The Archivist Read online

  ‘Look, Rosemary, I would love to stop and chat, but I really popped by to pick up my keys.’

  ‘Your keys? Oh, I gave them to Sam. Seemed to make sense.’ BS felt a swift plummet deep in his bowels and he knew in a sickening instant that Sam Westbrook had the inventory. Rosemary chattered on: ‘She was very keen not to let the grass grow under her feet while you were away. As were the trustees for that matter, the amount she charges per day.’ BS hadn’t been listening, but this last piece of information pulled him away from the rising crescendo of worry about the inventory and on to a wave of resentment. Naively he had assumed Sam Westbrook was on the same sort of pay as himself, after all she was doing a job he could easily have done.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Upstairs in your office I should think. She’s rather taken that over, her and Noel, until the workmen have finished knocking seven bells of hell out of the sealed chamber.’

  ‘Good grief!’

  He cut towards the west side of the passage into the watercolour room and entered the indigo library just as Walter Willis, a retired music scholar who had taken responsibility for the mighty Wurlitzer, was blasting the organ pipes through at the end of the room which was devoid of visitors. BS particularly disliked Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and Walter was not a skilful enough organist to pull it off. Even so, as the opening bars swelled and shook the room with their rising crescendo, BS felt he was in a film about himself, striding down to meet his doom as the mighty Wurlitzer organ played him towards his destiny. Walter wasn’t aware of BS’s approach until he came level with him, at which point the small man jumped and the organ coughed out a strangled squeak.

  ‘I do apologise,’ Walter said. ‘I thought I was alone.’

  ‘Carry on,’ BS said irritably as he opened the door and began to make his way up the spiral stairs. He could hear Walter recommence the twiddly bits of the piece, but he sounded as if he was playing with the backs of his hands. As BS ascended the stairs, the notes receded and the sound of voices from the room above became clearer. He took some comfort from the fact that by the time he reached the top he still had plenty of puff. Perhaps his time away had done him some good.

  Sam was seated at his desk and leaning over her was Noel. As he feared, they were studying the inventory, but he had already decided on a tactic. ‘Good morning,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I am so glad you have that. What a find! I had been down in the muniments room on that dreadful night searching and searching for the wretched thing when I was taken ill. The quest for it has been a long-held ambition, my belief that it existed a certainty, so much so that I have wondered often during my convalescence whether in fact it was the excitement of its incredible discovery that brought on my horrible attack. I cannot tell you how worried I have been that it was still lying locked away down there while I was ill, and you two having to struggle away without this incredible asset.’

  Both listeners had looked up when he entered, but apart from that, neither of them moved throughout his speech. Silence flowed back into the room as he stared from face to face. It was as if they were dumbfounded. He wondered if he should continue in the same vein, but before he could Sam said, ‘Hello. Are you better?’

  ‘Much. Thank you.’ He looked around and saw that his desktop had been cleared and on every side of the room the shelves were topped up with neatly stacked stationery. The bookshelves were devoid of the volumes he had carefully purloined from the library over the years, and with a feeling of intense irritation he guessed they had been returned to their rightful places once more. The computer was on again, and a labyrinthine pattern of colours coiled and whirled on the screen. ‘Well, you’ve certainly made some changes up here,’ he said.

  Sam got to her feet. ‘You must have your desk back,’ she said, but before coming round, she gathered up the inventory.

  ‘Thank you,’ and he manoeuvred around and past her, catching his stick on the table leg as he tried to squeeze himself into his old leather chair at an odd angle. Sam retreated to the other side of the desk where a new chair stood, and Noel sat himself down on the swivel chair next to the computer. The room did seem exceedingly crowded.

  ‘I’d offer to make coffee,’ Noel said, ‘but we’ve run out. Been too busy to replenish it.’

  ‘Have you now?’ BS said. He was determined to maintain his breezy demeanour. ‘Right. Fill me in. Tell me how it’s all been going. What have I missed?’

