by P. D. James
She had decided that her first task must be to try to trace Nanny Pilbeam. Even if the woman had nothing to tell her about Mark’s death or his reason for leaving college, she would be able to speak about his childhood and boyhood; she, probably better than anyone, would know what his essential nature had been. She had cared enough about him to attend the funeral and to send an expensive wreath. She had called on him in college on his twenty-first birthday. He had probably kept in touch with her, might even have confided in her. He had no mother and Nanny Pilbeam could have been, in some sense, a substitute.
As she drove into Cambridge Cordelia considered tactics. The probability was that Miss Pilbeam lived somewhere in the district. It was unlikely that she actually lived in the city since Hugo Tilling had only seen her once. From his brief account of her, it sounded as if she were old and probably poor. It was unlikely, therefore, that she would travel far to attend the funeral. It was apparent that she hadn’t been one of the official mourners from Garforth House, hadn’t been invited by Sir Ronald. According to Hugo, none of the party had even spoken to each other. This hardly suggested that Miss Pilbeam was the elderly and valued retainer of tradition, almost one of the family. Sir Ronald’s neglect of her on such an occasion intrigued Cordelia. She wondered just what Miss Pilbeam’s position in the family had been.
If the old lady lived near Cambridge, she had probably ordered the wreath at one of the city florists. Villages were very unlikely to provide this kind of service. It had been an ostentatious wreath, which suggested that Miss Pilbeam had been prepared to spend lavishly and had probably gone to one of the larger florists. The likelihood was that she had ordered it personally. Elderly ladies, apart from the fact that they were seldom on the telephone, like to attend to these matters direct, having, Cordelia suspected, a well-founded suspicion that only face-to-face confrontation and the meticulous recital of one’s precise requirements extracted the best service. If Miss Pilbeam had come in from her village by train or by bus, she had probably selected a shop somewhere near the centre of the city. Cordelia decided to begin her search by enquiring of passers-by if they could recommend the name of a good florist.
She had already learnt that Cambridge was not a city for the cruising motorist. She drew up and consulted the folding map at the back of her guidebook and decided to leave the Mini in the car park next to Parker’s Piece. Her search might take some time and would be best done on foot. She daren’t risk a parking fine nor the impounding of the car. She checked her watch. It was still only a few minutes after nine o’clock. She had made a good start to the day.
The first hour was disappointing. The people of whom she enquired were anxious to be helpful but their ideas of what constituted a reliable florist somewhere near the centre of the city were peculiar. Cordelia was directed to small greengrocers selling a few bunches of cut flowers as a side line, to the supplier of gardening equipment who dealt in plants but not in wreaths, and once to a funeral director. The two florists’ shops which at first sight seemed possible had never heard of Miss Pilbeam and had provided no wreaths for the Mark Callender funeral. A little weary with much walking and beginning to feel despondent, Cordelia decided that the whole quest had been unreasonably sanguine. Probably Miss Pilbeam had come in from Bury St. Edmunds or Newmarket and had bought the wreath in her own town.
But the visit to the undertakers was not wasted. In reply to her enquiry, they recommended the name of a firm which “provided a very nice class of wreath, Miss, really very nice indeed.” The shop was further from the centre of the city than Cordelia had expected. Even from the pavement it smelt of weddings or funerals, as one’s mood dictated, and as she pushed open the door Cordelia was welcomed by a gush of warm air which caught at the throat. There were flowers everywhere. Large green buckets lined the walls holding clumps of lilies, irises and lupins; smaller containers were packed tight with wallflowers and marigolds and stocks; there were frigid bundles of tight budded roses on thornless stems, each flower identical in size and colour and looking as if it had been cultivated in a test tube. Pots of indoor plants, decorated with variegated ribbon, lined the path to the counter like a floral guard of honour.
There was a room at the back of the shop where two assistants were working. Through the open door Cordelia watched them. The younger, a languid blonde with a spotted skin, was assistant executioner, laying open roses and freesias, predestined victims, graded according to type and colour. Her senior, whose status was denoted by a better-fitting overall and an air of authority, was twisting off the flower heads, piercing each mutilated bloom with wire and threading them closely on to a huge bed of moss in the shape of a heart. Cordelia averted her eyes from this horror.
