Chapter Five
The following week, Ruth stayed with her grandmother while Agnes went shopping, a protracted affair that involved trawling the Oxford department stores with her friend Kath, having an argumentative lunch at Poppins and coming home cross, with the intention of taking back next week what she had bought.
Ruth spent most of the morning doing laundry and cleaning up the mess Agnes had accumulated in the kitchen and bathroom. After lunch, when Ruth had removed the soup and shreds of corned beef from the old lady’s front and given her a chocolate cream, Mary Trout seemed quite bright and knowing.
Agnes was beginning to rave on a bit about nursing homes, but it was not time for that yet, and Ruth prayed it never would be. The Sanctuary was Mary Trout’s life, almost all the life she had ever known, except for the first fourteen years with six people in half a dark, damp cottage at Goosey, toiling for her mother indoors and her father outside.
She knew today was Monday and the gardens were closed, and did not ask to have her chair moved nearer the side window to see the visitors coming up the drive. She asked about Doreen, because she was interested in everything that happened in the tea-room, or anywhere at The Sanctuary. Tessa always dropped in to gossip when she was here, and William came in almost every day with a bit of news to keep her going.
‘Doreen?’ Ruth was glad of the chance to talk about it. ‘Took herself off at 1.30 yesterday, didn’t she, on a busy Sunday, and I’m not going to trouble her to bring back the skirt and blouse, because I don’t ever want to lay eyes on her again.’
‘Oh, dear, you’ll never manage. I’ll come up and give you a hand.’ Ruth’s grandmother bit her bluish lips anxiously. ‘Do you think Aggie will let me?’
Agnes was not such a tyrant, but Troutie, having lived under orders all her life, felt more comfortable if she still had a boss.
‘That’s all right, Gran,’ Ruth said, ‘I’ve had a wonderful stroke of luck. I put a little bit of an advertisement in the Gazette. Nobody answered, just like I thought. The people round here – I don’t know what they want nowadays, but they don’t want to work. I had to find somebody. I can’t rely on Polly all the time, and Brenda won’t touch teas. I was getting desperate.’
‘Deshperate?’ The faded old eyes searched Ruth’s face.
‘I didn’t know what I was going to say to Will, he sets such store on everything being done right for the visitors.’
‘Not like his mother,’ the old lady half closed her crêpey eyelids, drifting into memory. ‘Poor Miss Sylvia. Brought up as she was to society and entertaining, if guests came, she’d say, “Oh, damn, we’re not putting on extra for them, Troutie. They can take us or leave us.” But her mother, Lady Geraldine, she’d want to put the best of everything on the table, to impress.’
‘Listen, Gran. I’m making egg and cress sandwiches, see, when suddenly along comes this woman like a bolt from the blue, like the angel Gabriel himself.’ You had to ginger up your conversation to keep Gran listening. ‘And it turns out she’s living only a few miles away, and wanting part-time work.’
‘She’ll do?’ The watery eyes, sparsely lashed, picked up the message from Ruth’s eager face.
‘She’ll do, you’re right. She’s a good little worker, quick and neat, strong too, she can lift those boxes about, great with a jam sponge, and we’ve started shortbread again. I said shortbread, Gran. I’ll fetch you some down if you’ll wear your teeth. Nice enough looking, tackle anything, cheery with the customers. Pinch me, I must be dreaming. Good old Doreen. She walks out and Josephine walks in. Jo, I call her. A widow, poor soul, very sad. Her husband stopped eating and talking, went to choking, and was dead of cancer before he saw thirty-five. What do you think of that?’
But Mary Trout had drifted right away, shoulders hunched under the soft shawl Dorothy had brought her from Cotswold Weavers, hands like dead fish in the folds of her lap, head dropped on her sagging bosom, thin trail of saliva dribbling from one side of her empty mouth.
The May heatwave had broken in a lashing storm that rolled down from the hills to finish off the last of the spring blooms, and dash the hopes of some of the more delicate summer stock. A whole bed of orange Welsh poppies on the bank above the mausoleum was flattened. Late narcissi sprawled. The buds on William’s new deutzia bushes were torn away from tender shoots. Two days of horizontal rain had put the marsh boardwalk under water, and John Dix ordered Keith out with Stuart and the trailer to pick up broken branches all over the grounds and pull down anything that might fall on a visitor.
