Ashenden (42 page)

“If Mrs. St. George rings again, tell her I’ll call her back this afternoon.”

“Oh?” said Elaine. “Do we have plans this morning?”

“Yes.” The idea, which had occurred to her as soon as she had opened her eyes, as if she had dreamed it, had got a grip on her. It was all she could think about. “I’m going over to the house.”

“Lady Lyell.” Elaine shook her head as if she’d expressed a desire to take up white-water rafting. “It’s freezing out there.”

“I’ll wrap up well, I do assure you.”

“Better stay in the warm. I should. Go another day.”

Reggie had anticipated the resistance, and the only way to deal with it was to ignore it. “Would you mind letting Tony know that I’m coming? Say in an hour or so.”

Elaine sniffed and said, “We’ll go together, then.”

“It would be lovely if you would see me across the courtyard, but I shall be fine after that. I’ll ask Tony to bring me back when I’m ready. You needn’t worry.”

“And what if we have another little fall?”

“I won’t.”

“We can’t be sure about that.”

“If I do,” said Reggie, “I shall press the button.”

She held up the panic alarm they insisted she wear round her neck, the electronic tag for an old offender. How Hugo would have hated it. Luke, her grandnephew, was teaching her to google. The first time she had made a search, she had entered her husband’s name, but his obituary wasn’t online. Hers, she thought, would be.

Elaine consulted her watch and sighed to register her disapproval. “Shall we listen to the news?” The radio, which had been talking quietly to itself in the corner, blared into life. A soldier had been killed in Helmand Province.

Reggie drank her tea and ate a slice of toast. The first carer the agency had sent, Debbie, had left after a few weeks to train as a probation officer. Elaine, the second, had been with her for two and a half years. Her magenta hair had gray roots. Magenta, Reggie remembered someone telling her (it might have been Bunny), was a shade that was unknown before the middle of the nineteenth century, the product of the harsh aniline dyes developed by the new chemical industries, and named after a Crimean battle. The old colors, the preindustrial colors, made from animal, vegetable, and mineral sources, were much subtler and faded in sympathy with one another, the same someone had told her (on the other hand, it might have been Kenneth). What a lot you learned in your life. What a lot you forgot, no matter how hard you tried to hang on to it. When she had realized that she had forgotten Hugo’s smell, and
could find it nowhere on the few clothes of his she had kept, she knew she had lost him for all time.

They had been living in the south pavilion for over twenty years when he died. During that time they traveled a good deal, around the Mediterranean and in the Middle and Far East. It had been a late education. Hugo was good with maps and itineraries and they saw temples, pyramids, and ancient ruins. Of all their journeys, she thought her favorite had been an early trip to Greece in the late 1970s, when a caïque had taken them from a ferry to an island in the Cyclades and they had stayed in a bare whitewashed cell at an old monastery. She remembered breakfasting on sheep’s milk yogurt, bread fresh from a conical stone oven built on the hillside, honey flavored with thyme, the sun hot on her shoulders, a donkey braying. Swimming off rocks in a sea as blue as heaven, as blue as the domes of the island churches.

“Are we finished?” said Elaine. “Lady Lyell?”

Reggie came back to herself. “Yes, thank you.”

She screwed the top back on the honey and wiped her mouth, leaving a trace of lipstick behind. Before Elaine had the chance to help her, she pushed back her chair and got up from her seat, perhaps not as steadily as she would have liked, seeing as she was trying to prove a point. She must get over to the house this morning. The urge was not a hunger or thirst; it was more a necessity, like breathing.

Elaine reached for the tray. “Buttons,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“
Buttons
. We’ve done our cardigan up wrong.”

So she had. She fumbled with her knotted fingers. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Elaine. “It’s what I’m here for.”

*  *  *

Less than an hour later Reggie, dressed in her warmest coat, a knitted hat and gloves, and a pair of thick-soled brogues she’d had for forty-three years, was standing by the door to the courtyard, like a
pensioner at a bus stop or a dog asking to go out. At her heels a long line of dogs stretched behind, all of them gone now, of course. She had been given the last one by her sister twelve years ago—it was a few months after Hugo died—and the vet had had to put her down last spring. No more dogs now. Not fair on the dogs.

