by Joseph Hone
I looked around me more carefully in the light of the single dim bulb. On a table by the door was a cellar book, together with several empty decanters, a few tulip-shaped wine glasses, a candle for checking the vintage colours and another of those old pub-counter cork extractors, a mate to the one I’d seen upstairs in the butler’s pantry. And, of course, there was the wine itself, carefully but generously chosen, with champagnes, ports, sherries and brandies to go with it.
I looked in one of the stone alcoves: Tättinger. Blanc de Blanc, 1967. The bottles were held in a metal rack here, given their bulbous shape. Further along was a great pyramid of Haut-Brion, 1961 – and beyond that there were a lot of Burgundies: Chambolle Musigny, 1971 and Les Charmes from the same year. There was some superb drinking here, I could see that, with all the necessary decanters, glasses and a most suitable corkscrew to start things moving. But there was no one to share it with …
And then, to one side of the dumb-waiter, I noticed two bell-pushes that had been let into the wall. One was marked ‘Pantry’ – the other ‘Smoking Room Tower’. Of course: having loaded the clarets and vintage port into the serving-hatch in the old days, the cellarman would thus warn the staff on the floors above to expect the lift’s arrival.
If I waited here for an hour or so, until I was sure the police had left – and if the bells still worked – I could write a message on a page of the cellar book, put it in the lift, haul it up and sound the alarm. There was a good chance that Alice would hear it, either in the pantry or up in her tower.
I tore a page out of the back of the cellar book. There was a ballpoint next to it. ‘Am locked in the wine cellar,’ I wrote, and then to make sure she saw the piece of paper I stuck it onto the partly released wire surrounding the cork on a bottle of Tättinger. Then I added a P.S.: ‘Come on down and join me!’
I was rather pleased with myself.
About an hour later I sent the lift upwards, straight up to the tower first, and rang the bell. I couldn’t hear if it sounded or not, that high up. Nothing happened in any case. So I brought the lift down then, to the pantry level on the first floor, and rang the ‘Pantry’ bell. Now I heard the sound, quite clearly, not far above me. And a few minutes later, after I’d rung a second time, the hatch doors opened and I heard the champagne bottle being taken out.
‘Alice?’ I called up the shaft. ‘I’m here!’
But there was no reply. She was obviously coming down to me straight away. I was saved.
I stood by the cellar door, waiting expectantly. Some time passed. Eventually a key was pushed into the Yale lock outside and the door finally opened.
‘Alice!’ I said.
But it wasn’t Alice. It was a very large, almost gross, woman in a pink twin-set and tight skirt, smartly got up, with too much powder and lipstick, who held the door open for me. Her size made her seem older. But she couldn’t have been more than forty. Her face was quite creased in fat, but the brown eyes were sharp and small and set close together, like chocolate buttons on a big sponge cake. She was large … Of course, I realized then: she was the same woman I’d seen spying on Alice down by the lake a week before.
I said nothing. I was speechless.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said entirely self-possessed. ‘Miss Troy must have gone outside. I’m the housekeeper, Mrs Pringle. I just got back. I heard the bell ring.’
‘Stupid of me,’ I said, for want of anything better to say. ‘I – I locked myself in.’ I thought I might bluff it out. ‘I was looking …’ I turned and gestured vaguely at the wine behind me.
‘Yes, of course,’ the big woman said easily, sympathetically. ‘You’re not the first person to get locked in here: the door, it swings to without your noticing.’ She had a London, not a Cotswolds voice; not Cockney London or South Kensington either, but the voice of someone trying to rise from one of the grey areas in between. Then to my great surprise she said, ‘You’ll be Mr Conrad, from London. Miss Troy said you’d be coming down some time this week. She must have shown you your room already. I don’t know where she is at the moment, out round the park looking for you, I expect. She wasn’t here when I got back.’
I followed Mrs Pringle along the basement passage. She clipped along the flagstones in her high-heeled shoes, with the neat-sounding rhythms of a Guardsman on parade, though she looked, on her small feet with her body rising out dramatically above, like a ninepin upside down. She seemed a very competent, authoritative woman, almost too familiar with her employers, I thought. But I assumed this might just be a reflection of an American domestic equality imposed on the household by its new owners.
