But no matter how I tried to concentrate on England in winter, on a cold palace, on a mad king, on the icy Thames, my mind kept straying to blazing desert sands, to gold souks and to semiautomatic something-or-others and to unexplained trips to Dubai. Even the fascinating possibility that George III had been replaced by a decoy king failed to hold my attention. For once in my life, the present seemed a good deal more arresting than the past. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing. At least, not for the sake of my dissertation.
After reading the same page over five times without absorbing a word of it, I admitted defeat. Pushing away from the table, I fumbled in my bag for that lifeline of our modern existence, my mobile phone. I’d been too much in the archives, too much among the improbable events of long ago. What I needed was a nice, sane, safe modern voice to bring me back to my senses.
Well, maybe not entirely sane.
Scrolling down through my contacts, I hit the first name to come up in the Ps. If anyone could whip away the cobwebs, it would be Pammy. I had no intention of confiding my embarrassing 007 suspicions to her, but if nothing else, at least she would be a distraction. And she had the added benefit of having gone to school with Colin’s sister, Serena, in London for two years. They didn’t move in entirely the same circles these days, but if anyone knew what Colin did for a living, it would be Pammy. The woman has the instincts of a bloodhound and the scruples of a Chihuahua.
Pammy doesn’t believe in outmoded social mundanities like ‘Hello.’ Instead, she started right in with, ‘You’re at Selwick Hall, aren’t you!’
‘Pammy! Hi! How are you?’ I have the social mundanities on autopilot. They just come out, whether I mean them to or not. ‘It’s me, Eloise.’
Pammy made a noise that would have sounded suspiciously like ‘duh!’ if ‘duh’ hadn’t gone out several years ago. Pammy is nothing if not au courant. ‘Who else would be calling from your mobile?’
‘Good point,’ I admitted.
‘So?’ piped Pammy. ‘How is it? Which flavour is he?’
As I so often do with Pammy, I removed the phone from my ear, looked at it, and put it back. It never helps. ‘Huh?’ I said.
‘Which flavour ice cream is he? It’s the latest thing. You compare every man you know to his corresponding icecream flavour. Vanilla is your standard City bloke, presentable, but bland. Vanilla bean has a bit more potential, but it’s still no chocolate chip … You get the idea.’
Hmm. I decided to try this out. ‘What’s moose tracks?’
Pammy answered without missing a beat. ‘Vaguely outdoorsy, from the Midwest in the States or the Midlands here, on the shaggy side.’
‘Strawberry?’ I asked.
‘Super WASP-y, always wears pink Brooks Brothers shirts, on the borderline of gay.’
‘Sorbet?’
‘Definitely gay. So what’s Colin?’
‘Mint chip,’ I said, without even having to think about it. Cool on the outside, but with all sorts of dark depths. ‘Listen, Pams, do you ever remember Serena saying anything about what Colin does for a living?’
‘Something in the City,’ Pammy said promptly. In the background I could hear the whir of an espresso machine. It takes a lot of coffee to maintain that level of constant exuberance.
‘That’s what he used to do. Any idea what he does now?’
There was a long, happy exhalation of steam in the background as the espresso maker did its thing. ‘Shouldn’t you be asking him?’
‘It seems kind of tacky,’ I hedged. ‘And I feel like I should know already.’ At least that much was true.
‘Hmm.’
I could hear Pammy thinking – and texting on one of her three other phones, but I chose to ignore that bit. Pammy texts even in her sleep; her phones are so much a part of her fingers that they have no impact on her other activities or on her brain.
‘I have this friend’ – Uh-oh. Pammy always had these friends. Which was this one going to be? The astrologist? The feng shui expert? The Colour-Me-Beautiful woman? – ‘who has an agency called ManTrackers.’
‘ManTrackers,’ I repeated flatly. I had an image of Xena: Warrior Princess stalking her man through the streets of London’s financial district. It was straight out of Monty Python. Did they bring back scalps, or just suit jackets?
