The Antique Dealer’s Daughter

Chapter 7

It was easy to trace where he had been. He’d allowed himself some time, I think, to search the house before our encounter in the stairwell. The evidence implied he must have been on the point of leaving until some sudden recollection drew him to race back inside with the bang that had brought me scurrying. It occurred to me that perhaps he had left some telltale mark behind, made some error that would allow us to identify him, and that was why he had dashed back in – in a determined effort to retrieve it.

If so, it wasn’t in any of the downstairs rooms. He’d left doors swinging into the little room that opened from the wall beside the little table with the lamp on it – a library – and also the study where the telephone stood. At the swift glance I cast in through the door of each, the shelves of the library were untouched, but perhaps the bottles on the drinks trolley in the study were fewer than they had been. He had, of course, also made a thorough tour of the kitchen and helped himself to my suitcase.

The door of the kitchen was probably how he had got in. I’d bolted the front door firmly as I’d left with Freddy last night and it showed no signs of a forced entry now. I bolted it firmly once more and crept upstairs. I know why I went stealthily, as if I were myself a burglar. It was because the house suddenly felt cold and alien again and I wished I wasn’t here.

Upstairs I found a series of three or more closed doors and a long passage that served as a gallery with a further collection of doors just distinguishable at the far end. It was darker again up here and the whole place smelled of mildew and old polish.

I was being watched. Not by the balding man or any possession of his. There was nothing to indicate he’d even been up here before the moment I caught him on the stairs. Instead, my audience was the row upon row of photographs on the wood-panelled walls. Hard Victorian gazes judged me severely as I passed. The women had sharp noses and the menfolk wore unattractive beards that sat beneath the jaw. Then I was greeted by the woman from the photograph in the study downstairs, this time glamorous in her Great War wedding suit. In the next she was smiling tiredly with black hair and extraordinary deep-set eyes and a very young boy in her lap and a badly concealed bulge around her middle. The same eyes were met in the portrait that followed this tranquil family scene, but this time in a young man. Even in hand-tinted colours in this gloom, the intelligent blue gaze of her teenage son shone out of the shifting features of one who might have been designed for the life of a musician or perhaps an orator. I knew which son this was. The clue was in those eyes and the height which matched Mrs Abbey’s idea of a ghost. He was older in the next and this portrait gave an even stronger sense of the handsome face with a flair for drama, yet here I thought I could perceive a tinge of something colder, sadder. Harder. Perhaps it had been taken after the accident that had lamed him. Even so, even with the slightly defiant challenge of the supple lines of that mouth it would, I thought, have been easy to have liked him.

By contrast, the next photograph showed a different kind of man. He was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty. It came with a peculiar twist of pity that I observed how unexciting this person seemed compared to the brother who had looked so much like their mother. It proved how misleading an impression could be when it was formed purely by hearing a voice on a telephone. The present man must be older. His voice had led me to imagine a man with easy confidence and my mind had countered it by presuming he would turn out to be the sort of officer whose chin retreated into his neck just as his forehead advanced on his hairline. This young man in the photograph was neither. His brother burned; this man was subdued, a level gaze in a blandly unemotional face. He was followed by a sequence that captured the career of his father – a senior military man distinguished by an ever-increasing collection of medals – and I thought I could perceive something of a similarity between the Colonel and his older son, particularly in the set about their mouths. Neither looked like they smiled easily. Above it all I was remembering my complaint about Mrs Abbey and how hard I found it to be certain I knew who and what she really was. I suspected the same rule would apply to this man.

The floorboards at the end of the row creaked. I had drifted down the length of the gallery, to be standing just shy of the black corner where a second, narrower flight of stairs turned out of sight up to the attic floor. That sense of trespass returned violently. It carried the message that at any rate I ought to know precisely who and what the younger brother was. He was dead and the sort that left a terrible memory for his neighbours.

The thought dawned that it was not my job to find the traces left by that imposter. The air up here was not still and settled after his invasion. He was here, brooding and silent, and waiting for me to climb onwards from this unexpected encounter with the images of masters past and present. I whirled and raced for the lifeline of the telephone downstairs and the police station that could be reached through it.

