Rather than regarding the brisk bossiness of her new companion as a threat to his own authority, he seemed amused by it, and showed not a trace of disapproval of her, or impatience with her meaningless chatter. In fact, he paid more attention to her than to Ursula, no matter that she showed enthusiasm for the garden project. But then, Bunty was enthusiastic about everything, most especially when it came to learning something of Byzantine art, about which she cheerfully admitted she was ignorant.
She knew nothing about gardening, either, but it didn’t prevent her from interfering – or pitching in, as she cheerfully put it. She pulled up tiny, cherished seedlings, believing them to be weeds. Oops, sorry! Surveying the garden through its haze of dust, which was hosed off each night when the garden was watered, she informed Ursula that she needed bedding plants to provide more colour in the courtyard, that the yucca in the corner, chosen for its architectural form, was ugly, and should go. She suggested that ‘the boy’ was no longer needed, either, now that she was here to help Ursula, now that the garden was at last almost finished, apart from the very last strip of bare earth which Ursula was reluctant to deal with, since that would leave little else to do but tend the garden while waiting for it to mature.
Khaled bent over his work at hearing what was proposed for him, hiding his thoughts and the resentment in his eyes.
And Nawal, meanwhile, noted every look that passed between Bunty and James, enraged on behalf of her mistress, fiercely jealous of the time Ursula was now forced to spend with the usurper, Bunty.
As for Ursula herself, she gritted her teeth at Bunty’s insensitivity and refused to let her get on her nerves, hoping that all she had to do was wait, and the untenable situation going on in her own house would resolve itself. For England had declared war on Germany in September 1939, and Bunty was forever talking of going back Home and becoming a WAAF. Ursula, entirely sick of her, couldn’t wait. Yet talk, it seemed, was all it was. Something held Bunty here, presumably in the person of James Palmer: she was by no means as naïve as she seemed, she knew very well which side her bread was buttered.
Though he was too old to fight, James was presently offered a job with an army intelligence unit, and was threatening to close the house and pack his wife off Home whether she wanted it or not. An ugly atmosphere developed at her point blank refusal to do his bidding. Egypt was neutral, maintained Ursula, she would be safer here than in England. Depend on it, James countered, sooner or later the war would be on their doorstep, and who knew what would happen then? But it wasn’t her safety that was in question, they both knew that; it was a face-saving ploy for getting rid of her.
Yet how could she have willingly left the only thing she had ever created, her garden?
* * *
What had it all been for, the struggle and the unhappiness? More than sixty years later, despite all the love and dedication lavished upon its creation, that garden, that bone of contention, but still the one shining star in an otherwise dark night, had disappeared as though it had never existed. The old feeling of melancholy overwhelmed Ursula as she contemplated where it had once flourished. It wasn’t only, however, that the garden had gone and the courtyard had reverted to its original air of sad, dark desolation, with the fountain in the middle as dried up as when she had first seen it, one could cope with that. It was something about the atmosphere itself that provoked such thoughts, a sort of pervasive accidie. A stain on the air, left by the events that had happened here. She felt oppressed by the thought, and the weight of her years. Or perhaps it was just that the last ten days had taken it out of her.
“Mrs. Palmer?”
She turned with weary resignation, but it wasn’t Moira Ledgerwood, being responsible. There was still half an hour of interesting things to see on the upper floors before the group descended for glasses of tea in the cafe. It was the doorkeeper who stood there. He said softly, “I’m sorry the garden is no longer there. It grew wild. They cut it down, during the war, when the house was occupied by English officers.”
The filtered light from the windows fell on the ample figure of the doorkeeper in the white galabeya, and as he turned slightly, she saw his profile. He knew her name. And suddenly, she knew his. It was a shock. The dark curls were silvered now, but the smile was the same. She saw the young, slim, beautiful youth inside the grossly fat old man. And he, what did he see? A scrawny old woman in her eighties. “Khaled? How did you know me?” she asked faintly.
