‘Come out for a drink tonight, I’ll tell you.’
She’d laugh, of course, a woman like this, find an excuse. He picked up the bucket and hurled the dirty water into the road, swirling the last slops towards her feet, playfully, watching to see if she would scream or move, half hoping she wouldn’t, a challenge.
‘Yes,’ she said, ignoring the water. ‘Where?’
‘Meet me here? My night off,’ he said, thinking of Dad with inexplicable triumph.
‘See you then.’
She began to walk back. The quay was suddenly busy. A small boy, the colour of sand, stopped at a corner and stared at her. The stare was similar to a public undressing, all the more intense for the childish lack of inhibition in the dropped wide mouth and the lack of preening which went with it. The stare followed her as she passed and remained lodged somewhere at the back of her neck. A clock on the wall of the harbour stated the time of high tide and low, and next to it was a record of the highest the water had ever risen. Sarah liked that, wondering what else it was could rule these lives.
Here it was Charles Tysall had died and his wife before him. Charles, who had chosen her as his next obsession. Punished her as he had punished his wife, and then walked out to seek the spot where the wife had died. Charles, whose love destroyed what it touched. She felt her arms, suddenly cold. There were the ghosts of spoiled dreams, shimmering above the water.
Mrs Jennifer Pardoe, always known as Mouse, had a fondness for things which glittered. She took her wardrobe seriously and the morning selection occupied an hour. For this hot summer, evening dress was de rigueur. Ball gowns, and her several euphemistically called cocktail frocks, were ideal for late July. When worn for their proper functions in wedding marquees, stuffy dinners in draughty old houses, charity dos in barns, openings of horrid little galleries in picturesque villages, any frocks which were chiffony, décolleté, short sleeved, were always too cold for comfort. No wonder a girl needed a fur coat: a girl was usually well advised never to take the damn thing off. Mrs Pardoe had once described the sailing club dance as an acre of gooseflesh sprayed with starch, not a remark, even whispered as it was, designed to win either friends or the plaudits of her spouse, who was, in those days of his social climbing, ashamed of her.
Today, she thought she might wear the silver lamé shift, circa 1973. Her stylistic roots were with Marilyn Monroe, while her figure, small and plump like a trim-waisted frigate, dictated a preference for the loose fold rather than the tight twist. Joanna inherited the same curves and one day the child would learn it did not matter.
Mouse uttered a brief, emphatic, ‘Huh!’ when her wavering concentration lit upon a vision of her deceased husband scolding her for filling cupboards with frocks for occasions she had never wanted to attend in the first place, but did anyway because she simply did not know how to disagree. Then the whole concentration went into the moment. Which one? The mid-calf, gold fabric shift without sleeves or back would do fine for the simple reason it was going to be hot. Big, glittering earrings, a golden bangle shaped like a snake with little green eyes and a pink stone in the tail; perfect. Nights of agony in crippling high heels came to mind wistfully as she selected what she had always secretly yearned to wear then, a pair of pink training shoes. Thus attired, she went down for breakfast with her coat on top.
Champagne cocktail for preference. Brandy in the bottom and sugar round the top, cornflakes on the side.
It was a big, ugly house, Sarah observed as she approached on her way back, seeing it clearly for the first time and realizing with something of a shock how the Pardoe mansion was no jewel in a simple setting. Had it been reached via a long curving drive, it would have been a huge disappointment and even as it was the monument grew straight out of the sky with every step nearer revealing another, discordant detail. East Wind House was a marriage of additions. The tiles were a new and vicious orange, ill-suited to the mellower brick of the walls and making the whole edifice resemble a person wearing the wrong hat for the occasion. The bright blue of the eaves and the guttering added extra disharmony along with the extension at the back in the wrong stone at the wrong height; windows had been replaced with modern replicas of originals. All in all the house looked like a woman dressed in a fit of indecision with more money than taste, a vision of half-executed dreams, absent-mindedly amended and finally worn for a careless fit like an old cardigan.
The massive front door, made of oak and curved to a point at the top, belonged to a church and only added to the impression of a folly. Sarah ignored this entrance and strolled round the back, her feet wet in grass which swayed to the knees. There were remnants here of a vast kitchen garden dominated by rampant rhubarb and a smell of unculled vegetables. A row of ornamental cabbages thrilled the eye with purple splendour. The sheep with the twisted horn hanging drunkenly over its wall eyes munched and burped next to a pot of uncontrolled nasturtiums flanking the back door.
