The Gambler and the Castle Read online

The Gambler and the Castle

  By Greg Blyth

  Copyright 2012 Greg Blyth

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  The stiffness in the joints of his hands and fingers was beginning to ease, as was the pain. The movement helped. Instinct and muscle-memory had taken over now and his hands started to flow over the discoloured piano keys like roving waves in an organised storm.

  With his eyes closed and his mind transfixed on the music, forcefully tangible, Ian rocked to the peaking crescendo of his latest work-in-progress. He breathed in deeply through his nose, taking in the dank smell of the master bedroom – rising mostly from the thinning Persian rugs, the thick curtains that had probably never been washed, and the heavy wooden furniture. Ian didn’t mind the smell of the room. He thought of it less as a smell of age and more as a smell of history – lives and stories of its previous residents since the great house was built in 1860 by Lord Rodney Illingworth of Horsham.

  Ian wasn’t sure how the lineage wound its way down through the generations, but somehow this mansion and its lavish estate had recently been left to his wife Philippa. She insisted that until Ian’s composition was complete he should stay out in the country where he could be free of distractions. She would stay in their house in Chiswick Park until he was done. But what he was beginning to discover more and more, was that it was Philippa who inspired him. And her distracting company was what he missed most. Even now, as his fingers gambolled across their ebony and ivory playground, he wondered what Pipsie was doing, and what she would think of this composition so far.

  Just as the music swelled into what was to be the climax of the piece, his hands came to a stop and the room fell silent. Now, for the first time today, he could hear the patter of rain against the large multi-paned window. He opened his eyes to the sheet music on the stand above the keys, pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose and flipped through the dog-eared pages. Months of reworking the music had resulted in the pages being filled with pencil markings and finger smudges. He turned to the seventh page.

  It was blank. Formidably so. The climax had yet to be completed, and his stomach tightened as he considered the looming deadline that had been set by Edmond Cole, the director of the Sussex Symphony Orchestra. Ian Hawes had earned quite the reputation over the last thirty odd years within the ranks of the SSO, but in recent months he deemed his reputation to be far more fragile than he had once believed; the cynics seemed to outnumber his supporters and heavy-handed criticism laced the whispers at the black-tie dinners and soirées: Does he still assume to be in his prime? Has he gone deaf to his own music?

  Exhausted and sore from the long hours of playing, and even more from worrying, he put his glasses down and stood up, his left knee creaking under his weight. He stretched his limbs as straight as they could go and moved across the room to the mahogany military chest under the window. The king-size four-poster bed was unmade and he did all he could to resist the temptation of collapsing on top of the scrunched goose-down duvet. As warm and as soft as the duvet was, it was a poor substitute for Pipsie’s cuddles and kisses.

  He wiped the foggy window with the sleeve of his cardigan, rested his elbows on the antique chest of drawers and stared out at the countryside. Lush and languid under the heavy grey sky. From here he could see the entire back garden, acres of lawn and flower beds in immaculate condition. Everything about this place fuelled his imagination. When he first arrived he could spend five minutes looking out the window or walking the grounds, followed by hours upon hours of playing his piano. The country invigorated him; even the incessant rain wasn’t as dreary as it was in the city.

  But lately the effect was dwindling. More time was spent staring and thinking and speaking to an imaginary Pipsie, while less time was spent composing. He found himself beginning to search for inspiration, trying to lure that shy muse from its barricaded vault for which no key exists.

  He tapped his fingers on the top of the chest, as though playing the piano’s keys. He played through the last few notes on the sixth page of his composition, trying yet again to break through the barrier. And once again the conclusion eluded him.

  He hammered his fist down on the chest and opened the window, but it got stuck less than a hand’s breadth out – he would have a word with Hanna about that – but it was enough for now. The crisp air infiltrated the stale room and he drew it in to the bottom of his lungs.

  A rap on the door was followed by Hanna opening it and stepping into the room.

  “This window won’t open further than this. Didn’t I tell you about this yesterday?” Ian asked the Polish housekeeper, who looked even larger than she did at breakfast. Has she been eating all morning?

  “And again I tell you what I told you yesterday: it doesn’t go further. Here.” She placed a silver tray with a fine china bowl and a cup of tea, down on his bed.

  “What have you got there?” He stepped closer and peered into the bowl. Pistachios. There were only a handful of them in the bowl and he scooped them all into his hand, before tossing a few in his mouth and chewing on them.

  Hanna glanced down at his piano. Ian caught her eyes wandering to the sheet music, her bushy brow furrowed as she considered the blank seventh page. Ian moved between her and the piano. She lifted an eyebrow with an expression of boredom and turned away.

  Ian knew she was feigning her disinterest. He remained between her and the sheet music while he finished the last of the pistachios and took a sip of the cold, sweet tea. “Ugh.” He placed the awful tea back on the tray. If the house were his he’d have fired the servants from the day he arrived. The whole bloody lot of them. But Philippa owned it and the estate’s trust fund was paying their salaries.

  Hanna collected the tray and exited his room. He stepped out into the passageway, keeping his eye on her as she waddled down the passage to the rest of the house.

  Ian contemplated the housekeeper’s loyalty and wondered how much his composition would sell on the black market. He was about to go back inside his room when he heard an indistinct, high-pitched squeak behind him.

  He spun around, half expecting to catch a mouse making a dash into his room, but instead saw Mrs Walters sitting on a chair in the middle of the passageway, exactly where she had been the day before. She hadn’t moved. And she was still in her flimsy gown, which left little to Ian’s imagination as to how horrendously her body had lost the war against gravity. Her eyes were so deep in her sunken eye sockets that Ian couldn’t tell if she were dead or watching him.

  He stared at the eerie old bat, waiting for a sign of life.

  Eventually her deflated cheeks moved and the wet, high-pitched sound came again: she was pressing spit out between her tongue and her top dentures, then sucking the spit back into her mouth again.

  Ian didn’t find many people interesting, but she certainly was an unusual one. He watched her intently. The only three things he knew about her was that she was a friend of Philippa’s parents, she had been living in the house since the early stages of the Cold War when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and her real name, or rather, given name, as Ian believed to be the case, was Susan Walters.

  But she didn’t look like a Walters. And she had a Third World smell about her. Ian looked up and down the passageway, they were alone.

  “I thought I told you not to hang around outside my room,” he enunciated loudly. “Hmm? What do you do here all day?”

  With no response whatsoever, Ian wondered if she was deaf.

  “Mrs Wa—alters?” Nothing. “Mrs Gru—umpybi—itch?” His left knee clicked painlessly as he bent down in front of her, levelling his eyes with hers. He lowered his voice to a hushed whisper. “Have you been listen
ing in on me? Did Hanna put you here… to steal my music?”

  She sucked spit between her dentures again.

  “Don’t you want to go to the window?” Behind her, at the far end of the passageway, which was lined with closed doors on both sides, a large bay window looked out the front of the house where the footpath led from the front door to the road that wound its way through the farmlands and neighbouring estates.

  “You’re going to the window. I won’t have you spying on me.” He took hold of the handles on the back of her wheelchair, but as it spun around she started making a guttural, moaning sound. Like a cow giving birth. Despite the incessant noise, he continued pushing her and as she neared the window her moaning stopped and her breathing stabilised.

  Leaning forward to see if her expression had changed, something else caught his eye entirely. Something he wished he had rather not