by Barbara Else
Child-stealers involved with a church. This is enough, Jocasta’s instincts tell her. She can find out more — if more is to be found — once she is there.
Well. The azalea is sometimes fatal. So is the castor bean. English ivy can put you into a coma. And if someone takes any of these of their own accord, you’re hardly the murderer, are you?
Not even if you’ve laid the weapon out.
Because you can’t know how big a dose it takes to kill an individual. You don’t know what else they might have eaten that will lessen the effect. Nor can you know, precisely, how long a single substance takes to work. It’s all up to the gods, says Jocasta.
She’s pleased she didn’t let her anger rise so far that Geordie’s a long-gone cinder. It’s been a sour and sweet endurance to smile and keep him happy, bed and table, submit to his authority while being quite clear what she’ll organise some day.
Geordie is colour blind, remember. He finds it difficult to tell some greens from cream and yellow. It’s been very useful to Jocasta, that: it meant he was around when she needed a husband and the fully able-bodied were being shot down, up, sideways, in the back. It meant Geordie was too careful of himself to volunteer, then yanked and twisted every kind of string, made sure he was in essential work. Plumbing, very useful work indeed. And after the war, if you knew how to manage a business, you didn’t have to do the dirty side of it yourself. He’s not a well-liked boss, but that’s not a problem when you’re a favourite with the mayor. His being colour blind and secretive about it? How useful it is now. How useful it is, especially, that he’s rich.
Jocasta sets two jars on the kitchen table. She places a freshbaked loaf on the table too, and remembers the flow of sun like honey on her hands that day, long ago, while she baked the apple loaf for Peter.
Her friend’s waiting at the front door. ‘Come on, Jo,’ calls the woman. Jocasta puts on her collarless blue jacket and pats her hair, looped up in a soft blonde bun. She looks like a woman in her early thirties. She flits to Geordie’s armchair. Her friend pops her head around to smile and say hullo.
‘Have a nice break, love.’ Jocasta puts the London Illustrated and the Hull Daily Mail on Geordie’s lap, ruffles his hair but sets it straight before he scowls. She tweaks the tartan rug over his knees. ‘You need another day or two to get over your cold. I’ve left some lunch out for you. Don’t touch the jar with the mark on.’
‘You be back home by four. Bring me something for a treat,’ Geordie demands.
‘I’ll come back myself, love, wearing feathers, how will that do?’
Geordie chuckles, the quintessence of a well-loved, contented man. Jocasta’s friend beams: she sees the sum and substance of a long and happy marriage in its prime.
You know, that man’s been such a miser with his money it really would be appropriate to steep some coin in poison, have Geordie die from handling it, as a Médici did to a cardinal of Lorraine. She could have poisoned his hairbrush, that would be appropriate too, or his striped pajamas. Jocasta bought a nightgown once, blackberry colour, which caused her serious swelling of the skin. She insisted that she get her money back. The shop assistant didn’t want to play along but Jocasta in a rage was formidable.
She was so tiny, you see. Who liked saying no to her? And nobody could suspect a tiny woman of doing any wrong.
So, will Jocasta and her friend return from town on the chime of four o’clock and find poor Geordie on the floor?
What do you think? Will she make a pretty widow?
Terror, when relived, has an icing of delight surrounding it. With dainty licks Jocasta tastes the icing of terror and takes care not to leave a dab of sticky on her neat pert nose. She did it. She survived. Geordie, lying on the floor.
Home she came laughing with her older woman friend. Think ‘gaily’, Jocasta told herself. Think ‘lightly’, ‘prettily’ and ‘innocent’. Lightly she danced into the kitchen with her friend behind her, innocently she fingered the green top of the jar with the large cream cross on, artlessly wondered aloud why it wasn’t where she’d left it.
‘Where’s Geordie?’ she called out, taking up the other jar. ‘Geordie, darling?’ And lightly she went to make a cup of tea. Her friend, the older woman, went into the living room and thus found Geordie first, lying doubled over on the mat in front of his easy chair. The rat lay on the mat. The rat had carked it. The older woman screamed, Jocasta ran in, shook him, turned to her friend and fainted. Not with shock: relief. But then, a faint’s a faint and no person but the fainter can tell why.
