins is a fool,” Mrs. Trevor-Finch said. “He’s been going about the country with that tape recorder of his, stirring up all sorts of ridiculous tales.”
“It’s all foolishness, to my way of thinking,” the professor said, “but these literary chaps quite go in for that sort of thing. Fairchild’s ears stood up when I told him the abbey is supposed to be haunted. Of course, everything’s supposed to be haunted in England! There’s money in it—from the tourists, you know.”
I wondered if I was really picking up an urgent transmission between the professor and his mother, or if my own preoccupation made me too quick to interpret the discomfort of their reunion. I said, “Would that include, by any chance, this house?”
The old woman’s eyes narrowed and hardened; her frown was majestic and I felt for the first time the full force of her great age. She was perhaps eighty, yet she gave the impression of having survived from an era of barbarian conquest and pagan sacrifice. She had been witness, I felt sure, to horrors.
“I think that you are not quite serious, Dr. Fairchild.”
“Serious? I’m pretty serious about some things, Mrs. Trevor-Finch. Unfortunately, I may have to return to America before I’ve finished my research.”
Mrs. Archer, who’d sat down with us and had been listening to our conversation without much interest, suddenly said, “Ah, America! I’d love to visit America. I have a niece who lives in California.”
Mrs. Trevor-Finch turned slowly. “Shut up,” she said, as if putting two calm, deliberate slaps across Mrs. Archer’s ruddy cheeks. “Go on about your business. Why don’t you start preparing my luncheon, for heaven’s sake?” And then to me: “I never have more than a little soup, and seldom leave these rooms anymore. I’m afraid my confinement here has made quite a horrid person of me, especially since my son and granddaughter so seldom visit me.”
“Well, Mama, what can you expect?” Trevor-Finch said. “When we do come, all you do is grouse at us for not coming more often. And bully poor old Archer for our edification. I’m sure you’ve made a dreadful impression on Fairchild.”
“I don’t think I care what Dr. Fairchild thinks of me,” the old woman said. “His opinions would no doubt shock us all, were he not clever enough to conceal them. But I am willing to talk to you again, young man. We may get on somewhat better when my son is not watching us like some deranged matchmaker. I don’t know which one of us you expect to sit up and do tricks, Kenneth, but we’re neither the sort for staged performances, I think.”
“Certainly, Mother. Whatever you say.” Trevor-Finch got quickly to his feet. I rose more reluctantly.
“I would like to talk to you again,” I said. “I think you could be very helpful, if you wanted to.”
“How could I possibly help you?” the old woman asked.
“By giving me some insight into the history of the region. One never knows just what one is going to find until one looks at all the possibilities.”
“And sometimes,” the old woman said, “one finds more than one bargained for. Have you never found that to be the case, young man?”
“Oh, I’m very fond of bargains,” I said with a smile. “Try me out and you’ll see.”
“I’m sure you take whatever you can get,” the old woman said, and waved us away, calling us back from the door only to ask the professor to send Stephany up—“at her convenience, if it isn’t asking too much.”
On the stairs, the professor, who had not smoked in his mother’s presence, paused to light his pipe. He puffed furiously for a moment, then glanced sheepishly at me, as if to say, “Well, even distinguished physicists must have mothers,” and led the way downstairs.
We crossed the great hall and entered a library in the Georgian wing, where Trevor-Finch looked a good deal more comfortable. He poured me a glass of sherry.
“Don’t be too put off by Mama,” he said. “She’s had a wretched time of it these last few years. Her health is very bad, and I daresay it gets lonely, and monotonous. She was quite an admirable woman in her day, believe it or not.”
I believed it, but I said, “She didn’t seem to take to me very much, did she?”
“She’s naturally suspicious of strangers,” Trevor-Finch said. “Give her a chance to get used to the idea of having you here, and she’ll come around.”
A large, broad-bottomed woman of middle age, with frizzy gray-brown hair and a wonderfully homely mug, looked into the library and asked the professor if he was ready for lunch.
“Yes indeed, Mrs. Mortimor. Is my daughter joining us?”
