That is what Sir Peter Wheeler had done, kept silent from the start, when I finally asked him and Mrs Berry, over Sunday lunch or, rather, afterwards, just before I got up from the table and left for the station to catch the train back to London, about the bloodstain at the top of his stairs.
'Before I forget,' I had said, taking advantage of a pause, the kind that heralds or brings about farewells, 'last night I cleaned up a bloodstain on the stairs, at the top of the first flight, when I went up to my room.' And I pointed backwards with my thumb at the first few stairs. In fact, it had happened when I was coming downstairs, carrying From Russia with Love as if it were a treasure, the copy dedicated to Wheeler by the former Commander Fleming of the Naval Intelligence Division ('… who may know better. Salud!"), but that didn't matter and I didn't want Peter to take me for a tattletale, or a chafardero, as they say in the Castilian spoken in Catalonia. 'I don't know where it came from, but it wasn't a small drop. Do either of you have any idea?' It was Mrs Berry who answered, the odder the question is, the more immediately a reply is required, although this one consisted only in repeating a word: 'A bloodstain?' she said, and her eyebrows arched of their own accord and not apparently in response to any previous command. And then she added, slightly annoyed: 'How could I possibly not have seen it on my way up to my room, especially if it was a large stain,' and thus she appeared to deflect the matter and turn it into a possible act of negligence on her part. 'At the top of the stairs, you say, Jack? How odd.' And she eyed with disgust the lower steps I had pointed to, as if the thing I had told her about were still visible – although I had also told her that I had cleaned it up – and in such an unfortunate place too. 'I'm so sorry to have put you to all that trouble, Jack.’
I glanced at Wheeler, who had opened his eyes very wide and his mouth just a little, a look of sufficient surprise to warrant the expression 'left speechless'. Or was it merely a look of partial incomprehension, as if the occasional slowness of his years were processing my question or news with bewilderment and even difficulty; as if he were thinking: 'Did I hear correctly, did he say blood? Did he mispronounce it, or did he actually say bloodstain? He may be foreign, but his pronunciation rarely lets him down, except in the case of strange or unusual words that he has perhaps never heard and only seen written down, but then he is conscious of his own uncertainty, and he hesitates and asks before saying them. Or was it me, perhaps I wasn't concentrating and didn't understand.' Those, at least, seemed to be his thoughts, but they couldn't have been because Mrs Berry had immediately repeated 'A bloodstain?' and there could be no doubts about her pronunciation.
'Don't worry, Mrs Berry, it was no trouble at all, besides, I wasn't tired,' I replied. 'It's just that I can't understand where it could have come from. I thought it must have come from me, that I had inadvertently cut myself, but I felt myself all over and I hadn't. So you've no idea either?' I insisted somewhat hesitantly.
Mrs Berry looked at Wheeler in perplexity, as if asking him a question with her eyes, or, it occurred to me, that glance might merely have been one of consultation or even of concern for me, because there I was claiming to have cleaned up some peculiar and highly improbable stain in the middle of the night. Peter, however, remained silent, with his metallic or mineral eyes very wide (in the daylight, they were like chalcedony) and his lips still parted (but not so much as to merit the description 'open-mouthed').
'Not really,' she replied. 'Perhaps a guest cut himself when he went up to the bathroom on the first floor, I saw several people go up there during the evening… Where was it exactly?' I stood up and so did she (‘I’ll show you'), I led her to the stairs, went up the first flight two steps at a time, and she followed more sedately behind.
'Here,' I said, and pointed to the approximate place. I couldn't be more exact because spatial memory is imprecise unless there is some established, unchanging reference point, and not a trace was left, you couldn't even see where I had rubbed, everything was smooth and immaculate, I had done a good, thorough job, I would have made an excellent servant in another life, or a conscientious, although probably not very illustrious, cleaner. 'It was more or less here,' I added, 'about an inch and a half in diameter, perhaps two. And what's so odd is that there was no trail, just that one drop. Like a single footstep.' Mrs Berry bent over to study the floor more closely. I had crouched down and was tapping on the wooden boards with my five fingers, my hand in the shape of a claw, as if trying to summon up something from the wood, only there was nothing to invoke and nothing that could burst forth from it. 'I knew it,' I thought fleetingly, 'I should have left a bit of the rim, there was a reason why it resisted being erased.' Peter had also got up from the table now, rather more calmly, and had followed us to the foot of the stairs, but he did not come up. He stood there with his hands resting on his walking stick as if it were a sword stuck in the earth in a moment of temporary rest, looking up, looking at us with that gaze one often sees in the old even when they are in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far off back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean, sometimes even the old and blind have this gaze, like the poet Milton in his dream, and it is not an absent look, but a very focused one, focused on something a very long way off. And Wheeler was still saying nothing.
