After cleaning his shoe of sheep dung, wrapping his handkerchief round the rash of bloody pricks on his hand, moving his ankle gingerly where he'd caught it amongst this clump of deceptive, moss-covered rocks, Melrose found a wide, flat stone and sat down to look at the running stream. Or beck, he supposed it was called.
He looked across the snowy patches beside the stream, past bracken and burnt-looking heather, to a distance where he caught sight of a woman who, probably because of the illusory quality of the moors themselves, had sprung from nowhere. She had simply appeared on the crest of a treeless hill, snow-covered, walking along it in a cape that billowed behind her, and nothing in hand that might identify her as a tourist, a walker along the Pennine or Bronte ways, empty-handed, going from nowhere to nowhere. The image fascinated him and he watched her walk, a silhouette against the white horizon, until his attention was called away by a sound. It was an odd grizzling sound, as if someone were trying to clear his throat, followed by a sort of cat-cry. He looked up, saw two birds circling. Curlews sounded like cats, didn't they? Well, if they were circling over him, they were probably buzzards.
Quickly he returned his gaze to the skyline. The woman was gone. He lit a cigarette, looked at the coal end, shook his head. Here he'd come with his picnic basket to commune with Nature in a Chesterfield coat and with a gold cigarette case. He shook his head again. Hopeless.
He must take decisions.
What decisions? They'd all been taken for him. Polly Praed was no doubt right now sitting with her amethyst eyes glued to the page in her typewriter on which poured forth the fates of dogs or doges, and Vivian Rivington—
Oh! But wasn't he disgusted with himself? Blame it on Trueblood; it was all Trueblood's idea. Liar. Trueblood got the cut-out book, but he himself had gone right along with it. Well, what fun could you get out of life if you couldn't devil Vivian, after all?
What he couldn't stand was change. He thought, sitting here, perhaps he could become a Zen Buddhist. If he watched the water, if he flowed with the beck . . . Wasn't that the idea? Weren't they always saying that one must flow? One must forgo attachments? That life must be considered a running stream and to try to hold water in one's hand was total illusion? The trouble was, though, that all of this transience only seemed to apply to friendship, love, and beauty. Not wars and plagues and people one loathed. You didn't see them go floating down the beck . . .
So what kind of comfort did flow offer? He wanted things to stay absolutely the same, the same little group at the same table in the Jack and Hammer; the same rat terrier outside of Miss Crisp's secondhand furniture shop)—
Melrose looked round, for he heard the sound again.
Well, what about the Everlasting Now? Wasn't that a Zen notion too?
He rummaged through the basket and yanked out a chicken wing covered in crumbs of broken roll and knew one of his problems was his total lack of vocation, except for those zombie lectures he inflicted on students of French Romantic poetry. He studied the chicken wing and thought of Rimbaud.
Did he have to choose a genius who'd died at nineteen? At nineteen all Melrose was doing was falling oif horses. He was going cross-eyed trying to find bits of meat on the wing and gave it up, tossing it in the basket. Naturally, Agatha had drunk the half bottle of Pouilly-Fume that his cook had put in specially for him.
He allowed himself a huge, self-pitying sigh. He'd simply got to take stock of himself. . . . Gevrey-Chambertin, Chateau Margaux, the incomparable finesse of the Montrachets; Chevalier, Batard, Chassagne. The ones Dumas had said should be drunk kneeling; the Chablis Grands Crus; the Cote de Girarmes Napoleon loved. And then the port . . . it was more interesting taking stock of his wine cellar.
The noise this time was nearer and more distinct. Melrose left the cobwebbed environs of his wine cellar to squint through the mossy rocks. That mewling noise he had taken as the curlew's was, after all, a cat: it sat there, blinking its yellow eyes, looking starved.
Start thinking of your private stock of port and something comes along to shame you, he supposed. Melrose put the cat in the basket—clearing out the chicken bones first—and lugged it back to the road.
A woman standing at a crossroad apparently waiting for a local directed him to a hamlet the other side of which was an animal hospital. Since she had nothing better to do but stand there and gape at his car, she took a long time about it.
