Dead as a Dodo

by Jane Langton

  “And he was smitten, is that it?” Freddy made a face, and Mary chastised herself for American vulgarity.

  “Well, we both were, I suppose.” Freddy struggled with herself, remembering her vow to be truthful. “But before long there were some rough edges. Differences.”

  “Differences? Between you and Oliver?”

  “He wanted me to know all about his family background. He was so proud of his genealogical heritage, bishops and so on. I forget all the others, except there was a Knight of the Garter.” Freddy was talking in a rush. “He loved to tell me about them, and he took me to see his stately home, only it isn’t really his anymore. His parents had to give it to the National Trust to avoid taxes. You know, so that they wouldn’t the possessing it.” Freddy hunched her shoulders in distaste. “It meant so much to him, all that lost grandeur.”

  “Where is it, the stately home?”

  “Not far, really. It’s near Burford. It’s called Windrush Hall because it’s on the Windrush River. It’s where Oliver was born.” Freddy stifled a laugh. “Oh, it’s so horribly ugly. Architecturally it’s famous for a very early bathroom with a patent toilet, but not for anything else. And there are a lot of tablets on the wall of the Burford church. Bishops and so on. We had to look at them too.”

  “And you weren’t impressed?”

  “No, I wasn’t. And I didn’t like the way it meant so much to Oliver. He used to go to Windrush Hall as a tourist, and dream about the glory of it all. In fact,” said Freddy impulsively, “he persuaded the proprietors to rent him a little corner of it, the old housekeeper’s quarters. He took me there once, thinking I’d be so excited. But it was pitiful. There was hardly room enough for a cot. Somehow he got a tremendous lift out of taking on the mantle of his ancestry, even if all he had was a coal cellar. You know.”

  “Is that all it was, a coal cellar?”

  “No, no, but you see what I mean.”

  Mary put down her coffee cup, groped for her handbag, and stood up. “So you weren’t sympathetic? Ancestor worship doesn’t appeal to you?”

  Freddy stood up too. “Not at all. Oh, I didn’t mind his having elegant ancestors, but it bothered me that he was so fixated on it. He was so—so”—Freddy pounded the arm of her chair with her fist—“stuffy. He kept talking about his heritage, this wonderful thing he was going to share with me. He just couldn’t understand why I wasn’t honored and thrilled.”

  At the door Mary thanked her and started down the steps. Then she turned and looked up at Freddy. “What if Homer and I were to rent a car one day and take you to Windrush Hall? Do you think we could see the room he rented?”

  Freddy brightened. “Oh, yes, I’d like that. I’m sure we could get in. I know the curator there. I’ll write to her. Oh, Mrs. Kelly, isn’t your husband some sort of policeman?”

  Mary waved her hand and pretended not to hear. How could she say yes or no? Homer’s status as a criminal investigator was far too fishy to be explained.

  After Mary left, Freddy ran upstairs. It had been weeks since she had written in her diary. She was anxious to start again.

  Last time I wrote in this book, it was about being looked at. I’m so ashamed. Last time Oliver wasn’t dead, and I was driving him crazy and falling in love with somebody else. It was all so Darwinian. I was the female of the species choosing between two competing males, and one of them had more spectacular tail feathers than the other—as though that made it all right to torment Oliver the way I did. And now Hal may be in awful trouble.

  I’ve got to stop and read Aristotle. Intellect alone is divine, that’s what he said. Intellect! Mine is smashed to pieces. There’s nothing left but feelings, and they’re all so miserable.

  CHAPTER 40

  The struggle very often falls on the … young; but fall it must … with extreme severity.

  Charles Darwin

  Mary told Homer as much as she could remember about her visit with Freddy. “Bleak, Freddy said. She said Oliver didn’t seem interested in her at all. He kept looking out the window, but there wasn’t anything out there, just the moon. He just seemed so bleak.”

