Closed at Dusk

by Monica Dickens

  ‘A boy at school’s brother died of it. You lie down to sleep and then you die.’

  ‘Boloney.’ Keith switched off the corridor light, to make Rob yell out, ‘You said you’d leave it on!’ Keith switched it on again and went downstairs, laughing like Dracula.

  Struggling out from beneath the limp weights of Charlotte and Corrie, Rob knelt again at the window and saw the oblongs of light go out one by one, and the bulldog disappear into thick darkness. Whatever had been waiting out there beyond the light drew closer. Rob wriggled back into the tunnel of bedclothes and listened for Keith’s bare footsteps coming up the stairs. They came at last, pad, pad, wearily. What if it wasn’t Keith? The footsteps passed his door. The labrador snored. Keith’s bedroom door opened and shut, and his music started quietly.

  Chapter Two

  When Rob’s mother Tessa arrived from London, she found him in the kitchen, dropping lemon biscuit dough neatly on to baking trays for Ruth.

  ‘Where you been, where have you been?’ He dropped the spoon on the floor and ran to Tessa.

  ‘You know I’ve been at a conference.’

  ‘I thought you would never come!’

  ‘No you didn’t,’ Ruth said. ‘You told me she was coming this morning.’

  Rob did not feel shamed. It was only a ritual. He went out with his mother to find where Keith was working.

  None of the gardeners had seen him for the last hour. They shrugged their shoulders and went on with what they were doing. Keith worked in spurts, for apprentice wages. He was a bit of a joke to them.

  ‘Let’s try the hidden garden.’ Tessa made the playful secret face that used to be only for Rob and his father, and now was only for Rob. They raced the dogs along the lake, and went round its narrow end where it met the little Lynn river, cutting under the road from the village.

  On a low green mound the miniature temple of the Egyptian cat-goddess Bastet stood blazing white in the sun against its semi-circle of dwarf cypresses. ‘Remember Gigi.’ There was a new card pinned inside one of the fluted wooden pillars among the faded photographs and curling in memoriams to visitors’ cats.

  Behind the aromatic cypresses they took the path between the giant beeches to a low doorway in a wall so overhung with honeysuckle and wisteria and crimson glory vine that you could not see the bricks. Standing upright again – Rob had ducked unnecessarily with his mother – they were in a charming little closed garden of odd-shaped flower beds and grass paths that rambled without pattern between box edgings. White seats fitted into corners. There was a sundial that said, ‘Never Too Late for Delight’, a goldfish pond with yellow iris, and a tiny thatched summer house. Pottery models of small animals sat or prowled among the flowers and bushes. Stone lizards and frogs rested along the rim of the pond.

  New visitors fancied, when they found this pleasance, that they had stumbled on a secret place which was private to the family and their friends. ‘Well, but the door’s open and there’s no one about …’ They sat in the summer house and on the white seats, and felt crafty and privileged. They did not know about the real hidden garden between the angle of the coach-house wall and the high hedge of rhododendrons, where the family had their own flower garden and swimming pool and comfortable furniture on suntrap flagstones. Because of the late May heatwave, Tessa’s father had filled the pool early this year. She and Rob eventually found Keith there, in the cold blue water.

  For looking after Rob for two days, Tessa had brought her cousin a beautiful peach-coloured shirt and a volume, bound in soft leather, of Rimbaud’s poems.

  ‘Was the Beast all right?’

  ‘Divine.’ Keith hung on the edge of the pool and tried to lick Tessa’s wet toes. The small nails were varnished cherries.

  ‘He can be an awful pest.’ She laughed down at Keith. ‘Always wanting attention and calling. It can drive you mad.’

  ‘Oh, no, he didn’t do that.’ Keith tilted back his head and squinted at Rob along the side of his bony nose.

  Rob had put on his swimming trunks in the pool house. He did a spectacular jump into the shallow end. ‘Race you a width,’ he gasped at the surface.

  ‘Too cold. Going back to work.’ Keith tried to pull himself up, failed, and climbed out by the steps. He picked up his towel, and Tessa went with him to the door that led to the private walk behind the stables.

  ‘Mummy – stay! Stay here and watch me swim – Mummy!’ Rob took in water, and choked. But his mother was only standing laughing in the arched gateway, calling something to Keith as he went towards the house.

