The Echoing Stones (11 page)

Flora was as good as her word. Two or three times during the following week she made her way to Joyce’s and took old Sir Humphrey for the promised stroll around the grounds; and so far as Arnold could make out, from his anxious position on the sidelines – for he did not venture to ask direct questions – the results were beneficial. The old man’s ruined intellect did seem to be recovering some spark of its long-ago fire, and he would talk quite lucidly – even interestingly – for minutes at a time on some topic of which he had once been an undisputed master. One
evening
, just after sunset, when Arnold was doing his usual rounds after the departure of the public, he came across his daughter and the old man seated companionably on a bench inside the Knot Garden. He had come here with the intention of locking the gate, but now he hesitated. It seemed a shame to disturb the incongruous and yet somehow harmonious pair when they were engaged in what seemed to be an absorbing conversation. Absorbing to Sir Humphrey, anyway. He was listing – correctly, so far as Arnold could gather from this distance – the names of the herbs and plants that would have been growing here in Tudor times – alyssum, gilliflowers, sweet basil, pansies, love-in-a-mist – with a short run-down on the alleged properties of each.

Arnold scanned his daughter’s face in the fading light, half-expecting to see on it the expression of glazed
boredom
which would certainly have suffused it had he,
Arnold, been the one to be indulging in such a recital of dry facts; all of them utterly remote from Flora’s narrow though thoroughly up-to-the minute range of interests.

But no, her face was tranquil, the smooth tanned skin faintly glowing in the last traces of golden light from beyond the great trees. She seemed relaxed, and inexplicably content with her prosy companion. Not as if she was actually listening to him, Arnold surmised; more as if she was looking inwards, into herself, and was pleased with what she saw: pleased with the self-image she was projecting, so young, so vital, and yet so full of empathy and understanding for this ancient wreck of a person at her side.

This was an aspect of the matter that had been irritating Arnold, on and off, ever since the start of this sudden do-gooding craze in his normally bone-selfish daughter: the arrogant assumption that she, and she alone,
understood
the dotty old man, and that the doctors, the welfare workers, and Joyce herself were all totally and ridiculously wrong.

“None of them seem even to have heard of this
marvellous
new book,
The
Manufacture
of
Madness
,” Flora had fumed last night as she and her father were sitting
reasonably
amicably over a late-night cup of cocoa. “
Everyone’s
reading it. It’s revolutionary. It debunks
everything.
It proves that the whole of orthodox psychiatry is just a load of crap!”

Arnold had waited, cautiously, for her to expand on this thesis, and sure enough she did. “You see, there’s no such thing as being mad, or mentally ill, or senile, or any of these things: it’s just that the family gets together to force one of its members to take on the rôle of being the mentally sick one. They
tell
him he’s mentally sick, they
treat
him as mentally sick, until …”

“Why do they do that?” Arnold had asked, perhaps unwisely; and Flora had been momentarily taken aback.
Perhaps she felt that the inbuilt villainy of families was so basic a datum as not to be susceptible to the question “Why?”: families just
are
like that.

However, she rallied.

“It’s the Scapegoat Syndrome,” she quoted complacently. “Because they’ve got so many hang-ups and neuroses
themselves,
they need to get rid of them by piling them all onto one member of the family, and making him the scapegoat. In order to carry such a load, to play his allotted rôle, he
has
to act mad. It’s his only option.”

Another option, it seemed to Arnold, would be to tell the family to get lost, and walk out; but this time he didn’t say so, and Flora continued:

“And that’s just what Joyce has been doing to her father. Not
consciously,
of course, it’s never conscious. She means well, of course she does, they always do. But just because he’s over ninety, she assumes that he
must
be senile, and so she treats him as senile. Talks to him like a child … never lets him go out by himself – or even stay in the house by himself. He can’t even go into the kitchen without her following him, and standing around watching him. In case he leaves the gas on, she
says,
but really it’s to undermine his self-confidence. To take away his sense of self. She’s doing to him just what the madness book says – she’s unloading onto him all her own anxieties and neuroses, so that under the weight of them his only option is to
become
what they call senile.”

