The Archivist Read online

  Max was at his side in a heartbeat. ‘You’re not serious,’ he said, wrenching the door out of Noel’s hand and looking out.

  ‘Course not, old chap. Load of porkies. Serves you right for making me stay on for those mythical ten Koreans last week when I was on last tour.’

  Max waited in the Hall like a doomed man and watched his colleagues collecting their bags and escaping for the evening. He saw Roger Hogg-Smythe and Weenie leaving together. They looked over towards him, Roger said something to Weenie, who laughed like a hyena and clung on to his arm. BS Moreton limped past him on his way up the stairs to the minstrels’ gallery. The family pounded up the steps, their breath forming clouds of vapour as they panted. Noel locked up the front door once the family were in the great hall and bade Max a cheery farewell.

  The tour was every bit as bad as Max had feared. He loathed small groups – he wasn’t able to use his expansive style to amuse his audience. The father was interested in a number of things but the son kept asking questions about how long it took men to die once they’d been shot in the face by a musket, what the fifth earl looked like when his nose was blown off, and how big buboes grew before they burst when you got the Black Death. Max could smell the mother from several feet away, a mixture of patchouli oil, sweat and hair. What woman, he thought, came out on a freezing March day wearing sandals? He was halfway through explaining the tenth earl’s passion for taxidermy when the child on her hip began to mewl again. To his horror she sat herself down on a seat in the watercolour room and flopped out a large-veined breast around which the child clamped its lips and proceeded to make the most repulsive sucking noises, squeezing and massaging the breast with its upper hand like a cat prinking a cushion. Max struggled on manfully with his description of the third earl’s trip on the Mayflower including a number of references to the physical effects of scurvy to enthral the younger member of his audience. The baby dropped off to sleep and its head fell away from its mother’s bosom, leaving the large glistening nipple clearly visible. Max hurried them on to the indigo library and saw Maureen, who was waiting in the library for the final tour to come through, get up and leave through the library bedroom.

  Eventually the tour was over and he let the family out into the twilight through the small door at the end of music room. By now the snow was falling steadily and the courtyard was whitening. A few flakes of snow swirled in around the door as he shut it and locked it with a sigh of relief. Pugh had been following quietly behind him, closing shutters and turning off lights as Max left each room with his group, and the building was now dark and quiet as the grave. He made his way back along to the foot of the stairs up to the guides’ room to collect his things, and pulling on his gloves, he wound his scarf high on his neck before stepping out into the freezing evening. The wind had got up and he tucked his face downwards and walked briskly to his car, flakes of snow stinging his cheeks and brambling on his eyelashes. Away from the shelter of the courtyard the snow was beginning to settle and his feet squeaked as they compressed it. He looked up. The flakes were coming thick and fast, grey against the clouds above.

  He swung his Land Rover out of the staff car park and across the great courtyard. The snow was starting to drift along the left-hand margin of the drive and as he accelerated he felt the tyres slip before they took hold and he followed the route around the top of the lake towards Dolley Green Gate. The drive was virtually impassable and he wondered if his had been the last car parked in the staff car park because he doubted anyone else would be able to leave the Hall this evening. Ahead of him his lights picked out a figure stooping against the wind, and as he drew near, he recognised the gait and stature. It was Claude Hipkiss. He was wearing a viyella shirt and corduroy trousers. He had tucked his trousers into his socks and wrapped a towelling cravat around his neck, but these were the only concessions he had made to the weather. Max drew up alongside him and rolled down his window.

  ‘Can I give you a lift, Claude?’

  The old man stopped and leaned towards the window. Snow was building up in Claude’s ear on his windward side and his comb-over was trailing in the wind like a banner. His nose was crimson and had a bead of moisture quivering on the end. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘The weather, of course. I could give you a lift into town.’

  ‘Better on foot,’ he said, stepping away from the car to continue his journey. Max cruised beside him.

  ‘I’ve got an old coat in here you could borrow,’ he shouted.

