by Ruth Rendell
Mr Liddon met them at the station in an old Volvo estate car. They were loaded down with camping gear, the tent and sleeping bags and cooking pots and a Calor gas burner in case it was too windy to keep a fire going. It had been very windy lately, the summer cool and sunless. Mr Liddon was Pringle’s father’s friend and Pringle had met him once before, years ago when he was a little kid, but still it was up to him to introduce the others. He spoke with wary politeness.
‘This is John and this is Roger. They’re brothers.’
Pringle didn’t say anything about Roger always being called Hodge. He sensed that Mr Liddon wouldn’t call him Hodge any more than he would call him Pringle. He was right.
‘Parents well, are they, Peregrine?’
Pringle said yes. He could see a gleam in John’s eye that augured teasing to come. Hodge, who was always thinking of his stomach, said:
‘Could we stop on the way, Mr Liddon, and buy some food?’
Mr Liddon cast up his eyes. Pringle could tell he was going to be ‘one of those’ grown-ups. They all got into the car with their stuff and a mile or so out of town Mr Liddon stopped at a self-service shop. He didn’t go inside with them which was just as well. He would only have called what they bought junk food.
Fen Hall turned out to be about seven miles away. They went through a village called Fedgford and a little way beyond it turned down a lane that passed through a wood.
‘That’s where you’ll have your camp,’ Mr Liddon said.
Of necessity, because the lane was no more than a rough track, he was driving slowly. He pointed in among the trees. The wood had a mysterious look as if full of secrets. In the aisles between the trees the light was greenish-gold and misty. There was a muted twittering of birds and a cooing of doves. Pringle began to feel excited. It was nicer than he had expected. A little further on the wood petered out into a plantation of tall straight trees with green trunks growing in rows, the ground between them all overgrown with a spiky plant that had a curious prehistoric look to it.
‘Those trees are poplars,’ Mr Liddon said. You could tell he was a schoolteacher. ‘They’re grown as a crop.’
This was a novel idea to Pringle. ‘What sort of a crop?’
‘Twenty-five years after they’re planted they’re cut down and used for making matchsticks. If they don’t fall down first. We had a couple go over in the gales last winter.’
Pringle wasn’t listening. He had seen the house. It was like a house in a dream, he thought, though he didn’t quite know what he meant by that. Houses he saw in actual dreams were much like his own home or John and Hodge’s, suburban Surrey semidetached. This house, when all the trees were left behind and no twig or leaf or festoon of wild clematis obscured it, stood basking in the sunshine with the confidence of something alive, as if secure in its own perfection. Dark mulberry colour, of small Tudor bricks, it had a roof of many irregular planes and gables and a cluster of chimneys like candles. The windows with the sun on them were plates of gold between the mullions. Under the eaves swallows had built their lumpy sagging nests.
‘Leave your stuff in the car. I’ll be taking you back up to the wood in ten minutes. Just thought you’d like to get your bearings, see where everything is first. There’s the outside tap over there which you’ll use of course. And you’ll find a shovel and an axe in there which I rely on you to replace.’
It was going to be the biggest house Pringle had ever set foot in – not counting places like Hampton Court and Woburn. Fen Hall. It looked and the name sounded like a house in a book, not real at all. The front door was of oak, studded with iron and set back under a porch that was dark and carved with roses. Mr Liddon took them in the back way. He took them into a kitchen that was exactly Pringle’s idea of the lowest sort of slum.
He was shocked. At first he couldn’t see much because it had been bright outside but he could smell something dank and frowsty. When his vision adjusted he found they were in a huge room or cavern with two small windows and about four hundred square feet of squalor between them. Islanded were a small white electric oven and a small white fridge. The floor was of brick, very uneven, the walls of irregular green-painted peeling plaster with a bubbly kind of growth coming through it. Stacks of dirty dishes filled a stone sink of the kind his mother had bought at a sale and made a cactus garden in. The whole place was grossly untidy with piles of washing lying about. John and Hodge, having taken it all in, were standing there with blank faces and shifting eyes.
