In fact she was neither. She was an antiques dealer, the recently-divorced wife of a lovable but chronically unfaithful artist called Ken who had shown too much appreciation for one of his models just once too often. She missed him; but she relished her freedom. His childish dependence on her had kept her tethered for six years like a sacrificial goat. Now she could travel wherever she liked, whenever she wanted – see who she liked, eat what she liked, and watch whatever television channel she liked, which was one of the greatest new freedoms of all. Like a curiously large number of artists, Ken had been an avid football fan.
The carroty-haired man gave her the car keys. “You’ll find the little fellow in space 21. Enjoy your visit.”
She hurried through the puddles and found her rental – a tiny Corsa in metallic emerald, very appropriate for Ireland. Gratefully she stowed her bag in the back and climbed inside. She pulled down the sun-vizor and combed her wet hair in the mirror and dabbed her face with her handkerchief. The rain pattered on the roof and ran down the windshield in herringbone patterns.
She was just about to start up the car when she became aware of a man watching her from the other side of the parking-lot. He was very tall and very dark, almost Spanish-looking, although his face was pale. What was strange about him was that he was standing in the pouring rain without a coat and without an umbrella, his hands in his pockets, staring at her unflinchingly, as if he had seen her before and was trying to remember who she was. The runnels of rain distorted her image of him. For a moment he appeared to have a hunched back, and then a twisted torso, and then his face became long and devilish. Sarah started up the Corsa’s engine and switched on the windshield wipers, and the man became a normal man again. All the same, she couldn’t think why he was staring at her like that.
She drove out of the parking-lot and the man turned around to watch her go. She kept checking her rear-view mirror to make sure that he wasn’t getting into a car and following her, but he stayed where he was until she had driven round the curve in the airport roadway and he disappeared from view.
The rain continued to lash down as she negotiated Cork’s south-western suburbs, past factories and road-works and mean rows of bungalows and semi-detached houses. At last she found the main road westward to Macroom, and began to make her way out into the countryside; although the rain was so torrential now that the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with it, and she could barely see where she was going. She drove for over half an hour along an empty, winding road, before she found herself in a small town with a church and a long stone wall and a sign that announced that she had reached Bandon, miles out of her way south-westward.
She stopped the car by the side of the road, and breathed, “Shit.”
She could turn back, and try to find the Macroom road again, but turning back was never in her nature. If she was careful, and followed the map, she could keep going westward, and then follow a convoluted road over the mountains that would take her to Bantry, and then north to Kenmare, which was where she was originally headed. Six or seven haughty London dealers had been on the same plane with her, and if she turned up late she would have to suffer the usual taunts about scatty women amateurs who couldn’t empty piss out of a Georgian chamber pot even if the instructions were written on the bottom.
A small boy in a tweed cap and a sodden sleeveless sweater came up to her car and knocked on the window. He was pale and freckled and very earnest-looking.
“Are you lost, miss?” he wanted to know.
“Well, a bit,” she admitted. “I’m trying to find the road to Bantry.”
“Sure and that’s easy,” he told her. “You follow the main road till you nearly get to the church. Then you turn right and go up the hill. Then left again, till you reach the main road. The turning for Bantry is half-way up.”
“Thanks,” she said, and wound up her window, before she realized that he had failed to tell her how far ‘half-way up’ might be. Oh well, she thought, that’s Ireland for you. At least the Irish are mad on purpose.
Although it was still raining. Sarah managed to find the narrow turnoff that would lead her over the hill. Through the frantically-whipping windscreen wipers. She saw a wild, green landscape of mountains and boulders, and valleys veiled with drifting rain, like processions of ghostly brides.
She carried on driving for another half-hour, gradually making her way over the mountains toward Bantry. In all this time she saw only one other vehicle, a speeding farm van, with its windows all steamed up. It overtook her at nearly sixty miles an hour and then went careering off in a plume of spray.
