Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  But if the school had offered a good price, which seemed likely, she could surely find a suitable, small house, where she could make another garden? Would leaving this be so terrible? How long could she stand out? The school’s plans, he felt, were unlikely to be given up quite so easily.

  He said gently, when the concerto had finished and she’d switched off, ‘Ignoring this business won’t just make it go away, you know.’

  She looked away and began fussing with the evening paper. ‘I’ve told you what I think.’

  ‘Come on, Dorrie,’ he said more firmly, ‘wouldn’t it be better to have it resolved, one way or the other? Let me have a look at the correspondence for a start, and see if I can’t suggest something.’

  Her face assumed a hunted, secretive look. He felt as though he was hurting a child. Then she said suddenly, uncaring, ‘Oh, go on, have a look if you want, it won’t make any difference.’

  ‘What have you done with the letters?’

  ‘I don’t know, they’re somewhere around.’ She gestured vaguely towards the ancient, battered desk in the corner. ‘In one of those drawers, I think.’ She leaned back and closed her eyes for sleep. ‘Three or four, I think there are. Unless I’ve thrown one or two away. I might have.’

  ‘Dorrie!’

  ‘Well, they made me so angry.’

  It took him twenty minutes, rummaging through seed catalogues, some of his own old letters, recipes torn from newspapers, sweet wrappers, communications from the bank, before he came up with three or four letters with the Lavenstock College heading. He sorted them into date order, then read the first one through, until he came to the large, almost illegible signature at the bottom. He stared at it, mesmerised, then propped his elbow on the desk, his hand supporting his head. It felt incredibly heavy. Eventually, he looked up to see Dorrie gazing at him, blinking through her round glasses.

  ‘Wetherby,’ he said when he could speak, ‘Charles Wetherby’s still Bursar here? I was told he’d moved on.’

  ‘You must have been mistaken.’

  But Sam knew he wasn’t. Charles Wetherby was the reason he’d joined the Antarctic expedition, the reason he’d sworn never to return to Lavenstock as long as the man was there. Two months later, he’d heard that he was leaving. Nothing would have induced Sam to come back had he known he was still here.

  He sat still, while a sense of hopelessness invaded him. That man, still here, when, if justice had been done and decency had its way, he should have been wiped from the face of the earth. His time in the frozen miles of Antarctica had purged Sam, healed the scars – or so he had thought. He was a young man in any case slow to anger, an easy-going fellow who believed in live and let live. But when he did lose his temper, it was monumentally. Now, it overtook his hopelessness, seethed up inside him like boiling sugar, until an even more terrible thought forced a certain calmness on him.

  He shuffled the letters together. ‘Dorrie,’ he began, ‘Dorrie, do you know —’ But then he stopped. Dorrie wouldn’t, of course, know. She’d never had anything to do with the school, or the people there, or wanted to. Look how she’d chucked those letters into a drawer, almost without reading them.

  ‘What’s wrong, Sam?’

  He roused himself, took a grip on his mind, and made himself say ‘Oh, nothing, Dorrie, dear. Just a rather nasty goose walked over my grave.’

  Hannah Wetherby sat in the darkened school hall, with only the stage lights switched on, wondering at the inanity that had caused Roger Barmforth, deputy head of English, director manqué, to choose The Beggar’s Opera for the end-of-term production – or to be more accurate, wondering why she’d ever allowed herself to be roped in to help with the costumes. Making her own clothes was one thing, this was something else.

  Roger Barmforth was an amiable idiot and nothing he did should have surprised her, but the choice of this bawdy entertainment for a school production, with its endless possibilities for innuendo and sniggers, was asking for trouble, when even the author’s name, John Gay, caused the adolescent cast to fall about. Nor had it been the world’s best idea to invite the sixth-form girls from the Princess Mary High School to participate. Though it had to be said that Rosie Deventer made a splendid Polly Peachum, hardly needing to act at all – and it was better than encouraging some of the boys to dress up, certainly better than Douthwaite with his blond baby face in the part. There was no need for false boobs where Rosie was concerned.

  Right choice or wrong, things had advanced too far to go back now. Hannah leaned back and closed her eyes. Subconsciously, she fingered the gauzy scarf around her throat, very aware of the letter in her pocket and the warm rush of feeling whenever she thought of it, though it had hardly been what she would have expected, or hoped for.

  ‘Our Polly is a sad slut! nor heeds what we have taught her. I wonder any man alive will ever rear a daughter!’ sang Polly Peachum’s father, to accompanying cat-calls from the wings and a compliant flounce, a rolling of eyes and various other body parts from Polly on the stage.

  Hannah had never expected to see Sam Leadbetter again, had fully expected they’d be gone from Lavenstock before his stint in the Antarctic was finished. She felt quite dizzy at the thought of seeing him again, and overwhelmed by what it would inevitably mean. Had all the anguish of these last years been for nothing?

  What would Sam think of her, now? Once she’d glowed with health, love had lent her warmth and vitality but now she felt herself a spent thing, who’d lost too much weight and was too pale. She often had a bruised look under her eyes, which she’d once thought echoed those other bruises … in her heart … Immediately the thought was formed, she’d scorned herself for such sentimental twaddle, but it was too late: she’d already thought it. And it was in any case exactly what she felt.

