The Last Baronet Page 5
Abandoning the old man at the foot of the steps, noting with apprehension his ghastly pallor, his convulsive shudders, Anna began to hop from window to window in an agony of impatience, following the sound, plunging through neglected shrubbery, her skirt snagged and dragged by firethorn, brambles and gnarled old roses. At length she reached a window longer and more imposing than the rest and to her relief saw within a grand piano and seated at it a slender, elderly woman, her greying hair secured on top of her head by a complex arrangement of pins and combs, playing a nostalgic love song which, had Anna been thirty years younger, she might have recognised...
‘I remember you, of course I do
Not just when soft winds blow
Dearest, everywhere I go
I remember you.’
Anna knocked vigorously upon the window, although the glass, being exceedingly small-paned and old, made very little noise and the lead casings bent inwards in a disconcerting manner. ‘Help! she shouted. ‘I need help!’
‘I remember you, of course I do
Not just when stars are bright
Sweetheart, every single night
I remember you.’
The pianist looked up with a delighted smile. A hand fluttered aloft in a graceful little gesture of acknowledgement, dropped in order to turn a page of sheet music, and resumed playing.
‘I remember you, of course I do
Not just when nocturnes play
Darling, each and every day
I remember you.’
Anna hammered on the window. With her clenched fist she battered the glass, the lead casing and the metal frame until flakes of rust flew. ‘Help!’ she cried. ‘You have to help! Please help me!’ But the pianist smiled and played on with a curiously serene and charming indifference, turning her extravagantly coiffeured head now and again in order to bestow upon Anna a gentle and affectionate yet totally impersonal glance, as if to reward her for being a particularly warm and appreciative audience.
‘I remember you, of course I do
Not just when church bells chime
Dear, I miss you all the time
I remember you.’
Anna opened her mouth as a great bawl of rage and despair welled in her throat, but the sound died on her lips. She stepped back, her eyes on the pianist, hearing the young man say again, ‘He’s mad. The whole family are mad. All of them.’ Anna backed away from the window, stumbling over edging bricks, slipping on broken roof tiles.
‘I remember you, of course I do
Not just when skies are blue above
Or when someone speaks of love
I remember you
Of course I do.’
Really, she could have fallen to the ground and wept out of frustration, fright and exhaustion but instead made her way back to the drowned man, inspecting every window on the way in the vain hope that one might be open, that she might somehow gain access to the house, to a telephone to call the emergency services, but these windows did not appear to have been opened for centuries. In the absence of any prospect of entry at the front of the house she decided to try the back and bent again to the handles, her palms by now red and blistered and the old man motionless – comatose or dead perhaps, it was impossible to know which.
The brick and gravel paths which ran alongside the house made haste awkward but, reaching the foot of one of the pepper-pot turrets and turning down the side of the house, Anna heard the unmistakable and most incredibly welcome sound of a vehicle door slamming. Stumbling and sliding on the gravel, she began to run.
The sudden acceleration roused her passenger. ‘Thanks be to God. Praise the Lord,’ he announced unexpectedly and with surprising vigour. ‘He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’ He clutched at the sides of the wheelbarrow for support as it veered abruptly back across the moat in the direction of the sound and swerved in between two ivy-covered gateposts bereft of a gate, on the other side of which was a cobbled yard with three or four horses looking over half doors (one of which was certainly the grey gelding since he was still wearing his bridle) and parked in the centre, a corn-merchants lorry laden with hay bales and sacks of animal food. There was not a single person in evidence but the door to the barn stood open and, abandoning her charge on the threshold, Anna ran inside.
In the gloom, Anna at first saw nothing but then, as stacked bales and galvanised corn bins materialised, she heard a familiar voice.
‘Not now, Anthony! I can’t! I have to go back!’ Some energetic scuffling was followed by the sound of something metal falling to the ground. ‘Anthony, this is serious! I really can’t! I have to find the rope!’
Anna did not know what she was interrupting, nor did she care. ‘I doubt if you will find the rope, Nicola,’ she said in a loud voice. ‘Not if it is the same one your father was wearing round his neck when I pulled him out of the water.’
SIX
There was a moment of absolute silence after which Nicola appeared out of the shadows and with her a young man with golden hair, furtively buttoning the fly of his blue overalls.
‘I am he that liveth, and was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore,’ announced the drowned man from the threshold. ‘I am tossed up and down as the locust. I am escaped by the skin of my teeth. I know that my redeemer liveth.’
‘Help me,’ Anna said urgently. ‘He needs an ambulance. He probably has pneumonia!’
‘I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt and bury me,’ said the drowned man. ‘Pneumonia, eh? There is death in the pot.’
‘He’s also delirious,’ Anna decided.
Nicola took in the situation without finding it necessary to utter a word. Abandoning the golden-haired youth without as much as a backward glance, she picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow and set off towards the house at breakneck speed. Her fair hair flew and her jodhpur boots pounded across the ground. Anna raced after her, holding up her wrecked and muddied skirt. Reaching the back of the house they heaved the wheelbarrow up three gracefully curved but calamitously worn stone steps and progressed speedily through various sculleries heaped with rubbish into a kitchen with a vast, stone flagged floor, a line of butler’s bells and an antiquated cooking range set beneath a wide chimney breast. A kettle sat beside one of the hotplates and an orange and red horse blanket was airing on the rail in front of it.