‘They run checkups on new boyfriends, you know, like due diligence, making sure they are what they said and all that.’
‘Due diligence?’
‘Well, just think about it, Ellie,’ Pammy said, as though it were all perfectly reasonable and I just a little bit slow, ‘you wouldn’t buy a flat or a business without first having it professionally checked out, so why expend less care on picking out a man? It never hurts to do your homework.’
‘That’s not homework – that’s stalking.’
‘Don’t be silly, sweetie. Stalking is when you do it yourself.’
I love Pammy, I do. Most of the time. ‘I think I’ll hold off on the, er, ManTrackers for a bit.’
‘It’s your choice.’ A bad choice, her tone said. I could practically hear her shrug. ‘But I’ll just shoot you their number, anyway, yah?’
‘Yah,’ I echoed absently. ‘I mean, yes.’
Easier to give in to Pammy than to argue with her. Disagreement is a form of discourse she does not understand. Not that I ever, ever intended to use this ‘ManTracking’ madness. What in the hell had happened to romance? To trust?
‘You don’t use them, do you?’ I demanded incredulously.
It was hard to believe it, even of Pammy. Especially of Pammy, who went through enough men per year to form her own private army. I didn’t like to think what the bill for that would be if she was having each one checked out individually. Sufficient to put a down payment on a London flat, no doubt. Fortunately, Pammy had a very large trust fund from a very guilty father.
‘Of course! If they were publicly traded, I would buy stock.’
That answered that, then.
‘They’re really great,’ said Pammy seriously. ‘They check out his financial records, whether he pays his bills promptly, his taxes, his properties, his exes. Total full service.’
‘Great,’ I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. At least, nothing positive. What next, going through their garbage to see if there were unexplained used condoms? That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. You were supposed to grow to know someone through mutual interactions, communicating with them, not with some bizarre surveillance agency about them. What had happened to trust, for crying out loud?
I was a fine one to talk about trust. There I was scrounging around in Colin’s desk drawers in the middle of the night. How was that any different?
Because it wasn’t systematic, I told myself. Because I’d felt guilty doing it. Because I wasn’t paying someone else to do it.
‘It’s a jungle out there,’ Pammy said seriously. ‘You have to protect yourself, Eloise.’
She didn’t know the half of it. What would she say if I told her that I suspected Colin was a gun-toting, licence-to-kill-carrying secret agent? Not much, actually. That wasn’t the sort of thing Pammy worried about.
Pammy’s voice was still streaming through the little holes in my mobile. ‘I mean, you’d be surprised by how many men say they’re single but really aren’t – and you can’t just tell by looking for a tan line on their ring fingers! And then there are a lot of them who lie about their financials, or who’ve cheated on their ex-wives, or—’
I have to admit, I tuned out somewhere after ex-wives. I just didn’t want to know. Dating was hard enough. Why create more things to stress about? I was about to say, You don’t seriously worry about all these things, do you? when I remembered: Of course she did.
Pammy doesn’t just come from a broken home; she comes from broken homes, plural. In fact, her mother had practically made a career out of it, trading up husbands. Some of the trading had been done of her own accord. Husband One, a reasonably successful attorney,
had been ditched for Pammy’s father, a wildly successful King of the Universe, Bonfire of the Vanities investment-banker type. Some of the trading had been thrust upon her. After Husband Two did his own trading up, Pammy’s mother had moved on to his English equivalent, Husband Three. I was still unclear as to what had happened with Husband Three, but Pammy’s mother had come out of it with a choice town house in London, and a ‘cottage’ in Dorset with fifteen bedrooms and its own tennis courts. The Palm Beach house was courtesy of Pammy’s father, as were the various Monets and Renoirs that now decorated the London and Dorset properties.
