When Keith looked round the other door to see what his aunt would like for supper, he was surprised to find Jo in a pair of denim overalls too big for her, sleeves rolled back and legs turned up over bare feet. She was paint-stained and workmanlike, but with that make-up, hair tied back in a jazzy scarf, and the tinkly bracelet, it was somehow like a stage costume, he thought.
‘Is it that late?’ Aunt Dorothy said. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘No, but I thought you must be.’
‘I’ll cook.’ Aunt Dottie began to clean her brush. ‘I’ll make you my special fish pie. You’re not eating enough these days.’
She tidied up her things neatly, and peeled off her rubber gloves, blowing into them like a nurse to pop the fingers out. Keith thought she might make a bigger pie and invite Jo to stay for supper, but she only said, ‘Thanks so much, Jo, that’s enough for the day. Come on, Fool.’ She called to her dog, and went into the kitchen.
‘I’ll just finish this bit, then I’ll go.’ Jo was standing on a stool inside the door.
‘They’ll never get rid of the smell in here.’ Keith sniffed what had been known as ‘the smell in the library’ ever since he could remember.
‘It’s the old books.’
‘That’s what they say, but have you looked in the locked cupboards? Could be a body.’
‘Is that one of your fables?’
Keith enjoyed telling Jo, a new audience, some of The Sanctuary’s myths and mysteries, time-worn, or invented to suit the occasion.
‘Well, my grandmother Sylvia did die in here, you know.’
‘Don’t have me on.’
‘Not this time, honest. As she got older, she sort of gradually began to shut up bits of the house until she ended up living in just the kitchen and this room, with a mattress on the floor and a smelly old dog. She wouldn’t let anyone clean the place up, but Troutie kept on coming to do what she could. One morning, after she’d been away to Agnes’s for a bank-holiday weekend, she found my grandmother with the dog in here – been dead for three days.’
‘The dog too?’
‘No.’ Did Jo think he had made this up, to match Troutie and the budgerigar taking the last trip together? ‘The dog was all right. It had eaten most of the food that Troutie had brought.’ He wanted to add that it had begun to eat bits of Grandma Sylvia, but Jo would only believe so much.
Jo got down from the stool, and admired her door.
‘It’s beginning to look much better in here,’ Keith said. ‘I suppose Aunt Dottie must be trying to exorcise the ghost. Oh, sorry – you don’t believe in that sort of thing, do you?’
‘No, I don’t.’ Jo bent down to the paint pots on the floor, the ends of the gaudy scarf swinging over her shoulder.
‘Pity, because if you did, I could tell you about the lilies.’
‘What lilies?’ Jo was kneeling down, cleaning brushes.
Keith’s mother had once told him the story of the lilies, but Dorothy would never let it be talked about, or admit that it was true. He ought not to repeat it to Jo, but because he wanted to impress her, he was tempted to go on. ‘Once when Uncle William came to see his mother, soon after he was married, Dorothy went upstairs and then she comes down and says to Sylvia, ‘What’s that overpowering smell in the big empty room at the corner?’
‘“What smell?” Sylvia asks, sharp as a terrier.
‘“Exotic, sort of churchy. Smells like dead lilies.”
‘“Lilies?” Sylvia is out of the room in a flash, and running half up the staircase. “Mother!” they hear her yell, in great fury. “What are you doing up there?”’
Keith put his hands in his pockets and looked at Jo solemnly. ‘Now her mother,’ he went on, ‘had been dead for twenty-five years. She croaked in one of the first flu epidemics at the beginning of the war, in that corner room, where my uncle and aunt sleep now. She was laid out on her bed, with a great mass of hothouse lilies on her chest.’
It was disappointing that Jo only said, ‘Oh, well,’ rubbing paint cleaner into her hands, not impressed. ‘You don’t look very well, Keith,’ she added.
‘I’m fine.’
‘I’ve heard that people with your illness can sometimes have relapses. Doesn’t your mother worry, with you being here all summer, and not knowing how you are?’
‘My mother,’ Keith said flatly. ‘Well, she’ll be here soon. Then you’ll see. She didn’t want me to come here to recuperate, but Uncle William knew it was my best hope.’
