A Death in Two Parts (14 page)

It was getting cold. The sun had gone in. She went into her shining new kitchen and assembled bread and cheese, salad and fruit for lunch. Delightful not to be waited on. That was one of all the many things she had disliked about living at Featherstone Hall. And yet she had lived there for almost fifty years. Unbelievable. But Geoffrey had wanted to. She nibbled Stilton and remembered the inquest, with the solid ranks of Ffeatherses and Brigances gazing inimically at her across the hall, and the by then inevitable verdict of suicide while of unsound mind. Afterwards, she had gone on refusing to see them.

Geoffrey had not approved of this. “Better get it over with,” he had urged. “You'll have to one day.”

“Why?” she had asked, still refusing to think about Mark.

Mr Jones, the solicitor from the firm Mrs Ffeathers had not dealt with in Leyning, had protested at the settlements she insisted on making on the family, but she had been adamant. “It should have gone to them really,” she told him. “She never meant that will to stand. And more than anything I want to make a clean break, feel free of them. This way, I can.”

She had said the same thing to Geoffrey, also protesting, and had refused to let him reopen the odd business of the attempt to frame her for shoplifting. “I'm sure it has to have been one of the girls,” she told him, “Mary or Leonora or Priss, but I would much rather not know which. Or why, come to that. It's all over, done with; I want to leave it that way.”

He had been glad enough to let it go. She had, by then, a feeling that he was in bad odour back at the Yard for his enthusiastic espousal of her cause, and it made her more grateful to him than ever. “‘Reader, I married him',” she quoted to herself now, and poured a second glass of sherry. Freed at last by his death, of a stroke, on the golf course one bright morning of early spring, she had found time and strength to face just what a disaster that hasty marriage had been.

She should at least have gone back to college and taken her degree. Grown up. They would have had her; they had said so. But Geoffrey had talked her out of it. “I want to take you away from it all,” he had urged. “From the whole sordid
business, the headlines, the gossip. Time enough when we get back to decide what to do about the Hall.”

“Oh, I want to get rid of it,” she had said at once, but he had been lovingly urgent that she make no more of what he called her ‘rash decisions' until the prolonged honeymoon was over.

Idiotic not to have realised what their long absence must mean in terms of his career. But there had been so much to come to terms with, in those desperately difficult weeks of getting to know the near stranger she had married. Full of guilt at feeling she did not satisfy him in bed, she thought she must have failed to listen to what he was saying to her. It was only when he casually suggested that they stay another week on their Caribbean beach that she came to and protested: “But your job, Geoffrey? You must have used up all your leave for the next several years already.”

“Oh that! Surely I told you, love? I packed it in. They were so stuffy about it all; it was a pleasure to throw their offer of a whole extra week back in their fat faces. You should have seen their jaws drop.”

“Geoffrey, you did that for me! But, what will you do? Your career … Oh, I feel dreadful.”

“No need to fret. I've got a much better idea.” She had learned already to recognise the tone of voice that meant he had made up his mind. “We are going home to Featherstone Hall, my sweet, and I am going for a new career. I'm going to turn the tables and boss the bureaucrats for a change. Just between you and me, I'd had enough of form filling and pen pushing at the Yard. I'm for politics. It's the career I always aimed for, you know, but first I had to earn my living.”

“And now you don't need to! Of course; I never thought. But, oh, Geoffrey, not Featherstone Hall.”

He had taken her to bed, and talked her round. Sussex was full of safe Conservative seats, he had explained as she lay, exhausted, in his arms.

“Conservative?” That had been a surprise too, though she was not much of a political animal, then.

“Of course,” he had said. “And the Hall is the perfect setting. We'll need to make some changes, naturally. All that dreadful chrome and white must go. You'll enjoy turning it back into the kind of house it ought to be, and you'll feel quite different about it when you have finished.”

