Fete Fatale
Page 13
Her smile was at its most fearsome. I wondered why I liked her, and thought it must be her honesty and self-knowledge.
‘I went to see Thyrza today,’ I said.
‘How brave of you. I’m saying my farewells to her by card: I don’t want to be upbraided as a renegade. But of course you had an added motive for going.’
‘I did.’
‘Hatpins?’
‘Hatpins among other things.’
‘Hatpins,’ said Franchita, thoughtfully stirring her tea, ‘stick rather closely home.’
‘That was a point that dear Thyrza made quite forcefully. As a source for hatpins your shop is quite as likely as the little collection of her old ones on my stall.’
‘Quite. And the more one thinks about it, your idea about hatpins, though quite brilliant as an aperçu, doesn’t exactly narrow the field, does it? Thyrza Primp invariably wears some horrific creation secured to her hair by a pin. Mary Morse hardly less often. The ladies of Hexton—all those of a certain age, anyway—have hats of that sort, every one of them, even if they only wear them from time to time. And the men of Hexton are all husbands, are they not? Very much so, one feels. So they’d have access to hatpins.’
‘Not Mr Horsforth.’
‘But Mr Horsforth looked after your stall from time to time. So there you are.’
‘But if this thing was an impulse murder—and surely one would never choose a hatpin as a weapon, not with premeditation—then it surely points to a woman. A man wouldn’t have one on him.’
‘Do men have similar things? Cigar pins, or something like that? And of course one of our husbands might have been taking one home for his wife, or carrying her purchases. No, I can’t see that it narrows it down. I’m taking the cast list of suspects, you see, at your own valuation, and assuming it wasn’t some passing nut, like the Pink Panter.’
The Pink Panter was our name for one of the local compulsive joggers, jogging away the boredom and miseries of unemployment. He was in his fifties, and habitually very pink indeed.
‘The Pink Panter certainly wouldn’t be likely to have a hatpin on him,’ I conceded. ‘He always looks regrettably without support of any kind. Yes, I’m resisting all idea of passing tramps, passing nuts and passing tourists with sudden homicidal urges.’
‘Well, then, if you’re really looking for the key in these shenanigans of the last few weeks—of my part in which I’m most sincerely ashamed—then presumably you’ve got to look to the ones who had most call to feel defeated and resentful.’
‘Obviously. The opposition.’
‘Thyrza and Mary, the Mipchins—’
‘And you, Franchita. Precisely. Why did you say just now that you were ashamed?’
‘Well, it’s hardly something one is likely to feel proud of.’
‘You don’t give a damn about the Church. You only come once in a blue moon. Why did you get involved?’
‘Boredom, I suppose. When I married Howard—he’s my third, you know, apart from “other compaignye in youthe,”—I thought: “All right, he’s dull, and he’ll knuckle under so easily there won’t be any pleasure in the struggle, but at least there’ll be the university to give a bit of spice to life.” And of course, it did: university people are so openly and unashamedly frightful, and there is all the intrigue and conspiracy and backbiting, so that life always keeps chugging along very amusingly. And then suddenly—poof—and it was over. And we were just fairly well off, in a rather dull little town, with a shop that not many people come into. So the fight over Father Battersby seemed to revive all that university infighting which I’d so enjoyed, and gave a bit of spice to life. But I am ashamed, and I’ll make it up to the poor man: I shall be so fearsomely hospitable and protective that he’ll run a mile when he sees me coming down the street.’
‘As people do from me at the moment. “Unclean! Unclean! Suffering from grief!” It’s a very uncomfortable feeling.’
‘Hexton isn’t too easy with the life of the emotions.’
‘No, indeed. Hence its need to resort to all sorts of shifts. By the way, Timothy and Fiona passed me today, and I was so infuriated by their act—perhaps it was the jealousy of the newly widowed, do you think?—that I said: “Don’t put on that act just for me. I know all about you.” The effect has been extraordinary.’
‘Really?’
‘Fiona ringing up and making all sorts of incoherent noises about I won’t tell Daddy, will I, and so on.’
