Mrs Brown raised her eyebrows very slowly until her forehead was a rack of wrinkles, then just as slowly she turned her head and gave a hard stare towards Miss Shanks. Miss Shanks heaved an enormous sigh made up of grievance and self-pity and then plastered a more than usually sickly-sweet smile on her face.
‘I wonder if you would come and have a private word with me, Mrs Gilver,’ she said.
‘Mrs Gilver again, am I?’ I responded, startled.
‘In my office, nice and private,’ said Miss Shanks.
‘Oh Ivy, you’re no fun,’ said Miss Barclay and she gave me a greedy look with an unpleasant reptilian glitter about it.
‘What’s going on?’ I said. I had had a long and exhausting day full of other people’s emotions and perhaps it had worn me out. Certainly I was feeling most peculiar standing here. The way they were all looking at me made me want to feel behind myself for the door handle to be sure that if I had to I could easily get away.
‘What’s going on, she asks!’ said Miss Shanks, with a good measure of glee. ‘Well, you’ve been disappearing, haven’t you? Wandering the village when you should be at prayers, tramping about the countryside instead of supervising prep, you’ve made very free with my telephone and you’ve done a wee bitty too much skulking around the house too.’
‘Not to mention not taking the register,’ put in Miss Christopher.
‘And your discipline in the refectory is abysmal,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Giggling fits from start to finish and you just sit there and let them.’
‘And to cap it all,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘you go drinking in pubs. Don’t think you kept that one quiet.’
‘Rather difficult to keep anything quiet when there’s a member of the Brown family to hand,’ I said coolly. My face did not feel cool, for when they set out my last few days like the sweets stall at a bazaar they made pretty rich pickings.
‘I’ve done a wee tate of checking up on you,’ said Miss Shanks. My heart was hammering now. ‘And do you know what I found?’ I shook my head, dreading the answer.
‘I can’t find the Gilver and Osborne Agency listed anywhere. I rang the number on your wee card and all I got was some hoity-toity fellow-me-lad who wouldn’t give his name and had never heard of it.’
Pallister, I thought, not knowing whether to bless him or curse him. His wilful determination not to countenance the existence of my career had no doubt cost me a case or two in the past (and I thanked the gods that most requests came by written letter) but at least he had not regaled Miss Shanks with the news that Gilver and Osborne were detectives.
‘So we’ve been having a wee confab to ourselves,’ Miss Shanks went on. ‘And we reckon you’re no more an English mistress than I’m a kangaroo.’ I kept my gaze level and waited. ‘We reckon you were just chancing your arm slipping in here when you knew your pal was slipping out, looking for a roof over your head and three square meals a day.’ Still, I made my face remain impassive. Was it possible that they had, in Teddy’s phrase, rumbled me as a counterfeit schoolmistress and yet completely missed the truth?
‘So we’re all agreed?’ Miss Barclay said, looking round.
‘I’ve been saying it since Friday,’ said Mrs Brown.
‘We’re all agreed,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘We’d like you to leave, Mrs Gilver. Anderson will take your things down to the Crown directly.’
‘What about the girls?’ I said. ‘Who’s going to give them their English lessons?’
‘I’m sure Miss Glennie will oblige,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘And it’s really none of your concern anyway.’
‘So I’m being sacked,’ I said, ‘for using a telephone I was invited to use and for going on walks no one told me not to go on and for spending time in a village inn that you knew I was staying at when you employed me, because you visited me there.’
‘You’re being sacked,’ said Miss Barclay coldly, ‘for perpetrating a fraud.’
‘Och, come on away!’ trilled Miss Shanks. ‘No need to get so het up.’
‘I’ll make my farewell then, ladies,’ I said. ‘I wish you well and give my regards to Miss Lovage and Miss Glennie.’
I bowed my head briefly and left them. Part of me was glad to be released, I thought on my way upstairs again, for now I could investigate the case instead of reading stories with schoolgirls and letting Alec have all the fun. Another part of me, however, could not bear the thought of leaving this strangest of places before I had discovered what was going on here. A third part of me, despite the fact that it was happening with depressing regularity these days, still felt that the touch of a boot to the seat of my skirts made rather a dent in my dignity.
