The Cruellest Month

by Hazel Holt

  ‘What a dreadful thing.’

  ‘The trouble is, it was Tony who found her.’

  ‘Oh, poor boy!’ I exclaimed. ‘No wonder he’s upset – it must have been a dreadful shock.’

  ‘Yes…’ Betty hesitated. ‘But I feel that there’s something more to it than that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know – he won’t talk about it. He’s always been so reserved. I really believe he talks to Cleopatra more than he talks to us!’

  I bit back the obvious remark about not being able to get a word in edgeways – neither Betty nor Robert ever seemed to draw breath. But Betty really did seem to be concerned.

  ‘Perhaps he’ll tell you about it, Sheila. He’s always been so fond of you.’

  ‘And I’m fond of him.’ I said warmly. ‘I’ll see what I can do. If he’s a bit tensed up about it all – and it’s only natural that he should be – it might be easier for him to talk to someone outside the family.’

  The telephone rang and Betty went to answer it and I took the tray of tea things out into the kitchen. While I was rinsing out the cups Betty came back.

  ‘That was Robert,’ she said. ‘Hess going to be late. He’s got to take old Mr Fraser into the Radcliffe – an emergency – and he doesn’t know what time he’ll be back. So we’ll have something on a tray, shall we, and then I can get on with the minutes of the Environmental Protection meeting we had last night. Do you know, this new extension of the M40 is going to do dreadful things to that area round Otmoor – there are some really rare species...’

  ‘What about Tony?’ I asked.

  ‘Tony?’

  ‘Something on a tray.’

  ‘Oh, he won’t mind,’ said Betty cheerfully, ‘he’s used to it.’

  Chapter Two

  When Tony got in he greeted me with quiet pleasure but barely spoke as we ate our cold pork pie and tomatoes. Not that there would have been much opportunity for him to do so since Betty plunged straight away into a detailed description of the trouble she was having with one of her committees. I was amused to find that the striving for peace and goodwill to all men (and women) certainly didn’t seem to apply among committee members. The knives were out, apparently, for some wretched woman who had contrived to offend certain other members and a conspiracy was being hatched to get rid of her in some Machiavellian way that I couldn’t actually follow.

  ‘Come to think of it,’ Betty said, ‘I might just nip round now and see Margot Greenford. She’s always in after six, and we can decide what to do next. You don’t mind, do you, Sheila?’

  She got up resolutely and gathered up some papers from the desk.

  ‘I’ll just go and make some coffee.’ Tony said and slipped from the room.

  When he came back, with Cleopatra winding herself round his ankles, his mother had gone. He put down a tray laid with the pretty white and gold coffee pot that Betty never bothered with, the matching china, proper coffee sugar and a lovely creamy gateau. I exclaimed with pleasure.

  ‘I got it from that shop in St Giles – I know you like them,’ he said.

  ‘Dear Tony,’ I said warmly, ‘that was very sweet of you. I absolutely adore their cakes. They are my favourite indulgence.’

  We smiled at each other and Tony seemed to relax for the first time since he got in. He poured the coffee and cut the cake, giving each of us a large slice. Cleopatra, sitting beside me on the sofa, dabbed at my arm with a delicate paw and I broke off a piece of the creamy centre of the cake and offered it to her in my hand. She sniffed at it, looked incredulously at me and jumped down.

  Tony laughed. ‘Oh, Cleo,’ he said, ‘you are wicked!’

  I laughed too – Cleopatra played the same trick on me every time and I always fell for it – and put the rejected piece of cake on the edge of my plate.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is nice. It’s been ages since I saw you. How’s everything?’

  ‘Pretty rotten, actually.’

  ‘Your mother told me that there was a bad accident – a woman at the library and that you found her. It must have been beastly for you.’

  He put down his plate as if he suddenly couldn’t bear to go on eating.

  ‘It was horrible...’ he said. His voice trailed away miserably and he sat hunched up in the chair, his hands locked together under his chin, a sure sign that he was upset. Although I knew that finding Gwen Richmond’s body must have been upsetting for him (I don’t suppose he had ever seen anyone dead before) I felt that alone was not responsible for his present distress. I was sure there was something else he couldn’t bring himself to talk about.

