Closed at Dusk (6 page)

‘Yes, of course. Why not?'

‘Your father told me you'd had a dodgy time.'

‘Well, I did. Just desserts. Meet fabulous man. Go insane for him. Seduce him away from adoring wife. Five years later, I'm – sane, I suppose. I see this bullying faker in the cold light of reason, and get out before he can hurt me any more.'

‘What was the wife like?'

‘Never seen her. Sort of flat and beige, I think. They married too young, and he went onward and she didn't. A beige bitch, Rex used to say. Beige and barren. God knows what he said about me to all the other women.'

‘You poor child.'

‘Don't give me that. I'm thirty-one. I knew what I was doing, and I know what I'm going to do now – take care of myself, enjoy my life, as I always have.'

‘I'm glad.'

‘No, I'm ruthless and selfish, haven't they told you?'

‘They love you.'

‘In spite of. Yes.' Tessa gathered her tumbling hair on top of her head with both hands, then let it fall and stretched out her arms with a serene smile, ‘Isn't it great about families?'

When everyone was sitting round the terrace table, Keith came out in frayed khaki shorts, his narrow chest bare.

‘Telephone, Sir Ralph. Your secretary.'

‘I knew it.' Angela picked up a chicken wing and bit into it. ‘Now we'll have to leave.'

In a few minutes, Ralph came out again with a face like death.

‘My God,' his wife said, ‘have we lost a fortune?'

‘Come inside, Angela.'

Angela's son Peter had been killed in a car crash in the West Country.

While they packed hastily, William went to bring round the Bentley. It was after two. A group of visitors crossing the end of the gravel sweep watched curiously as Ralph, grim, and Angela, looking smaller, came out of the front door, Matthew carrying their bags.

‘Let me drive you up,' William offered. ‘I can get a train back.'

But Ralph was in charge. He started off fast, scattering gravel; Angela turned her head and half raised a hand. Show over. The visitors went on to the ticket hut.

Matthew said despondently, ‘I'm glad she had a happy weekend.'

‘It will be a long time before she has another,' Dorothy said.

William said nothing. He went heavily through the flower-filled hall and out to the terrace. The plates of food were still there, the white chairs at angles, where they had been pushed back ten minutes ago. Leadenly, clumsily, he began to pile things on a tray. He felt bruised and sick, as if a mailed fist had come out of the sky and slammed him in the solar plexus.

All's well! All can never be well for more than the present moment. His excitement, his silly Sir Galahad dreams blown apart by Angela's face, her lovely face that he could never comfort and conjure to a smile again.

Gradually, they picked up the pursuits of the afternoon.
Dottie went to her desk to prepare her notes for a court appearance tomorrow. Forty Leckworth senior citizens had arrived in a purple coach, so Tessa went to help Ruth and Polly in the tea-room. As they were preparing to open, Ruth had got up the nerve to tell Doreen not to leave early, because she would like to speak to her after closing. That was what she meant to say. What came out was, ‘Hang on a bit after. Don't go off, mind, and leave the sink like a cesspit.' Doreen had torn off the short white apron, thrown down a handful of spoons, breaking a saucer, and bicycled off the premises.

Nina went up to wash her hair. Matthew found a private place to read. William went out among the visitors to answer the same old questions and to chat to the knowledgeable in the slow, word-sparing language of gardeners. Might as well do something for someone.

He was wandering along the edge of the copse, looking for late cowslips, when the wiry man with the mad scientist hair and the silly green shoulder bag strode past him to the rougher grass farther up the hill. Probably a botanist or a horticulturist, he was here so often. He must spend a fortune in gate money, so William gave him a dutiful ‘Afternoon'.

The man did not focus on William and did not answer. Off to do a bit of finger pruning, eh? Sneak cuttings? Dig up my white violets? ‘What's in that bag?' Angela had asked, with that laugh in her voice, to make a mystery for Rob.

The curly white clouds spread and grew dingier as the day advanced and cooled. The late May heatwave, which had bewitched the weekend, was over. A pilot breeze sailed down the lake and blew the hair and see-through mac of a woman who was looking for carp among the lily pads. William was mooning about among the daylilies that should have been divided last year, but would have to wait, when Rob came running, head thrown back, eyes anguished, along the bank of the lake.

