Enough to Kill a Horse (9 page)

Susan twisted her glass around in her fingers before she answered. She watched with concentration the way the liquid in the glass tilted first to one side, then to the other. Her square young face had its inscrutable look.

‘What would you do if you were me?’ she asked at length.

‘Take it, I think,’ Fanny said.

‘That’s what I thought – until this evening,’ Susan said.

‘What happened this evening?’

‘I don’t know, that’s just the point,’ Susan said, so quietly that it might not have been intended for Fanny’s ears. She went on, ‘It was awfully good of the Gregorys to bother and I like the sound of the job very much and I know that sooner or later I ought to get away from home. But I’m not quite sure that this is actually the right time …’

It looked as if, after a hesitation, she was intending to say more, but just then her father came up to them.

‘Fanny, I owe you an apology,’ he said.

He said it ironically, as if the suggestion that any action of his might make apology seriously necessary was naturally absurd.

Fanny took it in this spirit, saying, ‘I can’t believe my ears, Tom.’

He grinned and patted her shoulders. ‘You’re a nice girl, Fanny. I’d sooner practise apologizing on you than on anyone I know. But the fact is, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry I upset Jean and Colin. This girl here and Minnie gave me a terrible talking to when I got home. I meant it all for the best, of course, and when I told Colin that if he had any normal self-respect he’d have something better to do with his time than spend it sticking his nose into other people’s business, I didn’t say anything that I don’t mean and wouldn’t be ready to repeat when the occasion warranted it. But I do see that I ought not to have spoken in that way in front of Jean. She’s a good girl – she’s generous and she’s loyal and I have a very high opinion of her. It was just like her to turn on me as she did, when that good-for-nothing she’s married to couldn’t do anything but pretend to be amused at the home-truths I’d handed out to him.’

‘But, Tom, I always thought you liked Colin Gregory quite a lot?’ Fanny said.

Tom’s small, red, wrinkled face took on an expression of contempt.

‘I put up with him,’ he said. ‘I put up with him good-humouredly, as I try to with all the other half-educated baboons in this dump – ’

‘Daddy!’ Susan said warningly.

He paused, frowned, then his lipless mouth closed over his large false teeth. He nodded his large head at her, giving his high-pitched, nervous laugh.

‘Quite right, girl, quite right,’ he said. ‘I was apologizing, wasn’t I? And I’ll do it – I’ll do it right, if it kills me. Fanny – ’

‘Ah, we’ll take it as read, Tom,’ she said. ‘And when you meet Colin next in The Waggoners, I’d just forget the whole thing. Pretend it didn’t happen.’

‘For Jean’s sake, you mean?’ he said.

‘For Jean’s sake,’ she agreed tactfully, thinking of peace, of peace at any price, as she had been enjoying it until the day when Kit had told her of his engagement to Laura Greenslade.

Looking at Sir Peter, she thought that he was another person who understood the value of peace. But she noticed now that he was no longer looking as calm and cheerful as he had a short time before. He was listening intently to Clare, who had got into one of her talking spells, but he was frowning and there was a distinct look of strain on his face. Fanny wondered what Clare could be saying that was making him look like that, and decided that later that evening she would insist on being told the reason for Clare’s strange desire to meet him.

Only a few minutes later he got up to leave. His manner, as he said goodbye to Fanny and Basil, was oddly absent. He thanked them for a delightful evening, saying that he was particularly glad to have met Miss Forwood and particularly sorry to have missed meeting Mrs Greenslade. But his mind, while he was speaking, seemed to be on something else.

Clare, still where he had left her, was staring musingly into space, even more lost to the world, for the moment, than Sir Peter. From the doorway, in which he turned to look at her once more, he gave her a little bow but she seemed not even to see it.

Soon after Sir Peter had gone, Mrs McLean left and soon after her, the Mordues. Basil went out to the gate with them, while Fanny stood in front of the old, gilt-framed mirror, looking questioningly into the peculiarly lengthened, pallid face that stared back at her out of the flawed glass. Basil, returning, began at once to tidy the room.

‘For God’s sake, leave it!’ Fanny exclaimed, as he started collecting the glasses on to a tray. ‘Let’s all have another drink and forget the whole blasted show.’

He took no notice of her but went on with his clearing and straightening. Picking up the dish that had held the lobster patties, on which there were only half a dozen left, he said, ‘I should think these could go into the furnace, couldn’t they?’

