Sandlands Read online

  It was his period, he told himself, rationalising a decision he knew was already made. William Colstone’s period. And his man, like Whybrow himself, was from that part of Suffolk: Colstone was born in Wickham Market where his father, Frederick, had the living. William held a commission with the regulars, the East Suffolk regiment. He’d served in India and the Dutch East Indies and at the capture of Mauritius, but was garrisoned in England for a time after 1810, lending backbone to the local militia. His letters, and an essay of 1811, were regarded as prime sources on the invasion panic which gripped the nation at that time. Posted back home to defend our shores from Boney – why not, indeed, in Whybrow’s very tower? It was a tangible connection, as solid as anything to be found in books.

  To arrange the viewing had been a guilty thrill, but it was also unreal, incongruous, to be noting an appointment time and who would meet him with the key, as if he were looking round a three-bedroomed semi. A million bricks. Only on the drive over did excitement make way for the lurching fear of disappointment.

  He need not have worried. As soon as the heavy oak door swung open he felt it, that almost electrical charge which tingled the nerves in his scalp and set all his senses to hyper vigilance. It was a hard thing to describe exactly. A special quality of silence, certainly, the kind you encounter sometimes in an empty church or an underground cavern; the kind to make you understand properly that overused phrase ‘you could hear a pin drop’. It froze you to stillness; it set your ears on edge to listen for the pin. But it was more than that. Much later, he found the analogy which conjured it best: it was like being inside a giant bell. The high vault of the brick dome created a resonance which served to amplify the slightest sound and send it circling around and around. The least movement of air was translated to vibration, a thrum which reverberated almost below the frequencies of audibility. Even when nothing stirred, the air within the belly of the tower seemed to arc and crackle with life, as if detecting the presence of a listener. It was a place made for secrets.

  ‘Wait for the best bit, though.’ It was the girl from the estate agent – the young woman, as he knew he was supposed to say – who had demonstrated the tower’s special magic. ‘Stand over there. Put your head near the wall.’

  She chose the spot directly opposite him across the line of diameter and leaned her face close to the bricks. He watched her lips move and for a fraction of a second heard nothing – and then the whisper came and it was if she were right beside him with her mouth to his ear, but in the same moment the single word rebounded about his head as if reflected from countless invisible surfaces, multilayered, at once both as loud as timpani and quiet as a sigh.

  ‘Echo...’

  To look it up was a professional reflex for Whybrow. He had personally witnessed the same effect in the Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s cathedral, but now he found mention of other examples: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence; the Gol Gumbaz mausoleum in Bijapur. Even, apparently, a gallery outside an oyster bar in New York’s Grand Central Station. As so often, theories competed to explain the phenomenon, with argument going back to the nineteenth century. The Cambridge physicist Lord Rayleigh – a Trinity man – claimed that sound travelled round the surface fabric of the dome along its inner perimeter; the Astronomer Royal, the appropriately named Airy, contended that the waves bounced across the space inside the dome, moving through the air. Neither theory had been proved conclusively to be correct. Whybrow read of the recreation of strange acoustic effects in artificial whispering chambers, both circular and ellipsoid; he read of hot spots of acoustic symmetry and points of focus, and the observation of bizarre reversal events, where sound flipped round and seemed to be coming from the opposite direction.

  While all this knowledge might bring logic to the tower’s properties it did nothing, he found, to reduce its powerful hold on his imagination. More and more, as he camped out on the dusty boarded floor that summer and into autumn, he found himself preoccupied by the notion of echoes, of ancient confidences which arced through brick or spun through space, of communication leaping through earth and air and time.

  It never occurred to him to reflect on the most wasteful aspect of the acquisition of his gallery of whispers: the pity that he should always be there by himself.

  ‘I’m worried about Dr Whybrow.’

