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  Contents

  Winston Graham

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Winston Graham

  The Tumbled House

  Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel, The House with the Stained Glass Windows was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark’ novel, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which, Bella Poldark, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.

  Aside from the Poldark series, Graham’s most successful work was Marnie, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham’s other books were filmed, including The Walking Stick, Night Without Stars and Take My Life. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel, The Grove of Eagles, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Private Man, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.

  Dedication

  For

  DENIS and KAY HOCKING

  Chapter One

  You could have said that Joanna was potentially unfaithful to her husband from the moment she met Roger Shorn that Sunday in February. She had been at Brighton for a week-end with the Colcutts, and Roger came to lunch. He asked her if he might beg a lift home on the Sunday afternoon, and although she had thought of staying for dinner she at once said yes. She always hated driving. That was all it amounted to at first.

  Though not particularly notable in this rather grand company, he stood out in it just the same because of the odd way he had of looking and being distinguished anywhere. She saw it clearly. She also saw clearly that the minute she came into a room she was still the only woman in it so far as he was concerned. Perhaps that should have made a red light flicker somewhere; a different reflex in her own feelings certainly should, if she had been alert to it. But just at this time she badly needed someone to like her, someone to admire her, someone to be sympathetic. She needed warmth like a vitamin-hungry child. He gave it her.

  For the first few miles on the way home they talked about the house-party. Roger was at his best; light and amusing, he always knew the right anecdote about people, slightly malicious but disarmingly funny. The Colcutts, they agreed, were flying high. Roger told her of a house-party he had been to at Christmas to which the host had invited only couples who had been divorced during the past year.

  “How did you qualify?” she asked.

  “I got in as a season-ticket holder. How is Don, by the way? Setting the West Coast on fire?”

  “It’s a terrific success. He’s about his furthest distant now. Vancouver last week.”

  “People in Canada like young conductors as they like youth of every kind. Here you have to face a more sophisticated culture. But it’ll be the same in the end.”

  “So long as the end doesn’t take thirty years to arrive.”

  “Why should it?”

  “Well, among other things he has to overcome the handicap of an English name.”

  “Is it a handicap in his case? I should have thought it an advantage to have had a famous father!”

  “I’m sure not. Far better to have been called Volkonski.”

  The wind was collecting the dust and the old leaves and blowing them in surly spirals about the road, but the heater kept the car warm and cosy.

  Roger said: “ How did Don take his father’s death?”

  “He cabled asking if he should come home, but naturally I said not. There was nothing he could do.”

  “What’s happened to Sir John’s cottage?”

  “It’ll be sold when Don gets back, but there’s such a pile of personal papers there that we felt we had to leave them to Don to sort out.”

  Roger lit a cigarette. “ I was a great admirer of John Marlowe. Don ought to write a book about him.”

  “Sir John’s book says all the important things.”

  “None of the personal things that people like to know. ‘ John Marlowe, Barrister and Philosopher. A revealing portrait! By his Son.’”

  “You know all the angles,” she said.

  “I love you when you’re slightly contemptuous,” he said. “ I first saw you like that coming down the stairs after that first party. Like a Raeburn portrait, but with greater subtlety of tone. The only thought in my head then was: that portrait’s going to be mine.”

  “And it was.”

  “Too briefly. Why did you throw me up, Joanna?”

  “It happened. Need we bother?”

  “You don’t know how often I’ve regretted introducing Don to you. Without that complication.… .”

  “When did you first meet Don?”

  “I knew John Marlowe first—oh, eight or nine years ago. Then Don a year later—just before he went in the army—very young then, very explosive, very single-minded.”

  “He still is.”

  “Don’t you think—if it hadn’t been for him you might sometime have come back to me?”

  After a second’s hesitation she said: “ Is this the way home?”

  “Not the most direct.”

  “I thought that signpost said Arundel.”

  “It did.”

  “Am I being kidnapped?”

/>   “Far from it. But I thought we might go home through Midhurst. The Old Millhouse is empty, I suppose?”

  “Apart from John Marlowe’s ghost.”

  “Well, I thought we might stop on the way through, pay our respects.”

