The Antique Dealer's Daughter

by Lorna Gray

  Actually, there were two things I could tell. The first was that she didn’t have a very nice way of repaying the way everyone tended to be kind to her. And they did it without seeming to like her very much either.

  I also could tell that she was only prepared to allow a discussion on her old life amongst the barrow boys of the London East End in that it gave her a chance to return to a discussion of those squatters.

  ‘Sweet of you, Emily, dear,’ she remarked with the crisp elocution that comes from superior schooling at an early age, ‘to imply that I rank amongst the Freddys of this world as an evacuee but actually my old home was levelled years ago for a new gas works. But if it’s Londoners you want, you’ll find this place feels even more like home soon. There’s a whole bunch of émigrés in a camp a mile or two away at the old air-raid look-out station on the Gloucester road.’

  Her little conversational turn was so neatly done it made me smile. I understood at last why she’d been so keen to talk about Freddy. His origin would have brought us to this point if my comment about hers hadn’t.

  I was standing with my back to the cast-iron stove leaning against the rail that dried the dishcloth. Mrs Abbey’s attention didn’t enjoy the subject of the squatters for long. Her mouth was already running on to fresh sympathies for the old Colonel and his prolonged absence which had allowed the squatters to arrive unchecked. At least, I thought she meant to seem sympathetic. What she actually said was, ‘Silly old coward. The whole family knows how to make a mess of things, so I suppose we shouldn’t expect them to step into the breach about this. I suppose your cousin told you about young Master John Langton’s antics and passed them off as if they were just a little misstep?’

  I stilled against my prop of old metal while she added a shade sourly, ‘Everyone does it. It’s a great conspiracy of silence out of respect for the old man, but I can tell you that nothing the son did should ever be classed as forgettable. They have no right to do it to him. Master John was unreasonable, beautiful, vibrant and terrible and he gambled everything, including his life here, as if they were just counters to be won and lost. At the end, those fearsomely blue eyes—’

  ‘Mrs Abbey, don’t.’ The plea was sudden but forceful. The way that her voice dwelt on the man’s nature was almost like a caress.

  My urgent interjection came as she drew breath to start telling me about how John Langton had died. Only I already knew how he’d died. He died like anyone does losing a game they had intended to win. Unwillingly.

  She persisted, ‘Didn’t you say tonight that the man you saw was tall and dark?’

  Now Freddy’s white face was in my mind, and the way the Captain had sounded when I had unwittingly dredged up the memory for him. When I didn’t manage to formulate a reply, she added it for me. Musingly, seriously, she added, ‘Yes. Yes, you did. When you were telling Mrs Winstone that you’d seen him on the path you said that he was wearing summer clothes that were too good to belong to a farmhand, that he had black hair and was tall. Lean, was it?’ This was as I corrected her. ‘Well that’s just another way of saying tall, isn’t it? And if he should have happened to have a limp …?’

  ‘I—’

  She was sitting there with her hands spread on the table. It was the sort of manner a person contrives when they think they’re being very daring and I didn’t like it. I suppose I was easily spooked tonight. Her mistake in Mr Winstone’s house had sent all sorts of shadows racing about the room and Aunt Edna’s slightly mad collection had accompanied me all evening. I certainly didn’t need Mrs Abbey to begin conjuring the dead man’s shade from the corners again now.

  I told her more clearly, ‘I don’t want to know about it. Don’t you think it might be time for bed?’

  She didn’t take the hint. She told me with relish, ‘Master John had a physical weakness in one leg. He took a riding accident in his youth and his body never quite allowed him to forget it. Its waxing and waning was a barometer of his darkest moods.’

  I think she could tell I was about to protest rather more precisely. She turned her eyes to an ugly vase on the high shelf before she said with a different kind of eagerness, ‘Of course, if you’re about to tell me that the man on Mr Winstone’s path today didn’t have a limp and piercing blue eyes—’

  ‘You think I remember the colour of his eyes?’

