felt the heat of the flames as I set down the candelabra and turned the beam of the torch in my other hand on to the black padlock.
Here in the tunnel it would be just as dark at midday. And I would have spent another sixteen hours imagining what I might find on the other side of this door. With a certain fatalistic dread, I saw that the keyhole in the padlock had a short central pin, just right for the barrel of the one key I had not yet identified. The lock scraped and grated; the body of the padlock dropped away from the hasp. I lifted the latch and opened the door a fraction.
Nothing came out. The torch beam wavered down a narrow, precipitous flight of steps on to another flagged floor, dark with moisture. There was a handrail attached to the wall on the left of the stairs, but no banister on the other side, just a sheer drop to the stones below. A raw, urinous odour drifted up to me. Racks and shelves, mostly empty so far as I could see, extended along the walls. Patches of lichen flickered in the torch beam. The cellar was long and narrow. Beneath the end wall, I could just make out a mound of something that looked like earth.
The more I played the torch over that mound, the less I liked it. The candles gave far more light, but the flames dazzled me no matter where I held it.
I had been kneeling with the open door propped against my shoulder. When I moved away, it swung closed of its own accord: the bar slid almost to the top of the catch. I tried it again, letting the door go from hard against the side wall. This time the bar slid up and over and dropped, unnervingly, into place. One of those massive Victorian irons in the laundry would wedge it securely open. But then I noticed a small metal eye in the top of the door above the latch. At the corresponding point on the wall, in the vertical gap between two blocks of stone, a hook had been mounted so that it hung inside the recess. I dropped it into the eye and shook the door hard to make certain it was secure.
As I did so I noticed that the inside of the door was scarred by numerous vertical gouges, especially along the joints where the planks met, as if some savage animal had tried to claw its way out of the cellar. I remembered the deep scratches in the floor of the bedroom cupboard.
DOWN HERE THE AIR WAS COLDER STILL: CHILL AND DAMP and stale. I had the torch in my right hand, flames trailing from the candelabra in my left. A cobweb flared along the shelves-mostly anonymous tins and bottles, labels long gone-as I approached the dark mound. Not earth: a black tarpaulin shrouding an irregular form about five feet long. I stretched out a reluctant foot and twitched the covering aside.
Something scuttled from the heap. I recoiled, shuddering, and bumped against the shelves. The whole end section came crashing down, shattering glass and sending cans rolling and clattering into the dark. By a small miracle I kept hold of both the candelabra and the torch. The flames guttered wildly but did not go out, and as the light steadied I saw amidst the debris a small yellow package tightly tied with string.
As I bent to pick it up I heard another, softer sound from above. The creak of hinges. I had not even reached the foot of the steps before the door swung shut. The click of the latch dropping into place was audible even through the heavy planks.
BY THE END OF THE THIRD HOUR I HAD EXHAUSTED EVERY avenue of escape. The timber was like iron; the door closed flush onto a broad lip of stone, so that the edges were inaccessible from inside. I might have forced a blade between the planks, or prised them apart with a crowbar or even a heavy screwdriver, but there wasn't a single implement in the cellar. The entire construction of the shelving was wooden, much of it rotten, none of it strong enough to make an impression on the door. There were no tools, no knives; nothing bigger than a rusty nail. I tried scraping at the timber with broken glass, and cut my hand badly without making any impression. I tried the keys themselves: most were the wrong shape for gouging, and those that were thin enough had bent and then broken. I thought of prising up a flagstone to use as a battering-ram, but I had nothing to prise with; they were all immovable. I had even overcome my dread of what might be hidden beneath the black tarpaulin, and found only a pile of rotting sandbags-left over from the Blitz, perhaps. I tried hitting the door with one and it split on the first blow, showering me with damp sand.
Now, as I sat on the top step with my back against the immovable door, the torch was noticeably dimmer, though I had used it as sparingly as possible, and the first of my four candles-I had put out the other three as soon as the first wave of blind panic subsided-was almost gone. On one of the intact shelves I had found a pool of long- congealed candle wax, with an empty matchbox beside it. The corroded tins had all held paint or household cleaners. I had no food, no water, no jacket: only a filthy, sweat-soaked shirt and trousers, a box of matches, almost full, a fading torch, and three more candles.
I had read somewhere that you could survive for many weeks without food, so long as you had plenty to drink, but only four or five days without water. My mouth and throat were already parched.
My frenzied efforts at escape had given the panic an outlet. Now it was rising like water up the steps towards me. A
I had left the candelabra at the foot of the stairs. Beyond the circle of light, I could just make out the wreckage of fallen shelves and broken glass, and a faint gleam of yellow: the package, which I had dismissed as simply a folded section of waterproof cloth: there appeared to be nothing solid inside, and the knots were too tight to undo. But I might as well be sure.
Only about an inch of candle remained. The flame swayed as I passed, spilling molten wax on to the floor. I used a piece of broken glass to cut the string. In the centre of the package I found several sheets of typescript, also tightly folded several times over, with the typewritten side outwards.
Within seconds she was drenched, and though Harry met her with an umbrella as she approached the house, the roar of the thunder drowned every attempt at speech.
Towelling her hair dry in her room, while thunder rolled and reverberated overhead and the electric light flickered after every flash of lightning, Cordelia was seized by a reckless impulse to put on the emerald green gown. Earlier in the week, she had spent several hours brushing and sponging and pressing it, and airing out the musty smell. But how would she explain its sudden appearance in her wardrobe? and besides, it would upset her uncle. She chose another dress, also green but in a lighter shade, and went down to the kitchen, where she found Harry helping Beatrice assemble a cold supper.
'I'm sorry for what I said in the lane,' said Beatrice, as soon as she came in. 'You startled me, that's all; I didn't mean it. No'-as Cordelia reached for an apron-'you've done everything all week; Uncle has a glass of wine waiting for you.'
'Yes, you put your feet up, old thing,' said Harry. 'I'll be in in just a minute.'
Though Cordelia had grown used to being 'old thing' in company, she had not realised until that moment just how thoroughly she disliked it. But after insisting that she was not jealous, she felt obliged to accept. Harry's minute stretched to what felt like ten, and when he did join her and her uncle and aunt, she could not decide whether he was simply being his usual self, or behaving like someone determined to pretend that nothing whatever was wrong. The hiss of rain and the constant rumble of thunder made conversation difficult, and then, after an especially fierce flash of lightning, the electric lights went out, leaving them to dine by flickering candlelight, which made it impossible to read anybody's expression, even when you could hear what they were saying.
Gradually, the thunder receded and the rain diminished until there was only the drip drip drip from the eaves onto the gravel outside. The wind, too, had died away, and when Uncle Theodore opened the window, cool damp air wafted into the dining-room. Aunt Una retired to her room; but still Harry, Beatrice (who had evidently taken the confrontation in the lane as sanction for casting off her reserve with him) and Theodore chatted on, until Cordelia could bear it no longer, and more or less ordered Harry to accompany her upstairs to the studio.
The air was so still that, rather than light a lamp, she simply took one of the candlesticks from the
