Set in stone, p.2
Set in Stone, page 2
part #10 of Robert Goddard Series
“That is what you truly believe, isn’t it?” Lucy asked on the way back to Stanacombe. “I mean, I’d understand, really I would, if you were keeping quiet about a…possible motive…for suicide.”
“Marina was no more suicidal than you are. She wasn’t the type.”
“True enough. But a terminal disease, something like that.”
“She hadn’t seen a doctor in months. We hadn’t even got round to registering with one down here.”
“Good. I mean, I just wanted to be sure. I hadn’t seen her for quite a while and I, well, I wish I had, I suppose. We were hoping you’d come up for Easter, you know.”
“I’m sorry we never made it, Lucy. There was a lot to do here. You’ve just moved yourselves. You know what it’s like.”
“Yes. But we’ve settled in now. Are you going to come up? You need to get away, Tony. Put things into some kind of perspective.”
“You’re probably right.”
“It’s what Marina would have recommended.”
And it was, wasn’t it? Precisely what you’d have recommended. You were always realistic, as well as sensitive, more of both than me. I was going to have to start thinking about money soon. I was going to have to start thinking about a lot of things. And Stanacombe was no place to do it. So I went along with what everybody seemed to reckon was best for me.
I took Lucy out to a pub in a village south of Bude for a meal that evening. You and I had never been there. That’s why I chose it. It was strange to be alone with her. I couldn’t remember ever being so before. With Matt, yes, mostly before I met you. But never Lucy. I knew her as your sister, as much from stories of your childhood as from my own experience. I knew her as another version of you, with similar mannerisms and gestures, but different moods and opinions. She was always shorter-tempered than you, shallower as I saw it, less mature. But I was beginning to think she’d changed without me noticing. There was a gravity to her now that couldn’t all be down to grief.
“Tell me to mind my own business, if you like, Tony,” she said, as we lingered over a last drink after the meal, “but do you wish now you and Marina had had children? Or would that make all this so much worse?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” That was true. We hadn’t talked about having children, had we? Not in years. “I suppose it would give me somebody to…share the loss with.”
“You can share it with me, you know. And with Matt. We met at your wedding, remember.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“What I mean is that it ties us together closer than the average pair of sisters and their husbands. The four of us. That’s the way it’s been for fifteen years. Now it’s changed. And I reckon we need to help each other deal with the change.”
I tried to listen to what she was saying, but her reference to our wedding had thrown my thoughts back in time. Even though I’d been sure marrying you was what I wanted to do, I’d still been frightened, not by the commitment to you it represented, but by pledging the rest of my life in any particular way. I’d talked to Matt about it the night before and he’d given me some good advice. “As long as you’re sure it’s the right thing to do now, you can let the rest of your life look after itself.” I’d reminded him of that six months later, the night before his own wedding. And now here I was, fifteen years on, facing the kind of future I’d never imagined, sure of nothing, except that it wasn’t going to look after itself.
“Are you with me, Tony?”
“Sorry. I seem to have had trouble concentrating since it happened. Tell me about the new house. We were surprised you moved. What was wrong with the old place?”
“Nothing. But Otherways has a magic all of its own.” Some of the sparkle that had been missing from her eyes since your death returned as she spoke. “The moment we saw it, it cast its spell on us.”
“Otherways. Unusual name.”
“Unusual house. It dates from just before the First World War. The architect designed it to be full of surprises. And the biggest surprise of all is how homely it feels. As if it’s the place I’ve been looking for all my life, without knowing it.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
“No need to wait. I have a photograph.” She opened her bag and slid an envelope out of a zipped compartment. I remember thinking how odd it was to carry a picture of your house around like that, as if it were a loved one, but I supposed she’d only brought it to show me. She took the photograph out of the envelope and handed it to me. “What do you think?”