  ‘— There is someone else who matches that description, who didn’t die last March. Someone who is also tall and capable and to whom, for all they say he was innocent, everyone was happy to attribute all manner of violent tendencies until young Master John’s death put it clear out of their minds …’

  Her gaze returned to me. It actually made me laugh. ‘Mrs Abbey, if you mean to hint at Matthew Croft, I have to tell you I think you’d do better to stick to the version that blames the squatters. There must be someone amongst them who matches your description of tall and dark with blue eyes.’

  For a moment I thought my tone had shocked her. Then I realised that she was just amused by my tart adoption of her idea of Mr Winstone’s attacker. It didn’t really matter what I said I thought he looked like. She knew what I’d told them at the village.

  With rather more frankness and rather less play at scandal, she asked me with a coolness that was the most authentic curiosity I’d had from her, ‘When you were with Freddy just now, did you see anything? Find anything he’ll feel obliged to tell the others?’

  Oddly enough I appreciated the honesty of this open question. She wanted to know what we had found because if Freddy lived with Matthew Croft and Freddy told him that we’d searched the spot, she knew perfectly well that the information would not be returned to her. The exclusion almost explained her visit here, except that this might have just as easily waited until the morning.

  I told her the truth. ‘We tried to look about but it was dark and more than a little unnerving. We didn’t find any great clues, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  Mrs Abbey wasn’t smiling in the lamplight. This was the real woman and she was deeply alert for something. I could feel its energy emanating from her; building in hard waves ready to break. The thought came unbidden – ready to break like anger.

  ‘Mrs Abbey,’ I began tentatively, ‘Why don’t you like Mr Croft?’

  Her gaze flickered and cooled to a wry smile. ‘I wasn’t very tactful earlier, was I? That man … well, that man is everything John Langton can’t be. He’s alive and he’s frustratingly reserved. He won’t talk about what happened, regardless of how I ask – and don’t look like you think I’m only probing for the sake of gossip because, believe me, I knew young Master John and of all the ways we could manage what went wrong, this conspiracy of silence so that we never dare to even speak his name is the worst kind of healing. There isn’t even a grave where we can lay his ghost to rest—’ Something passed across her face like a settling of control. Afterwards, her words were steadier and less inclined towards revelation. I still wasn’t allowed to know her. ‘And to crown it all, that man refuses to buy my old car that’s mouldering in my barn.’

  Her mouth plucked into amusement. I mustered a vague smile in return as I was meant to. Then she asked in her own version of my earlier hesitancy, ‘Emily, dear, tell me the truth. Did you really see as little as you declared earlier? Or are you just displaying the practical city-dweller’s approach to a drama and walking swiftly by on the other side of the street?’

  ‘Do you mean to ask if I’m minding my business in case someone minds it for me? What do you think?’

  Mrs Abbey hadn’t meant to offend. At least, I presumed not. She said benignly, ‘I think it’s very unfortunate that poor Mr Winstone can’t remember the man’s face …’

  ‘… Since that just leaves my description and I barely saw him at all.’ I finished the point for her. Foolish honesty made me add, ‘Although, I should say that I think I’d recognise him if I saw him again.’

  I didn’t expect Mrs Abbey’s demeanour to transform to decisiveness quite so abruptl
y, but it did, all the same. The change might almost have been with relief. This feeling was certainly running high. She was suddenly dragging out a wristwatch on a broken strap from a pocket. I suppose it mattered to know that I knew enough that this man might be identified and caught; in a strange way I suppose it promised safety even if this night had to be got through first. And that in itself was a clue to her real purpose here, because then she was telling me about the footpath to her little farmhouse and doing one of those funny twists people do when they mean to point out its location only to find themselves waving a hand at the impenetrable screen of a wall. This was the reason why she was here. At last I understood that she wanted to feel in control and at last I was allowed to know the reason for all this odd circular conversation that she patently didn’t really enjoy. She’d given herself a fright at the turbine house and couldn’t quite bring herself to face the long walk up a darkened path to her farmhouse alone.

