Conversations With Mr. Prain (22 page)

I got up, went into the bathroom, pulled out a white towel from the oak chest and turned on the shiny bath taps. I filled up the bath fuller than I had ever filled a bath before, and then stepped in. When I had soaped myself, I lay back to wallow, recollecting the events of the past day and night, with a weird, sinking feeling.

After a few minutes I heard creaking floorboards and tinkling china in the bedroom. The bathroom door opened. Edward stood leaning against the door frame in a cream dressing gown. He looked tired.

“Hello,” he said, in a falsely bright voice.

“Hello.”

“I’ve brought you a tray of tea and toast. Will that be enough?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

I pulled out the plug, stood up, got out of the bath and rubbed myself down in front of him. He remained standing there, watching me, though when I looked at him he kept his eyes on my eyes, not on my body. I went over and kissed him, still wet.

“Oh Stella, we’ve got to get moving,” he said regretfully. No more time.

“Where did you go?” I asked, stepping away and drying.

“To my study. I needed to read some papers before my meeting today. I had intended to do this yesterday evening.”

“So what time did you get up?”

“Around half past four. I was wide awake, and famished. Did you sleep well?”

“No.” I glanced at him. “Only after you left.”

He seemed suddenly coy. Funny. Coy man.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Nearly eight o’clock.” That was later than I thought. But the sun was rising later now, in preparation for a change of season.

I wrapped a towel around myself. He went over to his shaving things and placed them in front of the mirror, and he looked at me through it, as if wondering about something. As I was about to pass him by, he stopped me with his hand and kissed me again, on the side of my neck.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I’m very well thank you,” he said, with mock politeness. “We’d better get ready.”

I went through to the bedroom and sat down on the four-poster bed, where I drank tea and ate toast from the tray he had set on the bedside table. I chewed in silence, listening to BBC Radio 4 news and weather on a small clock radio I found beside an ornate lamp. Another crisis. Another fine day. The Dow-Jones index. The voices of the newscasters made it unnecessary for us to talk to one another. I did not feel I had very much to say, and he seemed a little distant, as usual. After a few minutes he emerged from the bathroom and put on his clothes in front of me. He did not have much alternative but to do this, though I suspected he wished I would busy myself with something. I pretended to listen intently to an item on the radio about how in some British cities a walk in the city centre is equivalent to smoking ten cigarettes. I felt some satisfaction at being able to watch him, however, and to note the features of his body. After all, he had studied me. He handled my scrutiny gracefully enough, without showing any serious modesty, and glanced at me once or twice, inscrutably. I found myself smiling. I liked his body.

“If we hurry, we might get the quarter to nine train to Marylebone,” he said, while he was selecting a tie. “Then get a cab. If we miss it there’s one at five past nine.”

He pulled up his collar, placed the tie around his inside collar, and looked at me through the wardrobe mirror, with an expression I could not quite fathom.

I decided I had better get dressed too, and quickly donned the few items of clothing I had to wear. I wished I could ask to borrow his brush or comb, but somehow I felt that would be presumptuous, and he would not like it. I did not have any make-up with me except concealer, mascara and lipstick, and these were in the bag I had left in the study. He should have thought to bring it to me.

“I’ll just go and get my bag,” I said. “Shall I meet you downstairs?”

“Oh … yes,” he said, as if aware he had omitted doing something a gentleman should have done, but not apologising.

I went down to the first floor, and along to the study, or rather first I went to the second floor and into a completely wrong room (a bedroom) and then another (a broom cupboard) and then managed to backtrack and find my way to the study. I entered the still, musty darkness, with its hundreds of bits of the past, the misericords, the archaeological objects, the books, the paintings. There was a residual aroma of something sweet and floral, mingled with coffee (which I assumed he must have drunk in the small hours). I went over to the window and recovered my bag from its hiding place beside the chair in which I had been so uncomfortable. I wondered if the photograph was still leaning against the side of his chair, and looked for it, but it had gone. He must have taken it back to the gallery. I opened up my bag, took out my wide-toothed brush, brushed my hair, tied it up into a neat knot, and then
I applied what make-up I had as quickly as possible. I put my things away, and turned to go.