  - 16 -

  Maureen Hindle loathed the drive up to Scotland, and this time she resented it more than ever. It was as if each gaudy motorway stop marked another tranche of miles further away from BS Moreton. Michael liked to leave after the rush hour, which meant most of the journey was made in darkness, and although Maureen preferred to watch the countryside in the daylight as it slipped by and metamorphosed from the quaint fields and modest valleys of the south to the hulking shoulders of the mountains as they pressed on up through the Lake District to Carlisle and on towards the borders of Scotland, that Thursday evening she was content to gaze at the lights sliding past them out in the darkness and replay her waking dreams over and over again. The images she conjured up were like short trailers for movies on the internet, and she had to keep rerunning them because she didn’t want to forget a single detail, and as she reran them, she was rewarded by recalling other components of the event that she had hitherto seen as irrelevant.

  She was beginning to explain to herself why her feelings seemed to switch back and forth between cherishing BS and ardently hoping that he would be discovered. At times her devotion had seemed so unlikely to be returned that she tried to convince herself that instead of being the great man she initially thought he was, he was a man of straw, flawed like everyone else, and her fear of rejection spurred her on to watch for deficiencies in his character and behaviour which might, she hoped, eventually extinguish her feelings towards him. When the final rejection came, she was riven with such fury that she replaced her quest to see and interpret loving signs with a search to prove him false and disingenuous, fraudulent even, not only towards herself, but to the world in general. However, recent events had made her review the opinion she had held so tightly to herself for the past two seasons. She had invested so much thought around the events of Monday night, she could not believe it was only two days ago. She filled her mind with thoughts such as, This time last night, This time the day before yesterday, and as a result, time slowed. She recalled feeling his trembling fingers return her consoling grip, and realising that his feelings hadn’t altered, she formulated a plausible explanation for his rejection two years earlier: he had not been able to trust himself with her.

  And in a flash another thought struck her with such force that Michael turned to her, the headlights of the car behind reflected in the rear-view mirror and falling across his eye like a glowing mask. ‘Did you say something, dear?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought you said something,’ and he turned back to the road in front. She felt a wave of intense irritation that her train of thought had been broken. ‘Would you like a little radio?’ he asked.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Were you sleeping?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Why not put your seat back, have a proper snooze?’

  ‘I’m all right like this.’

  ‘Daydreaming?’

  ‘Just thinking.’

  They slipped back into what Michael referred to as companionable silence. This usually meant he didn’t want to have a conversation. Maureen never found it companionable. She had learned, however, not to try to kick-start a conversation with a series of questions as this generally resulted in Michael getting irritated and even quieter. Tonight she was quite happy to leave him mulling over whatever it was he liked to think about.

  The past few days had been frustrating. The morning after BS’s collapse in the undercroft, she had intended to offer him the same kindness he had shown her after her own accident and she was eager to get
out of the house and over to the hospital. She didn’t feel like confiding her plan in Michael, and as the morning ticked by she began to feel that he would never leave for work. He read his morning paper from cover to cover and then decided he wanted another cup of coffee. It spilled into the saucer when she put it down in front of him, and he looked up from his paper with an expression of mild contrition at a perceived scolding. The moment she saw his car turn out of the drive and into the rush-hour traffic she rang the hospital, but they wouldn’t give her any information because she was not a relative and it appeared that being a work colleague wasn’t seen as important. She wondered if she should contact Patricia, but she now had the odd feeling that she was a rival for BS’s affection, and she didn’t think she could trust herself not to leak her emotions in the tone of her voice. She thought about ringing Pugh, but she had never telephoned him before in all the time she had worked at Duntisbourne and would have to ask Rosemary in the office for his number, so she spent an irksome day at home trying to fill her time catching up with housework and the garden when she had expected to spend it sitting at the bedside of BS Moreton.

