Sweetheart, Sweetheart

by Bernard Taylor

  “I wondered . . . well . . . per’aps . . . per’aps you’d like to take some flowers with you . . .”

  “I should have thought of it myself,” I said. “Thank you.” I watched her then as she leaned over and snipped away at the roses, pink, yellow, white. Carefully she wrapped them in the brown paper.

  “From their own garden,” she murmured as she handed them to me. “I think it has more . . . meaning.”

  I could feel her eyes on my back as I started down the hill. Just before I turned the bend in the road I glanced back and saw that she was still watching me; I could see the movement of her blue blouse as she moved back behind the cover of the hedge. I wondered about Jean Timpson . . . Was it her intention to look after me while I was here? I wasn’t so sure that I wanted her around the place all the time. Still, it wouldn’t be a problem; I wouldn’t be staying any length of time.

  Following her directions I took the winding road that led into the heart of the village, coming into the square almost before I was aware of it. Last night when I arrived there by bus I hadn’t been in any frame of mind to take note of my surroundings. Now I did. It all looked as if it hadn’t changed very much over the years. There were a couple of hotels, the usual pubs and, in between, rows of shops in which only the goods displayed seemed to give any real evidence of the progress of time—this apart from the other signs of the century: the cars, and the inevit­able television aerials sprouting from the weathered rooftops.

  The few people I had passed on my way from the cottage prepared me now for the curious, surprised looks I got as I walked across the square. Being so like Colin, I knew I had to come as something of a surprise to the passers-by. But word would soon get around . . .

  Above the houses I saw, reaching up into the sky, the spire of the little church. Then, rounding the bend, there it was before me, surrounded by the cemetery with its green, green grass, and stones like uneven teeth. I turned in at the gate.

  Jean Timpson was right—the grave was easy to find. I saw it at once, the little marker bearing the number, the newness of the freshly turned earth, the vase holding roses, and delphiniums of the most exquisite blue. Jean Timpson’s work, you could be sure.

  I stood for some moments looking down, picturing Colin lying there with Helen beside him. I knelt and put the flowers along with those that were already there. The combined scent of the blossoms was strong, heady stuff.

  Colin . . .

  I couldn’t get my breath. Beyond my tears the flowers were a blur.

  After a while I got up and brushed the bits of dead cut-grass from my trousers. An elderly man came wandering along the little paths that ran between the graves. He walked slowly, going nowhere in particular, looking calmly around him with propri­etorial gaze. As I looked at him he nodded a silent good morn­ing, then came leisurely towards me. When he was close he stopped and looked down at the grave over which I stood, lost, and then up into my face. His eyes were cool, unruffled. Death, burial, were nothing new to him. I didn’t say anything. The tears were still wet on my cheeks and I knew that with my first words I would go completely. I turned away, waiting, gain­ing time. He waited too. He’d seen it all before. When at last I faced him again I saw his faded eyes were full of sympathy and understanding.

  He was the sexton, Harrier, he told me. Could he help me in any way . . . ?

  “Thank you . . . No . . .” It was beyond help.

  “I didn’t know them,” he said. His accent was very broad.

  “My brother and his wife . . .”

  He nodded. After a few moments he turned to go, his mouth framing a farewell. I said, stopping him:

  “I only found out about it yesterday—the car crash. I still don’t know when it happened.”

  He looked at me in surprise for a second, then took a small notebook from his pocket and flipped through the pages.

  “The sixteenth of May.”

  I stared at him. He looked back at me with concern.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “Yes. Yes, thank you . . .” The sixteenth of May. The day following my birthday. Our birthday.

  “Do you know what time?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be.

  “About eleven at night, I believe.” He was a mine of infor­mation.

  About eleven at night. In New York it would have been about six. The day of the faculty meeting. It was then that Colin had been killed. While I had been at the refectory table, with She­lagh beside me and Varley’s voice droning on. It was then. Colin, in his red MG had crashed, had died. And in the moments of his death I’d felt that explosion in my brain; I could remember it so clearly; and that terrible pressure on my chest, that wrenching at my heart, that vicious, piercing, rending inside me, so that I had gone down like a felled tree . . .