“Ah, there you are,” she said.

Elaine was wearing a quilted jacket and a pair of red-and-white polka-dot Wellington boots over her purple leggings.

“Are we sure this can’t wait? It’s going to warm up next week, that’s what they’re saying.”

Reggie opened the door and breathed in the sharp, cold air. The snow was so bright, even brighter than from the window in her bedroom. It made her feel light-headed. Across the courtyard a path had been cleared and salted.

“Somebody’s been busy.”

“Yes, well,” said Elaine, getting a firm grip on her elbow and handing her the stick the hospital outpatients department had supplied after the last fall. “We can’t be slipping and sliding everywhere, can we? Mind how you go. It’s that treacherous.”

They inched across the courtyard.

“I spoke to Tony and he’s expecting you,” said Elaine, her wellies crunching on the salted path.

“Thank you.”

They reached the other side.

“Much appreciated,” said Reggie.

Elaine released her grip on Reggie’s elbow and opened the door to the house. “I think we’d better go in together.”

“No need,” said Reggie.

“I think it would be best.”

“You’re very kind, my dear. But I should like to be on my own.”

She could see Elaine judging how far to take it. “Well, if that’s what we want.” Her words made a cloud in the frosty air.

“Do you mind? I won’t be long.”

“Right, then.”

“Please don’t worry.”

Before she’d left her bedroom, Reggie had taken off the panic alarm, the pendant monitor, and hidden it in a drawer. In its place she’d put on the pearls Hugo had given her for their first wedding anniversary. It had taken her a long time to do up the clasp. Always tricky, that clasp. She could feel the pearls under her coat warming themselves on her throat. Real pearls needed the oil from your skin to retain their luster; one ought to wear them every day.

“I’ll see you later.”

“What do we fancy for lunch?” said Eileen, rubbing her hand under her nose.

“Is there soup?”

“Leek and potato.”

“That would be lovely.”

Elaine screwed up her face. She had a son who lived with his dad and a daughter at “uni.”

“Back by twelve, OK?”

She was saying something about Tony and the stairs when Reggie went into the house.

*  *  *

Look thy last on all things lovely. The house was warm enough for her to take off her hat and gloves, not warm enough for her to shed her coat. They had to maintain a certain temperature for the sake of the pictures, although humidity was more critical than temperature, Hugo always said.

She spent some time in the lower hall, looking at the framed black-and-white photographs on the walls. When she and Hugo had first taken on the restoration of the Park, they had been so preoccupied by capturing what remained of its evanescent eighteenth-century atmosphere that they had paid little attention to the two centuries’ worth of history that had followed. Afterwards Hugo had remedied that. Here were local girls and village women stripping willows down on the riverbank. Here was a shooting party with their dogs and beaters and their feathered heap of pheasants. Here were First World War officers in civvies posed in the library. Here
was her father at their yard in his old tweed hat. She wondered what that photograph was doing there. Or whether it was a photograph.

Quarter of the way up the stairs to the first floor she thought that perhaps she should sit down for a moment to catch her breath and decided against it on the grounds that she didn’t know how she would get up again. Silly, really. All morning, consumed by the desire to get back to the house, she had completely forgotten about the stairs. Just imagined herself floating about somehow.

Look thy last on all things lovely. Between pushing down with the stick and pulling up with the handrail, she took it a step at a time. So many steps. Stick and handrail. Stop. Stick and handrail. Stop. Un-button coat. Hugo had bought their first television so that they could watch the coronation, during which news had come of Hillary’s conquest of Everest. Hillary and Tenzing on the roof of the world. Stick and handrail. Stop. Stick and handrail. Last step. Her heart fluttered in her chest and she laid her hand over it to contain its wild beating.

*  *  *

The house was a place of ghosts. She wandered from room to room on the principal floor, and the white dust sheets draped over the huddled furniture made it look as if the snow had found its way indoors. Sad that no one sat on the furniture anymore. She thought that she could remember every auction and country-house sale where she had bought each piece, if she put her mind to it.

When she peered round the door of the drawing room, she remembered the ceiling being cleaned for the first time, a task that had taken four people three days with paintbrushes. It hadn’t been cleaned since.

