Nicholas Royle
They pick me up from the local station and drive me back to their place. The drive takes about fifteen minutes. I’m trying to memorise it in case I need to retrace my steps, on foot, and can’t get a phone signal to look at a map. I haven’t seen Ruth for about forty years and I’ve never met her husband Martin, a Francophone Belgian, before today. It feels a little weird to be sitting in the back of their car being driven to their no-doubt enormous house in the middle of nowhere to pet-sit their dog, cat and five tortoises for a week when, really, I barely know them and they hardly know me.
I did know Ruth at university. We nearly had a thing, but then we didn’t and instead became good friends, but at the end of four years she moved to Brussels to work as a translator and it was there she met Martin, who people reckoned was a bit of an odd one, but they stayed together and got married and I virtually never heard from Ruth again until three weeks ago when she contacted me out of the blue via social media to offer me the pet-sitting gig. It couldn’t have come at a better time, as I had a story to write for an anthology and no ideas and even if I’d had an idea, the truth is I find it increasingly hard, if not actually impossible, to get any writing at all done sitting at home. Nothing suits me more than to be taken out of my home environment, away from all the usual distractions, so that writing can become either my top priority or in this case my second priority after walking the dog.
Don’t ask me where we are. Somewhere in the Dordogne. I took a train to Paris and then one to Bordeaux and then a local service east for an hour. I could be anywhere. The key thing is I’m away from home. Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife and she is very loving towards me, but if I need to write, I have to get away.
We leave the main road and join a minor road that winds through countryside that’s fields of sunflowers one minute, forest-clad hills the next, and end up on a track with grass growing in a line down the middle. When we get to the end of the track, Martin points a device at the windscreen and a gate opens. The car scrunches on to the gravel drive and Martin turns right and stops under a car port. He’ll need to reverse out to leave, I can’t help noticing. I’m more of a reverse-in-and-drive-out-forwards kind of a guy. Get the hard bit out of the way first.
Their house – I say their house, it’s more a collection of buildings set in half an acre of land – is stunning. They show me around. Martin seems okay. Maybe people misjudged him, or maybe all those years married to Ruth have shaved the rough edges off him. Martin asks if I want him to show me the walk he does every day with Luca, the dog. I know I said he seems okay, but do I really want to go off with him for a walk of – he tells me – about two and a half miles? I’d much rather Ruth show me the walk, but I don’t really feel I can say that.
Sure, I say.
So we go left out of the gates, up the green lane. Luca is with us and I stop and wait when he starts rooting round in the undergrowth.
I tend to just keep walking, Martin says. He’ll follow.
So we walk on up to the top of the rise and finally Luca joins us at the top. Then we plunge into the forest and Martin points out a patch of disturbed earth.
Wild boar, he tells me.
Les sangliers? I say.
Yes, he says.
The path takes us out past a house – it belongs to ‘the English people’, Martin tells me, but they’re never there – and then we have to stop and put Luca on a lead because the French owners of the next house pretty much insist on it.
The walk goes on. Luca is now off the lead and without warning stops to do his business. I’m expecting Martin to produce a little bag and pick it up, but instead he gets a stick and pushes it to the side of the track, which soon becomes a road and then we turn left into another track through the forest and this eventually passes an empty house that’s in the process of being done up and then with some twisting and turning and slightly awkward negotiation of a stony path we end up on a narrow road between fields full of reasonably fearsome-looking horned cattle, until we pass a tennis court, which seems slightly incongruous, and the rear entrance to a chateau – the inhabitants of the chateau own most of the land, apparently – and then more fields with more cows, past a house with a dog in the garden that barks at Luca and a sign on the house that says ‘Smile, You’re on Camera. Dog and Traps’. In French, naturally. There are two elderly Mercedes parked outside, a green estate model and a grey saloon. Once we get Luca away from the dog, we’re back in the forest for a while and there’s more twisting and turning and all the way along the walk there have been alternative paths to take that we haven’t taken and I’m thinking there’s no way I’m going to be able to remember this. Finally, however, we’re back, having done a circle of two and a half miles.
