For professional reasons, she said, she had changed the spelling of their name to “Sands.” It was easier to remember, looked simpler when the name flickered on the television screen at the end of the news report. Dolly had done well, very well. She had popularized something pretty dull.
Kate switched the carryall to her other hand, finding it a tiresome burden. The rashers and chops were best quality and probably half again as much as the price she would collect for the room. Dolly had been extremely put out to find that the house, old and dark but still elegant, was being turned by Kate into a bed-and-breakfast. They didn’t need the money, she had complained, and taking in roomers seemed terribly lower class.
Privacy. Kate had always heard her sister complain before of too much privacy — not even a servant to bring Dolly her early morning tea. Since Dolly never rose in the morning before nine, Kate didn’t know to what use the morning would have been put.
Kate made for the promenade and the news agent she patronized, where she bought a Times and a piece of Brighton rock. It was a sweet she had loved as a child before they had moved here permanently, when they had come (as her father liked to say) for the season — as though those were the Edwardian days of parasols and tea at the Royal Pavilion.
She walked toward Madeira Drive. Round and round in her mouth she turned the rock candy, its cloying sweetness like the aftertaste of childhood.
• • •
Dolly sat at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking tea and occasionally reading a tidbit from a review of a new American film as Kate cut up some potatoes and swede. They might have presented a picture of conviviality, even intimacy, to a stranger. Kate knew they were neither. She had said almost as much, asking Dolly why she bothered with this Brighton trip now their father was dead. The answer had been a stock one, that she didn’t want Kate to be “on her own” for the holidays. It was all dead dialogue out of one of Dolly’s own television programs.
Leaning her chin on her cupped hand, Dolly said, “I don’t know how you stand it, Kate. You should sell up and come to London and get a flat.”
“And do what?” Uninformed advice always irritated Kate. Dolly’s was always that sort, suggesting that changing her life was of no more moment than handing over a claim ticket at the lost luggage counter.
“Oh, you’d find something,” Dolly said vaguely, her eye returning to the social page. “You’ve got the education and you’re really good-looking when you fix yourself up.”
Kate turned up the flame on the cooker and positioned the pot with the basin over it. She laughed briefly. “Thanks for that. But when anyone says, ‘Fix yourself up a bit,’ that generally means a thorough turnout, like spring cleaning. The face will of course have to go. And the results of my A-levels dusted off and displayed —” She was getting angry. It was what she felt to be Dolly’s total indifference to her masked by this spurious interest that made her situation stand out in sharp relief. “You haven’t really thought about it. There’s something a little mean about dragging out my dubious qualifications for this hypothetical something.” Loneliness washed over her in waves. She felt she was back looking out over the sea again, not here in a warm kitchen.
Dolly’s silence in face of this little outburst made Kate turn to look at her. She was looking out of the window with much the same intensity of Kate looking out over the sea.
“Dolly?”
Her sister turned. In the clear skin Kate saw little lines etched, worrisome little lines.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing.” Dolly shook herself and went back to reading her paper. Then she said, “I don’t like the idea of turning this into a bed-and-breakfast. It’s so —”
“Lower class?” Kate felt the anger dissipate. She turned back to the cooker. “It gives me something to do.”
“And what do you know about the people you take in?”
“Not much. But I don’t take many, you know.”
Her sister arranged the lime-green nightdress in folds over her good legs, and the shift in posture accentuated the play of light across her breasts. It was all unconscious, Kate knew. The way she now held a match straight up to the tip of a fresh cigarette, the way she lowered her lashes, smoothed her hand over her pale gold hair. Then she rose and stretched, saying she thought she’d go up and have a bath and wash her hair.
As the slippers tapped down the hall, Kate sat down with her coffee and pulled the newspaper around, looking it over. Another drop in the economy, a shocking rise in rape cases, a child abused, a minister disrupting a cabinet meeting, a murder in Mayfair. Nothing ever changed much.