“No, sir. She already had a bite and went off to see a friend in Wimsett. But she said she’d be here for dinner.”
“Jolly good. I’m anxious for you to meet my daughter, Fairchild.”
I explained the circumstances under which we had already met.
“Clumsy of Mortimor,” the professor said, leading the way into an adjoining dining room. He pulled out a chair at the head of the long, lustrous table. There was a yellow cat curled up on the chair, and it blinked up at the professor.
“Scat!” he said, and gave the cat a whack across the flank with the rolled-up newspaper which had been waiting at his place. “Damned insolent beasts,” he muttered as he plopped down.
The dining room could easily have accommodated a small banquet. There was a row of French doors looking out on the puddled terrace, several murky paintings on the walls, a few potted ferns, and a glorious cut-glass candelabrum as a center-piece. Mrs. Mortimor arrived bearing steaming plates of steak and kidney pie. She uncapped two bottles of beer, then stood anxiously by to make sure everything was satisfactory.
The professor sent her off with a nod of approval. “Now tell me, Fairchild—what do you know about radio astronomy?”
“Not the slightest thing,” I said around a mouthful of hot and excellent pie.
The professor explained that radio astronomy was born in the 1930s, when a young radio engineer—“a Yank, by the way”—first detected radio waves originating in outer space. As the technology developed, radio sources were discovered on the sun, on Jupiter, and in the constellations Sagittarius, Cygnus and Cassiopeia. ‘‘My own setup is quite modest,” the professor said, “but by correlating the data from a number of widely spaced sites, we are sometimes able to pinpoint the exact origin of these signals. So far, we’ve located over two thousand of them.”
‘‘But what causes these radio waves?’’ I asked. “Is someone out there trying to reach us?”
“Hmm. Extraterrestrial life is a possibility no scientist would dispute,” Trevor-Finch said, “but these radio waves do not indicate any calculated attempt at communication. The current theory is that they’re caused by turbulent gases. The radio source on Jupiter, for instance, may be a gigantic electromagnetic storm on the surface of the planet. Other signals probably emanate from exploding stars or even the collision of entire galaxies. Some of these sources are extraordinarily distant—nine or ten billion light-years from earth—which means, of course, that these waves, which travel at the speed of light, originated some ten billion years ago, in the early development of the universe. What we’re getting is in fact a kind of afterimage or delayed report of the cosmic cataclysm which started the whole thing . . . Am I going too fast for you?”
“It does boggle the mind,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ve never studied astronomy.”
“Of course, your education in serious matters has been shamefully neglected. I daresay that most of the people on this planet still live in what is essentially a medieval universe.”
I was going to suggest that if a man could choose which universe he wanted to live in, a few things could be said for mine, but I let that go.
“Tell me, Professor—if all this happened so long ago and far away, does anyone know what’s out there now?”
Trevor-Finch looked a little surprised. “That’s a good question, Fairchild. The fact of the matter is, once one starts dealing with these sophisticated problems of
time and space, there’s no such thing as ‘now.’ Or rather, it’s all ‘now,’ since the universe may exist, metaphorically speaking, in the blink of God’s eyelash. It’s only our limited and highly localized perspective which provides us with the concept of historical time.”
“And would the stars have looked much different, do you suppose, to the astronomers of, say, the twelfth century?’’
“Not noticeably. Of course, new stars do appear on occasion. We call them novae or supernovae, depending on their brilliance. There was one reported by Oriental astronomers in 1054, for example, which was probably an exploding star of great size, perhaps that which formed the Crab nebula. So you see, the ancients were wrong—in this as in most everything—to speak of the ‘unchanging heavens.’ It’s quite a busy show up there, if one knows how to look at it. Have you finished your lunch?”
We left the house by a back door and crossed a cold though sunny garden. A few crocuses were blooming and the daffodils were swelling at their tips. We passed a shed where old Giles, surrounded by several of his mangy cats, worked at a bench stacked high with clay pots and bags of fertilizer. He glanced at us, but did not speak.