'That big? But there's nothing here,' said Mrs Berry. The wood was, indeed, polished, shining, waxed, as if it had never been touched. 'What did you use to clean up the stain?' 'I got some cotton wool and surgical spirit from the bathroom downstairs. I did it very slowly and carefully. I didn't want to dirty one of your cloths or leave a mark.’
'Well, you certainly succeeded, Jack,' said Mrs Berry approvingly, still staring hard at the blank floor, but I thought I noticed just a hint of irony in her words. She was possibly beginning not to believe me. 'Are you sure it was blood, Jack? It couldn't have been a drop of liqueur or wine that someone spilled? Or some juice from the roast beef, from a slice that slipped off someone's plate? I'm afraid Lord Rymer wasn't the only one who was a bit unsteady on his feet last night. And the meat was tres saignante, and some people had gravy with it. Could you have mistaken the juice or the gravy for blood? That would explain why there was no trail, a piece of meat falls from a plate and leaves just one mark. It doesn't drip.' I thought: 'She thinks I was drunk and that I imagined it all; true enough, a rare steak would just fall onto the floor, plop, but they weren't steaks, they were slices of beef And then I remembered that I couldn't even retrieve the bloodstained cotton-wool balls to show her, I had put them down the toilet, not in the waste bin, and, naturally enough, had pulled the chain; besides, it would have looked very odd if I had gone and rummaged around in the waste bin, it was fortunate I couldn't really, she would have taken me for a fool, a maniac.
'I didn't taste it, if that's what you mean, Mrs Berry,' I said and there must have been a touch of disappointment in my voice, or hurt pride. 'But I know blood when I see it, believe me. I can tell the difference.’
'Well, then, that's very odd indeed.' That is what Mrs Berry said, as if bringing the inspection and the whole matter to a close; it was as if she had said: 'Don't go on, Jack, what more do you expect of us? I don't know anything about it and I didn't see it, neither did Peter. And it's not like me to miss a stain like that, certainly not on the way up to my room. Don't you see how difficult it is?' I removed my fingers from the floorboards, I got up, I turned more towards Wheeler, I regarded him from above. He had not said a thing, but it seemed to me that this was not another oral blockage like the one that had afflicted him shortly before in the garden, after the episode with the low-flying helicopter, or the previous night, when we were alone and he could not get himself to come out with the ridiculous word 'cushion'. It did not seem to me that any kind of prescience was involved at all, his elderly gaze was no longer staring into a future that was as uncertain and, therefore, as blank and smooth as the floorboards, I was sure of that, rather, in his current state of amazement, it reached much further, to something beyond my head and Mrs Berry's head, at which his gaze was directed, although without actually focusing on that either or not entirely, and his wide eyes gave him a contradictory expression, almost like that of a child who discovers or sees something for the first time, something that does not frighten or repel or attract, but which produces a sense of shock, or else some flash of intuitive knowledge, or even a kind of enchantment. He was looking at something that was rough in texture, with a design or a figure on it, unlike the floor, but it wasn't clear to me at all whether its outline was firm and distinct or if it belonged to the past. It was as if he were gazing into limbo, that enviable place, the only one, on that final day, which, according to ancient speculations, would be free of judgements and calculations and to which the Judge would withdraw now and then for some peace and quiet and to take a breather from all the atrocities and all the perfections, from the wild excuses and the overblown aspirations, perhaps to enjoy a small snack to restore strength and patience for the interminable sessions, and even to take a sip from the divine hip flask, a little trip to perk him up, before returning to the great ballroom where he would continue listening to those millions and millions of imbroglios and confused, pathetic, ridiculous stories.