‘Is that your car outside?’ said Mark, adding more to his mental calculations about Frances’s status. A horrid man, whatever could have gone wrong with him? He was stiff and unnatural, and his head didn’t properly fit on his neck.
‘Yes, that’s mine,’ she agreed. She moved towards the door. ‘We’d better get off,’ she said, ‘or we’ll never get back again, will we?’
He laughed at this non-pleasantry, a hard, unnatural, unamused laugh, and followed them to the door, to see them out. There stood her car, parked at the end of the cement path. She looked at it with longing. She wanted to get moving, claustrophobia was sweeping rapidly over her, she would have felt frantic if she had had to hang around a moment longer, waiting for a taxi.
Safely in the car, she turned to Janet, as she started the engine, and asked, ‘Do you drive?’ She already knew the answer. Janet shook her head. ‘Mark tried to teach me once, but I don’t think I’d ever be able to. And then there wouldn’t be much point, because Mark always takes the car to get to work . . . ’
Her voice trailed away: Frances could see it all, the caged days, the walks with the pram, and not even a car at the end of the garden path. No way out. She would buy Janet a large drink, at the King’s Head.
The town looked good, in the night. They drove down the dark High Street. The Indian restaurant was still open: so was the Great Wall of China. Everything else was shut. The church spire, the famous church spire, was floodlit. Tedium and beauty lay like a quiet pall. How can one have content, without content?
The hotel was brightly lit, welcoming, its large front doors open. Cars were leaving the car park: there was activity, movement, the sound of voices and laughter. Friday night, the liveliest night of the week. Frances parked the car in the park, and she and Janet got out, and walked up the steps of the hotel and through its large revolving doors. The porter smiled, nodded, came up to Frances. ‘Dr Wingate?’ he said, politely. ‘Two gentlemen were looking for you, madam. I told them I didn’t know when you’d be back, but they said they’d wait. They’re in the bar, madam.’ He looked at the orange gilt clock in the high hall. ‘Been there some time, now,’ he said.
‘Oh dear,’ said Frances, to Janet, as they crossed to the entrance of the bar. ‘I wonder who that could be?’ A solicitor, an undertaker, a vicar, her brother: one or two of these, she thought it might be. But it wasn’t. There, in the bar at the King’s Head, looking, as the porter had said, as though they had been there for some time, sat David Ollerenshaw and Karel Schmidt.
For the second time in his life, Karel Schmidt had the satisfaction of seeing Frances Wingate’s face turn grey with shock. She stood there in the door of the bar, gaping, her eyes fixed; her mouth dropped open and all the blood poured out of her, leaving her that peculiar tint of yellow grey that had at first so enraptured him. Her recovery was terrific. She took a deep breath—he could see her, right across the room, take a deep breath, as though gasping for air—and as he rose to his feet, she ploughed towards him, the colour coming back, life coming back, everything returning to its proper place, her hair settling back on the nape of her neck, for there he was, there was Karel, looking exactly, but exactly like Karel himself.
She reached their table, stopped, stared again, smiled. ‘What on earth, but what on earth, are you two doing here?’ she asked.
‘Looking for you, of course,’ said Karel.
‘Whatever for?’ said Frances, already on the attack: she was not one to succumb too easily to surprise tactics.
‘I got your postcard, that’s why,’ said Karel. ‘I got it a day or two ago. I’ve been looking for you ever since. All over the place.’
‘You got my postcard?’ she repeated, stupidly. And then began to laugh. ‘But of course you got my postcard,’ she said. ‘Of course that would be it. I must have known you couldn’t have had it any earlier. Can I sit down?’
She pulled herself a chair, pulled one out for Janet. She sat down by Karel, she put her hand on his sleeve. ‘I need a drink,’ she said. ‘Shall we have a drink?’ She peered more closely at Karel. ‘My goodness me, Karel,’ she said, in a reproving, maternal, amazed tone: ‘my goodness me, you do look ill. Whatever have you been doing to yourself?’
