by John Burke
‘This evening,’ he said, ‘I’ll be seeing my agent, to sort things out. Then I’ll go back to Norwich to pick things up, and drive to Baldonald House first thing Monday morning.’
The lines in the corners of her mouth tightened. ‘Driving up? So you can make a quick getaway if you can’t stand me? Like last time?’
That was a more twisted interpretation of the facts than he would have thought even Brigid capable of.
He wondered whether the victims she was surely lining up for the book would eventually wish they had never been in her debt.
How many of them had she slept with? Or had she scrupulously avoided any entanglement of that kind?
He looked at her as the sudden bright reflection from a waiter’s tray skimmed across her face, and went on wondering.
And she looked searchingly back at him.
3
When Kate opened the door of her flat to him, she wasn’t putting on any pretence. Or, indeed, much else. She was wearing only the flimsy floral dressing-gown he had given her last Christmas, not even bothering to knot the sash.
‘First things first,’ she said.
In bed with her it was as easy and uncomplicated and fierce as always. Yet somehow each time was always the first time. He marvelled at the sleek length of her as if he had never explored her before: the creamy olive skin that suggested some distant Italian ancestor still lurking under that very English voice and self-assured, almost arrogant face; those steady nutbrown eyes and those full lips which in some lights darkened like purple bruises.
She flaunted herself at him before dragging him close so that it was the smell and feel of her that mattered, and in their loving battle he caught only the occasional glimpse of a writhing shoulder, the twitch of her head, a smile and a greedily opening mouth.
When they lay back, she let out a shuddering breath and said: ‘All right, now we’d better talk shop. Or do you want to get out of bed and pour us a drink?’
‘No, I don’t want to get out of bed.’
‘Good.’ Her fingers stroked his hip. ‘What’s the deal, then?’
He told her.
‘Just a minute.’ Her breath was still unsteady, but now out of disbelief. ‘You’re talking about getting involved with her again?’
‘It’s just a job of work. Analysing her dispassionately —’
‘You’re always boasting about actually becoming your subjects. You seriously think you can cope with this one — with being your wife?’
‘Ex-wife.’
‘Don’t niggle. You believe she’ll let you into all her secrets? You of all people?’
‘I’m quite looking forward to squeezing them out of her.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Kate. ‘You’re rather good at squeezing the lifeblood out of your women. But don’t you think that, just for once, you might be the one who gets squeezed? Suffocated?’
‘It could be a big seller, if we get it right. She’s got quite a reputation.’
‘I’m aware of that. But didn’t you tell me what a hell of a life she gave you? Left you mortally wounded. And you’re going to risk a replay?’
‘Things have changed.’
‘You reckon?’ Her cheek had been damp against his shoulder. Now she pushed herself up in bed and stared wonderingly down at him. ‘What on earth was it like, meeting her again after all these years?’
‘Weird,’ he conceded.
‘No nostalgic memories? No danger of falling for her again?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘The photographs I’ve seen of her, she still looks pretty terrific. Rather a bossy mouth, though.’
‘You’re dead right there.’
It was incredible that, long ago, he had so often kissed Brigid’s tight, savage lips. Why had he once loved her? Or, if not loved, been obsessed by her?
Brigid’s enthusiasms had been so overwhelming. She swept you off your feet with the intensity of whatever passion possessed her at any given moment; persuaded you of her intuitive rightness; until you learned to keep your feet firmly on the ground and let the tide break over you to expend itself somewhere behind you, somewhere further away.
He felt appetite stirring again. Not because of Brigid, not that. Oh, no, not any more. It was Kate whose skin was against his, Kate whose warm right leg moved sinuously against his left thigh.
She drew abruptly away from him. ‘Are you pretending I’m her? Wishing you could be back in bed with her instead of a nobody like me?’
She gasped as he cut her short with a sudden, angry plunge into her — an anger that she answered by digging her nails into his back, until the heat of their anger became the rich heat of desire. He mumbled sounds into her mouth that never became words but inflamed her into an uncontrollable dance, still in his arms and urging him to a faster, more insistent rhythm.
