The Man in the Wooden Hat Page 13

  “Who—?”

  “The comedy of that name written in honour of the immortal figure of the English butler. Second only to the incomparable Jeeves. Five performances a week plus matinées, good cheap theatrical lodgings thrown in. Alas, however, he is in at the final curtain every night and grows a little wearier each day.”

  “Oh, Delilah!”

  “But we find ourselves affluent, well-housed, awaiting the compensation for our London home. Our country property is deserted. We hear that you are recovering from surgery and our little empty dacha in the woods awaits you, if you would like to stay in it. For ever if you like.”

  “Like to!”

  “It is yours to use as long as you like. I am in touch with dear Eddie’s clerk. He will make all the arrangements. Why do you weep?”

  “With joy and disbelief. Oh, Delilah, it’s like a musical!”

  “There is, I fear, no music at our dacha,” she said, “except the music of the rooks and the morning chorus of a myriad other species of feathered creature; the pizzicato of the rain and the crashing tympani and singing strings of the west wind. There’s no electricity, dear, no running water and no abominable telephone.”

  “Oh, it’s not abominable! How else could we be talking?

  “Milk and bread are delivered daily to the lane—a little climb up from the back of the house. Also the daily papers. You can give them lists of groceries and you will pay in the basket provided before you go home. No one will disturb you. Dexter has a splendid theatrical library, if a trifle damp, and there is the evening softness of lamplight.”

  “Delilah—I’m a bit potty at the moment. I’ve had surgery and I’m still full of anaesthetic. I’ve just had a hallucination. Is this another?”

  “Hallucination, dear? No. Hallucination demands vision. Nor am I an aural manifestation. The return fare from Waterloo to Tisbury Junction is modest and you will be met. Contact Eddie’s clerk. Bring a wrap for the early mornings so that you can walk in the dew. And an insect repellent. You will be quite alone.”

  “Are we going to meet there, Delilah—dear, beloved Delilah? I’m so bloody lonely.”

  “Very good for you, dear. And I hardly think we’ll meet. My duties to Dexter are very onerous. He sends his love. We shall possibly meet again one day, of course. These things may happen. I don’t suppose”—her voice trailed away to nothing, then came back like a thread on a lute string—“you’ve heard anything about the gardens? They haven’t cut them down, have they? My London forest trees?”

  She said, “No, no. I’m sure not,” and the line clicked shut.

  But the phone number? She couldn’t call Delilah back. She must telephone Chambers. She must think of timetables on the Southern Railway. She must make lists of supplies. She must phone Edward. She must think of supper.

  In the fridge she found milk and food, and on the table yet another bouquet of flowers from Edward and a note from the Inn with the times of Sunday services at the Temple church. Then the phone began to ring again and again, friends from near and far. The world grew smaller and smaller and so crammed with kind enquiries that she left the receiver off. Kind and rowdy, the city surged up to her from the river and the Embankment and the Strand, rich and glorious. Tomorrow she would be coping with rooks.

  Then she saw, in the mail on the desk, a packet from Hong Kong lying beside the cards and she took it across the room and slowly and carefully opened it. Inside was a short double string of pearls with a diamond clasp and a note saying, He is better. He will live. Return these at your peril. For ever V. PS: Where did you go?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was a train ride of pure celebration. A train ride like childhood’s. Edward’s Chambers saw her on to the platform and right into the reserved seat for Tisbury Junction. The clerks gave her chocolates and told her that there would be a taxi waiting. At Tisbury she climbed out upon the single-track platform and sat on a seat in the sun and, like an old film, a man came along and said in a country voice, “Taxi, ma’am? Let me take your case.”

  He drove along the lanes and she saw a tree above a hedge like a hen on a nest, then a long stone wall, and in a gap in the wall she looked down upon a dell and a massive stone chimney pot attached to something unseen. The driver and the bag went ahead down the slope until they were on a level with the chimney pot and looking at an almost vertical track below and a thatched roof.

