awkwardness caused by Sam’s mention of his father, she said to Mrs Merritt, ‘How’s the dinner coming along? I hope those pheasants are all right.’
‘Nice and ripe,’ replied that lady, who had already roasted them and intended to serve them, neatly jointed, in a mushroom and white wine sauce finished with cream.
Sarah and Oliver Langdale had long ago decided to preserve the East Wing’s baronial-style hall and the large dining-room: ideal for giving parties; and sometimes the whole community, including the three Langdale children, would dine there with whatever outside guests, lovers or ex-spouses happened to be around. The expense of these evenings, often feasts, was shared out between them, except at Christmas when the Langdales acted host. Mrs Merritt liked nothing better than a fierce day’s cooking, not to mention the praise which always crowned her labours. She said, ‘Clementines are in. I’ve cooked some whole to serve alongside a nice Crème Brûlée.’ The incumbents were hearty eaters, not afraid of rich dinners.
‘I hope,’ said Sarah, ‘they’re all at home and in good shape.’
Mrs Merritt, always a mine of information, replied, ‘Stables A is a bit under the weather.’ ‘Stables A’ indicated Laurence Otterey, resident writer.
‘Oh. What’s wrong?’
‘’Flu, he thought.’
Kevin said, ‘Hangover, more like. Come in at midnight, woke me up.’
Mrs Merritt snorted. ‘The Last Trump wouldn’t wake you! Only just come in yourself, hadn’t you?’
Kevin shrugged. ‘Yeah, I was a bit late. Skittles.’ He belonged to the White Hart team which took itself seriously. When it wasn’t matches it was practice. When it wasn’t practice it was beer.
Sarah said, ‘Poor old Laurence, he’s got writer’s block. I bet ’flu’s just an excuse.’
As they rose from the table Sam said, ‘What am I going to do all afternoon?’ His older brother, Jonathan, was at boarding-school, and though Sam and his sister, Olivia, attended the same day-school (delivered and retrieved by Kevin in the cleaning ladies’ bus) Olivia played hockey on Saturdays and the small boy was left alone.
Sarah replied, ‘You can come and help me pick damsons.’
Sam was all for this because the orchard lay on the far side of the walled garden, and on their way to it they could look in on Harold the Norseman. Amid his hammering and his roaring furnace and the fierce hissing of steam, he was to the small boy a figure as fascinating as he was fearsome. Sometimes Sam, alone, dared not enter the forge but peered through a dirty window at the Wagnerian scene within.
Harold Newson was aware of the scrutiny and would have liked to talk to the boy; he enjoyed the direct simplicity of children which was much like his own. He was twenty-nine, and had always been solitary. His mother, a widow, had grown increasingly deaf towards the end of her life, and by the time she died he found that six years of caring for her, devotedly, had robbed him of the desire for speech. It seemed to him that everybody talked far too much, usually about nothing at all.
Trained in the foundry which had killed his father, he had eventually, via a solid Northern polytechnic, gained the sponsorship of a local firm, enabling him to study under the great Giles Petheridge. He had a natural talent which Petheridge had fostered, and, as his own strength diminished, he pressed his apprentice forward for more and more complex commissions, finally enabling him to branch out on his own.
Living by himself, talking hardly at all except to Rosamund, his good friend, and occasionally to Johnny Ash, Harold often wondered if he was quite right in the head. Sometimes, not always, he wished he could meet a decent quiet girl (another Rosamund) and marry her, but wherever he looked in the world of creative people he either saw men who ruined their talent through marriage or men who ruined the marriage because of their talent.
When Sam and his mother peered into the workshop on this particular day the forge was inert and black, the magic flown. Harold was upstairs, re-designing his gates. He was used to this; his drawings were often too fanciful for the iron, and the iron would tell him so in no uncertain terms.
In the kitchen of the manor Mrs Merritt had found time to make a fine game soup for lunch. She’d take some up to big Ben Elliston because he was unhappy and short of cash: also some to the novelist chap who, whether he had ’flu or hangover or writer’s block, could only profit from it. While she was making preparation for these errands of mercy she heard an unmistakable banging of doors and stamping from the front of the house. So the Lord and Master had returned—from Ireland, ha!
His handsome head appeared around the kitchen door. He was sandy-haired, outdoor-faced, a man’s man with the kind of good looks men could just about stomach. ‘’Morning, Mrs M. Mare foaled yet?’
‘Not as I know of, sir.’ But wasn’t that typical? No questions about his wife or children who all might have died in his absence, oh no! His only thought was of his precious horses. She watched him through the window, stalking across the yard to the mare’s stable. Men!
On Saturdays our mail always arrives very late, and I only looked in my letter-box because I’d momentarily forgotten what day it was. As soon as I saw the unaddressed envelope which lay there I experienced a twinge of doubt. If the postman had already been I would probably have thought it was yet more junk mail which often arrives unaddressed; but there it lay, alone, and I knew intuitively that this was something different. I opened it and drew out a sheet of paper on to which had been pasted the usual pieces of print cut from various newspapers or magazines: I saw you in London last night. Wickedness! More later.
I had so often wondered just how I’d react in this very situation that I found myself noting the reactions with a kind of removed interest: it seemed that consciousness, the will to think, even to breathe, had deserted me. What finally made me move was an overpowering desire to hide the message right away. I put it back in its envelope, reached out to the bookcase near which I was standing, took a book—it was Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—slipped the envelope inside it and returned it neatly to its place.
Then I stood quite still for a long time, wondering when, if ever, the ability to reason would return to me.
As it happened I’d just made myself a cup of tea and now drank from it automatically, without thinking. It was scalding hot, so hot that I had to spit it out all over the floor, but the sudden pain liberated me, and a rabble of thoughts came tumbling into my brain like ill-trained recruits, utterly without discipline. A moment later I’d lined them up for inspection. My initial reaction might have seemed like panic but now I recognized it as plain shock. Someone had seen me kill that dull girl. The fact that whoever it was had not gone directly to the police was intriguing: sinister and at the same time faintly encouraging. More later. What did that mean? Doubtless some kind of blackmail.
Still observing myself, I was interested to note that although my stomach remained queasily elsewhere, fear had disappeared. This was typical; I’d never suffered from it during all the years of my ‘wickedness’, and it had only dared to attack me now because I was stricken, virtually non compos mentis. There was no other sign of mental panic. I traced this to the fact that I’d been expecting some such discovery for eight years and was thus preconditioned to accept it. There was also, wasn’t there?, a kind of reassuring tone to the message which seemed to me more mocking than vindictive, not wholly serious. Wickedness! The exclamation-mark had been made with a pen, and the person who had chosen that word was for some reason amused, or at least conspiratorial: a person who would not naturally and at once go running to the police, who considered himself or herself to be above such things, capable of exacting his or her own retribution—as I would myself.
Him or her? It could be either, yet something suggested a male mind. Why? I was unable to say, except that there were more men than women in our community, and the sender had to be an inmate of Crackpot Castle: