The Last Houseparty (14 page)

Mr Mason showed no sign of boredom or impatience, but gave few hints of interest either until they reached a strange enclosure quite unlike anything else in the garden.

Coming along beneath the wall that retained the upper terraces they were confronted by a twelve-foot yew hedge. Through a gap so narrow that it seemed a mere slot came a glimpse of unnatural blue, as of the painted sides of a swimming-pool or an amateur water-colourist's attempt at a Mediterranean sky. Miss Quintain led the way in. The hedge turned out to enclose a precise circle, about thirty feet across, with the wall running at a tangent on its northern rim. At the centre was a statueless pedestal. A narrow grass path ran round the edge of the enclosure, and all the rest was a single flowerbed planted with a poppy-like flower whose blue, now that the eye could sort it into its individual saucer-bowls, no longer seemed unnatural, only unlikely.

“That's something,” said Mr Mason, apparently impressed for the first time.

“
Meconopsis grandis
,” said Miss Quintain.

“Why did you choose to shut them in this way?”

“Just an idea. One likes to be a bit different. In other gardens they tend to be where people spot them a long way off and go rushing across to see what on earth they can be. And besides—it's something to do with that stone thing—Harry used to call it the Bloodstone. I remember, during the war, one of the cats got run over by the postman. I stole it so that I could have the funeral here, not really for the cat's sake—more for the Bloodstone's. Harry used to say it was a place for oaths and undertakings. You sealed them with a sacrifice. I suppose you could say I've shut the stone off and given it these poppies to keep it happy. Now lunch.”

She led the way half round the circle, looking at the blue poppies as she went, not smiling but expressing a distinct sense of relationship, an almost maternal bond, between herself and these particular plants. She vanished through a slot in the far side of the circle.

They had come to the enclosure through an area of light woodland, but now emerged on to a wide lawn, featureless, so as not to distract from the famous Rose Wall at its northern edge. The child Jo-jo was standing near the middle of this space, wearing as usual jeans and a T-shirt. She had her weight on one leg and was tracing arcs on the grass with the toes of her other foot, like a bored dancer. There was a basket on the grass beside her.

“You're not very easy to impress, Mr Mason,” said Miss Quintain, a hint of pique at last spicing the dry amusement in her voice. Mr Mason stopped looking at the child and gave his consideration to the wall. The roses were old, types old enough for whoever had planted them to believe that a single luxuriant June flowering was all that could be expected; the individual specimens were also old enough for some of the bigger branches of their frame-work to be almost as thick as a man's arm. The main tone of the flowers was of cream flushing into pink, the unopened buds sometimes clear red at their tips, the lax, due-to-fall petals almost white. They spread fifty yards along the wall, climbing its height to the balustrade of terrace above, and had been pruned so that in front of the main curtain of blossom long trailers looped down almost to the ground, like the fore-running foam of an enormous wave.

“Very pretty,” said Mr Mason. “Very pretty indeed.”

“It's almost the only thing I've kept. You know, I rooted out over nine hundred of old Lord Snailwood's roses. I couldn't stand them. But this … I suppose you could say he got it right by accident—and anyway you've got to keep something from the old life of the garden. It would be wrong not to.”

At the sound of their voices Jo-jo had looked up and now came across the lawn carrying the basket, letting its weight pull her slight body sideways more than was really necessary, as if to emphasise the burden she had carried for them.

“You've been ages,” she said. “I'm ever so hungry. I almost started.”

“I'm so sorry,” said Miss Quintain. “Are you going to have your picnic with us? Why don't you take it up into Hangman's Tower? I'll keep an eye on you.”

“Oh, all right,” said Jo-jo, dumping the basket, snatching off the napkin that covered it and beginning to rifle through its contents. “There's two rolls each. Can I have the ham ones? Ooh—strawberries! The lemonade's for me. I don't need a mug.”