  “I’ll never get the case down there. This must be the back. There must be a front way somewhere.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “I’ll have a try.”

  He trundled and slithered, Elisabeth following, and they arrived at a paved yard and a back door. She paid him.

  “You O.K. here, miss?”

  “Yes,” she said, liking the “miss.” “Thank you,” and leaving the luggage in the grass she went looking for the front door where she had been told there would be a key under a mat. She could find neither door nor key and the silent valley beyond watched. In an outhouse which was an earth closet there was a huge black iron key and she thought she would try it in the back door, and set off further round the gentle, sleeping house and came to a front door with a Yale key in it, waiting to be turned. Inside were dark rooms and the smell of damp books. She saw furniture under dust sheets, a paraffin lamp with a cloudy globe, a box of matches alongside and a fresh loaf on the table.

  It was not yet dusk and so, after standing a kettle on a black stove that seemed to be warm, she walked outside again into the garden.

  It was a glade cut out from woodland. The stretch of grass that led to more faraway trees was not so much lawn as meadow where vanished trees were waiting somewhere to reclaim their home. She felt the stirring of life under the grass and saw spirals of bindweed standing several feet high seeking some remembered support. They swayed as if they were growing under water. There was nothing more, only the dwindling path, the dwindling light, the pearly quiet sky.

  She returned to the house, removed the kettle, found a staircase behind a cupboard door, reached a bedroom with wooden walls and smelling of cedar trees. She opened the window and looked at the glimmer of the evening and without even a drink of water, without locking the house or turning a key or taking off her coat, she lay down on the patchwork quilt and listened to the end of the day. Soon all the small sounds stopped, and she slept.

  It was an eerie dawn, blowy and cloudy, and she had no idea where she was. When she remembered, she listened for the rooks but they were silent. She was afraid for a while that yesterday’s journey belonged to someone else. Then, rolling from the bed, walking to the window, she saw that this was a strange place but in some way she knew it. The window looked at a wall of vegetation so close to the glass that she could stretch and touch if she opened it. She saw the roof of a shed that must be the earth closet. Yet she had remembered golden space.

  And then she remembered that she had chosen the tiny back bedroom to sleep in. The other room with its mighty feather bed had seemed too intimately a part of the Dexters’ lives to disturb. She went downstairs, dragged the black kettle across the wood-burning stove until it was over the hotplate—still hot. More wood was needed and when she looked, there it was. She found a tin teapot and a tea caddy that said it was a present from Blackpool. A jug of milk stood in a bowl of water on the pantry floor. Across the top, it had a muslin cloth weighted down with little coloured beads. The pantry stones were cool under her bare feet.

  She carried her tea with her towards a door—the cottage was shadowy—which she pushed open to reveal the stretch of meadow-lawn cleared from the forest. The trees around were wildly tossing and the grass was wet with dew. A fox stood still in the middle of the space, staring at her with black eyes, interested in an alteration of the scene. A dead bird hung down heavy and soft on either side of the fox’s mouth. It turned tiptoe on its black feet and was gone. Then the wind dropped and lemon-coloured light soaked over the garden and the river spread wide to the horizon where above the far tr
ees a triangle of hilltop was crowned with a knot of trees like a garland.

  It was warmer now. She sat outside on the shabby wooden balcony and drank the tea. She thought of her new London home that commanded a view of a thousand nameless lives. Here she was alone of her kind. She felt perfectly happy, no more lonely than the fox, or the rabbits she began to see in the bracken, or the strutting pheasant which appeared now at her feet. No telephone would ring, no car stop on the road above, she would hear no human voice.

  Amy, in her Kai Tak slum, would say, “Betty, this will not do. You need a cause.” Elisabeth thought of the hollow-cheeked crowds in the stinking streets. The old man who sat with no legs, his crutches splayed across his patch of the street, breaking open crustaceans, chanting the prices, cracking the shells. Urine in the pools. “We must forget ourselves, Bets. Our Englishness.” Amy had not been in the Camps.