  Claude waved his hand dismissively at him.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Max called out, but Claude waved again as if shooing him away. ‘Well, if you’re certain.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the old man shouted back over the wind. ‘Leave me be.’

  Reluctantly Max drove on, but pondered that perhaps Claude was right about it being better to walk. He couldn’t believe the weight of snow that was falling. His windscreen wipers were having trouble keeping it clear.

  Eventually he broke free of the park and was able to pick up a bit of speed in the lee of the valley running down towards the River Lugg, but it wouldn’t be long before this road too was impassable. He checked over his shoulder to make sure his wellington boots and shovel were in the back. The trusty Land Rover hadn’t let him down in fifteen years of living on the Welsh borders, but tonight might just be the night. He moved gingerly up the gears, relaxing into the bumping rhythm of the vehicle, and began to think about Sam. He wondered what she was doing right now – he hadn’t seen her in the Hall all day. He hoped she wasn’t out in this terrible weather – that silly little car of hers would be hopeless in these conditions. Already the road in front of him was a white ribbon, a single set of parallel lines had formed along the narrow lane away from the drifts where a few other vehicles had passed before him. She would probably be home by now. He wondered what her flat looked like. He should ask her – he wanted to imagine how she spent her evenings. Did she pour herself a drink the moment she had put down her things and hung up her coat? Did she have someone waiting for her in London and would she call each evening to say ‘Hi, how did your day go? Mine was terrible, and now it’s snowing’? He wondered if she ever thought about him when she wasn’t at work. This is ridiculous, he said to himself. Why on earth would she think about me?

  And suddenly, there she was. In the split-second that it took his headlights to illuminate a car tipped at a crazy angle on the other side of the road, he registered a flash of lime green paint, warning lights blinking and Sam’s blonde hair whipping around in the gale as she stood beside the open door talking on a mobile. He began to slow, his mind racing. Had she stopped to answer the mobile? No, he realised with mounting excitement – the warning lights were on. His happiness was almost beyond endurance. She needed rescuing. He searched desperately for a place to turn, braked and felt the back of the Land Rover skitter and slip before he came to a halt. He battled with the gears, the old engine revved and coughed but it never let him down, and he was back on to the packed snow of the road and heading towards Sam.

  ‘Can I help?’ he said, rolling down his window. ‘I just happened to spot you as I came along, and it looked like you could do with some help.’

  ‘Oh, Max, it’s you.’

  Max squeezed the Land Rover past her car and pulled off the road as far as he dared before climbing down. He felt his feet sink into the snow and begin to melt into his socks. He should have put on his wellingtons. He turned his collar up against the wind. Sam was hopelessly under-dressed for the weather. She plunged around in the snow to reach him and he put a hand out to help her.

  ‘If you could just get me back on the road,’ she said, ‘I can’t be that far from the Hall.’

  ‘Hopeless,’ Max said. ‘I hardly made it out of the park myself.’

  ‘I was trying to raise the AA,’ she said, waving her mobile at him. Max shook his head. Townies. ‘I’m sure I’ll get through to them in the end. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘That’s rid
iculous,’ he said. ‘You’ll freeze to death. Anyway, I don’t think you should be waiting here in the dark on your own. Someone odd might spot you.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘Good heavens, Sam, you do say the most extraordinary things. Of course not like me. You know me. No, I mean someone unpleasant. There are a lot of very unpleasant individuals in this world at the moment, and they all come out after dark. Look, my house is only ten minutes up the road from here. Come back with me. Sort this out from there, in the warm. The rescue services are going to be stretched to the limit tonight.’

  Sam hesitated. ‘Oh, I don’t know, it seems an awful imposition.’ She peeled a strand of soaking hair off her forehead and turned back to look at her car on which several inches of snow had built up in the time they had been talking. Shivering, she went on, ‘You’re probably right. If you don’t mind.’

  ‘Marvellous! What do you need to take out of your car?’

