by Ruth Rendell
‘Good morning.’
Greenleaf’s car drew level with his own and Oliver was forced to look up into his neighbour’s brown aquiline face. It was a very un-English face, almost Oriental, with dark, close-set eyes, a large intelligent mouth and thick hair, crinkly like that of some ancient Assyrian.
‘Oh, hallo,’ Oliver said ungraciously. He stood up, making an effort to say something neighbourly, when Nancy came running down the path from the kitchen door. She stopped and saw the doctor and smiled winningly.
‘Off on your rounds? What a pity to have to work on a Saturday! I always tell Oliver he doesn’t know his luck, having all these long week-ends.’
Oliver coughed. His other wives had learned that his coughs were pregnant with significance. In Nancy’s case there had hardly been time to teach her, and now …
‘I hope I’ll see you tonight,’ said the doctor as he began to move off.
‘Oh, yes tonight …’ Nancy’s face had taken on its former lines of displeasure. When Greenleaf was out of earshot she turned sharply to her husband. ‘I thought you said you left Tamsin’s present on the sideboard.’
Oliver had a nose for a scene. He picked up the bucket and started towards the house.
‘I did.’
‘You bought that for Tamsin?’ She scuttled after him into the dining-room and picked up the scent bottle with its cut-glass stopper. ‘Nuit de Beltane? I never heard of such extravagance!’
Oliver could see from the open magazine on the table that she had already been checking the price.
‘There you are.’ Her finger stabbed at a coloured photograph of a similar bottle. ‘Thirty-seven and six!’ She slammed the magazine shut and threw it on the floor. ‘You must be mad.’
‘You can’t go to a birthday party empty-handed.’ Oliver said weakly. If only he knew for certain. There might, after all, be no point in bothering to keep Nancy sweet. He watched her remove the stopper, sniff the scent and dab a spot on her wrist. While she waved her wrist in front of her nose, inhaling crossly, he washed his hands and closed the back door.
‘A box of chocolates would have done,’ Nancy said. She lugged the sewing machine up on its rubber mat. ‘I mean, it’s fantastic spending thirty-seven and six on scent for Tamsin when I haven’t even got a decent dress to go in.’
‘Oh my God!’
‘You don’t seem to have a sense of proportion where money’s concerned.’
‘Keep the scent for God’s sake and I’ll get some chocolates in the village.’
Immediately she was in his arms. Oliver crushed the letter down more firmly in his pocket.
‘Can I really, darling? You are an angel. Only you won’t be able to get anything nice in the village. You’ll have to nip into Nottingham.’
Disengaging himself, Oliver reflected on his wife’s economies. Now there would be the petrol into Nottingham, at least twelve and six for chocolates and he’d still spent nearly two pounds on Nuit de Beltane.
Nancy began to sew. The dress had begun to look passable. At least he wouldn’t be utterly disgraced.
‘Can I come in?’
That voice was Edith Gaveston’s. Quick as a flash Nancy ripped the silk from the machine, rolled up the dress and crammed it under a sofa cushion.
‘Come in, Edith.’
‘I see you’ve got into our country way of leaving all your doors unlocked.’
Edith, hot and unwholesome-looking in an aertex shirt and a tweed skirt, dropped on to the sofa. From the depths of her shopping basket she produced a wicker handbag embroidered with flowers.
‘Now, I want the opinion of someone young and “with it”.’ Oliver who was forty-two scowled at her, but Nancy, still in her twenties, smiled encouragingly. ‘This purse …’ It was an absurd word, but Edith was too county, too much of a gentlewoman to talk of handbags unless she meant a small suitcase. ‘This purse, will it do for Tamsin’s present? It’s never been used.’ She hesitated in some confusion. ‘I mean, of course, it’s absolutely new. I brought it back from Majorca last year. Now, tell me frankly, will it do?’
‘Well, she can’t very well sling it back at you,’ Oliver said rudely. ‘Not in front of everyone.’ The mention of Majorca reminded him of his second wife’s demands. ‘Excuse me.’ He went outside to get the car.
‘I’m sure it’ll do beautifully,’ Nancy gushed. ‘What did Linda say?’
