Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  Joel returned from Torcello and I told him the news. He was shocked and saddened but not surprised by Jerry’s death.

  “Poor devil, I could see it in his face,” he said. “That last evening at Knoyle. But what about you, Katya? Are you really fit to travel?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I’ll be glad to go. Parkson’s doing all the organizing.”

  Joel stuck out his bottom jaw, as he does when worried.

  “What’s the plan? Are you going to Ty’s Battersea place?”

  “No,” I told him (for this had been arranged in the course of the day). “Ty isn’t there anyway, he’s in Paris.” (Going through preliminary processes for the Companions of Roland, he was, but I didn’t tell Joel that.) “No, what I’m going to do is make my way straight down to Knoyle; Parkson will drive me in the Rolls.”

  “Where will you stay?”

  “Ty has a house — remember? One of the houses at Caundle Quay has been permanently dedicated to his use. So I’m going to put up there. It will,” I added a trifle doubtfully, “it will be fun.”

  “Fun?” Joel exploded with rage. “Fun? Who set up this crazy plan? Caundle Quay? How will you get up and down the hill?”

  “I’m becoming quite expert on my crutches. Anyway Ty’s house is near the top, I’m told. Someone can push me in my wheelchair. It will all work out,” I said.

  “But what will you eat? Suppose you need a doctor?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Joel! All that can be arranged!”

  “It can be,” he growled, “but will it, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  Joel wasn’t able to get a seat on the same plane as me, so I flew back in lonely first-class comfort, with my crutches propped in the closet where they hang the garment bags. And at Gatwick efficient Parkson had arranged to have the Rolls waiting, in which he swiftly drove me down to Dorset.

  So that was how I arrived for the second time at Caundle Quay.

  IV

  “OLGA LASZLO MOVES into No.6 today,” Pat Limbourne said to her friend. “Can you put the basics into the house, and generally make her welcome? I have to go into Dorchester for the story-prize ceremony. Terrible stories . . . never mind. It keeps them out of betting shops.”

  She gathered up a large untidy pile of handwritten manuscripts from among the flower-pots, garden-bast, coffee cups and photographic equipment on the kitchen table.

  But Elspeth, engaged in taking off gumboots, sat back on the doorstep, nursing one aged knobby foot, and gazed upwards in something as close to consternation as her amiable, crumpled face would permit.

  “Olga Laszlo? You never told me she was coming here?”

  “Didn’t know myself,” Pat said shortly. “Ty’s office passed on the glad news yesterday evening. She’d applied direct, and it seems her father was a friend or professional associate of old Leyburn — ran his advertising — knew him from way back — and she’s engaged on some design work for the Dorchester theatre — on the face of it she seems perfectly eligible — I suppose they thought so in the office —”

  “Oh dear” said Elspeth, slowly pulling off the other gumboot. Her face was all creased sideways in a frowning grin of distress and perplexity. “That girl is such a disruptive influence, poor thing. One can’t exactly blame her, I suppose, after having been a refugee in childhood and so forth —”

  “Other people have been refugees and survived to lead normal lives. Anyway, let’s hope she won’t be here for long. If it is just for one specific job she won’t have any reason to stay on afterwards.”

  “She is very talented — or so people say —” Elspeth shuffled her buniony feet into espadrilles and stood up by cautious degrees. Then, through the window, she caught sight of little Shuna. Odd Tom was busy in the yard, training the grape vine, with great delicacy fastening its long and floppy fronds to lengths of wire which he had nailed across the courtyard wall. Little Shuna was handing him strips of rag for this purpose. Also, apparently to encourage the vine to bear fruit, she was embellishing it with fruits of her own construction, small round typewriter-ribbon tins, enamelled red and hung on strings.

  She was making some comment about this to Odd Tom, who responded with an eager flow of reply, waving his hands, mouthing vigorously, nodding his head up and down.

  “Odd Tom is teaching Shuna sympathetic magic,” observed Elspeth, who had taken a degree in anthropology back in the ‘thirties.