“By your hair, first of all.”
Involuntarily, her hand went up to her white, serviceably short locks. “How could you? I had it cut off years ago, and it turned white before I was forty.”
“I recognised the way it grows.”
There was a silence between them. A feeling of what might have been, had they been born in other times, other places. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
“Mrs. Palmer.” He came forward with both hands outstretched and she saw he wore a heavy gold ring with an impressive diamond on his little finger. He clasped both her hands, something he would never have done in the old days, and she allowed him to. “It is so good to see you.” Something had radically changed, apart from the fact that his command of English was now excellent. He didn’t look like a boab, a doorkeeper, a man who sat at a table and took money. He looked like the sort of man who made it.
“But next year would have been a better time to come,” he went on. “Then, there will be another garden. The men come next week to begin. I needed to have the house restored first.”
She stared at him. “Khaled, are you telling me—?”
“Yes, the house belongs to me now, Mrs. Palmer. After the war, after the officers left, that is…” He paused. “It stayed empty, as you must know, until seven years ago, when I bought it, through your lawyers. The condition, the neglect!” He threw up both hands. “But I was too busy to do anything about it until now. A retirement project, you might say, hmm?” He smiled.
She digested the information that he was rich enough to do all this. “You did go to university, then? You became an architect?” The guilt that she had carried around for more than half a lifetime began to shift a little.
“Alas, no, that was not possible, in the circumstances.”
There was a long pause. “And did you marry Nawal?”
His soft, dark eyes grew inscrutable. “No, I never married anyone at all.” He shrugged. “Malish.” That unquestioning submission to fate. Malish – never mind – it doesn’t matter. Then he laughed. “I became successful instead. I sell souvenirs to tourists. I have co-operatives to make them, and also shops now in New York, Paris, London. Many times I have thought of you when I am in England.”
The hopeful young man with his lofty ambitions, now an entrepreneur, a curio seller, in effect – albeit a rich one. To such do our hopes and aspirations come.
“Why did you run away, Khaled?”
He looked at his feet. “It was necessary. Who would have believed me?”
“There were no questions asked, you should have stayed.”
“I heard that, but I was far away by then.” He smiled again.
Death due to extreme sickness and diarrhoea in this land wasn’t so unusual as to cause many inquiries to be made, especially when it was known that the victim was not Egyptian and had been suffering from stomach upsets for ten days or more before dying. It had been put down to one of the many ills European flesh was heir to, and for that matter Egyptian flesh, too, in this land where clean water was unknown and a mosquito bite could kill.
* * *
She and Khaled had been pruning the shrubs. The jasmine had already grown into a tangle, and the pink, white and red oleanders, though pretty, needed to be kept in check. Bunty, decidedly under the weather, was sitting in the shade of the stone alcove, too unwell to do anything but watch. Ursula threw her a long, speculative glance and pensively snipped off an oleander twig, careful not to let the m
ilky sap get on to her hands. “That’s a nasty cough you have there, Bunty,” she said eventually. “Why don’t you ask Nawal for some of her cough syrup?”
“It’s this wretched dusty wind,” said Bunty, coughing again, her eyes red and sore. “This khamsin. I’m going indoors.”
“Go and lie down, and I’ll bring you the medicine. It’s very good.”
“We-ell, all right. Do you think she might have something for my gippy tummy at the same time?”
“I go bring,” said Khaled, and departed with unusual alacrity.
The dry, rasping cough came again and another griping pain almost doubled Bunty up. It wasn’t only cholera and malaria, or worse, that one had to fear, here in Egypt. Stomach upsets, and quite often being slightly off-colour for unspecified reasons, were unavoidable hazards, facts of life. Bunty looked wretched, but Ursula had little sympathy for her predicament. She had a passion for sticky native sweetmeats, and one didn’t care to think about the flies. Ursula had actually seen her carelessly drinking water from the earthenware chatty by the kitchen door because it was always cool, and because the water which Ursula and James forced themselves to drink tasted so nastily of chemicals and didn’t, as Bunty pointed out, necessarily make them immune; James himself hadn’t quite recovered yet from the same sort of malaise that Bunty was suffering from now, and was still extremely queasy, even with the care he took. As for Bunty, it was hardly surprising that her usual rude health sometimes deserted her.