Just before two o’clock she reached a small village, two pubs and a post office, and she pulled up outside the least derelict-looking of the pubs. The Russet Bull, and climbed out of the car. Rain poured down the pub’s steeply sloping slate roof and gurgled into its gutters. Inside, there was a long, smoky room with a flagstoned floor and battered old wooden settles. A noisy group of young people were drinking and laughing in one corner. At the far end, two determined-looking men with the tweedy jackets of farmers and the hard faces of terrorists were playing snooker. A tape was playing a Celtic lament, all violin strings and haunted voices.
A plump fair girl behind the bar asked her what she was having.
“A sandwich, if it’s not too late.”
“Too late?” asked the girl, in mild perplexity, as if she couldn’t understand what sandwiches had to do with the time of day.
Sarah sat opposite the noisy young people with a huge wholemeal sandwich filled with slices of fresh ham and a half-pint of Guinness. The men with terrorists’ faces gave her a good looking over and then went back to their game, although one of them glanced over at her and said something to the other one, who laughed a sharp knowing laugh.
On the creamy-plastered walls of the pub hung pieces of arcane agricultural equipment, with blackened iron prongs and chains and leather straps, like instruments of, torture from the Inquisition, alongside framed sepia photographs of downtrodden-looking men in cloth caps and tightly-buttoned up jackets. The rain kept on sprinkling against the windows and the endless laments elegantly wailed of lost loves and times gone by, and Sarah began to feel as if she had been here for ever and would never leave.
She had almost finished her sandwich when she noticed the man sitting in the far corner, in the gloomiest shadows, half-hidden by the trailing cigarette smoke from the snooker table. He was dark, with slashed-back hair, and his cheekbones were knobby as a steer’s skull found in the desert. From where Sarah was sitting, his eyes were drowned in shadow, but she could tell that he was watching her. One hand rested on the small table in front of him, a long-fingered hand with a heavy silver ring.
He looked so much like the man who had stood watching her at Cork Airport that she felt deeply unsettled. She knew that it couldn’t possibly be him. He couldn’t have reached this village ahead of her, even if he had taken the Macroom road; and how could he know that she was going to come this way, and stop here?
She finished her sandwich and barely tasted it. The plump fair girl behind the bar said, “God speed, then,” and she was embarrassed because she hadn’t thought of saying goodbye. “May you find your heart’s desire,” the girl added, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to say, like ‘take care’ or ‘see you later.’ Outside it was raining even more heavily, and she had to run across to her car.
As she drove away from The Russet Bull she glanced several times in the rear-view mirror to see if the man was following her. But the pub door remained closed and soon she was round the bend and well on her way toward Bantry.
It was getting late now, and she made her way through the mountains as fast as she dared. The rain was pelting almost horizontally across the road, and the wind buffeted the car as if it was determined to blow it off the edge of the ridge and send it rolling four hundred feet into the valley below. Water cascaded from the crags on either side, and gushed down cracks and crevices into the heather. Sarah’s windscreen w
ipers could barely cope.
But as she reached the coastal road, and started to drive northward to Kenmare, between caravan-sites and bed and breakfasts, the skies began to clear with almost unnatural swiftness; and by the time she drove into Kenmare itself, the sun was shining and the roads were dry, as if it had never been raining at all.
Kenmare was a small tourist town with two main streets, each of them lined with souvenir shops and pubs and restaurants, all painted in solid reds and greens and yellows. O’Leary’s Pub and O’Sullivan’s Diner and Shamrock Souvenirs. Sarah drove through it slowly, looking out for antique shops. Even in a town as over-commercialized as Kenmare, it was still possible to discover good quality antiques at reasonable prices – especially chairs and sideboards that had been auctioned off from some of the local country houses. She saw a Regency chiffonier that she liked the look of; and made a note of the shop’s telephone number. Then she drove out of Kenmare, heading westward on the narrow road that would take her out onto the Kerry peninsula.
