Not to Disturb (3 page)

‘Oh yes, Madam. Perfectly, Madam. Thanks.' He steps back
a little pace, as if only too ready to withdraw quickly into the warm
cottage.

The Baroness makes no move to put her thick-gloved hand
on the wheel. She says, ‘I'm so very glad. Among servants of such mixed
nationalities, it's very difficult sometimes to achieve harmony. Indeed, we're
one of the few places in the country that has a decent-sized staff. I don't know
what the Baron and I would do without you all.'

Theo crosses his arms and clutches each opposite sleeve
of his coat just below the shoulders, like an isolated body quivering in its own
icy sphere. He says, ‘You'll be glad to get in the house tonight, Madam. Wind
coming across the lake.'

‘You must be feeling the cold,' she says, and starts up
the car.

‘Good night, Madam.'

‘Good night.'

He backs into the porchway of the cottage, then quickly
turns to push open the door. In the hall he lifts the house-telephone and waits
for a few seconds, still shivering, till it comes alive. ‘The Baroness,' he
says, then. ‘Just arrived. Anybody else expected?'

The speaker from the kitchen at the big house says
something briefly and clicks off. ‘What?' says Theo to the dead instrument. Then
he hangs up, runs out of the front door and closes the big gates. He returns as
rapidly to the warm sitting-room where Clara is lying dreamily on the sofa, one
arm draped along its back and another drooping over the edge. ‘You waiting for
the photographer?' says Theo.

‘What was all that talk?' Clara says.

‘Shivering out there. She was in her car, of course,
didn't feel it. On and on. Asked after you. She says, are we happy here?'

Pablo has got into the little cream coupé and driven it
away from the front of the house as soon as Lister has helped the Baroness out
of it, taken her parcels, banged shut the car door, and followed her up the
steps and into the hall.

‘Here,' she says, pulling off her big fur hat in front of
the hall mirror. Lister takes it while she roughs up her curly grey hair. She
slips off her tweed coat, picks up her handbag and says, ‘Where's everyone?'

‘The Baron is in the library, Madam, with Mr
Passerat.'

‘Good,' she says, and gives another hand to her hair.
Then she pulls at her skirt, thick at the waist and hips, and says, ‘Tell Irene
I'll be up to change in half-an-hour.'

‘Irene's off tonight, Madam.'

‘Heloise, is she here?'

‘Yes, Madam.'

‘Still working? Is she fit and well?'

‘Oh, she's all right, Madam. I'll tell her to go and
prepare for you.'

‘Only if she's feeling up to it,' says the Baroness. ‘I
think the world of Heloise,' she says, stumping heavily to the library door
which she opens before Lister can reach it, pausing before she enters to turn to
Lister while the voices within suddenly stop. ‘Lister,' she says, standing in
the doorway. ‘Theo and Clara — they have to go. I'm so very sorry but I need the
little house for one of my cousins. We don't really need a porter. I leave it to
you, Lister.'

‘Well, Madam, it's a delicate matter at the moment. They
won't be expecting this.'

‘I know, I know. Arrange something to make it easy,
Lister. The Baron and I would be so grateful.' Then she throws open the door
somewhat dramatically and walks in, while the two men get up from the grey
leather armchairs. Lister waits in the room, by the door.

‘Nothing, thanks, Lister,' says the Baron. ‘We have
everything here for the moment.' He waves towards the drinks cupboard in a
preoccupied way. The Baroness flops into a sofa while Lister, about to leave the
room, is halted by the Baron's afterthought — ‘Lister, if anyone calls, we
aren't on any account to be disturbed.' The Baron looks at the ormolu and blue
enamelled clock, and then at his own wristwatch. ‘We don't want to be disturbed
by anyone whomsoever.' Lister moves his lips and head compliantly and
leaves.

‘They haunt the house,' says Lister, ‘like insubstantial
bodies, while still alive. I think we have a long wait in front of us.' He takes
his place at the head of the table. ‘He said on no account to disturb them. “Not
to be disturbed, Lister.” You should have seen the look on her face. My mind
floats about, catching at phantoms and I think of the look on her face. I am
bound to ventilate this impression or I won't digest my supper.'

‘Not a bad woman,' says Pablo.

‘She likes to keep grace and favour in her own hands,'
Lister says, ‘and leave disagreeable matters to others. “The couple at the lodge
has to go, Lister,” she said, “I rely on you to tell them. I need the lodge for
my cousins,” or was it “my cousin”? — one, two, three, I don't know. The point
is she wants the lodge for them.'

‘How many cousins can she possibly have?' says Eleanor,
looking at the clean prongs of her fork, for some reason, before making them
coincide with a morsel of veal. ‘And all the secretaries besides.'

