Grave Mistake

  ‘Yes. But most of it’s grass and that’s looked after by a contractor,’ explained Verity, and felt angrily that she was adopting an apologetic, almost a cringing attitude.

  ‘Ou aye,’ said Mr Gardener again. He beamed down upon her. ‘And I can see fine that it’s highly prized by its leddy-mistress.’

  Verity mumbled self-consciously.

  They got down to brass tacks. Gardener’s baggage had arrived. He produced glowing references from, as Sybil had said, grand employers, and photographs of their quellingly superior grounds. He was accustomed, he said, to having at the verra least a young laddie working under him but realized that in coming to keep his sister company in her ber-r-rievement, pure lassie, he would be obliged to dra’ in his horns a wee. Ou, aye.

  They arrived at wages. No wonder, thought Verity, that Sybil had hurried over the topic: Mr Gardener required almost twice the pay of Angus McBride. Verity told herself she ought to say she would let him know in the morning and was just about to do so when he mentioned that Friday was the only day he had left and in a panic she suddenly closed with him.

  He said he would be glad to work for her. He said he sensed they would get along fine. The general impression was that he preferred to work at a derisive wage for somebody he fancied rather than for a pride of uncongenial millionaires and/or noblemen, however open-handed.

  On that note they parted.

  Verity walked up the lane through the scents and sounds of a spring evening. She told herself that she could afford Gardener, that clearly he was a highly experienced man and that she would have kicked herself all round her lovely garden if she’d funked employing him and fallen back on the grossly incompetent services of the only other jobbing gardener now available in the district.

  But when she had gone in at the gate and walked between burgeoning lime trees up to her house, Verity, being an honest-minded creature, admitted to herself that she had taken a scunner on Mr Gardener.

  As soon as she opened her front door she heard the telephone ringing. It was Sybil, avid to know if Verity had secured his services. When she learnt that the deed had been done she adopted an irritatingly complacent air as if she herself had scored some kind of triumph.

  Verity often wondered how it had come about that she and Sybil seemed to be such close friends. They had known each other all their lives, of course, and when they were small had shared the same governess. But later on, when Verity was in London and Sybil, already a young widow, had married her well-heeled, short-lived stockbroker, they seldom met. It was after Sybil was again widowed, being left with Prunella and a highly unsatisfactory stepson from her first marriage, that they picked up the threads of their friendship. Really they had little in common.

  Their friendship in fact was a sort of hardy perennial, reappearing when it was least expected to do so.

  The horticultural analogy occurred to Verity while Sybil gushed away about Gardener. He had started with her that very day, it transpired, and, my dear, the difference! And the imagination! And the work, the sheer hard work. She raved on. She really is a bit of an ass, is poor old Syb, Verity thought.

  ‘And don’t you find his Scots rather beguiling?’ Sybil was asking.

  ‘Why doesn’t his sister do it?’

  ‘Do what, dear?’

  ‘Talk Scots?’

  ‘Good Heavens, Verity, how should I know? Because she came south and married a man of Kent, I dare say. Black spoke broad Kentish.’

  ‘So he did,’ agreed Verity pacifically.

  ‘I’ve got news for you.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘You’ll never guess. An invitation. From Mardling Manor, no less,’ said Sybil in a put-on drawing-room-comedy voice.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘For dinner. Next Wednesday. He rang up this morning. Rather unconventional if one’s to stickle, I suppose, but that sort of tommyrot’s as dead as the dodo in my book. And we have met. When he lent Mardling for that hospital fund-raising garden-party. Nobody went inside, of course. I’m told lashings of lolly have been poured out – redecorated, darling, from attic to cellar. You were there, weren’t you? At the garden-party?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. I was sure you were. Rather intriguing, I thought, didn’t you?’

  ‘I hardly spoke to him,’ said Verity inaccurately.

  ‘I hoped you’d been asked,’ said Sybil much more inaccurately.

  ‘Not I. I expect you’ll have gorgeous grub.’

  ‘I don’t know that it’s a party.’

  ‘Just you?’

  ‘My dear. Surely not! But no. Prue’s come home. She’s met the son somewhere and so she’s been asked – to balance him, I suppose. Well,’ said Sybil on a dashing note, ‘we shall see what we shall see.’

