Ancient Images (21 page)

    The press secretary cut her off with an efficient click. Sandy replaced the receiver and set about packing, and began to regret having left the message. At the very least she'd trapped herself into waiting for a call that, now she thought about it, she had no earthly reason to expect; the nobility weren't so easily summoned. She ought to have driven straight to Redfield instead of announcing herself and her suspicions. No wonder she felt more spied on than ever, and caged by the anonymous room. She'd finish packing, she decided, and then call the press secretary to say she had to move on. That way surprise might still be on her side when she arrived at Redfield.

    She was snapping the clasps shut on her case when the phone rang. It was the hotel receptionist, she guessed, and took her time about picking up the receiver. "Yes?"

    "Miss Allan?"

    "I'm just leaving."

    "Can you wait? I have Lord Redfield for you."

    It was a voice from Staff o' Life, not from the hotel. Sandy swallowed and straightened her back. "I'm here," she said.

    If they played pat-a-cake with her now, she thought she might scream. She was steeling herself against the jingle when a man's voice breathed in her ear: "Miss Allan."

    "Yes."

    "I believe you have been after me."

    The voice was light, controlled, gracefully modulated, effortlessly sure of itself. "That's right," Sandy said.

    "I'm sorry you've had so much trouble."

    Whatever he was apologizing for, the apology threw her. "Well, yes, I did," she said awkwardly.

    "I'm told that you spoke of my grandfather."

    A hint of regret in his voice seemed to suggest it was her turn to apologize. "That was the message," she said, feeling churlish.

    "I should like to clear up any misunderstanding. Will you come here?"

    "Where's that?"

    "To my town," he said as if he was too polite to sound amused by her question. "Once you arrive, ask anyone for me."

    "When would you like me to come?"

    "Why, the sooner the better, I think you will agree."

    "Today?"

    "Ideal. I shall look forward to dealing with you face to face."

    "Me too," Sandy said, to say something, and held on to the receiver when he had vacated it. She snorted at herself to jar herself out of her reverie, and poked the receiver rest to clear the line of static that sounded like thin breathing. When the line buzzed at her to dial, she did.

    The second ring brought her a preoccupied response. "Mmh?"

    "Roger?"

    "Sandy! I was wondering where you'd got to."

    "I didn't want to call you until I knew where I'd be next."

    "Before you head off anywhere, you ought to know what I've found out. This may be the break you've been waiting for."

    "I'm pricking up my ears."

    "The magazine one of the guys you met gave you,
Picture
Pictorial?
It was owned by the same family that owns
the
Daily
Friend."

    "Redfield."

    "Oh, you know?"

    He sounded so crestfallen that she wished he were close enough to hug. "I didn't know that, and it's one more reason for me to go where I'm going. It was the Redfield family that tried to stop Giles Spence making his film."

    "Do you want me to be there when you talk to them?"

    "How soon could you be? Redfield must be five or six hours' drive from London."

    "I'll be on the road as soon as I finish this chapter. If I can't be there tonight I'd expect to be tomorrow morning."

    "I really ought to go there now. I've been invited. I'll be fine, don't worry," she said to reassure both of them. "And then I'll wait until you get there, if you like. Call Staff o' Life when you arrive. I'll leave a message with the switchboard to say where I am."

    "I'd really like to go with you," he complained, "but another book has started to germinate as well."

    "Got a title?"

    "Disney's Noses."

    "I can't wait," she said, and added, "to see you." She wasn't sure if he heard; he was saying "See you there." He broke the connection, leaving her alone with the static that sounded more than ever like laborious breathing close to her ear, or like a wind rattling in and out through a gap between sticks. "See you there," she echoed Roger, and made her way out of the hotel.