And then I turned back. I had just noticed that the rose he had picked for me was still on the table, in its little crystal vase. Now, when I first started writing about what took place at Walton Hall, I thought I would simply note that there was a rose on the table, without explanation, but I have already mentioned that it was Edward Prain who brought it to the study, in a gesture that was curiously romantic, and now that I am stuck with having relayed that piece of information I will let it be. The fact that there was a rose on the table at that moment was not something that reminded me of his gesture. It reminded me of something else entirely. When he had picked the rose it had been a bud, beginning to bloom, but overnight it had carefully fanned out its petals into a great cushion of pink. I instinctively bowed down to it, and breathed in its heavy perfume.

That smell, and the appearance of the rose, brought back an association far beyond the confines of Walton Hall. All at once I was in the living room of my Nana Marsh’s house, my maternal grandmother’s home, in Pukerua Bay near Wellington, in the sultry New Zealand summer. I often went there with my cousins. It was warm, windy and raining. The dark clouds pressed down like a sponge on the variegated greenness of the bush-clad hills and the pale houses. The seagulls cried out warily, buffeted by gusts, but we were inside playing a board game, safe
and dry. Outside, the roses of Nana’s award-winning garden hung their heads, and dripped softly. “It’s a blessing I cut the best before the storm,” she had said, and we’d agreed, as we played our game beneath a great cascade of roses of every colour imaginable that she had placed in chunky, high vases.

“What a scent,” she’d said. “Tell me then kids, which is the strongest?”

And we had sniffed and sniffed, and decided the one with the most powerful perfume was a pink rose, very like the one that was now unfolded before me.

Of course. I was named after a rose. “Stella,” she’d said. “Fancy that.”

“Stella’s smelly,” my cousin Mark had said, laughing.

“Ah, there’s nothing like a rose,” my Nana had said, shaking her head at him.

Stella, my name, is the name of a rose. There I was, in my rose-patterned dress, in my rose-pink shoes. I had unconsciously dressed in accordance with my name. I stood in Edward Prain’s study, caught by the memory, as if my skirt was caught by a rose-thorn in Nana’s garden, and then gradually became aware of myself as I was, there, with my bag in my hand.

I had to go. He wanted to get on. I did not want to be the cause of delay. I did not take the rose, but left it to bloom and throw its perfume into this place.

I turned again, thinking that secret passageway from the study to the kitchen was the quickest way down.
One of the wooden panels? I glanced around, and saw a panel slightly jutting out just behind his desk. I would just nip down there. Great.

“Great Scot!” as a professor would say in a 1930s murder mystery.

Déjà vu
again. But this time, to my amazement, I found its source. Something of my recollection of childhood had allowed it to surface. It felt as if certain disparate things had all at once met and been fused together. A board-game. We were playing a game on the floor, my cousins and I, at my Nana’s house, that day. The rose. The board-game.

Yes.

Cluedo. A secret passageway from the study to the kitchen is exactly what you have in a game of Cluedo. I cannot say that this was the game we were playing at the time of the “smelly Stella” incident, with which Mark tortured me for years after, but it might well have been. Whatever the case, my Nana had Cluedo in a stack in the lounge book-case—Scrabble, Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Cluedo, Chess—underneath the row of traditional children’s stories—Little Red Riding Hood, Goldielocks and the Three Bears, Hansel and Gretel.

Let me tell you about Cluedo, in case you are uninitiated into its dynamics. Each player is both a person and a colour: Rev. Green, Miss Scarlet, Col. Mustard, Mrs White, and so on. You have your particular starting places around the board. You throw the dice and move, one step, two steps, and then you’re in the study, or the billiard room,
or the conservatory, or whatever. The board is laid out like a sizeable country mansion.

The aim is to find out who committed a murder. Who killed Mr. Black? And it could be you, for all you know, temporarily struck with amnesia. In the beginning, you have no idea. You have a list of murder weapons, rooms and suspects, and you move about the board, making guesses every time you enter a room. The player to your left, or another around the board, at each guess, will give you a vital clue by means of a card, after which you can narrow down your options.

I suddenly realised something. It was as if I were a small character moving from one room to the other, in Walton Hall, investigating who was the culprit. Who killed Mr. Black?

With a rush of something like panic I looked around the room. The study. It had the same antiquated feeling as the drawing in the game, but here it was, equipped with furniture, books and artefacts. And where was the weapon? As I said, in the board game, when you go into a room, you have a chance to suspect one of the occupants of this spacious country house. You have a series of murder weapons they could have used. My eyes suddenly rested on the ornate Nordic knife on display in a cabinet. A knife.