  Jenny Lassiter was settled comfortably before the coal-effect electric fire in the back parlour of her college porter’s lodge, resuscitating toes which had suffered the double assault of a cold bike ride from the Faculty of English and unsuitably frivolous footwear. Shoes, as Jenny enjoyed confessing to people, were her Achilles heel. From her cycling helmet downwards she was prepared to adopt a style of dress appropriate to the filthy Cambridge climate and the expectations of colleagues and students, but her feet she regarded as her own to torture as she chose. The pair she had just eased off was a recent acquisition: peep-toed wedges in soft Italian leather of a delectable shade of cranberry. As feeling returned to her liberated toes, so Jenny, with a pleasurable sigh, reverted to her theme.

  ‘He’s never here.’

  Ernie, the head porter, took a carton of milk from the mini fridge and gave it the obligatory sniff. ‘Well, he is on leave. Professor Elwood ran a lecture course at Princeton when he was on leave last term.’

  ‘That’s different.’ Jenny raised her left foot towards the fire and performed slow circles from the ankle. ‘Dr Whybrow hasn’t gone away. He just isn’t here.’

  Ernie dunked teabags and pondered this distinction before handing her a mug with a considered, ‘Ah.’

  The back parlour of the lodge was the inner sanctum. Designed to serve as rest room for the porters on duty, especially at night, it provided a place of occasional resort for staff and students alike: part sanctuary and part confessional. Ernie’s substantial shoulder had been cried on by homesick first years and by Nobel laureates, and his pronouncements had an oracular quality about them which meant there were very few troubles within the college which weren’t eventually brought before him.

  ‘I mean, he was always here. Always has been, ever since I’ve been at the college. A permanent fixture – like the portraits of all those old giffers in hall. Earthquakes might come and mountains crumble to the sea but you could always rely on Dr Whybrow being in his rooms of an evening if you needed a bracing chat and a shot of nasty sherry.’

  ‘But now he’s not.’

  ‘Right. First it was only weekends – and fair enough, everyone’s entitled to a weekend away – although I’d never known him go off anywhere before. But I thought, well, maybe he’s acquired a lady friend or more likely an old mum with a dodgy hip or Alzheimer’s or something that he has to go and visit.’ She cast an appraising glance at Ernie over the rim of her mug, and a tiny flicker in the jaw made her think she’d stabbed close to the truth. But he only said, ‘A father. He died last year.’

  ‘Anyway, recently it’s not just the weekends. I dropped round three times after dinner last week and knocked and knocked. Nothing – and no lights on either. And it was the same the week before.’

  Her eyes strayed to the open door of the pigeonhole room. Ernie caught the movement and answered her question before she’d asked it. ‘Hasn’t cleared his mail since last Tuesday.’

  Out there in the real world it was milk bottles left out on the doorstep, wasn’t it? If anyone actually still had their milk delivered. But in college there were cleaners who went in daily, at least to empty bins and tidy round. He could hardly be lying undiscovered in a pool of blood. Nevertheless...

  ‘Thing is, he’s one of those old-style academic workaholics. Never takes a holiday. Lives for his work.’ You could set your watch by him, normally, coming and going from the library. ‘It’s just so out of character.’

  The head porter was volunteering no opinions. ‘Jaffa cake?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Jenny nibbled frowningly at one chocolaty edge. ‘Also—’ She didn’t want to be disloyal, but the pau
se spread out until it was impossible not to fill it. And her concern, after all, was genuine. ‘Also, to be perfectly frank, I don’t think his work has been going too well.’

  There – it was said. Ernie’s face remained impressively neutral, so she pressed on. ‘He hasn’t published anything in years. I mean, years. And I know it’s because he’s working on his monograph, this definitive biography of his, but...’ It all created its own pressure, didn’t it? The work that was to be a lifetime’s achievement, the crowning glory of a career – and meanwhile the lack of those smaller, regular outputs which maintained scholarly momentum, which kept your head in the game and your name in the public eye, and ticked boxes for research assessment purposes. The more time passed the better the book had to be. By now, this one had to be pretty much perfect.