Mr Liddon’s manner had changed slightly. He no longer kept up the hectoring tone. While explaining to them that this was where they must come if they needed anything, to the back door, he began a kind of ineffectual tidying up, cramming things into the old wooden cupboards, sweeping crumbs off the table and dropping them into the sink. John said:
‘Is it all right for us to have a fire?’
‘So long as you’re careful. Not if the wind gets up again. I don’t have to tell you where the wood is, you’ll find it lying about.’ Mr Liddon opened a door and called, ‘Flora!’
A stone-flagged passage could be seen beyond. No one came. Pringle knew Mr Liddon had a wife, though no children. His parents had told him only that Mr and Mrs Liddon had bought a marvellous house in the country a year before and he and a couple of his friends could go and camp in the grounds if they wanted to. Further information he had picked up when they didn’t know he was listening. Tony Liddon hadn’t had two halfpennies to rub together until his aunt died and left him a bit of money. It couldn’t have been much surely. Anyway he had spent it all on Fen Hall, he had always wanted an old place like that. The upkeep was going to be a drain on him and goodness knows how he would manage.
Pringle hadn’t been much interested in all this. Now it came back to him. Mr Liddon and his father had been at university together but Mr Liddon hadn’t had a wife then. Pringle had never met the wife and nor had his parents. Anyway it was clear they were not to wait for her. They got back into the car and went to find a suitable camping site.
It was a relief when Mr Liddon went away and left them to it. The obvious place to camp was on the high ground in a clearing and to make their fire in a hollow Mr Liddon said was probably a disused gravel pit. The sun was low, making long shafts of light that pierced the groves of birch and crab apple. Mistletoe hung in the oak trees like green bird’s nests. It was warm and murmurous with flies. John was adept at putting up the tent and gave them orders.
‘Peregrine,’ he said. ‘Like a sort of mad bird.’
Hodge capered about, his thumbs in his ears and his hands flapping. ‘Tweet, tweet, mad bird. His master chains him up like a dog. Tweet, tweet, birdie!’
‘I’d rather be a hunting falcon than Roger the lodger the sod,’ said Pringle and he shoved Hodge and they both fell over and rolled about grappling on the ground until John kicked them and told them to stop it and give a hand, he couldn’t do the lot on his own.
It was good in the camp that night, not windy but still and mild after the bad summer they’d had. They made a fire and cooked tomato soup and fish fingers and ate a whole packet of the biscuits called iced bears. They were in their bags in the tent, John reading the Observer’s Book of Common Insects, Pringle a thriller set in a Japanese prison camp his parents would have taken away if they’d known about it, and Hodge listening to his radio, when Mr Liddon came up with a torch to check on them.
‘Just to see if you’re OK. Everything shipshape and Bristol fashion?’
Pringle thought that an odd thing to say considering the mess in his own house. Mr Liddon made a fuss about the candles they had lit and they promised to put them out, though of course they didn’t It was very silent in the night up there in the wood, the deepest silence Pringle had ever known, a quiet that was somehow heavy as if a great dark beast had lain down on the wood and quelled every sound beneath under its dense soft fur. He didn’t think of this for very long because he was asleep two minutes after they blew the candles out.
; Next morning the weather wasn’t so nice. It was dull and cool for August. John saw a Brimstone butterfly which pleased him because the species was getting rarer. They all walked into Fedgford and bought sausages and then found they hadn’t a frying pan. Pringle went down to the house on his own to see if he could borrow one.
Unlike most men Mr Liddon would be at home because of the school holidays. Pringle expected to see him working in the garden which even he could see was a mess. But he wasn’t anywhere about. Pringle banged on the back door with his fist – there was neither bell nor knocker – but no one came. The door wasn’t locked. He wondered if it would be all right to go in and then he went in.
