Chapter 5
Rookhill
Rookhill House stood at the top of its own long drive of lime trees. It was a gray stone house with a slate roof and a great many windows, and every window was lit.
That was Helen's way. She disliked a house that looked asleep. Whenever he came up the hill, at any hour, in any weather, the whole front of the house blazed like a liner at a quay, a hundred small squares of yellow on the dusk. Arriving at Rookhill always felt like arriving somewhere you were expected and wouldn't be allowed to leave without being fed. He had loved it once. It had seemed a generous, theatrical, slightly absurd place, where Isabel turned from the quick, dry woman he knew into someone younger and more careful, a girl who set her cutlery straight and answered when she was spoken to.
He rang the bell. The housekeeper opened it, as always, a small gray silent woman called Mrs. Pym who had been there since before the war. She led him without a word down the long hall, past the barometer and the Chinese vases and the portraits.
They hung the whole length of the hall, the Marlow women, in oils, in order of age. A hard-eyed lady in 1790 with a ship in the window behind her. A great-great-aunt in mourning black, her face as white as a plate. A Victorian bride. An Edwardian beauty with a parasol. And at the end, nearest the drawing room, lit by its own small brass lamp, the most recent: a young woman of twenty-two in a white dress, painted in the nineteen-fifties by a man who knew what he was doing. She had her chin lifted and her gray eyes slightly narrowed, as though the painter had just said something she didn't believe. Helen at twenty-two. He had cleaned the varnish on it himself, six years ago, in winter, and she had stood at his shoulder the whole time, watching the brown film come away from her own face.
You'll make me look the way I wished I'd looked, she had said.
I'll make you look the way the painter saw you.
That, said Helen, with a small dry smile, is rather worse.
"Dear boy."
She came across the drawing room with both hands out. She was sixty-nine, tall and spare and silver, in a dark gray dress with a single strand of pearls. She had the kind of beauty that is mostly posture, which age hadn't so much reduced as concentrated. Her hands were cool and dry and light. She kissed him on the cheek, a brief cool touch, and held him at arm's length and looked at him with the same grave, measuring kindness with which, he supposed, she had once looked at ships' papers.
"You look better," she said. "You've had your hair cut."
"I had it done on Wednesday."
"It suits you. Isabel always said you looked like a man who'd been interrupted." Her smile didn't change at the name. She had a way of saying it as you lift something heavy, with a straight back. "Come and sit. Verity's been dreadful all afternoon. She's had a trial."
"I heard."
"She won. So she is unbearable and in a bad mood, which is her natural state." Helen laughed, a light, controlled sound. "Gareth is hiding in the kitchen with Mrs. Pym, being useful. And Esme is at the piano."
He heard it then, from the far end of the room. Someone was playing, lightly and hesitantly, a piece he didn't know, a slow tune in a minor key that kept stopping and going back to try a phrase again with a different weight. He crossed the carpet toward it.
She sat at the piano in the window, a girl of fourteen in a navy school jumper, her feet not quite reaching the pedals. Her back was to the room. He saw a thin neck, a lot of dark hair clipped up anyhow, and a pair of hands that moved across the keys with unusual confidence. Then she heard him and stopped mid-bar and turned, her whole body turning at once. He had the oddest feeling of being looked at by someone whose name he was about to say.
"Hello, Uncle Callum."
"Hello, Esme. Don't stop."
"I'm not any good. It's for the exam." She had her mother's coloring. She also had, as he noticed every time, a pair of gray eyes, wide-set and a little too direct for her age, which Verity's weren't. "I keep getting the bar before the end wrong. It does a little hiccup and I don't know why."
"Play it again."
"You'll think it's awful."
"I'm tone-deaf. In one ear completely."
"That's not true. You can hear me."
She said it with perfect, flat, teasing confidence, and he laughed. It was a surprise. It came up out of him unannounced, as it hadn't for months, and she saw it and her whole face lit up. For a moment he thought of a window being opened in a shut room.