‘Wum! Wum – you forgot!' He reached William, panting. ‘I've been waiting and waiting.'

‘What for?' William asked blankly.

‘You
said
. I brought my sketches. You said about the drainage plan.'

‘Oh, Rob.' William rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I
am
sorry,' he started to say, but Rob cried, ‘You forgot!' and ran towards the bridge, sobbing and dropping crumpled bits of paper. William picked them up and went after him.

The following week, Ruth stayed with her grandmother while Agnes went shopping, a protracted affair that involved trawling the Oxford department stores with her friend Kath, having an argumentative lunch at Poppins and coming home cross, with the intention of taking back next week what she had bought.

Ruth spent most of the morning doing laundry and cleaning up the mess Agnes had accumulated in the kitchen and bathroom. After lunch, when Ruth had removed the soup and shreds of corned beef from the old lady's front and given her a chocolate cream, Mary Trout seemed quite bright and knowing.

Agnes was beginning to rave on a bit about nursing homes, but it was not time for that yet, and Ruth prayed it never would be. The Sanctuary was Mary Trout's life, almost all the life she had ever known, except for the first fourteen years with six people in half a dark, damp cottage at Goosey, toiling for her mother indoors and her father outside.

She knew today was Monday and the gardens were closed, and did not ask to have her chair moved nearer the side window to see the visitors coming up the drive. She asked about Doreen, because she was interested in everything that happened in the tea-room, or anywhere at The Sanctuary. Tessa always dropped in to gossip when she was here, and William came in almost every day with a bit of news to keep her going.

‘Doreen?' Ruth was glad of the chance to talk about it. ‘Took herself off at 1.30 yesterday, didn't she, on a busy Sunday, and I'm not going to trouble her to bring back the skirt and blouse, because I don't ever want to lay eyes on her again.'

‘Oh, dear, you'll never manage. I'll come up and give you a hand.' Ruth's grandmother bit her bluish lips anxiously. ‘Do you think Aggie will let me?'

Agnes was not such a tyrant, but Troutie, having lived under orders all her life, felt more comfortable if she still had a boss.

‘That's all right, Gran,' Ruth said, ‘I've had a wonderful stroke of luck. I put a little bit of an advertisement in the
Gazette
. Nobody answered, just like I thought. The people round here – I don't know what they want nowadays, but they don't want to work. I had to find somebody. I can't rely on Polly all the time, and Brenda won't touch teas. I was getting desperate.'

‘Deshperate?' The faded old eyes searched Ruth's face.

‘I didn't know what I was going to say to Will, he sets such store on everything being done right for the visitors.'

‘Not like his mother,' the old lady half closed her crêpey eyelids, drifting into memory. ‘Poor Miss Sylvia. Brought up as she was to society and entertaining, if guests came, she'd say, “Oh, damn, we're not putting on extra for them, Troutie. They can take us or leave us.” But
her
mother, Lady Geraldine, she'd want to put the best of everything on the table, to impress.'

‘Listen, Gran. I'm making egg and cress sandwiches, see, when suddenly along comes this woman like a bolt from the blue, like the angel Gabriel himself.' You had to ginger up your conversation to keep Gran listening. ‘And it turns out she's living only a few miles away, and wanting part-time work.'

‘She'll do?' The watery eyes, sparsely lashed, picked up the message from Ruth's eager face.

‘She'll do, you're right. She's a good little worker, quick and neat, strong too, she can lift those boxes about, great with a jam sponge, and we've started shortbread again. I said
shortbread
, Gran. I'll fetch you some down if you'll wear your teeth. Nice enough looking, tackle anything, cheery with the customers. Pinch me, I must be dreaming. Good old Doreen. She walks out and Josephine walks in. Jo, I call her. A widow, poor soul, very sad. Her husband stopped eating and talking, went to choking, and was dead of cancer before he saw thirty-five. What do you think of that?'

But Mary Trout had drifted right away, shoulders hunched under the soft shawl Dorothy had brought her from Cotswold Weavers, hands like dead fish in the folds of her lap, head dropped on her sagging bosom, thin trail of saliva dribbling from one side of her empty mouth.