Without any need for consultation they stripped off the old man’s sodden clothing, wrapped him in the horse blanket and laid him, for want of anywhere more conveniently accessible, back in the wheelbarrow.
‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return hither,’ intoned the drowned man. ‘Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe. Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon. I am a brother to dragons and a companion to owls.’ His cheeks had become unwholesomely red. His eyes glittered.
From a cupboard beneath a stained and miserable Belfast sink, Nicola produced two stoneware hot-water bottles. ‘Fill these. I’ll ring the surgery. Then we’ll get him upstairs.’
Anna lifted one of the heavy lids and set the kettle on the hotplate beneath. She struggled to un-stopper the antiquated bottles and set them on a long, plank table, where they squatted on their flat bottoms, hideously expectant. Elsewhere in the house, oblivious to the drama; oblivious, it seemed, to anything, the pianist continued her performance.
‘It’s a brand new day to-morrow,
To-morrow is a brand new day...’
‘Cast me not off in the time of my old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth,’ pleaded the drowned man. ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’
All this can’t be happening to me, Anna told herself. It’s impossible. It has to be a dream; a nightmare. In a minute I will wake up and be safe in my bed at the Harbourmouth Hotel with my alarm clock bleeping and the smell of yesterday’s fish in my nostrils.
The spout of the kettle was so furred with limestone deposits that filling the hot-
water bottles was a painfully laborious procedure. The kettle was not only perilously hot, but also exceedingly full and heavy. The water poured forth in so thin a stream that Anna was obliged to keep resting the kettle on the table in order to allow her aching arms some respite.
‘Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds!’ cried the drowned man, undeterred. ‘Purge me with hissop, and I shall be clean; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame.’
From a telephone nearby, Nicola could be heard summoning assistance. ‘No, it is no use at all telling me to call the emergency services, I want a doctor, and if Doctor McLoughlin is unavailable then it will have to be someone else, but whoever it is must come now, at once. It really is most urgent; a matter of life or death. Yes, Rushbroke Hall. Yes. Good. Thank you so much. I would be terribly grateful if you could. And do please tell him to hurry!’
Anna put down the kettle. Her heart had suddenly leapt up into her throat, making it difficult to swallow. She felt light-headed, as if her brain had been removed leaving a cavity filled with air. Rushbroke Hall. Rushbroke Hall! With shaking fingers she twisted the stopper on the first stone bottle. Rushbroke Hall! She picked up the kettle. Water splashed onto the table.
‘How shall we carry him?’ Nicola was now considering the patient who was wrapped like a mummy with his arms pinned to his sides. ‘I shall have to find something we can use as a stretcher.’ She went away and returned after a short interval bearing a dusty oriental screen painted with elegant Japanese ladies, lush peonies and pale blue birds which she laid, unopened, on the flagstones. ‘It’s not ideal,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s the best I can do.’
Anna was beyond speech. In her mind the refrain Rushbroke Hall, Rushbroke Hall, was beating like a drum. Together they lifted the patient by his legs and shoulders and placed him upon the screen with the two stone hot-water bottles at his feet.
‘Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear,’ said the drowned man in tones of deep anxiety. ‘Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?’
Picking up the improvised stretcher was awkward because it involved the accommodation of three pieces of bamboo in each hand, but they managed it somehow, although when they raised the patient aloft there was an ominous crack. Anna froze, but, ‘We don’t have to go far,’ Nicola said. ‘Just to the top of the stairs.’
Cautiously they progressed out of the kitchen and along a gloomy passageway floored with brick, lined with bulging panelling and smelling of mushrooms. The passage led into great hall with an ornate plaster ceiling patched with mould and a massive armorial fireplace heaped with ash. There was no furniture. Light from a heraldic stained glass window flooded wide, dusty treads of a magnificent carved staircase with colour. Nicola, electing to go first, began to climb the stairs.
‘Cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days,’ muttered the patient. ‘Remember Lot’s wife.’
Anna, her eyes fixed on the hot-water bottles, willing them not to slip off the end of the screen during the ascent, followed as best she might, straining to hold up her end of the screen, unable to see the treads beneath, feeling with each foot the way up every step, painfully aware of the crackling protests of the bamboo. The patient was not himself heavy, but the combination of the patient, the stone bottles of water and the screen, made the burden excessively cumbersome and heavier than was desirable given the circumstances. Climbing from below, Anna found herself bearing most of the weight and whilst, as a rule, she would have been equal to the task, she was much hampered by the fact that her heart felt so constricted that it might have shrunk to half its customary size and, as if this was not bad enough, her lungs seemed to have lost most of their elasticity, making it difficult to breathe.
Nearby, the pianist began again with gusto.
‘It’s a brand new day to-morrow
Tomorrow is a brand new day...’