  She was on the rota for Wednesday and hoped to find Pugh on the gate in the morning when she turned up for work, but it was being manned by a scrofulous youth she had never seen before. He had the affront to stop her and ask for a ticket; without a word she jabbed her finger at the parking sticker in her windscreen and drove on through.

  The gossip in the Hall was that BS was home again. ‘Donna got a right bollocking from Patricia,’ she heard Weenie telling Roger Hogg-Smythe during her tea break. ‘She went into the hospital on her way to work to bring BS his diary, and Patricia fell on her like a circus tent. Said he wasn’t to have anything to do with work or the Hall, and please could she pass that message on and leave the poor man time to get well again.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Roger asked.

  ‘Heart attack, I think.’

  Maureen rolled her head away and looked out of the side window of the car at the lights moving slowly by in the distance and wondered if they were near Glasgow yet. Michael must have thought she was sleeping because he leant forward and turned the radio on, leaving the volume low. To her astonishment the sombre clarinet solo that preluded E lucevan le stelle, the aria from Tosca, filled the car with a sweet sadness. She felt sure it was a sign. This was the piece of music she had introduced to BS, the song he had included in his radio broadcast as one of his desert island discs. She didn’t understand Italian, but she was able to make out certain words: languide carezze – languorous caresses, and braccia – arms. Her heart soared with the passion in the tenor’s voice and she saw the stars shining over the snow and BS Moreton reaching out to her in the undercroft before he sank to the ground. She conjured up new images, taboo and exciting, remembering the weight of BS’s head as she raised it on to her lap. It seemed exquisitely intimate to have cradled his head, to have stroked the hair from his forehead, and she returned to the thought that had jolted her moments before – a thought so crucial yet at the same time so terrible she had to approach it carefully. The thought of a man pleasuring himself had always disgusted her, but she realised she had found the solution to the mystery of the rucksack. BS Moreton had pleasured himself as he thought about her, and he had made the act as dignified as he could in the circumstances. She could think of no other explanation.

  At the same time as these thoughts brought relief and satisfaction to her tumbling mind, she felt guilt sliding in again, hand in hand with her sin of carnal interest. It seemed to her that every time she pushed these notions aside, they strengthened. If she indulged them, just for a short while, would they pass more quickly? She thought it worth trying, and as they passed over the borders of Scotland and on up through Perthshire, she let her imagination step cautiously from the idea to the image of a room high up above the great hall at Duntisbourne, a room warm and dimly lit, a man lying back, the expression on his face one of self-transcendence, the kind of rapture that had shuddered from the throat of the tenor and which still rang in her mind, and a moment of release that she now shared with equal exultation.

  - 17 -

  The day was bright and chilly, cumulus clouds were scudding over from the Black Mountains. When the wind veered around to the north, it tore down the Lugg valley and walloped itself against the Hall’s stout doors, moaning as it squeezed through the gaps around the architrave. Max leant back on the marble radiator cover which was mercifully hot. He was on the door today.

  ‘On behalf of the thirteenth Earl of Duntisbourne, ladies and gentlemen,’ Bunty began, ‘I would like to welcome you all to Duntisbourne Hall, one of the finest examples of Tudor architecture in the country. ’

  An enormous gust of wind hit the front door at the precise moment Claude Hipkiss, arriving a little late for work, turned the handle from the outside. The wind caught the door and whacked it open with tremendous force, yanking the old man off his feet. He maintained a tenacious grip on the handle, and Bunty paused in her introduction as Claude sailed across the threshold in a horizontal position, crashed to the ground and slid a short distance on his front, papers fluttering around him in his wake. The visitors gasped in horror. He lay motionless, his bony limbs spread out at awkward angles like a squashed insect.

  ‘Heavens above, Claude,’ Bunty said. ‘What are you doing?’

