Closed at Dusk

by Monica Dickens

  The voices carried clearly over the water as the illuminated boats drifted down the lake, the light-trimmed oars of the rowers flashing and dipping like phosphorescence. The noises of the crowd were stilled. Only a dog barked from time to time, far away in the house. Nina, who had been helping Jo and Ruth on the bakery stall, sat with Jo on the bank, absorbing the music through her hair, apparently enthralled by the emotional beauty of the scene. But when Jo said, ‘Lee was clever to get hold of these lovely singers,’ Nina pulled up a tuft of grass and said moodily, ‘I was afraid she’d want to sing herself.’

  ‘Is she good enough?’

  ‘No,’ Nina said with some bitterness, ‘but she thinks she is.’

  Jo, never one to miss an opportunity, asked softly, ‘Did your mother come to The Sanctuary often?’

  ‘Yes. She loved it.’

  ‘You think about her a lot?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s been a rotten two years for you, hasn’t it? It must be hard for you, Nina. It always, is, when someone’s been through so much with their father, and then he …’ Between work on the stalls, Jo had been darting about among the crowds like a bandit working the Venetian back alleyways. She had been bought a beer by one of the gardeners and had knocked back a few glasses of wine, so she almost continued, ‘And then he lets someone else come pushing in,’ but she did not need to.

  Nina was looking at her in hopeful surprise. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Everybody adores Lee – and she’s OK, I suppose – but I’m glad someone seems to understand.’

  When the singing was over, people began to gather on the house side of the lake to watch the fireworks. Many of them crowded on to the terrace in front of the house. Tessa and Chris were making their way up there with Rob, so that he could stand on the balustrade and clutch an urn, when Tessa saw her little dog running about anxiously among the strange legs, looking for her

  ‘Charlotte!’ Rob shrieked.

  ‘I forgot about the cat flap. Here, Char-lotte! Here, little dog, here I am!’

  At first Charlotte could not see where Tessa’s voice came from. She darted back and forth, her ears flapping out sideways, panicking.

  ‘Char-lotte!’

  ‘Here she is!’ Chris bent to grab her just as the first fireworks went up with a swoosh and a machine-gun clatter; the little dog dropped her tail and bolted down the terrace steps and off into the darkness.

  ‘Sorry,’ Chris said.

  ‘She’ll come back.’

  ‘Of course, she always does.’ Chris put an arm round Tessa and she put an arm round Rob, tense and quivering on the balustrade, letting out screams shriller than any of the other children as each new coloured explosion of stars showered into the sky and fell in fizzling, diminishing flares into the lake.

  The crowds left. Floodlights were turned off. Rodney and Dennis unplugged the strings of bulbs on the wooden bridge and went down to the lake to check that the boats were securely moored, then brought the batteries on shore.

  Rob and Annabel had passed out and been carried to bed. Tessa and Chris, Nina, Keith and Gregory, William and Dorothy, Angela (Sir Ralph was on the phone to New York), Ruth and her husband, Jo, John and Polly Dix were all out with torches, searching to find Charlotte. The bigger dogs were running loose, but Charlotte had never had anything much to do with them. It was Tessa’s call and whistle that would bring her out.

  ‘Char-lotte! Char-lotte!’

  ‘Let’s give up for now, pet.’ Chris was willing to search all night if that would help, but he knew that Tessa was exhausted. ‘You know she’ll come back by morning.’

  ‘But supposing …’ They had been over and over all that: caught by a branch through her collar, stuck in rabbit wire, broken a leg, trapped somehow.

  ‘You’d hear her barking. She must have run a good way off, into fields or woods where she can’t hear your voice. But she knows the way back.’

  The others were returning to the house, telling Tessa those same things, which she knew, but only with her brain. The inner door to the boot room was left open, so that Charlotte, who was smaller than the largest black and white Tom, could come home the way she had got out, through the cat flap.

  After everyone had gone to bed, Tessa, still in her Mexican skirt, pulled a sweater over the low-necked blouse and went outside again and lay down under a rug on one of the long chairs on the terrace.