Until at last she had only enough breath left to sigh, lovingly: ‘You’re a real swine, aren’t you?’
‘I’m real, all right.’
Her hand strayed over his body. ‘I’ll say you are. When you’re here, that is. It’s damned dismal when you’re not.’
‘We’ve always agreed —’
‘No, we haven’t. You’ve made it clear you’re not going to be lumbered, and I’ve gone along with it. Had to. That doesn’t mean I’ve agreed. Just accepted, because there wasn’t anything else I could do. Selfish sod.’
‘Oh, Lor’. Kate … darling … you’ve always known what I am.’
‘No, I haven’t. When you’re working, you’re somebody else. I’m the mug who gets you these jobs, or sorts out the money for you. But then what? Once you’ve sunk into a part, I don’t know who you are. The number of times I’ve lost you. Never flaming well knowing who you’re going to be next time we meet.’ She stared intently at him. ‘Somehow, somewhere there’s always that question: who else are you?’
And in the morning, before he set off back to Norwich, she kissed him and said: ‘All right, I’ll screw every penny I can get out of Clement and Cowan. And while I’m slaving away at that, you’ll be nice and cosy in bed with her. I’ll bet on that.’
‘You’d lose your bet. After all the things I went through —’
‘If that woman decides you’re going to go to bed with her,’ said Kate sadly, ‘you’ll go to bed with her.’
*
Driving across the Fens in the early morning light, Greg began to wonder if Kate was right. Not about hopping into bed with Brigid — no way — but about his ability to cope. In this silvery haze, it seemed crazy to be leaving a world whose vast skies he had come to think of as his own, and a city whose streets never failed to enchant him. Leaving such security for another tussle, and this time a tussle with someone he had never been able to vanquish in the past — how could this be a rational judgment?
He stopped for coffee and a snack on the A1 and then was halfway to the Border before traffic thickened and lorries bore in from either side. Ahead, the A1 went on towards Edinburgh. He was glad she hadn’t insisted they start work in Edinburgh. Too many memories there; too many early frustrations. He turned off towards the A68, and could not help relaxing as he climbed the breathtaking miles to Carter Bar and its promise of the Scottish hills and valleys beyond. Through Jedburgh, and then a loop west into the vale of the Yarrow Water. In such surroundings he could almost believe that he was going to enjoy himself.
Baldonald House stood high on a brae above a curve in the river. He swept in between gateposts with two stags facing each other, and past a lodge with fuchsias trailing from a hanging basket.
A windbreak of larches and a dark barrier of rhododendron bushes which had long since shed their blooms shielded the frontage of the house until he was almost upon it. His first jaundiced thought was that Brigid had done very well for herself. Here was a setting worthy of the go-getting Miss Brigid Weir who had become Mrs Gregory Dacre and then Mrs Simon Pringle and now Lady Crombie.
The grey stone façade, with its two symmetrical arcs of steps meeting at a
huge front door on the terrace, would have defined it as a classical manor house were it not for the addition by a nineteenth-century Crombie, under the baleful influence of Sir Walter Scott, of a bulbous stair turret at the west end and an improbable flourish of battlements. A flag with the Crombie arms fluttered within the crenellations of the tower.
Greg stopped on a wide gravel expanse more fitting for a four-horse carriage than a Renault Laguna.
In keeping with the atmosphere, a young woman came out of the turret door, walking slowly along the terrace and down the steps like a princess in a pantomime. In other ways she obviously belonged to the late twentieth century, dressed in a sleeveless, figure-hugging charcoal-grey dress and chunky-heeled shoes probably advisable on those picturesque but chipped steps.
