The Judgement of Strangers (25 page)

In the nineteen-thirties, Doris went on, when they built the Jubilee Reservoir, Carter’s Meadow had at last come on the open market and Lady Youlgreave had bought it, intending to give it to her husband as a present. But the sale of Roth Park and then the war and her husband’s death prevented this; because the land belonged directly to Lady Youlgreave, it had not been sold with the rest of the estate.

‘I think she’d forgotten all about it until that man came to call,’ Doris said. ‘He wanted to buy it, you see, but she took against him.’

‘Which man?’

‘Toby Clifford. He tried to push her into selling it, but she wouldn’t budge. You know what she was like – she could be so obstinate. Then he tried to get me to do his dirty work for him.’ Doris frowned. ‘Bare-faced cheek. We were in the hall and I was showing him out, and he pulled out a wallet. Said maybe we could come to an arrangement.’ She snorted. ‘I told him he and his money weren’t wanted.’

‘Why did he want the land?’

‘Something to do with his plans for Roth Park. He thinks big, that one. Eyes bigger than his stomach.’ Her face creased into a smile full of mischief. ‘The only reason she took against him was because he looked like a girl with all that hair. The thing is, now she’s gone and left
me
that land. The Clifford boy’s still interested in buying it – Mr Deakin told me. But I don’t know what to do for the best.
She
wouldn’t have liked me to sell Carter’s Meadow to him.’

‘I don’t think you should worry about that,’ I said. ‘You can do whatever you like with the land, unless Lady Youlgreave laid down any conditions in the will.’

‘So do you think I should let him have it? If he offers a fair price, that is.’

I thought of Toby and Joanna, camping like a pair of waifs in that tumbledown house. And I thought of the hints I’d heard about Toby. I thought of the things that Toby had told me about Joanna, and Joanna had told me about Toby.

Toby was a determined young man, and if Carter’s Meadow was essential for his plans for Roth Park, then the timing of Lady Youlgreave’s death must have been convenient for him. I glimpsed melodramatic possibilities: a visit to a vulnerable old woman when the house was empty; another refusal countered by a quick push; a disguised voice on the telephone; knocking over the medicine in the bedroom to suggest a reason why Lady Youlgreave might have tripped on the hearthrug. I shook my head, trying to clear it of these fancies. But a residue of doubt remained.

‘If I were you,’ I said to Doris, ‘I’d hang on to the land for a while. Wait and see.’

At lunchtime on Sunday, Rosemary said that she could not possibly spare the time to come to Roth Park: she had to work. We did not press her. Michael wanted to go because of the swimming pool. Vanessa wanted to go in order to see Francis Youlgreave’s room. Even though her access to the family papers was now in doubt, and some of the papers had been destroyed, she was still determined to write the biography – far more so than she had been when Lady Youlgreave was alive. It was as if the Youlgreaves had infected her with a bacillus, and the disease would have to run its course.

‘There must be other materials,’ she said over lunch. ‘Just because nobody’s found them yet, it doesn’t mean they’re not around if one only looks in the right place. Perhaps I should go to Rosington.’

‘I doubt if you’ll find much there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m sure there’s some public record of him,’ I said carefully, aware that Rosemary and Michael were listening to us. ‘The dates of his appointments, where he lived and so on.’

‘Yes – but did people talk about him when you lived in Rosington?’

‘Occasionally. Gossip, mainly. But that’s not really what you want, is it?’

‘It all helps.’ She looked at me across the table, and I had the feeling that she saw me properly for the first time since our conversation on Wednesday evening. ‘I’m going to write this book, David, I really am.’

We finished the meal in silence. I wanted to go to Roth Park because I would see Joanna. I didn’t want to go for the same reason. Every night since Wednesday I’d dreamed about her. Try as I might to forget her, the image of her lingered in my waking hours as well.

At half past three, Vanessa, Michael and I walked slowly up the drive of Roth Park. Michael had his bathing costume and a towel, Vanessa carried a notebook and I had a bunch of roses from the Vicarage garden. Vanessa had insisted that we take the roses.

It was a warm afternoon, still sultry, but sunnier than it had been in the past few days. The house came into view. The E-type Jaguar was parked beside the empty fountain. I felt uneasy, as if some primitive part of me sensed that we were being watched, as if we might be walking into an ambush. I glanced up at the tower at the far end of the house. My eyes found the windows belonging to Joanna’s room, the one under Francis Youlgreave’s.

Vanessa said, ‘It’s quite a drop, isn’t it? I wonder if he was killed instantly. I must try the local papers. They must have something in their back files about it.’