  “I didn’t know you admired him so much.”

  Roger Shorn changed gear and slid past a group of hardy cyclists. “As a journalist I’m interested in all manifestations. John Marlowe had the courage to do the unfashionable thing. The pursuit of money is the religious creed of today. Anyone who challenges contemporary thought is interesting.”

  She glanced at him. His clever full lips were slightly pursed, his eyes narrowed, his long fingers held the wheel easily. He turned suddenly and smiled at her. “ Believe me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I even watched TV on Friday evening,” he said.

  “Oh, God! That was a challenge to no one.”

  “They’d used the wrong technique. Television is the medium of the close-up.”

  “I was so angry with myself, because it wasn’t a bad part.”

  “It wasn’t your part. They should never have asked you to do it; but that being said——”

  “That being said, it’s all there is to say.”

  He was silent for a moment. “All art is a conflict between self-expression and self-criticism. Sometimes, darling, it’s a disadvantage to see things too clearly too soon. I warned you years ago.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that you may be like me—too intelligent either to create or to interpret satisfactorily. It’s an obvious danger.”

  “It may be obvious but——”

  “But what?”

  “What does one do about it?” she said.

  “One comes to terms.”

  “I’m not sure I should be prepared to accept the only terms I can see offered.”

  They got to Midhurst about six. The cottage was out of the village on the Petersfield road. Set in an acre of garden, it was the conventional two cottages knocked into one, with the remains of the old mill at the end and a wheel with water still trickling over the edge. Roger Shorn stopped outside to open the gate, then drove in as far as the garage at the side.

  “Have you been down since he died?” he asked.

  “For the funeral, of course. And the week after. Not since.”

  “You don’t mind my stopping and looking round?”

  “I have the key. We might as well go inside, now we’re here.”

  He glanced at her and then got out and opened her door. She was almost as tall as he was, slim built but strong.

  By now dusk was not far off, but the day, already as grey as an etching, had no colour to lose. She led the way along the flag-paved path between the waving shrivelled heads of michaelmas daisies to the front door. The Yale key slipped into the lock easily enough, but the tumblers were hard to turn as if disuse had rusted them over. They went into the low square hall and from there into the main living-room, where her father-in-law had worked and spent most of his time. It was half dark and Roger clicked the light switch but there was no result.

  Joanna went to the window. “It’s dry enough after all that rain.… Everything’s thick with dust.”

  “The last time I came here,” said Roger, “in fact the only time, was just after Sir John Marlowe had published his book. I came down to talk over some aspects of it for a notice in my column in The Sentinel. I remember it rained most of the time and we spent it in here, except for an hour when we went out to the pub for a meal. But that was eighteen months ago.… Where’s the main switch?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  While he was gone she sank down on the window seat unbuttoning her coat, pulling off her gloves. In this room nothing had moved since its owner’s death. Even the air had last been breathed, one felt, by John Marlowe himself. His pipe still lay on the eighteenth-century Dutch marquetry writing-desk. Behind it was the Orpen portrait of his wife, and on the console table were the Guillermin and Leonhard Kern ivories collected by her. Books were piled on a wing chair.

  She had not moved when Roger came back. He switched on the light and said: “ That’s better. How lovely you look with your coppery hair and your Irish eyes.… Joanna, there’s quite a variety of tinned foods in the kitchen. Let’s have dinner here.”

  She ran her finger fastidiously along the edge of the window-sill. “It’s oppressive.”

  “It won’t be when we get a fire going. I’ll fix the meal. It will be like the old days.”

  “Why d’you suppose I want to remember them?”

  “Were they so distasteful?”

  “Not—distasteful. But people are like snakes, Roger, growing skins and discarding them. What happened four years ago is just something left behind—an old skin, best forgotten on all counts.”

  He inclined his head. “On principle I’m all against the backward glance. Forward with the People, in fact. Or forward without them. But I think dinner here would be much more fun than in some dreary roadhouse, even on the most contemporary terms.”

  She said slowly: “ I suppose there are some things I could do here. The solicitor last week was asking.…” She got up and went to the desk, picked up a photo in a frame, put it back. “I wish Don were here. I loathe picking over dead things.”