Police, of course, and the ambulance, and a tragic accident it is called in the Hull Daily Mail and over the Yorkshire puddings on many a hundred dinner tables that weekend in the good parts of town as well as the poorer, as well as from the coroner’s chair at the inquest. The man had known enough of his wife’s sideline in herbal cosmetics to be careful. The jar was labelled well enough; he’d been warned out loud to be cautious. Strawberry facial cream. The man had made a most unfortunate mistake. Poor little widow. Brave lady, pale, dry-eyed as widows often are, on a perpetual edge of faintness, having to support herself on the arm of a policeman, the lawyer and solicitor, the journalist, then the real-estate agent, travel agent.
Oh, how on edge Jocasta is. She shakes and shakes, often cannot speak in her despair. It’s wonderful to note how close hysterical glee can sound to anguish, how folk don’t see the difference. How people pity her: she misses her Geordie so much, feels guilty that he’s gone, but it’s not her fault.
They will miss her, too, when she sells up and moves away. A widow shouldn’t sell up and move on too fast, not when she’s still in the shock of loss, but can you blame the little thing? How could she stay in the house where her husband died so needlessly? Good heavens, she has been through enough.
It’s amazing, but it’s human nature, that nobody has realised that when she called out to Geordie to be careful which jar he used, she didn’t actually say which was the safe one. Two green lids, one with a little dab of purple which she rubbed off artlessly when she came home, one with a big yellow cross, which anybody ought to see —
There’s a party to say farewell, held in the home of her dear woman friend. The mayor and three town councillors pop in to wish her bon voyage and kiss the pretty widow goodbye. Big kisses. One tries to use his tongue. Jocasta bites it.
On the boat to the other side of the world, her small pale figure intrigues the other passengers. They like her lilting laugh, the way it often ends with an indrawn breath, the way her eyes lower to her wedding ring. Poor thing, poor pretty thing.
‘You are stopping in Sydney?’ asks the First Mate. ‘Oh, you’re going on to Auckland?’
Jocasta nods.
‘Ah.’ The First Mate blushes. ‘Fresh start.’ He isn’t good with women, though he does his duty and tries. His lack of expertise can be read between the lines around his eyes as he eats another forkful of shipboard pie. The menu calls it veal.
‘Nouvelle Zélande! Ah hah! Les moutons.’ The Frenchman at the table waves his fork. ‘Mon père — il tue des moutons! Ship! Le woolly ship.’
‘Imagine that. Your father is a butcher.’ Jocasta wonders why it is a cause of such satisfaction.
The Frenchman’s forehead creases with the difficulties of language. ‘Non, non. Mon père, il tue …’ He raises an imaginary rifle and aims at a porthole. ‘Bom!’
The butcher shoots sheep with a gun? Certainly not something to be proud of, say expressions of alarm around the table.
‘Aha.’ Jocasta smiles. ‘Votre père est chasseur. He is a hunter.’
‘Chasseur!’ The Frenchman shouts with relief at being understood. ‘Oui, oui, bom bom! The woolly ship.’ He cocks his fingers over his forehead and indicates curved horns. Feral things. Wild sheep and mountain goats.
The others at the table eat more heartily in their relief.
‘In New Zealand, they keep sheep in paddocks,’ says Jocasta. ‘They’d be very easy to shoot.’
But children — in their twenties — are not very easy to find.
Bella is the prettiest of widows. Her skin’s translucent, her eyes are still enlarged with shock. It’s as perilous as ever to skirt around the huge black beast of grief. Grief is a hologram: now you see it, now it seems to disappear, but it always lurks there somewhere, a trick of the light, trick of the dark. Two years, people say, is what it takes to tether dreadful heartache — that’s if you love, or loved, someone. Love can be a hologram as well. She is torn between a dead man and a live one. Where’s the contest?
Jocasta tuts. Lack of decision. It would never have done in her young day. Think they’ve invented sex, these modern women, when it’s all the same old story, heaven knows. This Bella should have more eye to the main chance, less on a track that’s petered out (Jocasta asks you to excuse the pun, it wasn’t one she intended). That Bella. Does it really matter if Eliot truly loves her or if he’s only after sex? Good grief, he’s been panting for months; how many men leave their tongues hanging out that long? Jocasta can see Eliot is the type that falls in love passionately and forever but will never push himself forward.