  Colin and I—we had been closer than I could ever have dreamed.

  I gestured to the newly dug plot at my feet. “The funeral was a week ago, I understand . . .”

  He nodded. “His was, yes . . .”

  “His funeral?” What did he mean? “You mean they had separate funerals?”

  His notebook was open again. He flicked the pages. “That’s it—Friday, the twelfth. She was buried ten days before.” He nodded confirmation, while I just stared at him. I didn’t get it.

  “I thought . . . I assumed . . .” I began, then ground to a halt. I took a deep breath. “What happened to her? How did she die . . . ?”

  He hesitated before he answered. “I—I just looks after all this, sir. You best go and talk to somebody else.” He turned away. Dimly I heard his murmured good morning, and he was off, moving along the narrow, angular, short-cropped paths.

  5

  There was no sign of Jean Timpson on my return to the cottage. I went back outside, across the lawn to the seat and sat thinking on what the sexton had told me. It was too much to deal with . . .

  As I sat there my eye was caught by a small lithe shape that crept amongst the flowers. A small cat, little more than a kitten. Against its glossy black fur the poppies showed up an even more brilliant red. I leaned forward, my hand reaching out, fingers moving on thumb.

  “Here, kitty . . . here, kitty . . .”

  The cat stopped, one white paw raised, and looked round at me. I saw the snow white bib, the alert, observing eyes, and then she was moving on again, on up towards the orchard.

  I leaned back and, squinting against the sun’s glare, looked at my cottage—my cottage. It was what I’d always wanted. Everybody’s dream house. But that I should have come by it in such a way . . .

  There was a blackbird perched on the chimney, very dark against the sky. He sang. His tune was made up of straight notes and trills, cascading, every few seconds the same song repeated, over and over. The sound, so pure, so effortless, seemed so much a part of everything around me—part of the newness of my being there, the trees, the flowers, the house, the garden. He had surely sung for Colin, too . . . Below the singing bird the steep roof pitched down in an uneven sweep—so much lower on this side of the house—to the walls, in places being met by the hollyhocks that reached up, and the honeysuckle that climbed around the door, the windows. The ground close along one section of the wall had long ago been scooped out to form the basis of a small sunken garden where blue, white and pink blossoms grew thickly among the stones. Everything looked so perfect. I sighed, stretched, then took off my jacket and let the warm sun get to my bare arms.

  Over to my left, at the end of the very long gravelled drive, stood what once must have been stables. I walked over and looked closer. Part of the old building had been converted into a garage, a smaller section into a kind of tool-shed, and the remaining large section into a studio—Helen’s studio. I could see her easel there, the canvases leaning against the walls. After a moment I went in.

  There were shelves all around bearing jars, bottles, books, papers, etc. There was a table with tins and tubes of paint. Paint-brushes and painting-knives stood in a large coffee can. Her eas
el stood near the window getting the best of the north light. Drawings and working-sketches were still pinned to the wooden frame for reference, and an unfinished painting of a face was still fixed there, abandoned, cancelled out by rough brush-strokes that zigzagged its surface.

  When I went into the kitchen a few minutes later I saw that Jean Timpson had returned and was making preparations for my lunch. “Won’t be too long,” she said, and I nodded at her briefly-, half-turned profile, sensing her discomfort as I stood watching her work.

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked.

  I thanked her and said I’d like a gin-and-tonic. She nodded. “You go and sit down. I’ll bring it in to you.”

  “. . . Okay.” I went.

