by James Wilson
CONSOLATION
A Novel of Mystery
JAMES WILSON
For my family
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
Copyright
I
It happened, as near as I can fix it, at twenty-seven minutes past six. When the church clock struck the quarter, I was still indisputably my old self. By the time it chimed the half-hour, I had already begun my queer journey to what I am now. Though I couldn’t have told you what it was, and hadn’t the faintest intimation where it would lead me, I knew – as certainly as if it had been a physical hand, reaching out and closing about my wrist – that something strange had taken hold of me, and would not lightly let me go.
I had been walking, at that point, for three days. The first evening I had put up at a small pub in a riverside hamlet, but the snugness of the bar, and the sweet-natured banter between the landlord and his pretty young wife, and the trusting way their small boy asked me to admire his toy engine, all tormented me as a hot bath does cold flesh. By the time I went to bed, I was in such mental anguish that I could hardly sleep. So the next night I decided to stay in the woods. I lit a fire in the crater made by a fallen tree, ate a supper of bread and cheese, then wrapped myself in my coat and lay down in the shelter of the overhanging root. I slept no better, as it turned out, than I had at the pub. But at least my mind, when morning came, was as numb as my limbs.
The following day I trudged on, taking the most out-of-the-way paths I could find, and keeping myself going by scooping handfuls of water from every little stream I passed, and grubbing among the leaves for a few old cob-nuts that the squirrels had missed. When dusk began to fall, I looked around for another place to camp, and in a few minutes had discovered the perfect spot: a shallow, leaf-strewn hollow, almost completely enclosed by a straggly wild rhododendron. As I set down my rucksack and started gathering sticks for the camp-fire, some small, critical part of my consciousness observed that I was behaving oddly, and that I should go in search of a hot meal and a change of clothes before hunger and solitude unhinged my mind. But I was already so faint and light-headed – the pulse thrubbing in my ears; my arms and legs turning to string – that it was easy enough to ignore it. Hunger, I knew now from experience, wasn’t so terrible: once you were past a certain point, in fact, it was actually rather soothing. And, in any case, I was in no state to go anywhere, or see anyone, tonight. Only let me sleep, I thought, and I’d be better in the morning.
I rummaged through the fallen leaves, but couldn’t find any dry enough to serve as tinder; so I reached into my pocket, and drew out the note my wife had thrust into my hand as I was leaving. I crushed it into a ball, and set a match to it – illuminating, for a second or two, a few random words on the crumpled surface: Black bear sez good by, and be shor to change yor soks. I should, I knew, have felt a pang of compunction; but the only emotion I was aware of, as I watched the flames, was a strange, unworldly kind of serenity, as if my soul were finally parting company with my body.
The next second there was a rustling in the bush behind me. I turned, and saw a trembling spaniel looking at me, one paw in the air. For a second or two we eyed each other curiously. Then its soft pouchy mouth began to move, and I heard it say:
‘Well, you’re a rum ’un, and no mistake.’
Dogs can’t talk, shouted the critic from his box. But that didn’t stop me bridling, and snapping back:
‘What a damned uncivil greeting.’
I was still speaking when the branches parted again and a well-dressed woman appeared. The instant she saw me, she made a barrier with her hand, to prevent someone behind her from coming any further. Then she stood staring at me for a few moments, before whistling for the dog, and backing away nervously, her arm still outstretched, and her startled gaze never leaving my face – as if she feared that, if she allowed her attention to lapse for a moment, I might commit some frightful outrage. All I could see of her companion was a felt hat garnished with a feather; but as they stumbled noisily through the undergrowth together, I heard sobs – whether of fear or laughter I couldn’t tell – and a rapid fire of half-whispered female conversation, from which I was able to make out only the word ‘lunatic’.
The critic was right: if I wasn’t careful, I could find I had drifted irrevocably beyond the edge of the known world. There was nothing for it: I needed an infusion of the real, before it was too late. I quickly stamped out the fire, and took up my bag again.
But where to go? I had only the vaguest notion of where I was, and it was so long since I’d last looked at the map that consulting it now would be useless. The two women must have come from somewhere, but there was no telling how far it was, or in which direction. And even if I managed to find the place, I doubted, after the incident with the dog, whether I could expect a very cordial reception.
I peered about me, searching for a sign of human life. Blankets of mist were starting to hang between the trees, reducing the view on every side to a few smudged-out pencil strokes, and when I held my breath all I could hear was the slow pop and prickle of dripping moisture. But I knew that I was close to the top of a hill, and that, if I could only find a path down, it was bound, sooner or later, to lead me to a road or a track.
The women had continued on along the ridge, so – to avoid the risk of another embarrassing encounter – I set off back the way I had come. And, sure enough, after a quarter of a mile or so, I spotted a small gap in the bushes to my right, and a dark line zig-zagging away through the undergrowth below it.
It was a treacherous descent, the mud spiked with flints and riddled with slippery, half-hidden roots, and more than once I lost my balance. But after no more than ten minutes I was rewarded with the unmistakable smell of wood-smoke, and then – a few hundred yards further on – the faint glow of a lighted window.