  “He has a local reputation as a healer — did you know that? Mrs Monkton at the post office told me.” Pat whisked a comb through her short brown hair and briefly glanced into a pocket mirror. Her forthright, uncompromising countenance had a fairly close resemblance to that of Oliver Cromwell.

  “Oh, dear heavens — I’ve just thought of something else about Olga —” Elspeth began.

  “I must go, Bets, I’ll be late. Well — what?”

  “Do you suppose Olga could have any idea — about —” Elspeth nodded her snowy head in the direction of the child outside the window.

  “Shouldn’t think so. Seems quite unlikely. Why should she? Nobody knew.”

  But Pat was frowning too.

  “That would be absolutely undesirable. — You know what Olga’s like — full of halfbaked psychological theories. No discretion whatsoever.”

  “And picks up gossip like black velvet picks up dust. And Satan’s own passion for meddling. Specially with children.”

  “Well, it’s because she lost her own two,” Elspeth went on distressfully. “Which makes her even more inclined —”

  “That was her own stupid fault.”

  “Of course, though she’d never admit it. But she does take a devouring interest in other people’s —”

  “Don’t I know. Feels she’s that much more qualified to sort out their problems. Well,” said Pat, exchanging her grubby cardigan for a tweed jacket, “We’ll just have to be as tight as clams. Invent some story Bets — you’re good at that.”

  Elspeth suddenly grinned an eldritch grin.

  “We’ll have to hope for the best. What time does she arrive?”

  “Dunno. After lunch. See you by and by.”

  Pat gathered up her manuscripts and went out, waving to Tom and the child as she passed, then climbing briskly up the steep marble-stepped street towards the car-park at the top.

  Elspeth presently announced to the two workers in the courtyard that it was lunchtime. The child came in; Odd Tom remained outside. He had become accustomed to solitude and preferred it. Elspeth took him out an apple dumpling, a tomato, and a bottle of stout, which he accepted with a nod of thanks, putting them beside the crisps and cheese which he had brought with him.

  “His diet is all wrong,” Elspeth lamented, going back indoors.

  “But he is healthy,” objected Shuna. “Quite as healthy as you.”

  “He seems healthy now; but if he got ill he wouldn’t have any resistance. What have you got there, my love?” she asked, noticing, as she sat down to her own hastily assembled meal, that the child was studying a thick packet of greasy newspaper cuttings. They were yellow and ravelled with age or usage. Elspeth’s first instinct was to snatch the unhealthy-looking wad away from the child.

  “It’s about Tom’s wife. He was telling me. It’s very sad.”

  “What happened to her?” Elspeth asked with interest.

  “She got sick. Like you said Tom might. And then, while she was in hospital, people came and took their home away.”

  “Took it away?”

  “Yes, took it right away. When they got back, it was gone. Tom had been staying in the town where the hospital was. Poole, I think. When they got back, there was just a patch of earth, all bare and muddy.”

  “My heavens!”

  “It was horrible,” Shuna said seriously.

  “Was their home a tent or caravan?”

  �
�A mobile home, Tom called it. It was really nice inside, he said — they had a green-and-gold stove, and a fitted carpet, and Jenny had made the curtains. And all their things. His collection of matchboxes. They never saw it again. They couldn’t find out where it had been taken. She got ill again, and he hadn’t the time.”

  “But that’s dreadful.” Elspeth frowned in anger and pity. Reaching across, she took a cutting and read the headline PENSIONERS LOSE FIGHT TO SAVE MOBILE HOME. “I wonder if they got proper legal aid? I suppose the Council must have had some kind of a case — I must try and talk to Tom about it (only I do find it so hard to understand what he says). I wonder if he’d let us help him get some teeth.”

  “His were in the mobile home, he says. Now he’s got used to doing without them and reckons they were just a nuisance. He only wore them for company occasions.”

  “What happened to his wife?”

  “She took another bad turn — finding their home gone like that. And went back into the hospital and died. Then Tom went and lived on a traffic roundabout.”

  “A roundabout?”

