Blind Date (2 page)

She thought of her
London home, bare, empty of frills, full of dust and eccentricity. It was big enough to swing that cat by the tail and throw it against the wall, spacious enough to lose the dog which had begun to yap outside, yruff, ruff ruff ruff, trying to make the threatening sound of a Doberman, failing dismally, stupid little dog, a bottlebrush on short, stumpy legs, barking while Mother's voice warbled with the affection she reserved for plants. “Silly,
silly
things …” The sea, twinkling, teasing; the sun beckoning, mockingly. With her good hand, the rest of her trembling with rage, Elisabeth picked up a silver-backed hairbrush from the dressing table and tapped, awkwardly but hard, against the window pane, until it smashed.

You cannot love me because I am foul. I may as well make it worse.

M
rs. Diana Kennedy stood back from the scattered glass which had spread across the soil and onto the gravel path. The terrier retreated, his bark turning to a whimpering whine for attention. Diana bent towards it and cuffed it lightly on one rough ear. Ywow, ywow, ywow; a short-lived keening before he gave up the effort and buried his nose to the underside of his back leg. These dogs are amazing, Diana had once said in her penetrating, youthful grandmother voice; nothing distracts them for long. She looked upwards to the silent window. That pathetic shower of glass was not meant to harm. Or not in particular.

She moved out of range, without calling the dog. The trug she had carried was full of glass splinters, so was the gravel in the path. How could Elisabeth fail to know that Matthew went around barefoot? Elisabeth did know, and she did care, and she still smashed things, knowing some other person would tidy it up. She was a thirty-four-year-old child, born to be endured.

March steady. Behave as
if nothing has happened; breathe deeply. Collect trug. Collect gloves. Collect dog, move towards kitchen; carry on as normal.

Her white hair was piled on her head. The way it lay, wave upon wave, would have been the envy of a bride. The style had never varied. She had one, unhurried way of walking, one way of dress. Loose, tailored trousers, tapering at the ankle, topped by a neat shirt in summer, or a high neck in winter, with plain-coloured woolen or cotton jackets, as weather demanded. Two combs and a hidden array of pins held up her mane in a controlled sweep back from the forehead, sometimes soft, sometimes severe and always rather ageless. She walked with a swagger: her hips swung as she strolled, limbs still loose from sea bathing almost every day in summer (a vigorous breaststroke, head above water). Her lined face was the colour of walnut.

Really, the child had quite put her off the task of tending to that section of flowerbed. She needed to buy more tree bark to deter the weeds, doubted she could afford that luxury and wished that the wretched dog did not spend quite so much time examining its private parts, as if nothing else mattered and they were something of which he was proud.

D
iana moved through the kitchen and into the hall. She stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. The stairs were magnificent with banisters of decorated oak which began in a wide sweep and branched to the left and right, leading to the family quarters on one side, the guest domain on the other. There was no barrier between the one and the other, which she found regrettable sometimes, although the guests who stayed here tended to know their place, and Matthew had learned his. Mrs. Kennedy remembered the early days, when her brochure had stated “Dogs and children welcome,” before two seasons of a particularly beautiful, disruptive and destructive little boy had made her change her mind. Her grandson, Matthew, at his worst was an angel by comparison. He borrowed things, but he did not steal.

From the dining room to
the left of the stairs, she could hear a murmur of voices. The last of the breakfast eaters, lingering over coffee, while Mary, cook, cleaner, treasure, chatted to them. No other meals were provided. Guests were urged to leave for the day as soon as possible, although they could make their own tea in the dining room, and sit there for a drink in the latter part of the evening. Sometimes, for form's sake, Mrs. Kennedy would join them in the comforting knowledge that they found her perfectly charming, while she found them, within varying degrees, either tolerable or detestable. She could not face them in the morning.

But a collision with Mrs. Smythe, coming downstairs as Diana herself preceded regally across the hall to the front door, proved unavoidable, so she forced herself to stop, as if pleasantly surprised, put on her air of distant friendliness and fixed her smile while her heart sank. Dear Mrs. Caroline Smythe had been a regular for a fortnight almost every year since financial necessity had forced Diana to accept her and her kind.

