The Echoing Stones Read Free Page A

project seemed to her and there had been moments, he remembered, when he’d wondered uneasily if she might not be right?
    After he’d been accepted for the job, that is. Beforethat, sustained by an unacknowledged certainty that he’d never get it, he had allowed himself to revel in the prospect as in an ecstatic dream. And indeed there was a dream-like quality in the way the whole thing had come about – the strokes of luck involved, the bizarre coincidences.
    If they were coincidences? Or was it, rather, that something deep inside him had for many a long day been watching, watching, for just such a chance as this? Had been scanning the Situations Vacant pages of the evening paper, not idly, as he had supposed, and for lack of anything better to read as he stood crushed against the other commuters on the District Line, but with set purpose; his whole soul secretly poised to pounce on something – anything – which spelt OUT.
    It was coincidence, though, by any calculation, that the Stately Home advertising for a caretaker should be Emmerton Hall itself, a Tudor mansion situated not three miles away from the village where Arnold had been brought up. He knew it well. It had been in private hands then and going to rack and ruin for lack of money. The overgrown kitchen garden had been a Mecca for the small boys of the neighbourhood. The high wall of ancient red brick, warm and rough against your bare knees as you scrambled up and over it, all came back to him as he swayed rhythmically in the tube train as it trundled its way towards Wembley Park: the plump, rosy peaches which somehow still managed to ripen among the all-embracing bindweed: the purple, half-split plums littering the ground: the murmur of the wasps: and how the most wasp-ridden specimens were always the best and the sweetest. Oh, the taste of them! The hot, sweet scent, and the juice that trickled down your chin!
    By the time he reached home, his whole being was lit by a sort of joyous madness which he hadn’t experienced in years. Well, ever, as a matter of fact.
    *
    “Had a good day, dear?”
    “Yes, thank you, dear, not too bad.”
    As this was the sum total of their usual conservation on his return from work, it was no wonder that Mildred didn’t notice anything special about it: had no inkling of how good a day it had been, and did not bother to wonder why, having hung up his coat, he hurried straight to his desk and started to write a letter instead of switching on the T.V.
    At this stage, there was no need to tell Mildred anything . Well, why have a row when nothing was going to come of it anyway?
    But something did come of it; and from then on, decisions crowded in upon him thick and fast. It was when the question of early retirement from his present job came up that things were brought to a head. The new job at Emmerton Hall was to start in April, in time for the tourist season. His old job, in the Accounts Department of the Town Hall, which in the ordinary course of events would have continued for another four years, must now be jettisoned with almost indecent haste: no golden handshake for him, and certainly a much reduced pension. Mildred must be put in the picture and fast. It was only fair.
    “You see, dear,” he explained, “it’ll mean a drop in income, obviously, but with the free accommodation and our own home-grown vegetables …”
    At first, she didn’t seem to be taking it in.
    “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “You don’t retire for another four years …”
    He sighed: started again: and this time, after a while, it did get through.
    “You mean retire ?” she shrieked. “Retire now !” and he could see the panic in her eyes. That well-known panic which the word “retire” is apt to arouse in even the most contented of wives. Home for lunch. Homefor tea. Home for mid-morning coffee. Round my feet all day, bored, restless, resenting my friends when they drop in for a chat.
    He hastened to allay these