I was woefully unprepared for the sudden tilt of my heart as I reached the stairs and a man emerged from the blaze beaming in through the freshly unbarred front door. His figure took form below, ascending as I prepared to race downwards.

I snatched at the banister rail. Only he wasn’t charging into the attack like a burglar. He was running his hand along the rail himself as if he had every right to be there as he climbed steadily towards me. There was a stick in his other hand. The sight forced my mind to swing violently away from the dread of a renewed confrontation with a returning imposter to a jolt that was altogether less tangible; less easily digested in the light of day. At the heart of his silhouette, I could feel he was watching me. For a second my legs actually carried me down a few more steps, as if I might attempt my own version of the wild leap down the stairs and bolt past him for the door.

Then in the next second my mind sharply observed that my appearance had surprised him just as much as he had surprised me. More than that, I saw that he had noticed my impulse to escape and was instinctively bracing himself to put out that arm to intercept it. It made him real. It made his shape become more solid. My hand tightened on the banister, snatching me to a halt where my feet weren’t quite yet ready to do the job themselves. He stopped too; or rather the instinct that threatened immediate action passed into something less intimidating as he read the manner of my appearance more clearly. And then my eyes adjusted to take in his features.

‘Emily, I presume,’ Captain Richard Langton said from his position about seven or so steps beneath me, and placed himself firmly in the land of the living. ‘Why are you up here?’

Like his portrait on the wall, the Colonel’s older son was unsmiling. Below I heard a mutter from a more aged person who was passing from the stairwell into the passage and onwards towards the kitchen. Outside, beyond the newly opened front door, a man was dragging cases out of the back of a shabby cab and stacking them on the drive.

The Captain’s steady climb reached me and I stepped aside to allow him to retain his grip on the banister. I remembered the sense of pity that had met my examination of his portrait and was disorientated by it. It stole my capacity to speak sensibly. I said in a shaken rush, ‘You’re limping. For a moment I thought—’

Later I would be forever grateful that intelligence briefly put in an appearance and checked the end of that sentence. I had been about to say that for a moment I’d thought he was his brother.

Instead, I found that he was surveying me with the sort of calm scrutiny that scorched. I imagine he saw a silly young woman in a summer frock with a pale face and standing on the stairs in a house where she had no right to be. I saw that he was a good few years older than the young man in his photograph. He didn’t tower over a person as his brother must have done, but was tall enough to have seemed nicely built had it not been for the debilitating distraction of the cane, and I had the slightly embarrassing thought that the voice on the telephone had been an indication of the presence of the real man after all. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. His ordinary single-breasted suit over shirt and tie would have done for any reasonably wealthy man of the day.

So much I grasped as he turned his attention to my question. I heard him say with creditable mildness, ‘I sprained something tangling with an idiot who was running for the same train. It’ll ease off soon enough. What are you doing up here?’

Then, sharper, ‘There’s blood on your ear.’

I put a hand up. My fingertips came away stained with a thin film, like grease. I had been bashed about the head by my case after all. The memory went through me like a bolt. Followed by the memory that I had been on my way to telephone for the police. I found that my eyes must have drifted past him onwards down the stairs at the thought because his head half turned to follow my gaze as if unsure that I wasn’t acknowledging a presence beyond him. There wasn’t anyone there, of course. His gaze slowly returned to me, watching me more closely. I imagine he was wondering if my sudden desire to move onwards was driven by the shame of snooping. I had an overwhelming urge to show him my empty hands, palms uppermost.

Instead I scrubbed away the blood on my fingers and gabbled anxiously, ‘There was a man. In this house. I was preparing your father’s lunch and he was in here. He stole my case. I’d only left it here while I went to the shop. I came through into the stairwell and he ran past me into a car – he’d been looking about the house, I think. He’d been into your library and the study. I came up to see what he’d been doing upstairs. I don’t know who he was. After what happened to Mr Winstone last night I thought, well … I don’t know. He bashed me as he took off and, as I said, he took my case.’ A hesitation before I added nonsensically, ‘It had all my clothes in.’