    

    

    More motorway. It swooped east through the Pennines, where factories sprouted red-brick chimneys in valleys among crags. Headlights in a drizzle turned the motorway into a river of diamonds, spilling over the horizon and winding in wide curves down the slopes. Further into the mountains, a mile-long procession of lorries was hauling itself upward, laboriously as wagons in a mine. As she sped past and left the drizzle behind, she felt she wasn't so much driving as being driven. She'd covered so many miles on Graham's behalf that she had lost count of the days she had been traveling.

    Beyond the Pennines the land grew flat, then flatter still. Sandy left the motorway at the exit which she judged to be closest to her destination, though Redfield wasn't marked on the signboard that announced the exit, nor on the sign at the intersection to which the access road led. The widest road from the intersection, heading more or less east, appeared to be her route.

    It was unfenced. Only ditches separated it from fields of grain and cabbages and grass beneath a pale bare sky out of which the sun had been cut, a round spyhole into a white-hot furnace. Sandy wouldn't have thought it possible for the landscape to grow flatter, but it had. The occasional line of trees at the limit of her vision was gray not with mist but with distance. Here and there a piece of farm machinery picked at a field. Mud tracked onto the road spattered her windscreen so often she began to worry that she might run out of washer fluid before she could reach a garage. Once, as she cleared the windscreen yet again, she almost ran over a pheasant in the middle of the road.

    The route sloped down through a copse, then climbed until it reached a humpbacked bridge, and stayed slightly higher than the landscape it wound through. The whole of the land was yellow with the widest fields of wheat she had ever seen. There was no movement except for the nodding of stalks and the occasional scarecrow. When she rolled down her window she heard the landscape rustling. The sound and the unrelieved yellow that appeared to stain the border of the sky made her feel oppressed, and so did her body. She'd started her period a day early, just as she'd reached the copse. She was more in need of a garage, or somewhere else with a toilet, than ever. When she caught sight of a thatched roof beside the road ahead she drove faster, willing the building to be a pub.

    Soon the pub sign came into view, swaying on a forked pole above a car park so meager it looked in danger of being reclaimed by the fields. The pub was called the Ear of Wheat. She parked under the sign, whose faint repetitive squeal she took at first to be the sound of a fault in her car engine. It was swaying in the incessant wind, the irregular breath of the land, a breath that smelled of soil and decay and growth. The wind, or the effect of so much driving, or her period made her shiver. She steadied herself with one hand on the muddy car and hobbled, dragging her suitcase, toward the pub.

    It wore its thatch pulled low above its small windows. Though she could see lights within, hers was the only car. She lifted the latch and sidled into the porch, the wind chasing her as she shoved the door shut, bills announcing dances and amateur productions fluttering on the glass of the porch. She turned the shaky knob of the inner door and stepped over the stone threshold.

    Black oak beams stood out from the walls and the low ceiling of the only room. A paunchy man with a pencil perched behind one ear was fitting an inverted bottle of whiskey in front of the mirror behind the bar, a squarish woman with her red hair in pigtails and wearing slippers in the shape of a cartoon tiger's feet was dealing ashtrays onto the oak tables that were scattered about the room. The only door besides the one to the porch was unmarked. "Excuse me," Sandy said, "is there a loo?"

    "Aye, we've a pair of those for customers." The landlord glowered at her in the mirror as if she had accused him of being unduly primitive. "What can I get you?"

    "Leave the lass now, Alan. You don't want him hindering you, hon, we girls know how it is. Come through here."

    The woman ushered Sandy through the door next to the bar and closed it behind her, leaving her in a short passage narrowed by a bare stone staircase. Sandy jerked the stiff latch of the Ladies', a stone cell with barely enough room for her to open her suitcase. At least she'd had the foresight to buy tampons in Manchester. Even in here she felt spied upon, presumably because the landlord must know what she was doing. She yanked her skirt down and stalked into the bar to buy a drink.

    She carried her half of beer that smelled of grain to a corner table, and was sitting down when the woman sat on the stool opposite. "Bound anywhere special, are you, dear?"

    "Redfield. Is it far?"

