I was in the ‘Michaelmas term of my second year at Oxford when my father bought Otherways. He collected me one Indian summer weekend near the end of his leave and we motored up to Rutland to see the house. He had already told me about his encounter with the architect at an embassy reception in Lisbon. I had paid his account of it scant heed, having the pressing concerns of a typically sybaritic Oxford undergraduate to distract me from my father’s plans for his retirement. He had left Mama in London. Ced was busily engaged in his studies at Harrow. The excursion was unusual in that it threw my father and me together for a whole weekend, with nobody else for company. We put up at the George in Stamford.

  Papa had told me to expect something unusual in Otherways. Superciliously, I had resolved to be unimpressed by what I felt sure would be a so-so Midlands hunting box. It was, of course, anything but that. There was no disguising the effect it had on me as we walked round it. I was bowled over, as my father had been and as he must have known I would be. The rooms were empty. The late Mr Oates’s belongings had been removed, leaving only dirty marks where the furniture had stood. The house should therefore have looked shabby and uncared for. Instead there was instant beguilement. Otherways stripped bare is Otherways revealed in all its dangerous allurement.

  Posnan’s design is intoxicatingly simple. It touches something primal in the soul. There is that word again. The chaplain would be pleased to know that I am thinking of it. But in the reason and in the recollection I fear he would detect what I am now sure formed even then, that first day, a small but glittering part of my attraction to the house. It was a sickness, almost a lust. It was temptation. And we fell, my father and I, in our different ways.

  Papa said Posnan had told him at the reception, “I have built a house you would be suited to. I see you living there, I really do.” Those words of Posnan’s recur to me often. “A house you would be suited to.” Not, as one might more commonly say, “A house that would suit you.” And “I see you living there.” It bears a double meaning, does it not, especially for those of us who have lived there? Papa never discovered how Posnan came to be at the reception in the first place. His name did not appear on the guest list. He was a recluse, we were told. He was the unlikeliest of gatecrashers. Yet there he was. Perhaps he felt he had to be. Perhaps he felt he had no choice, or that we had no choice, about becoming part of the history of the house he had built.

  I met Ann for the first time that day, too. It was pure chance. She was riding past as we nosed out of the drive from Otherways. Her horse was alarmed by the car engine, but she soon had him under control. She was a graceful rider and I was struck by her beauty. Who could not be? We exchanged a few polite words, nothing more. I never for a moment imagined that I had met the person whom I would one day marry. Nor, I had her word on it later, did she. But so it was. First Otherways, then Ann. In the course of an unportentous hour, it was done.

  Hindsight is a valueless commodity, yet one cannot but be haunted by it. My father was so very pleased with himself for acquiring Otherways. I was delighted that he had. Ann was carefree and radiant. The world was a kind and flattering place in which to be young and privileged. Seven years have passed since then, that is all; a mere seven years. The people I shared the day with are dead, one of them at my hand. The world is changed, changed utterly. Yet Otherways still stands, ready to charm another as readily and easily as it charmed me.

  At first, its charm really was all there was to be noticed. Only my mother seemed other than enchanted by the house. She and Papa moved into it the following summer, and it thereupon became my home as well as theirs. I lived there only during the vacations, of course, and subsequently, after I had followed Papa into the diplomatic service, when I was granted home leave. It was never my home from month to month. Perhaps that is why its less charming qualities revealed themselves to me, in so far as they ever did, with excruciating slowness. One found oneself, as it were, stealthily invested by a well camouflaged enemy, only becoming aware of the fact when one was utterly surrounded.

  I blamed the contrast of a quiet provincial life with the glamorous whirl of ambassadorial entertaining for the low spirits into which Mama sank after the move to Other ways. So did Papa, though for him the contrast came as a vast relief. Mama disagreed. “It is this house,” she more than once complained. “It oppresses me.” Her English was never perfect. We thought she meant it depressed her. Now I think she had it right all along.

