The Lamorna Wink

Hall.

“How long have you been here, sir?” Wiggins asked Tom without (Melrose noted) shrinking back at all.

“Six months. But this is only since I got really bad.” He gestured toward his face and yet managed a smile. After all, he’d been lucky to get into Bletchley Hall; so few were able to.

“How many patients do you have staying here?” asked Wiggins.

“Twelve. Twelve’s the capacity; there’re twelve bedrooms besides the four for Matron, a nurse who’s here full time, Jaynes, and me. The rest of the staff’s not live-in. We have doctors, of course. One lives in St. Buryan. Another lives near Penzance.” Moe Bletchley suggested Wiggins might like a tour of the place and Wiggins accepted with alacrity. Tom wheeled out with them.

Melrose excused himself from the tour, spent some five minutes disengaging himself from Miss Livingston and her pincerlike fingers and walked back inside.

33

He walked through the voluptuous green dining room: That crystal! That silver! He liked the idea that all this finery was laid on in case there was even one guest who could make it downstairs for dinner. Perhaps there was more hope of recovery in setting a good table than in administering a newly discovered drug.

He stopped before one table to look at the delicate arrangement of mauve orchids and cyclamen; touched the thin crystal of a wineglass, so delicate that a glassblower’s breath might have sighed it into existence; lifted a knife as heavy as a vault or as weighty as memory.

For that’s how he felt; memory really could weigh one down. Perhaps that’s what had happened to the Hooper brothers. They’d had to remember, at last, too much, and decided nothing was preferable. Melrose walked on.

There was another drawing room across from the blue room, still occupied by the two old ladies, who seemed not to have moved a muscle. Should he call for help? No, the breath of one lifted the frill of the lace collar on her jabot. She at least was still breathing, which meant the other probably was also.

The drawing room across from the blue room that he now entered was somewhat narrower, longer, and done in the burgundy red of an old Bordeaux. This room was darker and-if it could be so described-deeper, as if it had been steeped in wine. The colors at Bletchley Hall, Melrose noticed, were exceptionally strong-none of your weak- kneed off-whites, ecrus, or pastels but colors that seemed to demand that one just hold on.

The red room didn’t get much natural light, facing north as it did; it depended on lamps being lit and the logs burning in the fireplace, as a fire burned now. Because of this play of light and dark, Melrose hadn’t immediately seen Tom, who sat by the hearth. His eyes were closed or almost closed, and he hadn’t noticed Melrose come in either.

Melrose hung back, not wanting to disturb his doze.

He turned and was about to leave when Tom said, “Hello. Come on in.” He was still in Moe Bletchley’s wheelchair. Melrose walked to a wing chair in front of the fire.

Tom was holding a small sherry glass in his hand, which he raised. “Want some?”

“I do, yes. Just point me to it.”

“Over there.” Tom indicated a table beside a window hung in a sea of dark-red curtains. Melrose found the sherry decanter in among other decanters-cut glass, probably Waterford, that shade called “Waterford blue,” a unique assimilation of blue and gray. This table was stocked with the best and most expensive whiskies, gins, and vodkas. “I’m amazed,” he said, coming back with his sherry glass, Lalique, he thought, remembering Marshall Trueblood’s lessons. The glass was shaped like a tulip just beginning to open.

“What’s more amazing is how seldom we use it-the drink. It must be the idea that what’s so readily available loses a lot of its power to tempt you. You’d think all of us would be driven to drink, wouldn’t you?”

Melrose smiled. “Maybe. Listen: Why do you like that wheelchair so much?”

Tom smiled too. “Because it’s fancy, it’s fun, and it gets his goat. You’re living in Seabourne, aren’t you.”

“I am, yes. At least for a little while.”

“It’s haunted.”

Melrose laughed. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

“It is.”

“Come on, Tom. To tell the truth, the place does give me the feeling of-um, a movie set. It really does. One expects to see spectral shapes forming at the top of the stairs. Anyway, I take it you’ve been in it?”

“I’ve stayed there.”

“You’ve known Morris Bletchley for some time?”

“Like he said, I was his chauffeur for years. Mostly in London. He had a terraced house in Putney, maybe still does, though he never leaves here much, now.” He turned his head to look out of the tall window and smiled as if the memory made him happy. “That was just like him, living in Putney instead of Belgravia or some swank house in W-One. It was a small house, too, the Putney house. There was just me, a cook who came in daily, and an au pair for the kids, who used to come and see him a lot. They really loved him.”

“His grandchildren?”

Tom nodded. “Noah and Esme. Nice kids. I used to drive them places: the zoo, films, Chick’nKings.” He flashed Melrose a smile. “Of course.”

“I understand they drowned; it was a strange accident.”

“It was strange, all right. It was strange,” he repeated. Silence. Then he asked, “Want some more sherry?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

Tom might have liked the wheelchair for reasons other than “fun.” He rose slowly and, it appeared, painfully. It was a pain that hadn’t seemed to bother him in the sunroom or hadn’t registered, if it did. He continued talking as he poured and stoppered up the decanter. “Mr. B was in London, in the Putney house. After he got the call he came to my room to tell me to warm up the car, that he wanted me to drive him to London airport.” Tom was standing in front of Melrose, handing him the refilled glass. “I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen Mr. B look like that; sunk, he looked, as if he himself had drowned. I drove him to the airport; he keeps a Lear jet there, but he hardly ever uses it, only when he has to go to the Highlands or Paris or someplace. He really keeps it for his executives and employees. One of his girls who worked at the Watney C-K, her father had a heart attack, and Mr. B got her to the airport and she was home in Edinburgh in an hour. He doesn’t like the plane; he doesn’t like ostentation; he’s a plain man.”

Melrose laughed. “There, I disagree; he’s much too complicated to be plain. Though I do admit he works at it.”

Tom nodded and turned the tulip-shaped glass in his fingers. “Well, not plain, maybe, but generous. After a few years of this”-his hand swept over his body-“when I got too sick to do anything, he brought me here. Most of the people here are ones he knew before. The Hoopers owned a bookstore in South Ken he was always going to. Miss Livingston was once his son’s public school teacher.”

Afraid he’d gotten Tom off the subject of the grandchildren, Melrose said, “And what happened that night he flew down here?”

“Of course, by the time he got to the house, it’d all been done; I mean, police had come, and the ambulance had taken the bodies away. The cop in charge, at least I guessed he was in charge, talked to Mr. B for a long time. Then they all left.

“He told me it felt like the aftermath of battle, when you can’t do anything but look at the bloody battlefield. His son’s wife had gotten there first-I mean, after the cook, Mrs. Hayter. Daniel, his son, arrived later; they’d had a hard time locating him, so it was awhile after his wife got there. So Mr. Bletchley, he had to get information from his daughter-in-law. Karen, her name is. And that really frustrated him.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why? Because he doesn’t like her. He always said she married Daniel for money. I guess it wouldn’t be the first time. He was in a rage with both of them because they hadn’t been home when the kids got out of bed. I imagine Mrs. Hayter came in for some sharp words, too.” Tom sighed. “It was too painful for him to live in the