The mess in the kitchen was rather worse. A large white and tabby cat was on the table eating something it probably shouldn’t have been eating out of a paper bag. Pringle had a curious feeling that it would somehow be quite permissible for him to go on into the house. Something told him – though it was not a something based on observation or even guesswork – that Mr Liddon wasn’t in. He went into the passage he had seen the day before through the open door. This led into a large stone-flagged hall. The place was dark with heavy dark beams going up the walls and across the ceilings and it was cold. It smelled of damp. The smell was like mushrooms that have been left in a paper bag at the back of the fridge and forgotten. Pringle pushed open a likely looking door, some instinct making him give a warning cough.
The room was enormous, its ceiling all carved beams and cobwebs. Even Pringle could see that the few small bits of furniture in it would have been more suitable for the living room of a bungalow. A woman was standing by the tall, diamond-paned, mullioned window, holding something blue and sparkling up to the light. She was strangely dressed in a long skirt, her hair falling loosely down her back, and she stood so still, gazing at the blue object with both arms raised, that for a moment Pringle had an uneasy feeling she wasn’t a woman at all but the ghost of a woman. Then she turned round and smiled.
‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘Are you one of our campers?’
She was at least as old as Mr Liddon but her hair hung down like one of the girls’ at school. Her face was pale and not pretty yet when she smiled it was a wonderful face. Pringle registered that, staring at her. It was a face of radiant kind sensitivity, though it was to be some years before he could express what he had felt in those terms.
‘I’m Pringle,’ he said, and because he sensed that she would understand, ‘I’m called Peregrine really but I get people to call me Pringle.’
‘I don’t blame you. I’d do the same in your place.’ She had a quiet unaffected voice. ‘I’m Flora Liddon. You call me Flora.’
He didn’t think he could do that and knew he would end up calling her nothing. ‘I came to see if I could borrow a frying pan.’
‘Of course you can.’ She added, ‘If I can find one.’ She held the thing in her hand out to him and he saw it was a small glass bottle. ‘Do you think it’s pretty?’
He looked at it doubtfully. It was just a bottle. On the window sill behind her were more bottles, mostly of clear colourless glass but among them dark green ones with fluted sides.
‘There are wonderful things to be found here. You can dig and find rubbish heaps that go back to Elizabethan times. And there was a Roman settlement down by the river. Would you like to see a Roman coin?’
It was black, misshapen, lumpy, with an ugly man’s head on it. She showed him a jar of thick bubbly green glass and said it was the best piece of glass she’d found to date. They went out to the kitchen. Finding a frying pan wasn’t easy but talking to her was. By the time she had washed up a pan which she had found full of congealed fat he had told her all about the camp and their walk to Fedgford and what the butcher had said:
‘I hope you’re going to wash yourselves before you cook my nice clean sausages.’
And she told him what a lot needed doing to the house and grounds and how they’d have to do it all themselves because they hadn’t much money. She wasn’t any good at painting or sewing or gardening or even housework, come to that. Pottering about and looking at things was what she liked.
‘“What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”’
He knew where that came from. W. H. Davies, the Super-tramp. They had done it at school.
‘I’d have been a good tramp,’ she said. ‘It would have suited me.’
The smile irradiated her plain face.
They cooked the sausages for lunch and went on an insect-hunting expedition with John. The dragonflies he had promised them down by the river were not to be seen but he found what he said was a caddis, though it looked like a bit of twig to Pringle. Hodge ate five Mars bars during the course of the afternoon. They came upon the white and tabby cat with a mouse in its jaws. Undeterred by an audience, it bit the mouse in two and the tiny heart rolled out. Hodge said faintly, ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ and was. They still resolved to have a cat-watch on the morrow and see how many mice it caught in a day.
By that time the weather was better. The sun didn’t shine but it had got warmer again. They found the cat in the poplar plantation, stalking something among the prehistoric weeds John said were called horse tails. The poplars had trunks almost as green as grass and their leafy tops, very high up there in the pale blue sky, made rustling whispering sounds in the breeze. That was when Pringle noticed about tree trunks not being brown. The trunks of the Scotch pines were a clear pinkish-red, as bright as flowers when for a moment the sun shone. He pointed this out to the others but they didn’t seem interested.