  Dr Temple attended Mama during her illness. It began abruptly, within a year of the move, and dragged its sorry way through most of another year before she died. The good doctor could not drive. He visited most of his patients by pony and trap. Ann could drive, however, and often conveyed him to the homes of his farther-flung patients. So it was that our acquaintance was renewed. We met at point-to-points, as well, and rode to hounds together. Soon we would take drives around the countryside in Papa’s Delahaye. From hesitant beginnings, our courtship blossomed. It was a happy counterpoint to my mother’s doleful decline.

  One of the last things Mama said to me was also one of the first intimations I had that Otherways was not a wholly benign environment. “There is evil in this house, James,” she said, gripping my arm ferociously as she spoke. “I have seen it.” I attributed the remark to the delirium which often accompanied her fevers, though she was not feverish at the time.

  Ann and I were married a few months later. Many at the wedding said how sorry they were that my mother had not lived to see the day. I did not demur. But Mama had conspicuously failed to express any enthusiasm for the match, though she must have realized that we were sincerely in love. It is strange. She was never mean spirited. It is hard for me to doubt now that she had serious reservations about our future. “There is evil in this house. I have seen it.” Just what had she seen?

  For my own part, the future then seemed an inviting, indeed exciting, prospect. I had my way to make in the diplomatic service and a loving wife to support me. She insisted on going with me when I was posted to Moscow, though I had grave doubts about how she would cope with the privations of life there. For that matter, I had some about how I would cope.

  The embassy was large enough to house most of the diplomatic staff and the few wives foolhardy enough to accompany them, as well as a dubious band of servants and hangers-on. It was an externally ornate but internally dilapidated building, with a potentially lethal heating system. Edible food was in short supply and the details of day-to-day living were both dismal and debilitating. It was not the kind of existence I wanted Ann to have to endure, bravely and uncomplainingly though she did.

  We came home sooner than we had anticipated, because of my father’s death. It was a stroke, while he was alone in the house, as he mostly had been of late. Suddenly, I was the master of Otherways and Ann was the mistress. It was a transformation in our circumstances and it came much sooner than I would ever have predicted. But I was still just a humble third secretary with duties to return to. It was agreed between us that Ann should remain at Otherways, at least for a while. Frankly, I feared for her health in Moscow. She would have Ced’s company during the holidays, and her family was near by. She and Daisy were always very close. I had no wish to uproot her at irregular intervals to face an existence that was at best tedious and at worst downright dangerous. Stalin’s excesses were multiplying by the day. The first of the show trials had begun in my absence. There was no telling what might happen next. It had also been suggested that I should do a stint at the consulate in Leningrad, where dysentery and typhus were rife. All in all, I was mightily relieved when Ann agreed to stay at home in Rutland.

  My hope, shared by Ann, was that I would soon be posted to a pleasanter capital, where we could be together, lead a civilized life and start a family. Unfortunately, my fluency in Russian was so rare a talent in the diplomatic service as to minimize my chances of such a transfer. Lord Chilston said I should be flattered by how indispensable he found me, and so I was, to an extent. But I was also frustrated, and ultimately depressed.

  My jealousy began there, I suppose, in the knowledge that Ann, Ced and Daisy were sharing a comfortable, congenial existence at Otherways, which I could only sample in sparing doses between long stretches of Soviet austerity. When I went home, Ann would tell me of all the things they had done together—without me—and I began to wonder, back in Moscow, how many more things there might be that she did not tell me of.

  Occasionally, during home leaves, I would have strange dreams, in which Ann was not my wife and I was a stranger to her and Ced, or at best a friend, but neither husband nor brother. I heard whispered conversations in adjoining rooms, which I seemed to recognize as the two of them, but would find the room empty when I went into it. Either I had imagined it, or they had somehow eluded me. I did not know what to make of such experiences, but they would not leave my mind. They grew rather, expanding into fantasies I did not always recognize as such.

