Nursery Tea and Poison

by Anne Morice

  No one seemed ready to help him resolve the problem and Serena frowned and said with the utmost seriousness:

  ‘Well, I expect film directors and people like that have a truer sense of proportion, but I don’t see how you can be expected to cope with the major problems of life when so much time has to be devoted to the minor ones.’

  ‘Besides, the minor ones are so much more interesting,’ Pelham said.

  This observation reminded Jake of another utterly pointless anecdote concerning his gamekeeper, in which the latter was quoted verbatim, so that we not only had to suffer all the ahs and urns, but also a very embarrassing imitation of the Herefordshire dialect as well. Fortunately for his captive audience, Primrose returned at around the halfway point and revived the party into a state of startled alertness by digging into her congealed roast beef and polishing off the lot in five minutes flat.

  ‘That’s better,’ she announced, laying down her knife and fork as Jake paused for breath. ‘I was jolly peckish. Anyone want some more?’

  ‘No, thank you, darling, we’ve all finished now. If you’d just take a few plates out and ask Mrs Thorne for the pudding?’

  ‘Nannie wouldn’t touch hers, by the way,’ Primrose said, lumbering up again. ‘Chucked the whole lot back at me. Got one of her indigestion bouts coming on, by the look of it.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Serena murmured, looking more distressed than the news warranted and so no doubt confirming Jake in his views. ‘How very unfortunate! But please keep it dark from Mrs Thorne, will you? We don’t want to upset her and I expect Nannie will be able to manage a little caramel custard.’

  ‘Are you joking?’ Primrose asked, leaning her weight against the swing door to the kitchen. ‘Caramel custard, my foot. She’s heard there’s gooseberry tart on the menu and she can’t wait to get at it.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Serena said again. ‘That doesn’t sound very sensible. How on earth does she get to hear of these things, I wonder?’

  ‘See what I mean?’ Jake asked, looking in triumph from Lindy to me.

  ‘Yes, and I do apologise, Jake,’ Serena said. ‘I can see that it all sounds very trivial and unimportant, but she does have these awfully bad attacks sometimes and I should have thought gooseberries were the very thing to bring one on. I wish I could spend more time concentrating on pollution and everything, but it’s going to be even harder to do, if I have to sit up half the night nursing her through an attack.’

  ‘I guess you’ve had your share of the big tragedies too?’ Lindy remarked rather unexpectedly.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ Serena replied, flushing slightly and glancing at Pelham. ‘No one can expect to get through life without a few knocks; but they don’t immunise one against the pinpricks.’

  ‘And Robin is spending the weekend investigating a particularly foul murder which took place only ten miles from here,’ I put in, backing her up. ‘No one expects us to take a vow of silence while he does it.’

  ‘Besides, it’s a ridiculous argument,’ Pelham said, joining in the onslaught. ‘My dear old boy, you don’t seriously imagine we spend all our time frolicking around in Dingley Dell, wearing ourselves to rags over whether to have Sally Lunn or muffins for tea? Even this little backwater has its murky stretches, you know. I can remember some hideous scandals in my youth. Make your hair curl, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Like the baker ar ar aaarm running away with the candlestick maker’s wife?’

  ‘Oh, plenty of that; plus a fair share of the rapes and murders too. Do you remember that awful business of the boy, Serena?’

  ‘Boy?’ she repeated vaguely. ‘What boy are you speaking of Pelham?’

  ‘Oh, surely you remember? It was the big sensation of the year. I mean the boy who was tortured and left to die, right here in the Park.’

  ‘My dear Pelham,’ she asked, staring at him with fearful astonishment, ‘how on earth did you come to hear about that?’

  ‘Same way as you, I daresay. Servants’ gossip and all the rest of it.’

  ‘No, no, you’re quite mistaken, but please let’s not speak of it now.’

  ‘Just as you like. Perhaps I’ve imagined the whole thing.’

  ‘Why no,’ Lindy piped up. ‘I remember you telling me, Pel. It certainly seemed real enough, the way you described it.’

