‘You mean to say, sir, that you never suspected? Not in all those weeks. You didn’t wonder at her command of the English language or her familiarity with things British? You didn’t at any point make the connection between the missing Fairfield girl and the girl in your care? Really sir.’
Ted felt the heat rise in his cheeks. But he was determined to turn this episode into something ultimately good, determined to reach out to his parishioners without the veil of prejudice over his eyes. He felt a twinge of excitement at the thought of rebuilding his dwindling congregation. He had already spoken to Nancy Sanderson about starting Sunday School. He remembered an old teacher at his college saying, ‘It’s a simple truth that there is less crime amongst regular church-goers.’
Ted had assumed that the kind of youth club he ran in Liverpool would never get off the ground in Tollymead. Maybe he had assumed wrong. In Tollymead the young people didn’t have to steal a car, they just borrowed their father’s, but that did not mean they did not need him. Ted pulled up at the entrance to Evelyn’s drive and got out of the car. He did not know, from Liberty Turner’s telephone call some half an hour earlier, what was wrong, only that something had happened that had left old Evelyn Brooke in a state of collapse.
In spite of the icy January wind, the front door stood open and he walked inside. He followed the voices into the sitting-room, where he found the curtains drawn and the lights on as if it was night already. Evelyn sat slumped in a small, hard chair and Liberty and a man he recognized as Oscar Brooke, the local newspaper editor, were kneeling by her side. Oscar sprung up from the floor, looking relieved to be doing something, even if it was just shaking hands.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Liberty said, looking up at Ted. ‘We couldn’t think who else to call.’
‘I’m glad you did call me,’ Ted said. ‘That’s what I’m here for, to help if I can.’ Excited by his own words, he carried on, ‘I wish more people would call on me. After all I… What is the trouble?’ he followed Oscar who was beckoning him to the other side of the room.
‘It’s her garden,’ Oscar spoke quietly. ‘You know what that garden means to her. It’s wrecked. She’s hardly spoken since she discovered it this morning.’
‘What do you mean wrecked? Animals, weather? There’ve been no storms or anything like that.’
‘Come with me. See for yourself.’ Oscar led him outside.
‘Great heavens!’ Ted stopped dead on the back doorstep. ‘I see what you mean. It’s all… dead.’
‘She’s just come back home from ten days away to find this. The extraordinary thing is that Liberty, Mrs Turner, had been over only yesterday morning to turn the heating up, that sort of thing, and everything looked fine then.’
‘What about the neighbours’ gardens?’
‘They’re all OK as far as I can tell. That’s Liberty’s cottage over there.’ Oscar nodded towards the house next door, visible through a gap in the yew hedge. ‘I don’t know who lives the other side.’ He turned and pointed to the gabled roof of the house across the narrow lane. ‘I don’t think Evelyn does either. Their drive comes out on the main road the other side, they keep themselves pretty well to themselves.’
‘Tollymead people in other words,’ Ted couldn’t help saying.
Oscar frowned at him. ‘Well anyway, no-one seems to have seen anything.’ He stepped out on the dying grass. ‘It’s some kind of weedkiller you know. It must be.’
‘Weedkiller?’ Ted followed him towards the first flower bed, careful to step only on the green patches of the grass as if the poison could seep up the thick rubber soles of his shoes. ‘How?’
Oscar just shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Evelyn uses the stream for irrigation, but the pump has been turned off most of the winter. Still, I’ll take some water for testing.’
The garden shed down by the stream looked more like a gazebo than a shed, tall and octangular in shape. Inside, it was as clean and tidy as it was messy and dusty in the house. Polished tools hung like trophies on the walls and clay pots were stacked on the wooden shelves that lined the walls. Oscar found a small jar on a shelf and brought it outside, filling it with clean-looking water from the stream. Back inside the house he went to put away the jar of river water, Ted joined the others in the sitting-room.
As if they were actors in an interminable Edwardian tableau, Evelyn Brooke had remained hunched and silent in her chair and Liberty was still kneeling by her side.
