The Sibyl in Her Grave (6 page)

24 High Street
Parsons Haver
West Sussex

Tuesday, 22nd June

Dear Julia,

Do forgive me if I was slightly distrait when you rang earlier—I’d had a rather trying day. I suppose, if I’m going to tell you properly about it, that I ought to start with yesterday evening.

I’d had a most satisfactory interview with the
income tax man and it occurred to me, as I was beginning to get supper ready for Maurice and Griselda, that we had a first-rate excuse for champagne. So I ran down to the wine merchant’s and bought a couple of bottles, and on my way back I saw poor Daphne, sitting all by herself on a bench outside the Newt and Ninepence.

I was rather surprised to see her there. The black Mercedes had been seen here less than a week ago, and there’s usually at least a month between its visits. I didn’t feel I had time, though, to stop and talk to her, so I waved and went on my way.

But a moment or two later she came running after me and seized hold of my shopping basket, saying it looked much too heavy for me and I must let her carry it. I could hardly take it back from her by physical force—which it almost seemed I’d have to, she was so determined—so I let her go on carrying it, and she came trotting home beside me.

It seemed churlish, when we got back, simply to say thank you and shut the door in her face, so I invited her in for a sherry. It struck me, as I was giving it to her, that she looked even more miserable than usual—I mean, not just as if she might be going to cry, but as if she’d been crying a good deal already. So I asked her whether anything was the matter.

“Nothing—I don’t know—everything,” said Daphne, and did indeed burst into tears.

It wasn’t easy, between the sobs and the stammers, to make out exactly what she was upset about. In the end, it seemed simply to come down to this—that Isabella was giving her second
“Personal Reading” in the space of a week, and Daphne thought she was dangerously overtaxing her strength. I’m afraid I may have looked rather sceptical.

With more sobs and stammers, Daphne said that I didn’t understand. No one understood. No one understood what Isabella put into a Personal Reading. No one knew how exhausted she was for days afterwards. She ought to be still resting after the last one. And Isabella wouldn’t admit to physical weakness, and said she just had a cold, but Daphne knew there was something badly wrong with her. She didn’t know how, she just knew. And something awful was going to happen, and she didn’t know what to do about it. More tears.

Well, what could I do? I thought she was talking nonsense, of course, but I didn’t have the heart to pack her off to sit on her own in the Newt. So I told her that if she’d stop crying, I’d lend her a comb and facecloth to tidy herself up with, and she was welcome to stay for supper. I didn’t think Maurice or Griselda would mind—I had quite enough food for four, and I knew they both felt sorry for her.

It was a beautiful evening, and the garden’s at its best at the moment, so we ate out of doors. It was a very simple meal, just a salmon mousse with salad and new potatoes, and some strawberries afterwards, but it went quite well with the champagne, and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Daphne had two helpings of everything, and said it was the best meal she’d ever had. Which, without unduly flattering myself, I could all too easily believe, poor girl.

The conversation, I have to admit, didn’t exactly sparkle, though I’m sure that Daphne was doing her best—like a little girl at a grown-up party, trying hard to do the proper thing but not quite knowing what it is. She didn’t seem to realise that people don’t always mean exactly what they say, not because they’re insincere but because they’re making a joke about something. And she evidently expected Maurice to keep talking about religion, which of course he wouldn’t dream of doing over dinner.

A minute or two after ten she said she had to go home, in case Isabella needed her for anything before she went to bed. Maurice said that he ought to be leaving too—he had to be up early to take morning service at a church ten miles away—and suggested that they should keep each other company across the churchyard. Dear Maurice—he’d normally have stayed much later, morning service or no morning service, but he wouldn’t have liked to let Daphne go home in the dark by herself.

He rang a few minutes later, to say they were both safely home—he’d waited at the gate of the Rectory to make sure she got in all right, and he’d heard Isabella shout out to Daphne that she wasn’t needed and telling her to go to bed. The visitor had evidently left—Maurice said he’d seen no sign of the black Mercedes.

So it sounded as if Daphne’s anxieties had been as misplaced as I thought.

I usually wake up at about seven, but this morning I was woken earlier than that by the sound of someone ringing my doorbell. Not just ringing
and stopping and going away again, like the postman leaving a parcel, but going on ringing, as if they didn’t mean to stop until I’d answered. I looked out of my bedroom window and saw that it was Daphne, so I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went down to let her in.

She was in such a state of agitation, and stammering so badly, poor girl, that I could make no sense at all of what she was trying to say. All I could gather was that something was seriously wrong—or at least that she thought there was—and she wanted me to come straight back with her to the Rectory. So without being sure there was any real urgency, but not liking to take a chance on it, I put on my raincoat over my dressing gown and ran back with her across the churchyard.

She’d left the front door open. We went straight in, and through the hallway to the black drawing room.

The first thing I noticed was the smell—it was the first thing anyone would have noticed. A perfectly disgusting smell, acrid and sweet at the same time, mainly, I suppose, of bird droppings, but as if someone had tried to sweeten it with something else—incense or camphor or something like that. The second thing I noticed was the vulture, perched on the back of one of the chaises longues. The third was Isabella, lolling on another of them, dressed in the caftan she’d worn on my first visit, with her little black eyes staring at me without blinking, out of her white pudding face. I almost apologised for my intrusion.

