Skeleton-in-Waiting (13 page)

“I think you're making a mistake, Mrs Walsh. We're not trying to buy you off. We genuinely feel we should help in a case like …”

“I need no help. I have needed none all my life. What I have done I have done without help. If you wish, you may come and see how I live.”

Without waiting to see whether Louise in fact did wish, Mrs Walsh turned and started to hobble up the stairs, crab-wise, putting her left foot up a step and leaning her weight on her stick while she hoisted her right foot up beside it. The process had the deftness of long practice, and looked almost graceful, as though Mrs Walsh's powerful will was able to impose her own notions of order on the entropy of dissolution into old age. Louise followed her. The cold, if anything, increased as they went up.

The stair-carpet reached only a couple of steps beyond the first turn. After that came bare boards. At the top was a low ceilinged landing, carpetless and bare apart from a small ebony table with one drawer, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. All the doors onto the landing were closed, but Mrs Walsh opened one and held it like a landlady showing prospective lodgers round her boarding house. Beyond the door was a large bare room, directly beneath the roof, to judge by the shape of the ceiling. Two grimy dormers showed the back of the brick crenellations of a parapet. The only furniture was an upright wooden chair beside a black pot-bellied stove in the middle of the far wall. The room was no warmer than the stairs, but smelt faintly of that special kind of rather peppery smoke you get when somebody has been trying to light a fire and failed. There was, in any case, nothing to burn, no log-basket or coke-scuttle.

Louise walked into the room and turned. Mrs Walsh waited at the door. The tour continued. There was a bedroom, containing a bed, table with mirror, and chair, all old and plain; another room, smelling strongly of mothballs, with nothing in it but four old tin trunks against the walls, their lids stencilled “Major J. J. Walsh”; a kitchen with one chair and table and a condemnable gas stove; an icy bathroom with an equally dangerous-looking water-heater. The whole flat spoke of a life as bleak as those lived in the most basic and possessionless mud huts which Louise had been shown in the Sahel, but the inhabitants there had listlessly endured her coming, answered her translated questions in tones of no hope, stared at her with the large but lightless eyes of starvation. Mrs Walsh, though, seemed to vibrate with renewed energies as she hobbled round. The tap of her stick on the gnarled planking was a rattle of triumph. At last she turned and waited with an air of challenge beside the little black table on the landing. Louise felt an impulse to try and put Mrs Walsh off her balance by asking about this. It had an oddity about it. It was ugly but well-made, the only good piece of furniture in the whole flat, and as such seemed to have a symbolic quality, as if asserting something about Mrs Wash and her past life, rather in the way that the diamond brooch did. But this wasn't a game, so she asked the expected question.

“What happened? Was it all in the warehouse with the books?”

“I burnt it in my stove. What I could not burn I took out piece by piece and threw in the river.”

Louise stared.

“When you reach my age,” said Mrs Walsh, “you cannot know how soon you may die. You must do necessary things while you still possess the strength and will. That is all I am prepared to tell you. I have shown you this so that you may tell your father with what little comfort I am prepared to live. As his loyal subject I am grateful to him for his continued permission to reside here, in recognition of my husband's long service to His late Majesty. As I have said, I need no more help than that. None at all.”

She moved aside and waited for Louise to go first down the stairs, but Louise stayed where she was.

“Yes, I see,” she said. “I don't understand, I mean, but I suppose I accept what you're telling me. It's very difficult. You see, Aunt Bea really ought not to have Granny's papers. I know she wouldn't do anything to let my family down, and I'm sure you wouldn't either, but it doesn't stop people being extremely jumpy about them being here. You've read a lot of them by now. You know the sort of things Granny said about people. The trouble is, that the rest of us don't know exactly what she said, and there's people in the Palace and the Foreign Office and so on who are already putting pressures on my father to hand the problem over to the security services. I can't tell you what a nuisance that might be, not just to us, but to you and Aunt Bea too. They'll want to come and see you, and ask all sorts of questions, and bother people who used to know you, and so on. The reason I'm here at all is because we've been fighting them off, trying to save Aunt Bea—and you too, of course—that kind of fuss, but I'm afraid if Aunt Bea's going to go on taking that line that's the next thing that'll happen.”