‘I imagine the Youlgreaves tried to hush it up.’

‘Yes, but there’ll be something. But of course the big question is what is – or was – in the journals. There may have been a suicide note or something.’ She hugged her notebook. ‘It’s so frustrating.’

Michael watched us as we talked, his eyes flicking from one to the other. He spent most of that summer watching us.

‘Hello.’ Toby was standing in the path through the shrubbery at the corner of the house. ‘Come through this way. I’ve got chairs down by the pool.’

He was wearing a pair of shorts – cut-off jeans – and nothing else. Even his feet were bare. His hair flowed on either side of his central parting, twin waterfalls of ginger curls. The bones of the shoulders and the ribcage stood out clearly. His body was slighter than I had expected and almost hairless. I remembered then what he usually made it so easy to forget: how young he was.

‘Rosemary not with you?’

‘She felt she had to work,’ Vanessa replied. ‘She’s got a holiday reading list as long as my arm.’

‘Shame.’ Toby led us into the shrubbery. ‘Joanna sends her apologies, by the way. She’s lying down. She woke up with a foul headache, and it’s been growing steadily worse.’

Lying down in the room below Francis Youlgreave’s.
I was both frustrated and relieved.
Thank God she’s not here.
Yet while I thought this, my nails were digging into the palms of my hands because I had wanted to see her so badly.

We reached the path beside the terrace. Someone had cut back the grass to an uneven stubble. To our left, the east facade of the house reared up to the sky. We picked our way across the ragged lawn.

‘I’m beginning to think we’re making a difference here at last,’ Toby said. ‘I hope we’ll be playing croquet by this time next year.’

I doubted it. Among the stubble were molehills and stumps of thistles. Brambles had colonized the former flowerbed beneath the terrace and in places were spreading into the lawn. It struck me then with renewed force what an insanely difficult job Toby had taken on. Surely he was too intelligent not to realize that Roth Park needed an ocean of money poured over it? Or was his belief in his own powers so strong that he had drifted into fantasy? Or was it simply that age had not yet blunted his ambitions, that the never-ending compromises that come with maturity had not yet hit him?

‘Gosh,’ Michael said, and whistled.

He was a few paces ahead of us and had seen the swimming pool first. Freshly painted, it glowed in its stone-lined hollow. It seemed much larger than it had in its derelict state. The water was clear and blue. The flagstones around the pool had been weeded and swept. The little changing hut with the verandah, where Rosemary and I had sheltered on the afternoon of the storm, gleamed a fresh, clean white in the sunshine. The springboard had either been replaced or re-covered.

‘Not bad, eh?’ Toby said. ‘Take care of the luxuries and the essentials will take care of themselves.’

Near the changing hut was a row of four deckchairs. Beside one of them was the radio, a heavy cut-glass ashtray and a paperback novel.

Vanessa and I made appropriate noises of admiration. Toby smiled and stretched his arms above his head, reminding me suddenly and incongruously of Lord Peter when he was well fed and pleased with life.

‘How would you like to do this?’ Toby asked Vanessa. ‘Would you like to see the room first or have a swim? Or you might like a cup of tea?’

‘I’d like to see the room, please.’

Toby smiled at her. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much to see. Not unless you’re psychic and can decode the vibrations, or whatever psychics do.’ He turned to Michael and me. ‘Would you like to come?’

I didn’t want to see the room again. I did not want to remember my last visit. Besides, if I went up to Francis’s room, there was a very real risk that I would bump into Joanna. I could not say that I had seen the room before, because Toby did not know of that visit to Roth Park and my conversation with Joanna. Nor for that matter did Vanessa. I glanced at Michael: he was staring wistfully at the water and that gave me my cue.

‘I’ll stay here with Michael,’ I said. ‘Watch him swim.’

Vanessa looked sharply at me.

‘It’s up to you,’ Toby said. ‘There’re towels in the hut. Are you sure you’ll be all right?’

Toby seemed excited, in a hurry to be gone. I even wondered if for some reason he wanted to be alone with Vanessa; but that was ridiculous. The two of them walked towards the house. Michael went into the hut to get changed. I moved one of the deckchairs, the one nearest the pool, into a patch of shade. There was a wet footprint on the slab that had been under the deckchair: a small, bare foot – too small for Toby’s so it was almost certainly Joanna’s. Presumably she had been out here until a few moments ago. Had she suddenly felt unable to cope with us? Or unable to cope with me?