  Roused by her hearty tones, Claude raised his face from the floor, shook his head a couple of times like a dog drying its coat, mumbled something, then began to get to his feet as Max came forward to gather up the old boy’s belongings and replace them in the Tesco bag from which they had issued.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Claude grumbled. ‘Nothing at all. Just a little trip.’ Snatching the bag off Max, he stumped away down the statue corridor. Bunty clapped her hands sharply to regain the attention of her audience and continued: ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to hand you over to your guide, Edwina, and I just know you will enjoy your tour.’

  As the group of visitors shuffled off down the corridor behind Weenie, Bunty hailed Max across the hall. ‘Good morning, Max. How do you find yourself this morning?’

  ‘Just threw back the bedclothes, Bunty, and there I was.’ Major Frodsham, who had been nodding off behind the guide book desk in a patch of early spring sunshine which flooded through the windows and on to his back, came to with a snort and began chuckling.

  ‘Well, something’s tickled Frodders,’ Noel said, moving round the corner of a pillar inside the door to shelter from the draught. ‘Hard to believe it now, but the Major was a brave man in his day. Saw action over in Borneo in the sixties.’

  ‘What’s your history?’ said Max. ‘How did you end up here?’

  ‘Oh, blew in one day, like the rest of the guides. No, truth is my wife’s from this part of the world. We met out in Hong Kong, but when I retired we came back; then I realised that playing golf every day was getting as tedious as going into an office every day, so I came to work here. They get a motley bunch applying for jobs, and they never turn anyone away. You, for example.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Claude there,’ and Noel pointed in the direction the old man had gone, ‘was a big noise in London – worked as a lawyer up in Lincoln’s Inn. Now he gets the bus in from Leominster because his wife needs the car. Laurence was out in Manhattan in the sixties – did a stint at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, he was a contemporary of Robert De Niro.’

  ‘Really?’ Max said.

  ‘He made a reasonable living – I sometimes see him popping up in old reruns of The Saint. Bunty looked after horses for the rich and famous. Her niece dated Lord Montague for a time, years ago.’

  ‘And Weenie?’ Max could see her silhouette in the morning room – tiny body, huge lollipop head topped with a mane of brittle hair dyed a desperate blonde. She was giving her all to her group.

  Noel raised his eyes heavenward. ‘Weenie! Hard to believe a thing that woman tells you, but she swears she was a
top model in London and shared a flat with The Shrimp. Eats like a shrimp. In fact, I’ve never actually seen her eat. You keep an eye open, Max. See if you can catch her putting food into her mouth. I’ve never seen it. Oldest anorexic I’ve met. Fancies herself as a maneater though. You’d better watch it. When she squeezes herself into those leather party pants, no man is safe.’

  Max shuddered.

  ‘Wait until the summer party. Guarantee she’ll be wearing them then.’

  ‘What summer party?’ Max hated parties.

  ‘Nothing to worry about yet. It’s not until August. It’s to celebration the 1575 Summer Progress, when the queen first pulled the second earl into bed with her. He wasn’t a earl then, of course – he was only thirteen, she was nearly forty. Ah, here comes our venerable archivist.’

  Max and Noel watched BS’s progress across the courtyard. His head was down and he seemed deep in thought, but a peal of laughter from a group of schoolgirls sitting on the steps to his left drew his gaze and as Max and Noel watched, he veered over towards them and ascended the steps on which they sat. He greeted them to left and right, pausing to talk, and the girls tittered and tugged their plaid skirts over their knees.

  ‘Look at the old goat,’ Noel said. ‘Can’t resist the schoolgirls. You can tell when his blood’s up. Wears his tie flopped out over his jumper, like an escutcheon. You are witnessing the full display of the Great BS Moreton.’

  ‘You’ve been upstairs too long in that exhibition Noel,’ Max said.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Good morning Noel – and, Max isn’t it?’ BS said as he eventually came in through the front door.

  ‘Yes. We met when I was being shown around,’ Max said.

  ‘Of course.’ BS swung his rucksack up on to the marble of the radiator box and leant back against it with his hands spread out. The archivist was looking well despite his recent illness.