24

The bright red lorry whined up the empty roads of the estate. It had recently been cleaned and it gleamed, curiously silk-like, in the early sun. A few loose timbers and ropes bounced on its lightly springing back.

After its growling ascent of the final slope it stopped at the gates of the Place, its bonnet almost touching the eroded ironwork, and Ewbank’s black figure climbed awkwardly down from the driving seat. He stood for a while looking at the closeness of the lorry to the gate as if their juxtaposition in some way resolved the dilemma in his own mind. Rooks, which had been disturbed by the intrusion of the vehicle, now returned to the summits of the overhanging trees.

Suddenly the lorry began to run backwards. There were agitated movements inside the cab, then Ewbank reached up, wrenched open the door and pulled clumsily on the brake. He could scarcely reach the lever, poised forward on the toes of his tiny shoes. The vehicle rocked. It swayed, arrested. Pilkington climbed down from the other side. Then Tolson.

The contractor immediately stepped onto the footboard, then onto the front mudguard. His arms reached up to the top of the cab from where, after a certain struggle, he flung down two shovels. Dropping to the ground, he gave the two men instructions and watched them push between the embedded gates and begin digging the drive on the other side.

They shovelled out two symmetrical quadrants in the gravel until they were able to swing back the gates within their circumference. The three of them worked first on the right hand gate, the track of which Pilkington had dug, then on the left, which was Tolson’s.

The right hand gate was moved with some difficulty, its three hinges so eroded that within the space of a few feet the centre one snapped and the cumbersome structure groaned on the remaining two. The sound of crunching metal accompanied its retreat, Tolson standing at its head and straining to support the weight between his arms. It travelled to within a foot of its full radius and, easing its weight down, Tolson released it cautiously and began to dig out a deeper trough. He discovered a rusted hook secured in the ground and, pressing the gate fully back, set it over the lowest strut. He stood up rubbing his hands and looking at the other two with a slight smile.

They moved the second gate more confidently, forcing it back through the gouged arc and allowing its weight to smooth out the remaining pebbly obstructions. Then, half way across the quadrant, and with a sudden shower of rust, the upper hinge snapped, then the second, and the gate sprang like a compacted spring from the stone pillar. Ewbank and Pilkington leapt back, and the gate was left leaning across the drive, supported at its foot by the remaining hinge and at its side by Tolson himself. It swayed hugely as he fought with the structure, then it began to fall back against the post. As its head touched the stone the final hinge broke and the gate subsided onto the ground. Lifting it between them, they propped it against the pillar and rested a heavy stone at its foot.

The shovels were flung back on top of the cab and they climbed inside. Then, with a particularly clumsy application of the clutch and a guttural roar, the vehicle suddenly sprang forward, its tyres groping at the loose gravel, sinking slightly then spinning forward more quickly. The lorry passed between the two leaning flanges of the gates; they rested there like wounded guards as it forced its way beyond them through the low foliage of the drive.

The sun slid from the banks of vegetation, casting dull waves of shadow and reflecting from the damp leaves and the windows of the Place itself. It was still; the red metal glinted between the green slips of shrubbery and the darker stooped boughs. Across the terrace came the grating percussion of the engine. The light moved on the windscreen like an introspective eye, slow, half-glazed.

The moment Ewbank dropped onto the terrace the bolts crashed back in the shadow of the porch and the left-hand door was pulled open. John stood in the porch waiting for them to enter, and scarcely seemed to notice when first Pilkington, then Tolson appeared from the other side. He turned and led the way up the stairs.

The York Room was as the caterers had left it, the chairs indifferently collapsed or thrust to one side and the tables standing at varying angles, two of them kneeling on broken trestles. When Tolson came through the door Ewbank turned quickly to him. ‘We’ll just have them straight out as they are.’ He pushed his foot against the nearest table and, unintentionally, toppled it to the floor.

John, standing moodily at the far end of the room, glanced round. ‘Do you mind doing it quietly?’ he said. Then he recognised Tolson standing in the doorway.

Tolson stood gazing in at the barren interior with a kind of stifled curiosity, half-embarrassed. He seemed neither to hear nor to see John who, as though recognising some sort of threat in Tolson’s attitude, had suddenly leaned against the wall in a vague gesture of appeal.

