Ancient Images Part 9

"No, I'm sure that's not the case. He wasn't just overexcited. Something upset him rather badly, and we haven't been able to persuade him to say what. To be frank with you, he won't open his mouth."

"I'm sorry," Sandy said, and stood up. "I won't keep you any longer. I hope he gets better soon."

"I was thinking you might be able to help."

"If I can," Sandy asked, feeling as if she should first have asked how.

"He never talked much about his career, and none of us knew enough about it to get him talking. You may be able to remind him of something that will start him off."

"I only really know about the film I'm researching, and I believe he injured himself making that one. Would it be wise to remind him of that just now?"

"It doesn't have to be a pleasant memory," the nurse said as if Sandy were questioning her professional judgment, "so long as it brings him back to us." She clapped her hands at the old man in the television lounge, who was clutching his stick with one hand and pressing the beret to his scalp with the other. "Look, we've a visitor. What must she think of you? Behave yourself, now, or there'll be no outing for you tomorrow," she called, and marched upstairs.

Sandy hesitated long enough to make it clear that she was choosing to follow. The nurse padded briskly to the end ------------------------------------135 of a corridor on the middle floor, where a window overlooked the play area. "We think Mr. Tomlinson may have seen someone climbing on the children's frame. One of the staff thought she saw someone running away. You'd wonder what they've got between their ears, someone who won't even leave our old folk in peace." She pushed open the last door in the corridor and motioned Sandy forward. "Here's someone to see you, Mr. Tomlinson," she p.r.o.nounced in a slow clear hearty voice.

Sunlight was streaming into the room beyond the door, through pink curtains drawn back toward wallpaper printed with baskets of flowers. In the midst of the brightness, which all the white bedroom furniture appeared to be directing at him, an old man lay in bed, smiling at the sky. The flowered quilt was pulled up to his plump mottled chin. His hands lay slack on the quilt, and between them were several childish paintings of the sun above yellow fields. "Were his grandchildren here recently?" Sandy whispered.

The nurse looked puzzled for a moment. "Oh, you mean the pictures? He painted those."

Whatever made him happy, Sandy thought--but it didn't seem as if she had much chance of communicating with him. She was disconcerted to see that though he had performed stunts for both Karloff and Lugosi in the film, he didn't resemble either of them. Still, his face had puffed up with age, and the weight of it had dragged it and his vague smile slightly askew.

The nurse strode over to the bed as if she meant to heave him out of it. "Now then, Mr. Tomlinson, aren't we going to say hallo to our visitor? We'll have her thinking we've forgotten our manners. She wants to talk about one of the films we made."

Even her casting herself in the film didn't startle him into awareness. His hands moved on the quilt, but only as they might while he was asleep. His gaze seemed empty as ------------------------------------136 the sky. The nurse gestured Sandy to step closer. "Look, here she is," the nurse wheedled, and directed Sandy to stand where he was gazing.

As she moved into his gaze Sandy felt uncomfortable, tongue-tied, out of place. She felt compelled to speak, to counteract the absence in his eyes, the meaningless brightness of the room. "I'm Sandy Allan, Mr. Tomlinson. I'm a friend of Graham Nolan's."

"You remember Mr. Nolan. Mr. Nolan," the nurse repeated as if he were deaf. "The nice gentleman who's seen all your films."

The names, his own included, seemed to fall unrecognized past him. "You remember," the nurse said almost accusingly. "He was interested in the film Miss Allan wants to talk to you about, the one where you hurt your back."

Though he appeared not to react, Sandy felt resentful that he should be reminded of his accident while he was gazing at her. She turned deliberately and followed his gaze. "It's a lovely view," she said, though the climbing frame out there made her unexpectedly nervous--she thought that if an adult stood on the top rung, their face would be level with Leslie Tomlinson's window. She had just realized that when a voice, composed as much of indrawn breaths as exhalations, bayed behind her. "Made me fall," it said.

Sandy swung round. The stuntman was still gazing as if there were nothing between him and the sky, but his mouth had fallen open, its corners sagging. "Who made you fall, Mr. Tomlinson?" the nurse demanded. "When did they?"

Sandy's impatience with the nurse overcame her determination not to trouble him. "While you were making the film, do you mean?" she said. "While you were standing in for Boris Karloff?"

