This Rough Magic (20 page)

‘I’d adore some coffee. But I don’t know if I ought to stay – my sister really will have the wind up by now.’

‘I rang her up and told her what had happened … more or less.’ He grinned, a boy’s grin. ‘Actually, Godfrey Manning had already called up and told her about the dolphin, and that her ring was safe, so she’s quite happy, and says she’ll expect you when she sees you. So come along.’

I followed him through the service door and down a bare, echoing passage. It seemed that the Castello servants could not be allowed to share the glories which fell to their betters, for ‘below stairs’ the Castello was unadorned by dead animals and lethal weapons. Personally I’d have traded the whole building, organ pipes and all, for the kitchen, a wonderful, huge cavern of a place, with a smaller cave for fireplace, where big logs burned merrily in their iron basket, adding their sweet, pungent smells to the smells of food and coffee, and lighting the big room with a living, beating glow. Hanging from the rafters, among the high, flickering shadows, bunches of dried herbs and strings of onions stirred and glimmered in the updraught of warm air.

In the centre of the kitchen was about an acre of scrubbed wooden table, and in a corner of the room Adoni was frying something on an electric cooker
which had probably been built, or at any rate wired, by himself and Spiro. There was a wonderful smell of bacon and coffee.

‘You can eat some bacon and eggs, surely?’ asked Max.

‘She will have to,’ said Adoni briefly, over his shoulder. ‘I have done them already.’

‘Well …’ I said, and Max pulled out a chair for me at the end of the table nearest to the fire, where a rather peculiar assortment of plates and cutlery were set in a space comprising about a fiftieth of the table’s total area. Adoni put a plate down in front of me, and I realised that I was suddenly, marvellously hungry. ‘Have you had yours?’ I asked.

‘Adoni has, and I’ve just reached the coffee stage,’ said Max. ‘Shall I pour some for you straight away?’

‘Yes, please.’ I wondered whether it would be tactful to ask after Sir Julian, and this made me remember my borrowed finery. ‘My things were still wet, so I borrowed your father’s dressing-gown. Will he mind, do you think? It’s a terribly grand one.’

‘
Present Laughter
,’ said Max. ‘Of course he won’t. He’d be delighted. Sugar?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘There. If you can get outside that lot I doubt if the pneumonia bugs will stand a chance. Adoni’s a good cook, when pushed to it.’

‘It’s marvellous,’ I said, with my mouth full, and Adoni gave me that heart-shaking smile of his, said, ‘It’s a pleasure,’ and then, to Max, something that I
recognised (from a week’s painful study of a phrase book) as, ‘Does she speak Greek?’

Max jerked his head in that curious gesture – like a refractory camel snorting – that the Greeks use for ‘No’, and the boy plunged forthwith into a long and earnest speech of which I caught no intelligible word at all. It was, I guessed, urgent and excited rather than apprehensive. Max listened, frowning, and without comment, except that twice he interrupted with a Greek phrase – the same one each time – that checked the flow and sent Adoni back to speak more slowly and clearly. I ate placidly through my bacon and eggs, trying not to notice the deepening frown on Max’s face, or the steadily heightened excitement of Adoni’s narrative.

At length the latter straightened up, glancing at my empty plate. ‘Would you like some more? Or cheese, perhaps?’

‘Oh, no, thank you. That was wonderful.’

‘Some more coffee, then?’

‘Is there some?’

‘Of course.’ Max poured it, and pushed the sugar nearer. ‘Cigarette?’

‘No, thanks.’

He was returning the pack to his pocket when Adoni, who had been removing my plate, said something quickly and softly in Greek, and Max held the pack out to him. Adoni took three cigarettes, with the glimmer of a smile at me when he saw that I was watching, then he said something else in Greek to Max, added ‘Good night, Miss Lucy’, and went out through
a door I hadn’t noticed before, in a far corner of the kitchen.

Max said easily: ‘Forgive the mystery. We’ve been putting my father to bed.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘He will be.’ He threw me a look. ‘I suppose you knew about his – difficulty?’

‘No, how could I? I’d no idea.’

‘But if you’re in the business … I thought it must surely have got round.’

