by Peter Helton
Damn it was hot. The heat stung in my nostrils and sweat made me blink. This had to be a hundred per cent humidity; any more and we’d drown. I was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic. The room was only a modest eight by eight feet and had enough steam in it to drive a train. I gave it another polite minute, then made my move.
‘Sorry to interrupt, Guy, but I’m done to a turn. I’ll see you at dinner.’ This time I didn’t imagine it: Andrea looked less than happy. My desertion made me feel unchivalrous but she looked fit enough to fend for herself, towel slip permitting.
After all that exertion and heat treatment I felt quite justified in spending a couple of hours simply lying on my bed with the clockwork radio on and studying the tiny flower print of the wallpaper. The rain stopped and the sky grew lighter and eventually the sun broke through the edge of the cloud like a second dawn. Just as my stomach had finished working through the cake and cream and began growling for more it was answered by a very faint dinner gong; the privileged few were being called for a VIP supper and for once I was one of the chosen.
It looked like I was the last to arrive in the dining room. None of us had made a great effort to dress for the occasion, which seemed almost regrettable, since the dinner table with its silver and crystal, its gold-rimmed dinner service and flower arrangements, cried out to be matched by evening dress. Not that I had brought any. There was no starter but a generous abundance of well-cooked food: two legs of lamb spiked with garlic and rosemary, roast potatoes and colourful dishes of simply cooked vegetables. That reminded me of the greenhouse, hidden away and gated behind the hedge.
‘Do you grow any of this yourself?’ I asked Mark.
‘Lord, no, what for? We’re surrounded by farms, I get it delivered. And there’s a farm shop not five minutes from here.’
‘I just thought you might when I saw the big greenhouse.’
Mark made a dismissive gesture with the carving knife. ‘Yeah, well, Sam usually grows a few tomatoes in there and raises plants for the beds, but that’s as far as it goes.’
Lamb was being carved and dishes handed around. Emms looked down the table. ‘Guy isn’t here. He didn’t go out, did he? Anyone seen him?’
It appeared that no one had. I had been too distracted by the prospect of food to even notice his absence. Cy looked across at me. ‘Chris, sorry, but could you see where he’s got to? If he starts skipping meals and gets all his calories from single malt he’ll be even more impossible to work with.’
My stomach felt quite murderous when I agreed to see where he had got to. This babysitting and shepherding was beginning to feel like real work. I took the stairs two at a time and rapped at his door. No answer. ‘Guy? Dinner is served . . .’ I knocked again, waited a polite half-second then slowly opened the door. He was not in his bedroom. The bathroom door was closed. I went and knocked again before pushing it open. There was some sort of resistance and I had to push hard to get it open. I stuck my head through the gap. A damp towel had fallen to the floor and wedged itself under the door. I yanked it free and chucked it at the towel rail. No sign of Middleton. I clattered down the stairs, the smell of roast lamb in my nose. In the drawing room I opened the French window and looked up and down the terrace. At the north end a snake of archaeologists and technicians in a fantastic variety of rain gear and rubber boots queued for their supper by the catering van. A thin curl of smoke rose from the Roman camp but there was no sign of our Celtic heroes, which was hardly surprising since the pubs were open. No Middleton here either.
I stuck my head in at the library. ‘Guy?’ The overstuffed room still smelled vaguely of coffee and cake and a hint of lavender. I closed the door. Lavender?
I opened it again and stepped inside. Olive Cunningham stood very still behind the door, a book in one hand, her stick in the other. She was dressed in black, with pearl earrings her only adornment. Her hands tensed around book and stick; she wore no rings. I opened my mouth but she got there first.
‘They used to be ours, you know, and he doesn’t even read. Not sure he can. Who are you? Why aren’t you at dinner?’ It was less a question than an accusation.
‘I’m Chris Honeysett. I’m trying to find Guy Middleton.’
‘Then you must be the only one.’ She gave me a withering look as she walked past me and out of the door. ‘And you need a haircut, young man!’ she called from the hall.
Young man, how kind. At least she didn’t hit me, I thought when I walked down the lower gallery. Here too I could smell the old lady’s perfume but she had once more disappeared. At the end of the corridor I opened the door to the pool house. I couldn’t imagine Guy still using it after more than two hours yet there in the dressing room were his house shoes and dressing gown.
