17
At first it’s hard to distinguish individual figures. Wilf’s impression is that he’s entering a crowd. He looks at the faces in the room. Grinning, grimacing, contorted, panting. Twisted around to boggle at him from the walls. Some are turned away: he sees profiles, intent and preoccupied, and the backs of heads. Swathes of faded, orangey-pink paint and blotches of deeper colour resolve themselves into new meaning. Wilf registers, at last, that most of these figures are naked, some partially dressed in the remnants of rich formality—a green cutaway coat, blue unbuttoned britches. Two or three of the figures are black. Suddenly the shock of recognition jolts Wilf’s whole body. He hears Lambert behind him, laughing in his throat.
‘Yes,’ says Lambert, ‘yes indeed’.
It’s taken a farcically long time for Wilf to realise what’s happening on these silent, clamorous walls. He begins to pick out details. A young boy—or perhaps a girl?— with curtains of red hair, bent forward on all fours, mounted by a bearded man, who shakes his fist and opens his mouth in a climactic bellow. Legs wrapped around a neck. Three men clamped parasitically onto a naked woman—one behind her, one at her breast, one between her legs. Her strangely impassive face gazing ahead, into the storeroom, into the future. Two familiar, golden-haired youths go about their business at the meeting of two walls; a broken violin lies at their feet, its strings overhanging the skirting board.
‘The minstrels’ says Wilf.
‘Making the most of their time off’ adds Lambert.
Wilf examines more details—fingers tweaking, hands grasping, tongues intruding—until faint arousal has subsided into faint nausea. His ear buzzes frantically in the silence. Then he starts to giggle, a strained, incredulous giggle, and he turns to Lambert, who’s blushing slightly, obviously pleased with the impact of his secret room.
‘Who did this?’ squeaks Wilf. ‘Your barmy Lord Lane? The harbour man?’
‘Not Caractacus’ says Lambert. ‘His grandson. Peregrine Lane. By his own hand.’
Wilf shivers. ‘So Gwennie was right’ he says. ‘Your secrets are smutty’.
Lambert places both hands on his walking stick and leans forward, scanning the walls.
‘It’s all history, dear boy. All part of the story. Can’t pretend it isn’t there.’
More detail catches Wilf’s eye. A painted cobweb in an upper corner; suspended from it, a spider, about to drop into the bulging cleavage of one of the few dressed women. A small, wizened figure disappearing under the same woman’s skirts.
‘So, what did he do, hide away in here after dark?’ asks Wilf. ‘Wasn’t he worried the servants would find out? Or didn’t it matter?’
‘Dear me, no! This was for public consumption. Up to a point.‘
Wilf looks at him in astonishment.
‘Oh, yes’ says Lambert, nodding his eagle head. ‘Back he came from the Grand Tour, you know, with all the requisite goodies for family viewing: Roman antiquities, fossils and skulls, ceramics and silks, splinters of the Holy Cross, icons and statuettes and … and then came the rest. Securely packed into sturdy tea-chests, we must imagine. Strictly for the boys.
‘The boys?’
Lambert pulls a long, preparatory breath through his nose.
‘Peregrine’s chums. The lads, you might say. Formed a little club. Called themselves The Sorcerers and Knowledge-Seekers. Not much record of their activities, but we can hazard a guess. Drink, drugs, gambling—almost goes without saying. And on special occasions, down to the storeroom for a viewing of the other artefacts. Those kept under lock and key’.
‘Foreign porn’.
‘Quite so. This was just the backdrop. There would have been drawings and figurines, implements … that sort of thing. Mentioned in a couple of letters I’ve rooted out. Referred to as “Perry’s Particulars”’.
Wilf narrows his eyes.
‘Lambert—have you got some of this stuff?’
Without moving his eyes from the scene on the walls, Lambert smiles a slow smile. ‘Patience, dear boy. Patience’.
‘Not that I’m—’ Wilf starts to giggle again.
‘Of course not. Of course not. It’s history, dear chap. As I said’.
Wilf suppresses his schoolboy hilarity and asks,
‘When was this? Eighteenth century?’
