The Realms of Gold (41 page)

 

When Karel Schmidt's telegram arrived in Adra, it was read, solemnly, by the secretary of the conference, by various other official people, and finally by Patsy Comford and David Ollerenshaw, who were thought to be most likely to know what to do about it. It was at first assumed that it was simply another telegram in the sequence which had arrived upon Frances Wingate's breakfast tray that morning, but Patsy and David, staring at it after a long and wearing day in the tin mines, were at last not so sure. It said:
POSTCARD RECEIVED SEVERAL MONTHS LATE SORRY ABOUT SILENCE AM CATCHING NEXT PLANE TO ADRA SEE YOU SOON HARLING
.

‘Funny,' said Patsy, ‘the way they always get darling wrong. It couldn't be from a man called Harling, could it?'

‘No, it couldn't,' said David.

‘Well then, who is it from? We ought to send him a telegram and tell him not to come all this way, he'll be terribly annoyed if he gets here and finds she's gone.'

‘Yes,' said David, at this statement of the obvious.

‘But we don't know who he is, do we?'

‘No,'

‘Did she ever tell you about anyone? It couldn't be from her ex, could it?'

‘Ex-husbands don't address one as darling, do they?'

‘Oh, sometimes,' said Patsy, vaguely, then went on, ‘Actually, I bet I know who it's from, it's from her lover with the false teeth.'

‘Did she have a lover with false teeth?'

‘Yes, didn't you know?'

‘What was he called?'

‘I've no idea.'

‘Then there's not much to go on, is there?'

‘I can't imagine what he wanted to fly out here for, when she'd have been going home on Friday anyway. Can you?'

‘It doesn't look as though they've been very closely in touch lately,' said David, staring at the telegram. And they were still staring at it; and speculating rather wildly about its intentions, when Karel Schmidt, looking distraught and harassed, as well he might, walked into the air-conditioned, fountain-bedewed, jungle-creepered, marble-tiled, fairy-lit lounge of the Hotel Sahara.

 

Janet Bird neé Ollerenshaw was sitting in a television make-up chair staring at her own image with mingled fascination and alarm. She was ceasing to look like herself at all, as the make-up girl put on deep, thick, sticky pancake make-up, and applied mascara to her eyelashes, and back-combed her hair, and powdered her nose, and highlit her cheekbones. Janet was far too subdued to protest, but she couldn't help thinking that it wouldn't be wholly appropriate for her to appear on Midlands tv looking like a receptionist in a smart motel, when in fact she was supposed to be discussing the tragic and appalling death of Great-Aunt Con. The back-combing had the most dramatic effect. It made Janet's face, normally highly respectable, look pert and crazy and sexy. She wondered what words would come out of her mouth, if she spoke. There was a little part of her that rather enjoyed looking so improper.

Most of herself, however, was engaged in feeling guilty. She felt responsible for Great-Aunt Con's death. Not in any obvious way, such as a television interviewer or a social worker might suggest—she didn't feel the slightest guilt for not having visited the old girl, for it was well-known in the neighbourhood that Connie Ollerenshaw was a witch, and chased intruders from her overgrown premises with dogs and curses. But she did feel some obscure responsibility for having willed disaster. She had willed it, very strongly, the week before, and it had happened, pat, on the doormat, like a response straight from heaven. She'd been walking home with Hugh through the churchyard, thinking about supper and when to get the engineer to come and look at the washing machine, as Mark didn't seem to be able to fix it, when a wave of boredom so intense had swept through her that she had stopped in her tracks, and fixed her eyes on the evening star, which was winking away somewhere near the celebrated Perpendicular steeple, and had said, as usual combining deities, Oh God, Oh God, Star light, star bright, First star I've seen tonight. Oh God please make
something
happen, anything, however awful, so long as it's
something
. (But not anything horrible to Hugh or me, she added as a proviso.) And then walked on. And when she got back, there it was, lying on the doormat, the evening paper, with its fearful headline.
OLD WOMAN FOUND DEAD
, it said, and smaller print announced that Miss Constance Ollerenshaw of Mays Cottage had been found dead in her bed, and seemed to have been dead for some time. She had been discovered by a neighbour, Mr James Armstrong, of Mile End Farm, who had called to see how she was, as he hadn't seen her around for some time.