9
THE sign of the Mortal Man made the dusk hideous with its creak and clangor, swinging precariously above the road that wound about the village green. The gentleman pictured on the trembling sign was appropriately depicted, his gouged eyes seeming to reflect not so much on his own mortality as that of the sign. It was an old gallows sign, the sort that was made illegal over a century ago because of the traffic hazard. Probably no traffic hazarded the narrow lane crossed by the beam on which it swung.
From the outside, the Mortal Man wore much of the look of the country inn — black-and-white Tudor timbering and thatched roof. Inside, one of these beams was in the process of being hammered to splinters by a spindly young man up on a ladder. As Melrose looked left to the lounge and right to the saloon bar, he thought the inn had been caught in the middle of being taken apart or put back together again. Wood paneling leaned against the bar, a gold-framed mirror sprightly with cupids was in sore need of resilvering, a stained-glass window looked recently boarded up.
The hall was appropriately dark, with its thread of turkey carpet running along to a gloomy staircase. A porcelain leopard appeared to be guarding the dining room to his left. To his right a half-moon-shaped desk was attended by a burly man who was arguing with an unseen opponent, and through the archway to Melrose’s left, the inn’s personnel came and went — a maid with saucy curls demanding her wages of the gentleman behind the counter, who turned her back with vituperative rhetoric; a woman with a saucepan; a boy with a notebook followed by a muddy, hybrid hound; a thin girl with a mop and a slack look both in face and dress.
The dog welcomed the new guest by grabbing his trouser cuff and hanging on for dear life until the owner rousted him with a kick. Nathan Warboys (for so he had introduced himself) then stood with his arms splayed over the counter under a sign reading Reception, with the intention of giving Melrose a hearty one by letting him in on the family secrets.
“And my Sally. It’s a treat, it really is, and ’er comin’ in night after night lookin’ like the leavin’s of a dogfight. Thought that’un ’ud stay on the shelf, I did, but no, she’s got t’be gettin’ up t’mischief just like the other. ‘Ang about, ‘ang about, now. Got to sign this, it’s the law, mate.” Whereupon he thwacked a card down for Melrose to fill in, and hit the bell with such force it sprang from the counter. This was by way of summoning the young lad with the terrier panting with the expectation of another go at the ankle. During their trudge up the narrow staircase, whose creaks and crepitations echoed the sign outside, the boy introduced himself as William Warboys. The dog’s name was Osmond. Midway in this tortured ascent of a staircase only fit for one, Osmond had hitched his steel jaw to the toe of Melrose’s shoe and no manner of shaking could dislodge him; to lift the shoe was to lift Osmond, who hung as tenaciously as a high-wire artist without a net. When William swung the bag at the dog, it slid from his hands and slapped Melrose on the shin on its dive down the dark tunnel of stairs.
Looking out from under the dripping thatch of the Mortal Man, Melrose was still rubbing his shin, and wondering if the tibia was in one piece. There was an unfamiliar rasping sound coming from his knee joint, an echo of the gallows sign.
He saw that the dull rain hadn’t stopped, nor the fog lifted. The pavements were unpeopled, the green across the way uninhabited except for some geese and swans gliding on the po
nd, their white feathers threading in and out of the fog like graveclothes. The Norman church at the green’s center looked buckled up and riveted shut. He made out the dimly lit windows of a cafe and a cluster of cottages with the same thatched roofs of the inn, all so close they looked stitched together.
Lucinda St. Clair had told him he would be collected for drinks at seven. He was glad it was drinks and not tea, for he was drinking that right now. He had not ordered it, but it had been brought nonetheless by the shapeless Sally Warboys, crockery dancing on the tray in her uncertain hands, tea slopping out from the pot and wetting the napkin. Even after she had set it down, tea dripped and china jangled, as if moved by a tremor of fear that Sally would take it up again. Melrose felt that the Warboyses, unable to direct their energy or even contain it, had unleashed it into the air, where it had then been absorbed by chairs, tables, glass, and cutlery. And now all of them were emitting it in nervous little jibs and jerks. Probably, he thought, it would all lead up to some Poe-esque denouement, where the Mortal Man, like the house of Usher, would be rent and fall apart, shuddering into dust. Every whack of the hammer on the floor below, every bellow of a Warboysian voice, told him this fancy must be so.
