The Realms of Gold (43 page)

Blood is thicker than water, she said to herself as she drove up the M1.

She knew more details now, about Connie's death. She had broken a leg, which had prevented her from getting over to the farm or down to the shop. She had dragged herself around for some time, eating what was in reach, and then had died. Neither the farmer nor the shopkeeper had registered her absence, which apparently wasn't as surprising as it seemed, for she was in the habit of quarrelling with each for long periods, and each had assumed she was getting food from the other. Also, in the summer, she tended to look after herself more—she had vegetables in the garden, and fruit trees, and she would push an old pram round the lanes nearby, picking and scavenging. So nobody had missed her. Her dog was found dead on the bed.

The cottage was in a state of appalling neglect and had been shut up till it was discovered who now owned it. There was a will, a solicitor in Tockley had a copy, but he hadn't divulged its contents.

A horrible mess it all was, really. She hoped it wouldn't take too long to sort out. She wanted to get home again, to her children and her own aifairs.

When she reached Wolverton, she found, as she had suspected, that her mother had taken refuge from unwelcome questioning and publicity in hysteria. She had not, however, foreseen that the hysteria would be so unmanageable. Her father, over lunch, tried to hint that things were bad, and he himself didn't look at all well. He kept shaking his head and sighing to himself, when he wasn't speaking. After lunch, he took her to the hospital, where her mother lay in a private room in a blue nightdress with a shawl round her shoulders, looking not so much aged as washed away. Her face, soft and youthful, looked as though a storm had passed over it, taking from it all memory, all expectation. The tension of waiting had gone, there was a blank drop in the tight skin round her wrinkled eyes, and the eyes themselves had that curious lustreless bland unseeing gaze that so often accompanies or succeeds acute mental distress. Her very hands were changed: they lay on the white strapped smooth sheet, puffed and inert.

Frances half-expected her not to recognize her, so changed was she, but she looked at Frances with a placid look, a terrible nod. ‘It's not my fault,' she said, as though continuing a conversation, with a calm and interrogating inflection, as though Frances had been at her bedside for hours.

And she proceeded to recount the death of Alice, a story which Frances had successfully tried to avoid for years, and avoided now, by the expedient of shutting her ears and thinking hard about other things. She wondered what her father was thinking. He had crossed to the window, he was looking out, with his back to the room.

Lady Ollerenshaw didn't seem to be able to stop talking. Old sorrows, old grievances, were weighing on her mind, and she talked of them evenly, dully. Frances found herself putting her fingers in her ears and humming to herself slightly and very quietly, in order not to hear. After what seemed like hours and hours, a nurse came and tapped on the door and said that it was time for them to go, and they left. She and her father didn't say a word to one another, as they walked down the corridor, and down the stairs, and out into the courtyard, and into the car. They drove back to the Lodge in silence.

‘She'll get better,' said Frances, over a cup of tea.

‘Oh yes, I suppose so,' said her father. She didn't know whether to speak to him, or not. She felt at a loss, useless.

Later in the evening, he asked her if she thought the
Sunday Examiner
would follow up its original attack, or whether it would forget the story. She said that she didn't know; she suspected, herself, that the heat was off. (She'd finally got hold, that morning, of her friend Bill Merriton on the
Examiner
, and he hadn't seemed particularly keen to pursue the story. He'd been much more interested in trying to find out whether she'd been doing anything worth reporting in Adra. I hear they've discovered uranium, he suggested: oh, I wouldn't say that exactly, said Frances. He could chase that one up for a while.) No, she said to her father, I wouldn't worry too much, if I were you. Something else is sure to happen before next weekend. There'll be some drug firm that needs exposing, or some race riot in a comprehensive school that needs investigating, don't you worry.

He said that her mother had only gone into hospital to get away from the journalists and the telephone, but that the longer she stayed there, the worse she seemed to get.

‘She'll get better, perhaps, when the danger's over,' said Frances, and he agreed. ‘Though she has been rather odd lately,' he said. ‘Perhaps it's her age.' Frances forbore to remark that her mother was well past the age where one might expect such a temporary oddness.

