Grave Matters

by Margaret Yorke

  ‘Do call on Valerie if you’ve time, before you leave the village,’ he urged Patrick. ‘She’s got Mildred Forrest staying with her. She was a great friend of Amelia’s and until this year always went with her to Greece. She has a weak heart and felt she would hold Amelia back if she accompanied her again. A pity. She’s grieving for her friend. I think it would comfort her to meet you. Valerie doesn’t mean to be unsympathetic but she has little time for the softer side of life, the small deeds that cushion things for others less tough than she is. I suppose it’s to be expected. She has an excellent job in industry.’

  Patrick remembered Valerie’s curt little note.

  ‘Was she fond of her aunt?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps she didn’t see much of her?’

  ‘She came to stay sometimes. Not often. Amelia respected her very much for her achievements and often talked of her with very great pride. But I sometimes wonder if Valerie has ever had time to grow fond of anyone,’ was the vicar’s sad reply.

  ‘I’ll certainly call on Miss Forrest, if you think she would like me to,’ Patrick said.

  ‘Please do. If you lose your nerve, say I suggested it,’ said Mr. Merry. ‘I wish I could invite you to supper at the vicarage, but we have a social in the parish hall tonight and both my wife and I will be out. Another time, perhaps, if you should be this way.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Patrick.

  He walked slowly down the church path back to his car pondering on this exchange. The vicar had painted a not particularly alluring portrait of Valerie Brinton, but surely he did not expect Patrick to shrink from her in fright? She could hardly be more daunting than some of the female dons he knew who were often much cleverer than he was, but who seldom filled him with alarm.

  V

  Patrick knew which turning to take for Mulberry Cottage because he had earlier seen Valerie Brinton swerving round the corner. He drove slowly down the lane. There were fields on either side, and he had travelled about three hundred yards before he came to a thatched cottage on the left-hand side of the lane. A red mini with a dent in its wing was parked outside. Patrick went past, looking for somewhere to turn, but there were no gateways until he reached the end of the lane, where it widened out in front of a large house built of stone. This must be Abbot’s Lodge. A high yew hedge concealed most of it from the road, but Patrick could see the leaded windows in the upper rooms, and the tiled roof. There was space for him to swing the Rover round without reversing into the gateway of the house; as he slipped into first gear he heard the deep barking of a large dog somewhere not far away.

  Abbot’s Lodge certainly was secluded, almost isolated in fact, he thought as he returned the way he had come, and so was Mulberry Cottage. He drew up behind the mini and saw that as well as a dented wing it had a crushed bumper. Then he looked at the cottage. It was very old, probably 17th century, he decided, built of the soft-coloured brick that predominated in the village. The windows were small, the two upper ones peering like eyes out of the fringe of the thatch that framed them. The ridge line of the roof sagged in the middle, and though it was wired, in places the wire had rusted and the birds had made merry with the straw, removing some of it for nests, and in other places burrowing in and building on the spot. A fence, rotted in places, separated the cottage garden from the road, and there was a wicket gate in it that opened on to a flagged path leading up to the front door. There was no garage, and no other gate large enough to let a car in off the road, but there was quite an area of garden around the cottage, filled now with dahlias and michaelmas daisies, and large yellow chrysanthemums.

  Patrick got out of the car, opened the little gate and walked up the path, disturbing a squabble of sparrows who were pecking at the dust between the flagstones. The cottage, except that it was more dilapidated, reminded him of one where Jane had lived for a while when Michael was in America, in a village not so far away from here. Country villages were not always the peaceful places they appeared to be on the surface, and Meldsmead probably had its share of undercurrents like the rest.

  A lawn ran away from the cottage at one side, and in the corner, its boughs spreading wide, was a mulberry tree. Patrick was conscious of a movement as he approached the front door, and before he could knock, it was opened. A woman with carroty hair stood before him; she was about forty, of medium height, and slightly built. Her eyes were a brilliant blue, and she was skilfully made-up, wearing lipstick that toned with her well-cut purple trouser suit. Far from being garish, the whole effect was impressive. Patrick found it easy to believe, on her appearance alone, that she was a powerful force in whatever firm she worked for, and he saw the point of the vicar’s exhortations.