‘When we’ve had lunch,’ Keith protested. He had a headache from the wind.
‘Dinner can wait.’
‘OK, OK.’ Keith could not say that Dorothy was making him a toasted cheese sandwich at 12.30, because the understanding was that unless he was ill, he worked along with the others, and no favours.
When he came down the hill, kicked off his muddy boots and went up the back steps to the kitchen, Dottie had gone out and there was no cheese, nor anything to make a sandwich.
He went down to the tea-room with faint hope, because nobody would turn up for the gardens or the teas on such a foul day, but he found that a woman with dark hair and a wide expectant smile had the smaller urn simmering, flowers on the gingham cloths of each small table, and cakes laid out bravely.
‘Hul-lo!’ she said on a rising note, as if muddy Keith with plastered hair and splattered glasses were just the person she had hoped to see.
‘Where’s Ruth?’ Keith was not supposed to cadge free handouts in the tea-room, but Ruth was always kind.
‘I made her go home, with that cold. No sense in two of us waiting for no customers.’
‘Where’s Doreen?’
‘She left. I’m Jo.’ She wore a crisp white blouse over interesting breasts, and a flowered skirt, shorter than Ruth’s, which revealed straight, vigorous legs.
‘I’m Keith.’
‘Can I get you tea?’
‘I’m famished.’
She made him a pot of tea and a sandwich, and then another one.
Keith had no money in the pockets of his dungarees or his anorak.
‘That’s all right.’ Jo folded strong bare arms under her high breasts. ‘Work here, do you?’
‘Yes, but …’ Why was it difficult to say ‘I’m one of the family’? Because her gaze through the thick dark lashes was so frank and approving that he did not want to see it diluted by caution.
‘Never mind.’ One set of lashes descended. ‘I won’t tell.’
‘Thanks.’ Keith picked up an eccles cake. ‘Are you a temp then, or a fixture?’
‘Oh, I’ll stay.’ She stood upright and passed a cloth over the counter. ‘I like it here.’
‘In spite of the – er – the noises?’ Keith could not resist asking. He jerked his head towards the outer wall beyond which the foaling stable had burned down.
‘What noises?’ Jo kept the smile wide. She had a lot of good white teeth.
Keith told her.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t pay any attention to that kind of thing.’
‘I do.’ He gave her the intense goggle that he practised in the mirror, along with other devices to add interest to his unremarkable face.
‘Please yourself.’
William was in London most of the week. When Dorothy came home, Keith made chicken à la king and fried bananas.
At her clinic, Dorothy had seen a small boy, the only son of divorced parents: bed-wetting at six, night terrors, withdrawn at school – the classic loss–separation reactions.
‘He made me think of Rob,’ she told Keith. ‘Hair in his eyes, long skinny legs, two big front teeth. Jittery, looking over his shoulder for trouble.’
‘Father not interested?’ Keith liked it when Doctor Dottie discussed cases with him.
‘That’s it, but the mother is obsessed. She makes him her whole life.’
‘Poor little sod,’ Keith said. ‘At least you can’t say that of Tessa.’
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‘She does dote on Rob, you know.’
‘In her way.’
‘Have more of this good rice, Keith. You’re still horribly thin. Why didn’t you come in for lunch?’
‘I couldn’t get away from the führer. I sneaked something later in the tea-room. Ruth wasn’t there, but I conned the new woman.’
‘That’s not fair.’ He couldn’t con his aunt about rules.
‘What do you think of her?’ Keith changed the subject.
‘All right so far.’ Dorothy thought Jo was a real find, but she had seen too many come and go.
After Keith went to bed, she parcelled up the beautiful dressing-gown that Angela Stern had left behind in her distress. She knew that William had been enchanted, and that he had gone off to London depressed. Poor pet. Normal, though, at his age.