‘Well, Lord Peregrine was resident from 1771 to 1838.’
‘Same sort of time as the prisoner, then. John Auvrice.’
‘The prisoner, or the refugee’.
Wilf looks at the snarling, slavering face of a man bending over a complexity of limbs, and his stomach turns.
‘Ready to go?’ asks Lambert. ‘Dispiriting after a while, isn’t it? But before we leave—’
He moves to the storeroom door, which has stood open against one segment of the mural, and half shuts it to reveal two more male figures. Both are fully dressed. One is older, middle-aged, with a ridged, broken nose. He seems to be bald or thinning, but it’s hard to tell, as there’s a bandage wound tightly around his scalp. He wears a long, embroidered coat and one hand is raised, tentatively, towards the younger man, as if about to caress his face. The other man is avoiding his eye, looking away from him and from any observers in the room. He wears knee-britches, a waistcoat and a jacket, a soft-collared shirt whose cuffs bloom at the wrists. Everything about this figure is more carefully, more expertly, more tenderly painted than any other part of the room. The hands, relaxed at his side, are slim, smooth, sensitive. The face, framed by loose, chestnut-brown hair, is perfect. A triangle of mouth. Broad, high cheekbones. Most striking of all, the dark, deep, serious eyes, still gleaming with intelligence after 200 years. Wilf studies that face for several minutes, then asks, softly,
‘What are they doing here?’
‘Indeed’ says Lambert moving aside to let him out before shutting the door.
18
‘You’re early’ says Vic, as Wilf and Lambert lumber in to the Sunbeam Café. ‘Making the most of it before the rush?’
Wilf looks at his watch. He feels as if he’s been to a distant planet and back, but it’s only half past nine. He sits heavily. Their walk along the beach was magnificent: a clean, blustering breeze, a hearty smack of waves on solid sand, a vast sky tugging swathes of cloud. But it couldn’t sweep away those convulsed features and frantic hands. They’re still there, baying and bucking at the back of his mind.
‘Good sea day’ says Vic, bringing their frothy coffee. ‘Think it’ll hold?’
Lambert leans his walking stick against the wall and takes his coffee from Vic’s hand. ‘You never know, Victor, my boy. The climate hereabouts is almost as unreliable as the people’.
‘For shame, Mr Stokes’. Vic’s returning to his counter when he stops in his tracks. ‘Tell you what, gents—how about a fry-up? Just the weather for a full English, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’ve already—’ starts Wilf, and is amazed to see Lambert sit forward eagerly, kneading his hands. Lambert orders sausage, eggs, bacon and beans, ‘and one of your splendid triangles of fatty bread, if you please’, then registers Wilf’s gaze and assumes an injured innocence. ‘One must refuel after a journey, old man. Go ahead—I recommend it’.
Wilf pats his belly in protest but — now he comes to think of it — he is a little peckish.
‘I can’t eat two cooked breakfasts in succession’ he insists. Vic is still hovering, sure of his prey. Lambert leans towards Wilf and murmurs,
‘Best thing, after an assault on the senses. Helps shift the hangover, as it were’.
Wilf’s stomach gives a tentative mew, and Lambert holds up a two-finger salute to their host. ‘Same again, please, Victor!’
For a few minutes they sit in silence while Vic clatters around with his frying pan. Then Wilf says,
‘What the hell should I write about that place?’
Lambert sighs.
‘As I said, it may be that we should keep that particular room hidden from the prying hordes.’
‘You certainly can’t have National Trust members trooping past all those—goings on. I mean, there might be children…’
‘Quite so. I thought perhaps restricted access. Application by letter only. Evidence of research interest required’.
‘Academics, you mean? Historians?’
Lambert gives an equivocal duck of the head. ‘Hmmm … I suppose that would be so restricted as to be virtually non-existent. We historians are an endagered species.’ Wilf nods. This was one of Aggie’s pet issues: the decline of taught history. Along with chemistry, politics, philosophy and theology, it’s fallen victim to a combination of cuts and the Direct Education Act’s Seditious Tendency clause. Aggie went on a couple of protests about it, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.
Lambert crosses his legs and ponders.