She turned back to the keys and played the phrase again. At the bar before the end, where the little hiccup was, she stopped and tapped the lid of the piano three times with the flat of her forefinger, tap, tap, tap, and said to the music, in an undertone of mild comic dismay, "Well. There's a thing."
He didn't move.
It was a small sound. It was gone in an instant. She said it casually, a girl muttering at a bad bar, and didn't look up. He stood with his hand on the lid of the piano and felt the room go quite still around him, as if everyone in it had stopped breathing at once.
"Where did you get that?" he said.
"What?"
"The thing you said."
"What thing?" She looked up, confused. "I don't know. I just say it. Mummy says I got it from Aunt Isa." A pause. "Is it wrong?"
"Esme," said Verity, from the doorway.
She had come in without a sound, in a charcoal trouser suit, with a glass of wine in one hand and a briefcase on her shoulder. She stood in the arch of the door with her free hand on the frame and her eyes on her daughter. Her face was quite pleasant. It was the pleasantness of a barrister about to object.
"Practice upstairs, darling," she said. "You know the rule. Not when there are guests."
"He's not a guest, he's—"
"Upstairs."
Esme closed the lid of the piano. She did it with a slow, calm, slightly rude gentleness. She picked up her music from the stand and looked once at Callum, a quick, grave, level look he couldn't read, and went out past her mother without speaking. He heard her feet on the stairs. At the turn, very faintly, a door.
"She's fourteen," said Verity. "Everything is a performance."
"She's good."
"She's adequate. It's different." She crossed the room, set down the glass and kissed him on the cheek, quickly and briskly, which he understood after six months was her way of being kind. "You look as if you've seen a ghost. Is it the piano? It's a horrible piece. It's Satie. I told her it would depress everyone."
"It wasn't the piece."
"Then it's the room. Everyone says that." She turned her back to fetch the decanter. "Mummy's had the whole place done up for you. She's put out the good silver. Please don't make a face. I think it's rather sweet."
He watched the back of her head as she poured. The tall straight line of her shoulders. The exact, controlled movement of her wrist. And he thought, with the careful, idle, unwelcome part of his mind that had never been able to switch off: She stood in the doorway for some time before she spoke.
They ate in the long dining room under the portrait of Gerald Marlow, by candlelight, off plates Helen's mother-in-law had chosen. Helen sat at the head, upright, her pearls catching the flame. Gareth sat at the foot, quiet, tall and tired, a gentle stooping man with kind eyes and the hands of a doctor who still liked to touch his patients. Verity sat opposite Callum with her wine. The soup was cold and the lamb was pink, and the conversation moved with a stiff, bright politeness around a space in the middle of the table that nobody looked at.
"Tell us about Carrow," said Gareth.
"There's a dinner. I speak for ten minutes."
"On what?"
"On the Gerard. The seascape." He cut a piece of lamb. "How you can clean a sky and find the weather was there all along."
"That's rather beautiful," said Helen.
"It's what Isabel said."
It was out before he could stop it. It dropped into the candlelit air with the dull, soft thud of a coin into snow. He saw Verity's hand go still on the stem of her glass. He saw Gareth's eyes go, briefly, to his wife. And he saw Helen, at the head of the table, put down her fork, slowly, and fold her hands.
"Did she?" said Helen.
"The first time we met. About a painting."
"She had an eye." The silver head tilted. "She had it from her father. He saw things in a room that other people missed. I always thought it was a rather lonely gift."
"She wasn't lonely."
"No." The pale face didn't change. "Not with you."
There was a silence. In the distance a clock struck the quarter. And Verity, with her eyes on her plate, said in a clear, conversational voice, "Callum. The police told Mummy you'd been ringing a number."
He put down his knife.
"In January," Verity said. "Some number in the north. You got it from Sergeant Cairns. He felt he had to mention it, since you'd phoned him four times about it, and he thought we ought to know." She looked up. "I didn't know you were doing detective work."
"It was Isabel's last call."
"It was a wrong number."
