‘Think of it as practice,’ I told him. ‘Your two hours at the barre, your daily scales in every key. We haven’t had a case all year and we’re getting rusty. So, here are three excellent psychological studies for the plucking, all laid on round the same table, one night only.’
‘Psychological studies!’ said Alec. ‘What have you been reading?’ But his voice belied his words. He really is one of the most amiable individuals I have ever been lucky enough to know. I smiled at his profile as I thought so. In the scant reflection of the head-lamps, he looked rather more ordinary than by day, his curious tawny hair stripped of colour and the stippling of matching freckles invisible, the slight frown of concentration as he drove making him look nearer his true age of thirty-four than the usual tail-wagging twelve and a half he can muster when we are detecting. Or perhaps he only looks twelve and a half to me who am, as Grant described it recently, practically forty.
The bright-eyed schoolboy was much in evidence by the time we had sat down to dinner, for Ina, Albert and Robin Laurie between them surely provided all that any student of human nature could hope for and more. I had worried that Alec would get the giggles and infect me with them when he looked up to one end of the table at Ina, down to the other at Albert and across its vast expanse at Lord Robin and me, even though I had told him about Ina’s delicate condition and her husband’s guarding of it and Wilson himself had reiterated the main points over sherry too.
Alec had cottoned on admirably well to my run-down. When we had arrived to find Lord Robin smoking on the doorstep, he had said without prompting:
‘Keeping the air clear for poor Mrs Wilson, I see. How thoughtful of you.’
‘I told Wilson,’ said Lord Robin, ‘that just as many medicos are in favour of a bit of smoke in the lungs as against it. Protective, cleansing, and all that. Strengthening if anything. But we mustn’t upset the apple-cart, must we?’ He bared his teeth, threw his elegant cigarette down on the gravel to smoulder and walked inside again, letting a long curl of delicious smoke trail after him through the hallway.
‘Right, first impression,’ Alec had said in a low voice as we followed him, ‘is that what we see here is a well-developed specimen of common “oaf”.’ I snorted. ‘A hat stand, a coat-rack. Exists purely that clothes might be draped over it and can also be dabbed with cologne to scent a room.’
‘Rather fierce,’ I chided him. ‘He’s not that bad.’
‘Women always stick up for them,’ said Alec. ‘Women young and old are putty in the hands of a fragrant hat stand. Tchah!’
I was startled by his vehemence, truth be told, but I concluded that it was to be expected when one young man, blessed by nature and fortune as he was, met another much taller, a great deal richer and rather more handsome than himself. It was a zoological response, nothing more.
‘Well, Mrs Wilson will be your blue-eyed girl then,’ I said, mildly. ‘She can’t stand him.’
‘Have you been down to the camp yet, Lord Robin?’ I asked as the soup was being handed. I noticed that Ina had a maid all of her own serving her soup from her own little tureen, while the three of us shared the friendly butler, and I missed the start of Lord Robin’s answer, thinking it through. Surely the servants jostled together in the kitchens and surely if I brushed against the butler and then he brushed against the maid and then the maid brushed against Ina, it was all the same as if Ina had brushed against me. There was, I considered, a goodly measure of ceremony about Albert’s precautions and not a lot of common sense. I retrained my attention on the talk at the table.
‘—but they clammed up rather, I’m afraid,’ Lord Robin was saying. ‘Perhaps I just don’t have what it takes to talk to gypsies on their own level.’
The insult was subtle and Albert Wilson’s smile remained undimmed.
‘I don’t think they’re gypsies, Lord Robin, if you’ll forgive me correcting you,’ he said.
‘The fat old woman with the ear-bobs and the crystal ball, surely,’ Laurie replied.
‘French, Russian and Irish, she told me,’ I chipped in, smarting for Mrs Cooke although his description of her was accurate enough.
‘Have you met her, Dandy?’ said Alec, shaking his head at me in amusement. Albert Wilson had stopped with his soup spoon halfway to his mouth.