‘Maybe we should extend access to anyone over eighteen. What do you think?’
‘Might work’. Wilf pictures the house cleaned of graffiti and camp fires, creaking with polite visitors and helpful guides, shining with authentic 18th-century wall papers and polished wood. He adds a few costumed maids and copper kitchen utensils, and a small exhibition in the cellars: copies of the letters and deeds from Lambert’s collection; smudged Victorian photographs of the house falling into genteel ruin; family trees, fragments of broken stonework and rescued fabric … There they go, shuffling past the displays, peering through blue-framed reading glasses, veering into the second vaulted room for tea and fruitcake. Wilf imagines the customers stirring their tea and wiping stray raisins from their chins, ignoring the bolted wooden door at the far end of the room.
The smell of bacon fat moistens his tongue. Outside, a young woman hurries past with her coat collar turned up. Lambert says,
‘I’m sure it can be done. After all, that room was kept secure by generations of purportedly high-minded owners’. He winks.
‘How do you mean?’
‘No attempts seem to have been made to paint or plaster over Lord Peregrine’s work of art’.
‘So the Victorian fuddy-duddies indulged in a bit of naughty viewing themselves?’
‘One can only surmise’.
Wilf makes a mental note to contact Paul and revise the structure of the guide. More pages for Hestyn. Several spreads for the house alone. Full colour illustrations, tastefully cropped.
They emerge from the Sunbeam after two hours and stand on the pavement, braced against the salty air that tunnels down the street.
‘Where are the regulars?’ asks Wilf, and interrupts himself with a burp. He’s aware of his loaded stomach pulling at him like an impatient child.
‘Still a little early for them’ says Lambert, ‘but they’ll be along, you can depend on it’.
Wilf looks up the street. Fish and chip shop, closed. The Seaside Store, with a window display of bucket and spade, and striped bikinis stretched over cardboard torsos. Closed. The Bargain Basement, open and barricaded with plastic boxes, mops, laundry baskets, flowerpots and shopping trolleys. A newsagency, with a sorry-looking stand of postcards outside. Not a soul in sight. Wilf looks the other way, towards the seafront, and can just make out the corner of the boarded-up donut stall. That’s the way the woman went, the woman who passed the Sunbeam a couple of hours back. Where was she going? A discarded cigarette pack skids past the end of the street.
Wilf doesn’t know where to go next.
‘What do people do around here?’ he asks, as if his own life were a social whirl.
Lambert nods at the bare street.
‘Other than delving into past erotica, you mean? Well … ‘ He leans on his stick into another rush of wind. ‘There must have been a time when Hestyn was connected to the world. I believe my aunt was a great surfer of the web’.
Coming from Lambert, the phrase sounds archaic. ‘But by the time I arrived all that was being shut down, of course’.
‘You’ve never applied for a net permit? I’d have thought you’d find it invaluable for your research’.
The two men start walking, for no apparent reason, across the street and towards the newsagents. Lambert says,
‘All that bother about producing credentials and testimonials and what-have-you … Far easier to rely on the good old public library’.
Not very convincing, muses Wilf. Maybe Lambert Stokes has some reason to avoid the vetting procedures. But in his overfed stupour he finds it hard to muster any more questions. Besides, he knows it doesn’t take much to disqualify an applicant. Membership of a vaguely troublesome union, a bolshy letter to The Times, attendance at a rally camcorded by the police … Wilf himself has let his first permit lapse without applying for renewal. Aggie never bothered in the first place.
They stroll away from the sea, and pause at the postcard stand. Wilf fingers the pictures of anonymous coastline. Their corners have softened and the colours are gradually seeping into abstract splashes of beige and blue. Wilf decides to send a card to Paul, and fishes in his pocket for cash. In the gloom of the shop he can just make out a shopkeeper hunched over the counter, flanked by pale blocks of newspaper.
‘I’ll buy a few’ he says, taking the cards from the stand. ‘That ought to make his day.’
‘I’ll wait here’ says Lambert.
