The Open House

by Michael Innes

  But this – Appleby told himself impatiently – really made no more sense than anything else that had so far come into his head. It required one to believe that the lights throughout the house had been turned on severally, that all had then been simultaneously extinguished at a main switch, and that now some accident had reversed the process. This just wouldn’t do. The spectacle before him was a spectacle deliberately contrived.

  Having arrived at this conclusion, Appleby decided he must investigate. Investigation had been his métier, after all.

  It would not have occurred to him to ascribe to himself anything that could be called a fanciful mind. But imagination of a sort had been pretty regularly required of him, and it sometimes took odd turns. This happened now. The house was like a giant crab – one out of some sort of old-fashioned science fiction and to be thought of, perhaps, as madly luminous on the bed of ocean. The curving corridors, each connecting with a wing fully twenty yards in front of the main building, were preparing to exercise a pincer movement on him at any moment. They would grab, and then the whole phosphorescent enormity would execute a rapid sideways retreat into a vast subaqueous cavern.

  In spite of this alarming notion, Appleby walked straight up to the house. Or rather he walked straight to the foot of the impressive flight of steps – a to-and-fro affair lavishly provided with balustrades, urns and statuary – which would elevate him to the base of the main portico and presumably enable him to present himself before the principal door of the mansion. It wasn’t quite evident what he ought then to do. Simply ring a bell, perhaps, and see what happened. Appleby had a vision of a stately man-servant answering his summons, and receiving not too well anything that he could find in his head to say. But he would be perfectly justified, after all, in representing himself as a distressed wayfarer in need of succour. Perhaps he ought to have brought that useless gear-lever with him. It would, in a fashion, have attested his bona fides.

  He had climbed the last steps, and was beneath the lofty portico. It was only dimly lit. He walked towards its centre, and turned to face the house. At last its front door was before him. It was a suitably impressive double-leaved affair. And it was wide open.

  Inside was a warm glow – warm, although the effect that the revealed décor suggested ought surely to have been decidedly chilly. For here was a hall which was certainly the height of the whole building, with colonnades of alabaster Corinthian columns and a coved ceiling in the Adam style. The general impression was of a great deal of marble and quite a lot of gold. But most of the light was reflected from areas of the ceiling which were predominantly in Italian pink. It was this that lent a certain august cosiness – almost a welcoming quality – to the scene of which Appleby thus found himself to be enjoying a totally unexpected view.

  The autumn night, although it couldn’t be called chilly, was far from warm, and it could not conceivably be to admit the air that the door before him stood wide open as it did. But nobody was coming out – nor, equally clearly, had anybody just gone in. Nor again, in the great void hall was anybody in view. Beyond the long expanse of marble floor, boldly figured as in some classical basilica, the columned vista closed upon lofty doors which no doubt admitted to the domed saloon upon which the whole house must pivot. But of living things there wasn’t so much as a domestic cat. Nor did the most muted sound of any sort float to Appleby’s ear.

  But at least there was a perfectly ordinary door-bell. He put out a hand and rang. There was nothing wrong with the bell, for he could just hear its summons in some distant and probably subterraneous place. He waited. It would only be reasonable to wait for quite some time. But nothing happened. He rang again.

  A long silence. Appleby realized that a fresh problem confronted him. Before this unaccountable and even slightly unnerving state of affairs, he supposed, it would be irresponsible simply to turn and walk away. Nor did the prospect of continued blind wandering through the small hours appeal to him in the least. Servants ought to appear. The servants ought to be followed by the owner of the property, who would presently be unobstrusively anxious to provide the hospitality which, in such circumstances, one gentleman owes to another. There would be drinks, a common acquaintance or two would be discovered; after a little civil talk, Appleby would be shown to a comfortable bed.

  But this wasn’t happening. And in front of him was this open door, this opulent and seemingly unprotected mansion. Action of some sort was incumbent upon him. Perhaps the proper initial step was to circumambulate the exterior of the whole house, seeking somewhere in its obscurer offices a lurking caretaker who might explain the mystery. But he didn’t really think much of this. He was a Justice of the Peace, and the Queen’s commission ought surely to justify a little mild trespass in face of the untoward circumstances confronting him. Appleby walked through the open door.

  He had an instant sense of being observed. So strong was this that he halted at once, and in a voice not pitched above that of normal conversation asked: ‘Is there anybody at home here?’ Only a faint echo answered him. But in a colonnaded chamber like this as many people as there were columns could play at a kind of hide-and-seek. He took a couple of paces forward, and glanced between the first two pale honey-coloured shafts. He was indeed being observed, and in a further moment he saw that it was by a whole company. Sightlessly, however, and by a double row of marble statues set in niches in either wall. They were an incongruous assemblage of undraped Greek divinities and of English gentlemen – some in huge tie wigs and some in hunting perukes. It seemed improbable that any information could be extracted from them – except, indeed, that they further attested to the general consequence of their invisible owner.