"He said it was a prepaid phone. Unregistered. It rang in Carrow." He heard his voice go low and level, as it did when he was angry. "She rang it at two minutes to eight and talked for six minutes. Then she went to the bridge. I'd like to know who she was talking to."
"Verity," said Gareth quietly.
"I'm only saying what everyone is thinking."
"What is everyone thinking?"
"That you can't let it go." She said it without malice. That was what made it hard. She said it the way you read out a finding. "That you've turned her into a puzzle. You want a reason, and there isn't one, so you're making one out of a phone call. I understand it, truly. It's what people do. But I wish you'd stop."
"She's right, dear boy," said Helen.
He looked at her.
She sat quite still in the candlelight, hands folded, pearls gleaming, and her face showed such grave, tender, real concern that for a moment all his anger lost its footing, like a man stepping onto ice that isn't where he thought it was.
"I've lost a child," said Helen, very softly. "I know what the not-knowing is. It's the worst of it. Your mind goes round and round looking for a door. But there is no door, Callum. There's only a bridge and a river and a bad night." She reached out and laid her cool fingers over his for a moment. "Go to Carrow. Give your speech. And leave the telephone in the hotel safe."
He almost said yes.
He felt it rise in him, the great weary wish to be told, to have it settled by someone older and kinder and surer than himself. It would have been so easy. He looked at her hand lying on his own, white and fine and cool, and his eyes went, as they always did, to the wrist.
The support was gone. It had been gone since January. There was only the faint pale ghost of its edge, a narrow line where the skin was lighter than the skin around it. She wore a thin gold watch instead. And as she spoke she moved it, he saw, from the left wrist to the right, a small, natural, careless movement, the kind you make when something has begun to feel uncomfortable.
He didn't know why he noticed.
"I'll leave it in the safe," said Callum.
"Good boy," said Helen.
It was Quist who drove him home.
He hadn't asked for it. Helen settled it at the door, as she settled everything, with a slight lift of the hand: Tobias will take you. No, I insist. It's raining and you've had wine. So at half past ten he found himself in the back of the long black Bentley, among the smell of leather and wet wool, with a rug across his knees, watching the lime trees slide past in the headlights.
Tobias Quist had been Helen's driver for fourteen years. He was a lean, silent, gray-faced man of about sixty, with close-cropped iron hair and a dark overcoat. He sat at the wheel fixed and upright, as though the car were a witness box. He wore thin black leather driving gloves, even in summer. His cufflinks, where they showed beneath the coat, were small and plain and the color of pewter. In all the years they had known each other he had said perhaps twenty words to Callum, and each had been polite.
They came down off Rookhill into the lit streets of Halvern, past the museum, the cathedral, the wet shining glass of the Corn Exchange. Quist drove slowly. He didn't put on the radio. At the foot of the hill the road forked, one fork running down to Lantern Row and the other swinging east to the river. He signaled left, to the east, and then, a moment before the junction, as if changing his mind, right.
"Sorry, sir," he said. His voice was dry and quiet. "The Greaves Bridge is shut again for repairs. They've coned off the lane. I'll go by Corder Street."
"It's been shut since November."
"So it has."
"They haven't mended it."
"The council," said Quist, "has a great deal on its plate."
Callum looked out at the rain. He thought of the bridge, half a mile away through the streets, a long dark span over the water with orange tape that he had never been able to make himself go and look at. He thought of Quist, lean and gloved in the driver's seat, taking the long way round without being asked.
"Mrs. Marlow asked me to say something, sir," said Quist, as they turned into Lantern Row.
"What?"
"She said, take care in Carrow." His pale eyes met Callum's in the mirror for a fraction of a second and went back to the road. "She says it's a city that can be hard on a man who's not himself."
The car stopped at the curb. Quist got out, came round and opened the door. Rain blew in. As he stood holding it, bareheaded, one gloved hand on the frame, Callum looked up into the gray face and saw nothing in it at all. There was no warning and no malice, only a long smooth patience, like a stretch of water over something deep.
"Good night, Mr. Wray," said Tobias Quist.