It took the best part of half an hour, and an awkward, one-handed search of the downstairs rooms, before Michael finally accepted that the phone was not in the house and that it must therefore still be in Edmund Fane’s car. Blast Edmund Fane and his spinsterish outlook and his unfamiliarity with mobile phones! Dear me, am I using this right? he had said. I don’t possess a mobile phone, you know – I’m afraid I’ve always found them rather intrusive.
And now Fane’s dithering uncertainty had resulted in Michael being stranded out here with no means of communicating with anyone. At the moment he did not much care if he never communicated with the entire western world again, but he did care about not communicating with Francesca. Would she think he had stood her up? Was there any way he could get to a phone? Was he, in fact, sure that the phone in this house really was disconnected? He tracked down the two extensions, one in the largest of the bedrooms and one in the hall. Both were dead. Hell’s teeth.
He went back into the study and sat down to review the situation. From what he had seen on his previous visits this house was at least a couple of miles from any other buildings. Could he walk that far in his present state? The painkiller was already starting to kick in, and he was feeling unpleasantly light-headed. And even if he did manage to reach a house, could he be sure he would be allowed in to use the phone? His mind flew ahead, seeing himself knocking on the door of a house where some lone female lived (it was a safe bet that the first place he tried would have a solitary woman there!) and making the classic horror-film request. ‘I’m stranded and I wondered if I could possibly use your phone.’ And the bandaged hand, and the blood on his shirt-cuff, and his dishevelled appearance all contributing to the sinister image.
How about a public phone-box? He tried to remember if he had seen one along the road, and could not. But how often were phone-boxes working nowadays? How far away was the White Hart? Not far, surely?
This was ridiculous. It was the twenty-first century, and it was possible to contact most of the world with the touch of a phone-pad, or the press of a computer key, or the activating of a fax machine. And here he was, stuck in this old house, as cut off from the world as if he had been transported back a hundred years!
He glanced at his watch. It was coming up to six o’clock. Would Francesca be home from school by now, perhaps taking a shower and deciding what to wear for the evening? Did women bother about that kind of thing these days? Michael had not exactly fought shy of women, and women had not exactly fought shy of him, but he had backed away from the deeper emotional involvements. He did not want to back away from Francesca, however.
Probably most women just took dinner dates on the wing, saying, Oh, this is the first thing that fell out of the wardrobe, and it’ll do for a plate of spaghetti and a glass of red plonk.
Francesca had changed her mind about what to wear tonight three times already. She had finally decided to play safe with a black silk sweater (it was fairly low-cut, but not tartily so), a chunky gold necklace, and some rather jazzy silk palazzo trousers that Marcus had once sneeringly said made her look like a refugee from a circus.