‘I did, I have,’ I gabbled. ‘I stopped off on the way home this afternoon. Sheer nosiness, I admit, but they didn’t seem to mind. So,’ I turned and looked Robin Laurie in the face, ‘whatever the talent is for making friends with them, I have it too. Mrs Cooke told me an enchanting story from her childhood, without bidding, minutes after we met.’ I had thought to be weighing in for Albert with this, but Lord Robin managed to turn it back on me. He gave me an impish look, as though assessing whether I was nearer in standing to Albert and the Cookes than I was to him, and then he nodded as though deciding that yes, I was.
‘Quite so,’ he said, grinning. ‘She barely speaks to me, she shares a fond memory with you, and she gives Wilson here the life history of every last clown and tumbler in the show. Quite so.’
I suppressed a sigh. Clearly he was bored and was making fun to lift the boredom but it was getting rather blatant now. Alec’s golden eyes had narrowed.
‘And I’ll bet their life histories are worth the telling, sir,’ he said to Albert. Ina gave him a grateful look.
‘Oh indeed,’ came the reply. ‘Take Merryman, the clown. He was the son of a gentleman and was thought by his doctors to be an idiot. Prone to fits and tongue-tied until he was ten. Then he taught himself to read and write and joined his brothers at public school.’
‘Yes,’ said Robin Laurie. ‘You told me on the train.’
‘Whereupon he started to grow. And grow. And grow,’ said Albert Wilson, as though this were a fairy tale, ‘so he sits himself down and thinks what will I do about this, then? And he left school and took himself a-travelling, all over Europe, all the way to St Petersburg, Constantinople and back again and taught himself everything he needed to know.’
‘You’ve got to admire his pluck,’ said Alec. ‘There was a chap at my school who was ten feet tall when he was fourteen – Fanshawe – and he just had the life ragged out of him until he left.’
‘And even more amazing still,’ Albert Wilson continued.
‘You amazed me all the way from Waverley to Rattray, changing at Perth, old man,’ said Lord Robin. ‘I’m not sure I can take any more amazement today.’
‘Pretty good stuff of this Merryman to say instead: here I am, turning into a beanpole, now what is a beanpole good for?’ said Alec, looking hard at Lord Robin who, although not quite as outlandishly tall and thin as the figure I had glimpsed in the Gilverton woods, was certainly far from stocky.
Albert Wilson, deaf to all slights directed at him by Lord Robin, was not similarly oblivious when lowly hangers-on such as Alec started taking pot-shots at his prize and, with a look at me as though asking me why on earth I had brought such a boor, he began a sustained bout of flattery which Lord Robin accepted with amused graciousness but to which I could not listen for fear of being sick.
Alec and I, instead, chatted to Ina, with Alec being quite charming, claiming common ground with her as a fellow incomer to Perthshire, as though there were no difference between his inheriting Dunelgar and Ina’s husband buying up Benachally with the money from his bricks.
When the two conversations merged again, Lord Robin was saying what I knew would bring Ina great relief.
‘No, I’m afraid I must be off in the morning. I can hardly forgive myself for tonight’s little holiday from duty.’
‘Oh, come now, Lord Robin,’ said Albert Wilson, ‘you’ll do your brother all the more good for a night’s rest and refreshment, and you know you could not have come to see us here from the sickroom. I am sorry to be so blunt but I couldn’t have allowed that.’
‘He’s dying of heart trouble,’ said Laurie. ‘There’s no danger of infection.’
‘Your brother’s dying?’ s
aid Alec, squirming a little.
‘Still, once a body is weakened there’s no telling,’ said Wilson. He was on his home ground now.
‘He is,’ said Lord Robin to Alec, then he turned to Albert Wilson. ‘Believe me, we are just as well versed in the knotty question of contagion at Buckie as you are here at Benachally,’ he said.
‘You must excuse my insisting,’ said Albert, his voice rising almost to a squeak at the thought of his own temerity. ‘Of course, it must seem silly to you, but we have all been through the same—’
‘Hardly!’ Robin said, interrupting. ‘You had it easy down in Glasgow. Doctors on hand and nurses to spare. You should have tried getting a decent nurse to travel all the way out to Cullen when in town she could wait until one patient was dead and then just walk down the street to the next.’