But the trouble goes deep. Bella knows that beauty can be even less than skin deep, can exist only in the eyes of the beholder. Bella doesn’t know what she is worth beneath the skin. It might come time to give the silly girl a shove. Jocasta waits, but she has had to admit that since Barnaby’s death time is running out.
The gallery, with its pockets of shadow, wrinkles of gloom. Bella is sorting out the shelves. She can’t stand being here, but it’s one way to keep out of Eliot’s hair. He’s working at home today and going to see his mother later on.
Anna passes by, presses her pale button of a nose to the window and gives a peremptory knock. Bella pretends not to notice and isn’t sure that Anna sees her either. (It’s Barnaby who’s dead, not Bella — why does she feel like a ghost?)
Craig had thought she was selling the shop. If she did — rid herself of the porcelain, the silver, prints, the antique rings and necklaces, cufflinks, the cigarette cards, the beautiful unused horse muzzle with its oiled leather straps — she would be rich. By her standards. She would be independent. What a terrifying thought. Bella nearly phones Ruth to ask her what to do and tell her what she knows of Anna. But Anna is of adult age and ought to take care of herself. Whatever it was she lost on the bus, it can’t have been a baby. And whoever’s baby she may or may not be having, it isn’t Bella’s problem. The jealousy may hurt, but Bella simply must live through it (if she isn’t going to do something vengeful about it — as Jocasta would).
Turning, Bella knocks her hip against the safe. Responsibility, what a bastard. She opens the damn thing and drags out the Gundersens. The owner might have good reasons for wanting copies made. It’s not uncommon. But because she’s done it once, it doesn’t mean she has to do the job again.
There’s no record of how much Barnaby was paid. She calls the owner. ‘Three hundred and seventy-five,’ he says. Daylight robbery.
‘Lovely,’ Bella says and downs the phone. She scribbles a cheque for the amount, stuffs it and the originals into a packing tube to mail back to him, then finds she’s calling Lydia, sounding so cool and reasonable she is astonished.
‘I’ve done some sorting in the shop and I’ll be very glad if you and Charlotte will choose something. Maybe tomorrow or …’ In half an hour! Well, at least she’ll be shot of Lydia soon.
She finishes cleaning out the safe. In a box with some little silver ingots are the first sets of earrings she made to her own design about eight years ago. Barnaby must have fished them out of the waste basket where she flung them when she saw how poorly they lived up to her ideal. The bastard, something else he never told her. A numbness begins to creep over her. She gasps, and steadies herself on the safe. The musty dusty shop, the shadows, echoes of time — all the things that Barnaby amassed. How acquisitively he’d examined each new treasure, how it satisfied him to run his finger over makers’ marks and guess what route this jug, that porcelain shepherdess, had travelled across the world to end up here. His eyes had glowed, the pleased tilt of his head of badger hair, his laugh …
Hang on, Bella can’t cry now, not if Lydia’s going to charge in. Right — when Bella had been in dark moods before, she had seen herself as one of Bluebeard’s dead wives, hung up on a hook for him to gloat at. Which was probably unfair to Barnaby, but wives are meant to be unfair sometimes. Barnaby liked collecting precious things and playing jokes with them. Hiding the dragon-foot bowl underneath his damned Borsalino and smuggling it out of the French diplomat’s house. Signing Lydia’s name and address on order forms for those tacky mail-order objets that pretend to be quality art. She grabs up the Georgian coffee pot and watches her face in its bellied curve. Barnaby used to get so irritated with her doing that.
The face. It’s just a face, as Shakespeare had it. Two eyes. A nose, two lips. She told Ruth once that she was waiting with some interest to see how long before gravity made her jowls droop like a bulldog’s. Ruth had turned white around the eyes and told Bella she was undermining the entire appearance industry. The shape of Bella’s face changes as she turns the pot and wonders what is really there inside. Jonah — he’s had a very longlasting grip, that collector of pretty things, some of them human. She supposes he might have been dead for a while now, too. Life has its little blessings.
