The Open House (2 page)

The night was very still. His ear, it occurred to him, was having to get along on as short commons as his eye. Rural writers are fond of enumerating the multitudinous sounds which even the most silent-seeming night will offer to the instructed listener: hedgehogs puffing across the path, Appleby thought, and worms wriggling beneath the sod. But he had himself distinguished nothing except a train in the distance and the hoot of a single discontented owl. That, and his own footfalls. His own footfalls… Appleby listened to them again now. He halted, and stirred at the surface beneath his tread with an exploring toe. He stooped, and let his fingers confirm the message. This was no sort of byroad or country lane down which he was advancing, for what was beneath him was fine gravel, evenly raked. And of course the trees, too, were now explained. He had turned off along something quite different from what he had supposed; he was on a well-tended avenue leading to some private house. Unless, indeed, ‘inn’ on the map meant nothing of the kind, but some more pretentious establishment of the kind nowadays known as a country-house hotel.

Such a place would at least be bound to offer some sort of hospitality. Appleby moved on, and almost at once sensed that he was heading for an even deeper opacity than that which had hitherto surrounded him. Deep and
large
. A great rectangular block of blackness, which for a moment he thought to interpret as an enormous barn. And then, in another moment, the scene (if it could be called that) was shatteringly transformed. In place of blinding obscurity there was equally blinding light. For seconds Appleby’s night-attuned vision was utterly confounded. Then he saw that what had sprung into existence before him was an imposing mansion-house. Its every window was uncurtained – and all had been simultaneously illuminated. The effect was as of a great fanfare of trumpets released upon the dark.

This confusion of the senses – which the learned would have described as a synaesthesia – lasted only for a moment; but Appleby’s mere bewilderment didn’t so quickly abate. For time, too, was playing a trick upon him. He might have been Proust’s Marcel, hard upon inbibing the displeasing little sopped
madeleine
which brought his childhood flooding back to memory. Appleby was a small provincial boy again; and there had arrived the grand climax of the Christmas holidays. The Cave of the Demon King – a murky place at best – had vanished momentarily into entire darkness, and had been succeeded in a flash by the dazzling and breath-taking splendours of the Palace of the Fairy Prince. The ‘transformation scene’ of the pantomime had begun.

The anachronistic promise did not, of course, fulfil itself. The massive Palladian façade before which he stood at gaze showed no sign of twitching, quivering, revolving, lifting, parting in order to reveal those farther and interior splendours amid which the entire company would presently assemble to receive the just plaudits of the audience. Appleby’s surprising encounter was with quite solid stone and mortar.

He stepped quickly behind a tree. This might have been judged an odd reaction on the part of a respectable citizen to the sudden appearance before him of an even more respectable house. But old-established professional habit was at work; he had often enough found swift evasive movement to be healthy when something abruptly enigmatic occurred. The mysterious, moreover, was apt to associate itself in his mind with crime, whether achieved or designed; and it was because of this that his thought now took the turn it did. What confronted him, he conjectured, might be a species of eccentric but effective burglar alarm. Unauthorized nocturnal intrusion within the purlieus of this august habitation automatically produced not a ringing of bells or the like but a deluge of light calculated to appal and repel even the most temerarious burglar. The measure was certainly an extravagant one, and there seemed an unnerving possibility that the mind devising it might have backed it up with others more positively disagreeable. The landed gentry of England – not to speak of the great territorial aristocracy – harboured a good many individuals inclined to linger behind the times. The trend of modern social legislation being disposed to develop on somewhat democratic and even egalitarian lines, the employment of man-traps and spring-guns designed to ensure that an Englishman’s castle should
be
his castle had undoubtedly fallen largely into desuetude. But here and there squirarchal persons disposed to walk in the ancient ways might be continuing to direct such engines upon intruders disposed to walk where they shouldn’t. Alternatively – and more prosaically – a dangerously excited proprietor, or even butler, might at any moment emerge from the alerted house with a loaded shotgun. It was with appropriate caution that Appleby peered out from his shelter now.