They show me around the living quarters – a converted barn – and they tell me about the two men who did the conversion, locals who specialise in this sort of thing.
One of them was a water diviner, Ruth says. He went around saying there’s a spring here and a spring there.
He also told us the house has an entity, says Martin.
An entity? I say.
Yes, he didn’t say much more than that and we didn’t ask, says Martin.
Great, I think. An entity.
They show me the cat, who runs away, and the enclosure in the garden that they insist contains five tortoises, although I only see two.
Do I have to walk them too? I ask.
Martin appears to be considering the question, but Ruth gives me a smile that takes me back forty years, when I would sneak her into press shows of films I was reviewing for the college newspaper and then, as I say, we nearly got together, but managed somehow to avoid it. It probably wouldn’t have worked.
Where are you going walking? I ask them.
The Basque Country, Ruth reminds me.
Oh yes, I say. I wouldn’t like it there. I don’t like complicated underwear.
No, I remember, she says, laughing.
I allow myself a sly look at Martin, who’s frowning.
And you’ll be back on Thursday? I ask.
Yes, at three o’clock, says Martin, and I remember that this is one of the things people used to say about him, that he was obsessive about punctuality, which seems a pretty harmless sort of thing to be obsessive about, but I think it was one of a few things.
Help yourself to the books, Ruth says, pointing to a bookcase next to the French windows, and the DVDs, she adds, pointing to the other end of the living area where there is a large TV.
I kind of wish they’d hurry up and set off and within five minutes they do, avoiding a big goodbye so as not to upset Luca, who I’ve to keep inside until I hear the gate clang shut after them. I hear the car on the gravel – there’s another car, to which they’ve left me the key – and then the gate and then it’s just me and the menagerie.
* * *
I try to take Luca for another walk, the same walk, while it’s fresh in my mind, but he’s not having it. He sits down halfway up the green lane, apparently determined not to leave sight of home. I can’t really blame him, as he’s literally just done this walk, so I give in and we head back, which I suspect is one-nil to Luca and may cause problems down the line, but we will see.
Instead, I feed him and the cat. The tortoises are more or less self-catering. Ruth said I could pick a few dandelion leaves if I were to see any on my walks. Then I feed myself – Ruth left a pasta sauce made with her homegrown tomatoes – and have a local beer, which is not bad at all. I get my laptop out and answer a few emails and create a file called ‘Story’, which I sit staring at for five minutes before writing a single word, ‘Untitled’, and then a line of random text that I will later select and replace with my opening line, whatever it happens to be. I sit there for another five minutes in case it should come to me and when it doesn’t I open a web browser and look at my social media for a bit until I realise the dog has gone to sleep in his basket and I think I might as well do the same.
* * *
Monday.
For some reason the title cards for The Shining come into my mind.
Ruth told me Luca doesn’t have to eat first thing, but he looks pretty keen to get out, so I make a quick coffee and butter some bread. There’s homemade jam in the fridge, though I couldn’t tell you what sort. I hope it’s not fig. Like Ruth, I studied languages and so I’m able to speak to Luca in French, which is the only language he understands, but don’t worry, I’m going to translate what I say to him into English, just for you.
Shall we go for a walk? I say to him, picking up the lead from the shelf by the door. He bounds up to me, tail wagging, and when I open the door he darts through the doorway. I lock the door even though, as Martin showed me, the French windows on to the terrace don’t lock. We scrunch to the side gate, which doesn’t require the zapper, and then we turn left on to the green lane we didn’t get very far up last night. This morning he’s more in the mood and gets to the top before I do. We pass through the forest and I see the House of the English People coming up through the trees. I can’t resist a little nose around. It’s clear there’s no one at home. They have French windows, too, and maybe they’d be unlocked like Ruth and Martin’s, but I don’t try them. I content myself with inspecting their living room from outside. It has the look of a stage set. The curtain is up and we’re waiting expectantly for someone to walk on stage. But no one does.
Come on, Luca, I say, let’s go.
