Jo walked up the opposite side of Tessa’s road again, moving slowly behind the parked cars. She crossed and recrossed the top end of the street, looking down the slope of Brackett Road. She turned down it again and stepped behind a van as she saw her quarry, the jaunty red car backing into a space. Tessa sat in it with a man. They were laughing. He put a hand across her shoulders. She leaned her head towards him, a smaller head, with the loose shining hair pulled up neatly into a chic urban coil.
They sat there outside the house, liking each other, too busy with this present moment to get out and start the next one.
One morning when Marigold and Rex were living in that pretentious development house with the kitchen window at the front, they were washing up last night’s dinner-party dishes quite amicably. Rex was dressed. Marigold was still in her nightgown, because the more uneasy she was about Rex, the harder it was to get up. This morning, she felt more hopeful. Perhaps the old lore was right. Give them some rein, and they will come back.
Rex quite suddenly put down the dish towel and went out of the room. Thinking he had gone up to the bathroom, Marigold finished the drying, went upstairs with her coffee mug, and took off her nightdress.
‘Rex?’ He wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the house. She looked out of the front bedroom window and saw him sitting in a car with a woman in it, shamelessly parked at the end of the short drive.
Rex got out of the car and came up the drive, smirking. As he opened the door and came into the hall, an enraged woman, a virago stark naked on the stairs, threw hot coffee all over him, mug and all.
The relief had been wonderful, for a very short time. As soon as she had stopped screaming, Marigold was horrified at herself. Rex never talked about it, and nor did she. There was already no point.
Now, as the door of Tessa’s car opened, Jo turned and walked away. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tessa and a nondescript man with a soft beard cross the pavement, open the glossy gate and go up the short steps into the house. In a minute or two, a fat young baby-sitter with unbrushed hair came out and walked down the road towards the station.
On a Friday in mid July, William came back from Somerset and told Dottie that the equestrian centre deal was going through. Ralph Stern’s enigmatic friends were putting up a substantial amount of money, with Ralph himself somehow involved.
Yesterday when he had to ring Ralph at home early in the morning before the final meeting, Angela had answered the telephone.
‘He’s in Newcastle.’ She had given him the number of the hotel, and then said, ‘Will, don’t hang up. Let’s talk.’
‘I’ve wanted to. I couldn’t reach you. Angela, I – I don’t know what to say.’
‘You don’t need to. One of the worst agonies is watching people struggling to say the right thing about Peter.’ She still had a little laugh in her voice, but no joy in it, only strain.
William said, ‘How are you?’
‘Terrible.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know.’
They waited. It was Angela who said, ‘Can we meet again? I think I need to talk to you.’
‘I’d like that. Shall I–?’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll see.’
They could have met quite openly to talk as friends, but she had ended on a paused, secret note that filled him with a flushed emotion he could not identify at first, but which he later recognized as fear. Telling Dottie about the Somerset negotiations, he was gentle and loving with her, to exorcize his unease.
‘Will you mind if I play in the Shiplock match tomorrow?’ He sometimes played cricket for the village team. ‘They want Matthew to play too.’
‘That should terrify Shiplock. Why should I mind?’
‘It’s going to be a busy weekend, with all the family. You’ll have a lot to do.’
‘Tessa will help. Don’t worry, Will. What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. All’s well. I’m a lucky man.’
It was a good weekend for everyone. Keith, who dreamed of older women and had no girl-friend of his own age, was glad to find Tessa’s new man unthreatening, quiet, good-tempered, and interested in Tessa in an admiring way that was neither doggy nor too lecherous. The last one she brought here had been obtrusively physical, and had not even bothered to go back to his own room before morning, as Keith discovered when he woke feeling kindly and took Tessa a pot of tea in bed.
The big gift of the weekend was that Matthew, poor, dull, old, dispossessed Uncle Matthew, brought a new friend with him. Lee Foster, a visiting lecturer at his university, was a funny, gutsy American from Boston, who seemed to be as fond of him as he obviously was of her. She was tall and stylish in an unaffected fashion, with a round curly head like a cherub that she turned quickly to take in everything that was going on, adding to it with civilized New England appreciation.