  ‘Miss Brinton?’ he asked, ducking to address her, for the lintel of the door was very low.

  ‘Valerie Brinton. Not Amelia. She’s dead,’ was the uncompromising answer.

  ‘My name is Patrick Grant,’ he said. ‘I happened to be passing—’

  She interrupted him.

  ‘Oh, Dr. Grant, do come in.’ Her tone was still brisk, and she did not smile, but she stood back, inviting him to enter. He thought she probably seldom softened more than this.

  Bending still further, Patrick entered the cottage. Once inside, he could only just stand upright without touching the ceiling. After the bright, clear day outside it seemed dark at first until his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light within, but the living-room, into which the front door opened, was gloomy. The ceiling was heavily beamed, and the walls were, as he had been told, completely covered with books. Every available space was filled with them. On their knees amongst a pile of volumes on the ground were, he saw, two other women, both staring at him. One got up; she was young and slim, with long dark hair clasped into a slide at the nape of her neck.

  ‘My niece Ellen,’ said Valerie Brinton. ‘And this is Miss Forrest, a friend and colleague of my aunt’s. Dr. Grant, who was in Athens.’

  ‘Oh!’ came a little cry from the floor, and Miss Forrest made fluttery movements. Patrick was meanwhile shaking hands with Ellen, who offered him a cool, firm palm. At first glance she bore no resemblance to her aunt except in build.

  ‘Please don’t get up, Miss Forrest,’ Patrick urged the figure on the floor.

  ‘But I must, I’ve got cramp,’ said Miss Forrest, hauling herself up by clutching at a chair.

  Patrick was a big man, and his presence made the small room seem crowded.

  ‘Mind you don’t trip,’ Ellen warned him. ‘There are books all over the place.’

  Patrick’s eyes were adjusting to the light, and he took in more details. He saw that Miss Forest, now upright, was tiny; her neat head was covered with snow-white curls. She came up to him and caught hold of his arm with her two little paws.

  ‘You were so kind to write as you did about poor Amelia,’ she said, and her voice trembled, with emotion, Patrick thought, and not extreme age.

  ‘We’re just sorting out some of my aunt’s books,’ said Valerie, briskly. ‘Milly thought they might be valuable, and anyway I can’t possibly keep them. This whole place will have to be done up from top to toe.’

  ‘You’ll be keeping the cottage, then?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘Oh yes. For a time, anyway. I’ll do it up and see how things go. I might sell it eventually,’ Valerie said. ‘I’d make a bomb.’

  She would, too. She’d enlarge the windows, get all kinds of grants and add heating and so forth. Quite right, really. The place would fall down if it wasn’t rescued soon, and olde-worlde charm could pall in cold, wet weather.

  ‘You would know about the books,’ said Ellen.

  ‘What about them?’ Patrick turned to her. She had enormous eyes of some dark colour; could it be violet?

  ‘Whether they’re valuable.’

  ‘I’m not an expert,’ Patrick said.

  ‘Some of them are first editions,’ Ellen told him. ‘They belonged to Amelia’s father.’

  They might, in that case, be of interest to his classical colleagues who wer
e always bemoaning the impossibility of obtaining various out of print works for their own use or as replacements for volumes lost or stolen from the college library.

  ‘Mildred is going to spend a week here later, making a list,’ said Valerie.

  ‘It’s so kind of you, dear, to let me. I shall enjoy staying here,’ said Miss Forrest.

  Cataloguing the books would be quite a task, and Patrick wondered if she were physically equal to it. He peered at the nearest shelf and what he saw made him whistle.

  ‘I see you’ve got a Burmann Petronius,’ he said. ‘I know someone who’d be very glad to get hold of that.’

  ‘Dr. Grant had better have a copy of the list, Milly, when you’ve done it,’ Valerie said. ‘Perhaps you would advise us?’ she asked him.

  ‘With pleasure,’ Patrick said. He could soon enlist more expert advice than his own, and there were some treasures here.

