The Empty House

by Michael Gilbert

  “What about Kevin?”

  “Before you go out, write a note for him and ask Dave Brewer to hand it to him personally when he gets back. Tell him that we’ll contact him tonight, if he’s allowed away, or tomorrow at the latest, through the tourist office in Cryde. Whoever gets there first leaves a message for the other.”

  Anna said, “I think you’re wonderful,” kissed him quickly on the mouth, slipped out from under his arm when he would have held her, and disappeared. Ten minutes later she was back with a small brown bag. Peter was sorry to see that she looked a lot more in charge of herself.

  She said, “I’ve given Dave the note. He said not to worry. One of the policemen told him that Kevin would be all right – it was just routine questioning. Do you think we’re being silly, running away like this?”

  “No,” said Peter firmly. “I think we’re being very sensible.”

  He finished his own packing and walked downstairs. There was a uniformed policeman in the hall, who looked at him curiously, but made no move to stop him. He threw the two cases into the back of the car, waved goodbye to Mr. Brewer, who had come out to see him off, and drove away down the sleepy main street. His first stop was the garage, where he found Mr. Key and arranged to keep the Savoia for a further week. He said, “I had a bit of trouble with the distributor, but that’s fixed now, and she’s going like a humming top. Better fill her up.”

  Anna was waiting for him sitting on the low wall that surrounded the churchyard. She jumped in beside him without a word, and they drove off.

  “’So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,’” said Peter to himself. “’So light to the saddle before her he sprung,’” and added, as he accelerated down the road, “’They’ll have fleet steeds that follow, quoth young Lochinvar.’”

  He had worked out a roundabout route, leaving Bridgetown on the west, turning south to Exford, and cutting back to Wheddon Cross and then north again to Dunster and the coast. The sun shone. Earth and sky were empty of menace.

  Captain Andy seemed unsurprised at the arrival of a second guest and the promise of a third on the following day.

  “Lucky I’ve done up two more bedrooms,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ll all have to clear out at the end of the week when the Porters and the Moxhams come with their children.”

  Peter said, “We’ll be away before then.” He wasn’t thinking about the end of the week. He was only thinking of that night.

  When he had undressed, he sat on his bed, in his pyjamas, and thought about Anna. He had carried her away across the crupper of his horse. She was in the room next door to his. He could hear the faint sounds as she moved about and, he presumed, undressed. It was his fatal lack of experience, not the wall between them, that was the barrier. How did one start? Would it answer if he rushed in, grabbed hold of her, rolled her over onto her back—?

  At this moment the door of his own room opened softly and Anna came in. He saw that she was wearing a knee-length pyjama coat and nothing else.

  She said, “I thought it would be polite to wait five minutes in case you were coming in to say good night to me.” And as Peter put his arms around her clumsily, “Is this the first time ever, little Peter?”

  “The first time,” said Peter thickly.

  “It’s not at all difficult. Like dancing, only nicer. Do you want me to teach you?”

  This made Peter angry. He said, “No. I’ll do the teaching.”

  Later Anna said, “Gently, Peter, please. When I said dancing, I meant a slow waltz, not a fox-trot.”

  15

  When Peter woke up in the morning, Anna had gone. He dressed slowly and was halfway through breakfast when he saw her coming up the front path. She was wearing a macintosh, her hair was in a mess, and a towel over her shoulder made it clear that she had been swimming.

  “You’re a lazy pair of slugabeds,” she said.

  “I’m too old for early-morning bathes,” said Captain Andy with a grin. “You ought to have been out, though.”

  “Tomorrow I will,” said Peter.

  “Tomorrow it mayn’t be bathing weather. The barometer’s down three points. Like I told you, there’s something bad coming up.”

  After breakfast Peter drove Anna into Cryde and they called at the tourist office. It was the same girl who had helped Peter a week before. She said, “Your friend called in early this morning. He left a message. The car’s in the station car-park. He’ll be there every hour, on the hour, until you turn up.”

  Since it was ten past eleven, they spent some time strolling round the town. The sunshine during the last two days had cheered the visitors up and there were red arms and peeled faces everywhere. At midday they went back to the station and found Kevin sitting in the Land-Rover.

  He said, “Discharged, without a stain on my character. But it took them hours to do it.”

  “What happened?”

  “At first they didn’t believe a word I said. Star-gazing indeed! Tell that to the marines! I told them exactly where I’d been, and said if they went to look they’d probably be able to find my tire tracks. I’d nearly got bogged several times. They said tyre tracks didn’t prove anything – they could have been made at any time. Then I remembered I did talk to one character. It was in the middle of nowhere, and I was beginning to think I was totally lost, stars or no stars, when I spotted this chap. He was some sort of sheep warden or cowkeeper, and he put me on the track back to Huntercombe. Then they did agree to go and check up, and since his story tallied with mine they apologised and let me go.”

  “They apologised?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I think that’s a bad sign,” said Peter. “What did you do next?”

  “I went back to the hotel and found you had flitted. Dave gave me your message, and I decided to pull out, too, and spend the rest of the night in the back of the car. Somehow I couldn’t fancy the hotel any more.”

