by Burke, John
“I’ll press on, then,” said Ellen. “Let me know when she’s better.”
“No, love, no.” Alec put one hand on her arm and waved the other at Fiona in a symbolic embrace that brought them all within one happy, happy family. “We’ve got a volunteer.”
A pigskin case stood on its edge a few inches from Fiona’s left ankle. “Don’t tell me,” she cried. “I don’t know what I’m letting myself in for. But I’m coming with you, darling.”
They travelled in Fiona’s car, an electric-blue Sprite. Ellen had protested, but Fiona was used to overriding other people’s wishes and protests. Within five minutes she had arranged for Ellen’s Fiat to be garaged at the company’s expense in a basement car park two streets away – “And get back later in the week.”
“But...”
“Darling, it’s the least I can do. You’re in charge of the expedition, and you don’t want to arrive at the various supply dumps dog-tired, now do you? I’ll do the driving, you do the thinking.”
Ellen decided after the first hour that Fiona’s driving would tire her far more disastrously than any spell she herself might take at the wheel; and Fiona’s conversation, shrill and bubbling and insistent, didn’t help.
“Such a treat,” Fiona gushed happily. “I was getting a bit cheesed off with sitting on my behind all day. Gorgeous to go out into the unknown. I told Alec I’d resign if he didn’t let me take it on. Stupid nit” – this to a Jaguar driver who crowded her on a corner. “Poor Dulcie. But we all have to go through it, don’t we? Honestly, Ellie, I’m sure I can add something to the project. Really. I wouldn’t have pushed myself forward otherwise. That’s what I told Alec when I was bending his ear. I told him I was sure I could bring a new viewpoint, become a sort of catalyst...”
I’ll bet you did, thought Ellen.
“The way I see it is that while you concentrate on the food I pick out some of those little social nuances – oh, hell, you know what I mean – and give some indication of the ambience, the...oh, I don’t know, I’m talking off the top of my head, you know how it is, a sort of with – it or without – it”
The words didn’t mean much and weren’t meant to. Fiona was a voluble exponent of what Ellen, with her provincial, not to say parochial, background, thought of as the London twitter: a terrible shallow eagerness, an unfiltered flow of words not so much selected as chucked in. It was enough just to keep stridently talking, repetitive and incoherent as a budgerigar or a transistor radio: meaning was irrelevant, persistence was all.
Wind from passing lorries sucked or smacked at the side of the Sprite. An ambulance hee-hawed its way past and slewed in beside a pile-up of three vehicles. Fiona swerved madly to avoid a ragged carpet of broken glass.
Sticky perspiration tacked Ellen’s dacron jacket between her shoulder-blades. Fiona’s driving would surely bring them an ambulance of their own before long.
And yet that wasn’t fair. Fiona was enviably confident. Her car was an extension of herself. It accelerated, slowed, swerved and curved in a rhythmic accompaniment to the flicking, penetrating stab of Fiona’s voice.
“Oxford ahead, now I know the sweetest man in Oxford. A bit of a fuddy-duddy, but a sweetie. Shall we stop and scrounge a drink from him?”
“We’ve got a long way to go yet,” said Ellen.
“We’ll have to stop somewhere. I want a wee.”
“You should have had one before we left.”
Fiona shrieked her delight. “Sorry, Mummy.”
Her mannerisms belonged, thought Ellen uncharitably, to a much younger woman. The plumply pretty face, with its cap of golden ringlets, was too mobile, too arch in its expressions, too emphatic in its registering of amusement, despair and amazement. What might once have been a gay impersonation of some fashionable ideal had taken hold so insidiously that it was doubtful whether Fiona could ever speak in a normal voice or smile an ordinary, straightforward smile.
They stopped for lunch at a one-time coaching inn which was starred on Ellen’s list.