  ‘Milly lives in London and spends her days beetling round museums and art galleries,’ Ellen said. ‘She’s just the person to do this sort of cataloguing.’

  ‘Amelia used to visit me,’ Miss Forrest said, ‘and I often used to come here too.’ She looked wistfully round the room.

  ‘Now Milly, you’ve done quite enough work for the present,’ Valerie said. ‘You take Dr. Grant into the garden while Ellen and I do some clearing up in here and get tea ready.’ She spoke quite kindly to the old woman. Despite the fizzing image she projected she was not without compassion.

  ‘Oh—very well, Valerie, if you say so,’ agreed Miss Forrest meekly.

  ‘Do we go this way?’ Patrick asked, indicating the front door, and at her nod opened it and stood aside for her. She walked with quick steps down the path and across the lawn. Patrick ducked his head to clear the door as he followed. There was a wooden seat under the mulberry tree and they made their way towards it, Patrick taking one long stride to about three of Miss Forrest’s bird-like hops. She was rather out of breath when they arrived; no, she would not have been fit to climb the Acropolis of Athens this summer.

  ‘Earlier in the year mulberries keep landing on one’s head, sitting here,’ she panted as they sat down. ‘But it’s safe now.’ Sure enough, the seat and its arms had crimson splodges on them, the dried-out stains of crushed fruit.

  Sitting beside her on the bench, Patrick described how he had first seen Miss Amelia Brinton at Delphi, so that he knew her again when they were both looking at the Caryatids. Then he told her about the accident and what followed, stressing the kindness of the Greeks and the British Embassy and minimising the horror of the accident.

  ‘Poor dear Amelia. I am glad she was buried in Greece, she would have liked that. But I shall never see her grave. When you next go to Athens, Dr. Grant, will you put some flowers on it for me?’

  Patrick promised to do this.

  ‘She was my friend,’ said Miss Forrest simply.

  Patrick was silent while she extracted a handkerchief from the sleeve of her grey crimplene dress and mopped her eyes with dignified delicacy. Then he said, ‘She must have been a remarkable woman.’

  ‘She was. She had a first-class brain. Some people thought her hard and too inflexible. She could never forgive a girl who let down the high standards she had set,’ said Miss Forrest. ‘But one must have ideals. If not, what is there to live for?’

  A good question, and one that might with advantage be asked more loudly and more often nowadays, thought Patrick.

  After a little prompting, Miss Forrest described some of the holidays she had shared with Miss Amelia.

  ‘She made all the arrangements and took total charge. I just followed where she led, but she made it all come alive for me. I understood the aesthetic side of what we saw, but she was the scholar who made the historical aspect real,’ she said.

  ‘You will miss her,’ Patrick said gently.

  ‘Yes. I never thought she would go first, she was always the strong one,’ said Miss Forrest. ‘I’ll get used to it. One gets used to anything.’

  Patrick thought of the cynicism with which the modern world would regard such a friendship between two women and the snide inferences it would prompt. Yet each had probably once hoped to marry; he could easily imagine Miss Forrest during the 1914-18 war on the arm of a subaltern soon to die.

  He was going to ask her if she remembered Jane during her last year at Slade House when Valerie and Ellen appeared from the back of the cottage, each with a tray.

  There were scones.

  ‘Bought, I’m afraid, from the village shop this morning,’ said Valerie. ‘But the jam’s home-made. Amelia got it at the church fete, it’s Mrs. Merry’s strawberry, and famous here.’

  ‘And,’ said Ellen, whose tray bore a yellow earthenware pot with a large bee on the lid, ‘there is honey still for tea.’

  Later, she walked with Patrick to the fence that divided the garden from the field beyond.

  ‘I thought no one read Rupert Brooke now,’ he said to her. ‘My pupils don’t, much.’

  ‘Oh,’ she shrugged. ‘Perhaps I wanted you to realise I could read and write, in spite of my obvious lack of education.’

  ‘You don’t seem ill-educated to me,’ said Patrick, who had given the matter no thought at all. ‘If you went to Slade House you must have learned a lot.’