She reached the grand gates of the Parknasilla Hotel and drove into the grounds. The afternoon was brilliant now, and the subtropical palms and bamboo bushes that lined the driveway gave her the feeling that she had driven out of Ireland and into some colonial other-reality, a memory of Mandalay. The hotel itself was a huge Gothic building, looking out over the glittering waters of the Kenmare estuary, with a view of the Caha mountains on the opposite side, still half-concealed by grey pillowy rainclouds.
The light was extraordinary. It was reflected from the ripples of the river in all directions, and gave the whole promontory a spangled, theatrical shine.
Sarah recognized several dealers from London and Brighton, and smiled in particular at Ian Caldecott, a dapper, florid-faced furniture expert from Surrey, who had taught her all about William and Mary chairs and card-tables. He raised his Panama and came over to greet her.
“My dear Sarah, I didn’t know you were coming,” he said. “We could have traveled together.”
“I didn’t know I was coming, either, not until the last moment. Then Fergus told me that they were going to be selling two Daniel Marot chairs.”
“Really? They’re not in the cataloge.”
“Late entries, apparently,” said Sarah. “They come from the Ballyclaran estate.”
“Well, well. I hope we shan’t be bidding too frantically against each other.”
“We can always join forces.”
Ian tapped the side of his nose with his finger. “Very naughty, Sarah. We don’t want to be accused of auction-rigging, now do we?”
“If the chairs are good, I want them,” Sarah warned him.
A porter came out to take her bag, and she went into the hallway to register. Inside, the hotel was as Gothic and grand as it was outside, with a wide staircase and sunlit lounges with deep, heavily-upholstered chairs. Sarah was taken to her room by a grinning boy with sticking-out ears.
“Hope you enjoy staying here twice as much as we enjoy having you,” he said. She tipped him a punt and he was gone before she understood what he had said; and even then she couldn’t be sure that he had understood it himself.
She kicked off her shoes and started to run herself a bath. As she took off her jacket and unbuttoned her blouse she walked toward the window, which looked out over the gardens and the river, and the mountains in the distance. It was odd to think that less than two hours ago, she had been driving through those mountains in devastating rain, and yet here the weather was balmy and bright. She hung up her blouse and she had just reached behind her to unfasten her bra when she saw a man standing in the garden, partially hidden by the shadow of a yucca tree – a man who appeared to be staring up at her window.
He was tall, and dark-haired, and dressed in black. His face was as white as a sheet of notepaper. He didn’t move, but there was no way in which Sarah could tell for sure that he was actually watching her window. It was just that he looked so much like the man she had seen at the airport, and the man she had seen at The Russet Bull.
She retreated back into the room so that he wouldn’t be able to see her. She sat on the end of the bed and she suddenly found that her mouth was dry, and that her heart-rate had quickened. Come on, Sarah, she thought: dozens of men dress in black; and dozens of men look at you; you’re still quite attractive, after all. It was probably a coincidence: three different men who just happened to look similar. Apart from the sheer logical impossibility of the man in The Russet Bull reaching Parknasilla before her, why on earth would anybody want to follow her? She didn’t have very much money. She was attractive but she wasn’t a movie star. And as far as she knew – even in the devious world of buying and selling antiques – she hadn’t cheated anybody, or trodden on anybody’s toes. She had once sold a bureau to a well-known horse trainer on the understanding that it was a Hodson; and when it had turned out to be a fake he had threatened to burn her shop down if she didn’t give him his money back, but that was the most alarming thing that had ever happened to her. And she had given him his money back.
She bathed and washed her hair and changed into a light grey collarless suit. The first event of the day was a champagne reception for the dealers, to be followed by a viewing of some of the most important lots on sale. She went downstairs into the bar where she found most of the dealers already well into their third glass of Lanson, telling each other jokes and laughing too loudly.
“—and I said, if you want to believe that’s a jardinière, my dear, then who am I to say it isn’t? But make sure you tell people to take out the potted palm before they piss in it!”