I had to suddenly reach past him for the banister. Not because I was in any way unequal to the distress but because my words were coming out so quickly that I ran out of breath. I found that his hand had flashed to my elbow to steady me. It was done with the same instinctive reflex that would have formerly intercepted my flight. It meant to save me from tipping head first down the stairs but it hurt too because his walking stick was trapped beneath his hand and my flesh.

Now I really was breathless. He steadied me for a moment and then said, ‘All right now?’

‘Yes. Yes, fine now, thank you.’

He let me go. I stayed propped against that vital solidity of the banister. Then he said in a tone of some doubt, ‘Did you say someone came in here to steal your bag?’

‘My suitcase, actually. It was only left in the kitchen while I went to the shop.’

‘Very well, your case,’ he amended calmly. ‘But why?’

I was calm again myself now. I turned my back against the banister and said plainly, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. He’d been in the library. And that office to the right.’ A waft of my hand. ‘I was about to go in there myself to telephone the police when you arrived.’

I saw something snap in his expression. An indefinable shift in his attention. ‘Show me,’ he said. And suddenly, uniform or no, I really was face to face with a career soldier.

The cane was dropped against the banister and the long coat that had been draped over his arm was hung there above it. There was no sign of the limp now as he went with me down to the white and black chequerboard tiles on the ground floor.

He hesitated when he reached the threshold into the room that housed the telephone. For a moment I thought he was anticipating something that waited for him in the room beyond.

I was seeing the room for the first time as he must; as a person familiar with it must, I mean. There was the same warm sunlit glow and today it cast into relief the pretty feminine décor of a woman’s drawing room that was only superficially supplanted by its later incarnation as a man’s study. This had been his mother’s room and her personal choice of paintings still hung on the wall; two landscapes in unattractive brown. My father would have loved them both. I was more conscious of the masculine touches that overlaid the woman’s tastes. They belonged to the young Master John as Mrs Abbey had called him, and they also belonged to the dread that had flooded Freddy’s face as he had approached this very same threshold last night.

It was the same memory that this was the brother’s domain that checked the man beside me now. But the Captain had better mastery of his feelings than the boy had, where calmness might manage the job better. He only asked me unnecessarily, ‘In here, you say?’

And stepped into the room.

I watched him as he surveyed the untouched surfaces and shelves of this space. I found myself recalling the photographs on the gallery wall and realising that I’d misread him there too. The idea I’d had that he was a cold, bland man beside the insatiable, charming energy of his brother was a lie. I’d read that grey portrait as calm but it was only calm if the manner of the control itself served to prove the energy of the thoughts beneath. I don’t mean to say that he displayed an unhealthy tendency for concealment. In fact, I believe it was the opposite. This was a man who had the intelligence to feel but also to take responsibility for his manners and to govern them, particularly at times like the present when a young woman had surprised him in his house.

Of course the contrast to this was the intimidating idea that instinct might be the force that unchained responsibility for him. It made me wonder if the physical part of his life in soldiering was the moment that measured reason twisted into the freedom of pure reflex. In short, I found myself wondering if he enjoyed the liberation of violence.

It was a bad moment for the Captain to turn and spy me waiting awkwardly on the threshold, fingers toying blindly with the grooved wood that framed the doorway. My mouth began to frame the tentative suggestion that perhaps he should undertake the act that had motivated my flight from the gallery upstairs and it was time to call the police. It would have marked a conclusion to my part here for both of us. Then he caught as I did the crescendo of speech in the passage behind me and beyond the stairwell. The sharp rattle of raised voices in there was accompanied by the unexpected yip as a dog barked.

