The God of the Labyrinth

  ‘Whatever came over us?’

  I knew what she meant. It had not been ‘normal’ sex, the sex of two people who decide they like one another and want to explore one another’s bodies. It had been a kind of frenzy, as if we were two animals. And now I was ‘Mr Sorme’ again, and she was Lady Angela Glenney, and we were two people who liked one another, but were not lovers. Except, of course, that it was impossible for us not to be aware that we had just abandoned ourselves to one another.

  She said suddenly: ‘My God, I forgot. It’s the worst time of the month.’

  I placed my hand gently on her stomach. ‘Then there’s probably a little Sorme in there.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  She laughed suddenly.

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  The telephone rang. It was Alastair, saying he was having a drink with some old schoolfriends, and would not be back for another hour.

  Angela and I took a shower together. I felt oddly cool and fresh, totally relaxed. Every time I looked at Angela, I experi­enced a faint shock, as if what had happened had been a sexual fantasy inside my own head.

  Half an hour later, as we sat on either side of the fire, sipping vodka martinis, she said:

  ‘I think they put something in the drinks.’

  ‘An aphrodisiac, you mean? I don’t think so. Spanish fly has an irritating effect on the lining of the stomach—I once tasted some in Algiers.’

  ‘But surely you don’t believe it was something psychic, do you?’

  I said: ‘I’ll tell you what I believe. I believe that Klaus wanted to make love to you, and she wanted me to make love to her. If we’d stayed for supper, we’d have finished up in bed with them. As it was, whatever they did to us made us want one another.’ When I thought back on the fury of our lovemaking, I knew there was something odd about it.

  She said: ‘It makes you wonder whether there’s really some­thing in these stories about love potions—Tristan and Isolde, and all that.’

  ‘I knew a man who could tell you—a man called Caradoc Cunningham.’

  ‘Yes, I know about him. I read your book. I don’t think I’d like to meet him.’

  When Alastair came in half an hour later, she was cooking a meal, and the flat was full of the fragrance of garlic and mint. He said: ‘I hope you didn’t get too bored without me.’ Angela said: ‘No, we found plenty to do.’ ‘To do?’ ‘I mean to talk about.’ He was joking, of course; he knew that neither Angela nor I were the type to become lovers within a few hours of meeting one another.

  In the night, I had disturbing dreams that I could not remember; but when I woke up, I was Esmond again. This was the strangest sensation so far. I had drunk a little too much Pommard after supper, and although I was not drunk, I had that feeling of slight separation from reality, of meaninglessness. On the other hand, Esmond was wide awake. For him, this high-ceilinged room seemed familiar enough; the only slightly puzzling element was the occasional sound of a passing car or lorry on the Holland Park Road. My sense of being back in the eighteenth century was stronger than it had been in Dublin, perhaps because there were no distractions in the dark. I fell asleep again, and had confused dreams of Horace Walpole, Lichtenberg, Boswell and Johnson. When I woke up in the morning, I had a very clear memory of Johnson saying emphatically—and spluttering with his large, pendulous lower lip: ‘The man is a lecherous rogue, sir, and you would do better to avoid him utterly.’

  We took a plane at 11.30, and were in Edinburgh an hour and a half later. We ate lunch in the back room of a pub with Dr David Smellie, Angela’s professor, a small man with a face like a terrier. He had once given one of my books a particularly vicious review, so he smiled sheepishly when he was introduced to me; but when he made an oblique reference to the subject over lunch, I pretended I had not seen it, and we got on well enough. There was no need for me to do a great deal of talking—Alastair and Angela wanted to tell him all about Esmond Donelly, and my discoveries. He listened politely for a while, then said:

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t see why you find him so interesting. It sounds to me as if he was a typical eighteenth-century rake. Did he ever think about anything but sex?’

  Angela looked at me; I think she was inclined to agree. I said:

  ‘In a sense no. And in another sense, sex didn’t interest him at all.’