‘Cousins uncountable, secretaries perhaps fewer,' says
Lister, ‘if only she had survived to enjoy them. As it is the lodge will
probably be vacated anyhow. No need for me to speak to the poor silly
couple.'

‘You never know,' says Heloise.

‘Listen! — I hear a noise,' says Pablo.

‘The shutters banging upstairs,' says Hadrian.

‘No, it's him in the attic, throwing his supper plates
around,' Heloise says.

‘It wasn't plates, it was a banging,' Pablo says. ‘There
it goes. Listen.'

‘Eat on,' says Clovis. ‘It's only the couple of ladies in
the car again. They're getting impatient.'

‘Why don't they ring?' says Lister as he listens to the
thumping on the back door.

‘I disconnected the back door bell,' Clovis says. ‘We
need our meal in peace. Since I was goaded to do most of the cooking it's my say
that goes. Nobody leaves the table before their supper's over.'

‘Suppose one of them in the library rings for us?'
Eleanor says.

Lister reaches out for his wine-glass and sips from it.
The banging at the door continues. Clovis says, ‘It's doubtful if they will call
us, now. However, we must no longer respond, it would be out of the question. To
put it squarely, as I say in my memoir, the eternal triangle has come full
circle.'

‘They've as good as gone to Kingdom Come,' says Lister,
‘However, it is I who decide whether or not we answer any summons, hypothetical
or otherwise.'

‘It's Lister who decides,' says his aunt Eleanor.

II

It is ten-thirty at night. Lister has changed his clothes
and so has his young aunt, Eleanor. They walk hand-in-hand up the swirling great
staircase with its filigree of Regency wrought-iron banisters, imported in their
time as were so many other appointments of the house. Lister flicks on the light
and opens the folding doors of the Klopstocks' long drawing-room, allowing
Eleanor to pass before him into the vastness with its curtains looped along the
row of French windows. Outside is a balustrade and beyond that the night. The
parquet glitters obliquely, not having been trodden on today. The blue and
shrimp-pink of the carpet, the pinks and browns of the tapestried chairs, the
little tables, the scrolled flat desk and the porcelain vases are spread around
Lister and Eleanor, as they enter the room, like standing waiters on the arrival
of the first guests at an official reception. A porcelain snow-white lamb,
artfully woolly, sleeps peacefully on the mantelpiece where the Baron placed it
eleven years ago when the house was built and his precious goods brought in. The
Adam mantelpiece at one end of the room came through the Swiss customs along
with the rest as did the twin mantelpiece in the ante-room at the other end.
Eleanor, wearing a grey woollen dress and carrying a black bag, sits down
gracefully on a wide, upholstered chair and leans her arms on a small table,
toying with the pink-blond carnations she herself arranged freshly this
morning.

She looks about thirty-four. Her nephew, Lister, well
advanced into his mid-forties He wears a dark business suit with a white shirt
and a dull red tie. They could be anybody, and more conceivably could be the
master and mistress of the house just returned at this time of night from a trip
to a city — Paris or even Geneva — or just about to leave for an airport, a
night flight. Eleanor's hair is short, curled and dull. Lister's gleams with
dark life. Their faces are long and similar. Lister sits opposite Eleanor and
looks at a part of the wall that is covered with miniature portraits. Many
objects in this large room are on a miniature scale. There are no large
pictures, such as would fit it. The Monet is one of the smaller scale, and so is
the Goya. So too are a group of what appear to be family portraits, so that it
seems as if the inclination towards the miniature is either a trait descending
throughout a few generations to their present owner, or else these little
portraits have been cleverly copied, more recently, from some more probable
larger originals. Ornamental keys, enamelled snuff-boxes and bright coins stand
by on the small tables.

Lister looks away from the wall, and straight at Eleanor.
‘My dear,' he says.

She says, ‘I hear their voices.'

‘They are still alive,' says Lister. ‘I'm sure of that.
It hasn't happened yet.'

‘It's going to happen,' she says.

‘Oh, my dear, it's inevitable.' He takes a cigarette from
the long silver box and lights it with the table lighter. Then he raises a
finger for silence, as if Eleanor had been making a noise, which she had not.
‘Listen!' he says. ‘They're arguing in high tone. Eleanor, you're right!'

Eleanor takes from her bag a long steel nail-file, gets
up, goes to a corner of the carpet, raises it, kneels, then with the file
dislodges a loose piece of parquet.

‘Softly and swiftly, my love.'

