Bearing a tall glass of juice on a small silver tray, like a waiter, her father offers a modest bow to the woman, who responds with a smile that seems to indicate an affection for him – the smile of a visiting relative or a friend, rather than a paying guest.
‘You sure that’s all you want?’ he asks, setting the glass on a frilly paper coaster.
‘Thank you,’ she says, thinking of what Mr Morton said about him. And right away she asks: ‘So who’s Lily?’
‘Beg your pardon?’
‘Which one is Lily?’ she clarifies, waving a hand at the wedding scene.
Evidently surprised that she knows Lily’s name, he sits down and points towards the banquet table. ‘That one. The serving girl. And that one too,’ he adds, pointing to the fields. ‘The shepherdess. See? They have the same face. They’re both Lily Corbin.’
‘Mr Morton told me about her. I saw him yesterday,’ she explains, and it’s clear he didn’t know that she had been to see him. ‘So what’s the story?’
‘How much do you know?’
‘Only that her name’s Lily and that there’s a story about her and the painter.’
‘Well, she was a local girl, in her twenties when this was done. She modelled for the painter and she became his girlfriend. That’s him. The monk.’
‘Right. So the painter painted a portrait of his girlfriend, twice. Is that it?’
‘Not quite,’ he replies, after a pause from which she can tell he doesn’t know what to make of her having visited Mr Morton. ‘Lily was his girlfriend, but there was a wife as well.’
‘OK. This has potential. Wife and girlfriend. And?’
‘His wife found out about Lily and took a knife to him, here, in this room. See the poppies? Supposedly they’re covering the bloodstains.’
‘Sex and violence. Better and better. She killed him?’
‘No. Taught him a good lesson, though.’
‘So he ditched the girlfriend and stayed with the wife?’
‘He ditched the girlfriend and stayed with the wife, yes. But after the wife died he tracked Lily down, which wasn’t that hard, because she was still living on the family farm. He turned up one day, on her doorstep, and told her he’d realised he’d made a big mistake. Begged her to take him back.’
‘And her heart was melted?’
‘Not entirely. She gave him a room in her house, as a lodger, because he was destitute. But there was no late-flowering romance, no.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘That’s the gist of it.’
‘A tale of two mistakes.’
‘Or the tale of an idiot,’ he proposes, turning to examine the figure of the monk again, and he gives a short snort of a laugh, as if he takes the life of the painter to be a slightly comical fable, not a tale of romance.
Yet her father’s eyes have no amusement in them, she sees, and now she understands why he dismissed the story of the painter in the way he did, and why he laughed – because Randall’s regret is a version of his regret, the regret he feels about her mother, or about her, and by dealing with the painter so flippantly he is asking her to observe, to admire, his self-knowledge and self-reproach. ‘My sympathies are with the women,’ she says.
‘Mine too,’ he replies convincingly, and then his gaze travels down from her eyes to the raised glass of juice, to her hand, to her wrist, where it pauses at the bracelet and changes, softening, before it returns to her face and, seeing that she has noticed what he has noticed, slips off into the space of the room.
‘Another hour?’ she asks, wishing she had thought what she was doing when she put on the bracelet this morning.
He looks at his watch. ‘About that,’ he confirms. ‘All right if I leave you here for a while?’
‘Sure,’ she says.
He puts the empty glass on the tray and peels the wet coaster from the table-top. ‘See you here in an hour, then,’ he says. A tiny creak comes from his shoes as he crosses the room. At the big table he stops to fuss at the arrangement of the roses in the vase, just like her mother would.
For a minute more she stays in the Randall Room, until, surveying the panorama of the country wedding, she recalls how she had felt before, when she had become lost in it, and she gets up to go into the garden, as though there were a risk of contagion from the boy sitting beneath the boughs of the oak tree.
seventeen
Malcolm puts the phone down and sees Ian standing in the corridor looking in, wiping his hands on the hem of his apron, with the air of someone who has been hard at work while others have been taking it easy. ‘Do you want to see me?’ he asks.