  He said snappily: ‘Isn’t that what is called casuistry?’

  ‘No.’ He was unsympathetic, but I decided to try to explain. ‘I see Esmond as a man obsessed with the problem of meaning.’

  ‘The meaning of what? Human existence?’ I recalled that he had made a number of jeering comments in his review on what he called my ‘crypto-religious obsession’. But I wanted to explain to the other two. I said:

  ‘It’s a matter that either you understand or you don’t. To me, it’s a self-evident problem. Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times it’s as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this eclipse of meaning as we accept changes in the weather. If I wake up with a bad cold or a headache, I seem to be deaf to meaning. Now if I woke up physically deaf or half­blind, I’d feel there was something wrong and consult a doctor. But when I’m deaf to meaning, I accept it as something natural. Esmond didn’t accept it as natural. And he also noticed that every time we’re sexually stimulated, meaning returns. We can hear again. So he pursued sex as a way of recovering meaning.’

  Angela asked: ‘How about Horace Glenney?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t interested in Esmond’s search for meaning. He admired Esmond, but he didn’t understand him.’

  ‘Having read Of the Deflowering of Maids, I doubt whether there was anything to understand.” Smellie remained uncon­vinced. I said:

  ‘I don’t believe Esmond wrote that book.’

  ‘No? Then who did?’

  ‘I don’t know. But the style isn’t Esmond’s.’

  He shrugged as if to say I could indulge in any fancies I liked, but it was none of his business. I said:

  ‘Do you happen to remember the date on the edition you saw?’

  ‘Of course. 1790.’

  This excited me. The edition I had seen in Galway was printed in Leipzig in the 1830s.

  ‘Who printed it, and where?’

  ‘There is no printer, but the university catalogue says it was printed privately in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am not in the habit of confusing my facts.’ I recalled that this was another of his jibes, so I dropped the subject. But my cordiality as I shook his hand half an hour later was not entirely feigned. Another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. And a suspicion I had already entertained began to seem less absurd. For assuming that the Deflowering of Maids was a forgery, who could have written it? Obviously, someone who was interested in making Esmond out to be a rake and a writer of pornography. This might easily be Gilbert Stuart, who had been friendly with Horace Glenney, and who had a motive for blackening Donelly’s reputation. But he was dead by 1786. That left only one obvious candidate: Glenney himself. And if the ‘Deflowering’ book was printed in Edinburgh, it became a distinct possibility.

  It was after four o’clock that we finally left Edinburgh in a hired car, and started on the long drive north—almost as far as from London to Edinburgh. We broke the journey at Pitlochrie, and left early the next morning. By four that afternoon we were on the last stage of the journey, from Dornoch to Golspie. The wild, open moors and the sudden views of the sea were impres­sive; but what really occupied my thoughts was the sheer effort involved in making this same journey in 1770—in a bumpy coach, over roads that were little better than dirt tracks. Most of the people of Golspie had probably travelled no farther than Dornoch or Inverness. No wonder Horace Glenney was an objec
t of such admiration when he returned from his European travels. We stopped in the village to ring Franklin Miller—the new owner of Golspie House—then drove on to the north-east. Golspie House stands on the slopes of Ben Horn, overlooking Loch Brora. As we drove this last lap of the journey, I tried hard to relax, to see it with Esmond’s eyes; but it was no good. It was all too strange. The sight of the square, grey house brought a flash of recognition; but I could have been deceiving myself.

  There was a great deal of scaffolding up at the front of the building; evidently its new owner was improving it. The drive had been tarmacked, and the lawns looked well kept. It might have been an expensive hotel.

  Franklin Miller was a big, friendly man who looked as if he had been born to be a country squire. He seemed genuinely delighted to have us as guests. He led us into the great library, where there was a huge log fire burning. We accepted whiskies, and met Mrs Miller, who begged us to stay for as long as we could. After walking around the grounds and down to the side of the loch, I asked if we might spend an hour before dinner looking through the attic, where Alastair had seen bundles of old papers. Our host told us to treat the house as if it had never changed owners, and went off to find out what his workmen were doing.