‘She said it was square,’ Edith said shortly. Her children’s failure in achieving the sort of status their parents had wanted for them hurt her bitterly. Linda—Linda who had been at Heathfield—working for Mr. Waller; Roger, coming down from Oxford after a year and going to agricultural college! She would feed them, give them beds in her house, but with other people she preferred to forget their existence.
Nancy said with tactless intuition: ‘I thought you weren’t terribly keen on the Selbys. Patrick, I mean …’
‘I’ve no quarrel with Tamsin. I hope I’m not a vindictive woman.’
‘No, but after what Patrick—after him influencing Roger the way he did, I’m surprised you—well, you know what I mean.’
Nancy floundered. The Gavestons weren’t really county any more. Their house was no bigger than the Gages’. But still—you’d only got to look at Edith to know her brother lived at Chantflower Grange. I suppose she’s only going to the party to have a chance to hob-nob with Crispin Marvell, she thought.
‘Patrick Selby behaved very badly, very wrongly,’ Edith said. ‘And it was just wanton mischief. He’s perfectly happy and successful in his job.’
‘I never quite knew …’
‘He set out to get at my children. Quite deliberately, my dear. Roger was blissfully happy at The House.’ Nancy looked puzzled, thinking vaguely of the Palace of Westminster. ‘Christ Church, you know. Patrick Selby got talking to him when he was out with that dog of theirs and the upshot of it was Roger said his father wanted him to go into the business but he wasn’t keen. He wanted to be a farmer. As if a boy of nineteen knows what he wants. Patrick said he’d been forced into business when all he wanted was to teach or some absurd thing. He advised Roger to—well, follow his own inclinations. Never mind about us, never mind about poor Paul with no-one to take over the reins at Gavestons, no heir.’
Nancy, greedy for gossip, made sympathetic noises.
‘Then, of course, Roger had to say his sister wanted to earn her own living. Made up some stupid tale about our keeping her at home. The next thing was that impossible interfering man suggested she should work in a shop till she was old enough to take up nursing. I don’t know why he did it, unless it was because he likes upsetting people. Paul had a great deal to say about it, I assure you. He had quite a stormy interview with Patrick.’
‘But it was no good?’
‘They do what they like these days.’ She sighed and added despondently, ‘But as to going tonight, one has one’s neighbourhood, one cannot pick and choose these days.’
‘Who else is coming?’
‘The usual people. The Linchester crowd and Crispin of course. I think it’s splendid of him to come so often considering how bitter he must feel.’ Edith’s sensible, pink-rimmed glasses bobbed on her nose. ‘There was a clause in the Marvell contract, you know. No tree felling. Everyone’s respected it except Patrick Selby. I know for a fact there were twenty exquisite ancient trees on that plot, and he’s had them all down and planted nasty little willows.’
It was just like Oliver, Nancy thought, to come in and spoil it all.
‘If you’re looking for your cheque book,’ she said innocently, ‘it’s on my record player. While you’re about it you might collect my sandals.’
‘Oh, are you going to the village?’ Edith got up pointedly.
‘I’m going into Nottingham.’
‘Into town? How perfectly splendid. You can give me a lift.’
She picked up the wicker basket and they departed together.
Two fields and a remnant of woodland away Crispin Marvell w
as sitting in his living room drinking rhubarb wine and writing his history of Chantefleur Abbey. Some days it was easy to concentrate. This was one of the others. He had spent the early part of the morning washing his china and ever since he had replaced the cups in the cabinet and the plates on the walls, he had been unable to keep his eyes from wandering to the glossy surfaces and the warm rich colours. It was almost annoying to reflect what he had been missing in delaying this particular bit of spring-cleaning, the months during which the glaze had been dimmed by winter bloom.
For a moment he mused over the twin olive-coloured plates, one decorated with a life-size apple in relief, the other with a peach; over the Chelsea clock with its tiny dial and opulent figurines of the sultan and his concubine. Marvell kept his correspondence behind this clock and it disturbed him to see the corner of Henry Glide’s letter sticking out. He got up and pushed the envelope out of sight between the wall and the Circassian’s gold-starred trousers. Then he dipped his pen in the ink-well and returned to Chantefleur.