  But it was an uncomfortable analogy which she skittered away from. She looked sometimes at the album containing her wedding photograph, like probing a sore tooth, and couldn’t believe what she’d once been: slight, even then, with big brown eyes and soft brown hair falling to her shoulders, but glowing and vibrant in a cream silk frock and her grandmother’s lace veil, standing on the steps of Our Lady’s Roman Catholic church – glowing with what she’d then thought was love. Adoring love for Charles, the tall, good-looking man beside her. Looking at the photo with hindsight, she could see that even then he was complacent, though she had never noticed it through the haze of her infatuation.

  They had met when he was standing as the prospective candidate for the Surrey constituency where she lived, and where she’d drifted in as a helper. She was eighteen, messing around after leaving school with nothing to fill in her time, not knowing what she wanted to do – a condition, had she but known it then, that was fatally endemic to her character. Here she was, still messing around at forty, still being roped in to lend a hand whenever there was no one else to do it, not knowing what she wanted to do with her life – except that, quite passionately, she wanted to live it without Charles, wrong though her religion said that was.

  Her mother had never wanted her to marry him, and within two years would have been able to say, ‘I told you so,’ had she not been dead by then of a secondary cancer.

  After Charles left school, his father had found him a job in a City bank, but though he had undoubted abilities, he had never felt he received the acclaim from it he thought he undoubtedly deserved, and eventually decided a life at Westminster would suit him better. He had convinced the selection committee of his solid worth (or perhaps dazzled some of the women as much as he’d dazzled Hannah) and achieved considerable publicity during the subsequent campaign, when his suave manner and photogenic good looks had made him apparently very popular. The seat he was contesting was thought to be a safe one, but the people of the constituency he was meant to represent had thought otherwise, and presumably seen through him. He had lost by a large margin.

  Some people could cope with disappointment, but Charles was not one who fell into this category, never having be
en allowed to know what disappointment meant by either of his parents, who had spoiled him outrageously all his life. After failing in his bid for Westminster, he had stayed with the bank for some years then found an administrative job in industry, which was a mistake of the first order. He had lasted barely eighteen months among people who were quick to spot a supercilious phoney.

  God knows what would have happened had the post of school Bursar not conveniently become vacant at that particular moment. The then Headmaster of Lavenstock had shortly been due to retire, and was happy enough to push the appointment of a man who seemed to have the required financial and administrative acumen, without going too deeply into his background, other than to note with satisfaction that he was an Old Boy of his own school.

  The post of Bursar, and the authority it conferred, had persuaded Charles that he had finally found a niche that suited him, and he filled the post with admirable efficiency. But he had never seen the advantage of showing circumspection, and was less and less able to curb his arrogance, even in public. He made few friends, of the sort he thought worthy of his upbringing, certainly none among his colleagues at the school. None of this went unnoticed; he was tolerated because of his undoubted abilities, but he could not be unaware that he was not popular.

  Hannah was dimly aware of all this but dared not say anything lest she precipitated one of his rages with himself. The effect on their marriage was disastrous. The more his complacency became dented, his personal inadequacies revealed, the angrier he became. Hannah had not been able to bear it, but she bore it better than what came after … She could scarcely believe that they had once been happy, or how wretched their lives had since then become.

  When Sam had come into her life, it had been like letting in the sun. He was too young for her, ten years in age and twenty in experience. What did age matter, said Sam, and she’d believed him. Until he’d gone berserk and nearly killed Charles when Charles found out what was happening. What would he do now, when he discovered nothing had changed? That she was still too spineless to have made the move to leave Charles, even though Paul was now old enough to lead his own life? That, trapped in an unhappy marriage, she had allowed herself to get lost in a labyrinth of introspection, which had led to much worse?

  So much worse that she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about it.

  6

  Cleo had often before passed, but never had reason to enter, the premises of Maid to Order, which were situated on a busy road, lined with shops and houses of Edwardian vintage: the business was run from Val Storey’s own house, the yard being the back garden which had been concreted over. That first morning, there were four snazzy white vans drawn up in the yard, with Maid to Order written across the sides in black and scarlet.

  It was a large, double-fronted, villa-type house and Cleo found Val distractedly supervising operations in what had once been a sitting-room and was now her office. It was thronged with women talking fifty to the dozen, receiving their instructions through a haze of cigarette smoke, being issued with invoice pads and replenishing cleaning kits from the bulk supply cartons lying around the room and spilling out to line the passage to the back door. Not knowing what to do, Cleo stood hesitantly to one side until Val, looking up and running a hand through her hair, saw her, smiled and told her to make herself comfortable and she’d be with her in a minute.

  She found a chair and tried to squeeze herself out of the way, ordering herself to remember that this was going to be fun, resolutely squashing her doubts that she’d be in any way suitable for the job. Too late for that, she was committed, but if she couldn’t actually enjoy the work, at least she would be earning some money, not only to pay her parents the modest rent they were asking for Phoebe’s house, but also to live on.

