‘I own the house, but it’s a wreck. Ought to be worth a good deal — not as much as it was a few months ago, what with the market falling the way it has — but it’s in a dreadful condition. Needs a lot: spending on it to get its real value. I’ll have to sell it, of course, but I’d like to be able to get enough to get a decent place of my own somewhere. A small flat.’ She looked yearning for a brief moment. ‘Somewhere small and warm and centrally heated without open fires to be lit and cleaned and — ’ She caught his eye and reddened. ‘Well, why not? I dare say you think a house like mine’s picturesque and all that, that open fires are real cute and that I ought to be glad to live in such a heap of old — ’
He shook his head. ‘I think nothing of the sort. I have a healthy respect for comfort and clean plumbing and hot water and radiators. Open fires are attractive, sure, in other people’s places, like here. At home you need something more sensible.’
‘I always needed something more sensible,’ she said. ‘You can’t know what it was like coming back to that house on a cold day after school. He’d be there, so busy he hadn’t noticed the cold, though he’d be blue with it, and I’d light the fire again — though I always did it for him before I went to school, he always forgot to put any coal on. Then I’d do what I could about supper, and that was it. Till school again.’
‘Was it always like that?’ he asked, needing to encourage her, for she had stopped and was staring sightlessly down the long room.
‘Mm? Oh, pretty well. He tried in his own way — we’d go out for a meal sometimes, walk a bit, but mostly it was just his work he needed. He was old. Work was more than enough for him.’
‘Oh, Miriam, you poor lonely — I mean — ’ He changed tack hastily as he caught a sharp glance from her. ‘Didn’t anyone notice how deprived you were? People at school, neighbours?’
‘Did anyone notice how deprived you were?’ she retorted and he caught his breath sharply.
‘I take your point. So you had it hard in that house.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that one of the reasons you want to sell it? Only bad memories there?’
‘Such stuff!’ she said with some scorn. ‘I’m more practical than that! If the house was comfortable, I’d stay in it. But it isn’t. It never has been. And as soon as I can get Geoff’s stuff safely into a library somewhere, I’m going to sell it — I must.’
And then she shook her head in some irritation. ‘I don’t know why we’re talking about this — ’
‘Because I asked you. OK, so you’ll sell the house and get a flat, a nice, small, really comfortable flat. What then? Will you have enough money left over to live on from selling the house?’
‘Oh, that’s very likely, that is!’ she said scornfully. ‘Of course I’ll have to get a job. Though what kind — I’m not trained for anything except looking after old historians. There’s not a lot of demand for that as far as I can tell.’
‘Ever thought of being a researcher? In films?’
She stared at him. ‘A what?’
‘You heard me. A researcher.’
‘I don’t even know what a researcher does in films. How could I have thought of doing it?’
‘A researcher digs out information. Checks on backgrounds, the history of the piece, and all the details the script writer, the designer and costume department need. Some of the people in those departments do their own basic research, but there’s always need for some more. Researchers work close to directors and writers, to make the film authentic — with your experience you’d be a wow, I think.’
Her face lifted into a wide jeering grin. ‘I see! Because I’ve spent all these years looking after an old man, you reckon I’d be good at looking after you, hmm? You want someone to run around after you and make sure you’ve got your slippers or whatever, and dig out a bit of information from time to time, just to keep my hand in and make me feel I’m more than just a house servant — just the way I used to do for Geoff. Is that it? Thanks for the offer, but no thanks.’
He had flushed a brick red. ‘I wasn’t offering you a job.’
‘No? It sounded bloody like it to me.’
‘Then you should listen more carefully and try not to be so full of yourself,’ he retorted. ‘Goddammit, I don’t have a production set up yet! I’m the only person working on this lousy project right now and I’m getting zilch for it. I’m as broke as you are — more, because I’ve got no house to sell. That’s why I have to make dog food commercials. So don’t come the acid with me, lady! I tried to make suggestions, is all.’