  Ced’s visit to Moscow during his Easter vacation last year gave me an opportunity to set my mind at rest by questioning him closely about life at Otherways without me. His answers should have reassured me. They revealed nothing suspicious. But that merely convinced me of the subtlety of the deception being practised upon me. Likewise, I should have taken comfort from the announcement this spring of his engagement to Daisy. Instead, I grew more suspicious still.

  My state of mind soon began to affect my work. Nervous strain was not uncommon among the staff in Moscow; it was an occupational hazard. Spectating at the show trials, as I did, acquainted me with the bizarrerie of human behaviour. Guilt and innocence seemed not to be easily definable concepts. Doubt was everywhere, within and around me. I suffered some kind of nervous collapse shortly after returning to Moscow in May. The embassy doctor diagnosed complete mental and physical exhaustion. An extended period of sick leave was granted and I was shipped home.

  There, at first, I felt better. Ann was worried about me. Her attentiveness consoled me. All was well, I told myself. There was nothing to fear, nothing to suspect. I would soon be my old self.

  Then Ced came home from Cambridge for the summer and, little by little, as my strength returned, so did my doubts, reinforced, as before, by strange dreams and disquieting misapprehensions: glimpses of Ann and Ced strolling together in the garden, apparently hand in hand; snatches of whispered endearments carried bewilderingly to my ear on fickle breezes and wavering draughts. A summer of rest and recuperation changed into a prolonged agony of mind.

  There came a point when my dreaming and waking hours merged. I would see or hear something, only to realize later from the comments of others that I had dreamed it. Or I would dream that I saw or heard something, only to realize by the same retrospective process that it had actually occurred.

  During a Sunday tennis party, when we rigged up a net on the lawn and entertained a dozen or so people friends of Daisy’s and some college chums of Ced’s—to tea, I met one of the company, as I supposed, in the house. She said her name was Rosalind. But, when I mentioned her to the others, they were clearly bemused. There was no-one there called Rosalind.

  On another occasion, I woke from an afternoon doze and saw something very strange through the bedroom window: a body of water, blue and glistening in the sunlight, filling a space between Otherways and Whitwell, where I should have been able to see cattle grazing the meadows along the banks of the Gwash—indeed, where I had seen them only an hour before. My first thought was that there had been some kind of flood, that Burley Fishponds had somehow overflowed. But there was too much water for any such event, far too much. I ran downstairs, expecting to find…I know not what, but not the calm that actually prevailed. When I ran into the garden and looked again the water was gone, the Gwash was meandering its placid way through gentle pastures; I was mistaken.

  Ann was aware that all was not well with me. Ced must also have been. Nothing was said, nothing laid bare between us. But in their eyes I could see pity and concern, or scorn and complicity, if I chose to read it that way, which often I could not help but do.

  One night, towards the end of August, I had my most disturbing dream yet. In it I was indeed married to Ann, but utterly persuaded by irrefutable evidence that she and Ced were having an affair behind my back. I say it was a dream, for it was, but it seemed real at the time, wholly and horribly real. I had entered the house late in the afternoon, unannounced and undetected, and spied on them through Ced’s half-open bedroom door, making love; my wife and my brother, in passionate coition. Appalled and enraged, I had retreated outdoors and lain in wait for them. Only Ann emerged, however. There was no sign of Ced. Ann went down to the sunken garden and sat in the gazebo. I followed and watched her sitting there, smiling to herself as she recalled what had just happened. Then I took the revolver from my pocket, walked up to her and—

  I swear I thought she was dead, that I had actually shot her, when I woke from that dream and found her sleeping peacefully beside me. There had been nothing to distinguish the dreamed experience from the genuine action, nothing at all. Only the fact that she was alive proved I had not done it.

  That was only a couple of days before my appointment in London with the ministry doctor, who was required to decide whether I was fit to resume work. I travelled to London on Friday 1st September and saw him that afternoon. He asked me a good many questions. I answered them as reticently as I could, fearing that a recital of my apparent delusions would deter him from giving me a clean bill of health, which I was anxious to obtain, an early return to Moscow seeming to represent, at that point, my only hope of salvation. Alas, my evasiveness told against me. The doctor said I should remain at home for at least another month.

