Powerscourt nodded. ‘I certainly can understand it.’ He thought of his parents’ house, the dances until dawn in the great drawing room in the summer, the ornate steps down to the great fountain, the ever-changing reflections in the lake with the water lilies, the blue-green of the Wicklow Mountains in the background, the riders in their scarlet coats leaving for the hunt from the Powerscourt front door on crisp winter mornings. He thought of the funerals and the burials of his parents and how the entire family had to flee their grief and escape to the colder world of London after their parents died. ‘I was brought up in the country in Ireland,’ he went on, ‘not anything as grand as Calne, but Irish country houses have charms of their own, as you know.’
‘Forgive me, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Elizabeth Dauntsey, ‘look at the time. It’s beginning to get dark. I’m sure you would like to see the house, everybody always does. The really grand bits aren’t in use at all, the family haven’t lived in them except for special occasions for decades. But I’m sure Marshall, our butler, could show you round. He doesn’t say much but he does know the way. Some people went off to tour the place on their own last year and got terribly lost. It was hours before they were found. Please come back and say goodbye when you’ve finished.’
Powerscourt was to tell Lady Lucy later that evening that it had been one of the stranger experiences of his life. Some of the state rooms of Calne had the shutters drawn or the curtains pulled so there was little light there in the first place. In others the grime of ages had accumulated on the windows, forming a thick film, now laced with enormous cobwebs and malevolent spiders. Marshall had a lantern which threw extraordinary shadows on the walls, baroque reflections from enormous marble mantelpieces that seemed to touch the ceiling, fleeting shafts of light on nymph and shepherd on the tapestries that lined the walls. The sound of their boots on the oak floors was muffled by a protective layer of threadbare and faded carpet. Marshall himself was a giant of a man casting giant shadows on floors and ceiling as they went. They passed long galleries, two lined with pictures and one with elaborate tapestries. A dining room that seemed to have walls of pale blue had an enormous ghostly dining table, far longer than a cricket pitch. They passed through shadowy bedrooms with vast beds, four-posters that looked as if they could accommodate entire families at a time. Marshall hurried them through dressing rooms and retiring rooms and sitting rooms and studies. The lantern swung across an entire wall of books in the vast library, surprising a full-length Restoration Dauntsey at the far end and a pair of rats in the skirting board. Vast pieces of furniture, draped in dust sheets, loomed in front of them, like ocean liners in a fog. Everywhere they could sense other Dauntseys watching their progress, full-length Dauntseys in robes of state, miniature Dauntseys in Jacobean lockets, Dauntsey wives in green and blue and scarlet peering out of the frames at a future they never saw. Sometimes they would hear the scuttling of tiny feet as the mice or the rats retreated from the invaders to regroup on a higher floor. When the lantern swung upwards the ornate plaster patterns on the ceilings assumed grotesque shapes, racing down the room to vanish in the darkness. They passed statues nude and statues clothed, ancient statues, Roman statues, some that might have been sold as Greek but were made in Florence or Bologna. The heads of innumerable deer and stags stared down at them from on high as they passed. They sped through an enormous kitchen where the brass saucepans on the wall gleamed and glittered for a brief second of glory as the lantern went by. In some places the air was musty, as if the tapestries and the pictures on the walls had only each other for company. Some of the clocks still worked, sounding out the quarter hours as the lantern sped on and the chimes echoed round the great empty rooms of Calne.
‘I take it, sir, that you don’t wish to see the cellars on this occasion?’ Marshall spoke for the first time as they descended yet another oak staircase, dust sheets on the ornate banisters, rough matting on the floor. Powerscourt had a sudden nightmare vision of Goliath-sized shadows flitting across abandoned wine racks, of discarded pieces of furniture, sharp at the edges, lying in wait for the unwary, of cobwebs and spiders brushing across his face, of dirt and grime and smell and squalor.
‘You are quite right, Marshall,’ said Powerscourt, now deposited outside Elizabeth Dauntsey’s doorway once again. ‘Thank you very much.’
Powerscourt thanked Mrs Dauntsey profusely for her time and her insights into her husband. She thanked him for his visit and said she hoped he would feel free to come again if he thought she could help. But it was the handshake Powerscourt remembered most vividly as he set off back towards the station. It had been cold, her hand, and the grip firm, but it seemed to him, or was it just his imagination, that the grip meant more than it seemed to say. Quite what that might be, he did not know. But he did feel that at some point in the future it might be necessary, if not vital, to return to Calne and shake Mrs Dauntsey by the hand once again. Most of all, he fretted about the children that were not there.
5
I wonder if she’ll come, Edward said to himself. He checked his watch again. She was ten minutes late already. Edward had placed himself at the top of the drive that led into the Wallace Collection, a famous collection of paintings, armour and furniture in Manchester Square. He had sent Sarah Henderson a note the day before asking her to join him here at three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. She had dropped in to see him on her way home and said she would be delighted. Powerscourt, who had appointed himself to a position of unofficial godfather to the attachment and the meeting, had insisted that the pair should come to tea at his house in Number 8 Manchester Square. He had, he told Edward, recently purchased a typewriting machine and would be grateful for an expert opinion on the instrument.
Sarah had not intended to be late. Perhaps her mother had planned it. For just as Sarah was about to set off for the distant quarters of Marylebone and the Wallace Collection, her mother suddenly announced that she had run out of one set of pills. It would be all right, she said, if Sarah got them on Monday, but then she might be in agony for the rest of the weekend. Maybe, maybe, Sarah could find the time to pop down to the chemist’s and collect the medicine this afternoon. Surely her other engagement couldn’t take precedence over her mother’s health. Fuming quietly under her breath, cursing her brother and sister for having escaped the drudgery and the intensity of their Acton home, Sarah walked as fast as she could to the chemist, but it was fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes home again. When she got back her mother calmly informed her that she was now so late it was hardly worth while going. Nobody would wait that long. Sarah might as well stop at home and read to her mother from one of the weekly magazines. Sarah smiled sweetly, said she would see her mother later and fled to the smoky embrace of the District Line.
Some people might have wondered how Sarah reconciled her earlier resolve to have nothing to do with her colleagues at work with an afternoon tryst with a young man, even if he seldom spoke. That had not proved too difficult. For a start, she told herself, most of the men she had been warned against on her secretarial course were older. They were married. They had families. Edward fitted into none of those categories. Anyway, she thought, Edward was perfectly harmless. Everybody knew that.
It was only after about fifteen minutes delay that Edward began to grow seriously worried. I’ll go at twenty past, he said to himself. Twenty past came and went and Edward was still there. There were vague rumours, nothing substantiated, nothing Edward would ever have allowed any of the men he devilled for to take into court, but rumours nonetheless that Sarah’s mother was ill and liable to be difficult. Half past came and half past went. Edward was reluctant to abandon the afternoon because he had arrived two hours early. He had spent them learning about the story of the collection and about the most famous of the pictures. He had astonished himself by asking one of the curators two questions about one of the Fragonards. And on his afternoon vigil, he could console himself with surreptitious glances at the Powerscourt house and wonder about what was going on inside. He hoped he might meet the other twin this time, but then he wondered if he, an outsider, would be able to tell the two of them apart.