The patient began to struggle, flipping up and down like a chrysalis about to pupate.
‘Stop that at once,’ Nicola commanded. ‘Keep still. You will do yourself a mischief.’
‘If today is filled with pain
Tomorrow you can start again...’
Anna wobbled. Her arms felt as though they might easily snap off under the strain, and still the patient struggled. ‘Praise him with the sound of the trumpet!’ he bellowed. Every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.’
‘If today you feel forlorn
Tomorrow there’s a brand new dawn...’
Just after the turn of the stair the screen gave out. There was a resounding crack and the patient vanished in a welter of tearing fabric and splintering bamboo. Anna threw herself forward in a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to break the drowned man’s fall only to be struck on the temple by one of the stone bottles.
‘It’s a brand new day tomorrow
So let your heart be light and gay
Pack away your worries and wear a smile
Tomorrow is a brand new day!
Lady Lavinia Rushbroke of Rushbroke finished with a flourish.
SEVEN
‘And how is Sir Vivian, may I enquire?’ Francis Sparrow looked a trifle apprehensive, as if anticipating an unfavourable response, adding, as Anna hesitated in order to formulate a reply not too greatly removed from the truth, ‘In good health, I hope and presume?’
Never before had Anna seen a man with such round and shining eyes, nor such a curved and shortened upper lip, pouting forward slightly like a fish, or perhaps a beak, yes, thought Anna, very like a beak. How birdlike he looks; how appropriately named. ‘There has been some cause for concern recently. The responsibility of preserving what is left of the Rushbroke estate has taken its toll.’ Anna thought it best not to mention attempted suicide, delirium, heart problems, pneumonia.
‘I am indeed sorry to hear that.’ Guilt was not a permissible emotion by bank mandate but Francis Sparrow’s regret was both genuine and allowable. ‘And now, if I am to understand you correctly, you are here to repay the overdraft? May I enquire on whose authority?’
‘Would I require authority in order to settle a debt?’ Anna wondered. ‘In any case, I am not offering to repay any of the borrowings, not yet. First, I need to be sure I have enough money to invest in the restoration and conversion of the property.’
‘And do I further understand that it is your intention to turn Rushbroke Hall into an hotel?’ Francis looked incredulous and also somewhat nervous, as well he might, having had dealings with hoteliers before. Any dip in the economy hit the hospitality industry first; one didn’t need to be a bank employee to be aware of that. ‘Would you care to elaborate?’
‘Not a hotel exactly – a restaurant with rooms perhaps, but beautifully done, properly done.’
Anna had rehearsed this part. ‘I want to invest my own money in the conversion and setting up of Rushbroke Hall and, with your permission, keep the existing borrowings on an interest-only arrangement until I have a clear idea of how much the restoration will cost. The house, as you probably know, needs a great deal of attention, especially the roof and the exterior brickwork and chimneys, not to mention the windows, and as for the interior, the plasterwork is...’
Francis Sparrow held up a restraining hand. ‘If you will excuse me, Miss... er...’
‘Gabriel,’ Anna supplied.
‘...Miss Gabriel, would it be deemed permissible for me to enquire, at this admittedly extremely early and preliminary stage, exactly how much capital you have available to invest in such a project?’
Francis Sparrow’s tone was courteous, respectful even, but how bright his eyes were; how sharp his gaze: he doesn’t believe I have the money, Anna thought, but then I can hardly believe it myself. I don’t feel like a person of substance and I probably don’t look like one either. He probably sees me as some hopelessly naive and foolishly optimistic person, full of unrealistic ideas and has already dismissed my proposal out o
f hand. ‘Almost a million pounds,’ she said, and was gratified by Francis’ obvious surprise and awakening interest; by the way he seemed to grow upwards in his chair and change shape, so that instead of resembling a round, roosting bird, he appeared quite sleek and elongated and altogether more predatory. ‘It is a legacy,’ Anna was moved to explain. ‘My parents, both of them, died almost two years ago.’
‘Leaving you a most respectable sum,’ said Francis in an appreciative tone. ‘A tidy sum indeed. A substantial legacy, if I may be permitted to say so. A most useful inheritance. But sad,’ he added hastily, ‘most sad and unfortunate to lose both parents together. May I enquire as to the circumstances? A tragic accident, perhaps? An aeroplane? An automobile?’
Anna thought it none of his business. ‘A handful of barbiturates, actually. And two plastic bags. A suicide pact.’
Francis sank back into his chair with a small cry of distress.
Anna was instantly repentant. ‘Mr Sparrow, the truth is that my father had Motor Neurone Disease; it was fairly well advanced and neither of them could face what lay ahead. They were extraordinarily close.’
Francis opened his mouth to commiserate but no sound emerged. He had not married, but his sisters had taken husbands and had produced children toward whom he had proved surprisingly and devotedly indulgent, and whilst he remained unattracted to the marital state, he was enormously grateful for the opportunity to appreciate the pleasures and pitfalls of family life at second-hand. How close, he wondered, would a couple have to be in order to disregard the possible effect of their actions upon their children?