Really?

Then all at once I was rewinding the day and fast-forwarding in a kind of weird delirium. The bedroom: there was a pistol above the door. The bedroom was no
location in a Cluedo game though. It was as if the Cluedo house had expanded out and up, no longer a two-dimensional space but three-dimensional and wider, including new zones: the bedroom, the gallery, the garden, the studio. But still, was this where I was, in a giant installation of conceptual Cluedo?

There was a plastic knife in the gallery. The gardener was holding a spanner. There was rope hanging in Monique’s studio. For God’s sake—candlesticks in the drawing room! Monique packed knives into the dishwasher. Where was the lead piping? Surely there must have been lead piping somewhere, maybe in the workshop I had passed through so quickly. Then all the murder weapons of the game were accounted for, with knives featuring most prominently in the assemblage.

And who were the players? We were not to be identified with those little plastic figures of the game, clearly. Just as Walton Hall was expanded, different, so were we. Ha! I knew. Edward could be Mr. Cream, Monique Miss Brown, the gardener Mr. Grey and me—well obviously I was Miss Pink. I looked at all the roses of my dress and at my Barbie-doll shoes, the pink rose on the table. Stella.

Jesus Christ. I shivered. This was too creepy.

And what was it all saying then, this installation? Use your wits! What was the concept? Who was the murderer? And—just as important—who was Mr. Black, the victim?

Miss Pink would not be a victim, I realised, despite my sense of victimisation. She would be a suspect. She was
one of the characters moving, step by step, room by room, to some dim awareness of what was going on, of whom she was with, and why.

Mr. Black was the victim, always. Who killed Mr. Black?

Mr. Black.

I could have screamed.

No. He wouldn’t have. He didn’t.

But if he did?

“Then I’ve slept with a murderer!” I said aloud.

He was waiting downstairs.

I ran. Quickly I opened the panel into the secret passageway, and found a narrow, dark spiral staircase winding down, which brought me into the empty kitchen, where there was a knife holder with a variety of perfect murder weapons staring at me from the marble surface. I raced through this room, and down a corridor to the entrance hall, and confronted a portrait of an 18th-century male Coyman ancestor in wig and blue sash eyeing me imperiously, discombobulated that I would suspect a descendant of his of any misdemeanour. I tore into the drawing room, where my black box was still sitting on the table, and picked it up, this tiny coffin, under the gaze of Edward Prain’s mother.

Mr. Black. My work.

Had I allowed Edward Prain to be a murderer? If so, there was no secret mystery about it. There was no investigation. It had happened right in front of my eyes, and I’d wanted it. No, not exactly. I’d wanted feedback. Feedback! If you were a foreigner, you’d think that word meant “vomit.”

“I accuse Mr. Cream of murdering Mr. Black in the drawing-room, with his tongue!”

The lawnmower started up outside.

Whirring things shot around my brain.

Had he lied about my novel? Had he murdered it in front of me? But it should have lived. It should have been celebrated. He should have told me it was brimming with vitality, and worth bringing out into the open. Instead he had stuck a knife into it.

Was this true? Was I imagining this?

I tried to think clearly, to use reason. Let’s just say he thought highly of my novel. Would admitting his admiration have fitted in with his proposal, his strategy? How could he possibly have said he liked it, when if he had said he thought it would be perfect for Coymans and a real seller there would be no reason for him to present me with such an alluring offer? That would close things rather than open them, because then I would have trusted I could have that thing I wanted—publication—without any special extra time. He had to deride it, while still giving me enough praise to indicate I had talent. If he had said, “Stella, I love this. It’s brilliant and engaging, and it could sell well,” I would have had the impetus I needed to keep going, as I was, and the confidence that I could make my “£500” and still have the room of my own, where I could remain my own person, independent, not wrapped up in some scheme of his making. It was about power. If he told me this one was inadequate, but that I could make the
grade next time after his patronage, given all that time I would have writing away at Walton Hall, I would be much more compliant. And then he could always change his mind about the first one in due course. It didn’t have to be the last judgement. He wouldn’t be losing a product. He could say his opinion had been wrong—he was not the Delphic oracle. He would publish it later.