Deciding a glass or two of wine might steady my nerves, I went back downstairs to the cellar. Hmm. I could see what Bel meant. The stocks really had taken a beating recently. Was it possible that I could have put away this amount on my own? Or could it be that I was getting help from another quarter? I clenched my fists and swore. Frank! I could just see him, laughing soundlessly in the back of his rusty white van, rocking back and forth as he swigged from the neck of a bottle of Marsanne. Or at the dog-track, the green rim poking from the collar of his windcheater as he frittered away the proceeds from our ottoman. Or — a new thought struck me, maybe it wasn’t Frank at all! Maybe Mrs P had drunk the wine! Maybe she was a Secret Drinker, like that laundrywoman of Boyd Snooks’s he’d found asleep in the dog basket! Wouldn’t that explain why she was acting so strangely? Unless of course it was only a symptom of her collapse… Great Scott, we were living in a time bomb!
I grabbed a soothing premier cru, and returned to the study. There was only the ghost of a moon outside, but I left the light off. I sat at the desk, poured a glass and raised it to Father’s portrait — just in case there might be some vestige of his spirit still hanging around among the toxic oils and leads that could give me a sign, point the way out of my quandary. But the glass was filled and emptied until there was nothing left, and I remained in the dark.
I turned to the window and looked out at the Folly, half-hidden by night. The Folly was my idea: it had occurred to me on one of my strolls around the grounds that we hadn’t got one, and as no one else seemed to be doing anything about it, I had called in the builders. That was almost a year ago, but the tower, to be the glory of our estate, was still nowhere near finished. The builders hadn’t been in all week; possibly they were on strike, they were always on strike for one reason or another. Unlike most builders one hears of, these ones were very moral. They would go on strike at the drop of a hat, in support of the nurses or the bricklayers or some other branch of labourer, or often on more general humanitarian grounds. ‘We can’t work,’ the head builder would tell me in the kitchen of a lunchtime, ‘until the UN does something about Indonesia, it’s getting ridiculous’ (‘It is,’ I’d agree, as they went off to picket the Nike shop in town); or they’d down tools on a Tuesday morning, telling me ‘It’s the whole Kurdish thing, Mr Hythloday, it’s unconscionable, and the US is just making things worse’ (‘I know,’ I’d say with a sigh as they gathered up their placards and set off for the Turkish Embassy); and every week the Palestine question took a new turn to prompt a day off.
‘Basically, it would be wrong of us to work while this sort of thing is going on,’ they would argue, and they had a good point; however, the world didn’t seem to be improving and consequently the Folly was going very slowly. I still wasn’t allowed to enter it, and they weren’t sure exactly when it would be safe enough to do so. Yet in a way, I almost preferred that they did it like this; as I looked out at its skeletal form, I could perceive already its proud upsurge, its noble future. ‘Liberty!’ it seemed to cry. And tonight, just as I was about to look away, I saw something: an angelic face peeping out from one of the narrow windows. It was a very beautiful face, painted in the choicest greys and silvers of the clouded moonlight; it saw me, smiled and waved. I waved back, whereupon it disappeared.
I should explain at this point that this sort of thing wasn’t entirely new to me. In recent months I had had quite a few supernatural experiences. My theory was that without Mother here to distract me with her nagging, I was more receptive to communications from the spirit world. I’ve mentioned the eerie feelings I had had watching late-night films — i.e., the unshakeable sense that the films were watching me. Often the Visions were of a more hostile variety. Leaning from the window after a long night, attempting to assuage my spinning brain, I had on more than one occasion seen huge, goblin-like figures, not dissimilar to Frank, lurching about in the shadow of the Folly, or lumbering with silent menace across the lawn. Whether these manifestations had always been resident in Amaurot, or whether they had only arrived recently in some sort of premonitory capacity, I didn’t know. But whichever line you took, this particular Vision seemed propitious. I mean an angel was a definite step up from a goblin, for one thing; symbolically speaking, it surely meant that the Folly (representing me, Charles, and also the family line in general) would continue to rise and transcend the intrusions of the brutish world (symbolized by Frank, if you want).
I tipped an imaginary hat to Father, by way of thank you for the good omen, and returned to my room in a much more optimistic frame of mind, and it wasn’t until I tried to sit down on it that I realized the chair to my writing-desk wasn’t there. ‘What now?’ I said to the ceiling, which had risen to prominence in my new horizontal position.
Picking myself up, I scoured the room for it, and then the landing, but it was nowhere to be seen. This was exasperating. It wasn’t a costly chair, it wasn’t even an attractive chair; it had come down from the attic after its predecessor succumbed to woodworm. Its theft revealed a hitherto unsuspected degree of stupidity in the malefactor. There were lots of nicer things in the house to steal, and it was most bothersome that he should settle on this worthless item just as I intended to sit on it. At that very minute I heard them come in and, sniggering to each other, climb the stairs to Bel’s room. I had half a mind to go and confront him there and then: indeed I had put on my slippers and was halfway to the door when the horrible image of interrupting him and Bel in the middle of something appeared in my mind, and my legs quite failed me. The room began to list, like a ship in a storm; knees buckling, I staggered into the armoire, then back the way I had come as the room tilted to the other side. I lay down on the bed and covered my eyes. This had to end. We couldn’t go on like this; my stomach, for one, couldn’t bear it. Action had to be taken: definitive action.
3
The next couple of days were peaceful enough. Bel was out most of the time and she took her Project with her; when at home they tended to stay in her bedroom at their reading lesson. The day after was when all the trouble with the bank materialized, and things really started to cave in: though the morning began so sweetly, with Mrs P waking me just before noon with the telephone on a tray.
‘Hello?’ I said, after establishing that this was not a murderous ruse on Mrs P’s part.
‘Hello,’ an unfamiliar voice said. ‘Charles?’
Heart pounding, I scrambled out of bed to my feet. It was a sultry voice, throaty, at once refined and scandalously suggestive; it could have come from a thousand black-and-white movies — the fallen dame in the bar-room asking for a light, the heiress with the detective parked on a shadowy driveway, the trembling young widow pleading for help from the embittered ex-marine. A monochrome voice that could belong to only one person.
‘Laura,’ I said with a strange, thankful calmness, a sense that one thing had ended and a new one was beginning.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your sister called me last night, she said you had something you needed to discuss with me…?’
Damn that Bel, she would make nothing easy for me. ‘That’s right,’ I said. A moment of blissful tension elapsed.