“She’s been sitting there like that since I came
down this morning,” said Daphne. “She doesn’t seem to hear what I say to her. There’s something wrong with her.”

I knew straightaway what was wrong with her, and I could hardly believe that Daphne still hadn’t realised. I tried taking her pulse, and the other things they tell one to do in first-aid classes, but I already knew she was dead. The vulture knew it too, and was looking at Isabella in a way I didn’t much care for.

I didn’t think I was the right person to break the news—I asked Daphne who her aunt’s doctor was.

“Aunt Isabella doesn’t believe in doctors,” she said, looking more frightened than ever. “She says that Nature has a cure for everything if you know how to look for it.”

I said that nonetheless her aunt must have professional attention, and sent her off in the end to fetch Dr. Selkirk. He’s not the doctor I’d normally call-a bad-tempered little Scotsman, semiretired, with a bee in his bonnet about keeping fit, and not much in the way of a bedside manner—but he was the one who lived nearest. I knew at that hour of the morning he was more likely to answer the doorbell than the telephone, and I thought that with any luck she could bring him back to the Rectory in ten minutes or so.

If I’d gone myself, I could have probably persuaded him more quickly, but I couldn’t leave poor Daphne on her own with a corpse, and we couldn’t both go. I’ve lived in Egypt and Syria, and I’ve seen what buzzards can do. So someone had to stay and discourage the vulture.

I don’t know quite how long I waited for them—it seemed a good deal more than the
mauvais quart d’heure
I’d bargained for. Isabella still seemed to be staring at me with her little black-currant eyes, and from time to time the horrible Roderigo spread his wings and screeched at me. Having only my nightclothes on under my raincoat made me feel ridiculously defenceless, and I wished I’d something more effective than my bare hands to ward him off with if he tried to challenge me for his breakfast.

The worst thing of all, though, was still the smell—it wasn’t simply disgusting but somehow narcotic, so that I felt dizzy as well as sick from it. I wondered if Isabella and her visitor had been smoking marijuana—I suppose it would be quite an effective way to heighten the atmosphere for a séance, or whatever one’s supposed to call it. It’s some years since I smoked any, and I don’t remember the effects being so unpleasant—but that was in Paris and in better company.

There were no ashtrays, though, and no traces of smoke in the room, so perhaps I was wrong about that. There weren’t any dirty glasses, either, which struck me as rather odd. Whatever else one might say about Isabella, I wouldn’t have thought she’d have sat all evening with a visitor without offering him a drink, and having one herself. Anyway, there were two empty champagne bottles in the wastepaper basket.

And Daphne had been sent straight to bed when she got home the night before, so she couldn’t have washed them then, and she certainly wouldn’t have stopped to do it after she found Isabella in the morning.

Well, of course, it wasn’t really at all odd—it simply meant that Isabella had washed the glasses herself, and then come back and sat down again on the chaise longue. That’s not at all an odd thing to do—it’s what I’d have done myself. Just not what I’d have expected Isabella to do—I’d have bet almost any sum you like to mention that she’d have left them for Daphne. Which shows how one can misjudge people. Or perhaps she’d just taken them through to the kitchen, and left them there to be washed.

It occurred to me, thinking of the kitchen, that I might find something there that I could use to ward off Roderigo. So I went quickly in there, leaving the door open so that I could keep an eye on him, and found just what I wanted—a long-handled broom, which made me feel much braver. But no dirty glasses anywhere, so Isabella must have washed them up after all. And yet somehow I still just couldn’t imagine her doing it, so I decided that it must have been her visitor—the man in the black Mercedes.

Dr. Selkirk, when he at last arrived, declined to examine the patient in the presence of the vulture. At the cost of several savage pecks, Daphne managed to remove the bird to the conservatory. After that, we waited at the far end of the room while the doctor carried out his examination.

“Heart,” he said, when he’d finished. “What did she expect, carrying all that weight?” He seldom misses a chance to point out the dangers of obesity.

“Will she have to go to hospital?” asked poor Daphne.

“It’s not the hospital she’s needing,” said Selkirk, with his usual tact. “It’s the undertaker’s. She’s dead, lassie—been dead for hours.”

And poor Daphne threw herself down on the floor and howled.

You’ll understand by this time why it’s been a trying day. It’s now nearly midnight, and I thought when I came to bed that I’d go straight to sleep. But I found I couldn’t, and decided to write to you instead.

The funeral’s on Friday, and with Daphne having no close family I somehow feel responsible for seeing that it all goes properly. There are all sorts of things that I could quite reasonably be lying awake and worrying about—like how to make Daphne presentable for it, and what to give people to eat, and whether we can find anyone to say a few words about how nice Isabella was.

What seems to be stopping me from sleeping, though, isn’t any of those things but a perfectly idiotic question of no importance at all, which is nagging away at me like a clue in the crossword that one hasn’t managed to get the answer to. As soon as I close my eyes, the absurd question which comes into my head and starts buzzing round there is, “Do men with Mercedes cars usually wash their own glasses?”

Yours with very much love,
Reg