It’s not like Pammy went around talking about it – other than in the most matter-of-fact of ways – and she had never, to my knowledge, sought psychological counselling, or ever, in any way, given anyone to believe that she was anything but perfectly well-adjusted. Mildly crazy, but perfectly well-adjusted. But sometimes even perfectly well-adjusted can cover a multitude of scars.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to call them scars. Call it a different world-view, then. Talking with Pammy could be like one of those Twilight Zone episodes where you get a peep into a universe that operates on laws entirely differently from your own. Visiting Pammy-land was like travelling through a totally foreign country, one where they didn’t take Visa and none of my own expectations applied. Which was funny, since we’d grown up together. We’d gone to the same private school together from kindergarten till her mother whisked her off to England in tenth grade, the same ballet classes, the same skating lessons, the same hideous middle school dances; but our home situations were different enough that we might as well have hailed from different planets.
It was true: I did take for granted having two parents who had met, fallen in love, married – and stayed married. Sure, they’d had their moments, but for the most part they were a united front, aligned against the world, two heads with the same brain, and on and on. My sister, Jillian, and I always joked that telling one something was tantamount to telling the other because after thirty years of marriage, information went back and forth between the two of them like some Discovery Channel program on osmosis.
Unlike Pammy’s mother, who had only learnt that her second husband – Pammy’s father – was cheating on her when she came home from a trip to a spa in Arizona and found that all her clothes had been cleaned out of the closet and a younger model installed in her bed. When I say younger model, I mean that literally. Her replacement had been a runway model, all silky hair and exposed hip-bones. The resulting divorce had been brutal and very, very bitter.
Pammy had her own reasons for her preoccupations.
It did say something about Pammy that she had always managed to stay on decent terms with her father. She handled him with the same casual insouciance with which she dealt with everything else in her life, never indicating by word or deed that she resented what he had done to her mother – but she had never had a boyfriend who had lasted more than three months. Most got the boot in fewer than two. Two weeks, that was.
Just enough time for ManTrackers to issue a report.
We all joked about Pammy’s infamous two-week rule, but … I suddenly felt like the wormiest of worms. ‘Thanks, Pams,’ I said soberly. ‘I’ll bear them in mind.’
We hung up with mutual expressions of goodwill. It took me a moment before I realised that I was no better off than before I had called. What with icecream flavours and ManTrackers, I wasn’t the least bit closer to discovering what Colin actually did.
Dropping my mobile back into my bag, I wandered over to the long windows that looked out over the gardens. I did have a few options other than ManTrackers. I could (a) continue snooping; (b) talk to Colin’s sister or his great-aunt; or (c) just ask Colin.
For a moment, I was tempted by option B. Colin’s great-aunt, Mrs Selwick-Alderly, had been the moving force in getting us together in the first place. She had also made some very interesting comments – oh, goodness, what was it that she had said? Colin had been raising a ruckus about my being allowed access to the family papers. Mrs Selwick-Alderly, as poised as an Edwardian duchess, had simply smiled at him and said, ‘The one doesn’t lead to the other, you know.’ Or something like that. What did it mean? What did she mean?
Could she have meant that revealing the identities of nineteenth-century spies wouldn’t clue me in that he was following in the family tradition?
I did have her number stored in my mobile somewhere.
No. I folded my arms across my chest so they wouldn’t be tempted to reach for my mobile. I wasn’t going to do that. I had a choice to make. I could talk to Colin like a reasonable human being and set a pattern for a proper relationship – a real relationship, based on communication and trust – or I could continue skulking around behind his back like a dime store Mata Hari, abusing his trust in me in the process. It might be exciting, it might be titillating (playing with the unknown is always so much more thrilling than dealing with anything head-on), but in the end it meant the difference between something real and something make-believe. At that rate, I might as well call Pammy’s ManTrackers and have done with it.
Did I want something real? Up until now, there had always been intrigue of some kind. There had been the whole does-he-like-me/ does-he-want-to-throttle-me dilemma so beloved of Gothic novelists to keep me entertained, and after that, once I knew he liked me, there had been all the euphoria of a new relationship coupled with a transatlantic separation. There hadn’t, until now, been any of the real bread and butter of a relationship, the day-to-day getting to know each other. Speculating like mad about the other person behind his back didn’t count.