The house perched, as such places do, upon a basement storey out of which alone a good many reasonably commodious dwellings might have been carved. There was a dominating central block with a Corinthian portico, and on each side of this quadrant corridors connected with substantial and symmetrical wings. It seemed probable that the same effect was repeated at the back – in which case what one would view from the air would be something like a giant crab or sprawled four-footed beast. The whole pile wasn’t all that vast; one might have called it – Appleby reflected – a Kedleston Hall cunningly miniaturized; but it was undeniably imposing, all the same. Whatever its present eonomic hinterland, it had been built for somebody who knew himself to be the person of principal consequence for a great many miles around. And here it was, consuming electricity at a prodigious rate for reasons which remained decidedly unclear.

For the burglar-alarm theory didn’t at all explain all those uncurtained windows. The effect of sudden pervasive illumination would be quite adequately startling even through drawn curtains or lowered blinds, and that the whole mansion should be condemned to a kind of lidless vigil in order to produce a marginally more striking impact upon some hypothetical housebreaker made no sense at all. So Appleby tried another guess. Might the place be both untenanted and disfurnished – a mere empty shell in which some defective master-switch or the like intermittently produced this weird manifestation? Electrical contrivances did, after all, behave badly at times. His own torch had done so, only half an hour ago.

This seemed excessively improbable, too. And certainly the house was not abandoned. The light pouring from it illuminated everything immediately round about, and the resulting suggestion was of a property in apple-pie order. The windows, moreover, could be distinguished as not mere bleak rectangles; one could discern the silhouette of curtains formally drawn back, blinds lowered by the prescriptive few inches of day-time use, and here and there what might be the looking-glass on a dressing-table. In one wing, furthermore, the ground-floor windows came down to the level of the terrace upon which they gave; and through these it was possible for Appleby to view the book-lined walls of a library.

His gaze travelled up to the roof. He was too close to the house to command anything here except a long bold cornice and a crowning balustrade. Behind this there possibly lurked lines of attic windows. No chimneys were visible. But when he raised a hand to shade his eyes from the main glare he could just detect against the dark sky beyond a single faint column of smoke. For a moment he wondered whether the place was on fire. If the house was closed and untenanted, and a fire had broken out through some faulty electrical installation, it was conceivable that the untoward spectacle to which he was being treated was in some way a result.

But this – Appleby told himself impatiently – really made no more sense than anything else that had so far come into his head. It required one to believe that the lights throughout the house had been turned on severally, that all had then been simultaneously extinguished at a main switch, and that now some accident had reversed the process. This just wouldn’t do. The spectacle before him was a spectacle deliberately contrived.

Having arrived at this conclusion, Appleby decided he must investigate. Investigation had been his
métier
, after all.

It would not have occurred to him to ascribe to himself anything that could be called a fanciful mind. But imagination of a sort had been pretty regularly required of him, and it sometimes took odd turns. This happened now. The house
was
like a giant crab – one out of some sort of old-fashioned science fiction and to be thought of, perhaps, as madly luminous on the bed of ocean. The curving corridors, each connecting with a wing fully twenty yards in front of the main building, were preparing to exercise a pincer movement on him at any moment. They would grab, and then the whole phosphorescent enormity would execute a rapid sideways retreat into a vast subaqueous cavern.

In spite of this alarming notion, Appleby walked straight up to the house. Or rather he walked straight to the foot of the impressive flight of steps – a to-and-fro affair lavishly provided with balustrades, urns and statuary – which would elevate him to the base of the main portico and presumably enable him to present himself before the principal door of the mansion. It wasn’t quite evident what he ought then to do. Simply ring a bell, perhaps, and see what happened. Appleby had a vision of a stately man-servant answering his summons, and receiving not too well anything that he could find in his head to say. But he would be perfectly justified, after all, in representing himself as a distressed wayfarer in need of succour. Perhaps he ought to have brought that useless gear-lever with him. It would, in a fashion, have attested his
bona fides
.

He had climbed the last steps, and was beneath the lofty portico. It was only dimly lit. He walked towards its centre, and turned to face the house. At last its front door was before him. It was a suitably impressive double-leaved affair. And it was wide open.