Wilf enters the shop. The shopkeeper gives no sign of acknowledgement. Even now Wilf can see little more than an outline of curly hair and bent shoulders. Only Lambert, framed in a rectantle of light through the door, is clearly visible. Wilf moves nearer the counter. The shopkeeper is leaning on his elbows, reading a magazine. He doesn’t look up. Wilf pretends to browse. There’s a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves, half-empty. The seedy magazines are at eye-level, the car mags, needlework patterns, TV listings and fashion glossies on the shelf below. No computer magazines, since the ban. One of the items taken from Aggie’s flat was a copy of Tekkie, where subversives were said to swap tips on breaking through domain barriers. At ankle-height are the national papers and the Coastal Clarion. Wilf stoops to read its main headline: Coast Road Buses Are Back! Southport to Beaumont route to reopen after seven years. There’s a rack of cards: happy birthday, happy anniversary, congratulations, deepest sympathies; and a row of cut-price CDs: Bing Crosby, Sounds of the Sixties, The Golden Age of Swing. Wilf tries approaching the counter again. Its glass front is cracked and sellotaped along its length. Behind it is a ramshackle display of Hallowe’en masks. The newspapers piled to each side of the shopkeeper are all copies of the Clarion. Wilf clears his throat and the shopkeeper, still absorbed in his magazine, extends a slow hand. For an instant his eyes shoot from page to cards. He speaks through the fingers of the hand supporting his chin:
‘Five pound’.
Wilf puts the money into the hand, which closes around it like a flytrap, making the fiver rustle.
‘Ta’.
Outside, the wind drums the Bargain Basement’s boxes. It sidles halfway into the shop and agitates the papers and the bead curtain behind the shopkeeper. Wilf catches sight of a fire-door between the beads.
He returns to Lambert, dealing through the postcards and wondering who in hell he can send them to. Paul, his sister … who else does he know? As he blinks back into daylight Lambert asks,
‘How many did you buy?’
‘Five’ says Wilf, and though he studiously avoids checking, he’s aware that Lambert’s eyes are crinkling in recognition. There was a campaign recently, set in train by students to highlight the increase in state power. Buy five postcards, write on each one your name, address and number and send them to a friend, a relative, your MP, your local hospital and a newspaper. The idea was that, in the event of sudden disappearance, incarceration or unexplained injuries, you had a ready-made support group to pester the authorities on your behalf. It was just a stunt, but it caught on for a while. Aggie did it, of course. Wilf still has the card she wrote him in her quick, jagged hand. Funny, really, thinks Wilf, that he should buy these now, wasting five quid on postcards he’ll never send. He tells himself it’s a sort of tribute to Aggie. An apology.
Lambert and Wilf amble on up the street, away from the sea. The tacky shopfronts peter out. The buildings towards the far end of the street are brooding and introspective: a square, stern-walled Methodist church; a single-storey block with peeling plaster, a rusty corrugated-iron roof and a noticeboard next to the door headed ‘Community Hall’. The only notice is a reminder to residents not to let their dogs foul the pavements. On the opposite side, another low building, with metal-shuttered windows and Liberal Club 1926 engraved into the stone lintel. Finally, a stark, granite-faced building on the corner with a short flight of steps leading to barred double doors. Empty fag packets, newpaper pages and husks of broken plastic form a dune against the steps. There are no windows or identifying features. At this point the street butts into a wide, unmarked road edged with stretches of scrubby grass and hedging and, here and there, sprawls of bungalow and dwarf conifer. They stop here and Lambert indicates the granite building.
‘Once upon a time, believe it or not,’ he says ‘this was a variety theatre’.
Wilf pulls a sceptical face. ‘Doesn’t look much like a theatre to me’.
‘No, indeed. It has since served as a cinema and a bingo hall, and more recently as a nightclub’.
‘A nightclub? Where did the clubbers come from?’
‘They didn’t. As shortlived a venture as all the rest’.
‘And now?’
‘Now—nothing. Left to decay, as was the Big House.’ Lambert is shielding his eyes from the glare, looking up the wide road in expectation. He adds, absently,
‘Hideous. Looks like a detention centre’. Then his voice expands into avuncular heartiness. ‘Right! Let’s see who’s the first to spot the approaching stampede’.
