Death in Summer

  Aghast, Zenobia turns from the sink, a potato half scraped in her hand. She is hungry, and so must everyone else be. She has made sandwiches for the police who have returned yet again, feeling that they, too, are probably in need of food. The kitchen quarrel which brought a coolness in the night seems to belong to some distant time, and plays no part now.

  ‘Was the girl…,’ she begins to ask, intending to inquire if the girl responsible for the stealing was frightened off by the lad poking round, or has been found and apprehended. In fact, with the three words hanging, she is answered without addition to them.

  ‘No one else was there but the baby, with food laid out on the floor, not that it was of use to her. As far as can be ascertained, the next thing was she got carried by this lad through the streets, to the quarters of the Salvation Army.’

  Zenobia does not entirely follow this, wondering where the Salvation Army comes into it. She does not speak, knowing it is unnecessary, since her confusion is apparent in her face.

  ‘The lad shouldn’t have been in a house due for demolition, but there’s no fuss made about that. A few marbles short, by all accounts, but no one’s on about that either.’

  ‘He couldn’t be-?’

  ‘We know who took her, dear.’

  Never in all his years in other people’s houses has Maidment garnered so much or so richly in so brief a time. The disappointment of missing the news of Mrs. Ferry’s death when it came is amply compensated. Pleasure flushes his edgy features, lights his eyes, causes a mild quivering of his lips when he reports what he has to. Observing these signs of his excitement, Zenobia is concerned for him; but her concern is slight, for the relief she experienced when the child was found continues so joyfully to possess her that all other emotions fall back. And what does it matter how the crime was committed, or even by whom, now that the thing is over? Private by her bedside, she has already knelt in gratitude.

  ‘Sugar lumps for the dog.’ She hears her husband repeat what he has stated several times already. ‘Chocolate or mixed sweets, a burglar’s ploy Loitering with intent under four pairs of eyes.’

  He extracts a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a pocket, and for an alarming moment it seems to Zenobia that he may light up in the kitchen, which he hasn’t done since their first position as a couple, the morning they came down to discover the water tanks had overflowed in the night.

  ‘Didn’t I say I didn’t like the look of her,’ he’s saying now, ‘the time she came back with her story?’

  With the cigarettes and lighter still safely in his palm, he moves towards the passage that leads to the yard. In the doorway he selects a cigarette and returns the packet to his pocket. Left to him, he says, he wouldn’t have let her in that day.

  Zenobia has little memory of the girl who is suspected, having glanced only once in her direction that afternoon, when the landing curtains needed a stitch. She looked an unremarkable girl as far as Zenobia can remember, small and peering a bit, the way a short-sighted girl might, nothing special. It all just goes to show, Zenobia’s view is, and silently she gives thanks again.

  14

  The ordeal, which has lasted a little longer than twenty-three hours, has left with Mrs. Iveson what she knows will always be there: Maidment white-faced in the sunshine when she asked him to look among the shrubs, the trembling of his hands when he returned; Thaddeus saying blame does no good; Zenobia confessing later that some time in that night she gave up hope.

  We are left with no explanation and no sign of one, she writes the news to Sussex. Why any of it happened is the mystery we must live with, for I do not believe they will find the girl. If that boy had not gone to the place when he did Georgina would not be alive. That that was what the girl intended we must live with, too.

  She does not think, she adds, that she can remain at Quincunx House. She shall, of course, until a new arrangement is made, but in the end the arrangement she suggested herself has been shown to be a failure. Thaddeus, though, does not accept my view and is adamant it were better I stayed. I press him — not that I want to go, but feel I should — and still he does not see it. So it is left. Stubbornness is a quality I have not noticed in him before.

  The only flowers Thaddeus has ever sent Mrs. Ferry he sends on the day the letter that tells of this unresolved consequence is posted. Having forgotten about the funeral, he remembers the night before it is to take place and telephones first thing, relieved to find he is not too late. Cut flowers, not a wreath, he stipulates, bright colours, the brightest mixed together. When the time comes for the woman he was once attracted by to lie briefly in the crematorium chapel he thinks of her. ‘A generous spirit,’ he does not know the clergyman’s description is, but guesses that a favourite tune is played and that the chef who was at the Beech Trees is there. A few others are present too, her onetime husband arriving five minutes late, delayed by traffic on his journey down from Lytham St. Annes, his second wife waiting in the car, feeling that to be proper in the circumstances.

