The Lamorna Wink

whisky as much as Johnny missed Chris. He said, “She hadn’t been gone long; I mean, she’d only just taken things out of the oven.”

Johnny’s tone was so dejected that Charlie reached across the table and put a hand on the boy’s arm. “This sounds like hollow comfort, but I bet when we know what happened, after she comes back, we’ll be amazed we didn’t see it.”

“It’s like she just-vanished. As if there’d been some sleight of hand, a huge trick played,” Johnny said.

Charlie smiled. “Sleight of hand’s our stock-in-trade. Given what’s going on, you’d better have this.” He pulled the fake gun from his pocket and put it down on the table.

“I thought you said a friend needed it for his act.”

“I’ve got another.” Charlie flashed a smile. “Forget Chekhov.”

12

He had crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s on the lease. He had handed over a wad of money (in the form of a draft on his bank) and received the keys in return.

Melrose was again at the house he was free to inhabit for the next three months, happily without the estate agent following him about or Agatha erupting on his horizon. Tomorrow he would take back the hired car, jump aboard the train to London, from there to Northants, collect his Bentley and some clothes, and return and live here for three months, or longer, or less.

How fortunate he was to be rich. He only partly agreed with that glib saying that money can’t buy happiness. It certainly made misery a lot more bearable. Money was at the moment freedom to live here, or to live there, or to take a lease for three months and leave after only one.

But that did not answer the question, Why was he using his freedom in this way? He had wandered into the large living room and was standing now before one of the long windows looking out over the weedy garden. He wondered if he was coming up against a midlife crisis and this move was the first sign of it. No, he decided, midlife crises were not an option with him; he was too sanguine. He was simply overpowered by the melodramatic quality of this house and its situation. He certainly was given to regard himself in more melodramatic terms. It was quite fun, really, to picture himself standing on a shelf of rock, looking out over the swell of the waves folding over the rocks: Ever stood she, prospect impressed. He couldn’t get those lines out of his head.

He turned from the window in this smaller reception room and looked at the sheeted furniture, at its ghostly glimmer in what was fast becoming dusk. He moved over to an armchair, took hold of a corner of the sheet, flicked it off like a matador provoking a bull. He then went about removing the sheets from sofas and chairs, wondering where people put the laundry. At home, Ruthven and Martha took care of such things, made them disappear from sight (Melrose’s, at least) as if a party of elves had been at work while the house slept. Could he make it on his own? Perhaps he should advertise for a housekeeper. Yes, it would be good to have a housekeeper, not so much to keep house as to bring him up to speed on gossip. Although he would not have wanted anyone like Agatha’s char, Mrs. Oilings, he thought he could strike a happy medium between capable housekeeper and capable gossip.

He wondered where he should dump the sheets. He considered putting the kettle on (so nice to have all of this equipment furnished) but decided to take a long, long walk round the house before tea. It rather delighted him, too, that he could do his own tea and drink it in the living room or library with no other company than portraits and pictures of those absent.

He found himself trying to absorb what traces there were here of the lives of the Bletchleys. Maybe it was because the family depicted in those snapshots had been so beautiful-before the double tragedy-that he wished in some way he could join them.

Melrose’s memory of his own father was fitful, fluid and vague. He had not been terribly fond of him, nor had he greatly respected him. His feelings were all for his mother. The seventh Earl of Caverness had spent most of his time riding to hounds and only occasionally taking his seat in the House of Lords-with, as far as Melrose knew, no particular effect on the country or himself. He remembered a distant man, if not an absolutely cold one; Melrose had wondered, when he was old enough to wonder such things, how his mother, a very warm and loving woman, a woman who had these qualities in abundance, could be happy with him.

She had not been; she had been happy, but not with her husband. And knowing this had weighed Melrose down. He didn’t really know why.

Nicholas Grey. Melrose had deliberately distorted the image of Nicholas Grey, again without understanding exactly why. Even knowing who and what he was, Melrose still at times hated the man, saw him as an interloper in the Belgravia house. Would it have been easier to accept his mother’s affair if Grey had been a seducer, a rotter, and a layabout? And his mother a woman caught in his spell? Or was it simply that the real Nicholas Grey was none of these things but was instead the sort of man it would be difficult to live up to?

He had seen Grey several times in the Belgravia house, which Melrose had since sold. He had sold the house for that reason-it was where Nicholas Grey had come. The sale had taken place a few years after the solicitor had handed over a letter that his mother had directed be given to Melrose long enough after her death to give him time to get over the worst of it. His mother had been dead for five years when the lawyer had given him the letter. And he hadn’t gotten over it.

He returned to that letter time and again, reading it so often he had worn down the fold so the two parts barely hung together. Nicholas Grey was Irish (the letter said), and it was that which one could say killed him. He had died in Armagh in a skirmish with the IRA. He had himself at one time when he was younger been a member of it, until he finally couldn’t put up with what he felt were random and arbitrary assassinations. Grey himself had been a hot- head but not an anarchist. He was a man sublimely caught up in his cause and had the reputation of being a brilliant strategist, a matchless orator, and an inspiration to the men under him. Grey had disliked the aristocracy, not in theory but in fact; he had hated it for what it had become.

What Lady Marjorie, his mother, had done was to trade a fairly amiable and undemanding man born to wealth and leisure for one who it would be very hard for Melrose, his son, to live up to, a father who had stamped Melrose with a nearly impossible romanticism for which he could find little or no outlet.

He thought she had been wrong to tell him, and yet her motives, if clouded, had been good ones. His mind, he hoped, was large enough to allow for this. His own motives he felt were equally cloudy. He told himself that in relinquishing the title of eighth Earl of Caverness he was squaring things with his nominal father, the seventh earl. But he suspected what he was really doing was squaring things with Nicholas Grey, though he couldn’t say why.

He wondered if it was his vanity, rather than his heart, that had been bruised.

He would much rather weigh in as the real Melrose Plant than as the bogus Earl of Caverness.

13

She had said:

I make no apology for my behavior (which might strike you as arrogant and selfish), except insofar as you’re being made unhappy; I did not want you to read this until some years after my death-when you would be over the worst of it… There is so much of Nicholas in you, your looks, your moods, that it haunts me.

She was not telling him “to unburden myself and thereby place a heavier burden on you” but to fill in what she saw as a tremendous distance between what he, Melrose, really was and what he had to think he was, “gentleman, an aristocrat without a past-” Melrose still wondered what she meant here-

and an uncertain future, the Earls of Caverness having been unremarkable in their lives and legacies. They were perhaps what people think of when they think of the aristocracy. You do not fit this mold and