But there was no time to nurse it. Before I left St Columba’s for ever there was something I had to do.
9
‘Miss Glennie?’ I said, opening the door in response to the timid invitation to enter.
‘Miss Gilver,’ she said. ‘Again.’ She was hunched over her desk with a great number of sheets of paper spread around, but looked up as I entered.
‘I’ve come to warn you,’ I said, closing the door behind me. ‘I know you’ve only just arrived but if there was another opening you turned down in preference to this one, I’d urge you very strongly to see if it’s still there.’
‘There wasn’t,’ Miss Glennie said. ‘Lambourne only sent me this one and I was lucky to have that. And then Miss Shanks has been very kind to me . . . most accommodating. Bent over backwards, actually.’
‘No doubt,’ I said, thinking of the way Ivy Shanks had given over her study to me and allowed Alec to visit me in my room until her swift volte-face and my even swifter sacking. ‘And do you know she’s expecting you to teach English as well?’ I saw from her quick frown that this was news. ‘I’ve been given the boot, you see. And I want to help it not happen to you.’
‘I—’ stammered Miss Glennie. ‘I’ll very happily take on English if there’s time. I mean, the other mistresses help out in areas not their own, don’t they?’
‘Well, then, at the very least, if there’s any way that you could . . .’ I fell silent. This next bit was rather difficult to work one’s way round to. ‘If you had said anything, out of nerves perhaps, over-egging or maybe even slightly exaggerating your curriculum vitae, I think it would be a good idea to see if you could perhaps tone it down a bit. Rescind, if possible. Recant. Miss Shanks can be a bit capricious when it comes to . . . she might seem to have countenanced something that she later will pounce on. You might not even know why.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Miss Glennie. She looked baffled; no sign that she had caught even a wisp of my meaning.
‘Well, if you didn’t want her to know that you’d been without a position for a while and you said something . . . unlikely . . . that you regretted.’
‘My last position?’ said Miss Glennie, cottoning on at last. ‘She’s been nothing but sweet about that. And I didn’t tell her. Lambourne told her.’
‘You told them, presumably,’ I said, thinking she was rather splitting hairs.
‘I think they knew anyway,’ said Miss Glennie. ‘They hinted as much when they rang me. I was . . . very surprised.’
Not as surprised as me, I thought, staring at her. Could it be true after all that this awkward woman really had been a member of the royal household? How did she come from that to Miss Shanks’s school? Or even to a scholastic agency? Would she not be desired by every family in the land to teach their little ones the French she had taught to the princes and the princess there?
‘Naturally, I hadn’t said a word,’ said Miss Glennie. ‘But one of the Lambourne ladies is Aberdonian and maybe there was a domestic connection.’
‘Very possibly,’ I said, thinking of the Browns and how they ran the Crown, the Post office and St Columba’s amongst them. ‘And very commendable of you, Miss Glennie, I must say, not to trade on your illustrious acquaintance. It must make you uncomfortable that Miss Shanks is so much less circumspect, eh?’
‘I’m in no position to complain,’ Miss Glennie said. ‘Thankful to have a job and to be accepted by these good people.’
Almost as though, I thought to myself, it was something of which to be ashamed. A very odd position to take, unless one had fallen in with Bolshies, which Miss Shanks and her mistresses were not.
‘Well, I’ve said my piece,’ I concluded, ‘and I wish you all the very best, in spite of it. I hope you will be happy here.’ Miss Glennie gave a pained smile, although whether to indicate that she doubted it or simply that she had had enough of this odd woman bothering her was hard to say.
‘You seem to have settled in anyway,’ I said, waving a hand around at the watercolours hanging on walls which had been bare the day before and the crowd of photographs on the chimneypiece. I am ashamed to say, I even sidled towards these to see if among them were any of the exalted household; for governesses, like nannies, were much given to mementoes of their charges. To my disappointment, if not my surprise (for I still did not quite believe the Balmoral angle), the photographs in their ornate frames were two ancient ones of a couple dressed in high Edwardian style, and a enormous number of just one child from infanthood to the army.
