‘I’m afraid that’s Buster.’ Rafe looked vexed. ‘He’s still a young dog and his manners aren’t all they should be.’
‘Then let us set him a good example and invite him into the warm,’ said Conrad.
Buster raced round the room, jumped into one of the deckchairs, leaped onto the table and yapped ear-splittingly at the fire before hurling himself at my knees.
‘Honestly, it’s perfectly all right,’ I said as Rafe helped me tenderly to my feet. ‘I bet if I jumped off that balcony my leg would be preserved whole, even if the rest of me was dashed to pieces.’
Rafe spoke sternly to Buster and directed him to ‘lie down, sir!’ Buster licked his pointing finger lovingly and raced round the room again in an excess of enthusiasm. While Rafe was concentrating on helping me out of my coat and settling me in one of the deckchairs with my foot raised on the stone hearth, I saw Conrad bend down and drop something discreetly beside Buster. It worked like a charm. Buster crouched down and began to push it round the floor with his nose until he and it had disappeared under the table, where he remained quietly for the next half-hour.
‘Do tell us about the man who built this house,’ I said to Conrad. ‘Is it true that he killed himself?’
‘Quite true. Orson Ratcliffe’s diary, or a copy of it, is in the Gaythwaite library. Apparently, each year he had many printed and issued them to friends. Also his poems. He left a letter giving his reasons. It seems he was a man driven to communicate his feelings.’ Conrad’s expression was perfectly grave but there was in his eye, somewhere deep in its dark centre, a hint of what might have been amusement.
‘So why did he do it?’
‘He saw that inferior poets were exalted above him and he no longer wished to live in an insensible world.’
‘Poor man. Were you playing Parsifal because this house reminds you of that castle in Bavaria?’
Conrad looked at me with something like surprise. I expect he thought me too much of a bird brain to recognize the music of the Master. ‘Bavaria has many castles. But no doubt you mean Neuschwanstein. You are perfectly right. I happened to look up and there it was, this house with its towers springing up out of the forest and the lake below, and at once I was reminded of Bavaria. How does it happen that you know of it?’
‘Oh, we did a tour of Germany and we danced three nights in Munich. They took us to see the castle, but it was so jammed with tourists you couldn’t see anything below six feet. We were squeezed through the rooms like toothpaste through a tube. Luckily the ceilings and walls were wonderful. Did you buy this place because you were homesick?’
‘Homesick? No. I have never experienced that. I like to move about. I bought this house because it amuses me. It is a failing of mine that I am quickly bored.’
Evidently being married to Conrad was not going to be restful. Fortunately Isobel, too, was easily bored, so they were well matched.
‘Tell us about the statues on the bridge.’ Isobel looked up from the keyboard. ‘I think they’re vile. I hope you’re going to get rid of them.’
‘On the right as you approach the house are the Virtues.’ Conrad counted them off on his fingers. ‘Faith, Prudence, Justice, Strength … who else?… yes, Harmony and Hope. On the left are the Vices. They are Falsehood, Sloth, Pride, Lechery, Gluttony and Envy.’
‘I think they’re all unpleasant and intimidating.’ Isobel played a loud chord to express the strength of her feelings. ‘A lot of stone bullies. Fancy being preached at by a bridge. Perhaps a garden centre would buy them. Or a museum. I expect they’re worth something. Not that that would matter to you, of course.’
‘Even if I wished to sell them, which I do not, they are listed along with the house.’
‘Oh well, as far as that goes, our house is listed Grade One and we aren’t supposed to put up even a compost bin without permission, but they never come to check. If you got rid of them at once—’
‘I have no intention to get rid of them.’
Isobel looked at him, her mouth sulky, her eyes fierce, an expression I knew well and always gave in to. Conrad merely held her gaze, his face and body perfectly relaxed. It was going to be a tempestuous relationship. But Isobel would not have liked a man she could order about. After a while she lowered her eyes and smiled. ‘All right, Conrad. Whatever you want.’ She left the piano and came to stand next to him, holding out her glass to be filled. ‘I expect I’ll get used to them.’
Perhaps she thought it wise to give in gracefully to the man she loved. Or she had remembered that she was already deeply in his debt. Whatever it was, she had her reward at once.
