Mrs Clare the housekeeper was waiting and the gardener was by her side. He reached for the rope and secured the boat. Helena rose and, with Mrs Clare’s hand to steady her, climbed out.
‘You are frozen to the bone! Whatever possessed you, dear?’
Helena turned back towards the water. ‘He’s gone …’
‘Who’s gone?’
‘The ferryman … He towed me back.’
Mrs Clare looked into Helena’s dazed face in perplexity.
‘Did you see anybody?’ she asked the gardener in an undertone.
He shook his head. ‘Unless – do you suppose it were Quietly?’
Mrs Clare frowned and shook her head at him. ‘Don’t go putting fancies in her head. As if things weren’t bad enough already.’
Helena gave a sudden, violent shiver. Mrs Clare shrugged off her coat and wrapped it around her mistress’s shoulders. ‘You worry us all half to death,’ she scolded. ‘Come on in.’
Mrs Clare took one arm firmly, and the gardener took the other, and they made their way without stopping through the garden and back to the house.
On the threshold of the house, Helena halted confusedly and looked back over her shoulder to the garden and the river beyond. It was that time of the afternoon when the light drains rapidly from the sky and the mist was darkening.
‘What is it?’ she murmured, half to herself.
‘What’s what? Did you hear something?’
Mrs Vaughan shook her head. ‘I didn’t hear it. No.’
‘What, then?’
Helena put her head on one side and a new focus came into her eyes as if she were extending the range of her perceptions. The housekeeper sought it too, and the gardener also cocked his head and wondered. The feeling – expectation, or something rather like it – came upon all three of them and they spoke in unison: ‘Something is going to happen.’
A Well-Practised Tale
IT WAS HERE. Mr Vaughan came to a hesitant halt in the street of Oxford townhouses. He looked left and right, but the curtains in the windows of the respectable-looking houses were too thick to tell whether anybody was standing looking out. Still, wearing his hat and with the light wateriness of the air, nobody would recognize him. In any case, it wasn’t as if he were going to go in. He fidgeted for a moment with the handle of his case, to give himself a plausible reason to have stopped, and looked from under his brim at Number 17.
The house shared the trim, correct air of its neighbours. That was the first surprise. He had thought there would be something to set it apart. Every house in the street was a little different from its neighbours, of course, for the builder had taken the trouble to make it so. The one he had stopped in front of had a particularly attractive light set over the front door. But that wasn’t the kind of difference he meant. He had expected a gaudy colour to the front door, perhaps, or something faintly theatrical in the drape of the curtains. But there was nothing of the kind. They are not fools, these people, he thought. Of course they will want to make it look respectable.
The fellow who had mentioned the place to Vaughan was a mere acquaintance and it was something he himself had heard from a friend of a friend. From what Vaughan could remember of the third-hand tale, some man’s wife had been so distraught following the death of her mother that she became a shadow of her former self, barely sleeping, unable to eat, deaf to the loving voices of her husband and children. Doctors were powerless to arrest her decline and at last, dubious yet having exhausted all other possibilities, her husband took her to see a Mrs Constantine. After a couple of meetings with this mysterious person, the wife in question had been restored to health and returned to her domestic and marital responsibilities with all her old vigour. The story as Vaughan had heard it was at so many removes it probably bore only the most tangential relation to the truth. It sounded like a lot of mumbo-jumbo to Vaughan, and he had no belief in psychics, but – so he remembered the acquaintance telling him – whatever it was this Mrs Constantine did, it worked, ‘whether you believed in it or not’.
The house was impeccable in its correctness. The gate and the path and the door were neatness itself. There was no peeling paintwork, no tarnished doorknob, no dirty footprints on the step. Those who called here, he supposed, were to find nothing to encourage them in any reluctance, nothing to cause them to hesitate or draw back. All was spick and span, there was nowhere for doubt to take root. The place was neither too grand for the ordinary man, nor too humble for the wealthy. Why, you have to admire them, he concluded. They have it all just so.
He put his fingertips on the gate and leant to read the name on the brass plaque next to the door: Professor Constantine.
He couldn’t help but smile. Fancy passing herself off as the wife of a university man!
Vaughan was about to lift his fingers from the gate, but hadn’t quite done so – in fact, his intention to turn and depart was mysteriously slow to take effect – when the door to Number 17 opened. In the doorway there appeared a maid, carrying a basket. She was a neat, clean and ordinary maid, exactly the kind he would employ in his own house, and she spoke to him in a neat, clean and ordinary sort of voice.
‘Good morning, Sir. Is it Mrs Constantine you are looking for?’
No, no, he said – except that the words failed to sound in his ears and he realized it was because they had not reached his lips. His efforts to explain away his appearance were confounded by his own hand that opened the latch on the gate, and his legs that stepped up the path to the front door. The maid put down her shopping basket and he watched himself hand her his case and his hat, which she placed on the hall table. He smelt beeswax, noticed the gleam of the staircase spindles, felt the warmth of the house envelope him – and all the while marvelled that he was not where he ought to be, striding away down the street, after a chance pause outside the gate to check the fastening of his case.
‘Would you like to wait for Mrs Constantine in here, Sir?’ the maid said, indicating a doorway. Through the doorway he saw a fire blazing, a tapestry cushion on a leather armchair, a Persian rug. He stepped into the room and was overwhelmed with the desire to stay. He sat at one end of the large sofa and felt the deep cushions mould themselves around him. The other end of the sofa was occupied by a large ginger cat that roused itself from sleep and began to purr. Mr Vaughan put out a hand to stroke it.
‘Good afternoon.’
The voice was calm and musical. Decorous. He turned to see a woman in her middle years, with greying hair pulled back from a wide, even forehead. Her dress was dark blue, which made her grey eyes almost blue, and her collar was white and quite plain. Mr Vaughan was pierced by a sudden memory of his mother, which took him by surprise, for this woman was not at all like her. His mother, when she died, had been taller, slimmer, younger, of a darker complexion and never so plainly neat.
Mr Vaughan rose and began to make his apologies. ‘You must think me an awful fool,’ he began. ‘Awfully embarrassing, and the worst of it is, I hardly know how to begin to explain it. I was outside, you see, and I had no intention of coming in – not today, at any rate, I have a train to catch … Well, what I’m not explaining very well is that I cannot abide a railway waiting room, and having some time to kill, it seemed I might as well just come and see where you were, for another time, that was my intention, except that your maid happened to open the door at that very moment and naturally she thought – I don’t blame her in the least, bad timing, that’s all, easy mistake to make …’ On and on he went. He snatched at reasons, grasped for logic, and sentence by sentence it all evaded him; he felt that with every word he was talking himself further and further away from what he meant to say.