Hard on the heels of Sally came Mrs. Warboys, a stubby woman who moved like an eggbeater in fits and starts of stirring the log in the little fireplace, sending a burning particle onto the threadbare rug, which flamed up. They managed between them to stomp out the fire, but in the excitement Mrs. Warboys dropped the poker on Melrose’s arch. She apologized and went about whipping a dresser set into place, sending the two glasses there crashing to the floor. Assuring him that Bobby would clean that up, she jerked together the muslin curtains and tore out one end of the rod so that the whole thing drooped pitifully. Her work done, she would now send up Bobby to undo it.
Up came Bobby with the hammer in his hand and a determined look on his face. He would certainly beat that curtain rod back into place, he said, until Melrose convinced him that he had a migraine headache and didn’t care who looked in the window, anyway. Thwarted in his dedication to his hammer, Bobby shot Melrose a dark look and left.
Bobby’s place was taken by William, who came with notebook and pencil like a plumber to give an estimate on fixing the toilet. From the bathroom came a tearing sound and a thump: William had slipped in the water from the overflowing toilet and fallen in the bathtub, taking the shower curtain with him in an attempt to keep his balance.
Melrose was beginning to wonder if a stay at the Mortal Man was so short-lived that each member of the family had to see the guest at least once before he died.
When the door had slammed behind William, Melrose thought that must be all of them, until he heard the scratching at the bottom of the door.
His welfare, he saw, depended upon his getting out.
• • •
There was little to see in the dark beyond the saloon bar’s window, but Melrose thought it a safe place to stand, for if he suddenly toppled perhaps some passerby would see him and go for help. Fog drifted in threads round the street lamp, and lay like a canopy over the pavement, giving an oddly truncated look to the person wading through it, a tall man in a muffler and deerstalker. His face was long and sad and the pouches under the eyes reminded Melrose of Osmond. He shook Melrose’s hand and introduced himself unhappily as St. John St. Clair, Lucinda’s father. Perhaps it was having to trip over that name that made St. John St. Clair look so sad and grave.
They walked across the road to the large old car and once in it, St. John St. Clair began as if no time were to be lost in filling in the gaps in Melrose’s store of knowledge about pickles. He was, apparently, a pickle baron, and was quite trenchant in his observations of the hopelessness of such a suzerainty. Not a good year for gherkins, seemed to be the top and bottom of it. He said this while grinding the very stuffing out of the gearbox of his ancient Morris.
St. Clair slapped the gearshift with the heel of his hand and the car lurched forward and they darted away from the curb. A patch of ice spun them sideways and slapped Melrose against the dashboard. St. Clair nearly strangled the wheel getting the Morris back on course without missing a beat in his pickle-talk.
Melrose sighed and mumbled and rubbed his shoulder. As he wondered if he’d leave Somers Abbas alive, he tried to be sympathetic. To have three unmarried daughters (so St. Clair had gravely informed him) all living under one’s roof and to have devoted one’s time and talents to pickles were perhaps not cheering thoughts for a winter’s night.
10
BY the time the Morris slid to a stop in front of the Steeples, had Melrose had any stock in Shrewsbury Pickles and Fine Relishes he would have called his broker immediately, so grim were St. John St. Clair’s prognostications for the fate of his company. Perhaps the dark months ahead (for so his host painted them) goaded him into several flirtations with danger on the roads: they had only just missed a collision with a wagon, an overhanging willow, and a stone wall; and now the car had shaken the snow from the privet hedge and nearly toppled an urnful of frozen stalks that sat at the edge of the broad steps.
