by Lis Howell
‘How did you feel about that? D’you think Phyllis knew when she phoned you?’
‘Maybe. You know, I didn’t mind. I had lived for so long with the shadow of George in our home that it was almost a relief. To be honest, it was as if it was meant to be: the final catharsis for Mary. I thought our relationship was strong enough to cope. I was a bit of a fool.’
‘So they had an affair?’
‘No! That’s where everyone got it wrong.’
Mary had promised that there would be no revival of a romance and Robert had believed her. He still did. And he knew that, as a priest, George had strong principles, not to mention his commitment to Joan and his children.
Robert shrugged. ‘But Mary and George got closer and closer, and met more and more often, until I was squeezed out. George was undoubtedly the love of Mary’s life.’
‘But it wasn’t mutual?’
‘I don’t think so. George had had so many more chances to broaden his life. His love for Joan was genuine, I’m sure. It was a mess, really. Mary was the loser.’
‘And what about you?’
‘It hurt like hell. I knew she never got over him. She was a disappointed person, whatever I did.’
‘So in the church that day when I turned up, she and George were meeting, just to talk. You’re right, it wasn’t sexual. I didn’t have any sense of them touching.’
‘But that wasn’t the point. She’d promised me to see less of him. Promised!’ He winced involuntarily and looked down at his plate.
Ouch. And how jealous that makes me feel in turn, Suzy thought. ‘And then she died and George went to pieces?’
‘I suppose so. I think guilt got to him then.’
But none of this explained Yvonne Wait’s hold over Robert. If Mary and George were half siblings, why not just come out with it? It was hardly a crime, especially these days, and if they weren’t sexually involved who would care?
‘But why did this mean Yvonne could threaten you?’
‘She told everyone Mary and George were having an affair. It couldn’t be disproved. If she had dropped another bombshell, that they were siblings too, and that there had been a pregnancy, it would have been a real scandal. Maybe Yvonne’s father was party to the abortion — doctors, dentists, they were all the elite then. Yvonne certainly knew everything. She’s got a real tap into the past.’
But it wasn’t just the past, Suzy thought. Yvonne would have not only her father’s old records, which must have been a mine of information, but new information too. Being in administration in a hospital must have been the job from heaven for someone like her.
‘Did she use medical records from the hospital to threaten other people?’
‘I think so. How else would she know about Stevie’s HIV test? And I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the person who wrote to Russell Simpson telling him Tom Strickland was his father.’
‘So everyone wanted her dead!’
‘Me included. Yvonne thought I should sell her The Briars. I refused. Then she wanted the bungalow, so she tried to blackmail me into ignoring any will Phyllis might have made.’
‘And did you give in to her? Did you ignore Phyllis’s will?’
‘No. I didn’t have to. I searched the house for the will, and found nothing. There was no document. In the end, Phyllis was a Drysdale from Tarnfield. If Yvonne was family, however distant, she was family, and she should get everything.’
But what if Mary had lived, and been threatened by Yvonne? What would Robert have done then? Suzy wondered, after the story he had told her, just how far he would have gone to protect his wife’s reputation. It was only the timing that stopped him being a suspect too.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I need to go to the loo.’ Robert looked at her anxiously.
‘Don’t take too long,’ he said. ‘There’s no bidet here! Or at least not in the Gents’!’
In the Ladies she stood with her hands on either side of the sink and looked at her face in the mirror. She looked flushed, excited even. The story of Robert’s marriage both intrigued and appalled her. He was such a loving person, but he had spent his love on someone else. If she were to pursue her feelings, would their relationship always be a competition she couldn’t win?
She went back to the table to change the subject. They talked about Isaiah over their dessert. It was a good conversation.
On the way out, in the car park, lulled by the wine and the soft lilac Lakeland dusk like smoke on the hills, she said, ‘So you really loved Mary, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes! But I often wondered if she really loved me.’