To her surprise and rather to her dismay, the name made his eyes gleam and then roll in their sockets. He glanced around him at the flowered walls and the flowered quilt, as if he were searching for somewhere he could bear to ------------------------------------137 rest his gaze, then he looked beseechingly at her. "It looked through the window," he said, never closing his mouth.

Was he someone else who'd been distracted by intruders on the set of the film, or at least by the director's paranoia? "I was Mr. Karloff," he said loosely. "I fell off the tower."

She had to go on, even if it disturbed him. "What did you see at the window?"

His gaze began to rove again, so desperately she wished she hadn't asked. He stared at the walls and the quilt, and his hands began to pluck at the latter as if he wanted to tear the images of flowers off the cover. He stared past her, and she glanced nervously out of the window. The only figure in sight would be out of his, an old woman on a lawn chair, reading a book printed so large that Sandy could read it at that distance if she strained her eyes. When she turned to the stuntman, his gaze had quietened and was back in the sky. "The dogs," he mumbled like a last trace of an answer.

"What about dogs, Mr. Tomlinson?"

"Mr. Lugosi. He was worried about the dogs."

"Oh, his pets," Sandy remembered. "He couldn't bring them to England because of the quarantine regulations."

For the first and only time, Tomlinson looked directly at her. His face quivered with strain, whether to call a memory to mind or to fend it off she couldn't tell. The quivering spread to his lips, which fell open. By the time he finished speaking, his gaze had drifted back to the sky, and neither Sandy nor the nurse was able to provoke any further response. "Not his dogs," he said windily. "The dogs he saw and I did. The dogs with a man's face, and things growing in their eyes." ------------------------------------138 Only her sense of the absurd let Sandy approach the reception desk at the hotel. She'd already canceled one booking today, and now she was going to cancel another. She told the receptionist that unexpectedly she had to visit her parents. It wasn't quite a lie, more a way of making herself seem less unreliable. She'd meant to visit them soon anyway, she told herself. They lived less than an hour away from her route to the Lakes. She wanted to make her peace with them if she could, but wouldn't she also welcome the chance to be safe with her family while she tried to think over the last few weeks? Once she admitted that to herself, she was so uncertain of her motives that she didn't call her parents before she set out from Birmingham.

She drove out of a bunch of lorries on the motorway and sped north for an hour. As soon as she grew used to the speed, a song began to run through her head: "D'ye ken John Peel in his coat so gray?" She'd left Tomlinson singing that line over and over almost tunelessly as he smiled at the sky and feebly tweaked the quilt. The song was part of the score of the film, but knowing that didn't help her dislodge it from her brain. It had been too bloodthirsty for her taste when she was a child, and now the tune dredged up lines which she was perhaps remembering inaccurately but which still made her uncomfortable: 8... from the chase to a view, from a view to a death in the morning ..." 8... and the cry of his hounds would awaken the dead ..." and one she had never understood: "D'ye ken that b.i.t.c.h whose tongue is ------------------------------------139 death?" Sounds like another case of blaming the female, she thought, but the thought didn't help much. When she reached the division of the motorways, she followed the route to Liverpool.

She cruised through the town for a few minutes. Many of the buildings she remembered from her childhood had been ousted by anonymous shopping malls, and she felt so disoriented that she headed for the tunnel at once, though driving under the river made her claustrophobic. Midway she glimpsed a figure emerging from the subterranean wall onto the walkway alongside the road. He must have been a workman, and of course he wasn't chasing her; he must have gone down on all fours to examine something. She was glad to be back on the motorway beyond the toll booths and racing, however briefly, before she turned off toward the sea.

Beyond Hoylake the houses and their grounds grew larger, more aloof. At West Kirby the peninsula rose to show a panorama of the Irish Sea beyond an obelisk. A tanker gleamed on the horizon and eased itself down over the edge of the world. Sandy took the road opposite the obelisk, toward the farms and the common. Her parents lived just out of sight of the sea. She parked outside the small detached white house, and was opening her door when her mother ran to her along the garden path.

She hugged Sandy and kissed her and called past her, almost deafening her: "See, I told you it was Sandra's car. Didn't I tell you this morning I could feel we were going to have a visitor?" She touched Sandy's ear and grimaced apologetically, the wrinkles around her large brown eyes and at the corners of her wide dry lips multiplying, before another smile fluttered across her broad face. "I knew it was going to be you," she whispered, "but there's no use trying to persuade your father."