  Rob had his mother to himself for two days before anyone else arrived. They did things that Tessa used to do here when she was a child, visiting Grandmother Sylvia. In the mornings before the visitors came, they waded in the marsh and rolled down the banks of the terraced lawns. She rowed him in the blue dinghy under the humped wooden bridge to the front of Walter Cobb’s empty tomb, set into a high overgrown bank of the lake.

  ‘I won’t look.’ Rob turned his head away. He did not mind seeing the mausoleum from the other side of the lake, but staring close up, you might see the heavy doors bulge and buckle, and the desperate spirits of hell burst out and blaze down the broken marble steps to set the lake on fire.

  ‘There’s nothing there, silly,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s a good place.’

  ‘She put him there.’

  ‘For love. Your great-great-great-grandfather. She buried him here for love, with a statue of his favourite dog above, to guard him. Like Charlotte guards us.’

  Tessa’s rag-bag mongrel was in the bow of the boat, small blunt head up, ears out sideways, short legs braced. Since she left Rex a year ago, Charlotte and Rob were the best things in Tessa’s life. Rex had broken her heart, but she had never lost her buoyant optimism. By nature impulsive and disordered, she did not tie herself to future plans, but embraced whatever came along. She was at the moment a personnel counsellor with Maddox Management, a consultancy which ran seminars for business and professional staff. The sessions she conducted were lively and stimulating. Thanks to some inspired training with the great Dr Oscar Ferullo, she was equipped to help men and women improve working relationships. Their private lives might be a mess, but then so was Tessa’s.

  She tied up the boat for their picnic, and when visitors began to straggle into the gardens, they went back to the house.

  Rob ran with his head ducked, as if he were naked. Tessa walked, and waved and smiled at people and said hullo. Some were pleased to see one of the family. Some were baffled, wondering about this friendly young woman in shorts, with her caramel hair gathered randomly on top of her head.

  Tessa and Rob went down to the lodge cottage where Ruth’s mother Agnes lived with Ruth’s grandmother, Mary Trout, who was almost ninety. Troutie, as she had been to the family for as long as anyone could remember, sat in her big old fusty chair beside the window, so that she could observe cars and walkers going up and down the drive.

  Starting at The Sanctuary as a fourteen-year-old under-maid before the First War, she had progressed to being nurse to Tessa’s father and his brother and sister, and later cook and everything else to their mother. After Sylvia Taylor died and her son William restored the house and opened up the gardens, he wanted his beloved Troutie to help Ruth to start the tearoom. Non-feudal Agnes urged her to break free, but Troutie simply expanded her output of victoria sponges and bakewell tarts while her wrists and back held out, and continued to hobble up to the big house to mend clothes and polish silver for as long as she could walk.

  Tessa kissed her. The old cheek was like a cobweb. ‘Here’s Rob, Troutie, you remember? My little boy.’

  ‘She knows that.’ Agnes’s voice, relentless as the rooks, came from the other room.

  ‘She knows everything.’ Tessa toured the room to inspect once more the photographs of people with horses, horses without people, Beatrice Cobb bottle-feeding a baby lamb, Sylvia Taylor in a hideous hat, with a goat, William and Matthew in long school shorts, o
n donkeys; groups, weddings, babies; a Dutch china dog pulling a cart, glass birds from Venice, painted teacups – all the trophies of trips abroad brought back for someone who had never been abroad. ‘Tell Rob some more about the old days, like you used to tell me. What do you think about?’

  ‘What can she think about?’ Agnes answered for her mother. ‘At that age, it’s a blank. Very peaceful. I can’t wait.’

  ‘I think about the good old times.’ The long old-lady hairs waved as Troutie’s toothless jaw moved to talk. Why didn’t Agnes pull them out? Tessa did not like to suggest it. Rob watched from a safe distance, rubbing a fat china cat against his cheek. ‘Such times we had with all the staff. I was only a little mite of twelve.’

  ‘Fourteen,’ from Agnes.

  ‘First proper home I ever had. Never had a home like The Sanctuary. It was lovely.’ Her voice quavered off.