Louise had been reasonably sure that Mrs Walsh was going to refuse her first appeal, and so had thought out her line with care; she had spoken in tones of sympathetic worry, and got it about right; but she hadn't expected to enjoy the process. It was the sort of devious, bullying, backstairs work which her ancestors had employed courtiers for, and which had in the end got most other monarchies booted into exile. As it turned out, though, she felt no shame. The tour of the flat had changed her attitude to Mrs Walsh. Previously she had found her forbidding but impressive and, despite the nuisance of her intervention into the imbroglio over Granny's papers, had assumed that it was nice for Aunt Bea to have fallen so quickly into the dependent relationship she needed—anyway, a distinct improvement on Granny. Now she began to wonder whether Mrs Walsh mightn't turn out to be an even worse monster.

Mrs Walsh listened to the speech, nodded a couple of times and tapped her stick on the ground. The cold on the landing seemed to close round them. It struck Louise that there might be a far more basic and straightforward explanation for Mrs Walsh's wish to prolong the sorting of Granny's papers, at least till the summer.

“It must have been desperately cold here in that spell we had in January,” she said.

“Your winters are nothing. I have known real cold. I have seen my mother left to die in the snow like a foundered horse, with the dribblings freezing to her cheek.”

“How ghastly.”

“It is how we were treated.”

“Let's go and warm ourselves up with a pot of tea.”

Louise was in bed, giving Davy his goodnight feed, when the telephone rang. She picked it up with her free hand and cradled it into her shoulder.

“Lulu? I got a message to call you.”

“You owe me a bottle of champagne or something.”

“I can spare a Mars Bar. What are we celebrating?”

“Aunt Bea says we can have Granny's papers back.”

“Excellent. How did you manage it?”

“I went over and saw her this afternoon. I had a bit of luck, because I spotted Mrs Walsh on the way and gave her a lift, and that meant I got a chance to ask her not to come in while I was talking to Aunt Bea. Anyway Aunt Bea tried to tell me a lot of fibs which Mrs Walsh had put her up to about Granny giving express orders that she had to hang on to the papers, so I trotted off to see Mrs Walsh. I talked to her about the pension, but she wasn't interested—do you know she lives in the most appallingly spartan way, no carpets, no heat, a hard bed, a few kitchen chairs; she showed me to prove she didn't want anything. She's a bit dotty, I think. I'm not sure she's going to be good for Aunt Bea after all. Anyway, when she said no to the pension hike I told her that in that case we'd hand the whole thing over to Security, and they'd start investigating her …”

“I trust you didn't put it in those terms.”

“Of course not. I said what a nuisance it was going to be for poor Aunt Bea, and just mentioned they'd do Mrs Walsh too while they were at it, but we both knew what I was talking about. Anyway Aunt Bea rang up before I'd even got home and left a desperate sort of message with Joan. Poor old thing. I felt awful when I rang her, listening to her squirming. But the upshot is I'm going over to pick the papers up next week.”

“We could send people round.”

“I'd rather do it myself. It'll be Janine's day off, so I'll take Davy over and let Aunt Bea hold him. John can carry the heavy stuff. I'll take one of the big cars. It'll be all right. I thought if we just send men round Aunt Bea doesn't even know …”

“Well, if you can spare the time.”

“Davy will love the ride. And then that'll leave your people free to see what they can do about Alex Romanov. How's that going?”

“Last I heard they were having trouble locating the blighter.”

“What does that mean?”

“He's pushed off somewhere. Gone skiing or something.”

“I wouldn't have thought he was the type. Piers might know. I'll ask him, soon as he comes to bed. Hold it, I'm just switching the brat to the other barrel. No, don't ring off—I want to know about Soppy … OK, ready now. Joan told me you'd found her.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that's something. You don't sound too happy.”

