Chapter Five

THE WINDOW CURTAINS WERE AS THIN AS TISSUE PAPER so I woke up early, at about four o’clock, just as the light was coming in. The other two were probably awake as well but they said nothing as I got up and fumbled about for my clothes. I needed to go to the place across the yard, but since that meant getting dressed I might as well walk round and take a look at the place. After moving as a pack the day before I wanted to be on my own for a while. There was nobody in the kitchen and the fire was out. I went through the porch, unlatched the door and walked round the side of the house to the walled yard. It had gap broad enough for a farm wagon to get through on one side. The facing side consisted mostly of a high open-fronted cart shed with an old haywain and a neat wagonette parked inside. There was nobody visible, human or animal, but a cow was mooing not far away and the soft churring sound that hens make when they’re waking up was coming from a chicken shed in the angle between house and wall. Underfoot was mostly hard beaten earth, with shallow craters where the chickens had been scratching, but somebody had dug a vegetable patch along the wall at right angles to the cart shed and planted onions, carrots and a few cabbages. The place didn’t look poor exactly, but not very prosperous either. The Old Man and his little household obviously lived a spartan life. When we’d decided to inflict ourselves on them I suppose we’d envisaged more of a country house existence, or at least somewhere surrounded by rosy-cheeked country folk with trugs of fruit and jugs of cream. This was more like a place under siege and the supplies we’d brought with us were only enough for a picnic or two. We’d have to discuss that later, along with a lot of other things, but meanwhile being up so early was like stealing the best part of the day and I intended to enjoy it.

I strolled out of the yard and on to a farm track that ran uphill between hedges smothered in honeysuckle and dog roses, frothed with white cow parsley. The sky was clear blue with a few clouds towards the west, the air cool enough to blow away the itchiness of the long day’s journey and restless night. A little way up the track the view opened out and suddenly there were sea and hills, the sapphire glint of the Solway Firth and beyond it on the Scottish side the southern uplands misty and paler blue with the sun not yet on them. I stood leaning on a gateway enjoying them until I realised that something was happening nearer at hand. The gate led into a paddock of fine grass scattered with buttercups and cuckoo-smock, sloping up to the edge of the wood. A horse was cantering towards me, such a horse that might have been made by the old gods to go with the place and the morning. Technically he was a grey, but the effect was shining silver. He wasn’t large, probably no more than fifteen hands, but well proportioned and fine boned, with his long mane flying up and his tail streaming out like a pennant. He moved as if the grass had springs under it. A few yards from the gateway he came to a halt, looking at me wary-eyed, blowing gently through wide nostrils. He’d been expecting somebody else. When I reached out he let me stroke his muzzle, but guardedly. I was talking to him, telling him he was beautiful and so on, when I heard footsteps swishing in the grass and looked up to see the Old Man. When I arrived he must have been at the top of the field near the wood or I’d have seen him earlier. He was carrying his carriage horsewhip and I wondered if he might have been there all night, on guard at the high point of his land. The horse turned and went to him, nuzzling against him.

‘A fine horse,’ I said.

He smiled, arm over the horse’s neck. ‘Seawave Supreme.’ Like a herald announcing a title. ‘You like horses?’

‘Yes.’ It was practically a guilty secret because most of the people I knew thought that liking horses went with everything we despised, such as country squires and Conservatives. ‘Especially Arab horses.’

Which was true. For me, they’d always had a kind of gallantry about them that made the heart lift just to see them.

‘Want to see the others?’

‘Yes please.’

He vaulted over the gate, head down and heels up, almost as easily as a young man and straightened up beside me, pleased with himself. We fell into step together back down the track. It was my first taste of what was to be one of the oddest things about that summer – the feeling of at least two worlds going on at the same time, side by side. The evening before he’d confessed to murder, I’d spent most of the night lying awake wondering if he’d meant it but there we were, strolling along with the sun coming up as if we had nothing to think about but horses. I suppose I might have started quizzing him about Mawbray’s son and all the rest of it – an older version of myself might have done just that – but it would have been an intrusion, brutal bad manners. Besides, it was such a fine morning and I liked him. We walked down past the house then up again along the track we’d been on when he’d shot at us the night before. He pointed with his whip.

