by Anne Morice
‘Honestly, Robin, you are well informed.’
‘Well, that was the bait, of course. Taking me into her confidence, or pretending to, anyway.’
‘But she didn’t give you any details about the circumstances of this fire?’
‘No, I had the feeling there was more to come, but then you appeared and she switched to the subject of Toby and his masterpieces.’
‘I must contrive some more opportunities to throw you together. In the meantime, I don’t suppose that Mr Fellowes’s firm was the one Pauline worked for, by any chance?’
‘No, they were called Winthrop Son and Gayford.’
‘You remembered that, or did you look it up?’
‘I checked it, but I had remembered. It had struck me as having a somewhat gentle and appealing ring about it, which one doesn’t readily associate with that business. It wasn’t so inappropriate as it sounded, though, because the Gayford half turned out to be a woman.’
‘Husband and wife?’
‘No, she’d originally been engaged by Winthrop senior as a shorthand typist, but he must have been ahead of his time, because he recognised her potential and encouraged her to rise in the world. He gave her time off to study and so on. By the time he died she’d become a fully fledged chartered surveyor and he’d made her a junior partner.’
‘Good for him! And how about Pauline? Did she show signs of going the same way?’
‘Not that I know of, although she was said to be exceptionally competent. She was Young Mr Winthrop’s secretary. He was still known as Young Mr Winthrop, even though he was in his sixties and going deaf by then.’
Heartened by the way he described these matters, as though they belonged to fiction, instead of real life, I said:
‘You never explained why Pauline was so set against racing?’
‘No, and the answer is that it had killed her father, having first broken up his marriage. It left her, at the age of five, in the care of relatives, who did not underestimate the magnitude of their generosity in taking her in, or let a week go by without reminding her of it.’
‘Yes, that sounds a pretty good reason, but could horses really be blamed for such a trail of disasters?’
‘Her father was a National Hunt Jockey, which, as you know, can be a precarious way of earning a living. He was beginning to get established, though, and had just been taken on as stable jockey by quite a successful trainer, so things were looking up for him. Then came the accident.’
‘A fall, you mean?’
‘And no ordinary one. He was leading by two lengths when his horse stumbled and threw him at the last fence. It fell on top of him and the rest of the field, about twenty of them, came thundering up behind. He spent the next nine months in hospital, with multiple fractures in practically every bone in his anatomy.’
‘It can happen.’
‘Yes, but this was worse than most because his spine was affected. He was paralysed from the waist down.’
‘Poor man!’
‘ Perhaps, in time, he would have recovered, but his wife didn’t wait to find out. She ran off with another man. He was a jockey too and he’d been offered a well paid job in Hong Kong, which must have seemed like adding insult to injury. She also abandoned the child.’
‘And he didn’t recover?’
‘He didn’t wait to find out either. He shot himself.’
‘How could he do that, if he was paralysed?’
‘One afternoon they brought Pauline to visit him. They were left alone for ten minutes and he got her to climb on a chair and get his revolver out of a suitcase, which had been stacked on top of a cupboard. She and the nurse who’d been sent to fetch her and hand her over to the uncle and aunt were only halfway down the corridor when they heard the shot. It put her off horses for good.’
‘The wonder is that she should have chosen to spend her life in Chissingfield, where you can hardly avoid them.’
‘It’s not unique in that. You’d have your work cut out to find a town in the south of England which isn’t within reach of a race course. Besides, her adoptive parents were living in Taunton when she went to them and she was at school and college there. They were her only means of support, so there was no possibility of breaking away until she was qualified to earn her living. After that, she naturally didn’t want to move to a strange neighbourhood where she had no friends or connections. Also, despite everything, she seems to have felt some affection for her uncle and aunt, who were getting on in years and may have mellowed a bit by then. When she got the job with Winthrop and Gayford she moved into lodgings in the town, but once every two or three months she took the bus to Taunton and spent Sunday, or sometimes the whole weekend, in what, after all, was the only home she could remember.’
‘How long had this been going on when she was killed?’
‘Three or four years. Then her uncle died and her aunt sold up and went to live in a bungalow in Worthing. So the regular visits came to an end, but Pauline still kept in touch and made a point of going to see her once or twice a year.’
‘So when her home had gone, what charms did Chissingfield hold for her, apart from her job?’
‘Everything she needed, apparently. She was country born and bred and there’s no shortage of green pastures around here, as you know so well. She seems to have been a reserved sort of girl, without strong emotional entanglements, but she had friends here, people she’d known since her schooldays and new ones she’d met at the office. And you have to remember that, although they hold about ten meetings a year, the race course is several miles from the town and doesn’t impinge on it to any great extent. We discovered people who’d spent half their lives here and never set foot on the race course.’
‘And Pauline was one of them?’
‘She never went herself, but it didn’t seem to have bothered her that other people did. Except, that is, on one special day of the year and thereby hangs the rest of the tale. Perhaps we should shelve that for the time being, though, since we now seem to be faced with a decision of some gravity.’