She looks up. ‘Don't be so smart. This isn't the time to
lark about.' She bends to dislodge another, and moving backward a little, knee
by knee, leans forward on her elbows and places her ear to the planks of dusty
common wood beneath the parquet.

‘Eleanor, it isn't worthy of you,' he says. ‘You look
like a parlour maid. A minute ago you didn't.'

She listens hard, looking upward through space to the
high ceiling as if in a trance. Every little while a wave of indistinct voices
from below reaches the drawing-room, one shrill, another shrill, then all
together, excited. From a floor above, somebody bangs and the sound is repeated,
with voices and a scuffle. Eleanor raises her head and says, exasperated, ‘With
him in the attic barking again and banging, and you carrying on, it's impossible
to hear properly what's being said below. Why didn't Sister Barton give him his
injection?'

‘I don't know,' he says, leaning back with his cigarette.
‘I'm sure I advised her to. This parquet flooring once belonged to a foreign
king. He had to flee his throne. He took the parquet of his palace with him,
also the door-knobs. Royalty always do, when they have to leave. They take
everything, like stage-companies who need their props. With royalty, of course,
it all is largely a matter of stage production. And lighting. Royalty are very
careful about their setting and their lighting. As is the Pope. The Baron
resembled royalty and the Pope in that respect at least. Parquet flooring and
door-handles. The Baron bought them all in a lot with the house when the old
king passed away. They definitely came from the royal palace.'

‘All I heard from down there,' says Eleanor, putting the
oblongs of palace parquet back in place and rising, while she folds back the
carpet over them, ‘was something like “You said . . .” — “No you did not. I said
. . .” — “No, you did say . . .” — “When in hell did I say . . .” That means
they're going over it all, Lister. It could take all night.'

‘Heloise said it could be around six in the morning,'
Lister remarks as Eleanor stands flicking her skirt against the strange event
that it has gathered fluff or dust. ‘Not,' he says, ‘that I normally take any
interest in Heloise's words. But she's in an interesting condition. They get
good at guessing when they're in that state.'

Eleanor is back in her chair again. Down at the back door
there is a noise loud enough to reach this quiet room. A banging. A demand. At
the same time, at the front door the bell shrills.

‘I hope someone answers that door before the Baroness
gets it in her head to go and answer it herself,' says Eleanor. ‘Any break in
the meeting might distract them from the quarrel and side-track the climax,
wouldn't you think?'

‘The Baron said not to disturb,' says Lister, ‘as if to
say, nobody leaves the room till we've had a clarification, let the tension
mount as it may. And that's final. She'll never leave the library.'

‘Well, they must be getting hungry. They've had nothing
to eat.'

‘Let them eat cake,' says Lister, and he adds,

‘Think, in this battered
Caravanserai

Whose doorways are alternate Night
and Day,

How Sultan after Sultan with his
Pomp

Abode his Hour or two, and went his
way.'

Eleanor says, ‘It's true they've had some important
visitors.'

‘The adjective “battered,”' Lister says, looking round
the quiet expanse of drawing-room, ‘I apply in the elastic sense. Also
“caravanserai” I use loosely. The house is more like a Swiss hotel, which you
may be sure it will become. But endless caravans, so to speak, have most
certainly come and gone here, they have come, they have stopped over, they have
gone. I'm fairly to the point. It will make a fine hotel. Put different
furniture into it, and you have a hotel.'

‘Lister,' she says, ‘you're always so wonderful. There
could never be anyone else in my life.'

He says, rising to approach her, ‘Aunt to me though you
are, would you marry me outside the Book of Common Prayer?'

She says, ‘I have my scruples and I'm proud of them.'

He says, ‘In France an aunt may marry a nephew.'

‘No, Lister, I stand by the Table of Kindred and
Affinity. I don't want to get heated at this moment, on this night, Lister.
You're starting me off. The press and the police are coming, and there are only
sixty-four shopping days to Christmas.'

‘I was only suggesting,' he says. ‘I'm only giving you a
little thought for when all this is over.'

‘It's going too far. You have to keep your unreasonable
demands within bounds. I'm old-fashioned beyond my years. One thought at a time
is what I like.'

‘Let's go down,' says Lister, ‘and see what the servants
are up to.'

As they come down the staircase voices rebound from the
library. Lister and Eleanor continue silently and, turning into the servants'
hall, Lister stops and looks at the library door. ‘What were they doing anyway,
amongst us, on the crust of this tender earth?' he says. ‘What were they doing
here?'

The other servants fall silent. ‘What are they doing here,
anyway in this world?'

Heloise, pink and white of skin, fresh from her little
sleep, says, ‘Doing their own thing.'

‘They haven't finished it yet,' says Clovis. ‘I'm getting
anxious. Listen to their voices.'