‘That’s the barn they burnt. It was empty because we hadn’t got the hay in at the time, but they didn’t know that, the devils.’

It was up near the road. We must have passed it in the dark without seeing it. A few blackened timbers stuck up at odd angles and the grass all round it was burnt brown. We looked for a while then he opened a wide farm gate to the left of the track and we went into a broad meadow that sloped up to the road on one side, down to a curving line of willows and alders on the other. From where we were standing you could hear a river but not see it and I guessed it was hidden in the trees. I found out later from the map that it was a tributary of the Waver that ran down to the Solway Firth. There were some pockets of mist down by the river. When the Old Man stood by the gate and whistled, heads and necks of horses came out of the mist and the little herd came galloping uphill to us. They were mostly mares, three bays and two greys, with a couple of youngsters.

‘Two year olds,’ he said. ‘Sid’s first sons.’

‘Sid?’

‘Seawave Supreme. Sid’s his stable name. He’s one in a lifetime, that horse. Best stallion I’ve ever bred.’

‘Why Seawave?’

I hoped he might confirm at first hand the story Nathan had passed on, about bringing the original mares and stallion from Arabia.

‘You want to know? Come with me and I’ll show you.’

He stroked the necks of the nearest mares then pushed them gently aside so that we could get back through the gate. We went back down to the house and when we went through the gateway to the yard we found Robin letting out the hens. He said ‘Good morning, sair’ to the Old Man and gave me a diffident little bob of the head. The two Afghan hounds were sniffing around and came up to the Old Man to have their long heads caressed.

‘Morning, Robin. We’ll be needing the wagonette. When you’ve finished in the stables, will you go and get Bobbin. He’ll be down by the river as usual.’

Robin just nodded and walked away through a gap in the wall next to the cart shed.

‘Robin’s not very talkative with human beings,’ the Old Man said, ‘but he understands horses better than anyone you’ll ever meet. Came over on the boat from Ireland a couple of years ago and stayed.’

He followed Robin through the opening by the cart shed. It opened into another enclosed yard larger and more prosperous looking than the one by the house. It was paved in sandstone with a water trough and pump in the middle, loose boxes around three sides and a two-storey brick building backing on to the other yard. He opened the door of the building and let me into one of the finest tack rooms I’d ever seen. The walls were newly distempered, with saddles and bridles ranged on supports and hooks along them, all supple and newly cleaned. Gleaming window panes let in the light and gave an uninterrupted view of the stable yard. There was none of the casual muddle of the house. Everything was bright and orderly as a cavalry stables.

‘That’s it,’ the Old Man said.

He was looking at the wall at the end of the room. It had no saddles and bridles on it, just one huge painting. It was an oil more than ten feet high, almost filling the wall, and showed a group of Arab horses galloping along a beach with white crashing surf in the background.

‘Who painted it?’

‘Can’t remember. Got some young chap to do it for me, but I told him what to put in. Like the poem.’

There was a gilt-edged panel under the picture, with lines of poetry inscribed on it. The Old Man started reading.

‘With flowing tail, and flying mane,

Wide nostrils never stretch’d by pain,

Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein,

And feet that iron never shod,

And flanks unscarr’d by spur or rod,

A thousand horse, the wild, the free,

Like waves that follow o’er the sea.’

Long before he got to the end I realised that he was reciting from memory, not reading. He repeated the last two lines, his eyes on my face. ‘Seawave, you see. Free as a wave on the sea. Know who wrote that?’

‘Byron. It’s from Mazeppa.’ A fierce tale about a young man who made love to another man’s wife and in revenge was tied to the back of a wild horse to be galloped to death.

‘That’s right, Mazeppa. Greatest poem in the English language.’

I could tell it wasn’t an occasion to indulge in literary discussion and he’d said it the way he recited the lines, like a matter of religious faith. He stood in silence, staring at the picture then suddenly turned to me.

‘I’m taking Sid on a ride to the sea, any day now. Want to come with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘As long as there won’t be any trouble about it. Had enough trouble. Which one of them do you belong to?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I stared at him wondering what he meant. College, political party?