So many mistakes. She rose wearily and stacked dishes in the sink. She had indeed done her best to make the house and herself into the proper setting for a rising young politician, and he had plunged into local politics, eager to be co-opted on to any committee that would have him. As soon as the house was ready, she found herself busy giving dinners for his contacts, and coffee mornings for Conservative ladies. It had been a kind of game at first, and she had enjoyed playing it well, happy to feel that she was making up to him for the ways she felt she failed him.

The telephone rang. She dropped the duster with which she had been polishing the mahogany table and moved over to pick it up, wondering who it could be. She had insisted on a new number, and few people knew it yet. But when she gave her number only silence answered. “Leyning three-six-four two-four-two,” she said again and was answered by a click at the other end. Whoever it was had hung up: a wrong number.

At least it had distracted her from a gloomy enough
line of thought. What use to brood over past mistakes? She found her gardening gloves and went out to start the autumn digging of her two small flower beds, delighted to be able to do it herself after all the years of gardeners who listened to her instructions and then did their own thing.

The sun went on shining; a robin came and watched her; she found she was singing tunelessly to herself as she worked, something she had not done for years. It was this secret garden, as much as the compact little house, that had won her at first sight, soon after Geoffrey had died. Terrified of losing it, she had bought the house at once, at auction, without a survey, though Mr Jones, her lawyer, had spoken gloomily of dry rot and inroads on her capital. She had defied him and never regretted it, though in fact that was when she had first realised how her huge inheritance had shrunk over the years of Geoffrey's management. It had provided her with a good, public reason for selling the Hall. One thing she had learned over the years was a healthy respect for the Leyning grapevine, and it had not failed her in this instance. She was soon meeting sympathetic looks from women who had heard of her straitened circumstances and thought them worse than they were. It was the perfect reason for extricating herself gently but firmly from her commitments to the Conservative Party. No need to live that lie any longer. It had been a lie ever since Anthony Eden's shabby handling of the Suez crisis. She had quietly voted Liberal ever since, grateful for the secret ballot and ashamed at deceiving Geoffrey. But what else could she do?

The telephone rang. She dropped her gardening gloves on the little iron table and hurried indoors to answer it, only to get the same silence, the same click. Tiresome. But she had
done enough gardening. Her back was reminding her of the years she preferred to ignore. Exercise, the osteopath had said, and she had added the ones he advised to those she had learned in self-defence classes at college. She went back to the garden to do them in the sunshine, happy all over again in its privacy.

Walking was good, too. Back in the house, she combed short grey hair at the hall mirror, slapped on lipstick and a dash of pressed powder, put her keys and a ten pound note in her pocket and went out into the little town where she had chosen to live.

The house itself was so quiet that it was always a surprise to emerge directly down three steps on to the High Street, but then this, too, was quiet enough, since the shopping centre had moved to the other end of town, where Tesco was. It had been disconcerting to find, when she moved in, that the butcher, greengrocer and invaluable all-purpose store that had been round the corner when she bought the house had vanished. But you could get milk at the paper shop, she had discovered, and anyway the walk to Tesco was good for her, though she did not much like supermarkets.

It no longer surprised her to see two Conservative ladies nipping across the road to avoid her. It was not just because of her defection from the party. She had realised, early on, that people simply could not cope with the fact of bereavement, particularly not a sudden one, like hers. How long did one continue a pariah? she wondered, and remembered her friend Penelope Cunningham – only, of course, she had been Penelope Forsham by then – describing her own experience as a recent widow up in Essex. ‘They drop you, you know, once you're not a couple any more. It hurts, but you get used
to it.' Penelope had solved her own problem by going to live with her rich brother Gerald, who had never married and lived in extreme comfort in the south of France. Patience had gone to stay with them for a while after Geoffrey's death, but it had not worked. She sighed, remembering. She must write to dear Penelope. She turned briskly into the Post Office to buy airmail paper and stamps.

Putting the change into her pocket she crossed the road and started up the long steep track that led to her favourite view of the sea. This was the way she had come, all those years ago, when Mrs Ffeathers had sent her into Leyning with the cheque and forged prescription. She was not going to let it be haunted for her. Aside from anything else, it was much the quickest way into real country, and the driest when the weather got bad. She could not afford ghosts here, nor to be reminded of the niggling doubt that had always lurked in the back of her mind after that convenient verdict.

