I had just arrived at this conclusion when Carl returned, the lights of his vehicle cutting a bright swath over the dark surface of the pool as he parked in front of the porch. Laden down, he entered the house and I went down to the spacious if somewhat old fashioned kitchen to find him filling shelves and cupboards and stocking the refrigerator with perishables. This done, bright and breezy in his enthusiasm, he enquired about the radio.
“Radio?” I answered. “I thought your prime concern was for peace and quiet? Why, you’ve made enough noise for ten since we got here !”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s not my noise I’m concerned about but yours. Or rather, the radio’s. I mean, you’ve obviously found one for I heard the music.”
Carl was big, blond and blue-eyed; a Viking if ever I saw one, and quite capable of displaying a Viking’s temper. He had been laughing when he asked me where the radio was, but now he was frowning. “Are you playing games with me, John?”
“No, of course I’m not,” I answered him. “Now what’s all this about? What music have you been hearing?”
His face suddenly brightened and he snapped his fingers. “There’s a radio in the Range Rover,” he said. “There has to be. It must have gotten switched on, very low, and I’ve been getting Bucharest or something.” He made as if to go back outside.
“Bucharest?” I repeated him.
“Hmm?” he paused in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, yes—gypsyish stuff. Tambourines and chanting—and fiddles. Dancing around campfires. Look, I’d better switch it off or the battery will run down.”
“I didn’t see a radio,” I told him, following him out through the porch and onto the drive.
He leaned inside the front of the vehicle, switched on the interior light and searched methodically. Finally he put the light out with an emphatic click. He turned to me and his jaw had a stubborn set to it. I looked back at him and raised my eyebrows. “No radio?”
He shook his head. “But I heard the music.”
“Lovers,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Lovers, out walking. A transistor radio. Perhaps they were sitting in the grass. After all, it is a beautiful summer night.”
Again he shook his head. “No, it was right there in the air. Sweet and clear. I heard it as I approached the house. It came from the house, I thought. And you heard nothing?”
“Nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.
“Well then—damn it to hell!” he suddenly grinned. “I’ve started hearing things, that’s all! Skip it…Come on, let’s have supper…”
• • •
Carl stuck to his “studio” bedroom but I slept upstairs in a room adjacent to the study. Even with the windows thrown wide open, the night was very warm and the atmosphere sticky, so that sleep did not come easily. Carl must have found a similar problem for on two or three occasions I awakened from a restless half-sleep to sounds of his moving about downstairs. In the morning over breakfast both of us were a little bleary-eyed, but then he led me through into his room to display the reason for his nocturnal activity.
There on the makeshift easel, on one of a dozen old canvasses he had brought with him, Carl had started work on a picture…of sorts.
For the present he had done little more than lightly brush in the background, which was clearly the valley of the house, but the house itself was missing from the picture and I could see that the artist did not intend to include it. The pool was there, however, with its encircling ring of quartz columns complete and finished with lintels of a like material. The columns and lintels glowed luminously.
In between and around the columns vague figures writhed, at present insubstantial as smoke, and in the foreground the flames of a small fire were driven on a wind that blew from across the pool. Taken as a whole and for all its sketchiness, the scene gave a vivid impression of savagery and pagan excitement—strange indeed considering that as yet there seemed to be so little in it to excite any sort of emotion whatever.
“Well,” said Carl, his voice a trifle edgy, “what do you think?”
“I’m no artist, Carl,” I answered, which I suppose in the circumstances was saying too much.
“You don’t like it?” he sounded disappointed.
“I didn’t say that,” I countered. “Will it be a night scene?”
He nodded.
“And the dancers there, those wraiths…I suppose they are dancers?”
“Yes,” he answered, “and musicians. Tambourines, fiddles…”
“Ah!” I nodded. “Last night’s music.”
He looked at me curiously. “Probably…Anyway, I’m happy with it. At least I’ve started to work. What about you?”
“You do your thing,” I told him, “and I”ll do mine.”
“But what are you going to do?”
I shrugged. “Before I do anything I’m going to soak up a lot of atmosphere. But I don’t intend staying here very long. A month or so, and then—”
“And then you’ll burn this beautiful old place to the ground.” He had difficulty keeping the sour note out of his voice.
“It’s what my uncle wanted,” I said. “I’m not here to write a story. A story may come of it eventually, even a book, but that can wait. Anyway, I won’t burn the house.” I made a mushroom cloud with my hands. “She goes—up!”
Carl snorted. “You McGilchrists,” he said. “You’re all nuts!” But there was no malice in his statement.
There was a little in mine, however, when I answered “Maybe—but I don’t hear music when there isn’t any!”
But that was before I knew everything…
6. The Familiar
During the course of the next week Scotland began to feel the first effects of what is now being termed “a scourge on the British Isles,” the beginning of an intense, ferocious and prolonged period of drought. Sheltered by the Pentlands, a veritable suntrap for a full eight to ten hours a day, Temple House was no exception. Carl and I took to lounging around in shorts and T-shirts, and with his blond hair and fair skin he was particularly vulnerable. If we had been swimmers, then certainly we should have used the pool; as it was we had to content ourselves by sitting at its edge with our feet in the cool mountain water.
By the end of that first week, however, the drought’s effect upon the small stream which fed the pool could clearly be seen. Where before the water had rushed down from the heights of the defile, now it seeped, and the natural overflow from the sides of the dam was so reduced that the old course of the stream was now completely dry. As for our own needs: the large water tanks in the attic of the house were full and their source of supply seemed independent, possibly some reservoir higher in the hills.
In the cool of the late afternoon, when the house stood in its own and the Pentlands’ shade, then we worked; Carl at his drawing or painting, I with my uncle’s notebook and veritable library of esoteric books. We also did a little walking in the hills, but in the heat of this incredible summer that was far too exhausting and only served to accentuate a peculiar mood of depression which had taken both of us in its grip. We blamed the weather, of course, when at any other time we would have considered so much sunshine and fresh air a positive blessing.
By the middle of the second week I was beginning to make real sense of my uncle’s fragmentary record of his research. That is to say, his trail was becoming easier to follow as I grew used to his system and started to detect a pattern.
There were in fact two trails, both historic, one dealing with the McGilchrist line itself, the other more concerned with the family seat, with the House of the Temple. Because I seemed close to a definite discovery, I worked harder and became more absorbed with the work. And as if my own industry was contagious, Carl too began to put in longer hours at his easel or drawing board.