I remember to stick the lead on him before we get to the House of the French People. In the front garden there are two empty deckchairs, turned to face the house. Luca pulls me towards a shed on the other side of the track. Even a dog his size – he’s a Tibetan terrier, small to medium size under all that long hair – can generate a considerable amount of traction when he gets his head down. I give him a few moments, wondering what he can smell at the bottom of the wooden door to the shed. I can guess. He can’t be the only dog that comes past here.
A little way past the House of the French People, after the track has turned into a road, there’s a patch of white stones or chips of stone embedded in the tarmac. Something about it draws my eye, but also drawing my eye is Luca’s scampering form rounding the next bend and I can’t remember how far it is down there to the next road where there might be actual cars or something, so I run to catch him up.
I would have walked right past the left-turn into the forest if Luca had not stopped there to wait for me. A short way into the forest there’s a path on the left. Do we take it or go straight on? Frankly I have no idea and Luca rests on his haunches waiting for me to make my mind up and I understand that at moments like this he won’t dictate the route to me, but he might pause if there’s a choice to be made. He must have been down most of these paths with Ruth or Martin and presumably none of them leads to a deadly bog or a concealed abandoned mine-shaft. You’ll have gathered by now that I don’t actually know much about dogs. Indeed, up until a couple of years ago I would have happily included ‘dogs’ in a list of personal dislikes, had somebody asked me to compile one.
I decide not to take the path on the left and Luca trots along behind me perfectly happily and as soon as there’s a downhill section he bounds off in front of me. A year or two ago I was standing outside a fancy bakery waiting for my turn to go in. It’s a small place and they seemed to want to keep the one-in-one-out system that had been introduced post-lockdown. For once there was no one else outside waiting, just me and, after a moment, a woman with a dog that was off its lead, and it came up to me, slowly, but very much as if it knew what it was doing. I was at an extremely low point at that time, worrying about a health matter, the possibility of something serious, and there was something going on at work. It’s fair to say I was depressed. The dog, a spaniel of some kind, brushed against my leg and sat down looking up at me. It was one of the strangest things that’s ever happened to me. I swear it knew how I was feeling and wanted to comfort me. I know it sounds ridiculous, although people with knowledge of dogs might disagree. And then the person who had been in the bakery came out and it was my turn to go in and the dog went back to its owner and I went in and bought a loaf of sourdough bread that would turn out to be more holes than bread. Four quid for a load of holes and a bit of bread and a crust to break your teeth on.
Luca stops and squats right at the edge of the path. I somehow can’t tear my eyes away although I remember reading somewhere that dogs don’t like to be watched when doing what Luca is doing. It seems to take him a long time but then it is done and he moves away and paws at the ground. I don’t know what that’s about. I find a stick – there’s no shortage of sticks in the forest – and approach the doings and am disappointed to see that it is runny. This isn’t the kind of thing I can flick away into the part of the forest where only hunters might step in it. Instead I collect a number of sticks and build a little structure over it. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. I suspect not, but we didn’t see anyone walking here yesterday and I haven’t seen anyone at all today.
I keep an eye on Luca for the rest of the walk, which is uneventful, and even if I dither over the route once or twice we do actually make it back, and he seems well in himself, but I’m in uncharted territory here. Ruth and Martin said I could call them or message them at any point with any questions no matter how minor, but my feeling is that I should try to ride this one out.
In the afternoon it’s too hot to sit on the terrace, so I sit inside at the dining table staring at my laptop. I write an opening sentence and delete it. I look out of the French windows. I write another sentence and delete that. I look at the bookcase to the left of the French windows. I hear a noise in the back kitchen and when I go to explore I almost step on the cat, who has just entered the back kitchen via the cat flap. I sit back down and write another opening sentence. Sitting on top of the bookcase is an antique doll, its head turned towards the dining table. I hear a noise from the main kitchen area. I get up to investigate. The noise appears to be coming from above the range cooker, but all there is above the cooker is an extractor hood and above that a vent going up to the ceiling. As I stand there looking at it, I hear the noise again. There’s something up there inside it, or on the roof above it, or in the roof, but there’s not much of a cavity, as I can see from the setting of the skylight. Anyway, I swear I can hear something moving up and down inside the shaft of the vent. A bird, a squirrel? The squirrels here are red, not grey, and I’ve only seen one, in the forest. A mouse, a rat? The noise stops. I stand in the kitchen for a while longer but it doesn’t start up again.