  Serena looked from one to another of them, still shaking her head in a stupefied way, which gradually had a hypnotising effect on the whole table. The spell was broken by the appearance of Primrose in the open doorway, carrying a tray, which she slammed down on the sideboard, saying stonily:

  ‘Every word can be heard in the kitchen, you know. Luckily for you, Mrs Thorne is on the deaf side, but you’d better watch it. I’ll be upstairs if anyone wants me.’

  She then banged out of the room again, kicking up the door hook with such violence that it went on swinging back and forth for several seconds after she had left.

  ‘I do apologise,’ Serena said, almost in tears, ‘but we’ve got on to a painful subject, as you’ve probably realised. I’ll explain why later on, but for various reasons this is not the time for it. Now, who’s ready for some gooseberry tart? Not you, Jake, I know, but we’ve got an alternative. Tessa, darling, I wonder if you’d be kind enough . . . ?’

  I jumped up instantly, but Jake was ahead of me, already on his feet.

  ‘Pardon me, Serena, but if I understand you correctly, oughtn’t one of us to aw ar go after ah um Primrose?’

  ‘Oh no, my dear, I should leave her alone. I expect she’s gone to see Nannie. She’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Didn’t look quite that way to me. If you’ll ah care to excuse me, I’ll go and check on it.’

  ‘You must find us somewhat eccentric,’ Serena sighed, looking round at her depleted party. ‘You, especially, Lindy; but we don’t usually behave in this fashion. Bear me out, Tessa!’

  ‘My darling Serena, you make me feel like the utmost heel,’ Pelham told her, pushing his plate aside, in order to lean forward and clasp her hand. ‘Obviously, I’ve plunged my tiny foot straight into it. It was quite unintentional, but I should be the one to apologise, for upsetting everyone and spoiling your lovely dinner. Can we please now forget the whole subject and never refer to it again?’

  ‘No,’ she replied firmly, ‘I think we shall need to refer to it just once more, before it’s forgotten. You’re entitled to an explanation for our somewhat dramatic reactions, but I’d prefer not to give it to you here, or when Primrose is with us. Not that that need delay us for long. Jake was quite right, of course; she’s badly upset and, judging on past form, she won’t be coming down again this evening.’

  ‘My God Almighty, I really have set a cat among the pigeons, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes, my dear, I have to agree, and precisely for that reason the matter had better be cleared up once and for all. There’s one point I want you to explain for me in return. In the meantime, though, who’d like some more to eat?’

  Ironically enough, the pie was delicious, and so was the stiff, yellow home-farm cream which accompanied it, but none of us took up her offer. If my own reactions were anything to go by, we were all too eager to hear Serena’s tale to have much appetite left for food.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘You may as well hear this too, Jake,’ Serena said, when, minus Primrose, he joined us for the after dinner coffee session. ‘It does concern you, in so far as it’s part of Chargrove history, and one still occasionally hears allusions to it among the people employed here. Besides, it’s only fair to Mrs Thorne, now that we hope to be seeing quite a lot of her. One wouldn’t want anything said, through ignorance, which might upset her.’

  I was privately of the opinion that not upsetting Mrs Thorne was Serena’s primary motive in her determination to reveal all, and Jake may have shared it, for he glanced at his wrist watch, which resembled a ship’s compass in size and complexity, and said in his harsh growl:

  ‘Well, look . . . ah . . . now, Serena. I ha
ve an . . . ahm . . . early start tomorrow . . . If you’ll forgive me, I need to get some ar ar ar ahm sleep.’

  ‘This won’t take long and we can begin as soon as Pelham comes back. He has gone to say goodnight to Nannie; it was better to get that over first and this may be my only chance. Where is Primrose, by the way? In her room?’

  Jake allowed himself about five minutes to answer in the affirmative and at around the halfway mark Pelham returned and poured himself some coffee.

  ‘I must congratulate you, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘Not only the best tenant that God ever breathed life into, but you appear to be among the select few in making a deep impression on Nannie. She was positively over-awed by your delivering her dessert in person. The archangel Gabriel couldn’t have caused a bigger sensation.’