  ‘Look, tell me all about it – how it happened and everything. It often helps just to go through things that have upset us. I expect you’ve been squirrelling around in your mind, getting things out of proportion. We all do it.’

  He gave me a wan smile, but a smile none the less.

  ‘It was Gwen Richmond – she and her sister are friends of Mother’s. Gwen used to work in Bodley years ago, and then she went abroad with the British Council – Italy and Greece mostly. When she retired she did occasional little jobs for us – updating catalogues she had worked on before, that kind of thing. When she – when she died she was working on the Anstruther Collection. They found a lot of new material in a private library somewhere in Northumberland, you may have read about it?’

  His face suddenly became animated, as it always did when he was speaking about the library and his work there. ‘Yes I did – they’re more or less my period, some fascinating diaries and letters. I’d love to look at them some time.’

  ‘Yes, you must. Gwen had almost finished cataloguing them and most of them have been dealt with by Conservation, so they’ll be available soon...’

  He stopped, took a deep breath and then continued.

  ‘Anyway, Gwen was working on this collection. We’re a bit pushed for space at any time and just at this moment we’re having a lot of alterations done – new humidifiers, things to comply with new fire regulations – the lot! You can imagine, it’s all a bit difficult. So Gwen had to work more or less where we could fit her in. She used to call herself an “itinerant cataloguer”. She ended up working in Room 43 – it used to be one of the old stack rooms – all squashed up in a corner, surrounded by shelving. It houses a lot of old volumes, mostly local history, a collection someone left to the library that nobody really wanted, but he’d left some money as well, so of course ... By rights we shouldn’t have had them, but Carlisle wouldn’t have them in his department so, as usual, they were dumped on us. As I said, it’s one of the old rooms with wooden shelving and it simply wasn’t up to the strain.’

  He stopped speaking. Cleopatra, as she did every evening, jumped up and curled herself on his chest, breathing lovingly into his face. He smiled, stroked her head delicately with one finger and continued.

  ‘Gwen seems to have wanted to get a book from one of the upper shelves. Nearly everywhere else the ladders are those metal ones that slide round on a rail – you know the sort of thing – but the ladder in Room 43 is a tall wooden one with a wide strip across the top, a bit top-heavy. Anyway, the ladder must have slipped and she caught hold of the shelving to steady herself and the whole thing came crashing down on top of her, books and all...’

  ‘How terrible. And you found her?’

  ‘Yes. It was a Friday afternoon and she hadn’t been in the day before so I wanted to ask her if she was coming in on the Monday – she didn’t come in every day. I opened the door, but it would only open half-way because of all the debris. I saw the shelving and the books and then I saw Gwen pinned underneath. I thought she was just badly hurt – her eyes were open, you see – but when I crouched down beside her I could tell ... I think just the shelving wouldn’t have killed her, but she was struck on the head by a great heavy book, calf-bound with brass edges. Horsley’s Britannia Romana…’

  This pedantic little detail moved me very much.

  ‘Oh, Tony...
’

  ‘It was such a shock, you see.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone hear anything? Surely a crash like that would have made a fearful noise.’

  ‘It must have done, but no one heard because Room 43 is right at the end of a corridor, through a couple of fire doors. I suppose someone might have heard a muffled thud, but we’re used to a bit of crashing about because people aren’t always as careful as they might be with the book trolleys.’

  This was obviously a long-standing grievance and the thought of it, I was pleased to see, did take away the stricken look he had as he remembered finding Gwen Richmond’s body.

  ‘Tony, dear, it was a really dreadful thing to have happened and you must have had an awful shock, but accidents do happen. You must try to put it out of your mind.’

  He shifted Cleopatra’s sleek fawn body to one side so that she could rest more comfortably and said uncertainly, ‘I can’t help feeling...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh ... well, responsible, in a way.’