Ian takes two steps forward, stopping an inch or two beyond the threshold. ‘We have a problem,’ he announces, still wiping his hands.
‘We do?’
‘Yep,’ he confirms, folding his arms.
‘And the problem is?’
‘A member of the team’s gone awol.’
‘Oh? Who?’
‘Eloni,’ he says with a smirk, as though this were but the latest of many misdemeanours.
‘Eloni’s missing?’
‘Meant to be in the kitchen half an hour ago. No sign of her.’
‘But she’s here. I’ve seen her this morning.’
‘She’s not here now.’
‘Do you know if she’s left the building? Has her coat gone?’
‘No, her coat’s not gone.’
‘So she’s in the building?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. I haven’t seen her, that’s all I know.’
‘She’s not upstairs?’
‘Rooms are done, Annie says.’
‘Have you looked for her at all?’
‘Annie says they’re through with the rooms.’
‘But you haven’t looked for her?’
‘No, I haven’t looked for her. She’s supposed to be in the kitchen. She knows where to find it.’
‘She might have had an accident.’
‘Might have,’ he concedes, unpersuaded.
‘So why don’t we look for her?’ he proposes.
‘I’m supposed to be in the kitchen, aren’t I?’
‘They can manage without you for five minutes. You search the basement, OK? I’ll do the garden. Nobody’s looked in the garden, I take it?’
‘Why would she be in the garden?’ he objects, baffled by the outlandish idea.
‘Why would she be missing?’ he counters, as Ian, shaking his head, leaves the office.
In the garden he finds Stephanie, who has been reading here, on the bench by the hornbeam, for the last two hours and hasn’t seen anyone else in all that time. Annie hasn’t seen Eloni for the last hour or more; David hasn’t seen her since ten o’clock; nobody has seen her since eleven. He searches the top floor and then the first floor; he searches every corner of the ground floor, even the smallest storerooms, even her coat and bag, in case her purse and keys have gone, but they are there. Though Ian swears he didn’t overlook any part of the basement, he investigates every part of it: the laundry room, the pool, the changing rooms, the toilets, the pump room. From the terrace of the Randall Room he again surveys the garden before returning to the hall. She has not appeared, he is told. At a loss, he stands at the front door for a minute or two. Back at the desk he stares at the rack of keys, until it occurs to him that he is looking at the space where the key for room 42 should hang, but nobody is staying in room 42, as far as he is aware. He consults the register: there is no reservation for room 42.
Room 42 is locked. He listens, hears nothing and knocks. ‘Eloni?’ he whispers. For ten seconds or so he waits, then knocks again and again receives no answer. He puts an ear to the door. ‘Eloni?’ he repeats, knocking lightly. He hears no definite sound inside the room, yet has the sense of someone moving towards him, as if the door were a membrane through which he can feel a movement of the air. Once again he says her name, and now the lock turns and the door slowly opens. Eloni steps back, her face downturned and hidden by her hair, and si
ts down on the end of the bed, with her hands limp on her lap, abject.
He closes the door. ‘Eloni? What’s wrong?’ he asks, but she will not answer and will not look up. ‘What is it?’ he asks, taking a step towards her.
‘No,’ she says quietly, raising her hands to stop him, then makes a mask of them and puts them to her face. ‘I am sorry,’ she murmurs. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry,’ she repeats, as if tired of the words. She breathes deeply, her chest shuddering as she draws the breath in. Her shoulders begin to tremble.
‘Tell me,’ he says, slipping the handkerchief from his pocket.
She opens her fingers a fraction. Empty-eyed, she looks down on the floor. ‘I do not know,’ she says at last. ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ she asks herself, her voice quavering. She takes the offered handkerchief and regards it without comprehension, as if concussed by misery, before pressing it to her eyes. ‘There is nothing after this,’ she states. ‘Nothing for me at all.’
He drags the chair from the writing table to the side of the bed and sits down, his feet almost touching hers.