  ‘I’d say that was . . . ah . . . ah . . . slight exaggeration. Fact is, I . . . um . . . ar . . . often find time to look in for a chat with ah ah . . . ah . . .’

  ‘Just a minute, both of you,’ Serena cut in, putting an end to this fruitless exchange. ‘Jake’s in a hurry and there’s something I want to tell you all, before he goes. May I please begin?’

  Pelham nodded, without much enthusiasm, and sat down in the armchair opposite hers. Lindy, who was bunched up on the hearthrug, hugging her knees, leant her head against his legs in an attitude of child-like love and trust.

  ‘To understand the background,’ Serena began, ‘I must explain that Mrs Thorne was in service at the big house when I was a girl, and a very pretty creature she was too, in those days. She married Ted Thorne, one of the under-gardeners and Rupert gave them a cottage on the estate, where they still live. Their boy, Alan, was born about four months after the wedding, which is around average in these parts. It was a long and difficult confinement and she was ill for weeks afterwards with puerperal fever. As you may know, this can temporarily affect the mind and one of the symptoms in this case was to turn her right off the child. Even when she had fully recovered she never had any genuine fondness for him. She brought him up as efficiently as she knew how, but without love or affection.

  ‘You must bear with me if much of this seems irrelevant to you,’ she went on, looking down at Lindy, who was picking out pieces of embroidery silk which had become embedded in the carpet and rolling them between her fingers. ‘It is important, in view of what people said after the tragedy. And a further point which has to be made is that, maybe as a direct result of his mother’s lack of feeling for him, poor little Alan grew up to be a particularly detestable child. Not only physically stunted, but greedy and sly as well and with a kind of cringing manner which made even quite civilised people want to strangle him.’

  ‘Which one of them eventually did?’ Pelham asked.

  ‘No, it wasn’t as simple as that. The crisis came just after his eighth birthday, which was in late December. It began to snow around midday, I remember. Mrs Thorne was working here in those days and Alan was in and out of the house rather more than she liked, helping himself to mince pies and trinkets off the Christmas tree whenever her back was turned and generally making a nuisance of himself. It wasn’t really his fault either. His father was working too and it was the school holidays, so he was thoroughly at a loose end and ready for any mischief. I ought to have stepped in and taken a hand myself, I suppose, but I was younger then and more self-centred, and Mrs Thorne has always been very proud. She would never have stood for anything in the nature of criticism or interference.

  ‘Well, anyway, on that particular morning Alan had been playing her up so badly that she finally lost control and gave him a whacking, whereupon he ran out of the house, howling at the top of his lungs. It was all rather distressing, but unfortunately not specially unusual and I must confess that my chief reaction when he didn’t come back was one of profound relief.

  ‘Mrs Thorne left here soon after twelve to go and see to her husband’s and Alan’s dinner and she was supposed to return at half past two, to wash up and finish off one or two jobs. She didn’t turn up, but I hardly registered the fact because by then it had become just another small annoyance in an exceptionally trying day. I was to drive Primrose and Nannie to a children’s fancy dress party over near Ledbridge and I was getting worried about the roads because the snow was beginning to come down quite heavily. As though that wasn’t enough, there were blood-curdling squalls going on in the nursery, where Nannie was trying to coerce Primrose into dressing up as the fairy queen. As you can imagine, that wasn’t a very popular move, and I must say Primrose had my sympathy because no costume could have been more inappropriate. But she had been very naughty and run away and hidden and Nannie had been searching high and low for her, so that the issue had become a sort of challenge to her authority, and I should only have made matters worse by taking the child’s side. And so there we were, a most unhappy little trio, including a solid, red faced and tearful fairy queen, setting off at three o’clock for the party.

  ‘It was a ten mile drive and the original plan had been for me to stay and have tea with half a dozen other far flung parents, rather than do the journey four separate times, but the light was already fading when we arrived and our hostess advised me to turn the car round and drive straight home, saying that she would keep Primrose and Nannie for the night. I must admit that I was enormously relieved because I had been dreading the drive home in the dark and also I could now look forward to a quiet evening on my own, which was about the greatest luxury life had to offer in those days.