  “On the Dorchester bypass. As a — what do people do when they want to show they haven’t been treated properly?”

  “Protest.”

  “Yes, a protest. He lived in a tent on the roundabout. But the police made him leave. Then he found Arkwright somewhere, wandering about. Arkwright had been their cat when they had their home. He was real pleased to meet up with old Arkwright again, he said. Hadn’t reckoned on such a bit of luck. So he and Arkwright lived in an old A.P.V. till the soldiers found them and threw them out.”

  “What is an A.P.V.?”

  “I don’t know,” said Shuna.

  “Some sort of army vehicle, I suppose.”

  “He said the soldiers would have let him stay, he wasn’t doing no harm, but the Major said he was to go.”

  “Where does he live now?” asked Elspeth, studying the rest of the clippings, which were almost illegible from grease and wear.

  “He will never tell. Mum’s the word, he says.”

  “You can’t really blame him . . . I wonder if Lord Fortuneswell would give him a cottage in Glifonis . . .” Elspeth’s voice faded as she considered the improbability of this. Odd Tom was not at all the kind of occupant Lord Fortuneswell had in mind for his chic Greek cottages.

  “A whole house?” Shuna’s expression was sceptical. “I don’t think Tom would want a whole house. He wouldn’t mind a nice railway carriage, he says, if British Rail was offering any. Or an old Wessex bus, pensioned off.”

  “How long ago did all this happen? There aren’t dates on any of these.”

  “I don’t know. Quite a long time, I should think. — Why are you putting in your hearing-aid? Is somebody coming?”

  “Yes, later on this afternoon.”

  Elspeth had recently taken to a small inconspicuous hearing device which sat snugly in her ear. Impatient of all gadgets, she had adopted it with the greatest reluctance and still wore it infrequently. Pat and the child had clear voices to which she was well accustomed, so, at home, she rarely troubled to use the aid. But in the presence of strangers she found it an advantage. Olga Laszlo, she remembered, had an extremely soft, confidential voice, delivered in a rapid breathless murmur.

  “Who is coming?” inquired Shuna, watching with technical interest as a tiny yellow protective shield was peeled from the pinhead-sized battery, which was then deftly slotted into the moulded pink plastic device, itself little bigger than a kidney bean.

  “A lady called Olga Laszlo. She’s working on a job at the Dorchester theatre. She’ll be very busy and she won’t be here long,” Elspeth answered rather repressively.

  “What kind of a job?”

  “Designing scenery.”

  Shuna’s eyes lit with interest, but Elspeth said, “Now, that’s enough chat. It’s time for your afternoon rest. And after that I’ve set you ten Latin exercises and a bit of parsing. When those are finished you can draw a picture — anything you like — then practise your piano pieces for twenty minutes, then you can go out and help Tom some more.”

  “Can I first give him back his pieces of newspaper?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Looking after the child as she ran out, Elspeth heaved a deep habitual sigh, of care and responsibility. Then, briskly, she addressed herself to compiling a list of the supplies that would be needed to make Olga Laszlo’s house fit for occupation.

  A delivery van plied weekly from the Dorchester supermarkets and would bring out most household necessities if instructed beforehand; accordingly, pencil in hand, Elspeth went to the telephone. Just as she got there, it rang.

  “Number 2, Glifonis?” Elspeth announced.

  “Oh — hello — Miss Morgan, is that you? Lord Fortuneswell’s office here. We have another new neighbour for you — can you take delivery?”

  “Of course! The more the merrier. Glifonis is really filling up — that’s so nice. With such interesting people, too! Who is coming now?”

  “The new Lady Fortuneswell — Cat Conwil the actress.”

  “Now, that really is interesting. — But I thought they were still on their honeymoon?” inquired Elspeth, who knew everything in the news from an addictive reading of The Independent every night.

  “Lord Fortuneswell has had to fly over to Paris on business and she has to come down to Dorset because they are obliged to re-shoot some of that TV serial they were working on at Knoyle. And she can’t stay in the Manor because of the conference being held there. So can you see that Lord Fortuneswell’s own house — Number 1, is it?—will be ready for occupation?”