Death, though! No one could have foreseen that. These things took unexpected turns, however, madame, they said at the hospital, shrugging, affected different people in very different ways. A constitution already weakened by bouts of sickness and diarrhoea…inshallah. There were few formalities.
Afterwards, the desire to shake the dust of Egypt from their feet had been mutual. Home was all there was now, wartime England. It had been Ursula, after all, who joined the WAAF, taking a rehabilitation course in horticulture when she was demobbed.
“I made another garden, Khaled, in England, in Surrey. It became a commercial success. Hollyhocks and lupins, as well as roses.” They smiled, remembering. “But no oleander. The climate is too cold there for oleander.”
“Ah.” The smiles faded as their glances met.
That day, after she’d administered Nawal’s medicine, which Khaled had brought, Ursula had come downstairs again and sat on the carved wooden bench where Bunty had sat, to wait. The garden was tidy, and so still, apart from the splash of the fountain. The oleander twigs which had lain scattered on the brightly patterned tiles had already been swept away and cleared, she noticed.
Nerium oleander. All parts of which, including the nectar, are deadly, even the smoke from the burning plant, and especially its milky sap. Causing vomiting if ingested, sweating, bloody diarrhoea, unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis and, finally, death.
The memory of that day was etched into her brain forever: the sultry heat, the metallic smell of dust, the perfume of the roses. The silence in her head, as though the habitual din of life beyond the high walls had been stopped to let the world listen to what she was thinking. Even the Arab music from the kitchen was stilled. The waiting.
Within half an hour, the sickness had begun, and twenty-four hours later, it was all over.
* * *
Khaled was looking at her earnestly. “And you, Mrs. Palmer? Have you had a happy life, Mrs. Palmer?” he questioned acutely.
A happy life! How could that have been possible? Living with the tedium of Bunty’s bright inanities, year in, year out. But there were many ways of expiating guilt. In the end, she’d become quite fond of her. A delicious irony indeed.
“I have – had no regrets.”
“Meesees Palmer!” Hassan’s voice, rounding up his flock, echoed down the staircase.
“Ursula!” Moira Ledgerwood was coming in, looking for her protégée, finding her. “Oh, the things you’ve missed! What a pity you didn’t come with us.” She looked curiously from the old lady to the old doorkeeper.
Ursula held out her hand. “Goodbye, Khaled. Good luck with your project.”
She turned to go and then turned back, as he said softly, for her ears only, “Your husband should not have died. Nawal’s medicine was good.”
She smiled. “It must have been intended, Khaled. Inshallah, hmm? He must have been too ill for it to make any difference. Who knows?”
Khaled watched her go. And perhaps Bunty Cashmore would have died, too, if she hadn’t been so violently sick again, immediately after swallowing her own dose.
“Who knows, Mrs. Palmer?” he said into the empty room.
Melusine
Martin Edwards
On the hillside, bodies were burning. As Jason drove down into the valley, he glanced across and saw the outlines of the bloated carcasses. Their stiffened legs protruded through the flames and pointed to the sky. On a fresh June morning, smoke and fire had turned the sky a strange purple hue that, until the coming of the plague, he had never seen before. A steamy white vapour hung close to the ground. He kept the windows of the van wound up, but the stench from the corpses on the funeral pyre was inescapable. It choked his sinuses and made his gorge rise.
The fields were deserted. Cows and sheep should be everywhere, but only their ghosts remained. All the footpaths were barred with tape and official notices; ramblers had been asked to stay at home. The winding route to Sidebottom’s Farm was closed, a red sign blocking the middle of the lane. KEEP OUT – FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE.
