‘He wasn’t much fun to talk to: just a shadow of the man I’d met before. He seemed very angry with himself for never having settled, for not finding someone he could build a home with and start a family. He seemed to think it was too late to do any of that now. So then when I began talking about myself, I just couldn’t help it. I had to tell him about you. I thought perhaps it might mean something to him. And of course he’d no idea. He was completely flabbergasted. He wanted to know all about you, when you were born, what you looked like, how you were doing at school, all that sort of thing. And the more I told him, the more he wanted to know; until in the end, he asked me if he could come and see you. Just the once. So I thought about it and to be honest I didn’t really like the idea, but finally I said all right, but I’ll have to ask my husband, thinking of course that he’d say no, and that would be an end to it. But you know what Ted was like, he could never deny anybody anything, and when he got home that evening I did ask him, and he said yes, he didn’t mind, he thought it was the least the poor man deserved. And so later that night, after you’d gone to bed, he came round to the house and I took him up to your bedroom and he stood and looked at you for about five minutes, until you woke up and caught sight of him and started screaming fit to bring the roof down.’
‘But that was my dream,’ said Michael. ‘That was my nightmare. I dreamed that I was staring into my own face.’
‘Well you weren’t,’ she said. ‘It was your father’s.’
For some time Michael said nothing. He was too astonished to speak — until, brokenly, he managed to ask: ‘Then what?’
‘Then nothing,’ said his mother. ‘He left and none of us ever saw him again. Or heard from him.’ About to take another sip, she hesitated. ‘Except that …’
‘Yes?’
‘He asked if he could have a photograph. I can still remember how he described you—“the only trace of myself I’ve managed to leave behind these last twenty years”—and when I heard that, I didn’t feel I could refuse him, very well. So I gave him the first one I could find. It was the one you always kept out, the one of you and Joan, writing your books together.’
Michael looked up slowly. ‘You gave him that picture? So I never lost it?’
She nodded. ‘I meant to tell you, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t think of any way to tell you.’
His capacity to absorb these revelations almost, but not quite, exhausted, Michael said: ‘When was all this? When did it happen?’
‘Well,’ said his mother, ‘it was in the spring. That I do know. And it was before your birthday, the day we took you down to Weston. You were never the same after that day. So I suppose it must have been … 1961. It must have been spring, 1961.’
It was already dark when Michael disembarked from the train at York. The three Winshaws and Mr Sloane, without noticing him, immediately hailed a taxi and drove off into the city traffic. Having established that the fare would leave him little in the way of change out of seventy pounds, Michael decided that he would have to forego that means of transport, and waited instead for a bus, which was due to depart in forty-five minutes. He passed the time consuming two packets of Revels and a Curly-Wurly in the station waiting-room.
The bus journey lasted for more than an hour, and for almost half of that time, as the tired, spluttering vehicle carried him along ever darker, narrower, wilder and more tortuous roads, Michael was the only passenger. When he left the bus he was still, by his own calculations, some seven or eight miles from his destination. The only sounds, at first, were the forlorn bleating of sheep, the soft moan of a gathering wind, and the falling of a thick rain which looked ready to settle, before too long, into a steady downpour. The only lights came from the windows of a few isolated houses, scattered and remote. Michael buttoned his coat up against the rain and began walking; but after only a few minutes he heard the distant rumble of an engine, and turned to see the twin beams of a car’s headlights, no more than a mile away and advancing in his direction. He put down his suitcase and, as the vehicle approached, stuck out a plaintive thumb. The car braked to a halt.
‘Going anywhere near Winshaw Towers?’ he asked, as the driver’s window was wound down to reveal a dark, clean-shaven man wearing a flat cap and green Barbour.
‘I go within a mile of it: and I’ll go no closer,’ said the man. ‘Get in.’
They drove for several minutes in silence.
‘It’s a poor night,’ said the driver at last, ‘for a stranger to be lost on the moors.’
‘I thought the bus might get me a bit further,’ said Michael. ‘The service up here seems rather erratic.’
‘Deregulation,’ said the driver. ‘It’s a crime.’ He sniffed. ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t vote for the other lot.’
He dropped Michael at a crossroads and drove off, leaving him once again at the mercy of the wind and the rain, which already seemed to have doubled in intensity. Nothing was visible in the surrounding darkness but the rough, stony road ahead, fringed on either side by a narrow strip of moorland, ever alternating between black, naked peat, straggling heather, and piled, weirdly shaped rocks; not, at least, until Michael had been walking ten minutes or more, when he became aware that the road had begun to run alongside some sort of man-made lake, illuminated at one end by parallel rows of lights which called to mind an airport runway. He could even distinguish the outline of a small seaplane parked at the water’s edge. Shortly after that, he came upon a patch of thick woodland, cordoned off by a long brick wall which was interrupted, at last, by a pair of wrought-iron gates. They creaked open at his touch, and Michael guessed that his journey must nearly be at an end.
By the time he emerged from the seemingly endless, mudcaked and densely overgrown tunnel of blackness which constituted the driveway, the golden squares of lamplight shining out from the windows of Winshaw Towers might have seemed almost welcoming. This impression, however, could not survive even a cursory glance over the bulk of the squat, forbidding mansion. A shudder passed through Michael’s body as he approached the front porch and heard the ghastly howling of dogs, protesting at their confinement in some hidden outhouse. To his own surprise he found that he was muttering the words: ‘Not exactly a holiday camp, is it?’
The line should have been Sid’s, of course: but there was no Sid to keep him company now. For the moment, he would have to keep the dialogue going by himself.
CHAPTER TWO
Nearly a Nasty Accident
As soon as Michael attempted to lift the immense, rusty knocker, he found that the door promptly swung open of its own accord. He stepped inside and looked around him. He was in a huge, dingy, stone-flagged hall, lit only by four or five lamps set high in the wood-panelled walls, with badly weathered tapestries and oil paintings adding to the crepuscular impression. There were doors leading off on either side, and, directly in front of him, a broad oak staircase. He could see light coming from beneath one of the doors to his left, and from the same direction occasional voices could be heard, raised in desultory conversation. After hesitating briefly, he put his suitcase down near the foot of the stairs, brushed the wet and tangled hair away from his eyes, and advanced boldly forward.