  ‘I know where we can begin,’ Alastair said. ‘The family Bible. It lists the births and deaths of all the Glenneys of Golspie.’

  This was in the library, on a top shelf—a magnificent, shiny-leather thing that weighed half a hundredweight. It was a ‘Great Bible’—the Cranmer version of 1539. It struck me that it was probably worth nearly as much as Golspie House, but I didn’t like to say so. The half-dozen pages at the back were covered with writing—page after page in illegible scrawl, written in faded ink, beginning with an Alexander Gleinnie, who died in 1579 (before Shakespeare had left Stratford upon Avon), and who was apparently knighted by Henry VIII. The Glenneys were raised to the peerage by James I. Sometimes, the dates were followed by the cause of death, ‘fever’, ‘cholick’, ‘of a twisted middle’ (whatever that meant). There were several entries in the hand­writing I recognised as Horace Glenney’s. His own name was followed by two dates: 1747, and 1796; but there was no men­tion of cause of death. His father died in 1778, upon which his brother Moray became Lord Glenney; Moray was killed ‘by a fall from a misen’ (mizzen mast?) in 1781, upon which his younger brother assumed the title.

  This at least was helpful; I now knew Horace Glenney’s dates. But not the cause of his death. I asked Alastair if he could remember which room had been showed to him as the ‘murder room’.

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ He led me out of the library, up the main staircase, and along a corridor. He knocked on the door, then opened it. The room was now apparently a guest bedroom; it overlooked the loch, and a workman was whistling on the scaffold outside.

  Angela said: ‘This was definitely not the room Gordon showed me. That was in the other wing.’

  After some hesitation, we found this. It overlooked the back part of the house; there was a sheer drop outside the window to a small courtyard. It was a plain, cold room, and one wall was not panelled; the granite had been smoothed to form a flat sur­face. Angela pointed to a brown stain that ran down this to the floor. ‘Gordon said that was a bloodstain—that he was lying in bed when someone shot him from the doorway.’

  This was possible; it looked like a bloodstain. On the other hand, it seemed to me unlikely that the master of the house would sleep in a room like this. What was more probable was that the bloodstain had led to the story of a murder.

  Three more flights of stairs took us to the attic, which proved so dark and dusty that Alastair went off to borrow a torch. Angela and I sat down on an old chest, after I had brushed off the dust with my handkerchief. We were both tired; it had been a long journey and we needed a good night’s rest. I put my arm round her shoulders, and she leaned her head against me. I let my cheek rest against her hair, and closed my eyes. It was very quiet. There was no sound but the hiss of the wind against the gables, and the distant chirruping of a bird. The feeling of her warmth against me was pleasant. And suddenly, without tran­sition, I remembered. Or rather, Esmond remembered. The smell of dust was familiar, and so was the smell of Angela’s hair. I realised what had been wrong. When we see new places, the mind finds them strange, and makes an effort to grasp them to adjust to them. It is this effort that destroys the instinctive familiarity of memory. I was so anxious to enter into the spirit of this house, to remember it, that I was forcing my own impres­sions upon it. Now, for a moment, I stopped seeing it as a strange place; I relaxed; and it was as if an old picture had superimposed itself on my new impressions of the house, and then blended with them. I knew this place; I knew the loch and the hills and the glimpse of the sea down the valley. I also knew that Angela had been right. The room we had just seen was the one in which Horace Glenney was murdered. But Angela was wrong in one respect; he had not been shot. He had been stabbed. I felt a curious certainty about this.

