The Echoing Stones

by Celia Fremlin

  Val gave a short laugh, as well she might, for “Listener” was something of an over-statement. In Gordon’s company, what Mildred was doing was not so much listening to him as enjoying his level of satisfaction with his own discourse, bolstering it wherever she could with bright little platitudes.

  But perhaps this is being a good listener? Tentatively, she put this to Val: but was not too much surprised at Val’s robust response.

  “You mean he likes the sound of his own voice!” she pointed out. “And you let him get away with it! Oh, Mills, will you never learn?”

  Learn what? To stand up for your own tastes and opinions was what Val meant, of course; not to defer to the tastes and opinions of some man.

  But what Mildred had actually learned, over many long decades, was that by deferring to the man in your life over absolutely everything that doesn’t matter much to you – as the transporting of tapestries across Piedmont in the sixteenth century didn’t matter to her – you can enjoy a peaceful and pleasant association with almost any man almost indefinitely. Though of course when something crops up that really does matter to you, such as Arnold’s mad change of career …

  She tried to explain this distinction to Val, handsomely admitting that she shouldn’t have succumbed to Arnold’s wishes on this occasion; but in the case of ordinary, unimportant things …

  But Val wasn’t having any.

  “That’s the whole point, Mills!” she cried, thumping the arm of her chair with her fist until the dust flew. “By giving in to a man over what you call the unimportant things, year in and year out, you make it impossible for yourself to stand up to him about anything. You will have had no practice; you don’t know how to do it. It’s like trying to fly an aeroplane without first taking flying lessons.”

  Since the last thing Mildred wanted to do was to fly an aeroplane, and would never have dreamed of taking flying lessons, the simile was not well-chosen. But Val continued, regardless:

  “And that’s why I’m so worried for you, Mills, when I see you walking into exactly the same old trap with this Gordon fellow! You shut your eyes to the fact that he’s a pretentious windbag who doesn’t care if he’s boring the pants off you …”

  “Oh, but Val!” Mildred couldn’t help remonstrating. “When he came to dinner that time, you seemed …”

  But what Val had seemed was evidently no longer relevant, for she silenced Mildred’s protest with another thump on the chair arm; the dust flew in specks of gold around the reading-lamp.

  “I’ve warned you before, Mills, and I’m warning you again. He’s after something. He’s softening you up ready for the kill.”

  A rather mixed metaphor, but the general drift was clear enough. Mildred was puzzled rather than alarmed, and in a small way reassured. After all, a man who is “after something” isn’t so likely to be bored.

  “What sort of thing, Val?” she asked, genuinely curious; and Val – who had obviously been thinking about it on the quiet – was ready with her answer.

  “If you ask me, I think he’s a professional con man. I think he’s planning to steal something from your Emmerton Hall. Something really pricey, and next thing you know, he’ll be selling it in Japan or somewhere for millions and millions of dollars. I’ve heard the Japanese are crazy about Western antiques, God knows why, and money means nothing to them, and so Bob’s your uncle.”

  Well, no, Bob wasn’t quite her uncle, not on this wholly speculative evidence anyway.

  “But why me?” she enquired. “Even if what you say was true, which of course it isn’t, how could I be any help to him?”

  “How? Why, by knowing the ropes. By having lived in the place all those weeks, so that you know the routine inside out. You know the times when your husband does the locking-up – the order in which he does it. You know where he keeps the keys, I daresay. And Gordon knows, by now, what a muggins you are, he could worm all the information he needs out of you without you even knowing he was doing it! Look at that crazy business with the sheep’s skull! A woman who can be taken in by that could be taken in by anything, he must have thought. And another thing, Mills. You remember how he picked you up on that bench in the park, and you assumed it had all happened by chance? Well, looking back at it, I don’t believe for a moment that it was only chance. I think he’d seen that bit in the local paper about you and Arnold being about to start a new career at Emmerton Hall, with a picture of both of you. Remember? LIFE BEGINS AT SIXTY was the caption.”