I could see what he meant. Our footpath had been ascending sharply for the last quarter of a mile and had now brought us to a stile, which separated it from a narrow road on the outskirts of the village. There were one or two medium sized, newish looking houses on this level, but not for nothing had it been named Mattingly Bottom. Fifty yards from where we stood the road curved round to the right and began a steep and winding descent to a huddle of buildings crammed into a hollow.
Louisa’s warning that it had little to offer when you got there, and the inescapable truth that whoever walked down must walk up again, naturally prompted us to turn back. The only reason to waver was a signpost on the left-hand side of the road, at the point where the right-hand side disappeared from view. We were too far off to decipher the words, but the oak leaf design, inviting us to set our feet in the direction of some historic treasure trove, was hard to resist. Dedicated holidaymakers, as we had set out to be, we had not neglected to bring our National Trust cards, so it was not even going to cost us anything.
‘Tell you what,’ Robin said, ‘we’ll compromise. It’s now five to eleven. If we haven’t caught sight of whatever it is when the hour strikes, we’ll turn back. What do you say?’
We stretched it a bit, needless to say, but still the effort was wasted. The hands stood at three minutes past eleven when we saw our second oak leaf, this one beckoning us down a leafy lane, which stretched away in a dead straight line to infinity.
‘What we could do now,’ I said, ‘is to make another compromise. Give it up and come back in the car this afternoon. We might even find out first whether the damn thing is open on Tuesdays.’
Robin was not listening. His attention had now strayed to a house on our left, diagonally opposite the turning to the lane. It was larger and older looking than any we had so far passed, but otherwise unremarkable, except in one particular. There was a notice board nailed to the front gate, announcing that its sale wa
s under offer and that the agents who were handling it were called Fellowes and Gayford.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘The two firms have amalgamated, presumably. Or, to put it another way, the big fish has gobbled up the little one. Come on, let’s go back now, shall we, and live to fight another day?’
‘I worry about Young Mr Winthrop,’ I said, as we plodded up the winding hill. ‘I do hope the big fish hasn’t spat him out. I had begun to feel quite attached to him.’
‘Now, don’t start getting maudlin, Tessa. That would be the last straw.’
‘It’s your fault. Transporting oneself back into the past, for whatever reason, is bound to bring trouble. If you’d told me from the beginning what lay behind this so-called holiday, I could have warned you about some of the pitfalls.’
‘Although I can’t say you’ve worked very hard since then to protect me from them. All you do is keep asking questions and pitchforking me into more of them. It will be quite a relief when Toby is here and we can talk about something else.’
‘Don’t depend on it,’ I said, cheered by the sight of the stile and the knowledge that it would soon be downhill all the way. ‘You know as well as I do that he likes nothing belter than to sit back and let someone else work out a plot for him. So far as I know, he’s never used the cut and thrust of an estate agents’ office as a setting for a play, but I daresay he’ll find possibilities in it, so be on your guard.’
(3)
Lupus was not in the reception hall when Toby arrived, nor Verity either, which was not such good news, and it was only by chance that I saw his car from the bedroom window, while changing for dinner.
Ten minutes went by, still with no word or sound from Number Four, so I put on my dressing gown, hoping it would pass for an evening cloak, and went downstairs to see what had become of him. He was seated in one of the chintzy armchairs, reading a local paper.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked him.
‘About an hour.’
‘Oh no, Toby, that must be an exaggeration.’
‘Possibly. So far as I am concerned, time has now stood still.’
‘Well, never mind, you will get used to that and it is one of the charms of this place. So happy-go-lucky, you know, and you are free to come and go as you please.’
‘So I should hope, since I see it is advertised in this paper as a hotel and not a prison.’
‘All I meant was that you don’t have to bother with formalities, like signing the register and so on. It so happens that I know exactly where they’ve put you and, if you will follow me, I will conduct you to your room.’
I lifted the flap and went behind the reception desk, taking down the key of Number Four from its hook and then, hearing the front door open, twirled round with a guilty start, to be greeted by a familiar tenor voice:
‘Oh no, I don’t believe it! I positively do not believe it. And Toby too, I do declare! Have you taken the place over? Well, high time somebody did and I can’t think of two nicer people.’
He was an actor named James Featherstone, the very one, in fact, whose name I had noticed in the cast list of As You Like It, although I had exaggerated a little in describing him as a boy in his twenties. It would be more accurate to say that he was a boy in his thirties. Although it was some years since we had met, at one point, when we had played opposite each other as a couple of moony teenagers in a television serial, we had become as intimate as his nature would allow. This was not saying much because, although a celebrated chatterbox, he had few close friends. So far as I could remember, the nearest he had come to confiding in me was in confessing that Featherstone was his mother’s maiden name and that he had chosen it partly because it looked better on the credits, but principally to dissociate himself from his detestable father.
‘Oh, hallo Jimmie!’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘Very well, thank you, darling. How’s Price?’
