‘She took advantage, Albert.’
He piles his own dishes on to her tray and waits for hers. One morning he didn’t come in and she thought he was dead. Out on the streets in the night hours, someone like him could easily be set on because he’s the way he is, because he’s different.
‘I’ll make a jelly,’ he says. ‘Greengage. For tomorrow.’ The door closes behind him and then she hears him beginning to wash up. After that he’ll go and have his evening rest. They told him down the platforms he must have his sleeps and he always does. She listens to the clatter of the dishes, then drops off for a moment, waking to hear his footsteps in the room above her. The day she managed the stairs when he was resting, his sleeping face was like an angel’s, the empty eyes closed over, lips parted a little. Everything in the room was tidy around him, the little decorations on the walls. Sometimes all she wishes for before she goes is to have his worries taken from him, to know he’ll be all right when she isn’t there to think about him. When she can’t move at all, which won’t be long now, she wouldn’t mind it if he washed her. He could bring the basin in and lift her nightdress off. She’d lie there with something else private between them, not anyone else’s business, like the upset over the girl isn’t.
7
Mahonia shoots shrivel, the elaeagnus is arrested. The climbing hydrangea droops, the leaves of the smoke shrubs have lost their sheen. Thaddeus’s spinach goes to seed, the potatoes he digs are small. The drought is worse than the drought of 197 6; the worst, so people interested in such matters say, for two hundred years. In the fields the sheep are fed hay, cattle are parched when streams dry up.
But the apple trees in Thaddeus’s garden are laden, the pear trees and the plum orchard. Gooseberries and redcurrants ripen before their time. Cosmos has grown high, its misty foliage heavy with purple flowers, and pink and mauve and white. Butterflies flap silently through the buddleia.
Beneath the catalpa tree, with her grandchild on a tartan rug beside her deckchair, Mrs. Iveson reads. Casting shadows on the pages of her book, lacy white panicles hang among the vast leaves, their scent delicate in the heat. On a cold grey morning in late December Mr. Charles set forth as usual, his letters stamped and sealed. Miss Amble greeted him, Mrs. Mace a moment later. To both he raised his hat. The plump housemaid did it, Mrs. Iveson’s thought is, before The Mystery of the Milestone slips from her fingers.
When you had collected seven transfers from seven tins of cocoa you sent away the seven pictures they made and received in return a statuette of Snow White. With a crust of bread clamped between her teeth, skinning and chopping two onions, Zenobia remembers that. She washes carrots and parsnips beneath a running tap, then trims the fat from a tenderloin of pork. Duplicates wouldn’t do. She had Sneezy twice and Happy four times and still had to go on collecting. Her father said you’d maybe drink forty gallons of cocoa to get it right. He declared the whole thing a disgrace, on a par with chain letters and brush salesmen at the door.
‘She has settled in,’ she hears, as from a distance, her husband admit. ‘I have to say you were right.’
Removing the bread from her mouth, she is startled: that does not come easily from him. He was certain there would be fireworks, unease at the very least. In spite of a loss two days ago at Ascot, he has given in gracefully; and Zenobia knows better than to gloat.
‘It’s early days yet, of course,’ she acknowledges, since that seems only fair.
‘She has come to accept what must be accepted.’
Maidment has inspected the newcomer’s correspondence. Letters are often left not yet completed on her dressing-table, all to her friend in Sussex, whose replies later tie up loose ends. At the kitchen table, replacing one of the lugs that hold the strap of his wristwatch, he agrees that the blood tie of the child has made the difference.
‘As you said yourself,’ he graciously repeats. His beaky features are bent close to his task, the spigot in the spring of the metal lug repeatedly slipping as he attempts to prise it home with the blade of a knife. He experiences neither frustration nor impatience. Sooner or later, he knows he will succeed. Mr. Nice Guy he should have gone for, but that is water under the bridge.
‘Whoever’s that?’ Zenobia exclaims when the jangle of the hall-door bell sounds.
Achieving success before this dies away, Maidment returns his watch to his wrist and goes to answer the summons.
Kneeling on a plastic fertilizer sack, scattering the seeds of his winter parsley in a shady corner, Thaddeus wonders if in these conditions they’ll germinate. Carefully, he waters, then places a sheet of glass on the four lengths of wood he has used to construct a square around what he has sown. Weeks will pass before the first green specks arrive, for if they do so at all they’ll come slowly, the dendritic formation following at that same slow pace.
The summer has settled into a pattern of its own. Its days go ordinarily by in a season that belongs to circumstance, time dawdling, tranquillity a balm. The constitution of the household, which prospectively he feared, seems right to Thaddeus now: faith kept with unexpressed wishes, as it was with a last request.
‘There’s that girl, sir,’ Maidment interrupts his thoughts, calling out, still some yards away. ‘The girl about her lost ring, sir.’
Thaddeus nods, remembering the girl, knowing what all this is about. Maidment knows too, having been asked to keep an eye out for a ring. It could have been hoovered up, he said at the time, but he believes that is most unlikely.