  “Let me do it for you—if you’ll tell me what you want.”

  She shook her head decisively, opened a drawer and turned over some of the papers. He had come over to her, picked up a book lying on the desk, tapped the dust off it and looked at the title. She took out an empty cheque-book, opened it to see the date on the stub.

  “Flecker’s Poems. Odd choice. Cigarette?”

  She smiled and nodded and took one. He lit it for her. His closeness was something she was very much aware of. She said. “I wish I didn’t always feel so much at home with you, Roger——”

  “It’s a community of temperament. I told you all along.”

  “There are quite a lot of things——” She stopped: “ Who’s that?”

  Her eyes had gone past him. He turned. “ What?”

  “There was someone looking in the window! A woman.”

  He went to the window and peered out. Dusk had fallen. “I can’t see anyone. Wait.” He went into the hall. She heard him open the front door and go out into the garden. He was gone about five minutes. When he came back he said: “There’s no one about at all. Are you sure you saw someone?”

  She blew out a thin smoky breath. “A woman with a scarf round her head.”

  “There’s certainly no one about. I went right to the gate.”

  Joanna shrugged. “Maybe it was a banshee warning me.”

  “Warning you?”

  “To keep away from dark men.”

  “I should have thought it was the last thing your Irish ancestry would have told you to do.”

  She went to the window herself now, staring into the darkened garden. An owl cried from the branches of a cherry tree and flew across the dying evening sky. Roger watched her, his handsome sallow face shadowed with a hesitation he didn’t often feel. Joanna Marlowe was one of the few women he could never be sure of two steps ahead.

  He said: “ Well?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I almost never keep away from dark

  men.”

  They had a successful meal with a bottle of good claret, and once it was settled she was glad she had stayed. Something that mattered was happening to her, for the first time for months. Life had an edge, on which one moved insubstantially but alert. Roger was at his most charming, with that subtle sophisticated attractiveness of manner given to a few men in their early forties. While he talked his hair ruffled over his forehead, his face came alive.

  “Coffee without milk. But you don’t take it, do you? I’ve been handicapped tonight. Thank God for olive oil and a tin of butter.”

  “I’d nearly forgotten how well you could work these things. A delicious talent.”

  “Tell me wh
at your next play is.”

  She looked at her coffee. Her lashes were the same colour as her hair, that very dark auburn that comes without freckles. He studied her; there was a hint of wildness in eyebrow and nostril that he liked to see.

  “I’ve about struck an all-time low,” she said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  She shrugged. “It comes down to what we were talking of in the car, doesn’t it? I used to think I was going places on the stage. It’s uncomfortable waking from that sort of dream.”

  “Darling, you’re exaggerating.”

  “Oh, maybe. I can get by. I’ve a face and a figure. I needn’t ever be short of jobs, of a sort. But I had ambitions to be something more than one of the crowd.”

  “Why not go back to the legitimate stage for a change? One doesn’t stop developing, you know, even at the great age of twenty-six.”

  “My dear, Don earns very little, as you know. We need the money.”

  “Perhaps living with Don makes everything more difficult.”

  “Living with Don, who obviously is going to amount to something, who already does, makes thoughts about oneself harder to take. That’s all.”

  “Did you ever tell him about us?”

  “I told him before we married that I’d had an affair. I named no names.”

  There was silence. She said suddenly: “And what about yourself? You’ve said absolutely nothing. What happened to the girl you were going with last year?”

  He blinked, his face half amused, half clouded by the question. “Fran? It didn’t work. I can never make anything of hard women. We broke up in the autumn.”

  “I see.”

  “Since you gave me up,” he said, “ it’s never been quite the same. You don’t find easy substitutes for the one good thing.”

  Her eyes glinted restlessly. “ What is the one good thing? I haven’t noticed you depriving yourself of the second best.”

  He said: “ We must have more meals together like this. And soon.”

  “The town would talk, darling.”

  “Let us have clandestine pleasures, then. Sybaritic meals in lonely cottages with nobody to look on. I’ll be an uncle to you.”