  Indeed Mildred remembered. It had upset her very much at the time. “Life Begins at Sixty,” right under the picture of both of them. It implied that she, as well as Arnold, was turned sixty, and she wasn’t. She was only fifty four. It was enough to upset any woman.

  But Val was still following her own train of thought.

  “My guess is, he decided then and there to scrape acquaintance with this woman who was going to care-take at Emmerton Hall, where there were so many valuable treasures. And so when he saw you handed to him on a plate – on a bench, I mean, in the park – well, we know the rest. He set himself to suck up to you, to win your confidence …

  “You must drop him Mills. You really must. You’ll be ending up in prison if you aren’t careful, for conspiracy to defraud. You won’t stand a chance with the Judge because you’re a wife who’s run away from her husband, and he’ll see that as proof of your criminal tendencies.”

  It all sounded rather exciting. Better than being dropped for being boring, anyway.

  Perhaps there was a case, though, for dropping Gordon herself? Drop before you get dropped, and save yourself the humiliation.

  How much would she miss Gordon? As a potential lover, not at all. After four successive outings, and still only that chaste kiss on the cheek, such an outcome seemed very much not on the cards; and in the mixture of relief and disappointment which this realisation caused her, she was aware that relief predominated. She was being spared yet another of those challenges that she might easily prove to be no good at.

  Companionship, then? Despite all that Val had said, and despite her own sense of inadequacy as a companion to a man of his calibre, she still nurtured a warm, secret feeling that she did, somehow, contribute something to the apparently one-sided conversations that took place between them.

  None of this could be explained to Val. Or even to herself.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said; and Val, taking this for acquiescence, launched good-humouredly enough into some general reflections on the man-woman predicament, and in particular those aspects of it to which her friend should pay special attention.

  “What does a woman of our age need a man friend for? Let’s be quite, quite frank about it,” Val urged. Not sex, that was for sure. “In our generation we’ve had sex up to here,” she declared, waving her left hand somewhere on the level of her ear. “It’s been rammed down our throats ever since we were at Primary School.”

  Although none of this abundance had formed any part of Mildred’s experience, she accepted the “we” meekly enough as the royal plural, and listened with some anxiety to what might follow from such a premise. Companionship, would it be? Even as she made the suggestion, Mildred was aware of how platitudinous the thought sounded, and how ripe for pouncing on.

  And pounced on it was.

  “Companionship, Mills? You must be joking! When I hear of a woman getting married for the sake of companionship, I just fall about! Don’t they realise that a husband keeps you away from far more companionship than he provides you with? By the time he’s decided that he can’t stand any of your relatives, and has driven all your friends away by throwing sulks every time they set foot in the house – well, quite soon you find yourself serving a life-sentence, banged-up twenty-four hours a day, two to a cell.”

  Had it really been like this for Val? And if so, was it any wonder that her fellow-prisoner had engineered his escape? Mildred opened her mouth to ask about this, but Val was still being quite, quite frank, with special reference to
Mildred’s current predicament:

  “So what do women want a man friend for? Not sex. Not companionship. Don’t kid yourself it’s either of those. No, they just want to show him off to their friends. The Look-What-I’ve-Got syndrome. Ugh!”

  Mildred shrank a little, recognising the element of truth in this diagnosis. But this wasn’t the whole truth, of course it wasn’t. But while she was still trying to assemble her thoughts on the matter, Val got in ahead of her. Well, Val had the advantage of having assembled her thoughts long ago, at many a Women’s Rights meeting, and therefore having them at the ready.

  “Any relationship with a man,” Val was declaiming, “whether inside or outside marriage, is a full-time job for which you aren’t being paid. He is basically an accessory, an advertisement for your personal charms. He’s a framed certificate of your proficiency in the sexual attraction stakes. But, Mills, don’t forget: it’ll cost you! A man in your life – any man, whether he’s a lover or not, is like an expensive and fashionable outfit in which you are either too hot or too cold, and certainly can’t move freely, or do anything at all active. So be warned, Mills! Be warned!”