  ‘How could it have been?’ Agnes came into the sitting-room in her purple jacket, a cigarette on her lip. ‘That nasty basement with those terrible icy rooms. You ever seen the room where they washed out mops and cloths in cold water?’ she asked Tessa. ‘The tears froze on her face. Ma’s told me. Who do you think it was found Maryann Button hanging from a rope at the back of the cellar where they hung the game?’ Rob turned round from the army of ornaments on the mantelpiece. ‘My mother, that’s who. She was fifteen.’

  ‘What games?’ Rob asked.

  ‘Hares, pheasants, partridge.’

  ‘They hung up the birds?’

  ‘It’s all right, Rob.’ Tessa made a face at Agnes.

  ‘And Maryann Button with ’em.’ Agnes had had a drink or two.

  ‘They hung up the birds alive?’

  ‘Come on, Rob.’ Tessa put her arm round him. ‘We must go, darling Troutie.’ She raised her voice because the old woman had closed her eyes.

  ‘Go and get down a hare,’ Cook says. Behind the small furred corpses hanging from the beam, Maryann Button dangles from a gammon hook in her parlourmaid dress and white apron, the cap tipped forward on the skewed surrendered head, a pickling jar broken by the chair she has kicked over on its side.

  ‘Clumsy to the last.’ Phyllis Bunby sticks out her thick bottom lip before her face collapses and she sobs and slobbers for half an hour.

  William and Dorothy Taylor came home on Thursday evening. When he turned the car into the drive under the two wrought-iron lambs that pranced together above the gateway, William smiled and said, ‘There it is.’

  ‘You always say that.’ Dorothy had known that he would. ‘Are you afraid that one day it won’t be there?’

  ‘I can’t ever quite believe it’s ours.’

  The house had been built by one of William’s ancestors to impress guests and neighbours with a sort of domesticated fortress. The walls were massive blocks of Cotswold stone, anchored at each corner by broad hexagonal turrets; and yet even on its most lowering days when it bulked darkly, lashed by rain against a hopeless sky, it was not grim and foreboding. Its size and weight were steadiness, and beauty was given to it by the harmonious slopes and angles of its many roofs, the elegantly placed chimneys, the calm ranks of Georgian windows, five panes high on the raised ground floor, four panes above, two under the roof, below the attic dormers.

  ‘Your sister Harriet wants you to smother it with ivy and Virginia creeper,’ Dorothy said. ‘She thinks it looks like a prison.’

  In the turret ahead of them, sunset fire signalled from watery old glass. Oatmeal stone soaked up the glow.

  ‘She can put her head in a bucket,’ William said.

  Growing up here, he had always adored this house, and now that it belonged to him in middle age, or he to it, he spent as much time here as he could, sleeping in the Chelsea flat only when he had to stay late in London.

  William, a partner in a large firm of land agents, was fifty-five, a large rumpled man who was often taken for one of the gardeners, which pleased him. He was a hardworking, capable businessman, who could play at being sophisticated when necessary, but his likeable face was still boyish, his pleasures and enthusiasms vulnerably simple. His passion was this house and garden, which he had inherited twelve years ago when his mother died. His wife Dorothy, who had preferred their smaller home, had come to terms with The Sanctuary and its unending demands. With the battle finally won to repair the devastation of Sylvia Taylor’s last eccentric years, Dorothy forgave the house and allowed it to make her comfortable, running it with the same energy and competence she brought to all her work. She was a child psychologist. At fifty-seven, she saw private and NHS patients at a local clinic and was consultant to a children’s home and the area fostering service, as well as giving some time to a support group for single parents in London.

  She was small and purposeful; William was overgrown and careless. Now that her hair was grey, she kept it short and close to her head, her eyes, under the abrupt fringe, still a clear and startling light blue behind rather severe rimless glasses.

  William loved her deeply with the love of years. He was proud of her, although felt some regret that she had grown less womanly as her children grew away from her; but Dorothy had never much cared for her more yielding maternal self. She was satisfied with her self-sufficient middle age.

  William went straight round the side of the house to check his seedlings in the alpine house. Tessa and her mother laid cheek against cheek.

  ‘Hullo, Mum. How’s Tantrum Tactics?’

  ‘Very good. How was your conference?’