  Gradually the room emptied and she was able to inspect her surroundings properly. There wasn’t much to look at, other than Val’s desk, occupied by a small PC surrounded by a sea of papers, and a stack of filing cabinets to one side. After a while, her eyes were drawn to the wall above the fireplace, still papered in a psychedelic 1970s wallpaper, where an A4 sheet of the firm’s headed notepaper was pinned. Underneath the heading, ‘MAID TO ORDER’, was an accomplished sketch in black felt tip of a saucy French maid wearing a very short skirt and a suggestive wink. Ring Fifi, maid to order, it said, and gave a telephone number. Underneath, somebody had scrawled, ‘We should be so lucky!’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of that,’ Val said, seeing her smiling at it when the rest of the women had gone. ‘It’s only someone thinking they’re being funny,’ she added, nodding towards the corner, not seeming in the least put out by it.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get her to accept it as the firm’s logo but she won’t listen,’ said the languid person to whom she’d obviously been referring, a youth of about seventeen or eighteen, who was smoking and lounging in a chair tipped on its back legs, his feet propped up against the wall.

  He was seriously weird. Ear-rings and an eyebrow stud and cropped-off dyed carroty hair were par for the course, but that was only the start. It wasn’t only that he was as thin as a broomstick, either, with the pale eyes and complexion that go with ginger hair, not to mention ears that stuck out like batwings. A deep scar ran across his forehead and lifted one side of his face, so that his features looked somehow uncoordinated, as though one half was saying one thing and one another.

  ‘This is Tone, Tony Gilchrist,’ Val said, ‘Cleo Atkins.’

  ‘Hi, Cleo.’ It sounded as though the simple effort of getting the words out had exhausted him.

  ‘You’ll be working together, with Sue – that’s Sue Thomas – when she gets here. She’s your team leader,’ Val added, glancing at her watch, looking worried, while Cleo was trying to believe that, appearances to the contrary, Tone might well be a whizz with a squeezy mop, for all she knew. ‘I hope she isn’t going to let me down. She’s usually so reliable. Well, let’s get you sorted, Cleo, before she comes.’

  She tossed Cleo a black sweatshirt with MO monogrammed on it in red, and a pair of black jogging pants, the uniform she must wear every time she went to a job. ‘That way, people know who you are,’ Val said, seeming confident that it was enough for the people who employed them to accept without question this evidence of any lack of evil intent. She was shown to a little washroom where she could change.

  As she emerged, Val was throwing open a window, though it was another clear, piercingly sharp, blowy March morning and the wind immediately began to blow the papers on her desk about. ‘Oh, close the bloomin’ thing again, Tone, will you?’ she said resignedly, chasing papers, wrinkling her nose. ‘I don’t allow smoking on the job, so they all get as much in as they can before they start, never mind that I might die of passive smoking.’

  She shot an accusing look at Tone, who was about to light up again. He mumbled sorry, put the packet away and shut the window. At that moment, the door burst open and Sue surged in, full of apologies for being late.

  Like many fat people, she moved lightly on her feet, bouncing as energetically as a sorbo rubber ball. She was very pretty, with a round, pink-cheeked face, dark eyes and curly brown hair, and within a few minutes she had Cleo and Tone outside in the yard, the cleaning gear stacked in the back of her van and herself in the driving seat.

  ‘I’ll go in the back,’ Tone offered, insinuating himself in amongst the bottles of Flash and the plastic mop-buckets and the industrial vac, sitting on the floor, thus relieving Cleo of one anxiety at least. She hadn’t fancied being wedged in the front seat of the van between him and Sue. Even though there wasn’t all that much of Tone, there was more than enough of Sue.

  He was very quiet on the way there, but Sue became chatty, once out on the road, explaining how the system worked for MO. ‘We mostly have regular calls, but we do have one-offs as well, like cleaning before somebody moves in and that. Domestic jobs are best,’ she added, ‘doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries mean getting up early, and office cleaning generally means worki
ng late.’ She threw Cleo a speculative glance. ‘We often get students helping out, between terms, they’re always hard up. That’s why you’re doing it?’

  ‘That’s right, money,’ Cleo said, and Sue nodded with understanding, seeing this as an entirely satisfactory explanation which needed no elaboration. She had three children, she added, you wouldn’t believe what they cost.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind mucky jobs,’ she remarked, after a few minutes. ‘This one we’re going to, it’ll be pretty rotten. It’s not a regular, though Val thinks we’ll likely have to come at least twice.’ It was only then that Cleo learned they’d been earmarked for work at one of the houses which had been flooded.

  It had a desolate feeling, she thought when they arrived, this place where the Kyne began. So near Lavenstock, yet it might have been fifty miles away. Even the quality of the light was different, suggesting that the sharp, brilliant sunshine of the morning was only transient. Although the water levels were everywhere going down rapidly, here it was less apparent. Light reflected on flat sheets of still, dirty yellow water that stretched across the reedy terrain, riffled by the wind. Sparse groups of alders still stood with their feet submerged. But the sky was eggshell-blue and clumps of wild daffodils blew on the few patches of higher ground, and in the distance could be heard the calls of spring lambs and ewes.