I sit down and delete my opening sentence and then suddenly I’m watching my hands as they fly over the keyboard and before I know it I’ve got an opening paragraph. There’s nothing more boring than reading about a writer writing, so I’ll spare you the details, but after five minutes I save what I’ve done and close the laptop and sit back with a small feeling of satisfaction.
I feed the animals and myself and then open the laptop again and change what I’ve written from third person to first person, then save it and close it.
* * *
I wake several times in the night to the sound of heavy rain and get up on Tuesday morning to find it’s rained in through the kitchen skylight. Then I realise it’s not rain and that the dog has been unwell. Luca is curled up on the floor in the living area, possibly looking a bit sheepish. I clean up the mess and wash the floor, thinking this is just about preferable to having a leaking skylight to deal with.
I message Ruth and ask how it’s going in the Basque Country and she says it’s lovely, lots of cliff paths and little coves. I tell her about Luca and she tells me not to worry and to give him mashed rice and squash from the garden until he’s back to normal and to make sure he drinks plenty of water. When I take him for a walk, it’s not long before it becomes obvious he still has bad guts. We press on. I figure out what it is about the pattern of white stones on the road past the House of the French People that drew my eye: it looks like the distorted human skull in the foreground of Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors.
Great. A memento mori.
I write in the afternoon. When I say I write, I mean I open up the laptop on the dining table and change what I wrote yesterday from past tense to present tense and add a couple of paragraphs. Then I sit back and look out of the French windows. I look at the bookcase to the left of the French windows. I look at the doll on top of the bookcase.
There’s a new noise in the living area coming from the fireplace. When I investigate by sticking my head in the fireplace and looking up the chimney, I hear a frantic twittering or squeaking. Birds or rodents, maybe. While I’m puzzling over that, the noise of something moving about in the extractor vent starts up again, so I head back round to the kitchen area. It stops when I get there and I hear the twittering start up again from the fireplace.
I go into my bedroom to wash my hands and I see that my bed is a mess. I’m sure I remember making it after getting up. I straighten the duvet, wash my hands and sit down at the dining table again, but decide it’s not happening and close the laptop and look out of the French windows. I should look around a bit. I step out on to the terrace. The gardens are ahead of me, containing flower beds, vegetable garden, swimming pool, tortoise enclosure, various raised beds, large numbers of trees. There’s a workshop and a garage containing a ride-on mower and a BMW. Towards the back of the garden is what Ruth called ‘the other house’ and I’m going to call the Other House. They are in the process of doing it up as guest accommodation. It’s left unlocked, they told me, as there’s nothing of value in it, but then they effectively leave the main house unlocked as well. Unlived in and a little bare, the Other House is somewhat cooler and has the feeling of a long-term project. There’s a living area, a bedroom and a shower room downstairs. Upstairs are two more rooms that could become bedrooms. I glance into both and walk into a spider’s web in one of them and decide I’ve seen enough.
* * *
On Wednesday morning I get out of bed and almost step on a lizard. I wonder why it doesn’t run away and when I put my glasses on I can see why not. It’s missing its tail and left foreleg and won’t be running anywhere.
I think I know what you got up to last night, I say to the cat as I fill its bowl.
I grab the dog’s lead and we head out. Up the green lane, through the forest, past the House of the English People, past the House of the French People, past Holbein’s skull, down the road, into the forest, stopping to answer the call of nature (Luca – back to normal, almost), past the Empty House, down the stony path, up the narrow road and as we approach the rear of the Chateau and are about to turn left on to the tree-lined avenue that becomes a track and leads past the House of Cameras and Booby Traps and the two Mercedes, I see that two cows from the field on the right have escaped and are wandering in the road. I call the dog and attach his lead.
