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By Root 367 0

experiment – shrouded in snow yet with the bright sunlight flashing on its windows. Taken as a piece of architecture the house is a puzzle. Look at it straight and it is simply a house, about a hundred years old, stone-fronted, large and unremarkable. But look away, and there is always something that jars in the corner of the eye, some feature that is suddenly ‘wrong’. Looking back it is impossible to see what is so wrong about it, and some other facet catches the attention. As I looked up at Banquo Manor from the edge of the frosty woods that afternoon I was overwhelmed that this sense of ‘wrongness’. Suddenly it seemed that the geometry of the entire house was askew, and the window eyes laughed back at me in the sunlight. Each corner and line was perfect, yet as a whole the frontage seemed to add up to more than the sum of its angles, as if the straight lines were somehow curved, and the corners made up from edges that did not in fact meet. To claim that in that moment, paused on the snow-clad path, I felt some foreboding or premonition would be to read too much into my feelings. It was not odd that I was fascinated by the house in such a way – I always was, and seeing it again in the crisp clarity of the winter sunshine after being away from it for so long combined with my emotional confusion to emphasise the singular character of the place. As a ‘legal man’ I like to be able to explain and define everything in terms of exact precision, and Banquo Manor has always defied me in this. For this reason alone (and God knows there are sufficient others) it haunts me.

I reached the door to discover Simpson struggling gamely to manoeuvre my largest suitcase through it. His hair was perhaps showing just a shade more grey in the brown than it had on my last visit, but his face was the same solemn mask behind which no man could discern a thing. I suspected that he was really a comic player underneath. Every time I met Simpson I remembered some of his first words to me; I had gone out into the hallway in answer to the doorbell (I forget who was calling), but Simpson beat me to the hall and as he passed me he paused to report: ‘I’m just going to the door, sir. To open it.’ This explanatory habit coupled with the strange way in which he seemed unable not to peer down his nose at everybody, and the fact that his Christian name was, I had recently discovered, ‘Cuthbert’, was enough to endear him to me.

Simpson looked up as my shadow fell across his efforts to manipulate my case: ‘I’m just taking in your luggage, sir.’

I smiled, again trying to place his accent – it was either cynical and very correct or dragged up from the gutter by its bootlaces, but which I could never quite decide.

At last he managed to wrench my case lengthways through the broad opening, and disappeared suddenly from sight, leaving me alone on the doorstep with my small suitcase.

‘It’s all right, Simpson,’ I called, ‘I’ll bring this one.’ And I followed him into the hall.

Inside Sir George Wallace was waiting, watching as Simpson dragged my large case across to the stairs.

‘John,’ he exclaimed, and his grey eyes lit up as he offered his hand affectionately. I transferred the case and took his hand, feeling my own face brighten.

‘Hello, George, old chap. You look well.’

‘Oh, not so bad now.’ He looked past me, down the hallway. ‘Gordon not travelling with you?’

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, he’s not. How’s Elizabeth?’

‘Fit as ever, thank you. Don’t know how she manages it, and that’s a fact.’

I laughed. ‘You manage very well yourself.’

Sir George smiled and let go my hand at last. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘get settled in and then come down for a glass. Be lunch before long I expect.’

He glanced up at Simpson, who had paused for breath at the half-landing.

‘In about an hour, I gather, sir.’

Wallace nodded, and Simpson renewed his attack on the luggage.

‘I’ll just show Mr Hopkinson to his room, sir.’

Did he smile slightly as he said it, I wondered as I followed his struggling form up the stairs? As ever, I could not say for certain. I transferred my attention