‘Which one of the men? If you get all that straight at the start, saves trouble later.’

I suppose I just stood there, gaping at him. He grinned.

‘I should hope my nephew’s taken the pretty one and the man with the laugh’s got his eye on the little one. Can’t make out you and the other two, though.’

There was no need to draw myself up to my full height because I was already taller than he was.

‘I can assure you for the three of us that we’re not in the ownership of any man and we never will be.’

‘Of course you will. You all seem healthy nice-looking girls. You’ve got a bit of a temper by the look of it, but some men like that. You’ll marry all right.’

‘If we decide to marry we shall enter into a free relationship of equals. The idea of a wife being subservient, let alone owned, as you put it, is downright disgusting.’

I could tell he was enjoying himself, that he’d wanted to provoke an argument, and that made me more angry.

‘It’s a law of nature, girl. You saw Sid. He’s the only stallion here and the mares are his mares. If another stallion came and tried to take them, they’d fight and tear out one another’s throats with their teeth till one of them gave in and probably dragged himself away to die.’

‘So you’re implying that men and women are no better than horses?’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it. Most of us aren’t nearly as good. Have you ever seen a human being as much of a real nobleman as my Sid?’

‘I wonder if his mares think so. But I don’t suppose they have much choice in the matter.’

‘They don’t need choice. They’re happy.’

‘Don’t women need choices, then?’

‘No. Doesn’t make them any happier and only causes a lot of trouble and confusion.’

‘So that’s why we don’t need votes, I suppose.’

‘Nobody needs votes. Whatever side you vote for you end up with meddling idiots.’

‘If parliament gives women the vote, perhaps we won’t keep getting idiots elected.’

‘Give? They’ll never just give it to you. If you want anything, you just have to go and take it. If you all wanted it enough, you’d have had it by now.’

It’s always seemed odd to me that this remark, from an old man I thought was certainly misguided and quite probably mad, turned out to have more influence on the next twenty years of my life than all the sober good sense I’d heard from my friends and teachers. I’d grown up with the idea that because the logical case for giving us the vote had been made over and over again, it was only a matter of time before it would happen. Only it hadn’t happened and it was beginning to dawn on me that something more than asking politely might have to be done about it. So what he’d said stung me more than he deserved. I don’t know what I’d have answered because at that moment a little door through from the cart shed opened. We turned round and there was Dulcie Berryman, more or less conventionally dressed this time in blue serge skirt and jacket and blue cotton blouse. The only odd note was that her feet were in leather Turkish slippers much too big for her. She shuffled towards us.

‘Robin’s asking when you want the wagonette round.’

‘When they’ve had their breakfast. Are they up yet?’

‘Some of them.’

The Old Man had turned back to look at his picture of the horses, rather wistfully, and she went to stand beside him.

‘There’s nobbut tea and clapbread and butter,’ she said.

‘No eggs?’

‘Nobbut three. The hens are out of kelter.’

‘Clapbread and butter then.’

There was something curiously intimate about the little conversation, more like two friends than employer to housekeeper. Then I noticed the Old Man’s right hand. Slowly but quite deliberately it was caressing Dulcie’s serge-covered haunch much as he’d stroked the neck of the horse in the meadow. She showed no sign of resenting it any more than the horse had. It was a casual almost automatic gesture, as if he’d done it many times, and yet I was sure it was connected with our discussion. It meant ownership and he meant me to see it. When he turned and looked at me over his shoulder I was quite sure of it. I said something, I don’t know what, and blundered out through the little door, embarrassed and angry, through the cart shed and back to the yard by the house. Then, as luck would have it, the first person I saw was Meredith just when I was feeling at my least intelligent and philosophic.

‘Good morning, Miss Bray. Is anything wrong?’

He’d been standing in the middle of the yard staring up at the house and looked as fresh and tidy as if he’d just come from his college bathroom, close shaven with a jaunty black felt hat on his head, which he raised to me. There was something ironic in the gesture – conventional manners in a mad situation.