  ‘Have a lovely time. How’s the arthritis?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Pretty ghastly, but I’m learning to live with it. Nothing else to be done, is there? If it’s not that it’s my migraine.’

  ‘I thought Dr Field-Innis had given you something for the migraine.’

  ‘Hopeless, my dear. If you ask me Field-Innis is getting beyond it. And he’s become very offhand, I don’t mind telling you.’

  Verity half-listened to the so-familiar plaints. Over the years Sybil had consulted a procession of general practitioners and in each instance enthusiasm had dwindled into discontent. It was only because there were none handy, Verity sometimes thought, that Syb had escaped falling into the hands of some plausible quack.

  ‘– and I had considered,’ she was saying, ‘taking myself off to Greengages for a fortnight. It does quite buck me up, that place.’

  ‘Yes, why don’t you?’

  ‘I think I’d like to just be here, though, while Mr Gardener gets the place into shape.’

  ‘One calls him “Mr Gardener”, then?’

  ‘Verity, he is very superior. Anyway I hate those old snobby distinctions. You don’t, evidently.’

  ‘I’ll call him the Duke of Plaza-Toro if he’ll get rid of my weeds.’

  ‘I really must go,’ Sybil suddenly decided, as if Verity had been preventing her from doing so. ‘I can’t make up my mind about Greengages.’

  Greengages was an astronomically expensive establishment; a hotel with a resident doctor and a sort of valetudinarian sideline where weight was reduced by the exaction of a deadly diet while appetites were stimulated by compulsory walks over a rather dreary countryside. If Sybil decided to go there, Verity would be expected to drive through twenty miles of dense traffic to take a luncheon of inflationary soup and a concoction of liver and tomatoes garnished with mushrooms to which she was uproariously allergic.

  She had no sooner hung up her receiver when the telephone rang again.

  ‘Damn,’ said Verity, who hankered after her cold duck and salad and the telly.

  A vibrant male voice asked if she were herself and on learning that she was, said it was Nikolas Markos speaking.

  ‘Is this a bad time to ring you up?’ Mr Markos asked. ‘Are you telly-watching or thinking about your dinner, for instance?’

  ‘Not quite yet.’

  ‘But almost, I suspect. I’ll be quick. Would you like to dine here next Wednesday? I’ve been trying to get you all day. Say you will, like a kind creature. Will you?’

  He spoke as if they were old friends and Verity, accustomed to this sort of approach in the theatre, responded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will. I’d like to. Thank you. What time?’

  III

  Nobody in Upper Quintern knew much about Nikolas Markos. He was reputed to be fabulously rich, widowed and a financier. Oil was mentioned as the almost inescapable background. When Mardling Manor came on the market Mr Markos had bought it, and when Verity went to dine with him, had been in residence, off and on, for about four months.

  Mardling was an ugly house. It had been built in mid-Victorian times on the site of a Jacobean mansion. It was large, pepper-potted and highly inconvenient; not a patch on Sybil
Foster’s Quintern Place, which was exquisite. The best that could be said of Mardling was that, however hideous, it looked clumsily important both inside and out.

  As Verity drove up she saw Sybil’s Mercedes parked alongside a number of other cars. The front door opened before she got to it and revealed that obsolete phenomenon, a manservant.

  While she was being relieved of her coat she saw that even the ugliest of halls can be made beautiful by beautiful possessions. Mr Markos had covered the greater part of the stupidly carved walls with smoky tapestries. These melted upwards into an almost invisible gallery and relinquished the dominant position above an enormous fireplace to a picture. Such a picture! An imperious quattrocento man, life-size, ablaze in a scarlet cloak on a round-rumped charger. The rider pointed his sword at an immaculate little Tuscan town.

  Verity was so struck with the picture that she was scarcely conscious that behind her a door had opened and closed.

  ‘Ah!’ said Nikolas Markos, ‘you like my arrogant equestrian? Or are you merely surprised by him?’

  ‘Both,’ said Verity.

  His handshake was quick and perfunctory. He wore a green velvet coat. His hair was dark, short and curly at the back. His complexion was sallow and his eyes black. His mouth, under a slight moustache, seemed to contradict the almost too plushy ensemble. It was slim-lipped, and, Verity thought, extremely firm.