‘Mr Laidlaw said he had work for me but I have phoned him and they will not let me speak to him. Many times I have phoned, but they will never let me speak to him.’
‘Mr Laidlaw said he had a job for you?’ he asks, making an effort to dissemble his incredulity.
‘Yes. In Manchester. He said he would help me, but when I phone his office they say he is not there but I know he is there. I say please tell him that I must speak to him, but they do nothing.’
‘Have you tried many times?’
‘Many times.’
‘Shall I try for you?’
She shakes her head emphatically, then removes the handkerchief from her eyes. ‘It is no good,’ she says, holding the handkerchief flat in one hand, like a book in which she seems to read words that verify the hopelessness of her situation.
‘I’ll willingly speak to Mr Laidlaw for you. I’m sure I can get hold of him.’
‘No. It is no good. Thank you, but I know what it is. There is no job. I know this now. But I am angry. He should tell the truth. I am angry. Very angry,’ she asserts and she folds the handkerchief neatly in two, as if to signify that she is finished with Mr Laidlaw. She gives it back to him, and as he takes it she lifts her head and looks at him with eyes that are reddened by crying and inflamed not by anger but by desperation. ‘What will I do?’ she pleads, clutching at her mouth, as if someone terrifying were hammering at the door. A fierce tremor, like a spasm of fever, shakes her body.
‘Eloni,’ he says, bending towards her.
‘You don’t know,’ she cries, raising her hands to her face. ‘You don’t know.’
Bending forward to look up into her eyes, Mr Caldecott takes her hands between his, like a priest, and says her name, and she begins to tell him everything.
She tells him about the money she paid at home and the money Francesc wants from her, and when she speaks the name of Francesc it is like spitting out a mouthful of poison. She tells him about Francesc and she tells him about the shop, the filthy room and the tattooed man, and how she had one chance to go and she took it, leaving behind everything she owned, and walked away, walked all night, until she reached the road where the lorries were leaving the city. She tells him about the money she has saved and the letter she gave to Mr Morton, and the plan she had thought up, to make sure that she got the papers when he got the money. She tells him what Francesc had said to her on the phone, the very words he had used, and what he had said about a fire. ‘I heard what he said but I pretended it did not mean anything, because I did not want to find out. It was too much for me,’ she explains, as if defending herself to a judge, but she knew he had done something, that something was wrong, but for a whole day she pretended and then she phoned her uncle and he had told her about the fire. ‘Everything is destroyed. Everything in the place my father works, all things for him to repair, all burned, and the workshop burned to the ground, because of this man, this devil,’ she protests, using hatred to stop herself from weeping. ‘And it did not happen just now. It was done many weeks ago and I did not know because I never spoke to them, because I could not speak to them. You understand? You understand why I could not speak? I was bad. A bad daughter,’ she tells him, and it helps that he shakes his head because she can argue with him and if she argues she will not weep. ‘Yes,’ she insists, ‘I was the worst. I brought shame on myself and my family.’
And she talks about her father and her mother and all the young people who had left her town over the years and sent money back. She talks and talks, confessing almost everything, until all the shame has been talked out of her, and briefly it is as if nothing exists outside this room and this moment. It is almost as if she herself does not exist, the way you don’t exist as you fall asleep, but then Mr Caldecott presses her hands between his and says her name, in a tone that is preparing her for a hard decision, then tells her: ‘I think you should go to the police.’
‘That is not possible.’
‘I think –’
‘I cannot go to the police,’ she says to the floor. ‘The police will send me to home, and all the other women also.’
‘Francesc will go to gaol.’
‘No.’
‘I think he will.’
‘I think he will not and I know I would have to go. All the other women that he has, they would have to go. And nothing would happen to him. I cannot go to the police,’ she repeats. ‘It is not possible.’