‘Frankly, I’d have thought Fiona could twist Colonel Weston round her little finger with no problem at all. Mummy might be more of a problem—mummies always are. Timothy’s another matter, of course. Once one knows the whole gooey performance is an act, one is inclined to look more favourably on that pair, and want them to get away with it a little bit longer, don’t you think? I am not inclined greatly to like Headmaster Horsforth. Under that bleak exterior there lurks a bleak interior. A born tyrant in the home, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Oh, no question, I’d say. I can see the lad must have his problems, which might excuse his acting a role, if not overacting it so disgustingly. But I must say I found the whole episode generally interesting: it suggested that the secrets of Hexton respectables might be a fascinating further field for investigation.’
This was the sort of idea that was likely to appeal to Franchita.
‘Enticing possibilities seem to open up,’ she said. ‘Like Thyrza Primp’s long-concealed lover in Harrogate.’
‘Quite,’ I said. ‘Or yours in Barnard’s Castle.’
I’m never quite sure whether Oscar at this point stirred from his snoozing place beside the table, or whether an involuntary movement from Franchita overturned it: both Oscar and Franchita were potentially lethal to occasional tables. At any rate, over it went—cups, plates, the lot, and though a thick, handwoven rug ensured that nothing much was broken, still an undoubted diversion was caused.
‘Damn. Oscar, you’re a menace. Christ, look at that cream cake all over the rug. Lick it up, boy. You don’t really want cream cake, do you, Helen? Here, have a chocolate instead. Rather amusing, the box, eh?’
She handed me a ’thirties box of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose chocolates, with sweet, coy pictures of the little princesses themselves on the top.
‘The chocolates are new, of course.’
‘How amusing,’ I said. ‘The Palace would never allow that today, more’s the pity. We could have a Princess Anne chocolate box—all hard centres. Come on, Franchita, I know you’re stalling for time. Tell me about Barnard’s Castle.’
Franchita’s habitual bellicosity was distinctly softened by now, but she was not one to be driven into a corner without protest.
‘What the hell makes you think there’s anything to tell? All sorts of people prefer to have their professional men from outside the town. I bet there are heaps of people in Hexton who didn’t use Marcus as their vet.’
‘I really don’t know. Lots of animals hardly ever need a vet at all.’
‘If you go outside the town it saves awkwardnesses: you change your dentist because you think he’s ham-fisted, then you’re always meeting him at sherry parties and things. Damned unpleasant. No—it makes sense to go outside.’
‘Come off it, Franchita. You might go to Barnard’s Castle for your dental treatment without arousing suspicion, but there’s no earthly reason for your staying overnight, which you do every time. It’s no distance at all from here. Now—don’t go all coy. Spill the beans.’
Franchita gave me one of her most tradesman-quelling glances, but her heart wasn’t in it, and, seeing it had no effect on me, she struggled with her facial muscles and gave me a terrifying grin instead.
‘Oh, what the hell. Yes, well, we are sort of friends, the dentist and me. He was one of the “other compaignye in youthe” I mentioned. Always kept contact—damned good fun, to tell you the truth, which Howard isn’t, always.’
‘And you have regular meetings?’
; ‘Well, yes. Combining it with a check-up—which obviously you find very funny, but it just happens to be convenient. Anyway, sometimes something happens, sometimes it doesn’t, because he has a wife, and he’s getting on a bit, but either way it’s a bit of a diversion. Relief from the monotony.’
‘And Howard knows?’
‘Haven’t the faintest idea. If so, he’s gentleman enough not to say. May have noticed that I say I go for a check-up every six months, whereas really it’s more like four. May have—and then again, may not have: not all that bright, Howard.’
‘Not all that dim either, though. You Hexton wives always assume that because you’ve got the upper hand, you’ve got a devoted, unquestioning lifelong slave. It ain’t, as Sportin’ Life says, necessarily so.’
‘Maybe not. Really, I’d rather like to have Howard rebel. It’d be sort of like the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto—heroic and hopeless. But I can’t see it happening.’
