The Carousel (7 page)

After a little, Daniel said, "Yes." He put out his half-smoked cigar, grinding the stub into the ashtray as though he had a grudge against it. He finished his drink and set down the empty glass, then turned and smiled at me and said, surprisingly, "Tomorrow. Will you come and have lunch with me?"

Taken unawares, I did not immediately reply. He went on, swiftly, "That is, if Phoebe can spare you. And lend you her car again."

"I think she could. I don't think she'd mind."

"Ask her, then, when you get back."

"All right. Shall I come here? To the hotel?"

"No. I'll meet you in the Ship Inn on the harbour in Porthkerris. We'll get a ploughman's lunch and a glass of beer, and if it's fine we'll go and sit on the harbour wall and pretend we're tourists."

I smiled. "What time?"

He shrugged. "About half past twelve."

"All right." I was very pleased that he had asked me. "Half past twelve."

He said, "Good. Now finish your lager and I'll take you back to the car."

We emerged from the revolving doors, ejected into wet darkness. We found Phoebe's car, and Daniel opened the door for me, but before I could get into it, he had put his hand around the back of my neck and drawn my face towards his and kissed my mouth. His face was damp with the rain, and for an instant we stood there, and I felt the cool pressure of his cheek against my own.

We said good night. I drove giddily back to Penmarron, feeling drunk, as though I had consumed a great deal more than a single half-pint of lager.

I was bursting to tell Phoebe about everything and to indulge in more long and illuminating discussions about Daniel and Mrs. Tolliver and Charlotte, but when I got back to Holly Cottage, I disturbed her dozing by the fire, and when she woke up, she admitted that she was very tired. Her arm ached, the cast was heavy, the day had been long and exciting. She looked tired, too, her face, beneath the obliterating brim of her hat, thin and shadowed. So I told her only that Daniel had asked me to have lunch with him the next day and asked if this would be all right and if I could borrow her car. She was, as I had known she would be, perfectly agreeable, so I went off to the kitchen and poured her a glass of restoring wine, and then I made scrambled eggs and we ate them in front of the fire.

After that, although it was only half past eight, she decided that she would go to bed, so I helped her upstairs and switched on the electric blanket and drew the curtains against the chilly darkness. When I left her, cosy in her huge bed, she was reading a book by the light of the bedside lamp, but as I shut the door and took myself downstairs, I knew that very soon she would be asleep.

Next morning I was out of bed before she could be, and downstairs. It was too early for Lily Tonkins, so I laid a tray for Phoebe's breakfast, made coffee and toast, and carried the lot upstairs. She was already awake, watching through her open window the sun climb the sky. When I appeared through the door, she turned her head on the pillow and saw the tray and said, with all her usual energy, "You are an idiot, Prue; you know I never have breakfast in bed." 

"You are this morning." She pulled herself up on her pillows, and I laid the tray across her knees and went to close the window.

"Red sky at morning, shepherd's warning. I suppose it's going to rain today."

"Don't be so gloomy. You haven't brought a coffee cup for yourself."

"I thought you'd like to be left in peace."

"I hate being left in peace. I like chatting over breakfast. Go and get a mug." She took the lid off the coffee pot and peered inside. "You've made enough for ten people; you'll have to help me drink it."

In bed, which was about the only place she did not wear one of her dashing hats, she looked different: feminine; older, perhaps; vulnerable. Her thick, wiry hair hung in a plait over one shoulder, and she was wrapped in a fleecy shawl. She looked so comfortable that I said, "Why don't you stay there for the morning? Lily Tonkins can cope with everything, and there's not much that you can do to help with only one arm."

"I might," said Phoebe, not committing herself. "I just might do that. Now go and get a mug before the coffee gets cold."

I fetched not only a cup but a bowl of cereal as well, and ate it sitting on the edge of the great, carved pine bed that Phoebe and Chips had shared for all those happy, sinful years. She had once told me that everything she really enjoyed in life was either illegal, immoral, or fattening, and then had roared with laughter.

