“What do you think?”
“That you didn’t have a choice, Father. Any more than if you’d been asked to tell something you’d heard in the confessional.”
The old priest was silent, looking at his beer. It had gone down in the pint by barely an inch with all of his talking. He said, “What are you here for? In Dublin, I mean.”
“Looking for someone.”
“Ah. Well, I reckon we all are, that. But can I buy you a pint before you have to go on looking?” The priest smiled.
So did Jury. Still, he rose, though he had no place he had to be and the search seemed hopeless.
“Some other time,” said Jury. “Nice talking to you, Father.”
PART III. Blessings and Curses
21
He had driven back to Northants, packed up the Bentley, and made the long drive to Bletchley (sans Agatha, who had blessedly decided to remain in Long Piddleton a bit longer). Melrose kept his eye out for Chick’nKings along the A-road, but saw only Little Chefs.
He parked the car in the garage, which sat some distance from the house and which might once have been a caretaker’s cottage, although the size of the property did not seem to warrant an extra building.
Melrose had not brought much, only a couple of largish suitcases with clothes in one, books and CDs in the other, the CDs mostly Mozart and Lou Reed. He had not noticed a stereo system in the house, but he could always go to Penzance and buy one. Maybe he had skinhead inclinations, this love of loud brash music, but probably not, since it was all Lou Reed (or, of course, Mozart); he imagined the skinhead population was far less discriminating.
He lugged the suitcases through the door and set them down. He saw that in the room to the right, drawing room or living room, someone had started a thriving fire whose flames shot straight up the chimney and whose light thrust portentous shadows across the walls.
Who had done this, Esther Laburnum? He doubted it, but she had mentioned a caretaker or gardener; he seemed a more likely person. The fire was such a welcoming touch, a stranger attending to one’s needs.
There was central heating; still, some of the rooms were so large, so cavernous, that the fire gave not only warmth and light but comfort. He took the suitcase of clothes upstairs and disposed of its contents in several dresser drawers in the careless manner that one might do when one hadn’t a Ruthven around to stack perfectly ironed shirts and handkerchiefs in drawers. Melrose did not think of himself as an aesthete, but he admired Ruthven’s aestheticism. Ruthven (and his wife, Martha) established an order that went ticking along, hardly ever a beat missed. One got used to it; one got spoiled, too. Melrose dumped a dozen pairs of socks in one of the drawers where Ruthven would have tucked them in like babies in bassinets. Then he went back downstairs.
He commenced another wander through the house, allowing himself a much slower pace than last time. He went from drawing room to dining room, thence to the library and the little room the agent called a snug and isn’t it dear?-a locution that made Melrose wince. Along the way, he studied each of the silver-framed photographs he had but glanced at during his first visit. He looked longest at the one of the Bletchley family gathered on the dock near the boat. They were a handsome group. The small sharp face of the elder Bletchley (Mr. Chick’nKing) jutted out from under a brimmed cap that left it half in shadow. The face struck Melrose as shrewd. How happy the two children looked. Losing a child must bankrupt one emotionally. After that loss washed over one, would there be any feeling left at all? A little, perhaps; perhaps enough to be going on with. And in the Bletchley case, it was not just death but death cloaked in mystery. His thoughts went to places where wholesale wipeouts were a daily occurrence, an hourly anguish. It was unimaginable to the observer, whose mind could not possibly encompass the depths of sorrow into which a mother or father might sink.
He was overtaken, as he looked around, by a sense of the familiar. Initially, the house had reminded him of Ardry End; now, it did even more. It was not as large and hadn’t as many rooms, but the feeling was the same. Was he one of those people who, upon venturing into something new, are actually rein-venting something old? A person so attached to the past that whatever path he takes leads back to it, rather like fresh footsteps on a course of already trammeled ground?
He went from the small library to the winding staircase and upward. These rooms he had scarcely glanced at. He looked in on each of five bedrooms gathered round the stairwelclass="underline" two on each side and one at the front of the house. The bedroom at the front had its own bathroom; the two on each side shared bathrooms. He had stowed his belongings in the first bedroom to the left of the stairs because it gave the best view of the sea, a very dramatic view. Melodramatic, he should say; it depended on who was doing the looking. Thus far in his Cornwall experience, things seemed to be shaping up with melodrama to spare.
The bedrooms were fundamentally the same except for a variation in furnishings and color. He had chosen one with a thick four-poster bed and worn leather easy chair, which he had pulled over to the window and set beside it a glass ashtray on a bronze stand. He designated this room as a smoking room.
The other bedrooms did not yield anything in particular in keeping with his mawkish mood, but upstairs as well as down he was struck by the rooms’ readiness to receive visitors. Satin quilts and counter-panes; books on night tables. (By his own bed, volumes that leaned toward rigorous self-improvement: Emerson, Thoreau, and The One-Minute Manager, whose advice he was sure he should follow and equally sure that the lessons in the first two would shine in print but not in action. Really, these Americans could be so self-involved.)
In the piano room (which continued to fascinate) he was impressed anew by the sense that someone had left it just a moment ago. Bletchley-if it had been he who had last used it-might have only a few minutes ago inked in the notes on this score resting on the piano stand. Melrose wondered about him, wondered what the deaths of his children had done to his music. He wondered if the composing was a comfort. He stood by the casement windows and watched the sun going down. The tops of the clouds looked wet with light; the waves were edged in silver.
The position of the windows, the way they seemed to overhang the rocks so that one was looking directly down at the sea, made it, of course, impossible to see what was on the cliff directly beneath him. It had hidden the woman down there from his gaze until she moved on to a spot where the side window, the west-facing window, revealed her.
Melrose was dumbstruck. He had been so much in the company of ghosts, or at least had entertained ghostly thoughts, that a human presence now seemed unreal. It had started to rain since he’d returned, and he found himself looking down through a rain like floating gauze at the crown of this stranger’s light hair. She was wearing a fawn raincoat. He turned the fixture of the casement window, rolling it open. He called, “Hello!”
The woman looked behind her, seeing nothing.
“Up here!” Melrose shouted.
Then she craned her head upward, one hand tented over her eyes.
Melrose recognized her as the woman in the photographs, the mother of the two drowned children.
22
Please come in,” said Melrose, finding her still outside, waiting.
Stepping into the kitchen, she introduced herself as Karen Bletchley and added, “I’ve been seeing Esther Laburnum about the house. You’re Mr. Plant.”
“I am indeed. Are you very wet? Let me have your coat.”