Mandrake by Susan Cooper

surprise, turned round on his subject and gone into the Church. Queston had visited him once, and found him a genial country vicar with a growing brood of gay, untidy, shrill children. Wasn’t it Andover? Somewhere near there…
    He took the Andover road, and drove more cheerfully.
    On the edge of the town he drew into the kerb beside a telephone box. Better to ring up first. Solitude seemed to have given him a new shyness, a horror of arriving, unannounced, unwelcome. He thought of his aunt, long ago, jumping nervously as the door-bell rang: ‘O dear, who’s that ? And me all in a pickle—David, tidy those books away—’
    Stewart’s name was in the telephone book, with an Andover number. He dialled twice, but each time heard only a high-pitched buzz. Blankly listening, he looked out through the grubby panes of the glass box at the road; narrow, empty, dwindling into enclosing trees, opaquely lit by the mist that had not properly left the sun, or the sky, all day. He turned inward, and looked at his chin in the small square mirror above the telephone. For a sudden moment he was in the cottage, seeing himself in the mirror above the sink. But this mirror was too low; he was back in the telephone box again. He had always been too tall for telephone boxes.
    Irritated by the peevish noise, he dialled the operator. For a long while no one answered, but at last a metallic voice told him that Stewart’s number was a ceased line.
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘The line has been discontinued,’ the voice said, bored.
    ‘D’you mean they’ve gone away?’
    ‘I’m sorry, caller, we have no information. Your number is listed as a ceased line.’
    ‘Thank you so much,’ Queston said acidly, and hung up. He wrote down Stewart’s address, and drove on into Andover to look for the house. A policeman on the fringe of the town looked up sharply as he passed, and in the driving-mirror Queston saw him turn and stand staring after the car. But in the centre of the town he began to pass other cars, and felt less vulnerable.
    It was a large Georgian house, greatly the worse for wear. Facing straight on to the street, with no garden or yard, it was obviously a rectory: everything visible spoke the right devout carelessness of comfort or repair. Queston knocked at the door, with an immense snarling lion’s head whose blackened brass had not been cleaned for a long time.
    The woman who came was wispy and sluttish, wiping one hand on a dirty apron and pushing ineffectually with the other at loose strands of hair.
    ‘Mr Stewart? ’ Queston said tentatively.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Mr Stewart—doesn’t he live here? Isn’t this the rectory?’
    ‘No,’ the woman said. She raised her eyes to look at him, then glanced away again without interest.
    ‘Oh. But I thought—he used to live here, didn’t he?’
    ‘I wouldn’t know.’ She spoke in a flat, country monotone. ‘He’s listed in the phone book at this address.’
    ‘We haven’t got no phone.’ She glanced up again, seeking an excuse to shut the door. She sniffed, and added: ‘The authorities give us the house. They’d know about your friend. You ask at the office.’
    ‘The office? ’ Queston said blankly.
    ‘In the square,’ the woman said, and stared. Then apathy smoothed her face again, and she shut the door. The lion’s head rattled emptily.
    In the square, Queston understood. Its largest building, bright with the familiar posters, was labelled ‘Ministry of Planning’. He parked the Lagonda, and went in.
    At the inquiry counter an elderly, weather-beaten man in Ministry uniform greeted him with a fatherly smile. A nervous tic continually jerked the corner of his right eye; it gave the smile a faint leering complicity.
    ‘ Good afternoon, sir.’
    Queston regarded him warily. ‘Good afternoon. I’m trying to find a friend of mine. He seems to have moved.’
    The man chuckled warmly, as if he were accustomed to this kind of approach. He reached behind him for