Hugo said, “Do you know, I think I’ll try the marmalade today, just for a change.”

“Why don’t you?” she said. “Thick cut. It’s very good.”

“More patience than I’ve got,” said Frances, although what that had to do with marmalade she didn’t know.

“Reggie?”

She was standing bathed in the thin white light pouring down
from the clerestory, feeling transparent to the point of X-rayed, when the caretaker, Tony Knoll, came across the staircase hall. Despite the weather he was dressed for action in Lycra cycling shorts.

“Elaine said you’d be over. Sorry I’m late. I’ve been checking the pipes.”

As ever, she wished Hugo were still alive to share the joke. When someone died, you missed their physical presence first, the warmth in the bed, all the tones and shadings of their speech, the footsteps or sighs or rustlings in the next room, even the irritations and annoyances. You missed these things as if your skin had been peeled off in long, bleeding strips. When all that became less painful, you still missed their mind, the consciousness that partnered yours, that gave you bifocal vision. Tony Knoll was conscientious and reliable, no question about that, but something about him had always struck her as hilarious. Hugo would have known what it was and they would have laughed about it.

“So,” Tony said, rubbing his hands together, “what brings you over here today of all days?”

Today of all days. All days were the same.

“Have you been here long?” he said.

Had they been here long? “Quite a time. We moved here in fifty-two.” She gazed upwards and sketched her fingers in the air. “They’ve put that ceiling back the cheap way. It used to be vaulted.”

“I see.” Tony removed a dust sheet from a carved mahogany hall chair (Vyckers Court house sale, 1956, she remembered) and gestured at it. “Take a pew, Reggie. I’ll fetch you a cup of tea.”

“Oh no,” she said. “Not now. I must go upstairs.”

*  *  *

Tony rang Elaine on her mobile and got her voice mail. “You’d best come over here right away,” he said after the beep. What was the woman playing at? Agency staff, he thought. “Ring me back as soon as you pick this up.”

Reggie was across the hall and making her way up the cantilevered staircase by the time he caught up with her. “Goodness me,
Luke,” she said, “whatever is the hurry? At my age you learn to take things as they come.”

“Let’s wait a moment, shall we?” he said, peering over the wrought-iron balustrade. What a long way to fall. As he grasped her arm, she sagged a little. “Shall we sit down here on the step for a time?”

She looked at him with her dark-blue eyes. Her coat was open and there was a stain on the front of her cardigan, an old-lady food stain of some kind or another. “No, I don’t think so. Help me to the top, will you? I’d like that, please.”

The hall yawned below as they climbed to the next floor under the white light of the clerestory. Something fell out from underneath her coat, and he turned to see a pearl necklace cascade down the stairs. Pick that up later, he thought. He didn’t dare let go of her and she didn’t appear to have noticed it had gone.

At her insistence, they went along the corridor. Outside what had been the master bedroom she paused, gray about the mouth, leaning on her stick. She fumbled with the handle.

“Do you want to go in?”

She nodded and he pushed the door open for her. “Here we are. Your old bedroom, Reggie, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

The curtains were drawn against the glare of the winter’s day. He went over to switch on a bedside light.

“Want to lie down for a bit?”

“That might be an idea.” Her voice was a whisper.

His phone went as he was helping her onto the bed.

“You have a little rest. I won’t be long. I’ll be back in two ticks, I promise.”

*  *  *

The great bed, with its Regency hangings, was a ship lying at anchor. She had left a lamp burning by the bedside, and a moth, drunk on light, pattered against the shade.

“Are you asleep?” said Hugo, coming into the room.

“I think so,” she said.

W
ho knows what comes next, what lies around the corner? The house can’t tell you, nor is the future in its power to determine. But it knows what it wants. What it wants is a beating heart.

*  *  *

It probably wasn’t the first time someone had been sick on Skype, but it was a new experience for Charlie. Saturday afternoon and he was sitting in Tony’s office in the north pavilion talking into his computer, telling his wife about the discussion he’d had with his sister the evening before, when Rachel went greenish white, lurched to the right of the screen, and disappeared from view. He heard a retching, splattering sound, a groan, and an “Oh,
Christ
!”