The Book of Air and Shadows

relieved, for I’d been finding the man ever more annoying. I mentioned this to Paul as Brown drove us away from the pub and he asked me why that was, since Crosetti struck him as mild enough. He’d hardly said a word in the car during the journey north.
    “I don’t like him,” I said. “A typical poseur from the outer boroughs. A
screenwriter
, for God’s sake! Completely untrustworthy. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I invited him along.”
    “You should pay attention to the people who irritate you,” said Paul.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Oh, I think you know,” he said in that irritatingly confident tone he sometimes has, like a voice from the clouds.
    “I
don’t
know. I would have said if I knew, or have you been vouchsafed the power to read minds?”
    “Hm. Can you think of another poseur from the outer boroughs, this one an actor rather than a screenwriter? But this one didn’t have a family as happy as Crosetti’s, didn’t have a loving mom, didn’t have a heroic dad-”
    “What, you think I’m
jealous
of him? That I’m
like
him?”
    “-who decided to play it safe and go to law school instead of taking a shot at what he really wanted to do, and he sees a kid with a warm and loving family who has the guts to follow his dreams-”
    “That is such horseshit…”
    “Not. Plus, you practically accused him of trying to seduce your wife, in fact, you encouraged him to do so. Just before you wrecked the bar in your hotel and put the bartender in the hospital.”
    “I did no such thing,” I said spontaneously.
    “I know you think you didn’t, but you really did. Have you ever had blackouts like that before?”
    “Oh, thank you! I’m sure you have an AA group in your church basement that I’d fit right into.”
    “No, I don’t think you’re a drunk, or not yet, although three pints of strong English beer is a lot to drink in the middle of the day.”
    “I’m a big guy,” I said, a little lamely, for it was all starting to come back, little fragments of horrid memory. I am
not
a drinker ordinarily.
    The hell with this.

    We got to Darden Hall about four, under sodden skies. The surprisingly short autumn day of these latitudes was nearly gone and our headlights illuminated dark drifts of leaves on the long drive up from the road. The place had recently come into the National Trust, on the demise of the final Baron Reith in 1999, and had not yet been renovated for public view. We had called ahead to arrange a conversation with the resident conservator, a Miss Randolph.
    The place was the usual crumbling pile familiar to us all from horror films and
Masterpiece Theatre
anglophiliac fantasias, although the hour and the weather gave it the look more of the former’s sort of prop. It had a Jacobean core, a couple of Georgian wings, and some Victorian gewgaws despoiling the facade. We chance to meet a workman on a tiny tractor in front of the house and he directed us around to what was once the servants’ entrance. Our knock was answered by a solid fortyish woman of the English Rose type who wore half glasses, a tweed skirt, and two cardigans, wisely in the case of these last, for the room she showed us into was almost cold enough to show breath. A tiny electric fire hummed valiantly, but clearly to little avail. It was the old steward’s office, she explained, the only habitable room in the house, and her headquarters.
    She asked what she could do for us and I said, “We’re here to see Count Dracula.” She grinned and replied in an appropriately
Masterpiece Theatre-
ish accent, “Yes, everyone says that, or else something about the peasants coming for Frankenstein. Too many Gothic novels and films, but I think there’s something in all that nonsense, you know. I think that even then, in the nineteenth century, when it seemed as if the life that produced these houses would go on forever, writers knew there was something wrong with them, that they rested ultimately on the most dreadful suffering, and it bubbled up in the Gothic tale.”
    “What sort of suffering is this one built on?”
    “Oh, take your pick. The original Lord Dunbarton stole it courtesy of Henry VIII from some Benedictine nuns who ran a charity hospital here. None of that for the baron, of course, and afterward the Dunbartons made their pile in sugar and slaves. That funded the Georgian buildings and afterward they had coal and gas and urban property in Nottingham and Coventry. None of