I put the figure down on the desk and picked up the journal, which turned out at the first glance to be written on the same kind of paper as the notebook I had inspected in the Hobson Room at All Saints’; it had perhaps lain originally between the same covers. The writing on these sheets had faded very markedly, to a kind of washed-out mid-brown, but was still quite readable. It was a thin sheaf of papers, no more than fourteen or fifteen in all, and the first dozen carried nothing but agonizingly vague injunctions to the unearther of the manuscript; stuff like
‘Bee not impacient: all things shall be deliver’d to thee in time. Put thyself under my Will, & thou shalt see a great Wonder. Prepare; abstain from all spirituous Liquors & Cordials (here at least I had already started to do my best to cooperate), takg only such Wine & small Beer as may conduce to health. Bethink thee, that altho’ Philosophy be amiable in herself, her Aspect is upon occasion full strange & stern …‘
And so on. The only entry that stood out in any way from this kind of thing, inset from the margin as though to differentiate it, to mark it perhaps as a note from Underhill to himself (a type of communication I have shown I understand) rather than a memorandum to me, ran as follows:
‘The name, Fareham village. Cf. Fareham Haven in Southhamptonshire. No knowledge of this. Quasi, far Home, sc. distant habitation, or, fair Home. Or, from the Saxon & Gothick, feor, sc. fear. So, feorhame, quasi, the Place of Fear.’
Whatever the rightness or wrongness of Underhill’s etymology, I found this making a kind of sense, the same kind as my conjecture about the derivation of the name of my house. But such theorizing belonged to an impossibly vast and remote field of thought; I put it by and went dispiritedly on through the journal. On its last leaf were half a dozen lines of writing, in a tumbling, scribbled hand barely recognizable as Underhill’s.
‘My time is nearer than I had thought. Dismiss thy Servants at once; send all from home save thine own Family. Go not abroad thyself; see no one & keep thy chamber, that I may find thee alone when I come to thee. Have our small Freind of Silver by thee AT ALL TIMES—or everything will be in vain, Now, fare well, until I shall return.’
There was only one of these instructions that it would not be difficult to obey, but that one was evidently the most important. Unhesitatingly, unreasoningly and with revulsion, I picked up the figure and placed it in my left side coat pocket, where it made an ugly bulge. That was that; what now? Preparatory to gathering the papers together, I turned the last one over and laid it on top of the others, noticing as I did so that it bore a couple of lines of writing. They were in the firm, unhurried hand of the earlier pages, and read:
‘I will wait upon thee in my Parlour at twelve of the clock, the night following thy Discovery. See thou art alone.’
What made me stare and rise to my feet and start trembling was not the content of this message, but the quality of the ink: dark blue or black, not faded at all, as if it had been put on paper that day. But how could that be?
A powerful but (again) unreasoning sense of urgency came upon me. I must find Lucy at once. I had heard her say that she was going to spend the afternoon … how? Where? Yes— reading, sunbathing, in the garden. I snatched up the paper and rushed from the office, across the hall, out of the front door and along to the south-east corner of the house. Lucy, with Nick near her, was sitting on an outdoors chair in the middle of the lawn. Slipping clumsily about on the thick dry grass, and with the silver figure bumping against my hip, I ran over to her.
‘Lucy, look at this. The ink.’
‘What is it?’
‘Look at the colour of the ink. New, fresh. Isn’t it?’
‘I don’t see—’
‘No no, the other side, that one. That’s fresh ink, isn’t it?’
She hesitated, finally saying, ‘It doesn’t look fresh to me,’ and handing the paper back.
Of course she was right. The writing on both sides was brown and faded. No amount of hurrying, presumably, would have made any difference. He had caused it to fade, or, more likely, he had caused it to look unfaded a minute ago. I noticed that Lucy was wearing a navy-blue bathing-dress with the shoulder-straps pulled down, and had a brightly-jacketed book on her lap, and was looking slightly dazed with sun. Nick took the paper from me, glanced at it, then started to read it. He was just wearing trunks and sandals.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ I said, ‘now I look at it again. I don’t know what made me … It must have been the light. It’s not very good in the office. The light. Unless you have the light on.’
‘What’s all this about, Dad?’ asked Nick.
‘Well, it’s … part of a letter or something, I suppose. I found it.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, I was turning out an old cupboard and this had got sort of shoved underneath a lot of stuff.’
‘How could it have been written in fresh ink, then?’
‘I don’t know. I just thought it looked like that.’
‘What does it mean, this friend of silver thing, and this discovery?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea.’
‘Well, why all the excitement? You were—’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
A car I recognized was turning in at the main entrance to the house, a green Mini-Cooper belonging to the Mayburys. For a moment I thought I was going to have Jack on my hands, with more pills and unwelcome advice; then I saw Diana in the driving-seat, and remembered.
‘Never mind, Nick,’ I said, recovering the paper. ‘Sorry to have bothered you. Forget it.’
I went back to the house, put the papers together, half dropping them in my impatience, and locked them up again. By the time I re-emerged from the office, Diana was coming in by the front door and Joyce descending the stairs into the hall. Both had changed their clothes since lunch—Diana into a tan shirt and green trousers, Joyce into a short red dress of some faintly glossy material—and both were groomed and earringed and necklaced as if for a garden party. When, with precision no rehearsal could have improved, we had converged in mid-floor, neither girl made any move to kiss the other as they usually did on meeting, an odd omission in the circumstances. Joyce seemed as tranquil as ever, if not more so, Diana nervous or nervy, her eyes widened and blinking a lot. There was a brief silence.