Conrad waved his hand over her glass and a second later something sparkled in the bottom of it. Isobel gave a cry of excitement.
‘Diamonds! Earrings! Oh! They’re exquisite!’ She fished them out and held the delicate teardrop-shaped clusters up to her ears. ‘Where’s a mirror? I must see!’
‘There is no such thing here. You will have to wait.’ He smiled at her impatience.
She kissed him. ‘I adore them! How did they appear in my glass. I saw! You didn’t even touch it! Are you a magician?’
‘It was a simple conjuring trick.’
‘When did you learn it?’
‘I spent long periods in a mental institution when I was young. To while away the time I taught myself Taschenspielerei or, what do you say?, legerdemain. Sleight of hand?’
If it was a shock for me it must have been doubly so for her. Isobel laughed as though she didn’t believe him. I caught Rafe’s eye. He smiled rather grimly.
‘Yoo-hoo! Conrad!’ It was Dame Gloria Beauwhistle.
‘In here, Golly.’
‘My dear boy! You never fail to astonish me. Whatcha folks …’ She acknowledged our presence with a wave. ‘When you said house, I thought you meant a nice safe farmstead or a dignified presbytery. My poor old motor nearly gave up on those bends.’ Golly sported a leather blouson over the boiler suit she had worn to Evelyn’s lunch. On her head was a leather helmet, shaped like a baby’s bonnet, which made her face more moon-like than ever. ‘And that bridge! I’ve shed little bits of exhaust pipe in every pothole.’ She looked about her, then sucked in her breath in a whoop and rushed to the windows. ‘Now I understand!’ She threw out her arms. ‘Worth every pound of the garage bill. Dear old thing, this is Valhalla!’
‘I thank God there are not five hundred and forty doors,’ said Conrad. ‘It is quite draughty enough.’
I should have liked to ask him about the five hundred and forty doors, but Golly saw the piano and rushed over to it.
‘A Steinway! Of course, nothing but the best for you, you lucky dog! There’s still nothing to touch them.’ She ran her fingers up and down the keys. ‘This is a fine instrument. Did you know they were auctioning Johannes Spiegel’s last week? I went all the way down to London to bid for it, but some damned hustler bought it out of hand before the sale …’ She struck her forehead with the heel of her hand. ‘No, don’t tell me! This is it, isn’t it?’
Conrad shrugged. ‘If you tell me not to tell you, what can I say?’
Fritz had gone away and returned with an extra glass and a plate of apple cakes covered with icing sugar. I had eaten such things on our trip to Bavaria. They are a trap for the greedy and unwary. If you draw breath while eating them, the sugar flies into your throat and you cannot speak or even breathe for several minutes.
‘Hello, Fritz, old bean,’ said Golly with a wave.
‘Vat fettle, Golly.’
‘Ah’s champion,’ she replied promptly.
Fritz put down the plate on the hearthstone and took out his notebook. ‘Old bean,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Ah’s champion.’
‘Now can we have a tour of the house?’ said Isobel like an impatient child.
From the beginning it had struck me as odd that Conrad had bought Hindleep House without confiding in his wife-to-be. When we were children, Isobel had always been sensitive to any suggestion that she was not the m
ost important person to be considered. Perhaps she was so wildly in love with Conrad that she was prepared to suffer his high-handed ways with sweet-tempered passivity. Or possibly this house was merely an interim amusement and not intended to be the place where they would live as man and wife. All these ideas wandered through my brain as I watched him covertly for manifestations of lunacy. He must have been in the asylum a long time to have become so good at conjuring.
‘This reminds me of the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s,’ said Isobel when we were standing in the basement kitchen, reached by a stone spiral staircase leading from the hall. It was fairly dark with a vaulted ceiling supported by sturdy pillars. Over the fireplace was a roasting spit with chains and spikes and an iron cage, presumably for the joints of meat.
‘Perhaps it was a torture chamber,’ suggested Golly, her mouth rimmed with an icing-sugar moustache to rival Lady Pruefoy’s. ‘How else could they have got through a wet Sunday afternoon with no entertainment but books of sermons and whist for penny points? I expect they liked nothing better than to lure a few shepherds and nymphs off the hillside and subject them to a little racking of limbs and screwing of thumbs.’
