Faustine Read Online Free PDF Page B

for a moment, and I stood feeling ridiculously defenceless in this part of the house, to which I had most definitely not been welcomed by Mr and Mrs Neidpath. I felt, at the same time, a presence – though whether it was at the other side of the old manor, down one of the landings and further flights of stairs I had seen on reaching the top of the principal flight, I couldn’t at first say. Lisa Crane was just possibly inured here, I thought – and I cursed myself for being a reader of trash gossip columns and not even retaining the information I had lazily ingested. Somewhere within the walls of the house – and thus accounting for the feeling of a lair, a sanctuary, rather than an arranged exhibition of her life – Lisa Crane might by lying, asleep, with the Neidpaths as her custodians. I thought, even, I could hear the quiet tread of the couple as they climbed the stairs, and the faint clink of china and cutlery on a tray; they were very likely bringing her evening meal and must have considered me long gone, slipping out most probably when they were engaged elsewhere in the house. My agitation suddenly doubled. What if they had gone to the top of the drive, seen the taxi, impatient of waiting, no longer there, and considered me ensconced in it, already approaching the suburbs of Salisbury, the spire rising to greet me and the dolmens of Stonehenge left well behind? What then? How wasI to explain myself? So great was the power of the slumbering house, of the past that choked any idea of the present-day or the mundane, that I found the very concept of ringing for another taxi quite laughable. Somehow, even if the Neidpaths in their Cerberus’ gate room to the life-in-death chamber of Lisa Crane possessed the telephone already fantasized about and longed for in my dangerous position here, I could barely see them lifting the receiver and calling to a denizen of the outside world.
    As it happened, a second burst of noise from the downs – the first had caused only a flicker of interest, I remembered, but this was much louder – stopped the footsteps on the stairs for at least a minute, if not more, and made me realize, as a police siren and wail of ambulance followed, that the road running along the boundary of the manor’s grounds was the focus for all this activity. The hippies, as Maureen had eagerly informed me, were at their most disruptive at Stonehenge at the time of the summer solstice. The road would by now be almost certainly out of bounds, the taxi dismissed back to the rank at the station.
    The steps resumed and, coming up to the door, paused for a moment before John Neidpath came in with a tray – as I had rightly surmised – with folded napiery and a bowl of soup and a half-bottle of a very yellow wine, glinting in the last of the setting sun.
    John Neidpath – as if it were the most run-of-the-mill thing that I should be in this room (and, as I looked hastily round in the dying light, I saw it was a master bedroom, almost without doubt the bedroom of Lisa Crane herself) – set the tray down on a rosewood table at the foot of the bed and informed me in a quiet, neutral voice that my car had indeed been sent away and that the road in front of the manor’s thick shrubbery was blockaded by police at both ends.
    Then, apologizing for the lack of a dining-room ‘at present ’, he made his way out of the room, flicking on an array of downlighters and brightly coloured sixties lighting equipment as he went.
     *
    I ate the soup and I drank the wine. It was very quiet (there was no TV or radio). I lay on the bed, with its lacy flounces, its patchwork of purple satin that hangs over the headboard like a pious reminder of those heady days of fame and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I dreamed of the great stars of the past, and the marijuana-scented picnics on the lawns outside, by the bushes of wild briar and the clumps of bamboo that hide the river and the boathouse beyond. I dreamed of the boathouse, where