Fully self-centred, she pushed the rolls in through the neck of her T-shirt and let them fall to her waistband, stuck a bottle top-down into a pocket, chose the best of the little plastic boxes of fruit and after popping the largest berry into her mouth said a mushy thank you and ran off to an old stone pine that stood some forty yards away across the lawn, its bare stiff-curving limbs with their large-mottled bark looking as though it was waiting to be painted by Cezanne. She disappeared round the trunk, emerged a moment later in the first fork, climbed another six-feet and then out to a horizontal crotch where she settled and began to balance the items of her meal along the branch beside her. Though she looked entirely safe and confident, Miss Quintain watched her closely and did not speak until she was still.

“Her mother doesn't approve her going up so high, but I'm afraid I encourage her. You know, it's extraordinary how little there is left of Snailwood that belongs to the old days. I only half do. Robson's father was Lord Snailwood's valet, and that's all. I sometimes wonder if I'm not using Jo-jo to try and re-live my own childhood, showing her the best trees and telling her their names. Harry showed me, of course—they're all part of an extraordinary game he used to play with his cousin. We can still see her from the bench.”

Mr Mason bent stiffly to pick up the basket, then followed her to where a large variegated maple closed off the cliff of roses. He took a flat cap from his pocket and with it dusted the slats of the garden seat that stood in front of the tree; they sat, with the basket between them; Miss Quintain answered the child's wave. The apparent stillness was threaded with birdsong, and leaf-shift, but all so peaceful that the odd tumbling petal, the first of that summer to fall, seemed to whisper as it touched the grass.

“Tell me about meeting him,” said Miss Quintain.

Mr Mason took some time to answer, apparently absorbed in rearranging the tomato slices in his roll so that they wouldn't squirt when he bit.

“I've kept wishing there'd been more to it,” he said. “You're going to be disappointed … Well, I was with 208 Squadron. March 1941 it was. I don't know how much you know about that bit of the war …”

“I've read everything I could lay my hands on. Naturally. General O'Connor had made a tremendous advance and destroyed the Italian army almost by accident, but he'd had to stop beyond Benghazi. And then Rommel came and pushed us back because Churchill had insisted on half of our army going to Greece.”

“You can never stop in the desert,” said Mr Mason, earnestly. “That's the logic of it. If you don't go forward you've got to go back, because there's no defensive positions for hundreds of miles. And Greece and then Crete. That was a right old … I won't say it. Well, there we were. 208 Squadron was reconnaissance. My crowd was on detachment, right down on the southern flank, no more than a dozen of us to fly and service a couple of Lysanders. Know about them too, I dare say?”

“I've seen the one in the RAF museum. A high-wing monoplane, very slow. A sitting duck, they told me.”

“That's not fair. Used right you couldn't ask better than a Lysander. Take off and land on a handkerchief. Pretty well stand still in the air if you wanted it. Vulnerable, I give you, but it wasn't ever meant to be used without fighter cover.”

“All the fighters had gone to Greece, though.”

“That's what you get in a war. We weren't that worried. Been sitting in the same bit of sand for more than a month and getting sick of it. Just sending up one of the planes every day for a look round and not finding anything and coming back. I was engine maintenance mechanic, but our A/c Airframes was sick so I was working alone on one of the planes, March 30th it would have been. Bloody hot for March it was, too. I had my head in the cabin when I heard a couple of blokes gabbing away behind me. One was Pilot Officer Toller. The other had a lah-di-dah sort of voice I knew wasn't one of our crowd, but as I'd been told to get the plane ready for a recce with an ‘I' corps officer I guessed it might be him. After a bit Mr Toller had me out to talk about when I'd be finished, and from that I gathered they were expecting to go a bit further than usual—something this major wanted to look at, special. He didn't say much. Matter of fact I don't think he said anything direct to me. Just stood around, lounging out in the sun beyond the camouflage. I could see he was a gentleman, just the way he stood.”

“Did he look happy?”

“I heard him say to Mr Toller he'd been having an interesting war. He had that drawn look, though—lot of the staff got to look that way—it's the strain, I'd imagine. Or he might have been jumpy about the flight. He'd have known about there being no fighters.”

