Marty had one final interviewee. Carys.
He hadn’t seen her since he’d trespassed on the upper landing the day before. What he’d seen between Carys and her father had unsettled him, and there was, he knew, a childish urge in him to punish her by withholding his company. Now he felt obliged to seek her out, however uncomfortable the meeting might prove.
He found her that afternoon, loitering in the vicinity of the dovecote. She was wrapped up in a fur coat that looked as if it had been bought at a thrift shop; it was several sizes too big for her, and moth-eaten. As it was, she seemed overdressed. The weather was warm even if the wind was gusty, and the clouds that passed across a Wedgwood-blue sky carried little threat: too small, too white. They were April clouds, containing at worst a light shower.
“Carys.”
She fixed him with eyes so ringed with tiredness his first thought was that they were bruised. In her hand she had a bundle, rather than a bunch, of flowers, many still buds.
“Smell,” she said, proffering them.
He sniffed at them. They were practically scentless: they just smelled of eagerness and earth.
“Can’t smell much.”
“Good,” she said. “I thought I was losing my senses.”
She let the bundle drop to the ground, impatient with them.
“You don’t mind if I interrupt, do you?”
She shook her head. “Interrupt all you like,” she replied. The strangeness of her manner struck him more forcibly than ever; she always spoke as though she had some private joke on her mind. He longed to join in the game, to learn her secret language, but she seemed so sealed up, an anchorite behind a wall of sly smiles.
“I suppose you heard the dogs last night,” he said.
“I don’t remember,” she replied, frowning. “Maybe.”
“Did anybody say anything to you about it?”
“Why should they?”
“I don’t know. I just thought-”
She put him out of his discomfort with a fierce little nod of her head.
“Yes, if you want to know. Pearl told me there’s been an intruder. And you scared him off, is that right? You and the dogs.”
“Me and the dogs.”
“And which of you bit off his finger?”
Had Pearl told her about the finger too, or was it the old man who’d vouchsafed that vicious detail? Had they been together today, in her room? He canceled the scene before it flared up in his head.
“Did Pearl tell you that?” he said.
“I haven’t seen the old man,” she replied, “if that’s what you’re driving at.
His thought encapsulated; it was eerie. She even used his phraseology. “The old man,” she called him, not “Papa.”
“Shall we walk down to the lake?” she suggested, not really seeming to care one way or the other.
“Sure.”
“You were right about the dovecote, you know,” she said. “It’s ugly when it’s empty like this. I never thought of it like that before.” The image of the deserted dovecote genuinely seemed to unnerve her. She shivered, even in the thick coat.
“Did you run today?” she asked.
“No. I was too tired.”
“Was it that bad?”
“Was what that bad?”
“Last night.”
He didn’t know how to begin to answer. Yes, of course, it had been bad, but even if he trusted her enough to describe the illusion he’d seen-and he was by no means sure he did-his vocabulary was woefully inadequate.
Carys paused as they came in sight of the lake. Small white flowers starred the grass beneath their feet, Marty didn’t know their names. She studied them as she said:
“Is it just another prison, Marty?”
“What?”
“Being here.”
She had her father’s skill with non sequiturs. He hadn’t anticipated the question at all, and it threw him. Nobody had really asked him how he’d felt since arriving. Certainly not beyond a superficial inquiry as to his comfort. Perhaps consequently he hadn’t really bothered to ask himself. His answer-when it came-came haltingly.
“Yes . . . I suppose it’s still a prison, I hadn’t really thought . . . I mean, I can’t just up and leave anytime I want to, can I? But it doesn’t compare . . . with, Wandsworth”-again, his vocabulary failed him-“this is just another world.”