She shook her head at him as Sam arrived to remove their soup bowls and set trout in front of them with a shaky flourish, and he watched in frustrated fury as the old man fiddled around and piled his plate with creamed cauliflower and mashed potatoes as well, impatient and feeling horrible. What had seemed charming a while ago was a nuisance now. The pleasure he had been finding in the evening had vanished and a prickly irritation had taken its place. For two lousy pins, he thought savagely, I’d get to my feet and walk out on her here and now, the sour bitch. Why does she have to be so —?
‘I’m sorry,’ she said as soon as Sam was out of earshot. ‘I really am sorry. That was rotten of me.’
His head snapped up and he stared at her, as the irritation slid out of the ends of his fingers and left only a comforting glow behind.
‘I do it all the time. I don’t mean to. I hate myself for it. It’s just that whenever anyone’s kind to me I get so angry and — and suspicious. It’s so stupid. I’ve sent away so many people I might have liked, and I don’t want to do it again. Please, do accept my apology. And the idea’s a super one, really it is. I mean, if you think I could learn how. Would you help me, find someone who’d give me a job maybe?’
He shook his head in confusion, dazed still, staring at her. She was looking at him very directly with eyes that seemed to glitter in the candlelight, and there was a nimbus of light around her dark frizzy hair that gave her skin a golden colour. She was quite the loveliest thing he’d looked at for years, he thought confusedly, and knew he was gaping at her stupidly.
‘If I do that again — get nasty, I mean — tell me off, for pity’s sake. I really — ’ She bent her head and picked up her knife and fork with a sharp little movement. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to make you so angry with me that you went away. This fish smells awfully good, doesn’t it? It’d be an awful pity to let it get cold. Bon appetit.’ And she set to work on it as though they had talked nothing but small talk all evening, and there had never been that flare of anger in him.
So he ate his dinner too. There seemed little else he could do. But good as it was, he didn’t taste any of it. All he could think of was the words she had used — I wouldn’t want to make you so angry with me that you went away — because they really were the best words he could ever remember hearing anyone say. Ever.
Twenty-three
Afterwards, standing in the road outside the Old Swan, feeling the agreeable nipping of the cold air on his cheeks, he had to bite his tongue not to ask her to stay longer; to talk more, to just be with him. But to do that would be to court disaster with this one; he knew that as well as he knew himself to be full of good food and wine. And somewhere at the back of his mind he thought gloomily, hell, how am I ever to get anywhere with this lady? Like Shandwick said, I’ve hit the mother lode, and I don’t dare to touch it.
‘Are you in a hurry to go?’ she said abruptly and he turned and looked down at her in the dim light and lifted his brows.
‘At half after ten! I shouldn’t say so. I was even thinking of maybe seeing if they have a room here for the night. I don’t have to be back in London till Wednesday morning. Seems a shame to waste the car.’
‘There are ruins at the end of the village,’ she said. ‘Rather magnificent. And there’s a moon, so you’ll be able to see. If you like.’
‘Yes, please,’ he said, not believing his good fortune, and she nodded and started to walk up the vil
lage, her hands pushed deep into the pockets of her coat. She had her collar up and above it her profile was sharp and agreeable to look at. He looked at it a lot as they walked up the gentle incline that ran between the cottages.
But not all the time. He had to look at the village too, and with each yard they covered it became more and more like a film set. He was seized with the notion that if he walked behind any one of the cottages he’d find it was just a canvas front with struts holding up the back and held in place with braces and weights.
He said as much to her, and she nodded. ‘I told you it’s too pretty to be true. The people who live here, they’re the same. There was a time when it was a real place, I imagine, but now it’s mostly retired people and second-homers so busy being authentic and countrified it’s like they’re made out of plastic. The real life of the place is somewhere else. But it’s a good place to come. I like the peace. And the ruins are — well, you’ll see. Come on.’
