Cont'd

‘Forgive my intruding, but would either of you ladies happen to have anything as useful as a paper-clip?’

The inquiry came from Arbuthnot Lacey, a man of some sixty years with curly white hair, a creased linen suit, and a sheaf of manuscript under his arm. He appeared to have been standing by the door for some moments, for he smiled complicitly as he approached and said, ‘I’m having trouble keeping Plato out of Aristotle, if you know what I mean.’

‘Von Tilsbach’s arrived,’ announced Aunt Flora, who had very little time for Mr. Lacey’s jokes.

‘How thrilling,’ said Mr. Lacey, drawing squiggles in the air with a much-chewed dip-pen as he spoke.  ‘Or should I say, Donner und Blitzen.’

‘This is not a laughing matter, Mr. Lacey.  And I don’t like to hear that language spoken in this house.’

‘Aunt –’ Emily began.

‘I don’t,’ her aunt insisted.  ‘It reminds me,’ she added darkly, with the little upwards tilt of the head with which she usually settled such matters.  ‘As if losing my home and all my possessions to those bestial Askaris were not enough.  People in this country have no idea what we went through out in East Africa.’

‘Yes, but we did start it, didn’t we?’ Lacey couldn’t help but observe.  ‘Little matter of the bombardment of Dar-es-Salaam, if I recall.’

‘Mr. Lacey, please do not try to be flippant on that subject,’ Flora warned.  ‘You will have your Maker to reckon with.’

Arbuthnot Lacey heaved a stoical sigh.  ‘Emily, my dear,’ he said, gravitating softly across the carpet to where Emily stood before the piano, ‘you wouldn’t happen to have a paperclip, would you?  The history of the English essay in the early twentieth century might hinge on this.’

‘Yes, I think I’ve got some in my room,’ said Emily, absently.

‘I am at a critical juncture,’ said Mr. Lacey.

‘Yes, presently,’ murmured Emily, who was still conducting imaginary conversations with her aunt.  ‘Anyway,’ she addressed Flora at last, ‘I have invited Christoph to stay for as long as he likes, and I expect him to be treated as a guest by everyone under this roof.’

Flora’s hand was on the stopper of the hart’s-horn.  ‘As you wish, my dear,’ she said, with a sudden sigh of resignation.  ‘Perhaps,’ she added, dabbing her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief, ‘you could ask McGregor to step in here if you happen to see him.  The curtains need adjusting.’

Emily turned to leave, her fingers itching with the music she had longed to be playing for the past fifteen minutes.  ‘We’re taking tea on the lawn in half an hour,’ she said.

‘I don’t think I shall feel well enough for that,’ replied Flora, picking up her book of pressed flowers and staring demonstratively at the cover.  In her mind’s eye she pictured Lacey with an Aksari spear at his throat.

‘As you wish,’ said Emily.  ‘Oh, that paperclip, Mr. Lacey.’

‘Future generations will be grateful to you, my dear,’ said Mr. Lacey, nodding sweetly at Flora before following Emily out of the room.  ‘I say,’ he remarked in an undertone, ‘I would be careful of our visitor, if I were you, my dear.  There may be no love lost between your aunt and yourself, but she’s right in this instance: that man has brought nothing but sorrow on this house.  You’re probably too young to have been told all that happened, but some of us here have very long memories, I assure you.’

Emily drew a deep breath before replying.  ‘I believe that William would want us to receive him, Mr. Lacey,’ she said at last.  ‘And receive him we shall.’

1.3

The house had that characteristically English atmosphere of mahogany and leather and beeswax which von Tilsbach knew so well from his own days at Cambridge before the Great War; it gave him a sense of welcome as he climbed the stairs behind the taut black back of the incommunicative McGregor.  Here and there he recognised pictures or ornaments that William had referred to when speaking of his home, and it was with a guarded but definite sense of pleasure that von Tilsbach realised that the imaginary Elmsforth House which he had carried round with him for so long was scarcely different in its essentials from the real Elmsforth House which William had grown up in.  It was a little darker, perhaps, a little less generous in its dimensions – just as the golden days of William’s childhood had perhaps been a little more mundane than his recollection of them – but von Tilsbach felt that he knew every nook and cranny of it, from the bust of Byron on the half-landing to the slow and solemn tick of the grandfather clock outside what had been William’s room.  The only unexpected thing was a smell of paint and plaster on the first floor, and the sight, through one or two half-open doors, of paint-splashed sheets and buckets and step-ladders.  Unable to live with the emptiness of her parents’ bedroom, Emily was having it redecorated and turned into a suite for guests.

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