dislike for each other. He read maths and The Daily Telegraph, played rugby and liked student politics; he was someone I knew could not be my friend. Our natural instinct was to disagree on all things. However, as I had a refrigerator and he had a toasted sandwich-maker; and he had a car, and I had a girlfriend he fancied greatly, we ended up seeing more of each other than we would have chosen. She moved on. We were left as friends.
I had never been to Norfolk. All I knew was that it was flat, intensively farmed, on the way to nowhere and that doctors marked the medical records of patients who had survived accidents but been left slightly subnormal ‘NFN’—Normal for Norwich. It was also, at the end of the 1980s, the county that transport policy forgot. It was getting dark as the All carried us through the Thetford Forest to wide, open fields with huge metal irrigation booms. And it was after 11pm by the time we turned in through a pair of brick lodge gates and up a long drive to what was evidently a vast country house. All was in darkness except for a single downstairs window. When we switched the engine off, the sound of organ music wafted out into the cool spring night air.
We pushed on the bell of the grand main portico. There was no sound from within to indicate that it was working. After a few moments of alternate ringing and knocking, we tried the door. It had appeared to be locked, but when Richard gave it a harder shove it opened, and we found ourselves standing in a huge entrance hall, enveloped by resounding organ music. There was a yellow glow from behind an organ case at the top of the big double staircase. ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Hello!’ The organ music continued.
‘Hello! HELLO!’ shouted Richard.
The music stopped. A male voice echoed back.
‘Hello? Is someone there?’ It was the voice on the phone.
‘Hello!’ we shouted back.
A short, wiry figure came down the stairs. He looked at us a little doubtfully, as if unsure what we wanted.
Then he spotted our cases. His face cleared.
‘Just off?’ He extended a cordial hand. ‘Excellent. Very nice to see you again. You’ve signed the book? Good, good.’ He gently ushered us back out through the door. ‘Do come again. Bye.’ The door shut with a click.
There didn’t seem any alternative but to go back in. The room was now in darkness, but we were in time to see our man disappear down an unlit passage which led into a square, high-ceilinged kitchen. When we got there he had disappeared. Or rather, he had metamorphosed into a tall, good-looking and rather formidable woman, standing by an ancient Aga. She had a pen on a string round her neck which, as she looked up, she clicked menacingly.
‘Who are you?’ she said sharply. I smiled, apologised if we were late, and explained that we had come about the microlight. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’ At that moment her husband re-emerged by another door. ‘Lester, some people are here. Something to do with lights or lighting or something. Is this something you’ve arranged?’ She looked mildly irritated.
‘Lights?’
I attempted to explain again. Lester showed polite interest but no recognition. ‘Are you friends of Dan?’ he suggested helpfully. This seemed to crystallise something in the woman.
‘What sort of time do you call this? We might easily have gone to bed. If you want to stay in this house in future, perhaps you’d care to make your arrangements with the manager, not the lift boy.’ Mr Watson had left the room again. I was beginning to feel slightly seasick, and almost wondered if I had imagined my telephone conversation with him. But Mrs Watson had moved on. ‘I suppose you want feeding. Do you think these raspberries are defrosted?’
There were no further enquiries about the microlight. In fact no one seemed to mind in the least why we were there. I made one more attempt on Mr Watson when he wandered into the library where I had been sent with instructions to get a drink. ‘A Thruster? Yes, from what I can gather they’re very good machines. Very good. We’ve been thinking about getting one ourselves,’ he said. ‘There’s an instructor near here. We could go over tomorrow, if you liked.’
Later Mrs Watson led us up a bare wooden back staircase to the third floor and along a wide passageway. It was lined with bookcases, old magazines, stacked mattresses, ancient convector heaters, old telephones, broken toys and three-legged stools with birdcages perched on top of them. The linoleum had worn through in patches, revealing undulating floorboards beneath which squawked and groaned as we crossed them. Opening doors more or less at random, she settled on a room containing two beds and a mountain of furniture stacked under dust sheets. There was a musty smell, which turned into a heavy scent of musk and vanilla near the window. As she pulled the curtains on their noisy metal runners I glimpsed a branch of wisteria, laden with flowers, which had grown through the open top sash of one of the windows. The branch was at least three inches thick.
‘I don’t think anyone’s slept in here recently,’ she said. Her tone implied that this was to our advantage. Tugging on the frayed, plaited cord of an ancient electric fire, she retrieved a brown Bakelite round-pinned plug, which she plugged in and flicked the toggle. Sparks fizzed from the middle section, where one of the ceramic bars had at some stage been knocked, though the wire remained intact. ‘Make sure you switch it off,’ she said sternly. ‘The last person left it on for three months.’
As she removed the bed covers, the bars set up a whining, moaning resonance and the tarnished reflection plate began to tick as it heated up. In the bathroom across the corridor she twisted the newest (and only chrome-coloured) tap of some four different sets of plumbing which converged upon the bathtub, crossing and weaving round each other as they led off via a maze of pipes. It emitted a groan of air. ‘You’ll have to wait until the morning for hot water,’ she said, adding, with a momentary return to her earlier asperity, ‘if we’d known you were coming, we could have switched it on.’ With that she said good night.
We had finished breakfast before Dan Watson appeared in the kitchen. Lean and high-cheekboned, radiating unhurried calm, he swept his brown hair away from his eyes but didn’t remove his sunglasses as he held out a friendly hand. He had been at a party, he explained, until five. His movements were apparently choreographed always to finish in an elegant position. He sniffed the coffee in the cafetière doubtfully, inspected the sausages and bacon that Mrs Watson had told us in a note were in a roasting tin in the oven, then set about assembling his own breakfast. He ignored most of the fare on offer, set a battered espresso machine to brew on the Aga, scrambled some eggs and added some chopped parsley. He set some butter to melt in a pan, added a big field mushroom which he said he had found the day before. Only when he had assembled everything to his liking, ground salt and pepper coarsely over it, and his coffee was ready, did he start to eat.
Mr Watson we had already seen. He seemed to know all about us now. He had pottered in and out of the kitchen several times, carrying files, or music, or pairs of pliers. Despite being dressed in a grubby fawn nylon jerkin, which made him look like a cross between a grip, a conjuror and a big game hunter, there was something curiously intimidating about him. ‘Do you play the piano?’ his disconcerting opening remark had been. ‘What, neither of you? Tst.’ Followed by a muttered, ‘No-one seems able to do anything nowadays.’ He was plainly a man of parts. The downstairs loo was festooned with a mass of framed photographs and faded newspaper cuttings of a younger Mr Watson—at Cambridge; in Africa; winning a by-election; as an MP at Westminster.
Nor, it turned out, was Mr Watson a novice when it came to flying. He had flown in Africa, where he had set up an engineering business after the war. His first plane, he told us, he bought