‘Robin!’ I said, unable to help myself. ‘Surely there’s no need to go back over such things after all this—’
‘What he is saying is quite true, Dandy,’ said Ina, although why she should defend him was beyond me. ‘I cannot imagine what it must have been like for anyone with no nurse to help.’
Robin Laurie frowned at her and then turned back to Alec.
‘My sister-in-law, two nephews and two nieces died like flies all within a week,’ he said.
Alec was struck dumb by this and turned to me beseechingly. Albert looked close to tears and Ina only stared into her lap.
‘Too, too horrid,’ I said, thinking if the conversation could not be stopped then one owed him at least a little sympathy. ‘And then there was a dreadful accident too, I believe?’
Robin nodded curtly.
‘The oldest,’ he said. ‘Drowned.’ He looked at Albert Wilson as he carried on. ‘And when my brother heard that, he took his weak heart and went to the sickroom and lay down beside his dead wife, holding his dead baby in his arms, and he did not catch it.’ These last words were drilled into the air like nails being banged into oak and there was a long silence after them. Finally, Albert spoke.
‘What a sad story, Lord Robin,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we’re all very touched by it.’
‘Dandy,’ said Ina, rising to her feet and dropping her napkin on to her chair, although we had not yet had pudding or cheese. I stood, cast a quick horrified glance at Alec and followed Ina to the door. She was shaking, blundering rather than walking, and, instinctively, I reached out towards her.
‘Careful, Mrs Gilver,’ said Albert Wilson. ‘Not too close now.’
Robin Laurie behind me let out a long hooting laugh.
4
‘So I for one decided to get drunk,’ said Alec on the telephone the next morning. I was waving a biscuit in front of Bunty’s nose and she was snapping at it and whining. ‘Yat!’ I said. Bunty ignored me.
‘What?’ said Alec.
‘You don’t need to tell me you got drunk,’ I reminded him. ‘I drove you home.’
‘I couldn’t decide which one I felt more sorry for, you see, so I decided to give myself such a crippling hangover that I’d only feel sorry for me. But it was very good port and I feel fine.’
‘At least I got my question answered,’ I said. ‘Laurie must have heard about the Wilsons and decided to come along to tea and treat them to a sermon. That’s what he was doing there.’
‘Pretty cruel sort, isn’t he?’ said Alec.
‘Not usually,’ I said. ‘Your initial character sketch was more on the nose – silliness rather than cruelty, as a rule. And besides, it was in a fairly good-hearted cause.’
‘Do you think it’ll make any difference? Do you think Wilson could let his poor wife live her life? Could she insist on it?’
‘She’s not the insisting type,’ I said. ‘She endures. And makes the best of it when she gets the chance.’
‘Yes, but why?’ said Alec. ‘She can’t really love the man. I could tell she was trying not to wince every time he opened his silly mouth last night. A comfortable home and respectability? But didn’t you say her parents were terribly advanced? They’d surely welcome her home and tough out the divorce, wouldn’t they?’
I felt rather ashamed to admit that the question had not occurred to me. One simply did endure. I did and it seemed unremarkable that Ina Wilson did too. ‘Worn out by ill health?’ I suggested. ‘Can’t summon the energy? Or maybe she does love him, deep down. Who can say?’
‘No,’ said Alec. ‘I think you’re right about the enduring, but I got the distinct impression that she has an end in sight. She’s putting up with it all until something. Do you see?’
All of a sudden, I did. All of a sudden, Ina’s kindness to Albert Wilson the evening before seemed a little like the treat one gives to an old horse while, out of sight, a groom is loading the gun.
‘I suppose the obvious thing is widowhood,’ I said, reluctantly.
‘Not much chance of that – Wilson looks good for decades yet. I’d back him surviving her any day.’
‘And she doesn’t have the leisurely air one sees when good fortune is just about to fall into someone’s lap.’
‘The cushioned look of sure inheritance,’ said Alec. ‘The one that Robin Laurie wears like a mink cloak. It’s pretty sickening and, I agree, absent from young Mrs Wilson. So anyway, what did she say to you in the drawing room once you were alone?’
‘Not much of import, as you can imagine,’ I told him. ‘She was knocked flat by that debacle at the table.’
