The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  "… the utter childishness of it all! I'd think the two of you might as well have joined the kiddies invading Scroggs's place… oh, ho, Trueblood! Oh, I can understand that person doing such a thing… always has been a sneak…"

  Thus could Agatha rewrite Trueblood's personal history to fit a single act…

  "But you, Plant! And Earl of Caverness, fifth Viscount Ardry…"

  He refused to speak. She'd have the titles whizzing by the Bentley like an eerie flank of motorcyclists. Was that, please God, the Harrogate turnoff? Yes. I'll start attending services.

  "… your dear mother, Lady Marjorie. I simply can't imagine what got into you, I truly can't. Creeping about the poor girl's property, hiding in the shrubberies, knocking at her door. It leaves me speechless."

  It would take Jack Nicholson with an axe knocking on her door to do that, he thought, lip buttoned, eyes on the wide, tree-lined street that led toward the center of Harrogate.

  "One of these days I'll find the two of you up in a tree, hammering boards together. Grown men. Grown men. And poor, dear Vivian with so much to do-"

  Vivian had become poor and dear and wonderful only since she'd actually set a wedding date, thought Melrose blackly, taking his eye from the road for just that second that caused him to swerve to avoid hitting an old lady in one of those electrified wheelchairs that she obviously thought gave her the right to cross against the light, any light- probably have whizzed past the burning bush-look at her go!

  "My heavens! You very nearly hit that poor old cripple in the wheelchair."

  In the rearview mirror, he saw the poor cripple was giving him the finger as she bumped herself up on the curb. He said nothing.

  "… thoughtless. What if the Oilings woman puts an item in the Bald Eagle? Have you ever thought of that?"

  The only way Mrs. Oilings, Long Pidd's gossip-cum-char, would know is if Agatha had told her this morning. Mrs. Oilings had refused to help with the luggage as she'd been busy leaning on her mop and catching up on last-minute items. They were driving near the Stray, that wonderful two-hundred-acre common replete with gardens, walks, and streams.

  "I can see it now-" Here Agatha drew with thumb and forefinger an imaginary banner-space in air: "Earl of Caverness and Local Antiques Dealer Take Part in New Year Festivities. 'Said Miss Vivian Rivington, long-time resident of Long Piddleton who is about to wed the Count Franco Giopinno, "It was tacked to my door. Of course, I thought it must be the children…"'"

  He pretended the Jermyn Street tailor had stitched his lips together, fighting his desire to yell shut up! Imagine, two blissful weeks without one of the Talking Heads.

  As he spotted the sign that pointed them toward the Old Swan Hotel, she said, "You've done it this time, Melrose." Agatha smacked her lips in satisfaction. "She'll never speak to you again."

  If only he could get the same result by doing something to herdoor.

  They had turned up the wet gravel drive, the trees sodden with the weight of old rain, the air raw, threatening snow. The Old Swan was a Harrogate landmark, located near the famous Baths, and large enough for the Kitchener troops, its floors going up and up. It was at this hotel that Agatha Christie had reputedly stayed during her remarkable disappearance. Agatha disappearing. Lightning, unfortunately, didn't strike twice, he thought, as he braked and spat up gravel.

  "This is it, Plant. We're here!"

  She said it as if Melrose had suddenly had a fit of hysterical blindness and would zip straight past the entrance at eighty per. Agatha left the disposal of her luggage to her nephew and the hotel staff and marched up the steps.

  Mentally, he gave himself a pat on the back. He'd won!

  Two hundred miles and he hadn't uttered a word. Such grim determination would have earned him a knighthood had he not already thrown away an earldom! Four hours, and she'd elicited no response from him no matter how much needling, how much baiting. Melrose imagined what the poor bears must have suffered before bear-baiting was made illegal, chained to stumps and set upon by dogs. As he followed in the wake of Agatha's "things"-the trunks, the cases, the reticules, portmanteaus-Melrose noticed the bellhop carrying the hatboxes wore the insolent and sinister expression of Robert Montgomery in Night Must Fall.

  Really, old man, he thought. Was there a secret spring of violence in him waiting to be tapped? Axes, snarling dogs, heads in boxes?