  The perfect evening had chilled. The breeze off the lake was cold on her face as she stared out into the night beyond the wide terrace steps up which Charlotte would hop slowly, bedraggled and complaining, to find her. She dozed and woke and tried to stay awake. After dawn, with long shadows already travelling the wet grass, and the birds riotous, Tessa woke to a weight beside her feet.

  ‘Charlotte!’

  Her little boy was sitting on the rug, shivering in his pyjamas.

  ‘Oh, darling Rob—’

  His face dropped down and his mouth fell open in a square howl when he saw her begin to cry.

  William, coming wearily downstairs to make tea, opened the dining-room curtains and saw the forlorn pair out there. He brought them in, made tea and put out cereal for Rob. Tessa took a mug up to wake Christopher, so that they could start searching again.

  When William took the tray up to Dorothy, she sat up in her neat pyjamas and asked, ‘Did the dog come back?’

  William shook his head.

  A short while later, someone knocked on the door. ‘I hate to bother you.’ It was Angela. ‘But I’ve been so worried about the little dog. Any news?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘Oh, dear. I’ll get dressed right away and start looking again.’

  ‘I’ll make you some breakfast first.’ Dorothy got up and took clothes out of the walk-in cupboard.

  William noticed that she went in and out of that cupboard rather quickly now. She had removed the big square mirror from the wall in there and hung it in the bedroom.

  ‘Kind of Angela,’ she said, dressing nimbly. ‘She’s really nice.’

  ‘You and she are quite friendly, aren’t you?’ William said from the bathroom doorway.

  ‘Good policy.’ Dorothy gave a short, rather hard and un-Dottie-like laugh. ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. It’s all right, Will. Don’t look at me like a child caught stealing. I do know you’ve been seeing her in London.’

  Only as a friend … to talk about her son … William discarded the whitewash and just said, ‘How?’

  ‘She told me.’

  ‘She told you?’ William came into the bedroom. ‘Why?’

  ‘I suppose she knew I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ Dottie gave him a smile that was tolerant, but patronizing. ‘Does nobody any harm to have a little bit of a fling at this age.’

  William was dressed in clean clothes, shaved, bathed, teeth cleaned, but he felt totally wrung out and dilapidated, as if it were the end of a devastating day. By knowing the very little there was to know about him and Angela, and not minding, Dorothy had mercilessly diffused the situation. The glamour and adventure were gone.

  ‘“Young again and quite insane …”’ Dottie went towards the door. ‘Good for you to feel boyish, dear. It fits into your Peter Pan syndrome.’

  They used to laugh about that, when Dottie was first studying psychology; she would come home with new clinical diagnoses and fit them on to William. But this was not a joke.

  ‘That’s not like you, Dottie.’ She was never spiteful to him. ‘What’s got into you?’

  He tried to stop her going out, but she said, ‘Don’t bother me. I’m so upset about poor Tessa’s dog, I hardly know what I’m saying.’

  Tessa was demented. She had to leave by midday to prepare for an early meeting in London tomorrow.

  She rang up dozens of local people and went to the police station and drove about with Chris, putting up desperate little notices about Charlotte.

  ‘Someone will find her. She’s suc
h a pretty dog, someone must have taken her in.’

  Tessa could not react to, or even hear, the standard reassurances. Every time the phone rang, she snatched it up breathlessly, but it was always friends saying how wonderful the Festival had been.

  ‘Thank God she’s got that nice chap,’ William said to Angela, after Chris had finally driven Tessa and Rob protectively away. ‘He’s the best she’s had. But now, she’d rather have the dog.’

  Angela had met William crossing the lawn, as he came back from saying a sad goodbye to Tessa at the garage.

  ‘This is silly and I don’t like to say it. I did bring the picture of my tortoiseshell cats for Bastet, but now –’

  ‘Let’s put it up.’ William turned her towards the temple. ‘There’s always another animal. Life goes on. And for you and me, without each other, I suppose.’ Angela said nothing. William added, ‘Since Dottie knows.’

  ‘Is that why she’s been so nice to me?’

  They went up the grass mound and into the small round temple.