‘The original building had a clerestory of round-headed windows with matching windows in the aisle bays. Only by looking at the Cistercian abbeys now standing in France can we appreciate the effect of the …’
He stopped and sighed. Carried away by his own domestic art, he had almost written ‘of the glaze on the apple’. It was hardly important. Tomorrow it might rain. He had already spent two years on the history of Chantefleur. Another few months scarcely mattered. In a way, on a wonderful morning like this one, nothing mattered. He gave the plate a last look, running his fingers across the cheek of the apple—the artist had been so faithful he had even pressed in a bruise, there on the underside—and went into the garden.
Marvell lived in an almshouse, or rather four almshouses all joined together in a terrace and converted by him into a long low bungalow. The walls were partly of white plaster, partly of rose-coloured brick, and the roof was of pantiles, old now and uneven but made by the hand of a craftsman.
He strolled round the back. Thanks to the bees that lived in three white hives in the orchard the fruit was forming well; they hadn’t swarmed this year and he was keeping his fingers crossed. The day spent in carefully cutting out the queen cells had been well worth the sacrifice of half a chapter of Chantefleur. He sat down on the bench. Beyond the hedge in the meadows below Linchester they were cutting the hay. He could hear the baler, that and the sound of the bees. Otherwise all was still.
‘All right for some people.’
Marvell turned his head and grinned. Max Greenleaf often came up about this time after his morning calls.
‘Come and sit down.’
‘It’s good to get away from the wasps.’ Greenleaf looked at the lichen on the bench, then down at his dark suit. He sat down gingerly.
‘There always were a lot of wasps in Linchester,’ Marvell said. ‘I remember them in the old days. Thousands of damned wasps whenever Mamma gave a garden party.’ Greenleaf looked at him suspiciously. An Austrian Jew, he could never escape his conviction that the English landed gentry and the Corinthian aristocracy came out of the same mould. Marvell called it his serfs to the wolves syndrome. ‘The wasps are conservative, you see. They haven’t got used to the idea that the old house had been gone five years and a lot of company directors’ Georgian gone up in its place. They’re still on the hunt for Mamma’s brandy snaps. Come inside and have a drink.’ He smiled at Greenleaf and said in a teasing voice, ‘I opened a bottle of mead this morning.’
‘I’d rather have a whiskey and soda.’
Greenleaf followed him to the house, knocking his head as he always did on the plaque above the front door that said: 1722. Andreas Quercus Fecit. Marvell’s reasons for living there were beyond his understanding. The countryside, the flowers, horticulture, agriculture, Marvell’s own brand of viticulture, meant nothing to him. He had come to the village to share his brother-in-law’s prosperous practice. If you asked him why he lived in Linchester he would answer that it was for the air or that he was obliged to live within a mile or two of his surgery. Modem conveniences, a house that differed inside not at all from a town house, diluted and almost banished those drawbacks. To invite those disadvantages, positively to court them in the form of cesspools, muddy lanes and insectivora as his host did, made Marvell a curio, an object of psychological speculation.
These mysteries of country life reminded him afresh of the cloud on his morning.
‘I’ve just lost a patient,’ he said. Marvell, pouring whiskey, heard the Austrian accent coming through, a sign that the doctor was disturbed. ‘Not my fault, but still …’
‘What happened?’ Marvell drew the curtains, excluding all but a narrow shaft of sunlight that ran across the black oak floor and up Andreas Quercus’s squat wall.
‘One of the men from Coffley mine. A wasp got on his sandwich and he ate the thing. So what does he do? He goes back to work and the next thing I’m called out because he’s choking to death. Asphyxiated before I got there.’
‘Could you have done anything?’
‘If I’d got there soon enough. The throat closes with the swelling, you see.’ Changing the subject, he said: ‘You’ve been writing. How’s it coming on?’
‘Not so bad. I did my china this morning and it distracted me.’ He unhooked the apple plate from the wall and handed it to the doctor. ‘Nice?’