  As Agatha took to reeducating the desk clerks as to the running of the hotel, and attending to the matter of her room's location ("overlooking the gardens, of course…"), Melrose plucked a little pamphlet from those set out for visitors. The Harrogate hydros were, of course, famous. He was fascinated by the item on the Countess of Buckingham pitching a tent near one of the wells apparently to get the chalybeate waters before anyone else could. People flowed in, like the waters themselves, in carts and gigs to take these malodorous waters…

  Good heavens, Melrose thought, Harrogate was the perfect milieu for Wiggins. Jury's sergeant would be the first to agree that the more offensive the sulfur, the greater its potency and the better the cure.

  He looked up and down the long hall, where windows displayed the latest finery to be bought at great expense from the local swank shops. In the enormous and handsome dining room, waiters were moving about putting final touches to napkins and crystal. To his left was a large sitting room that served as bar and a place for tea. Here the tea-drinkers sat about like sticks, what few there were: three couples and one single lady, all middle-aged, looking as if they were caught in some holding pattern between life and death.

  One could feel the history of Harrogate pressing heavily in, looking round the Old Swan, sitting here in the cold and sodden January of Yorkshire's West Riding.

  God! Would he stop thinking about Death in Venice? Melrose shut his eyes tightly to make the vision go away, himself like Prufrock in white flannel trousers strolling along the beach-

  "Over here! Yoo-hoo! Melrose, dear! Melrose!"

  The fluting voice broke up a vision, like pebbles dashed in water, of himself dying in a canvas deck chair by a bathhouse. He looked about, baffled, and then heard the bellowing voice of Agatha behind him answering the other:

  "Teddy! Teddy, dear!"

  Hell's bells! he thought. He'd been mentally basking in the Italian sun when he should have been making his get-away. Now he was stuck, that was all there was to it, as Agatha trumpeted by him toward the table where sat the single lady. He was, after all, a gentleman, and could hardly walk out without saying hello…

  Or could he? Not walk out, of course, but continue his vow of silence? If he could manage to keep his mouth shut for two hundred miles, surely he could play the game for another half hour. He checked his watch as he walked toward the two women. One-half hour, chair to door, the acid test. Could he make a comparative stranger believe that he'd actually taken part in their exchange without saying anything?

  "Hello, Melrose!" Teddy extended her heavily veined and beringed hand.

  With what he hoped was a debonair smile, rather than shaking the hand, he barely grazed the fingers with his lips.

  Teddy's tiny black eyes, being lent the glint of shadow and kohl liner, glittered like sequins.

  Melrose sat as his aunt said, "Well, practicing for the Continent, are you, Plant? But you'll never scrub off that old moth-eaten country-tweedy look…"

  He smiled, choking the desire to ask her if she'd any more adjectives on hand, but merely crossed his unbespoken-tailored gray-worsted-trousered legs, plucked an apple green napkin from the blush pink tablecloth, and sat back while Agatha told Teddy that they were all off to Italy soon.

  As they greeted each other, kissing air, and then sat gabbling away, Melrose wondered both how he was to order tea without opening his mouth (here came the waiter) and if this was the same woman whom they'd visited in York. That Teddy (Althea, he believed, was her name) had been a heavy, squarely built woman with a frieze of bright orange hair so lacquered that a North Sea gale couldn't've dislodged a wisp
of it. This Teddy looked a bit gaunt and had given up the henna, apparently, for her bluey-black hair was done in some hairdresser's idiot version of a '20s style, a lot of little wet-looking ringlets like a bunch of mashed grapes.

  And she was no longer plain old Mrs. Stubbs, but had snagged-good Lord, were they that common?-a nobleman somewhere in the South of France. De la Roche was her name now. Were there so many loose princes, counts, crackpot kings wandering round that they were ripe for the taking? Which line of thought quite naturally only led him back to Count Dracula Giopinno and that Vivian had shouted at him and Marshall Trueblood she'd be bloody damned if she'd let them come to her wedding-

  Slam went the door of her cottage. He chewed his lip. Marshall had a plan for taking the Orient Express.

  "Well, good Lord, Melrose! Absolutely everyone disguises himself on the Orient Express. You should see them trooping about Victoria Station."

  "Sir?"

  Melrose was jolted now from Vivian's doorstep, where he was determined to stand until he molted, by the white-jacketed waiter. He was nearly surprised into a reply of some sort. He merely returned the waiter's smile and got the result he wanted.