Pilkington pushed obliviously into the room past Tolson. Picking up the nearest table, they carried it out between them. Ewbank, his eyes concealed beneath the broad brim of his hat, reflectively smoked a cheroot, glancing occasionally at the figure across the room and then, on their reappearance, at the two workmen as they took out a second table. There was, after all, only a few minutes’ work altogether, and he seemed content that they should prolong it by duplicating each other’s efforts. Normally this was a job he would have delegated to a foreman. As the room was gradually emptied he began to walk up and down with increasing ease, puffing out vaster clouds of smoke. Any stranger coming in at this moment would have naturally assumed that Ewbank was the proprietor of the place and John merely another employee.

He took out his glasses and balanced them briefly on his nose to glance casually at the carved relief dominating the room.

‘We were sorry about Leonard leaving, you know, Mr. Radcliffe.’ He swept the glasses from his face to illustrate the sincerity of his observation. ‘He was a good workman. And very reliable. We lost two of them that week. He probably told you.’

He had begun to look determinedly at John who was still watching him with an absent-minded, half-wakened expression.

‘The other one, Shaw, they had to commit, you know. To a mental institution. I think that’s the phrase currently in favour. He had some sort of breakdown.’ He nodded his head in a gesture of self-agreement. ‘Yes.’ Then he looked away.

Tolson had come back into the room. He threaded his arm through the struts of several chairs and swung them with him through the door.

‘And what’s your son doing now, Mr. Radcliffe?’ He pointed at the door where Tolson had just disappeared. ‘I mean, has he taken another job?’

‘No.’

‘I see. Well …’ He nodded again and dropped his cheroot on the floor. He trod on it, grinding it out. ‘We had a bit of difficulty with the gates when we came in,’ he said, watching the slow activity of his shoe. ‘I had the men dig them out a bit, but when they swung them back it seems the hinges …’

‘It’s all right.’

‘This has been a very nice room indeed, has this.’

‘Yes.’

The early light was flung in parallel rays towards that end of the room where John was standing, immediately below the fireplace. Ewbank looked up in some irritation. He saw that John’s gaze was directed to the door. Standing there was Leonard.

Pilkington came into the room at that moment, pausing as he recognised the figure beside him, then dumbly lifting a table and carrying it out. He nodded slightly as he passed through the door.

‘How much longer will you be?’ Leonard said as though, concealed nearby, he had been impatiently watching their progress.

‘Well, we’re nearly through.’ Ewbank’s face was still twisted in greeting.

‘Hurry them up, then. Get them out of here.’ He was nervously excited, his hands trembling slightly by his sides. His father had moved from the wall and was now standing only a short distance behind Ewbank himself, in the centre of the room. One table, leaning down over a broken trestle, and several overturned chairs were all that remained of the previous day’s celebration.

‘We’ll do our best.’ Ewbank, skilfully humouring this familiar abruptness, walked slowly over to his former employee. ‘Well, young man. How are you keeping, then?’

‘I’m fine … I’m fine. Very well,’ Leonard said, not knowing quite what to do in the face of such an oppressive affability. He continually glanced behind him towards the head of the stairs, as though expecting some interruption from that direction.

‘You’ll have heard about Shaw, of course,’ Ewbank went on, glancing quickly at Leonard, then up at the ceiling which surged in hopeless frenzy above their heads. ‘It’s an impressive room is this, and no mistake. I was saying to your father just before you came in …’

‘Look, can you get out?’ Leonard said as though despite his agitation it were something that could be amicably arranged between them. ‘I don’t want you in here. Do you understand? You could have sent a couple of the men who didn’t know the place.’

‘We were wondering, you know, if you’d be coming back to work,’ Ewbank said as though such amicability were the thing he recognised most easily. ‘Now that you’ve recovered from your accident. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, as far as I’m concerned. You know that.’ He glanced behind him at John. ‘Poor Shaw seems to have found everything too much for him all of a sudden. I suppose Tolson’s told you. We’re quite short of men now. What with the season reaching its peak.’ He distributed this information equally between father and son.

‘There’s no reason for you to stay here, Leonard,’ his father said. ‘They’ll be finished soon and I’ll see to it that it’s cleared up.’

‘But why have they come?’

