A Free Range Wife Page 7

  She went into the bedroom, which Henry referred to as “Versailles,” and hunted again through drawers and possessions, and under and in the canopied, curtained four-poster bed. Henry merry and missing was the least of it. She was worn out, unable to speak, and now had lost not only her voice but her Boswell, a virgin volume eleven of his journals left by an archeologist in the dining-room and unclaimed for two months. If she had lost it and the owner came looking for it, would she own up? Some was slow going but by and large it was smashing.

  Funny though, Henry’s reaction to the bit about self-castration she had read to him in bed last night: the German jeweller with the unrequited love for his landlady. In the end the jeweller had told her, “You bitch, you shall have it one way or the other,” and had cut it off and thrown it at her. Henry had hardly reacted at all, just a grimace and a thoughtful look. Obviously not a yarn to tickle the male ego.

  Bookless and frustrated, Miriam climbed with magazines into the four-poster, being careful first to remove the foil-wrapped chocolate mint placed dead centre of the pillow by the chambermaid after turning back the cover, and assuring herself that she did not care where Henry was so long as he stayed there and did not come to bed. But he would come to bed. He always did. When she was fast asleep he would arrive singing, turning the light on, then off, bumping into things in the dark, and shushing himself with the stifled agony of a pressure-cooker so as not to wake her. Amazed to find that she was awake, he would ask solicitously why she was not asleep, sit on the edge of the bed, and tell her about his evening. Then he would make a great clatter in the bathroom, dropping the toothpaste and singing. Then he would get into bed and announce, “I demand my marital rights though I’m not saying they have to be this minute.” He would open his book, close it, turn on his left side, and go to sleep with the light on, leaving her to switch it off.

  Miriam giggled. She started to read the ingredients for Caribbean calaloo soup, progressing as far as “one pound of calaloo, available at Caribbean markets,” which was not very far, before switching off the light and falling instantly asleep. Whether the light went on after ten minutes or an hour or longer she could not have said, but it dazzled. Henry was tiptoeing towards her across the carpet carrying a bunch of azaleas and halting, smiling uncertainly, when she opened her eyes. His hands were dirty, the knees of his trousers were smudged and damp.

  “Can’t you sleep?” he whispered.

  Miriam pulled the blankets over her head. After what seemed a long enough delay for him to have snipped the stems, stripped away the lower leaves, and arranged the flowers in vases, she felt her shoulder persistently tapped, anxious not to awaken her. When she did not awake, a hand drew the covers back from her head.

  “I brought you these,” he whispered. A soily drip dropped from the flowers onto her cheek and lay there like a beauty spot. “Begonias.”

  Miriam sat up and mouthed voicelessly.

  “They’re fresh,” Peckover said. “Do I put them in water? Don’t say anything. You must save your voice. Nod once.”

  She did not nod but neither did she remain monumentally still. While her mouth worked, telling him something, she leaned far sideways, and yet further sideways, away from the gusts of vinous breath.

  “Can’t ’ear a word,” he said.

  He walked round the bed, through pile carpet towards the bathroom, singing, “I loff Paree in ze zpringti-i-ime . . .” When there came a rush of air and a fluttering sound, and a magazine hit the carpet near his feet, he turned and watched her again telling him something. His lip-reading prowess having advanced of late, he decoded a message to the following effect: “Stop singing that horrible song! You’ve been singing it all horrible day!”

  Poor love, she’s collapsed, it’s the long hours, she’ll be all right, Peckover thought. He said, “That’s not my entire French repertoire. Don’t think I’m limited. ’Ow about this?” He drew breath, then began to bray: a jarring, vibrating sound on roughly one note.

  “No-o-ong, riang de riang, no-o-ong, je ne regrette ria-a-ang . . .”

  Braying and vibrating, he pivoted and disappeared into the bathroom, whence sounded a bang and a cry.

  “Aaaagh! Fallen in the bath!”

  Peckover’s grinning head appeared round the bathroom door. “Gave you a fright, dinnit? I ’aven’t really.” The grin slipped. “Probably will though. They ought to ’ave railings around it. Red lamps. It’s like a bleedin’ building site in ’ere.”

