3

 

 

A winding gravelled drive led from the narrow hedge-lined road up to the house. The grounds must have played a part in reducing the club to bankruptcy, Murray guessed. They were extremely elaborate, and even before he stopped at the front entrance he had seen a maze of carefully tended box, magnificent ranks of rhododendrons, beds of what looked like peonies set among neglected lawns. Around the corner of the house he glimpsed the high board of a swimming pool.

The house was a rambling structure of grey stone and old brick, with dark red creepers reaching to the roof. It had an empty look; the windows were dirty, and one of the ground-floor rooms was shuttered. There was a gravelled stand for cars at the left of the front door, which boasted a pillared porch and no less than seven stone steps of decreasing width.

He pulled up, switched off the engine, and in the sudden silence had to repress a wild thought—that this was an alcoholic delusion, and Blizzard had never asked for him at all, and he had come to a deserted house to find nobody waiting and no hope for the future.

He snatched the key from the ignition and jumped out. With as much noise as possible he slammed the car’s door and opened the boot. He reached inside for his travelling bag.

‘You will be Mr Murray Douglas.’

The voice was as soft and unexpected as if the trees had spoken to him. He started violently and let the lid of the boot fall with a crash. At his elbow a man of indeterminate age and nationality, wearing a black suit and a black tie, had appeared like a conjuring trick. He hadn’t even made a crunching sound in the gravel as he approached.

Conscious of prickly sweat on his spine, Murray said, ‘Yes, I am. You seem to be—uh—expecting me.’

‘Yes, sir. My name is Valentine, and I am the head steward here. May I take your bag and show you to your accommodations?’

The extraordinary Victorian phrase heightened instead of dispelling Murray’s sense of unreality. He stared at Valentine, taking in the pale, unlined, ageless face, with its dark eyes, the immaculate suit like a funeral mute’s, the high-sided black leather boots in which the legs terminated.

‘Your bag, sir?’

‘Oh—here you are. Is Mr Blizzard here yet?’

‘No, sir. You are the first to arrive. I expect Mr Blizzard at six o’clock and Mr Delgado with him. The rest of the company will be arriving at various times this afternoon or this evening. Please come this way.’

He turned. Even the weight of the bag didn’t seem to make his footsteps grind the gravel. Feeling as though he was walking beside a ghost, Murray accompanied him up the steps, through a small vestibule inside the front door, and into a large—no, an enormous—hall. It reached up to an arched ceiling and a domed skylight, and a gallery serving the upper rooms ran around it from a curving staircase with a polished mahogany balustrade. There were the country club’s ornaments and decorations everywhere: old sporting prints, horse brasses, foxes’ masks and brushes, a pair of eighteenth-century fowling pieces with the barrels polished like silver, a tiger skin in front of the roast-an-ox fireplace.

Valentine led him upstairs, but instead of turning along the gallery, opened a green baize door at the head of the staircase and went through it. Beyond stretched a long light corridor, with panels of fluted glass let into its ceiling and numbered doors on either side. This must be a new wing jutting from the back of the house, which Murray hadn’t seen as he drove up.

‘Your room, sir,’ Valentine said, putting a key in the furthest door. ‘Number fourteen.’

There was a room thirteen adjacent, Murray noticed. He wondered idly whether it was going to be left vacant, in view of the number of theatrical people who were superstitious, or whether he was going to find himself with a doggedly sceptical neighbour for the duration of his stay. Then, as he followed the steward into his own ‘accommodations’, he forgot the question. He couldn’t prevent himself whistling.

Many London hotels would be glad of a few rooms like this. Plain, square, low-ceilinged, it was panelled with maple and raw yellow pine. A low double divan with a smoke-grey candlewick cover on it was flanked by twin bedside tables, one of which bore a phone, the other a huge vase of flowers. A full-size Picasso reproduction was centred over the head of the bed. The windows, curtained with dark green hessian, ran the length of the outside wall and gave a view on to the lawn behind the house and dark woods beyond. The corner of the swimming pool was just visible. There was a TV set on a white iron stand, an easy chair, a shelf bearing a row of Readers’ Union editions and a stack of back numbers of Acting.

Add one to the list of reasons why the club went broke. Murray gave an impressed nod and wandered to peer out of the window. At a half-seen movement behind him, he turned back; Valentine was opening his bag, which he hadn’t locked, as it was riding with him in the car, and had started to lay out his belongings.

‘No, leave that, Valentine,’ Murray said. ‘I prefer to sort out my own gear. Here.’ He felt for a tip, but Valentine raised a pale hand to prevent him.

‘That’s not necessary, sir. Mr Blizzard is giving me a very generous retainer.’

‘Oh. I see.’ Murray shrugged and dropped the coins back in his pocket. ‘Say, what’s the routine going to be—have you a timetable of some sort?’ He took the first few items from his bag and began to sort them into groups on the bed.

‘I understand that it will be up to Mr Delgado and the progress which is made with the play, sir. Tonight there is to be dinner at seven-thirty, after which Mr Delgado wishes to make the acquaintance of everyone present, and there will be some kind of an introductory discussion.’

