Come If You Must

Chapter One: Come If You Must

The telegram had cost her great-aunt Prudence Pettifer one shilling and eightpence, and Imogen Standen felt that every penny of it had been spent on menace.

COME IF YOU MUST. DO NOT BRING FRUIT.

She had read it eleven times on the train from St Pancras and it had not improved. It sat in her handbag now like a small hostile animal, next to a notebook, a slide rule she no longer had any professional use for, and a letter from Wattling & Pearse (Market Intelligence) Ltd. regretting that in the current climate the Consumer Behaviour Department was being reduced from four persons to none.

Imogen was twenty-six. For three years she had been paid eleven pounds a week to stand in shop doorways and ask women what they thought about soup, and to write reports explaining that what women thought about soup was that it was too expensive and the tins were hard to open. She had been rather good at it. What she had discovered in those three years was not a love of soup but a strange, almost embarrassing talent: she could walk into any badly run operation — a dairy, a shoe shop, a firm of solicitors with four typists and no filing system — and see, laid over the mess like tracing paper, the shape it ought to be. It was not a gift she had asked for. It kept her awake in restaurants.

Her mother had died in February, quietly and tidily, leaving Imogen a Bakelite clock, four hundred pounds, and one-ninth of the Marlbeck Hydro.

The bus from Bakewell put her down at a signpost. The signpost said MARLBECK HYDRO — MINERAL SPRING — TERMS ON APPLICATION, and somebody had shot it, some years ago, in the O.

It was half a mile up a drive lined with rhododendrons that had given up all pretence of being decorative and had gone feral, and then the trees parted and there it was, and Imogen stopped walking, because you had to.

The Marlbeck Hydro was enormous. It was 1897 in every brick: forty-seven bedrooms, three gables, a turret with a weathervane shaped like a fish, two hundred and sixty windows of which perhaps nine looked as though anybody stood behind them, and a cast-iron winter garden fastened to one flank like a greenhouse that had married above itself. Great-grandfather Ephraim Pettifer had built it around a mineral spring which, according to the brochure Imogen's mother had kept in a drawer for forty years, cured gout, melancholy, bad legs and disappointment.

The building itself looked as though it had all four.

She went up the steps. Somebody had swept exactly the top three of them. On the door, a brass plate said RING AND WAIT, which struck her as the family motto.

She rang. She waited. Two hundred yards away, in the wet green silence, a rook made a remark.

The door was opened by a very old woman with a duster in each hand, like a duellist.

"You'll be her," said the old woman.

"I'm Imogen Standen."

"You'll be her. From London." She stepped back to allow entry, and then said, over her shoulder, in a tone of vindicated triumph: "There. She's brought no fruit."

The hall smelled of damp plaster, coal, mutton, and something else underneath — a faint mineral tang, like licking a penny. The floor was black and white tiles, worn into pale rivers where seventy years of gouty people had walked to the pump room. There was a reception desk of mahogany with a bell, a register, and a rack of forty-seven room keys, of which forty-six were hanging up.

"I'm Elsie Bunn," said the old woman. "I do the first landing."

"Only the first landing?"

"The first landing is mine," said Elsie Bunn, with the flat calm of a woman describing a border settled by treaty. "Second landing is contested."

"Contested by whom?"

Elsie Bunn's eyes went sideways and up, and she pressed her lips together, and Imogen understood that she had been given the answer and was expected to know better than to ask again.

A door opened at the far end of the hall and a man came out at speed, holding a sheet of paper at arm's length as though it were an infant he did not fully trust.

"Listen to this," he said. "Listen. *Dear Sir, I have your letter of the 14th, which I have read twice, once for content and once for pleasure* — no. *Once for content and once in disbelief.* Better. *Once in disbelief.*" He looked up. "Who are you?"

"Imogen Standen."

He had a splendid head — white hair swept back, a nose built for looking down, a cardigan with a burn hole over the heart — and he was, she calculated, about sixty-five. He lowered the paper.

"Ah," he said. "The ninth."

"I'm sorry?"

"You own a ninth. I own a ninth. Gladys, Wilfred, Clement and Nesta own a ninth apiece, my cousin in Rhodesia owns a ninth and has never once written, and Aunt Prudence owns two ninths, which she considers modest." He put out his hand. "Ivor Pettifer. Proprietor. You've come about selling."

"I wrote to everybody."

"You did. Splendid letter. Clear, unemotional, three paragraphs." He said it the way a man might praise a cheque he had no intention of cashing. "You can't sell, of course. Nobody can sell. It's the Deed."

"The Deed of 1897."

"You've read it?"

"My mother had a copy of the first page."