  She was not laughing. Normally she might have. He was not discouraged.

  “’Old on a minute. Got something for you. Don’t go away.”

  He loped from the Rob Roy Room, closing the door behind him, and leaving the light on.

  *

  This time Miriam did not fall instantly asleep. Assuming he would be back any minute, half an hour at most, there seemed little point trying. She turned the light out to discourage him when he did come back. Some hope.

  Apart from awaiting his return, she smouldered with too steady a heat to sleep. How dare he! Keeping her awake all night with his schoolboy antics, and which of them was slaving all day? She was tempted to find a sofa in a lounge to sleep on, or even the car, but he would find her and wake her up again. In any case why should she? He was the one should be sleeping in the car.

  The one move she must on no account make was to turn the key in the door and lock him out. He would start by tapping as softly as an elf. When there was no response he would gather steam and soon be rapping like a bailiff, calling to her probably in his boozy French and awakening the whole château.

  Apart from all that, Miriam failed to sleep because of noises which were faint, unextraordinary, hotel-by-night noises, interspersed with silences, but sufficient to keep her listening, awaiting the next noise. Doors closing along the passage. Doors opening. Voices. Padding feet. Half the château seemed to be awake even without rapping and singing from Henry.

  These doors, voices, toing and froing, it couldn’t be Henry in his present state, not possibly. Far too discreet, even fairy-like. She supposed he would be nicking more flowers; perhaps sawing down a pine-tree as a souvenir.

  Yet she was on the rim of sleep, perhaps had slept, when she heard the door open and felt light on her eyelids: not dazzling light but a diffused milkiness as if from an advance party of glow-worms. As she turned her head towards the door, the thought occurred that her visitor did not necessarily have to be Henry.

  After opening her eyes, Miriam opened her mouth to scream. She might have done so had she had a voice to scream with. A shapeless silhouette of God knew what filled the doorway. Light percolated from the corridor.

  Martians, Blobs, Things from the Deep, all such supernatural horrors had never exercised Miriam’s imagination, not anyway since the common nightmares of childhood. But here was an apparition so shocking in its suddenness that she believed she would have been unable to scream even had she had a voice. In those instants, the closest she came to forming an idea of what it was she gazed at, if it existed, if this were not her first nightmare since childhood, was of a black, dead, phantom Henry on horseback.

  Henry had never been on a horse in his life. Was it a horse? It was more mule-sized and with jagged horns. Her eyes coping better with the half-dark, Miriam saw that part of the shape was moving.

  “It’s a stag party!” called the shape. “Watch! We’ve got wheels! ’Ere we come!”

  The moving parts were his knees, which bent as he dug his toes into the carpet. His legs straightened, and the shape, increasingly three-dimensional, launched into the room, moving briskly for two or three metres but equally abruptly coming to a stop, bogged down in shagpile.

  “Sod. It’s like bicycling across the Sahara.” He was wearing his hat but no jacket. ‘We’re on wheels, did you know? Wheels or castors. Watch. Gee up, Rudolph!”

  He pushed with his feet. Beast and rider ploughed through the carpet. Another double-footed thrust kept up the momentum.
Miriam, unamused, sat upright in the four-poster, her knees raised beneath the covers, thumping them with her fists. Rudolph, travelling well, struck his nose against the south-east bedpost. The bed shuddered, the rider jolted forward, an antler tilted his hat.

  “Whoa, boy!”

  Miriam failed to utter a cry of fury but she threw the bedcovers aside.

  “It’s tomorrow’s menu, save you a trip to the market,” Peckover said. “Venison farci.”

  Miriam stormed round the end of the bed. Unable to voice her opinion, she started thumping Peckover. His hat fell off. He dismounted on Rudolph’s further side, out of range. His folded jacket, which had served as a saddle, slid to the floor. Miriam, in pursuit, thumped Rudolph’s rump.

  “Whoa, girl! Cruelty to animals!” Peckover backed, outstretched arms warding off her tiny blows. “Moose-n’t be cruel to dumb animals. Comprenny? Moose-n’t—wait, no, not that!”