It came, I saw, as I drew nearer, from a square cottage tucked into a fold in the steep hillside. Beyond it stood a tall, overgrown structure that looked as if it might once have been the gateway to a much bigger house, though the drive – if that’s what it was – had now disappeared under a wild tangle of scrub.
I hesitated. And then it occurred to me that even if the two women did live here (and their clothes and their manner suggested something rather grander), they would not have been able to get back before me. So I pushed open the garden gate, walked up the flagged path, and knocked at the door. Almost at once, I heard the shuffle of feet on tiles, and then the click of the latch.
The rank sawdust-and-bile smell should have warned me. But it took me so much by surprise that for a moment I couldn’t identify what it reminded me of. And by the time I had the answer – Mr. Angwin’s butcher’s shop – I was looking into the milky eyes and blood-matted faces of five dead rabbits stretched side by side on a table.
I dropped my gaze and turned abruptly away, to keep myself from retching. A fair-haired child was staring at me round the edge of the door. She was perhaps eight or nine, and dressed in a patched and darned Alice-in-Wonderland smock. It was a second before I noticed the red spatters on the front of it.
A black iris closed around my vision, and I only managed to stay on my feet by clutching at the door-jamb, and resting my forehead against the angle of the wood. From what sounded like the end o
f a long tunnel, a deep male voice said:
‘Hullo! You look all-in.’
I felt a hand taking my elbow. I opened my eyes again, and found a thin, dark-bearded man examining me. He was so close that I could smell the oil of his hair, and the oaty fust of his tweed waistcoat.
‘Come on,’ he said, gently trying to draw me inside. ‘Let’s sit you down.’
If I got any closer to those rabbits, I knew for a certainty that nothing in the world would stop me from being sick. So I pulled free of his grasp, and clung on to the door-post.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But I’m perfectly all right. I was just wondering if you could tell me where I might find a bed for the night?’
He frowned, trying to square the way I spoke with my appearance. Then he jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said:
‘If you go up there, to the big house, they’ll give you something to eat. And maybe let you sleep in one of the stables. Tell them Davey Riddick –’
‘No, I’m quite willing to pay,’ I said. ‘If you could just point me in the direction of the nearest village …’
He studied me for a second – calculating, I suspect, my chances of getting there on my own. Then he said:
‘I’ll be going that way myself in a couple of ticks, so if you just hang on a moment, I’ll show you.’
I had little appetite for company or conversation, but I couldn’t very well refuse. I propped myself against the wall and waited while he retreated into the nauseating fug of the cottage and exchanged a few words with another man. As he came out again, shrugging on his coat, I heard the little girl calling:
‘Goodbye!’
I could not bring myself to look at her again, so I waved blindly into the gloom, and then turned hurriedly towards my companion.
‘This is very kind of you,’ I said. ‘Is it far?’
‘A fair step,’ he said, striding off ahead of me. ‘But most of it’s through the park. So easy enough on the feet.’ I found him as hard to place as he had found me. He didn’t sound like a Sussex man, and wasn’t dressed like either a gentleman or an estate-worker: to see and hear him you might have imagined he was a board-school teacher. But I had met him in what appeared to be a game-keeper’s cottage, and he had a countryman’s easy alertness to his surroundings.
‘This used to be the main entrance, I believe,’ he said, as we approached the overgrown gateway. ‘But a few years ago they cut a new drive, so now you can get to the big house directly from the village, rather than having to take the long way round through the woods. Which is lucky for you, because it’ll save you a mile or two.’
The arch was clogged by a jungle of brush and ivy, which had shrunk the opening to a ragged wound no more than eighteen inches across.
‘Good thing we’re a couple of bean-poles,’ said my guide, as he squeezed through sideways. I took a deep breath and followed him, my clothes snagging on twigs and thorns, and a bristly stem grazing my face – so that when I emerged again on the far side, I felt as if I had been re-born in another world.
And indeed the atmosphere was, all of a sudden, strikingly different. A breeze had started to blow up from the valley below; the moon was edging above the horizon; and through the thinning mist I could see the puckered scar of the old drive winding ahead of us across a lake of silvery grass dotted with little islands of trees.
‘Invigorating, eh?’ said the man. ‘No refuge, in a landscape like this. You have to take what the elements fling at you. But at least you know you’re alive.’ He took a few paces forward, then stopped abruptly, and lifted his nose like a pointer. ‘Smell that?’
I shut my eyes and snuffed the air. Mingled with the downland sweetness I could just make out a faint spice of salt.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Don’t you wish you could run away to sea sometimes?’
‘Yes. Everyone does, don’t they?’
‘I mean the real thing. Hawsers, and capstans, and engine-rooms, and the stink of coal. Pitting your muscles and marrow against the might of nature.’ He hesitated, then turned towards me with a short bark of laughter. ‘What do you say? Shall we do it? I’m game, if you are.’