Inside was a warm glow – warm, although the effect that the revealed
décor
suggested ought surely to have been decidedly chilly. For here was a hall which was certainly the height of the whole building, with colonnades of alabaster Corinthian columns and a coved ceiling in the Adam style. The general impression was of a great deal of marble and quite a lot of gold. But most of the light was reflected from areas of the ceiling which were predominantly in Italian pink. It was this that lent a certain august cosiness – almost a welcoming quality – to the scene of which Appleby thus found himself to be enjoying a totally unexpected view.

The autumn night, although it couldn’t be called chilly, was far from warm, and it could not conceivably be to admit the air that the door before him stood wide open as it did. But nobody was coming out – nor, equally clearly, had anybody just gone in. Nor again, in the great void hall was anybody in view. Beyond the long expanse of marble floor, boldly figured as in some classical basilica, the columned vista closed upon lofty doors which no doubt admitted to the domed saloon upon which the whole house must pivot. But of living things there wasn’t so much as a domestic cat. Nor did the most muted sound of any sort float to Appleby’s ear.

But at least there was a perfectly ordinary door-bell. He put out a hand and rang. There was nothing wrong with the bell, for he could just hear its summons in some distant and probably subterraneous place. He waited. It would only be reasonable to wait for quite some time. But nothing happened. He rang again.

A long silence. Appleby realized that a fresh problem confronted him. Before this unaccountable and even slightly unnerving state of affairs, he supposed, it would be irresponsible simply to turn and walk away. Nor did the prospect of continued blind wandering through the small hours appeal to him in the least. Servants ought to appear. The servants ought to be followed by the owner of the property, who would presently be unobstrusively anxious to provide the hospitality which, in such circumstances, one gentleman owes to another. There would be drinks, a common acquaintance or two would be discovered; after a little civil talk, Appleby would be shown to a comfortable bed.

But this wasn’t happening. And in front of him was this open door, this opulent and seemingly unprotected mansion. Action of some sort was incumbent upon him. Perhaps the proper initial step was to circumambulate the exterior of the whole house, seeking somewhere in its obscurer offices a lurking caretaker who might explain the mystery. But he didn’t really think much of this. He was a Justice of the Peace, and the Queen’s commission ought surely to justify a little mild trespass in face of the untoward circumstances confronting him. Appleby walked through the open door.

He had an instant sense of being observed. So strong was this that he halted at once, and in a voice not pitched above that of normal conversation asked: ‘Is there anybody at home here?’ Only a faint echo answered him. But in a colonnaded chamber like this as many people as there were columns could play at a kind of hide-and-seek. He took a couple of paces forward, and glanced between the first two pale honey-coloured shafts. He was indeed being observed, and in a further moment he saw that it was by a whole company. Sightlessly, however, and by a double row of marble statues set in niches in either wall. They were an incongruous assemblage of undraped Greek divinities and of English gentlemen – some in huge tie wigs and some in hunting perukes. It seemed improbable that any information could be extracted from them – except, indeed, that they further attested to the general consequence of their invisible owner.

There was at least nothing much – Appleby noted with professional approval – that a nefariously disposed person could walk away with. Anything that could be called furniture in this vast space was confined to marble benches and elaborately inlaid marble tables for which substantial machinery would be required if they were to be budged an inch. Appleby walked the full length of the hall, and opened the door at the end. The saloon – a square chamber rendered semi-octagonal by the presence of large statue-filled niches in each corner – was in much the same formally bleak condition, except that here the benches and tables (which he guessed to be Spanish) were in ancient wood, and were disposed on and around a Persian carpet which was certainly beautiful and probably very valuable indeed. Appleby surveyed this, frowning. He turned back, found another door, and opened it upon what proved to be a drawing-room. There was only a low light here, but it was quite good enough to reveal a pilferer’s paradise. Within fragile cabinets, or disposed upon the finely polished surface of sundry tables and escritoires, were innumerable objects of virtu – good, bad and largely indifferent – of the sort that silt up over the generations in a house of this kind. But Appleby’s eye didn’t linger on these; it had been attracted to a painting over the mantelshelf. He crossed the room and studied this with attention. He was left in very little doubt that the painter had been Claude. It was decidedly not the sort of possession that ought to be left hanging around.