Interesting, she thought. Madly, it was on the tip of her tongue to say, ‘Well, sod Mary. Move on.’ But it was too much, too soon, for both of them, and anyway it sounded like a challenge rather than a declaration. Instead, she raised her eyebrow and looked out of the window.
Robert glanced at her. I wonder what it would be like, he thought, to make love to someone and feel equal passion returned, rather than to someone who has another person in her head? Fighting for Mary’s attention had had its erotic side, but not for very long. He had come to terms with being second best, and eventually that had been good enough. But, at least to start with, it had caused him great pain. So could he impose that on someone else? No, there was no way. If he were to love again it would have to be mutual, strong and equal. Mary would have to move over and make room in his heart.
He shook his head to clear it. The motorway was coming up.
‘We haven’t talked about the flower arranger very much,’ Suzy said as they approached Tarnfield.
‘One thing at a time, I suppose. D’you still want me to come to Rachel’s in London and see the Lachish frieze?’
Suzy had put that to the back of her mind. But now, aping him, she paused, then said, ‘Why not? I’m sure you’d be really interested. And by the way, Robert, what started your own interest in theology? You were a mature student, weren’t you?’
‘Yes. I wanted to beat George at his own game.’ Robert laughed. ‘The books I brought for you on Isaiah are in the glove compartment. And thanks for listening.’
‘Thanks for talking. Goodnight, Robert.’
‘Goodnight.’
He dropped her on the corner. She got out and his car turned away. She watched the red lights glow like rubies through the navy night.
39
Trinity season
Be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour.
From the Epistle for the Third Sunday after Trinity, 1 Peter 5:8
The following Monday, Molly came down with chicken pox. Suzy ached for her, watching her toss and turn, desperate to scratch. The scabs came off in the bed and dried in the summer heat, pricking her tender pink skin. After three weeks she emerged a longer, thinner child and Suzy realized her baby was gone.
Jake had been taking his first serious tests at school. Robert gave him some extra classes in English and called at the house with comics and Lucozade for Molly. Suzy didn’t invite him in: chicken pox in children could cause shingles in adults. It was best to keep everyone away. She and Robert phoned and emailed — sensible, restrained messages about Molly’s health. She didn’t go to church, and somewhere in that miserable month she realized that Nick Melling hadn’t called to ask after her or her daughter. She got her gossip from Babs Piefield. And Daisy popped round a few times to see how Molly was, but always stood on the doorstep, terrified of passing infection to her mother.
Suzy had bought herself a new Bible, the Revised Standard Version, and spent a lot of time reading about Isaiah. She sampled a commentary which was fairly academic though accessible for the general reader; then she read a book about Isaiah of Jerusalem — hardly a page-turner, but she had the book in her hand when Daisy knocked at the door.
‘Light reading!’ joked Suzy.
‘It’s really interesting,’ Daisy replied, seriously. ‘You will be coming back to All Saints when M
olly’s better, won’t you?’ she asked anxiously.
‘I don’t know, Daisy. To be honest I think I’ve had enough of all that.’
‘Nick will be so disappointed.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
Robert had left her The Language of Flowers, with its little Edwardian-style illustrations, and also brought her an old book on flower arranging which had belonged to Mary. Suzy browsed through it, sitting by Molly’s bed as the little girl dozed one silent, sunny afternoon in the front bedroom, surrounded by soft toys and the soporific sense of a child’s sickroom.
Suzy recognized some of the flower arrangements. Mary was the sort of woman who cooked by recipes and followed manuals, her work always perfect. Suzy was much more slapdash and achieved the occasional stunning success after dozens of messes.
But she admired Mary’s thoroughness. She spotted the illustrations of the azaleas and rhododendrons, with glossy camellia foliage, which Mary had used for the Trinity Sunday decorations two years ago, just after her illness had been diagnosed. And there was a dahlia and chrysanthemum display, using leaves of globe artichoke and the ubiquitous hellebore. She caught the name ‘zinnias’ and recognized them from some of Mary’s work. Wondering what they were, she turned to the end of the book and read that their bright colours came originally from South America. Native English flowers were softer and vaguer in tone. Suzy liked the calm of it all; she was missing all this.
