Free Conversations With Mr. Prain by Joan Taylor Page A

tea?”
    “Would you?” he asked.
    “No thank you,” I said. I summoned politeness and forbearance and put a mild expression on my face. I sat forward. I must be more assertive, I decided. This is becoming strange. “All right, then show me the house now, and that gallery with the photographs.”
    “Certainly,” he replied, formally.
    Mr. Prain and I rose, and moved away from the tea table, but, as he passed Monique, she bowed her headtowards him and whispered something. His forehead wrinkled. His dark eyes flashed, concentrating, like those of a rodent.
    A conspiracy. I knew. Collusion. Aiding and abetting. Murmured French. What better tongue for intrigue? I wondered if they were lovers, but decided I had got it back to front. Lovers can appear like conspirators because they have their own language, their own purposes and codes. Conspirators therefore remind one of lovers. This is what I decided, looking at them.
    Like the reader of a bad novel, who laments the time it takes to get to the end and cannot put the book down because the barbed bait of the promise of answers drags the reader on through the plot after one bite, so I, uncomfortable as I was, remained where I was.

chapter two | the bedroom
    The brief discussion we had about my work, following so quickly on the revelation of the photograph, put me in a vulnerable and morose mood.
    Dismissive, pompous, supercilious, conniving snob, I thought, sullenly. The adjectives I could have fun with here, in order to pinpoint precisely why he was so vexatious! He was nothing but a hubristic, Machiavellian, cunning, starchy, bumptious turkey cock! No, that would sound too much. A controlling, hoity-toity know-it-all. That was not quite right either. I wanted to sum him up. If I could define him perfectly, that would make him safer. Yes, I did like words.
    I really did not understand what was happening between us. I had believed that he had invited me to his house to discuss my work, and instead we appeared to be playing a game of wits. I did not know what the rules were, or to what end this would lead. He had misled me into thinking he was interested in my typescripts, when he had other, ignoble, motives for inviting me to tea. Literatureand the publishing industry was just something we could talk about in safety, intellectually, but our conversation was a mask.
    Mr. Prain showed me the house. We went downstairs to the main hall and began from there, to the library, the ballroom, the dining room, the kitchen and the salon. There was the old Tudor part from the sixteenth century, and then newer parts which expanded sideways and upwards, with curious connections, corridors and staircases, and a secret passageway between the kitchen and the “study” where we had just been sitting, at which point I had a peculiar feeling of
déjà vu
. There were vestibules, large rooms, small rooms, furniture, carpets, paintings, ornaments, with everything perfectly displayed inside this architectural mishmash. A mirror. A vase. A tapestry. Precision.
    Because they were generally spacious and sparsely furnished, the other rooms of the house made the room in which we had been sitting seem even more cluttered by comparison. This was the sort of house that was featured in glossy magazines: a photo spread in
Hello!
or
OK
in which an overly made-up lady in designer clothes would pose resplendently by a gold-framed portrait, or beside her wealthy husband, or hold a pug dog in front of a Louis Quatorze cabinet.
    The tour of the house was a moratorium, and an escape. Gradually I felt myself relax, and release the tension in the muscles of my neck. I could be passive and listen as he recited the history of the building and his ancestors. He toocould relax into a monologue he had repeated so many times before, for other guests. But in fact, deep down, I suspected now that he was no calmer than I. He had a way of suddenly glancing this way and that as if he expected someone to leap out; though I