The following weekend Tessa had a conference at Hereford; on the Thursday her only reliable overnight baby-sitter cancelled. Too late to find anybody else. Rob could not stay at The Sanctuary, because his grandparents and Keith were going to a wedding. Ruth’s cottage? Not fair, when Ruth had so much to do, even though she had apparently found a new body for the busy tea-room. Rob’s other grandmother? That spoiled vindictive woman who had been heard to speculate, during the mess of Rex and Tessa’s divorce, ‘I’ve always thought Rob might not be his child anyway.’ Never.
Rex? It was time he saw Rex anyway. After being with a father-and-son team like Rodney and Dennis, Rob began to say things like, ‘Why does nobody bowl balls to me?’
‘You want to play cricket, darling?’
‘No.’
Tessa rang Rex at the office, so as not to risk talking to the new woman, sweet Rosalie.
‘Rex. I won’t keep you.’ Tessa always said that quickly, before he could wound her with, ‘Look, I’m really tied up just now.’ ‘Could you have Rob on Saturday and Sunday?’
‘What? Wait … I don’t see why not.’
‘If we stay Friday night at The Sanctuary –’
‘I can’t pick him up there. I’m still taboo at the holy shrine.’
‘I know that. I can bring him half way.’ Rex, who was making a lot of money, lived with Rosalie in a pillared mansion near High Wycombe. ‘Could you meet me at that hotel on the M40, The Crown, where we met before?’
‘Our trysting place – ah, yes.’ He put on a dreamy voice. ‘Of course, Tess.’ He switched on sincerity. ‘I’ll be glad to.’
It was still painful to hear the bastard’s voice. Tessa hated and despised him now, but it still stabbed her to hear his voice. That voice. As irresistible as it had been when Tessa flung away everything for him in a blind consuming passion. No one had ever understood that it had been impossible to care, or even think, about his wife, ‘poor Marigold’. Rex obliterated everything. There was nothing else.
No right or wrong. ‘A sin?’ her father had asked her once tentatively, when it came out that Marigold had tried to kill herself. ‘Do you ever have black moments when you, er, when you think that what you have done might be a sin?’
‘Nothing is a sin,’ Tessa had told him then, presumptuously exalted, ‘unless you think it is.’
It was less painful to see Rex in the flesh than to hear the intimate voice that carried such shivery memories. He was absurdly good-looking, better than ever at nearly forty, his mouth a snare for your eyes. But she knew what lay beneath all that. Beneath the superb white sweater and those jazzy joggers that bounced through a muzak-fouled hotel lobby where an ecstatic little boy rushed at him.
‘Hey, old mate!’ He bent to Rob, who put a puny strangle hold on his neck. When the child let him go, Rex stood up and looked at Tessa with those shameless grey eyes.
She had her organization-and-management-consultant clothes on, careful make-up, her caramel hair swept up and back in a sophisticated French pleat like a brandy snap.
‘You look good.’ Rex appraised her as if he still had the right to approve or not approve. ‘Where are you off to?’
‘Conference. Here’s the hotel number, and Rob’s things.’ Her son was already on his way to the hotel door, holding his exercise book of drawings. ‘I should get away late on Sunday afternoon, if you could bring him here.’
‘Rosalie or I will.’ (You come yourself, you bastard.) ‘Call me when you know what time.’
They were two cool strangers, making efficient plans. He took the small purple backpack that said, ‘Zermatt’ and she turned away.
‘My sessions start this afternoon. I’ve got to go,’ she said.
‘Recruitment in the Nineties’ was a working conference for the personnel and training staff of a big London department store. Tessa had helped to design the programme with Dr Oscar Ferullo and the consultancy’s psychologist. Oscar gave the main talks, and Tessa and the other assistants led small discussion groups.
Tessa enjoyed conferences. She liked staying in comfortable hotels. She liked knowing the language that everyone talked, and the small power of being a teacher.
By the end of a long Saturday afternoon, she was beginning to get the feel of some of this group’s hidden conflicts, which Oscar would identify and work on tomorrow. ‘Issues’, they would be called – less threatening than ‘problems’. In the career re-entry sessions she had to try to head off the tendency of each small group to degenerate into gossip or irrelevant personal grievances about married women and single mothers coming into the job market for training.
