"Absolutely not," he replied. "Mother used to talk about the Bakers of the seventeenth century, and the Rashleighs who followed them. We knew nothing about their predecessors, although my father had a vague idea that the foundations went back to the fourteenth century; I don't know who told him."
"Is that why you converted the old laundry into Bluebeard's chamber?"
"No, it just seemed a suitable place, and the cloam oven is rather fun. It retains the heat if you light the fire, and I can keep liquids there at a high temperature while I'm working at something else alongside. Perfect atmosphere. Nothing sinister about it. Don't run away with the idea that this experiment is some sort of a ghost-hunt, dear boy. We're not conjuring spirits from the vasty deep."
"No, I realise that," I sald.
"To reduce it to its lowest level, if you sit in an armchair watching some old movie on television, the characters don't pop out of the screen to haunt you, although many of the actors are dead. It's not so very different from what you were up to this afternoon. Our guide Roger and his friends were living once, but are well and truly laid today."
I knew what he meant, but it was not as simple as that. The implications went deeper, and the impact too; the sensation was not so much that of witnessing their world as of taking part in it.
"I wish", I said, "we knew more about our guide. I dare-say I can dig up the others in the Saint Austell library — I've found the Carminowes already, as I told you, John, and his brother Oliver, and Oliver's wife Isolda — but a steward called Roger is rather a long shot, and is hardly likely to figure in any pedigree."
"Probably not, but you can never tell. One of my students has a buddy who works in the Public Record Office and the British Museum, and I've got the business in hand. I haven't told him why I am interested, just that I want a list of taxpayers in the parish of Tywardreath in the fourteenth century. He should be able to find it, I gather, in the Lay Subsidy Roll for 1327, which must be pretty near the period we want. If something turns up I'll let you know. Any news of Vita?"
"None."
"Pity you didn't arrange to fly the boys over to her in New York," he said.
"Too damned expensive. Besides, that would have meant I had to go too."
"Well, keep them all at bay for as long as you can. Say something has gone wrong with the drains — that will daunt her."
"Nothing daunts Vita," I told him. "She'd bring some plumbing expert down from the American Embassy."
"Well, press on before she arrives. And while I think of it, you know the sample marked B in the lab, alongside the A solution you're using?"
"Yes."
"Pack it carefully and send it up to me. I want to put it under test."
"Then you are going to try it out in London?"
"Not on myself, on a healthy young monkey. He won't see his mediaeval forebears, but he might get the staggers. Goodbye." Magnus had hung up on me again in his usual brusque fashion, leaving me with the inevitable sense of depletion. It was always so, whenever we met and talked, or spent an evening together. First the stimulation, sparks flying and the moments speeding by, then suddenly he would be gone, hailing a taxi and disappearing — not to be seen again for several weeks — while I wandered aimlessly back to my own fiat.
"And how was your Professor?" Vita would ask in the ironic, rather mocking tone she assumed when I had passed an evening in Magnus's company, an emphasis on the 'your', which never failed to sting.
"In the usual form," I would answer. "Full of wild ideas I find amusing."
"Glad you had fun," was the reaction, but with a biting edge that implied the reverse of pleasure. She told me once, after a somewhat longer session than usual, when I had come home rather high about 2 a.m., that Magnus sapped me, and that when I returned to her I looked like a pricked balloon.
It was one of our first rows, and I did not know how to deal with it.
She wandered around the sitting-room punching cushions and emptying her own ash-trays, while I sat on the sofa looking aggrieved. We went to bed without speaking, but the next morning, to my surprise and relief she behaved as if nothing had happened, and positively glowed with feminine warmth and charm. Magnus was not mentioned again, but I made a mental note not to dine with him again unless she had a date herself elsewhere.
Today I did not feel like a pricked balloon when he rang off — the expression was rather offensive, come to think of it, suggesting the foetid air of somebody's breath exploding — merely denuded of stimulation, and a little uneasy too, because why did he suddenly want a test done on the bottle marked B? Did he want to make certain of his findings on the unfortunate monkey before putting me, the human guinea-pig, to a possibly sharper test? There was still sufficient solution in bottle A to keep me going…
I was brought up sharply in my train of thought. Keep me going? It sounded like an alcoholic preparing for a spree, and I remembered what Magnus had said about the possibilities of the drug being addictive. Perhaps this was another reason for trying it out on the monkey. I had a vision of the creature, bleary-eyed, leaping about his cage and panting for the next injection.
I felt in my pocket for the flask, and rinsed it out very thoroughly. I did not replace it on the pantry shelf however, for Mrs. Collins might take it into her head to move it somewhere else, and then if I happened to want it I should have to ask her where it was, which would be a bore. It was too early for supper, but the tray she had laid with ham and salad, fruit and cheese looked tempting, and I decided to carry it into the music-room and have a long evening by the wood fire. I took a stack of records at random and piled them one on top of the other on the turn-table. But, no matter what sounds filled the music-room, I kept returning to the scenes of this afternoon, the reception in the Priory chapter-house, the stripping of carcasses on the village green, the hooded musician with his double horn wandering amongst the children and the barking dogs, and above all that lass with braided hair and jewelled fillet who, one afternoon six hundred years ago, had looked so bored until, because of some remark which I could not catch, spoken by a man in another time, she had lifted her head and smiled.
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE WAS AN airmall letter from Vita on my breakfast tray next morning. It was written from her brother's house on Long Island. The heat was terrific, she said, they were in the pool all day, and Joe was taking his family to Newport on the yacht he had chartered mid-week. What a pity we had not known his plans earlier on. I could have flown the boys over and we could all have spent the summer vacation together. As things were, it was too late to change anything. She only hoped the Professor's house would turn out to be a success — and how was it, anyway? Did I want her to bring a lot of food down from London? She was flying from New York on Wednesday, and hoped there would be a letter for her at the flat in London. Today was Wednesday. She was due in at London airport around ten o'clock this evening, and she would not find a letter in the flat because I had not expected her until the weekend.
The thought of Vita arriving in the country within a few hours came as a shock. The days I had thought my own, with complete freedom to plan as I wished, would be upset by telephone calls, demands, questions, the whole paraphernalia of life en famille. Somehow, before the first telephone call came through, I must be ready with a delaying device, some scheme to keep her and the boys in London for at least another few days.
Magnus had suggested drains. Drains it well might be, but the trouble was that when Vita finally arrived she would naturally start asking Mrs. Collins about it, and Mrs. Collins would stare at her in blank surprise. The rooms not ready? This would reflect on Mrs. Collins, and bode ill for future relations between the two women. Electricity failure? But it hadn't any more than the drains. Nor could I pretend to be ill, for this would bring Vita down immediately to move me, wrapped in blankets, to hospital back in London; she was suspicious of all medical treatment unless it was top grade. Well, I must think of something, if only for Magnus's sake; it would be letting him down if the experiment was brought to an abrupt conclusion after only two attempts to prove success. Today was Wednesday. Say experiment on Wednesday, give it a miss on Thursday, then experiment on Friday, a miss on Saturday, experiment on Sunday, and, if Vita was adamant about coming down on Monday, then Monday she must come. This plan allowed for three trips (the L.S.D. phraseology was certainly apt) and, providing nothing went wrong and I chose my moment well, did nothing foolish, the side-effects would be nil, just as they had been yesterday, apart from the sense of exhilaration, which I should immediately recognise and accept as a warning. In any event I felt no exhilaration now; Vita's letter was doubtless the cause of the slight despondency that appeared to be my form today.