Fruitful Bodies (30 page)

But at breakfast Warwick, entering the dining room at the same time as James, saw that there was more than poor eyesight affecting Bunny this morning. Bunny was sitting in her usual chair and judging by the food that had accumulated round her, appeared to have been there for some time. She was voraciously eating porridge, shovelling it in as if it were some sort of live slime that might evade capture unless she chased it round the bowl and worried it into the spoon with urgent jerks of her hand. And her appetite seemed to have brought with it a taste for peculiar combinations because, after glancing up from her porridge-guzzling with a cursory good morning, she busied herself with sucking hard on a slice of lemon which she lifted from the saucer of lemon slices on the table. The saucer was nearly empty and several strands of rind, nibbled clean of lemon juice and flesh, lay on Bunny’s side plate.

‘I simply must have something sharp to taste,’ she muttered, sensing perhaps by the stunned silence of her admirers that an explanation was called for. ‘Ivan’s porridge is so good, of course, whatever you say, I think I could eat it all
morning, but
this
morning I must also, I
must
have something sharp.’ She leaned forward with a dry smack of the lips and seized the last lemon slice almost from under the nose of Jane, who sighed and stirred her lemonless herbal tea.

Bunny’s improved appetite was not matched by any improvement in her appearance. Even under her chalky face powder, small livid spots were beginning to show and her hair had the dusty look of dead grass. When not actually eating she rubbed her hands together briskly as if she were cold. Her eyelids were weighted not just with her usual industrial quantities of tarry make-up but also with fluid, while her lips and eyebrows were puckering slightly, rising and falling as if engaged in a far-off conversation that only they knew about. She placed the last chewed lemon rind on her plate.

‘My body is telling me something,’ she announced with a twitch of the eyes, mainly to Jane. ‘That’s how it works, you see, once one is properly in tune. The body calls for what it needs—liquid, vitamins, sweet or sharp—and redresses its own imbalances! Our task—what I am doing now—is simply to listen and give it what it needs!’

James’s body was at that moment telling him it needed bacon, eggs, toast and coffee, badly, and he did not reply. Warwick chewed bravely on a spoonful of dried nuts and seeds. Jane’s was presumably telling her it needed to satisfy some cannibalistic craving, since the finger-ends of one hand had disappeared into her mouth and her jaw was hard at work on her nails. She rose from the table. Sighing again, and sliding the hand from her mouth she said dolefully, ‘Dr Golightly’s changed my balneotherapy prescription. I’m changing from seaweed to luma today,’ and seeing James’s face she added, ‘to stimulate circulation. The seaweed was for body tension and high blood pressure.’
She wafted towards the door and turned. ‘I’ve got numb fingers. Though frankly after what I’ve been through, it’s amazing I’m not numb all over.’ Before anyone could respond she had left the room, leaving another sigh behind her.

‘Divorce,’ Warwick whispered to James. ‘Recent. Taking it badly.’

‘What a fuss,’ Bunny said crossly. ‘When you’ve been through it as often as I have …’

‘But, dear lady …’

She waved away his concern. ‘Warwick dear, we shall continue in the studio this afternoon, shan’t we? The head!’ It was half entreaty, half command. Speaking seemed to cost her some effort and loose porridge and saliva were now exiting from the corners of her mouth.

‘But, dear lady, don’t you feel that perhaps you’re tiring yourself …?’

‘Of course I’m not tired. I’m having massage and balneotherapy this morning. I’m having oatmeal, for my dry skin. We’ll start as usual straight after I’ve had my rest, at three o’clock.’ With a shaky smile she got up and cooed, with an ancient burble from somewhere deep in her chest, ‘See you in a while, crocodile,’ and then tottered from the room.

For several moments the only sounds were James’s attack on his bowl of mixed cereals and Warwick’s disappointed throat-clearing. James looked up.

‘Nice cravat, Warwick,’ he said, through a mouthful of husks.