  “Bleak,” echoed Homer. “Well, everybody feels that way sometimes. You get up in the morning and it’s raining, and everything you cared about has turned to ashes, and then you get a disappointing letter in the mail. That’s the word for it—bleak.” Homer blundered around the small sitting room, picking up books and setting them down again. “Mukerji thinks Hal Shaw murdered Oliver. His fingerprints are all over that jackknife. Of course Oliver’s are on top, but Gopal thinks that after killing Oliver, he put the knife neatly into Oliver’s dead hand.”

  “Oh, but I didn’t tell you. Freddy says she was there after Hal went away. And Oliver was alive and well when she came along. And why on earth would Hal kill Oliver Clare? It’s absurd.” Mary stopped and thought about it. “Well, maybe it’s true that he had a crude sort of motive—killing off Freddy’s boyfriend because he loved her too. But it’s impossible. It wasn’t that heavy an affair.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Homer remembered the passionate embraces he had witnessed in the maze at Hampton Court. “Suppose Hal and Freddy are in cahoots, and they figured out this story together.”

  “Oh, Homer, I don’t think so. She wasn’t lying to me. When she said Oliver was staring out the window at the moon instead of listening to her, it was the truth. She couldn’t have made up anything like that.”

  “Or suppose,” said Homer remorselessly, “that Hal hung around on the street until after Freddy left, then went back and did the deed.”

  “But wouldn’t Mrs. Jarvis have heard him? She heard everything else.”

  “The woman has to sleep sometime,” said Homer lamely.

  “Homer, I’m convinced Oliver killed himself.”

  “Well, prove it. That’s the question, all right. Did he or didn’t he?”

  “Wait,” said Mary, struck by an idea, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to the Samaritans. Remember the Samaritans, Homer? When you feel so bleak you want to do away with yourself, you call up the Samaritans. They’ve got a branch in Oxford. I’ll find out if they ever encountered Oliver Clare.”

  “The Samaritans? Oh, of course, the suicide people. Right, good idea. If Oliver was really feeling suicidal, he might have talked to them. If he did, we’d know he was at least thinking about it, which reduces the possibility that he was killed by somebody else. Good for you.”

  Mary started with the yellow pages. At first she tried SUICIDE PREVENTION, but there was no such heading, only STUD FARM PROPRIETORS and SUN TAN CENTRES. Next she looked under THERAPISTS, but they were either transcendental meditators or holistic massagers or acupuncturists. Then she was distracted by the entries under THATCHING—Freeman & Son, Wheat Reed, Water Reed, Long Straw, Established five generations. “Oh, Homer, listen to this.”

  But Homer was at the window, looking out. “Nothing out there but the moon, she said, isn’t that right? But the moon isn’t nothing. The moon is something. I mean, it’s really something.”

  “Homer, what are you talking about?”

  “Nothing, but I’ve just thought of a little research project of my own. Just me and the moon.”

  Mary finally found the Samaritans in the regular phone book under their own name. But when she presented herself at the door of Number 123 Iffley Road, the response to her question about Oliver Clare was noncommittal.

  “I’m sorry,” said the soft-spoken gray-haired man, leading her into the sitting room, “that’s not the way we work.”

  The room was bland and nondescript. The posters on the wall were unprovocative—the Alfred Jewel, Van Gogh’s irisis. A box of tissues on the table was the only thing suggesting the possibility that emotions might sometimes run high. Mary sat on the sofa, the Samaritan sat down in a straight-backed chair. “We never,” he said politely, “give out the names of the people who come to us.”

  “Oh, but—” said Mary.

  He would answer onl
y general questions.

  Mary tried to think of one. “The people who come here, you try to talk them out of killing themselves, is that it?”

  “No. Lots of people think that’s what we do, but it’s not true. We never try to talk anyone out of it.”

  “But what do you do then? What are you for?”

  The man smiled gently. “We let them talk. Sometimes that’s all they want, a chance to talk.”

  Mary was nonplussed. “So you won’t tell me whether or not Oliver Clare ever came here?”

  He shook his head. “Our interviews are confidential. We never give names.”

  “Even to the police?”

  “Not even to the police.”

  “But don’t they—?” Mary had been going to say something dramatic: Don’t they arrest you? Don’t they threaten to close you down? Thinking better of it, she got up to go, and tried one more question. “Do clergymen ever come to you, you know, troubled about their faith or something like that?”