‘I should think they could!’ Fanny said. She took a look at the dish. ‘Six! Only six left. Well, if he spends the night being sick, he can’t say I didn’t warn him. I never saw anything so extraordinary in my life.’ She threw herself into a chair. ‘Kit, get me another drink. Then you might go up and see how Laura is. See if she’s feeling well enough to have dinner with us, or if she’d like something on a tray, or what. And tell her that the lobster patties were wonderful and that they all got eaten. You know …’ She reached out to take the glass that Kit had filled for her. ‘I can’t think why one actually bothers with food at all on these occasions. People don’t really want to eat, they only want drinks and something for their hands to fiddle with. But it’s a chance for me to show off with one of the few things I can do well so that’s why I do it. But I’ll never do it again, never.’ She gulped her drink, leant back and closed her eyes.

Kit went out of the room. A faint crunching sound from Clare’s corner of the room told Fanny that she was eating salted almonds.

Opening her eyes again, Fanny asked, ‘Well, did you get what you wanted from the Poulter man?’

‘I didn’t want anything from him,’ Clare replied.

‘What did you want then?’

‘Just to see what he was like.’

‘Oh come – there’s got to be some reason for your interest in him.’

‘There is, of course. But that’s really all I wanted – just to see what he was like.’

‘Did you tell him so?’

‘What do you imagine?’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t – though I don’t really see why not. But you must have said something to upset him.’

‘I?’ Clare said in surprise.

Fanny nodded.

‘What makes you think so?’ Clare asked warily.

‘His whole manner changed a little while before he left, and he wasn’t talking to anyone but you, so I thought it must have been something you’d said to him.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Clare said. ‘I really don’t. I can’t think of anything that could have … Are you sure?’

‘No, of course not, I don’t know him well enough to be sure. Perhaps he was just bored at the whole thing and at that point stopped pretending not to be.’

‘Oh, I don’t think he was bored,’ Clare said a little sharply.

‘Well, are you going to see him again?’ Fanny asked.

Clare looked irritated, as if she found that Fanny was asking too many questions.

‘Probably,’ she said shortly.

‘When?’ Fanny persisted.

‘I don’t know. Tomorrow perhaps. I’ll tell you all about it some time, when I know a little more clearly what I think about it all myself.’

‘It’s all very mysterious.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’

‘I liked him myself,’ Fanny said. ‘I hope we see some more of him.’

‘I expect you will.’

But in this Clare was wrong. She was wrong in thinking that she would see Sir Peter the next day or indeed that she or Fanny would ever see him again.

As he walked back to his house along the quiet village street, he was taken violently ill, and late in the night, in extreme pain, with Dr McLean at his bedside, working uselessly to save his life, Sir Peter Poulter died.

Dr McLean was a small, slight, grey-haired man, curiously like his wife in appearance and manner. His skin was less sun burnt than hers, since he had less time to spend in the garden than she, but his face, like hers, was long and thin and deeply lined, with the same kind smile and clear blue gentle gaze.

However, he had not quite her capacity for concentrating his thoughts on only one thing, which meant that he had never quite achieved such serenity as hers. His narrow forehead sometimes wrinkled in a worried frown and the blue eyes became deeply troubled. Yet even at such times they seldom lost their look of sympathy. There was sympathy in them, as well as the shadow of a great tiredness and anxiety, as he told Fanny and Basil, on the morning after the death of Sir Peter Poulter, that he was not wholly satisfied as to the cause of that death.

Dr McLean had come straight from Sir Peter’s house to theirs and asked to see them alone. They had not yet had breakfast. Fanny, in an old quilted dressing gown and with her hair more unkempt than usual, had been in the kitchen, yawning as she filled the electric kettle to make tea. Basil, fully dressed and as neat as ever, had been laying the fire in the sitting room.

Because of Dr McLean’s insistence that he wanted to speak to them privately, they took him into the small room behind the antique shop, which was used by Fanny as an office. But no one else in the house was stirring yet. Only Spike took an interest in Dr McLean’s arrival. Pattering along the passage with his claws clicking on the stone flags, he sat down outside the closed door of the little office, scratching at it and whining to be let in. Dr McLean wished that Fanny and Basil would either let the dog in or send him away. The soft little whines worked on the doctor’s tired nerves so that they seemed to be almost the last straw after the terrible night.