*     *     *

I
MMEDIATELY AFTER
lunch, James’s bowels expressed a violent objection to Ivan’s ratatouille and wholemeal macaroni,
and back up in the bathroom of the Wisteria Suite he groaned not only with pain but with the injustice of it, for the meal had been delicious and he had eaten lots. He himself would have used three times as much olive oil and thrown in parmesan but had reached the conclusion, after the first mouthful, that Ivan’s was better for being without.

The dining room had been busier than usual, with half a dozen or so Open Day visitors, as well as Bunny’s daughter and son-in-law who seemed to be permanent visitors. James had discovered, too late, that all of his fellow patients had opted to lunch in their rooms and so avoid scrutiny.

‘D’you want to skip off back up to the Wisteria then, sweetheart?’ Yvonne had asked confidingly, when she had found him hovering. ‘We’re run off our feet doing trays but we could manage one more if you like.’ James had smiled bravely and stayed. But just as he had finished his plateful and was wondering about seconds, his innards had cruelly informed him that whatever he might think the ratatouille and macaroni were not going down well with
them
.

Rather exhausted and already late for his art therapy, he came downstairs again to find the hall milling with clinic staff and people holding neat little folders with the Sulis Clinic logo on the front. Dr Golightly was busy assigning them to members of staff for the guided tour part of the afternoon, one couple each to himself, Sister Yvonne, Ivan and Hilary, who were wearing evangelical smiles. James slipped past.

Halfway down the corridor which led to the art studio, the swell of voices from the hall grew faint. Just then, drifting out from the music room came the sound of quite
good,
extremely
good, cello-playing. Boccherini, perhaps? He stopped and looked at his watch, because his first thought was that Sara must be here early (he was expecting her at four) but listening a moment longer he realised that neither the instrument nor the playing was hers. Not as sure, impassioned, intense; not, to be truthful, as good. Silently, he opened the door a fraction and slid into the room. At once the playing stopped. Joyce was sitting with her cello in a high-backed chair in front of the open french window. On a long table sat an array of instruments, enough to equip a small percussion band. Pretzel, covered loosely by a blanket, lay nearby with a bowl of water on a newspaper beside him. Joyce stared at James, startled. Her face was flushed and she was breathing rather hard.

‘Sorry. Did I disturb?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t mean to put you out.’

‘I’m perfectly fine,’ Joyce said, a touch defensively. ‘I’ve just this minute got back in. I just popped out for a few messages. I had things to get. I’m just out of puff, getting back up that hill in a hurry.’ James followed her eyes, which glanced behind her at the french window and then rather nervously at her large black handbag under the electronic keyboard. ‘I thought you might be the visitors. I was supposed to be in here, playing when they come.’ She drew herself up.

‘I think they’re probably on their way. It was very nice, anyway,’ James said. ‘Was that Boccherini? Lovely piece.’ He did not know what else to say, it seeming to him inappropriate to congratulate a former professor on regaining a standard of competence. ‘I’m very impressed,’ he said, truthfully.

Joyce inclined her head graciously. ‘It’s what I’m here
to do. I’m to be here playing when the visitors come.’ She had been tidied up quite effectively, James noticed, and a large shiny badge on her sweatshirt said
The Sulis Clinic—Naturopathy Works!

‘Really …’ James hesitated, wondering if he was about to sound patronising, ‘your playing was lovely. The visitors are going to come expecting concerts, not health treatments.’

‘Music’d do most of them more good than the other stuff,’ Joyce said with tired certainty, getting up and placing her cello against the wall. ‘Music’s good for you. Anyhow, when I’m playing I’m thinking about wee Pretzel here, not the visitors. I’m playing for him. He likes me playing to him when he’s not well, don’t you, son?’

Pretzel stirred at the sound of his name, and his tail gave one tired flip against the floor.

