Gillespie and I (18 page)

Sarah did seem to have been settling in fairly well, despite her inscrutability and a general dearth of cheer. There is a slightly mournful quality to her, a sense of something lacking. She is also inclined to overeat. Indeed, she has gained weight since she arrived here; her waist has thickened; her arms, like two plump sausages, seem ready to burst out of her sleeves. I myself have never had much of an appetite, and, these days, it is an effort to eat enough, in order not to become too frail; none the less, I can understand that it must be uncomfortable to carry around all that extra bulk, especially this summer, which has, thus far, been quite too horribly warm. Sarah is clearly conscious of her size, since—no matter what the temperature—she swathes herself in old-fashioned, wide-beamed skirts, long sleeves, and thick stockings. It is perhaps unfortunate that her sitting room is in the kitchen, adjacent to the larder: in the evenings, there are rustlings, and munchings.

She has not eaten the birds, of course. That would be silly. Why I even mention her weight, I do not know. She has perfectly pleasant features, and one can see that—beyond the frown lines and dewlaps—she must have been pretty when she was young. I do find myself wondering why she never wed. Perhaps she was once married and is now a widow; but there has been no mention of a husband, and she calls herself ‘Miss Whittle'. Without prying, I have tried, on several occasions, to ask about her life, and her family background, and so on, but she continues to be reticent. I do suspect that she would have had children, had she been able.

It is unsettling to hear her chatting away to Maj and Layla, as if they could understand her. She checks on their feed and water with a frequency that borders on the obsessive and, recently, I became aware that—even though I had asked her not to—sometimes, when she believed me to be taking my nap, she was shutting the dining-room window and letting the birds out of the cage. At any rate, she has tended to fuss over them too much, and is preoccupied with them in a way that seems not quite healthy. One cannot help but draw certain conclusions, particularly after our recent upset.

It all began about ten days ago, when Sarah came to the threshold of my sitting room and uttered the following words: ‘Well, you'll not believe what those birds have gone and done now!'

Patiently, I put down my book. Having owned Maj and Layla for seven years, I am familiar with all their little quirks, but Sarah, as a newcomer, still has the capacity to be surprised by them.

‘What have they done?' I asked.

Instead of replying, she bustled off down the hall, and I was obliged to set aside my book, and follow her to the dining room. When I got there, the birds were in their cage, as usual; Maj was preening under his wing, whilst Layla alternately shook her little head, and pecked at seed. Sarah had taken up a position at the end of the sideboard, which had been pulled a few inches away from the wall. She was smiling.

‘Look,' she said, pointing into the shadows.

My spirits sank: I already had a good idea of what she might have found, but just to be sure, I stood next to her and peered down behind the sideboard. There, next to the skirting, was a small nest made from some horsehair stuffing, newspaper shreds, and a few sweet papers. In the centre lay three bluish white, speckled eggs.

‘Oh dear,' I said.

‘Aren't they tiny?' Sarah whispered. I could feel the heat rising from her body. Her pullover gave off a sharp, damp smell.

‘Yes, they are indeed.'

‘Those are my toffee papers she's used, you know, and I only got those toffees once, a few weeks back; they weren't very good. She must have been building this for ages, out of all the things we've dropped or put in the wastepaper basket. I did wonder what she was doing behind here, every afternoon.'

This, for Sarah, was a very long speech. She was more animated than I had ever seen her before. I sighed.

‘Oh, Sarah! Didn't I ask you not to let them out, unless I was here?'

She frowned, and looked a little guilty. ‘Sorry, I've only done it a few times. I do shut the window if I open the cage—sorry.'

Feeling quite miserable, I picked up the nest and put it on the sideboard. It really was a too poignantly comic little object. Poor Layla-bird! Presumably, she had pecked the horsehair stuffing out of a chair. She had also utilised, in the nest's construction, an old shoelace, and some cigarette stubs, which she must have stolen from the ashtrays. ‘Oh dear,' I said again. ‘They will build nests, you see, if you don't keep an eye on them. She's done it before.'

‘Really?'

