The Winter Ground (26 page)

Of course, he was right. I ascertained from the butler that there was no blanket ban on visitors and when Robin was summoned to the telephone I delivered the little speech Alec and I had concocted about my passing Cullen on my way to a visit at Cairnbulg and my wondering if I might stop in.

‘But of course,’ said Robin Laurie. ‘Of course.’ He spoke with such an air of understanding and with so little surprise that one could not miss the implication: that of course
I
wanted to see
him
; that ladies begging to see him was a cross which manfully he bore. On the other hand the implication was so subtly laid down that one could not counter it – to deny it would be to confirm it.

‘Latish on tomorrow then,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want dinner,’ and, blushing, I rang off. ‘Oh, shut up,’ I said to Alec, who had not spoken.

Cullen, the estate of the lords of Banff and Buckie, unrivalled bosses of this particular corner of the eastern Highlands, at least since the MacDuff family, earls of Fife, had turned up their toes centuries before (for reasons never quite clear to me despite Hugh’s retellings, although I could not help slightly blaming Shakespeare), was a large square block of uninspiring scrub farmland bound on the north by battered coast, where grey villages alternated with grey cliffs, and unleavened by anything so dashing as a glen, a forest or even a heathery moor. (And when one finds oneself regretting the absence of a heathery moor, one knows one has arrived somewhere one should not linger.) The first time I had ever endured the endless slog up the side of the Spey and the even more endless chug along the coast road eastwards to Cairnbulg – for the friends were true, except in that they were Hugh’s friends and I would not voluntarily have paid them a visit if they had been giving away mink coats and diamonds – I had remarked aloud that the north coast was not actually that much worse than Perthshire. This was in the early years of my marriage before, by a combination of my learning some tact and Hugh’s stopping listening, I ceased giving daily affront. Hugh, who had not yet given up trying to educate me, informed me in clipped tones that we were not currently
on
the north coast, that the north coast was a hundred miles further up and was perfectly charming although not quite as lush as this, the Grampian coast. I had looked around at the dried-out grass, the sheep – who seemed, even for sheep, quite remarkably forlorn – and the few stunted trees, leafless already in September and bent over like crones by the ceaseless howling winds, and had said nothing.

Cullen Place itself, when I arrived there, came as rather a relief. I knew that there was a Castle Cullen, brooding on a headland somewhere hereabouts, but a practically minded Georgian had turned his back on the salt spray and had erected, in a sheltered dip a mile inland, a comfortable little mansion house after the style of John Nash – or it might even have been with the help of John Nash, I supposed, if the Buckies had been in funds at the time. It was, I could see as I swept up the drive and puttered around wondering where to leave my motor car, a cosy kind of overgrown cottage, facing south and catching the last fiery rays of the winter sun in its pink-washed plasterwork and in the bays and french windows it sported here and there wherever some Victorian inhabitant had felt they should like a better view or an easy stroll out to the gardens; a house made for the comfort of a family, one where the servants’ wing took up more space than the whole suite of formal apartments, and that is always a very good sign. I have spent far too many visits, cold, starved and wretched, amongst the marbles and Fragonards of the other kind of house ever to sniff at one which makes do with just two drawing rooms and concentrates itself instead on dairies, smokeries, fish stores, laundries, and above all a boiler house, reeking of coke and pumping delicious warmth around the place with the zeal of a speeding steam engine. I was sorry, as I walked up to the front door, that I had been so unequivocal about not staying for dinner or even stopping the night.

A parlour maid showed me into a ground-floor room at the back of the house before going to announce my arrival to ‘master’s brother’ and, thinking I should look less like a lamb on an altar if I were not seated when he entered, I wandered around while I waited, slapping out a little tune with my gloves. Oddly, the room had an air of disuse despite being decorated as a family apartment with its plump, mismatched cushions and its footstools worked in the drab and lumpy tapestry covers so redolent of captive girlhood. Well I remembered the lumpy tapestry covers I produced myself, with many a droplet of blood from my pricked fingers, in the empty years between dolls and cocktails (although the covers themselves were not around to remind me since my mother had been something of an aesthete and she had tended to beam at my footstools and send them straight to Granny).