He came to the front door and peered over his reading gla.s.ses, and ducked his head to his hand as always to remove ------------------------------------140 the gla.s.ses. Because Sandy remembered him as reading throughout her childhood, to himself or to her, his topheavy face with its pale blue eyes blinking at the low sun looked unprotected; his small ears seemed to have nothing to do now that the heavy earpieces weren't hooked over them. He screwed up his eyes and limped forward, and gave her a hug that smelled of tweed and pipe tobacco and a hint of rosin. "This is a treat. We were hoping to hear from you. You'll be staying, won't you? As long as you like."

"I thought overnight, if it isn't too much trouble," Sandy told her mother.

"How could you ever be too much trouble? You know your room is only the guest room when you aren't here. Where will you be off tomorrow? 8 "Up to the Lakes."

"The good old Lakes. Your father and I stayed there once for a dirty weekend," Sandy's mother cried, and glanced about in case the neighbors had heard.

"We hadn't realized you were due for a holiday," Sandy's father said, "or is this work?"

"They've given me time off to recover."

"We discovered just the other week that two of your father's quartet were gay," her mother said before the silence could grow awkward. "They told us halfway through a Mozart recital. We were flattered they felt they could tell us."

Her father gave Sandy another squeeze and stepped back. "Carry your bags, miss."

"You settle yourself in, Sandra, and then we'll have a drink and a chat before we go out for dinner."

Her father dropped her cases at the foot of the bed and waited until Sandy said, "I'll be down in a few minutes." She kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the counterpane she and her mother had made together one Christmas. The room still felt like hers, with the furniture and floral wallpaper and curtains that she'd chosen as a teenager, and being ------------------------------------141 in it still felt like taking a breather. Today her parents were more emotionally overwhelming than ever, though perhaps by displaying their broadmindedness they were trying to convey obliquely that they were prepared to forget last week's disagreement. She seemed hardly to have lain on the bed when her father called, "What drink will you have?" She sighed and shouted her preference, and soon she went downstairs.

Her mother was waiting to show her the work she was doing in the botanical gardens at Ness, sketches of rare plants in all their seasons. Sandy sat on a Queen Anne chair in the front room, which was moderately full of elegantly carved furniture whose lines seemed to be developed by the silvery Oriental patterns of the wallpaper, and sipped her gin while she admired the sketchbook. "That one was a little swine," her mother said as Sandy reached the last drawing. "I just hope your London shops won't think the book is too provincial when it's done at last."

"I'll make sure every one of them stocks it. I'm looking forward to being able to say it's by my mother."

"Yes," her mother said, so tentatively that Sandy wondered what she wasn't saying.

"Here's to it," her father said, elevating his Martini.

The three of them clinked gla.s.ses. "And to the Liverpool Philharmonic," Sandy said.

"Long may they let me saw," her father said. "Which reminds me, I must buy some rosin."

"Colophony prevents cacophony," Sandy said for him.

"How old were you when you learned that? Too young to stay up for a concert, I remember. Lord, how many things we bury in our memories to be revived to brighten our declining years."

"If you two are declining, the rest of the country may as well bury itself."

"I suppose there's some life in us yet, right enough. Here's to yours." ------------------------------------142 "Amen," her mother cried, and paused. "Someone in your line of business was asking to be remembered to you, Sandra."

"Who was that?"

"An old boyfriend of yours. Can't you guess? Why, Ian whatever his name was, who escorted you to one of your father's concerts. I should have thought you would know he's in television now."

"Quite a few people are, you know. He wasn't really what I'd call a boyfriend. I never realized someone wearing so much after-shave could be so unshaven. I bore the scars for weeks."

"He seemed quite polite and musical to me. Anyway, he's grown a beard now, and he's working for the BBC. He'll be moving back to Liverpool now that they've opened their dockland studio."

"Good luck to him."

"I wish you were staying long enough for us to show you round dockland. It's a real little village now, you know. Lovely shops and restaurants, and independent television have a studio there too."

"We'll go next time, but I hope you won't be disappointed if it doesn't tempt me back from London."

"If you've made your mind up in advance there's no point in showing you at all."