‘No, nothing thank you.’ I was still hot with confusion and embarrassment and didn’t want to talk about it to anybody, least of all him.

‘Did you all sleep well?’

This was altogether too ironic. ‘No, we didn’t, and I don’t suppose any of you did either.’

‘No. At least it gave us a chance to come to some tentative conclusions.’

‘You mean on whether the Old Man really has killed somebody?’

‘Oh no, nothing like as precipitate as that. The main question at issue was go or stay.’

‘I thought Alan and Kit had decided.’

‘Under some pressure, in an emotional situation. It seemed my duty to put the other argument.’

‘As a tutor?’

‘Not quite, but I have some duty to protect them, don’t you think?’

‘So you advised Alan to leave the Old Man to sort things out for himself?’ Although I was angry with the Old Man I felt a twinge of conscience about that. I remembered how he’d cried in front of us all.

‘I didn’t advise him of anything. I just wanted to be sure he was thinking clearly.’

‘And the result?’

‘He’s staying. You’re looking pleased about that.’

‘Am I? I suppose I’d have thought less of him if he hadn’t.’

‘So would I – logical or not.’

‘So he’s staying and Kit’s staying.’

‘We’re all staying.’

‘You too? You won’t get your book finished with all this going on.’

‘There are some things more important than books. This kind of opportunity isn’t likely to come more than once or twice in a lifetime.’

‘Opportunity?’

‘We’ve all been talking about philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, which means choices. It’s not often that you get a chance to put it into practice.’

‘So we’re all in a kind of philosophical laboratory, are we?’

‘You disapprove?’

‘No. I know you like experimenting with people.’ Again, I was amazed at what I found myself saying to this man on such a short acquaintance.

‘That makes it sound a very clinical process, as if I were outside it.’

‘What happened to that scout’s son – the one you coached?’

For a split second he looked surprised, then laughed. ‘We keep in touch. He has a good job with a solicitor, if that reassures you.’

Did I look as if I needed reassuring? While we were talking, Robin had come through the arch from the stable yard, leading a big dark bay cob. He tied it to a ring outside the cart shed and started manoeuvring out the wagonette.

‘You’ll need to get ready for the journey back,’ Meredith said. ‘We shall come to the station to see you off.’

‘We’re not going.’ He looked startled, I thought. ‘We had our own discussion last night and came to the same conclusion.’

‘So you’re determined to be moral experimenters as well?’

‘I suppose so.’ I certainly wasn’t going to tell him about Imogen’s thunderbolt.

If he had been startled, he recovered quickly. ‘Then you must join our college. In the hay barn after breakfast.’

‘There’s nothing left of the barn.’

‘There’s another one at the top of a field by the wood. I’ve just been to look at it.’

‘Nell.’ Imogen’s voice. She came out of the house and saw us. ‘Where have you been? We thought something else must have happened.’

Meredith raised his hat again and walked away.

‘Nothing’s happened,’ I told her. Except a silver horse and a stroking hand and a maverick philosopher bent on experiment. ‘Nothing.’

*   *   *

In the end the wagonette did go to the station with Robin driving it, but only to collect our luggage. By then we’d all had our breakfast in the kitchen and were in the yard to see it drive off. As it went away up the drive, Meredith looked at Alan and waited. It struck me that all the men except Meredith seemed worse for wear, with bags under their eyes and crumpled collars. Kit’s left arm was in a sling. When I asked how it was he told me Meredith had dressed and rebandaged it. The skin was still inflamed from the Old Man’s application of carbolic, but the wounds were clean and all the shot pellets out. Midge and I probably didn’t look any better than the men and although Imogen would still be elegant after a night in a dog kennel she was paler than usual. I’d been curious to see how she’d behave with Alan at breakfast. After the passionate declaration the night before, I was worried that she might do something unthinkable like running up to him and putting her arms round him. I’d underrated her there, thank goodness. She poured tea and buttered oatbread quite calmly and, if anything, was more distant and formal with him than usual. Anyway that problem would have to keep while we sorted out more immediate ones.