‘Oh, yes, quite a few times, here, behind the sideboard, and once or twice behind the sofa. You can't let Layla out of your sight, I'm afraid. This breaks my heart. They're probably no good anyway, but we have to do this, dear, just in case.'

And then, I did the decent thing—as I have done, on a few previous occasions—according to the vet's advice. I took the little eggs, one by one and, feeling dreadfully squeamish, I shook them until I heard a tiny, sloshing sound. ‘There,' I said, despondently, restoring them to the nest. ‘They won't hatch now. We can put it back on the floor for a while. She'll sit on them when she can, poor thing, and then, when they don't hatch, she'll grow bored of them, and we can quietly tidy the nest away.' I turned to Sarah. Her face had fallen. ‘I know, it's awful,' I said. ‘Frightful! When the vet first told me what to do, I was appalled. But it does have to be done, and I suppose I'm used to it now. We can't possibly have any more birds, dear. They're the most awful breeders. We'd be overrun in no time. Two is quite enough.'

Sarah said not a word; she simply gave me a very reproachful look, and then marched out of the dining room.

Since then, I hear her, from time to time, talking to the birds in soothing tones, as though they are the victims of some atrocity. She fails to realise that finches are hardy little souls; I would not be surprised if they had already forgotten about those eggs. What I did was no more than standard practice; most bird owners do something of the sort. Not only that, but the eggs were, in all likelihood, already dead, since Layla can have sat on them only for a matter of minutes.

I did try to explain all this to Sarah but, for the moment, she continues to brood: a most apt word that—brood—for I suspect that all this upset over the birds is linked in some way to Sarah's own sorrows about having never brought a child into the world. Consequently, I cannot be cross with her and, to be perfectly honest, I now utterly regret having done the vet's bidding—or at least, having done it in front of Sarah, without warning. Personally speaking, I have not even been able to look at a boiled egg, since.

Perhaps, if the birds ever lay again, I might let Sarah keep one of the chicks. There is no reason why she should not have a caged bird of her own; she could keep him in the kitchen. I tend to doubt, however, that there will be much more laying of eggs. Maj and Layla are getting rather too elderly for that sort of thing. I suspect that this clutch of three was one last moribund attempt at breeding.

Ever since the egg incident, relations between Sarah and myself have been strained. I am still rather cross that she was letting the birds out, against my specific instructions. Indeed, I have begun to wonder whether she has been entirely honest with me in other respects. Is she, in fact, trustworthy? For instance—although, up until now, I have thought nothing of it—I have noticed a number of inconsistencies in the way that she speaks. Admittedly, when first she came to live here, I scarcely noticed her accent. She is not a Cockney, certainly. To my ears, she initially sounded like many other women of her sort: born and raised—not in London—but in the Home Counties or somewhere in the South. She attempts to speak well, but the end result is that her pronunciation is only rather bland; at times, a little strained. However, as the weeks have gone by, I have begun to notice that there is something amiss with her vowels. The word ‘bird', for instance, never sounds quite right.

On Friday afternoon, I was having a nap in my room when she tapped on the door and asked my permission to give some fruit to the finches. Their mainstay is seed, but they do love fruit. Lockwood, the grocer, was kind enough to store a crate of Coxes for me this winter. Even though the remaining apples are now wrinkled, they are still edible and, once or twice a week, we pop half of one in the cage, and Maj and Layla peck out the pulp. At any rate, there was Sarah in the doorway, saying: ‘Would you be bothered if I gave the birds some apple?'

Quite apart from the phrasing of this sentence (which does not strike me as pertaining particularly to the South of England), there—again—was her strange pronunciation of the word ‘bird', with the oddly shortened vowel sound, and perhaps even a slight roll of the ‘r'. Ignoring her question, for the moment, I said: ‘Your accent, Sarah, I can't quite place it—where is it from?'

‘Around about,' she said and then clamped her teeth down on her lower lip.

‘But where, exactly? You're not from London, are you?'

‘Originally West Country, miss, like I've told you, but I've moved around, London, Colchester, Sevenoaks, Woking…'

‘I see—was that with your family?'

‘For work.'

