I was too excited to get back to sleep and for an hour I lay there happily considering my new life with Laura. But as the night wore on the excitement curdled, and I began to be tormented by doubts. That everything should fall into place this way: suddenly it seemed too neat, too easy. Should I have turned down the pact? Had I sold Bel down the river? And then I thought I heard noises, and I couldn’t reassure myself that it wasn’t him, stalking deadly through the halls and corridors, making sure all was quiet before beginning his maleficent enterprise.
Chiding myself, I put on my slippers and went out to the landing. But all was silent, save the distant clanks and rumblings the house made in its sleep, and somewhere a clock ticking to itself. There was no one in the bathroom, although there was an unfamiliar stench. I drew the curtains in Mother’s bedroom, then went to the door of Father’s study. And there I paused: seized, as I turned the handle, by memories, as if they had been waiting there coiled inside the metal. They were from when I was very small, before he started locking the door, and I would come to see him with a glass of milk or a snail or my homework (norway has alot of fjords, nobody does much there), and find him brooding in the recesses of his enormous chair; how the room had seemed enchanted, with its vertiginous walls of arcane books and ledgers, the murky carpet that he wouldn’t let Mother change, the obsequious plaster head waiting hopefully on its plinth — the room like an alchemist’s lair, that both was and wasn’t part of the house, where Father both was and wasn’t with us…
‘What’s this about Dad, bones?’
‘Cheekbones, Charles, see some people don’t really have ’em, and these colours —’
‘And what’s this?’
‘Ah, well that’s a chemical formula, is what that’s called, this fellow here’s a stearate radical and — no, don’t touch that, Charles —’
‘Oops, sorry…’
‘Doesn’t matter. Look, there’s Mother out in the garden, I wonder if she needs a hand,’ steering me gently but firmly out the door…
Nothing in the room had been touched since his death. Everything was as he had left it, as if he’d just stepped out and would be returning momentarily: the vials of dyes and tinctures, the colour charts and cross-sections; the desk overflowing with magazine-cuttings of tempestuous models in hair and dresses already passed out of fashion, like spirits that had been called into being for that moment alone, sprung like flames from shadows before disappearing back to that essential realm where it was forever 1996. The only addition was the portrait that Mother had installed — opposite the window, so that he could continue to enjoy the grounds and gardens, this empire he had built from nothing. Or not quite nothing: our family traced its lineage back to the first Norman conquerors, although some regrettable dalliances with the local peasantry over the centuries had somewhat thinned the bloodline, perhaps accounting for an occasional lassitude in judgement such as exhibited by my sister. Standing in the moonlight, leaning back with my arms rigid against the desk, I studied the aquiline nose, the thinly smiling lips, the ruddy cheeks. It had been painted posthumously, from photographs, but the picture really captured the spirit of my father, a man devoted to life in his own inspiring if inexplicable way.
I’d almost forgotten why I came in at all, when by chance I spotted something unusual. Two red dents in a velvet square: two pieces of Father’s coin collection mysteriously absent. Frank! So that was his game — start slow, no one will notice, until the whole house was cleaned out! I pictured him at one of those vile suburban pubs, sitting at a faux-marble table top, drinking a fizzing lager with his fence, satellite television blaring above them as they laughed and clinked glasses in their pork-pie hats. Now from downstairs came the sound of a cupboard opening. In a fury I rolled up my pyjama sleeves. Just let me catch him in a fresh act of thievery, I would settle his hash for him, Golem or no!
I padded softly down the stairs. I took the poker from the drawing room, then saw a faint glisten of light along the wooden floorboards of the halclass="underline" I whirled about in the eye of the sweeping staircase, glancing from one shut door to the other, and then a noise! I pounced, poker high, through the scullery door — and checked myself just in time, so that Mrs P was dealt only a glancing blow, although unfortunately enough to bring the silver tray she was carrying crashing to the floor. ‘Young Master Charles!’ she cried. ‘You are giving me the heart failure!’
‘Oh, yes, sorry Mrs P, didn’t think you’d be about this late —’
‘Yes,’ she faltered, ‘I am — I am making the breakfast…’
I picked up a tender sliver of pheasant from the floor. Morsels of roast potato clung to it alluringly. Making breakfast at three in the morning? And no ordinary breakfast either — on top of the pheasant, or rather beside it on the floor, was a heavenly looking soufflé and a bottle of rather fine Armagnac. It looked like someone was in the running for a first-class breakfast in bed. And there could be little doubt as to who that someone would be — the poor thing was still upset about the kidney-bean debacle; indeed, now that I looked at her properly, I could see the rings that worry and tiredness had left on her simple rustic face.
She protested, but I would not hear of her making another breakfast at this hour; I told her to forget about the kidney beans and go directly to bed as soon as she had cleaned up the floor. She bowed gratefully, and I left the room, marvelling at her diligence even if increasingly concerned about her mental stability — I mean to say, pheasant for breakfast? In all the excitement, the Frank conundrum went clean out of my head; and it wasn’t until some time later that I noticed the disappearance of the ottoman, and the ornamental teapot.
2
Perhaps it might seem that Bel had a point, about me not having a job, I mean. To the casual observer it may have looked like I was living a life of indolence, compared to the noisy industry with which the city to the north was ripping itself to pieces. It was true that, after a brief but regrettable entanglement with Higher Learning, I had fairly much confined my activities to the house and its environs. The simple fact of it was that I was happy there; and as I didn’t have any skills to speak of, or gifts to impart, I didn’t see why I ought to burden the world with my presence. It was not true, however, to say that I did nothing. I had several projects of my own to keep busy with, such as composing, and supervising the construction of the Folly. I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times, they had called it sprezzatura: the idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat. I had explained it several times to Bel, but she didn’t seem to get it.
Our house was called Amaurot. It was situated in Killiney, some ten miles outside of Dublin, a shady province of overhanging branches, narrow winding roads and sea air. Most of the houses had been built in the nineteenth century by magistrates, viceroys, military and navy men; in recent years, however, the area had become something of a tax haven for foreign racing-car drivers and soi-disant musicians. But it still possessed a sequestered elegance, an arboreal hush: I would not have lived anywhere else. On bright mornings I might take a walk up to Killiney Hill, climbing mossy steps under canopies of ash and sycamore; at the top stood the Obelisk, a monument to the kindness of the landed gentry to the local peasants during the famine year of 1741, from where you could look out over the half-hidden rooftops to the blue mountains and the golden sickle of the beach. Beside it was a little ziggurat, and the legend was that if you ran around each level of it seven times your wish would come true. But neither Bel nor I had ever managed to make it to the top; and even if we had, we would have been too dizzy to wish.