  “Certainly, I’ll be glad to. No problem!” Elspeth chirped. “I’ll get Mrs Monkton just to run over and give it a polish. And make sure the heat is on.”

  On her way back, later, from this errand, Elspeth saw, with a slight lowering of the spirits, that Olga Laszlo had arrived, and was picking her way cautiously down the wide-spaced marble steps, rendered slippery and hazardous by a sea-mist. Olga’s raincoated figure bore a cautious, deferential air, depressingly familiar to Elspeth — as if the new arrival were, in advance, apologizing for her presence, knew that she could be received only on sufferance, and hated to give everybody the acute trouble she knew she must be causing.

  “Good afternoon!” called Miss Morgan cordially. “Your little house is all ready for you! Just come on down this way. We can get your luggage later. Or one of the Greeks will carry it down for you. They are such nice, obliging men.”

  “Oh,” sighed Olga. “Thank you. But I have nothing — just a little knapsack.”

  She gave Elspeth a wan smile; it conveyed that her entire worldly goods were packed into the little knapsack.

  “Very good, then you can get it yourself,” said Elspeth comfortably, not about to take any nonsense. She knew that Olga made a handsome living from her theatrical designs.

  Olga Laszlo was handsome in a haggard, hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed fashion, but made the worst of herself, on purpose, Elspeth thought tartly. Her dark hair, revealed as she pulled off the dirty brown wool scarf, was unkempt, rough, and could obviously do with a good wash. Her sallow skin was equally rough. Looks as if she never ate an orange in her life, surmised Elspeth. And, then, she carries herself so badly! — with her head poked forward, and her spine slouched, like an old woman. Which she certainly is not, thought Elspeth; I doubt if she is a day over thirty-four. And just look at those teeth! Not bad teeth, but does she ever brush them? A chain-smoker too. And she once had two little girls. What a terrible mother she must have been to the poor children; really, from their point of view, it’s probably a mercy that she lost the custody.

  But then Elspeth’s kinder nature reproved her for these judgments. All children should be with their own mothers — especially girls; the girls probably loved Olga just as dearly as if she had been Mr
s Beeton and Niobe rolled into one. No doubt she loved them too. It’s not to be wondered at that she has let herself go.

  None of these ruminations were reflected in Elspeth’s face or voice as she opened the solid wooden door (painted a deep chocolate brown) saying, cheerfully, “Here you are, then! Number 6, Glifonis. It’s all yours. Front room here, in the front — kitchen behind — bathroom to the left — bedroom at the back. All as Greek as can be — except that in Greece the bathroom would be on the other side of the courtyard. But in view of the English climate and to economize on space — which is very limited in this little crack of land — the bathroom has been fitted inside the house.”

  “But it is charming — perfectly charming!” Olga’s low, breathless voice combined a touch of her father’s Hungarian accent with an English upper-class intonation acquired from a very superior boarding-school (where she had been maintained by the kind offices of friends). The result was often unintentionally patronizing; as now. Elspeth bristled a little, then laughed at herself.

  “Groceries in here — towels — extra blankets — I’m afraid there’s no room for a work-desk, but I got them to put you in an extra-large kitchen table.”

  “Oh, you are so kind,” sighed Olga. Her gaze rested on the table with a hint of disparagement. “Could there be an easel as well, I wonder? And is there a telephone?”

  “No, I’m afraid none of the houses has a phone yet,” said Elspeth, passing over the easel, “except for ours, Number 2 (British Telecom, you know how they are) — but you are welcome to come and use our phone at any time,” she added untruthfully.

  “Oh — but I wouldn’t — that is such an imposition — isn’t there a callbox? Can’t something be done to hurry British Telecom? Perhaps if Ty himself were to get on to them?”

  “I think he’s off in Paris at the moment,” Miss Morgan said restrainedly.

  “Oh — well — then I suppose I must be resigned. Could I possibly come and use it now? I do have so many arrangements to make —”