Ted did not care for gardening, or gardens either, for that matter. When his father had joked about concreting over the family’s neat handkerchief garden in Wimbledon, Ted had secretly thought it a perfectly sound idea. Only weeks ago he might have judged Evelyn’s grief unworthy of sympathy, the champagne tears of an over-privileged old woman. But then would he not also have scoffed at the idea of a deluded vicar who played at being the Scarlet Pimpernel and fell in love with his own creation?
‘Miss Brooke, Evelyn.’ He squatted by her chair, his knees creaking. ‘Can something be done?’
Evelyn did not look at him but she did answer. ‘Nothing. Nothing can be done. That garden is dead, and even you, vicar, can’t resurrect it.’
Ted shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Liberty squeezed Evelyn’s hand, turning her vivid green eyes on him. She gave a little shake of her head, blinking back tears, and he flinched as he pictured for a second those eyes opening up dead and colourless like the leaves and grass outside. But her eyes opened up clear and green still as she smiled weakly at him.
‘Have I had breakfast?’ Evelyn asked suddenly, her voice strong.
Liberty nodded. ‘I would think so, before you left Mary’s?’
Evelyn nodded back, but slowly. ‘Oh yes, so I did.’
Ted sat down in the sofa. Evelyn freed her hand from Liberty’s clasp and struggled to her feet. ‘I would like to talk to you vicar.’
Liberty got clumsily to her feet, grabbing at the chair for support.
‘No you stay. We’ll go into the library.’
Ted got up and put his hand out to Evelyn who took it, using it to lever herself out of the chair. Liberty sat down again, following Evelyn with worried eyes as she stuttered across the worn carpet with Ted following behind. They closed the door behind them. Moments later Oscar came in from the kitchen with a tray of mugs and a gleaming glass-and-chrome jug.
‘I made coffee,’ Oscar said unnecessarily as he put the tray on the low table, after first removing the heap of seed catalogues that lay scattered across the ink-stained and scratched mahogany.
‘Modern machine monstrosity,’ Liberty nodded towards the jug from Evelyn’s cappuccino maker, but the sight of the polished chrome, incongruous amongst the shabby comfort of the room, made her feel tearful again. ‘Evelyn has gone into the library to talk to Ted. I offered to leave,’ she added hastily in case Oscar thought she had no tact, ‘but Evelyn wanted me to stay.’ She looked at him longingly, badly wanting to snuggle up close to him and forget the misery around them, but she stayed put. Touching would be unfeeling.
But Oscar took a step closer and put both his arms round her. ‘No-one has died,’ he said.
So touching was all right. She buried her face in his shoulder and then she looked up again. ‘It will take years to restore that garden. Some of those plants were grown from seeds she had collected from all across the world. Not to mention the amount of plants she smuggled into this country. There was even a plant from Tibet. How do you collect plants from Tibet when you’re almost eighty years old? No, it’s over Oscar, as surely as if that garden had been parcelled up in a publisher’s padded brown envelope and stuffed through her letter box.’
Village Diary
Tollymead: Miss Evelyn Brooke regrets that her ‘Winter Garden’ will not now be open to the public as planned these next four Sundays.
Yesterday afternoon I went to tea with Sam and Gertie Cook, and was met by the sad news that Tigger, Sam’s gun dog, has been killed in a hit-and-run accident.
&
nbsp; Unable to hide his tears Sam told me, ‘Tigger didn’t come in for his dinner and his toys were all over the place. You see, normally when he goes out for any length of time he collects them all up and puts them by his bean bag, so he can’t have meant to be gone very long. Then this little lad comes running and tells us that a dog looking like our Tigger was lying injured up by the rec.’
Apparently poor Tigger died just minutes after Sam and Gertie arrived. ‘He must have been waiting for us to get there,’ Gertie told me, her voice choking, ‘but how he managed to hold on, we’ll never know, every bone in his little body was broken. When he heard us come he struggled to lift his head, and there was a tiny waggle of the tail, but within seconds of Sam reaching him, he was gone.’