A buxom lady in a pink smock appeared behind the counter apparently from nowhere. She was as pungently scented as the shop, but had obviously decided that no ordinary floral perfume could compete and that she had better rely on the exotic. She smelt of curry powder and pine so strongly that the effect was practically anaesthetizing.
Cordelia said her prepared speech: “I’m from Sir Robert Callender of Garforth House. I wonder whether you can help us? His son was cremated on 3rd of June and their old nurse very kindly sent a wreath, a cross of red roses. Sir Ronald has lost her address and very much wants to write to her. The name is Pilbeam.”
“Oh, I don’t think we executed any orders of that type for 3rd June.”
“If you would be kind enough to just look in the book—”
Suddenly the young blonde looked up from her work and called out: “It’s Goddard.”
“I beg your pardon, Shirley?” said the buxom lady repressively.
“The name’s Goddard. The card on the wreath said Nanny Pilbeam, but the customer was a Mrs. Goddard. Another lady came to enquire from Sir Ronald Callender and that was the name she gave. I looked it up for her. Mrs. Goddard, Lavender Cottage, Ickleton. One cross, four foot long in red roses. Six pounds. It’s there in the book.”
“Thank you very much,” said Cordelia fervently. She smiled her thanks impartially at the three of them and left quickly in case she got embroiled in an argument about the other enquirer from Garforth House. It must have looked odd, she knew, but the three of them would no doubt enjoy themselves discussing it after she had left. Lavender Cottage, Ickleton. She kept repeating the address to herself until she was at a safe distance from the shop and could pause to write it down.
Her tiredness seemed miraculously to have left her as she sped back to the car park. She consulted her map. Ickleton was a village near the Essex border about ten miles from Cambridge. It wasn’t far from Duxford so that she would be retracing her steps. She could be there in less than half an hour.
But it took longer than she had expected to thread her way through the Cambridge traffic, and it wasn’t until thirty-five minutes later that she came to Ickleton’s fine flint and pebble church with its broach spire, and drove the Mini close to the church gate. It was a temptation to take a brief look inside, but she resisted it. Mrs. Goddard might even now be preparing to catch the Cambridge bus. She went in search of Lavender Cottage.
It wasn’t, in fact, a cottage at all but a small semi-detached house of hideous red brick at the end of the High Street. There was only a narrow strip of grass between the front door and the road and neither smell nor sight of lavender. The iron knocker, in the form of a lion’s head, fell heavily, shaking the door. The response came, not from Lavender Cottage, but from the next house. An elderly woman appeared, thin, almost toothless and swathed in an immense apron patterned with roses. She had carpet slippers on her feet, a woollen cap decorated with a bobble on her head and an air of lively interest in the world in general.
“You’ll be wanting Mrs. Goddard, I dare say?”
“Yes. Could you tell me where I could find her?”
“She’ll be over at the graveyard, I don’t doubt. She usually is this time of a fine morning.”
“I’ve just come from the church. I didn’t see anyo
ne.”
“Bless you, Miss, she’s not at the church! They haven’t been burying us there for many a year now. Her old man is where they’ll be putting her in time, in the cemetery on Hinxton Road. You can’t miss it. Just keep straight on.”
“I’ll have to go back to the church for my car,” said Cordelia. It was obvious that she was going to be watched out of sight and it seemed necessary to explain why she was departing in the opposite direction to the one indicated. The old woman smiled and nodded and came out to lean on her gate for a better view of Cordelia’s progress down the High Street, nodding her head like a marionette so that the bright bobble danced in the sun.
The cemetery was easily found. Cordelia parked the Mini on a convenient patch of grass where a signpost pointed the footpath to Duxford, and walked the few yards back to the iron gates. There was a small flint chapel of rest with an apse at the east end and beside it an ancient wooden seat green with lichen and spattered with bird lime which gave a view of the whole burial ground. A wide swathe of turf ran straight down the middle and on each side were the graves, variously marked with white marble crosses, grey headstones, small rusted circles of iron heeling over towards the smooth turf and bright splashes of flowers patchworked over the newly dug earth. It was very peaceful. The burial ground was surrounded by trees, their leaves scarcely stirring in the calm hot air. There was little sound except the chirruping of crickets in the grass and from time to time the nearby ringing of a railway level-crossing bell and the swooping horn of a diesel train.