I watch the cows from a distance. One is smaller, possibly a calf, with its mother.
It’s not worth it, I say to Luca. Too risky. If it were just me, maybe. But with you, I can’t take the risk. What do you think?
I kneel down and look into the dog’s eyes.
Do you agree? I ask him. Are we agreed? Not worth the risk? Wasn’t someone killed just recently? A woman walking a dog? Let’s go back.
So we turn around and walk back down the narrow road and now that I’ve seen the escaped cows, all these other cows in the fields either side of the road, kept in their respective fields by the thinnest of electrified wires, take on a different aspect. I hear a car coming behind us, so I move with Luca to the side of the road and hold him close, my arm around him. He’s panting and I can feel his heart beating. It’s one of the two Mercedes from the House of Cameras and Booby Traps, the green one. It slows down and the window on the passenger side descends. The driver, a dark-haired man in his forties with an unlit hand-rolled cigarette between his lips, leans towards me. He removes the cigarette and says there are a couple of cows loose – he nods towards the road further up – and we should take care. I thank him and say we’ve seen them and does he know whose they are and when they might be put back where they belong. He shrugs. I thank him again and he drives on.
We carry on down the narrow road then turn right up the stony path, past the Empty House, into the forest. Walking the route in the opposite direction I notice different things. I see signs saying ‘CHASSE GARDEE’ nailed to trees telling me the forest is a private hunting ground, which I already knew anyway. I see alternative routes as tempting options when they might be traps or dead ends. On occasion, I fail to see the right path, even though it’s right in front of me. I’ve always felt that going back is not simply the opposite of the way there.
Nevertheless, we do make it back, but not before an outburst of torrential rain. My shirt is stuck to my skin, my glasses sliding off my face. Luca appears completely indifferent to the rain and gives himself a vigorous shake as we enter the house.
I go into my bedroom to change into dry clothes and see that my bed has been messed up again. Just like last time, I remember making it in the morning. I retrieve my laptop from under the pillow – one of my ingenious hiding places in a strange environment – and take it into the main living area, where I give Luca a look intended to tell him I get it about the bed, and bravo, but that’s enough, okay? Installing myself at the dining table, I open up the laptop to find that my story has disappeared. I look in Word under File and Open Recent. It’s not there. I look in the folder where I saved it. It’s not there.
Cheers, Entity, I say, reflecting on how I’ve always blithely believed there was no need to put a password on my machine. I like being able to open the lid and dive right in. Although I probably don’t really believe the Entity has opened my machine and deleted my file, I decide to set up a password. I look at the doll on the bookcase and choose a password I’ve got a chance of remembering. I practise entering it a couple of times. Then I write some notes to help me get back to where I was in the story, which was not very far, I have to admit, but I manage to lose myself in doing that for a couple of hours.
It’s stopped raining, so I close the laptop and after a quick look around I open one of the deep drawers in the kitchen and wedge the machine in there between two stacks of bowls, then I pick up the lead from the shelf by the front door.
Shall we try again, Luca?
As we walk I try to figure out what happened to that file. The House of the English People. Was my machine too full? The House of the French People. Was my machine out of memory? Holbein. Had I accidentally deleted it myself? Empty House. Did I even check in the bin? Forest. Could the file have been called something other than what I thought it was called? Stony path. Did I create it in some other application and not in Word? Narrow road. Was the Entity real? Chateau. Tree-lined avenue. Cows. The cows are in their field. The dog at the House of Cameras and Booby Traps is out in the garden, but we get past without difficulty.
When we get home, I feed both the animals and put a pan on to boil for pasta. I take the laptop out of the kitchen drawer and set it up on the dining table, surprising myself by remembering my password.
The new file that I created filled with notes to remind me where I’d got up to with the story that disappeared has also disappeared. This time I check in the bin. The bin is empty. I try other applications. I look in recent files. I do a universal search for a phrase I know I used in the notes. I put it in double inverted commas. Nothing.
This isn’t funny any more, I say, though I don’t know who I’m saying it to.
I restart the machine.
The files do not reappear.