The True Friend Animal Hospital lay at the end of an infernal, potholed track of road that ended at a square, gray-stoned building with a cleared-off patch of equally rutted earth meant as a car park. Occupying it were a Ford truck of '40s vintage, a Mini Clubman Estate, a Jag, and a couple of bicycles with wire baskets. A drenching rain had started up right after he'd left the woman still staring after the Bentley. He turned up the velvet collar of his coat and jogged to the unfriendly-looking door of True Friend.
The waiting room was furnished with three wooden benches, one against each wall, and the counter behind which a tired-looking woman in steel-rimmed glasses and hair like a Brillo pad sat with a pile of filing folders.
Melrose's acquaintance with veterinarians was minimal; he wondered, though, why these places always had names like Animal Haven and Loving Kindness when they generally resembled jails and had receptionists like wardens. This one told him that as he had no appointment, he'd have to wait until the regular customers were taken care of. Her tone registered her disapproval of his casual and his damp and his rather noisy cat as she nodded toward the benches for him to be seated.
Not that there was any shortage of noise in the room already. A bullterrier and an Alsatian were having an awful row, each straining at his lead to see which could grab a portion of Melrose's ankle first. Some ineffectual snorting sounds came from their master, a middle-aged man with a basin-cut hairdo and a face like a cliffside, who apparently thought he was controlling his charges when finally one lay and the other sat tensely, both with snarls locked in their throats, the bullterrier with teeth bared at a calico cat a youngish couple had wedged between them.
On the other end of that bench sat the owner of the Jaguar (clearly), who appeared to think her foothold on a rung way up the social ladder from the other benchwarmers got her feet far enough off the ground to avoid the drooling bullterrier. Everything about her was glossily groomed: her Chanel suit, her wings of frosted hair, her whining poodle whose snout was pressed to the wire insert of the sort of carrier required by airlines. She did give Melrose a quick, appraising glance, fingered her pearls, and craned her neck to get a better view of the hood of the Bentley.
The two women on the other bench both wore thick woolen coats and paisley scarves over their heads and tied under their chins. In their laps were almost identical flat, black bags. Leaving off what had been a gossipy exchange about some "owld sluther-guts," they turned their wide, pleasant faces, bland as Yorkshire puddings, on Melrose and acknowledged both him and the weather by commenting on the rain lashing the windows. "Fearful poggy the rooads be," said one, giving him a rubber-band smile.
Melrose returned the smile and the nod as he sat himself and the basket on the single unoccupied bench.
The two returned to their exchange, apparently unconcerned that the Skye terrier at their feet was lying with glassy eyes and front legs splayed out and possibly already dead; or that the cardboard box beside the one who had spoken seemed to be moving toward the edge of the bench—
". . . to get 'em to stir theirsen, an' then ah cooms doan't'see't'bairns w'Mickey 'ere . . ."
She nodded at the terrier. ". . .'t'lectric an' ... in t'Persil. Ah was ommast fit to bust, Missus Malby . . . wi''t'bairns yammerin' an' . . . roun' 'n roun'."
"Ooh, aye. Pore ting loaks deead i''t' middle, 'e do. Perky, 'ere . . ." And she tapped the box with the airholes. ". . . clackin' away, ahr Tom was . . . caught i''t'mangle, and ahr Alice yammerin' abaht . . ."
She opened the box and Melrose thought he saw the beak and top of some colorful-looking bird pop out before the
one called Malby shoved it back in.
The other one clucked her tongue. "Aye, Missus Livlis, lookin' yonderly 'e is," and gave the room in general a gummy smile. Melrose interpreted this to mean the parrot was near death, for these two were certainly into it.