‘Do you still see your doctor?’
‘I’m sick of doctors.’
‘I don’t blame you. You’ve had a rotten time.’
‘Better days are coming.’ Keith did feel stronger now, in a hopeful way that he had thought would never come to him again. ‘If I stay away from the quacks, I know I’ll be all right at Cambridge in October. Got to be. They’re going to let me take a linguistics course.’
‘Good for you. You certainly deserve it.’
Sometimes she came on a bit too hearty, spraying good cheer out of that exaggerated smile, but his ego was strong enough now to take nourishment, so he said, ‘Thanks for the sympathy. People here – they do know about the illness, but being the kind of family they are, they still smell whiffs of hypochondria.’
‘Like the lilies?’ Jo laughed.
‘Don’t tell Aunt Dorothy I told you that story.’
‘Of course not.’
‘She swears now it never happened.’
‘I can see why.’
Jo took a day off and went up to London to have her hair re-coloured and her eyebrows and lashes re-dyed.
‘Still shooting the film?’ Veronica asked. This was the reason Jo had given when she first walked into the hairdresser’s in an unfamiliar part of London and asked to be made into a brunette.
‘No, thank God. What a bore. But after all his complaints, my husband has decided he likes me this way, so I’ll keep it for a bit.’
Having put about the story at The Sanctuary that she was tinting her hair because grey was coming in too early, Jo decided to reinforce that by having a few subtle streaks of silver-grey flecked into the front of the dark hair. She would answer comments with ‘I can’t fight the grey, so I’ll exploit it, and prepare you all for seeing me snow white some day.’ Thus she could go on touching up the roots of her fawn hair without arousing suspicion.
With the frosty streaks, she was more dramatic than ever. She and Veronica decided that it looked smashing, and since it was still early afternoon, Jo celebrated with a side trip to Acton on the way to the motorway.
In her disguise of dark glasses and headscarf and the old raincoat she kept in the back of the car, a reminder of the drab old Marigold who was rejected by William and Dorothy, Jo skulked about at the top of Brackett Road and was rewarded by the sight of Tessa and Rob coming out of the house. They headed down the hill, and turned left towards the park. It was thrilling to shadow someone who was unaware of being followed. When they paused at lights, or Rob stopped to fiddle with a sandal, or veer off to investigate something, like a dog, Jo turned away at once and studied a shop window, in case either of them looked round.
Good old Jo, turn her hand to anything, she can. Trail your husband, lady? Check on your wife? If she got fired as a tea-person, she could make a living as a private eye.
In the park, it was easy. She lay face down on the grass behind a tree, and watched Rob being a monkey in the adventure playground, while Tessa sat on a bench with the au pair girls and read a book.
After a while, Jo went back to Brackett Road to look into the uncurtained ground-floor room as she walked past. By the kerb near the house was a worn green car that looked somehow familiar. Of course. It was Chris Harvey’s car. Jo had last seen it disgracing the weedless gravel in front of The Sanctuary, before Chris removed it modestly to the yard outside the garages. It sported a local residents’ sticker inside the windscreen. Chris had moved in with Tessa.
Before she went to her own car a few stre
ets away, Jo walked down to the post office, looked up the number of Tessa’s firm, Maddox Management, and went into one of the phone booths.
‘Could I speak to Theresa Taylor?’
‘I’m sorry. She’s not in the office this afternoon. Would you like to leave a message?’
‘Yes, er – thank you. It’s Mrs Christopher Harvey.’ This was all said in a flat, Marigold voice, nothing like Jo’s. ‘Just tell her I rang.’
Tessa and Chris were going to Paris for three days.
‘What for?’ Rob kept asking.
‘It’s not for anything,’ Tessa told him. ‘Just for fun.’
‘Then why aren’t I going too?’
‘Because Granny and Wum want you to stay with them.’
Tessa was trying not to do anything that might make Rob resent Chris. So far he liked him, and Chris was very good with Rob – calm and patient, helping him to draw and make plasticine models. When Chris went back to his Finchley flat to work in the pottery, Tessa sometimes took Rob up there. While she did some cleaning and tidying in the ground-floor flat, managing subtly to make it look less purely masculine, so that Chris would be aware of her when he was here alone, Rob messed about happily with wet clay alongside him in the garage, both of them humming.