Thaddeus gathers together the tools he has used, folding the plastic sack as he moves towards his house. He leaves it, with fork and trowel, at the front steps, to take to the yard later.
‘If you ask me,’ Maidment remarks dismissively in the kitchen, ‘that ring never came into the house.’
The girl is after compensation, he suggests. Some devious way of claiming compensation, which nowadays is very much the fashion. Mingy little thing, he says.
She watches him feel with his hand under the sofa, crouched and stretching, then on his knees. He shakes his head when he stands up. He pulls the cushions out. All this has been done already, he says, but it’s better to be certain. No luck? he says when she has searched, herself.
When their hands touch on the sofa he gives no sign. She wonders if the scent of the perfume she put on is reaching him, Flowers of Egypt, that she came by when the saleswoman was maundering on about New Shade lip salve. She went back to EasiEyes for the smoky frames, and paid for having them changed, but she hasn’t seen him noticing that the frames are different from the ones she wore before. If he remarked on them she had it in mind to make him smile by saying she once tried contacts but they were like having shop windows stuck in. ‘I’m old enough to be your father,’ he might have said if anything had happened, if they stood up together and found themselves close. Sorrowing gets to you, he might have said, saying also that he shouldn’t have done that, that he got carried away. No, it’s all right, she had it in mind to reassure him. She knew, she understood.
They go upstairs. He pulls the curtains away from a window, looking down at the stair-carpet, explaining that unfortunately it would have been hoovered. She runs her fingers beneath an edge of it and then beneath another edge. Grey, she says again, a single grey stone, her mother’s, and adds that her mother settled in the outback of Australia.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But I rather think we’re not going to find it.’
She stands beside him by the nursery door. The house feels empty, although she knows it isn’t. It’s quiet, as it was before, and again the way it seemed the first evening she pushed open the green door. An older sister brought her up, she says, and when he smiles, but doesn’t ask about that, she adds that her older sister went off years ago.
‘To Australia?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Look wherever you like in here.’
Her mother writes every week, she says. Every Tuesday, sometimes a Wednesday, there’s a newsy letter. She’d like
to travel, she says.
He smiles and nods. He pulls an armchair to one side in order to look under it. ‘Nanny’s armchair,’ the old grandmother said that day. She helps him push it back again.
‘It’s a lovely nursery, Mr. Davenant.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
‘You don’t often see a picture done like that. On a floor.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’
‘Were you a child in this house too?’
‘Well, yes, I was.’
‘It’s a lovely house. The garden’s lovely.’
‘Yes, it is.’
Pettie smiles, looking up at his face. There is a star, she can’t remember who it is, with flecks of grey in his hair and those same pale eyes. She can see him clearly, in evening dress and nonchalant, leading a woman in a gown to a restaurant table, the waiter bowing and scraping, an orchestra.
‘You remind me of someone, Mr. Davenant.’
‘Do I?’
She dared to say it because he’s still unaware, nothing in his voice except the softness she feels caressed by. He does not know that everything is special as they stand here now. He does not know that comfort and consolation in his grieving can come from somewhere.
‘A star,’ she says.
‘Star?’
‘Who you remind me of.’
He shakes his head. She wants to tell him she can hear the music of an orchestra, the people in that restaurant moving on to the dance-floor. She wants a conversation to begin, to tell him that this is her kind of music, to ask him if he likes the smoky frames, if the scent of Egyptian flowers is reaching him, if perfume on a girl is what he likes. Five times in all he has said he’s sorry, including on the phone. When first she was alone with him, when the grandmother was out of the room, she found herself trembling and for a moment had to grip the sofa cover. It was then she knew something was up and ever since she has been a different person, just thinking about him. She wants to say that. She wants to say that they have stood together in the firelight with glasses of sherry, that he has put his arms around her and held her to him. She wants to share it with him, but of course there can’t be that.
‘A lot of children,’ she says, ‘must have played on that picture. I can just see them.’
‘Yes.’
‘I love children.’
‘I’m sorry we weren’t able to offer you the position here.’
‘I know you’re sorry, Mr. Davenant.’
‘It is a difficult time for us. What we decided is best, I think.’
The knee that’s nearer to him touches some part of his leg when she slightly moves. ‘I would give you the world, Pettie,’ her Sunday uncle used to whisper, the first to call her by that name. His loving little princess, he whispered, the only one there would ever be for him. It was Eric who said he was old enough to be her father, and then said he was busy now.
‘I thought I’d got the job. When you was telling me the directions to get here I thought it was all right.’
‘Oh, no, no.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
She laughs, pretending it doesn’t. It was silly of her to make that presumption. When she rang the doorbell that afternoon she kept thinking she was coming home at last, and that was silly too. She laughs again, telling him that, but he’s as solemn as he was before.
‘Well, I’m afraid we haven’t found your ring.’
He has been standing back to let her pass through the doorway in front of him, but now he doesn’t any more. He goes first and she follows on the landing, their moment shattered. Other doors are open that were closed when she was here before, a bedroom and then another bedroom.
‘It doesn’t matter about the ring.’
‘You’ve had a journey for nothing.’