In the cellars were what claimed to be the remains of a Roman villa. A few fragments of tessellated flooring were religiously lit by iron-framed lanterns originating from Birmingham rather than from Rome. Busts of Roman emperors stood in niches in the walls. The cellar was labelled THE CATACOMB. The lights at the tables were as feeble as those in the lanterns. It was difficult to decide whether the effect aimed at was one of intimacy or of sinister oppressiveness. Ellen was tempted to take the pencil torch from her handbag to read the menu, but refrained.
Fiona had no such scruples. “What are they so anxious to hide?” she brayed. “Must be something about the food. Absence of colour or presence of maggots? Make a note, Ellie.”
The waiter had tucked them away in a corner, but several times a couple of inquisitive faces peeped round a column at them. Men’s faces. Halfway through the meal there was a burst of laughter, and then another: some remark about Fiona and Ellen, or a run-of-the-mill dirty joke?
Fiona ordered lasagne. “Do you grow it yourself?” she asked the waiter with cloying sweetness.
As the waiter went away, Ellen was about to lay down some of the rules of the exercise – one of them being to try civility before getting tough, even where toughness was necessary but Fiona gave her no chance.
“Now, darling. Tell me how the whole thing’s been going. Had a glorious gorge? Oh, and love – what did you think of Bryncroeso? Or didn’t you bother to go?”
“Yes,” said Ellen, “I went.”
“Oh, do tell. What marks are you going to give old David?”
The waiter was bending over a nearby table. Ellen said: “I’d prefer you not to give him any idea of what we’re doing here. Once they think you’re a food guide representative, they put on a completely different act. And that’s no use.”
“Sorry. Quite right. Subtlety – that’s the approach.”
The concept seemed to depress Fiona.
She sank into mute contemplation of the table mats, which bore hazy reproductions of ruined temples and other antiquities.
Before she could get her second wind and say something to the waiter as he approached their table again, Ellen hurried to speak. Within her head she was conscious of her own brittle chatter, and a breathlessness which she seemed to have caught from Fiona.
“Bryncroeso,” she said. “Now, that was odd. There was I going all that way – entirely due to you – and when I got there, the place was shut.”
“Shut? At this time of year?” Fiona sat back, not only because the waiter was setting a plate gently before her. “But that’s crazy.”
“That’s what I thought. And if I hadn’t...hadn’t happened to bump into David – Commander Parr – I’d never have seen the inside, and...”
“So. So you got a personal invitation?”
“Pure chance. And it was all a bit creepy. I mean, I don’t know how well you knew Commander Parr...”
Ellen heard herself babbling on. She told the whole story but not the whole story: she omitted any speculations about gold, said nothing about the truck, and nothing about Mark Nicholson’s interest.
Really, there was no need. Fiona was entranced enough by the basic outline.
“Crazy,” she repeated when Ellen had finished. “What’s he living on, then? Turning away custom at the height of the season!” She attacked her food with unexpected vigour. While she was eating she didn’t speak at all. It was another waywardness in her nature: she ate as quickly as she talked, almost scooping the food up, incapable of resuming conversation until she had finished. “But you got away intact?”
“I’m here,” Ellen pointed out.
“That’s no answer. Up there all alone with him – and you didn’t get chased round the fountain?”
“You knew him when...”
“I knew him when. Yes. Sounds like a song title,” said Fiona. “Oh, I knew him all right. And I wasn’t the only one.” They were interrupted by the waiter, showing Ellen a half bottle of wine wit
h a mixture of deference and doubt. Ellen nodded. The waiter uncorked the bottle, poured, and stood back, his sneer of doubt slightly more pronounced. Fiona looked calculatingly up at him. Ellen hastily sipped the wine, nodded, and sat back. The waiter filled both glasses.
“Not to the top!” snapped Fiona.
“Madam?”
“Never heard about the bouquet? Oh, for God’s sake.” Fiona tasted, and histrionically wrinkled her nose. “And do you usually serve a Burgundy stone bloody cold? I suppose if we’d ordered hock you’d have warmed it up under the grill?”
“If this wine isn’t to your taste...” The waiter haughtily consulted Ellen over Fiona’s head.
“It will do,” said Ellen. “We haven’t much time.”