Alan said, ‘Meredith’s found a barn that might do.’ (Although the rest of us were on first-name terms, he remained Meredith. It was a careful judgement by his former pupils. A ‘Mr’ in front of it would have been too formal, but he was still a don and too senior in years to us to be ‘Michael’.)

After a little hesitation Alan led the way across the yard and through the gate to the uphill track where I’d walked earlier in the morning. Just past Sid’s field there was a gate on the other side, leading to a field of pale grass that had been shaved close for its hay. In the top corner below the wood was a grey stone barn that looked older than the house, pierced by narrow window slits.

‘Behold our college,’ Nathan said.

We walked up the field in silence. The view from outside the old barn was even better than from the track, across the flat green fields of the Solway Plain to the sea and the Scottish hills. As we went inside a flock of startled house martins came skittering out over our heads and swung up into a cloudless blue sky. Inside was shadowy and sweet smelling, with shafts of sunlight coming through the window slits and illuminating random areas among the shadows. The new hay crop that had been taken off the field was stacked along one wall but the barn was so big there was still a lot of empty space. Alan and Nathan took the lead in piling up some of the hay trusses to make seats near the open doors of the barn where the light was best, seven hay piles in a semicircle, looking out at the view. We settled ourselves self-consciously, as if on a stage set and waited for somebody to speak. It was Nathan who broke the silence.

‘It’s not far from here to the sea, is it?’

Kit said, ‘I don’t think we’re here to discuss the geography.’

‘I mean, it would be quite easy to get the Old Man away. Down to the coast, off in a fishing boat and in France or somewhere before they know he’s gone.’

We all stared. Meredith asked gently what the purpose of that would be.

‘Well, as far as I can see it’s either that or wait until they come and arrest him, and we can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’ Meredith again.

‘Well, he’s Alan’s great uncle and he seems a nice enough old chap in his way when he’s not blazing away at people with shotguns. I take it if we’ve all decided to stay it means we’re on his side and the main thing is to stop them hanging him.’

Midge gasped, ‘They wouldn’t hang an old man like him, would they?’

‘Is it worse to hang an old man than a young one?’ Meredith asked.

Midge started saying something, but Kit cut in, ‘I suppose you might argue that it’s not so bad, because an old man hasn’t got so much life left anyway.’

‘But death’s an absolute. You can’t look at it as if you’re slicing cheese—’

‘If you go down that road, you’d say it wasn’t so bad to murder an old man as a young man—’

‘Anyway, if he’d wanted to go he’d have gone by now wouldn’t he, so—’

Everybody talking at once, then we all stopped at once, waiting for each other to go on. Meredith broke the silence.

‘So we have one practical proposition from Nathan, that we should help a murderer escape justice. Any comments on that?’

Midge said quietly, ‘After all, a man’s dead. I don’t see how we can get away from that.’

I started saying something, then stopped because Kit was speaking.

‘So you’re arguing that we should let justice take its course?’

‘It depends what you mean by justice.’ A groan from Kit. ‘It wouldn’t be justice to hang an old man for accidentally killing somebody, but—’

‘What do you mean accidentally? By his own account he fired a double-barrelled shotgun twice at a crowd of people.’

‘People who were threatening him,’ Midge said. ‘It could count as self-defence.’

‘Are we talking about justice or law?’ Meredith asked.

‘Both, I hope.’

‘Essentially you’re arguing that we should let the law take its course, but do what we can to influence that course?’

‘By helping him prove self-defence, yes.’

‘So you’re against Nathan’s proposition of helping him to escape?’

Sounding impatient, Alan said, ‘He wouldn’t go anyway. He wouldn’t leave his horses.’

It was his first contribution to the discussion. Up to that point he and Imogen had been the sitting at the far ends of the semicircle, not saying anything. Nathan looked disappointed. He’d clearly been enjoying the prospect of night escapes and fishing boats.

‘So we wait until the police come for him, then get him a good lawyer, is that it?’

I said, ‘Doesn’t it seem odd that the police haven’t arrested him by now? After all, it must have happened more than a month ago. If it did happen.’

‘Something happened,’ Alan said. ‘He thinks he killed somebody, even knows who.’