‘You sound like our auntie,’ said Hodge. ‘She does flower arrangements for the church.’
‘And throws up when she sees a bit of blood, I expect,’ said Pringle. ‘It runs in your family.’
Hodge lunged at him and he tripped Hodge up and they rolled about wrestling among the horse tails. By four in the afternoon the cat had caught six mice. Flora came out and told them the cat’s name was Tabby which obscurely pleased Pringle. If she had said Snowflake or Persephone or some other daft name people called animals he would have felt differently about her, though he couldn’t possibly have said why. He wouldn’t have liked her so much.
A man turned up in a Land-Rover as they were making their way back to camp. He said he had been to the house and knocked but no one seemed to be at home. Would they give Mr or Mrs Liddon a message from him? His name was Porter, Michael Porter, and he was an archaeologist in an amateur sort of way, Mr Liddon knew all about it, and they were digging in the lower meadow and they’d come on a dump of nineteenth-century stuff. He was going to dig deeper, uncover the next layer, so if Mrs Liddon was interested in the top, now was her chance to have a look.
‘Can we as well?’ said Pringle.
Porter said they were welcome. No one would be working there next day. He had just heard the weather forecast on his car radio and gale-force winds were promised. Was that their camp up there? Make sure the tent was well anchored down, he said, and he drove off up the lane.
Pringle checked the tent. It seemed firm enough. They got into it and fastened the flap but they were afraid to light the candles and had John’s storm lantern on instead. The wood was silent no longer. The wind made loud sirenlike howls and a rushing rending sound like canvas being torn. When that happened the tent flapped and bellied like a sail on a ship at sea. Sometimes the wind stopped altogether and there were a few seconds of silence and calm. Then it came back with a rush and a roar. John was reading Frohawk’s Complete Book of British Butterflies, Pringle the Japanese prison-camp thriller and Hodge was trying to listen to his radio. But it wasn’t much use and after a while they put the lantern out and lay in the dark.
About five minutes afterwards there came the strongest gust of wind so far, one of the canvas-tearing gusts but ten times fiercer than the last; and then, from the south of them, down towards the house, a tremendous rending crash.
John said, ‘I think we’ll have to do something.�
� His voice was brisk but it wasn’t quite steady and Pringle knew he was as scared as they were. ‘We’ll have to get out of here.’
Pringle put the lantern on again. It was just ten. ‘The tent’s going to lift off,’ said Hodge.
Crawling out of his sleeping bag, Pringle was wondering what they ought to do, if it would be all right, or awful, to go down to the house, when the tent flap was pulled open and Mr Liddon put his head in. He looked cross.
‘Come on, the lot of you. You can’t stay here. Bring your sleeping bags and we’ll find you somewhere in the house for the night.’
A note in his voice made it sound as if the storm were their fault. Pringle found his shoes, stuck his feet into them and rolled up his sleeping bag. John carried the lantern. Mr Liddon shone his own torch to light their way. In the wood there was shelter but none in the lane and the wind buffeted them as they walked. It was all noise, you couldn’t see much, but as they passed the plantation Mr Liddon swung the light up and Pringle saw what had made the crash. One of the poplars had gone over and was lying on its side with its roots in the air.
For some reason – perhaps because it was just about on this spot that they had met Michael Porter – John remembered the message. Mr Liddon said OK and thanks. They went into the house through the back door. A tile blew off the roof and crashed on to the path just as the door closed behind them.
There were beds up in the bedrooms but without blankets or sheets on them and the mattresses were damp. Pringle thought them spooky bedrooms, dirty and draped with spiders’ webs, and he wasn’t sorry they weren’t going to sleep there. There was the same smell of old mushrooms and a smell of paint as well where Mr Liddon had started work on a ceiling.