  At the second attempt, Miriam succeeded in goal-kicking his fallen hat high and far. They watched it soar across the Rob Roy Room. In the doorway, looking in, stood a petite, pretty woman in a filmy peignoir with lace at the neck and shoulders. Her eyes were wide, her mouth slightly open, and she carried a fat, rolled-up eiderdown as if in search of a place to bed down. The room and its inhabitants on which she gazed did not appeal. Observed, she scurried away, leaving the doorway empty.

  Miriam seemed unnecessarily upset. All his lip-reading achieved was, improbably, “Housekeeper.”

  “Housekeeper? What about it?”

  Miriam ran and slammed the door.

  “Can’t see,” Peckover said, groping in search of lights and walking into Miriam.

  She flailed at him. Retreating, protesting, gasping, laughing, Peckover backed into a door, found a handle, and made an exit. Someone had turned the lights out and left behind a smell of soap and cologne. He was in the bathroom.

  He turned on the light, then the bathtaps. Now, Peckover reluctantly supposed, was probably bedtime. Just when he was enjoying himself.

  Odd creatures, women. You never could tell whether they were going to see a joke or not. Water gushed into the streamlined, sunken bath. After watching and considering for some minutes he experimentally pressed a lever. The plug plunged into place.

  He soaped and sang, but softly. Once she had told him he had a nice singing voice. A light baritone, had she said? Bel canto? Largo al factotum rallentando? She must have said it during an affectionate phase. Not like tonight.

  Women’s Lib had much to answer for. Things never the same since. Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, all those girls, stirring things up, confusing everyone.

  “Girls were made to loff and kee-e-ees,” Peckover sang with bravura, soaping and giggling.

  He had brought her begonias too. And Rudolph. Hurt, he pouted into the face-flannel. Ah well.

  Towelled, pinkly steaming, bare-bottomed, mouth aglow with viridian Close-Up, or Très-Près as this version insisted on having it, he felt his way through cossetting shagpile, round Rudolph—“G’night, boy”—and up and into the four-poster. Miriam turned away.

  “Gawd, what’s that?” Peckover turned on the bedside light. He groped beneath him. “Bugger. Sat on my mint.”

  He drew forth and held to his eyes a flattened disc of foil out of which had squelched, was squelching still, chocolate and white mint filling. Stickiness was on his fingers and under him. A glistening white glob decorated with a brown flake fell into the hair on his chest.

  He was wondering what he was expected to do about all this, whether for a start he was going to need a second bath, when someone screamed in the passage.

  Chapter Six

  Whether the scream sounded outside their room, in which case it was half-hearted, or further along the passage, or in a different passage altogether, or on a stair or in a remote room, in which case it must have been full-throated for them to have heard it at all, neither Peckover nor Miriam could have said.

  Neither would either have sworn under oath that scream was the word. Cry they might have accepted. A protracted yelp? A squeal? But high-pitched and therefore, unless falsetto, probably female, females being anyway more prone to scream than males, perhaps more frequently having cause.

  Peckover and Miriam, sitting up, looked at each other, and towards the door. They were aware that while they sat and looked, time was wasting. No built-in policeman’s trigger mechanism impelled Peckover like a bullet out of bed. Damn, damn, damn, he brooded. Had he been a quantity surveyor or an archivist on holiday from the British Museum he might fairly reasonably have stayed where he was. No one would have thought much the worse of him.

  He lost a further five seconds putting on one of the bathroom’s pair of bathrobes: a too-small, satiny garment with the château’s logo of inverted ice-cream cones on the back. He felt like a professional wrestler. Mighty Marty the Mordan Mauler. He was tempted to rinse chocolate mint from his hand, which would have lost five more seconds. He hastened through the bedroom and into the passage.

  The passage was dimly lit and deserted. Not a sound. Anyone sleeping, as most guests presumably were, might well have slept through the scream. Equally, they might have been archivists or similar and good luck to them.

  Peckover was reasonably sure the scream had been to his left, northwards, roughly. The more he considered, the stronger his impression that what he had heard had been full-blooded and distant rather than half-hearted and to hand; though it might have been nearby if muffled by—what? Cupboard doors? A mattress? As he set off along the corridor the next door along opened and an elderly white head in a hairnet appeared. On seeing the Mordan Mauler bearing down, the eyes closed tightly, the head withdrew, the door shut. As Peckover passed, the door was alive with metallic sliding of bolts and turning of keys.