“Caroline, how nice to see you!” Mrs. Kennedy murmured, taking an apparently impulsive step towards her and extending her hand. God forbid that the woman should kiss her. “I saw from the book that you'd arrived yesterday evening, I was out, I'm afraid. How
are
you? I was just coming to find you.”

This display of
pleasure, as befitted a pair of widows of a certain age and long, if intermittent acquaintance, may have been entirely false, but Mrs. Smythe beamed. She was wearing a variation of her usual, jaunty headscarf and her fringe was a different colour. She was dressed in cut-off trousers, socks, hiking shoes and a flannel shirt, as if she was making for the cliff path and all the miles beyond, although she had never been known to walk further than a hundred yards. It was quite a change from the frothy frocks of last year. The woman was a miracle of reinvention, doing well for her age, whatever that was. No-one would ever guess they had been close, once, by mistake. A friendship born of crisis, as inexplicable as it had been temporary.

“Oh, Diana, darling,” Mrs. Smythe murmured. “Lovely to see you, too, but, my dear, I am so sorry to hear your news. The poor girl! And here, of all places! I am so sorry. As if you hadn't had enough …”

Diana darling detached her hand from the other's grasp and resisted the temptation to wipe it on her trouser leg. Caroline's hands were always sticky, as if she had overdone the moisturiser on fat fingers so soft they could no longer absorb it.

“Yes, well,” she said briskly, regretting Mary's inevitable propensity to share family gossip with regular guests, and also realizing that this encounter could not be curtailed without adding something to the information already received. She lowered her voice to one of intimate confidentiality. “Terrible of course. Bizarre, isn't it, to have a daughter with a dangerous job in horrid old London—although she'd already given that up, thank heavens—come down here for a break, only to get mugged by a madman in the village. Still, she's getting better all the time.”

“Did they catch
him?”

“Oh yes. A weirdo from down the coast. Confessed. He'd been barred from the pub. Kept on throwing things at customers on the way home. Troubles never come singly, do they?”

She had a dim memory of Mrs. Smythe's son, sliding down these banisters, screaming colourful abuse. Mrs. Smythe's boy, who must have been born when Mummy was too old to control him and Daddy was halfway to desertion, the very child who had caused Diana to prohibit children and dogs apart from her own, and for that, she supposed she should feel grateful. She remembered not to ask about the son, just in case she should be told yet again how well he was doing now and what a fine young man he was, all to remind her of a faint feeling of guilt. She could not quite forget the memory of longer conversations with Caroline. Diana should never have confided in Caroline Smythe whatever the occasion: she had known it even at the time and had resisted a repetition, using any subterfuge which came to mind, in the same fortnight, every year.

“I suppose that makes a difference to her recovery?” Caroline said. “One would imagine it would,” she added kindly. “I mean, knowing the danger's removed, the culprit apprehended.” There was a mere tinge of a London accent in her voice; the use of words of more than one syllable sounded unnatural, as if she employed the longer words to decorate her speech rather than to explain herself. “But she was always a tough little girl and I expect she's being very brave. Isn't she?”

“Oh yes,” Diana agreed. “Very brave indeed.”

Diana was not going to tell this smiling face,
or any other, that her only surviving daughter was being a selfish swine.

“She has to go to the hospital this afternoon. She hates the hospital,” Diana added, searching for something innocuous to say which might also sound confidential.

“Oh dear. More treatment?”

She wanted the gory details.

“No. A checkup. And a demonstration.”

Caroline Smythe looked uncomprehendingly sympathetic. She clasped her hands in front of her waist and leant forward.

“Would it help if I were to chat … you know, keep her company?”

“No! No, it wouldn't. How very kind of you, but it wouldn't.” This time, the recoil was obvious, albeit quickly disguised. There was subdued laughter from the dining room and the sound of clattering plates.