Not many people in my circle refer to Robin as Price, but Jimmie always made a point of doing so. His explanation was that Robin was an unsuitable name for one engaged in such sinister activities, but I suspected that it might have had more to do with the fact that it so closely resembled the name of his own beloved companion. Reminded of this, I said:
‘He’s very well too. How’s Bobbie?’
‘Splendid, thank you.’
‘And what brings you here, if one may ask a personal question?’
‘No, one may not. I hate having my line pinched and I consider I have far more right to this one. Furthermore, I have to say that I am not sure you will get very far in this new venture of yours, if this is the style in which you intend to greet all your customers. It might have been more comme il faut to have climbed out of your negligee by seven-thirty in the evening. Unless, of course, you hope to attract a more raffish type of clientèle than the tweedy lot one is accustomed to seeing here. In which case, you are probably going the right way about it.’
‘What I’m doing,’ I explained, ‘is finding the key to Toby’s room. And the reason for my question is that I was under the impression that you were even now on your way to another part of the forest, in order to give out the news that all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.’
‘Tomorrow at this time I shall be doing just that. Tonight they are in another part of Norway, which is no concern of mine, thank God. I have been summoned here by my father, whose birthday it is, to celebrate the dawn of another nefarious year in his life.’
‘Oh, I see! And, since it might get the festivities off to a better start if I were not parading about in my negligee when he arrives, we shall leave you to it. See you later, maybe.’
Verity came marching through from the lounge, as we were halfway up the stairs, so I leaned over the banister to introduce her to Toby and explain about the key. She responded with a certain degree of head-tossing and outraged amazement, but it soon fizzled out. Almost immediately she caught sight of Jimmie and her expression changed to one of goggle-eyed astonishment. She stared at him, with her mouth hanging open and looking as though she were about to burst into tears.
This reaction, although somewhat overcharged, came as no great surprise, for I had seen him provoke a similar one in adoring women who had waited for hours in the pouring rain, with their autograph books at the ready. I could have warned her, however, that, so far as they and she were concerned, signing autographs was where it would begin and end.
He had fallen in love many years ago with a woman fifteen years older than himself and had remained so ever since. Her name was Roberta Grayle and she was married to a writer and reformed alcoholic, whom she watched over like a female dragon guarding its young. Believing that without her, Max would inevitably revert to his bad old ways, she had refused to leave him and, by way of compromise, Jimmie had moved in with them, to become a permanent member of the household and part-time guardian.
So far as I knew, from that day forward he had never seriously glanced at another woman and I had always believed this state of affairs to be at the root of the hostility between him and his family. However, he was reticent to the point of secrecy on this, as on most subjects which concerned him personally and, curious as ever about other people’s lives, I welcomed this chance to see and possibly meet his father and to discover more about their relationship.
(4)
‘And while you were downstairs seeing to the running of the hotel,’ Robin said, ‘I have had a visitor. Honestly, I don’t see how you can be bored. One can never tell from one minute to the next ‘what they are going to spring on you.’
‘Who was your visitor? Lupus?’
‘No, Louisa.’
‘But how can that be? Did she fly in on a broomstick, or had she been lurking in the bathroom?’
‘No, just the usual, conventional means of entry.’
‘But Toby and I were in full view of the staircase and we didn’t see her.’
‘It seems to have escaped your no
tice, but there is a back staircase at the end of this passage, leading to a garden door and the kitchen, where the current crisis is now raging.’
‘What’s happened? Creosote in the soup?’
‘Worse! She did her best to make light of it, but she was seething with rage behind the smiles. Apparently, the oil pipe to the stove has got blocked up and it’s not functioning. It must have started cooling down some time in the afternoon, but no one noticed it until after six, by which time it was too late to get anyone to come and fix it.’
‘What does that mean? Cold dinner?’
‘They might have got away with that, if it had just been ourselves and the Fellowes to cater for, but there’s a gala on tonight. A birthday party, with a dozen guests, and the booking was made weeks ago. They’ve got an electric stove for emergencies, but it’s barely adequate for a fiesta of this kind, so they want us to take it in shifts. Louisa came to ask if we’d mind very much holding back till eight forty-five or nine.’
‘I do mind, as it happens, because all that exercise has sharpened my appetite, but I suppose it can’t be helped. What did you say?’
‘Oh, I agreed. It seemed more sensible to make a virtue of necessity than to insist on our rights. Nothing could be more dispiriting than sitting round a bare table, watching other people have a hilarious time at their groaning board. I went so far as to say we shouldn’t even enjoy being in earshot of the hilarity and groans and would have our drinks served up here this evening.’
‘Do we fetch them ourselves?’
‘No, it’s all organised. We ring reception when we’re ready and Verity will transmit the order to Kenneth.’
‘I’m ready now, so start ringing.’
There was no reply from reception, so he said he would give it another five minutes and then try again. Ten minutes later he went down to fetch the drinks himself.
‘You do see what I mean?’ I asked Toby, who had just walked in. ‘If we were at home now we could simply cross the floor and pour out whatever we wanted to drink and have dinner at whatever time we wanted to eat. It does seem absurd to dole out huge sums of money just to be denied such basic rights.’