  The week that brought Mrs. Ferry’s death and the ordeal of Georgina’s abduction comes to an end, and on the Sunday that finishes it Mrs. Iveson agrees to think further about her decision, and next morning agrees to stay. The days settle back into ordinariness then, as the summer heatwave continues. From Sussex come commiserations and exclamations of outrage in a shaky hand. Terrible things happen, it is declared; that is life today, enlightened times or not. A postscript adds that the cataract operation, twice postponed, is to take place at last, next month. And news goes back to Sussex of Georgina’s teething.

  In time, the first green specks of Thaddeus’s winter parsley appear. Murder in Mock Street is taken from the drawing-room shelves, and then The Corpse on the Fourteenth Green. ‘My!’ Zenobia marvels on a weekend outing to Scarrow Hill, for the giant is taller than in her dream, and shocking in a way she failed to anticipate. Maidment wins with Cappoquin Boy. No change is reported from St. Bee’s.

  Of course, we live in fear, Mrs. Iveson brings herself to confess, that again we are watched, that even now she comes by night to the garden, that again she will hurt us. I see her face, staring at me from where she stood that day, the sunlight glinting on her glasses.

  But no one comes to the garden in the way Mrs. Iveson dreads, either by night or by day. Instead there are the first late-August signs of autumn there, a softness in the fading colours.

  15

  A man exercises greyhounds on the towpath where horses once drew the narrow boats of the canal. The muddy sediment that separates the two banks is dankly shadowed, its surface active with autumn insects. The greyhounds are obedient, running on and turning when they’re whistled back, one jet black, the other speckled.

  The walk from the town has taken Albert forty-seven minutes, the time checked on his Zenith because he likes to check the passing of time. He has paused quite often to watch the greyhounds racing on the towpath opposite; now, he turns to the right, leaving them behind when he sees the spire of the church in the distance, and houses clustered nearer. A few minutes later the notice he has been told about says the petrol pump is out of order. Then there is the shop, and the public house next door to it. ‘That name’s all over the graveyard,’ she said, and there it is: Davenant on upright and horizontal stones. ‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ she said, but there’s no one answering to that, Johns and Williams and Percivals mostly, all sorts when it comes to the women. No stone yet marks the newest grave; she said that, too.

  He leaves the graveyard, and on the lane a tractor comes slowly towards him and he stands in against the hedge to let it pass. The driver waves his thanks, an old man in a cap, his glance passing inquisitively over Albert’s clothing — the red and blue uniform he has coveted for so long, found for him when he was accepted into the ranks.

  It’s quiet in the lane once the tractor noise has faded, no aeroplanes to look up at, no one about. The edges of the leaves are withering; there are a few white flowers, a few pink and yellow, in among the
brambles. The sky is grey and dull, all sunshine gone, but Albert doesn’t mind: there are the flowers, even though they’re past their best. ‘Immortal, Invisible’ is the hymn that is in his mind. He has never walked in the country before.

  There’s a wood behind a fence of barbed wire. Some sort of path through fields he was told about, but he doesn’t look for it. A breeze is getting up, rippling through a crop and in the high grass of a meadow. Merle said she came from the country, a big house by a river, brown horses grazing, like in the picture above Mr. Hoates’s desk. Don’t ever throw down sweet papers in a country field, Miss Rapp ruled. Because the country was our heritage.

  Drops of rain begin, heavy drops that spread damp patches on Albert’s jacket and are cold on his forehead and his cheeks. Cows move slowly in a field, all going together, maybe for shelter. The gateless pillars that have been described are straight ahead. The drops have become a downfall, puddles already filling, the surface of the lane awash.

  On the drive, the parched laurels drip and glisten; water streams into gratings; Albert’s shoes are soaked. He blinks the rain out of his eyes, he turns up the collar of his jacket. It is the first time rain has fallen on his uniform. Who’d ever have thought that it could rain?