The grey stone cottages where a couple of the farm workers and their families had lived were shuttered and silent. When blisters were found on the tongue of one of Mick Sidebottom’s bullocks, the men had been given forty-eight hours to pack their bags and leave. Folk said it was worse than going on evacuation, during the last war. This time the enemy drifted through the air, silent, ruthless and invisible.
His head was pounding and he kept taking the bends in the road too fast. At least there was no other traffic around; the Ministry kept warning against ‘non-essential movement’. As he had driven through the smoke and vapour up top, a couple of tiny patches of unburned flesh had landed on the bonnet of his van. He clipped a hedge as he skimmed round a tight bend, but only when he struck a pothole did the bits fall off. At last he slowed as he reached the disinfected matting stretched over a cattle grid. In the distance he could see Gordon Clegg power-washing his tractor for the umpteenth time. Anything to keep the plague at bay.
Five minutes later, the squat church tower came into view. He glanced at his watch. Twelve o’clock. Time for a quick drink at the Wheatsheaf before he called home for half an hour. He had done enough killing and maybe he’d done enough drinking, too, but alcohol helped in a way nothing else did.
Dave Sharpe’s rusty Vauxhall was the only other vehicle in the pub car park. He hesitated and thought about going straight to the house. Part of him wanted not to see Dave, not to speak to him, not to have to think about him ever again. But at least if he was swilling beer, he wasn’t doing anything more dangerous. Jason took a breath and headed for the saloon.
Sally Binks was behind the bar, wearing a low-cut pink top and flirting with Dave. Apart from a couple of old men in the corner, no one else was in.
“Usual, love?”
He nodded. “And one for him.”
“Cheers, mate,” Dave said.
Funny, that. They had disliked each other for years, and still they called themselves mates. They had met on the first day of school at the age of five and on that very morning, Dave had pulled his hair and made him cry, then pretended it was all some kind of joke. As they grew up together, anyone listening to their lazy banter would never have a clue about what went on inside their heads. Jason wondered if he actually hated Dave. He never cared to analyse his feelings, but he thought probably he did hate him. For many reasons, not least because Melan
ie had said last week that he looked like Kurt Cobain.
“All right?” he asked.
As Sally moved to pick up the tankards, Dave reluctantly shifted his gaze from her cleavage and gave a shrug. “Feller from Padgett’s was in here a few minutes ago. He said that when the rain came after they buried the sheep out Settle way, the bodies exploded. They exploded, literally exploded. He said, if you watched the ground, it looked as though the earth was sweating blood.”
“Wicked,” Sally said as she pulled the levers. Her breasts wobbled, hypnotising Dave again. “Wicked.”
In the corner of the bar, the television was murmuring. The mid-day news. A government spokesman, carefully compassionate in a Paul Smith suit, was promising that everything was getting better. The detail of his explanation was lost as the old men in the corner hooted with scorn.
“‘Back under control?’” one of them said. “Tell that to Jack Wilson’s widow. No wonder the poor bastard hung himself. Took him and his dad forty years to build that herd.”
“Aye,” his toothless companion said.
“Nothing even wrong with the animals. Slaughter on suspicion, that’s what it was.”
The other man supped his pint. “Aye.”
“See that bugger?” the old man said, jerking a thumb at the screen. “Pity he’s never had blood and brains splashed all over him.”
“Aye.”
Dave winced. He was a postman and his work was already finished for the day. He’d never worked on the land and was one of the few people Jason knew whose life had not been touched by the coming of the plague.
When Jason said nothing, Dave nudged him in the ribs. “So how are you, mate? And how’s the missus?”
His wolfish features gave nothing away, but was there a touch of mockery in his tone? Jason thought so. It wasn’t just his imagination.
Vintage Crime Page 29