  There were paintings in the living-room, too. Paintings of Helen’s, all in her own very special style; I no longer needed to look for her signature to know they were hers. And there were other pictures, by other hands. I saw a large abstract in blues and reds, garish and hard-edged and, a few feet away, flanked on the other side by a photograph of an elderly women surrounded by cats, a rather primitive oil portrait of a man and a woman. They were both quite young. She looked somewhat self-conscious, but behind her shyness I thought I could read a gentleness, a humour there in her eyes. She was shown sitting, while the man, tall, dark-haired and rather stern of aspect, stood slightly behind and to one side, his left arm hidden behind her shoulder. The woman held a bouquet of roses in her lap. In the background was the cottage. The picture was probably the work of a local artist, I thought. It possessed a certain childlike charm; there was an endearing naïveté in the meticulous attention to detail—the ring on her finger, her brooch, the buttons on his jacket.

  “I brought your drink . . .”

  Jean Timpson stood there holding my gin-and-tonic.

  “Thank you.” I took the ice-cold glass from her. “You even remembered to put in lemon.”

  She gave me her shy little smile in acknowledgement. Then she said, nodding towards the painting. “That’s a nice picture, isn’t it?”

  “. . . Yes. He looks a bit—forbidding. Though she looks pleasant enough. Who were they?”

  “Named Temple. Robert his name was. His wife was called Bronwen. She was a Gerrard before she married him. He was no good to her at all. Went off and left her. And she died.”

  “You mean of a broken heart? I thought that only happened in the old English folk ballads.”

  She glanced at me blankly, not understanding. “They found her dead . . .” She turned her attention to the photograph of the woman who sat knee-deep in cats. “That was Miss Merridew.” She added after a beat: “She liked cats.”

  “So I see.” I couldn’t help smiling. “This—” I indicated the abstract, “—who did this?”

  “Oh . . . Alan De Freyne.”

  There was something in her voice that made me turn and look at her, but her face showed nothing—except her awareness of my glance. She avoided this by pointing to a framed sampler that hung on the wall. “Look at that . . . how beautifully it’s done . . .”

  I read the embroidered words of a poem:

  Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

  Lengthen night and shorten day;

  Every leaf speaks bliss to me

  Fluttering from the autumn tree.

  I shall smile when the wreaths of snow

  Blossom where the rose should grow;

  I shall sing when night’s decay

  Ushers in a drearier day.

  And there in the same neat stitches with their harmonious colours, By Margaret Lane, April, 1904.

  “Strange,” I said, “and all these years I thought that was by Emily Brontë.”

  My feeble humour was lost on Jean Timpson. She said, “Oh, it just means it was sewn by Margaret Lane.” She paused, added: “Your brother didn’t go much on it, I don’t think. He took it down. Put it in his study. I put it back just a day or two ago. The wall looked—wrong without it.” She looked suddenly doubtful. “. . . You don’t mind . . . ?”

  “Of course not.”

  “There’s lots of things down in the cellar,” she went on. “From the different people who’ve lived here over the years. Your brother spent ages down there poking about—and when the antique man came. I’m afraid the place is a bit of a muddle down there right now, so you must excuse the state of it. Your brother said not to bother trying to tidy it up.” Still looking at the sampler, she added, “She didn’t have a very happy life either. She had a sad end, too . . .”

  Silence. I said suddenly: “I went to the cemetery. What sort of end did Helen have?”

  Jean Timpson’s discomfiture was so apparent it made me wince. And then she was turning, looking from the window, saying too loudly, too quickly: “You left your jacket out there, look. And it’s going to rain, I’m sure.” And she hurried away, through the doorway.

  I caught her up outside as she got near the seat.

  “You didn’t tell me,” I said, “that Helen died at a different time. The sexton told me. He said she was buried ten days before Colin. I thought they’d been killed together in the car. Why didn’t you say?”

  She shrugged, nervously picked up my jacket, handed it to me. I went on:

  “That’s all he told me . . .” Then I asked: “What happened to Helen?”

  “. . . She had an accident. A fall . . .” She looked up and I followed the direction of her eyes.

  “. . . From the roof?”

  “It was an accident.”