  ‘She said you’d told her.’

  ‘Will – I didn’t. Why on earth would I?’

  ‘To make a fool of me?’ William stood between two of the slender white pillars, looking out at the wreckage of the Festival on the lawns, while Angela was paying her respects to the aloof cat goddess on her pedestal, and sticking up her cat picture.

  ‘She lied.’

  ‘Dottie never lies.’

  ‘She did this time. Look.’ Angela stood close behind him. She gave off a kind of perfumed electricity that made him want to whip round and assault her. ‘Whatever happens with us, it’s all right, Will. It’s all right.’

  ‘It’s not. She’s spoiled it.’ Sulky little boy. ‘She – oh, I can’t explain. She’s – she’s killed it.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Charlotte never did come back. Tessa returned in a few days’ time to wander desolately round the grounds, calling, whistling, but after that sad visit, she told William, ‘I think I’ll have to stay away for a while. If my little dog’s not going to come back … I can’t go on looking for ever; but I can’t be here and not look for her. I’ll be all right, Daddy, I swear I will. But for now, it’s sort of – not the same.’

  After Tessa had gone, he dwelt on her thought. It was not the same. Was it, for him, because he did not know if he would ever see Angela again? He was nearly fifty-six, on the downhill slope towards sixty. Could The Sanctuary no longer subscribe to the fiction of William as its little boy?

  Dottie seemed more like herself again, as if the spiky little conversation in the bedroom had not happened, but William had an uneasy sense of slight, subtle changes creeping over his beloved home. Once, coming up from the drive on a dull day, he caught the house looking different. The corner turrets lowered at him a little. The creamy Cotswold stone seemed darker. Or was it only because there had been so much rain?

  It was the end of summer, the closing in, the twilight approaching evening by evening. John Dix had told William that when the autumn work was done, he would be leaving to find work in the West Country. Did Polly really want to be near her mother when her baby was born, or had she and John sensed something wrong?

  No one else seemed to notice anything. Visitors still wandered about the September gardens as peacefully as ever; but for William, the sense of content and security was slightly clouded, like the haze on an old mirror. Once or twice he thought he heard something in the night, and went down to check doors and windows. When he was alone in the great house, he had always loved the waiting spaces and the safe breathing silences. Now, at his desk, he might turn his head to the window, listening for Dottie, or swing round to look at the high solid door. Presently, he would get up and open the door. The flowers massed in the wide hall fireplace seemed excessive, like a wake. The clock ticked too loudly. What was this quality in the stillness? What was the house waiting for?

  After the festival, Keith had been up most of the night searching for Charlotte. If he had not been so exhausted the next day, he might not have got into a fight with his mother, who had two large gin and tonics before lunch, and complained that Tessa had made more fuss about one disobedient mongrel than if she’d lost her child.

  ‘Very clever.’ Keith curled his lip across the table at her in the way he had learned at eleven. ‘The minute she’s gone, you manage to insult all three of them – Tessa, Charlotte, and Rob.’

  ‘I’m only surprised’ – Keith’s mother reached for the bread basket – ‘that there isn’t more missing than just a dog. I’ve told you, Will, it’s always been a mistake, letting every man and his uncle clutter up this place as if they owned it.’

  Trying to divert trouble, Angela Stern had said sunnily, ‘But Harriet, the visitors to the gardens, all those happy people who were here last night, surely none of them –’

  ‘Any of them,’ Sir Ralph interrupted her, ‘given half a chance.’

  ‘Without the visitors, we couldn’t keep up the gardens,’ William said patiently. He knew better than to say, ‘I like them.’

  ‘For your vanity.’ Harriet could curl a lip too. She was drinking white wine on top of the gin. ‘I saw you last night, lord of the manor: “Hullo there, Mr William. Evenin’, mas’r Will.”’ Her Oxfordshire accent misfired. ‘“Done it again, you ’ave, ho ho, you Taylors.”’

  ‘Mother, shut up,’ Keith growled. ‘You’re pissed.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that. You’ve been here too long. Give me some more of that potato salad.’