  "Tea for three, sir?"

  After all, waiters in places like the Old Swan were trained to anticipate one's needs. Melrose nodded. He'd really have loved to have been challenged with a menu in Greek, or something. No, that wouldn't be a challenge. All he'd have to do was point.

  The waiter returned his nod and said, "The set tea, ma-dame? Or would you prefer sandwiches? Buttered toast-?"

  Melrose was absolutely enjoying the small challenge this could present, until the waiter said, "Madame?" Hell, "Madame" would fill up the whole thirty minutes-now twenty-two-just ordering.

  "-tarts, of course. Have you watercress sandwiches? Yes, we'll have those with the cucumber ones, too-"

  Teddy put in: "Oh, you must try the anchovy toast, dear. It's quite delectable."

  "Sir," said the waiter, and swanned away as if Melrose had given him the complete order.

  Checking his watch, he raised his time-frame to forty-five minutes, all told, which left, as of now, thirty-one minutes in which he intended to make them believe he had talked when he hadn't.

  The Times crossword in under fifteen minutes seemed dull by comparison. When he thought about it further, he realized actors could do this very thing: Bogart only needed to narrow his lips, Cagney to grit his teeth, Gielgud to raise his eyebrows, and Gable-hell, did anyone remember a word he'd ever said except "I don't give a damn"? Of course not.

  Thus for thirty-one minutes, two cups of tea, one finger of anchovy toast, Melrose grinned, grimaced, touched, sat back and forth, laughed soundlessly, leaned close, leaned back, slapped his leg, crooked his elbow, looked intent.

  He had become, in half an hour, a brilliant conversationalist.

  As they gibbered like gibbons in the bush, he rose, looked pained that he must leave, once again brought Teddy's hand to his lips, and actually squeezed Agatha's shoulder in farewell.

  As he walked off, smiling all round at waiters and stone-faced guests, he thought again, I won!

  He'd make a mockery of speech, a burlesque of words, a travesty of talk.

  "Melrose!"

  Agatha was bellowing at his back. He stopped, turned. She was waving him back.

  Very well.

  She was actually being gracious as she said, "But Melrose, you didn't notice!"

  He raised his eyebrows in question, a thin smile playing on his lips.

  "It's Teddy! Don't you remember how she looked in York?"

  A confidential whisper now from Teddy: "Dear, I've been completely done over!" Here she spread her arms, then touched her neck, her hair, turned her head this way and that. "There's this marvelous little clinic in Zurich… Well? What do you think?"

  He knew he didn't need to do it. He knew he was clever enough to get out of this. After the whole day's efforts, he could have ordered Wellington's troops with a few flicks of his fingers; beaten Connors at Wimbledon with a teabag; left Lester Piggott a length behind with a hobbyhorse.

  "Well, Melrose? Well?"

  He splayed his arms on the table, looked deeply into Teddy's eyes and said, "Why waste words?"

  The gasps and giggles trailed behind him as he left the Old Swan Hotel.

  10

  Gnawing on a chicken leg that Agatha had missed in her rummage through the picnic basket, Melrose drove through Ilkley.

  Trying to circumvent the moors was like trying to get round London on the Circle Line. Every gritty little town seemed to have its moor. Ilkley Moor, Stanbury Moor, Haworth Moor, Keighley Moor, Black Moor, Howden Moor: they were fixed about like railway station stops. Nothing like the North York moors he had crossed several years ago in the snow, a vast expanse of Arctic waste; nor like Dartmoor, a lunar landscape of fogs and slanting rains. Here in Yorkshire's West Riding there was a plethora of moors. Nature, abhorring yet another vacuum, must have said, There's a space, drop a moor in it.

  And this narrow ribbon of road he'd taken to connect up with Haworth was meant for sheep, not for man-certainly not man in a Bentley. He looked up at the sky, now turgid like brackish water, looked out at the sad-faced sheep and slid down in the driver's seat, his earlier euphoria dissipating.

  Face it, you are no lover of Nature. He sighed. The only Nature he seemed able to appreciate was the picture-book change of seasons in his own parkland at Ardry End. Golden autumn, lilac-scented spring…

  Oh, for heaven's sake; it wasn't like that at all. There wasn't a lilac bush within ten miles.