As soon as the waiter had withdrawn, Fiona said: “That was weakness, Ellie. No way to get good service. Where are your principles? This wine is too cold, and you know it.”
“Unless you order well in advance, you can hardly expect a bottle to be chambre’d.”
“You don’t expect it to come straight from the fridge.”
“Look, it’s not necessary to stir things up. We make a note of this particular point, and that’s that.”
“But we’re supposed to test their reactions.”
“Not by being offensive over every tiny detail.”
“Who’s being offensive?”
“You can hardly expect good service, or have mistakes put right, if you take a high-handed attitude right from the start.”
“God, you’re a bit stuffy, aren’t you, sweetie?”
When they drove on Ellen was silent, and Fiona said nothing for quite a while. But it was not in her character to stay silent for long. By the end of the afternoon she was chirping as piercingly as before, this time about a commercial artist who did a lot of work for the Lucullus Press and who might have crossed Ellen’s path. The purpose of this guileless outpouring, Ellen surmised, was to find out more about a man with whom Fiona was probably drifting into an affair. She didn’t know him, so could offer no comments. This didn’t stop Fiona, who went on talking about him, theorising about him, and dropping salacious hints.
They booked into a hotel in Ludlow that night.
“He thinks we’re a couple of tarts,” said Fiona loudly as they signed the register.
The manager went very red and busied himself with a sheaf of bills.
When they had been shown to their rooms, Ellen marched into Fiona’s and said: “Now look...”
“It’s all a great big giggle, really.”
In the dining room that evening, Fiona began to hum a song to herself. Ellen was silly enough to frown, which encouraged Fiona to increase the volume. She began to murmur the words: “Please don’t burn my coal-house down...” A waitress said something to the head waiter, who shrugged but remained watchful beside a trolley carrying a spirit stove. “They’re licensed for music,” said Fiona. “It says so over the front door.”
“Music?” Ellen allowed herself a hostile infection.
“If they get stroppy,” said Fiona, “I’ll sing the real words.”
It was not, Ellen foresaw, going to be a comfortable week.
The exasperating thing was that Fiona not merely got away with it: she actually had many of them – to use a culinary metaphor – eating out of her hand. When the head waiter came to ask if everything was satisfactory, it was Fiona he addressed; and when she made a tart joke he smiled, and smiled again at her when the two of them left.
In the morning the manager bowed at her appearance, and came effusively to the door to see them off.
At lunch that next day she hectored a timid little waitress, then made the girl blush with pleasure simply by patting her shoulder at the end of the meal. Ellen, irritated, nevertheless found herself laughing even when she was protesting. Fiona exuded a sort of unquenchable sociability, a chaotic brightness that could never be switched off.
By the late afternoon, after a session in a hotel bar which was unspokenly for men only but which Fiona had insisted on invading, the Sprite headed through Oswestry towards the Welsh border. Ellen awoke to this fact only when the familiar bare shoulders of mountain began to hunch darkly up against the sky.
“I’ve already covered Wales,” she said. “Not with me, you haven’t.”
“But we haven’t the time to doublecheck every place I’ve been.”
“We can give it a whirl.”
“But...”
“Two heads are more varied than one.” Ellen subsided. Secretly, she admitted that she was not displeased to be going back in this direction. Wherever they finished up, she would surely be not too far from Mark. She wanted to know how he was getting on. She wanted to see him again.
As Fiona fiercely but competently drove the car up the steepening slopes, Ellen retraced her own steps over those recent days. Like someone swotting for an exam, she tried to marshal the facts in the right order in her mind. Perhaps, then, she would get a flash of revelation: it would all make sense, and she would have something to contribute when she next met Mark.
It was not until the landscape outside began strangely to echo the landscape in her thoughts that she shook herself back into awareness.
“Where are we going? If we’re going to eat, there’s nowhere round here.”
“You want to bet?”
Ellen’s mental images solidified. She recognised the curve of a hillside. Even though they were on a strange road she had an inkling where they would emerge. She found she was right.