    The landlord looked up from polishing a tankard and said unwelcomingly, "You're there."

    "The town, I meant."

    "Straight on. There's no missing it. Nowhere else to go." A frown tweaked his eyes. "Not looking for work, are you?"

    "Just visiting."

    He grunted and recommenced polishing. "Never mind him," the woman said, "it's his way with strangers. Living all your life where you were born makes some of us like that. Me, I like a new face now and then."

    "Do you see much passing trade?"

    "No more than we need to," the landlord said, and muttered an addendum: Sandy was almost sure she heard, "And that's bloody little."

    "I expect you're crowded when they're working in the fields," Sandy said. "I don't suppose Lord Redfield ever comes in for a drink."

    The landlord raised his head like an animal disturbed while feeding. "He knows our place."

    His quiet pride sounded like a warning to her to be careful what she said. She emptied her glass and lifted her suitcase. "You just carry on the way you're going," the woman said, opening the porch door for her, "and you'll see Redfield before you know."

    Sandy made herself as comfortable as possible in the driver's seat and eased the car onto the road. A wind shook the dormant windscreen wipers; the fields surged at her like a wheaten sea. Ripples hundreds of yards long came through the fields to meet her as she drove. For a while she thought they were confusing her sense of perspective, making her unable to determine how far ahead a lonely tree stump was. Then the town appeared, thatched roofs like clumps of mushrooms, and she realized that the stump was beyond the town. It was a tower, a gray watchtower so tall that it seemed to command the town and the yellow landscape. For a moment she felt dwarfed by being watched, tiny as an insect ready to disappear into the earth.

    The road sloped gradually upward to the town, and brought the tower rearing higher. As she reached the outskirts of the town she thought she saw a figure at the top of the tower, but it must be growing there: the colors were wrong for a face. She slowed at the town sign, which stood quivering slightly on the trim verge, its four legs planted in the soil.

    REDFIELD
HOME OF STAFF O' LIFE

    DRIVE CAREFULLY

    Beyond it a man was mowing the verge, and turned to watch Sandy as she passed. The ragged tongue that stuck out of his face and swayed in front of it was a stalk he was chewing.

    A few hundred yards past the sign, the town began. Terraces of small newish Tudor cottages gave way to thatched houses on both sides of the road. The front gardens looked as if they were competing for an award for neatness. Much of the western side of the town consisted of the Staff o' Life factory, and she headed toward it through the town square, in which women leaned on strollers full of children and groceries and gossiped beside a war memorial. The square gave Sandy a view of the tower beyond a thoroughfare, and as far as she could see, the top was deserted.

    A road of piebald cottages and thatched houses the color of stubble led straight to the factory gates, which were open and unattended. A wide drive curved past a sprinkler flinging rainbows at a lawn. A few cars were parked in the shadow of the long Victorian facade. Sandy tidied her hair in the driving mirror, but a wind that smelled of baking tousled her hair as soon as she climbed out of the car.

    A ring on the bellpush by a waist-high sliding panel in the wall just inside the entrance produced a bust of a young woman with heavy bluish eyelids. "Welcome to Staffolife," she said as if the name were a single word.

    "Thanks so much. I'm Sandy Allan, looking for Lord Redfield."

    "Yes, of course. Go to the hotel and there'll be a message," the young woman said with a horsey smile so bright it seemed to linger after the panel was back in place.

    Sandy assumed there was only one hotel. She drove back to the square and turned along the main road. The building two stories higher than the shops was a hotel, the Wheatsheaf. An arch that looked mortared with moss led into the hotel car park. She hauled her suitcase up the steps into the lobby, where chandeliers dangled fragments of light above carved oak banisters, settees like unwound leather scrolls, a reception counter inlaid with a rectangle green as a marsh. A plump pale girl with white hair was typing a menu behind the counter, and stood up to greet Sandy. "You may have a message for me," Sandy said, "but first can I have a room?"

    "What would your name be?"

    "Sandy Allan."