The May heatwave had broken in a lashing storm that rolled down from the hills to finish off the last of the spring blooms, and dash the hopes of some of the more delicate summer stock. A whole bed of orange Welsh poppies on the bank above the mausoleum was flattened. Late narcissi sprawled. The buds on William's new deutzia bushes were torn away from tender shoots. Two days of horizontal rain had put the marsh boardwalk under water, and John Dix ordered Keith out with Stuart and the trailer to pick up broken branches all over the grounds and pull down anything that might fall on a visitor.

‘When we've had lunch,' Keith protested. He had a headache from the wind.

‘Dinner can wait.'

‘OK, OK.' Keith could not say that Dorothy was making him a toasted cheese sandwich at 12.30, because the understanding
was that unless he was ill, he worked along with the others, and no favours.

When he came down the hill, kicked off his muddy boots and went up the back steps to the kitchen, Dottie had gone out and there was no cheese, nor anything to make a sandwich.

He went down to the tea-room with faint hope, because nobody would turn up for the gardens or the teas on such a foul day, but he found that a woman with dark hair and a wide expectant smile had the smaller urn simmering, flowers on the gingham cloths of each small table, and cakes laid out bravely.

‘Hul-lo!' she said on a rising note, as if muddy Keith with plastered hair and splattered glasses were just the person she had hoped to see.

‘Where's Ruth?' Keith was not supposed to cadge free handouts in the tea-room, but Ruth was always kind.

‘I made her go home, with that cold. No sense in two of us waiting for no customers.'

‘Where's Doreen?'

‘She left. I'm Jo.' She wore a crisp white blouse over interesting breasts, and a flowered skirt, shorter than Ruth's, which revealed straight, vigorous legs.

‘I'm Keith.'

‘Can I get you tea?'

‘I'm famished.'

She made him a pot of tea and a sandwich, and then another one.

Keith had no money in the pockets of his dungarees or his anorak.

‘That's all right.' Jo folded strong bare arms under her high breasts. ‘Work here, do you?'

‘Yes, but …' Why was it difficult to say ‘I'm one of the family'? Because her gaze through the thick dark lashes was so frank and approving that he did not want to see it diluted by caution.

‘Never mind.' One set of lashes descended. ‘I won't tell.'

‘Thanks.' Keith picked up an eccles cake. ‘Are you a temp then, or a fixture?'

‘Oh, I'll stay.' She stood upright and passed a cloth over the counter. ‘I like it here.'

‘In spite of the – er – the noises?' Keith could not resist asking. He jerked his head towards the outer wall beyond which the foaling stable had burned down.

‘What noises?' Jo kept the smile wide. She had a lot of good white teeth.

Keith told her.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘I don't pay any attention to that kind of thing.'

‘
I
do.' He gave her the intense goggle that he practised in the mirror, along with other devices to add interest to his unremarkable face.

‘Please yourself.'

William was in London most of the week. When Dorothy came home, Keith made chicken à la king and fried bananas.

At her clinic, Dorothy had seen a small boy, the only son of divorced parents: bed-wetting at six, night terrors, withdrawn at school – the classic loss–separation reactions.

‘He made me think of Rob,' she told Keith. ‘Hair in his eyes, long skinny legs, two big front teeth. Jittery, looking over his shoulder for trouble.'

‘Father not interested?' Keith liked it when Doctor Dottie discussed cases with him.

‘That's it, but the mother is obsessed. She makes him her whole life.'

‘Poor little sod,' Keith said. ‘At least you can't say that of Tessa.'

‘She does dote on Rob, you know.'

‘In her way.'

‘Have more of this good rice, Keith. You're still horribly thin. Why didn't you come in for lunch?'

‘I couldn't get away from the
führer
. I sneaked something later in the tea-room. Ruth wasn't there, but I conned the new woman.'

‘That's not fair.' He couldn't con his aunt about rules.

‘What do you think of her?' Keith changed the subject.

‘All right so far.' Dorothy thought Jo was a real find, but she had seen too many come and go.

After Keith went to bed, she parcelled up the beautiful dressing-gown that Angela Stern had left behind in her distress. She knew that William had been enchanted, and that he had gone off to London depressed. Poor pet. Normal, though, at his age.