‘My parents and my brother,’ said Miss Glennie.
I knew better than to ask about the brother, for when the photographs stop with a young man in uniform one knows exactly what it means.
‘And are your parents . . . gone to their rest?’ I said. It was Grant’s phrase and I had not employed it before.
‘No,’ said Miss Glennie, her face tightening.
‘My mistake,’ I said. ‘Awfully sorry.’ And since there is nothing much to say after one has suggested that a person’s entire family is dead and been corrected, I bade her goodnight and withdrew. Well, what did she expect? I asked myself crossly as I returned to my own room. She should have a snap of them all white of hair and gnarled of knuckle at their cottage gate if she wanted people to know they were still living.
‘Ah, there ye are,’ said a gruff voice as I turned the last corner. The sound of it was startling in this place where femininity reigned. It was Anderson the handyman.
‘Here to see me off the premises?’ I said.
‘Just to give ye a lift wi’ yer bags, miss,’ he said, and his eyes, it is true, were kindly enough. He might be Miss Shanks’s servant but he was not, I thought, her henchman.
‘Lots of coming and going, eh?’ I said. Anderson raised his eyes to heaven and whistled. Meanwhile I opened my suitcase, standing with my back to him and hoping to cover my movements. I took out Jeanne Beauclerc’s case and immediately sat my hat on top of it. I opened my wardrobe, extracted the small bag and dropped my mackintosh over it. Thus I tried to hide the initials, which had winked at me in the lamplight.
‘And now I just need to throw some things in here,’ I said, nodding at my own case.
‘I’ll go down and get your trunk,’ he said. ‘I thought ye were packed and ready.’
‘Oh, I don’t have a trunk,’ I said, flinging open drawers and tossing underclothes into the open suitcase. Anderson looked everywhere except at the flying stockings and vests. I scraped the heap of brushes, papers, cigarettes and powder tins in on top and shut the lid, stuffing in the escaping corners of garments until the latch caught and I could lock it.
He lifted it without effort and made a move towards the larger of Jeanne Beauclerc’s cases too.
‘I’ll take those, Anderson,’ I said, working my hands in under the hat and coat and grasping the handles.
‘Away,’ said Anderson. ‘I’ll manage them fine. One under ma oxter and the other in ma hand.’
‘No, no, really, I insist,’ I said.
‘I’m mebbes nearly seventy but I’m no’ that clapped out just yet,’ he said, setting his jaw at a mulish angle.
‘Oh God,’ I said – which shocked him more than my proposal to carry my own bags – and lifted the hat and coat. He was looking me right in the eye as he tucked the overnight case under one arm, but he glanced down as he grasped the other handle and his eyes widened. J.A.deV.B. glinted unmistakably there. I considered for just a second trying to convince him that these were the initials of my maiden name, but the notion passed without making its way as far as my lips.
‘You must be wondering about that, Anderson,’ I said. But he surprised me.
‘I keep my head down and my trap shut,’ he said. ‘This job comes wi’ a house and there’s a fine big stretch o’ garden.’
Now my eyes flashed. What did he keep his head down to avoid seeing? What did he keep his trap shut about? Before I could ask him, we were disturbed by the sound of someone approaching. Not Miss Shanks for once, I thought, even before the figure appeared at the bend in the passageway. It was Miss Barclay, holding herself very rigid and with a thin smile of untold meanness on her mouth. She held out a brown envelope to me.
‘One day’s pay, Miss Gilver,’ she said. ‘So there’ll be no need for you to come back for anything once you’ve gone.’ She glanced at Anderson and I was surprised and delighted to see that he had turned the case, so that its initials were hidden against his corduroyed leg.
‘Miss,’ he said, giving a nod.
Miss Barclay gave exactly the same nod back to him and, with her mouth even tighter and yet even more amused by it all, she left us.
I followed Anderson in silence to the side door, where he loaded my bags onto a small handcart, lit a lantern which swung from a pole at its prow and started pushing it up the drive.
‘It’s a jolly long way,’ I said, trotting after him.
