Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  I drifted back to sleep and dreamed of Masha larding a chicken with garlic and saying thoughtfully, “It can’t, you know, it can’t be right to stab a body, even a dead one,” and Fitz replying, “No, that’s why I’m going to become a vegetarian.” Half waking again I remembered all those ingenious kitchen gadgets Fitz had given her in his teens to ease her lot: the pressure cooker, the apple-chopper, the Mouli mixer, electric tin-opener, magnetic pot-holders, the tiny immersion heater for one cup of coffee, the various appliances for extracting corks from bottles, the blender, the steam-iron. “Oh, darling boy, how good you are to me,” she said with overflowing gratitude on each occasion, and there they all were at the back of the pantry, gathering dust, while she went on using her little old kitchen knife, worn bent pans, and pot-holders made from Papa’s shirts when they grew thin and frayed beyond patching and turning the cuffs. But what she valued beyond praise, beyond speech, was Fitz’s goodness to Papa: his endless, endless patience and kindness when Papa attempted to pick up two things at once while holding a third; when he somehow contrived to lock himself in the bathroom and drop the key; when he got in a terrible muddle with his buttoning and unbuttoning; when once, with a sudden piteous effort at generosity he tried to give Fitz a pound note with one hand but quickly lost it again with the other hand in his waistcoat pocket; at each of those moments Fitz would be ready, unfailingly kind, providing the necessary first-aid and cheerful response. — As he was, too, when Masha lost things. Growing older — perhaps in a kind of wordless protest? — she lost her possessions continually, half a dozen in a day, library tickets, her watch, her good glasses, National Savings Certificates, their TV licence, the little worn purse Aunt Dolly had given her when she was sixteen, her chequebook; in hunting anxiously and distractedly about the house for one article she would come to the blank spot where something else ought to have been, her embroidery scissors, her little Zen book, and become diverted on to a secondary quest for that. Fitz always helped her search, but it was a never-ending process; at the end of the day it could be counted as a triumph if two things had been found; losing them, as Fitz said, seemed to be an exercise she continually set herself. But why, why? Each day towards the close of her life, presented an impossible obstacle course, a challenge that she had to brace herself to meet.

  We never did find the key of her desk . . . Perhaps she was trying to divest herself of her cares, her responsibilities?

  On the day she finally took to her bed she summoned me by telephone. “Now listen,” she said triumphantly. “I’ve done the washing and the ironing. If you could just put out the rubbish — it’s dustbin day tomorrow —”

  Most people, I suppose, have a public persona and a private one. When in the company of others, they speak and move in chosen patterns adopted over years to reinforce the image they have decided to assume; while, in private, they pad about barefoot, pick their noses, eat voraciously and randomly with their fingers, sit straddle-legged, watch Dallas and read gangster novels. Don’t you think that is true? Nearly everybody must have some secret self, removed, if only by a marginal distance, from the one offered to society. Yet with Masha I felt this was not so, could not be so; what you saw was what she was; her envelope was so transparent that any concealment would have been an impossibility; or rather, it would never have occurred to her that anyone would wish to conceal their real identity.

  Poor Ty, what was his, Jim or Jas? I shall never know.

  In the morning my little room seemed unnaturally dark; looking out of the window over the roofs of Outer Dorchester I saw the sky veiled in whirling grey flakes. Perfidious March had taken a plunge back into winter.

  “Nasty storm,” remarked the kind police lady, bringing me a breakfast ten times larger than my norm and a used copy of the Daily Mirror. “Half the roads in Dorset blocked.”

  “Oh dear,” I said with foreboding. “What about Glifonis?”

  “Caundle Quay? Cut off, love. All the power lines are down, too.”

  “Goodness, I hope they’ll be all right.”

  I looked out at the scurrying flakes and felt a protective anxiety for my friends in the village and all those cheerful Greeks in their Portakabins; but then remembered the enormous freezer housed in the Ladies’ utility room. No doubt they would manage very capably.

  “They can drop food by helicopter if they run short.”

  “That’s true . . . What about the roads to London?”

  “A35 and A31 both blocked; they’re working at clearing them but it’ll be all day.”

  She went off leaving me to my sausages and toast, and I remembered how Masha used to love the treat of breakfast in bed, and how rarely she had it. Whereas I don’t much like meals in bed, am always too worried about the possibility of mess and spillage. Which is why I don’t look forward to my terminal illnesses with any enthusiasm. Those sybaritic repasts in the great gilded Venetian bed were something out of context, clean contrary to the regular warp of my life. And I owe Ty for them, I’m grateful that we had that time of nonsense together. He, plainly, poor dear, felt just the other way; for him, afterwards, that interlude was like the wound of Philoctetes or the Fisher King, an oozing drain on his vital sources for ever more.

  Roger Blagdon came down by train; a horrible journey, he said it was, and took him over eight hours. He didn’t reach Dorchester till nine at night and came round to see me next morning.

  Meanwhile, I passed a long, dull day; a police doctor came and examined my wrist and ankle at one point but went away without discussing any conclusions he might have reached. He was a taciturn man.

  So it was a pleasant relief to see cheerful, red-headed Roger.