Wilf squints up the road with Lambert.
‘What are we looking for?’
‘Ha-ha!’ cries Lambert, his arm flying up. ‘I see them! The prize is mine!’
At the farthest reach of Wilf’s vision a movement disturbs the sky. With the next gust of wind he catches a distant wittering, indistinguishable at first from the calls of the gulls, but separating into human voices as the movement resolves itself into a hobble of people.
‘Here they come!’ booms Lambert. ‘Right on time!’
From the other direction they hear an answering babble and Wilf swings round to see more residents bustling along towards the junction with the high street. He recognises Millie and her tartan shopping trolley, and a couple of other Sunbeam customers. Old men in caps, with ridged cheeks the colour of wood; women in scarves and buttoned-up macks, cawing to each other under cloudy hair. Lambert begins to dole out greetings as the advance guard draws near. Some of the men give Wilf a wary nod.
‘Where do they all come from?’ asks Wilf.
‘They live here, old boy! These’ —Lambert flaps a hand towards the bungalows—’go on for many miles! Morning, Maureen! George, my dear chap, how’s the leg?’
The regulars stream down the main street, their chatter billowing and diminishing with the play of the wind. Past the Bargain Basement and the newsagents, past the Seaside Shop and the fish ‘n’ chip shop and into the Sunbeam Café with a clatter of the door. A few stragglers slow their pace and dawdle in the logjam outside.
Wilf says,
‘They’ll never fit in. They must be going straight through and out the other side’.
Lambert laughs.
‘Far from it, dear fellow. It’s remarkable how readily human beings can squeeze into a tight space. As you’ve discovered for yourself’.
One by one the Sunbeam sucks in the regulars and their din, until the street is left to itself and the stuttering plastic crates once more.
Lambert touches Wilf’s elbow.
‘Shall we strike out into open country?’
Wilf looks about him in confusion. The main street to the seafront and the wide road of bungalows seem to shut in the landscape. It doesn’t seem possible to break their boundaries.
‘Come on’ says Lambert, as if he’s summoning a dog, and his walking stick takes a long stride across the road. Wilf casts one vaguely regretful glance back to the safety of the sea, then trots after him. Lambert marches straight into the middle of the opposite hedge, which gulps him in through a gap camouflaged with straggly growth. Wilf follows and, on the other side, treads on the edge of something solid in the mud. It’s a half-submerged sign: ‘Public Footpath’. Ahead of him a trail of footprints marks out the route across a grassy field. He slithers, regains his balance and struggles on. A few crouching trees line the edge of the field, their branches frozen permanently in the direction of the ocean gales. He concentrates on keeping his footing and keeping Lambert in view. Involuntary snapshots burst behind his eyes: a slavering mouth; a clawing hand. A hidden room. He thinks of the tower, its secret passage, then of the windowless granite building. He tries to quicken his pace.
Lambert is bellowing something and waving his stick. Wilf hears the word ‘summit’. He catches him up at a wire fence, interrupted by a stile. From here the view opens onto a mildly undulating stretch of coarse coastal grass, whose death-rattle fills the air. About a mile further on the ground levels off in a straight line, as if the top of a hill has been lopped off. The upper edge of some man-made structure can be seen above it.
‘Better see to your footwear’ advises Lambert, jabbing his stick at the thick coating of mud on Wilf’s shoes. ‘And then it’s Ho for the church!’
Wilf bends to find a sharp stone and scrape the mud away, then straightens swiftly, grasping his belly, as his innards threaten to implode.
‘That’ll soon pass’ says Lambert. ‘a bracing walk is the best way to keep one’s intestines at work, I find’.
‘I can’t believe’ says Wilf ‘I’ve eaten two cooked breakfasts in succession’.
‘It’s the sea air’ says Lambert. ‘And by the time we’ve completed our stomp ;you’ll be ready for one of Gwennie’s nourishing feasts, I’ll warrant’.
Wilf subdues the urge to vomit with a mighty effort of will. Lambert leans on the stile. ‘There’ll be a slap-up…’ he begins, then turns aside, letting the rest of his sentence fly away.
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