“No. That is to say, from our own immediate point of view, things have perhaps taken a turn for the better. It seems that we all rather misjudged the Lipchitzes. They'd only had the girl in the house a couple of days before they'd cottoned on something was seriously wrong …”

“She probably ate a passing steer, or something. Sorry.”

“It is far from funny. They had their doctor flown up from B. A., and a nursing team to keep an eye on her. I've talked to the doctor. He knows his stuff. He's doped her pretty thoroughly and we're making arrangements to have her flown home.”

“How bad is it?”

“Can't say. These things take a hell of a lot of investigation and trial and error. Most of them are more treatable than they used to be though, but even when you've come up with a treatment you don't always know what went wrong in the first place. She'll certainly need treatment, and there's a very good chance that it will be effective.”

“Poor thing. I suppose the next question is, is it the same thing Lady Bakewell had?”

“Whatever that was. Schizophrenia appears to have an hereditary element. We did a pretty thorough investigation at the time, and we couldn't turn up anyone else in the family who had shown signs of instability.”

“I sometimes think that you have to be a bit potty to be as unpleasant as Aunt Eloise.”

“Power mania is not a recognised disease. It is a normal human condition. You have of course hit on the most serious aspect of the problem, as it concerns us. All I can say is we won't be able to make up our minds until we've been able to form some sort of diagnosis of Soppy's case …”

“At least you can let everyone know it was mainly pressure from the bloody hacks that brought it on.”

“Do you think so?”

“Well, it must have been.”

“Not necessarily, but in any case not what I meant. If we take that line, whether openly or with a leak or two, they'll go on the defensive, and their best line will be that Soppy was mentally unstable from the start and we should never have let Albert marry her. That, of course, is why it's such good news that you've persuaded Beatrice to release my mother's papers. My own view is that there are going to be quite enough busybodies of various kinds taking the line you suggest for us not to need to. We are proud to have a free press and while regretting certain recent excesses blah blah blah.”

“And let them tear each other's throats out.”

“If we're lucky we might get two or three months of slightly less repulsive manners.”

“From some of them, anyway.”

“It's about the best we can hope for. Look after yourself, darling.”

“Same to you.”

Davy had fallen asleep between suck and suck, a bad habit he was supposed to be getting out of. Louise squinted down at the almost abstract shapes, the round cheeks, the round skull, the round of her breast. How long was Father going to live? No guessing—you couldn't help feeling that someone with such a bad temper might pop off any moment. He'd often said he was going to retire when he was sixty-five, like everyone else—in seven years' time that would be—supposing Mrs T. would let him. She intended to be still going by then, and she might regard it as a bad precedent. Let's say he did, Davy would be pushing eight … of course it wasn't really going to matter until Albert snuffed it or retired, and by then his two would be in their forties and if they were going off their rockers it would have shown up, surely … Only the in-between years, growing up as a might-be-heir, that would be bad … worse if he'd been a girl, of course … poor Soppy.

“Oh, come on, you little brute. Wake up!”

In answer to her shake Davy tilted his head away from the breast and snored, the personification of smug male apathy. Briskly Louise swung herself out of the bed, took him back to the nursery, slapped a dry nappy round him and shoved him down into his cot. Of course he would wake in less than an hour in an outrage of wind. Let him.

3

“Not a word. He was supposed to ring me—when was it? Friday.”

(They had already talked about Soppy, back and forth, round and round, useless. They had kissed and started to drowse when the grit of a small undissolved duty had grated in the wards of sleep and woken Louise to ask about Alex.)

“What about?”

“Some sort of traffic control project his firm wants to tender for. It involves a bit of math I did a paper on a few years back—too abstruse for anyone on his team, but I've got a student who could do with the money. There's a deadline on the tender, apparently.”

“So he hasn't gone skiing.”

“Wouldn't have thought so. Most likely they've decided not to use Simon and Alex as a result is locked up with a towel round his head trying to sort out the math himself.”