What the hell game was Ernest playing? There might be an element of expensive eccentricity, the sense of money spent unwisely, but there was nothing in this establishment which had the perfume of riches, a scent Sarah Fortune found easy to detect in a client and often easier to despise. Charles Tysall had the odour of an arrogant minority, but there was nothing yet discernible here to attract the hourly rates of Ernest’s London partnership. Not even the row going on in the kitchen, to which she listened without shame.
‘Where’s Mrs Tysall? Doesn’t she eat breakfast? She looked very thin.’
‘Shut up, Mother. Just shut up . . . And will you go and change out of that horrible dress? She’s not Mrs Tysall, she’s a lawyer from London and she’s going to think you’re even madder than you are, dressed like that.’
‘Mrs Tysall and I would like champagne.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Julian, get her some lemonade, will you?’
‘I don’t want—’
‘Yes you do. You just said you did. Drink your tea, you look like a—’
‘Don’t hit me,’ Mummy was whining until Julian’s voice rose, deceptively calm, with a hint of weariness.
‘Don’t be so silly. No-one’s going to hit you, never have, never will. Why did you let her wear that dress,
Jo?’
‘Oh, here we go again. Let her! Have you ever tried stopping her? She does what she wants. How do you suppose I stop her? I’ve got enough to do—’
‘Sitting on your bottom all day? Playing house? Leaving dirt everywhere and the garden a mess? Pretending to cook? I don’t know where you get the energy.’
Sarah remembered the elaborate meal of the night before, the polish on the furniture, the semi-tidiness, her own clean sheets, and reflected that Julian was being less than fair. Joanna’s voice now had a hint of tears.
‘Oh what’s the point? I do nothing while you play God with the sick. Bet they’re all queuing up now, praying for the chance to see another doctor. You look like those dead cod off one of the boats.’
‘At least I work. One of us has to.’ His voice was dangerous. There was a pause, a clatter of cutlery, then a crash.
‘Oh, what a pity!’ Mother’s voice rose to a giggle. ‘No champagne for Mrs Tysall!’ Julian ignored the interruption.
‘I’d have more to offer the sick if I wasn’t surrounded by idiots at home. A brother who can’t work and can’t get a job unless I get it for him, a sister who thinks she deserves to be kept.’
‘OK,’ she howled, ‘give us some money and we’ll go. Isn’t this what the lawyer’s for?’
‘Mrs Tysall, please,’ Mother chanted.
‘Money?’ Julian taunted. ‘Other people start their lives without.’
‘I’ll go,’ Joanna shouted, ‘and you can keep Mother. But you wouldn’t, would you? Would you?’ Her fist was pounding the table, her voice rising in hysteria, then sinking. Mouse began humming tunelessly; there was the sound of a chair scraping back on a stone floor. Julian’s voice again, dismissive and distant.
‘Tell Miss
Fortune, when she deigns to appear, that I’ll be in the surgery at twelve, and do remember what else I told you. Don’t forget to give her directions. Don’t offer to feed her either, not tonight, not any night. She supports herself as long as she’s here and I don’t think it will be long.’
Sarah waited. There was the remote sound of a door banging somewhere inside the house, silence but movement inside the kitchen, a sensation of relief. Sarah knocked on the open door and stepped inside.
Joanna leapt to her feet and turned back to look busy at the vast Raeburn with its large simmering kettle, rubbing her eyes with a tea towel, while Mrs Pardoe’s mouth formed into a startled OOOh of something like pleasure. She looked as welcoming as a placid baby with exactly the same span of concentration. There was a stale-looking edifice of chocolate cake in the centre of the table.
‘Good morning, Mrs Pardoe,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s a lovely day.’ The sleeveless gold lamé dress was only as shocking as the enormous ear-rings which hung down to bare shoulders, tinkling as Mrs Pardoe finished chewing her toast and dabbed at her mouth with the corner of the tablecloth, leaving small traces of marmalade.
‘Good morning to you, Mrs Tysall. How nice to see you.’
Sarah felt cold as Joanna, flushed and uncertain, came back to the table with a pot of coffee.
