He watched them disappear from the space in the trees, saw their heads bobbing up and down among the leaves further along the lane. They were like a cigarette commercial, he thought: happy but dangerous.
Helen was riding ten yards ahead of me as we reached the end of the dark lane. We could see open rising country beyond, a heath with lines of elm and big blocks of forest higher up. And her horse saw all the pleasant invitation too. The big powerful animal had been constrained too long. And she couldn’t hold him properly when he reared and made for this delightful vision of space and pace. And my own horse followed it, its rear legs stuttering for a moment as they found a grip. And then it lunged forward, veering awkwardly to one side as it stepped in one of the ruts. And I was off its back then, like a shot, as cleanly as a champagne cork, and into the ditch at the end of the lane. I hit the bushes and seemed to keep on falling into them, deeper and deeper into the moist grass, my head and shoulder hitting something on the way. And then the piercing shot of pain, that was painful and nauseating at the same instant, so that my mouth was open and retching as the stars burst in my eyes.
After a minute, I suppose, lying there invisible and insensible, my head cleared and I tried to move. And I was surprised that I could — propping myself up into a kneeling position, my head just above the undergrowth.
And then I saw the man, on the far side of the lane just out of the bushes, about fifty yards back, in a green anorak and faded slacks and field boots looking down past me onto the heath with a pair of binoculars. I couldn’t see much of the face under a canvas hat, just something of white hair over the ears and deep-set eyes. I ducked back into the grass as he moved forward slightly to get a better view down onto the heath. And when I looked up again he was gone.
I didn’t tell Helen when she came back for me. I felt some obscure need to possess a secret myself, as a bargaining counter to hers perhaps — for she’d not told me everything yet. And I wanted time to think. Had I seen the man somewhere before? I thought perhaps I had. And what possible agency, or combination of agencies, private or national, did he represent? Perhaps he was just someone working on Perkins’ estate or a National Park warden. But his covert behaviour made this seem unlikely — and Guy had said he’d paid off his Peeping Toms. So who was he?
And I was suddenly very angry at this endless hide and seek. And that must have had a lot to do with my drinking too much at lunch when we got back to the house. First it had been a medicinal brandy, but with the taste in my mouth and the pain in my shoulder melting, I found a psychological easement in the same and other beverages. And Harold Perkins was a willing ally, taking up again over the long dining-table his own liquid crusade against the failure of all right thinking in the world. A liquid lunch and I liked it. And I liked him, the old open man beaten before his time. And I thought: the hell with them — Mr and Mrs Jackson and all their crooked past and knavish tricks. And the hell with their bloody horses as well. I was truculent and I liked that too.
‘Can we play in the rooms?’ the twins asked later that afternoon when we’d got back from a picnic at somewhere called Flatrock, a small steeply wooded canyon on the estate several miles away, where a river flooded through a gorge and there was a railed promontory high above it. Their hair and macs were still wet from the spirals of haze that had come over them as they’d played in the fine spume.
‘Can they, Father?’ Helen asked. She spoke as if these rooms were his toys.
‘A little late isn’t it? But it’s OK by me if you go with them.’
‘Let’s get you dried first. And a bath. Then come on up in your dressing-gowns for a bit before you go to bed. Martha?’ She turned to the housekeeper standing by the kitchen door. ‘Will you look after them and bring them up?’ And then to me: ‘Like to see them?’
‘Yes. Show him the rooms, Helen,’ Guy put in quickly, always the perfect host, generously self-seeking.
‘Rooms?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Rooms. But curious.’
And they were. They were up in the long attic of the house, built in under the eaves — an extraordinary adult fantasy, a child’s dream. There was a miniature cobbled street down the middle, with sidewalks, gas lamps and a dog cart at one end. Along either side were a short row of New York brownstone houses with steps up to the four-feet-high front doors. Inside the rooms were not built to the same scale, each side of the street making up the lower floor of one complete house — with a drawing-room, nursery and kitchen, all perfectly furnished to scale in the late Victorian period — a velvet-covered and tasselled chaise longue, rocking chairs, a minute Persian carpet, an upright satinwood piano in the drawing-room, a child’s cot, a high feeding-chair; oleographs of Little Red Riding Hood in the nursery, and a kitchen equipped with a miniature coal stove, tongs, poker, a brass grocer’s balance and a line of little pots and pans, each one bigger than the next, hanging from a dresser, with a series of painted wooden plates above, depicting the life and times of a family of rabbits: a Mrs Twiggy Winkles’ kitchen — the whole mood close to Beatrix Potter, yet twenty years before her time.
‘Grandfather had the place built for his children. Got the idea from the dwarf family — the Kellys — in Barnum’s Circus. They had something of the same thing as part of their act.’
Helen bent down and got into one of the houses — the lights were on in the rooms already — and I climbed into the one opposite. The ceilings inside were about five feet high. She opened the street window and waved.
‘Hi!’
I opened mine.
‘Hello,’ I said less easily. The scale of everything was very strange and unsettling: neither dolls’ houses nor real ones. And I felt neither adult nor child myself but a trespasser of a quite indefinite age and nature. Someone, built appropriately and almost certainly malevolent — a dwarf — would at any moment, I felt, come through the little hall door and ask me to get out of his house. It was the confusion of Alice after the magic potion, when she grew bigger instead of smaller in the rooms of Wonderland.
Helen disappeared from the window opposite and the little piano began to tinkle: Boys and Girls come out to play …
Then she stopped and reappeared at the window, her face very bright and young looking. I crouched by the chaise longue in my parlour, a cumbersome Victorian Lothario.
‘The thing I like best is the street,’ she said. ‘More than the houses.’
I looked out of my window, past the dog-cart on the cobbles, the attic wall at the far end where the rows of brownstones disappeared in a painted perspective. She put the lights out in the rooms and turned the street lights on and we both looked out of our windows. And now I could see the curved metal girders of a bridge on the skyline in the distance, past ghostly four-wheelers and horse trams.
‘Brooklyn Bridge,’ she said. ‘They’d just finished it. One Christmas I remember we put salt all over the street and holy garlands on the doors and had a party up here with the windows frosted and lit up. And I liked best being out on the street and looking up at the bridge and in through the windows. Especially that for some reason. Being outside, not in.’