  ‘But it wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t know that it would collapse – you can’t be expected to go around inspecting every inch of shelving to see that it’s properly secure.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ He broke off as his father came into the room.

  Robert always makes me think of Richard III. I don’t mean that he is a Wicked Uncle with a hunchback (though, in any case, I belong to the Josephine Tey/Guy Paget school of thought about Richard). No, I’m reminded of the line in the Shakespeare play when Richard talks about leaving the world free for him to bustle in. Robert definitely bustles. There is a small explosion of energy whenever he comes into a room.

  ‘Sheila! How lovely! Is that coffee still hot? And do I see some cake?’

  He embraced me warmly, poured himself some coffee and cut a wedge of Tony’s cake all in one breath, as it were, and flopped rather dramatically into a chair.

  ‘What a day! Well, I got poor old Fraser settled in the Churchill. It was a stroke of course. Wasn’t it lucky I was paying him my weekly visit today?’

  Robert always assumes you know exactly who he’s talking about and I usually find it easier to let the whole thing flow over me, making little agreeing noises from time to time. Fortunately Robert never seems to require anything else.

  ‘Well,’ he continued through a mouthful of cake, ‘I rang and rang and there was no reply, so I knew some-thing must be wrong. None of the doors or windows was open, so I had to get in through that skylight thing in the conservatory.’ he said triumphantly. ‘He’s got a splendid plumbago in there – I must see what I can do about it when he’s out of hospital.’

  Robert’s collection of fine plants was largely built up by a sort of horticultural tithe that he exacted from those of his patients who were keen gardeners.

  ‘Robert! Are you all right? It was really a very dangerous thing to do. You might have slipped and cut yourself very badly!’

  ‘Nonsense. No problem at all. I just let myself down on to the staging and got into the house from there. He was lying on the bathroom floor – couldn’t get up or anything. Still, he’s all right now. His speech is coming back and we’ll soon get some movement into that left side. I told him we’d have him back in his greenhouse in no time.’

  I reflected that Mr Fraser might make a specially rapid recovery simply to get back to protect his plants from Robert’s acquisitive hands.

  ‘I rang that daughter of his. Now she’ll have to come back and see to things. All that nonsense about a flat of her own in Oxford. It’s only because of this man – he’s married, of course. Naturally her father wouldn’t approve...’

  I used to worry about Robert’s gossip, but I decided long ago that since I didn’t know any of the people involved I could regard it as a continuing soap opera and enjoy it in the same spirit.

  Robert put down his cup with a clatter and rose to his feet.

  ‘Well, I’ll be making tracks for bed. I want to read an article on gallstones by that chap in Norwich – he’s got some very way-out ideas, but he’s very able – we trained together at Bartss you know. Does anyone want that last bit of cake?’

  He scooped it up from the plate and went out of the room eating happily, scattering a trail of crumbs like the Babes in the Wood.

  I laughed. ‘Dear Robert, he doesn’t change! Does he ever listen to a word anyone says?’

  ‘Only to his patients, and they all seem devoted to him.’ ‘I’m not surprised – I should think that just seeing him would make them feel better – all that cheerfulness and vigour.’

  ‘There are times when it might be a bit overpowering...’ Tonyss voice died away and I felt that he wasn’t just thinking of Robert’s patients.

  I stood up and collected the cups and plates.

  ‘I want to wait up and have a chat with your mother when she comes in, so I’ll see to these. You go on up. You look absolutely exhausted and I daresay you’ll be up long before me tomorrow. Do you still go in at that ungodly hour?’

  Tony was always at work long before anyone else and was one of the last to leave. As I said, it really was his whole life.

  ‘Oh, the usual time – I like to be in early to get things done before we’re really busy. How about you? When will you be in?’

  I bent and picked up some of the cake crumbs from the carpet.

  ‘I’ll be in around mid-morning. Have you got anyone interesting in at the moment?’

  I was always fascinated by the cross section or the academic world that foregathered in Room 45 and Tony had many stories of their eccentric personalities and behaviour.