  “I’m terribly sorry about your hideous journey. How was Little Eyolf?”

  “A thoroughly sick, nasty play! I don’t want to see it ever again. Now, tell me the whole story. I’ve seen Joel, by the way; he’s just back from Bombay. He sends his love and says he’ll be down as soon as he’s finished his assignment; he seems extremely worried about you.”

  I told Roger the whole story, my side of it at least.

  “So Ty was trying to kill you, but someone else was trying to kill Ty.”

  “Someone did kill Ty.”

  “What about Olga Laszlo? Did Ty kill her?”

  “It seems very possible. Hoping to shut her up.”

  “More than possible, probable,” said Roger, who had done some scouting round before he came to see me. “The police found shotgun pellets in the cliff; that earth-fall was engineered in order to cover her body. There was a shotgun in the station wagon and the pellets match. Olga’s head was bashed in by a rock, but that might have been done earlier. And they found an envelope from her, addressed to Ty, in his hotel room; also, at the Battersea flat, several plaster hands with her fingerprints on them, which had been sent to Ty anonymously.”

  “How disgusting.” Any sympathy I might have felt for Olga evaporated at once. “So she had been blackmailing him.”

  “At least trying to soften him up for blackmail.”

  “She might have known it wouldn’t work on Ty. But, my goodness, Roger, how did you ever get all this out of the police so fast?”

  “I have my methods,” he said, looking smug. “There are lots of suspects besides you for his murder. The Goadbys, for instance —”

  “The Goadbys?”

  “A couple who have one of the houses in the village.”

  “Oh yes, the grey-faced man and fur-coated woman. Why in the world should they want to murder Ty?”

  “One of Ty’s business ventures was a new housing estate near Kettlewell. Their five-year-old child fell down an open drain in the foundations and was drowned. They claimed the area was insufficiently protected and brought a case, but Ty’s lawyers were too good for them.”

  “How horrible.”

  “Goadby had made several unsuccessful attempts to see Fortuneswell. A
nd his avowed intention, in coming to Glifonis, had been ‘to get to grips with the chap’. He’d been heard to use those words. And there are the Pools, and Tom Stavely, who lost his home when the caravan site was demolished.”

  “Stavely? Odd Tom? Is that his name? I do so hope it wasn’t him.”

  “He does garden work for Miss Morgan,” Roger said, “and knew about her crossbow.”

  “Everyone knew about it. But she said she had some theory —”

  “Oh yes, the police told me about that. They think it’s really way out —”

  “What is it?”

  “This organization that Fortuneswell might have been invited to join —”

  “The Companions of Roland.”

  “What is it, exactly?”

  “Founded by Charlemagne, I think, and has been going ever since. It’s a secret society; Ty told me it was established to defend the Holy Sepulchre but now I think it’s basically an industrialists’ group, used for mutual advantage. Like Freemasons.”

  “Miss Morgan suggested they were angry that your husband accepted their invitation while concealing this very discreditable episode in his past, and so they took steps to eliminate him.”

  “Now that is far-fetched,” I agreed. “Why not just blackball him?”

  “To discourage other frivolous applications.”

  “I hope they never invite me to apply for membership.”

  “I don’t think women can apply.—Do you want to spend another night in this place?” asked Roger, looking disparagingly round my bare little room.

  “Not above half. There isn’t much to read. Why? Can you get me out on bail?”

  “My dear fool, you haven’t been charged with anything. The police say they took you in for your own protection. And now they know you can’t have killed Ty —”

  “They do? How do they know that?”

  “Because of your wrist, idiot! No one with a recently broken wrist could winch up a hundred-pound crossbow.”

  The police surgeon might have told me that, I thought. But he was not a communicative man.

  Roger helped me pack my things and drove me to the Close Hotel, where I took occupation of Ty’s suite.

  The police seemed relieved to see me go; I suppose they had been wondering how soon they could politely ask me to leave.

  It was queer, sad and ghostly to sleep in the hotel room with Ty’s things still strewn about untidily as they had been left after a police search. I put them away in his case and, remembering that Ty preferred the bed nearest the window, slept in the other one. And, in the night, dreamed of him crying out piercingly for his drowned friend.

  I woke before seven next morning and switched on Radio Three — what luxury!—there had been no radio at Number 1, Glifonis — and caught a performance by Alfred Brendel of Beethoven’s piano sonata Opus 109 and remembered with grief how Masha, who meticulously planned her whole week’s work from one musical programme to the next, marked out beforehand in the Radio Times, had been stuck for an hour in the bathroom with excruciating pains and therefore missed Barenboim playing that same sonata, because there was nobody else in the house to switch on the radio. That was when — hearing of the episode by sheer chance — I knew she must be moved to a nursing home.

  “Roads in the south are now mostly cleared after yesterday’s freak blizzard,” said the announcer on the eight-thirty news. “But flood warnings are in operation as the melted snow fills rivers and drains. The body of a man was found in a barrel at Poole harbour. Foul play is not suspected.”

  Oh God, I thought with foreboding. Please don’t let it be Odd Tom.