Over a drink and some small onions (I still haven’t eaten, thought Frances to herself, through the confusion), he explained what he had been doing to himself, and she explained what she had been doing to herself, and Janet and David explained what they were up to also: the explanations took some time, and by the end of them everybody was in an elated mood, even the sickly Karel, whose arm was by now redder and more swollen than ever. ‘Well, well, well,’ said Frances happily, ‘this is quite an evening, don’t you think? More fun than a funeral, Janet, don’t you think?’ And both women laughed, at their own joke.
After a while it emerged that neither Karel nor David had eaten either, and the bar had run out of onions and crisps. ‘You should have eaten earlier,’ said Frances, ‘especially when you’re so ill.’
‘I didn’t want to miss you,’ said Karel.
‘Well, you’ve been missing me for months and months now, I can’t see what difference an hour or two would have made. You might have warned me, you know. When I saw you, I nearly died of shock.’
‘So I saw,’ he said.
They looked at each other: there they both were, again, after all. No wonder they were pleased with themselves.
David was quite pleased with himself, too. He had organized Karel, a hopeless traveller, with exemplary efficiency: he had tracked Frances down like a detective, and here, as a reward for his efforts, was his own little cousin Jan, looking quite pink and cheerful, and giggling rather a lot with excitement and gin and tonic. It was all very satisfactory.
One could always rely on Frances, thought Karel, to rise to an occasion. They would have to have something to eat, but she would know what to do. He sat back admiringly, and watched her.
‘Well, this is quite a party,’ said Frances, as though she had arranged it all herself. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to go and get one last round of drinks, then I’m going to find us somewhere for a meal. You’ll come too, won’t you, Janet? Janet only had shepherd’s pie,’ she told the others, ‘she can surely manage another meal.’
Janet felt that she could quite easily eat another meal. Excitement makes one hungry.
They watched Frances depart to the bar, then disappear to the telephone: the drinks arrived on a tray, and as they were drinking them, she returned triumphant.
‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ve fixed it all up. There’s a restaurant in a village five miles out which does late meals, and they’ll be delighted to see us in half an hour. We’ll get a cab off the station rank, I think we’re in no state for driving. There’—she said, sinking down, picking up her glass—‘there, what about that for efficiency?’
‘Full marks, I think,’ said David. ‘And now, tell me some more about Constance.’
‘No, no, we’ve talked enough about Constance, I wanted to hear about Karel in Africa. Was he terribly cross to find I’d already left?’
‘I think he was past being cross, by that stage,’ said David, and obediently, as they finished their drinks and went out again into the night and the smell of beet, and picked a cab up from the rank just outside the door, he described Karel’s arrival, and told Frances what Patsy had said, what Spirelli had said, what the hotel manager had said, and how Karel had refused to leap into the swimming pool. The dark night passed by, and the air grew clearer, and Frances listened, and held Karel’s hand. It was all right, of course it was all right. The restaurant (recommended through a quick phone call to Harold Barnard) was all right too: it was a country inn, a cheery mixture of ancient and modern, with fruit machines in the bar, and little pink lampshades in the dining room. The food, as Harold Barnard had promised, was excellent, and the clients (business men, professional men) looked prosperous and happy and fat, as they munched their way through smoked salmon
and fried whitebait and home-made pâté glistening with little green peppers and brochettes of scallop and nice red tournedos and green salads and spinach and a delicious raspberry flan. Janet, who had often heard tell of this place (it was the only local Good Food place, and Mark tended to sneer at it and its clientele because it was so expensive) looked around her with satisfaction: no doubt most of what Mark said about it was true, but it wasn’t true (as he asserted) that the food wasn’t good, and she was rather glad that Frances’s telephone call had interrupted her shepherd’s pie, because this was much, much more agreeable.
The only person who didn’t seem to be doing too well with his dinner was Karel. He managed his soup, but began to slow down rather noticeably on the steak.
But in the hall, on the way out, waiting for the women to emerge from the cloakroom, he inserted an idle coin into the fruit machine, and won the jackpot. It seemed appropriate. He filled his pockets with silver shillings. Frances, flashing credit cards, had paid the enormous bill for dinner: he would make it up to her, later.