Controlling himself, he watched the looks of shock and horror on the two faces before him. Fanny’s face expressed the more, tears gathering quickly in her eyes and trickling unregarded down her cheeks. Basil’s face became drawn and remote, with a look in the eyes which surprised the doctor. It was almost, he thought afterwards, a look of calculation.

It was Fanny who said in a shaking voice, ‘The lobster – it was that frightful lobster.’

Dr McLean closed his eyes for a moment, partly from exhaustion and partly to shut out the sight of what he saw dawning in her face.

‘That’s what I wanted to ask you about, my dear,’ he said. ‘I want you to tell me all about what Sir Peter had to eat and drink while he was here. Because, you see, he had nothing to eat after he got home. He was already feeling ill by the time he got in – in fact he had his first attack of vomiting by the garden gate.’

‘The lobster,’ Fanny repeated. It was plain that she was hardly listening to what he was saying. ‘I tried to stop him eating it. I knew there was something horribly wrong with it. But he said it was delicious and he would go on … I couldn’t understand it. None of us could, because it tasted awful.’

‘You mean you could actually taste that there was something wrong with it?’ Dr McLean asked.

‘Taste it!’ Fanny said. ‘No one else even tried to eat it.’

‘Yet Sir Peter liked it?’

‘Yes, and he insisted on going on with it, even when I tried to take it away from him. I did try, Dr McLean, I really did. They’ll all tell you so. It must be my fault that poor man’s dead – I must have got more absent-minded than usual and put some frightful thing into the sauce – but when I tasted how awful it was I did try to take it away from him. I didn’t mean to do him any harm. I liked him. I thought he was so – ’

Basil interrupted her by pressing a hand on her shoulder.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said. ‘Don’t start saying that. The lobster itself must have been bad.’

‘But then it would have tasted quite different,’ she said. ‘In fact, with all those spices, it might have tasted perfectly all right. But that horrible bitter thing must have been something that I put in, in mistake for the paprika or the brandy or I don’t know what.’

‘Bitter?’ Dr McLean said.

‘Yes,’ Basil said, ‘it was very unpleasantly bitter.’

‘Yet Sir Peter liked it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t that very strange?’

‘It is.’

‘And no one else besides Sir Peter liked it?’

‘No one at all. In fact, I don’t think anyone else swallowed more than one mouthful.’

‘Then it looks as if the lobster probably was the cause of the trouble,’ the doctor said. He spoke hesitantly, glancing unhappily from one face to the other, then down at his own hands. ‘It’s terribly sad, but – well, these things happen. I know how you must be feeling, but don’t blame yourselves. No one could possibly think of blaming either of you. But I think it would be a good thing, don’t you, if I took some of the remnants away with me for analysis? We may all feel certain it was the lobster, but we’ll have to make sure.’

He waited for an answer. When none came, he looked up again at the two faces before him. Fanny, he thought, might not even have heard what he had said. She was staring before her while the tears ran down her cheeks and splashed from her chin on to the old quilted dressing-gown, making wet blotches on the shabby material. But Basil, sitting on the arm of her chair and with his hand still upon her shoulder, was watching Dr McLean with an unfamiliar look of wariness in the bright, dark eyes that usually looked so candid and innocent.

Outside in the passage Spike whined again and scratched impatiently at the door.

‘Well?’ Dr McLean said, a little more abruptly.

‘The trouble is,’ Basil said quietly, ‘there aren’t any remnants.’

‘But you said – ’

‘I know, that most people left theirs. They did, and the sight was so unpleasant that I collected them all as soon as the party broke up and dumped the lot in the furnace. And later in the evening we washed up, so there aren’t even any scraps left on plates or in the saucepan that Fanny used when she cooked the stuff.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s unfortunate,’ Basil said.

‘It is.’

‘But what difference does it make?’ Fanny wailed suddenly. ‘We know it was the lobster and we know it was my fault. It’s no good trying to tell me it wasn’t. I invited that poor old man here and I gave him poison and killed him. I didn’t mean to, but it feels just as bad as if I’d done it on purpose. I killed him by being careless and muddled and absent-minded, and that’s as bad as doing it on purpose, and I don’t know how I’m going to live with that thought in my mind now. I’m not going to be able to bear it. I never wanted to harm anyone and I shall go mad!’