She was angry with herself for being scrutable rather than with Sandy, and so her tone was only faintly injured when she asked Sandy her news. The conversation had become equable by the time the family went out for dinner. They drove along the peninsula to Parkgate and ate at Mr. Chau's, where colored lights swam in a fountain in the middle of the restaurant and vegetables were shaped like dragons. Halfway through the main courses Sandy's father said "How are Tracy and Hepburn?"

Her mother chewed furiously, and said "Bogart and Bacall" as soon as she could. ------------------------------------143 "They're feeding the weeds, I'm afraid. They were run over last week."

Her mother reached for her hand. "No wonder you don't know what to do with yourself with all this death around you."

"I do, honestly. Don't fret."

"Well, perhaps you do. I can understand your wanting to go up somewhere by yourself. You can see all the way to Wales if you go up on the common, you know, if it's only solitude you're going to the Lakes for."

"I want to do a bit of research as well."

"For what?"

Lying wouldn't be fair to herself or to them. "About the film Graham Nolan was going to revive."

"You do what you think is right," her mother said, so heavily that all her remarks during the rest of the meal felt like the same veiled accusation. As soon as Sandy was home she escaped upstairs, pleading a headache, and lay on her bed, hearing her father's placatory murmur in the living room. It seemed that coming home wouldn't let her ponder after all, but surely the truth was that she didn't need to: Tommy Hoddle's nerves had got the better of him, and Leslie Tomlinson was senile; both encounters had disturbed her, but what was the point of looking for connections where none could exist? What she needed before she continued her search was a good night's rest. She awoke once, remembering her mother's suggestion that she was surrounded by death. She blinked at the walls and the curtains, between which a gap glimmered. She wasn't surrounded by death but by flowers, she thought drowsily, and went back to sleep.

In the morning she awoke to see her mother tiptoeing out of her room after setting down a mug of coffee on the bedside table. The sight of her mother in her dressing gown, her gray hair trailing over the collar, made Sandy long to stay at least until they had reached a better understanding. ------------------------------------144 She glanced at the clock, and saw that it was already later than she had planned to leave. She struggled out of bed and stumbled with her coffee to the bathroom, and was in the shower when her mother rapped on the door. "I'm making your breakfast," she called.

In that case, Sandy knew, she would be at least thirty minutes. Sandy was downstairs in half that time. "May I use the phone?"

"Of course," her parents said in unison, so amiably that she felt a twinge of guilt for using it to carry on her search. All the same, she should try to set up an interview for tomorrow, since the composer who had scored the film lived just across the Scottish border. She dialed and heard the ringing cease. "Neville Vine?"

Her father gave the name a wry glance that stopped short of recognition. A voice that sounded shivery with age demanded, "Who wants him?"

"My name's Sandy Allan. I'm from Metropolitan Television. I wanted to ask Mr. Vine about one of his scores."

"Television? I want nothing to do with them," he declared, more shakily than ever, "nor with anyone who has."

"You did talk to a friend of mine, I believe. Graham Nolan."

"Never heard of him."

"It might have been a year ago or more. He would have asked you about a film you wrote the music for, Tower Tower of of Fear." Fear."

"I can't help you."

Vine's voice had grown so shrill that she was afraid he was about to cut her off. "Would you be prepared to talk to someone else who was asking me for information about the film? He isn't connected with television. He's writing a book."

"No use. I don't know anything about the picture." ------------------------------------145 "But you did write the score for it, didn't you? Surely you could--was "I've told you, I don't remember!" he screamed, and replaced the receiver so clumsily that she heard its clatter for seconds before it was cut off.

Sandy's mother waited for her to meet her eyes. "No luck?"

"He denied Graham ever spoke to him."