‘It was Austen’s idea.…’

‘No. Why have they come?’ He was glancing behind him the whole time, the conversation, his distress even, a formality which he impatiently maintained. It was almost with an expression of relief that he greeted Tolson’s appearance.

Whether they stood regarding each other as two protagonists or two friends, it was impossible for either of the men watching their encounter to decide. They seemed in fact to peer at one another for such a length of time that Ewbank turned round and walked over to the windows from which he was able to watch Pilkington arranging the load on the back of the lorry. The vehicle now stood fully in the sunlight, a heavy shadow underlining its red sides.

‘There’s no reason for you to stay up here, Leonard,’ his father said again.

‘Ah, now, Mr. Radcliffe. You can’t go hiding him all the time. He’s got to live like the rest of us.’ Tolson stated this quite genially, yet looking at the older man as though inviting him to reveal the extent of his concern.

‘No, it’s all right,’ Leonard said. ‘I want to see him. There’s something I want to tell him.’ He even laid a hand on Tolson’s arm as though anxious that he shouldn’t be discouraged by his father and, turning this into a more decisive grip, he began to guide Tolson from the room and along the landing to the stairs.

As they reached the staircase Pilkington, his head bowed to watch his ascending feet, was coming up from the hall. Leonard immediately turned to the stairs leading to the second floor. Having reached this landing he glanced about him uncertainly, at the passage leading off on either side and at the innumerable entrances to the rooms, then turned once more to the stairs and continued up to the top floor.

He had to stand and wait here impatiently for Tolson to come up, listening first to his feet then, as he reached the turn of the stairs, watching the tight, curled knots of his hair and, a moment later, his amused, upturned face as he ascended towards him. Leonard paused, glancing in both directions, then led the way down the passage to the right. When he reached the gallery at the far end, however, his indecisiveness momentarily returned and he stood in the centre of the long rectangular room staring at the featureless walls and then at Tolson. He had started trembling, and quite violently. Then suddenly he began to move towards Tolson.

‘Oh, Vic.…’

He put his arms round Tolson with the same delicacy with which a man might have explored an unusually shaped stone. Except that it was with a shuddering curiosity, and that the stone bore its own peculiar life.

Tolson glanced round the room with a kind of sombre surprise, heavy, purposeful. Like a retreating spider he began to draw Leonard with him towards the door. To one side of the gallery was a darkened room, and it was into this that Tolson finally withdrew with his burden. He laid Leonard down, then knelt beside him and began to loosen his clothes, stooping forward and kissing him gently.

A short while later Tolson lay back on the dusty floor. They were silent. Then Tolson said, ‘What would you have done if your father had come up? Or better still, Ewbank?’ And when Leonard didn’t answer Tolson rolled onto his side. ‘Why, I think that’s the reason you came up. Isn’t that it? Knowing they were there, waiting.’ He leaned forward and stroked Leonard’s thighs. ‘Why, you’re like a woman. Once you’ve started you’re always wanting it. And showing it, too. You can’t do without it.’

Leonard moved restlessly against the floor, his head sinking and turning away. ‘You ruin everything. You spoil everything.’

‘There’s one thing I’ve always wished,’ Tolson went on quietly. ‘I wish you were built a bit bigger. I wish you were bigger. Then we could box together. God, I’d love to fight you. It makes me bloody ache.’ He moved his body aimlessly against Leonard’s. ‘Why don’t you fight!’ he said wildly. He ran his hands the length of Leonard’s body. ‘I wish you would at times. I wish just once you’d fight.’

Tolson stood up. He began to fasten his clothes. A moment later he went to the corner of the darkened room. There was the splashing of liquid against the wall and floor. ‘Do you know what Blakeley calls you?’ he said above this sound. ‘The reluctant messiah. I know what he means now.’

Leonard pushed himself to his knees. He stooped forward, pulling and fastening his clothes. Then he stood up.

‘Listen,’ Tolson said. They were silent. From deep down in the house came the crashing of chairs. Then Tolson released a huge clap of wind. He laughed. Leonard went to the door. He stood frowning in the light.

‘Why do you act like this,’ Leonard said, holding his hand to his face. ‘Why do you make it like this? You absolute bastard.’ He leaned against the wall.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Tolson said bitterly.