‘I see. Are you left over from the country club they used to have here, by the way?’ Murray put socks and shirts into a handy drawer, picked up a spare suit on its hanger and went to the tall built-in wardrobe beyond the bed.

‘No, sir. I am specially retained by Mr Blizzard. I’m as much a stranger as yourself.’

‘Doing things in style, isn’t he—old Blizzard?’ Murray made to close the wardrobe door; in the act, he froze, staring down at something half seen on the lowermost shelf at the side of the cupboard. He barely caught Valentine’s reply.

‘I wouldn’t know, sir. I’m not acquainted with the world of the theatre. Is something wrong, sir?’

Murray forced himself out of his trance. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed grimly. ‘This is wrong.’ He tugged open the other door of the wardrobe and picked up what had caught his eye. He handed it to Valentine—a full, unopened bottle of White Horse.

‘And this! And this! And this!’ One after the other, he snatched up bottles—Booth’s Dry London gin, Lemon Hart rum, Cognac Hennessy. There were glasses there, too, a syphon of soda and bottles of lime and orange squash—but those were safe. He was sweating as he faced Valentine again, whose arms cradled the liquor and whose features were carefully composed into an expression of polite inquiry.

‘Get rid of them,’ he instructed curtly. ‘Is that part of Blizzard’s orders—laying in that stock for me?’

‘Mr Blizzard did require me to provide suitable refreshment in the visitors’ rooms, yes.’

‘All right, forget it. Just get rid of the stuff. Suitable refreshment for me is—oh, damnation! Get me a dozen cans of fruit juice.’

‘Very good, sir.’ If Valentine understood why he was being snapped at, he didn’t let it show. ‘Will that be all for the moment?’

‘Yes. Definitely all.’

It was going to be tough. But he’d always known that. At the sanatorium they’d told him, sympathetically but without sentimental pity, that it might be years before he dared take even a glass of beer; that he’d have to achieve a plateau of emotional stability from which he couldn’t slip back into his personal slough of despond. They’d said, in so many words, that if he took a drop of alcohol before he’d put five years of professional success and personal adjustment behind him, he would go to the gutter and stay there.

Murray Douglas didn’t like Murray Douglas very much. But in the gutter he’d hate him.

He had a store of tranquillizers they’d given him at the sanatorium, still not quite exhausted. He dug the packet out from the bottom of his bag and looked around for water. In the corner of the room was a washbasin with a mirrored cupboard over it. He cupped his hand under the cold tap, collecting enough water to rinse down the pill, and in a few minutes felt much better.

The rest of his gear, he decided, could wait till later. For the moment, he wanted to get acquainted with the setup he’d landed in.

Valentine, he found, had left the key in the outside of his door. He locked the door and set off on his tour of inspection.

The interior of the house didn’t detain him long. The big hall he had come through gave on to a dining room, a lounge with a bar in one corner, a reading room, and several other rooms whose doors were locked. He judged that one of the locked doors must give access to kitchens and storerooms. He left the door which led back into the new wing until last; it opened easily and he found beyond it not the corridor he had expected, but a complete small theatre with about sixty seats, a projection booth with a pair of sixteen-mill Bell and Howells, and a very decent-sized stage.

He whistled under his breath. So Blizzard did know what he was doing! Facilities like these weren’t found under bushes. Abruptly, the idea of high-pressuring a London production from scratch in four weeks didn’t seem so ridiculous after all. Author, cast, producer—and presumably lighting engineer, set designer and so on—under one roof, with their own miniature theatre for the rehearsals! That could be far, far better and more productive than meeting for rehearsal and then dispersing.

Murray cocked an eyebrow at the little theatre and went out again.

He wandered back through the big hall, catching a glimpse as he went of a man he at first thought was Valentine but who he realized after a second must be another steward, slightly taller, with the same eerie soft tread and the same mourning-black clothes. The front door was standing ajar. He paused by his car to put the top up because there was a scent of rain in the cool air, and went around the house to look at the grounds behind.

They were lavish. He crossed a long lawn, put his head into a dusty-smelling shed full of sports equipment, wandered to the edge of the swimming pool—the changing huts, too, had a dusty scent in them—and came at last to the woods beyond which he had seen from his room. They were dense and dark and very quiet. Kicking at a pebble, he followed a narrow path among the trees. He had gone barely fifty yards, and was already out of sight of the house because the path wound so, when he came to a fence.

It was eight feet tall, made of heavy-gauge linked wire on galvanized metal posts and topped with three strands of barbed wire into the bargain. There was no way of telling whether it was the club’s or belonged to the owner of the adjacent property; he guessed it must be the club’s, possibly installed to prevent members wandering on to other people’s land.

He shrugged and turned back. There was plenty of space open to him, and he didn’t care what happened beyond the fence.

At the back of his mind was the idea that it was a shame he had had to come here to work. This would have been a hell of a place to rest up after his spell in the sanatorium—if he’d had the money for it.

He was getting close to the house when he heard a car approaching up the driveway beyond. He hurried his steps; he was eager to know who else Blizzard had roped in to enjoy such unasked-forluxury.