The air outside, as they stood and waited for the cab to arrive to pick them up again, was cool and dank. A light rain was falling. They waited in the stable yard, where loose boxes now housed Jaguars and Mercedes, and smelt the cold smell of grass and stone, a vestigial scent of straw and apples, a smell of raw turned earth. ‘England,’ said David, breathing it in. ‘How lovely to be in England. I don’t know why one ever goes away.’
By the time Frances got Karel to bed, he was really rather ill. She put him in the twin bed, where she had so often imagined him, and examined his bare arm. It was swollen. She stroked it, anxiously, then went to look for her thermometer. He sat and watched her, as she looked through her bag.
‘I think I’m delirious,’ he said, as she turned back to him. She advanced upon him, put the thermometer in his mouth, and sat there by him, holding his hand, like a nurse.
‘You’re silly,’ she said. ‘You didn’t look after yourself properly. Fancy rushing off there like that, when I was coming home in a couple of days anyway. Whatever did you go and do that for? Apart from anything else, what a terrible waste of money.’
Karel took the thermometer out. ‘I wanted to impress you,’ he said. He put it back in again, then took it out to add, ‘It was a gesture, that’s all.’
‘It certainly was,’ agreed Frances, kicking off her shoes, and starting to peel off her stockings. Her feet ached. It had been a very long day. ‘If you ask me,’ she said, wondering how her feet had managed to get so dirty, through shoes and stockings, ‘it was a very childish gesture. You’re not twenty-one now, you know.’
‘No, I know. It was my last fling.’
She looked at the thermometer. His temperature was up, by a degree and a half.
‘Do you think you’ve got cholera?’ she asked him. ‘Is it one of those things where they give you a mild dose?’
‘I haven’t got any other cholera symptoms, have I?’
‘No, I don’t suppose you can have got cholera. You’re probably just suffering from exhaustion.’
‘You cousin’s got stamina, hasn’t he? I’ve been dragging him all over the place, and he never turned a hair.’
‘He’s used to it.’
She sat down on his bed. She regarded him. ‘You’d better drink a lot of water,’ she said, finally, thoughtfully. ‘I’ll go and get you a glass or two.’
She organized him, as best as she could: three tooth glasses of water, some soluble aspirin.
‘I should have made you go to bed much earlier,’ she said. ‘It was my fault, dragging you off for a fancy meal.’
‘One has to eat.’
She took off her large green sweater, and threw it onto a chair. She was wearing a familiar black garment underneath it. She had had it for years. She didn’t look any different, at all.
‘Come to bed,’ he said.
She considered it. ‘I don’t know if I should, really,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it would do you any good.’
‘We could try.’
‘We could just hold each other,’ she said, judiciously. ‘I think that would be all right. Though it’s a very small bed. They don’t seem to make proper beds these days.’
She undressed, went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, returned. ‘I love you, Karel,’ she said, staring down at him. ‘I always did, you know.’
And she got into the small bed.
An hour later, she had to get out again, and go back to her own bed. It was intolerable, in bed with Karel: he was burning hot to the touch, and the bed was too narrow to escape. The discomfort was appalling: treacherously, she abandoned him, yet again. He tossed and moaned. ‘Oh bloody hell,’ she heard him muttering to himself in familiar style. Uneasily, amused, she fell asleep. There he was again, after all, and after all, there was plenty of time.
Frances found herself busy in the morning. She had to get a doctor for Karel, an undertaker and a vicar for Aunt Constance: she had to ring her children, to see if Anthony and Sheila could hang on to them for a day or two more; to ring Natasha, to see if there was any news of Stephen, and her father, for news of her mother. All these calls went off reasonably well, apart from the one to Natasha: there was no news of Stephen, or his baby. Both had disappeared completely. Frances stored this information: she would get it out, to worry about later.