Melrose was fascinated by all of this, for what he made out was that Mrs. Malby's bairns had stuffed the terrier into the washing machine (which was apparently an appliance the Malbys had just acquired) and dashed in some washing powder. (Sometimes Melrose was just as glad he was bairn-less.) Whether the terrier had actually gone round at all before its rescue by Mrs. Malby, he couldn't discover from their clotted talk, but from the look of it, he'd say the terrier had been spin-dried. The parrot's fate was uncertain. Caught in a mangle? It could be Mrs. Livlis (Lovelace, perhaps?) was not as fortunate as Mrs. Malby and had to do her wash in an old-fashioned tub and the parrot might have enjoyed perching on the mangle—
The outside door burst open upon this scene of riot, carnage, and washday blues, admitting wind, rain, and a small girl covered more or less top to bottom in a hooded yellow oilskin and black Wellingtons. Melrose was hoping the box she held harbored something ordinary, like a litter of kittens. She entirely ignored the yowlings for her blood her entrance had effected in the Alsatian and the bullterrier as she marched up to the desk.
Fortunately, the receptionist was finally telling the man with the dogs to go back and the Alsatian and the bullterrier more or less chewed and clawed their way across the room, making passes at the child's boots, though she didn't seem to notice or to care as she set her box on the floor. The flaps were up; it appeared to be empty, so he supposed she was coming to collect her pet. That encouraged him, for he wasn't certain about anything leaving True Friends alive, given the intermittent screeches and yelps he heard coming from the bowels of the building.
Wearily, the receptionist put a question to her—Melrose was too far away to hear precisely, but he picked up on "appointment."
The girl's chin just grazed the counter. She sounded a little thunderstruck when she had to answer, No, and tried to add something about a doctor there.
With that sort of impatience some adults reserve for all children, the grizzle-haired receptionist asked her, "Have you brought in your pet?"
The girl raised her own voice. "No—" Something seemed to catch at her throat.
"Well? What's your name?"
"Abby." The word exploded. "It's my cat."
"And Doctor told you to collect it? Well? What's its name?"
"Buster!" said the girl in a voice raised several notches as she whirled from the counter and marched over to sit on the bench by Melrose, making sure she kept her distance. She sat with her arms hard across her chest, hands fisted, staring straight ahead.
The receptionist just shook and shook her head at this intractable girl and called across the room, "Is he in the hospital, then?" Here she jabbed her pencil toward the ceiling.
"She is dead!"
The receptionist quickly changed her tune, realizing that Buster had died at True Friends. The reaction of the customers was predictable: we didn't hear that; she didn't say that. Heads swiveled away from the Fury sitting amongst them. The couple with the now-obscenely-alive calico cleared their throats in unison, eyes ranging round the ceiling. Mrs. Malby and Mrs. Livlis had the grace to look truly mournful. The Jaguar owner smoothed her way to the end of her bench, leaned over the arm toward the furious child, put on a mushy look, and tried to engage the little girl's eyes.
Well, thought Melrose, sliding down in his seat, there were always people who liked to check out electrical sockets with their fingers or pull parrots from mangles. He knew what was coming.
Although the little girl refused to look at the well-dressed lady or her beastly poodle, the woman still said, "Never mind, dear; you can always get another kitty."
The Furies, Medea, Pandora could not have unleashed anything into that room more violent than the little girl's expression when she looked at this person. The woman backed physically away from what could have been a fist in the face when the child's dark eyes snapped up and locked with the woman's pale blue ones. And the thunderclap that shook the room just then certainly sounded to Melrose as if God had a few ideas about the fate of the poodle.
It was perhaps fortunate that as the little girl rose in something like a trance to face this woman, the receptionist hurried in with the box, obviously heavier now.
The child took it without a word, turned in her yellow slicker, and walked through the door that Melrose had risen to open for her.
The rain poured from a sky gray-dark as the little girl walked down the road, splashing through puddles.
Melrose had, of course, wanted to transport her to wherever she was going, and wondered what had sent this child on such an awful errand by herself.
But he didn't offer; he felt, for some reason, she knew how she wanted to go, and where; that she must go the way she came, carrying her dreadful burden. Two burdens, he thought, standing there in the door getting wet: her fury and her dead female cat named Buster.
11
As Jury was walking down the Citrine driveway to his car, hoping for a hot bath, a good meal, and a pretty waitress at the Old Silent, he saw her.
