The Echoing Stones

by Celia Fremlin

  “And it seemed so rude, just to go off without her,” Joyce lamented. “After she’d made such a kind offer, I mean. And anyway, it’s nearly three miles, and the last bus gone long ago. And besides, she seemed just about to go all the time. I mean, she’d fetched her coat from the bedroom and said what a lovely party it had been – all that sort of thing – and then kept getting into conversation with yet another person about yet another marriage break-up. You know how it is.”

  Arnold didn’t, of course. Being a car-driver himself, he was more familiar with the other side of the coin – the wearisome rounding-up of his allotted passengers and dragging them away from their drinking and chattering at what seemed to him a reasonable hour.

  Still, he saw the point, and certainly Joyce was being abjectly apologetic about it all.

  “I feel awful. I never meant Flora to have to stay so late. I told her I’d be back by midnight at the latest, didn’t I, Flora? It’s all my fault, It’s entirely my fault. If I’d been back by midnight, none of it would have happened!”

  It would, actually. That is to say, the aspect of the night’s doings which seemed to Arnold to be most reprehensible would have been unchanged. It had happened well before midnight, and Flora wasn’t even apologising for it. On the contrary, she seemed to be glorying in her bit of mischief-making – or her good-Samaritan act, if you chose to look at it that way.

  “At a little before ten,” she explained, “just when Family Fortunes was coming to an end, Sir Humphrey (who had gone to bed well before nine) came stumbling into the living-room in a great state of distress. Something was going on in the dungeon, he declared, he’d heard a child crying. He’d known all along that that was where the child was imprisoned, and tonight was the only chance to save him, while the guards were at their merry-making.

  “He seemed to have got Joyce’s party mixed up in his mind with some party the guards had gone to. Well, of course, there aren’t any guards there now, I know that – he must have been half asleep and kind of dreaming – but anyway, he was so terribly upset. And of course there might have been a child somewhere, lost or something, he might really have heard a child crying – and so I thought the only thing to do was to go and look, and set his mind at rest. It was a job to get him even to put some warm clothes on, he was in such a frantic state, but anyway, we managed it, and off we went.

  “The dungeon, when we got there, was all dark and silent. I crawled along by the parapet to peer through that bit of grating, but of course it was pitch dark, I couldn’t see a thing. It was all dead quiet, I was quite sure there was no one in there, and I told him so. But he still wasn’t satisfied. We must go inside, he insisted, we must explore the whole place properly, every corner; he was sure that the baby was hidden there.

  “‘There are secret places down there,’ he whispered, ‘that no one knows about, only I know. I’ve got to get in, I’ve got to!’

  “That meant the keys, of course; and I thought that even you, Arnold, would let us borrow them for a few minutes when you saw how distressed he was. But when we got to the flat, you were in the bath, for God’s sake; and so I thought the simplest thing – I mean, it would save a lot of aggro – if I just borrowed them for a few minutes, and then put them back before you noticed. I knew where you kept them – under your pillow. But – Bloody hell! – they weren’t there! You’d even taken them into the bloody bathroom with you – I couldn’t believe it! How paranoid can you get? I was just going to bang on the bathroom door and ask you what-the-hell, when I suddenly noticed that Sir Humphrey was smiling. He’d flopped down on the bed and was looking utterly peaceful and relaxed, as if nothing had happened.

  “‘What baby?’ he asked me, he seemed to have forgotten the whole thing. It must have been just a dream he’d had after all. And can you wonder, after all those rotten pills they stuff down him. He was terribly tired and sleepy by this time, it was all I could do to get him off your bed and out of the flat. Though he was better once we got outside. He loves the stars, you know, and they were very bright tonight. A huge very brilliant one was just coming up over the trees; he said it was Sirius, and I daresay it was. He knows so much, you know, his head is full of thousands of fascinating facts. He has a strange kind of wisdom …”

  Just above the trees. At eleven o’clock at night in early October. It probably was Sirius. The old man had been right, had even remembered the name correctly. The shattered fragments of a once-powerful intellect still jarred and rattled against the bones of his skull, locking and interlocking more or less at random: sometimes making contact, sometimes passing one another like ships in the dark night of his mind.

