At a table near the door Sadie Sackett and two companions were issuing library tickets to such of the new students as thought to apply for them. Clout stopped on his way out. He had hardly seen Sadie during the past few days, and rather suspected that she had been avoiding him. But he was too full of his fresh information to stand on his dignity at the moment. ‘Trade brisk?’ he asked.
Sadie shook her head so that her dark hair circled her shoulders. ‘Rotten. It hasn’t come to them yet that they may need books. They think getting a degree is a matter of attending lectures and writing down as much of them as they can remember afterwards.’
‘So it is.’
‘Well, yes. But we can’t admit it in the Library, or we’d all lose our jobs. How’s Shufflebotham?’
‘Come out and I’ll tell you about him.’
Sadie hesitated, and took a circumspect glance round the Pig Market. There seemed to be nobody about who would take the slightest exception to her abandoning her unfrequented post for a while. ‘Where to?’ she asked.
‘The mausoleum.’
Sadie stared. ‘Why ever do you want to go there?’
‘Because of the Shufflebotham. It seems my man was a tapheimaphil.’
‘I never heard of such a thing.’
‘I dare say. My guess is Gingrass invented the word on the spot. But think of Sir Thomas Browne, and what not. Some hang above the tombs.’
‘Some weep in empty rooms.’
‘I, when the iris blooms, remember.’ Clout took Sadie by the arm as she came from behind the table – it was fun that she remembered bits of verse they used to chant at each other – and led her out to the terrace. ‘Sir Joscelyn Jory,’ he said. ‘That’s my man. He owned Old Hall. And built the mausoleum. And had a bad-hat brother I’m to ignore.’
‘Are they the Jorys that live at New Hall nowadays?’
‘Yes. The chap there is Joscelyn’s great-grandson. I’m to delve into his family papers.’
‘But surely that’s what George is doing!’ Sadie was perplexed. ‘How very odd.’
‘George?’ They were walking down the broad avenue that led to the east side of the park, and they had already left the rows of labs behind them. But Clout now came to a halt. ‘George?’ he repeated suspiciously. ‘Who’s George?’
‘George Lumb, of course. He’s working at New Hall now. Not actually on family papers, perhaps – but cataloging the library.’
‘But it’s absurd. He nearly got the Shufflebotham, and didn’t. But there he is – in on the Jorys, all the same. It must be one of Gingrass’ idiotic tricks.’
Sadie shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I believe it’s just a coincidence. George was fed up with Gingrass, and went out and got this job on his own. Anyway, I’m glad.’ Sadie spoke with less than her usual conviction. ‘You’ll like George. You’ll be able to talk about–’
‘Yes, I know.’ The interruption came from Clout brusquely. ‘We’ll be able to jabber about D H Lawrence. What utter rot. And I’m quite sure Lumb’s horrible.’
They walked in silence. ‘I think I’ll go back now,’ Sadie presently said.
‘Don’t do that.’ His tone was decently penitent. ‘We’re almost there. Let’s just look inside.’
‘Very well. But I think it’s locked up. There was some fooling in it one night last term, and the V-C took a dark view. But we can try. I seem to remember it’s not much more than a shell.’
‘I’ve never had a look. And I don’t know that there’s much sense in poking about now.’ Clout was suddenly depressed. Starting in to examine Sir Joscelyn’s architectural folly seemed to typify the probable futility of the whole job that had been shovelled at him. And Sadie wasn’t inspiring either. He rather wished he hadn’t brought her. She only reminded him that his girl hadn’t turned up again, and that he might stop here indefinitely, writing the lives of all the Jorys that ever were, without having the slightest rational ground for supposing that it would ever be otherwise. ‘What a stupid affair!’ he said. ‘And it must have cost thousands.’
They had climbed a small hill, and the mausoleum was now in front of them. It had probably been modelled, Clout thought, on the celebrated affair at West Wycombe, but it had very little of the crazy impressiveness that Sir Francis Dashwood had achieved. It was a circular building, with half-hearted Ionic pillars engaged in the stone all the way round, and a dilapidated frieze of monotonously festooned urns on top. There was a single entrance closed by rusty iron gates, and here and there a few empty window-spaces, set very high up. These seemed to have no function at all, as the whole affair was without a roof, and one simply peered through them at the sky. Grasses and wild-flowers were sprouting everywhere between stone and stone, but this didn’t lend anything that could be called a pleasing picturesqueness to the scene. Sadie studied it for some moments in silence. ‘Stupid?’ she said. ‘Well, I suppose so. An enlightened landowner would have sunk the money in better cottages for the farm-labourers, or a row of alms-houses for the aged and deserving poor. But there’s something to be said for a period in which rich men had the self-confidence to do queer things.’
‘Nonsense – and, anyway, it’s third-rate of its sort. Too late by nearly a hundred years. Not like the Hall.’ Clout spoke rather roughly – perhaps because he found it obscurely tiresome that Sadie Sackett had no longer the large ingenuousness that he remembered in her. Then he walked up to the gates and rattled them. ‘But you’re right about it being locked up. Let’s go back. I don’t think we’d get much kick out of a lot of mouldering Jorys.’
‘But that wasn’t the idea. Don’t you remember? There’s a bit about your Sir Joscelyn and his mausoleum in the University Handbook. I ought to have recalled it as soon as you said he was a thingummy.’
‘A tapheimaphil?’
‘Yes. He didn’t intend the mausoleum for himself and all the future Jorys. It was to be a sort of museum of entombment upon historical principles. I suppose he was a collector as well as a student.’
‘Of tombs and sarcophagi and grave-stones and things?’ Clout looked at Sadie doubtfully. If she wasn’t romancing, then he’d either entirely forgotten this odd bit of local lore or had never happened to acquire it.
