Spider Light(6)
The rest of the cottage was fairly predictable. There were three bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom which had clearly been fashioned from an old box room. Clean sheets waited in an airing cupboard, and there was a modern immersion heater for hot water–she switched this on at once, and then lugged her suitcases up the stairs. After some food, and one of Dr Toy’s half bottles of wine, she would feel in tune with the world again. In fact, she might make that two half bottles of wine.
She had not brought very much with her, aside from clothes and food, except for a small CD player, along with her CDs, and a carton of books. After she had cooked a meal from tins and Dr Toy’s hospitality, she sorted through the CDs.
Once she would automatically have reached for Mozart, but tonight she needed something stronger, something that reflected her mood and knew how it felt to fall fathoms deep into the heart of black bitter agony, but something that also demonstrated how the agony could be torn out and ripped to shreds before it was exultantly discarded. Schumann’s Fourth? She did not know very much about the lives and motivations of the great composers–what she did know she had picked up from Richard–but she knew Schumann had created that symphony on emerging from a period of intense depression, and that it depicted the trapped, tortured spirit finally breaking free of dark savage unhappiness and soaring joyfully into the light.
After that flight of rhetoric it would have to be Schumann. Antonia thought she would pour a glass of Godfrey Toy’s wine, and then curl into the deep armchair by the window and listen to the symphony. The rain pattered lightly against the glass and a little gusting wind stirred the thin curtains, but inside the cottage it was warm and safe.
Warm and safe. Except for that well of clutching terror that might still lie waiting for her in that perfectly ordinary kitchen…Except for that blue hatchback that seemed to have followed her for three quarters of the journey here…
Dr Godfrey Toy looked out of his window on Quire House’s first floor, and was pleased to see lights in the windows of Charity Cottage.
It was very nice to think of someone being in the cottage for the winter; Godfrey always felt much safer when people were around him. Stupid, of course, but ever since–well, ever since what he privately called the tragedy–he had always been a touch uneasy about being in a house by himself. Just a touch. Particularly at night, and particularly in a house the size of Quire–all those empty rooms below him, all those stored-up memories.
But he loved living at Quire; he loved his flat with the high-ceilinged rooms and the big windows. This summer he had had the men in to spruce it up. He had chuckled quietly to himself over this, because it sounded exactly like a twittery maiden lady furtively recounting something slightly risqué. I’m having men in, my dear.
Anyway, they had done a good job–nothing grand, just a coat of emulsion everywhere, well, and one or two rolls of wallpaper if you were keeping tally. And, if you wanted to be really pedantic, a few licks of varnish to banisters and picture rails. But nothing so very much, and it had cost the merest of meres, despite the professor’s caustic comments about extravagance. Anyway, Godfrey considered it money well spent.
His flat had a view over Quire’s grounds. They were nothing elaborate, they were not in the Capability Brown or Gertrude Jekyll league, but Godfrey enjoyed them. The Trust kept everywhere in immaculate order, and visitors to the museum were very good about observing the ‘Do Not Leave Litter’ signs, although you still got the odd sprinkling of picnic wrappings, and occasionally there were other kinds of detritus which Godfrey preferred not to put a name to. (He could never understand people choosing somewhere so public for that kind of carrying-on.)
The letting agent had told him that a single lady had taken Charity Cottage. No, they said, in response to Godfrey’s anxious questioning, they did not know anything about her. They did not need to know anything, they added, except that she had paid two months’ rent in advance and the cheque had been cleared. She was a Miss Weston, and had given a London address. All entirely in order and Quire Trust might think itself fortunate to have a tenant for the place during November and December. And so Godfrey, who did think the Trust fortunate to have a tenant in the cottage for November and December, and who was pleased at the thought of a possible new friend, had put together what he thought of as a welcome-to-Quire box, and had felt guiltily relieved that Professor Remus was away because he would have been a bit scathing about it. An unnecessary gesture, he would have said, in the tone he always used when Godfrey gave way to an impulse. If he had seen the contents of the box he would have said, with sarcasm, ‘Good God, foie gras and smoked salmon, how very luxurious!’
So it was better that Oliver was currently away on a book-buying expedition–there had been the promise of a very nice early copy of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta in an old house where someone had lately died, and a rumour of some warmly romantic letters from Bernard Shaw to Mrs Patrick Campbell which one of the theatrical museums might like. Godfrey was hopeful that both possibilities would materialize. He would enjoy seeing the professor’s discoveries.
He was glad he had taken the little gift to the cottage. The unknown Miss Weston might find it bleak coming to a strange place on her own, and the first night in a new place was always lonely. Godfrey had said as much that afternoon to the young work-experience boy they had at Quire, and the boy had stared at him with what Godfrey felt to be quite unwarranted scorn. But that was youth for you. They had no romance in their souls. They stared at you with that curled-lip contempt, and sometimes they said things like, ‘What is your problem?’ or, ‘What part of “I won’t do that” didn’t you understand?’, which Godfrey never knew how to answer.