  A strange kind of wisdom, Flora had called it. A bloody nuisance others, less enchanted, might have felt to be a more apt description, particularly those who had been deprived of a night’s sleep by the old man’s antics. Thank goodness he was back in his own bed now, and asleep by all accounts; Joyce had been up to check on him only a few minutes ago, and had come down, yawning, to report that all was well.

  “Just one of his turns,” she explained, her face smudged with tiredness and with the remaining traces of rarely-used and inexpertly applied eye-shadow. “It won’t happen again, not tonight anyway. He’ll be as good as gold for several days now, you’ll see. I’m terribly sorry, Flora, it had to happen while you were here. What a piece of rotten luck!”

  Was it merely rotten luck, Arnold wondered? Or had Flora, in her superior wisdom and psychiatric insight, omitted to give him the regular sleeping-pill that had been prescribed for him by his unregenerate, non-holistic, non-alternative doctor?

  They would never know; and Arnold for one had no intention of finding out. Not now, anyway. All he wanted now was to go home and try to get at least an hour or two of sleep before the day’s work began.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Arnold had promised himself a good long sleep during his free time this afternoon to make up for his broken night; but it was not to be. The Magic and Witchcraft ladies who had undertaken to conduct the tour this afternoon had let him down. And at the very last moment. They’d got it down for next Thursday, not this Thursday, the one with the shrill voice protested when, with the crowds already gathering, he’d rung to ask why they hadn’t arrived? He’d got it all quite, quite wrong, the voice informed him, shriller than ever with the sheer Tightness of her case. This Thursday was their Bring and Buy Sale, hadn’t he had their notice?

  As it happened, he hadn’t. Nor could he imagine what saleable commodities witches might be expected to Bring, let alone Buy. Toads, perhaps? Love-philtres? The R.S.P.C.A would be after them in respect of the first; the Drug Squad in respect of the second. Still, it wasn’t his problem. What was his problem was the guided tour, for which he had made no preparations, and for which he felt hopelessly disinclined, so weary was he, so stupid with lack of sleep.

  Luckily, today’s crowd was an orderly one, noses in guide-books, and all earnestly trying to relate what they saw in front of them with what was portrayed on the printed page. Arnold knew he wasn’t being as helpful as he should be, he was hurrying them through, short-changing them in the matter of spicy little anecdotes. He even missed out his well-rehearsed and ever-popular demonstration of the manner in which people of quality ate their meals in the sixteenth-century; with knife only, and using the left hand where nowadays we would use a fork.

  Mercifully, there were no school parties. The worst he had to suffer was an amateur know-all agog to put him right about the probable date of Mary Tudor’s brief sojourn here; in the spring of 1551, or thereabouts, Arnold reckoned. It was debatable, he knew, but he felt an enormous disinclination to debate it with his balding, bespectacled interlocutor, with his sheafs of notes and his plethora of quotes from here, there and everywhere.

  “You may well be right, Sir,” seemed the quickest way out of it; but of course the last thing his opponent wanted was this sort of quick and effortless victory. He wanted a long, slow one, allowing him to deploy his assembled
evidence to best advantage, albeit to the mounting boredom of his fellow-tourists. In the end, there seemed no option but to let the man have his say, and to make up the lost time afterwards.

  “Why ain’t the tortures working?” demanded an outraged small boy as Arnold tried to hustle the throng through and out of the dungeon in record time; and echoing the child’s complaint, the young woman who seemed to be his mother added:

  “And what about the ghost? We had the ghost last time. A proper demonstration. It says on the notice PHANTOMETRY DEMONSTRATIONS DAILY.”

  Needless to say, this was no part of the official guide. The Magic and Witchcraft ladies must have pinned up the notice the last time they were here. However, not wishing to find himself in trouble under the Trades Description Act, Arnold gave a brief and very flat précis of the standard legend – disappointing, obviously, to those who were thrilled by hauntings, and boring to those who weren’t – and then shooed the whole lot of them, as briskly as politeness admitted, up the stone steps and out into the open air.