What I thought was that I’d never seen a house like it before. It was the height and breadth of a smallish manor house, set in its own wooded and lawned grounds. But it was completely circular. The roof was a cone of brown slate, its line broken by dormer windows and chimneys that still preserved the circular shape. There were no gables or bays. The lower windows all followed the curve of the grey-pink stone walls, while the front door was recessed in a porch, with steps leading up to it set within. The angle of the photograph made it difficult to judge, but the house appeared to be surrounded by a moat, a circle of water around a circle of stone. The only straight line visible seemed to be the bridge leading across the moat to the porch, although even this looked narrower at the end closer to the house, exaggerating the width of the moat in the process. There were two other bridges as well, and presumably a fourth, out of sight behind the house, all equally spaced around the perimeter. The overall effect was of geometrical symmetry and architectural bizarrerie. It drew the eye and confused the brain with its contradictory solidity. It was patently there, yet somehow, at the same time, not there, like a stage set or a projection: a mellow old stone house that threatened to dissolve even as you looked at it.
“Different, isn’t it?” Lucy asked with a smile.
“It’s certainly that.”
“You’ll love it there. We do.”
“How did you find it?”
“Pure chance. Or fate, maybe. If you believe in fate.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
I wasn’t sure. Not then. But now is different. Now even fate seems too weak a word to describe the way that house and the secrets within it had coiled themselves unseen around us. Lucy. And Matt. And me. And you too, Marina. I hadn’t even set eyes on it then. And you never will. But already it had begun to reel us in.
Lucy left next morning, taking with her my promise to follow within a couple of days. She also took some of your clothes, after I’d talked her into choosing those that would be useful to her. What was the point of hoarding them or donating them to Oxfam when you and Lucy were the same size and had swapped skirts and blouses often enough in the past? It seemed only sensible. You wouldn’t have been sentimental about my clothes in such circumstances, would you?
The eerie thing was, though, that Lucy’s selections were my particular favourites: the purple frock coat; the cerise jacket; the crisp, white oversized shirt with the coral trim; the clotted cream summer trousers; the pale-blue silk scarf I gave you on our first wedding anniversary. I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. But I let her take them, knowing I’d always think of you when I saw her wearing them, knowing I could always dream it was still you wearing them—if I wanted to.
After Lucy had gone, I drove to Holsworthy and asked the estate agent we’d bought Stanacombe through eight months before to put the house back on the market. Then I drove to Morwenstow, walked out past the rectory to the top of Henna Cliff and sat on the bench there, as the wind ripped at the surf below and shower clouds moved in and away, trailing scraps of rainbow and broken pillars of light. The air was clear and moist, glass-like and gleaming.
I ran my hand across my chin and realized I hadn’t shaved that morning. I’d simply forgotten to, and Lucy had been too kind to mention it. Grief had made me untidy and forgetful. You’d have told me to smarten myself up. You were never one for slovenly chic. “Move on,” I could almost hear you say. “Don’t linger now I’m no longer here.” You’d have been so much better at this than me, Marina, so much more certain of what to do.
I stayed there for a couple of hours, staring at the wire strand of the fence you’d crossed as it sagged and tautened in the gusts of wind. It all seemed so brutally pointless, so arbitrary, so bloody-minded of whoever or whatever ordained such things. Why let me have you at all if I was to lose you like this?
It was then, for the very first time, that I felt a stirring of anger at you for leaving me in such a stupid fashion. A fatal fall while admiring the spring flowers. “For God’s sake,” I said aloud, “why couldn’t you just have been more careful?” There was no answer, of course. From you or anywhere else.
I started packing as soon as I got back to Stanacombe. I had no clear idea how long I’d be gone, or if I’d ever return, other than to clear the house for a buyer. When I drove away next morning, my instincts told me I was leaving for good.
I stopped at Holsworthy, to drop the keys off at the estate agent, and bumped into Carol crossing the square. She’d found a job at the golf club and was in a hurry to finish some shopping before starting work for the day. I told her I was going away and that Stanacombe was up for sale.