Perhaps it would be better if they had children, and dogs, Diana thought, excusing herself. She could hide in the crossfire: she might be able to pretend that she was not a woman pursued by a series of tragedies, or deny that she and Caroline Smythe were sisters under the skin of motherhood, as if that gave them anything at all in common.

Caroline Smythe stood in the hall, torn between the desire to waylay another guest in the interests of conversation and the need to go and change her clothes. It was ever thus. She would come on holiday to relax, to be alone, but faced with a day's solitude, she found it excruciating.

A small boy cannoned into the hall, skidded on the parquet, righted himself and made for the stairs. A lovely lad, manic as hers had been.

“Hallo,” Caroline called after him, longingly, but he shied away, refusing any contact with her eyes, and pretended not to hear. No children, no dogs. All this family had ever done for her was offer hospitality, food and a pretence of friendship, laced with insults and rejection. She clenched her fists and, like Diana Kennedy, fixed her smile.

How do you make people
love you?

T
urning out of the front door, aware that the final, muttered, must dash excuse me, had lacked her usual refinement, vowing to make up for it later, Diana hesitated. Instead of walking towards the village shops, she turned right, and strolled towards the sea.

The village of Budley spread landward from a neat cleft between the cliffs which guarded the shoreline. The main street was an easy walk; the houses flanking it, viewed from the shore, were set in a series of ever-rising terraces, smaller houses on the seafront itself, the more substantial further uphill. Standing on the promenade, a raised walkway with steps down to the beach, continuing at either end into pathways up the cliffs, Diana could turn slowly and see first the town, then the sea, then the cliffs bordering the bay. On a morning like this, the colours would blind her: cliffs topped with brilliant green, their raw sides russet red, the shingle of the beach a muted gold, the sea reflecting the blue of the vast and harmless sky. Then she would look at the town, the houses bedecked with flowers.

And her own house, of course. The most unusual, the biggest on this level and the only one with such a large, walled garden. Other houses, built further up the cliff path, had gardens too, but none so mature. And none with a door set into the wall, leading directly onto the lower reaches of the cliff path and the sea, so that it seemed even the sea was hers. When Diana walked back, she looked at her house covertly. Brilliant white walls, green shutters, grey, pantiled roof, flower boxes at every window and a peachy rose around the fine front door. Yes, it was enviable, solid, beautiful. She could only comfort herself with such thoughts; did so on a regular basis. Anyone seeing her stand in rapt, if secretive, contemplation of her own freehold, would imagine that she was looking at it in order to find flaws, such a perfectionist she was, but Diana was simply admiring what she had with fierce pride, imagining all she could improve if she had money, worrying about tiles and rot and still fortifying her private attitude that anyone who did not want to live, not only in her village, but more particularly in her house, must be stark, staring mad. She was quite sure she did not think this was simply because the polite and fulsome remarks of her discreet paying guests over the years had gone to her head: it was simply a fact.

She strolled uphill.
A narrow stream flowed down on the right, with miniature bridges crossing to the front gates of the houses, the sound of the water a bubbling accompaniment to the civilized bustle of newly opened shops. It might have been the presence of this quaint addition which had made the village, high street and all, defy the presence, and accoutrements of the conventional summer tourist. There was no loud music here, no amusement arcade; no sellers of buckets, spades and windshields for the beach; no souvenirs or seaside rock. One shop selling ice cream and Devon fudge, three cafes and a fish and chip shop catered for all of that, disdainfully offering the visitors more than they deserved, while the rest remained essentially a place for the graceful enjoyment of those who lived in it, in a style befitting a population with an average age in excess of Diana's own fifty-seven years.

Costa Geriatrica, Elisabeth had jeered. Everyone here wanders round on sticks, discussing the state of their gardens and their health: no wonder it's so lovely. The only thing likely to cause a riot here would be a hosepipe ban. Well, perhaps by now Elisabeth had discovered there were some advantages to a place which made allowances for the less than fully mobile, despite the hills.

“Good morning,
Mrs. Kennedy … Lovely day.”

“Oh, yes, gorgeous. Aren't we lucky?”

“The lamb's good today. Saved you some. Delivery about lunchtime?”