  There was at least nothing much – Appleby noted with professional approval – that a nefariously disposed person could walk away with. Anything that could be called furniture in this vast space was confined to marble benches and elaborately inlaid marble tables for which substantial machinery would be required if they were to be budged an inch. Appleby walked the full length of the hall, and opened the door at the end. The saloon – a square chamber rendered semi-octagonal by the presence of large statue-filled niches in each corner – was in much the same formally bleak condition, except that here the benches and tables (which he guessed to be Spanish) were in ancient wood, and were disposed on and around a Persian carpet which was certainly beautiful and probably very valuable indeed. Appleby surveyed this, frowning. He turned back, found another door, and opened it upon what proved to be a drawing-room. There was only a low light here, but it was quite good enough to reveal a pilferer’s paradise. Within fragile cabinets, or disposed upon the finely polished surface of sundry tables and escritoires, were innumerable objects of virtu – good, bad and largely indifferent – of the sort that silt up over the generations in a house of this kind. But Appleby’s eye didn’t linger on these; it had been attracted to a painting over the mantelshelf. He crossed the room and studied this with attention. He was left in very little doubt that the painter had been Claude. It was decidedly not the sort of possession that ought to be left hanging around.

  Newspapers and magazines, of course, were another matter. There would be no great disaster in some dishonest person’s making off with the Times, the Field, or Country Life… Appleby found that he had paused before a neatly ordered pile of these. He picked up a daily paper. It bore the date of the previous day.

  And now a satisfactory idea came to Appleby at last. There was nothing unique about this place. Several score of such lay scattered about England. Unlived in, but given a contrary appearance for the better satisfaction of the curious, they were open daily to anybody who cared to pay half-a-crown at the door. There wouldn’t even be a former owner lurking in a private wing, as was the case in many houses of the kind. Ownership was vested in some trust or society dedicated to thus preserving the tokens of what was popularly (and erroneously) regarded as a vanished way of life. It would all be very well done. Fresh flowers would appear daily, there would be
linen on the beds, the dining-room would be set out as for a modest banquet for some thirty persons.

  But here, of course, was only the first part of the explanation Appleby had hit upon. Yet the rest was easy. There had been a failure in the electrical system; it was being repaired and tested overnight so as not to interfere with the normal museum-like routine of the mansion; and the workmen engaged on the job were being disgracefully regardless of the elementary considerations of security.

  Appleby was much astonished that all this hadn’t come to him at once. But he had to decide what to do in the light of his discovery. His own position was more than a little odd. A landed proprietor was one thing; he would recognize, so to speak, the smell of Appleby’s tweeds. But a crowd of electricians might well take him for a cunning crook talking posh. It would be prudent not to give the appearance of having been detected by them, but rather himself to act in a decisive way at the start. Having formed this wise resolve, Appleby returned to the hall, and this time addressed the empty air from fully expanded lungs. ‘Is there anybody around?’ he shouted – and was astonished and gratified by the racket he thus produced. The sound-waves positively bounced about the marble walls and alabaster columns like a ball on a pin-table. But the uproar died away without effect. None replied. Only Appleby had the impression that one of the staring gentlemen in wigs had assumed a stony expression (in every sense), as if deprecating so vulgar and gross an outcry.

  He had, of course, misjudged the dimensions of the place. That was it. The workmen were in some corner of it too remote for hearing. Indeed, supplying the load of electricity which might be consumed by so large a house probably needed an installation so substantial as to occupy a small building of its own. His only course was to explore further. This time, he left the hall on the side opposite the drawing-room, and found himself confronted by the principal staircase of the house. It was a wooden staircase, light and graceful except for stout newels, and with consoled step-ends delicately carved. Robert Adam’s own, Appleby told himself – and reflected, fleetingly and learnedly, that he would bet a dozen bottles of claret on the house-architects having been the elder Brettingham and the younger Paine. But for this kind of leisured connoisseurship (for which he had rather a weakness) the time was not apposite. He skirted the staircase, which there seemed no call to ascend, and tried another door. It took him into a large bedroom.

  There was nothing surprising in this. It had been a Georgian habit to have a single master-bedroom, together with certain ancillary chambers, on the principal floor. And here they were. As he had foretold, there was a fully made-up bed on view. It was even turned down, and a pair of men’s silk pyjamas were laid out upon it. Appleby felt this to be going a bit far. The effect was as of the service of the dead as it is found in certain Egyptian tombs. Less exotically, it was rather as Queen Victoria had insisted on things being ordered and disposed for the personal comfort of her deceased Consort. Only for Prince Albert, Appleby supposed, it would have been not pyjamas but a night-gown and nightcap… Appleby found that he was looking no longer at the pyjamas but at the centre of the lower half of the bed. Surely that small hump just distinguishable beneath the eiderdown quilt could speak of only one thing? Swiftly – but not without a childishly apprehensive glance over his shoulder – Appleby thrust a hand within the sheets. There was not a doubt about what it encountered. It was a hot-water bottle. And the hot-water bottle was hot.