  ‘I didn’t go there. Amelia never forgave my mother for not sending me, even though she’d retired. My father – Valerie’s brother – was killed in the war, and my mother married again when I was quite small. I’ve got two half-sisters and we all went to the local high school. We were very happy there. It’s gone comprehensive now.’

  ‘You probably had much more opportunity there than you would have at Slade House,’ said Patrick. She was older than he had thought at first, if she was born during the war.

  ‘Amelia didn’t think so. We were a bit short on the classics,’ Ellen said. ‘Valerie didn’t go to Slade House either. I’m not sure why – probably because she lived abroad. She’s a brilliant linguist.’ She plucked a blade of grass and rubbed it between her fingers. Some heifers in the field had moved closer to the fence and were looking at them both with mild-eyed interest. The beasts’ slow movements made the grass rustle. ‘My step-father’s a dear and I had a very happy childhood. I go home often,’ Ellen added.

  And you’ve got a giant chip of some sort on your shoulder or you wouldn’t be telling me all this, thought Patrick.

  ‘Good,’ he said, and after a suitable pause to show respect for this unknown man who had made a success of a difficult job, he changed the subject. ‘Is that the house with the bad reputation?’ he asked, pointing across the field to where a wing of Abbot’s Lodge was visible above its screening hedge.

  ‘Yes. How did you know about it?’

  ‘I had a sandwich at the pub. Some chap there mentioned it. It’s just been sold, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. My firm handled it, in fact. I work for an estate agent in London.’ She named a well-known firm. ‘We thought we’d have it on our books for ever. People got interested. Then they faded away when they heard the stories.’

  ‘What’s so awful about it?’

  ‘Oh, the locals say it’s an unlucky house. Someone hanged himself there once, and there was a fire, and a couple who lived there during the war split up, and Mrs. Fellowes, the wife of the man who’s just sold it, died there.’

  ‘In mysterious circumstances?’

  ‘No. But tragically, of leukaemia. She wasn’t old.’

  ‘Well, these things happen, don’t they? That house must have been standing there for centuries, and witnessed plenty of good things too, like births and golden weddings.’

  ‘I suppose so. All the same, it has a funny atmosphere. Sort of hostile. I felt it when I took people round it. Sometimes when the partners are busy I do that kind of job.’

  ‘Couldn’t it have been just because it was empty?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I go over lots of empty houses, I’m used to that deserted feeling. This was dif
ferent. Almost desolate. I felt rather sorry that we’d sold it, in case it brings bad luck to the new owners.’

  ‘You’d better change your job,’ said Patrick with a grin.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this anyway,’ said Ellen. ‘Val would laugh the whole thing to bits. But there’s something else. The last people who lived there – the Fellowes – looked so like this new couple. They’re called Bruce, the new ones. David and Carol. Mrs. Fellowes was pale and fair and thin, and very smart. And he was stockily built, with blue eyes and curly brown hair – very much the same types as the Bruces. And the last couple had a golden retriever, and so have these new people.’

  Patrick remembered the deep barking he had heard. The Bruces must be down today, inspecting their new property.

  ‘There are lots of brown-haired men with blue eyes about the place,’ he suggested mildly, ‘and I expect a good few of them marry slender blondes.’

  ‘You think I’m mad,’ Ellen accused.

  ‘Not at all. I think you’re highly imaginative and perfectly delightful, and that you might be happier if you were more ordinary, but it would make you less intriguing,’ he said in a light voice.

  Ellen turned her head away so that he could not see her reaction to this remark, which most modern girls would interpret just as casual banter. She did not answer.

  ‘You can’t anticipate the troubles of everyone, and prevent them, you know,’ he added, in more serious tones. ‘Tell me about your aunt. She’s not a headmistress, I gather.’

  At this, Ellen laughed.

  ‘Heavens, no. She’d terrify both the children and their parents. Mind you, Amelia did that too. No, Val’s a real tycoon. She did a course in business management, and ran a commercial translation service meanwhile. I told you he’s a linguist – she’s fluent in four languages, including Russian. Someone spotted her remarkable powers while she was dealing with their foreign correspondence and got her into his organisation. She’s on the board now – handles their P.R. and most of their overseas negotiations.’