‘Yes, of course – and of canopic urns, and family vaults and baby mausoleums as well.’
‘And, I suppose, a pyramid or two?’
Sadie nodded. ‘That was probably in his plans. But it all didn’t come to much. If it had, this would be a much more interesting place than it is.’
‘Let’s walk round it, and then clear out.’
They walked in silence. This corner of the park was very quiet. Nobody seemed to come near it. Suddenly Sadie stopped. ‘I thought I heard something – from inside.’
‘That’s doves.’
Doves in considerable number were certainly cooing in the mausoleum. But Sadie didn’t receive Clout’s remark kindly. ‘I know that’s doves, you idiot. I think there’s somebody moving about as well.’
‘Impossible. You saw the gate’s locked. Rabbits, I expect.’
‘Look!’ They had walked on again, and what had come into view was a ladder, its topmost rung resting against the sill of one of the window-like apertures high in the face of the building.
Clout judged Sadie’s gesture unnecessarily dramatic. ‘So what?’ he said. ‘Left by workmen, I suppose.’
‘Look where it’s been picked up from the grass. Clearly no time ago. Somebody’s climbed in.’
‘I don’t see how they could – unless there’s another ladder on the inside. And if they did, it’s just some idiotic students. Come on, Sadie, for goodness sake.’ Clout heard, with distaste, the quite unreasonable impatience in his own voice.
But Sadie didn’t seem to mind. ‘I’m going up,’ she said. Before he could dissuade her, she had run to the ladder and was scaling it. Reaching the top, she swung her legs over the sill, sat down, and then turned to wave at him challengingly. ‘Coming?’ she called.
She was quite high up. He realized that if it was his lost girl who was behaving in this way he would be enchanted; indeed he was rather reminded of the way she had sat on the parapet of the Hall and dropped crumbs of mortar on the terrace below. Sadie now got to her feet and stood hazardously on the sill – apparently to get a better view of the interior. Clout ran forward to the ladder and climbed up beside her. At least there was no ladder on the other side. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Nobody could get down.’
‘But I’ve just seen somebody. A woman. She’s disappeared somewhere below.’ Sadie’s voice was excited. ‘She must have scrambled down this tremendous old ivy. Dusty but not dangerous. I’m going too.’
‘I don’t in the least see why you should.’ The ivy had a trunk like a tree, and its branches seemed to niche themselves securely all over the place. So it certainly wasn’t a particularly formidable descent. But Clout had some doubts about getting up again; and moreover if somebody was really exploring the mausoleum he didn’t see why Sadie and he should barge in and interrupt. Sadie however was now clambering down, and he felt he had no choice but to follow. She had been right about the dust. He was coated in it and his lungs felt full of it by the time he arrived at the bottom. They stood side by side, looking and listening. Clout had a notion that Sadie wanted to take his hand – not by way of suggesting any reviving of their former flame, but because of an intuition that something was going to happen; that the unexpected and disquieting was about to confront them.
It was warmer inside Sir Joscelyn Jory’s mausoleum than it was without; their sensation as they looked up was of being at the bottom of a well so broad and shallow that the mild October sun reached down into it and soaked it. And the cooing of the doves was louder; they could be seen high up, comfortably tucked away wherever a stone had sufficiently crumbled to provide a shelf. It was evident now that this queer folly had never been completed. There seemed to have been a proposal to sheath it in marble that hadn’t got very far; and four or five bays of arcading, with the beginning of a shallower arched gallery above, hinted at the sort of lay-out that this peculiarly funeral museum was to have assumed. The whole place breathed the double melancholy of achievement fallen into ruin and of intentions unfulfilled.
It was perfectly possible for more than one explorer to have withdrawn from observation – for the moment, at least – by slipping into one or another of the chapel-like recesses which had presumably been designed to house major exhibits. But nobody would remain invisible for long unless positively concerned to hide. They waited. There wasn’t a sound. Clout turned to Sadie. ‘You really think you saw somebody?’ He found he was speaking in a half-whisper.
‘Yes. A figure in grey – gliding silently amid the tombs. Do you think it would be a ghost?’ Sadie, although she asked this satirically, had also lowered her voice.
‘It might be Sir Joscelyn himself – but alive and in the flesh.’ Clout’s uneasiness for some reason prompted him to fantasy. ‘All his life he had this obsession with the tomb. And it acted as some sort of inoculation – like Mithradates, you remember, and the poison. The poor old boy just can’t make the tomb. It won’t open for him. He lives on and on, haunting it.’
‘Like the old man in Chaucer, striking the ground with his staff. “Leve moder, leet me in!”’ Sadie was delighted with this. ‘But I think it’s more probably a real ghost – a Jory one, of course. What about the bad-hat brother? I expect it’s him. His spirit must be condemned to haunt the mausoleum, expiating some frightful crime. Let’s conjure him, Colin.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to try dancing for him.’ Clout had recalled Sadie’s exploit with the ridiculous Lumb.
But Sadie ignored this. ‘Let’s give a shout,’ she said.
‘Oh, rot. We’d better…’
‘Whatever Jory you are, appear!’
Feeling herself challenged, Sadie had called out in a clear voice that rang through the mausoleum. And the effect was remarkable. Quite close to them, a young woman stepped into the open – a young woman in a grey dress. Clout took one glance at her, and stood dumbfounded. It was his girl. She took a step forward in the clear sunshine, and for a moment looked from one to the other with an equal lack of recognition. Then she gave an exclamation of surprise. Clout felt his head swim – it was now an old, familiar sensation – and realized that it was because she had smiled. ‘Hullo,’ she said quietly. ‘Isn’t this an odd way of meeting again? And how did you know my name?’