Touch Not The Cat (2 page)

Nothing is left now of the formal gardens, which had once been beautiful, but which I had never known as other than neglected, with the wild, tanglewood charm of a Sleeping Beauty backdrop. The lovely, crumbling old house on its moated island, and the wilderness surrounding, were all that was left of an estate which had once been half a county wide, but which by my father's time had shrunk to a strip of land along the river, the gardens themselves, the buildings of what had once been a prosperous home farm, and a churchyard. I think the church officially belonged as well, but Jonathan Ashley—my father—didn't insist on this. The church stood in its green graveyard just beside our main drive gates, and when I was a little girl I used to believe that the bells were ringing right in the tops of our lime trees. To this day the scent of lime blossom brings back to me the church bells ringing, and the sight of the rooks going up into the air like smuts blown from a bonfire.

This was all that was left of the grounds laid out by the Cavalier Ashley. He, incidentally, must have been the only Cavalier throughout England who did not melt the family silver down for Charles I. He wouldn't, of course. I suspect that the only reason his family didn't officially turn Roundhead was because of the clothes and the haircut. Anyway, they saved the Court twice over, because my father sent most of the silver to Christie's in 1950, and we lived on it, and kept the place up after a fashion until I was seven or eight years old. Then we moved into one wing of the house, and opened the rest up to the public. A few years later, after my mother died, Daddy and I moved out altogether, to live in the gardener's cottage, a pretty little place at the edge of the apple orchard, with a tiny garden fronting on the lake that drained the moat. Our wing of the Court was put in the hands of our lawyer to let if he could. We had been lucky in this, and our most recent lessee was an American businessman who, with his family, had been in residence for the past half year. We had not met the Underhills ourselves, because, eight months before the April night when my story starts, my father, who had a rheumatic heart, contracted a bad bronchitis, and after he recovered from this, his doctor urged him to go away for a spell in a drier climate. I was working in an antique shop in Ashbury at the time. We sold a bit more of the silver, shut the cottage up, and went to Bad Tolz, a little spa town in Bavaria, pleasantly situated on the River Isar. My father had often been there as a young man, visiting a friend of his, one Walther Gothard, who now had a considerable reputation as a
Kur-Doktor,
and had turned his house into a sanatorium.

Daddy went there simply to rest, and to be cared for by Herr Gothard, who, for old times' sake, took him cheaply. I stayed for a month, but he mended so rapidly in that air that it was impossible to worry any more, so, when the Madeira job was suggested, I was easily persuaded to go. Even my lover, when I asked him, said there was nothing to go home for. I only half liked this kind of reassurance, but it was true that none of my cousins was at Ashley, and the cottage in winter and the damps of early spring looked lonely and uninviting; so in the end I took the job, and went off happily enough to the sun and flowers of Funchal, with no idea in the world that I would never see my father alive again.

Bryony?

Yes. I'm awake. What is it?
But the trouble was there already, in the room. It settled over me in a formless way, like fog; no colour, neither dark nor light, no smell, no sound; just a clenching tension of pain and the fear of death. The sweat sprang hot on my skin, and the sheet scraped under my nails. I sat up.

I've got it, I think. It's Daddy.
. . .
He must have been taken ill again.

Yes. There's something wrong. I can't tell more than that, but you ought to go.

I didn't stop then to wonder how he knew. There was only room for just the one thing, the distress and urgency, soon to be transmuted into action; the telephone, the airfield, the ghastly slow journey to be faced. . . . It only crossed my mind fleetingly then to wonder if my father himself had the Ashley gift; he had never given me a hint of it, but then neither had I told him about myself. Had he been "read" by my lover, or even been in touch with him . . . ? But there was denial stamped on the dark. With the denial came over a kind of uncertainty, puzzlement with an element of extra doubt running through it, like a thread of the wrong colour through a piece of weaving.

But it didn't matter how, and through whom, it had got to him. It had reached him, and now it had reached me.

Can you read me, Bryony? You're a long way off.