  ‘You could stay,’ I offered doubtfully. ‘Unless your hus—someone will be out looking for you?’ I’d almost said husband then and saw from the way she jumped that I’d cut rather too close to that deeply private pain. For a moment she stared at me with that vacancy of expression that a person gets when they’ve been tested unexpectedly on an unhealed wound.

  Then the moment passed and she was saying with elegant amusement that was also very genuine, ‘What, will you make room for me amongst all the Welsh love-spoons? No, I’ve got to get back. It’s practically neglect as it is and if I hadn’t been foolish enough to meet with Mrs Winstone by the shop I’d have been home hours ago. The path from the ford is very overgrown—’

  ‘Let me just fetch a jacket,’ I interrupted, ‘and a torch.’

  I stood up from my lean against the stove. Mrs Abbey’s eyes followed the movement. In the lamplight, her face was wan. ‘As easy as that? You’re coming with me?’ Her voice was odd. Shaken would be the best term I had for it, as though guilt strode in on the heels of getting what she wanted.

  I pressed my lips into a hapless line. After all those musings on responsibility, this particular question didn’t even require debate. There were some things that you would agree to do without forcing a person to ask first.

  I moved past her into the hallway. She rose to follow me and seeing her afresh in a different light I was startled to perceive the faint sheen of moisture on her skin. There was an energy to her movement that had nothing to do with her endlessly shifting humour. She had that look of exhaustion where she was growing so tired of her lot that she was coming out the other side. She was very glad I’d offered to come with her. It hadn’t been temper before. I’d mistaken it. This energy came from the unpleasantness of being horribly spooked by her night-time prowling and the release of finally admitting it.

  I found the torch as I struggled into my shoes. It was jammed inside a large and genuine Grecian urn that stood beside the elephant’s foot umbrella stand in the hall. The umbrella stand was inevitably a mark of the old lady’s taste, but the urn might just have been my cousin’s. Phyllis’s war had been a rather different experience from mine.

  Having lingered silently beside me for the past five minutes while I searched, Mrs Abbey abruptly spied a different object of interest. My suitcase was standing at the foot of the stairs where I had left it many hours before. She asked in a curiously strong voice, ‘Have we driven you away?’

  I didn’t quite trust myself to reply. It was too complicated. So instead I blew out the last of the lamps and stepped out into the surprisingly well-defined landscape beneath a starlit night in August. My companion took the torch from my hand and waited while I fumbled with the key. It was an enormous thing and I had a vague suspicion my aunt had taken it, lock and door and all, from a church somewhere. I only hoped the church had been a more willing participant in the transaction than the elephant who had supplied the umbrella stand.

  The night air seemed to revive Mrs Abbey. I heard the increase in the rate of her breathing while I struggled to turn the key. With the sort of embarrassed haste that, in my experience, is commonly used when one has just found a lost object in one’s own pocket after initiating an extensive communal search, I heard Mrs Abbey say, ‘You know, I don’t really need you to come with me at all. I’m bothering you unnecessarily. I’ll just borrow the torch, if I may, and return it tomorrow if I catch you before you go. Otherwise, I’ll leave it for Miss Jones. Goodnight. I’ll be quite safe, and thank you for the company tonight.’

  She left me standing there so swiftly that I didn’t even have time to formulate a protest. Or perhaps I was relieved to believe her and let her go. The garden gate clanged shut and then I briefly saw her shadow as a darker shape against the white streak of the stone track. There was a brief flash from the torch as she found the path beside the ford and then the light was extinguished long before her shape was swallowed by the scrubby woodland at the base of the hill. Wood smoke that wasn’t from my stove hung in a silver mist on the silent valley air. The idea of darkness in this desolate place really took on a very different quality compared to the sooty gloom I had known in Putney.