‘Mawbray, son of the magistrate, whoever he may be. But all we know is that on a particular night your uncle fired on a group of people in the dark and since then nobody’s seen Mawbray’s son. Even that assumes that your uncle’s account is more or less what happened – and that’s making a big assumption.’

‘You think he’s lying, Nell?’

‘Not lying exactly. But he’s a man with a strong sense of drama, to put it mildly.’

‘There’s the other barn,’ Alan said. ‘It really was burnt.’

Midge said, ‘Then there were those boys.’

‘Yes, shouting “murderer”. But even at best, all that would prove is that some people think he’s a murderer – or choose to pretend they think he’s a murderer.’

Nathan clutched his head and groaned. ‘Any minute now she’s going to start talking about that tree.’

We stared at him. ‘What tree?’

‘You know, the one in the quad and whether it still exists if there’s nobody around to see it existing. No?’

‘Not unless you want me to.’

‘No. So you’re saying it’s all moonshine – the Old Man never killed anybody and nobody thinks he did, they’re all just pretending to think he did.’

‘Has Nathan given a fair summary, Miss Bray?’ Meredith sounded amused. I knew I’d pushed my argument further than it deserved, but didn’t want to back down.

‘Fair enough.’

‘Can you explain why they should all be acting in this way?’

‘Let’s go back to that Mafeking meeting of his. Accepting for the sake of argument that it happened more or less as he told it—’

Alan interrupted, ‘I accept that at any rate. It’s exactly the kind of lunatic thing he would do.’

‘Or brave,’ Midge said quietly.

‘Lunatic or brave,’ I said, ‘we accept that he did it, and it obviously made him enemies. Let’s take another jump and assume some people really did come on to his land and burn down his barn, and he and Robin really did go out and fire at them.’

‘So you’re accepting his story after all?’ Kit said.

‘No. Here’s where I start questioning it. From his account, the only reason for thinking he killed Mawbray’s son is that nobody’s seen the man, or the boy or whoever he is, since that night. Doesn’t that allow two possible interpretations?’

‘More than that,’ Meredith said quietly.

Nathan cut in, more loudly, ‘I think I see what Nell’s getting at. The Old Man shoots at Mawbray’s son in the dark and misses. Mawbray’s son goes into hiding and his friends pretend he’s dead to get the Old Man hanged.’

I think we all wished that he wouldn’t talk so breezily about being hanged. It gave the thing too much hard reality.

‘They might not intend to go that far. Perhaps when they decide he’s suffered enough, Mawbray’s son will come out of wherever he’s been hiding – or back from wherever he’s gone – and they’ll pretend it’s all a great joke.’

‘Pretty cruel joke,’ Kit said. ‘So what Nell’s saying is nobody’s dead at all?’

‘I’m suggesting it’s a possibility.’ I’d been carried along by the argument and wasn’t as sure as I’d pretended. I’d never have admitted it at the time, but I can see now I wanted to impress Meredith. If I had, he was showing no obvious signs of it.

Imogen said slowly, ‘One thing about Nell’s version – it explains what the housekeeper woman was hinting at last night – that we shouldn’t believe the story. If she’d heard local rumours…’ Her voice trailed away and we waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She was carefully not looking at Alan.

‘If she knows it’s all a nasty joke, why doesn’t she tell the poor old chap?’ Nathan asked.

And Kit answered, ‘Maybe she doesn’t like him.’

I opened my mouth and shut it again. She’d shown no sign of dislike when he was stroking her haunch, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell them about it.

There was silence for a while, then Meredith asked if we thought we’d made any progress. Kit, who seemed to have taken on the job of group spokesman as usual, thought not.

‘We haven’t even gone round in circles, we’ve gone backwards. We started with what our ethical responsibilities would be if the Old Man’s a murderer, then we were talking like lawyers about reducing it to manslaughter, now we’re wondering if anybody’s dead at all.’

‘Fair summary,’ Meredith said. ‘Any conclusions?’

Midge said diffidently, ‘At least we’re talking about facts. Either Mawbray’s son is alive or he isn’t.’

‘Indisputable,’ Kit drawled. For some reason, Midge seemed to annoy him.

