Closed at Dusk (10 page)

‘So Colin is out of luck?'

‘Not really. I'm not cutting everybody else off. No commitment. I've had that. Never again.'

‘Till the next time. Why don't you bring the sculptor down here? He can inspect the statuary.'

‘That's the thing … I'd like to. Can I bring him some weekend? I'd love you to meet him.'

Before she left The Sanctuary, Tessa went to the tea-room, where Ruth and the new woman Jo were taking chairs down off tables.

‘Hullo. I'm Tessa Taylor.' She had gone back proudly to her own name after the divorce, although that stupid Marigold
was still sagging about calling herself Mrs Renshaw. Rob was still legally Robert William Renshaw, but Tessa called him Robert Taylor.

Jo smiled very warmly and put out a hand. Got to touch this Tessa some time. May as well start now.

‘I just wanted to say hullo and goodbye before I go back to London. I – I wanted to say I'm glad you're here, and I'm sorry about your husband. It's – so awful.'

She was embarrassed – good – eyes darting a bit.

‘How did he die?'

Jo told her the oft-rehearsed story that was beginning to take on a reality of its own.

‘So young … What was he like?'

Jo went to her bag and took a small snapshot out of her wallet. Not the same man as the one framed in the cottage, but near enough.

‘This was him when he was starting to be ill.'

‘Yes, he is quite thin. He looks so nice.' Tessa looked up at Jo, creasing her brow with genuine pity.

‘He was.' The brave little widow could say it with only a tiny tremor of the lip.

Now that Jo had seen Tessa and talked to her, she wanted desperately to know more. She must know everything about her. It was almost like being in love.

One Monday when the gardens and tea-room were closed, she drove up to London and scouted round the tidy little streets of Acton, sizing up the neighbourhood, noting the tube station and the wine shop and the post office which Tessa probably used, before she parked the car and walked towards the street where she knew Tessa and Rob lived. Jo had bundled her dark hair into a scarf, and left off the jewellery and bright assertive make-up. She wore a dreary raincoat from the old days, and dark glasses and flat shoes.

Viewed from behind a large car across the street, 47 Brackett Road had attractive arches over the windows in a lighter brick than the rest of the house and its attached neighbour. The front door was yellow, the window frames and gutters white, all the paintwork sparkling. A small paved front garden had tubs of riotous plants Miss Tessa had probably nicked from her father's nursery beds.

No signs of life, so Jo went back to her car and drove through Shepherd's Bush to Holland Park and along one of the streets that curved round Lansdowne Hill to the pink corner house which had been her hell after she lost Rex. The square, well-balanced house looked innocent and hopeful. The window-sills
were full of plants. There was a toy pedal car outside the garage. When Jo stopped the car, the sound of children's voices from the fenced garden cut her in two, and she had to bend over the steering wheel, gasping for breath. How
could
they? How could a family be living cheerfully in this house as if nothing had gone wrong here? What had happened to all the pain? Where was the ghost of the nameless unformed being whose bloody death should shame into silence the laughter of children here for ever?

Go home, Marigold. Go back to Jo's home in the country, where she has shoved the pain into the background, to be out of the way of the driving purpose.

But going west down Holland Park Avenue in the clotted traffic, she found she did not want to turn towards the motorway. She had to go straight on through Shepherd's Bush and find her way back to Tessa's street on the chance of seeing her returning from somewhere, coming home from this famous work of hers which Ruth rattled on about, but could not exactly explain.

Jo walked up the opposite side of Tessa's road again, moving slowly behind the parked cars. She crossed and recrossed the top end of the street, looking down the slope of Brackett Road. She turned down it again and stepped behind a van as she saw her quarry, the jaunty red car backing into a space. Tessa sat in it with a man. They were laughing. He put a hand across her shoulders. She leaned her head towards him, a smaller head, with the loose shining hair pulled up neatly into a chic urban coil.

They sat there outside the house, liking each other, too busy with this present moment to get out and start the next one.