  She sat on, looking towards the topknot garland of the next-door village and saw to one side of her, higher up than the Dexter trees, a flicker. There must be a building up there, and her heart plunged. No—too dense. An illusion. She looked back down her vista of meadow, and two children were walking hand in hand. They paid her no attention and slipped back into the tall grass. Later, a young man crossed from one side of the garden to the other but further away. He was lean, unkempt, dark-skinned, alert and self-contained. Some sort of Gypsy. He was swinging something like an axe and did not look towards the house. She heard the distant sound of the car bringing her groceries on the road above. The rooks began their civic racket. I must decide what to do with the day, she thought. But not yet.

  On the balcony was a long wooden chair with a footrest and padded cushions, and she thought: That will be damp, but lay down and found it warm and sweet-smelling, and she fell asleep again.

  All week she stayed alone in the house and garden, collecting groceries from the top of the steep slope, leaving money and details of supplies for the next day. A can of soup, a piece of cheese, three apples. She worried at first about water. Someone had left out two jugs on the slab in the pantry, otherwise there was only a stream. She washed in the stream, boiled some of it, eventually drank it unboiled, catching it in a tin mug as it rushed by. She liked the earth closet. Seated there, the door wide to the view, she commanded territory crossed by Roman cohorts on the march to Salisbury.

  On the third day she began to notice things to do in the garden and spent a morning getting out weeds, shouldering them in armloads to what seemed to be a compost heap. She amazed herself. She did not know where her knowledge came from. She marvelled at the rich soil—remembering the scratching in the earth by the skin-and-bone labourers in the lampshade hats of her Chinese childhood. She imagined a continuing supply of vegetables and along an old red wall a sea of European tulips. Then she remembered that this was Delilah’s garden.

  In the evenings, after a first attempt when black flakes flew to the ceiling and the wick roared like a petrol fire, she mastered the oil lamp and sat reading the books about old theatre productions and biographies of great actors. Sometimes, prising a book out of the damp shelves, she let loose a sheaf of theatre programmes. Some were signed flamboyantly with forgotten names, some smelled of long-dead violets. Once or twice a pressed flower fell out—a gardenia (gone brown) or a rose—and crumpled before her eyes when she tried to pick it up. Some of the books were inscribed, To my darling Delilah, the ultimate Desdemona, or, To my own Mark Antony from his adoring wife and the date of over half a century ago.

  Love, thought Elisabeth. Adoration. Was it all just theatre?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  One day she woke up and forced herself to think: When am I going home? In fact she knew the date. Somewhere it was written down, perhaps on her return railway ticket. A taxi was to pick her up that morning, to put her back on the London train. She remembered that.

  But when was it? She had no way of knowing the date: no radio, no daily paper. Letters had come for her but she had not opened them and they would not have helped. She would ask the village shop to put tomorrow’s newspaper in with her baked beans. They would not keep the Telegraph or The Times or the Manchester Guardian. Perhaps they only had the weekly local paper. She thought she’d try for the Daily Express. When she collected it, she found that she had only one day left. This day. The taxi would be here to take her towards London before nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

  She could hardly bear it.

  Suppose she ran from the house tomorrow and hid in the woods? She could creep back again in the evening? Or on another evening? She could sleep in the woods.

  But then, word would go round. The village shop (wherever it was) would come making enquiries. Friends in London—Chambers—even Edward in Hong Kong.

  I’m still trapped, she thought. I’ll have to go.

  She cleared the kitchen of the glorious squalor she had made in it. She dusted. She trimmed the lamp, thinking that there were very few people left in the world who could trim a lamp (and where had she learned? And when?). Fitting back its beautiful globe, she smashed it to pieces and was horrified. The lamplight had been the wonder of her evenings and the carrying up of the heavy lamp, one hand shading the light, to bed at night. Oh, Delilah! Oh, if there were a telephone . . .