Was it just the dating of a descendant of the Purple Gentian that I wanted? The thrill of being able to go home and tell everyone I’d caught a real, live Englishman – and then thrown him back? Or did I really want Colin, who wrote terse notes and woke up too early and forgot to pick up his socks?
I stared out over the gravelled paths of his garden, past the eighteenth-century follies and the dead rosebushes, all the way to the old Norman tower that stood on its own crest to the east of the gardens. My eyes narrowed on the bulk of the tower. The last time I had been at Selwick Hall, Colin had warned me away from it, explaining that it was an insurance liability to let guests wander around inside. Or something like that.
What if the liability involved didn’t have anything to do with insurance?
There had been a big, shiny padlock on the door last time. The big, shiny padlock was probably still in place. But it was becoming quite clear that what I really needed was a walk. There would be nothing like a walk through the damp, cold air to whip my head back into order. Walks are supposed to be good for you, aren’t they?
After last time, I already knew the drill. I knew where to find the spare Wellies (and I knew that it would be a very bad idea not to put on the spare Wellies, even if the smallest ones were still a size too big) and I knew the shortest way from the kitchen door to the tower. I virtuously emptied out my coffee grounds and deposited the French press in the sink along the way. And I tried not to think about what I was really doing.
Outside, the countryside was doing its best to demonstrate why so many Britons like to go abroad to other climates during the winter months. Instead of properly raining, the sky was snivelling, leaching down an irresolute moisture that was too thick to be called mist and too insidious to be called rain. The ground was sodden, turning that squelchy black unique to winter, where the entire landscape appears to be etched in shades of black and grey. The tower was the greyest of the lot, a lowering pile of roughly cut stone, dark with damp. Moisture dripped off the padlock, falling with a dull plop to gather in a small puddle below.
The whole thing looked highly unhygienic.
Huddling in my quilted jacket, I contemplated the stone mass. Bizarre to think that people had once lived in here. At some point back in time, there would have been men jostling one another and exchanging bawdy jokes in Norman French. There would have been a solar somewhere up top
, with women in pointy hats weaving on their looms. There would have been a hall with a great fire and meat roasting on it. Now, all that was left was a miserable, hollow cylinder of stone.
I might have turned back then. I like to think that I would have. It was those ridiculous water drops that did it, drawing my attention back to the lock, which was, indeed, still very big, still very shiny, and still very much a lock. It was also very unfastened.
To be strictly accurate, it was only slightly unfastened. It was one of those padlocks that involves driving a bit of metal into another bit of metal. There must be some technical term for it, but as you can see, I know roughly as much about locks as I do about medieval solars. What I did know was that the locking bit hadn’t been entirely pushed home, so that while the lock still looked closed, there was a crucial gap between the end of the curved piece and the hole it was supposed to go into. Whoever had been inside last had been careless.
Surely it couldn’t hurt just to take a quick look inside.
Feeling like Nancy Drew (who, I would like to point out, was also Titian-haired), I eased the padlock open. Despite the shiny newness of the lock, the door didn’t open easily. It creaked and protested on hinges made cranky by damp. Either the original roof had survived or a new one had been put on, because there was no light at all in the interior. I hadn’t noticed from the outside, but the original arrow slits had all been boarded up, blocked with thick planks of wood.
This was all beginning to look exceedingly suspicious. Or it would have, had I been able to see anything.
Propping open the door with my back, I stood at the threshold, wishing I had possessed the good sense to bring a flashlight. The reluctant winter light, lying low to the ground like mist, scarcely penetrated the door frame. But there was something inside; I could make out that much. If there were any partitions, they had long since crumbled with time. From where I stood, the inside looked like one cavernous circle. But it wasn’t empty. Something large and metallic occupied the centre of the room.