  ‘Is it a Uccello?’ she asked, turning back to the picture.

  ‘I like to think so, but it’s a borderline case. “School of” is all the pundits will allow me.’

  ‘It’s extraordinarily exciting.’

  ‘Isn’t it, just? I’m glad you like it. And delighted, by the way, that you’ve come.’

  Verity was overtaken by one of her moments of middle-aged shyness. ‘Oh. Good,’ she mumbled.

  ‘We’re nine for dinner: my son, Gideon, a Dr Basil Schramm who’s yet to arrive, and you know all the rest, Mrs Foster and her daughter, the vicar (she’s indisposed) and Dr and Mrs Field-Innis. Come and join them.’

  Verity’s recollection of the drawing-room at Mardling was of a great ungainly apartment, over-furnished and nearly always chilly. She found herself in a bird’s-egg blue and white room, sparkling with firelight and a welcoming elegance.

  There, expansively on a sofa, was Sybil at her most feminine, and that was saying a great deal. Hair, face, pampered little hands, jewels, dress and, if you got close enough, scent – they all came together like the ingredients of some exotic pudding. She fluttered a minute handkerchief at Verity and pulled an arch grimace.

  ‘This is Gideon,’ said Mr Markos.

  He was even darker than his father and startlingly handsome. ‘My dear, an Adonis,’ Sybil was to say of him, and later was to add that there was ‘something’ wrong and that she was never deceived, she sensed it at once, let Verity mark her words. When asked to explain herself she said it didn’t matter but she always knew. Verity thought that she knew, too. Sybil was hell-bent on her daughter Prunella encouraging the advances of a hereditary peer with the unlikely name of Swingletree and took an instant dislike to any attractive young man who hove into view.

  Gideon looked about twenty, was poised and had nice manners. His black hair was not very long and was well kept. Like his father, he wore a velvet coat. The only note of extravagance was in the frilled shirt and flowing tie. These lent a final touch to what might have been an unendurably romantic appearance, but Gideon had enough natural manner to get away with them.

  He had been talking to Prunella Foster, who was like her mother at the same age; ravishingly pretty and a great talker. Verity never knew what Prunella talked about as she always spoke in a whisper. She nodded a lot and gave mysterious little smiles and, because it was the fashion of the moment, seemed to be dressed in expensive rags partly composed of a patchwork quilt. Under this supposedly evening attire she wore a little pair of bucket boots.

  Dr Field-Innis was an old Upper Quintern hand. The younger son of a brigadier, he had taken to medicine instead of arms and had married a lady who sometimes won point-to-points and more often fell off.

  The vicar we have already met. He was called Walter Cloudesley, and ministered, a little sadly, to twenty parishioners in a very beautiful old church that had once housed three hundred.

  Altogether, Verity thought, this was a predictable Upper Quintern dinner-party with an unpredictable host in a highly exceptional setting.

  They drank champagne cocktails.

  Sybil, sparkling, told Mr Markos how clever he was and went into an ecstasy over the house. She had a talent that never failed to tickle Verity’s fancy, for making the most unexceptionable remark to a gentleman sound as if it carried some frisky innuendo. She sketched an invitation for him to join her on the sofa but he seemed not to notice. He stood over her and replied in kind. Later on, Verity thought, she will tell me he’s a man of the world.

  He moved to his hearthrug and surveyed his guests with an air of satisfaction. ‘This is great fun,’ he said. ‘My first Quintern venture. Really, it’s a kind of christening party for the house, isn’t it? What a good thing you could come, Vicar.’

  ‘I certainly give it my blessing,’ the vicar hardily countered. He was enjoying a second champagne cocktail.

  ‘And, by the way, the party won’t be undiluted Quintern. There’s somebody still to come. I do hope he’s not going to be late. He’s a man I ran across in New York, a Basil Schramm. I found him –’ Mr Markos paused and an odd little smile touched his mouth – ‘quite interesting. He rang up out of a clear sky this morning, saying he was going to take up a practice somewhere in our part of the world and was driving there this evening. We discovered that his route would bring him through Upper Quintern and on the spur of the moment I asked him to dine. He’ll unbalance the table a bit but I hope nobody’s going to blench at that.’