"Then you've read the good bit and none of the bad," said Ivor cheerfully. "Come and have tea. It's Thursday, so it's mutton, and Thursday's mutton is the worst of them because it's Sunday's mutton with a fortnight's thinking behind it."

He led her down a corridor lined with framed photographs of Edwardians standing in wet bathing costumes with the resigned dignity of hostages. Halfway along, Ivor stopped at a tall cupboard and unlocked it with reverence.

"This," he said, "is the Grievance Cupboard."

It was full. Not untidily full — beautifully full. Nine shelves of box files, each labelled in copperplate: WATER BOARD 1961–64. WATER BOARD 1965–. MINISTRY OF HEALTH. MINISTRY OF HEALTH (DEPT. OF MEDICAL BATHING) — WHO DO NOT ANSWER. THERMOMETERS. BEETLES. THE PRESS.

"You've written all of these?"

"Every one."

"And what did they say?"

Ivor closed the cupboard and locked it again, and his face wore a small, complicated pride.

"They said nothing," he said, "because I have never posted a single one."

Imogen opened her mouth and then shut it.

"Posting," Ivor explained kindly, "introduces the possibility of a reply. A reply is invariably a disappointment. Whereas an unposted letter remains, in perpetuity, unanswerable." He tapped the cupboard door. "There is a letter in there to the makers of a thermometer that has been described by a man who read it aloud in this hall as the finest thing of its kind in Derbyshire. If I'd posted it, they'd have sent me a leaflet."

They went in to tea.

The dining room had been built for a hundred and twenty. Eleven tables were laid; one was occupied. At the far end, under a window streaming grey light, sat a small round man of about seventy in a suit of pre-war cut, eating mutton with the unhurried attention of a man at work. Beside his plate stood a glass of cloudy water and a notebook.

"Mr Montague Boggis," said Ivor. "Our guest."

"A guest," said Imogen. "How many others?"

"You misheard me. Our guest. Resident since 1960." Ivor lowered his voice, though not very far. "Nine shillings a week, fixed, in writing, witnessed. He is unshiftable. We have tried damp, cold, mutton and a bugle. He thrives."

The kitchen door swung and a woman came through with a tray. She was perhaps fifty-five, handsome in a stern black dress, black stockings, black cardigan, a jet brooch at her throat, and she moved as though a hymn were being played somewhere just too quietly to hear.

"Gladys," said Ivor. "This is the ninth."

Gladys Pettifer set down the tray and looked at Imogen for a long, evaluating moment.

"You'll want feeding," she said. "There's mutton, and after there's blancmange."

"Thank you. Just tea, honestly, I—"

"There's mutton," said Gladys, "and after there's blancmange," and it was not repetition, it was a ruling.

Imogen sat. She was given mutton. She had a great deal of time to look at it.

"Miss Pettifer," she said. "Do you mind my asking. Is somebody— have you had a loss?"

Gladys's hand went to the jet brooch.

"My fiancé," she said, "went to the coast in 1949."

"I'm so sorry."

"He has not come back," said Gladys, and swept out.

Imogen looked at Ivor. Ivor was doing something intricate to a potato.

"Twenty-two years," said Imogen.

"Yes."

"Nobody's — I mean, was there an inquiry, or—"

"We don't raise it," said Ivor. "Gladys mourns. It gives her a shape to the day. Some women take up bridge." He glanced up. "You are a person who wants to look into things. I can see it. There's a look. You have the look of a woman who has just noticed that the pictures on that wall are hung at four different heights."

"They're hung at five different heights."

"Ah," said Ivor sadly. "Then it's serious."

After tea she was shown to Room 14, which had a bed, a wardrobe with a mirror that made her look drowned, a marble washstand, and a framed notice on the wall dated 1903, listing regulations for guests taking the waters. *Ladies are requested not to converse in the plunge.*

She sat on the bed and got out her notebook, because that was what she did when frightened.

*Assets:* she wrote. *47 bedrooms. Ballroom. Winter garden. Pump room. Some acres. One paying guest at 9s.*

*Liabilities:* she wrote, and then stopped, because she did not yet know how long the list was, and something in her already suspected it was going to be a very interesting list indeed.

From somewhere below and to the left, through several floors of Victorian brick, came a sound. It was a woman's voice, raised in song, and it was going for something ambitious, and it was not going to get there. It climbed. It wobbled. It arrived somewhere adjacent to the note, planted a flag, and held on.

Imogen went to the door and out onto the landing and looked down over the banisters into a well of gloom, and listened, and thought — with the cold clarity that had made her, briefly, worth eleven pounds a week — that whoever that was, they were singing at full volume to an entirely empty room, in a hotel with one guest, forty-six spare keys, and a locked cupboard full of letters to nobody.

And she thought: I will be out of here by Monday.

She was, in fact, going to be there until October.