‘I think he’s got a wee chill. He’s all trembly and thirsty. And his number twos, they’re—’

‘Oh, I think I just heard them,’ James said, quickly, glancing over his shoulder. ‘Your visitors are on their way. Must go. You get better now, Pretzel, you hear me?’

James made off down the passage and round the corner to the art studio on the other side of the building, where the atmosphere, the moment he escaped through the door and had closed it behind him, struck him as even more than usually calm. The bright sun streaming directly in set a silvery halo round the two silhouetted heads of the only other people in the room. Warmth and light flooded in through the line of three french windows opposite the door and for a moment it seemed that the specks of dust sparkling in the slanting beams of sunlight were all that moved. But Bunny, who was sitting with her back to
James, facing Warwick, who posed magnificently still in his usual chair in front of the french windows, was rather frantically shaving feathers of clay from her sculpture. No noise, except for the faint
pring-pring
of birds in the high trees outside, could be heard. If Joyce had resumed her little concert for her dog, the sound did not reach this far.

James drew breath to say good afternoon but thought better of it. Bunny was clearly in her fiercest mood, since Warwick had not dared even to lift a hand in greeting. And as he dithered, wondering whether to leave or settle quietly to his own laughable efforts with clay, he became aware that there
was
a sound, a slight, rhythmic, whistling snuffle, coming from Bunny’s direction. She certainly was concentrating hard. James took a step to one side, and the change in viewpoint sent the sun’s glare behind a section of wall between the windows. The room’s black and silver stripes of shade and light and the haloed silhouettes of Bunny and Warwick solidified. Seeing her properly now, he saw also that Bunny was snuffling through trickles of dark blood which ran unchecked from her nostrils. She turned sunken eyes to his, desperate to speak but unable to, either because the dead tongue which flapped in her mouth was too paralysed or because the twitching, blinking, jerking of her face and neck prevented speech. She raised a hand in a gesture of entreaty or hopelessness, and James now understood that she had not been energetically sculpting at all, but trying to scrape blood-stained vomit from the half-worked clay in front of her. His eyes followed the shaking hand still clutching the scalpel which was now pointing, with terrible effort, towards Warwick, whose condition was much less distressing. He was merely dead, strangled with his pale blue and crimson cravat.

B
Y THE TIME
Sara arrived James had negotiated a pot of Earl Grey with sugar for himself and was lying on his bed under blankets, trying not to tremble. Just slightly aware of being able to insist, for a while at least, on having exactly what he wanted, he had refused to let anyone be with him except Sara. She sat debating whether or not to hold his hand, thinking profanely that despite the shakiness he looked rather better than when she had last seen him. The shock had somehow perked him up. She had already listened once to his animated sugar-fuelled account of what he had seen and had allowed him to lapse again into silence, thinking he might sleep. He was still staring at the ceiling, but his shakes had grown gradually less seismic and had now almost stopped.

She said, ‘Andrew came with me, you know. The minute you rang, we both came. We got here before the police. Though they’re here now, of course.’

James nodded and smiled palely. After a blurred ten minutes which started with his horrified dashing from the room, then shouts, which must have been his, and the stampede of hurrying feet, he had had the sensation of extraordinary calm, as if all that could happen had happened
and the consequences would be for others to deal with. He had managed to use someone’s mobile phone to ring Sara. A minute or two later the shaking had taken hold of him and he had had to be brought upstairs and fussed over by Sister Yvonne. Sara had arrived some time later.

‘I’m glad you managed to ring us. Andrew’s switched straight into work mode. He’s downstairs now, handing things over.’ She sighed. ‘And getting in the way, probably. He won’t be leading the enquiry, you see. Andrew knows too many of the people here personally. Somebody new called Askew’s in charge. Want some more of your tea? It’s just about still warm.’

James pulled himself up a little, took the cup and drank shakily. ‘Oh, sugar,’ he said, slowly. ‘Shoo-gar.’ He smiled with more certainty. ‘Christ, Sara, it really was ghastly.’ He drank some more.