  ‘An American?’ asked Mrs Field-Innis. She had a hoarse voice.

  ‘He’s Swiss by birth, I fancy.’

  ‘Is he taking a locum,’ asked Dr Field-Innis, ‘or a permanent practice?’

  ‘The latter, I supposed. At some hotel or nursing home or convalescent place or something of the sort. Green – something.’

  ‘Not “gages”,’ cried Sybil, softly clapping her hands.

  ‘I knew it made me think of indigestion. Greengages it is,’ said Mr Markos.

  ‘Oh,’ said Dr Field-Innis. ‘That place.’

  Much was made of this coincidence, if it could be so called. The conversation drifted to gardeners. Sybil excitedly introduced her find. Mr Markos became grand signorial and when Gideon asked if they hadn’t taken on a new man, said they had but he didn’t know what he was called. Verity, who, a-political at heart, drifted guiltily from left to right and back again, felt her redder hackles rising. She found that Mr Markos was looking at her in a manner that gave her the sense of having been rumbled.

  Presently he drew a chair up to hers.

  ‘I very much enjoyed your play,’ he said. ‘Your best, up to date, I thought.’

  ‘Did you? Good.’

  ‘It’s very clever of you to be civilized as well as penetrating. I want to ask you, though –’

  He talked intelligently about her play. It suddenly dawned on Verity that there was nobody in Upper Quintern with whom she ever discussed her work and she felt as if she spoke the right lines in the wrong theatre. She heard herself eagerly discussing her play and fetched up abruptly.

  ‘I’m talking shop,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with shop? Particularly when your shop’s one of the arts.’

  ‘Is yours?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘mine’s as dull as ditchwater.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Schramm is late,’ he said. ‘Lost in the Weald of Kent, I dare say. We shall not wait for him. Tell me –’

  He started off again. The butler came in. Verity expected him to announce dinner but he said, ‘Dr Schramm, sir.’

  When Dr Schramm walked into the room it
seemed to shift a little. Her mouth dried. She waited through an unreckoned interval for Nikolas Markos to arrive at her as he performed the introductions.

  ‘But we have already met,’ said Dr Schramm. ‘Some time ago.’

  IV

  Twenty-five years to be exact, Verity thought. It was ludicrous – grotesque almost – after twenty-five years, to be put out by his reappearance.

  ‘Somebody should say “What a small world”,’ said Dr Schramm.

  He had always made remarks like that. And laughed like that and touched his moustache.

  He didn’t know me at first, she thought. That’ll learn me.

  He had moved on towards the fire with Mr Markos and been given, in quick succession, two cocktails. Verity heard him explain how he’d missed the turn-off to Upper Quintern.

  But why ‘Schramm’? she wondered. He could have hyphenated himself if ‘Smythe’ wasn’t good enough. And ‘Doctor’? So he qualified after all.

  ‘Very difficult country,’ Mrs Field-Innis said. She had been speaking for some time.

  ‘Very,’ Verity agreed fervently and was stared at.

  Dinner was announced.

  She was afraid they might find themselves together at the table but after, or so she fancied, a moment’s hesitation, Mr Markos put Schramm between Sybil and Dr Field-Innis who was on Verity’s right, with the vicar on her left. Mr Markos himself was on Sybil’s right. It was a round table.

  She managed quite well at dinner. The vicar was at all times prolific in discourse and, being of necessity as well as by choice, of an abstemious habit, he was a little flown with unaccustomed wine. Dr Field-Innis was also in talkative form. He coruscated with anecdotes concerning high jinks in his student days.

  On his far side, Dr Schramm, whose glass had been twice replenished, was much engaged with Sybil Foster, which meant that he was turned away from Dr Field-Innis and Verity. He bent towards Sybil, laughed a great deal at everything she said and established an atmosphere of flirtatious understanding. This stabbed Verity with the remembrance of long-healed injuries. It had been his technique when he wished to show her how much another woman pleased him. He had used it at the theatre in the second row of the stalls, prolonging his laughter beyond the rest of the audience so that she, as well as the actress concerned, might become aware of him. She realized that even now, idiotically after twenty-five years, he aimed his performance at her.