  On the landing he hesitated. The passage continued on the far side of the landing. The lift in which he had ridden with Rudolph was in the passage which led off at a right angle. Here were stairs up and down. On the handrail of the polished banister he observed an unacceptable, cerise smear of paint. There were tubs of flowers, pedestals bearing busts of Romans or Scotsmen, a chandelier, and the Ricketts, if he remembered the name rightly, standing in night attire in the doorway of the Gleneagles Suite.

  “Hi,” Mr. Rickett said.

  “Hullo there,” said Mrs. Rickett. The bodice of Peckover’s dancing partner’s night-gown was cut startlingly low. “You heard it?”

  “An owl.” Peckover bestowed a reassuring smile. “One of the Mordan owls. The rutting season, you know?”

  “Rutting season?”

  “Fledglings. Throstlings. Please, back to bed. Everything’s all right.”

  He trod barefoot across the landing and into the passage opposite: past a door which said Burns, as if awaiting casualties from a fire, but too tardily to pass the next door before it opened to reveal, above striped pyjamas buttoned to the neck, a bald head and blinking eyes. On the nose were purplish pinch-marks of spectacles but no spectacles.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est, alors?”

  “We think it’s owls. Hiboux.” Peckover was delighted with hiboux, recollected from fourth-form French as one of a handful of words taking x in the plural along with bijou, genou, probably frou-frou, and others he had forgotten. Probably an entire term had been spent learning them. “Back to bed, sir, please. Au lit. Dormez. Everything ça va.”

  “Everything ça va okay along there?” Mr. Rickett called. He stood in the mouth of the passage holding the hand of Mrs. Rickett.

  The other way, deeper along the passage, Peckover heard a door open. Jean-Luc with a flustered expression, one hand tying his tie, looked out. He saw Peckover and shut the door.

  I’ll fluster you, thought Peckover. He reached the door as the bolt slid home. At least the bugger was alive. He knocked.

  “Hello? Allo? Monsieur?”

  Silence. Peckover knocked again. “Momento, s’il vous plaît. Monsieur Fontanille? Open up pleas
e.”

  More silence.

  Isle of Skye, read the plaque on the door.

  I’ll sky you. I’ll kick your arse across the sky if you don’t open, Peckover fumed. Who did he, everyone, think he was? He kept up the knocking. If the whole château was not awake already they soon would be. He was aware of white at the far end of the passage. The white was the petite one. Was it? The looker with the lacy peignoir and eiderdown who had watched Miriam’s hatkicking. She had rid herself of the eiderdown but she was too slow if she wanted to be rid of foreign coppers. Though she stepped round the end of the passage he reached her in five strides.

  “Evenin’. Name’s Peckover. ’Usband of your cook, Miriam, if that ’elps. Bit of a circus going on here, wouldn’t you say? You’ll be Madame? . . .”

  “Comment?”

  “The housekeeper, right? Gardienne de la maison. Speak English?”

  “Non.”

  “Yes you do, some, ’ousekeeper in a pub like this. There was a scream. Un cri. Where? Don’t say ‘comment?’”

  “A scream. Is possible. Not know where.”

  Possibly she did not. She was as white as her peignoir and trembling.

  “You all right?”

  “All right.”

  “Who’s in your Isle of Skye Room?”

  “Not know.”

  “Mrs. McCluskey, where does she sleep?”

  “Not here. In Mordan.”

  “She must stay sometimes. Which is Mr. McCluskey’s room?”

  “He in Hong Kong.”

  “I didn’t ask that. Where’s he sleep when he’s here?”

  “East wing. Other side château.”

  “Here it’s all guests, is it?”

  “Oui.”

  “’Ow many at the moment?”

  “Twelve, fifteen. Is early. Season start next—”

  “So you’ve plenty of spare rooms?”

  “Oui.”

  “What’s through there?”

  “Staff.”

  “Show me.”