Lorna Gray - The Antique Dealer’s Daughter

‘Emily, I presume,’ Captain Richard Langton said from his position about seven or so steps beneath me, and placed himself firmly in the land of the living. ‘Why are you up here?’

Like his portrait on the wall, the Colonel’s older son was unsmiling. Below I heard a mutter from a more aged person who was passing from the stairwell into the passage and onwards towards the kitchen. Outside, beyond the newly opened front door, a man was dragging cases out of the back of a shabby cab and stacking them on the drive.

The Captain’s steady climb reached me and I stepped aside to allow him to retain his grip on the banister. I remembered the sense of pity that had met my examination of his portrait and was disorientated by it. It stole my capacity to speak sensibly. I said in a shaken rush, ‘You’re limping. For a moment I thought—’

Later I would be forever grateful that intelligence briefly put in an appearance and checked the end of that sentence. I had been about to say that for a moment I’d thought he was his brother.

Instead, I found that he was surveying me with the sort of calm scrutiny that scorched. I imagine he saw a silly young woman in a summer frock with a pale face and standing on the stairs in a house where she had no right to be. I saw that he was a good few years older than the young man in his photograph. He didn’t tower over a person as his brother must have done, but was tall enough to have seemed nicely built had it not been for the debilitating distraction of the cane, and I had the slightly embarrassing thought that the voice on the telephone had been an indication of the presence of the real man after all. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. His ordinary single-breasted suit over shirt and tie would have done for any reasonably wealthy man of the day.

So much I grasped as he turned his attention to my question. I heard him say with creditable mildness, ‘I sprained something tangling with an idiot who was running for the same train. It’ll ease off soon enough. What are you doing up here?’

Then, sharper, ‘There’s blood on your ear.’

I put a hand up. My fingertips came away stained with a thin film, like grease. I had been bashed about the head by my case after all. The memory went through me like a bolt. Followed by the memory that I had been on my way to telephone for the police. I found that my eyes must have drifted past him onwards down the stairs at the thought because his head half turned to follow my gaze as if unsure that I wasn’t acknowledging a presence beyond him. There wasn’t anyone there, of course. His gaze slowly returned to me, watching me more closely. I imagine he was wondering if my sudden desire to move onwards was driven by the shame of snooping. I had an overwhelming urge to show him my empty hands, palms uppermost.

Instead I scrubbed away the blood on my fingers and gabbled anxiously, ‘There was a man. In this house. I was preparing your father’s lunch and he was in here. He stole my case. I’d only left it here while I went to the shop. I came through into the stairwell and he ran past me into a car – he’d been looking about the house, I think. He’d been into your library and the study. I came up to see what he’d been doing upstairs. I don’t know who he was. After what happened to Mr Winstone last night I thought, well … I don’t know. He bashed me as he took off and, as I said, he took my case.’ A hesitation before I added nonsensically, ‘It had all my clothes in.’

I had to suddenly reach past him for the banister. Not because I was in any way unequal to the distress but because my words were coming out so quickly that I ran out of breath. I found that his hand had flashed to my elbow to steady me. It was done with the same instinctive reflex that would have formerly intercepted my flight. It meant to save me from tipping head first down the stairs but it hurt too because his walking stick was trapped beneath his hand and my flesh.

Now I really was breathless. He steadied me for a moment and then said, ‘All right now?’

‘Yes. Yes, fine now, thank you.’

He let me go. I stayed propped against that vital solidity of the banister. Then he said in a tone of some doubt, ‘Did you say someone came in here to steal your bag?’

‘My suitcase, actually. It was only left in the kitchen while I went to the shop.’

‘Very well, your case,’ he amended calmly. ‘But why?’

I was calm again myself now. I turned my back against the banister and said plainly, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. He’d been in the library. And that office to the right.’ A waft of my hand. ‘I was about to go in there myself to telephone the police when you arrived.’

I saw something snap in his expression. An indefinable shift in his attention. ‘Show me,’ he said. And suddenly, uniform or no, I really was face to face with a career soldier.

The cane was dropped against the banister and the long coat that had been draped over his arm was hung there above it. There was no sign of the limp now as he went with me down to the white and black chequerboard tiles on the ground floor.

He hesitated when he reached the threshold into the room that housed the telephone. For a moment I thought he was anticipating something that waited for him in the room beyond.

I was seeing the room for the first time as he must; as a person familiar with it must, I mean. There was the same warm sunlit glow and today it cast into relief the pretty feminine décor of a woman’s drawing room that was only superficially supplanted by its later incarnation as a man’s study. This had been his mother’s room and her personal choice of paintings still hung on the wall; two landscapes in unattractive brown. My father would have loved them both. I was more conscious of the masculine touches that overlaid the woman’s tastes. They belonged to the young Master John as Mrs Abbey had called him, and they also belonged to the dread that had flooded Freddy’s face as he had approached this very same threshold last night.

It was the same memory that this was the brother’s domain that checked the man beside me now. But the Captain had better mastery of his feelings than the boy had, where calmness might manage the job better. He only asked me unnecessarily, ‘In here, you say?’

And stepped into the room.

I watched him as he surveyed the untouched surfaces and shelves of this space. I found myself recalling the photographs on the gallery wall and realising that I’d misread him there too. The idea I’d had that he was a cold, bland man beside the insatiable, charming energy of his brother was a lie. I’d read that grey portrait as calm but it was only calm if the manner of the control itself served to prove the energy of the thoughts beneath. I don’t mean to say that he displayed an unhealthy tendency for concealment. In fact, I believe it was the opposite. This was a man who had the intelligence to feel but also to take responsibility for his manners and to govern them, particularly at times like the present when a young woman had surprised him in his house.

Of course the contrast to this was the intimidating idea that instinct might be the force that unchained responsibility for him. It made me wonder if the physical part of his life in soldiering was the moment that measured reason twisted into the freedom of pure reflex. In short, I found myself wondering if he enjoyed the liberation of violence.

It was a bad moment for the Captain to turn and spy me waiting awkwardly on the threshold, fingers toying blindly with the grooved wood that framed the doorway. My mouth began to frame the tentative suggestion that perhaps he should undertake the act that had motivated my flight from the gallery upstairs and it was time to call the police. It would have marked a conclusion to my part here for both of us. Then he caught as I did the crescendo of speech in the passage behind me and beyond the stairwell. The sharp rattle of raised voices in there was accompanied by the unexpected yip as a dog barked.