‘Maybe the person who did this thought that because Tigger was a dog, it didn’t really matter,’ Sam said, ‘but that little dog meant the world to Gertie and me. We had no children, so Tigger was the closest thing to it. Gill, that’s Gertie’s sister, she told us we were making a ridiculous fuss over an animal, but I can’t see it myself, really I can’t.’
I’m sure the vicar would tell them that there are no scales on which to weigh your loss. No-one has the right to judge what is worthy of grief and what is not. ‘You’ve lost an arm and a leg and a mother, you may weep and wail for two hours a day for months but you sir, you over there with the dead dog, you can’t have a tear over half an hour.’ Hardly.
I am glad to say that Agnes Coulson and Phyllida Medley came across just as I was leaving, bringing flowers and best of all, sympathy and understanding. At least they’re lucky to live in a place like Tollymead, surrounded by friends and neighbours.
Twenty-six
Nancy was washing the brick imitation kitchen floor with the Handy Mop. Sweeping as she went, she backed out of the kitchen, away from the large Brother gas cooker, like a courtier taking leave of the monarch, she thought, giggling. She paused for a moment in the doorway, the broom in one hand, the other on the china door handle. Her whole life seemed to have been confined to that room: cleaning, washing, cooking, always cooking, vast pies, enormous roasts, high-smelling, bloody lumps of meat, the way Andrew liked it. ‘We don’t want any of that rabbit food,’ he always said, so the children had said it too. ‘None of that rabbit food, Mummy.’ Now Louise was a vegetarian, another excuse for not coming home.
Suddenly she burst into tears. Louise, Piers, squandered gifts, chubby babies, endearing toddlers, awkward teenagers, hostile young adults, second fiddles always, to Andrew. She sank to the floor sobbing, and that was how Andrew found her some time later, crying her heart out in the kitchen doorway.
She looked up when she heard his steps.
‘Get up please Nancy. We need to talk.’
‘Why? We’ve never talked before.’
‘Don’t be silly Nancy,’ but he said it quietly, gently almost and she searched the face for signs of the usual irritation. But Andrew just looked tired, tired and old. He put his hand out. ‘Up you get,’ he said.
Feeling stupid, she scrambled to her feet, stumbling as her foot got caught in the hem of her skirt.
‘Let’s go and sit down shall we?’ Andrew made a move towards the kitchen table.
‘No, not in there.’
Andrew peered anxiously into the room. ‘What do you mean, what have you done in there?’
Nancy frowned then she understood, ‘Oh, nothing, nothing at all. I just hate that kitchen.’
With a sigh as heavy as a rock sinking to the bottom of a pond, Andrew turned and led the way to the sitting-room. He walked towards the sofa, not his armchair, and he put his hand out and took hers, pulling her down beside him.
‘I want to read you something.’
‘Oh make it Kipling,’ Nancy said, ‘I haven’t read any poetry for such an age.’ She remembered Andrew reading to her, on a long-ago picnic on a wintry Devon beach: ‘If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!’
‘Do you feel you’ve done that?’
‘Done what, Nancy?’
‘Filled each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run?’
Again that heavy sigh. ‘Now why do you ask that?’
Nancy sighed too. ‘Because I’d like to know of course. Why else?’
Andrew shifted in his seat. ‘Well no, I suppose I haven’t. I suppose I always meant to though. We all do, don’t we?’
‘And you thought selling farm supplies and pesticides was a good way to go about it,’ Nancy stated rather than asked. ‘Well, why not. I thought being the perfect wife for you was a life.’ The wild plans that had been forming in her mind during the last week suddenly seemed not only possible, but her salvation.
‘I’m going to Italy,’ she declared.
Andrew opened the Tribune. ‘Yes, yes why not. You should go away for a while. Have a break. Use the money in the holiday account, you might as well. I’ll manage. If you just label the meals for me and leave them in the freezer, I shall be quite all right.’
‘I’m not going there for a holiday. I’m going there to have a baby. They are good with older mothers in Italy. Besides, I’ve always wanted to go to Italy. You know how I used to beg you to take me—’
Andrew leapt from the sofa. ‘What do you mean you’re going to Italy to have a baby. You can’t. We haven’t—’
‘Slept together for over a year.’
