The Lamorna Wink

by Martha Grimes

  Probably used to Miss Livingston’s little ways, Moe Bletchley ignored her and said, “Tom here’s been my chauffeur for years in London. He’s such a good wheel man, there’ve been times I wished I could stick up a bank or a jeweler’s, just so’s I could zip out to the car with the swag, have Tom gun ’er up, and tear off on a chase.”

  Moe said this with such obvious affection that Melrose could guess how an AIDS case had come to Bletchley Hall.

  “How long have you been here, sir?” Wiggins asked Tom without (Melrose noted) shrinking back at all.

  “Six months. But this is only since I got really bad.” He gestured toward his face and yet managed a smile. After all, he’d been lucky to get into Bletchley Hall; so few were able to.

  “How many patients do you have staying here?” asked Wiggins.

  “Twelve. Twelve’s the capacity; there’re twelve bedrooms besides the four for Matron, a nurse who’s here full time, Jaynes, and me. The rest of the staff’s not live-in. We have doctors, of course. One lives in St. Buryan. Another lives near Penzance.” Moe Bletchley suggested Wiggins might like a tour of the place and Wiggins accepted with alacrity. Tom wheeled out with them.

  Melrose excused himself from the tour, spent some five minutes disengaging himself from Miss Livingston and her pincerlike fingers and walked back inside.

  33

  He walked through the voluptuous green dining room: That crystal! That silver! He liked the idea that all this finery was laid on in case there was even one guest who could make it downstairs for dinner. Perhaps there was more hope of recovery in setting a good table than in administering a newly discovered drug.

  He stopped before one table to look at the delicate arrangement of mauve orchids and cyclamen; touched the thin crystal of a wineglass, so delicate that a glassblower’s breath might have sighed it into existence; lifted a knife as heavy as a vault or as weighty as memory.

  For that’s how he felt; memory really could weigh one down. Perhaps that’s what had happened to the Hooper brothers. They’d had to remember, at last, too much, and decided nothing was preferable. Melrose walked on.

  There was another drawing room across from the blue room, still occupied by the two old ladies, who seemed not to have moved a muscle. Should he call for help? No, the breath of one lifted the frill of the lace collar on her jabot. She at least was still breathing, which meant the other probably was also.

  The drawing room across from the blue room that he now entered was somewhat narrower, longer, and done in the burgundy red of an old Bordeaux. This room was darker and-if it could be so described-deeper, as if it had been steeped in wine. The colors at Bletchley Hall, Melrose noticed, were exceptionally strong-none of your weak-kneed off-whites, ecrus, or pastels but colors that seemed to demand that one just hold on.

  The red room didn’t get much natural light, facing north as it did; it depended on lamps being lit and the logs burning in the fireplace, as a fire burned now. Because of this play of light and dark, Melrose hadn’t immediately seen Tom, who sat by the hearth. His eyes were closed or almost closed, and he hadn’t noticed Melrose come in either.

  Melrose hung back, not wanting to disturb his doze.

  He turned and was about to leave when Tom said, “Hello. Come on in.” He was still in Moe Bletchley’s wheelchair. Melrose walked to a wing chair in front of the fire.

  Tom was holding a small sherry glass in his hand, which he raised. “Want some?”

  “I do, yes. Just point me to it.”

  “Over there.” Tom indicated a table beside a window hung in a sea of dark-red curtains. Melrose found the sherry decanter in among other decanters-cut glass, probably Waterford, that shade called “Waterford blue,” a unique assimilation of blue and gray. This table was stocked with the best and most expensive whiskies, gins, and vodkas. “I’m amazed,” he said, coming back with his sherry glass, Lalique, he thought, remembering Marshall Trueblood’s lessons. The glass was shaped like a tulip just beginning to open.

  “What’s more amazing is how seldom we use it-the drink. It must be the idea that what’s so readily available loses a lot of its power to tempt you. You’d think all of us would be driven to drink, wouldn’t you?”

  Melrose smiled. “Maybe. Listen: Why do you like that wheelchair so much?”

  Tom smiled too. “Because it’s fancy, it’s fun, and it gets his goat. You’re living in Seabourne, aren’t you.”