I sat up, yawning, and put my feet into my slippers. ‘Where, originally, in the West Country, dear?'

‘Dorset.'

‘Ah! Such a pretty county—what part? I do know Swanage.'

‘It's nearer Weymouth—a small place—you won't have heard of it.'

‘And your village was called…?'

She paused, and then said: ‘Langton Herring.'

A preposterous name, and it occurred to me that, perhaps, she had made it up. I went on to ask a few questions about her family, and her reactions continued to be guarded. She told me that her parents were dead. I did manage to get a little more out of her. To my mind, it all sounds far too much like something out of a fairy tale. She claims to have grown up in a tiny cottage beside a well; her father was a shoemaker, and her mother, a washerwoman. Tempted to ask: ‘And your grandparents—were they elves?' I managed to restrain myself, just in time.

Admittedly, while we were talking about Dorset and her family, her pronunciation did veer towards the West Country; but before long she seemed to forget, and resumed her old, bland accent, with its puzzling vowels. I am still not quite sure what to make of this. The way she looks at me, of late, is also rather unsettling. There is a certain flinty cast to her gaze.

On Saturday, while Sarah was out shopping, I telephoned to Burridge's, the employment agency, and asked them to send me, once again, her letters of recommendation in a plain envelope, one that made no mention of Burridge's or its address. I stipulated this, since Sarah is often the first to see the post when it arrives, and I had no desire to alarm her, unnecessarily. I merely wished to follow up her references, something that I ought to have done before I hired her, but, at the time, I was busy, and took it for granted that the letters were to be trusted.

Mrs Clinch, the principal of the agency, possesses a drawling, affected, nasal voice, and evidently has a low opinion of the elderly, for she habitually speaks to me, very slowly and loudly, as though I were both half-witted and deaf. ‘What seems to be the problem?' she shouted, in answer to my request for the references.

‘No problem,' I replied. ‘I simply wish to be sent the letters in a plain envelope, with no return address, and no mention of your office.'

‘Miss Baxter, I'm just looking at the red chester here—'

‘The what?'

‘The red chester!'

I had heard her perfectly well; I simply cannot believe that anyone imagines a register to be called a ‘red chester'. Clinch is very fond of her ‘red chester'. Whenever she is being particularly superior, I take pleasure in making her refer to it.

‘—and I can see from what's written here, you've already had the references, I believe. We sent them to you some weeks ago, didn't we—and you sent them back to us, dear, remember? I have them in front of me. They're good references. Are you having a problem with Miss Whittle?'

‘No,' I said. ‘No problem.'

‘Then why d'you need the references for, might I enquire?'

‘I'd simply like to have another look at them. I believe I'm perfectly entitled to do so. I really fail to see why it should be so complicated.'

‘Well, provided Miss Whittle is happy—and you're happy—'

‘We're both quite content, thanks most awfully.'

‘Rightie-o, I'll put them in the post directly, dear.'

‘Oh, good—and you'll mark that in your—in your—eh—'

‘Yes, I'll mark it in the red chester. They should be with you soon.'

In fact, they arrived on Monday. As luck would have it, Sarah was out again, this time at the tobacconist's, but I was glad to see that, apart from my address, the envelope was blank. There were two letters of recommendation: one from a Miss Barnes, of Chepworth Villas, London, and another from a Miss Clay, of Greenstead, Essex. Just as I remembered, from when I looked at them back in April, both ladies praised Sarah's many qualities and did not hesitate to recommend her (et cetera). Only the Chepworth Villas address included a telephone number. I was tempted to dial it straight away, but Sarah was due to return at any moment and, since I wished to make the call undisturbed, I waited until the afternoon, when I sent Sarah back out, with a long list of questions about the economy of Scotland in the last century, and asked her not to return until she had found out the answers. In fact, I have no interest in the Scottish economy. There are, of course, some genuine facts that I would like her to check, but my main purpose in sending her to the library was to ensure that she was out of the apartment for a few hours.

Once she had gone, I waited, just in case she might come back to retrieve something that she had forgotten, until—after twenty minutes or so—it seemed certain that she would not return. Then, I placed a call to Chepworth Villas.