She stood waiting for Greg to get out of his car. Her black hair was closely cropped round her head like a helmet of deepest jet. Close to, she was sturdier than she had seemed from a distance, with arms which might have looked too muscular if they had not been so beautifully shaped. An outdoor girl, one would have summed her up. When she smiled a welcome her top teeth rested a fraction of an inch over her lower lip. The welcome did not include her eyes. They were pale green and very chilly.
He introduced himself. ‘Gregory Dacre. I think I’m expected.’
Her fingers as they shook hands were strong but unforthcoming. ‘Caroline Crombie.’
‘The Hon. Caroline,’ he said.
‘Been swotting us up already?’
‘Just the basics,’ he said.
‘Lady Crombie says she’s terribly sorry.’ There was an almost imperceptible emphasis on the Lady Crombie which might have been a faint sneer or just a mannerism. ‘She’s had to dash into Edinburgh.’
Typical, thought Greg. Brigid’s old tricks all over again. Making an appointment and then keeping you waiting. Showing up hours late with a bright, dismissive smile and an apology reverberating with an aren’t I just deplorable but forgivable?
‘She had a call from her solicitor about an action she’ll be bringing for constructive dismissal, breach of contract, that sort of thing. And father,’ Caroline went on, ‘has ridden over to see the Macphersons about some fishing rights. So I’ve been deputed to look after you until they get back.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t need to —’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ she said unconvincingly.
A young man in a waistcoat and tight trousers which must have been some kind of domestic uniform took Greg’s bags and showed him to his room. At the foot of the main staircase Caroline Crombie said: ‘I’ll be waiting for you in the vestibule here, to show you around. But don’t rush it. Do take your time.’
The view from the window of his room took in a long sweep of lawn, the stone wall of an enclosed garden, a stable block, and what looked like trays and pots of plants on trestles outside a greenhouse. Through the trees there was the glint of a stream, feeding down an uneven slope towards the Yarrow Water.
‘I’m sure one of our regular guides could do this better,’ the Hon. Caroline greeted him as he came down, ‘but this isn’t one of our open days, so you’ll have to make do with me.’
She brushed the perfectly smooth turn of hair behind her left ear with two fingers, and a moment later made exactly the same movement. She wore no rings, earrings, or other jewellery.
‘This is the morning room.’
It was huge, and smelt faintly of warm dust, heated by radiators under the tall windows. The panelled walls between the windows and beside the fireplace were hung with an uneven pattern of family portraits. ‘The first Baron Crombie,’ recited Caroline: ‘killed at Flodden Field.’ Then a succession of Lords of Parliament, a noble cousin who had been executed after the ’45, and a Countess or two. Names rolled unfaltering off her tongue. She might have been the most highly trained of those guides she had mentioned.
Brigid’s third husband was the twelfth Lord Crombie, descendant of a long line of Royal Keepers of the Forest, though there was little left of the ancient woodlands today. His face, like those others staring down from the walls, left little doubt of the continuing legitimacy of the line. All the men had the same heavy jowls and puffy lips, and each held his head stiffly back as if a collar were chafing his neck or he could not bear to look any ordinary mortal straight in the eyes.
And Caroline, like the men who had gone before her, tilted her head back when addressing Greg. He doubted, though, if she had inherited that habit of stroking the hair behind her ear so repetitively and with such a little click of tongue against teeth as she did so. They were very much her own mannerisms.
The paintings on the staircase were mainly of the womenfolk. Sir John Lavery was at his most sumptuously flattering in a group of two complacent Edwardian sisters and a large rough-haired deerhound. There were celebrations of a stream of distinguished marriages. In an earlier incarnation Caroline might herself have expected just such a union; but Greg wondered what sort of husband she could hope to find round these parts nowadays.
She nodded at a portrait in the shadow of a landing. ‘My mother. Used to hang in the dining-room. Brigid had it shifted for father’s sake, so it wouldn’t awaken memories every day.’
‘And replaced it with a portrait of the — um — present Lady Crombie?’
‘No, she hasn’t gone that far.’ Caroline allowed him the flicker of a faintly disdainful smile. ‘Not yet.’
