It was bright morning when Arnold woke, and he knew at once that something was wrong. An unfamiliar draught of cold air was playing around his face, and full of shapeless anxieties he jerked himself into a sitting position. Had he overslept? Had someone come to call him? A quick glance at his watch reassured him that this could not be so. It was barely 7.00 am, and though the daylight was bright through the cracks in the curtains, the sun was not yet properly risen. A renewed blast of chilly air got him out of bed in haste and not even pausing to put on his dressing-gown, he fairly raced across his bedroom and out into the passage. Surely he hadn’t been careless enough – mad enough – to have left the outer door of the flat swinging open last night?
No, of course he hadn’t. It was properly locked and bolted just as it always was at night; and he recalled, now, the actual moment of locking it, with Flora hovering at his heels, jeering, and asking what he was so scared of that he had to double-lock everything in sight? And then hide the keys behind his bed-head, for Heaven’s sake!
“By the time they’ve got around to murdering you in your bed, they won’t need the keys,” she’d pointed out. “They’ll already have got in without them. It’s potty! The whole set-up here is crazy …”
With which parting shot, she’d taken herself off to bed, and he’d finished the locking-up in peace, including the hiding of the keys. It wasn’t a question of being murdered in his bed or not; it was a question of no one being able to get at them without waking him.
And still the dawn breeze stirred and teased along the passage, from some source as yet unidentified. Shivering in his thin cotton pyjamas, he embarked on a quick survey of his small domain, and came almost at once upon the cause of the mystery. Sitting cross-legged and very straight-backed in the middle of her bedroom floor, eyes closed, Flora was breathing deeply and mystically of the cold air which swirled in through her wide-opened sash-window. She must have carefully unscrewed the metal brackets which normally prevented it being opened further than three or four inches … no, she hadn’t even unscrewed them, she had merely wrenched them from their moorings with some clumsy tool or other, splintering the woodwork in the process.
“Flora!” he cried, careless now of whether he was causing a row or whether he wasn’t. “What on earth do you think you’re doing? These ground-floor windows must never be …”
For several seconds she neither moved nor spoke, and her eyes remained peacefully closed.
Meditating, he realised angrily. Flora’s meditation sessions always irritated him. It was just one more way – or so it seemed to him – of putting her parents in the wrong.
“What funny, bustling little ants you are!” her tranquil pose seemed to be saying. “Just look at you, always running around in little circles, obsessed with trivialities such as whether I’m going to pay back the £200 you lent me! See how untroubled I am about it, how superior to such sordid material considerations!”
Or something like that. “Flora!” he shouted again, even more peremptorily. “Close that window at once! Now I’ll have to fix the brackets back on again – and I haven’t even got any proper tools …” As it dawned on him that he would probably have to apply to Norris, the self-appointed keeper of the tools for the estate, for even so much as a screw-driver, his voice rose by yet another few decibels: “How did you get them off, anyway?”
Slowly, and with exaggerated peacefulness, Flora’s eyes opened.
“With a knife,” she said. “It was the first thing I did. I had to. I can’t bear to sleep at night without a window open.”
How this predeliction tallied with the foetid environs of the squat it was hard to imagine. Not that it mattered. She was only trying to upset him; and, indeed, succeeding.
“You mean you’ve had that window open all night? On the ground floor? Do you realise I’m responsible for this place at night? If anything should get stolen …”
“You mean like that pre-historic T.V. set of yours? I’ll envy the burglar who gets that, I really will. And if you’re bothered about all that stuff in the show-rooms, then forget it. There’s no way a burglar could get from here into the main building even if he did get through my window.”
This was true. And, actually, no one had got in. No harm had been done. All the same …
“I can’t allow it, Flora. It’s not safe. It’s not safe for you, come to that, sleeping right under an open window, on the ground floor. Anyone could get in.”
“You mean a rapist?” she mocked. “What a mind you’ve got, Arnold! What sort of a rapist would bother to come all this way, to the back of beyond, when he can have his pick of victims just travelling up and down on Southern Region? Or in the Fulham Road, come to that. I guess I have more rapists passing my window in a single night than have set foot in this stately home of yours in all the hundreds of years since it was built.”
She paused, then laughed that hard, horrid laugh of hers.
“Poor old Arnold! Listen, if you’re really worried about my virginity, such as it is, then I’d better have Charlie with me at night. Hadn’t I?”
Charlie? Who was Charlie? Arnold’s heart sank. He sounded like extra work, anyway. Work and bother and argument. Arnold posed a few cautious questions, hoping for some clue to the identity of the prospective visitor, but Flora merely laughed again, and more loudly. Her laughter, indeed, seemed quite out of proportion to the humour of the situation, whatever it might be, and Arnold quickly gave up trying to understand. He had work to do. Time was getting on, and Sunday was liable to be quite as busy as Saturday, though of course the later opening helped. It was not yet clear whether the Witchcraft ladies, who had been such a success yesterday, were willing to come again this afternoon. He must be prepared, if necessary, to take the guided tour himself. He prayed that Pauline and Tracey would arrive punctually and apply themselves to their duties conscientiously and without supervision.