A path left the garden and entered the trees, and along this path we encountered the large person I’d observed from my window that morning. He was seated on a stone bench with another of the ubiquitous cats in his arms and he was gazing up at the barren treetops. He was younger than I expected—in his late teens or early twenties―with pale smudges of down on his chin and upper lip.
“Hullo, Jamie,” the professor said. “Getting a bit wet, aren’t you?” For the bench was glistening and situated beneath several dripping trees.
The boy stared at us with eyes as bland and vacant as the wintry sky. His lips moved in a vain attempt at greeting, then slipped into a lopsided dimwit’s grin, behind which I saw broken and discolored teeth.
“That’s Jamie, the Mortimors’ son,” the professor said as we continued along the path. “Hopelessly retarded, poor chap. His parents can’t bear to give him up, so I’ve got to keep him on, though he’s not good for much. It’s incredibly difficult to get servants these days, and Mrs. Mortimor is an excellent cook.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see Jamie still staring after us. “He’s harmless, I hope.”
“Oh, quite. Just an innocent simpleton.”
We had reached the end of the trees and a narrow strip of heather along the cliff edge. I could see an expanse of sandy beach and a very dark blue sea, running high, with thunderous explosions of surf along the concave shoreline. A quarter of a mile or so downshore, on a rocky promontory where the breakers flashed in the sun, stood a barrel-shaped tower. A large metallic saucer perched on the cliff just above it.
The professor led the way down to the beach. As we came out onto the sand dunes, he took my arm. “Now mind where you step—this entire coastline was heavily mined during the last war. Because of the tides and shifting sands, they haven’t all been recovered. I take rather long strides, and the mathematical probability is that I’ve not yet tested every inch of surface between here and the tower.”
He grinned at me and set off across the beach. I followed, matching my strides to his impressions in the sand, and we arrived at the tower unannihilated.
The professor unlocked a switch box and activated the current. Then he began removing the various padlocks, bolts and chains that secured the heavy door. It was dark and clammy cold inside, full of the smell of sea rot and brine. We went up a spiral stairway to the top of the tower, up through a hole in the floor to a large round room where patches of concrete marked the old gun emplacements. The professor’s radio equipment stood shrouded in sheets of canvas. We removed the coverings to reveal a bewildering array of instruments. The professor gave me a broom and I dislodged a couple of spiders as he turned things on, adjusted dials, made notations on a clipboard, then put on a pair of earphones and sat down to listen.
After several minutes he broke into a smile and looked like a man who had just received a long-distance phone call from old and dear friends.
‘‘Here, listen to this,” he said, and gave me the ear-phones.
I clapped them over my ears, but all I heard was static, and said so.
“That, Fairchild, is the music of the spheres—the stars in their courses, the cosmic wheel of time.”
I listened again, with the professor beaming at me from his panel of instruments, as if it were he himself who was making the universe go. I still could hear nothing but a belabored wheeze, as if the universe had caught a bad cold.
The professor took back the earphones, listened, adjusted certain dials, and had me try again. “Now surely you can hear that,” he said. “Note the pulsations—they’re quite distinct.”
“I’m getting them,” I said. “What is it?”
“It’s 3C-213,’’ the professor said, “or number 213 in the Third Cambridge Catalog of Radio Stars—to which I’ve contributed a few finds myself. This one is a cloud of turbulent expanding gas in the constellation Auriga, a quarter of a degree northeast of Capella. You can scarcely see it with the naked eye, but recent photographs from Palomar show the remnants of an explosion. We calculate that 3C-213 passed through its nova phase not too many hundreds of years ago—about the twelfth century, in fact.”
“And was it visible in this part of England?”
“For a few months or years it was probably the brightest star in our sky. Strange that we have no record of it, but the English were not keen astronomers in those days. Once lord of the heavens, 3C-213 is just a cloud of dispersing gas now, its light about to go out. Rather touching, don’t you think?”
We spent another hour in the laboratory, eavesdropping on the gossip and chatter of an amazingly hectic universe. The professor conjured up a collision of two galaxies, their millions of stars slipping through one another’s web like intangible phantoms. We picked up distress signals from another galaxy just then exploding like a Fourth of July rocket, spewing sparks and gaseous plumes into the great black emptiness. All that celestial violence, that birthing and dying of worlds, reached us through the professor’s radio apparatus as but the faint and timid scratching of a cat’s paw on the door of time.