‘Guy?’ My voice echoed unanswered in the deserted pool room. Then I heard a thumping. When I turned towards the steam room I saw Guy, his face contorted with panic and as red as a cooked lobster behind the glass of the steam room door. Someone had wedged a wooden chair under the door handle, making it impossible to open from the inside. I unblocked the door and yanked it wide. Middleton fell into my arms and looked up at me with dancing eyes. ‘Where the fuck have you been, Honeysett? I’ve been cooking in there for hours. I thought I was going to die. Might still do that,’ he added faintly. ‘I need water.’
‘You need to cool down and rehydrate. Lean on me and we’ll get you under a shower.’
He did lean heavily on me and breathed loudly with the effort of moving. In the shower cubicle he sat on the floor with mouth wide open, letting the cool water run over him. Between gulping mouthfuls of water he told me what had happened. ‘Andrea left soon after you did. Stuck-up cow.’
I briefly wondered what, in Middleton’s book, made a woman a ‘stuck-up cow’. Presumably the category included any woman who didn’t enjoy being groped. ‘Could she have done it?’
‘Andrea Clementi? Doubt it. Too serious. If she wanted to get back at me she’d write a letter to The Times.’
‘How long after she left did you notice the door was blocked?’
‘It was a while. I like steam rooms, even without girls in them. Always feel quite pure after a steam bath. Opens your pores. Sweats out the toxins. You know what they say – no pain, no gain. So I stayed in there until I really couldn’t bear it any longer. I had noticed it was getting hotter in there, too. Tried to open the door and couldn’t. I banged on the door, I shouted myself hoarse. On tip-toes I could just see the damn chair wedged under the door. I pushed like mad but it wouldn’t budge. And you can’t turn down the heat; the controls are on the outside. In that box of tricks between the two doors. The bastard who locked me in there must have turned it up at the same time.’
‘That was a cruel prank.’
Middleton wasn’t having it. He exploded at me. ‘Prank? Are you mad? I could have died in there. I thought I was going to have a bloody heart attack it was so hot. I’ve never been so thirsty in my entire life.’ He gulped some more water, his face lifted up, his eyes closed. Then he expelled a jet of it from between his pursed lips. ‘Never appreciated what luxury water is. I tried to lick the steam off the tiles in there but it tasted foul and I was sweating out buckets more than I was getting.’ He pulled himself up on his feet.
‘Feeling a bit better?’
‘A bit.’ He dried himself and began pulling on his clothes in the changing room. ‘I’ve got a monumental headache but I no longer feel like I’m about to croak. I need painkillers and a drink. A real drink.’
‘The housekeeper has cooked dinner for the house guests. Your presence was missed, that’s how I found you.’
‘Missed? My arse. I doubt many of that lot would.’ He had finished dressing. ‘And at least one of them was happy to have me steam to death in that horrible cubicle.’ He looked a bit pink still but otherwise recovered when he marched out of the pool house. ‘And it’s your fault, Honeysett!’
I went after him. ‘How is this my fault? I mean, I knew it would be, of
course, but how?’
‘You left me in there. You were supposed to look after me, but instead you left me alone in there.’
‘If I’d been in there with you we’d both have got locked in.’
‘They wouldn’t have done it had you been there too. I’m certain of it.’
‘It was me who rescued you,’ I complained.
‘I need protection. So I won’t need rescuing.’
I stopped by the dining-room doors but Guy carried on towards the stairs. ‘Won’t you come and have supper?’ I asked.
‘I need painkillers and a drink and I’m not hungry. I’m going to barricade myself into my room!’ he called from the stairs.
I let him go. He had every reason to be fed up and it was probably better for all concerned if he went for a quiet drink rather than vent his feelings in the dining room. I went inside and found everyone digging spoons into dessert bowls. Strawberries and cream. No sign of the lamb.
‘Didn’t you find him?’ Emms asked. ‘I thought I just heard his voice outside in the corridor.’
I hesitated a second. What was the form? Was I supposed to keep this secret too or tell everyone about it? It was his story, I decided; he could tell it himself. ‘I found him but couldn’t persuade him to have supper. He says he has a headache.’
