Marty had one final interviewee. Carys.
He hadn't seen her since he'd trespassed on the upper landing the day before. What he'd seen between Carys and her father had unsettled him, and there was, he knew, a childish urge in him to punish her by withholding his company. Now he felt obliged to seek her out, however uncomfortable the meeting might prove.
He found her that afternoon, loitering in the vicinity of the dovecote. She was wrapped up in a fur coat that looked as if it had been bought at a thrift shop; it was several sizes too big for her, and moth-eaten. As it was, she seemed overdressed. The weather was warm even if the wind was gusty, and the clouds that passed across a Wedgwood-blue sky carried little threat: too small, too white. They were April clouds, containing at worst a light shower.
"Carys."
She fixed him with eyes so ringed with tiredness his first thought was that they were bruised. In her hand she had a bundle, rather than a bunch, of flowers, many still buds.
"Smell," she said, proffering them.
He sniffed at them. They were practically scentless: they just smelled of eagerness and earth.
"Can't smell much."
"Good," she said. "I thought I was losing my senses."
She let the bundle drop to the ground, impatient with them.
"You don't mind if I interrupt, do you?"
She shook her head. "Interrupt all you like," she replied. The strangeness of her manner struck him more forcibly than ever; she always spoke as though she had some private joke on her mind. He longed to join in the game, to learn her secret language, but she seemed so sealed up, an anchorite behind a wall of sly smiles.
"I suppose you heard the dogs last night," he said.
"I don't remember," she replied, frowning. "Maybe."
"Did anybody say anything to you about it?"
"Why should they?"
"I don't know. I just thought-"
She put him out of his discomfort with a fierce little nod of her head.
"Yes, if you want to know. Pearl told me there's been an intruder. And you scared him off, is that right? You and the dogs."
"Me and the dogs."
"And which of you bit off his finger?"
Had Pearl told her about the finger too, or was it the old man who'd vouchsafed that vicious detail? Had they been together today, in her room? He canceled the scene before it flared up in his head.
"Did Pearl tell you that?" he said.
"I haven't seen the old man," she replied, "if that's what you're driving at.
His thought encapsulated; it was eerie. She even used his phraseology. "The old man," she called him, not "Papa."
"Shall we walk down to the lake?" she suggested, not really seeming to care one way or the other.
"Sure."
"You were right about the dovecote, you know," she said. "It's ugly when it's empty like this. I never thought of it like that before." The image of the deserted dovecote genuinely seemed to unnerve her. She shivered, even in the thick coat.
"Did you run today?" she asked.
"No. I was too tired."
"Was it that bad?"
"Was what that bad?"
"Last night."
He didn't know how to begin to answer. Yes, of course, it had been bad, but even if he trusted her enough to describe the illusion he'd seen-and he was by no means sure he did-his vocabulary was woefully inadequate.
Carys paused as they came in sight of the lake. Small white flowers starred the grass beneath their feet, Marty didn't know their names. She studied them as she said:
"Is it just another prison, Marty?"
"What?"
"Being here."
She had her father's skill with non sequiturs. He hadn't anticipated the question at all, and it threw him. Nobody had really asked him how he'd felt since arriving. Certainly not beyond a superficial inquiry as to his comfort. Perhaps consequently he hadn't really bothered to ask himself. His answer-when it came-came haltingly.
"Yes... I suppose it's still a prison, I hadn't really thought... I mean, I can't just up and leave anytime I want to, can I? But it doesn't compare... with, Wandsworth"-again, his vocabulary failed him-"this is just another world."
He wanted to say he loved the trees, the size of the sky, the white florets they stepped through as they walked, but he knew such utterances would sound leaden out of his mouth. He hadn't got the knack of that kind of talk: not like Flynn, who could babble instant poetry as though it were a second tongue. Irish blood, he used to claim, to explain this loquacity. All Marty could say was: "I can run here."
She murmured something he failed to catch; perhaps just assent. Whatever, his answer seemed to satisfy her, and he could feel the anger he'd started out with, the resentment at her clever talk and her secret life with Papa, dissolving.
"Do you play tennis?" she asked, again out of nowhere.
"No; I never have."
"Like to learn?" she suggested, half-looking around at him and grinning. "I could teach you. When the weather gets warmer."
She looked too frail for any strenuous exercise; living on the edge all the time seemed to weary her, though on the edge of what he didn't know.
"You teach me: I'll play," he said, happy with the bargain.
"That's a deal?" she asked.
"A deal."
-and her eyes, he thought, are so dark; ambiguous eyes that dodge and skim sometimes, and sometimes, when you least expect it, look at you with such directness you're sure she's stripping your soul.
-and he isn't handsome, she thought; he's too used to be that, and he runs to keep himself fit because if he stopped he'd get flabby. He's probably a narcissist: I bet he stands in front of the mirror every night and looks at himself and wishes he was still a pretty-boy instead of being solid and somber.
She caught a thought from him, her mind reaching up, easily up, above her head (this was the way she pictured it, at least) and snatching it out of the air. She did it all the time-to Pearl, to her father-often forgetting that other people lacked the skill to pry with such casualness.
The thought she had snatched was: I would have to learn to be gentle; that, or something like it. He was afraid she'd bruise, for Christ's sake. That was why he was all dammed up when he was with her, so circuitous in his dealings.
"I'm not going to break," she said, and a patch of skin at his neck blushed.
"I'm sorry," he answered. She wasn't sure if he was conceding his error or simply hadn't understood her observation.
"There's no need to handle me with kid gloves. I don't want that from you. I get it all the time."
He threw her a disconsolate glance. Why didn't he believe what she told him? She waited, hoping for some clue, but none was offered, however tentative.
They'd come to the weir that fed the lake. It was high, and fast. People had drowned in it, she'd been told, as recently as a couple of decades ago, just before Papa had bought the estate. She started to explain all this, and about a coach and horses that had been driven into the lake during a storm, telling him without listening to herself, working out how to get past his courtesy and his machismo to the part of him that might be of use to her.
"And the coach is still in there?" he asked, staring into the threshing water.
"Presumably," she said. The story had lost its charm already.
"Why don't you trust me?" she asked him straight out.
He didn't reply; but he was clearly struggling with something. The frown of puzzlement he displayed deepened to dismay. Damn, she thought, I've really spoiled things somehow. But it was done. She'd asked him outright, and she was ready to take the bad news, whatever it was.
Almost without planning the theft, she stole another thought from him, and it was shockingly clear: like living it. Through his eyes she saw the door of her bedroom, and her lying on the bed beyond it, glassy-eyed, with Papa sitting close by. When was this, she wondered? Yesterday? The day before? Had he heard them talking about it; was that what woke such distaste in him? He'd played the detective, and he hadn't liked what he'd discovered.