"Didn't we tell you your friend was mistaken? Perhaps now you'll let him and his film rest." The next moment she slapped her own face and walked rapidly to Sandy. "Don't listen to my doddering," she mumbled into Sandy's shoulder, "you trust your instincts as you always have," and then she gazed moistly at her. "Just don't you dare put yourself at any risk," she said. ------------------------------------146 Less than two hours later, when a downpour met her on the motorway, Sandy remembered her mother's warning. The gray clouds nesting on the Lakeland mountains surged forward and began to lash the traffic, and the mountains above the road dissolved into cloud. The vehicles around her were reduced to drowning headlamps and the weeping wounds of taillights. Even when she dropped her speed to thirty miles an hour she didn't feel safe, but there was nowhere to pull over, no access road for miles. At least the other drivers were keeping their distance. For a while she was virtually alone except for distant struggling lights and a dark shape that seemed to dance between her and the lights, until she began to suffer an unpleasant notion that if she didn't increase her speed the blurred shape would launch itself at her rear window. Instead she slowed down even more to let the lights creep closer, reminding her of eyes, unable to blink. "Shut up," she told her imagination, and stared ahead at the wall of rain, which thinned and parted at last and let her accelerate over the flushed concrete under a bleary sun.

Charlie Miles, the set designer Roger had called on her behalf, lived on a minor road above Derwent.w.a.ter. By the time Sandy left the motorway the clouds were sailing like ghosts of mountains into the sky, unveiling slopes of granite and heather and gorse, crystalline with rain and rushing streams above roads that blazed silver. Sandy felt her senses flowering, feasting on the refreshed landscape. ------------------------------------147 She had to a.s.sume that the unsignposted road onto which she eventually turned led to the set designer's house. As her route wound higher it gave her views of the lake, a giant section cut from a darker sky to fit the elaborately curving sh.o.r.e among the mountains. Sheep swerved away from her car and up the gra.s.sy slope, and then she met a bus full of pensioners. Rather than reverse almost a mile, she backed onto the soggy verge as a wizened little man with a large balding head and hands that seemed all knuckles emerged from a cottage beside the road and leaned on his gate to watch.

While the bus struggled to maneuver past her he took out a pipe and puffed at it until it was lit to his satisfaction, then he strolled over to the bus and began to direct the proceedings. "Come on, come on, hey up, come on, hey up, hey up, come on ..." The bus groaned by at last, and the oldster trotted over to Sandy, looking ferociously helpful. "Thanks," she said hastily, "I can manage."

As soon as she restarted the car, the old man slouched along his path and slammed the cottage door. Feeling rather mean for having disappointed him, Sandy eased the vehicle onto the road. She came abreast of the cottage, and glanced at the gate, where a name was all but engulfed by moss. She had to brake and lean out of the window before she could be sure that the name was Miles.

She turned the car, inching back and forth across the road six times, and parked beside the wall of the plot in front of the cottage, a garden planted with vegetables whose shoots glowed against the wet earth. She walked along the cracked path and knocked on the faded door. He made her wait before he jerked the door open and confronted her, his knuckly fingers drumming on his hips. "I thought you didn't need any help."

"I didn't realize who you were."

"That's supposed to make a difference, is it?" ------------------------------------148 "It certainly does to me. I'm Sandy Allan. I was coming to interview you."

He stared past her, wrinkling his nose, as if he were wondering if she'd hidden an accomplice somewhere near, then he stepped back so abruptly she thought he was going to shut the door in her face. "Let's be hearing from you, then," he said, and as soon as she opened her mouth: "Give a man a chance to sit down."

The front room was small and bare. A chair stood by a folding table spread with an embroidered tablecloth, on which lay a sketchbook with a pencil threaded through its spiral binding. Two easy chairs faced the window, which overlooked the lake. Several brown oval photographs of an unsmiling couple Sandy took to be his parents stood on the rough mantelpiece. Open doors let her see into a stone- floored kitchen and a bedroom that looked fit for a monk. She only glanced toward them as she took the unoccupied chair, but Miles shook his head at her. "Trust a woman, hardly in the house before she's seeing what she would change."

"I was just missing anything to do with films."

"Then you're the only one here who is, because I want nothing to do with them."

Could Graham have known better than to interview him, or was she in the wrong house? "You used to have, didn't you?" she said.

"Long before you were born. Back when there were films to take a pride in."

"So you're proud of the work you did."

"Did you hear me say that? Is that anything like what I said? Your generation's fed on so much television and films that you've no time for words. Before we know it we'll be back where the pagans were, not wanting to write."

"I take it you weren't satisfied with the films you were involved in."

"Chuck me in the lake if I said that either." He took pity ------------------------------------149 on her then, which was just as infuriating. "I was pleased with the Boadicea picture. I once read a Yankee magazine that praised my work on that. Only those were the days when a credit for set design meant something."

"I think it still does."