‘No, not for nothing.’
He just walks on, not asking what that implies. She sees his ties, striped and dotted, on a closet rail. A dressing-table is between two bay windows, a trouser-press. Hairbrushes are by a looking-glass on a pedestal. Curtains and wallpaper are a match, huge flowers like roses. It is just a glimpse, then there are the staircase pictures — paintings of different people, men and women, a picture of the house long ago, farm workers drinking in a harvest field.
‘Oh, that is nice.’ She stops and he stops also. ‘Everything is lovely here.’
She wants them to stand there for a moment longer, as they stood together in the nursery, but he goes on, one hand on the banister, his footsteps hardly making a sound. He would have worn every one of those ties, he would have knotted them and straightened them in that mirror. Every day, every morning and maybe again later, his brushes touch his hair. He folds away his clothes, he lies asleep in that room.
‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ she says, and wants to tell him that she has looked into the garden from the door in the wall, that she has come back and come back again, that she knows about the summer-house and about the gardener’s bayonet wound, that she knows his wife’s name was Letitia, that she knows his wife loved music.
‘Thank you.’
They are in the hall; the dog is waiting there. It sounds strange, thanking her because she’s sorry. He keeps on moving, touching the dog’s head as he passes, crossing the hall to the front door. She wants to say she wouldn’t feel jealous of his wife, or be against her, that there is nothing like that.
‘I cried on the lane, thinking about your wife.’
He looks away, nodding as he opens the front door. The dog comes up to her, knowing her, wagging its tail.
‘I went into the graveyard.’
He frowns, just slightly, then he nods again, standing by the open door.
‘You said that day it was an accident on the road.’
‘My wife was knocked off her bicycle.’
‘I thought she might have been in a car.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t know why I thought that.’
‘She had gone to fetch some pullets. She looked behind her for a moment, maybe because the box on her carrier felt unsteady. That’s what the driver saw. There’s a bend on the hill she was going down.’
‘I don’t think I know pullets.’
‘Young hens.’
She has saddened him; she has made him more sombre than he was. She didn’t mean to. She should smile, and take his fingers from the door edge and close the door again, pressing out the ugly sunlight. She should lean against it and be cheerful, telling him she has her own name for his baby: Georgina Belle.
‘Would you mind if I just looked once again in that room?’
‘Of course not.’
He doesn’t come with her, which she hoped he would. From the windows she can see the old woman in her deckchair beneath the tree, the baby on the patterned rug. In the room the photograph is still there, among the glass paperweights. Petals have fallen from a vase of flowers. In all her life she has never hated anyone as much as she hates the old woman: suddenly, Pettie knows that. She stands in the centre of the room thinking it, not looking for anything, since there is nothing to look for.
‘No luck?’ he says in the hall.
‘No.’
‘I don’t think you were in the conservatory that afternoon?’
He indicates it, to his left. Beyond a glass door, framed in white, rows of orange-coloured pots have different kinds of flowers in them, pink and yellow, shades of blue. Green foliage trails all over the slanted glass, two wicker chairs with cushions on them have a wicker table to match.
‘That’s a beautiful place, isn’t it?’
‘You didn’t go in there, though, that day?’
‘No, I wasn’t in there.’
‘If we had a number to contact you on we could let you know if your ring turns up.’
‘I put flowers on the grave, Mr. Davenant.’
‘What?’
‘I put flowers on your wife’s grave.’
He doesn’t speak for a moment. Again he frowns a little, which is understandable. He say
s:
‘We came to a decision about a nanny. There isn’t a vacancy for one any more.’
‘You said.’ She waits for a moment, sorting out the words in her head, getting them right. ‘I was brought up by a grandmother, Mr. Davenant. She never managed.’
‘I thought — ’
‘That was before. My sister came before. My nan was never up to it is what I’m saying.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t entirely follow this.’
‘There were accidents, like. Any old woman’d get dozy. An old woman drops off in the sun. Anything like that.’
‘There really isn’t a vacancy — ’
‘It don’t matter about the vacancy, Mr. Davenant. I didn’t come out about the vacancy. I didn’t put the flowers on because I thought you’d change your mind. The flowers was different. The heatwave killed the others, they was a sorry sight.’
‘If we find your ring -’
‘It doesn’t matter about the ring. The ring’s the least of it.’
‘Even so, if ever we should find it we’d want you to have it back.’
He has opened the door as wide as it will go now. Although he’s tall there’s a slightness about him, a delicacy about his hands and slender wrists, the top button of his shirt undone beneath the grey knot of his tie. A fine silver chain is what she’d like to give him, without a medallion, nothing flash.
‘It’s terrible, what happened,’ she says.
‘What’s terrible?’
‘Your wife.’
He looks away. He mentions the ring again and she says again that it doesn’t matter. It could have dropped off in the garden, she says, but he doesn’t suggest they should look for it there. In a minute, in less than a minute more likely, she’ll have gone, passed out of his company, everything over.
When her tears begin to come she looks away herself, not wanting him to see. But he notices, as she should have known he would, being the kind that does.