It sounded off-hand enough; but I could feel on my cheek the power of his gaze boring through the darkness.
‘I’m not sure my muscles and marrow are up to it,’ I said.
He laughed again. ‘Nor mine, I expect, worse luck.’ He looked at me for a moment more, then wheeled round and began walking again – so abruptly, that I was left standing for a second or two, like a runner who has missed the starting pistol. By the time I had finally forced my enfeebled legs into motion, he was so far ahead of me that – try as I might – I could not close the gap between us. From time to time he would glance surreptitiously over his shoulder, and, if I had fallen too far behind, ease his pace a little. But he always increased it again before I had a chance to catch him up.
And then, finally, he stopped on a knobby prominence, and stood peering out over the long swoop of the hillside below us. It was a minute or so before I had climbed high enough to see what he was looking at: a large, square country house lying comfortably at the bottom of the valley, protected by a little copse and a horse-shoe of outbuildings. I expected him to move on again as I drew near; but instead he fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a packet of Players, and offered it to me companionably.
‘Thank you.’
I found my matches and managed to strike one, but my hand trembled so much when I held it out to him that he had to take my wrist to steady it. He quickly puffed his cigarette into life. Then, still grasping my arm with one hand, and shielding the flame with the other, he leaned forward to study my face in the light of the match.
‘Heavens,’ he said. ‘You are in a state, aren’t you? What was it? The sight of those rabbits?’
I said nothing. He continued to stare intently at me, until the match started to burn my fingers. He blew it out, and flicked it on to the ground.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘You look like a man who’s seen a bit of life, and got dirt under your nails. I can’t imagine it comes as much of a shock to you to realize that a rabbit’s a flesh-and-blood animal, and not a character in a picture-book.’
‘I was feeling a bit faint, that’s all. Haven’t slept or eaten much recently.’
He drew smoke into his lungs, then slowly let it out again. ‘When’d you last have a meal?’
‘Two nights ago.’
He nodded again. ‘And where was that?’
‘Oh, just some little wayside inn. In a village somewhere.’
‘What, round here?’
‘I don’t think so. Though to be honest, I’m not sure. I don’t really know where I am now.’
‘About ten miles from Portsmouth. Is that where you’re going?’
‘I’m not going anywhere in particular.’
‘Ah.’ I suddenly noticed he was still holding my wrist, and found myself wondering if – having established just how lost and helpless I was – he meant to attack and rob me. But after a moment, he merely nodded again, and said:
‘So where’d you start out from, then?’
‘Brighton.’
‘You’re a Brightonian?’
I shook my head. ‘I took the train there.’
He waited for me to explain myself – to tell him where I did live, and who I was, and why I was there – but I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just weariness that prevented me, but the fear of being thought ridiculous, too. I couldn’t expect much sympathy for my predicament from a man who liked engine-rooms and the stink of coal.
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘You’re a rum ’un, and no mistake.’
I couldn’t help laughing. He squinted curiously at me.
‘You put me in a bit of a quandary,’ he said. ‘My way’ – jerking his head back, towards the house – ‘lies down there. Yours is straight ahead. So by rights, this is where we should part company. Only I’m not sure I ought to leave you.’
‘Oh, I’ll be all rig
ht, thank you.’
He scratched his chin irritatedly. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
Exhaustion doesn’t only weaken you: it makes you stupid, too. It should have been perfectly obvious that my dirty clothes and unshaven face and distraught manner were bound to arouse suspicion, but the idea hadn’t even occurred to me before. Now, trying to make light of it, I said:
‘Ah, I see, you think from my appearance I must be some poor desperate fellow who’s murdered his wife or something, and is fleeing the retribution of the law. Well, I can promise you I’m not.’
His fingers tightened on my wrist, and he peered into my eyes, as if – despite the darkness – he thought he might be able to see there whether or not I was lying. Then, after a couple of seconds, he let me go again, and pulled away.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe you are. A pity. I should like to meet a murderer.’ He turned towards the house, and raised a hand. ‘Well, whatever you are, and wherever you’re going, good luck to you. Don’t waste your time on the Three Crowns. You’ll find the Railway comfortable enough, though. At the far end of the village.’
‘Thank you,’ I called after him; and watched until he had dwindled to no more than a faint sinuous shadow slipping across the grass below me.
It was only now, as I resumed my journey alone, that it struck me how quickly the weather was changing. The breeze had grown to a gusty wind, blowing away the last rags of mist and flinging angry spatters of rain into my face. To protect myself, I pulled up the collar of my coat and walked with hunched shoulders and half-closed eyes. When I came to the new drive, I knew it more by the crunch of fresh gravel beneath my boots than by anything I could see.
There was a squat, newly built lodge at the entrance. I tiptoed past it, for fear of being challenged by the gate-keeper, and then out through the open gate on to the road. A hundred yards or so ahead of me a straggle of cottages marked the beginning of the village. Beyond them, I could just make out the black witch’s hat of a church spire. As I turned towards it, the clock in the tower below it struck the hour.