The chimneypiece and tabletops hinted at an explanation: they were crowded with photographs, the silver frames gleaming, the glass twinkling and smelling faintly of lemon from a recent wash. There in the biggest and grandest frame of all was the wedding photograph of Lord and the new Lady Buckie, looking young, scared and rather strangled, he in his high collar and she in a hideous wedding dress which topped off its leg-of-mutton sleeves and pouter-pigeon bodice with a kind of surgical neck-brace in ivory brocade with a row of pearls under the chin. All around this one were gathered smaller photographs of the ensuing progeny: the christening portraits showing the same girl, less frightened now, clasping armfuls of frothing ruffles from which, in some of the pictures at least, a fat arm or sturdy booteed leg was waving in blurred abandon; later pictures of the children too, taken in this very room against the french windows, where they sulked in ribbons and buttoned boots, staring down the photographer and hating every minute of it. There were a few happier moments: a boy on a riverbank holding up an enormous perch and beaming; a big girl leaning forward on a black pony, hugging its neck; a row of small children on the same black pony with their sister proudly holding its nose; two small boys, one just a baby, got up as pixies in acorn-shaped caps and pointed slippers with shining buckles. It was hard to tell how many children there had been for the crowded frames might have easily held a multitude of different babies, toddlers and growing girls and boys snapped just once each and, before the younger ones had begun to take on the finished look of grown people with the same recognisable features every time, the pictures stopped. That must be it. Small wonder that the room was not the first choice of retreat for the widowed and now childless man who lived alone here. I turned away, heaving a sigh which I hoped would take such thoughts away with it when it left me, and jumped to see a figure in the doorway.

‘Dandy,’ said Robin. For once, he was not smirking and both of his eyebrows kept their line. If I had not known the circumstances, I should have said he was cross about something, but perhaps this was only another morsel of evidence that there was a tender heart beating underneath the elegant waistcoat and the teasing. He must have thought I was being a perfect ghoul, peering at the photographs of the dead babies; perhaps I was – not a pleasant notion and one which I batted firmly away, telling myself that if they did not want people to look at the pictures they could pack them away or show guests into another room. I refused to hang my head about it.

Sticking my chin resolutely in the air, then, I walked over and shook hands.

‘Robin, thank you for letting me stop off. It’s much appreciated. How is your brother, if you don’t mind my asking?’

Robin frowned, no more than a twitch, but I could not miss it.

‘He’s much iller than he or anyone else in this place will admit,’ he said.

I made a few inadequate sorry-noises.

‘Now, then,’ he went on, sitting opposite me and slinging one long leg over the other with a gay unconcern for his trouser creases. ‘Something to ask or something to tell?’

‘Neither,’ I said, possibly too stoutly to be quite plausible, but it had rattled me to have him cut to the heart of the visit that way. ‘I just can’t resist the chance to chew it all over again with one who was there. Most excitement there’s ever been within a day’s drive of Gilverton, and I’m utterly thwarted. The police are being the expected plods and the circus folk have turned Trappist to a man.’

‘Closed ranks, eh?’ he said. ‘Hardly surprising.’

‘Yes,’ I replied slowly. ‘Of course, one cannot help the thought that it was one of them, but it does occur to me’ – I tried to sound as though as I were only just realising this as I spoke – ‘it does occur to me that everyone in the crowd really should have been interviewed too. Plods, you see? Plods. They haven’t even asked for anyone’s addresses, Ina tells me, and now the case is all but wound up.’

‘And you said you had nothing to tell!’ Robin cried, flapping a hand at me in a gesture reminiscent of an elderly woman gossiping in the street. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he saw straight through my careful show of thinking aloud and was laughing at me. Still, what could I do but plough on?

‘I suppose that is news,’ I said, attempting a look of innocent surprise. ‘Yes, they think it was an accident. They think the pony bolted and Anastasia was just dreadfully unlucky.’

‘Anastasia?’ he said. ‘That was the girl?’

‘I nodded.

‘So why the desperate urge to “chew it over”?’ said Robin. ‘If it’s all done and dusted, as you say. You are confirming a view of your sex that ladies more often seek to overturn.’ He flicked a glance at the silver-framed photographs again as he spoke but he was twinkling at me, the frowns quite vanished. I flushed and decided that I would have to take a more purposeful tack.

