Hammond Innes: Levkas man

The contents of the top three shelves were exactly as I had last seen them, the skull in the same place, in the centre of the third shelf, a lower jaw and a few pieces of bone, the rest built up of a smooth, ivory-like composition. The bottom shelf was empty except for some small fragments of bone in the right-hand corner; there were some teeth amongst them that looked as though they were human teeth. It was on this shelf that he had kept the books he valued most-a first-edition Darwin and several old-fashioned tomes, some in French, some in German. Breuil-that name came back to me-the Abbe Breuil, and Chardin. They were gone now, all except the worn leather-covered Bible. A slip of paper caught my eye and I opened the glass front and took it out. It was gummed paper and on it he had written: skull-cap fragments and 2 teeth, Kyzyl Kum No. 5.

Seeing his writing again after all these years, I stood there for a moment, the faded slip in my hand, remembering in detail the night I had surprised him sitting at the bureau with a pen in his hand and a leather-covered book in front of him. I had come down in my pyjamas, startled out of my sleep by a cry like that of a wounded animal. He was just sitting there, his head bowed in his hand and the book open in front of him.

Something, the draught from the open door perhaps, had made him turn. I had never forgotten the strange look in his eyes, the shock my presence seemed to give him. For a moment he had been unable to speak, his whole body shaking as though the effort of control was almost beyond him.

And then, suddenly, he was himself again and he had quietly ordered me back to bed. But that was the last time I ever dared enter his study at night, and even in the daytime I always knocked first. And though it had happened at least fifteen years ago, the terror of that moment when he had turned and discovered me in the doorway, the blank look in his eyes, was so vivid that my hands were trembling again as I found the key that unlocked the flap below the glass-cased shelves.

But there was nothing in the satinwood drawers, only sheaves of paper covered with notes in his minute, spidery writing, and when I slid back the writing top to reveal the secret cavity below, there was nothing there but letters; the leather-covered book he had always kept there-his Journal, a diary, or whatever it was-had gone. The letters were in two bundles, each tied with string, the larger from somebody in Cambridge who signed himself Adrian. But it was the other bundle that caught and held my attention, for the writing was the same as in the letter I had found announcing my birth. They were signed Ruth, which was my mother's name, and they were love letters, each beginning My Darling or Darling Peter.

I sat there for a long time, staring at that bundle of letters — not reading them through, not wishing to pry, but disturbed, almost appalled, by the thought that they had once loved each other. I had never understood why, following the death of my parents, I had been sent half across the world to live with a man whose whole life was devoted to dusty digs and anthropology. He had never told me and I had never dared to ask. Now at last I knew, and the knowledge shocked me in a way I did not quite understand-as though a door, previously barred to me, had suddenly swung partly open.

I could only just remember her-tall and serious, full of warmth and a dark-eyed vitality, at moments very emotional. My father had been the complete opposite, a broad, sunburned man with a moustache and a voice that carried through the bush like the roar of a lion. It was the country I remembered mostly, and those last moments when the Mau-Mau had come to the farm.

I put the letters back unread, slid the writing top over the cavity and unlocked the cupboard under the flap. But all I found there was an album of snapshots, myself mostly at various ages between ten and nineteen, though the first few pages were taken up with faded pictures of an old stone farmhouse, of himself as a boy with his parents-Edwardian figures against a background of overhanging cliffs and a winding river. A cutting from a French newspaper had been pasted in and a letter signed "H. Breuil." His boyhood I remembered had been spent in France. Also in the cupboard were some models of boats I had made and a chess set; he had tried to teach me chess once. At the back were old copies of the American Journal of Anthropology, but nothing of value, and I got to my feet, looking round for something I could raise some money on.

The two Greek statues on the mantelpiece were no longer there and the clock was too heavy. The wind outside had dropped and in the stillness I could hear it ticking. It was an eight-day clock and he had always wound it first thing Sunday morning. The sound of it, so faint, yet so persistent, held me rooted to the spot for a moment. Somebody had been in this room, somebody who knew his routine.

The key was where he had always kept it, in the old clay tobacco jar to the right of the mantelpiece, and when I fitted it into one of the holes in the clock's white face, it only turned twice before the spring was fully wound. Whoever it was had been in the study within the last two days. I wiped my fingers across the clock's marble top, down the whole length of the mantelpiece, but no dust showed. The bureau was the same, the desk, too. I couldn't understand it. He had never had a housekeeper or even a woman in to clean. He had always looked after the place himself, and we had made our own beds, got our own meals-a bachelor existence.

In the tiny dining room opposite the study, everything was clean. But the bits of silver, the salvers and the rather ornate candlesticks, were gone, put away perhaps for safekeeping. I went upstairs. In the spare room I found blankets and an eiderdown neatly stacked at the foot of the bed, and in the drawer of the dressing table there were hairpins and a dusting of powder. The room had a faintly alien smell, quite different from the test of the house.

I crossed the landing to my own room. The bed was completely stripped and nothing had been altered since my abrupt departure. I stood for a moment in the open door, a world of memories flooding back. My first chart, stolen from a vessel in the docks, had been studied at that table by the window. The window was closed now, but on summer nights … it looked out on to the backs of houses, each window, as the lights went up, revealing glimpses of other boxed-in worlds, and of that girl; my eyes switched involuntarily to the second-floor window of the old grey house opposite, where she had undressed so slowly through the hot nights of that last summer.

I closed the door quietly, shutting out the tawdry memories of adolescence, and was standing at the head of the stairs, considering what to do next, when I heard the click of the front door closing, and then the creak of the stairboards, the sound of somebody climbing, slowly, hesitantly.

I thought at first it was the old man and my body froze. But then a woman's voice called out, "Who is it? Who's there?"

I shrank back into the shadows and the house was suddenly still.

"Is anybody there?" Her voice sounded scared. I thought I could hear her breathing. The footsteps started to climb again.

There was no point in staying where I was. The light was on in the study and she would see my suitcase. I went down the stairs and I could feel her waiting, breathless, on the landing. We met outside the study door and she said, "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Her voice was pitched high, barely controlled. I could almost smell her fear as she stood very still, peering up at me in the half-light that filtered through from the fanlight at the bottom of the stairs. Then she gave a little gasp. "You're Paul Van der Voort, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Her face was no more than a pale oval, her head, outlined in silhouette, was bare.