‘I do so hope you enjoy your stay, I made you a cake. I’m always making cakes and things, but no-one eats them.’ Mother was continuing in the same, fluting tone of a hotel receptionist fresh from a training course.
‘Oh Mother,’ said Joanna uneasily, embarrassed, but all fight gone.
‘And I do wish,’ said Mother, rising from the table and affording Sarah a glimpse of her pink trainers, ‘that you young things would wear frocks. Trousers, my dear, are made for men.’ With this she swept from the room in a cloud of perfume, a bright smile and fluttering of fingers to indicate her blessing. Joanna looked at Sarah across the table and tried to smile. Tears still lurked, not as well controlled after a quick appraisal of Sarah’s appearance in the light of Mother’s remarks. Joanna did not notice the dirt on the jeans, only their immaculate fit and the vibrant silk shirt ending across slim hips, and the fact that Miss Fortune’s appearance in trousers bore no resemblance to her own.
‘Did you hear us having a row?’ she asked abruptly.
‘Think I caught the tail-end. Sorry.’
‘That’s all right then. You must have missed the worst bit, when Edward was in on it too. He stormed out a while ago. A morning ritual. I should stay in the cottage if I were you, until after eight-thirty on weekdays. After that, it’s only me and Mother. Have some coffee? Toast?’
‘Please. Coffee.’
‘By the way, you’ve to meet Julian at his surgery, about twelve, he said. I’ll take you, but I’m under strict orders not to discuss business beforehand, not that I know much, not about the estate, whatever you call it, and all that.’ The words were rushing out in a fit of apology.
‘That’s fine. I wouldn’t expect you to disobey orders.’ They smiled at each other conspiratorially, two women mourning the dominion of men. ‘But can you answer me two things? First, why does this family need a lawyer to sort out who should inherit what? Why can’t you do it for yourselves?’
Joanna waved vaguely round the mess of the kitchen, the tea spilt on the wooden table, rubbish stacked at one end, two fishing rods next to the Raeburn, the smashed glass on the floor. ‘You can see why, can’t you? We’re not exactly good at the art of communication. Bloody Julian gives the orders and buggers up our lives, Ed looks after me. He and Julian never speak, that sort of thing. What was the other question?’
‘Why on earth’, Sarah asked casually, ‘does your mother call me Mrs Tysall?’
‘Search me . . . Oh, I remember, Edward said something about it when she started this morning. There was a couple called Tysall had a holiday cottage down here, a few years ago, he said. Mrs Tysall had red hair, like yours, she sometimes came here by herself. Then she had some kind of accident and drowned. Ma used to talk to her in the hairdresser’s. Well, everyone talked about her, I gather. It was a bit of a scandal at the time, because the body got stuck somewhere, wasn’t found for a year, after a high tide. Must have been horrible. Lots of red hair.’
‘What about her husband?’
Joanna thought hard. ‘I dunno the details. More scandal, but you’d have to ask Julian about that. He dealt with the bodies: it suits him, he’s better off with dead people.’ She laughed at her own wit. ‘Oh, yes, once this Charles was told where his wife was found, he thought she’d run away, or something, you see, he must have walked out to see and got caught by the tide. He got washed up in Holkham the next day. Must have been love. Romantic, isn’t it?’
Joanna was pouring more coffee, enjoying herself with ghoulish tales which did not touch her own life and mattered less than her eighteen-year-old concerns with love and spots. Or so Sarah guessed. The passions of the over thirties were obscene mysteries to teenagers.
‘Charles Tysall was a client of ours,’ she volunteered without quite the right kind of indifference. ‘I knew him.’
‘Did you? I never did,’ said Joanna, wondering how a person managed to acquire a figure like Sarah’s and the jeans to fit it. It must be a combination of smoking instead of eating breakfast, and living in the sinful paradise of London which she did not crave.
‘Well, knew him slightly.’ She sipped her coffee, black. ‘What an action-packed place this is,’ Sarah added lightly. ‘Family fights, suicides, sirens, death and all other adventures. Even a ghost, you were saying last night. Everything happens here.’
Joanna shot her a pitying glance of incredulous impatience.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she wailed. ‘We own most of the village,’ she added mournfully, ‘and absolutely nothing happens here. Nothing at all.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The medical centre could have been anywhere. There was nothing rural about it and the clean, hygienic smell, still reminiscent of sickness, made it somehow a fitting place to discuss a will.