Keith had been fiddling about with some new music, and playing some of his Three Ring Circus songs to see what might last and what was now too juvenile. He was already looking forward to immersing himself in the plans of the revue company when he went back to Cambridge in September. He had gone up sporadically for sessions with the ageing adolescent graduate student who was supposed to be his supervisor and had seen some of the maniacs and deviants from the Circus, who had promised him he’d be included, if he didn’t die.
By now everyone in the house knew ‘Time Gone By’ like a television jingle. ‘Not that again,’ Tessa said when he started to sing it quietly on Friday night, playing round the notes instead of on them, and speaking the words. ‘Give it a rest, love.’
But Lee Foster got up from Matthew’s side and came over to the piano. ‘I know that song.’ Keith shook his head. ‘Sing it again.’
‘Time gone by … played a game.
I’d be leader. All would follow.’
‘Go on.’
‘Look round now. No one there.
Fingers click on empty air.
Life? It’s hollow.’
Lee joined in the last line. ‘I heard that song in a bar in Harvard Square where they do late-night cabaret. A British student sang it.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Scrawny, surprised-looking red hair, big nose.’
‘John Malchman. I’ll kill him.’ Keith put his face in his hands. ‘Oh, God, look what’s happened now, because I couldn’t do it in the show.’ He dropped his hands into his lap and looked up at Lee. ‘It’s mine. I wrote it.’
‘You did? I love it.’
Keith played the tricky, spare little melody, and they sang it together. He began to teach Lee the verse, and Uncle Matthew came over and put his arm round her. She turned her cherub’s head quickly to him, and then back to Keith.
‘Time gone by … played a game …’
She was much too young for dear stuffy old Matt, but she was great for him. Keith would be her special young friend, to sing and laugh with.
Agnes was thinking of going on the wagon again. She had clambered on to it many times in her life, because it was not a tumbril to the guillotine. You could fall off it any time you liked. His Lordship William Taylor, of course, would think it was because of what he’d had the arrogance to say to her, so he wouldn’t get told. It wasn’t because of that anyway. It was because of the way Agnes felt putting her feet to the floor in the mornings, and she awake in there, and croaking for her tea. Also, now that the question of pay had come up – for the job of keeper to the senile demented – Agnes was interested.
Ruth had brought in the new slave to the tea parlour to see the old lady: Josephine, whom everybody liked so much, such a good worker. A gallant little widow, they said. Nobody had called Agnes gallant when Edward Mutch died. She had not seen him for fifteen years, and she had only married him in the first place to get rid of the name of Trout – though Mutch was not much of an exchange – but it had felt unpleasant to hear that he had died in far-off Canada on the back seat of a long-distance coach.
Josephine could be a bit ha
rd to stomach in the morning, but she seemed a good-hearted soul. Budgie said ‘Come on, Ma’ for her, and she took to dropping in now and again on her way to or from work, to cheer up the old lady. Saturday morning she was at the lodge, asking to hear about the old days, which mother loved. They were on about the time when Lady Geraldine died at the beginning of the war, and Sylvia ran the house. Ran it into the ground, you might say.
Ma never talked much about Sylvia, of whom a lot could be said, and Agnes had always been glad that she herself had cut free of the whole mess and got away to sanity when she was demobbed from the ATS in 1946, long before Sylvia buried her old Mr Taylor and went off her nut and let The Sinktuary sink into rack and ruin around her.
‘Tell me some more about the war,’ Josephine coaxed, ‘when you had all those evacuees to look after.’
‘My mother never liked them,’ Agnes said, ‘because they had things in their heads and did their jobs on the floor if you weren’t looking.’