  I stayed overnight at the Hotel Russell. I telephoned Ann and told her I would take in some cricket at Lord’s before returning the next day by an evening train. It was agreed that she or Ced would drive into Oakham and collect me off the ten o’clock train. I prevaricated when she asked how my medical examination had gone and said that I would explain when I got home.

  The truth is that I had no intention of going to Lord’s. My mind was a ferment. I was the deceitful one now, paying them back, as part of me sincerely believed, for deceiving me.

  I suppose London must have been awash with war talk. It is a testament to my distracted condition that I was more or less unaware of it. I caught an early afternoon train from St Paneras, got off at Manton rather than Oakham, and walked to Otherways from there. It was a still, tranquil evening, I remember. I felt strangely calm myself, calmer than I had in months.

  I entered the house stealthily, expecting to find…something that would damn them, I suppose. But there was nothing. There was no sign of either of them. I looked into Ced’s bedroom, as I had in the dream. It was empty. He was not there. Nor was Ann. The bed was unmade, though. It had recently been slept in. The sheets were still warm beneath the covers.

  Something snapped inside me as I spread my hand across those warm sheets. It was as if I were living the dream anew. I fetched the revolver from the safe, loaded it and walked into the garden. If Ann was sitting in the gazebo, it would be, I seemed to know, a confirmation of all my worst fears. If not—

  But she was sitting in the gazebo. I saw her there as I approached. It had to be true, then. She had betrayed me. I did not call out, nor did she see me approaching. I walked straight up to her. And then I made the dreamed action real.

  For hours thereafter, even subsequent to my arrest and removal to Oakham police station, I believed that at any moment I would come to myself and realize that it had merely been another dream. Eventually, in the small hours of the following morning, I realized that it really had happened: I had killed Ann; I had murdered her.

  I did not want to excuse what I had done, or attempt to mitigate the awfulness of it. I was guilty and admitted as much from the first. I had condemned myself long before the judge donned his black cap in court.

  I have not set foot in Otherways since the evening of Saturday 2nd September. Nor, since then, have I dreamed in the way that I dreamed there; nor yet been assailed by the irrational and the unnatural to the extent that I was beneath its circular roof. I am free of all that, just as I am bound by the consequences of what I was driven to do there.

  “What have you done?” asked Ced, in horror, when he returned to the house that evening and found me waiting for the police to arrive. “What have you done?” There was no answer, beyond the deed itself. Too much had ended to be encompassed in words. Even the many words I have written now fail to circumscribe it. It is a circle without a circumference. It is a razed plane.

  My father once made some enquiries about the mysterious Mr Posnan. I paid them little attention at the time. I think of the meagre information he gleaned more and more as I sit here and wait for the end I have already made to become a legal fact. It says much or little, according to your taste.

  Basil Oates was a near neighbour, it appears, of Posnan’s father, in Hertfordshire—somewhere near St Albans, I seem to recall. The elder Posnan was an amateur bee-keeper, the younger already then some kind of architectural student, seldom seen at home. He had constructed a bee-house for his father—a circular structure, designed to resemble a summer house but actually intended to hold a dozen or more hives, to which the bees gained access through flight holes beneath the windows, while old Mr Posnan inspected and harvested them from within. There was some suggestion that it was the elegance of this building that prompted Oates to choose the younger Posnan as his architect when he decided to set himself up as a Rutland squire.

  At some point during the construction of Otherways, the elder Posnan was attacked by a swarm of bees while working in the bee-house and stung to death. The bee house itself was later demolished. That is all my father discovered. Whether it explains why Emile Posnan abandoned architecture and fled to Lisbon is no clearer to me than it was to Papa. It lingers in my mind, however, and will not readily leave it. Emile Posnan had a great gift. Presumably, he still does. But he does not exercise it. Why is that? What has deflected him? I do not know. Or do I? Am I, perhaps, the reason? Or am I a victim of the reason? If so, I am not alone. But in this company there is no comfort.

 

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