Definitely a Warboysian ride, he thought, as he swept a bit of boxwood from his coat and a twig from his shoe and followed St. John St. Clair up wide iced-over steps inviting death.
Sybil St. Clair rose to greet him, hands outstretched and — given her dress — flags flying. The frock seemed to consist largely of loose ends and scarves that looked about to flutter off through the long drawing room. Melrose could see that it had been a very handsome room with rosewood paneling and an Adam ceiling. “Had been” because Sybil, who fancied herself a decorator, had refurbished it in the Art Deco style: there was entirely too much of blue glass and green marble. He remembered now that she had quite an extensive clientele eager for her services. He couldn’t truly imagine anyone with any taste going to Sybil, who managed to put together rooms that reminded him of old cinemas. Indeed, she herself put him in mind of an old cinema star, with her frock of scarves and winged hairdo totally wrong for her plump face.
He could do nothing but take her two ringed hands in his own and accept their affectionate little squeeze as if he were an old and very dear friend. With her whispery sort of speech, Sybil St. Clair had a way of fashioning intimacy out of the briefest acquaintance.
Fortunately the St. Clair daughters did not share their mother’s tendency to rush and gush, Lucinda being too well bred and shy, and the others too haughty and holy in turn. The middle girl was named Divinity, and she sat pale and righteous by the fireplace on a hard chair; the youngest was Pearl, who kept herself on display on a giltwood fauteuil. Melrose wondered if the mother had meant to put a price on one head and a wimpel on the other. Pearl fingered a very long and very costly strand of them, and Divinity offered a limp hand and a lopsided smile probably meant to suggest that this little gathering was beneath her heavenly office.
It was unfortunate that Lucinda, a good-natured and honest girl, had got her father’s long face and mournful eyes. And her dress was hardly flattering to her, though it might have been to her father’s business; it was an ugly shade of gherkin green that, in the firelight, reflected up and deepened her sallow complexion.
Said Sybil to Melrose, “We did so want our neighbors, the Winslows, to come. But they couldn’t make it. We try to do what we can to help.” Sybil sighed and took an intricately decorated canapé from an Art Nouveau tray.
Before Melrose could ask why their neighbor was in need of help, St. John St. Clair said, “It would be nice if she were nearer.” He passed a critical eye over the canapés and selected two, which he put on his small plate. “— or if someone were nearer. I don’t know why we need all of this land.” He sighed.
“Good heavens, Sinjin, you’re the one who wanted to buy here. You’re the one who wanted land, you said.”
“Good land, yes,” said St. Clair.
“What do you mean? It’s perfectly good land.” Sybil offered Melrose a grating little laugh as if assu
ring him their land was as good as anybody’s.
“We can’t grow anything properly. Peters is always telling me that nothing will grow in this soil.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve a perfectly beautiful garden. Marion was remarking on it just the other day —”
“It is the Winslow garden that is perfectly beautiful, my dear. Not ours. And of course poor Marion would say that, she is the soul of kindness. Her floribunda would win ribbons. All we can grow is creepers because they seem to withstand mildew and black spot very well, of which we have an ample supply.” He said this with a sort of resignation that bespoke long acquaintance with the vicissitudes of blight and black spot. Then he bit into his cucumber sandwich, frowned at it, and with a sad head-shake returned it to his plate.
“Oh, Lord! Both of you,” said Pearl, adjusting a little pillow behind her back. “I doubt Mr. Plant wants to hear about our garden and land!” Which sounded more sensible than he expected Pearl to be until she added, “I’m sure Mr. Plant has gardens of his own.”
“I’m sure he has, too, and better,” said St. John, rather sadly. “Can’t I freshen your drink, Mr. Plant —?”
“Thank you.”
“— although I doubt very much you care for more gin. It’s really not up to standard. The whiskey might be better. A little.” He raised the whiskey decanter.
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