One morning when Marigold and Rex were living in that pretentious development house with the kitchen window at the front, they were washing up last night's dinner-party dishes
quite amicably. Rex was dressed. Marigold was still in her nightgown, because the more uneasy she was about Rex, the harder it was to get up. This morning, she felt more hopeful. Perhaps the old lore was right. Give them some rein, and they will come back.

Rex quite suddenly put down the dish towel and went out of the room. Thinking he had gone up to the bathroom, Marigold finished the drying, went upstairs with her coffee mug, and took off her nightdress.

‘Rex?' He wasn't there. He wasn't in the house. She looked out of the front bedroom window and saw him sitting in a car with a woman in it, shamelessly parked at the end of the short drive.

Rex got out of the car and came up the drive, smirking. As he opened the door and came into the hall, an enraged woman, a virago stark naked on the stairs, threw hot coffee all over him, mug and all.

The relief had been wonderful, for a very short time. As soon as she had stopped screaming, Marigold was horrified at herself. Rex never talked about it, and nor did she. There was already no point.

Now, as the door of Tessa's car opened, Jo turned and walked away. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tessa and a nondescript man with a soft beard cross the pavement, open the glossy gate and go up the short steps into the house. In a minute or two, a fat young baby-sitter with unbrushed hair came out and walked down the road towards the station.

On a Friday in mid July, William came back from Somerset and told Dottie that the equestrian centre deal was going through. Ralph Stern's enigmatic friends were putting up a substantial amount of money, with Ralph himself somehow involved.

Yesterday when he had to ring Ralph at home early in the morning before the final meeting, Angela had answered the telephone.

‘He's in Newcastle.' She had given him the number of the hotel, and then said, ‘Will, don't hang up. Let's talk.'

‘I've wanted to. I couldn't reach you. Angela, I – I don't know what to say.'

‘You don't need to. One of the worst agonies is watching people struggling to say the right thing about Peter.' She still had a little laugh in her voice, but no joy in it, only strain.

William said, ‘How are you?'

‘Terrible.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I know.'

They waited. It was Angela who said, ‘Can we meet again? I think I need to talk to you.'

‘I'd like that. Shall I–?'

‘Wait,' she said. ‘I'll see.'

They could have met quite openly to talk as friends, but she had ended on a paused, secret note that filled him with a flushed emotion he could not identify at first, but which he later recognized as fear. Telling Dottie about the Somerset negotiations, he was gentle and loving with her, to exorcize his unease.

‘Will you mind if I play in the Shiplock match tomorrow?' He sometimes played cricket for the village team. ‘They want Matthew to play too.'

‘That should terrify Shiplock. Why should I mind?'

‘It's going to be a busy weekend, with all the family. You'll have a lot to do.'

‘Tessa will help. Don't worry, Will. What's the matter?'

‘Nothing. All's well. I'm a lucky man.'

 

It was a good weekend for everyone. Keith, who dreamed of older women and had no girl-friend of his own age, was glad to find Tessa's new man unthreatening, quiet, good-tempered, and interested in Tessa in an admiring way that was neither doggy nor too lecherous. The last one she brought here had been obtrusively physical, and had not even bothered to go back to his own room before morning, as Keith discovered when he woke feeling kindly and took Tessa a pot of tea in bed.

The big gift of the weekend was that Matthew, poor, dull, old, dispossessed Uncle Matthew, brought a new friend with him. Lee Foster, a visiting lecturer at his university, was a funny, gutsy American from Boston, who seemed to be as fond of him as he obviously was of her. She was tall and stylish in an unaffected fashion, with a round curly head like a cherub that she turned quickly to take in everything that was going on, adding to it with civilized New England appreciation.

Keith had been fiddling about with some new music, and playing some of his
Three Ring Circus
songs to see what might last and what was now too juvenile. He was already looking forward to immersing himself in the plans of the revue company when he went back to Cambridge in September. He had gone up sporadically for sessions with the ageing adolescent graduate student who was supposed to be his supervisor and had seen some of the maniacs and deviants from the
Circus
, who had promised him he'd be included, if he didn't die.