‘Or he could have an affair.’
‘I’d like to see him try!’
‘Perhaps, though, he is already. In fact, perhaps everyone in Hexton has their little secrets, of this kind or some other. That’s what I find so interesting about my lucky hit with Timothy and Fiona.’
‘I’ve no doubt many of them have secrets—everyone might be going a bit far. I mean, Thyrza Primp makes a virtue of all her awfulnesses, so she has no reason to make secrets of them. She implies that anyone without those awfulnesses is somehow lowering the standard.’
‘Would you say Mary Morse was in that category?’
‘Mary? She’s not quite the same kind of case, is she? In fact, she’s interesting. One would hardly suggest that Mary could have a lover. On the other hand, she might have some kind of social secret—something she doesn’t want known. Because to Mary position in the town is everything: what would she be without it but a boring and middle-aged woman without enough to do with her time? So there’s likely to be something she would like to keep quiet, because there is in most families that value their position. The brothers? Could it be the brothers, now?’
‘I know nothing about them.’
‘No, quite. Nobody does. And sons are normally rather prized in Hexton—pathetic though most of the menfolk here are. Yet it’s many years since either the one or the other has been so much as mentioned by Mary, so far as I can make out. Yes—I’d plump for the brothers.’
‘It’s a thought. In fact, family is a more likely source of guilty secrets in Hexton, where everyone is so old, than sex. You get past one, but never the other. But most of us have moved here, and that makes it more difficult: if the Primps have a secret in their family, it’s no doubt well behind them in their past. Similarly with Mr Horsforth. Though I must say I would like to find out some really juicy secret about him.’
‘Oh, certainly—but that applies to Thyrza and the Mipchins too, though I really can’t believe in one in either case.’
‘Speculation,’ I said, stirring in my chair, ‘doesn’t seem likely to get us much further.’
‘Oh, don’t go, Helen. Have another chocolate.’
Franchita pressed on me a fat and milky specimen from the Little Princesses box, but I refused.
‘Just one more thing: did you notice when Thyrza Primp left the fête on Saturday?’
‘Oh—I should know. She came up and gave me tight-lipped thanks for organizing it, as if she were still vicar’s wife. I don’t know whose condescension was worse—hers, or Mary’s or Lady Godetia’s. Let me see, it was not that late in the afternoon. Mary, I know, was still there, because she was fawning over Lady Godetia in the background. I’d say it must have been about two o’clock.’
‘Right. My impression was that she wasn’t around as the afternoon wore on. Whereas you, of course, Franchita, were there all the time.’
She bared her teeth at me, and put her big, strong hands on her hips.
‘Of course. You know that. I was here, there and everywhere all day, making my presence felt. If I’d disappeared for twenty minutes or half an hour, people really would have noticed!’
Or would they, I wondered, merely have breathed a sigh of relief, and assumed that someone else in some other part of the tent was getting it in the neck? It really wouldn’t do to rule out Franchita on those grounds alone.
CHAPTER 13
DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR
To open the high gate in the walled garden of Mary Morse’s house, to go up the front path towards the whitewashed porch, was to feel that I had come full circle. There, once again, was Roote, bedding out stocks with a geometrical precision that had doubtless been enjoined upon him; there was the ugly, stonedashed house, put up for himself in the ’twenties by a builder with pretensions and a large family; there were the brass mud-scrapers on the doorstep. Inside, no doubt, the souvenirs of the Holy Land were kept immaculately dust-free, and the favourite novel by Angela Thirkell was waiting to be returned to the library after a third or fourth rereading. I remembered what an appalling old bitch Thirkell seems to have been, and thought what an appropriate read for Miss Mary Morse: the icy heart beneath the social veneer.
À propos of social veneers, I remembered that my last words to Mary Morse had been ‘God damn and blast you all to Hell,’ or some such formulation. Some bridging seemed to be necessary before a social call could get off on a fruitfully companionable footing—and after my experience with Thyrza I decided that that was about the only way I could play it this time. Thus, when I had saluted Roote, who gave me a suitably gnarled greeting, as if he were acting in a TV adaptation of a Victorian novel, I composed my face into a hypocritical mask, and when the door opened to my ring, I said:
‘Mary—I think I owe you an apology. I wasn’t myself when you rang the other day.’