  ‘I’ve had a great summer.’ Keith did not pass her the bowl. She stretched across him.

  ‘And you’ve worked for it,’ his Uncle William told him.

  ‘Work?’ Harriet scoffed with her mouth full. ‘He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. You’d better pack up your things and come home with me this afternoon, Keith. You can put some stuff into the computer for your father until it’s time to go to Cambridge.’

  ‘You know I hate that.’

  ‘You hate anything that means using your brain.’

  After coffee and a nod over the Sunday papers, she said to Keith more reasonably, ‘Ready in half an hour? I’ll let you drive the new Audi if you want.’

  ‘I’ve got a killer headache. I want only death.’

  Jo, who had been helping Dorothy with lunch, heard him as she passed with a tray, and said in her eager, solicitous way, ‘You look as if you might have a fever. Want me to take your temperature?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Keith had a thermometer in his room. He was used to monitoring his temperature during bad spells.

  Jo came upstairs to him. ‘I really do feel lousy,’ he told her, flat on the bed.

  ‘Same old thing?’

  ‘I hope not. It’s just, my mother gets me so wound up, and I’m worn out with looking for that wretched little dog, and seeing Tessa’s face when she had to go. But I’m better, Jo. I’m not ill. I’m going to make it back to Cambridge. But I’m not going back with my mother today.’

  ‘Want me to fix that for you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Dear, good Jo.’ He groaned and turned his face into the pillow.

  Dear, good Jo ran downstairs on a cushion of air. Ev-rything’s go-ing my way! Keith is ill again, and I can outwit Harriet. Power corrupts, but Marigold is already corrupted.

  Harriet was in the hall, nagging at Matthew, since she could not get far with William. She was the youngest, but she never gave up trying to straighten out her older brothers. ‘I’ve told you, Matt. What you should do with Nina –’

  ‘About Keith.’ Jo beamed at her from the last few stairs.

  ‘Where is he? I want to get going.’

  ‘He’s lying down. He wanted to get up, but honestly, I didn’t think he should. Perhaps he should stay here. I’ll help to look after him.’

  ‘He’s got into this neurotic pattern. If he can’t get his own way, he says he’s ill again.’

  ‘He really is ill. A low fever, and some of the other symptoms
recurring.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Jo had read up on myalgic encephalomyelitis after she first met Keith. ‘My brother-in-law had ME,’ she invented. ‘He’d get better and be all right for months, and then something would drag him down again.’

  ‘Oh, blast,’ said Keith’s mother. ‘I mean, I can say this to you because you seem to know him quite well. Are you sure he isn’t faking?’

  ‘I wish he was,’ Jo said with simple tenderness.

  By the middle of September, Keith was no better. His fever subsided, but he could not work, could hardly drag himself out of bed to study. Every morning, waking early at the bottom of a pit, he faced the dreadful doubt of whether it was worth making the effort to climb out.

  ‘Do something, give me something,’ he begged the London consultant. His college had agreed to let him take a second-year linguistics course, but if he could not start until January … ‘I must get back to Cambridge next month.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ the doctor said, ‘except home. This new virus infection means complete mental and physical rest.’

  His Aunt Dottie drove him back to The Sanctuary to pack up, then to his parents’ house.

  When she said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ Keith said, ‘No, I’m sorry. Everything was going so well. But then – poor old Troutie incinerated, and Tessa losing Charlotte – I’m just one more thing that didn’t go right this summer.’

  Tessa kept her ‘lost dog’ notice in the local paper, and continued to check with the police and the animal shelter. She missed Charlotte all the time: when Rob tore downstairs alone to greet her coming home; at the chopping board in the kitchen where there was only emptiness waiting behind her; in the park, which had lost half its point without Charlotte running circles with Rob, coming down the slide on his lap, facing up to enormous dogs, dashing back constantly to make sure she knew where Tessa was.

  Thank God she woke to find Chris in her bed. The weightless reminder that no one had sneaked up in the night to lie on Tessa’s far side was too painful to bear alone. Sometimes it could only be borne alone, and she wished Chris were not there, so that she could cry feeble hot tears into the pillow.