But somehow they had got away with it, she and Chips. Even in this small, parochial village, they had ridden out the inevitable storm of prejudice by sheer strength of character coupled with their disarming charm. I remembered Chips playing the organ in church when the regular organist had flu, and Phoebe busily baking enormous, lopsided cakes for the Women's Institute tea.

She cared for everybody, and yet for no person's opinion. I looked at her eating toast and marmalade and loved her. She caught my eye. She said, "How nice that you're having lunch with Daniel. What time are you meeting him?"

"Half past twelve at the Ship Inn in Porthkerris. But I won't go unless you promise me that you'll be all right."

"For heaven's sake, I'm not in a wheelchair. Off you go. But I shall want to hear all about it when you get back. Blow-by-blow descriptions." Her eyes twinkled, her cheeks bunched up in wicked laughter, and she was so obviously back to her normal good spirits that I started to tell her about the previous evening and our encounter with Mrs. Tolliver.

". . . And it was very embarrassing, because I thought Daniel was just behind me, and I said something stupid like, 'I want you to meet my friend,' and when I turned round, he wasn't there. Disappeared. Bolted to the bar."

"Did Mrs. Tolliver see him?"

"I've no idea." I thought about this. "Does it make any difference?"

"No-o-o . . ." said Phoebe.

I frowned at her. "Phoebe, you're holding something back."

She laid down her coffee cup and gazed abstractedly out the window. After a bit she shrugged and said, "Oh, well, I don't suppose it matters talking about it now. It all happened so long ago, anyway. Water under the bridge. And it wasn't anything very desperate even then."

"What wasn't desperate?"

"Well . . . when Daniel was living with us, when he was a very young man, Annabelle Tolliver came down from London to spend the summer with her mother, and ... well... I suppose you could say that they had a little fling. A flingette," she added hopefully, trying to make it sound trivial.

Daniel and Annabelle Tolliver. I stared at Phoebe. "You mean, he fancied Annabelle."

" 'Fancied.' " She chuckled. "Such a lovely old-fashioned word. Like 'frock.' Nobody wears frocks anymore." She gave a sigh and got back to the point. "No. Not exactly. If truth be told, I think it was Annabelle who fancied Daniel."

"But she must have been much older than he was."

"Oh, certainly. At least eight years."

"And married."

"Yes, married, too. But I told you, that never made much difference to Annabelle. She had a child by that time. Michael. He must have been about four years old. Poor child, even then I remember, he looked exactly like his father!"

"But. . . " Phoebe's endless digressions did nothing to clarify the situation. "What happened?"

"Oh, heavens, nothing happened. They used to go to parties together, picnics on the beach, swimming. She had a very flashy car that summer. It had a hood you could put down, and they used to drive all over the place together; very dashing they looked, too. Very eye-catching. Oh, you can imagine it, Prue."

I could. Only too clearly. "But I wouldn't have thought that Daniel. . . " I stopped, because I wasn't sure what I did think.

"You wouldn't have thought that Daniel was the social type. Perhaps he wasn't, but he was a very attractive young man. Still is, for that matter. And it must have flattered his ego to have her so eager to spend her time with him. I told you, she was beautiful. There were always queues of men swooning around her like lovesick cows. Or do I mean lovesick bulls? But Daniel was always a very quiet person. I think it was his quietness that intrigued Annabelle."

"How long did this go on?"

"The whole summer, on and off. It was just a little flirtation. Perfectly harmless."

"What did Mrs. Tolliver have to say about it?"

"Mrs. Tolliver never says anything about anything. She's the sort of woman who truly believes that if you don't look, it will go away. Besides, she must have realised that if it wasn't Daniel, it would have been some other man. Perhaps she reckoned that he was the lesser of a lot of other evils."

"But the little boy . . . Michael?"

"There was a starchy nanny taking care of him. He never got in the way at all."

"And her husband ..." I could hardly bear to say his horrid name. "Leslie Collis?"

"He was left in London, running his office. I suppose living in some service flat or other. I've no idea. It's not important, anyway."

I thought carefully through this extraordinary revelation. I finally said, "Then last night . . . you think that's why Daniel didn't want to talk to Mrs. Tolliver."

"Maybe. Maybe he just didn't want to get involved with four bridge-playing ladies."