  Alastair came back with an enormous length of electric wire, and one of those metal cages with a bulb inside that car mechanics use. We attached the bayonet plug to a socket on the floor below, and hung the bulb over a low beam in the attic. Then we sur­veyed the place. Nothing was more obvious than that it had not been looked at for years. Alastair could not remember ever investigating it in his childhood. Everything was inches deep in dust and a kind of fluffy moss, and one half of the attic was closed off by a series of enormous spider webs that were so thick with dust that they made an opaque curtain. (I have often wondered how spiders make a living in closed attics.) There was obviously plenty to investigate, including a pile of broken bag­pipes. As soon as we moved anything the dust choked us. I broke the spider’s web with an old metal poker, and looked into the other part. There were all kinds of crates and boxes here, and piles of account books and bundles of paper. I tried undoing one of these, and it began to crumble away, just as if it was paper that had been made brittle by a fire. Other bundles were soaked through with a brown stain that made them illegible.

  After half an hour of this, we were all very thirsty, and had been sneezing steadily about once a minute. Franklin Miller came up to investigate, looked around for a minute or two, then went away, after remarking: ‘Rather you than me.’ Alastair said finally: ‘I think I’ll go down and have a beer. Anybody coming?’ Angela said she was. I decided to stay on for a while, but five minutes was enough. I began to think longingly of a long, cool pint in the local pub. My eyes were smarting, and I was getting impatient, so that every time I moved I disturbed more dust than was necessary. I felt as if I needed a good bath, and as if my hair was full of baby spiders. After pulling a huge chest out of its corner, and struggling to undo a great leather strap that had hardened until it was like steel, I moved over to the trapdoor to get a little fresh air. I sat there, yawning, think­ing that if Esmond intended to help me, now was the time to get on with it. A spider walked over my neck, and I stood up so suddenly that I hit my head on a beam, and sat down on the floor, with brilliant lights flashing on and off. I sat there, staring up irritably at the spider that swung on a length of thread, sus­pended from a tattered diagram of an electrical circuit that was pinned to the beam. It was the last straw. I climbed down the ladder, and spent five minutes in front of an open window, brush­ing myself down and looking with envy at a man fishing from a boat in the loch.

  I reached up to unplug the attic light, when the thought suddenly struck me. Since there was no light in the attic, why was there a circuit diagram there? I went back up the ladder. I picked up a duster, and brushed away the spider’s web that covered the sheet of paper. Now I looked closer, I saw why I had mistaken it for a circuit diagram. It was neatly drawn, with various small boxes connected by lines. The boxes had letters written on them; and at the side of the sheet there was another list of letters, with writing beside each one. I suspected what it was as I took it down; my intuition was working ag
ain. It was so dusty that I could not read it in the dim light. I went down to the floor below, brushed it carefully with a clean handkerchief, and took it over to the window. It was a diagram—a diagram of the attic. If I had thought about it more carefully, I would have noticed that the various chests and bundles in the attic were laid out in a neat and orderly manner that suggested they had been arranged by someone. And whoever had carefully arranged them had made this sketch to act as a key.

  Alastair called: ‘Are you coming down, Gerard? It’s dinner in half an hour.’

  I said: ‘Who was G. Rullion?’

  ‘George Rullion? He was a sort of steward here in my grand­father’s time. He lived to be ninety-one in the gate lodge. Why?’

  I showed him the back of the diagram. The neat signature at the bottom read ‘G. Rullion’. I ran my finger down the list, and stopped opposite ‘K’: ‘Papers r. to 9th Lord Glenney’. That was Horace Glenney. I turned the paper over. ‘K’ was a space in a far corner of the attic.

  It proved to be an enormous tin chest, and the catch had rusted. We forced it open with the poker. It was jammed with account books, letters, loose papers. Either it had been disturbed since ‘G. Rullion’ had filled it, or its contents had been thrown in without much attempt at order. I opened a letter. It began ‘My dear Mary’, and the contents seemed to be about some family problem relating to the sale of a house in Guildford. I dipped into the chest, and opened several others at random. One was addressed to Miss Fiona Guthrie, and began ‘My dear Miss Guthrie’ and ended: ‘yours respectfully’. This was dated from Göttingen in August 1766—that is, a few months before the events he described in his letter to Esmond.