  ‘A look of an egg about the face,’ Maidment reports. ‘With eyes that do not express a lot, if anything at all. Drenched from head to foot. I wonder he didn’t shelter.’ He leaves the best till last. ‘Togged out by the Salvation Army.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I’m telling you what’s there.’

  ‘You know when the Salvation Army was mentioned.’

  This has struck Maidment too. A Salvation Army barracks, or whatever the term is. The name of the street was given, but he has forgotten.

  ‘He say what he wanted?’

  ‘A word. He said he wanted a word. He called me sir.’

  ‘It’ll be that boy’

  Weeks have passed since their outing to Scarrow Hill. On subsequent Sundays there have been visits to Notham Manor and the Dolls’ Museum at Hindesleigh, to Tattermarle Castle and a steam-engine display in a field. On each occasion Zenobia has attended church en route while Maidment read the News of the World in the Subaru. ‘No, I want to forget about it,’ Zenobia has firmly laid down when attempts have been made by her husband to embark on fresh speculation about the abduction. She doesn’t at all like the advent of this boy.

  ‘Come for another handout.’ And Maidment pronounces fiscal gain to be the universal language of the age, cure for all ills, salver of all conscience.

  ‘You’ll need to take in tea,’ Zenobia interrupts this flow, lifting a cherry cake from a tin. ‘You have tobacco on your breath,’ she points out also. ‘Take Listerine, I would.’

  ‘You ever get the planes going over?’ Albert asks. ‘Alitalia? Icelandic? Air Canada with the leaf? Air India, you get?’

  Nothing much in the way of plane traffic, they say, the man saying it first. ‘Mrs. Iveson,’ she said when he came into the room and he wondered how she was spelling that, but didn’t ask. ‘Mr. Davenant,’ she said, and he didn’t say he knew.

  Virgin has the pin-up, he says, the Saudis have the swords, the Irish the shamrock. ‘You’d know a shamrock never grew in England, sir?’

  The man Pettie took the shine to nods. The woman she didn’t like says the shamrock is special to St. Patrick, which he had ready to say himself. Pettie got off on the wrong foot with her on account she gave short on the fares, but it could have been she didn’t mean to. It could have been she hadn’t checked it out. He didn’t say it to Pettie, a waste of breath that would have been. Pettie didn’t go for her and that was that.

  ‘He took it as a sign.’ He explains in case there is confusion about the shamrock. ‘A three-leaved clover.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘You’d know it’s a bird on a lot of them, sir? One way or another, not that people realize. Singapore for starters, sir. Then again Indonesia. Then again Nigeria and the Germans.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Not much to Cathay Pacific, sir. Not much to Egypt Air.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘They give me the money, sir. What you sent.’

  They nod their heads. A Friday it was when she came out here the first time, a Saturday a.m. when she said Thaddeus Davenant the first time in the Soft Rock.

  ‘We’re extremely grateful to you,’ the woman says.

  ‘They said you was grateful.’

  ‘More than we can express.’

  The man who opened the door comes in with a tray. It’s laden down with a cake and toast cut into strips, and a plate of biscuits, and jam, and plates and cups and saucers. You can tell there’s butter on the toast from the glisten.

  ‘Georgina Belle recovered from her adventure?’ He planned to say that first of all, but he forgot, so he says it now. Then he asks about Iveson, how it’s spelt, explaining that he takes an interest in a name.

  ‘I, v, e,’ the woman says, ‘s, o, n.’

  The man puts the tray down. He fiddles with the cups and saucers, setting them out. Pettie didn’t go for him, either. She didn’t like the way he looked at her when he opened the front door. You wouldn’t trust a man like that, she said. vIveson,’ the woman repeats, and he’s put in mind of Ivy On Her Own, who sang for Leeroy. Still not speaking, the man who brought the tray in goes away.

  ‘Why d’you call her that?’ the woman asks. ‘Georgina Belle?’

  ‘The baby that is, Mrs. Iveson.’

  Just Georgina it is.’