‘He’s definitely giving me one,’ Cy said, reaching for his glass of mineral water.
‘Carla is keeping some lamb warm for you in the kitchen,’ said Stoneking, ‘and we’ll leave you some strawberries. But only if you’re quick.’
To get to the kitchen I had to walk back past the pool house door and take a turn down a darker corridor. The broad door was wide open. The kitchen matched the rest of the house, which is to say it was ancient, with high ceilings, and cavernously commodious. There was a large cast-iron range, no longer in use, and a cream-coloured Aga. The enormous four-door fridge looked to be barely post-war. The scrubbed oak table in the centre could comfortably seat ten though there were only four chairs of the type commonly used to jam shut the doors of steam rooms.
Carla was washing dishes by hand in a Belfast sink. She saw my reflection in the window glass in front of her and spoke to it. ‘You’ve come for your supper. I’ve kept it warm for you.’ She wiped her hands on her apron before taking the foil covering off a generous plate of roast lamb and vegetables. ‘You’ll have to fight the mob for the strawberries.’ Carla smiled serenely, standing rooted in her realm.
‘Stoneking – I mean Mark – is guarding my portion. If I’m quick, he said.’
She kept smiling. I had noticed before that Carla seemed to be looking at the world from a place deep inside herself and that she liked what she saw. ‘I was keeping some food back for Mr Middleton too but I couldn’t help overhearing,’ she nodded towards the open door, ‘that he wasn’t going to join the others.’
‘He has a headache.’ I stood, the plate of food in my hands, being smiled at. I had instantly taken to the self-possessed housekeeper but there was an unnerving depth to her eyes that appeared anything but domestic.
‘Mr Stoneking cannot be trusted,’ she said severely. ‘Your strawberries won’t be safe while he has access to a spoon. You’d better hurry, Mr Honeysett.’ She turned back to the sink and her washing-up.
Everyone was still at the table when I returned and Mark Stoneking was pouring wine from freshly opened bottles from his cellar. I attacked my plate of food with one eye on the remaining strawberries. A golden evening light lay on the gardens now and through the windows I could see people walking here and there. Suddenly Middleton was there outside the window like an apparition from a gothic novel. He held a whisky bottle in one hand and rapped the signet ring on his other against the window pane. The sash windows were open a few inches to let in air, so when Middleton started shouting we had no problems following his drift. ‘One of you treacherous bastards in there is trying to kill me! Which one of you is it, huh?’
‘Pissed already, well done, Guy,’ Cy said to the room rather than the raging Middleton. ‘And paranoid now as well.’
Middleton was shading his eyes against the glass. ‘Honeysett, are you in there?’ I didn’t answer, mainly because I had my mouth full. ‘Tell Honeysett I’m with the Britons and send him down there.’ He walked off and called back over his shoulder. ‘I may need a bodyguard.’
I turned my attention to the remaining strawberries. ‘Everyone finished with the cream?’
NINE
‘Whoever you are, go away. Quietly.’ Middleton’s voice sounded tragic on the other side of the door.
Last night I had failed abysmally in my task to stop Guy from drowning his brains with the hairy Britons. I had found him sitting on a crate outside Morgan’s tent, sharing his whisky around and drinking from demijohns of rough cider with names like ‘Legbender’ or ‘Skullcrusher’. I was full of good wine from Stoneking’s table and in no mood to argue much with him, especially since he was surrounded by a hirsute bunch of Britons who seemed to have remained in character. They had decided that the first round of fighting had gone to them and were celebrating with the celebrity. The celebrity was showing off in front of his new friends. ‘Piss off, Honeysett,’ Middleton had said. ‘I don’t need a bloody nursemaid.’
This morning he sounded like he could possibly do with a nurse. I stopped banging on his door and tried opening it. There was resistance but it was easy enough to push it out of the way. Guy had set the bedside table in front of the door in a feeble attempt at a barricade against night prowlers. ‘Leave me alone. I can’t possibly get up. I feel truly awful. Tell Cy I’m unwell. I need at least a day to recover.’
It felt cruel yet satisfying in a told-you-so kind of way to rip open the curtains and let the summer sun beam down on the cringing cripple curled up on the bed. ‘You can’t take the day off; it would give Cy all the ammunition he needs. That’s the one way he will be able to get rid of you, if you’re not showing up for work because of a hangover.’