Leading from the kitchen were smaller rooms, with hooks for hanging game and marble slabs for storing food and a large barrel on a stand which Rafe said was for making butter.
‘What are you going to do with this basement?’ Golly brushed away a web that hung like a lace cap over her forehead. ‘I can’t see Mrs Lerner rustling up the Sunday joint somewhere so gloomy and inconvenient.’
‘I can’t cook anyway,’ said Isobel in a decided tone. ‘I suppose one of the village women will come in.’
Conrad gave the butter-barrel handle an experimental turn and was rewarded with a shower of dust and plaster on his shoes. ‘That is not my intention.’
Isobel smiled. ‘You’re going to get a cook from London? That’ll be much better. Or Paris. That’d be better still.’
Conrad peered into the funnel of a circular object that Rafe said was for sharpening knives. A giant spider ran out, making him jump back. ‘No. Fritz is a good cook and he enjoys to do it.’
‘But you’ll get people in to clean and wait at table?’ Isobel persisted.
‘Who will come so far? And it would complicate what is to be a simple bucolic existence.’ He spun round to look at me. ‘Ludwig the Second had a table which sank on a mechanism through the floor to the kitchen, where it was recharged with dishes so he need not be waited on. He hated passionately to be stared at, particularly when eating. At state dinners he insisted that a barrier of flowers be arranged in front of him. He made the musicians play so loudly that there could be no conversation, and glared at the guests from between the leaves.’
‘Scopophobic, poor old fruitcake,’ said Golly. ‘Or perhaps just cunning. I can’t stand pomp and circumstance myself.’
‘No one knows the real condition of his mind,’ said Conrad. ‘His wish was to be an enigma – to himself as well as to others. From a boy he lost himself in dreams and fantasies of being Lohengrin, the swan-knight. His servants had orders to let him sleep all day and to wake him at midnight so that he could ride in his gilded sleigh by moonlight over his beloved mountains.’
‘At least he wasn’t dull,’ said Isobel.
‘Certainly he was not that. One of his desires was to travel in a flying car drawn by mechanical peacocks and powered by hot-air balloons across the Alpsee, but in those days there was not the technology to do it.’
Golly shook her head. ‘Shakespeare has a speech about the madness of kings but I can’t remember in which play. It must be an occupational hazard. Being kowtowed to is very bad for people.’
‘It is the Bastard’s speech in King John—’
‘The girls must be getting cold,’ Rafe interrupted, as though tired of providing an audience for a flow of information from Conrad. ‘Let’s move on.’
I wished we could tear ourselves away from the topic of madness.
My leg was a thorough nuisance on the tour. Rafe assisted me back up to the hall but I made him go on with the others while I recovered my breath.
Fritz was alone in the drawing room, sitting in one of the deckchairs, with a sprinkling of sugar decorating his flower-embroidered waistcoat, his eyes closed, listening to Wagner. The fire blazed high, and the music swelled to a climax in glorious sympathy with the ultramarine of the darkening sky, which was lit by a single unwinking star beyond the great windows. It was so like a stage set that, for the hundredth time that day, as every day since the accident, I wondered whether I would ever dance again.
Fritz opened his eyes and sprang up. ‘Dear Marigold! Vat is the matter? Hurts your bone?’
‘Oh … no. The spiral staircase took it out of me, that’s all. Are there many more rooms on this floor?’
‘Permit me. I show you. Zis,’ he conducted me through a door leading off from the drawing room, ‘vas, ve sink, vonce a library.’ Bookshelves covered with dust bore out this idea. ‘Here ve shall do our vorks. It holds no welcome at present but I have faith.’
It was fortunate that this room also had a large fireplace, for it looked towards the hillside and was as dark and as cold as the bottom of a lake.
‘Now this,’ he led the way to another much smaller room, ‘vill be a plunge pool. Ceramics all over and vith a big –’ with his fingers he imitated something trickling down on his head – ‘die Dusche … what do you say… douche? Conrad is most fond of taking seaweed baths.’