“I hope things work out for you, Mr Sheridan,” she said.
“Me too.”
“I’m sure they will,” she added as we parted.
I wasn’t sure, of course. But I’m blessed with an optimistic nature, so you always said. Part of me reckoned this had to be as bad as it could get. And that part of me was right. I just didn’t know how bad it really was. But I was going to find out. Whether I wanted to or not. At Otherways.
TWO
Matt and Lucy’s reason for moving to Leicestershire seemed logical enough to me. With Pizza Prego expanding into a nationwide chain of franchises, it made sense for Matt to find a base from which he could readily travel to any part of the country. You suggested, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, that it was more to indulge his passion for fox-hunting, though you must have known that really blossomed after they’d moved. A general enthusiasm for country squiredom was there from the start, however. But you always doubted whether Lucy shared that enthusiasm. You’d come away from sisterly heart-to- hearts implying she was bored with life at Market Bosworth. You suspected the move to Rutland, which they announced in the middle of our preparations to leave London, was meant to keep her busy with another round of designing and decorating. She’d admitted to frustrated maternal longings as well, though whether there was a physical problem or not was never made clear, and I know you didn’t probe too hard in case a painful contrast with our own voluntary childlessness became apparent.
They were both strangely coy about the new place when they came down to Stanacombe at Christmas, if you remember, saying only that we’d be surprised when we saw it.
Now I knew why. Otherways was nothing like the standard pile of manorial gabling I’d vaguely imagined. It existed entirely on its own terms.
Quite apart from its design, it was oddly located, though that at least was no doing of the architect. Rutland Water was created twenty years ago, when a couple of valleys east of Oakham, the county town, were flooded to form a reservoir. The crest of land between the two valleys survives as a peninsula, stretching out from the western shore most of the way across the lake. I drove onto it from Oakham on the afternoon of my arrival through patches of woodland and sparkling watery vistas. I came to the village of Hambleton an achingly picturesque cluster of mellow stone houses—and followed Lucy’s directions east, along a lane between fields of sheep and random glimpses of lake, until I reached the turning for Otherways.
It stood concealed from its surroundings behind a spinney clad fold of land. The photograph had prepared me for what I’d see, but it still came as something of a shock, sitting there in the Rutland countryside like some kind of trompe-l’oeil whose most artful deception was that it was no deception at all. The wedge of lake visible between the trees framing the house somehow got in on the act. The lake looked genuine, but wasn’t. The house looked as if it wasn’t there, but it was.
Matt was waiting to greet me, guessing I’d arrive before Lucy got back from a tennis lesson. He looked worried, it seemed to me, or distracted, perhaps by the prospect of an open-ended visit from me. But I didn’t really think that was the cause. The roots of our friendship went too deep for that. I wondered if he had business problems. If so, he probably didn’t want to burden me with them.
At first, we talked as if everything was as it had always been, as if you were still alive and the past few weeks had never happened. He showed me round the outside, enjoying the opportunity to unveil the oddities of the place to a first-time visitor, though he was disappointed by my lack of obvious astonishment. It soon emerged that he didn’t know Lucy had shown me a photograph of it. I had the impression he didn’t even know she carried one around with her.
“Lucy’s playground more than mine,” he said, by way of explanation, as we circled the lichen-patched wall around the moat. “I’m not sure I’d have bought it, but she insisted. I’ve had to switch hunts, you know.”
“Life can be a bugger, can’t it?”
He grinned at me. Then the grin froze. “But it has been for you. Lucy’s cut up about it, of course. So am I. But for you…”
“Tell me about the house, Matt. It’s made me curious. And curiosity takes my mind off Marina—for a while.”