  Was this the right road? It didn't even look finished. Macadamed on one side for a distance, rutted earth on the other, going nowhere, he imagined, but to Eternal Moorland. He pulled over, braked, opened the accordion map. Two moorland sheep raised their heads from the bracken, moved forward slightly, stared and chewed.

  Yes, this appeared to be the road. But where was this pub so clearly marked? Any pub marked on a map must be worth a stop.

  Good Lord, how self-indulgent. One would think he'd never set foot out of London, so citified did he feel at the moment. He looked over at the two sheep. They looked so clumsy with all that wool, he disliked them. Nor did they seem dying of curiosity to know him.

  He tried to refold the map, which remained intransigent to his handling; why was it maps, such neat accordions when you purchased them, would spring apart and seem to grow larger, filling your car, rampant as wild things. Oh, the hell with it. He squared it off and stuffed it, resisting, into the glove box and sat there glooming away.

  What was the matter with him? He must get out, stretch his legs, have a brief walk on the moor (very brief), and, warming to this mild burst of enthusiasm, decided to take the picnic basket with him. There might be another piece of chicken or a tart and he was hungry. Agatha had been so busy throwing the debacle in his face, she had actually missed out on some tasty morsels in the basket. He thought he spied a thin slice of salmon rolled around capers and caviar. He set off on his tramp through bracken and rocks, feeling like a true West Yorkshireman.

  After cleaning his shoe of sheep dung, wrapping his handkerchief round the rash of bloody pricks on his hand, moving his ankle gingerly where he'd caught it amongst this clump of deceptive, moss-covered rocks, Melrose found a wide, flat stone and sat down to look at the running stream. Or beck, he supposed it was called.

  He looked across the snowy patches beside the stream, past bracken and burnt-looking heather, to a distance where he caught sight of a woman who, probably because of the illusory quality of the moors themselves, had sprung from nowhere. She had simply appeared on the crest of a treeless hill, snow-covered, walking along it in a cape that billowed behind her, and nothing in hand that might identify her as a tourist, a walker along the Pennine or Brontë ways, empty-handed, going from nowhere to nowhere. The image fascinated him and he watched her walk, a silhouette against the white horizon, until his attention was called away by a sound. It was an
odd grizzling sound, as if someone were trying to clear his throat, followed by a sort of cat-cry. He looked up, saw two birds circling. Curlews sounded like cats, didn't they? Well, if they were circling over him, they were probably buzzards.

  Quickly he returned his gaze to the skyline. The woman was gone. He lit a cigarette, looked at the coal end, shook his head. Here he'd come with his picnic basket to commune with Nature in a Chesterfield coat and with a gold cigarette case. He shook his head again. Hopeless.

  He must take decisions.

  What decisions? They'd all been taken for him. Polly Praed was no doubt right now sitting with her amethyst eyes glued to the page in her typewriter on which poured forth the fates of dogs or doges, and Vivian Rivington-

  Oh! But wasn't he disgusted with himself? Blame it on Trueblood; it was all Trueblood's idea. Liar. Trueblood got the cut-out book, but he himself had gone right along with it. Well, what fun could you get out of life if you couldn't devil Vivian, after all?

  What he couldn't stand was change. He thought, sitting here, perhaps he could become a Zen Buddhist. If he watched the water, if he flowed with the beck… Wasn't that the idea? Weren't they always saying that one must flow? One must forgo attachments? That life must be considered a running stream and to try to hold water in one's hand was total illusion? The trouble was, though, that all of this transience only seemed to apply to friendship, love, and beauty. Not wars and plagues and people one loathed. You didn't see them go floating down the beck…

  So what kind of comfort did flow offer? He wanted things to stay absolutely the same, the same little group at the same table in the Jack and Hammer; the same rat terrier outside of Miss Crisp's secondhand furniture shop)-

  Melrose looked round, for he heard the sound again.

  Well, what about the Everlasting Now? Wasn't that a Zen notion too?

  He rummaged through the basket and yanked out a chicken wing covered in crumbs of broken roll and knew one of his problems was his total lack of vocation, except for those zombie lectures he inflicted on students of French Romantic poetry. He studied the chicken wing and thought of Rimbaud.