  ‘Not that I got it, by any means. In the first place, the car went into a skid when I was nearly home, about halfway between the lodge gates and this house and it landed up sideways in a snowdrift.

  I had some sacking and a spade in the boot, but the back wheels were wedged right up against the bank and although I struggled for about twenty minutes I simply couldn’t manage to free them.’

  At this point in the narrative Lindy shifted her position slightly, Pelham noticed that his cigar had gone out and Jake permitted himself another sideways glance at his watch. Watching them, Serena said:

  ‘I apologise for so many details, but they are important because, had it not been for these seemingly trivial accidents the ultimate tragedy might have been avoided. So to resume: I was eventually forced to abandon the car and walk the rest of the way home; and anyone who has had to plod through snow in the pitch dark will understand why it took me all of twenty minutes to get there and what a sorry state I was in when I arrived.

  ‘There were no lights on in the house and Mrs Thorne hadn’t been back. The remains of lunch were still on the table and the fire had gone out. I was exhausted and soaked through and I decided that the sensible course was to get out of my wet clothes and into a hot bath, before setting to and clearing up the mess.

  ‘While I was in the bath I heard sounds in the kitchen, so, concluding that Mrs Thorne had come back at last I took my time. However, when I eventually came downstairs I found that it was Ted Thorne who was waiting for me in the kitchen. He told me that Alan was missing. He hadn’t come home for his dinner and no one had seen him since his mother sent him packing in the morning. Ted wanted to know if I could throw any light on it.

  ‘Naturally, I was horrified and I immediately asked if he had been in touch with the police, but he said they had thought it best to wait until they had spoken to me. He had tried to ring me up at the house where the party was being held, but they’d told him I was on my way home, so he’d waited until he saw the lights go on here and then he’d come over.

  ‘Incredible as this must sound to the rest of you, and I am sure things have changed a lot now, Pelham will bear me out when I say that, even so recently as that, people like the Thornes who’d been born and brought up on the estate had an almost instinctive habit of shifting their responsibilities on to the people they worked for. Of course there were tenants up at the big house and it was all right to use their telephone, but no one would have dreamt of asking their advice. That could only come from one of the fam
ily.

  ‘Anyway, I said that the first thing we had to do was to inform the police and that was where we got caught in yet another maddening delay, because my telephone was out of order. We discovered afterwards that the weight of the snow had brought one of the lines down, but at the time it felt like living through one of those nightmares where you have to struggle to set one foot in front of the other. Luckily, Ted had his car outside and we drove up to the big house to telephone. After that he took me back to his cottage, where we waited until the police arrived.’

  ‘And was there anything they could do when they did come?’ I asked.

  ‘Very little. It was mainly a question of trying to reassure the parents. They did get a search party organised and they’d brought tracker dogs, but it was pretty hopeless because, as well as hampering movement, the snow had obliterated scents. Besides, the boy had been missing for nearly eight hours by then and there are fourteen thousand acres on this estate alone; and with no clues to guide them it would have been a miracle if they’d found him. He could have been lying somewhere with a broken ankle, or on a bus to Birmingham, or curled up asleep in a barn not a hundred yards away. I think the police believed that to be the most likely explanation, but they were wrong because the next morning he still hadn’t returned and at first light the search began in earnest, with every able bodied person joining in. All the same, it was early afternoon before they found him.’

  ‘Dead?’ Jake enquired, having, contrary to all the evidence, mastered the trick of cutting a few chunks out of the script when the need arose.

  There was a brief pause while Serena adjusted herself to this jump in the narrative and then she said:

  ‘Yes, and in the most grotesque and horrible way imaginable. He’d been stripped almost down to the skin, leaving him in just his vest and underpants, although they couldn’t see that at first because he was completely blanketed in snow. In fact, it was sheer fluke that they found him at all. He was standing upright, you see, lashed to a tree in High Copse, that clump of sycamores above the lake, and to the casual glance it looked as though a pile of snow had drifted there in the wind. It was only because one of the men noticed a finger sticking out that they discovered what was underneath.’