“All right. It’s the only known work of some oddball Anglo-French architect active just before the First World War. Emile Posnan. He built it for a wealthy recluse called Basil Dates. Oates died in the Thirties. Several owners since then, of whom yours truly is the latest. Everything really is as you see it. Circular. Or part-circular. The rooms narrow towards the centre. Every window is slightly convex, most of the internal doors slightly concave. Must have cost a fortune to build. Certainly costs a small one to maintain. But worth it, I suppose.”
“Because Lucy likes it?”
“Exactly. I try to keep her happy.”
“I wish I could still try to keep Marina happy.”
“I’ll bet you do.” He squeezed my shoulder. “If there’s anything…Well, treat this as your home, Tony. Stay as long as you like. There’s bags of room. We want to help, you know.”
“I do know. And knowing does help.”
“Want to see inside?” He winked. “Weirder still.”
We retraced our steps to the entrance bridge and crossed the moat. As Matt opened the front door, I saw what he meant about convexity and concavity. The curvature of the door was so slight it only became apparent as it swung on its hinges. But it fitted perfectly, as it had to, obedient to the overall concept. The same went for the frame, presumably. Posnan must have driven his carpenters to the brink of madness.
Inside, perspective was immediately distorted by the circularity of the whole design. A short passage, which looked longer because it narrowed en route, led to a central hall, from which a staircase wound, like a single elegant circuit of a screw’s thread, up to the galleried first-floor landing, then wound round another circuit to the second floor. Doors at the other quarter-points of the hall led to a drawing room on the left, a dining room straight ahead and a library to the right, converted into Matt’s study-cum-office. Each of these large rooms, identically shaped and proportioned and fitted with French windows to access their private bridges across the moat, commanded broad, curving views of the garden, supplemented, in the case of the dining room, with the late addition of Rutland Water. The kitchen lay below this room, served by a spiral staircase and a dumb waiter. A short tunnel linked the kitchen with a circular cobbled yard beyond the moat, to which the entrance drive had led me on arrival. Beyond this, concealed by curving walls and coiling rhododendrons, stood a garage and stable block, where circularity had given way to utilitarian rectangles. Matt’s theory was that Oates’s patience or pocket, or both, had worn thin before Posnan’s concept could run away with itself into every nook and corner of the property.
That still left the house itself, however, as a tribute to his curvilinear imagination. There were three bedrooms on the first floor, each equipped with its own dressing room and bathroom—an unheard-of extravagance in its day. Oates was evidently fastidious as well as reclusive. But an Edwardian recluse still needed servants, hence the small dormer windowed rooms on the second floor, currently filled with the possessions Matt and Lucy still hadn’t got round to unpacking, and some complimentary clutter left behind by the previous owner.
“Duncan Strathallan, a prickly old Scot,” said Matt as we peered at a dusty roomful of steamer trunks and assorted household junk. “I’ve asked him to clear it out, but it looks like we’ll have to do it for him.”
“Did he live here alone?”
“Another recluse, you mean? Not exactly. It was his family home for years, as far as I can gather. But he ended up on his tod. Seemed happy to go back north of the border.”
The top rooms had the widest-ranging views, out between the elms and oaks that looked as if they’d been there long before the house was even dreamed of, and across Rutland Water on either side towards gentle, rolling countryside.
“Oates owned quite a few acres to the north,” said Matt. “Strathallan sold them and they’ve since been flooded, leaving the house high and dry. The lake cuts us off, of course. It’s six miles to the Al as the crow flies, nearer twenty by car. But that gives us privacy and fishing on the doorstep.”
“Huntin’. Now fishin’. It’ll be shootin’ next.”
“Think I’ve sold out to the squirearchy, do you?”
“Oh, I think that happened years ago. Even as a student, you had a suspicious penchant for tweed.”
“What I had, Tony, was good taste. How you ever persuaded Marina to overlook your charity-shop wardrobe I’ll never—” He broke off, and we looked at each other, both shocked, I think, by our momentary lapse into old jokes and easy assumptions.
“Don’t worry about it, Matt. I don’t want you watching your every word.”