In a moment he was past me, a hand lightly brushing my sleeve in encouragement to follow, and perhaps reassurance. He met the commotion in the claustrophobic gloom of the passage. I was behind him. We weren’t witnesses to another assault though. At least not one by a human. Danny Hannis was there with a captive white blur wriggling away under his arm. He must have just snatched his dog up after it had been discovered attempting to worry the old man’s ankles. The Colonel was there now beyond him, a bullish head on a short neck, who must have once stood taller than his son. He was the sort of man who in his youth must have strutted about grim-jawed with all the might of his military training, but now he was reduced to being all torso and frail limbs. He seemed to develop a list as he marched along the passage towards us to the point that his shoulder veered helplessly into a line of gin traps. He was brandishing a fist like a prize fighter. I wasn’t quite sure who he was preparing to beat: the dog or the farmhand.

The Captain curbed it all by saying quite cheerfully, ‘Hello, Hannis,’ before adding, ‘Father, do you have to announce your return by battering an estate worker?’

‘Particularly when the estate worker in question only came in to see what Miss Sutton was up to.’ Danny was not, it must be said, particularly cowed by the Colonel’s anger. Perhaps it was a common enough mood that no one here thought to take it seriously.

‘What was she up to?’ I felt the Captain’s gaze switch curiously to my face.

Danny abandoned retreat to tell him quite coolly in a tone that was rather unpleasantly man-to-man, ‘I saw her go nosing into the tithe barn and then here, and then that car dashed off.’

There was something there that uncomfortably gave the suggestion of suspicion. I tried to hide my irritation. The Captain, on the other hand, really did conceal nothing. I felt the readjustment quite plainly as he reconsidered my flight from the gallery upstairs. It made my cheeks flush quickly and hotly since, on the subject of behaving oddly, Danny was rather more guilty than I, given the fact he must have been hiding in the machine barn while his dog had escorted me on my way.

I told Danny, ‘In which case you’ll be interested to know I thought I was looking for Mrs Cooke. Only I found a goat instead. And since we’re talking cars, did you have to nearly run me down in the lane with that beast of a machine?’

I felt my mouth work into silence in a peculiar way as it dawned on me just as soon as I spoke that of course it hadn’t been Danny who had roared along the lane at me. It had almost certainly been the bald-headed imposter arriving to begin his search. I risked a glance at the Captain. He’d guessed it from the change in my expression. That control was in evidence again on his face. This time from the cool turn of his gaze towards me his manner appeared to wish to project itself onto me. Well, as it was, I could appreciate the impulse that might drive a son to shield his ageing father from the shock of learning that his home had been invaded, particularly coming as it did in the wake of a belated return to the site of recent bereavement and the added distress of Mr Winstone’s attack.

I did my best to help. I stood there mutely and let the Captain tell me briskly, ‘Hannis isn’t allowed to drive the car. Something about the nature of his cornering has put my father off. I can’t imagine why.’

The remark made Danny’s grin return briefly in the dark. There was concealment somewhere in there of a different sort that seemed like a conspiracy to avert a different stress for the old man. I thought Danny knew I’d noticed. He added with perfect blandness, as if pre-empting another accusation, ‘And before you ask, it can’t have been Pops behind the wheel just now because the doctor took one look last night and prescribed bed and quiet. So with that in mind, he’s gone into town with Mum on the bus.’

There was no grin this time, but beneath the rough hair, his eyes gleamed. We attempted a general movement towards the light of the stairwell. Only unfortunately, for all the old man’s air of increasing infirmity, the Colonel was still as sharp as a tack.

As he stepped out into the better light of the space beneath the stairs from the peculiar tomb of violent implements that seemed in some way a physical representation of his grief, I saw his face clearly for the first time. In other ranked soldiers I had met, even when dressed in ordinary clothes, their profession had always been distinguishable by the peculiar suppleness around their mouths when they spoke; something like an exaggeration of the movement of the jaw that belonged to men who spent a lot of time in the officer’s mess and got a lot of practice at guffawing. I couldn’t imagine this old soldier had ever guffawed in his life.

His son didn’t look like he belonged to that class either. He certainly wasn’t smiling when his father queried coldly, ‘You saw this man?’