  “I know,” said Anna. “It had got creepy. And it was so nice, to start with. Never mind. Peter’s found a lovely place now. It’s kept by a man who looks like a retired pirate. Not that he’s very old, really.”

  “The best pirates retired young,” said Kevin.

  As the day went on, the heat increased. After a suitable pause to digest Captain Andy’s lunch, the three of them went down to bathe. Peter was a good swimmer, but he couldn’t keep up with Anna or Kevin, who went straight out to sea, using a lazy, effortless crawl which took them through the water like a pair of seals. After tea Kevin went into the town to do some shopping and Peter took Anna off in the other direction. He knew exactly what he wanted, and found it beyond the cliff top – a small dip, turf-covered and masked on three sides by bushes.

  Now that the barriers were down, everything was relaxed and easy and totally absorbing. Peter unbuttoned the boy’s shirt that Anna was wearing and found nothing under it except a warm and friendly brown body, which he explored gently.

  After a period of shameless enjoyment, Anna said, sleepily, “Wasn’t it lucky they did eat that apple?”

  “What apple?”

  “Adam and Eve. If they hadn’t eaten it, they might never have found out about anything. Think how dull that would have been. And no descendants. The whole experiment would have been abortive.”

  “Looked at in that way,” said Peter, “the serpent was one of the great benefactors of the human race.”

  They thought about the serpent for a few minutes. Then Anna, who had been lying on her back looking up at the sky, rolled over onto her side and put her face down onto Peter’s until the tip of her nose was just touching his. Then she said, “What are you up to, Peter?”

  Peter tried to focus on her face, but it was too close to see properly. She rubbed the tip of her nose against his and said, “That’s how Polynesians kiss. Isn’t it nice? Don’t change the subject.”

  “I wasn’t changing the subject,” said Peter feebly. “You were.”

  “All right. What are you up to? And don’t tell me you
came to this place by mistake.”

  “Well—”

  “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  “Very well,” said Peter. He hadn’t really considered not telling her. He was sorting matters out into some sort of logical sequence.

  When he had told her everything, she was silent for a long time. Then she said, “You are the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met. Do you mean to say that you’ve worked all this out yourself, inside your own head, and told no one about it?”

  “I did mean to tell the Colonel.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “He annoyed me.”

  “That’s not a serious reason.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then?”

  “It just occurred to me that I didn’t really know much about him. He was watching Dr. Wolfe. He seems to be hand in glove with the police. But what’s his real job? What’s he a colonel in?”

  “Some sort of intelligence outfit?”

  “Does that make him someone I’ve got to trust? When I was talking to him, he said when he’d heard I’d gone up to see Professor Petros he’d hoped the Professor would cut my throat and bury me. And, by God, I believe he meant it.”

  “I expect he did. Professionals never like amateurs taking part in their games.”

  “Particularly as they sometimes win.”

  Anna thought about this. Then she said, “I don’t think this is a game you can win, Peter. In fact, I don’t think it’s a game at all. It’s a private war. Outsiders who get mixed up in a private war always end up by getting hurt.”

  “When I was at school,” said Peter, “one of my reports said, ‘Manciple has an enviable facility for getting round and out of difficulties.’”

  “You’re an eel,” agreed Anna. “A great, long, slippery eel. But even eels get caught sometimes. What are you doing to do next?”

  “Talk to Dr. Wolfe. Try to make him see sense.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  He could feel that she was frightened. The idea that she should be frightened for him was intoxicating.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I shall be all right.”

  “It’s not all right.” Anna sounded angry. “It’s mad and it’s stupid. You still think it’s some sort of game. It’s not a game. You’ll get hurt. You may even get killed. Don’t you care?”

  “Getting hurt and getting killed are two quite different things. Yes to the first. I do mind about getting hurt. The thought that someone might treat me the way they treated Dr. Bishwas – it doesn’t just scare me. It turns my stomach.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But the idea of being killed doesn’t worry me in the same way at all.”

  Anna sat up. She said, “Either you’re crazy or you’re shooting a line. Of course you don’t want to get killed.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to get killed. I said I didn’t mind about it, one way or the other. My father died last year. He drove his car straight into a telegraph pole, at high speed, and was killed instantly. Officially, it was an accident. That was the verdict of the jury at the inquest. Nobody’s likely to find the truth out now. It hit us all in different ways. My brother, Jonathan, who was the one I was closest to, simply ran away. He went to New Zealand, married the first girl he met there, and turned his back on the whole thing. He writes to us occasionally. My mother ran away, too. She ran away from the real world. She lives a fantasy life of her own. I was the most cowardly of the lot. I decided to opt out altogether.”

  “To kill yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “I reasoned it out logically. I’d had a very happy twenty-two years. From that point on, things were bound to get worse, not better. The wise guest knows when to leave the party. It’s only the fool who stays on until the glasses are all empty and his host is longing to put the cat out and go to bed.”

  Anna was sitting bolt upright, staring at him. She said, “Having proclaimed all these platitudes and half-truths to yourself, just what did you do about it?”