“—squeezed his nose to stop himself from sneezing and found that he’d put in the top bid for two elephant howdahs, parasols, ladders and all!”
Sarah took a glass of champagne from the waiter and circled the room. Although she knew so many of the dealers, very few of them acknowledged her with anything more than a nod, and only one came over to welcome her, Raymond French, an art dealer who specialized in paintings of dogs. Raymond was tall and thin and very intense, with a wonderfully hooked nose and an accent that could have cut diamonds.
“Sarah, you’re looking as soignée as ever,” he said. “I didn’t think this was your kind of thing.”
“I’m looking for some chairs,” said Sarah.
“Oh, chairs! Well, you were always very up on chairs, weren’t you? I don’t know. There’s something about chairs that leaves me cold.”
“These are supposed to be Daniel Marots,” said Sarah, under her breath.
“Sorry, you’ve lost me. But ask me to find you a Stebbings. He did beautiful cocker spaniels, you have no idea.”
“Raymond, you don’t understand. These chairs could be really significant. Daniel Marot was a French furniture designer, but he was forced into exile in Holland because he was a Protestant. He designed furniture for William of Orange, and when William of Orange acceded to the English throne, Marot came to England and had a huge influence on English furniture. He was totally Baroque. I mean, up until Marot, English chairs had been terribly plain; but Marot gave them high backs, covered in carving, and tasseled seats, and curved legs. His designs had so much life.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, Sarah, a chair is a chair. It may have four legs but there isn’t much point in throwing a stick for it, is there?”
“You’re impossible,” laughed Sarah.
It was just at this moment that Sarah became conscious that somebody else was standing very close to her. She could sense his tallness next to her shoulder. She half-turned to the left, and found herself face-to-face with the dark, thin man who had been staring up at her window.
Close up, he appeared much more handsome, in a black-eyebrowed, saturnine way. His skin was very white and pitted, but he had a sharply-cut profile and amber eyes. A white scar ran from the right side of his mouth all the way down his chin. His suit and his shirt were dead black, funeral black, and his necktie was black, too. He smelled of something
faintly attractive but very old-fashioned, bay rum and lavender, and the tightly-closed rooms of expensive hotels.
“Excuse me for interrupting,” he said. His voice was deep and soft, Irish-accented, like rubbing up the fur of a big black cat in the wrong direction. “I couldn’t help overhearing the name of Daniel Marot.”
“You’re in furniture?” asked Sarah; and again she could feel her heartbeat quickening.
The man slowly smiled. “I’m in … finding people what they want.”
“And that includes Marots?”
“That includes everything, Mrs Bryce.”
Sarah felt herself blushing. “I’m surprised that you know my name.”
“You’re the only woman dealer … it wasn’t difficult to guess who you were. But let me introduce myself. Seáth Rider.”
“You’re a dealer, too?”
“Well, in a sense, yes. But it’s a strange business, isn’t it, this matter of taking paintings and furniture from people’s houses and selling it on, as if you were taking all of their lives to pieces, dismantling their existence so to speak.”
“I suppose it is, if you put it like that.” Sarah couldn’t help but feel conscious of Seáth Rider’s aura. He was charged up, almost electrical. She felt that if she touched him, sparks would crackle out of her fingertips. She had never felt like this about a man before, and she didn’t know what to make of it. It was partly sexual; but it was partly to do with fear, too. He didn’t seem like a man who could be easily disagreed with; or crossed.
“There are two Marot chairs and I’ve seen them,” he said.
“Do you know about furniture? What kind of condition are they in?”
He made a circle with his finger and thumb; and gave her a smile that barely curled his lips. “They’re perfect, Mrs Bryce. Seventeen-oh-five or thereabouts. I’d say, soon after Marot published his collection of designs. They were made in London by Shearley, so far as I know, on a special order, and brought out here when Ballyclavan House was first built.”
Faces of Fear Page 15