Rob had even said, ‘Must I go and see Dad before school starts?’
Tessa had said, mock-shocked, ‘Of course. Poor Dad, he’d be terribly disappointed,’ but secretly, her heart rose. She glanced at Chris, but he was carefully not looking or listening.
The three of them were happy in the house together. Tessa had not felt so hopeful about a man since she first cast herself blindly into the dazzle surrounding Rex. She felt quietly loved. She had gradually stopped seeing the half dozen useless men with whom she had been passing the time and trying to keep her ego nourished. Her work was going well. She had been given responsibility for two students in training. Christopher, who did not give away too much too quickly, was turning out to be the most worthwhile and warmly generous man on whom she had ever pinned her hopes. And they were going to have three days and nights on their own in Paris.
When they went down to The Sanctuary to leave Rob, most of the evening was spent making final plans for the Festival of the Lake. It was an ancient custom originated by Walter and Beatrice Cobb, mostly just for family and friends. Frederick and Geraldine had kept it going for a few years, because their son, the glorious Lionel, loved it (their daughter Sylvia hated it, like all parties). It was discontinued during the First War, and because Lionel died on the Somme in his twenty-first year, it was not started again until William decided to revive it a few years ago, not just for family and friends, but for anyone who wanted to come.
‘Last year, we had nearly 800 people,’ William told Christopher, ‘and there may be more.’
There would be booths and tents for food and drink, and all the usual bakery and craft stalls and sideshows and games and competitions, the silver band in the nearly finished pavilion on low wooden supports over the marsh, jugglers, strolling musicians.
A firework firm had been hired, and a man who built boats in his back yard was transforming the two row boats into tiny gondolas, with prows and canopies outlined in fairy lights. Keith and a Cambridge friend would be in one, with guitars. Lee, the lovely woman who was known as ‘Matthew’s American’, was bringing two friends, a tenor and a contralto, to sing old Neapolitan and Venetian love songs as the boats drifted up and down the lake, the oars flashing and glowing above and below the surface, if Rodney could get the underwater lamps fixed on to them.
They sat late on the terrace. When Tessa was first married to Rex, it had not been so peaceful here. Rex had been a good enough son-in-law, charming, amusing, showing off, arriving with bottles or smoked salmon or a new kitchen gadget from France or America, but when he was here, he made his own world, instead of adapting to theirs. He would fill the days with tennis, riding, golf, squash, phone calls, friends to be visited or to invite here, nights out in Oxford. He would not sit quietly and just talk for more than half an hour or so. That had suited Tessa then. She was infected with his restless energy. Now, with Christopher, she absorbed peacefulness, and felt closer to William and Dorothy.
The scent of the white nicotiana swelled and faded, like a pulse in the air. The stars were so bright that they were reflected in the lake, rocking in the ripples of something that plopped in the water.
Since the terrible episode of the doll being devoured by Flusher, Rob was more nervous of going upstairs than ever. He started the night on a sofa downstairs, and his mother would sleep in a room on the nursery floor.
‘Shall I come up to you, or will you come down?’ Christopher asked Tessa.
‘I’ll come down. He’s fast asleep.’
Christopher was at the other end of the corridor from William and Dottie’s room and the larger guest rooms. Tessa’s girlhood bedroom was next to his, through an archway into the swell of the turret.
They stood by the window of Tessa’s room and looked out at the amazing night, the bulldog statue as white as if there were a moon, and the massed heavy shapes of the trees across the park very dark against the starlit sky.
‘You’re quite sure you’re not married?’ Tessa had asked it six or seven times since she got the telephone message at the office.
‘Surely I’d know.’
‘But you’d be too kind to hurt me.’
‘If I was kind and married, I wouldn’t be here.’
‘But, Mrs Christopher Harvey. Who on earth …?
‘I told you. It’s probably one of the women in my office, or in the store. There’s a lot of jealousy and bitchiness in that place.’