  But she spoke good-humouredly, and soon the two of them were enjoying a midnight cup of cocoa, shoes off, feet up on ottoman and sofa respectively, and taking an agreeable off-stage part in a T.V. quiz show: one so stunningly elementary that even Mildred was able to call out the answer to just about everything.

  Relaxing thus on the shabby but comfortable sofa, an electric fire purring companionably alongside, it occured to Mildred that these were the bits of life she liked best: the soothing little interludes that crop up in the interstices of life’s serious activities, like little bright weeds between paving-stones, indomitably thriving in their narrow and apparently unpromising confines.

  I like things to be easy, she thought. I like everything to be well within my power. I don’t want to be stretched. I don’t want to be specially good at anything. When we first married, I thought Arnold was like that too, with his safe and unexciting job with a pension at the end of it. I went on thinking he was like that for more than twenty years.

  But I was wrong, wasn’t I? It’s not fair, she mused dreamily, when people suddenly start acting out of character. Like Arnold. Like Val dressing-up like that for Gordon’s visit after all her talk about not putting yourself out to please a man. That sort of thing. It made one wonder what sort of surprises Gordon might yet spring on her, from somewhere underneath his scholarly and imperturbable exterior?

  An unsettling thought. An un-relaxing one. Why spoil the peaceful present moment with it?

  “Someone who studies crystals!” she cried triumphantly, just ahead of Val, in answer to the question about the meaning of the word “Crystallographer”. She felt fulfilled, enriched, by this miniscule success. How easy it is to do easy things! Why can’t there be more of them?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Escaping as quickly as he could from this hideously embarrassing encounter with his wife and her new friend, Arnold fled to the dungeon, with the muttered excuse that he had to lock it up early. For three Sundays in a row he had been elaborately avoiding contact with Mildred – a task rendered easier by the fact that she was likewise elaborately avoiding contact with him. All the same, it was a nuisance. Why did she keep visiting the place like this? To come on the one occasion to collect her belongings – fair enough. Fair enough, too, to have found someone with a car to help her with transporting them. But to come again the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that – it was too much! And the thing was further complicated by the fact that her escort turned out to be an expert on sixteenth-century Italian tapestries, a man after Arnold’s own heart. He would have liked to get to know this Gordon Belfort a bit better; to invite him down, perhaps, for a special private tour of the place at a time when the public weren’t admitted. Such an occasion might prove especially rewarding since it seemed that this new acquaintance had been one of Sir Humphrey’s students many years ago; had had first-hand contact with the great historian at the height of his powers. Ever since Arnold had come here, it had been a source of abiding sadness to him that his only contact with that once brilliant mind was with its wreckage; with the shattered ruin of what it had once been. So the chance now to share the first-hand memories of one who had known the great days of Sir Humphrey Penrose would be poignantly welcome.

  But it was not to be. He’d been on the very point of issuing his tentative invitation, when he was silenced in mid-sentence by the sight of his wife stumbling towards them, clutching her handbag to her ribs as she always did when nervous. It was impossible to cultivate this new acquaintance if Mildred was to be forever at their elbows, her lamentable ignorance hanging like a dead weight over any interesting conversation. Right now, this very minute, she had succeeded in bringing a fascinating discourse to a dead stop simply by standing there, a yard or two away, clutching her handbag and not saying anything.

  How restful, how peaceful, the dungeon seemed after that awkward encounter! Even the torture implements – the rack, the thumbscrew and the Scavenger’s Daughter seemed like old friends, so quiet were they, so undemanding, and by now so familiar.