We walked up some steps and round into the big kitchen. A kettle was already singing on the great black range.
‘Yes, Miss Troy can’t be very far away. I’m just getting tea ready. Perhaps if you’d like to take a look round the gardens? I’m sure you’ll find her. I’ll serve tea in the small drawing-room.’
‘Thank you. That’s very kind. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’
‘Not at all. It’s no trouble at all. And I hope you enjoy your stay here.’ She turned and took some cake tins from a cupboard. A big currant loaf was already out on the pinewood table, several slices cut and gone from it. Mrs Pringle obviously liked her tea early, I thought.
I left the kitchen and went out by the back door and through the yard into the parkland to the west of the house. I was dazed, light-headed. Did Mrs Pringle really think I was Mr Conrad? And who was this Mr Conrad?
The grounds to the west of the house sloped away in a series of formal Versailles-style herbaceous terraces, enclosed with box hedges. Romantic, mythical statuary – the Muses, the Four Seasons – lined a broad flight of steps leading down to an ornamental pond at the bottom, where a big Neptune fountain sent rainbows of fine spray from the mouth of a dolphin up into the dazzling summer sky. Alice, her back to me, was walking slowly round the circumference of the pond.
I surprised her with my footsteps. She turned, twenty yards away, and I’m sure she would have run towards me, full of relieved welcome, had I not whispered across the space to her: ‘Be careful! She’s probably watching.’
‘What happened? What happened?’ Alice was like a child again, a desperate child whose companion in some frightful mischief has just returned from a visit to the headmaster’s study.
I told her all that had happened. We walked slowly round the pond and then moved further away, almost out of sight of the house, towards the croquet and tennis courts beyond the formal gardens. There was a dry-smelling wooden summerhouse here, with steamer chairs, where we sat down, completely hidden from any view.
‘Well,’ I said, when I’d finished my tale, ‘what do you think? About Mrs Pringle?’
‘It’s true, of course. We were expecting Harry Conrad. He’s more Arthur’s friend than mine. But Mrs Pringle doesn’t know that. A lawyer in London. He was to have come down here this week. But Arthur cancelled it just before he left.’
‘Did Mrs Pringle know he’d cancelled it?’
‘No. I’m sure she doesn’t. Arthur left in such a hurry. And I forgot to tell her.’
‘So it’s possible she actually does think I’m him?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she must be perfectly well aware… of this hunt for me around here: the police all round the place this afternoon, for example.’
‘She may know about them. I was out when she got back. I thought you might have hidden somewhere in the garden. But she probably didn’t see any of the police here this afternoon. They left almost an hour ago – full of apologies.’
‘Has anyone ever locked themselves into that cellar?’
‘Yes. Arthur did, only a week or so ago. The door swings to. There’s a breeze along the corridor, if the back door out to the yard is open.’
‘Well, maybe she does think I’m Conrad,’ I said.
‘Why shouldn’t she?’ Alice asked hopefully. ‘She’s always been a perfectly reliable, sensible, honest person.’
‘I wondered … Is she really just a housekeeper? Those eyes: I’m not so sure she’s honest. And that puffy face.’
‘Oh, that’s her only problem. But it’s just physical. She’s overweight, got a frightful sweet tooth. Always eating candy and baking marvellous cakes, and eating most of them herself. But she’s not calculating, I’m sure. She’d stop feeding if she was, since she likes to look smart. I’ve tried to help, given her several diets. But she’ll never stick at them.’
‘And her husband? The chauffeur? Of course she’ll tell him about me.’
‘Tom? Yes, but why should he bother about you? It’s true he’s more calculating, maybe. He’s thin, wiry. Just the opposite of her. A real Jack Sprat. He was in the army here, before they came to us. But he’s totally honest.’
‘Well, if so that’s what worries me: if they think I am … who I am, well, they’re going to let the police know at once.’