At the top of the street she turned right into a road where the houses petered out and then left, and there ahead of them loomed the bulk of a church, and he let her lead him between the tilted moss-grown gravestones, feeling a certain guilt. Was it decent to march over people’s graves this way? But she seemed insouciant about it, so he said nothing.
And then, on the other side of a small gate and a patch of mown grass she stopped. ‘Here’s the old road, you see?’ she said in a matter of fact voice. ‘This section of stones — built in the sixteenth century, or thereabouts.’
He looked down and saw them, the patterned rocks set into the ground like cobbles, and put out a foot and stood on one and it felt hard and painful through his shoe.
‘Jesus, they walked on this?’
‘Mostly rode on it. It was built for traffic. Horses and carts and so forth. Walkers went alongside on the soft verge. Look, through that arch there. That was the way it went.’
He looked and caught his breath for at the same moment the cloud cover, which was moving fairly swiftly across the sky, thinned out towards the east where a late-rising moon sat absurdly full and grinning, and the archway was clear against the indigo of the sky. The arch was massive and led into a dim covered way and she turned and made for it, and he followed, letting the dimness swallow him up, and came out on the other side.
All round him was grass, smooth cut and even, grey in the moonlight, and dotted about were piles of old stones, open-roofed enclosures and great soaring ruins that came straight out of an old Victorian monograph, an effect that was heightened by the silvering of the moonlight. Somewhere ahead of him he could hear water chattering angrily and he lifted his head to listen.
‘The Windrush,’ she said. ‘Shallow here but wide and busy. It’s heaven here on a hot day — you can sit with your feet in the water and pretend you’re almost anywhere but in the real world.’
‘What is this place? Or what was it?’
‘Minster Lovell Hall. Remember the old saw? “The Cat and the Rat and Lovell our Dog ruled all England under a Hog.” That Lovell.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and she laughed.
‘Sorry, I should remember what a foreigner you are. All right. Richard the Third, King of England in the late fifteenth century. His banner carried a boar’s head insignia. He’s had a bad press over the years, but all we know is he took over the throne when his nephew Edward the Fifth was pronounced illegitimate, and from then on it’s a bit shifty. Edward and his brother were put in the tower and were murdered there, and there are people who say Richard did it. That was the belief for years. I don’t think he did. Anyway the boys were killed and Richard was made King and eventually he was killed at Bosworth by Henry Tudor, who was a Welsh usurper, and that was the end of Richard. But one of his closest supporters was Lovell. There were two others called Catesby and Ratcliffe who were ill-thought of by Richard’s opposers, so they came up with a rhyme about them — the “Cat” and the “Rat” and so forth. When the trouble started for Richard, Lovell fled, so the story goes, came home here to his manor and was hidden by his trusty manservant — have you noticed, they’re always labelled “trusty”? — Anyway this chap tucked him away in a secret hiding place that only he had access to and then got himself killed, so Lovell couldn’t get out and died — walled up in his own home. They say they found his skeleton years later — it’s probably an apocryphal story, but it sounds interesting.’
‘Ye gods,’ Abner said, overawed. ‘One hell of a story! How long ago did it happen, do you say?’
‘Well, Bosworth was in 1485, so I suppose around five hundred years or so.’
‘You say that like it was just last week.’
‘So it was, in someone’s mind. This is rural England — memories run deep here. There’s a bedroom at the Old Swan with a wall painting in it that’s supposed to date from the other Richard’s time — Richard the First. And he was three hundred years earlier. I don’t believe that myself, but lots do.’
He stood there on the dim monochrome grass, staring at the grey and black of the stones lying so elegantly thrown around him and then laughed. ‘Jesus! I thought I was into history, working on what happened forty years ago. And you people here think in hundreds. You make me feel a bit stupid.’
‘Tens or hundreds, it’s all history. It all matters,’ she said. ‘Geoff was an historian and knew damn all about what happened before the nineteenth century. He stuck to his period. You’re sticking to yours, that’s all. And someone has to record what really happened. Here we get stories with no evidence to back them up. You’re looking for evidence for your history, aren’t you?’