‘She must have said something,’ Alec insisted. ‘Tell me at least that you got to work on her and didn’t just let her sit there fluttering and fainting.’
‘Alec, darling,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t truffle on just for practice. We’re not on a case, if you recall.’ Even as I said it, though, I could hear the approaching footsteps which would render my words untrue.
Pallister had been pushed beyond his – considerable – capacity for cold disdain and looked simply stunned.
‘A visitor for you, madam,’ he said and he delivered it without any editorialising at all, not so much as a meaningful hesitation; but numbly, as though in shock. He did not hold the door open but turned and walked away.
Into the doorway, with a rustle of bombazine and a flash of gold, stepped Mrs Cooke, a small black monkey in a sequined waistcoat perched on one arm.
‘I’m ringing off now, Alec,’ I said into the telephone, ‘but I imagine we’ll be speaking again very soon.’
‘You’ll excuse me bringing the little one, my beauty,’ she said as she plumped down on to a sofa, ‘only he gets so bored in the winter there and then what mischief like you wouldn’t believe.’ The monkey, closely watched by a very puzzled Bunty, was looking around my sitting room with bright interest and twitching fingers and I followed its gaze, taking in the Dresden clock and candlesticks on which there were porcelain petals and cherubs’ wings so thin one could see the sunlight through them, and the Rockingham pottery Dalmatians, which were admittedly rather vulgar but had been presents from my sister and had terribly spindly legs. On the other hand, no one had ever called me her beauty, and as a sweetening tactic it was hard to beat.
‘Would you like some coffee, Mrs Cooke?’
‘Cup of tea would go down a treat there,’ she answered and I pulled the bell-rope.
Pallister had clearly recovered himself enough to spread the news because the parlour maid was in the room almost before the rope had stilled again, her eyes like soup plates.
‘I’ll have my coffee now, Becky,’ I said. ‘A pot of tea too.’ I glanced at the monkey. ‘And some cocoa? Milk?’
‘Bobbo would take a few raisins,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘But he’s not a lover of milk.’
I dismissed Becky with a nod and a smile and turned to business.
‘Now then, Mrs Cooke,’ I said, ‘what can I do for you?’
‘My father,’ she said, apparently in reply, ‘wurr a lion tamer. Now, you might not think that’s strange there.’ She stopped and regarded me for a minute.
‘It’s certainly less s
urprising than if my father had been a lion tamer,’ I said.
‘Well, my beauty,’ said Mrs Cooke, ‘that’s where you’re wrong. For although there’s families of balancing slangers and tumbling slangers stretching right back, for wurn’t the first Tam Cooke a horse man just like Pa, the big cats is quite different, see. It’s like lightning, strikes anywhere, and dun’t come back.’ At this moment, she unclasped a little knitted bag she had hanging from her wrist and drew out a piece of card. ‘That’s me,’ she said, passing it to me. It was, I saw, a very old and rather yellowed photograph – a daguerreotype, probably – showing a fat baby dressed in the heavily beribboned style of the previous century, lolling amongst a set of cushions. I took a closer look and could feel my eyes widen. They were not cushions at all, but lion cubs, four of them, one of them with a big soft paw on the baby’s leg.
‘I loved the cats,’ Mrs Cooke said. ‘Watched them for hours, lions, tigers and leopards the same, watched my old pa in the cage every day, watched him break in the new stock, watched him clean their teeth and trim their claws. One time he tripped and fell over and got a bit of a biff for his trouble, because it dun’t do to show a cat your belly, and that day I just watched and din’t even leave off licking my lolly.
‘Until this one day.’ Mrs Cooke had a new note in her voice. ‘It wurr a tigress. Princess Zanzi was her name and Pa had bought her from the Rosaires to make three for his second spot. Well, as soon as I saw my daddy step into that cage with Zanzi I started to scream and holler and drum my heels, just like a little flatty rakly instead of a circus girl. I got tooken out, leathered hard by my ma and put in the wagon with no dinner, tea nor supper that day. And what do you think happened, there?’
The door opened and Becky entered with the coffee tray, followed by Annie with a tray of tea and one of the housemaids carrying a plate of buns which could easily have been brought by one of the others, but I could hardly blame them.
The Winter Ground Page 5