With a thumb Mr Caldecott rubs at the creases between his eyebrows, as if trying to solve a difficult problem, and he is quiet for so long that it seems possible, as possible as a miracle is possible, that he might think of something she has not thought of. He turns his eyes towards the window, but his sight seems to stop at the glass. ‘This Francesc,’ he says, and there he pauses and looks at her, frowning sorrowfully, as if he can read in her face the character of Francesc. ‘No amount of money is going to be enough for him, is it? It doesn’t matter how much you give him. You could give him five thousand pounds and it will make no difference. He’ll never give you the passport,’ he says, and it is like a doctor telling you that your mother is dead, when you know she is dead, when you have heard the last breath, but you are still holding her hand, which is as warm as when she was alive.
‘And it is worse,’ she replies. ‘He knows I am here. In this town.’
‘How does he know that?’
‘Because I spoke to him on a phone. He can tell where I am, from the phone.’
‘You rang from here?’
‘No, from the street.’
With a look of relief he gives her a thin smile. ‘Eloni, he can’t trace the call from a phone box,’ he reassures her, but she knows from the way he says it that he isn’t sure. ‘And even if he could,’ he goes on, ‘what’s he going to do? Come all the way here? For all he knows, you could have just been passing through. It’d be a wild-goose chase.’
‘He would do it.’
‘No. He couldn’t find you.’
‘I know he would do it,’ she asserts, hearing in her head Francesc’s voice, shouting on the phone. Once more Mr Caldecott rubs at the lines between his eyebrows, but this time it seems to mean that he does not know what he can say, not that he is thinking. ‘I am scared of him,’ she says. ‘I cannot go to my other job. I have finished it, last night. When somebody comes in, I think it is him or one of his people. This morning I think I see him, on the street, and I cannot breathe. At night I cannot sleep. I hear a car stop in the street and I think it is him. I hear voices in the street, it is his voice. When I come here, I run, like he could be anywhere. Here I am safe. For as long as I am here. But I cannot stay here. Here is finished,’ she says, as his arm goes across her shoulders, lying lightly, as if to comfort a stranger, and she begins to cry again. She cries like she cries at night, in her room. ‘What will I do?’ she wails at the window. ‘What will I do?’
Mr Caldecott�
�s arm withdraws from her shoulder and with the other hand he passes the handkerchief back to her. ‘This is what we will do,’ he says, in a voice that is placid and reasonable. ‘This is what we will do,’ he soothes, taking a hand. ‘I will find a room for you here. A room you can sleep in. It won’t be one of the bedrooms, but it’ll be comfortable,’ he promises, giving her hand a slight shake. ‘Nobody will know you’re there, only me. You can stay there until we close. We’ll fetch your belongings tonight, as soon as I finish work. I’ll come with you and we’ll bring your stuff here, OK? You won’t be on your own. I’ll take you into town and bring you back.’
‘OK.’
‘I’ll settle things with your landlord. Leave that to me.’
‘No. I must –’
‘Leave that to me,’ he continues, with a chop of his hand. ‘And there’s no point in thinking about paying anything to Francesc. We agree?’
‘Yes.’
‘So the money you’ve saved, we send that to your parents. It will help your father, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. We’ll get you installed here, we’ll send the money and then we’ll think what to do,’ he says, smacking the bed as he stands up.
‘OK.’
He goes into the bathroom and returns with a small towel, wetted with cold water for her eyes. ‘I’ll tell my daughter I’ll be late home,’ he says, opening the door. ‘And what will I tell them in the kitchen. Shall I say you’re ill?’
‘No. I will be downstairs.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ten minutes?’
‘Five minutes.’
His smile of quiet praise is the sort of smile her father might have given her, then he closes the door behind him, very gently, in a way that reminds her of the way he closed the door of the bedroom he gave her on the night she stayed in his house. She remembers too the new white towel that he left by the bath for her to use, and that he made noises as he moved about downstairs, while she was in the bath, which could only have been to show that she could trust him to leave her alone, as if he might have understood what had happened to her. And the way he talked to her through the bedroom door in the morning, when she was dressing – she remembers this as well, and the sight of the hotel that morning, rising like a castle above the grass and the bright pools of flowers, and the hope of that morning seems so distant, as distant as home.
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