‘If you’re ashamed of it. If you feel guilty … why do you keep on? It’s none of those things to me. If my father had come up it just wouldn’t have mattered. I wanted you. I wanted you. And then you become like this.’

Tolson was silent, standing in the door of the room. He looked about him distractedly. Then he said quickly, ‘Has Elizabeth said anything to you? I mean, today, this morning.’

‘No.’

‘She hasn’t spoken to you or anything?’

‘I haven’t even seen her. Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter … Len.’ Tolson came to stand by him. He stroked Leonard’s hair a moment. Then he kissed his neck.

He stood bowed over Leonard, his face pressed against his hair. Then Leonard swung round and folded his arms round Tolson’s neck. He kissed him wildly, pulling Tolson’s face ferociously against his mouth.

‘You shouldn’t abuse it. You shouldn’t!’ he said as he withdrew. He rested his head on Tolson’s shoulder, staring down. ‘Don’t you see what it does? It makes me frightened for you. You don’t know what it does to me. I don’t know what it might make me do.’

He looked up at Tolson’s face. ‘There’s no need to be like this. I’ll never betray you.’

Tolson didn’t answer. If anything, he seemed confused.

‘Why.… Why do you think I came up here with you? Why do you think I brought you here?’ Still Tolson didn’t answer.

‘You make these situations, then you drive me into them. There’s no need. There’s no need! We mustn’t fight!’

‘You don’t know. You don’t understand,’ Tolson said. He suddenly wrenched himself away from Leonard. Yet it was only as if the next moment to take hold of him more fiercely. It was then that he heard Ewbank’s voice calling, ‘Tolson! Tolson!’ He swung round with a half-cry and started down the landing to the stairs.

Leonard watched him, his face torn with despair. Slowly he began to follow him. ‘There’s no need to feel ashamed. There’s no need to be frightened,’ he said to Tolson’s back. ‘Don’t you understand? I want you. And there’s nothing else. I’ll never betray you. Vic.…’

‘Hell!’

Quite unintentionally – he seemed in fact to be tormentedly and wholly preoccupied with his own thoughts – Tolson had missed his foot on the top step and, his hands clutching out unsuccessfully for the support of the banister, he began to tumble down the stairs. It happened so impulsively that at first it seemed almost a deliberate projection of his heavy body. But the next moment the awkward convolution of those massive limbs, turning slowly and ponderously in that narrow space, had gained such a momentum that by the time Tolson reached the only bend he was unable to prevent himself from being flung round it by his own prodigious weight and sent by a series of incredible leaps and bounds to the landing below.

Such a helpless display from someone who normally was so portentously co-ordinated seemed to affect Leonard more than anything that had happened that morning. He gazed tormentedly down the empty stairs as though there were still some visual evidence lingering in the dimly-illuminated space, and it was with almost paralysed gestures that he began his own descent. When he reached the landing below, Tolson was standing with his back to the wall opposite the foot of the stairs and looking at him with a sombre and hideous smile which seemed to indicate, if nothing else, a need to express some sort of extreme threat.

‘And what do you expect me to be, then? Frightened of you? Giving in to you!’ Tolson cried, referring to their previous conversation, as if by some ludicrous assertion of his personality he could continue as though the accident had never taken place. ‘Is that what you’re trying to say? Expecting me to be frightened! Can’t you see what I am!’

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ Leonard said quietly, watching Tolson as though he had now reached some important decision. He seemed almost in tears.

In Tolson himself there had appeared a sudden hardness. Almost the need, it seemed, to exact some sort of revenge.

They gazed at one another in silence for some time, standing so still and intent that John, emerging from the stairs below, did not see them until he almost collided with his son. He looked up at them in terror.

‘Leonard!… Vic. Mr. Ewbank’s looking for you.’ They seemed dazed, completely unaware of his presence. ‘Mr. Ewbank’s looking for you.’

Tolson turned an almost hysterical look of threat on him, then more potently on Leonard. As if re-animated by Tolson’s look, Leonard said incoherently to his father, ‘It’s all right, is it? We’re coming.’

He immediately turned to the stairs.

John watched first Leonard then Tolson pass by. He seemed about to speak, his mouth opening, but he watched them in silence as they sank below him.

