Upstairs, in Arthur’s suite of rooms, and what I glimpsed of her own room through an open door across the corridor, the fixtures and fittings were rather different. Indeed they could not have been more opposed to the meticulous Victoriana of the ground floor. Alice’s large bedroom, looking inside briefly as she pointed it out to me, was sparsely white; light and airy, with cushions on the floor and a very few bits of delicately modern furniture: a low bamboo, glass-topped table, and a dressing-table even lower, so low down by the big French windows looking over the formal gardens that a person, I thought, would have almost to kneel down to see themselves in the glass.
Arthur’s rooms were even more contemporary, but in a much heavier mode, which included unbearable chrome-plated easy chairs, mirror-topped table, a futuristic bureau and a chest of drawers in some highly polished, deep-veined hardwood, edged in brass, with counter-sunk brass handles, an old portable Indian Army officer’s travelling chest gone very wrong.
I was surprised. ‘You lost heart with the Victorian, I see,’ I said, looking about me. ‘When it came to the essential creature comforts?’
‘In a house this size,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the space to make a lot of little theatres, haven’t you? Different rooms. Different settings, whole new backdrops, that you can walk into. And out of. A variety. Lots of new parts,’ she added with excitement, like an actress reflecting on some unexpected recent successes, where she had broken out of a previous typecasting with a vengeance.
‘And the attics?’ I said. ‘Are they belle-époque — or Louis Quinze?’
‘A lot of the rooms up here are a little different,’ she admitted. ‘Only the ground floor is all in the original Victorian period. Change,’ she added with the sudden excited stridency of a dancing mistress, ‘Change! Variety! Why not? You didn’t think the whole house was a sort of Victorian mausoleum, did you?’
‘No,’ I said, lying. For I had expected exactly that. It was obvious that she saw this house, this whole estate as some kind of personal theatre, woods and rooms made available, made over, each in a different fashion, in a manner that would enhance or fulfil her in some way. And I didn’t mention this thought to her either.
The bed in Arthur’s room was slightly raised on a dais, a huge affair, covered in a snowy white counterpane: it was like a remote sacrificial tomb or an Emperor’s sarcophagus. I knew I would never sleep in it. A dressing-room led off to one side filled with hanging cupboards and beyond that a large bathroom, with showy gold and marble fittings. Two unopened boxes of Roger & Gallet soap, one of carnation, and the other cologne, lay to either side of the twin washbasins.
‘Two basins?’ I asked. ‘“His” and “Hers”?’
‘That was the idea. To begin with.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was the second time round for both of us.’
‘Yes. It was the same with us. I expect we shouldn’t have hoped for so much.’
I looked up then and saw myself properly for the first time in the big triple mirror. My beard, even in ten days, was no more than a half-hearted, unsuitable thing. The scar above my eye had healed well enough. But the half-beard and the red wound together gave me an ugly, even a frightening, piratical air. And I noticed, too, how scratched and torn my skin was, particularly behind my shoulders and down my back, red welts, as if, a martyr to something, I had been scourged recently. I wondered what Alice would have thought of me had she met me in any ordinary circumstances, dressed and shaved, the dull pedagogue smelling of chalk. She would never have noticed me. But, obviously, in the guise she had found me — naked, hirsute, scarred — I must have seemed an ideal player for her repertory company. I would be costumed soon. But what was my role to be?
Back in Arthur’s dressing-room Alice opened out half a dozen drawers in the deep-veined mahogany wall cupboard. There were formal and leisure shirts, from Turnbull and Asser, and Hawes and Curtis, in every shade and material; silk, sea-island cotton and winter wool, sky blue, red pin-stripe, casual olive. There were classic and tropical suits, from Benson, Perry and Whitley in Savile Row, tweed sports jackets from Dublin and Edinburgh, together with tail suits, formal grey morning wear and smoking jackets with scarlet cummerbunds, all meticulously, expectantly tucked into the big press. There were casual Bally shoes, more casual multi-coloured sneakers and traditional bespoke brogues from Ducker and Son of Oxford; silk ties by Gucci and silk socks from someone else — and sporting wear, too, I saw; jogging suits, tennis clothes, shorts, swimming trunks, patent white cellular cotton shirts, and even cricket flannels.
‘Does he play cricket?’ I asked.
‘He’s tried. Out in the Park. It’s the old Beechwood estate team. I’ll give him his due: he tried as well.’
The dressing-room was an emporium of very expensive male attire, all of it tasteful, to certain tastes, but not to mine. And I prayed that none of the clothes would fit me, that here would be an excuse, a first reason to make it back to the woods. But Alice flicked one of the sea-island cotton shirts out of its neatly ironed shape, and held it up against me. The chest width and length, the arms exactly matched my own. And the shoes, I’d noticed before without admitting it, were exactly the same size as mine.
Yet she sensed my lack of enthusiasm, how I held back.
‘You said you wanted help, remember, to get out of here, didn’t you? Well, you can’t get out of here without clothes. And your own clothes out in the woods must be pretty filthy by now. So what had you in mind? Running naked?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘So go on, then. Have a hot bath, a shower, a shave. It’s all here. Choose whatever you want. Then we’ll have lunch. And you can tell me … whatever you want to tell me. If I can help … You did ask. Remember?’
It was warm in the dressing-room, with a smell of expensive carnation soap, good cotton, old leather and fine worsteds: tempting smells that I had missed in the woods. She laid out the short-sleeved summer shirt and some casual trousers. But she put back one of the formal silk ties that had fallen on the floor.
‘You won’t want this, I think. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Yet?’
‘Unless we have guests in,’ she smiled, leaving me.
Eight
‘My!’ she said when she saw me transformed half an hour later outside Arthur’s bedroom. ‘I wouldn’t recognise you.’
‘No.’
She looked at me in her carefully appraising manner again. ‘You’re a whole different person. It all fits, doesn’t it? Even the shoes.’
She looked down at the pair of hand-stitched moccasins I’d found in the bottom of the press.
‘A bit tight round the toes,’ I said.
‘Yes. But you’re not the same man at all.’ She considered me, a distant look in her eyes, like a casting director giving nothing away.
‘Maybe the beard was better,’ she said at last.
‘I can always grow it again.’
‘Maybe.’ She thought about this intently, so that I became impatient at her too careful consideration.
‘Or I could black up,’ I said. ‘With burnt cork and one of your husband’s cutaway morning suits and play a nigger minstrel.’
‘You could,’ she said shortly and decisively, as though she really believed this. ‘There’s an awful lot of clothes in this house one way or another,’ she went on. ‘Even old ones. We found a lot of Victorian clothes here, in one of the attics.’
‘Yes. I think I saw some of them on the scarecrow out in the kitchen garden. And that Camelot outfit you were wearing the other night in the conservatory,’ I added pointedly.