  ‘All right, I hope. Bit tricky, a diversified publishing group. They seem to have been conducting a hidden war, with four different sides.’

  ‘So I suppose you told them to fire all the cannons, Tessa, beat each other up, say terrible things no one will ever forget?’ Dorothy’s problem children could say anything they wanted. For grown-ups, she favoured self-control.

  A reliable granny, she had brought books and a convertible monster for Rob. Wum (the first grandchild had called him that after seeing William spelled Wm) had brought some grey plastic elbow joints he had found in a skip in Flood Street.

  Rob was allowed to start his night on the couch in the study. Keith cooked the Chinese meal, then was tired and went to bed early. When he picked up the dead weight of Rob asleep and sweating gently, he could only carry him to the halfway landing. His Uncle William, almost three times his age, took the sleeping child from his arms and carried him easily up to the cabin room.

  Chapter Three

  On Friday, William Taylor’s brother Matthew came with his young daughter Nina, of the dusky impenetrable hair. Matthew, a professor of English at a provincial university, was broader and shorter than William, greyer and balding, although he was a few years younger. His wife had died of cancer two years ago when Nina was twelve.

  Tessa’s older brother Rodney came with his wife and three children and two King Charles spaniels. Everybody brought their dogs to The Sanctuary. Rob’s mother went into high gear when her brother arrived, as if she had not had any fun with anyone of her own generation for weeks. After tennis, everyone swam, and Tessa fooled about gaily and paraded her body, although it was only family. Keith watched her and bit his nails. Rodney, who strove to be a good father because he was away a lot, as an international banker, challenged his son Dennis to races and diving contests. Rob sulked and would not put on his swimming trunks.

  ‘Where’s your father these days?’ Nina asked Rob. With a torn man’s shirt over her swimsuit, she was reading by the pool with the eye that was not concealed by hair. ‘This family – I can’t keep up.’

  ‘My mother got sick of him, so he married another person. Where’s your mother anyway?’

  Nina grunted.

  ‘Is she dead? I forgot.’

  After the Closing Bell had rung from the tall cypress tree, the visitors were gone and the window of the little ticket hut was shuttered up, the family had drinks on the terrace while the sun went down. Upstairs in the playroom, Rob had failed to frighten his cousin Ann
abel with a story about The Flusher, but her brother Dennis offered to tell him something so much worse, something so horrible …

  ‘I won’t listen! Mummy!’ he screamed out of the window. Tessa waved back at him gaily.

  ‘I wish the Sterns weren’t coming,’ William said at breakfast. ‘Much rather garden all day.’ He had been outside with the dogs since 6.30, tying up the clematis shoots rampaging along the front balustrade of the terrace. ‘Wish I hadn’t invited them.’

  ‘Why did you?’ Dottie was in a neat pair of overalls, ironed as well as clean. She was going to paint the windowsills in the library.

  ‘I need him. Sir Ralph is a hot number since he made that speech about the dollar at the CBI dinner. He seems to know everybody … he can get me to a group of rich felons I want to talk to about this big land purchase at Chard, and developing an equestrian centre.’

  He sighed. He resented even thinking about business on a day like this. Sir Ralph Stern, an inflated power broker, would descend as from a higher plane, hoping to impress this peaceful family as much as he impressed himself, and he would want to have closed policy sessions with William, shut up in his study with the whisky decanter.

  Lady Stern would be too elegant and social, affronted to find nobody special invited to dinner. She would aerate the lawn with high heels and pretend to recognize the waterfowl.

  She turned out to be quite charming. Sir Ralph got out of the Bentley, his predictably imposing self: fat nipples under a silky polo neck, tan hacking jacket, oxblood riding boots. His wife held out both hands to William and would have kissed Dorothy, with any encouragement.

  ‘I’m Angela,’ she said. ‘We met briefly at the Mandersons’, do you remember? Probably not. But I didn’t forget what you told me about The Sanctuary.’

  She greeted Keith and the children enthusiastically and with respect, and gave them appropriate small gifts. She had bothered to find out from William’s secretary who would be here. She ran her hands through her frosted yellow hair and dropped her embroidered jacket carelessly on a chair in the hall before going straight through the glass doors to the terrace to see the lake and garden. Tessa took a look at the jacket label.