‘To be perfectly frank,’ I said, ‘I’m feeling rather uneasy about something. My conscience is pricking me.’

Robin opened his eyes very wide, looking thrilled and horrified in equal measure.

‘She was an unappealing girl, to be sure,’ I went on.

‘I shouldn’t have said so,’ said Robin. ‘I’d have taken the little one on the rope if given a choice but … Oh dear, now I’ve shocked you.’

‘Not at all,’ I retorted, although he had. ‘Her character, I mean. Terribly difficult for the Cookes to manage – disruptive, eccentric – but if it wasn’t an accident, then no matter what her shortcomings, she deserves more than to be tidied away and forgotten. Do you see?’

‘And are you going to tell the police about this pricked conscience? This unease? Whatever it is,’ said Robin.

‘Possibly,’ I replied. ‘Except that it’s more than likely nothing to do with Anastasia at all and one doesn’t like to cause mischief willy-nilly.’ Of course, causing mischief willy-nilly was one of Robin Laurie’s favourite pastimes and so I hurried on. ‘It’s about when Mrs Wilson slipped out, during the show. She can’t give me any very plausible account of where she went or why or even when.’

‘And should she?’ said Robin. ‘Give you an account of herself, I mean.’

‘Not – no – not in the ordinary way of things, of course. Why would she? But only just because I knew she’d gone and I asked her about it instead of telling the inspector and so I thought she should come clean, to repay the favour. To set my mind at ease.’

‘And how did you come to know that she had slipped out?’ said Robin.

‘I happened to turn around and I saw that she wasn’t there.’

‘Really? You do surprise me. You turned around, turned away from the spectacle?’

‘Just briefly.’

Normally, one would say that Robin Laurie’s gaze was all show, his eyes flashing a message of mischief out to the world, but just then he was also gazing to
see
, taking everything in that he could, drinking it in. After a moment, he seemed to come to a conclusion.

‘Am I to understand, Dandy, that you think dear Ina might have bashed the circus girl on the head and you would like me to be her character witness and alibi?’

I would far rather it had not come to this, for Robin Laurie was the last man on earth to be trusted with a woman’s reputation; I could just hear him pointing her out to his chums and telling them that she owed him her freedom – nay, her neck!

‘Let’s say I should feel a little more comfortable about not telling the police if … if it were on your head as well as mine.’

There was another long pause and then he grinned at me, a fresh, uncomplicated grin like a schoolboy’s.

‘Yes, she slipped out,’ he said. ‘She didn’t catch my eye or wave or anything. She’s not my biggest fan, you know, although she hides it marvellously. I’d have said she was going for a quiet smoke if she’d been anyone else. And it was ages before all the fun began.’

‘I see,’ I said, shuddering a little at the word he chose. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what she told me.’

His shoulders dropped a little as though from a small tension let go. ‘Did she tell you what she was doing?’ he asked.

‘She did, but …’

‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have you betray a confidence for the world.’

‘Oh, bother it! There’s no “confidence” to betray,’ I said, once again finding myself hooked by an unspoken implication, this time that Ina was up to something not to be mentioned in the hearing of men. ‘I must say, you have an uncanny knack for—’ He bent his head in eagerness to hear the end of this and I bit it off. ‘She went out to the moonlight, to regroup.’

‘Regroup?’ said Robin. ‘And it wasn’t moonlight that night, by the way.’

‘Well, the starlight, then. Yes, to regroup. To reignite her innocent excitement about the circus show, which had been driven off by the crowds and … very well you know this … by you!’

He nodded sagely and explored the inside of one cheek with his tongue.

‘And you believe that, eh?’

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘Behave.’ I had finally been provoked into treating him as though he were a child. He sat back, triumphant, counting this a victory. ‘So,’ I continued, trying not to look or sound stern, ‘in summary, she slipped out, just for a minute or two, and back in again, and this quite early on.’

‘More than a minute or two, I’d have said,’ Robin replied. ‘Long enough to subject these “stars” to a thorough inspection, but otherwise that’s about it.’