There was only one other person in the graveyard, an elderly woman bending over one of the far graves. Cordelia sat quietly on the seat, arms folded in her lap, before making her way silently down the grass path towards her. She knew with certainty that this interview was going to be crucial yet paradoxically she was in no hurry to begin. She came up to the woman and stood, still unnoticed, at the foot of the grave.
She was a small woman dressed in black, whose old-fashioned straw hat, its brim wreathed with faded net, was screwed to her hair with an immense black bobbed hat pin. She knelt with her back to Cordelia, showing the soles of a pair of misshapen shoes from which her thin legs stuck out like sticks. She was weeding the grave; her fingers, darting like a reptile’s tongue over the grass, plucked at small, almost undetectable weeds. At her side was a punnet holding a folded newspaper and a gardening trowel. From time to time, she dropped into the punnet her little mush of weeds.
After a couple of minutes, during which Cordelia watched her in silence, she paused satisfied and began smoothing the surface of the grass as if comforting the bones underneath. Cordelia read the inscription carved deep on the headstone.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES ALBERT GODDARD
BELOVED HUSBAND OF ANNIE
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE 27TH AUGUST 1962,
AGED 70 YEARS.
AT REST.
‘At rest’; the commonest epitaph of a generation to whom rest must have seemed the ultimate luxury, the supreme benediction.
The woman rested back for a second on her heels and contemplated the grave with satisfaction. It was then that she became aware of Cordelia. She turned a bright, much wrinkled face towards her and said without curiosity or resentment at her presence: “It’s a nice stone, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. I was admiring the lettering.”
“Cut deep, that is. It cost a mint of money but it was worth it. That’ll last, you see. Half the lettering here won’t, it’s that shallow. It takes the pleasure out of a cemetery. I like to read the gravestones, like to know who people were and when they died and how long the women lived after they buried their men. It sets you wondering how they managed and whether they were lonely. There’s no use in a stone if you can’t read the lettering. Of course, this stone looks a bit top-heavy at present. That’s because I asked them to leave space for me: ‘Also to Annie, his wife, departed this life, …’ and then the date; that’ll even it up nicely. I’ve left the money to pay for it.”
“What text were you thinking of having?” enquired Cordelia.
“Oh, no text! ‘At rest’ will be good enough for the both of us. We shan’t be asking more of the good Lord than that.”
Cordelia said: “That cross of roses you sent to Mark Callender’s funeral was beautiful.”
“Oh, did you see it? You weren’t at the funeral, were you? Yes, I was pleased with it. They made a nice job of it, I thought. Poor boy, he hadn’t much else, had he?”
She looked at Cordelia with benign interest: “So you knew Mr. Mark? Would you be his young lady perhaps?”
“No, not that, but I cared about him. It’s odd that he never talked about you, his old nurse.”
“But I wasn’t his nurse, my dear, or at least, only for a month or two. He was a baby then, it meant nothing to him. No, I was nurse to his dear mother.”
“But you visited Mark on his twenty-first birthday?”
“So he told you that, did he? I was glad to see him again after all those years, but I wouldn’t have pushed myself on him. It wouldn’t have been right, his father feeling as he did. No, I went to give him something from his mother, to do something she had asked me to do when she was dying. Do you know, I hadn’t seen Mr. Mark for over twenty years—odd, really, considering that we didn’t live that far apart—but I knew him at once. He had a great look of his mother about him, poor boy.”
“Could you tell me about it? It’s not just curiosity; it’s important for me to know.”
Leaning for support on the handle of her basket, Mrs. Goddard got laboriously to her feet. She picked at a few short blades of grass adhering to her skirt, felt in her pocket for a pair of grey cotton gloves and put them on. Together they made their way slowly down the path.