Molly muttered and shifted in her sleep; Suzy put down the flower-arranging book sharply. A piece of headed paper fell out of the final pages she had just disturbed. She recognized Phyllis Drysdale’s handwriting straight away on the back. It was a note she had written to Mary years before, reminding her she was reading the lesson in church that Sunday because someone else was away. It made Suzy feel sad and creepy in equal measure.
She turned it over and looked at the printed heading. It was from a college in London, and below it was an invitation to a reunion. Someone else had written in blunt black letters, Are you going, Phyllis? I’m thinking about it. It was signed, George P. Interesting. They must have gone to the same college.
So he had been a postgraduate and Phyllis an undergraduate at the same place. Perhaps they had kept in touch for years and Phyllis had known all along that he was coming back to Tarnfield when she suggested Robert and Mary bought The Briars. Now both women were dead and Suzy would never know.
It made her think again about the deaths in church. The police seemed to have come up with nothing and village life went on, as varied and as unchanging simultaneously as the River Tarn, always in the same bed but with different water.
But the idea of a second link between Phyllis and George Pattinson intrigued her. She thought about Phyllis’s note to George. An old colleague has some very disturbing information about someone. She had assumed it meant a colleague of Phyllis’s. But say it meant a mutual colleague? Someone they both knew? Then it would be much easier to pin down the source of the information, the original broken reed.
She picked up The Language of Flowers. It was all very sweet, but it was hardly an academic tome of any real importance, unlike the commentaries on the Old Testament. She and Robert had really been getting mixed messages. It was as if the flower arranger had been playing a game with them: Isaiah for the serious messages, flowers to get them involved. It showed contempt and compulsion in equal measure, as if he was laughing at them by swinging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Perhaps he thought flower arranging was silly — but useful for communication. Suzy saw him as macho and arrogant, using a girlie thing like flowers to get to her. It was suddenly personal and suddenly real all over again.
But who would think of connecting flowers and prophets? Was it someone who had stumbled on a way of scaring people, rather than planning it that way from the start? Perhaps the flower arranger had terrorized Phyllis with a reed, then overheard Tom Strickland, seen Robert and Suzy’s response, and realized the potential. It had to be someone who had been within earshot when Tom talked. But that meant the same few suspects as always. Who could it be? And why?
Suzy stood up and looked down the road from the window at the front of the house where Molly’s little bedroom was. She had tried to comply with Rachel’s instructions when she boarded the train: ‘Forget about it, Suzy. You’ve got enough to do, worrying about your kids.’
But she couldn’t forget it. Jake’s problems seemed more or less ironed out. Molly was recovering, and before she had been ill she had acquired yet another new best friend. Suzy’s family was OK now — so she had time to worry about other things. And the idea that the flower arranger was playing with her frightened her. Of course, nothing had happened for weeks. But nothing had happened for the weeks between Easter and Whitsun. It didn’t mean they were safe.
At the beginning of the summer holidays Nigel was planning to take the children away to Spain. Suzy felt a physical twist in her stomach at the thought of being without them for a fortnight. But she was glad they would get away. And she had to get back to work. There was the possibility of holiday relief shifts in several TV newsrooms. Maybe if something more permanent came up as a result, she could move away from Tarnfield and leave all this behind.
And then what would happen about Robert? She wasn’t sure. She knew she had fallen for him, but perhaps that was because there was nobody else. If she went back to work, meeting like-minded people in a busier environment, surely she would forget him?