  There was a flicker on the Samaritan’s serene face, as though Mary’s question had struck home. “Perhaps sometimes,” he said.

  Mary went home and told Homer about it. “Oliver went there,” she said. “I swear he did. I can’t prove it. I just know he did.”

  CHAPTER 41

  I am a bold man to lay myself open

  to being thought a complete fool.

  Charles Darwin, letter to L. Jenyns

  It was another fool’s experiment. Homer was too embarrassed to tell his wife the exact nature of the expedition. Getting up at one o’clock in the morning to set out for St. Barnabas Street, he nudged Mary awake and told her where he was going, but not why.

  “Oh, Homer,” she said drowsily, heaving herself to a sitting position, “it was a month ago. They will have cleaned everything up. You won’t find any threads on the floor or anything like that. Does Mrs. Jarvis know you’re coming?”

  Homer groped for his pants in the dark. “Yes, it’s all right. She’s expecting me.”

  “Funny woman. Maybe she’ll tell you another juicy piece of information she’s been withholding from the police.”

  Mrs. Jarvis was indeed voluble. Early as it was—two o’clock in the morning—she was there to answer Homer’s knock, fully dressed. She was a tall powerful woman in a flowered wrapper. Her laced-up shoes were masterful, dominating. Her inquisitiveness about her deceased lodger and his guests was not the prying curiosity of a landlady, it was more like the interest taken by a goddess of ancient Greece in all of humankind.

  “Go right up, Mr. Kelly. I’ve left the door open. It’s all cleaned up now. Those police constables, poor things, they did the best they could, but their mothers didn’t teach them right. I scrubbed the floor for an hour, and it came out spotless. Fantastik, it’s called. They advertise it on TV.” From some hole in the air Mrs. Jarvis summoned a plastic bottle with a nozzle. “Fantastik really does the job.”

  It was a television commercial by the Queen of England. “I’ll tell my wife,” promised Homer, as he stumbled upstairs, realizing at once that it wasn’t the sort of thing you told Mary Kelly.

  “Just give my door a tap when you come down.”

  She had turned on the overhead light in Oliver’s room. The place was sparkling clean, the floor scrubbed and bare, the bed neatly made. The crucifix was gone. There was nothing to remind Homer of the unhappy young man whose throat had been cut. Nothing but the southwest window overlooking the Oxford Canal.

  Homer switched off the light and went to the window. Yes, there was the moon.

  The astronomy of it was simple. According to Freddy Dubchick the full moon had been shining over the Oxford Canal on the night she visited Oliver Clare. She had stayed about an hour, she said, between two and three in the morning. Tonight on the twenty-fourth of November it was a full lunar cycle later, with another full moon. Would the view from the window be the same?

  Homer stood for a long time looking out the window, seeing what Oliver saw. At last he turned away, closed the door behind him, descended the stairs, tapped on Mrs. Jarvis’s door, and left the house on St. Barnabas Street.

  Perhaps his fool’s experiment was a success. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t, and he was a fool for sure.

  CHAPTER 42

  How nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-Glass House!

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

  Burford was eighteen miles to the northwest. Mary and Homer took a bus to Motorworld on the Botley Road to hire a car for the day. As the salesman led them out into the parking lot, the new weed in the neighboring ditch was not something anyone would notice. It was only a few dry stalks puncturing the brittle patches of ice along the narrow stream.

  “Do you want to drive?” said Mary, offering Homer the key.

  “Me?” Homer waved it away. “No, thank you. No killer roundabouts for me. It’s all yours.”

  “Oh, why is it,” said Mary, getting in timidly on the wrong side of the car, “that two friendly countries like the United States and Great Britain insist on driving on different sides of the road?”

  As it turned out, she had no trouble keeping to the left. The problem was how to avoid the curb on that side. At home the bulk of a car was on the right, here it was on the left, and she kept getting too close to the edge of the road. Homer kept shouting, “Right, keep right! No, not that far right, just—There, that’s better. No, no! there you go again, keep right!”