  I looked down into the sunken garden, the rocky well with the flowers growing amongst the stones.

  “. . . And she fell down there . . . Oh, Jesus . . .”

  Jean Timpson took a step away, eager to be gone. Not yet, though. “Please,” I said softly, “tell me what happened.” More silence. I saw the ripple of her throat muscles as she swallowed. “What was she doing up there?” I asked.

  “She had this kitten. Girlie. A little black and white thing . . .”

  “I’ve seen her around . . .”

  “Well . . . it got up on the roof, and got stuck up there. Mrs. Warwick tried to get her down. She fetched the ladder and put it up against the wall and climbed up.” She gestured. “—From the other side. It’s not nearly so high there. She got right up to the top and then—then she—slipped . . .”

  “. . . Did you see it happen?”

  “No . . .” Then she said with a rush, “It wasn’t my fault. It was late. I thought she was sleeping.”

  “So you were here in the house at the time.”

  “Yes . . .” Her voice grew stronger, a little shrill. “—But I didn’t know that was happening. I didn’t know what she was doing. I just heard all the noise—the shouting, the screaming. When I came out it was—all over.”

  “You say it happened quite late . . .”

  “About ten or half-past . . .”

  “Where was my brother at the time?”

  “Up by the thicket, I think he said. He heard her shouting, like I did.”

  “What was she shouting . . . ?”

  “—For someone to help her, I think . . .” She paused. “I was supposed to be keeping an eye on her. And I had tried. I’d stayed for three nights—but I’d hardly got any sleep, myself. All night long she’d be getting up, doing this, doing that . . .” She rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I tried,” she protested, “but there wasn’t no telling what she’d do any more.” Her glance flicked to my face, then away again. “I’m not speaking ill of the dead. I liked Mrs. Warwick, I really did. But it’s true, she was . . . different . . . towards the end. You just didn’t know what to do with her . . .” She sniffed, dabbed at her nose with a handkerchief. “When I looked in on her I thought she was asleep. I went to have a bath. It was the first time I’d had to myself all day. I felt sure she’d be all right. I never dreamed. I wouldn’t have let her climb up there. Never. But I didn’t know . . .”

  “What was my brother doing outside?”

&nb
sp; “They were talking, I s’pose. I don’t know.”

  “They . . . ?”

  “Him and Mrs. Barton. She’d only got here that evening. When I ran outside they were both there. He was holding Mrs. Warwick . . .” She clenched her eyelids tight shut. “Mrs. Warwick was still alive then, when I got there. It was terrible. There was so much blood. I saw her die.” She stared before her as if seeing the scene being re-enacted in the well of the sunken garden. “I watched her eyes go—glazed. I knew then she was dead.”

  The tears were streaming down her cheeks. And all the time the blackbird went on singing.

  6

  I stood silent. Somewhere in the trees a wood pigeon rose up, clattering, squeaking on rusty-sounding wings. It settled again, and then I was only aware of the rippling trill of the blackbird’s song against the broken sound of the woman’s weeping.

  “It was an accident,” she said. “They said so at the inquest.”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself . . .” I felt useless.

  She put her hand to her mouth in an effort to still the sobbing. “I heard her, but I just couldn’t get out fast enough.”

  “It’s over now . . .” I reached out, let my hand fall back to my side. “. . . Don’t cry . . .”

  “But I’m sure he thought it was my fault. He must have done. I should have been watching her . . .”

  “How was he—afterwards?—Colin . . . ?”

  “He sent me away.” She stood there like a child whose doll has been taken from her.

  “—How do you mean?”

  “He told my father, too. Dad had been coming up, helping with the garden. Your brother—he told us not to come back. He said he didn’t need anybody any more. But he did. He should have had somebody looking after him. He wasn’t looking after hisself, that’s for sure. And I don’t think he was doing his work or anything . . . He went away at the end, but then he come back again. And that’s when he—died.” Her tears ran stronger—for herself?—for Colin?—I wondered.