Because I was stupid, I asked blankly, ‘Which man?’

‘Father, this is the young woman who made me run for the train. Miss Sutton.’ Just beyond my right shoulder the Captain’s voice was low and mildly persuasive, as though his father was in danger of bullying me like he did Danny Hannis. For a moment I thought the son was saving me, but when I turned my head I found that although his eyes were a considerably less dramatic shade of hazel compared to his father’s grey, at that moment they shared rather too much of the family intensity for my comfort. There was something odd there; a kind of dismissive impatience when he added, ‘I think, Emily, you said you were about to prepare my father’s lunch?’

Flushing, I said lamely, ‘Why yes, I—’

‘This man who nearly ran you down.’ The Colonel’s interruption was decisive. ‘He was here? At this house? Was it the same fellow who …?’

He meant to ask, of course, if this were the same fellow I had encountered on Mr Winstone’s garden path. Standing by the table with the lamp on it, the old man’s gaze was unwavering. I couldn’t help answering now. I risked a glance at the Captain as I said awkwardly, ‘He wasn’t the same man.’

I caught the moment the son raised his eyes to heaven.

The Colonel was waiting. I could see that he was used to having his orders obeyed. I could also see that his hand was trembling a little where it hung by the polished lip of the table. I said unwillingly, ‘He looked like a city man who had taken a wrong turn off the main road.’ I couldn’t help the stray of my eyes towards the Captain’s own city attire. There was a twitch of enquiry in response to the unintended insult. I added hastily, ‘I mean his suit was grey and he wasn’t terribly tall and he was balding.’

‘Age?’ This was from Danny.

‘About fifty, I think. He had a pappy complexion.’

‘Pappy?’ The Colonel frowned at the term.

‘You know, fleshy but soft, like a shrivelled potato.’

‘You have excellent powers of observation.’ I believe the Captain was mocking me. Little did he know how much I had been privately congratulating myself for learning the lessons of yesterday and managing to commit this man’s features to memory. The Captain asked, ‘And what did he take, do you know?’

He’d asked me this once before. He knew what I would say. ‘Nothing that I know of,’ I said, ‘except my case, of course. He took my suitcase.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the Captain agreed impatiently, ‘and with it, all your clothes. So that when we next see you, I presume you’ll be clad in your aged aunt’s wardrobe, which last saw the light of day in the era of bustles or something like that. Have pity for me while you do it. I wasn’t planning a trip to the country when I dropped Father at the station yesterday and my change of mind came up on me, shall we say, rather abruptly and without leaving time to pack.’

‘You needn’t have come at all,’ remarked the old man tersely while revealing for the first time the first glimmer of the parent beneath. He was fond of his son. That weakness in his hand wasn’t fading though. It suddenly struck me that it was perhaps deliberate that the Captain was keeping us loitering in the lee of the staircase. A few steps more would confront the old man with the open door into the younger son’s study and I thought I knew by now what effect it had. To lay it before the old man like this just as soon as he’d arrived would be an awful welcome.

‘Hold on a minute, Emily.’ I must have moved impulsively to shut it because the Captain put his hand out. I think he thought I was running away. His gesture held me there while he said to his father, ‘Do you want your cane? I’ve taken it upstairs already. Emily? Perhaps you might …?’

Perhaps he’d understood me after all. And perhaps he knew his father well enough to know that it wouldn’t help to let the old man know why we were, in effect, managing his entrance to his own home. I nodded my agreement and turned to slide through the gap between the Captain and the painted triangle that screened the space under the rising stairs. Then the Colonel’s voice addressed me so that I turned again and found myself briefly faced with the panel of glass beneath the stairs that proved to be a historic gun cabinet. Sporting guns from the ages were locked inside, gleaming with oil, and an awful lot of rotten old shooting sticks with deer’s feet for handles.

I was turning again to face the Colonel as he asked, ‘Do I understand correctly that you saw both these men? This fellow today and the man who struck Bertie? Has your stepfather remembered anything useful, by the way?’ This last question was barked at Danny.