  By the time he had cleared up the odd bits of litter and locked the heavy door, the Tea Room was already closing, and Flora arrived at the flat only a few minutes after he did, the usual plastic bag full of money swinging casually from her wrist. He had quite given up complaining about this. What was the use? By making a fuss about this sort of thing he had nothing to gain and everything to lose. For he had begun to realise that his daughter, despite her annoying ways, was fast becoming indispensable to him. If she were to walk out in a huff, where would he ever find another helper in the Tea Room so efficient, so hard-working, and so willing to receive such minimal remuneration?

  Dropping the load of money carelessly on the floor, with a nerve-shattering din of clashing coins, Flora kicked her shoes off and threw herself onto the settee with a theatrical sigh of weariness. Well, to be fair, she might actually be weary. She’d had at least as broken a night as he had had; though of course she’d slept in in the morning until he didn’t know what time. After he’d gone out, anyway.

  “Had a good day, Flora?” Chat about the Tea Room seemed a safer subject than any post-mortem about last night’s traumas. Surely by now, Flora must have realised that the old man really was mad, and that all her amateur efforts to alleviate his condition by encouraging his delusions were worse then useless. Downright dangerous, in fact. For him, Arnold, to hammer in this lesson would assuredly be counter-prodictive. Flora was no fool. Far better to leave her to assess for herself the implications of last night’s events. Since when has “I told you so!” engendered any useful dialogue?

  “I told you so!” exclaimed Flora, brushing aside her father’s tactful query about her day for the red-herring that it was. “I told Joyce, too, over and over again – I told both of you that these tranquillisers and things were damaging him, and last night you saw it for yourselves! He was so confused, he couldn’t even remember what he’d come to the flat for! I only hope Joyce has learned her lesson!”

  She probably had. She was probably, right now, ringing up the doctor to ask if she might increase the dose of tranquillisers, in view of her father’s exceptionally disturbed state?

  Such are the diametrically opposite lessons which can be learned from precisely the same data. For a moment, Arnold felt a huge hopelessness, not just about himself and his daughter, but about the whole wrangling, disputatious world. In spite of his resolution not to make matters worse by starting an argument, he could not resist taking a stand on the side of common sense. He pointed out, in careful and reasoned terms, some of the facts that Flora seemed to be ignoring. Such as that Sir Humphrey’s mental deterioration had long pre-dated the administration of the tranquillisers; and, most importantly, that this medication was not designed merely to make him less troublesome to his attendants, but was for his own protection.

  “You see, Flora, if his fantasies were just simply inside his head: if he just sat about harmlessly dreaming of unreal situations, there might be no harm in encouraging him. But it’s not like that. He’s more and more beginning to act out his fantasies, and it’s going to get him into terrible trouble one of these days. Do you realise that was a real sword he was brandishing last night? He could have killed someone. He really believes that he is surrounded by conspirators who are plotting to destroy him. He truly thinks that he is living in the sixteenth century.”

  “How do you know he isn’t?” snapped Flora – just to annoy her father, surely? “How do you know he isn’t experiencing an altered state of consciousness in which the time dimension curves back upon itself – a sort of U-bend in the space-time continuum …”

  Another bloody book! It’s quite untrue that the new generation of school-leavers are growing up illiterate. On the contrary, they seem to have an inordinate greed for poly-syllabic nonsense on the printed page. Because it wasn’t just Flora. It couldn’t be. Publishing houses expect to make big money, they need a readership running into hundreds of thousands, not just Flora. Young people all over the world must be absorbing this kind of gobbledygook. Attending exorbitantly expensive seminars on it, sitting at the feet of gurus who – terrifying thought – might actually believe what their own voices were saying.