Michael came out of the hut, suddenly shy in a pair of black swimming trunks. I smiled at him and he darted towards the water. There was a great splash. His head appeared, the hair plastered against his skull.

‘What’s it like?’ I shouted.

‘Freezing. It’s wonderful.’

He looked younger in the water, less guarded, less self-conscious. He turned away from me and began to swim towards the shallow end of the pool, using a primitive crawl that made a lot of noise for very little return. Watching Michael, I stepped forward to the side of the pool. I heard a noise behind me, half concealed by the splashing. I turned.

Joanna was sitting in the deckchair I had moved from the edge of the pool.

For a second I could not speak. I knew I must look a fool, standing there open-mouthed. Joanna wore a white wrap that came down to her ankles. It was made of fine cotton, or perhaps silk, and there were long splits in the material from the armpits down to the thighs. Underneath the wrap was a green bikini, still damp to judge by the marks on the wrap. She smiled up at me. It was the sort of smile that hints at shared secrets.

‘Toby said you were lying down. Is your headache better?’

‘I haven’t got a headache.’ She spread her arms wide, a gesture which made the wrap fall open, revealing the bikini, revealing the high, firm breasts. ‘He thought I wasn’t in a fit state to receive visitors.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’re not ill.’

‘Come and sit down.’

I glanced back at the pool. Michael had reached the far end and was swimming back to us. Joanna waved to him. There could be no harm in talking to Joanna, I told myself. Michael was our chaperone. Not that we would need one, of course. I sat down beside Joanna and tried not to stare at her. Her voice was slightly slurred and the whites of her eyes were bloodshot. I wondered if she might be on drugs. That might explain why Toby did not want her to meet us.

Her eyes slid towards me and away. ‘So Rosemary didn’t come?’

‘She had to work, I’m afraid. Oxbridge entrance coming up, and she’s very tense about that.’

‘I think she didn’t want to see Toby.’

I didn’t say anything. In a sense, I did not want to hear any more.

‘I think they had a quarrel,’ Joanna went on. ‘They were both up here, in the house.’

There was a silence. Then I moistened my lips and said, ‘When?’

‘On Wednesday. He drove her up to London the day before. But on Wednesday they came here.’ The green eyes slid towards me again and this time they did not slide away.

I heard myself saying, ‘You don’t have to tell me this.’

‘I do. I saw her running down the drive afterwards. She was crying.’ She bit her lip. ‘I don’t know. I’m just trying to do what’s best. I thought you should know.’

I was not sure whether to believe her. Wild accusations might be no more than a symptom of psychological disturbance. On the other hand, what she had said fitted neatly with what had happened on Wednesday afternoon, and with Vanessa’s speculations about why Rosemary had been upset.

‘Don’t tell Toby I told you.’ Joanna’s voice was urgent now. ‘He’d take it out on me.’

For a few minutes we watched Michael swimming up the pool towards us. He clambered out and ran on to the springboard. He turned to make sure we were watching him and plunged in with an even greater splash than before.

‘I’m not like Rosemary.’

Startled, I looked at Joanna. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t follow.’

She ran a fingernail down her bare forearm. Suddenly she stretched out her hand and touched mine. As if stung, I jerked away from her. We stared at each other.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying, David?’

I looked at Michael. He was swimming underwater. I turned back to her. She made no further attempt to touch me, but she leant a little towards me. She was smiling. I wanted to touch her face, her neck, her breasts.

‘No,’ I muttered.

But she was no longer looking at me. She was looking past me, towards the house.

Vanessa and Toby were walking across the lawn towards us. Vanessa was laughing at something Toby had said. At a distance, they looked much of an age. As a couple she and Toby were far better matched than she and I were.

They came down the steps from the lawn. I stood up. It suddenly occurred to me that we might have been visible from one of the windows of the house. Toby or Vanessa might have seen Joanna touch my hand.

‘You sure this is wise?’ Toby said to Joanna as he came down the steps from the lawn. ‘The sunshine won’t do your head much good.’

‘I’m feeling much better now.’ She sat back in her deckchair, as though resisting any attempt to prise her away from it. She asked Vanessa: ‘What did you think of Francis Youlgreave’s room?’

‘A very lonely place,’ Vanessa said.

‘With a very long drop from the window,’ Toby added dryly. ‘What about some tea?’

We drank tea from cracked mugs and ate digestive biscuits from the packet. Michael swam on and on. He gave us all something to look at, a useful activity to fill the silences. There were many silences. The urge to look at Joanna was almost overpowering.