  Closer by, something rustled in the dry stalks of the bean plant behind me. It made me shiver and step back in through that heavy door very rapidly indeed. What, I wondered, had she been so afraid was waiting for her out there that she’d come to find me, only to abruptly change her mind? Because she had been afraid for a while there, I knew she had. It had been the only feeling she had shared, but it had been genuine. And then the feeling had passed for her with a suddenness that had carried its own kind of violence.

  I bolted the door and checked all the windows. This house was wonderfully secure. No intruders would be working their way in here except in the same manner as the one who had lately stepped in after knocking on the front door. I shut out her visit like I shut out the night. It was, however, impossible to shut out the overwhelming sense that I had just escaped something, only I didn’t know whether the relief had really been hers.

  Chapter 6

  This new morning began with company and friendliness, where yesterday had ended with loneliness and worries. The nearby shop – and by nearby I mean at the end of a heating two-mile walk to the bus stop and beyond – stood a few doors down from Mrs Winstone’s hairdresser in a sunken lane with sheep pasture beyond. The most sinister thing I encountered in that busy place while I made the sacrifice of funds and rations for the sake of the Colonel’s lunch was the welcome offered by the shopkeeper and her mildly mildewed husband and the collection of respectable mature ladies who used the shop as a waiting room for the doctor’s house next door. They seemed to take their slice of gossip as a kind of tithe on users of the public telephone.

  Which meant in a way that it was perhaps fortunate that I failed to reach my cousin on the ward telephone at the hospital. If I had, I’d have unwittingly filled the assembled ears with enough gossip to keep their mouths working for the next few days at least. Instead, I only got to speak to a nurse, who wouldn’t even confirm that there was a Miss P Jones on the women’s ward at present. The most she would say was that the telephone trolley would be on the ward for the patients’ use at six o’clock this evening and I could try again then, which wasn’t terribly useful since sometime in the course of last night I had discovered the idea of achieving a different and more enjoyable kind of flight in the form of going down to join Phyllis today. It would be typical if it turned out that as I travelled down on the bus to Gloucester, she should be travelling up towards her home.

  I’d left my suitcase at the Manor. It would save at least part of this long walk if I decided to make the trip anyway. It was a good job too because I knew I’d never have found the courage to climb back up out of the valley otherwise. The walk back to the village on its own seemed designed for exhaustion. It was hot already and a heat haze was casting mirages amongst the tall masts of the wireless station by that bus stop. Only one car passed me on the long lane and it was fortunate that I had about a mile’s warnin
g before it came into view because, unbelievably, it nearly ran me over. It barrelled down into a dip between farm buildings like a rude black beast of a bull and sent a chip of stone flying up onto my ankle while I politely waited on the verge. Then it vanished around a bend and took the roar of its motor with it.

  I thought I’d found it parked in the massive stone barn that flanked the Manor farmyard. No one was in the village again and the farmyard had renewed its camouflage of dereliction. I’d walked that way round to the Colonel’s kitchen door after doing my duty by knocking on Mr Winstone’s door first. He wasn’t there. No one spent their days at home here.

  The long black nose of the enormous car was occupying the cusp between light and shade beneath the great gaping threshing doors of the barn. A touch to its bonnet proved that the engine was warm. Movement emerged from the depths within and it was Danny Hannis’s dog. He sauntered out from the left-hand wing of the barn. It was now that I saw that this great building was no longer dedicated to grain processing. Half of the space within was consumed by the unmistakeable profile of a shrouded steam engine. The other bay housed rusting hay rakes and implements and a very expensive modern grey tractor which looked similarly like it had already worked very hard for its keep.

  There was no sign of the man but the dog was a curious soul. He supervised me as I abandoned this dark cathedral for farming technology. He was with me when I caught the distant murmur of a voice beyond the turn of the other barn; the older one that sagged beneath the weight of its years and ranged further up the hill to meet the Manor kitchen.