‘All right, stating the obvious. But surely there’s something we could do to find out.’

Nathan said, ‘We might start by finding out who he is, or was.’

*   *   *

So we gave up any pretence of philosophic discussion and got down to ways and means. The problem was that we had only three possible sources of information at Studholme Hall. Of those, one was the suspect himself, another Dulcie Berryman who had offered one questionable piece of evidence, and then there was Robin who’d hardly uttered a word since we arrived. Widening the net was essential but that meant going back to the town or around the Old Man’s neighbours and we felt we were in hostile territory. It was odd how quickly that feeling had grown on us. I supposed we simply weren’t used to people disliking us and were too young to have developed thick skins.

It was Nathan who came up with both the simplest and most alarming suggestion – that we ask the police. He pointed out that it could hardly make things worse. If they were on the point of arresting the Old Man, at least we should know about it. If the whole thing might be the yokels’ idea of a joke, we should know that too. At the very least, the police would know about Mawbray’s son. Since we could hardly descend in a body on the local police station, Alan and one other should go. Alan looked unhappy, but agreed.

‘You’ve got standing after all,’ Kit said. ‘I suppose you’re the nearest relative.’

‘My father’s probably that, but he and the Old Man quarrelled decades ago, so I’m the nearest one on speaking terms.’

Meredith agreed to go with him. As Alan’s tutor (or more strictly, former tutor) he’d add weight to the deputation. The next question was when. Obviously not that day, because we’d been talking all morning and it would be too late for them to walk to town and back. Tomorrow then? But the next day was Saturday, so by the time they got to the police station it might be closed for the weekend and Sunday was out of the question. Monday morning then, a good comfortable few days away. On Monday morning we’d definitely start doing something. It seems strange now to think how fast and how slowly time seemed to move that summer – as if we were living simultaneously in both centuries, the more leisurely nineteenth and the hurrying twentieth into which time had just tipped us. While we sat up there in our barn below the wood at the top of the hill we could enjoy the view and choose to be part of it or not. And if we chose to be part of it then we could take our time, make our own terms with it. Even on that morning the barn was already becoming for us a kind of sanctuary, a philosophers’ porch. Which was why nobody seemed very surprised when Alan made his proposal.

‘We’ll live here. I don’t see how I can stay under the Old Man’s roof and go calmly down to the police station and ask if he’s killed somebody. There’s enough hay to sleep an army, we’ve brought some food with us and we’ll get more from town. We’ll move our books in and do some reading the way we’d intended.’

Instant agreement from Kit. Nathan added, ‘Anything but that confounded parlour again.’

Alan said, ‘I’m sure the Old Man will find you a room in the house, Meredith. After all, you’re in a rather different position.’

‘On the contrary, I’m in exactly the same position as the rest of you. It’s a perfectly good barn.’

I thought wistfully how good it would be to go to sleep in the sweet-smelling hay and wake up to the house martins’ twittering but knew it would be no use.

‘What about us?’ Midge said.

‘You’ll stay in the house. At least you have a bed there.’

Imogen said instantly, ‘I’m not staying in Dulcie Berryman’s bed.’

Alan turned from anxious to downright miserable, as he always was when he thought he’d offended her.

‘I’ll speak to him. We’ll find somewhere.’

I asked if we weren’t bound, like the men, by the ethical impossibility of staying under the Old Man’s roof but didn’t get an answer because somebody spotted the wagonette going down the drive to the house, loaded with all our luggage. There was a surge downhill, Nathan running to get to it and start setting up their camp, Kit following at good pace in spite of his injury, then Midge and Imogen. Alan hung back to talk to me.

‘What’s wrong with Imogen?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s been avoiding me all day, hardly said a word to me.’

‘She’s tired.’

‘It’s more than that, isn’t it? She blames me, doesn’t she? Blames me for bringing her here.’

‘No, I’m sure not.’

‘Is it the business with the Old Man, then? She thinks I’m doing the wrong thing?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Then for pity’s sake, what is it?’

I told him he’d just have to ask her, then stepped out fast to catch up with Midge and Imogen. Five words would have answered all his questions, but I wasn’t the one to say them.