  Ten minutes took half an hour. Sam didn’t say much as they drove but sat staring out of the side window. Every now and then her body gave another shiver, and she tucked her hands under her thighs. Max reached back and pulled across an old Barbour coat which he pushed into her lap, and she rustled around with it to cover her front and hands.

  ‘Cold?’ he said.

  ‘Frozen.’

  Eventually Max turned into a quiet lane and crunched the gearbox into a lower ratio to climb an ascent through woods until they reached a hamlet of houses. He parked in front of a small row of modern timber-framed cottages and came round to help Sam down. She began to shiver again and he grabbed the coat from her seat and wrapped it around her shoulders, retrieved her handbag and briefcase and offered her his arm to help her up the path to the door. The snow was heavy on the trees above. The crunch of their footsteps and the gentle ticking of the cooling engine was muffled as if they were already indoors, then the high-pitched barking of a small dog sounded from inside the house. Sam turned and looked at Max.

  ‘That’s Monty,’ he said with a slight shrug.

  ‘I wouldn’t have had you down as a dog person at all.’

  ‘He’s not my dog – he belongs to my daughter. I ended up with him by default.’ Max opened the front door and stood to one side to let her pass into the warmth of the compact hall. A brindle Cairn careened up the passage, his claws clicking frantically on the tiles to get a better grip, his tail wagging every part of his little body. Max squatted down on his hunkers and scrabbled his hand across the dog, ‘Hello, you old stumper,’ he said before straightening up.

  He shook the snow and moisture off his coat and hung it up on one of a row of cast iron hooks. ‘Let me take yours,’ he said. ‘Come on through, you’ll soon warm up.’

  The sitting room, which took up most of the ground floor of the cottage, was at the end of the corridor and turned back on itself into the kitchen. Max flicked open the doors of the wood-burning stove and dropped in some more logs. ‘Sit down,’ he said gesturing towards the sofa. ‘These will soon blaze up. I’ll get some wine.’ Monty sprang up on to the sofa beside Sam and responded to Max’s glare and pointed finger by circling round a couple of times and settling into the corner against a cushion.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Sam said. ‘What a night! Is spring always like this?’

  ‘Not always,’ Max called through from the kitchen, reaching into a tall double-doored fridge. ‘Sauvignon?’

  ‘I’d better not. I ought to call the AA again. I may have to drive.’

  ‘One won’t matter.’

  ‘OK then, just a small glass.’ Sam dialled the number and wandered over to the fire. She finished her phone call and came into the kitchen where Max was leaning back against the worktop, a glass of chilled wine in his hand.

  ‘Hopeless,’ she said. ‘Unless I go and wait with the car, they say they can’t come out. If I’m not in any danger, they say wait ‘til the morning. They’re unlikely to get here tonight.’ Max tried to affect a look of frustrated despair on her behalf to cover his delight. She looked around the kitchen and added, ‘Goodness, Max, you live well.’

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ he laughed. ‘What did you expect? Middle-aged bachelor squalor?’

  ‘I don’t know really.’ She took the proffered glass of wine. ‘I don’t know very much about you. In fact, I don’t know anything about you. What do you do?’

  Max disliked this question for a number of reasons. He had done well for himself in the eighties, but recognised that the decade had damaged the reputation of stockbrokers to such an extent that many of his breed were regarded with suspicion at best, disgust at worst. When his marriage failed he was pleased to give up his high-octane life and go back to where he’d grown up on the borders of Wales, but found that for a man the role of single parent brought with it other difficulties. He lacked a support network to help him, there were no other single dads in the area, and he was wary of socialising with young mums in case his motives were misconstrued. This didn’t pose much of a problem when Charlotte was younger, but when she hit her teenage years with a vengeance he would have valued the sounding board of other parents going through the same experiences. However, by this time he had carved out a niche for himself as a loner and was content to deal with parenting as best he could on his own. Around this time the first e-broker developed and for the next four years he devoted his time to trading from home, spending all his days and most of his nights puffing away at his Rothmans upstairs in his study and making a great deal of money. This stopped him worrying too much about the things Charlotte was up to, but he didn’t regard his career as admirable. In light of this, his answer to Sam’s question was, ‘About what?’