"I wonder why he didn't tell me himself."

"There was no reason he should. It has nothing to do with you, and it was a total nonevent, anyway." She poured herself more coffee and said, quite briskly, "You're not to make anything of it."

"I'm not. I just wish it had been anybody but Annabelle Tolliver."

Red sky at morning, shepherd's warning. But it was the sort of day when you couldn't be sure what would happen to the weather. A warm, west-wind sort of day, with gusts that tore leaves from trees and sent them flying and flecked the indigo sea with white horses. The sky was a brazen blue swept by high clouds, and the very air seemed to glitter. From the top of the hill above Porth-kerris, I could see for miles, long beyond the lighthouse to the distant spur of Trevose Head. From the harbour far below me, a solitary fishing boat butted out into the choppy sea, making for the deep water beneath the cliffs of Lanyon.

The way led steeply downhill, through the narrow streets of the little town. Most of the summer visitors had now departed. Only a handful, looking chilly in shorts, stood about outside the news agent's or made their way down the hill to where a bakery was redolent with the smell of fresh, hot pasties.

At Porthkerris the Ship Inn stands, where it has stood for three hundred years or more, on the harbour road by the old quay where the fishermen used to land their pilchards. I drove by it, but there was no sign of Daniel, so I found a place to park the Volkswagen and then walked back along the cobbles and went in, dipping my head beneath the low, smoke-blackened lintel. Inside, after the brightness of the day, it was very dark. A small coal fire burned in the grate, and an old man sat by this, looking as though he had sat there all his life or had, perhaps, grown up out of the floorboards. "Prue."

I turned. Daniel was sitting in the deep window seat with an empty pint tankard on a wobbly table that had been made out of a barrel. He stood up, easing himself from behind this table, and said, "It's too good a day to have lunch indoors. What do you think?"

"So what shall we do?"

"Buy something. Eat it on the beach."

So we went out again and down the road until we reached one of those convenient shops that seem to sell everything. We bought fresh pasties, so hot that the man had to wrap them in newspaper. We bought a bag of apples, and some chocolate biscuits, and a packet of paper cups, and a bottle of dubious red wine. When the kindly man realised we were going to drink it right away, he threw in a corkscrew as well.

We went back out into the sunshine and crossed the cobbled street, and climbed down the stone steps that were dry at the top and coated with green weed at the bottom. The tide was on its way out and had left behind it a sickle of clean yellow sand. There was a cluster of rocks pounded smooth by the seas of centuries, and we settled ourselves on these, sheltered from the wind and with the sun on our faces. Screaming gulls wheeled in the windy air, and from where some men worked peacefully on a boat came the pleasant sounds of hammer blows and muted voices.

Daniel opened the bottle of wine, and we unwrapped the pasties. I was suddenly very hungry. I bit greedily into mine, and it was so hot that I nearly scalded my mouth and bits of steaming potato fell out of the pasty onto the sand, to be spied and scooped up in an instant by a great, greedy gull.

I said, "This was a brilliant idea."

"I have them, every now and again."

And I thought that if it had been Nigel, we would in all probability have been lunching at the Castle Hotel, with white tablecloths and waiters hovering, hampering conversation. Daniel had taken the cork out of the bottle; now he took a mouthful of wine, considered its taste, and swallowed it.

"An amusing and unpretentious little wine," he said, "if you don't mind it being stone cold. I don't suppose it improves its bouquet, drinking it out of a paper cup, but beggars can't be choosers. The only alternative seems to be the neck of the bottle." He took a bite out of his pasty. "How's Phoebe this morning?"

"She was tired last night. She went to bed early, and this morning I took her up her breakfast in bed, and she promised she'd stay there till lunchtime."

"What would she have done if you hadn't been able to come to Penmarron and take care of her?"

"She'd have managed. Lily would have looked after her, but Lily can't drive, and Phoebe hates being without her car."

"Were you able to get away from work just like that? What does Marcus Bernstein do without you?"

"I was on holiday anyway for two weeks, so that was no problem. He'd already engaged a temp to take over while I was away."

"You mean you had two weeks' holiday and you weren't going to do anything with it? What were you going to do, stay in London?"