The other Hooper asked gruffly, “Why’d you want to see us, Colonel?”
“I think the cryptogram’s been broken,” said Moe, eyeing a cream cake.
The Hoopers looked at one another. “It has?”
“Both of you. You’d best go to Plan A before they come.”
The Hoopers stood up abruptly, one upsetting his chair. He picked it up, set it down with a thundering crack, and the two went back to their chess game, but not before Melrose heard one of them ask the other what Plan A was and saw the other shake his head, he didn’t remember.
“Cryptogram?” asked Melrose.
Moe shrugged. “Hell if I know. They’re always rattling on about secret codes and being spies. Of course, they’ll forget it before they’re through the dining room, so it does no harm.”
Tom said, “Still, it’s like one thing they half remember with any consistency.” He laughed.
“It’s retrograde amnesia, something like that,” said Moe. “It’s not being able to remember something you heard not more than two minutes ago. They’ve both got Alzheimer’s, but whether that’s causing it, the doc doesn’t know. Not surprising.”
Not caring a fig for the Hoopers’ condition, little Miss Livingston’s strong fingers clamped Melrose’s forearm. “Let’s you and me go for a walk out there around the grounds. There’s some spots only I know about, dearie. They’d never find us. Besides”-here she shook her beaded bag and set the coins jingling-“I’m rich”
Not at all tempted by this invitation, nevertheless Melrose gave her a darling smile and made a quick movement to free himself from her grip.
Probably used to Miss Livingston’s little ways, Moe Bletchley ignored her and said, “Tom here’s been my chauffeur for years in London. He’s such a good wheel man, there’ve been times I wished I could stick up a bank or a jeweler’s, just so’s I could zip out to the car with the swag, have Tom gun ’er up, and tear off on a chase.”
Moe said this with such obvious affection that Melrose could guess how an AIDS case had come to Bletchley Hall.
“How long have you been here, sir?” Wiggins asked Tom without (Melrose noted) shrinking back at all.
“Six months. But this is only since I got really bad.” He gestured toward his face and yet managed a smile. After all, he’d been lucky to get into Bletchley Hall; so few were able to.
“How many patients do you have staying here?” asked Wiggins.
“Twelve. Twelve’s the capacity; there’re twelve bedrooms besides the four for Matron, a nurse who’s here full time, Jaynes, and me. The rest of the staff’s not live-in. We have doctors, of course. One lives in St. Buryan. Another lives near Penzance.” Moe Bletchley suggested Wiggins might like a tour of the place and Wiggins accepted with alacrity. Tom wheeled out with them.
Melrose excused himself from the tour, spent some five minutes disengaging himself from Miss Livingston and her pincerlike fingers and walked back inside.
33
He walked through the voluptuous green dining room: That crystal! That silver! He liked the idea that all this finery was laid on in case there was even one guest who could make it downstairs for dinner. Perhaps there was more hope of recovery in setting a good table than in administering a newly discovered drug.
He stopped before one table to look at the delicate arrangement of mauve orchids and cyclamen; touched the thin crystal of a wineglass, so delicate that a glassblower’s breath might have sighed it into existence; lifted a knife as heavy as a vault or as weighty as memory.
For that’s how he felt; memory really could weigh one down. Perhaps that’s what had happened to the Hooper brothers. They’d had to remember, at last, too much, and decided nothing was preferable. Melrose walked on.
There was another drawing room across from the blue room, still occupied by the two old ladies, who seemed not to have moved a muscle. Should he call for help? No, the breath of one lifted the frill of the lace collar on her jabot. She at least was still breathing, which meant the other probably was also.
The drawing room across from the blue room that he now entered was somewhat narrower, longer, and done in the burgundy red of an old Bordeaux. This room was darker and-if it could be so described-deeper, as if it had been steeped in wine. The colors at Bletchley Hall, Melrose noticed, were exceptionally strong-none of your weak-kneed off-whites, ecrus, or pastels but colors that seemed to demand that one just hold on.
The red room didn’t get much natural light, facing north as it did; it depended on lamps being lit and the logs burning in the fireplace, as a fire burned now. Because of this play of light and dark, Melrose hadn’t immediately seen Tom, who sat by the hearth. His eyes were closed or almost closed, and he hadn’t noticed Melrose come in either.
Melrose hung back, not wanting to disturb his doze.
He turned and was about to leave when Tom said, “Hello. Come on in.” He was still in Moe Bletchley’s wheelchair. Melrose walked to a wing chair in front of the fire.
Tom was holding a small sherry glass in his hand, which he raised. “Want some?”
“I do, yes. Just point me to it.”
“Over there.” Tom indicated a table beside a window hung in a sea of dark-red curtains. Melrose found the sherry decanter in among other decanters-cut glass, probably Waterford, that shade called “Waterford blue,” a unique assimilation of blue and gray. This table was stocked with the best and most expensive whiskies, gins, and vodkas. “I’m amazed,” he said, coming back with his sherry glass, Lalique, he thought, remembering Marshall Trueblood’s lessons. The glass was shaped like a tulip just beginning to open.
“What’s more amazing is how seldom we use it-the drink. It must be the idea that what’s so readily available loses a lot of its power to tempt you. You’d think all of us would be driven to drink, wouldn’t you?”
Melrose smiled. “Maybe. Listen: Why do you like that wheelchair so much?”
Tom smiled too. “Because it’s fancy, it’s fun, and it gets his goat. You’re living in Seabourne, aren’t you.”
“I am, yes. At least for a little while.”
“It’s haunted.”
Melrose laughed. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”
“It is.”
“Come on, Tom. To tell the truth, the place does give me the feeling of-um, a movie set. It really does. One expects to see spectral shapes forming at the top of the stairs. Anyway, I take it you’ve been in it?”
“I’ve stayed there.”
“You’ve known Morris Bletchley for some time?”
“Like he said, I was his chauffeur for years. Mostly in London. He had a terraced house in Putney, maybe still does, though he never leaves here much, now.” He turned his head to look out of the tall window and smiled as if the memory made him happy. “That was just like him, living in Putney instead of Belgravia or some swank house in W-One. It was a small house, too, the Putney house. There was just me, a cook who came in daily, and an au pair for the kids, who used to come and see him a lot. They really loved him.”
“His grandchildren?”
Tom nodded. “Noah and Esmé. Nice kids. I used to drive them places: the zoo, films, Chick’nKings.” He flashed Melrose a smile. “Of course.”
“I understand they drowned; it was a strange accident.”
“It was strange, all right. It was strange,” he repeated. Silence. Then he asked, “Want some more sherry?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
Tom might have liked the wheelchair for reasons other than “fun.” He rose slowly and, it appeared, painfully. It was a pain that hadn’t seemed to bother him in the sunroom or hadn’t registered, if it did. He continued talking as he poured and stoppered up the decanter. “Mr. B was in London, in the Putney house. After he got the call he came to my room to tell me to warm up the car, that he wanted me to drive him to London airport.” Tom was standing in front of Melrose, handing him the refilled glass. “I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen Mr. B look like that; sunk, he looked, as if he himself had drowned. I drove him to the airport; he keeps a Lear jet there, but he hardly ever uses it, only when he has to go to the Highlands or Paris or someplace. He really keeps it for his executives and employees. One of his girls who worked at the Watney C-K, her father had a heart attack, and Mr. B got her to the airport and she was home in Edinburgh in an hour. He doesn’t like the plane; he doesn’t like ostentation; he’s a plain man.”