Again, Arnold could not see why it was Sir Humphrey’s only option; but again he didn’t say so. He only hoped that Flora wasn’t saying all this to Joyce as well as to him. Well, almost certainly she wasn’t, because Joyce still seemed pleased and grateful to have her around; and there was no doubt at all that the old man was benefiting from the girl’s company. Look at him right now, sitting so happily in his beloved Knot Garden; talking so coherently, so eagerly, and with so clear a grasp of his subject.

Even as this thought drifted through Arnold’s mind, the soliloquy seemed to come to an end. The two of them rose slowly from the bench and strolled arm-in-arm towards the ornamental iron gate, where Arnold awaited them with his keys. And now the old man came to sudden halt, jerking free from his companion’s arm and staring at Arnold. His gaunt body tautened and stiffened, like a dog who has scented prey.

“The keys! Who gave you permission to take the keys?” he demanded; and Arnold, keeping his temper, treating his accuser as senile, exactly as Flora had said one shouldn’t do, answered placatingly.

“I’m the caretaker, my name is Arnold Walters, and I have to lock up now.” Suiting the action to the word, he turned away, aware of the pale, steely stare that followed his every movement. He walked briskly along the gravel walk towards the main building, easily outpacing the two of them and thus avoiding further argument. He now recalled Flora’s account of the old man’s babbling about keys when he found locked a door which he imagined to be the door into his long-ago office. Poor old thing, locks and keys on the brain! Understandable, though, in the man who had once been in charge of the whole place, responsible for everything. Tatters of long-past authority still clung about him, and no doubt would until his dying day.

*

Arnold was fairly accustomed, now, to getting phone calls in the evening, often quite late; for since the night of her brief panic over her father’s disappearance, Joyce had taken to ringing him nearly every evening about one thing or another. Sometimes it was to discuss with him some small problem about the day’s takings, or about the ordering of new stocks for the kiosk – postcards and such. More often, it was just to have a few minutes’ chat, including not infrequently some flattering remarks about
how marvellous Flora was being, an absolute brick.
Gratifying
, of course; but, like many parents of his generation, Arnold found his pleasure at hearing such praise of his offspring from an outsider to be somewhat tempered by bewilderment. Can it really be this rude, argumentative, arrogant and totally unco-operative creature that they are talking about?

Yes, it can; and inexplicable though these words of approval may be, they are still pleasant to a parent’s ears, and so Arnold usually quite enjoyed these nightly interruptions to whatever he might be doing – working on his notes for the next Guided Tour maybe, or listening to a concert on Radio Three.

And so when, soon after ten that evening, the phone went, he picked up the receiver without any qualms at all, even with a degree of pleasant anticipation. It was a shock, therefore, when the voice at the end of the line wasn’t Joyce’s at all, nor even Mildred’s. He had been in touch with his wife a couple of times lately about fetching the rest of her things, but so far nothing had come of it, and he was becoming slightly impatient. He wished she wouldn’t dither so.

However, this wasn’t Mildred’s voice. Indeed, it wasn’t a female voice at all, but a masculine one, and all too recognisable. That note of malicious glee could come only from one source – Norris, the head gardener; Arnold’s undeclared enemy, ever on the watch to catch Arnold out, to put him in the wrong.

“I suppose you know that the lights in the Great Hall have been left on?” he fairly chortled down the phone, gloating. “I’ve been wondering, Mr Walters, if I shouldn’t take over the locking-up myself, since it’s getting too much for you? Of course, it isn’t my job, but …”

“I’ll see to it,” Arnold snapped, and slammed down the phone. He was shaking all over. What had
happened
? Whatever it was, it was his fault, his responsibility, but
… He knew, he absolutely knew that he had turned all the lights out before locking the doors at the end of his final check-up. He had this fixed routine, he stuck to it evening after evening; he
couldn’t
have slipped-up this time, not possibly.

Well, whatever it was, he must go immediately and investigate. Hastily, he changed out of his slippers, donned his coat – luckily Flora was still out, so he didn’t have to explain anything. On this sort of occasion, the less said the better. Heading for his bedroom, he reached for the keys in their hiding-place behind the bed-head.