  Roger drove me through slushy, squashy lanes back to Glifonis, and then returned to Dorchester for more police business. The sun gleamed, almost unbearably bright, on melting crystals and rivulets cascading down steep banks between clumps of flashing brambles. It was a joyful, brilliant, distracting day. The birds were busy shouting their heads off. Everything heralded spring.

  But Glifonis was in mourning.

  One could tell that instantly. The Greeks, with their loads, plodded in silence up and down the zigzag hill. The blue-and-white flag down by Father Athanasios’s church flew at half-mast. Despite the sunshine, the whole place seemed shrouded in sadness. A knot of black crepe had been tied to the brass knocker on the door of Number 2. And old Elspeth answered the door with her face drawn into lines of sorrow.

  “Poor, poor little man. — No, it was just exposure, natural causes. The bitter cold was just too much for his heart. He’d told me once the old ticker wasn’t all it should be — but he was so independent. We’d begged him to let us try to get him a cottage here — or a council house — but, no, he wouldn’t have that. He said that a whole house would be more than he wanted. Oh, well —” she wiped her eyes — “I suppose now the police will find it convenient to decide that he killed that unpleasant man — sorry, my dear, your husband — and they’ll stop fussing round everybody else, which will be a good thing, I suppose. Tom wouldn’t mind at all, he’d think that funny.”

  “You don’t believe he did it, then? Nor do I.”

  “My dear, I’m quite positive he didn’t do it.” She darted me one very shrewd glance from tear-reddened eyes.

  “Miss Morgan — there’s something I’d like to ask you.—Where’s Shuna?”

  “She and Pat are down with Father Athanasios, organizing Tom’s funeral service.”

  “Was Shuna Lilias Leyburn’s child?”

  “Yes, of course.” Glancing about, as if walls had ears, Miss Morgan went on rapidly, “Ostin Leyburn’s elder sister, Mrs Mulready, had the care of her at first. But then, you see, her arthritis got so terribly bad that she had to go to Portugal. And died there. And there really wasn’t anybody else. So we said we’d be happy to take charge of her.”

  “And you’ve done a wonderful job —”

  “But how long can we go on, my dear — how long would it be suitable? — After all, I am seventy-five and Pat is sixty-five, the child really needs younger company —”

  “What I was going to say was — I suppose in time I shall come in for some of Ty’s money. I don’t mean to keep any of it — I have no right to it and don’t want it — but that child does have a right to it —”

  “Yes, yes, of course — yes, yes, well, we’ll see!” Miss Morgan gave me several very bright-eyed nods. “Lots of cash not at all good for the young, much better put it in a trust, something like that, don’t you agree? For later on, if she wants to do research. We’ll talk about all that. Now: would you like a cup of coffee, my dear?”

  “No, that’s very kind of you but I think I’d better go and tidy my house. Probably the police have left it in a terrible mess —”

  “We do hope, my dear, that you will stay on in Glifonis? That you haven’t been put off the place by your experiences here?” Another of those shrewd, bird-like glances.

  “Oh, no. No, I do like it here, very much. Though I shall miss Tom. No, I’d like to stay here, at least part of the time.”

  “That’s good. That’s very good. We’ll find plenty of things for you to do here.” She patted my arm — two quick taps. And I leaned forward and removed a tiny yellow disc, the size of a pin-head, from her collar.

  “Oh, those things. They get everywhere. They are the protective caps, you know, from my hearing-aid batteries. Wonderful devices! Without it I would not have been able to hear you blowing that whistle.”

  I walked slowly back up the hill, missing Odd Tom every step of the way. I must learn the rest of my part, I thought. In two days, shooting was due to begin again. I must go into Dorchester and get my hair done. Tie the strands of life together. Furbish up the Rosy mask a bit. Plato was quite right, I thought. Didn’t he say that acting was morally bad? That you take on the persona of those sinful characters you are depicting, and are thereby likely to come to grief? I to
ok on the character of Rosy and I came to grief.

  The door of Number 1 was unlocked. As usual, I thought. Now who has been in, prowling about? Or did the police carelessly fail to lock up? No, some person was inside, for, as I put my hand to the latch, the door flew open.

  “Fitz!”

  “Old Cat!”

  We hugged and hugged each other, and laughed, and hugged again.

  “But why didn’t you let me know, why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  “I did call that number you gave me and got some old duck, but I thought I wouldn’t leave a message, as I was in transit, it seemed simpler just to come; and then at Heathrow, of course, we found all the lines were down, so the only thing was just to drive here —”

  Vaguely I remembered Elspeth saying at some point that a man had left a message, but I assumed that it was Joel.

  “So down we drove,” said Fitz, “but of course the blizzard slowed us —”

  Us?

  He drew forward someone from behind him. Tiny, frail, blonde, waiflike: Rosy-in-miniature. Scared, bewildered blue eyes; and looked as if she never had an idea in her entire life.

  “This is Polly,” said Fitz, proud, shy, tremendously protective. “We got married last Wednesday.”

  I suppressed my silent scream: What about your fellowship? What about your job? What about your career, your new philosophical concept? I said the proper things, my darlings, how wonderful, tell me all about it, tell me how you met, let’s open a bottle of champagne.