  “I am, yes. At least for a little while.”

  “It’s haunted.”

  Melrose laughed. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

  “It is.”

  “Come on, Tom. To tell the truth, the place does give me the feeling of-um, a movie set. It really does. One expects to see spectral shapes forming at the top of the stairs. Anyway, I take it you’ve been in it?”

  “I’ve stayed there.”

  “You’ve known Morris Bletchley for some time?”

  “Like he said, I was his chauffeur for years. Mostly in London. He had a terraced house in Putney, maybe still does, though he never leaves here much, now.” He turned his head to look out of the tall window and smiled as if the memory made him happy. “That was just like him, living in Putney instead of Belgravia or some swank house in W-One. It was a small house, too, the Putney house. There was just me, a cook who came in daily, and an au pair for the kids, who used to come and see him a lot. They really loved him.”

  “His grandchildren?”

  Tom nodded. “Noah and Esmé. Nice kids. I used to drive them places: the zoo, films, Chick’nKings.” He flashed Melrose a smile. “Of course.”

  “I understand they drowned; it was a strange accident.”

  “It was strange, all right. It was strange,” he repeated. Silence. Then he asked, “Want some more sherry?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  Tom might have liked the wheelchair for reasons other than “fun.” He rose slowly and, it appeared, painfully. It was a pain that hadn’t seemed to bother him in the sunroom or hadn’t registered, if it did. He continued talking as he poured and stoppered up the decanter. “Mr. B was in London, in the Putney house. After he got the call he came to my room to tell me to warm up the car, that he wanted me to drive him to London airport.” Tom was standing in front of Melrose, handing him the refilled glass. “I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen Mr. B look like that; sunk, he looked, as if he himself had drowned. I drove him to the airport; he keeps a Lear jet there, but he hardly ever uses it, only when he has to go to the Highlands or Paris or someplace. He really keeps it for his executives and employees. One of his girls who worked at the Watney C-K, her father had a heart attack, and Mr. B got her to the airport and she was home in Edinburgh in an hour. He doesn’t like the plane; he doesn’t like ostentation; he’s a plain man.”

  Melrose laughed. “There, I disagree; he’s much too complicated to be plain. Though I do admit he works at it.”

  Tom nodded and turned the tulip-shaped glass in his fingers. “Well, not plain, maybe, but generous. After a few years of this”-his hand swept over his body-“when I got too sick to do anything, he brought me here. Most of the people here are ones he knew before. The Hoopers owned a bookstore in South Ken he was always going to. Miss Livingston was once his son’s public school teacher.”

  Afraid he’d gotten Tom off the subject of the grandchildren, Melrose said, “And what happened that night he flew down here?”

  “Of course, by the time he got to the house, it’d all been done; I mean, police had come, and the ambulance had taken the bodies away. The cop in charge, at least I guessed he was in charge, talked to Mr. B for a long time. Then they all left.

  “He told me it felt like the aftermath of battle, when you can’t do anything but look at the bloody battlefield. His son’s wife had gotten there first-I mean, after the cook, Mrs. Hayter. Daniel, his son, arrived later; they’d had a hard time locating him, so it was awhile after his wife got there. So Mr. Bletchley, he had to get information fr
om his daughter-in-law. Karen, her name is. And that really frustrated him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why? Because he doesn’t like her. He always said she married Daniel for money. I guess it wouldn’t be the first time. He was in a rage with both of them because they hadn’t been home when the kids got out of bed. I imagine Mrs. Hayter came in for some sharp words, too.” Tom sighed. “It was too painful for him to live in the house after Noah and Esmé died. But at the same time, he couldn’t stand to leave the village. It’s the reason he bought this place. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to do with it until he got the hospice idea-taking in only people who’ve been diagnosed as terminal. Strange thing for him to do, isn’t it?”

  “Not if you want the illusion that you’re controlling death.” He’d said something like that to Karen Bletchley.