The keys were gone! Wildly, unbelievingly, he thrust his hand down between the mattress and the wall in case they’d somehow slipped off their hook. Not that they could have, but what can one do but look, in however impossible a place? Sprawled on the floor, he scrabbled among the dust and fluff under the bed in case they’d fallen right down.

But they hadn’t. He’d known all along they couldn’t have. Less than a minute later he was out of the flat and half-running through the darkness, his heart thundering behind his ribs, towards the shafts of light that fell in great oblongs across the gravel and slanted away across the dark stretches of the lawns.

Not just the odd switch left on, then: the whole of the Great Hall must be ablaze with light from end to end. And not only that; everything was unlocked, too. The heavy outer door swung open at a touch: his heart still thudding, his breath almost gone, he raced up the wide shadowy curve of the stairs and pushed open the great carved doors of the Great Hall itself. And there in front of him, unashamed, in a blaze of light, and not making the smallest attempt to hide themselves, stood the intruders.

*

“But I’d only
borrowed
the bloody keys!” Flora protested after they finally regained the flat, having set the Great
Hall to rights and returned Sir Humphrey to his own home. You don’t have to make such a production of it. How could
I
know you were going to be suddenly looking for them at this time of night? I thought you’d finished all that daft locking-up business ages ago – 7 o’clock, isn’t it supposed to be? That’s what you’re always telling me, anyway. It’s not
fair
!”

She seemed almost on the verge of tears at the injustice of it all, and the final childish protest took him back a decade or more, in spite of himself, to the days when he’d maybe over-reacted to some childish misdemeanour?

Was he over-reacting now? His anger, in the first instance, had surely been fully justified, although
somewhat
uncharacteristic. He had always thought of himself as a rather reserved man, a man who did not lose his temper easily, but all the same, on this occasion and in the face of tonight’s outrage …

But that, of course, was the very core of the problem. Flora simply couldn’t see the thing as an outrage at all. A bit thoughtless, perhaps, and maybe she shouldn’t have taken the keys without asking, knowing how hung-up her father was on locks and keys and things, but no
harm
had been done, for God’s sake! She just couldn’t see what all the fuss was
about.

And she really couldn’t. She wasn’t just pretending in order to annoy him. In vain, as his anger cooled a little, he tried to make her understand the enormity of what she’d done; recognise the position of trust he held here, the extent of his responsibility for protecting the irreplaceable treasures gathered together here for the edification of the whole nation, of the whole world, and for posterity as well.

At all of which she’d shrugged tolerantly and with a total absence of comprehension. She seemed to see the whole business of locking up as a little foible of Arnold’s which, up to a point, she was prepared to
go along with for the sake of peace: but enough was enough.

“If something can only be preserved by being locked up, then it isn’t worth preserving,” she intoned smugly. He was sure it was a quote from that damn book, and not a genuine thought of her own.

“And in any case,” she went on, “I was with Sir Humphrey wasn’t I? He was the
Curator
, for God’s sake, for years and years before you ever came. He has a
right
to go into any part of the building he likes. It’s been terribly frustrating for him all this time, and so when I told him I could get hold of a set of keys for him – oh, he was so excited! The Great Hall was where he wanted to go first. You should have seen him. He walked slowly along, stroking the oak panelling as if he really loved the feel of it, running his fingers round and around those skirliwigs, and telling me it came from somewhere or other, or was a copy of something from somewhere or other – anyway, he loved it. He’d had something to do with restoring it, or something.

He hadn’t thought much of the waxworks, she said: he thought they were vulgar and pretentious.

“He said he should have been consulted before they were brought in, and he began trying to shift them. He got hold of that smallest one – you know, the Queen or whoever she was that got her head cut off – but even she was much too heavy, he could only tilt her a bit, and I was afraid she was going to fall and get smashed. So I told him he’d better not move things, not without consulting you; but I shouldn’t have said that, it made him quite angry. He said he was the one to judge, he didn’t have to consult anybody. ‘I am the Judge,’ he said, and he kept tugging at her and muttering ‘Take the Lady Jane from me, take away the Lady Jane.’”