  By the time they picked up Freddy Dubchick at her house on Norham Road, Mary wasn’t speaking to Homer. As he held open the left front door for Freddy, he suggested brightly, “Perhaps Freddy could do the driving?”

  “Of course,” said Freddy. “I’d be glad to.”

  It was an insult. “No,” said Mary, “I’ve got to learn.”

  Fortunately by this time she had caught the trick. It was only at the roundabout where the Woodstock Road joined the A40 that she was in trouble. “Homer, don’t say a word,” she said between clenched teeth, as other drivers blatted their horns.

  Homer closed his mouth, Freddy murmured, “Here, move to the left, this is where we get off,” and the crisis was past. They could stop leaning forward, bodies tense and eyes straining. The car sailed forward in the direction of Burford. Homer relaxed in the rear seat, and Freddy looked back at him anxiously. “The police,” she said, “have they found out anything? They don’t really think it was Hal, do they? Not anymore?” Homer glanced uneasily out the window at a field of sheep. “I don’t think Mukerji has made up his mind.” The field of sheep was succeeded by another field of sheep. “Of course there’s the possibility of suicide, but the pathologist isn’t sure.” Homer wished he could forget the medical examiner’s gesture, the slashing stroke from left to right. “He said either one was possible.”

  “I see,” said Freddy in a small voice.

  The village of Burford was a pleasant little resort town with a main street running up the hill. “The church,” said Freddy impulsively. “Let’s stop here first. I’ll show you the family memorials.”

  Mary found a parking place in front of a Laura Ashley shop, and Freddy led them across the street and into the church. “The chapel’s this way,” she said, hurrying ahead.

  On the walls of the chapel were the tablets to the memory of many a departed Clare. “There’s the bishop,” said Freddy, pointing to a grand inscription with pediment and garlands. “Oliver was very proud of him.”

  Homer was interested in the last line. “I see he was Snatched by untimely death. I wonder what happened to him?”

  “Probably blood poisoning or typhoid or something,” said Mary. “They had no protection against those things. Look at this, a brother and sister carried off in their teens. You know, I’ve always wanted to spend a couple of weeks in the middle of the last century, but only if I could bring antibiotics with me, as if I were traveling deep in the jungle in some foreign country.”

  “The past is a foreign country,” murmured Ho
mer, reciting a famous phrase. He looked at Freddy, who was kneeling in a corner, reading an inscription next to the floor.

  “This is the one I like,” she said. “You see? It’s another Oliver Clare, but all it says is Forgive. What do you suppose he needed forgiveness for?”

  Mary and Homer stopped to look. “How strange,” said Mary. “Look, someone’s scratched a picture on it, some sort of duck. It’s very crude. Insulting, too, I should think, defacing a tombstone like that.”

  “Oliver told me he didn’t know anything about this one,” said Freddy, “but I think he did. There must have been something shameful about it, and he didn’t want to tell me.”

  They went back to the car and Freddy directed the way to Windrush Hall, which overlooked the river a mile or so to the north of town.

  “Good God,” said Homer, staring at the great heap of stone, “is that it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Freddy.

  Homer’s anarchist sympathies flared up. “My God, did any of those people deserve it?”

  Freddy gave him a bright flash of a look. “Exactly, that’s exactly what I said. Nobody should own so much. Oliver was shocked when I said that. He couldn’t understand why I wasn’t impressed. He thought I must be kidding.”

  “Well,” said Homer sarcastically, “I suppose a place like this gives employment to an army of servants. That’s always the excuse for any ghastly enterprise.”

  Mary pulled into a field where a sign said PARKING. “Back in Massachusetts this would be a nursing home,” she said, getting out of the car, “or an institution for the criminally insane. Does anyone live here now? Or is it just a big museum?”

  “A monument,” snarled Homer, “to the subjugation of the poor.”

  Freddy laughed. “That’s more or less what I told Oliver. But he said, oh, no, the family was always so kind to the staff, and they felt such a responsibility to the village and everybody working on the land. Anyway, nobody lives here now except the guides who show visitors around. They open it every afternoon from two to five, so tourists can gawk at the portraits and the Venetian chandeliers. Come on, we go in this way.”