‘Oh, what is it? Tudor? Palladian? Victorian gothic? Ranch-style bungalow? Wigwam?’
‘Do you really not know, or is this still part of my … assessment?’
‘Oh, um ah,’ burbled Andrew. Alice wasn’t meant to know about the reporting-back side of things. Would she think him a snitch? ‘No, I really don’t know about the house. I know we’re always supposed to see if it’s in Pevsner, but I can never be bothered. I just wing it, and talk about new cures for deathwatch, and the best grade of rubber for a Wellington boot, and how to shift dried-on pigshit from the rear axle of the Range Rover.’
‘Well, let’s leave it as a surprise then.’
The house was very easy to miss, although not, perhaps, the four times that Andrew managed to miss it, as he drove up and down the same stretch of B-road, squinting and cursing and swerving around hedgehogs, weasels, gnomes, and sprites, ignoring Alice’s good advice about turn-offs.
‘I can’t see how this house can be famous, except for invisibility. It must be some kind of fucking shed, hidden away like this.’
However, once through a cleverly concealed gateway in a thick hawthorn hedge, a smooth tarmac driveway, elegantly lined with poplar, led on. But to where? No house, grand or otherwise, appeared at the end of the driveway, just another Quantock ridge.
‘Follow the road,’ said Alice, in a knowing way, which Andrew would have resented, if he’d thought about it more. As it was he was too concerned with the coming trials. Would it be the rare first edition of the Audubon, engraved on copperplates in Edinburgh and London, or just the very nice American lithographs of the octavo? Worse still, perhaps it was one of the subsequent editions of the octavo, tinkered about with by Audubon’s sons after his death. Not worthless, but certainly not career-making.
Career bum. Andrew hated thinking about a career. How he still longed, when he allowed himself the indulgence, for that vanished ivory tower. Long lovely hours daydreaming in the Bodeleian. Discussing Edmund Burke over tea and crumpets with a pretty student. Delivering his paper on the influence of Burke on Winckelmann (or was it the other way round?), at a conference in Milan; oh yes, the Milan conference, with all the free drinks they pour down you, and the tasty nibbles (Andrew made a fetish of nibbles), and then the dramatic quasi-perverse sex with Steffi, the Swedish professor of what? yes, Pneumatics. Ha! But that wasn’t to be, and now he’d made his bed, and now he’d rather like Alice to lay in it. Or Ophelia. Or both together. Stop it.
Fuck.
House.
The Merdemobile had seemed to be heading over the ridge, where they would fall, for all Andrew knew, for a thousand feet to the canyon floor below. He stopped himself from making the explosion noise he’d perfected twenty-five years ago when blowing up bridges behind enemy lines. But the road dipped and curved, and suddenly they found themselves facing a wall of glass.
‘Jesus,’ said Andrew, ‘it’s a fucking cave of ice.’
‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose. If you’re a modernist goldfish. Or the Snow Queen,’ he said, peering through the windscreen. ‘No, I can’t be too curmudgeonly about it; it’s amazing. God I hate the rich.’
The house had been built partly into the side of the hill, facing a broad wooded valley with a suggestion, if not quite the actual presence, of the sea somewhere beyond. The initial impression of pure and solid glass dissolved after a moment into a more complicated pattern of facets and angles, with panes of varying opacity intercut by steel panels and weathered concrete pillars. There was an area of polished granite slabs, like a pool of impossible calm, in front of the house, dimly reflecting the glittering walls and the sky above.
‘Who is it, Frank Lloyd Wright?’ Andrew was pleased that he remembered the name of any architect, and was silently ecstatic when Alice said:
‘A pupil of his, actually. Funny how you could tell when it’s so different from anything Wright ever built.’
‘Ah, yes, em, it’s all to do with the, you know, the use of space, and, er material,’ said Andrew, anxious to move on before he became more exposed. ‘Anyway, how the hell do you know about this sort of stuff? Your land snails I can see, but I never had you down as a Country Life subscriber.’
‘Mummy gets the magazines. They’re always around. And I am, after all, a girl.’
That got Andrew’s biggest laugh of the day. He was still smiling as he asked, ‘Well, Miss Girlie-Girl Alice Duclos, just how the hell do you get into this place?’
Finding the entrance proved a little easier, for Alice, than extracting herself from the car, which took a series of increasingly violent rocking movements, and a final inelegant lunge. They walked gingerly across the polished granite to a tall thin door of beaten metal. Andrew rang the bell. They waited. Andrew rang the bell again. They waited some more.
‘You did phone and tell him we were coming?’ asked Alice, trying not to sound too sceptical.
‘Someone did. I didn’t. I might have asked Ophelia to do it. But yes, of course he knows we’re coming.’ Andrew sounded nervous. ‘Shall I try the door? Perhaps they can’t hear us in the West …’ waving vaguely, ‘whatever.’
Before Alice had time to say ‘no’, the door opened, apparently by itself, as no head appeared level with their own.
‘What do you want?’ came a voice from groin level.
Alice and Andrew looked down into a child’s face. Six? Seven? Andrew was always rubbish at guessing ages. But a girl, even he could tell that. She had black, very straight hair, and black eyes with grown-up dark smudges beneath them.
‘We’ve come to see Mr Lynden,’ said Alice, once more taking control as Andrew wavered.
‘He’s my daddy.’
‘Is he at home?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can we see him?’
‘He’s playing music.’
‘I think he wanted to see us.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I promise. He wrote me a letter. He wants me to have a look at some books.’
‘What books?’ She looked at Alice as though she had come to extradite her Barbie annual.
‘A bird book.’
‘Oh.’
‘Look, little girl,’ said Andrew with an unconvincing severity, ‘why don’t you go and tell your daddy that we’re here.’
‘I told you, he’s playing music. If I go in he’ll shout at me.’ The girl’s serious face lightened for a moment, before she went on, ‘You can go in and see him, if you want.’
‘It’s a trap,’ whispered Andrew in Alice’s ear.
‘Well, it’s that or stand out here for the rest of our lives. And it’s started to rain. Will you show us the way?’ she said to the girl. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Semele. What’s yours?’
‘I’m called Alice and this is Andrew.’
The girl nodded. ‘Do you see that door? Go through it, and then carry on in a straight line, going through each door directly in front of you. If you do that you’ll get to Daddy. Don’t dare go off on either side, or go through any other door.’ Semele then walked calmly away in the