  This time Sir John Appleby (JP, and lately retired from the position of Commissioner of Metropolitan Police) was really shaken. What could have persuaded him – just because he had fondly supposed there to be something odd about this house – thus to barge in upon the bed-chamber of what appeared to be a single gentleman obviously moving in the upper reaches of society? Appleby felt rather like Goldilocks when she began to apprehend the possible arrival of the Three Bears.

  He retreated hastily, and with a distinct sense that he had better begin to think. Ever since his car came unstuck, he had been doing little more than doze comfortably along. There is something relaxing in a crisis that one knows perfectly well to be no crisis at all; in a minute disturbance of expectation or routine which will certainly do no more than keep one an unwonted two or three hours out of bed. But he wasn’t too sure now that he hadn’t stumbled upon something of a different order. And he didn’t really and truly believe that it was either a bears’ den or a mare’s nest.

  3

  Next to the big bedroom was the dining-room – although some small connecting apartment had been converted into a bathroom and corridor in recent years. Here, too, was a very rational eighteenth-century disposition of things. The footmen, one supposed, had only this short distance to transport their master at the conclusion of the evening’s convivialities. Equally, the transit would be feasible, in a hobbling way, during an otherwise incapacitating attack of gout. But Appleby was less struck by these considerations than by the spectacle the room presented to his view. The dining-table, although it had been abbreviated to its minimum number of leaves, was still very large and long. And – again as he had predicted – it had been set out for a meal. Only – and quite contrary to his expectation – it was a meal for a single person. And a real meal.

  Quite a simple real meal. The silver and the crystal were there, but it was their quality and not their quantity that might impress. Six candles – and they hadn’t been burning long. A decanter of what might be madeira, with an appropriate glass. One other glass, for champagne. And – iced in a bucket – a bottle of champagne. There was cold food on a side-table. There were covered dishes on an electric hotplate. Momentarily, Appleby had to resist the conclusion that this feast had been set out for him. Then he remembered how Goldilocks had sat down to the porridge.

  But somebody was expected. Of this there could be no doubt at all. And – once more – it might all be very simple. The person entitled to sup in this way was expected to arrive very late, or rather very early. The servants had been instructed not to wait up. They had simply retired to bed in some distant region appropriate to their quality.

  This all made sense – if somewhat eccentric sense. But not that open front door. The Claude, and much else, might by now have been fifty miles away in a burglarious van or pantechnicon. Even if an employer had given so absurd an instruction, no responsible servant in such an establishment would have done more than pretend to concur with it, and somebody would have been set to keep an eye on things in a quiet way. Already, in fact, Appleby would have been embarrassingly apprehended. The whole thing remained an enigma still.

  Appleby considered finding a telephone and calling the local police. They would at least tell him where he was. But then – having received so strange a report or enquiry – they would themselves arrive in no time, and the resulting situation would be awkward and absurd. Perhaps he could ring the telephone exchange, announce that he had suddenly lost his memory, and demand to know not only where he was but who he was. But this idea was merely frivolous. He dismissed, at least for the time being, any notion of having recourse to the telephone.

  But there must be other means of discovering at least some relevant information about this dispeopled, yet mysteriously waiting and expectant house. He remembered the library he had seen through French windows from the drive, and it struck him as a likely source of knowledge. That had been in one of the wings – the one on the drawing-room side. He would find, and make his way down, the quadrant corridor leading to it. In a house like this it would probably be known as the private wing, and that on the dining-room side would be the kitchen wing, which was quite likely to contain servants’ quarters also. It might be as well to make his way there first, and do a little more shouting.

  The first of these expeditions – kitchenwards – was entirely negative in its results – except, indeed, that a large number of small empty rooms on an upper storey presented a puzzling suggestion of the present non-existence of any domestic staff at all. But the library was more interesting. It proved to be a ro
om of moderate size, furnished for comfort rather than ostentation. The impression was enhanced by the fact that, behind a large glass screen, a bright wood fire was burning on the hearth.

  These appearances were ceasing to be surprising, and Appleby merely reflected that here was the source of that column of smoke. What was much more significant for his present purpose was a large eighteenth-century topographical engraving hanging above the fireplace. It represented, without a doubt, the building in which he now stood. He walked over to it, and found that it bore an inscription in flowing and much-embellished copperplate. This read:

  Ledward Park

  The seat of Augustus Snodgrass Esquire

  Although somewhat surprised, Appleby reflected that an Augustus Snodgrass had a perfect right to existence outside the covers of Pickwick Papers. Perhaps Dickens had borrowed the name from a family tomb in the neighbouring parish church. The name Snodgrass, indeed, suggested itself as having been that of a citizen rather than a member of the ancient nobility of the realm. But plenty of eighteenth-century city men had bought or built themselves houses quite as grand as Ledward Park. Appleby hoped that the family still flourished, and that he would make the acquaintance of some member of it soon. He was beginning to feel that he was spending altogether too lonely a night. But perhaps he could gather a little more information first.