My phone vibrates. A message from Ruth. A picture of her and Martin on a cliff top smiling at the camera.
Looks fantastic, I message back. Have a great time.
I close the laptop and sit back in my chair at the dining table staring out through the French windows. As if in mockery of my efforts, the light in the garden is exquisite. The sun is low in the sky and seems to pick out every single flower in Ruth’s beds. I see the Other House at the end of the garden and suddenly I remember something. I remember Ruth saying something to me one evening on Hampstead Heath, when the light was similar to now.
Where’s the other Tim? she said.
I probably frowned at her.
What other Tim? I said.
You know, she said, the relaxed Tim, the Tim who’s not so intense, the Tim I used to have a laugh with.
He’s right here, I said.
She gave a sort of sad little smile.
Where’s the other Ruth? I said.
Which other Ruth? she said.
The Ruth who seemed to want what I wanted, I said. The Ruth who laughed at my jokes.
She laughed at that, but it was a hollow laugh.
* * *
Thursday.
The Entity is upping the ante.
For a moment or two, after I’ve pulled back the curtains in front of the French windows, I can’t make sense of what I’m looking at. It’s a confusion of black and red and white, and appears bristly. There’s a sense of violence and energy. Slowly the elements come together and I realise I’m looking at the body of a wild boar lying on its side on the terrace. There’s blood and its face is damaged and there’s some material on the window, all of which leads me to suspect that it ran into the window, killing itself. Presumably not on purpose, although the way this week is going, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I reach for my phone to message Ruth or at least take a picture, but then I decide against it. I find a wheelbarrow in the workshop and load the carcass on to it, with some difficulty and not without getting its blood on my hands, and wheel it up to the far end of the garden, where I leave it outside the Other House. Let them deal with it when they get back. Which, I remember, will be in a few hours. Three o’clock, if Martin is as punctual as he was always supposed to be.
What I can’t work out is if the creature crashed into the French windows in the night, it surely would have woken Luca, who would probably have woken me in turn.
When I get back to the main house I see Luca standing behind the French windows watching me. I slip in without letting him out that way – I don’t want him snuffling round the body of the boar – and then get his lead and offer him outside the front door and we head up the green lane, past the House of the English People, past the House of the French People, past Holbein’s skull, down the road, left into the forest, past the Empty House, up the narrow road and as we approach the top of the hill and the rear of the Chateau I am scanning the skyline on the left for the wandering cows. They are indeed wandering. They look like the same two, a cow and a calf. In the field they have escaped from there are normally six cows: four are dark tan in colour and two are light tan. The two I have seen wandering have been dark tan. But why just these two and why are they not always wandering, only sometimes? If there’s a way out of the field, why don’t the other cows escape?
We double-back down the narrow road and cut the corner by the tennis courts, emerging on to the tree-lined avenue nearer to the House of Cameras and Booby Traps. I look back to the right towards the Chateau and there are the two escaped cows right down there, at a safe distance. We walk on.
* * *
I’m sitting at the dining table, staring at the doll on the bookcase. In front of me, my laptop is open. This time there was no file relating to the story I’m supposed to be writing for whoever or whatever to delete, so instead, whoever or whatever has deleted some other stuff, random files, as far as I can make out. Novels, stories, notes for projects, an unfinished script. All stuff that’s backed up at home, but that’s not the point.
I think for a moment about upgrading my security to Touch ID. I look at the tip of my right index finger and decide I want to keep it.
I close the lid of the machine and get up from the dining table and wander over to the bookcase. It’s a mixture of cookbooks and travel guides – I see one to the Basque Country – and novels in English, Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me, Rachel Cusk’s The Temporary, and detective novels by Fred Vargas and Georges Simenon, in French, and French translations of novels by Len Deighton and Mick Herron. I’m making assumptions about whose books are whose. War and Peace? Dracula? Those are harder to call.
Seeing Dracula reminds me of the film Martin, by George A. Romero, often considered a vampire film and probably only once interpreted as a biopic about Ruth’s husband Martin, on the occasion when, not long after she met and formed a relationship with him, I sent her a copy of the DVD as a joke – a joke not appreciated by Martin and possibly not by Ruth either, because it was after sending it to her that I didn’t hear from her again for over thirty-five years.