‘Little devils.’ Troutie smiled, for she had liked the children really, soft as she was, and ruined by feudalism to believe that whatever went on at The Sinktuary was all right. ‘Put ’em all into the library. When the parents took the kiddies away, we had all those airmen.’
‘How nice,’ said Josephine brightly, as if she were talking to a lunatic or a baby.
‘It wasn’t.’ Troutie chuckled herself into one of those coughs that made Agnes think about giving up smoking, but if you gave up everything, you might as well be dead. ‘Never really got that room cleared out, we didn’t, after scrubbing, scrubbing. Buckets of suds …’ She had housework on the brain.
‘I heard in the village –’ Mrs Josephine had been smarming around those gasbags in the shop and post office, you could be sure – ‘that the poor house never really recovered from all that, until Mr and Mrs William took over.’
‘What? What do they say?’ Troutie opened her leaky eyes wider than usual.
‘Well, that Sylvia Taylor became – a bit of a hermit?’
‘Bit of what?’
‘Closed up most of the house.’
‘When? I always took care of it, and she’d say …’
‘Say what?’
‘Eh?’
Josephine was sharp enough to see that she was faking deafness, and Troutie was sharp enough to see that Josephine was prying into what was none of her business. Score: nil-nil.
Jo was getting up to leave the old lady when there were voices outside the room, and William and Matthew Taylor came in with an attractive American woman.
‘Hullo, Jo.’ William seemed pleased to see Jo in there. ‘Glad you’ve made friends with Mrs Trout. She’s my best friend, aren’t you, Troutie dear?’
After introducing the American, he and his brother were all over the old lady; Troutie this and that, and, ‘Do you remember such and such?’ While the American woman talked to the mouldy budgerigar and examined the hundreds of knick-knacks and family pictures, the old lady flirted a bit with her ‘Billie’. William and Matthew were like overgrown little boys, back in the nursery with Nanny – the kind of Englishmen who want spotted dick and lumpy custard all their lives.
When Tessa was a child, Troutie must have been about sixty, and still a powerful force at The Sanctuary. With William probably spoiling his daughter and Dorothy being enlightened, this was the kind of security in which Tessa had grown up to see the world as hers for the taking.
Jo said goodbye politely, but Marigold within was working herself up through bitterness towards anger. Tessa had always had everything. Why did she have to have Rex too? Tessa was a creation of her ancestry and upbringing. Marigold was self-made, in every sense of the word. With her father never there and her mother managing the hotel and always tired and irritable, Marigold was expected to grow up early: ‘Don’t be a cry-baby, be your age, use your head, don’t whine, you’ll be all right, you’re a big girl now’.
She had never been all right. She always felt like a little girl, guiltily, since she knew that was wrong. Rex was the first grown-up who loved the little girl in her. How could she help crashing her whole defenceless being full tilt into his world?
Nannies … Daddies … Teddies … Billie … Jo saw Ruth’s car in the car park, and turned off behind the stables, past the little paddock with the donkey and goats, and along the rhododendron hedge to the gardens. She was not ready yet to give Ruth a cheerful greeting.
She walked, simmering, on the springy lawn. The cat temple was insufferable, with its sentimental cards pinned up and its pagan goddess degraded into a sort of Christian domesticity. Who did they think they were, this family who carried on as if they had exclusive rights to animals?
The Scottish gardener was mowing along the edge of the lake, so Jo ducked between the giant beeches and into the hidden garden, to brood on a bench, helplessly. She got up and looked at the sundial, which told the wrong time. ‘Never Too Late for Delight,’ it said. The happy people were impregnable.
She bent down, picked up one of their precious totems, the life-size hare with his long paw raised and his ears straight up together like tulip leaves, and hurled it against the wall.
At Sunday lunch, Jill said to William, ‘Some news you won’t like, I’m afraid.’ His daughter-in-law never just told you the news and let you decide for yourself.
‘What’s that?’ he asked tolerantly, carving the cold beef from last night.
‘Dennis and I went to the hidden garden to count the goldfish. You know that hare – the very life-like one by the sundial?’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s in a flower-bed by the wall, smashed to pieces.’