They talked, for a while, about the Ollerenshaw family, and Frances told him about her meeting with David. She had resolved to ask him if he knew the origins of the dispute between Ted and Enoch, but now she came face to face with the problem, she found that she dared not. He was too remote, and he had doubtless had good cause to remove himself; she did not wish to disturb him, she did not wish him to end up in a hospital bed. Let him deal with his life in his own manner,
it
was too late to ask questions. So she contented herself with telling him about David, and Spirelli's views of kinship. Adra seemed a thousand miles away, as indeed it was, and she invoked it in her own defence, feeling as she had felt when a girl, invoking extra-family activities by inexplicable runic references, as though to reassure herself that there was a world elsewhere. Her father was interested in Adra, he was usually interested in information. He had followed her career with admirable paternal attention.

Before they went to bed, he asked her if she would mind going to Tockley for him, to see the solicitor. ‘I'd better stay near your mother,' he said. ‘I'd ask Hugh, but I think you're better at this kind of thing than he is.

‘And there'll be a funeral to fix up, I suppose,' he said.

Frances, rinsing out the coffee cups, saw herself as an adult, her parents declining feebly to the grave. The matriarch, arranging funerals. It was a role that she might have expected, but it seemed to have come to her rather suddenly.

‘I'll have to get back to my children at some point,' she said, as her father, in a placating movement, dried the cups, although the cleaning woman would be there as usual in the morning. ‘I've already been away a fortnight.'

‘Where are they at the moment?'

‘They're with Anthony and Sheila.' Her husband, unlike herself, had married again, conveniently for Frances: Sheila liked to prove herself by being pleasant with the children. Frances thought of the children, back-chatting, wise-cracking, amusing, boiling themselves eggs and making cups of tea and studying physics and geometry and resolutely growing up, the rising generation.

‘Do they like it there?'

‘Oh yes. They like it anywhere, really.'

‘So you could spare a day or two more?'

‘Yes. Of course.' She thought, she hadn't sustained so long a personal conversation with her father for years. ‘You'll have to tell me, though,' she said, ‘what to do about the funeral, and that kind of thing. And the will.'

‘The solicitors will help you with all that. They're a perfectly reliable firm. Brooke and Barnard. My father used to deal with them.'

Frances wiped the clean white kitchen surfaces, and folded the dishcloth much more neatly than she would have done at home, and hung it over the edge of the sink.

‘I suppose,' said her father, rather helplessly, ‘I suppose I must be the next of kin.'

 

Stella Ollerenshaw lay in her hospital bed and thought about the death of Constance Ollerenshaw. One had to die at some point, but surely not like that. She couldn't help thinking of her lying there all that time undiscovered. Not so long ago she'd read a very unpleasant item in the local paper, about an old woman in a council flat who had lived for four years in the same flat as her dead husband. When her husband's maggotty skeleton was found, he was just lying there in the bed, under a blanket. The old woman didn't seem to have noticed him at all. She was suffering from senile dementia. When questioned closely, she said it was true that she hadn't seen her husband up and about lately.

 

David Ollerenshaw and Karel Schmidt caught the plane home from Adra together. They were getting on not too badly, despite the inconvenience of the situation. Karel had shown remarkable self-control when informed that he had missed Frances by a day, and wasted several hundred pounds in the effort. ‘Well, bugger that,' he had said bleakly, and had sat down to recover. He had been unable to tell them anything at all about the crisis that had recalled Frances. He didn't read the
Sunday Examiner
, he only read the
Sunday Times
. ‘I don't even read the
Observer
any more,' he said from time to time, as though that would contribute to the sum total of information about Frances's sudden disappearance.

The as yet undispersed conference members were delighted by his romantic arrival, which gave an unexpected thrill to their last evening. They fed him and bought him drinks and asked him about Frances and tried to prod him into the swimming pool, wondering what grand passion could have brought him so far; for Karel certainly had a quixotic look about him, a look of harassed desperation. He had a tatty, dishevelled air, as of one whose clothes have been disintegrated by the constant fret of violent emotion, and they gazed at him with respect, a traveller from distant lands. Karel, conscious of his role, tried to live up to it, but he was feeling far too ill to leap dashingly into the swimming pool for their delight. He had had to have a cholera jab at the airport when leaving, and his arm was huge and swollen. He had been horribly sick on the flight, and the Adran food, delicious though it was, didn't seem to go down too well, so Karel, with his usual aggressive policy towards his own health, had firmly washed it down with a large quantity of Real Scotch Flora MacDonald Whisky, and swallowed a good many pills which kind geologists and engineers offered him. By the time he boarded the plane home the next morning, he was feeling extremely ill.