  ‘Come on, Max, you know what I mean. No one could work at Duntisbourne Hall unless they have another income source. What’s yours?’

  ‘I retired young.’

  ‘And well, by the look of it. What did you do?’ she persisted.

  ‘Very little indeed, if I could help it.’

  ‘Max!’

  ‘Oh all right then. I was a stockbroker and now I top up my income with a little day trading.’ And he gave her a smile of resignation accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders.

  ‘Interesting,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s go back next door, that fire should be going now.’ He put his glass on the table by the sofa and went over to the French windows to close the curtains. The outside light penetrated several feet into the garden which was heaped with soft mounds of snow. He saw in the reflection of the dark glass that Sam was watching him from behind, and he felt a flutter of excitement that she was appraising him. ‘It’s getting nasty out there,’ he said as he drew the curtains shut and returned to the sofa. Sam sat down beside him.

  ‘Not much point ringing for a cab then?’

  Max stared into the fire and shook his head. There was only one solution to her dilemma, but he needed to handle things carefully. He turned towards her, resting his arm along the back of the sofa. ‘I hope this isn’t going to sound all wrong,’ he said, ‘but could I suggest that you stay the night?’ He raised his hand and hurried on. ‘No, don’t get the wrong idea. I’ve got a perfectly safe double spare room with its own bathroom and I’d be honoured if you would consider it. Then I can run you back tomorrow and you can wait with your car for the AA. Or I may even be able to pull you out with the Land Rover. I could probably get the tow bar on in the daylight and take you back to the Hall. These spring dumps don’t tend to last. And you can have another glass of wine. And I could fix us a bit of supper. And,’ he smiled, ‘I could tell you all about my sad and complicated early life and get to know you a bit better.’

  He could see her struggling with the suggestion and guessed that the glass of wine on an empty stomach, together with the comfort of his warm home was tempting.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I insist.’

  So Max got up again and went through to the kitchen to rummage around in the fridge until he found some cheese and packets of
cold meat which he started to lay out on a serving plate. As he worked he leaned back a little to enable himself to see what Sam was doing. She had tucked her stockinged feet up on to the sofa and was relaxing. Max was happy.

  Monty trotted into the kitchen and sat under the table watching the floor in the hope that a few scraps of food might drop in front of his nose. When Max started making toast, the smell brought Sam through to the kitchen again, and she opened a few drawers until she found the cutlery and started to lay the table. It felt so comfortable, the two of them moving around the kitchen, making a meal together, that Max had to resist the temptation to walk over and hug her as she chatted about her meeting that day in Hereford with the council and the architects, finalising the details of pushing the walls of the sealed chamber out to the west above the dining room to create an exhibition space beyond the room above the minstrels’ gallery.

  ‘But I have yet to see any of the pieces that might go into the exhibition,’ she said. ‘BS Moreton is a charming fellow, but working with him is like knitting jam.’

  Max opened a second bottle of wine and they settled down to eat. She talked about her work at the British Museum, her divorce, her flat in London and her daughter. He told her about Charlotte and Monty and day trading. Over the years he had found that courtship was similar to an interview for a job except that it generally ran for longer than a few hours. When he had first spotted Sam he had been interested in her, and this evening confirmed that he wanted the job. However, he knew he would probably have to go through a process of tests and vivas until she decided he was the right candidate and gave him the post.

  He thought this analogy had probably begun to form during his adolescence. He was academically lazy and his parents hadn’t been confident he would pass his Common Entrance, but they found a progressive boarding school in Hampshire which offered hordes of hopeful boys and girls the chance to impress over three days of the summer holidays. Max, a keen sportsman, had injured his leg and attended this three-day marathon in a plaster cast, and he was certain this had gained him the sympathy vote and got him a place.