  Well, no. Thank God. And I don’t know the number. I shall leave you, Delilah, a huge sum of money to replace the lamp. I shall scout the London markets for a new one.

  She scrubbed the whole house clean. That evening she walked down the garden and looked at the red wall in the fading light. The rooks grumbled their way to bed.

  In the morning she gathered her things together around the door and ate some bread. There was a fumbling shadow outside the window and she saw the Gypsy person ambling about outside. He was trying to look in.

  “Yes?” she called, not opening the door. “Yes?” He was trailing the thing like an axe. “Who are you?”

  He mouthed words at her. She thought: The poor thing’s simple. But the axe made her hesitate. He was speaking of a key. He needed a key. The taxi would be coming.

  “But the axe,” she said.

  “It’s for the w-w-w-wood. Firewood.”

  She brought him in. “I’m so sorry. I was afraid of you.”

  Among the things she had been leaving for the Dexters were two bottles of village shop wine and she handed them now to the Gypsy. He looked bewildered so she gave him some money. He took the key and the money and went ahead of her with her case and, when she was through the front door, he locked it behind her and put the key in his pocket. He went ahead, up the steep bank through the slit in the wall, not helping her, and when she had climbed the perilous slope there was her suitcase beside the road, and he was gone.

  She sat down then on a stone on the roadside, her back to the wall. It was not yet a quarter past eight. It was beginning to be cloudy. Cloudy and wettish. England in October, although it was only September. Nobody passed by.

  I had to be here for the taxi, she thought, before nine. I hadn’t thought of rain. It’s only eight twenty.

  Out of her bag she dragged the brown and gold pashmina and wrapped it round her. When the rain began she rearranged the coloured silk to cover her head. Bright against the dark bushes she sat on in the rain and when the village shop van passed she waved, but she had paid her bill yesterday and the car went by.

  Nobody came. The rain became heavier. It was after half past eight now and the wind blew the rain in surges and began to sound angry and bitter. The rain lashed back.

  Elisabeth looked up the road and down it, and wondered how far it was to the village. Below her the cottage was all securely locked up. Maybe she should stumble down the slippery path again and shelter in the earth closet.

  No. Ridiculous. The taxi was taking her to catch a particular train. At Waterloo Station a cab had been ordered by Edward’s Chambers to take her back to the flat in the Temple. All arranged. Foolproof.

  But no taxi.

  I’ll go and see if there is a hous
e up there, she thought, and shuddered. She was frightened of houses in woods.

  No. She would walk into Salisbury, carrying her suitcase. Her scar still hurt and still bled a little but she didn’t care. She tightened the silk cloth about her, picked up her suitcase and heard the sound of an approaching car. Thank God! Oh, thank God!

  She stood holding the suitcase as the car spun into sight and it was not a taxi, but an ordinary private car going by. It was travelling very fast and splashed past her and down the hill, and vanished round the bend in the road and was gone.

  So much, she thought, for answers to prayer.

  She gripped the handle of her suitcase tighter, turned to face what she hoped would be Salisbury, soaked now to the skin, and heard the same car roaring back again up the hill, so fast that she had to jump into the side of the hedge.

  The car stopped, the driver’s door flew open and Edward stood in the middle of the road.

  Wet to the skin, enclosed in his long arms, Elisabeth began to cry and Edward to set up the curious roaring noises that had overtaken him since his stammering childhood but now only when he was on the point of tears.

  She said, “Oh, Eddie! Oh, Filth!” her wet face against his clean, warm shirt.

  She thought: I love him.

  He said, “I thought you’d left me!”

  PART FOUR

  Life After Death

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Scene Hong Kong.

  Crackle and swish of limousine bringing the Judge home from court at exactly the appointed hour (insert clock: 7 P.M.).

  Interior. Elisabeth waiting for him in living room of Judges’ Lodgings, a row of mansions behind a wall and steel gates, guarded. She has an open library book face-down upon her knee. Outside, Edward Feathers’s driver rings the front-door bell.