When they reached the first floor Ewbank came along the passage from the York Room accompanied by Pilkington.

‘Ah, so you’ve found the two miscreants,’ he said, calling to them in an unusually loud voice and expressing with this last word that tone of ridicule upon which were hinged all his remarks and gestures directed at the Radcliffes. ‘I must say, they were forever off on their own when I had them working together, so I’m not so sure exactly what advantage it would be if Leonard did come back.’

Perhaps intended as a note of badinage, the remark emerged from Ewbank as one of specific condemnation. But even if he were aware of the ambiguity of the words he saw no suspicion of offence in any of the three faces confronting him. If anything, Leonard and Tolson appeared to be suffering from extreme shock, while John seemed lost in a private wilderness of regret and confusion.

It was only as Tolson reached the broad turn leading down into the hall that he looked back, past Pilkington and Ewbank who were close behind him to where Leonard stood on the landing with his father. ‘I’ll see you again, then?’ he said to Leonard.

He continued to stare up at the two figures, Ewbank and Pilkington waiting beside him, until Leonard nodded his head.

‘All right, then,’ Tolson said.

He swung round and crashed down the stairs to the door and disappeared.

Leonard and his father walked back in silence into their inhabited part of the building, leaving open the partition door and going down to the kitchen. As they passed Elizabeth’s room she called Leonard’s name; but it seemed that John himself was too immersed in his thoughts to give her any attention. It was only when he entered the kitchen, and Stella told him that Elizabeth was unwell, that he realised Leonard had not followed him down.

Having already picked up his coat at Stella’s suggestion that he should call the doctor, he dropped it into a chair and hurried back up the stairs.

He emerged on the landing just in time to see Leonard coming out of Elizabeth’s room and, apparently excited, hurrying to his own room and closing the door. When he entered Elizabeth’s room, she appeared to be fast asleep. He was unable to wake her. Her face was flushed and her forehead extremely hot. He stroked her cheek a moment, calling her name. Then, a short while later, he hurried out to telephone the doctor.

Ewbank, lean and almost child-like in his grip of the huge circumference of the steering wheel, watched the Place vibrate in the mirror. The leaves, then the branches, enveloped it until, swinging abruptly round the descending curve of the drive, he was distracted by the sight of one of the metal gates lying across the opening to the road. The heavy vehicle lurched, braking, and almost stopped.

Then, gradually urged forward by its own weight, the lorry ran onto the metal skeleton. The tyres, scarcely deflected by the gate, rode up over its narrow ribs, the wheels driven up slightly onto their springs, then released suddenly as the eroded metal snapped in several places so that, as the truck turned out into the road, it left in its wake a strung network of debris. Ewbank stopped and got down. After kicking the tyres and glancing beneath the axles of the machine, he walked back to the gate and examined the fragments.

He called the men from the truck to clear the debris to one side, and, while they worked, strolled back up the drive. When the building came into view he stopped and glanced about him as he might have examined any site which his tents had recently abandoned, and very much as a man might inspect a derelict home for the last trace of things he might wish to take with him. Except that the contractor’s gaze was arrested by the building itself as if that blackened stone tent had somehow escaped dismantling and he was now considering whom to reprimand and whom to send back to load it on his red, titanic lorries. When he turned back down the drive it was in a grave and restless mood.

The two men had finished clearing the drive. The largest segment of the gate was propped against one of the posts. After examining it, Ewbank instructed them to lift it onto the truck. As they drove off he looked back at the chimneys of the Place diminishing over the roofs of the houses and said, ‘It reminds me of something, does that …’ glancing at the two figures beside him as though having to identify it in so many words would somehow obscure his meaning. Tolson, however, was gazing straight ahead through the windscreen, apparently unhearing; and Pilkington, in the cramped space, was struggling to light a cigarette.

When they reached the yard Ewbank got down from the large vehicle, lit a cheroot, and stood gazing up at the incredible emptiness of a clear sky. The sunlight fell directly into the yard. There was a light breeze. He set Tolson and several other men onto dragging out the wet tenting that had accumulated in the sheds and – stretching the creased and greying canvas across the paddock. He seemed scarcely satisfied until the alleys between the sheds and the grass beyond were full of the flattened shapes, like sucked bodies, swaying and billowing with every variation of the breeze.