‘Really?’ To my ears, unaccustomed as they were to luxury – not only my ears, of course – the seaweed had a dangerously Ludwigian ring to it.
‘Ve Bavarians have a strong pleasure in therapeutic walue of bathing. Our bath towns are most numerous.’
These three rooms made up the whole of the ground floor, since the house was only a castle in miniature. The stairs to the upper floors were too narrow and steep for crutches. Fritz and I returned to the fireside and shared the last Apfelküchen, while he gave me an interesting account of German confectionery, a subject evidently close to his heart, until the others came down.
‘Four bedrooms and a bathroom of sorts,’ said Isobel in answer to my question. ‘Polythene tacked over the windows and plastic canisters of water.’
‘Naturally, after so long unused, the system does not work,’ said Conrad. ‘It pours rust only.’
‘I’m sure Mummy won’t mind if you come over to Shottestone for a hot bath every day.’
‘Thank you,’ said Conrad, ‘but I enjoy prevailing over difficulties and I believe in the benefits of cold-water bathing.’
‘Poor boy!’ Golly tapped his head. ‘Wandering in his wits! I’m all for the simple life and I hate pretension above all else –’ she broke wind noisily and quite unselfconsciously, as though to emphasize the point – ‘but no water, no electricity, no telephone … For one of the world’s richest men to choose to live in a ruin, surely this is taking eccentricity to the point of masochism?’
I was inclined just then to agree with Golly that the entire enterprise was the product of a seriously disordered brain, but later, as we sat by the fire in candlelight, watching the last ray of light die out of the sky and a panorama of moon and stars take its place, I had to admit that the project offered thrilling possibilities. When Conrad drew the stool up to the piano and began to play Chopin nocturnes so beautifully that they made me shiver, I was quite prepared to concede that the whole scheme was the cleverest thing ever thought of.
‘How good Buster’s been all evening.’ Isobel bent to look under the table.
Rafe looked gratified. ‘Dogs are pack animals. It’s a matter of teaching them who’s boss.’
‘How revolting!’ said Isobel. ‘He’s sleeping with his chin on a dead mouse!’
I looked at Conrad. He happened to catch my eye. To my surprise he bared his teeth and growled low like a dog. Then his black eyes filled with mischief. I was sorry to remember that he was undoubtedly deceitful a
nd probably insane as well.
20
‘Keep still.’
The nurse approached the frayed and filthy edge of the plaster with a small whizzing circular saw. I imagined flesh and blood, mine, splattering the walls of the outpatients’ ward of Carlisle hospital. I had dreamed almost every night of being able to walk and run and dance again, free of the hated cast. Now that the moment had come, my heart was beating so hard I was quite worried about pulling through the experience.
‘Steady.’ The nurse frowned and stuck her tongue into the corner of her mouth. ‘I don’t like this job. I’m always afraid me hand’s goin’ ter slip. It’s that hot wi’ the radiators going full blast.’
She paused to wipe her forehead with the back of her arm. My own palms were moist and my skin prickled. I closed my eyes and thought of the view from Hindleep as the saw buzzed again like a furious bee.
A cracking sound made me open them quickly.
‘Here we are.’
She was peeling away the plaster. There was my leg, incarcerated for six weeks, white, thin and feeble-looking, covered with a fine ginger down like a gooseberry.
The nurse examined the scar, a purple line. ‘It seems to have healed up nicely.’
Feeling sick with fright, I flexed toes that hardly seemed to belong to me. But oh joy! I could point them! I stood up and put my feet in the turned-out position. Carefully I lowered myself into a plié, then rose and extended my leg in a trembly battement tendu. The arch of my foot would have disgraced a ten year old, but I would work, work, work to get back its flexibility. Tentatively I lifted my foot above my head. My thigh muscles hurt like hell, but feeling pain again after weeks of numb immobility was exquisite pleasure.
‘Crikey!’ The nurse was impressed. ‘However did you do that?’
‘I’ve been doing it every day since I was ten,’ I explained. ‘That way you retrain groups of muscles and ligaments. It isn’t possible otherwise. I’m a dancer.’
Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs Page 25