Greenleaf took it wonderingly in short thick fingers. ‘What’s the good of a thing like this? You can’t put food on it, can you?’ Without aesthetic sense, he probed everything for its use, its material function. The plate was quite useless. Distastefully he imagined eating from it the food he liked best, chopped herring, cucumbers in brine, cabbage salad with caraway seeds. Bits would get wedged under the apple leaves.
‘Its purpose is purely decorative,’ Marvell laughed. ‘Which reminds me, will you be at Tamsin’s party?’
‘If I don’t get called out.’
‘She sent me a card. Rather grand. Tamsin always does these things well.’ Marvell stretched himself full-length in the armchair. The movement was youthful and the light dim. Greenleaf was seldom deceived about people’s ages. He put Marvell’s at between forty-seven and fifty-two, but the fine lines which the sun showed up were no longer apparent, and the sprinkling of white hairs was lost in the fair. Probably still attractive to women, he reflected.
‘One party after another,’ he said. ‘Must come expensive.’
‘Tamsin has her own income, you know, from her grandmother. She and Patrick are first cousins so she was his grandmother, too.’
‘But she was the favourite?’
‘I don’t know about that. He had already inherited his father’s business so I daresay old Mrs. Selby thought he didn’t need any more.’
‘You seem to know a lot about them.’
‘I suppose I do. In a way I’ve been a sort of father confessor to Tamsin. Before they came here they had a flat in Nottingham. Tamsin was lost in the country. When I gave that talk to the Linchester Residents’ Association she bombarded me with questions and since then—well, I’ve become a kind of adopted uncle, Mrs. Beeton and antiquarian rolled into one.’
Greenleaf laughed. Marvell was the only man he knew who could do women’s work without becoming old-womanish.
‘You know, I don’t think she ever really wanted that house. Tamsin loves old houses and old furniture. But Patrick insists on what are called, I believe, uncluttered lines.’
‘Tell me, don’t you mind coming to Linchester?’ Always fascinated by other people’s emotions, Greenleaf had sometimes wondered about Marvell’s reactions to the new houses that had sprung up on his father’s estate.
Marvell smiled and shrugged.
‘Not really. I’m devoutly thankful I don’t have to keep the old place up. Besides it amuses me when I go to parties. I play a sort of mental game trying to fix just where I am in relation to our house.’ When Greenleaf looked puzzled he went on, ‘What I mean is, when I’m at Tamsin’s I a
lways think to myself, the ha-ha came down here and here were the kitchen gardens.’ Keeping a straight face he said, ‘The Gages’ house now, that’s where the stables were. I’m not saying it’s appropriate, mind.’
‘You’re scaring me. Makes me wonder about my own place.’
‘Oh, you’re all right. Father’s library and a bit of the big staircase.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ the doctor said and added a little shyly, ‘I’m glad you can make a game of the whole thing.’
‘You mustn’t think,’ said Marvell, ‘that every time I set foot on Linchester I’m wallowing in a kind of maudlin recherche du temps perdu.’
Greenleaf was not entirely convinced. He finished his whisky and remembered belatedly his excuse for the visit.
‘And now,’ he said, at ease on his own home ground, ‘how’s the hay fever?’
If the doctor had not perfectly understood Marvell’s Proustian reference, he had at least an inkling of its meaning. On Edward Carnaby it would have been utterly lost. His French was still at an elementary stage.
Jo-jo monte. Il est fatigué. Bonne nuit, Jo-jo. Dors bien!
He looked up towards the ceiling and translated the passage into English. Funny stuff for a grown man, wasn’t it? All about a kid of five having a bath and going to bed. Still, it was French. At this rate he’d be reading Simenon within the year.
Bonjour, Jo-jo. Quel beau matin! Regarde le ciel. Le soleil brille.
Edward thumbed through the dictionary, looking for briller.
‘Ted!’
‘What is it, dear?’ It was funny, but lately he’d got into the habit of calling her dear. She had taken the place of his wife in all ways but one. Sex was lacking but freedom and security took its place. Life was freer with Free, he thought, pleased with his pun.
‘If you and Cheryl want your lunch on time you’ll have to do something about these wasps, Ted.’ She marched in, brisk, neat, womanly, in a cotton frock and frilled apron. He noted with pleasure that she had said lunch and not dinner. Linchester was educating Freda.