‘It didn’t get to me,’ I said. ‘I suppose there must have been rumours, but all I ever knew was that he wasn’t well. I thought it was heart or something. And honestly, nobody knew here – at least, Phyl didn’t, and if there’s been any talk you can bet she’d be the first to hear it. She just knew what you told Leo, that he’d been ill, and in a nursing home. Does it happen often?’

‘If you’d asked me that yesterday,’ he said, a little bitterly, ‘I’d have said it probably wouldn’t happen again.’

‘Did he talk when you took him upstairs?’

‘A little.’

‘Tell you who it was?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what they’d talked about?’

‘Not really, no. He just kept repeating that “he hadn’t got anything out of him”. That, with variations. He seemed rather more pleased and amused than anything else. Then he went to sleep.’

I said: ‘You know, I think you can stop worrying. I’d be willing to bet that your father’s said nothing whatever.’

He looked at me with surprise. I hadn’t realised before how dark his eyes were. ‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Well …’ I hesitated. ‘You were a bit upset, in there, but I had nothing to do but notice things. I’ll tell you how it struck me. He was certainly drunk, but I think he was hanging on to something he knew … he’d forgotten
why
, but just knew he had to. He knew he hadn’t to say anything about–about whatever you and Adoni were doing. He was so fuddled that he couldn’t sort out who was safe and who wasn’t, but he wasn’t parting with anything: he even kept stalling you and Adoni because I was there, and even about things that didn’t matter, like what happened at Mr. Andiakis’.’ I smiled. ‘And then the way he was reciting, and fiddling with the tape recorder … you can’t tell me he normally gives private renderings of Shakespeare in his own drawing-room? Actors don’t. They may go on acting their heads off off-stage, but they aren’t usually bores. It struck me – look, I’m sorry, am I speaking out of turn? Perhaps you’d rather I didn’t—’

‘God, no. Go on.’

‘It struck me that he was reciting because he knew that once he’d got himself – or the tape – safely switched into a groove, he could just go on and on without any danger of being jumped into saying the wrong thing. When I heard it, he was probably playing the tape to his visitor.’

His mouth twitched in momentary amusement. ‘Serve him right. What’s more, I’m certain that the meeting at the garage was an accident. If Adoni and I
had been suspected, we’d have been watched, and perhaps followed … or intercepted on our way home.’

‘Well, there you are; and it stands to reason that if your father had told him anything, or even dropped a hint where you both were, there’s been masses of time to have the police along, or … or anything.’

‘Of course.’ The look he gave me was not quite easy, for all that.

I hesitated. ‘Worrying about your father, though – that’s a different thing. I don’t know about these things. Do you think it may have, well, started him drinking again?’

‘One can’t tell. He’s not an alcoholic, you know; it wasn’t chronic, or approaching it. It’s just that he started to go on these periodic drunks to get out of his jags of depression. We can only wait and see.’

I said no more, but turned my chair away from the table to face the fire, and drank my coffee. The logs purred and hissed, and the resin came bubbling out of one of them, in little opal globes that popped and swelled against the charring bark. The big airy room was filled with the companionable noises of the night; the bubbling of the resin, the spurt and flutter of flames, the creak of some ancient wooden floor settling for the night, the clang of the old hot-water system. As I stretched Sir Julian’s bedroom slippers nearer the fire a cricket chirped, suddenly and clearly, about a yard away. I jumped, then, looking up, caught Max watching me, and we smiled at one another. Neither of us moved or spoke, but a kind of wordless conversation seemed to take place, and I was filled with a sudden,
heart-swelling elation and happiness, as if the sun had come out on my birthday morning, and I had been given the world.

Then he had turned away, and was looking into the fire again. He said, as if he was simply going on from where we had left off:

‘It started just over four years ago. Father was rehearsing at the time for that rather spectacular thing that Hayward wrote for him,
Tiger Tiger
. You’ll remember it; it ran for ever. Just eight days before the play was due to open, my mother and sister were both killed together in a motor accident. My sister was driving the car when it happened; it wasn’t her fault, but that was no comfort. My mother was killed instantly; my sister regained consciousness and lived for a day – long enough to guess what had happened, though they tried to keep it from her. I was away at the time in the States, and, as bad luck would have it, was in hospital there with appendicitis, and couldn’t get home. Well, I told you, it was only eight days before
Tiger Tiger
was due to open, and it did open. I don’t have to tell you what a situation like that would do to someone like my father … It would damage anybody, and it half killed him.’