I flick through the copy of Dracula. There are no clues as to whose copy it is. No bookmark, no name in the front. I put it back and turn away from the bookcase, looking around the room. I see the TV and remember Ruth’s offer to browse their DVDs.
The Ipcress File, A Dandy in Aspic, The Conversation. Again, I’m quick to make assumptions. Enemy of the State, Funeral in Berlin, Martin.
Martin.
I pull out the DVD case and see that it is indeed George A. Romero’s Martin, the film I sent to Ruth, in a light-hearted reference to her new boyfriend, more than three and a half decades ago, in a different format. I wonder who replaced the VHS with a DVD? I open it and remove the disc. In good condition, no fingerprints. Who bought it? It’s among the spy movies. I imagine Martin choosing to internalise his hurt. I open some more of ‘his’ DVD cases and inspect the discs. They’re all in good condition, like Martin. Towards the right-hand end of the shelf there’s a shift in genre. Grease, Saturday Night Fever, The Sound of Music. I remember Ruth suggesting we go to see Grease and me demurring. I open Grease – also in good condition, but a few fingerprints. Saturday Night Fever, likewise. When I remove the disc of The Sound of Music I see there’s another DVD underneath. Reading the title of this film produces a confusion of feelings, good and bad. I’ve only seen the film once, forty years ago, with Ruth – The Entity.
Why doesn’t it have its own case? Was it lost or thrown away? I remember we saw the film on release, at a public screening, not at a press show, so it was a film we saw in the evening and after the screening, instead of the sandwiches on paper plates that would follow a 10:00 a.m. press show, we found ourselves in the West End and hungry. We went to the Stockpot on Panton Street and then for a drink at the Blue Posts on Rupert Street and then ended up back at my flat. It was the high point of the relationship we didn’t quite have.
I sit there on the floor, clutching the case of The Sound of Music and the two DVDs, unable either to put them back or to see if I can work out how to operate the DVD player and have another look at The Entity and see if it offers any further clues to what is going on, when a sudden twittering issues from the fireplace. I’m certain it’s a bird. I imagine it being stuck, unable to get out in either direction, panicking. As I stand in front of the fireplace, asking myself what I can do, not only to help the bird but to put a stop to its noise, which is louder than before and more desperate and becoming unbearable, I hear a commotion from the kitchen area. I walk around there and whatever was trapped in the vent and making a racket the other day is back and making more noise than before. Both noises appear to increase in volume at the same time.
In a bid to control myself, because I can feel anger and frustration rising to the point where I’m visualising myself climbing up on to the cooker and ripping the vent away from the wall, I sit down at the dining table. I’m tempted to open my laptop, but resist. Instead I look at the doll on the bookcase. The vacancy of its expression seems ironic, almost as if it’s signalling that it’s joining in the campaign of harassment.
As I stare into its eyes, I notice something I haven’t noticed before. Its eyes are not identical. I get up and reach for the doll and sit back down, placing it on the dining table. Its right eye looks like how I expect an antique doll’s eye to look, but its left eye looks different, less like an imitation eye and more like an optical instrument, more like a lens.
I pick the doll up and bring its head down sharply on the table top. The head breaks into several pieces and among them sits a tiny device, black and shiny like a beetle. I may have never seen a hidden surveillance camera before, but it’s clear to me that that’s what I’m looking at. I pick it up between finger and thumb and place it lens down on the tabletop.
Now, everything looks suspicious. An empty electric socket in the kitchen. A fly ribbon’s hanging empty canister. The microwave oven. The TV and accompanying devices. The car key. The zapper to open the gate.
I go into my bedroom. I look at the light over the mirror and wash basin. The reading lamp. A pottery cat on the window ledge.
The terrace. The bird feeders. The rattan garden furniture.
Luca exits the house via the French windows behind me and curls up on the gravel. I look at him, lying there unsuspecting and trusting, and something passes through my mind, but I shut the thought down. I’m not going there and they know I wouldn’t go there. Whatever this is about, I’m not going there.