  They could do with a good rub-up, actually, the metal parts in particular which could so easily rust if left neglected for too long. Cleaning rag in hand, he visited the appliances one after another, rubbing at any trace of rust or dirt, and here and there checking the mechanisms. The school parties – little ghouls that they were – loved to see the sinister cogs and wheels stirred into slow, menacing action. “Oo-Ooh” they would breathe, awed, and giggling defensively. Sometimes one or two would cover their eyes in mock – or perhaps genuine? – horror; but whichever it was. fingers would be spread a little to allow a peep. Arnold wondered, sometimes, what the fascination was; was it really just straightforward and regrettable sadism? Or was there, perhaps, in growing children an actual physical need for experiences of shock and horror in order that the adrenal glands might develop properly? Perhaps without such early experiences the flow of adrenalin would tend to be sluggish and inadequate throughout life, a state of affairs conducive to lethargy and depression? A good and sufficient reason if true, for the breathless eagerness with which the youngsters flocked around these grim relics.

  Not that the adults were all that behindhand in their (slightly shamefaced) enthusiasm for archaic horror. Interest in the dungeon and its grisly contents had been redoubled since the Magic and Witchcraft people had been filling-in for him when he couldn’t manage one or other of the afternoon tours. The dungeon was haunted, they proclaimed, by the ghost of an old woman who had died there three hundred years ago, accused of witchcraft. She had died bravely, not pleading for mercy, but rather proclaiming her defiance to the last. “Against my will, gentlemen, ye have brought me to this place to encompass my death; and verily I tell you, against your will shall I stay here. My corporeal body ye may destroy, but my soul being deathless will live on to encompass your destruction, each and every one of you.”

  Had the destruction of each and every one of these unnamed gentlemen been encompassed? Well, each and every one of them had died in the end, that was for sure; but beyond that, nothing at all was known of any of them. Not that this lacuna in the historical evidence had deterred or disheartened the Magic and Witchcraft people in any way; evidence of their own was forthcoming in plenty. One of their number would bring with her a contraption that looked like two cocoa-tins connected by a tangle of electric wire. It was called (so the demonstrator proclaimed) a Phantometer, and it was designed to emit a low regular clicking sound if a ghost passed by within a few feet. Holding one cocoa-tin in each hand, the demonstrator would close her eyes, call for silence, and then, after the appropriate number of seconds for bringing the tension to fever-pitch, lo and behold, the clicking sound would begin: at first so soft as to be barely audible, and then becoming louder … louder … louder as the ghost emerged out of the East wall and neared the centre of the vault, where the ap
paratus was located, and then softer … softer … softer as it proceeded on its way and finally made its ghostly exit through the West Wall.

  Well, it brought in the crowds: an extra ticket for the dungeon would seem to be called for. It would bring in a most welcome addition to the afternoon’s takings; though of course on the days when Arnold took the tour himself, the customers would be sadly short-changed in respect of ghosts and other mysterious phenomena.

  No way – not for any amount of extra money – would Arnold have any truck with such nonsense. Apart from the ludicrous Phantometer apparatus, the whole story was implausible in all sorts of ways. A woman accused of being a witch in the seventeenth century would have met her death at the stake, with huge crowds watching, not in the secrecy of a dungeon. The whole point of putting witches to death was to make a public spectacle of it; a dramatic warning to any other woman whose native intelligence and intuitive skills might tempt her into being too clever by half.

  *

  Flora, of course, disagreed with this analysis; and when Arnold finally ventured back to the flat that afternoon – making sure first that Mildred and her escort were safely away – the argument started up all over again.

  “How do you know that the Phantometer thing is all nonsense?” she demanded. “All you mean is that you don’t see how it could work. Well, I don’t understand how a laser beam works, operating on eyes and things, but I don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that it’s all nonsense, and that these operations must always fail.”

  True enough. Arnold didn’t understand how laser beams worked either. He tried to explain to his daughter that, faced with some bit of technology you don’t understand (and there are more and more such, with every passing year, for even the most knowledgable of laymen) you simply have to accept the judgement of the experts in the field. That’s what experts are for – to present to the layman conclusions that have been arrived at through immensely complex precedures and trains of reasoning.