(Mr James Armstrong, in fact, had said to his wife that morning, Have you seen old Con around lately? His wife said no, pulling a face expressing distaste at the idea. I'll go down and have another go at getting her out, said James Armstrong, farmer. Perhaps she's dead, said Nancy Armstrong. If she's dead, she'll save me the trouble, said James. And dead she was.)

The evening paper had tried to hint that her death was the fault of the electricity workers who kept going on strike, but even Janet, not very good at reading between the lines of papers, knew that that was a lot of nonsense, for Mays Cottage had never been on the electric. And the paper had to change its line about that particular cause of death, as it was established the next day that she had been dead for months, ever since the summer, and that hypothermia could not have played even a minor part in the tragedy. This interesting fact was blazed to the world the next day not by the
Tockley and Barton Telegraph
, but by the
Sunday Examiner
, a paper of high intellectual prestige, and undisputed integrity, and Janet, for once, found herself in the position of having a preview of the national news. For as she was giving Hugh his supper that evening, and wondering what Mark would say when he got back from the match (she had already got round to thinking that Mark might blame her for Great-Aunt Con's death, though not the wildest flight of fancy had yet suggested to her that anybody else would), she had been telephoned by the press.

They wanted to know all about Constance Ollerenshaw, her age, her habits, why she lived alone, was the cottage her own, when did Janet last see her, was there anyone else in the family who ever saw her. Janet replied, truthfully, that nobody saw her much, she didn't like people calling on her, and that she, Janet, had probably been the last person to visit her from the Ollerenshaw family. When was that? Oh, about six months ago, said Janet. In the spring.

The news had excited them greatly, and telephone call had succeeded telephone call, throughout the evening. The drama of events gave Janet the satisfaction of seeing Mark, for once, completely out of his depth, unable to work out any way to respond (should he blame her for having been to see Aunt Con so rarely? Should he blame her for having been to see her at all? Should he blame the whole Ollerenshaw family for its disgraceful connections? Should he allow himself to enjoy the slight tremor of importance that reached him from having his wife interrogated by the
Sunday Examiner!
). He would have to come down in favour of some, if not all, of these possibilities, but for some time he seemed genuinely confused. As Janet was also thoroughly confused, however, she couldn't really enjoy his confusion much.

It never occurred to her not to answer the press. Like most people unfamiliar with journalists, she accepted their interrogations with complete docility: it never crossed her mind not to respond. When they descended on her with cameras and tape recorders and note books, she gave them the freedom of her house, as though she were contracted to do so. And here she was now, in a television studio, about to take part in a local news programme, and a discussion about care of the elderly and the collapse of family responsibility. It had, by this time, after some days of activity, become clear to her that there were some people who were out to make a fool of her, who were determined to cast her as the villain of the piece, but she was so sure that she wasn't, that by now some faint stirrings of real opinion of her own had begun to coalesce in her mind; they were beginning to stick together and to thicken, like something stirred in a pan. She hadn't had the confidence to tell the Midlands tv people that she wasn't going to be on their programme, but she was beginning to think that she might be able to say what she wanted to say rather than what they wanted her to say. Though she wasn't quite sure, yet. They were certainly clever at twisting one's remarks.

She felt almost safe, inside the thick greasy pancake make-up. It filled up the pores of her skin, it concealed blemishes, it warmed her all over like a sun-ray lamp, it hid her like impenetrable armour.

Mark had finally decided that she should never have been to see Aunt Con at all, and then she wouldn't have got herself mixed up in all this publicity and disgrace. He didn't seem to think this was a disgraceful attitude to hold, but he'd never been very good at self-criticism. And she'd had to admit to herself that her motives for going to see Aunt Con hadn't been very honourable. She had been asked so often to recall that insignificant-seeming visit that it had got a little blurred in her memory, but she thought she'd gone out of perversity, partly, to annoy her family, but in fact she hadn't annoyed them with it because it had been so awful that she'd never, until now, thought of telling anyone about it.