  Tom moved the wheelchair closer to Melrose’s wing chair. He leaned forward, in the manner of someone with important things to impart who doesn’t want others to hear him. “It’s funny you’d put it that way, because not everyone leaves here in a coffin. Some of us actually get better. It hasn’t happened too often, but it has happened several times. Cancer of the esophagus, you can hardly ever win out over that. But a woman who had it went into remission and still keeps in touch. Then there’s Linus Vetch, who should have been dead a year ago. He’s still with us. There’ve been others-well, all of us are terminal; what a hell of a word-so when something like that happens it’s like a bloody miracle. Don’t think I’m talking about false hope. For me, it really would have to be a miracle.

  “I don’t think the comfort of this place comes from not having to die alone. I think it’s because if you have to die, you want it to be in a place like this or someplace like a battlefield, where death’s a fact, not a fantasy. Outside of places like this and beyond wars and battlefields, death is more of a fantasy. People don’t really believe it; they deny it at every turn.”

  “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” said Melrose.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tolstoy’s story. Ivan Ilyich is ill for a long time; he knows he’s dying. But the doctors, his wife, and his children keep denying it.”

  Tom said, “That’s what happens, isn’t it? Here’s the most terrifying experience you will ever have and you want to share how you feel and make others understand. But people won’t let you. ‘Oh, stop talking like that; don’t be morbid.’ Or ‘You’ll see; you’ll be up and around in no time.’ ” He stopped. Then he said, “A lot of people have ended their days here in a way they could never have hoped for without Bletchley Hall. Every once in a while children or parents come to visit. Not often. Not mine.”

  There was a silence while they grasped their sherry glasses. Melrose didn’t know what to say that didn’t sound banal.

  Tom went on. “Except for my sister, Honey. She’s only sixteen and just three months ago got her driving license-as she says, ‘to kill.’ The first drive she took was to come here from Dartmouth. That’s a long way. I assumed Dad would give her a hard time about visiting, but he doesn’t. I think maybe he and Mum are secretly glad Honey’s got the guts to do it. And she keeps me from really hating them; she keeps reminding me that this is how they are. They don’t know any other way to be. Honey. She’s only sixteen and yet she knows that. It’s something we don’t realize about people. We do what we do because we don’t know any other way to be.

  “She takes me for rides. Sometimes Mr. B goes with us. And a few times we’ve gone to Seabourne. You know what we do? We look for clues.” Tom smiled. “He says something will turn up, that if we don’t find it, somebody will.”

  Looking at Melrose, Tom added, “Maybe you’re the somebody.”

  34

  An inductionist who never got around to tallying bits of string or footprints in zinnia beds, Sergeant Wiggins had never subscribed to T. S. Eliot’s dictum about the rose and the typewriter, that if you could think of them in the same breath you might have the makings of a poet. Wiggins, who clearly hadn’t the makings, could still think of the rose and the typewriter together. Contraries didn’t bother him at all, nor did obverses, inverses, and converses. In Eliot’s book, the rose and the typewriter were headed for a third encompassing emblem. But Wiggins’s mind did not give birth; the rose and the typewriter remained discrete elements. They did not produce an objective correlative until a Macalvie or a Jury or (he gave himself credit for at least this much) a Plant. Jury would look at the typewriter and the rose and go Aha! Macalvie and Jury were intuitionists.

  But Macalvie (who was to meet them in Lamorna, toward which they were now hurtling on a narrow coastal road) also wanted to know everything-every rose petal, every bent blade of grass, the precise length of every bit of string; he was famous for this attention to detail. It wasn’t easy to work with Macalvie if you believed (as most men surely do) that some little things are eminently forgettable.

  Wiggins didn’t believe in forgetting. To him, everything was memorable. His mind operated like the four-race accumulator; you left the bet on the table and, through the next three races, “accumulated” winnings.

  Right now, he was informing Melrose (who was doing the driving) that Kaposi’s sarcoma wasn’t a kind of cancer as originally supposed. “It’s caused by a herpes virus, HHV8, it’s called. Though I doubt,” he added, sympathetically, “it makes any difference to poor Tom Letts.”

  Melrose marveled: Here was Wiggins, who often talked as if a walk through a field of dandelions could do him in, yet who could shake Tom’s hand, sit beside him, breathe a common air-all without blinking an eye.