Andrew looked away as he paced the room. ‘You can’t anyway, you’re too old.’
‘I’m only forty-eight. Anyway, I told you, in Italy women of sixty have babies. I want a baby.’
Andrew crossed the carpet and sat down next to her again. When he spoke again, his voice was reasoned, level.
‘I bumped into Oscar Brooke in town. He told me Evelyn’s garden had been vandalized, hardly a plant untouched. He says it was almost certainly poison of some kind.’ Andrew sighed. ‘He obviously was wondering whether I had anything to do with it. Look at me Nancy.’ He took her by the shoulders and swung her round so that their eyes met. ‘But it wasn’t me, was it Nancy?’
Nancy frowned, trying to concentrate her fanning thoughts into one direction. ‘No,’ she admitted finally. ‘No, it wasn’t you.’
‘You did it for me, didn’t you?’
Nancy looked up at him, surprised. ‘No, no not really.’
‘You didn’t do it for me?’ He stared at her. ‘But why then?’
Nancy’s brow cleared. ‘Because she made me see you for what you really are.’
The colour rose in Andrew’s stolid face, but his voice remained calm. ‘And was that so terrible?’
‘Not terrible, just not worth it all.’
‘All what?’
‘Everything, Andrew. Everything that could have made my life count for something. I turned down my university place and we both know I was the clever one. I squandered Piers’s and Louise’s childhood, putting your needs always before theirs, and they have never forgiven me. I want some of it back, some of those squandered minutes. That’s why I’m going to Italy.’ She was silent and in the silence she heard Andrew crying.
Liberty sat in the worn grey-and-white striped sofa in the sitting-room of Laburnum Terrace, flicking through the papers. They had been over to see Evelyn. Now Oscar lay stretched out, his legs over the armrest, his head in her lap. She dropped the paper over the back of the sofa and it fell to the carpet. Oscar did not stir, he must have fallen asleep. She could look at his face as closely as she liked. Without actually touching him, she outlined each feature with her finger, lightly, in the air. She leant forward, and knowing she had not long ago brushed her teeth, felt free to blow a puff of breath across his forehead, moving the lock of hair that had flopped down across the pale skin. Oscar smiled, his eyes still closed, and suddenly his arm shot up and he grabbed her wrist, pulling her down so he could kiss her.
‘Oh God, I love you,’ L
iberty said.
Oscar opened his eyes, dark in the evening light, and serious. ‘I love you too. I wonder if you know how much.’ He kissed her again.
Liberty thought of the article she had just read in the paper. ‘When I’m older I will keep your love by becoming immaculate, lacquered, scented, stockinged, bedecked and bejewelled. It’s the way to go when you get older. Only youth can afford to be careless of their appearance.’
‘Is this original thought or something you’ve just read?’
‘Something I’ve just read.’ Liberty wriggled onto her knees and tipped herself over the sofa-back, fishing up the paper. ‘Here,’ she pointed at the elderly but newly engaged countess pictured immaculately in love in a large photo on page five.
Oscar propped himself up on one elbow, looking first at the paper, then at Liberty. ‘Well, for the moment I like you fine all tousle-haired and pink-cheeked and,’ he poked her leg with the toe of his shoe, ‘dimple-thighed. But who’s to say in a few years … Immaculate can be very restful. I had an immaculate great aunt. On my mother’s side, not Evelyn’s mother, you understand. I could sit for hours when I was a small boy, just listening to her and looking at her. I still remember her scent – gardenia and face powder. Face powder had a scent in those days.’
‘Hypo-allergenic,’ Liberty said. ‘That’s what stopped things smelling.’ She got up from the sofa. ‘Hang on a moment.’ She disappeared upstairs to the bathroom and rummaged through her cupboard, overflowing with years’ worth of oils and soaps and shampoos and more packets of Tampax than anyone could decently need in a year. Right at the back was a round box with rose-tinted loose powder, topped with a velvet puff. She undressed swiftly and grabbing the box, she powdered herself until she stood like a great, floury rose-scented bun on the bathroom floor. Then she dressed again and ran downstairs.
A Rival Creation Page 22