The doctor said Karel ought to stay in bed. So he stayed there, getting hotter and hotter. I’d been so looking forward to having a good feel of you, said Frances, but it’s as though there’s some spell on you to make me wait. She laid her hand on the smooth skin of his shoulder. ‘I love your shoulder particularly,’ she said, ‘but it really is too hot.’ She lent him a copy of The Charterhouse of Parma to read while she went off to look for David and an undertaker.
She was rather glad of David’s moral support with the undertaker: not that he wasn’t a nice man, he was very pleasant and made the negotiations as simple as possible, but it was a relief to have somebody else there. It seemed so respectable, to be talking to an undertaker with one’s own cousin. They ordered a plain oak coffin: not a very large one. As they all realized, though weren’t quite sure how to express it, there hadn’t been much left of Constance.
‘A funny business, funeral rites,’ said Frances, as she drove David along a leafy suburban road to see the vicar, Mr Fox. ‘What are you going to have done with yours?’
‘I haven’t really thought about it much,’ said David. ‘Leave it to medical research, do you think?’
‘You’d have thought they’d get far too many corpses left to them,’ said Frances. ‘An embarrassment of corpses.’
‘I wonder why she wanted to be buried in unhallowed ground. Seems a bit odd, doesn’t it?’
‘A sense of guilt, do you suppose? Thought she wasn’t worthy. Or perhaps she just hated the church. There was some mix-up, with a vicar.’
‘Really? I can’t imagine anyone caring tuppence about hallowed or unhallowed ground. But people do. Murderers’ fathers, and people like that. People are odd.’
‘All superstition, you think?’ said Frances, as she turned up the vicar’s pebbled drive. Two small children were playing in the drive: they stared up resentfully as the car passed them. Another child was yelling in a shrubbery, and Mrs Fox, who opened the door to them, was covered in wet paint, and had her hair done up in a towel. ‘I’m just doing a bit of decorating,’ she said, ‘excuse me,’ and disappeared with her paint brush into the back regions of the large Victorian house.
It needed a bit of decorating, Frances thought. She had rarely seen a home so subdued to the demands of children. Toys, bicycles, push chairs, lay about: the walls were covered in drawings and graffiti. It was going to be a long day’s work for Mrs Fox.
Mr Fox, who received them in his study, was very pleased with himself. He had solved the problem of unhallowed ground to his great satisfaction. ‘It’s simple,’ he said, ‘we’ll bury her in the new plot that’s just been annexed on to St M
artin’s at Barton. She didn’t specify St Oswald’s, did she? It’s very overcrowded at St Oswald’s. No, we’ll slip her into the new extension at St Martin’s. It’s being consecrated at the end of next week. So we’re just in time.’ Frances wondered whether Constance might not have objected to being consecrated after interment, but the vicar, a casuist, waved aside this objection. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘how could she object? One can’t be too particular, can one? Think how much simpler it will be, in a properly organized cemetery. It’s a very pleasant church, St Martin’s. She must have known it well. After all, one can’t go burying old ladies at the bottom of the garden, can one? Have a glass of sherry.’
It was too early for sherry, by any standards: certainly, Frances would have thought, by a vicar’s standards. Perhaps he was absent-minded. ‘You will say a few words, though, won’t you?’ she asked him. ‘As Constance requested?’
‘Well, it wasn’t me particularly she requested, as you know,’ said Mr Fox, ‘and I can’t say I ever met the old lady. But I’ll do my best. I’ll do my best. Life’s rich pattern made richer by its eccentrics, something along those lines? We all rest in peace with God, however lonely our chosen paths?’
He laughed, in a disconcerting way, and proceeded to tell them about the interesting ceremony of consecration: a time-hallowed ritual, he said, and really rather affecting. The priest walks round the plot, reading these words;—he started to look the service up, but couldn’t find the right reference book, which wasn’t surprising, as his study was as confused as the rest of the house, a sea of papers and books and bits of woodwork and small models of aeroplanes. Too many small children had driven him mad, thought Frances compassionately, as she watched him scrabble unsuccessfully through his piles of books. They arranged that the funeral should take place on Monday. Despite the air of confusion, he had been, she realized, remarkably efficient on their behalf. She thanked him.
The Realms of Gold Page 38
