The hotel lobby was deserted, enabling him to climb the three flights of stairs without being seen. When he fumbled open the room door there was darkness beyond, but the tiny beacon of a cigarette near the window signalled that Jane was awake and waiting for him.
“Where have you been, Victor?” she said quietly. “What happened to you?”
The concern in his wife’s voice reminded Rowan that she had her own kind of dreams, better dreams than those which had just ceased to dominate his own life.
“What do you want first,” he said, forcing his body to remain upright for the necessary moment, “the bad news, or the good news?”
THE COTTAGE OF ETERNITY
When a young man devotes a lot of time to a scheme – a scheme which culminates in his slipping a vital question to a young woman – he usually feels pleased when she says yes. With Barney Seacombe, however, things were different. On hearing the affirmative answer he had at first refused to believe his ears, then had come the numb conviction that his life was in ruins.
The question was one he had rehearsed many times, and he uttered it with a brash and breezy confidence. “Have you,” he said, “a vacancy for a nuclear physicist?”
The young lady, a clerk in the employment exchange in the rural community of Daisyford (population: 8,324), glanced through the card index on her desk and said, “Yes.”
“That’s a good one.” Barney chuckled to show his appreciation of the witticism, then returned to the serious business of the day. “Now, where do I sign on and how soon can I have some money?”
The young lady gave him a look of cool reproach. “There’s no question of your drawing benefit while there is suitable employment on offer.”
“Wait a minute,” Barney protested. “I’ve got my old mother to look after – I can’t go away off to Aldermaston or Windscale or somewhere like that.” The part about his mother was a lie – she was being quite well looked after by her current boy friend – but he had thrown it in to win sympathy.
“The vacancy is in Gibley End,” the young lady said, keeping her sympathy to herself.
Barney shook his head in disbelief. “But that’s only three miles from here.”
“I know.”
There aren’t any nuclear establishments there.”
The young lady’s eyes flickered like those of a bad poker player. “Are you refusing to consider this offer of employment?”
“Give me the address,” Barney said, acknowledging defeat. He left the employment exchange and stood for a moment in the sunshine of a glittering spring morning.
The main street of Daisyford was a scene from a tourist poster, painted in exuberant acrylics, but Barney was not in an appreciative mood. When entering university he had chosen to concentrate on nuclear physics for no other reason than that it was a field which offered zero employment opportunities in his home area. The plan was that, having prolonged his education for as long as was humanly possible, he would return to Daisyford and settle down to a state-financed life of fishing the numerous local streams and sipping real ale in the equally numerous local hostel-ries.
It had seemed a good plan, virtually foolproof, and the last thing Barney had expected was for it to go awry on the first day, especially on account of someone who styled himself:
Arthur Haggle, Squientist,
Gibley Castle,
Gibley End,
Herts.
He thought hard about the name and address which had been supplied to him and, as he rode his motorcycle through the lanes which tenuously connected Daisyford to Gibley End, his natural optimism began to return. Gibley Castle was too old and dilapidated to have been taken over by a research organization looking for low-cost accommodation, so the whole business was either a mistake or a hoax which had been perpetrated on the humourless clerks of the employment bureau.
Squientist, indeed, he thought scornfully as his engine pulsed its note into vistas of quiet fields. What a give-away! If the idiots in the dole office had any brains they would have realized immediately that there’s no such word.
By the time the compact grey mass of the castle came into view, hulking up incongruously from pastures and ploughed fields, Barney was rehearsing a jocular account of the expedition for his friends in the Daisyford Arms. He was slightly taken aback, therefore, to find on drawing near the old building that a gleaming letterbox had been fitted into the gnarled timbers of the main entrance, and that above the letterbox was a brass plate engraved with the words: a. haggle, squientist.
Frowning a little, Barney took stock of the building’s exterior and noted the renovated stonework and freshly painted window frames. Gibley Castle was a comparatively modest affair, more like a manor house with delusions of grandeur than a proper castle, but it appeared that someone with money had taken up residence in it. Perhaps, Barney speculated, he had been too quick to assume that no research company would have bought the place. Perhaps there really was a prospective employer lurking inside. Perhaps – Barney’s spirits quailed at the thought – he was on the verge of obtaining work and would have to spend the forthcoming summer at a desk instead of lingering on the banks of murmurous streams. Numb with apprehension, he thumbed the new electric bellpush and waited to see what fate held in store for him.
After a minute’s delay the door was opened by a thin, middle-aged man whose rusty black suit, walrus moustache and white-gleaming cranium made him look like a character from a Mack Sennett comedy. His gaze hunted suspiciously over Barney’s face, and Barney – with a swift, sure instinct – knew that here was a man with whom he could never form a working relationship of any kind. He made an immediate decision, assuming he was looking at Haggle, to flunk the job interview in as spectacular a manner as possible.
“You must be Seacombe, the one they phoned me about,” the man said in a fussy voice. “I must say you don’t look like a nuclear physicist.”
“Cyclotrons weigh thousands of tons,” Barney explained. “That makes it difficult for me to wheel one up to people’s front doors and ask them if they have any atoms they want smashed.”
Disappointingly, Haggle appeared not to notice the sarcasm. “You’d better come down to my laboratory – we can talk better down there. Quickly, man!”
He closed the heavy wooden door and took Barney through an antechamber, a hall, and into a small elevator. The elevator was smooth in operation, but seemed to go an inordinate distance into the earth. When it stopped Haggle led the way into a tunnel-like corridor. The passageway was warm and dry, and was illuminated by modern electric light fittings, but Barney began to feel cool fingers of unease caressing his spine. It was quite obvious that he had descended into the castle dungeons in the company of a complete stranger whose motives and intentions were shrouded in mystery. Barney tried to draw comfort from the fact that Haggle resembled a silent movie comedian, then recalled that as a child he had been terrified of silent movie comedians because, one and all, they looked like frightening maniacs.
“Mr Haggle,” he said brightly, ‘what exactly is a squientist?”
Haggle replied without looking back. “I presume you’ve heard of a squarson?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“What’s the education system coming to? If you look squarson up in the dictionary you’ll find it means a squire who also happens to be a parson. I’m a squire who happens to be a scientist.”