Page 68 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
A small path came out of the shrubbery by the gate and the ground was hard under its covering of dead leaves. Despite my protests, Carey climbed far enough up the open rusted gate to examine the top of the column.
‘It looks as if the cement holding it on had loosened over the years … though why it should suddenly roll off just at that moment, when there wasn’t a breeze, or even the vibration of a heavy lorry passing to cause it to, is anyone’s guess. Unless the squirrels are conspiring to kill me and got together to push it?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I said.
Carey checked the other column, which seemed firm enough, before we got back in the buggy and headed towards the house. It struggled a bit up the steep part, but my legs were feeling jellified and there was no way I was walking.
The Lodge curtains didn’t even twitch as we passed, and the only sign of life was Clem, doing something horticultural with a spade on the lower terrace.
The house seemed empty and quiet without the others, just Fang dozing by the stove. Carey made us both coffee and spiked it with the remains of a bottle of dark rum.
‘I think you just lost another of your nine lives – how many does that make?’ I asked.
‘Three used, six to go,’ he said. ‘Cheers!’
But I wasn’t entirely cheered, even after the rum, because I suddenly remembered that when he was a little boy he’d fallen out of a tree and the back of his jumper had caught on a branch, slowly throttling him.
Mum, who did have her practical moments, saved him by bashing the branch with the long wooden clothes prop, though he was badly bruised from the fall and half asphyxiated. I reminded him of this.
‘Five lives left, then,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’d better stop having near-death experiences, even if the kiss of life was enjoyable.’
I looked at him uncertainly, but he gave me his familiar, loopily brilliant smile and pushed the biscuit tin in my direction.
‘Sugar’s good for shock,’ he said.
In the ensuing days, I saw little of my husband and missed our easy comradeship. I was much occupied in the workshop, of course, and I now decided to make a full-size cartoon of the Lady Anne window, which fascinated me.
And the more I worked on copying the design, the stranger the whole thing struck me. Some of the diamond panes were painted with repeated sequences of motifs of no apparent significance, while others were filled quite randomly, sampler fashion. The man dressed in Cavalier fashion below the house I had at first supposed to be walking through a cornfield, but on closer inspection I thought it resembled more a bed of flames!
It was all very curious.
24
Connections
Carey’s mind soon turned to practical matters and he wondered if the people up at Moel Farm might know how to get the stone ball out of the ditch. It would in any case give him an opportunity of meeting them.
Having cut the rusted padlock off the back gate, we dragged back one side, squealing and protesting, just far enough to get the golf buggy through.
Clem, alerted by the noise, appeared out of the shrubbery with a wheelbarrow and was shocked when we told him what had happened yesterday.
‘I haven’t been down the drive since then and the tops of the rhododendrons hide that gatepost from the Lodge, so I hadn’t noticed the stone ball was missing.’
‘It was very odd it should choose the exact moment when Carey was standing next to it to roll off,’ I said.
‘But perhaps the post has sunk a little, so that it might not be level any more,’ Clem suggested. ‘In that case, if the mortar loosened enough, it could roll off any time.’
‘Angel thinks it was pushed off on purpose,’ Carey told him, and Clem’s ruddy face blanched. He glanced at me uneasily and then away again.
‘Surely not? Who’d do such a thing?’
‘Homicidal squirrels – that’s my theory,’ Carey said with a grin.
‘Something big crashed away into the shrubbery right afterwards,’ Iinsisted stubbornly. ‘I was shocked, but not so shocked I didn’t notice a noise like that.’
‘I had other things on my mind,’ Carey said innocently, and I shot him an uncertain look.
That kiss had certainly been far different from our usual friendly exchanges … but then, shock affects us all in different ways, so it probably had no other significance.