‘. . . the residue of my estate, whatsoever and wheresoever, to my wife Jennifer absolutely. For her to dispose of between my children entirely in such shares as she sees fit.’
‘Look,’ Julian was saying from the opposite side of a depressing metal desk, oblivious to her curiosity, cutting short niceties and looking at any point in the bare room which did not include Sarah’s presence, ‘I can’t pretend I like this because I don’t. I don’t like any of this business and I regret the necessity for your presence here. Ernest Matthewson was my father’s lawyer for half a lifetime, but I don’t always see the sense in his ideas.’
‘I thought it was your idea,’ she interrupted. Julian looked blank. A brief, forced smile touched his features like a magic wand, to reveal a glimpse of humanity on a face carved from stone, distressed by chronic pain which may or may not have been his own.
‘My idea? Ernest simply told me you were coming. Never mind. You ARE here, for better or worse. You’ve looked at the will, but not the list of assets which form my mother’s property as it is now.’
She waited for signs of smugness, saw none as he handed her three typed pages, headed with the name of a local estate agent. A glance at the list showed a longish list of houses, business premises and shops. Sarah wondered fleetingly if there was anything freehold left in the village belonging to anyone else.
‘About two thirds of it,’ Julian said, guessing her thoughts. ‘Took him twenty years. My father,’ he continued, ‘believed passionately in bricks and mortar, exchanged the proceeds of his manufacturing concerns for nothing else. Hence it was apposite for him to be on a roof when having a heart attack, because, at the age of seventy, he chose to clean leaves from the gulley. He always was an over achiever and a lousy delegator. Since his death, my mother has been as you see her; it appears to be a permanent malady. She can no longer read or cook, has no sense of property or propriety, no sense of
time, no sense of fear, absolutely no insight into her own condition and no perception of ours. She’s difficult, irritating, demanding, vulnerable and quite incapable of dealing with her own affairs since she doesn’t even know what she owns. Neither do I, entirely. I believe Edward does. He works at the estate agent’s who manage things.’
He sighed as if bored by the whole subject. ‘Father was copping out, you see.’ Julian went on with the same suppressed irritation. ‘For such an astute and materialistic man, he was very indecisive. He left it all to Mother to sort it for him. Amazing. I thought he loved and trusted me. Obviously not.’ Sarah watched him flinch.
‘For the last couple of years, he and Mother seemed to rediscover each other. They behaved like lovers, told each other jokes instead of him simply issuing orders. Father even gave up social climbing, she hated it anyway. He perfected his skill at fishing. Talked about raising rare breeds of sheep. There’s one left, in the garden.’
Sarah wanted everything. She wanted to know where Mrs Pardoe had worn her gold dress for the first time and what Mr Pardoe had been like. She wanted family portraits, anecdotes, signs of grief, instead of this unnerving formality. All she could see from here was that husband and wife between them had created a good-looking tribe, disparate in appearance, Edward, dark and slight, Joanna fair and rounded, and the eldest, sitting opposite, stocky and attractive with a jutting chin, red-gold curls, the blazing eyes of a fever and no inclination to wander from the point. Sarah supposed she had better act as she had always done with clients and pretend that she had more to offer than educated common sense. The pretence often became real.
‘Look,’ she began, ‘it’s a perfectly valid will.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ he said rudely. ‘And it leaves me, as the eldest, to administer an estate over which I have no power. Mother can’t make a power of attorney in my favour, because she’d have to understand what it was. I’ve tried and failed. I manage to collect rents, pay cheques and run things only because the bank manager’s a patient, but I’ve got responsibility without authority. I also know, before you deign to tell me, that if she dies, Edward, Joanna and I would inherit in equal shares. Meantime, we’re all stuck. We’ve got assets without a huge income. Enough, but not generous. Mother could last for thirty years.’ He made the last statement fondly, a glimmer of admiration in his voice. Sarah caught him smiling, smiled back and watched his face harden, a man coarsened by bitterness and a loneliness beyond his own curing. Sarah was watching the fleeting betrayals of a condition which was second nature to herself, saw a man who had passed harsh judgements on himself.
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