  “Oh, I had every last detail worked out. I went to my doctor and complained of insomnia. He gave me a small bottle of sleeping pills. Ten, to be exact. He warned me never to take more than two. I put them carefully away. A month later I went again. I said that the pills had been a great help. I got another ten. Two months later I got ten more. Then I booked a room in a quiet hotel in Surrey. I had a good dinner, retired to my room, locked the door, and sat down to write a note explaining what I was doing and why I was doing it. It covered six foolscap pages. While I was writing, I was drinking the half-bottle of whisky which I’d brought with me. Then I started to swallow the pills.”

  “All thirty of them?”

  “All thirty. I got them down, too. Helped by what was left of the whisky.”

  “Then?”

  “Then I lay down and blacked out completely. I must have been out for about six hours. It was just getting light when I woke up. My first idea was that I was in heaven. My next idea was that I was going to be sick. I just got to the basin in time. I spent the rest of the night being sick and wondering whether the top of my head was going to come off.”

  “And that was all?”

  “That was all.”

  “Thirty sleeping pills?”

  “No. Only ten. My doctor had guessed what I was up to. The second and third bottles weren’t sleeping pills at all. Compressed bread. He told me afterward.”

  “You really meant it, didn’t you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And during all the time it took you to collect those pills – three months – it never once occurred to you that what you were doing was stupid and cowardly?”

  “Certainly not. It was entirely my own business.”

  “You really think that? You think your life’s given you, like a twopenny bar of chocolate that you can eat as slowly or as fast as you like and throw away the wrapper?”

  The anger in her voice surprised Peter. He said, “If my own life doesn’t belong to me, who the hell does it belong to?”

  “It belongs to everyone in your world. You’re given it so that you can do something for your people. You may have to expend it, yes. But you expend it in defence of them, as young men do in a just war.”

  There was a very long silence, in which the syllable “war” seemed to hang. It was Anna who broke the silence. She said, “I am being too serious. All that you told me is in the past. It is all forgotten now.”

  “If you mean,” said Peter, “have I any present intention of killing myself, the answer is ‘no.’ But it remains a matter of total indifference to me if someone else chooses to do it. Provided they do it quickly, and reasonably painlessly. But I’m not going to pull the trigger myself. Not now that I’ve met you. How soon can we get married?”

  Anna came up on one elbow and said, “What on earth makes you think that I am going to marry you?”

  “Instinct.”

  “Your instinct has let you down. You’d be a dead loss as a husband.”

  “Why”Because you don’t live your life at all. You play it, as if it was a sort of game where you throw dice and go on six squares or back three. And if you happened to land on a square which said ‘commit suicide,’ you’d probably do it. It’d be a hell of a consolation to your widow to know that you’d done it because the rules said so.”

  Peter looked at her in admiration. A new and formidable person was developing in front of his eyes. He said, “Like should never marry like. We’ll make a terrific combination.”

  “I can see it’s no use arguing with you.” Anna started buttoning up her shirt. And I suppose you’re going on with this particular game.”

  “In reason,” said Peter. “But only in reason. I don’t want to get involved with what’s going on behind the scenes. Colonel Hay and Professor Petros can get on with it, and the best of British luck to them. I just want to finish the business I
was sent down here to do. Prove, beyond any argument, that Dr. Wolfe is alive. I can only do that by talking to him.”

  “And you’re going to do that this evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “From what I saw of him last time, he doesn’t seem to be the type who goes to bed early. Last time I visited the house it was eleven o’clock and he was just starting to cook supper. I thought I’d look in around midnight.”

  “I think you’re mad,” said Anna. “Let’s go and swim.”

  After supper that night the four of them sat in the Captain’s room and looked out over Cryde Bay as the sun went down behind the cliffs to the west of the town. No one made any move to turn the lights on. Afterward, Peter was able to remember almost every word that was said as they sat there in the dusk while the day died and the lights of the town came out.

  Kevin, it appeared, had a theory about Mother Melldrum, and wanted to try it out on Captain Andy, who seemed to know almost as much about Loma Doone as he did.

  “You remember that she had two houses. Her summer one was inland, near Hawkridge, above Tarr Steps, at the crossing of the River Barle.”

  “But at the fall of the leaf,” said Captain Andy, “she set her face to the Bristol Channel.”

  “Right. And made for the Valley of Rocks, which everyone now identifies with that dip in the cliff which local people call the Denes. Wrongly, I’m convinced.”

  “Blackmore located it quite precisely. As I remember it, he said it was westward a mile from Lynton. And there is such a place, with the Castle Crag on one side and the Devil’s Cheese Ring on the other.”

  “Quite so. But what you have to remember is that both those places were identified and named after the book became famous. People looked for them and found them because they were in the book.”

  “Then what’s your idea?”

  “I think that Blackmore deliberately misled people. He had a strong personal affection for the places he was describing. The last thing he would want was hordes of trippers climbing over them. The places existed, all right, but not just where he put them. Now, I’ve found a spot which fits in far more accurately with his description. It’s not one mile west of Lynton at all. It’s three miles east, between Kipscombe Hill and Countisbury Bay. There’s a rock formation there which is exactly like his description of the Devil’s Cheese Ring.”