  So no, it wasn’t just Flora, It was a whole generation. And that made it worse. No, it didn’t, it made it better, because it meant that his daughter wasn’t herself crazy. You don’t need to be crazy to follow a crazy fashion. Look at crinolines; just about the craziest and most impractical garment ever designed, and yet the women who wore it were neither crazy nor impractical. On the contrary, they had made a shrewd and entirely sane assessment of the strength of society’s demands, and the practical advantages that would accrue from adapting to them; and likewise the penalties they would incur by failing to do so. In the same way, Flora must be conscious of a need to go along with the cult crazes of her peers.

  “Did you ever see ‘Time-Warp?’” she was asking him – knowing, surely, that he hadn’t. “There was this young lawyer, you see, who believed that he should have inherited an enormous fortune from his grandfather. He – the young lawyer – had been reading up all about it, and had come to the conclusion that his grandfather had been swindled out of this fortune by a crooked business partner. If only the grandfather had had proper legal advice, the fraud would have been exposed, and he’d have got his money, and thus would have passed it on to his descendants. So he thought to himself – the young lawyer did – he thought, if only I’d been there to advise him! Next thing, through the intensity of this thought, he found himself in a time-warp, he’d gone back nearly a hundred years, and so was able to conduct the grandfather’s lawsuit with complete success. The crooked partner was exposed and given a long prison sentence, and the grandfather got the money.

  “You can guess, can you, Arnold, how it ends? The young lawyer comes triumphantly back into his own time all agog to claim his inheritance – only to find that he doesn’t exist. His father hadn’t been born, you see, because he hadn’t actually been the grandfather’s son at all. The crooked partner had been the wife’s lover all the time, and so of course when he was clapped into prison the love affair came to an end, and so …”

  Arnold listened patiently right to the end. Fictional accounts of time-travel have been two-a-penny ever since H.G.Wells, he pointed out, but fiction after all is only fiction …

  “I know it’s only a story,” Flora admitted handsomely, “but that doesn’t prove that it’s nonsense, does it? There could be a germ of truth in the idea that by thinking a thought with sufficient intensity, a person just might be able to put himself outside the time dimension, and so be able to reach back into the past and alter something …”

  “And thus run the risk of finding that he doesn’t exist!” retorted Arnold. “In fact, it wouldn’t merely be a risk, it would be a virtual certainty. Look at what they call The Butterfly Effect. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Japan, which is what the weather people tell us, then tinkering about
with even the smallest trifle in the past would be liable to wipe away the whole of the present including ourselves.”

  If he had hoped that Flora would be impressed by her father’s acquaintance with so trendy an idea as The Butterfly Effect, he was to be disappointed. She ignored his intervention, and continued with her own train of thought.

  “There is a theory,” she pointed out – and Arnold, to his annoyance, knew that there was – “That there are an infinite number of parallel universes, in each of which anything that didn’t happen in our universe, did happen in one of the others, if you see what I mean. According to that theory, the baby which Mary Tudor didn’t have in our universe, she will have had in one of the others. It’s just a matter of bringing the two universes into contact, and almost anything becomes possible. Look, Arnold, I can’t stay and argue any more,” (the cheek of it!) “I’ve got to make some more scones for tomorrow. You know what it’s like on Saturdays. And the weather forecasters threaten sunshine, too! They’ll be here in their thousands.”

  Sighing, she heaved herself off the settee, slid her feet into their espadrils and moved slowly to the door. Half way out of the room she paused, and half-turned towards him.

  “I’m pregnant,” she informed him. “Did I tell you?”

  Of course she hadn’t. She knew she hadn’t. But at least she seemed embarrassed. As she should be.

  She stayed hovering in the doorway, still with her back half-turned, but waiting for him to say something.

  But what? His immediate, uncensored feeling had been a rush of unfocused resentment – a “Why-should-this-happen-to-me?” sort of feeling, quickly to be succeeded by the realisation that it wasn’t happening to him, it was happening to Flora; at which point anger against the young man in the case took over, whoever he might be. The scruffy, good-for-nothing Trev, presumably. A good-for-nothing name, if ever there was one.