I was thoroughly numb by the time we finally put the laboratory to bed and started back to the house.
~§~
Sherry at six-thirty, dinner at seven. I wore a coat and tie. Stephany (her hair done in Wimsett, her face lovely and mysterious by candlelight) wore a dinner dress of her own creation and designed, I was sure, with her own endowments in mind. I talked a good deal about my research. Stephany asked intelligent questions; the professor gave an occasional grunt to indicate that such matters were beneath consideration by a man of science. It was settled that we would visit the abbey the next morning, and that later in the week we would have the village parson out to dinner.
“Perhaps I’ll invite a few of my friends, as well,” Trevor-Finch said. “Some chaps from the local scientific community I’d like you to meet.”
“Oh, Daddy, not those dreary men again,” Stephany said, with a wink in my direction.
“Dreary?” Trevor-Finch said. “Quite good company, I’d call them. Besides, if I’m going to humor Fairchild’s regrettable preoccupation with our sordid past, I think he can submit to some civilized conversation on occasion.”
“I’ll submit to anything,” I said, returning Stephany’s wink. “Especially if it’s good for me.”
“Of course it will be good for you,” the professor said. “Why, we’ll drag you kicking and screaming into the twentieth century if we have to, won’t we, Steph?”
“If he’s going to kick and scream,” Stephany said, “we’d better leave him where he is. The Middle Ages do seem to suit him, you know. He can be our knight in shining armor, come to rescue us from the evil spell that broods over this awful house.”
Though her tone was light and mocking, her choice of imagery drew a sharp look from the professor. “Inde
ed! Well, shall we adjourn to the library? You say this poet of yours was a famous chess player, Fairchild. I take a mild interest in that game myself. Would you care to take me on? I believe there’s a set somewhere about.”
I had hoped that the professor would go off to bed early and give me a chance to become better acquainted with his daughter. No such luck. The professor was neither good enough to win quickly nor poor enough to allow me an easy victory. Stephany sat fetchingly on the davenport, her fine long legs on display, and watched us match oedipal hostilities. I took the professor’s queen. He assassinated both my bishops. As the game dragged on, Stephany yawned, stretched, nodded sleepily. Finally, she went up to bed.
An hour later, the professor stared in astonishment at the board. It was, I thought—it always was—a little like murder.
“Well done, Fairchild. Will you give me a rematch?”
“I’m sorry. Not tonight. I’m pretty bushed myself and I’d like to turn in.”
“Go along, then. I’ll get you another time. Can you find your way up? I’ve a couple of new journals here I’ve been meaning to look over.”
“I can manage. Good night.”
We had drunk a quantity of wine with dinner and port in the library. My blood was running high with alcohol and with the heady sense of triumph at the chessboard, and I was convinced that all those looks and smiles Stephany had given me during dinner had to mean something. I was half persuaded that I would find her waiting for me upstairs, in her room or even in mine.
The stairway was dark and I searched for a light switch. Instead, I located a box of candles mounted on the wall, took one, lit it, and proceeded up the stairs amid looming shadows. I suppose the romance of the moment had me fairly giddy: young American scholar on the trail of the unknown, guest in an ancient manor house, out to seduce the master’s daughter. Just what anyone would hope for during a year in England. I was perhaps halfway up the stairs when I realized someone was waiting for me at the top.
I paused and raised the candle, but it failed to dispel the darkness in which the figure stood. A woman in a long white nightgown, I could see that much, and I hurried up to meet her, my heart thundering with wicked joy. But before I’d reached the top step, the woman turned away and started down the corridor toward my room. I followed her through the shadows, my candle the only light, but my lust providing an auxiliary glow in which I noticed that the woman’s yellow hair had been put into braids that trailed nearly all the way down her back. Stephany’s hair wasn’t that blond, or that long, and it did seem strange for a young lady of this day and age to braid her hair before bed—especially if she intended to share it with a new lover.
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