Touch Not the Cat Read online

  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 a 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 pot-pourri 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 storeys 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 neck-cloth, 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.

  2

  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 Tölz 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 passer-by 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 Tölz. 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 tyre 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 note-case 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. H
e 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 mid-sentence, changed direction without a tremor. ‘All that Jon said, you mean?’

  ‘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.’

  The transcript was typed, with no attempt at making sense; just a string of words and phrases, punctuated seemingly at random.

  ‘Bryony. Tell Bryony. Tell her. Howard. James. Would have told. The paper, it’s in William’s brook. In the library. Emerson, the keys. The cat, it’s the cat on the pavement. The map. The letter. In the brook.’

  It broke off there, and started again on a fresh line:

  ‘Tell Bryony. My little Bryony be careful. Danger. This thing I can feel. Should have told you, but one must be sure. I did tell Bryony’s [word indistinguishable]. Perhaps the boy knows. Tell the boy. Trust. Depend. Do what’s right. Blessing.’

  I read it aloud slowly, then looked up at Walther. My face must have been blank. He nodded, answering the unspoken question.

  ‘I’m sorry. That really is all, exactly as we heard him. You see where he found it too much for him, and stopped for a while. He was still conscious, and worrying at it, so we let him speak. The last word, I’m not sure about that. I thought it might have been “bless him”, but the officer was sure it was “blessing”. Does it make any sense to you at all?’

  ‘No. Scraps here and there, but no. Nothing important enough to be so much on his mind then. I’d have thought – I mean, if he knew how ill he was, I’d have thought . . . you know, just messages.’

  ‘Yes, well, it may mean more later, when you have had time to study it.’

  ‘There’s this about a letter. It might all be there. Did he leave a letter?’ I knew the answer already. If there had been a letter for me. Walther would have given it to me straight away.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, ‘and there was nothing mailed from here within the last day or so. I checked. But it is possible that he took something down with him to mail from Bad Tölz yesterday. In which case it will be on its way to Madeira. No doubt they will forward it straight away to your home.’

  The last sentence came with perceptible hesitation. There is something strange, I suppose, in the idea of a letter arriving from the dead. I didn’t find it so. It was a break in the clouds of that dark day. Something of the sort must have shown in my face, because Walther added, gently: ‘It’s only a guess, Bryony. The word itself was a guess. If there is anything, it may not even be for you.’

  ‘I’ll find out once I get home.’

  I would of course have to go home to England now, and it had already been arranged that I would take my father’s ashes back to the Court, as he had wished.

  Walther nodded. ‘And after that? Do you intend to stay there?’

  ‘I’ll have to, I think, until things are settled.’

  ‘It may take a long time.’

  ‘It’s sure to. It’ll be beastly complicated, I gather, but Mr Emerson will do all the fixing. I suppose Daddy told you that the estate doesn’t go to me, but is entailed to the nearest male heir? That’s my father’s cousin, Howard Ashley, who lives in Spain.’

  Walther nodded. ‘Your lawyer said something about it when we spoke over the telephone. He had not been able to get in touch directly with Mr Howard Ashley, he said. It seems that he is ill.’

  ‘Yes. Daddy told me so last time he wrote. It’s a virus pneumonia, and I gather that Cousin Howard’s been pretty bad. I don’t suppose he’ll be able to attend to any business for a long time. Emory and James will have to see to things.’

  ‘So I imagine. It seems that this was one of the things your father had on his mind. Emory – a strange name, surely?’

  ‘I suppose it is. It’s an old Saxon name that crops up in the family from time to time. I think it’s the same as Almeric.’

  ‘Ah, then I have also heard it in Germany. They are twins, are they not, this James and Emory?’

  ‘Yes, identical twins. When they were boys, no one could tell them apart, except the family – and sometimes, when they were trying it on deliberately, not even the family. It’s not so hard now, but I still wouldn’t bet on it if they really tried to fool you. They’re twenty-seven. Emory’s the elder, half an hour’s difference, something like that.’

  ‘A big difference when it comes to inheriting an estate,’ said Walther drily.

  I said, just as drily: ‘A crumbling old house that never quite got over the flood ten years back, and a few acres of garden gone wild, and a ruined farm? Some legacy.’

  ‘As bad as that? Jon loved it.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘And your cousins?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t see why they should. They were brought up there, the same as me; Cousin Howard had a house less than a mile away. But whether they want a beautiful old millstone round their necks I’ve no idea. Beautiful old millstones take money.’

  ‘I understood they had plenty of that.’

  ‘I suppose they have.’ Whether they would want to spend it on Ashley was another matter which I didn’t pursue. I did not know a great deal about the wine shipper’s business which Howard Ashley had started some years back, except that it had always seemed to prosper. In the early days, when it was relatively small, it had been based in Bristol, and the family had lived near us in Worcestershire. Then when the twins were about thirteen, and Francis eleven, the boys’ mother died, and after that the three of them seemed more or less to live with us at the Court. Certainly they spent their school holidays w
ith us: their father was in Bristol during the week, and his housekeeping arrangements were so erratic that my mother finally intervened and took my three cousins in. There would have been ample room, in those days, for Howard as well, but, though there had never been anything approaching coolness between him and my parents, they could not have happily settled to share a house. The three boys were despatched home to their father most weekends, until, some five years after his wife’s death, Cousin Howard went off to Mexico City to negotiate a deal of some kind, and met a Spanish-Mexican girl and married her. Her family was wealthy, and also connected with the wine trade. Howard’s deal had been with the girl’s father, Miguel Pereira, who owned a share of a prosperous business in Jerez. Howard took his new wife off to Europe, and they eventually settled in Spain. Emory took over the Bristol offices, and James more or less commuted between the two.

  ‘Would your Cousin Howard want to come back to live at Ashley?’ asked Walther.

  ‘I’ve no idea. I don’t honestly know him so very well. I was only fourteen when he left, and I was away at school most of the time. I doubt if his wife would want to live there, though. She’s years younger than Cousin Howard, and she’d hardly want to settle in a remote little place like Ashley. But I suppose one of the boys might.’

  ‘The boys . . .’ Walther said it half to himself, and I realised that he was thinking of the paper I still held in my hand. But he only said: ‘I understand the two elder ones are in their father’s business. What about the youngest?’

  ‘Francis? Oh, he is, too. Rather reluctantly, I think. He doesn’t have his family’s head for business – he’s more like our side. But he’s with his father now in Jerez. I think he went into it almost absent-mindedly, while he marked time and thought out what he really wanted to do. He has to earn a living some way, and I suppose Spain is as pleasant a place as any. He’s a poet.’