God forgive me for a liar. I even smiled wanly. Mary Morse was clearly taken aback. She was obviously expecting my visit, but equally obviously she had been anticipating a more aggressive approach. She too smiled, with a fusty sweetness.
‘Of course, Helen dear. I quite understand. Won’t you come in? So lucky you called at tea-time.’
I went in—into the varnishy hall, smelling of old overcoats and furniture polish. The book on the hallstand turned out to be an R. F. Delderfield. The pile on the hall carpet was so immaculately fluffed up, so completely devoid of grime or grit, that I felt I ought to be offered overshoes, as in a Moslem holy place. The feeling of hushed holiness was augmented by a photograph of old Mrs Morse, presiding over a table of vegetable marrows at some long-ago harvest festival, stood in a place of honour on the stand: she had an expression of aggressive triumph on her face, and the marrows looked like nothing so much as cannons trained on an invisible enemy. It was not the most welcoming photograph Mary could have chosen for her hall.
We went into the sitting-room, lighter than when I had seen it last. Mary was wearing the same drab grey dress as she had had on then: as I suspected, she had anticipated my coming, and this was her wear for funerary parties. She left me for a moment to put on a kettle. How much more appropriate, I thought, if Mary had had a little maid to bully and to train up in the ways of gentility. Who knows—with so much teenage unemployment, Mary might yet manage it. The times were ripe for a return to semi-serfdom.
When Mary returned from the kitchen, with a plate of cakes and one of sandwiches that must have been prepared in advance ‘in case’, she had got her little speech nicely prepared:
‘I don’t want to say too much, Helen, or to open up wounds that are healing, but how we are all going to miss Marcus. Sophronia Tibbles instinctively knows, I’m sure of it. I can’t think who I’m to take her to now.’
Sophronia Tibbles gazed balefully at her mistress from a chair in the corner, as if she resented having human feelings attributed to her by so foolish a human as her mistress.
‘Simon Fox is an excellent vet,’ I said.
‘But the sympathy, my dear, the quiet sympathy, the warmth of understanding that Marcus had for animals . . . ’
So it was Marcus the vet we were missing, was it, I thought, as Mary went back to the kitchen. Not a word about Marcus the churchwarden. Was she going to keep the conventionalities on pussies and doggies for the entire visit? Not if I could help it.
‘It’s a gift,’ said Mary determinedly, coming back with a tray of cups and jugs. ‘And Marcus just had it.’
‘Quite,’ I said. ‘And he was very good with humans too, you know, though he did feel he had failed with them, over the last few weeks of his life.’
‘Don’t you think, my dear,’ said Mary, who was presiding over the pouring, and who had assumed an expression of ineffable complacency, ‘that that is a subject that we would do best to avoid? When is the funeral to take place?’
I bit into a sandwich. Cress again. Mary must have registered how much I disliked it.
‘I really don’t know. When the police release the body.’
‘And will his family come? Isn’t his father a clergyman? So very appropriate, I always thought.’
‘A dead clergyman, I’m afraid. But his mother is still alive, and he had brothers and sisters. Yes, I’m sure they’ll all come.’ I added, since this gave me an opening: ‘Family can be helpful on such occasions—if they’re the right sort of family. It must have been trying, for you, being on your own.’
‘But of course I couldn’t have expected Philip to come—not from Australia,’ Mary replied hurriedly.
‘I suppose you couldn’t. And John—?’
‘Couldn’t come. Have a sandwich, dear. So interesting that Marcus in a way grew up in the Church—’
In her haste to escape from the topic of her brothers, Mary had plunged into the very subject she had suggested we avoid.
‘Quite,’ I said. ‘Tinged with the ecclesiastic from birth. One of his brothers, in fact, went into a monastery—’