“Important, is it? I don’t know why it should be. It’s all in the past now. She’s dead, poor lady, and so is he. All that hope and promise come to nothing. I haven’t spoken to anyone else about it, but then who would care to know?”
“Perhaps we could sit on this bench and talk together for a time?”
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t. There’s nothing to hurry home for now. Do you know, my dear, I didn’t marry my husband until I was fifty-three and yet I miss him as if we had been childhood sweethearts. People said I was a fool to take on a man at that age but you see I had known his wife for thirty years, we were at school together, and I knew him. If a man’s good to one woman, he’ll be good to another. That’s what I reckoned and I was right.”
They sat side by side on the bench, gazing over the green swathe towards the grave. Cordelia said: “Tell me about Mark’s mother.”
“She was a Miss Bottley, Evelyn Bottley. I went to her mother as under-nursemaid before she was born. There was only little Harry then. He was killed in the war on his first raid over Germany. His dad took it very hard; there was never anyone to match Harry, the sun shone out of his eyes. The master never really cared for Miss Evie. It was all the boy with him. Mrs. Bottley died when Evie was born and that may have made a difference. People say that it does, but I’ve never believed it. I’ve known fathers who loved a baby even more—poor innocent things, how can they be blamed? If you ask me, it was just an excuse for not taking to the child, that she killed her mother.”
“Yes, I know a father who made it an excuse too. But it isn’t their fault. We can’t make ourselves love someone just because we want to.”
“More’s the pity, my dear, or the world would be an easier place. But his own child, that’s not natural!”
“Did she love him?”
“How could she? You won’t get love from a child if you don’t give love. But she never had the trick of pleasing him, of humouring him—he was a big man, fierce, loud talking, frightening to a child. He would have done better with a pretty, pert little thing, who wouldn’t have been afraid of him.”
“What happened to her? How did she meet Sir Ronald Callender?”
“He wasn’t Sir Ronald then, my dear. Oh, dear no!
He was Ronny Callender the gardener’s son. They lived at Harrogate, you see. Oh, such a lovely house they had! When I first went into service there they had three gardeners. That was before the war, of course. Mr. Bottley worked in Bradford; he was in the wool trade. Well, you were asking about Ronny Callender. I remember him well, a pugnacious, good-looking lad but one who kept his thoughts to himself. He was clever, that one, oh he was clever! He got a scholarship to the grammar school and did very well.”
“And Evelyn Bottley fell in love?”
“She may have done, my dear. What there was between them when they were young, who can tell. But then the war came and he went away. She was wild to do something useful and they took her on as a VAD, though how she passed the medical I’ll never know. And then they met again in London as people did in the war and the next thing we knew they were married.”
“And came to live here outside Cambridge?”
“Not until after the war. At first she kept on with her nursing and he was sent overseas. He had what the men call a good war; we’d call it a bad war I dare say, a lot of killing and fighting, imprisonment and escaping. It ought to have made Mr. Bottley proud of him and reconciled to the marriage but it didn’t. I think he thought that Ronny had his eye on the money, because there was money to come, no doubt about that. He may have been right, but who’s to blame the boy? My mother used to say, ‘Don’t marry for money, but marry where money is!’ There’s no harm in looking for money as long as there’s kindness as well.”
“And do you think there was kindness?”
“There was never unkindness that I could see, and she was mad about him. After the war he went up to Cambridge. He’d always wanted to be a scientist and he got a grant because he was ex-service. She had some money from her father and they bought the house he lives in now so that he could live at home when he was studying. It didn’t look the same then, of course. He’s done a lot to it since. They were quite poor then and Miss Evie managed with practically no one to help, only me. Mr. Bottley used to come and stay from time to time. She used to dread his visits, poor darling. He was looking for a grandchild, you see, and one didn’t come. And then Mr. Callender finished at the university and got a job teaching. He wanted to stay on at college to be a Don or something like that, but they wouldn’t have him. He used to say it was because he hadn’t influence, but I think he may not have been quite clever enough. In Harrogate we thought he was the cleverest boy in the grammar school. But then, Cambridge is full of clever men.”