‘Damn,’ said William. ‘That was a lovely old piece, one of my great-grandparents’ originals.’
‘I didn’t do it,’ Dennis put in unnecessarily. ‘I bet it was one of the peasants … sorry’ – he glanced at Keith, from whom he had got the word – ‘visitors.’
‘They don’t do things like that.’ His grandfather brought the dish of thinly sliced meat to the table.
‘They do everywhere else these days,’ Jill said. ‘Why not here?’
‘Because they don’t.’
‘You’re so trusting,’ Jill accused him. ‘I’m amazed that half the stuff doesn’t get pinched.’
‘There’s two goldfish missing,’ her son put in.
‘Dennis …’ William warned.
After lunch, he went off to inspect the damage. Tessa and Christopher went with him, in case the sculptor could give advice on repairs. The hare was smashed into half a dozen pieces and some small chips.
‘Hopeless.’ William and Christopher poked about in the flower-bed, picking out all that was left of the graceful hare. ‘It could never be repaired,’ Chris said. ‘But,’ he added tentatively, ‘if you’d like, I could have a try at making another for you.’
‘Could you?’ Bit awkward. Chris was a nice chap, the best Tessa had come up with since she had been on her own – suppose he made something ghastly which William couldn’t use?’
‘If you didn’t like it, Daddy,’ Tessa read his mind, ‘don’t worry. Chris makes a lot of animals, and they do sell.’
‘Draw me a rough sketch,’ Chris said, ‘of what you want, and I’ll have a go.’
Tessa purred at him. Smiling, William watched them duck under the low door and go off.
He strolled about the gardens, speaking to visitors, answering questions about slugs and delphiniums, and about the circular blue bed round the dwarf spruce, which had plants in it of all cerulean shades from purple to pale sky blue. He tidied away the few cunning weeds in the greenhouse which camouflaged themselves as alpines, and did some dead-heading in Lady Geraldine’s rose garden, the long curving bed with hybrid teas and floribundas, backed by standards and arches of climbers, that his grandmother had laid out and he had restored. The staff never seemed to have enough time for that.
Several of the rose bushes had green shoots neatly nipped off by what looked like the teeth of the gr
eedy little muntjack deer, which did an enormous amount of local damage. Perhaps he should at least try George Barton’s suggestion; but it did sound daft.
Frank Pargeter had come in by the paying entrance today, with the Venture Club, and would be lucky if he got the chance to sneak off up the hill to where his nightingale fledgelings must be flying by now.
Mr Taylor saw him looking at the family of pintail ducks on the artificial nesting island in the lake.
‘Hullo,’ he said to Frank. ‘You here again?’
‘I haven’t finished my study on deciduous exotics.’ Frank gave his brief cover story.
‘Have you seen the fruit coming in on the Acmenia?’
‘Ripening nicely,’ Frank hazarded. ‘I’ll be making sketches, but today I’m here with a group. I drive the minibus for the Venture Club.’
‘Good,’ said Mr Taylor absently. ‘Look at this.’ He pointed to a mutilated rose bush. ‘Muntjack deer. Devils. We’ve tried spraying, but they think it’s salad dressing. They’re getting in somewhere. Have to check all the walls and fences again, I suppose.’
And find out where I’m getting in, Frank thought.
‘One of my staff says I have to hang up hair. Human hair. It’s the only thing they hate, apparently.’
‘I’ve heard this, Mr Taylor.’
‘Where would one get that?’
‘Hairdresser?’
‘I couldn’t go there.’
‘Mrs Taylor?’
‘Hers is cut in London by a girl who comes to the flat. I can’t see myself prancing in to Faringdon Unisex looking for long hair. They’d think it was some kind of fetish. Do you really think it would work?’
‘It would have to be dirty. They need to get the human smell.’
Mr Taylor made a face.
‘I don’t mind trying for you, if you like,’ Frank said.
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