  Wiggins went on, reporting in staggering detail the status of each guest at Bletchley Hall. He had met them all, talked to them all, listened to them all; this was Wiggins’s great talent, even if he did not know what he was listening for (which was Jury’s job, Macalvie’s job).

  There was Mr. Clancy with inoperable pancreatic cancer; Mrs. Noonan, who had come to Bletchley after a bone marrow transplant had failed (“Imagine going through all of that! You know how painful a transplant is”); Miss Timons-Browne, who had been a piano teacher before rheumatoid arthritis had taken away her livelihood; Mr. Bleaney-

  “That’s a poem by Philip Larkin,” put in Melrose, to show he was interested in the fates of these poor people. He recited:

  “This was Mr. Bleaney’s room; he stayed

  The whole time he was at the Bodies, till

  They moved him.”

  “Ah, that’s as may be, Mr. Plant, but I doubt your Mr. Bleaney suffered from pancreatic cancer.”

  “He’s Philip Larkin’s Mr. Bleaney, and he suffered as much as anyone-well, go on.” He tried to concentrate on the waves (out there) crashing against the shoreline (in here), and it would have been a pleasant-enough drive had the road not been potholed and had he not had the incarnation of Hippocrates or Sir Richard Burton sitting beside him. Every detail of every illness and, thrown in for good measure, a complete picture of every thankless, graceless relation.

  “Poor Mrs. Atkins, she’s the one suffered three strokes and no one can see how she’s holding on, and you’d think her daughter-in-law could do more by way of bringing the grandchildren-”

  Et cetera, thought Melrose. Was Wiggins through? Had he run down the entire roster of twelve patients? Take away the three met in the sunroom-no, four, including Tom-that left eight; take away Bleaney, Timons-Browne, Clancy, Noonan, Atkins, Fry. Still two to go.

  The Hoopers’ long battle with Alzheimer’s brought them into Lamorna and Melrose pulled up, spitting dirt and gravel, in front of the Wink.

  “Bit tired-looking, in’it?” said Wiggins, slamming shut the car door. His tone hinted at the superciliousness one might expect from a Londoner-in this case Wiggins, who ordinarily hadn’t a shred of the city snob about him. But then he was ordinarily with Richard Jury, who was the least supercilious human being Melrose had ever known. Oh, that he were here!

  Although the layout and the shape of the Wink we
re completely different from his pub in Long Piddleton, it reminded Melrose nonetheless of the Jack and Hammer. Perhaps it was the nucleus of regulars seated at a round table, three men and two women, the same as had been there three nights before, and he toyed with the notion that they were the actual models for several Dorian Gray-like portraits of the habitués (Melrose being habitué number one) of the Jack and Hammer. That old one with the pinched cigarette and the pocked face, surely that would be no other than the true soul of Marshall Trueblood; the woman with the long sad face wearing a dusty brown jumper, Vivian Rivington to a T; the other woman, stout and squat with shreds of gray hair boiling about her forehead-well, actually, she wasn’t the inward self of Agatha, she was the outward incarnation.

  Yes, as he and Wiggins stood at the bar waiting for their drinks, he thoroughly enjoyed his little scifi fantasy, his little ghostly dimension, and was also quite sure that everyone in here was delighted that he had something wonderful to chew over, something to get his teeth in. Murder! No longer would they have to pretend Lamorna was a village to excite the admiration of tourists. Now, it really was! The clay pipe, the black patch, the wooden leg, the rheumy eye, the oil lantern-these were now things to be reckoned with.

  “I don’t know what I want,” said Wiggins, in a pedestrian way that jerked Melrose back from pirates’ gold and Jamaica Inn.

  “What do you mean? It’s just another pub. Get what you usually do: horn of toad, eye of frog, whatever. Have a beer.”

  Wiggins just gave him a look. Have a beer was not one of the Wiggins fallbacks in emergencies. He sighed. “A lemonade, maybe.” He was already getting out a small tubular glass bottle.

  Bromo Seltzer. It was by now one of Wiggins’s staples. Melrose wondered how much of the damned stuff he’d consumed since that trip to Baltimore. Wiggins only remembered the city as the home of Bromo Seltzer. He’d taken a snapshot of the tall building with the logo.