‘I am?’
‘Of course you are! You went to talk to that man this afternoon — that’s good historical research. You’re getting the truth from the prime source of it, people who were there.’
‘Not really. Not with him. He doesn’t remember.’
‘He remembers what his mother told him. That’s better than just stories handed down over centuries. You don’t realise how important the work is that you’re doing. It’s good stuff.’
She turned to move away, but he couldn’t stop himself from taking hold of her arm and pulling her back.
‘What did you say?’
‘I said you were doing good stuff.’ She looked up at him in the darkness and pulled back in an attempt to get out of his grip but he didn’t let go and she stood there letting him hold her and keeping her eyes fixed on him.
‘You’ve changed your mind — you don’t think I’m wasting your time when I go through Geoff’s stuff then, for just a film?’
‘I told you. No, I don’t. I’m sorry I was so rude the first time.’
He couldn’t help it. She looked too good to be true and there was such elation in him that it just happened. He let go of her arm, took her shoulders and kissed her hard. She stood very still and her mouth was like a trap, shut tight, and then she softened and her mouth opened and he felt a leap of excitement that made him shake. Just for a kiss? Ye gods, it was like being a child again and smooching behind the bicycle sheds with one of the girls in the sixth grade, and he felt the laughter brimming in him to threaten the excitement.
And then she pulled away and said in a flat voice, ‘Well, I hope you feel better,’ and turned and went back to the archway and the old road and he stood and watched her go as the excitement dwindled and died. And then sighed and went after her.
He caught up with her on the other side of the churchyard.
‘Am I supposed to apologise like one of your milk and water heroes in an old movie?’
‘You must do as you please,’ she said, and her voice was still flat. ‘It’s not important to me, either way.’
‘Oh, boy, what a putdown!’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘I don’t see why.’
‘If you don’t see why then there’s no way I can explain it.’ He was angry now and the feeling warmed him as they went rapidly along the smooth tarmac of the road, the slap of their heels echoing sharply against the houses as the
y passed. ‘So I don’t apologise. Why should I apologise for being a normal man, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Ah, I see,’ she said. ‘I’m not a normal woman, is that it?’
‘You’re a goddammed peculiar one,’ he said and then as they reached the Old Swan put out a hand and held on to her arm.
‘Oh, come on, Miriam! What the hell. So, I got a bit elevated and got fresh with you. It’s no big deal.’
‘Isn’t that what I said?’ She looked up at him. ‘It’s not important to me. I’m not fussing. You are.’
He let go of her arm and stood there, feeling flat and stupid. ‘Yeah. Well, I suppose so. OK then. I’ll take you home.’
She lifted her brows at him. ‘And what do I do about my car?’
‘You really have a gift for it, don’t you?’ He shouted at her, luxuriating in a loss of control. ‘Making a man feel like a little heap of something really nasty! What’s in it for you, this sort of — are you coming the liberated lady or what? It’s not liberated to be bitchy. It’s just bitchy.’
She kept her cool remarkably. ‘I only pointed out that I’d driven myself here, and if I let you drive me home, I’d have to leave my car behind.’
‘Oh, go to hell,’ he said furiously and flung away from her, digging in his pocket for his car keys. ‘Do what the hell you like. I try my damnedest with you and much good it does me.’
‘I don’t know why you’re so angry,’ she said. ‘Is it because I’m not angry? So you kissed me. So what?’
‘That makes a guy feel really great, that does. Me, I get emotional, I show it. You, you’re just as — ’
‘I’m just what I am. Damaged goods,’ she said quietly and turned and left him, walking into the car park that stood alongside the Old Swan, and he stood beside his own car, uncertain what to do next, until he heard the cough of her engine as she switched on the ignition. And he knew he couldn’t let her go that easily.
He flung himself into his own car and switched it on and threw it into reverse and shot backwards just in time; the lights of her car came bumping over the gravel of the car park just as he reached the entrance and stopped, almost blocking the way.
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