  ‘Not many people just now – mostly regulars – a few members of the University, someone from St Andrews and a couple of quite nice Americans, though the American season hasn’t really started yet – give it a couple of weeks and we’ll be knee deep in them.’

  ‘Oh, good. I like it best when it’s quiet. I always get distracted by all the fascinating faces…’

  ‘Can I get anything out for you to save time – have you got a list?’

  ‘Bless you, but don’t bother. I always use the time while I’m waiting for the books to arrive to catch up on my correspondence.’

  ‘OK. By the way, how are the animals?’

  ‘Fine. They’re all staying with Rosemary. Electric blanket for Foss and consoling chocolates for the dogs – she is really sillier about animals than I am!’

  We smiled at each other and Cleopatra, sensing that Tony was going upstairs, began her usual bedtime ritual. She leapt down and rushed up the stairs and down again, out into the kitchen and back into the sitting room where she went to ground under a chair.

  ‘Ah right, Cleo.’ Tony got down on his hands and knees and peered under the chair. A fawn paw emerged and batted at him while its owner uttered a low cry. Then a whiskered face emerged, pale golden eyes enormous with excitement. With one deft movement Tony scooped her up and swung her on to his shoulder. She lay there, completely relaxed, one paw dangling negligently down his back and with the sort of smug expression on her face that I have always imagined her namesake had as she drifted down the Nile in her golden barge.

  Chapter Three

  I have always loved working in libraries. Especially the Bodleian. When I was an undergraduate it always seemed positive proof that I was a scholar – look at me, I wanted to shout, here, in the Bodleian – and the atmosphere, especially in Duke Humfrey, of accumulated centuries of learning had seemed almost a tangible thing, the cloak of history thrown round my shoulders. Indeed, I do believe that it is the Bodleian rather than my own college, that will always mean Oxford to me. Now, in later years, that feeling had been reinforced – almost replaced – by a powerful sense of nostalgia. And not only nostalgia for my academic past. How many of today’s (more earnest) undergraduates, I wonder, see this venerable building primarily as a place of assignation? Well, not quite assignation – more a place where you might, if you were lucky, catch a glimpse of the object of a passion (requited or not,
as the case may be), and plan how to find yourself in the next seat, books cosily adjacent?

  When you get your Bodleian reader’s card you have to swear an oath, hearing your voice self-consciously reading out the words written on the card, agreeing to all the prohibitions required of you – you may not bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, or consume food or drink – but among all these prohibitions there is nothing to say that you may not, within the confines of this great library, fall in love. Which is just as well.

  In my second year I had seen, usually sitting in the same seat at the end of a row, a young man who had intrigued me. I was struck, first of all, by his extraordinary resemblance to Peter Wimsey. I got up from my seat, took a dictionary from the open shelves beside him, and, leaning on the radiator in its metal grille, studied him covertly. He was of medium height and slightly built, with a long face, straight fair hair and very beautiful hands – Miss Sayers’ hero to the life! By an extraordinary coincidence (to one who knew Gaudy Night by heart) he was reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici. After that I haunted the library. One day I managed to get a seat next to him and was able to read over his shoulder the name and college on his notebooks: Rupert Drummond (immensely glamorous), Trinity (a disappointment – it should have been Balliol, but we cannot expect perfection in this life). He too was reading English, and also in his second year, so I saw him at lectures, shadowed him around Oxford and, through a young man I knew at Trinity, was finally able to make his acquaintance more formally.

  It is a cliché, I suppose, that you never forget your first love, but it’s true. Sometimes when I think of Rupert I find that I’m going around with an idiotic smile on my face, remembering that idyllic time in Oxford – simple pleasures, really, in those innocent days before the swinging sixties when holding hands in a punt and snatching a kiss in the shadows outside the college gates seemed infinitely romantic. It was, indeed, a perfect romance, perfectly (a cynic might say) rounded off by Rupert’s tragic death in a climbing accident in the Alps the year after he went down, so that he remained in my memory as a young hero, a sort of Rupert Brooke figure, whose memory I still treasured like some rare piece of porcelain, fragile but enduring.