  He mentions Leeroy. Ivy On Her Own, he explains, Bob Iron and the Metalmen. ‘I thought it was Georgina Belle,’ he says, and explains that Leeroy’s singers didn’t exist, that no one could hear them except Leeroy. Probably no one can to this day, he explains.

  ‘I see,’ the woman says.

  ‘One of those things, like.’

  He likes the cup his tea’s in, flowers all over it and a gold ring on the edge, and another round the saucer. He likes the cake he’s eating, as good as anything Mr. Kipling does. ‘You know Mr. Kipling at all?’ he asks them and then he realizes they think he means personally so he explains that Mr. Kipling is a cake-maker. Mrs. Biddle is partial to Mr. Kipling’s almond slices, he says, anything with jam in it and Mrs. Biddle’s away. When she was younger she had to watch her waist.

  ‘All right then, Mrs. Iveson?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ vNot that Mrs. Biddle’s stout these days. Skin and bone, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Would you like to see Georgina? I’m sure you would.’

  She goes away and Thaddeus Davenant offers him the biscuits. The dog’s asleep, stretched out in a corner. There are more books in those bookcases than he has ever seen in a living-room before. Albert says that, keeping things going.

  ‘What’s his name, sir?’ he inquires, looking over at the dog.

  ‘Rosie.’

  He remembers. And he remembers this same dog described, friendly and brown, and how he warned her that you can’t be too careful with a dog. The rain’s still coming down, sounding on the window glass.

  ‘They don’t like a uniform, sir. Depending on the dog, a postman said to me once.’

  ‘Postmen have a lot to put up with in that respect.’

  He’s a man who doesn’t say much, which maybe was what she took to. She could sit in silence with a person, it didn’t matter. When they lived in the glasshouse she didn’t speak herself for hours on end. It would come on dark and he daren’t flash on his torch, but she never minded. She’d things to think about, she said.

  ‘You read all them books, sir?’

  ‘Not all of them. But most, I think, one way or another.’

  Mrs. Biddle has a few behind glass in the hall. Not his business, so he never took one out. Magazines are more Mrs. Biddle’s thing. Hello! and Chic he gets her, the People’s Friend.

  ‘Read a Book with Me, by the Man Who Sees. You come across that, sir? I come across it somewhe
re, maybe Miss Rapp it was. The Home Encyclopaedia we had. Arthur Mee’s Talhs for Boys, sir? You’d have known that in your young days?’

  ‘No. No, I’m afraid I didn’t.’

  ‘You ever go on Varig, Mr. Davenant? Varig Brazilian?’ vActually, I’ve never flown.’ vThey have the rainforest down Brazil way.’

  ‘Yes, they do.’

  Mrs. Iveson is back with the baby, and the baby’s eyes are fixed on him, not that she shows recognition. Too much to expect, in a baby.

  ‘Hullo, there,’ he says.

  She puts the baby down on a chair, bunching it back into a corner, with a cushion in front of it in case it tumbles off, although it’s hard to see how it could.

  ‘Is it Albert?’ she asks. ‘I think at the time they said Albert.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you tell us your name?’

  He feels foolish, as he did when he forgot about the dog being mentioned. He should have given his name when he entered the room. Best to call it an adventure was what he was concentrating on, best to smile, which he did, only he forgot to give his name.

  ‘Albert Luffe.’

  ‘We guessed when we saw your uniform. We were told you took Georgina to one of your hostels.’

  ‘You think it’s all right?’ He strokes one lapel and then the other, to indicate what he means. They say it suits him. ‘You look ridiculous, dear,’ Mrs. Biddle said the first time he wore it, taking against it because it was something new. ‘You’re in that uniform again,’ she has taken to calling out, knowing he has it on when he doesn’t look in to say goodbye to her on his way out. Mrs. Biddle needn’t see it if she doesn’t want to, no way he’d foist something new on her. He didn’t tell her Captain Evans is going to teach him an instrument, soon as they find out which one he’d be all right on. Best not to bring it up if it isn’t what she wants.

  ‘Sorry about that, Mrs. Iveson.’