By now everyone in the house knew ‘Time Gone By' like a television jingle. ‘Not that again,' Tessa said when he started to sing it quietly on Friday night, playing round the notes instead of on them, and speaking the words. ‘Give it a rest, love.'

But Lee Foster got up from Matthew's side and came over to the piano. ‘I know that song.' Keith shook his head. ‘Sing it again.'

‘
Time gone by … played a game
.

I'd be leader. All would follow
.'

‘Go on.'

‘
Look round now. No one there
.

Fingers click on empty air
.

Life? It's hollow
.'

Lee joined in the last line. ‘I heard that song in a bar in Harvard Square where they do late-night cabaret. A British student sang it.'

‘What did he look like?'

‘Scrawny, surprised-looking red hair, big nose.'

‘John Malchman. I'll kill him.' Keith put his face in his hands. ‘Oh, God, look what's happened now, because I couldn't do it in the show.' He dropped his hands into his lap and looked up at Lee. ‘It's mine. I wrote it.'

‘You
did
? I love it.'

Keith played the tricky, spare little melody, and they sang it together. He began to teach Lee the verse, and Uncle Matthew came over and put his arm round her. She turned her cherub's head quickly to him, and then back to Keith.

‘
Time gone by … played a game
…'

She was much too young for dear stuffy old Matt, but she was great for him. Keith would be her special young friend, to sing and laugh with.

Agnes was thinking of going on the wagon again. She had clambered on to it many times in her life, because it was not a tumbril to the guillotine. You could fall off it any time you liked. His Lordship William Taylor, of course, would think it was because of what he'd had the arrogance to say to her, so he wouldn't get told. It wasn't because of that anyway. It was
because of the way Agnes felt putting her feet to the floor in the mornings, and
she
awake in there, and croaking for her tea. Also, now that the question of pay had come up – for the job of keeper to the senile demented – Agnes was interested.

Ruth had brought in the new slave to the tea parlour to see the old lady: Josephine, whom everybody liked so much, such a good worker. A gallant little widow, they said. Nobody had called Agnes gallant when Edward Mutch died. She had not seen him for fifteen years, and she had only married him in the first place to get rid of the name of Trout – though Mutch was not much of an exchange – but it had felt unpleasant to hear that he had died in far-off Canada on the back seat of a long-distance coach.

Josephine could be a bit hard to stomach in the morning, but she seemed a good-hearted soul. Budgie said ‘Come on, Ma' for her, and she took to dropping in now and again on her way to or from work, to cheer up the old lady. Saturday morning she was at the lodge, asking to hear about the old days, which mother loved. They were on about the time when Lady Geraldine died at the beginning of the war, and Sylvia ran the house. Ran it into the ground, you might say.

Ma never talked much about Sylvia, of whom a lot could be said, and Agnes had always been glad that she herself had cut free of the whole mess and got away to sanity when she was demobbed from the ATS in 1946, long before Sylvia buried her old Mr Taylor and went off her nut and let The Sinktuary sink into rack and ruin around her.

‘Tell me some more about the war,' Josephine coaxed, ‘when you had all those evacuees to look after.'

‘My mother never liked them,' Agnes said, ‘because they had things in their heads and did their jobs on the floor if you weren't looking.'

‘Little devils.' Troutie smiled, for she had liked the children
really, soft as she was, and ruined by feudalism to believe that whatever went on at The Sinktuary was all right. ‘Put 'em all into the library. When the parents took the kiddies away, we had all those airmen.'

‘How
nice
,' said Josephine brightly, as if she were talking to a lunatic or a baby.

‘It wasn't.' Troutie chuckled herself into one of those coughs that made Agnes think about giving up smoking, but if you gave up everything, you might as well be dead. ‘Never really got that room cleared out, we didn't, after scrubbing, scrubbing. Buckets of suds …' She had housework on the brain.

‘I heard in the village –' Mrs Josephine had been smarming around those gasbags in the shop and post office, you could be sure – ‘that the poor house never really recovered from all that, until Mr and Mrs William took over.'