‘Hangover! There ought to be a completely new word for what I’ve got.’ Middleton sat up in bed, hunched and dishevelled, the loose strands of his ponytail hanging thin and lifeless over his shoulders. He was holding his forehead as though he was afraid it might come apart. A few years ago he had been the soap-star heart throb; this morning he wouldn’t have needed make-up for a vampire movie. ‘Right now I don’t know who I hate more, you or him,’ he growled.
‘I don’t care. Every day I’m getting an earful from Cy about how useless you are and how I’m supposed to make sure you do your job and I’m getting nothing but crap from you. I’m on your side, Middleton. I may be the only one around here and I’m only here because I get paid. So stop the baby talk and get on with it or else pack it in and retire. Go and live quietly in your cottage in the Lakes.’
He swung his legs out of bed, grunting as though he’d been stabbed. ‘Huh. Retire. What on? I need this bloody gig. And I’ll have to do it until I’m old and grey.’
Older and greyer, surely. ‘Then I suggest you get under that shower and come downstairs smiling. And apologize for last night’s little outburst outside the dining room while you’re at it. I hadn’t told them you had been locked into the steam room so your accusations made you sound more than a bit mad.’
‘Oh, bugger. All right, I’ll try. Look, Chris . . . You’ve no idea what pressure I’m under. There’s other stuff. Not just Cy or the death threats. Other stuff.’ He gave another grunt as he pushed himself off the bed and got to his feet. He shuffled into the shower. ‘I might tell you later.’
‘I can’t wait.’ I left him to it and went to get breakfast.
Ageing rock stars know how to live. Fresh orange juice, scrambled eggs, drop scones, smoked salmon and the whole English breakfast thing – Carla had to be up at the crack of dawn each day to build this wall of food in the dining room. The IT blokes were there, murmuring at each other through mouthfuls of croissant; cameraman and soundman were working through small mountains of fried food. Stone
king was sitting in the open window with a long glass of juice. He was watching Emms and Cy carry their cups of coffee across the sodden grass to the tent that had been erected over the larger trench the day before. Andrea was already there, staring inside. The Roman encampment was still in place and so was that of their enemies. It was bank holiday weekend and they would be with us until it was their time to return to reality.
‘The trench has flooded, despite the tent,’ Stoneking called over his shoulder.
‘To be expected,’ Paul said without looking up. ‘They’ll pump it out and mop it up. Take at least an hour, though.’
‘Has the digger been repaired yet?’ Stoneking asked.
‘Nah. Bloke stopped working when the rain started. What a lightweight. Back this morning, he said.’
I had nearly finished my pile of scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes when Guy turned up. ‘Morning, chaps.’ He looked quite presentable, considering what state he’d been in twenty minutes ago. ‘Where is everyone, I’m not late, am I? Morning, Mark.’ He walked over to the window where Stoneking sat. ‘Sorry about last night, I got a bit upset.’ He quickly explained what had happened to him in the steam room.
‘Shit, that would have narked me off too,’ Stoneking said. ‘Especially after that thing with the urn. You’ve got a practical joker on your case, Guy. Better watch out.’
Guy went to get himself some coffee and I went to join Stoneking, who was on the terrace now. ‘OK to climb through the window?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘Now you’ve mentioned the urn – have you had a look at the roof yet?’
‘I was up there first thing this morning. Called the roofers already.’
‘Did you check out the place where the urn fell off?’
Mark spoke quietly. ‘I didn’t actually go out on the roof, I’m not completely mad, that’s what roofers are for. But I’m pretty sure it was an accident.’ He looked over his shoulder at Guy, who was sitting at the table nibbling toast. Stoneking left his glass on the windowsill and we ambled to the edge of the verandah out of earshot. ‘The place needs some serious maintenance; I do feel guilty. I will get the roofers to check out all the nonsense stuck to the parapet, see if any of it needs securing. Or pushing off, when it comes to it. I mean, this stuff’s been up there for an age. You know what they say – what goes up . . . But what’s this thing with Guy and the pranks? No wonder Guy’s a bit paranoid now. First the note in his bed, now this steam room thing.’
