Soldier No More

misinterpreting his face this time.

Roche felt his back muscles shiver. How could the man have come so close, after having been so wide of the mark? 'But his father didn't take the point, did he!'

'His father? Whose father?' Wimpy frowned.

'Audley's—David Audley's. 'Mr Nigel'— the expectancy and rose of the fair state,' quoted Roche brutally. 'Wasn't 'Mr Nigel' about to sell the house?' He threw the truth down like a gauntlet between them, challenging Wimpy to choose where his loyalty lay, with the father, his old comrade-in-arms, or with The Old House and his David.

The schoolmaster's face clouded. 'Ah . . . well . . . Nigel . . .

was Nigel.' He looked up and around nervously, as though he'd only just realised where he was, and Nigel— was —Nigel might be eavesdropping on them. 'Clarkie said we ought to look out for her Charlie, because it's time for his tea—half of which we've already eaten . . . And she also said, sotto voce, as we were leaving—as I was leaving—that old Charlie's having one of his turns ... in his downhill phase, as the headshrinkers say . . . which means, the sooner he's back home, the better. You just wait here, old boy, and I'll go look for him—he's in the garden somewhere.' Wimpy started to turn away before Roche could open his mouth to protest.

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'Talk about Nigel later, maybe.' The turn went through a full circle so that Wimpy was facing him again while retreating backwards towards the wrought-iron gate into the walled garden. 'Just look after the books till I get back.' Wimpy pointed to the pile of historical novels he had deposited on the gravel. 'Or, better still, take 'em into the house and stack

'em on the table by the door, and then have a scout round for yourself—right?'

Roche shut his mouth. If Wimpy was transparently set on ducking the question, solving his loyalty-dilemma simply by quitting the field, at least he was offering something attractive in exchange: to enter The Old House without a running commentary was a chance not to be missed.

'Right.' Wimpy waved vaguely, half at Roche, half at the house, and swivelled back towards the gate.

Roche watched him disappear through the trailing cascade of magenta-flowered clematis which covered the stone archway above the gate. Then he dumped his own armful of books alongside Wimpy's and stamped across the gravel forecourt to the porch.

As the door swung open a burst of sunlight edged with rainbow colours caught him full in the face.

He shifted his head, shielding his eyes from the light with his hand, and stared up the beam of light through an arch full of dancing dust-motes into a stained-glass window—a high window blazoned with a rich coat-of-arms, yellow and red dummy5

and blue, set at the top of a carved oak staircase—beyond which the afternoon sun blazed.

Directly ahead of him was an immense refectory table, dark with age like the panelling all around it, with a great bowl of roses on it. Some of the roses had shed their petals in different-coloured piles around the bowl, on a fine coating of dust which the sunlight betrayed. He sniffed, and the scent of the roses, mixed with a damp cellar- smell from somewhere under his feet, combined with the stained-glass to carry him back to this morning's church and Genghis Khan. He wrinkled his nose, uncertain whether it was the cloying rose-scent-plus-church-smell which made him think of funerals, or the memory of Genghis Khan which also made him think of death, that disturbed him more.

His eyes were becoming accustomed to the strange mixture of brightness from the searchlight-beam of the sun and shadow accentuated by the dark panelling, with its ghost-marks of pictures which had once hung on the walls.

Family portraits, maybe? And no prizes for guessing what had happened to them, one by one, as Mr Nigel's horses let him down in the last furlong before the winning post, also one by one; the pictures were always the first thing to go, the easiest things to pack off to Sotheby's and Christie's. All that was left on the walls was a line of old photographs up the staircase, school and college groups of cricketers and oarsmen sun-bleached to pale sepia- brown; and the refectory table, which was too big to sell, and the grandfather clock in dummy5

the furthest corner, silent at ten minutes to noon or midnight

—had that also been too big, or not worth the trouble of selling? Or had Adolf Hitler saved the last furniture with the house by his own pre-emptive bid for Europe and all its contents in 1939?

In spite of the sunlight, the house was cool, almost chilly, he could feel its cold breath against his cheeks. It wouldn't do to let his imagination stray too far here: reason advised him that thick walls and stone-flagged floors could hold winter all the year round when the owner was mostly absent, and fires were only lit occasionally, and that this house had been trapped in the vicious circle of such absences for a generation, so it was no wonder that its atmosphere was unwelcoming; but beneath reason he could sense an older instinct of unreason, which whispered very different rumours inside his head, of the enmity of old things to the flesh and blood of intruders like himself, and to would-be destroyers, like Mr Nigel, who had not lived to come safe home to the house he had neglected.

Of course, it was foolish to let such thoughts unnerve him; and they were only the combined product of his own disturbed emotions, and his own fascination with old buildings, and maybe too much of Ada Clarke's rich fruit cake unsettling his digestion.

It was only an old empty house, and the afternoon sun was shining outside, and Wimpy wasn't far away— Genghis Khan was far away, and Audley was even further, and Mr Nigel was dummy5

bones in a war grave long-forgotten, and none of them could touch him at this moment, any more than the house itself could reach out at him.

There were doors, panelled in the panelling, ahead of him—

to the right, and to the left, under the staircase—that door would lead to the cellars . . . to the wine-cellar, at a guess; which would be full of racks emptied, but not renewed, by Mr Nigel, for another guess . . . cellars full of cobwebs and the damp smell which was in his nostrils, and he certainly wasn't about to scout around in them unless Wimpy was cheerfully leading the way, by God!

The door on the right didn't look much more inviting, but there were those arched passages on each side of him which he'd half-glimpsed in the first moment after he'd ducked the sunlight, before his whole attention had been drawn up to the stained-glass coat-of-arms . . . one way would lead to the day rooms, most likely—the sitting room,