Still no Lydia. Bella checks the workroom for any more silversmithing supplies — a lump of rouge, the small rolling mill of course, which is far too heavy for her to lift on her own, the hammer with diminishing screwdrivers hidden in the handle like a set of Russian dolls. She telephones the supplier and orders borax, pumice powder, potassium sulphide to be sent around to Eliot’s. Well, it was the next thing to do — she might never use them but she can cross ordering off her mental list.
The phone rings. It makes her jump and she can’t get to it before Eliot begins to leave a message: Wondering how you’re doing, hope you’re okay, don’t push yourself too hard. She could pick it up before he finishes. But Eliot’s guilt makes her own sharper and more painful. Why can’t he just Svengali her, encourage and cosset her, all those seductive things at the drop of a hat (the Borsalino, still casting its shadow). Also on Bella’s list? Yes, deal with Eliot being brooding and honorable. It’s a bit late to be honorable now.
The shop seems to loom around her but here at last comes Lydia, with James along. Lydia’s eyes glitter in the murky light.
‘Well,’ says Bella. Her stomach feels as if a miniature roller coaster’s swooping round in it. She opens a cabinet of estate jewellery and beckons James. ‘Thou shalt take two ouches of gold.’
‘Eh?’ He grins.
The Old Testament talks about ouches. There’s a lot of bad translation. Or it could be a misprint for ounces. Otherwise, I can only suppose ouches are clip-on earrings.’
James laughs.
‘I thought we were going to be serious,’ Lydia says.
Bella makes her hands hold steady. ‘This is the horrible part.’
‘Horrible?’ Lydia’s gaze skitters round the shelves as if her eyes are chilly mice in search of crumbs.
‘When my mother died,’ says Bella. ‘When it came to dividing the bits and pieces, everybody seemed so grabby. Even me — well, I did say everybody. The trinkets she’d gathered — they meant her, in some way. We really wanted to keep her, little bits of her. But none of us wanted her shoes. We couldn’t bear to touch them. Empty shoes, with the shape of someone’s bunions. All those years of walking.’
When her mother died, Barnaby had been so calm and quiet, strong for her in an unobtrusive way — a bulk of shoulders, wide chest, low voice as he soothed her, hushed her. Bella covers her mouth for a moment with her fingers and turns into the workroom, pretending that she has to pull the blind up.
James follows. ‘Y’know, I’ll go and pack his clothes for you. I could take them to an op shop.’
‘You’d have
to go through his pockets. You’d probably find his heart pills. His suits — they’ll smell of him.’
James rubs her shoulder.
‘Have his hats,’ says Bella. ‘You’d look good in them. It would serve him right. He’d enjoy that, actually.’
She returns into the body of the shop.
Lydia grasps her handbag to her stomach rather like a kangaroo. ‘Where shall we begin? Do you have a plan, Bella?’
Bella shakes her head. ‘Just wander round and choose whatever you like.’
Lydia swoops on the Georgian silver. ‘Barnaby hated breaking up a set.’
‘Jeesh,’ mutters James.
‘The most expensive single item that isn’t silver,’ says Bella, ‘and the most easily portable, would be that Moorcroft vase. The peacock one.’
Lydia seems to slide sideways through the air until she stands in front of it. She gives a stagey quiver, and sidles round the shelves again. ‘It’s cram full and yet the place seems empty,’ she murmurs. She pokes amongst the antique books, passes her fingers over and through the clutches of bric-a-brac till she is in the workroom. James huddles near the shop door, hands in pockets.
‘What are these?’ Lydia appears with the Gundersens in one hand, the packing tube in the other.
‘They’re going back to the owner,’ Bella says.
Lydia flicks through them and looks closely at the signature. ‘It hurts me to say it, but they’re only as good as your copies. Better paper, of course.’ She slides them back into the tube. ‘I’ll mail them for you. I suppose it’s the least I can do.’
It is.
‘As you wish,’ Bella says.
Lydia hands the tube to her son. ‘Barnaby liked to see how far he could push the limits. He always managed to push mine.’ She shakes her head. ‘I could never put up with his mess, and I never understood why you did. So. The Moorcroft vase is gorgeous, Bella, but it’s the idea of it I like rather than the thing itself. And I really wouldn’t know what to do with the bird cage.’ She shrugs, a jerky little movement. ‘Mother didn’t want to come but she said she’d like the ferret. Lord knows why.’