‘They won’t think, I’m sure. They’re not like that.’
‘What happens if Mrs Pringle finds I have no luggage, in the guest bedroom? If she goes up to turn the bed down or something?’
‘We’ll go back now. And I’ll put some luggage in the room. There are plenty of suitcases in the house she’s never seen. And plenty of Arthur’s clothes. I can fix that. You’ll see.’
Alice had regained all her confidence and enthusiasm. ‘I told you,’ she went on, ‘I told you, when you first changed into Arthur’s clothes: you’re a completely different person. You’re free! The police found nothing up here. The Superintendent said he was quite convinced that you’d got a car out of here that first night. He told me before he left how this whole new search for you was just a wild goose chase. It was only that man, with the shotgun – Ross wasn’t it? – from London who thought you might be still here.’
‘Yes. And that worries me too.’
‘Well, don’t let it,’ Alice said lightly. ‘Ross won’t be back; he’s not going to bother the local police a third time. Don’t you see? You can stay here quite openly now, for a bit anyway. You don’t have to go back to the woods like a savage. And we can start thinking about Clare. I asked the Superintendent –’
‘Yes, I heard you. In Banbury hospital. Her grandparents obviously haven’t been allowed to collect her yet.
‘But I told you at lunch: it was in the papers. Laura – your wife: they sent the body back to Lisbon for burial. And the child, well, she must be in some state of shock. Unable to move yet, maybe –’
‘It’s all nonsense,’ I suddenly interrupted. ‘Running like this, pretending to be Harry Conrad, thinking of kidnapping my daughter. I don’t know what I’m, doing. I wanted – just wanted revenge, when I first got away that night. I wanted to kill Marcus. Or Ross. Or anyone. But now it’s different. All this childish plotting. If you hadn’t encouraged me,’ I said angrily, confused and annoyed at my predicament now that I recognised how that first wild need for revenge had died in me. Revenge wouldn’t bring Laura back, which was all I wanted just then, for Laura had gone back to Lisbon for ever. They had probably buried her in the Anglican graveyard by the Estrela gardens on that windy summer hill where I had first met her.
And it was the thought of this and the state I was in generally, exhausted and overwrought, that made the tears prick my eyes, so that I turned away, unable to stop them.
But Alice confronted me the moment I stood up – her arms suddenly around my shoulders, kissing me, kissing me.
They weren’t the kisses of a lover, I thought then. They simply represented the concern of a close friend whose sympathies could no longer be restrained and whose artless nature it was to express them in such a way. Of course, I was still in love with Laura. And I hadn’t yet realised that Alice had already started to fall in love with me.
She drew back from me, perspiration, hers and mine, smudging her long, angular face. It was too hot again now in the little pavilion, exposed all day to the glare of the sun. Sweat had come to mark both our shirts beneath our arms and where she had pressed against me her breasts showed through the damp of the fine material.
Oh, I liked Alice; I was attracted by her – that would never have been difficult, God knows. But I held back. It all seemed too convenient. It was nonsense, really.
‘It’s not nonsense, you know,’ she said at last, as though listening to my thoughts. ‘You’ll see. Everyone can start again. You’ll see.’
I thought she was simply invoking the American right to happiness here, that hopelessly optimistic amendment to their Constitution. I have never had such expectations. On the other hand, I could not but be drawn forward by her optimism, by what she offered me, both spiritual and material. Certainly I couldn’t go back. In the space of six hours I seemed a part of Alice’s life already, as though I’d known her for years. I was responsible for her now, just as she, almost from the beginning, had so clearly meant to take charge of me. And I thought: such a sense of responsibility belongs as much to friendship as to love, especially with her, who lacked friends. I was a friend at last for Alice, I thought.
So I kissed her myself then, briefly, but just long enough to sense the ache in her lips, in her body, which I should have known had little to do with friendship.
‘I’ll put the luggage and some clothes in your bedroom,’ she said. ‘We can have some tea then.’