‘It's my fault for lying,' he told David, groaning into the paper bag provided. ‘I told the Poly I couldn't turn up because I was sick. And now I am.'

David tried to cheer him up with the story of his first night in Tehran.

They had to change planes in Paris, and owing to a strike of airport workers were unable to find seats on the normal scheduled flights: they were nearly fitted on to a plane from Bombay, and would have been if Karel hadn't been feeling too ill to stand in a queue. This was just as well for them, as the plane blew up over the Channel, killing every one of the two hundred and seventeen passengers. Karel and David were lucky enough to spend the night in a hotel instead, and flew back to London the next morning, Friday morning, just as Frances Wingate was setting off to drive across the Midlands from Wolverton to Tockley, to bury her long-dead great-aunt.

 

Harold Barnard sat in his office and stared at Constance Ollerenshaw's will. He was wondering what his father could have been thinking of, to let her draw up such a tiresome document. It must have been quite obvious when she made it, twenty-five years earlier, that all its beneficiaries would be dead shortly, if they weren't then dead already. And now, of course, they were. The list of beneficiaries was short. Her dog—presumably any current dog. Her cat. (There might still be a cat roaming around there somewhere, of course—cats are good at survival.) The matron of Star Valley Nursing Home. (He had checked that one, and she had died in 1959.) And the cottage she had left, mysteriously, to the owner of a lodging house in Morecambe, who had died without issue the year after the will was made.

His father really ought to have kept her up to date on it, he thought. Though perhaps there wouldn't have been much point—she was dotty, had been for years, she might have tried to draw up something yet more inconvenient. The fact was that the firm of Brooke and Barnard had completely forgotten the existence of Constance Ollerenshaw. She had still been vaguely in their minds when Ted Ollerenshaw, her brother, was still alive, and somebody had mentioned her when Eel Cottage was sold, but that was a good many years ago now. Mays Cottage would probably go to the next of kin. If they wanted it. The Armstrongs at the farm had had their eye on it for years, but Constance had hated them so much that she had actually added a clause that the cottage shouldn't be sold to the Armstrongs. He wondered whether the clause would stand. The cottage, derelict though it was, might be quite valuable now. People were prepared to pay fancy prices for cottages, even in districts like this, and Mays Cottage was a period piece, completely unrestored, which in these days seemed to be an asset. Eel Cottage, which had changed hands several times since Ted died, had more than quadrupled in price, and would fetch an even better sum now.

He was waiting, now for Ted's granddaughter, Dr Frances Wingate. It did seem rather ironic that her father, who must have done very well for himself, seemed to be likely to inherit Connie's money (and there might be a bit more than the cottage, his father hadn't been very strict about cats and dogs in wills but he'd told her where to invest the odd hundred pounds or two, forty years earlier). There were plenty of other Ollerenshaws around on the spot, as it were, and several of them had been round to see him about the will: apart from the fact that they clearly weren't as well off as a Vice-Chancellor they now claimed that they had looked after Connie well in her old age, and were therefore more deserving of her money. In view of the circumstances of her death, he permitted himself to find this comic. But people have short memories. There was one of them who'd tried to go and see her, but only one: he'd seen her on the local tv news. She'd made quite a good impression. She'd given the old lady a box of Black Magic chocolates. When starving to death, Constance had eaten the box in which the chocolates came: relics of it had been found in her stomach. He hoped the young woman wouldn't get to hear that bit of information. It might upset her. And whoever's fault it was, it wasn't hers. (She, of course, hadn't been around after the money.) Harold Barnard inclined to take the line that it was nobody's fault. If people chose to live alone, they chose to die alone. Though they thereby sometimes created a good deal of work for their solicitors. She had expressed a request, in her will, that she should be buried in unconsecrated ground, and that the Vicar of St Oswald's, Tockley, should attend. He wondered what Frances Wingate would make of that. It wasn't all that easy to bury people in unconsecrated ground, and the vicar of St Oswald's to whom she had referred had been lying long years in his highly respectable grave.