At least, he thought it must be Nell Healey. It was at a distance, and down a torturously winding path screened by trees; but he was sure he had seen a woman moving beyond him.
Jury stepped from the drive to the footpath that wound erratically between pines and spiny-branched elms. No wind stirred. It was as if there had been no storm. The wood at dusk was drearier even than it had seemed earlier that afternoon, as desolate and unhappy a scene as could be.
Wretched was the word that came to mind. Oak-galls clung to barks and branches; the skeletal remains of birches lined the gray sky. Jury looked back at the dark slab of the gatehouse, its squints for windows through which no light would show. Drab and eyeless, it looked almost pernicious. Along the path were the stiff remains of wagwort and flea-bane; sodden leaved and congealed between the roots of tree trunks; moss climbed around lichen-slippery stones.
He wondered if there were places that could infect the mind, abrade the heart, corrode the spirit. Why would anyone choose, as she certainly had, to live in such cold chambers, such a severe landscape, which he doubted was much improved by the coming of spring.
She was standing beside an elm. Standing, not leaning, apparently looking down to the end of the path where a useless gate listed. Useless, because the tiers of stone on either side had nearly disappeared. In this wall that no longer defined any boundary, the gate was redundant.
"Mrs. Healey?"
Although her back was to him, she would have heard his approach over stone shards and fallen twigs. There was no response. But he thought in the moments that followed that her gaze was turned inward, that the wood, path, gate—the entire landscape—was lost on her.
Before he could repeat the name, she swerved a little, looked round at him. "Oh. Hello." She did not pretend that she couldn't remember him, or imagine why she'd be meeting him on this path.
She was holding, incongruously, a handful of leaves rescued from autumn like a small bouquet, as if, having set out to pick some winter flower, this was all she could find. Her skin had a gauzy sheen to it, like her hair. He thought at first the face was made paler by a lack of rouge and eyeshadow; then he knew that what he had taken in the Old Silent for the pallor of illness was not that at all. Her skin had the pellucid look of a child's; her hair was not ash-blond, but streaked here and there with lighter glints and reddish strands; it was variegated, like her eyes. Though the look she gave him was glancing, like cold light on cold water, frozen in the prismatic irises were bits of color like the leaves she held: mottled gold and green and brown with a silvery bloom. Even her clothes were the same colors—dark green sweater hooked round her shoulders, gold silk blouse, brown trousers. It was an autumnal look. In some sort of alchemy, she had absorbed what colors remaine
d. Or, chameleon-wise, was trying to blend in and hide there.
After a moment or two in which she looked from the path to him and back toward the falling-down gate, she said, "I
wasn't meaning to be avoiding—" She stopped and expelled a long sigh.
"Avoiding me?" Jury laughed a little. "I'd hate to try to find you if you meant to be elusive."
Her gaze went back to the path and gate.
Jury looked down it. "Were you waiting for someone?"
That earned him a flicker of honest interest. "Waiting?" She smiled slightly. "No."
Either she gave the impression of one always just on the point of speaking, or he was so used to people rattling on about their lives that he was uneasy, waiting himself upon her silence. "You seem so intent," he added limply, "upon that prospect." He looked down the path.
Her smile was very slight. "I have none of those," she said, ambiguously and almost irrelevantly. "A useless gate, isn't it? I expect this place was surrounded by a medieval wall. Perhaps that was what was called a clair-voyee. ..."
He moved closer, to a position that would have commanded more attention, if that were possible. She continued in her odd way both to note his presence and to ignore it.
"Mrs. Healey—"
"Nell." Her smile was almost convincing. "We were in close enough contact I think you can call me by my first name." Now, she looked away again, this time at the surrounding elms and birches. "I wonder why you're back."
It was a statement only; she did not seem interested in Jury's reasons. He had the feeling that things were done with, finished, for her. There was no trace of hostility in her tone, and none of hope, either. She looked down at the path, as if studying the groupings of pebbles, leaves, and roots. She seemed deep in thought, but it was not her surroundings that engaged her attention, and not him. She appeared not to care how he answered.
Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent Page 10