Yes. I can read you. I'll
go . . .
I'll go straight away, tomorrow—today?
There was a flight at eight; they would surely take me. . . . Then urgently, projecting it with everything I had:
Love?

It was fading. Yes?

Will you be there?

Again denial printed on the dark; denial, regret, fading . . .

Oh, God,
I said soundlessly.
When?

Something else came through then, strongly through the fading death cloud, shouldering it aside; comfort and love, as old-fashioned as potpourri and as sweet and sane and haunting. It was as if the rose shadows on the ceiling were showering their scent down into the empty room. Then there was nothing left but the shadows. I was alone.

I threw the sheet off and knotted a robe round me, and ran for the telephone.

As I put a hand on it, it began to ring.

Ashley, 1835

He stood at the window, looking out into the darkness. Would she come tonight? Perhaps, if she had heard the news, she would think he could not be here, waiting for her; and indeed, for very decency, he surely ought not to have come. . . .

He scowled, chewing his lip. What, after all, was a little more scandal? And this was their last time—the last time it would be like this. Tomorrow was for the world, the angry voices, the laughter, the cold wind. Tonight was still their own.

He glanced across in the direction of the Court. The upper stories showed, above the hedges, as a featureless bulk of shadow against a windy sky. No lights. No lights showing anywhere. His eye lingered on the south wing, where the old man lay behind a darkened window.

Something like a shudder shook him. He tugged at his neckcloth, and found his hand shaking. She must come. Dear God, she had to come. He could not face the night without her. His longing, stronger even than desire, possessed him. He could almost feel the call going out, to bring her to him through the dark.

Find them out whose names are written here!

—Romeo and Juliet,
I, ii

Madeira to Madrid, Madrid to Munich, from Munich the express out to Bad Tolz in the Isar Valley; it was twenty-seven hours after the telephone call came from Walther Gothard before the taxi slid up to the sanatorium doors and Herr Gothard himself came down the steps to meet me.

Twenty-seven hours is a long time for a man to hold on to life when he is rising sixty with a dicky heart and has been knocked clean off the road by a passing car and left there till the next passerby should find him. Which had not happened for about four hours.

Jon Ashley had not held on for twenty-seven hours. He was dead when I got to Bad Tolz. He had come round long enough to speak to Walther, then he had slept; and sleeping, died.

I knew, of course. It had happened while I was on the plane between Funchal and Madrid. And then it was over, and I blotted it out and watched the clouds without seeing them, and waited in a curious kind of limbo of relaxation while the Caravelle took me nearer and uselessly nearer his dead body; and waited, too, for my lover to come with what comfort he could offer. But he did not come.

Walther and his wife were divinely kind. They had done everything that had to be done. They had arranged for the cremation, and had telephoned the news to the family lawyers in Worcester. Mr.

Emerson, the partner who dealt with the Ashley affairs, would by now have been in touch with Cousin Howard, the father of the twins and of Francis. And of course Walther and Elsa Gothard had been closeted, hour after hour, with the police.

The police were still asking questions, and with most of the questions as yet unanswered. The accident had taken place on the road up from the town, just at dusk. This was the way my taxi had brought me. The Wackersberger Strasse climbs out of the newish quarter of the town beyond the river bridge. Once past the last of the houses the road reverts abruptly to its country status and winds, narrow and in places fairly steep, through the climbing woods. My father, who had been so much better (said Walther) that he had been talking of going home for the summer, had gone down to the town to buy some things he needed, including a bottle of Walther's favourite brandy as a gift, and had apparently started to walk back. No doubt he would have taken the bus when it caught him up. But when the bus climbed that way there was no sign of him. A car, going fast, and clinging to the edge of a bend, had apparently struck him a hard, glancing blow which flung him clear off the road and down the slope into the edge of the wood. He hit his head on a tree trunk, and was knocked unconscious, hidden from the road by the bushes into which he had been flung. The car drove off, leaving him lying there, barely visible in the dusk, until some four hours later when a cyclist, pushing his machine uphill at the edge of the road, ran a tire over a jag of the broken brandy bottle. When he wheeled the crippled cycle to lean it against a tree trunk, he saw my father lying among the bushes. The man took him at first for a drunkard; the brandy still reeked in his clothes. But drunk or no, the wound on his head was black and crusty with blood, so the cyclist wobbled off down the road on his front rim until another car overtook him, and he stopped it.