* * *
July had been very hot to start with. Stevie Nesbit liked the warm weather. But Alan didn’t: he hated the constant bright reflection on his glasses and the way he had a tendency to sweat. He remembered as a child thinking that Trinity was the longest and most tedious of the Church’s seasons. The green altar frontals in his home parish always had a dusty, well-worn look, which wasn’t surprising. He had always looked forward to the summer holidays, then found them stuffy and constraining in the big Edwardian house his parents had rented, filled with dark furniture and threatening family portraits. He only felt that summer had really blossomed when he took the two buses to Tarnfield and his Auntie May’s. Then they could go walking, up on the top of the world. He remembered pacing over the fells, following in Auntie May’s footsteps until they had reached Tarnfield Scar, and an almost magical grove where the little oak trees had been clinging to the thin layer of shaley earth. He’d only been there once since. His brow creased.
‘Shall we go for a walk, Stevie?’
‘Oh, do we have to? It’s so nice sitting here with a glass of wine.’
That was true. But he noticed Stevie was staring into space again. He was probably thinking about Nick Melling, Alan thought. Stevie felt snubbed. Without even telling him, Nick had cancelled the Whitsun service where Stevie had been going to play the keyboard. Not that Stevie would have been in any fit state to play, the day after finding Yvonne’s body, but he should have had some sort of acknowledgement, Alan thought. Stevie had been prepared to get really involved in the church again, despite that awful day. Alan remembered it vividly — Yvonne’s cropped hair and staring eyes, and the scattering of dark green serrated leaves around her body. But Melling had ignored Stevie, not even visiting to comfort him.
Alan sighed. Stevie had gone back into the house.
‘What are you doing?’ Alan called through the french windows.
‘I’m just putting some flowers in a jug. Come and see.’
Alan got up and went into the lounge. Stevie was arranging some flowers for the centre of their dark oval Victorian table.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘aren’t they lovely? I’ve been reading up about flowers recently. It’s really interesting. There’s love-in-a-mist — that’s Nigella! And sea holly with clematis. It’s all from the garden. Except this one.’
‘Where did you get that, Stevie?’
‘Oh that? I sneaked in and got it from the church ages ago. It’s just dried hellebore!’
Alan looked at him in horror.
*
* *
Frank took his gin-and-tonic down to the mahogany bench at the bottom of the garden. He hoped Monica would join him. He looked at her broad bottom as she bent to deadhead the Queen Elizabeth roses they’d planted when they first built the house. The roses were lovely but their big sugar-pink blossoms didn’t last long. Still, they could be easily removed. Things had got better recently, he thought. Yvonne’s death seemed light-years away. The police had accepted everything he said about the ladder, and Monica had slowly started treating him decently again.
She came and sat next to him, took off her sun hat and flopped it on the table. He’d put another glass there for her and she raised it to her lips.
‘Matthew seemed to enjoy staying with Joanne, didn’t he?’ he said cautiously.
‘Well, he must’ve. He’s still there. Is it a girl, d’you think?’
‘I reckon so. A girlfriend would do him the world of good. He doesn’t seem to be seeing so much of Russ Simpson, does he?’
‘No. That’s no bad thing either.’
Frank stretched out and put his arm round his wife. It was the first intimate contact he had risked since that awful Sunday at Joanne’s. ‘Now things have calmed down, we ought to think about a holiday.’
‘I’d rather spend the money on the house.’
‘OK, love. What would you like?’
‘Well, maybe a water feature in the garden?’
‘That would be lovely!’
Trust Monica to push the right button every time, Frank thought. He would really like a water feature too. Some sort of waterfall, perhaps, leading to a pond. He said, ‘We could have all sorts of plants too. Lilies. And reeds. As long as they’re not broken reeds of course. We’ve had enough of them!’
Instead of laughing with him, his wife looked horrified. She stood up sharply and marched back into the house. Oh, for goodness’ sake, Frank thought. What the hell have I said now?
Monica looked back at him from the conservatory at the back of the house. Frank ought to watch his mouth, she thought. It would be awful if he made remarks like that to anyone else. It didn’t take rocket science to work out that Phyllis’s death and Yvonne’s death were connected.