“No,” she said as they swooped down and then climbed again, past the road that was no longer there and up towards the drive gates. “You’re not serious?” The Sprite stopped before the locked gates of Bryncroeso Hall.
“You can’t,” said Ellen. “I told you, it’s closed. Locked.”
Fiona pulled her handbag from under the dashboard. She took out a small leather wallet of keys. Leaving the engine running, she got out of the car, went to the padlock, and examined it. She nodded, selected a key, and turned it in the lock. When she had pushed the gates wide open, she came back.
“Oh, no,” pleaded Ellen. “It couldn’t be. You’re not...?”
The front door of the Hall opened as the car swished up the drive, past the deserted garden and the deserted terrace. David Parr came out, staring incredulously.
Ellen got out first. She straightened up; and David said: “What are you doing here? How the hell did you get in?”
You’ll come again? Come as yourself next time. You’ll do that – you will, won’t you?
That was what he had said when they parted. Said it intensely, desperately. But now he didn’t sound too pleased to see her.
Fiona’s door opened and she got out. “Not much of a welcome, sweetie.”
David moved stiffly towards her, like a robot. He shook his head jerkily, mechanically.
“The two of you?” The words were squeezed out. “I don’t get it.” He was looking fixedly at Ellen as though it were all her fault. She was the one who owed him the explanation.
Fiona jauntily took her arm. David reached them.
Fiona said: “Ellie, love, you’ve already met my ex, haven’t you?”
“Not ex,” said David.
“Well, no, not really. If you’re going to be exact. We’re still married, aren’t we? Technically, that is.”
Chapter Seven
The path narrowed between bushes. Branches clawed at Ellen’s skirt or scratched her arms. Fiona said: “Time these were cut back. How does he expect the old dears to come and drool over the waterfall if their woollies keep unravelling on the prickles?”
She led the way down a slope spongy with last year’s pulped leaves. The rumble of water which Ellen had heard remotely on her last visit grew louder, but it struck such confusing echoes from the trees and hummocks of rock that it was impossible to tell its true direction.
Evening sunlight caught the bright green curl of a leaf, added splintered haloes to the bushes, and lost itself in th
e more thickly clotted undergrowth. Fiona’s hair gave out intermittent sparks of gold.
“Leave him to it,” she had said. “The poor man’s Escoffier. He’d sooner be left alone in his precious kitchen – wouldn’t you, love?” That to David. And to Ellen, brazenly confidential without lowering her voice: “Part of his trouble, you know. Wanting to be left alone. And then hating it when it happens.”
She had whisked Ellen away for a walk in the grounds before darkness submerged the valley. “You mean he didn’t show you round? The quaint old mine workings, the wild Welsh waterfall, the Druid stones?”
Surefootedly she picked her way along the sketchy track, between beeches and into the chill of clustering firs. The remarks she tossed negligently over her shoulder were not so much guidebook explanations as criticisms. The path was crumbling, the soil was poor, the waterfall would be a disappointment when they got there; and really she was only doing this to show Ellen what a crummy, godforsaken wilderness the place was.
By now the hoarse clamour of the water was drowning most of what she said.
Suddenly the path widened, and they came out into a clearing.
Above them, stepped against the slope like the station of a funicular railway, was the sagging stone skeleton of what might once have been a vast barn. A spindle carrying two rusty iron wheels was balanced across two uprights, and behind it was a scrapheap of flaking corrugated iron.
“One of the mills,” said Fiona. “You’ve heard of sitting on a fortune? That’s what we did all the time I was here. Only I never did believe in that Klondike jazz. And now they’re trying to start it up again. Honestly, I ask you: men!”
David hadn’t mentioned recent developments to her. Ellen was sure of that. He hadn’t had time.
She said: “How do you know about this?”
“It was in the papers, love.”
“So you did read about it. And about Dr Mansell? The corpse, the boat, the inquest – all that.”
“I can read, Ellie. I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, but illiterate isn’t one of them.”