‘Perhaps they need another seminar: “How to resolve your emotional difficulties without making obscene phone calls.”’
‘Someone found out where you work, and decided to play games.’
‘I’ll kill them.’
‘They can’t hurt us,’ he said peacefully. ‘I don’t know who it is, and I don’t care.’
‘Nor do I, my darling.’
In the park, on the other side of the wall where the shadow was deep, Jo continued to watch Tessa’s window for quite a long time after the dimly seen figures moved back into the room, and the light went out.
Chapter Eleven
‘You look tired.’
Dorothy saw Jo coming up to the pantry with baking tins at the end of the day.
‘I’m never tired.’ Jo always said that. ‘I hope it’s not my famous silver streaks. Do they make me look dreadfully old?’
Dottie never took bait. She said, ‘Don’t come in so early tomorrow. Have a lie in.’
‘I’ve got to go to the shops. I’m out of things like sugar and coffee.’
‘Rob and I are going shopping early. Tell me what you need and we’ll drop it off on our way home.’
At Bramble Bank, Rob was fascinated by the small stream and the little bridge that led into Jo’s front garden. The stream was quite meagre at this time of the year, and Rob stayed outside to plan a dam while his grandmother was in the house.
‘You have made it nice, Jo.’ The rooms were small but comfortable and not cluttered. ‘I came here once or twice to see the Thompsons. They had a retarded child.’
‘It had been done over before I came,’ Jo said. ‘I was lucky to find it.’
‘What brought you here, after your husband died?’
‘Oh … old associations. Birdwatching. Walking on the Downs with Alec.’ She looked away, as if her eyes were filling with tears.
‘Is this him?’ Dottie picked up the photograph of a young man with a small moustache, from a side table. Jo nodded without speaking. ‘He looks like a lovely man. Poor Jo. He died of cancer, didn’t he? Was he ill for a long time?’ Dottie sat down, so that Jo could talk if she wanted to. She waited, drinking her coffee. ‘Or don’t you want to talk about it?’
Jo shook her head. She took the picture and looked at it for a long time before putting it back. H
er face was quite different without the smile. It hung from her wide cheekbones, instead of rising up to them.
Outside, Mr Richardson saw Dorothy over the fence. ‘Hullo, Dr Taylor.’
Dorothy remembered him. ‘How nice to be able to see your beautiful vegetable garden. It used to be such a jungle here.’
‘Done a lot of work, hasn’t she? Josephine’s a good neighbour.’
Rob had to be coaxed out of the stream, and did not want to get in the car with Dottie.
‘You come again any time,’ Jo told him.
‘Can I, Granny?’
‘If Jo doesn’t mind.’
‘I’d love it.’
‘Soon, may I?’
‘Of course.’ Jo moved to kiss him, but didn’t. Dorothy saw that she had discovered that if you bent to embrace Rob, he slithered away. Not rudely. He just suddenly wasn’t there.
It was sooner than either Jo or Rob expected. The next day, Dottie’s children’s home in Witney had a crisis. They had organized the annual combined meeting of Special Homes in the region. Their big prize, the well-known child-abuse psychiatrist who was to be the opening speaker, was stranded by an airport strike in Greece. No one else was free in August at the last minute. Only Dr Taylor could do the job. Dorothy was a clear, down-to-earth speaker, with enough wit to keep an audience’s attention, and enough knowledge and experience to tell them something new that they would not forget.
‘I’ve got to do it.’ She came into the tea-room soon after opening time when the only customers were a few who could not face the gardens without a stomach full of hot tea. ‘Will is in London, and Rob was running a little temperature last night. I don’t like to leave him with Keith. Ruth, could you possibly …?’
‘Of course I could.’ Ruth’s warm downy cheeks lifted in a beam of pleasure. ‘I always love to have him. Shall I take him home after work?’
‘Oh, thanks, you’re such a good friend, Ruth.’
‘Hang on a minute, no, I’m not. Blow it, I forgot George’s mother. It’s her birthday. We’ve got to go over there, and she doesn’t like small children. That’s her own bad luck, but Rob would hate it. Oh, dear, I don’t like to let you down.’
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