Great-Aunt Con wasn't at all popular with Janet's parents and grandparents, because she had belonged to the wrong side of the family. There had been some family feud, way back in history, between her grandfather Enoch and his first cousin Ted Ollerenshaw, who had owned the nursery garden at Eel Cottage. The row had been over something to do with property—a will, a field, a paddock, something of that sort. Janet suspected that even her elders had forgotten precisely what the trouble had been about, but it had certainly lingered on in the most remarkable way. Connie had been Ted's sister, and report was that she was as mad as he was. The grandfathers were now dead, but Con had lingered on, living alone in the rather large cottage that had come to her, from Bible-crazed Albert Ollerenshaw. Eel Cottage no longer belonged to Ollerenshaws and when it had done, Janet had never visited it, so complete was the family rift, though she had-known that it existed, and indeed had always noticed it, with a kind of thrill of appreciative horror, whenever she passed it on the bus. Recently she had even been inside it, for it had been bought up by friends of the Streets, health food people who went in for organic farming and gave occasional classes on vegetarian cookery for the WEA. Cynthia Street had persuaded Janet to go round there with her for tea one day, on one of her periodic Janet-bullying phases, and she had found it quite interesting. It was in Eel Cottage that the thought of visiting Aunt Con had entered her mind. Heather Stabler (who knew she was related to the people who had owned the cottage before her) showed her some books that had been there when they bought it, and she had leafed through them, politely, as she sipped her watery flowery tea, and ate her cress sandwiches. They were dark spotted copies of Walter Scott and Shakespeare and Carlyle, with wicked ogre Ted Ollerenshaw's firm signature in the corner of each. She was ashamed to find herself surprised that he could write so nicely. In the small-printed Shakespeare, oddly enough, somebody had written comments in the margins, in a handwriting more modern and more youthful than Ted's. Perhaps they had been made by Frank, Ted's clever son who had gone off to University and become a biologist or something like that.

She was no more than politely interested in these ghostly memories (she didn't really want the books, and hoped Heather wasn't going to offer them to her, as she was very pregnant at the time and didn't want to have to lug worthless old volumes all the way back to Tockley)—but livened up a little when a few photographs and what looked like letters fell out of Carlyle. The letters were in fact accounts—accounts touching in their extreme modesty. On one day, Ted Ollerenshaw had sold 3d of tomatoes, 4d of potatoes, 6d of lettuces, 1d of beetroot, and ½d of parsley, and had expended 6d on unspecified seed. Heather and Janet gazed at these figures, and clucked and exclaimed and spoke of the cost of living, and then Janet had looked at the photographs. There was Ted, fat and Dutch, in his flat cap, his trousers tucked into his socks, with a walking stick. He looked so like Enoch, whatever could they have found to quarrel about? History had made them interchangeable. And there was Mrs Ted, skinny and upright, an old witch Enoch always called her. And there was Ted's son as a little boy, in a sailor suit in the photographic studio in Tockley: and again, on a rocking horse in what was recognizably the garden in front of Eel Cottage. There was Ted's son, again, as a grammar-school boy, in his uniform, and an out-offocus one of him at what seemed to be some graduation ceremony, wearing a cap and gown. None of them were very good photographs—all rejects, no doubt, from a better batch which had ended up somewhere.

There was also a photograph of a young woman, heavily braided and beaded and fringed, upright, unsmiling, stern, beautiful. Her clear features gazed scornfully from the sepia tint, across the decades. She looked savage and predatory, grim and determined, and in her hand she held the handle of a parasol, with threatening elegance. Who could this superior and arrogant person be? No Ollerenshaw, surely, for the real Ollerenshaws (so it was said) ran to fat, and moreover had never been well off enough to command such stylish garments, such black jet decorations. They had been peasant people, 1d of beetroot people, and only a few of them, like Ted's son and her cousin David, had struggled out by their wits and climbed perilously up from the flat land, up the beanstalk of the grammar school, to the golden world above.

Have another cress sandwich, said Heather, and Janet took one, for although she wanted to sneer at the health food, she couldn't really, because it was so delicious, and Heather's homeground brown bread was irresistible. So was the lovely peppery cress and juicy tomatoes. She took a large bite (she'd been ravenously hungry ever since she started expecting the baby: would she perhaps end up a fat Ollerenshaw, despite her childhood skinniness?), and turned the photograph over.