It was Walther Gothard's. He, growing anxious after two buses had come and gone with no sign of his friend, had telephoned various places where he thought the latter might be, intending to drive down himself and bring him home. Finally, failing to locate him, he set out to look for him. He took the unconscious man straight up to the sanatorium, and telephoned the police, who, having examined the scene of the accident, confirmed the doctor's guess at what must have happened. But four hours' start is four hours' start, and the guilty driver had not been traced.

Herr Gothard told me about it, sitting in his big consulting room with the picture window framing the prospect of rolling pastures, smooth as brushed velvet, and looking as if they had been shaved out of the thick forests that hung like thatch eaves above them. A bowl of blue hyacinths on the desk filled the room with scent. Beside it lay the small pile of objects which had come from Daddy's pockets: keys, a notecase I had given him with the initials
J
.
A.
stamped in gilt; a silver ballpoint pen with the same initials; a penknife, nail clippers, a handkerchief newly laundered and folded; the letter I had written to him a week ago. I looked away from this at Herr Gothard, who sat quietly, watching me, the gold-rimmed bifocals winking on his broad pale face. No longer Daddy's friend, with a shoulder I could cry on if I needed it; now he was just a doctor, who had heard and seen it all before, and the room itself had held so much of pain and emotion and courage that it was coloured by none of them. I sat calmly, while he told me what had happened.

"He came round towards morning and talked a little, a very little. Not about the accident, though; we questioned him as much as we dared, but he seemed to have forgotten about it. He had other things on his mind."

"Yes?"

"You, mainly. I couldn't get it clear, I'm afraid. He said,
'Bryony, tell Bryony,'
once or twice, then seemed not to be able to put it into words, whatever it was. I thought at first he was anxious in case you had not been told about the accident, so I reassured him, and said I had talked to you on the telephone, and that you were on your way. But he still worried at it. We got a few snatches, no more, none of which made much sense, then in the end he got something more out. It was

'Bryony—my little Bryony—in danger.'
I asked what danger, and he could not answer me. He died at about ten o'clock."

I nodded. Between Funchal and Madrid; I knew the exact moment. Walther talked on, professionally smooth and calm; I think he was telling me about Daddy's stay in Wackersberg, and what they had done and talked of together. I have no recollection of anything he said, but to this day I can remember every petal on the blue hyacinths in the bowl on the desk between us.

"And that was all?"

"All?" Herr Gothard, interrupted in midsentence, changed direction without a tremor.

"All that Jon said, you

"Yes. I'm sorry. I wasn't really taking in—"

"Please." He showed a hand, pale and smooth with scrubbing. "I did not imagine you were. You ask me what else Jon said at the end. I have it here."

He slid the hand into a drawer of the desk, and brought out a paper.

I don't know why I was so surprised. I just stared, without moving to take the paper. "You wrote it down?"

"The police left a man to sit by his bed," explained Walther gently, "in case he managed to say anything about the accident which might help them to trace the culprit. It always happens, you know."

"Yes, of course. I knew that. One never quite thinks of oneself in those contexts, I suppose."

"The officer spoke very good English, and he took down everything Jon said, whether it seemed to him to make sense or not. Do you read shorthand?"

"Yes."

"It's all here, every word that was intelligible. I was with Jon myself most of the time. There was another emergency that morning, so I had to leave him for a while, but as soon as he showed signs of coming round they sent for me, and I stayed with him after that until he died. This is all that he said. I am sorry it does not make more sense, but perhaps it does, for you."

He handed me the paper. The pothooks straggled a little wildly across the page, as if written too hurriedly, on a pad balanced on someone's knee. Walther slid another sheet of paper across the desk towards me. "I made a transcript of it, just in case. You can compare them later, if you like."