‘Safer than the cliff steps, though but,’ said Anderson.
‘And it’ll give us a nice chance for a chat,’ I said, hopefully.
‘We’ve got space for ten chickens and we can fatten a pig,’ said Anderson, returning to his previous topic. ‘And there’s a good apple tree and a fine patch o’ rhubarb and brambles all over the bank.’
‘And I would do nothing to put any of that in danger of being snatched away,’ I said. ‘If you have anything to tell me I shall think of some way to make it seem I found out from an entirely different quarter, you have my word.’
‘Oh, it’s no’ that,’ said Anderson. We had emerged from the drive now and were making our way along the top road towards the row of villas. ‘Just if St C.’s gets shut down what’s to become of Maidie and me? Our laddie has six o’ a family in a two-room house and our lass is in service. I dinnae fancy the Parish – would you? – so I keep my head down.’
‘And your trap shut, yes,’ I said. So whatever it was would close St Columba’s down, would it, if it ever came to light?
‘Anyway, nae harm done,’ said Anderson.
‘I’m not sure Mademoiselle Beauclerc would agree with you,’ I said, crisply. ‘Or Miss Lipscott.’
‘Eh?’ said Anderson. ‘They’re off an’ out o’ it. They’re all right now.’ I made the mistake of looking as interested as I felt in this cryptic remark and by the light of his lantern he saw me. He shut his mouth as though he meant never to open it again in his life and put his head down like a bull, pointing the way with his lowered brow. I got not another syllable until he lifted his cap at the door of the Crown and said farewell.
The landlady of the Crown was in her dressing gown and curling papers with vanishing cream in a thick layer all over her face, but she had me sign the guestbook without making too much of a murmur – after I named a lordly new rate for the same room in which I had spent that first night – and she unbent so far as first to shout for her husband to carry my cases and then to ask me if I had had my tea or would I like a drop of soup brought up to me.
‘The parlour fire’s banked for the night, madam,’ she said, ‘so you’ll be cosier in your bedroom with the gas on.’
It seemed a long time since dinner with those silly little girls but I rejected the offer. I know that the leftover soup from a Scotswoman’s kitchen is not for the fainthearted, given its starting point of rib-sticking heft
and the nature of the inevitable barley which works away long after the actual cooking is done, so that sometimes second- or (I have heard tell of it) third-day soup can be just as easily eaten with a fork as with a spoon.
A door across the landing cracked open as the landlord – hastily bundled into his trousers over his nightshirt – set my bags down inside the door of my room and in the space I saw the gleam of more vanishing cream and the wink of the landing light glancing off spectacle lenses. The landlord stumped off to the back stairs.
‘Can I help you?’ I said with cold grandeur, at which the convalescent widow opened her door and attempted to stare me down.
‘He’s not here,’ she said. ‘He left this morning.’
‘I do not have the pleasure of understanding you,’ I replied.
‘Oh, very dignified,’ she said, ‘with your chin in the air and your head high!’ Her lip had curled. ‘I wouldn’t live that grubby, scrabbling life of yours for a king’s ransom.’
There could be no doubt of her meaning and I should have been able to sneer back, shrug and shut my door but I was possessed of some devil all of a sudden. I could not help thinking of all the girls who would hang their heads in the face of it. I saw Jeanne Beauclerc’s drooping head in my mind’s eye and remembered her saying her family did not own her. I saw Fleur’s pinched, pale face and her fathomless reserve. I saw the scared eyes of Miss Thomasina Glennie as she huddled over her papers, shrinking away from me. I could picture too Miss Blair’s look of hurt and bewilderment, as Alec had described it, and I wondered what we would see in the faces of Miss Taylor and Miss Bell if we should ever find them. Something – some idea, vague and shapeless – shifted deep inside me like a shipwreck dragging across the ocean floor when a current catches it broadside.
I blinked and the widow came into focus again.
‘Gossip is a nasty habit, my dear madam,’ I said, ‘but slander is a crime. Or is it libel when it’s written? I can never remember. And lying is a sin.’
‘I don’t know what you mean!’ she said, thoroughly ruffled.
Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses Page 23