‘I can imagine.’ I was also imagining Max himself, chained to his alien hospital bed, getting it all by telephone, by cable, through the mail …

‘That was when he started drinking. It was nearly two months before I got home, and a lot of the damage had been done. Of course, I had realised how it would hit him, but it took the shock of actually coming home
to make me realise …’ He paused. ‘You can imagine that, too; the house empty, and looking lost, almost as if it hadn’t even been dusted for weeks, though that was silly, of course it had. But it felt deserted – echoing, almost. Sally – my sister – had always been a bit of a live-wire. And there was Father, as thin as a telegraph post, with his hair three shades whiter, drifting about that damned great place like a dead leaf in a draughty barn. Not sleeping, of course, and drinking.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘What was that he said about the house being like a lord’s kitchen without a fire?’

‘It’s from a play, Tourneur’s
Revenger’s Tragedy
. “Hell would look like a lord’s great kitchen without fire in’t.”’

‘“Hell”?’ he quoted. ‘Yes, I see.’

I said quickly: ‘It wasn’t even relevant. It only occurred to him as a sort of image.’

‘Of emptiness?’ He smiled suddenly. ‘Sweet of you, but don’t worry, things pass.’ He paused. ‘That was the start. It got better, of course; shock wears off, and with me at home he didn’t drink so much, but now and again, when he was tired or over-strained, or just in one of those damned abysmal depressions that his sort of person suffers – they’re as real as the measles, I don’t have to tell you that – he would drink himself blind, “just this once”. Unhappily, it takes remarkably little to do it. Well, if you remember, the play ran for a long time, and he stayed in it eighteen months. In all that time I only got him away for three weeks, then back he’d go to London, and after a while the house would get him down, and “just this once”, he’d go on another drunk.’

‘You couldn’t get him to sell the house and move?’

‘No. He’d been born there, and his father. It was something he wouldn’t even begin to think about. Well, a couple of years of that, and he was going downhill like something on the Cresta Run. Then the “breakdowns” started, still, thanks to his friends, attributed publicly to strain and overwork. He had the sense to know what was happening to him, and the integrity and pride to get out while he could still do it with his legend intact. He did what he could … went into a “home” and was “cured”. Then I got him to come away here, to make quite sure he was all right, and to rest. Now he’s breaking his heart to get back, but I know he won’t do it while there’s any danger of its starting again.’ He gave a quick sigh. ‘I thought he was through with it, but now I don’t know. It isn’t just a question of will-power, you know. Don’t despise him.’

‘I know that. And how could I despise him? I love him.’

‘Lucy Waring’s speciality. Given away regardless and for no known reason. No, I’m not laughing at you, heaven forbid … Will you tell me something?’

‘What?’

‘Did you mean what you said down there on the beach?’

The abrupt, almost casual question threw me for a moment. ‘On the beach? When? What did I say?’

‘I realise I wasn’t meant to hear it. We were just starting up the steps.’

There was a pause. A log fell in with a soft crash and a jet of hissing light.

I said, with some difficulty: ‘You don’t ask much, do you?’

‘I’m sorry, that was stupid of me. Skip it. My God, I choose my moments, as you say.’

He leaned down, picked a poker up from the hearthstone, and busied himself with rearranging the pieces of burning wood. I stared at his averted face, while a straitjacket of shyness gripped me, and with it a sort of anger at his obtuseness in asking this. I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried.

A jet of flame, stirred by the poker, leaped up and caught the other log. It lit his face, briefly highlighting the traces of the night’s excitement and pain and tension, the frowning brows so like his father’s, the hard, exciting line of his cheek; his mouth. And the same brief flash lit something else for me. I was the one who was stupid. If one asks a question, it is because one wants to know the answer. Why should he have to wait and wrap it up some other way when the ‘moment’ suited me?

I said it quite easily after all. ‘If you’d asked me a thing like that three hours ago, I think I’d have said I didn’t even like you, and I … I think I’d have believed it … I think … And now there you sit looking at me, and all you do is look – like that – and my damned bones turn to water, and it isn’t fair, it’s never happened to me before, and I’d do anything in the world for you, and you know it, or if you don’t you ought to – No, look, I – I didn’t mean … you
asked
me …’