‘There must have been some good in them,' Eleanor says.
‘They couldn't have been all bad.'

‘Oh, I agree. They did wrong well. And they were good for
a purpose so long as they lasted,' Lister says. ‘As paper cups are suitable for
occasions, you use them and throw them away. Who brought that fur coat in here?'
He points to a white mink coat draped over a chair.

‘It looks a dream on me,' Heloise says. ‘It doesn't meet
at the front, but afterwards it will.'

‘You'd better put it back. Victor Passerat's been seen in
it,' Lister says. ‘The police will inquire.'

Heloise takes away the coat and says, as she goes, ‘I'll
get it in the end. Somehow I feel I'll get it in the end.'

‘She might well be right,' Lister says. ‘Her foresight
runs high at this moment. Who were those people banging at the back door and
ringing at the front?'

‘The girls in the car, demanding what's happened to their
friend, Passerat,' Hadrian says. ‘I told them that he was with the Baron and
Baroness and they were not to be disturbed. They said they had an appointment.
One of them's a masseuse that I haven't seen before.'

‘And the other?' says Lister.

‘The other didn't say. I didn't ask.'

‘You did right,' Lister says. ‘They don't come into the
story.'

Outside are the sounds of the lake-water lapping on the
jetty and of the mountain-wind in the grandiose trees. The couple in the car are
separated, one in the front, one in the back seat, each lolling under a rug.
They seem to be sleeping but every now and then one of them moves, one of them
speaks, and again their heads bend and the blankets move over their crouched
uneasy shoulders. The lights from the house and from the distant drive touch on
their movements.

They both start upright as another car, dark and large,
pulls up. A lithe, leather-coated young man sprints out and approaches the
couple. They are scrambling out of their car now.

‘We can't get in the house,' says the one from the front
seat. ‘They won't open the door, even. We've been here over three hours, waiting
for our friend.'

‘What friend? What do you want?' says the lithe young
man, impatiently jangling a bunch of keys. ‘I'm the secretary, Mr Samuel. Tell
me what you want.'

The other friend of Victor Passerat replies, ‘Victor
Passerat. We're waiting for him. It's serious. He had an appointment with the
Baroness and with the Baron, and — '

‘Just a minute,' says Mr Samuel, looking closely at the
second friend, ‘just a minute. You sound like a man.'

‘I am a man.'

‘All right. I thought you were a girl.'

‘That's only my clothes. My friend here's a woman. I'm
Alex — she's a masseuse.'

‘My name's Anne,' states the masseuse, stockily regarding
Mr Samuel's bunch of keys. ‘Do you have the keys to the house?'

‘I certainly do,' says Mr Samuel.

‘Well, we want to know what's going on,' says the
woman.

‘We're worried, quite frankly,' says her young
friend.

Mr Samuel places a gentle hand on the shoulders of each.
‘Don't you think,' he says, ‘that it would be more advisable for you to go away
and let nature take its course? Go away, quietly and without fuss; just go away
and play the piano, or something. Take a soothing nightcap, both of you, and
forget about Passerat.'

From an upper room comes a sound like a human bark
followed by an owl-screech.

Anne the masseuse adds a further cry to the night. ‘Open
that door,' she screams and running to the back door beats her heavy shoulder
against it, banging with her fists as well.

Mr Samuel winds his way to her with pleasant-mannered
authority. ‘That was only the invalid,' he says. ‘The nurse has probably bitten
his finger again. You would do the same, I'm sure, if one of your patients
attempted to place his hand over your mouth for some reason.'

Anne's friend, Alex, calls out, ‘Come on back in the car,
Anne. It might be dangerous.'

Mr Samuel is touching her elbow, urging her back to their
small car. ‘There's nothing in it for you,' he is saying. ‘Go home and forget
it.'

The masseuse is large but she appears to have very little
moral resistance. She starts to cry, with huge baby-sobs, while her companion,
Alex, his square bony face framed in a silk head-scarf and his eyes pleadingly
laden with make-up under finely shaped eyebrows, puts out a bony hand to touch
her face. ‘Come back in the car, Anne,' he says, giving Mr Samuel a look of hurt
umbrage.

Anne turns on Mr Samuel. ‘Who made you the secretary?'
she says. ‘Victor Passerat has been secretary since June.'

‘Please,' says Mr Samuel. ‘I didn't say he wasn't
secretary. I only say I'm the secretary in residence. There are I don't know how
many secretaries. Victor is only one of the many and it's only just unfortunate
that this appointment between him and the Baron Klopstocks should keep you
hanging around outside the house on a cold night. Just go home. Put on a
record.'