He was shown the bedroom where Bonnie Prince Charlie had slept on his way back from England, heading towards fatal Culloden. On the dressing-table stood an anamorphosis painted on a concertina’d fan of parchment. From one direction, the slats showed a portrait of the Prince; from the other, a human skull.
‘There’s a similar one of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Edinburgh,’ said Caroline. ‘A few weeks from now this one’ll be going to join it, off to Canada with some of our Jacobite portraits and relics for a big exhibition. They settled on a nice dramatic title in the papers yesterday: Secrets of the Stewarts.’
The Crombies had, like so many other families with Jacobite sympathies, been disgraced for a while — which Caroline quietly but uncompromisingly declared to have been no disgrace. In any case they were too important to the traditional social and administrative balance in the old Border region for their banishment to last more than a few decades.
Caroline opened a door and stood back to let Greg look in. ‘There used to be a small suite of rooms for the Master here.’
‘The master of the house?’
‘No. The older son, always given the title of Master — in our case, the Master of Yarrow. Only in this generation there’s been no son. I occupied the suite myself for a while. But after I’d left, Brigid — Lady Crombie’ — in the correction there was again that whisper of distaste —’preferred to bring the rooms up to date. Preferred something more modern.’ The interior was that of an expensive hotel bedroom, leading on to a sleek modern bathroom and shower, with toilet paper matching the flowered wallpaper. ‘For guests. Especially big shots coming for the horse trials, or country fairs, or whatever else she can persuade my father to put on. Had to get rid of a lot of … well … family junk, I suppose you’d call it … to pay for it all.’
At the end of the landing, she pointed out of a tall window with wooden interior shutters drawn back. At the foot of a grassy slope was what looked like a cobbled track.
‘Our Roman pavement. Must have been part of the ancient route to Trimontium — near Newstead, as it is today.’ She sounded calmly possessive, as if the Crombie line was in unbroken succession from the great Roman generals who decreed the building of roads to link their centres of civilisation.
To one side of the half landing was a small room whose door she opened with a kind of reluctance, as if unwilling to trespass. ‘My father’s hideaway. And that hole in the wall over there is the laird’s lug, of course.’
‘The what?’
‘The laird’s lug. Through which he could listen in to seditious c
hatter in the sitting room underneath here, or in the kitchen.’
‘Both at the same time?’
‘It could have been confusing, yes. Like two overlapping radio wavelengths.’
She closed the door.
They went downstairs by another staircase at the back of the house, emerging into a long corridor with more portraits and a few landscapes of local forest which had since disappeared. Caroline opened the first door on the right. ‘The library,’ she said. ‘Or it used to be. Lot of family history tomes that nobody ever looked at. A few fetched a good price. Paid for the phone extensions and the rest of it.’
One range of mahogany bookcases remained at the far end of the room, but its shelves held modern business manuals, and tables jutting from the other walls carried telephones, a fax machine, and arrays of files.
‘There used to be a pretty little ebony work table there, with pewter-inlaid drawers.’ Caroline nodded at a plastic and metal desk on castors, with shelves angled to take a computer screen, keyboard, and printer. ‘I suppose you could call that a work table. Just as curious and olde-worlde a hundred years from now.’ Abruptly she added: ‘You’re one of her exes, aren’t you?’
‘The first,’ he confessed.
‘Must seem odd.’ She could be wondering just how envious he was to see what his ex-wife had achieved since they split up.
At the far end of the corridor a door opened on to the outside world. From this angle, the stable block he had seen from above now sprouted signs lettered Refreshments and Toilets.
‘Another of Brigid’s ideas. Ploughmen’s lunches and gifts. It’s only just beginning to cover the cost of converting the stables.’
‘Well edited,’ said Greg.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘As a TV documentary, you couldn’t have done it better.’
She looked him up and down, and her tone became less impersonal. ‘Very observant, Mr Dacre. I do do some local television work.’
‘A bit of a remote base, this.’