“But not specially excited?”

“No … not that I could tell.”

“And that's really all?”

“I told you it wasn't much.”

“You're sure?”

Mr Mason, who had been speaking more slowly even than usual, and with a heavier presence of his unplaceable Midlands accent, merely nodded.

“If that is all, why did you remember his name? Why did you ask me about him?”

“Ah well, there was the inquiry, you see,” explained Mr Mason, apparently not noticing the definite sharpness in her voice.

“Tell me about that.”

“Well, I was surprised they bothered. I said it was March 30th, didn't I? March 31st Rommel hit us, wham, and back we were going like blown leaves all the way to Egypt. Three hundred miles in six days. Flew the one Lysander back and the rest of us came out clinging to the one truck after the other one had hit one of our own mines not done twenty miles. Only just made it to the coast road in front of the Germans. They didn't hold the inquiry till we'd settled down back in Egypt, and because I'd prepared the Lysander for the flight I had to give evidence. That's how I came to hear the major's name. I couldn't say why it's stuck—unusual way it's spelt, much as anything. But I've always had a head for names, and when you spelt yours out to me that time I asked you about mending the clock, it rang a bell. They spelt it out loud like that at the inquiry, you see, more than once.”

“I see.”

“I'm not keeping anything back from you. I've no call.”

“Oh, I'm sure you're not. I've been keeping something back from you, though, Mr Mason. I didn't want to put ideas into your mind before you'd told me everything you remembered. You see, Harry wrote my mother a letter that afternoon, before the flight.”

Mr Mason turned his head slowly to look at her.

“He'd an hour or two to wait,” he said. “Something to do. Take his mind off the flight, I expect.”

“It wasn't like that. Just one page, and very excited, almost incoherent. He said something extraordinary had happened and he was writing to her to get over the shock. He was going to tell her all about it when he'd had time to talk it over, but whatever happened it might make all the difference at Snailwood. He didn't explain anything more than that.”

“Not much to go on.”

“More than you think. My mother used to show me most of his letters, even when … well, Harry didn't mind what he wrote.”

“I know what you mean. There was a lot of them like that, writing to their wives, never mind it had to go through the censor.”

“Exactly. Harry would put in jokes about that in the margin. My mother would laugh aloud and pass them across the breakfast table to me. I think she enjoyed seeing me blush. But she never showed me this one. I knew it had come, and I knew where she hid things, so I stole it and copied it out and put it back. I couldn't understand it all at the time, but later on several things happened which make me almost certain that Harry had met his cousin Vincent.”

“Ah. The one you told me he used to play the game with.”

“That's right. Vincent Masham. For reasons I won't go into Vincent disappeared about a year before the war. My mother would never let Harry talk to me about him. The only way I knew he existed was because of the game. That's why she hid the letter, of course. And that bit about Snailwood. Vincent's mother—we all called her Aunt Ivy—was a perfectly poisonous woman. Her world began and ended with Vincent, and when he disappeared she decided to make things as difficult as possible for Harry. But if he'd met Vincent and persuaded him to do something about Aunt Ivy … You see?”

“Vincent Masham? Nobody of that name in our crowd.”

“He wouldn't have called himself that.”

“Apart from Mr Toller the only other officer was Mr Allison—thin and tall and droopy. Don't know what became of him.”

“He was killed in Italy. I found that out.”

“Mr Toller was a perky little fellow.”

“No. In any case I don't think it would have been an officer. Vincent was very good at machines. He'd very likely have been doing something like you. He was a big man, very good at games. To judge by his photographs—I'll show you when we go back to the house—he had blond hair and rather a red face, I think. He used to have a moustache, but he could have shaved it off.”

“He'd still have stood out like a sore thumb in a crowd like ours. It's the voice, more than the face. Anybody talking the way I heard your stepfather would have been ragged blind about it.”

“Harry left me a long letter, partly about Vincent. Usually he had a stammer, but he could control it unless he got excited. And he was quite good at what Harry called oickish accents.”

“Come again?”