I look at my watch. It’s twenty to three.
I go back into the house and take a large, broad-bladed knife from the knife block. Placing it on the worktop, I hoist myself up until I am standing on the cooker. I kneel down and grab the knife, return to a standing position and insert the blade of the knife between the edge of the vent and the wall and apply leverage. I get the fingers of one hand under it and pull and a section of the stainless-steel structure comes away. I let it fall and look down, worrying for a moment that Luca might have followed me in. He hasn’t, but I see him now at the French windows cocking his head at a quizzical angle. I throw the knife into the sink and stick my hand up the remaining part of the vent and root around. I feel something hard and grab it and give it a tug. I withdraw my hand; it’s holding a loudspeaker. No doubt there will be a similar sort of device up the chimney. I jump down.
I look at the knife sticking out of the sink.
I’m not going there either.
I leave the house and stand on the terrace looking out into the garden. I see the Other House. I start walking. Luca gets up and follows me.
No, I say to him, you stay here.
I hold him and stroke him.
I get to my feet again.
Sit, I say, and he sits. Wait.
I walk away from him and I don’t hear his feet on the gravel behind me. I walk across the grass, past the flower beds and the raised vegetable beds, past the tomato plants and the compost heaps, across another expanse of grass and soon arrive outside the Other House. I open the door and enter and cast only the briefest of glances around the downstairs area as I climb the stairs. Light falls through a large skylight over the staircase. I go into the first bedroom and look around. It’s bare and there are no cupboard doors or anything. There is one window. The ceiling is high and steeply sloping; there is no loft.
I turn around and enter the other room. Here again there is one window and light pours through it. There are two doors in the far wall. I step forward and open the one on the left. A small loft space full of boxes and suitcases. I step back out and move across to the other door and open it. A small box room, but this one is empty, apart from a thin tracery of spiders’ webs. I go back to the other loft space, the one that’s full of boxes and suitcases, and, yes, there’s enough light to see cobwebs to the sides of the space and between the boxes and cases, but nothing hanging down from the low, sloping ceiling.
I drag a load of boxes and cases out of the way and in the far wall, low down, previously hidden by a pile of boxes, is a dark vertical line, a break in the wall. I kneel down and get my nails into the gap and a panel no more than three feet by two feet comes away. I discard it.
Within, in a cramped space barely six feet high, three feet deep and as wide as the room behind us, crouched on floor cushions in front of an improvised workstation comprising laptops, screens and other devices, Ruth and Martin turn to look at me. I take in sleeping bags, bottles of water, a camping stove: the paraphernalia of paranoid survivalists. Or, in this case, perhaps, vengeful pranksters.
A lot of things go through my mind while the next few seconds play out. The Basque Country. Complicated underwear. Not just the creature in the vent and the birds up the chimney, but also the messed-up bed, the dead lizard and the body of the wild boar. Not the work of the dog and the cat, then, not an accidental death. The escaped cows? A neglectful farmer? Doubtful. The deleted files. Luca’s bad guts. Did they poison their own dog? Or was that just a bonus?
Martin. Martin. Was it all Martin? I remember Ruth’s photo message supposedly from the Basque Country. Was she in his thrall? Was he coercively controlling her? Was he really that jealous of the night Ruth and I spent together, before he had any idea she existed, after seeing The Entity? I remember with scorn the copy of Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me in the bookcase in the main house. It’s not even one of his good ones. I remember the spy novels and the spy films. Did he want me to see those? Did Ruth want me to find The Entity? Did he even know about the copy of The Entity? Well, he does now.
They both look braced for something.
The truth is, I don’t know what to do. I don’t really want to do anything.
I remember Ruth saying, Where’s the other Tim? And me saying, Where’s the other Ruth?
I think I just want to pack my stuff and go.
But then I hear it. We all hear it. The clang of the gate. The scrunch of the gravel.
I look at my watch. It’s just after three.
I look at Ruth and Martin, their eyes wide with fear.