We walked back up to the house, the great Gothic pile shimmering in the afternoon light. And the thought first brushed across the edges of my mind. What if I was ever free again, if they caught the man who’d really killed Laura and I had Clare back with me? What if Alice and I ever came to love and marry? Would we all live together here, in this great place, the scheming, mean-spirited, penny-pinching world outside well forgotten? Would all three of us live happily ever afterwards? I let the thought die at once, unlikely as a fairy story: or a medieval romance.
*
But I was wrong here. The same thoughts soon crossed Alice’s mind. She was quite an actress, of course. More than most of us, she saw inviting, if quite unlikely or unsuitable parts ahead of her in life, which she had but to choose to fulfil. But that’s no excuse. I should never have encouraged her in this role of courtly damsel with me. On the other hand I encouraged her by my very presence. She was in love with me – if not that very afternoon in the summerhouse, then very shortly afterwards. The only way I could have changed things was by going back, there and then, to my oak tree in the woods. And of course I didn’t do that.
Instead, as I soon realised, we embarked on a world then, that afternoon, where everything seemed possible at last for us, where we had both miraculously been given a second, a third? – but certainly a last chance in life: she to make amends for that social and emotional failure which had apparently so plagued her and I to find some hope, some renewal, out of my own disasters. Thus, alone together afterwards in the empty house, we took to each other with the sharpest sort of appetite: our very lives came to depend on each other. Each could save the other. But could we be saved together?
*
I changed into some more of Arthur’s casual clothes in a guest bedroom along the corridor from Alice’s room. Mrs Pringle hadn’t come to turn the bed down and one of Arthur’s large leather suitcases now occupied a prominent place on a chair.
Mrs Pringle gave us tea in the small drawing-room afterwards, an elaborate tea, of scones and cakes and sandwiches. If I’d not been told of her own gluttony I’d have thought she must have known all about my starvation in the woods. When Mrs Pringle was in the room with us, bringing the tea or taking it away, Alice and I talked about London and New York – about friends she and the real Harry Conrad had in common. I knew London and New York well enough, so I was able to reply convincingly in the same coin. But I watched Mrs Pringle’s face out of the corner of my eye. It was impossible to tell anything from it. The extreme plumpness hid almost all facial movement and thus any change of expression.
Then she said to Alice, ‘I hear the police were up all over t
he place here again this afternoon. Looking for that man.’ She gathered the tea things up onto a tray as she spoke.
‘Yes,’ Alice replied easily, ‘we were just talking about that. They found nothing of course.’
‘Oh, I’m sure the villain left the area weeks ago,’ Mrs Pringle said, confidently putting the silver lid back on the strawberry jam pot. ‘I’m sure of it.’
She never so much as glanced in my direction either then or as she made her way out of the room. I was just going to say something to Alice when suddenly Mrs Pringle was back, putting her head round the door.
‘For supper, Madam, I’ve done a salmon mousse. It’s in the fridge. And there are the lamb cutlets you ordered afterwards. Five minutes under the pantry grill should do them. And I’ve made a salad.’
‘Thank you,’ Alice said. ‘Thank you, Anna. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
And in that instant, just as Alice spoke to her, Mrs Pringle looked at me directly for the first time from the doorway. Her expression had certainly changed now. She smiled at me. But was it simply a polite courtesy, or a smile of connivance? I couldn’t tell which. It could quite well have been either. Its meaning remained buried somewhere beneath the pumpkin of flesh, behind her little dark eyes.
Alice and I ate supper next to each other at a large round table set in an embrasure at the head of the great windowless dining-room in the centre of the house. Mrs Pringle had laid the two places complete in every high Gothic detail: gleaming fern-handled cutlery and old plate, with chased silver goblets and all the other accoutrements of a feudal dinner in time to go with them. I felt I should have been dressed in one of Arthur’s dinner-jackets, though this, of course, would hardly have suited the Arthurian mood of the surroundings. I would have needed a doublet and hose to match the Camelot outfit, the almost diaphanous, high-waisted silk dress which Alice wore again that evening.
‘We could have had all this in the kitchen,’ I ventured.