  ‘I don’t think he’s been making much progress lately. There was a half-day Regency Literature conference in the faculty at the start of term, slap bang in his field, and he didn’t offer a paper, though you’d think he’d have had a draft chapter or something he wanted feedback on, at least. In fact, he only showed his face for the first session and then disappeared before the Q&A. It was one of our own research students, and she was really disappointed.’ No wonder – his early departure had bordered on bad manners. And Dr Whybrow’s comments were enormously respected. For Jenny, her supervisor’s gently insightful criticism had been the making of her doctorate.

  ‘And lately, if I ask him how it’s going, even in the most general sort of way, he goes all weird on me. Defensive, you know. Clams up, changes the subject. I think he might... well, I think he might be...’

  ‘Blocked.’ It sounded dreadfully final, the way Ernie said it.

  ‘I suppose so, yes. And what with that, and then not being here, it makes me anxious about him.’ She prodded one cranberry sandal with her toe and stared at the glowing plastic coals. ‘I’m afraid he might be running away.’

  The fire into which Dr Whybrow gazed threw out a much more hesitant glow, and from time to time he stretched forwards from his squatting position to insert another twist of dried marram grass at the seat of the flame. The driftwood bonfires of his boyhood had lit easily and burned with a brisk intensity – but those memories were of breezeless summer afternoons, a far cry from the damp of a late October evening on an exposed rooftop.

  A wooden ladder afforded access, via a vertiginous climb from the main chamber of the Martello tower and thence through a heavy trapdoor, to a roof terrace which must once have served both as lookout and gun emplacement. Four square stone platforms commanded the view to north, south, east and west, each presumably once surmounted by heavy cannon: 24-pounders, according to his reading, at least if his tower was similarly equipped to the one at Aldeburgh. Of the timber gun carriages there remained no sign, but embedded iron rings still marked where they were shackled against recoil. Between the stone blocks were four rectangular recesses in the brickwork of the parapet, vented behind and above, which he took to have housed braziers. It was in one of these openings, on an improvised scrap of corrugated tin, that he was coaxing his fire to life.

  A light drizzle began to fall, and he moved in closer in an attempt to shield the half-hearted blaze. Even on a clear night, and stoked by more accustomed hands, this hearth can surely have supplied precious little warmth to the soldiers sent up here to keep watch. A lonely, fearful watch by Colstone’s account: his essay spoke of a ‘dread presentiment’ which ‘ran like flame before the wind’ to seize the populace, and to which even battle-hardened regulars were not insusceptible. With the grande armée massed at Boulogne one hundred thousand strong and the Frenchman bragging he would plant his imperial eagle on the Tower of London, along the English coast all eyes were trained upon the horizon for signs of the invasionary fleet, a new armada to eclipse the historic might of Philip’s Spain a dozenfold, a hundredfold. The fleet that would never come.

  From past the parapet, below the tower, came the soft slap and hissing withdrawal of breakers on the shingle. A fragment of Colstone’s verse slid into Whybrow’s mind: ‘...while old man Strand / suck’d brine through rattling teeth...’

  He was here. The conviction was as unalterable as it was unexpected: the sudden, hurtling, headlong certainty that he was here, that William Colstone had stood here on this roof, chafing frozen fingers at this fire, his gaze fixed out beyond this rampart on the same black, empty, breathing mass of sea.

  Back in the inner sanctum again two weeks later, Jenny was taking the weight off a pair of eau de Nil vintage kitten heels.

  ‘I know where it is he goes now, anyway.’

  The head porter was sorting keys on a panel of hooks on the wall. The college was endowed with excessive numbers of keys, none of them seemingly ever in the right place, and Ernie was engaged in a one-man game of perpendicular Chinese chequers. Without turning, he gave a short nod. ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Yes. He’s bought himself a castle.’

  The shuttling hands paused, though he still didn’t turn. ‘A castle?’

  ‘Well, all right, not a castle exactly. More of a fort. A Martello tower, to be precise.’

  ‘Ah.’ Impossible to tell, with Ernie, what his familiarity might be with the military architecture of the Napoleonic Wars.