It was dusk when she got home, and it felt more like home than ever as she drew the curtains in the front hall against High Street eyes and put on the kettle for a cup of tea. No need to draw curtains at the back of the house. One of its great virtues for her were the high flint walls on each side of the long garden and the creeper-hung one at the end where the lane cut her off from the graveyard beyond. When she had finished the flower beds she must make a start on cutting back the polygonum that had taken over that end wall. She might even find that she needed experts to do it, but hoped to manage it herself. Already she felt it her garden as the one at Featherstone Hall had never been, but it had inevitably been neglected in the months when she had had to stay on at the Hall, settling the estate and arranging the sale.

It had been a lonely time, lonelier even than she had expected. She had been angry with herself at finding she had so few friends. You don't make friends when you are living a lie, she thought now, and she had been living at least two. Three really. She had pretended to be the happily married wife of a successful politician, and that she shared his politics. None of it true. He was not even successful. She had recognised this finally, too late, at the meeting where he was not selected as prospective parliamentary candidate for the district. That was a long time ago – but she remembered it with cruel clarity. The other candidate had spoken first, and spoken well, and then Geoffrey had stood up and got it all just faintly, fatally wrong. He had been sure and unsure of himself in all the wrong places and she had known it for a lost cause when he sat down.

Afterwards, he had blamed her, and in some ways, though not the ones he accused her of, he had been right. She had failed him because the gap between his thinking and hers had become so wide that it had been impossible for them to discuss things. Instead, she had cravenly taken to agreeing with him so as to avoid the rages he got into when she did not. Cavilling, he called it. After that bitterly disappointing failure, he had been away from home, on one pretext or another, more than ever, and it had been nothing but a relief to her. But she had been lonely. And here she was now, in her new house, with no close friend on whom she could rely, no one who would telephone and ask how she was settling. My fault, she thought. I must join things, non-political things: the University of the Third Age, the local theatre company, groups like that. How else would one meet one's neighbours, now the age of the morning call was past?

On the thought, the front door bell rang, surprisingly loud in the small house. It was dark now. Should she put the chain on? It seemed idiotic, here in the High Street. She switched on the outside light and opened the door.

There was nobody there. She looked up and down the surprisingly empty street. Nothing. Had she really taken so long to get to the door, or had it simply been a naughty child, ringing and running? Probably.

She went back into the kitchen to put a chop into the oven for her supper, irked with herself at letting the incident upset her. But it had left her jumpy. Idiotic, but she suddenly found she did not like the feel of the black garden outside, and drew the curtains there too. That felt better.

She got out table mats and silver to set a proper table – begin as you mean to go on – and the telephone rang. She did not even expect a voice this time, and there was none. I'll ring the operator in the morning, she thought; this is beyond a joke.

In the morning, taking out bread for the robin, she saw footprints in the newly dug flower bed. Not her own; she knew that at once. Her walking shoes left an unmistakable pattern in the soft earth, but these were the marks of trainers, and smaller ones than hers. Impossible. But they were here, in the little bed under the kitchen window where she meant to plant sweet-william for the scent. No wonder she had felt nervous last night. Someone had been standing there, watching her.

It was impossible, but it seemed to be true. She looked up at the high walls on either side of her garden. Hard to imagine either of her neighbours getting out a long ladder
and manoeuvring it over the wall. Mrs Palmer on the right hand had lived in her little house all her long life and was letting it fall quietly to ruin around her. Mr Simpson, on the other side, had only moved in since Patience had bought and never seemed to be at home at all. He worked in the City, she knew, and commuting from Leyning must be no joke. She had recognised early on that neither of them would be the kind of useful neighbour who takes in parcels and messages, and had been glad that she owned the wall between her garden and Mrs Palmer's neglected one. Anyway, there were no ladder marks in the soft earth on either side of the lawn. And no side entrance.