A woman with pink eyelids and a man with a coarse lower lip and jaw carried on interminably – ‘I know it’s true because my brother’s wife –’ seducing the rest into mistaking the particular for the general because they were tired, and it was better than working seriously. A man at the back with soft brown eyes and beard went quietly to sleep.
The real Tessa would have got up and told the group, ‘I don’t want to hear this rubbish,’ and gone away to find a drink. Consultant Tessa, weary but still spruce, said, ‘Do the rest of you really want to hear this?’ The group took intelligent shape again and replied ‘No’.
‘You handled those morons pretty well.’
When Tessa was getting a drink at the bar for herself and Oscar, the man with the neat sweet beard was on a stool by her side.
‘You were asleep.’
‘Not with you in the room. Shall we get a bottle of wine and go into that other lounge where the good chairs are?’
‘Just let me take Doctor Ferullo his drink.’
His name was Chris Harvey, and he was content to be in middle-level personnel, because he was also a potter, with a wheel and a kiln in his garage, and that was his real life. Having an unreliable car, he had come to Hereford by train, so at the end of the conference Tessa drove him back to Finchley. Because he was with her and she was on a high, Tessa rang Rex to say that she would pick Rob up at the mansion on her way into London.
Rosalie was indoors, or out, or drowned in the swimming pool. Tessa had never seen her. Rob was up a tree and Rex was fiddling with his big shiny ride-on mower, out on the front lawn, for effect. Chris stayed in the car, sorting through Tessa’s tapes with a view to recognizing her taste in music.
‘How’s he been?’ Tessa asked Rex, leaning backwards to hold Rob, who had scrambled desperately into her arms, as if he had been rescued from purgatory.
‘No problems.’ Rex always said that, as he did if Tessa rang him to discuss a difficulty, implying: no problems with me. ‘How has he been?’ He looked towards Tessa’s car.
‘Exciting.’ Tessa stuck out her tongue at him and put Rob down, and they galloped hand in hand across the drive, which was paved with square grey tiles, like a Mercedes advertisement. Chris leaned his head out of the car window with a charming smile for Rob. Tessa looked back, but Rex had his head down to the engine of the mower.
William had called in at the lodge cottage to see his darling old nurse Troutie, and to tell Agnes about the gutters.
‘I’ll get them seen to next week,’ he said.
‘My mother says
she’ll believe that when she sees it.’
Troutie was saying nothing, but Agnes used her as a ventriloquist’s dummy for rude comments. ‘She knows who’s last on the list for repairs, and it’s never the big house, is it?’ If you caught her after lunch, with the morning hangover cleared and the foundation of tomorrow’s laid, Agnes did not care what she said to anyone.
Having delivered his message about the gutters, William wanted to go, but he worried about Agnes’s drinking, and so he nerved himself to say something.
‘Not happy here?’ he began.
‘I do as well as can be expected, Mr Taylor.’ Her mother called him by his childhood name, Billie, and Ruth had always known him as Will, but Agnes stuck to Mr Taylor in public and private, because she felt that people like him should be kept in their place.
‘And I’m sure we’re all grateful.’
Agnes narrowed her eyes at him over her cigarette. What was he up to? ‘It’s no more than my duty.’
‘Yes, but – well, don’t take this the wrong way, Agnes, but there is a bit of a problem, isn’t there?’
‘Old people are always a problem.’ Agnes jerked her bulldog chin towards her mother, who was silent, lids lowered, but listening.
‘I mean – we all know you have a bit of a problem with alcohol.’ He had learned that from Dottie, a modish way of saying, ‘You’re a lush.’
‘All? Who’s all?’
‘Well – the family.’
‘The family.’ Agnes made a face as if she saw dog mess on the carpet. ‘What business is it of theirs? Hasn’t my family given enough of their lives to your family?’
‘Well, of course … But look, we could get a companion for your mother.’
‘Cost the earth.’
‘We’d pay, of course.’
‘No one’s ever paid me.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Mr Taylor.’ Agnes tossed her head of faded thinning hair that had been permed to the consistency of breakfast cereal. ‘This is my mother.’
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