  ‘Out on the coast in Suffolk, near where he’s from, I gather. Where his family was from, I mean. And he’s been staying in it – though goodness knows how. It sounds a complete wreck from what I can make out, been empty for years. In fact, I’m not sure it’s ever been lived in at all – not properly, not by a family or anything, not since it had the army in it, back in the day.’

  Ernie, having achieved some arcane symmetry in the disposition of the keys, joined her beside the fire. ‘Is there electricity?’ Trust him, with the obvious practical question that it hadn’t occurred to her to ask.

  ‘I think so. I’m not sure. He mentioned something about the place having been used by the Home Guard for exercises during the war, and also for animals at some point – cows, I think it was. He said that’s why there’s water there: the farmer had a tap put in. Perhaps he put in electricity as well.’ She traced a hazy arc with one hand. ‘A generator or something.’

  ‘Red diesel.’

  Jenny blinked. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Red diesel would be the thing. Farmers get it cheap, for registered agricultural use. And you can run a generator on it.’

  ‘Right. Um, he didn’t say.’ Dr Whybrow hadn’t said much, really, in the way of functional detail. Nothing about how you reached the place, which was right on the beach: quite literally down on the shingle, so it seemed. Nor about furniture – if you could even have got it there – or whether the roof leaked, or what he was doing for heat. There wouldn’t be a cleaner and three hot meals a day provided like he was used to in college. But if he’d been sketchy on the practicalities there was nothing unforthcoming about the way he described the tower, and especially its early history. How hammocks were slung from hooks set in the walls of the main barrack room, and tarpaulin sheets to partition off the officers’ sleeping quarters from those of the men. Even the smell of the place, salty with seawater and dried sweat and fish hung smoking above the fires to supplement their rations – though quite how he knew all this was another matter. In fact, it was odd, when you came to think about it, the contrast in him from the polite evasiveness with which he’d fended off her attempts at gentle probing earlier in the term and this newfound loquacity. There was an undercurrent to his voice she’d never encountered in him before: an edge of excitement, almost of zeal.

  ‘Colstone served there, he reckons. You know, William Colstone, the poet he’s working on. The one who’s the subject of his book. It seems he was actually billeted in this Martello tower.’

  ‘Ah. He knows that, does he?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. I guess he must have found a mention of it in the literature. Or maybe – I don’t know, maybe he’s come across some evidence there in the tower.’

  Ernie’s e
yebrows lifted a notch. ‘Evidence?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’ She giggled. ‘I don’t mean he’s found the bloke’s initials carved into the doorframe or something. Fingerprints, or traces of his DNA. I meant evidence in the historian’s sense, not the TV detective drama sense. Papers – a letter, receipts, some old army paperwork. In fact—’

  It was a word he’d used about himself, unremarked at the time but which afterwards had stuck in her mind. The word he’d used was ‘witness’.

  ‘In fact, I wonder if he might have found some writing of his own. Of Colstone’s own, I mean.’ A diary, even? A diary would be gold dust, the biographer’s Holy Grail. Why not? Such shafts of unexpected light did strike occasionally, in research. The extraordinary, serendipitous find.

  But in a disused cowshed?

  Apparently satisfied, Ernie leaned back in his chair. ‘So that will be why he bought the place, then. Because of its connection to this man.’

  ‘Could be,’ said Jenny. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling that it was somehow, obscurely, the other way about.

  In the cold belly of the tower, beneath the arching hemisphere of brick, Whybrow lay awake. The paraffin storm lamp, which served him for both light and heat, threw into uneven, ridged relief the inner surface of the dome which in daytime appeared only as a smooth curve. Strange, really, the way more detail and texture was visible by the dim glow from the paraffin wick than could be seen in the daylight. The slightest shift in his own position, even a turn of his head towards the lamp, and the movement, or his breath, would cause the flame to shiver in its glass chimney, sending shadows scattering over the bricks.

  He could pick out the contours of the broad wooden door recessed in the wall to the inshore side; the only pool of black was the deeply embrasured window opposite, facing out to sea.