by Anne Weale
Towards midday, Imelda was carefully examining a fifteen-pound copy of Queen Victoria’s Dolls, when a voice said, “Hello, what brings you here? It isn’t often that one sees the female of the species in these surroundings.”
She had heard the footsteps mounting the winding stairs to the upper room where she was browsing, and had thought they were made by the proprietor who had been up and down several times since her arrival. The last person she expected to see standing in the doorway was Charles Wingfield.
“Oh ... isn’t it?” she answered, responding to the statement rather than the question.
“Now I come to think about it, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a woman in here. I suppose there are women bibliophiles, but they must do their book-hunting in catalogues rather than shops. What is your particular weakness?” - coming to stand behind her so that he could look down over her shoulder at the book she was holding.
“I’m not a proper book collector. I came in to see if they had an encyclopaedia of porcelain marks,” she explained. “I was only looking at this book out of curiosity. What brings you here?”
It seemed to her that he hesitated. “The Brothers Grimm. I’m astonished to find that my nieces have never heard of Rapunzel or Snow White and Rose Red.” He began to look along the shelves. “Perhaps you haven’t either?” he added, with an interrogative glance at her.
“Yes, of course I have,” she protested.
“The girl who teaches Sophie and Fanny is about your age, and she tells me that fairy tales are out of date. In her expert opinion, modern children want modern stories,” said Charles sardonically. “However, while I’m doing the reading, I’ll decide what is suitable and what isn’t.”
“Do you read to them much?” asked Imelda, rather surprised.
“To the girls — yes. Not to Henry. My grandmother can’t be expected to cope with every aspect of their welfare. As it is, she has much less leisure than she ought to have at her age. Speaking of leisure, do I gather that you’re having a day off?”
“Oh, no, only the morning. Mrs. Walsham is holding the fort for me.” She glanced at her watch. “I must fly.”
“To the bus station?”
“Yes.”
“No need. I’ll run you back.”
Imelda hesitated. “It’s very kind of you, but I promised to be back by one o’clock.”
“So did I. Aunt Boadicea is coming to lunch, and she’s a stickler for punctuality. If I’m not at attention on the doorstep when she arrives, there’ll be the devil to pay. I’m in her black books as it is.”
“Boadicea?” she echoed. Could Mrs. Wingfield have named her daughter after the warrior-queen of the Iceni?
He grinned. “My aunt was christened Margaret, but Boadicea is far more appropriate, as you’ll see if she calls at your shop on the way home. She lives in Suffolk, and she’s coming over to discuss the arrangements for the children’s summer holiday.”
At the foot of the stairs, on their way out of the shop, they encountered the proprietor, who said, “Good morning, Mr. Wingfield. I didn’t know you’d come in. What a fortunate coincidence! I should have telephoned you later. I’ve had a report of Letter From a Gentleman at Mahon.” Charles introduced him to Imelda, and for some minutes the two men discussed the book the proprietor had mentioned. It was evident from the bookseller’s manner that Charles was a regular and valued customer. Imelda remembered Mrs. Wingfield saying that he bought a good many books, but she had not implied that her grandson was a serious and erudite collector. Yet this was the impression Imelda was receiving now as she stood quietly at his elbow, listening to a conversation sprinkled with terms which she recognised, without understanding them, as the special jargon of the antiquarian book trade.
“What sort of books do you collect?” she asked, as they walked round the corner to where he had left his car.
He gave her a guarded glance. “Having a cottage in Menorca has given me an interest in the history of the island. It was held by the British for the greater part of the eighteenth century, and I’ve picked up one or two books about that period.”
His tone was casual to the point of being off-hand. But Imelda had the feeling that he was deliberately making light of a matter of deep importance to him. When they were seated in the car, before he switched on the engine, Charles looked at her again. He said, “You have lost what my grandmother calls ‘the London look’. The first time you came to Norfolk, you were too pale - and too thin. Do you feel better for living in the country for a time?”
“I don’t know that I feel any healthier. I feel much happier,” she conceded. “It’s wonderful to be a square peg in a square hole after years of being stuck in a roundhole.”
A curiously sombre expression came over his face. “Yes,’’ he said abruptly. “Yes, that’s the most important thing in life.” And he switched on the motor, he gave all his attention to the business of edging out of a tight parking space.
They were only a mile from the city when there was a loud bang, and the car ahead of them suddenly slewed on to the grass verge and jolted to a standstill.
“Tyre’s gone,” said Charles succinctly, braking and steering his own vehicle on to the grass.
Imelda followed him back to where a middle-aged woman was emerging, visibly shaken, from a small grey saloon. “Oh ... Mr. Wingfield,” she murmured, recognising him. “Oh, dear — what a nasty sensation!”
“You handled it splendidly, Mrs. Runton. Don’t worry: I’ll soon change the wheel for you. Go and sit in my car with Miss Calthorpe.”
Within ten minutes the spare wheel had replaced the burst tyre, and Charles was kindly but firmly insisting that the still upset Mrs. Runton should resume her journey home.
“It will probably never happen to you again,” he assured her. “But anyway we’ll be right behind you.”
Hall a mile further on, he cocked an amused eyebrow at her cautious thirty-mile-an-hour progress, and said to Imelda, “You’ll just about make your deadline, but I shall definitely be too late to salute Aunt Boadicea.”
His tolerance in keeping the big car at a comparative crawl, and tucked dose to the nearside verge so that it did not impede the passage of any following traffic, was another revelation to Imelda. She would have expected him to have little patience with women drivers who could not take a burst tyre in their stride.
“Why are you in your aunt’s black books?” she asked.
A crease appeared in the lean cheek nearest to her. “She disapproves of my interests,” he said enigmatically.
“Why should she call at the shop? Does she collect?”
“If she didn’t, one would suspect that the nursing home gave my grandmother the wrong infant. Apart from Aunt Margaret’s mania for treen, they’re completely un- alike. Which is why I’m not sure it’s a sound idea for them to share Na Vell for a month this summer.”
“Na Vell?”
“My house on the island. Hasn’t Grandmother mentioned the plan to you?”
Imelda shook her head.
“My aunt’s son and his wife are in Japan for a year, and she has charge of their child,” he went on. “The idea is that, as I can’t be away for six weeks, Aunt Margaret should use this car to drive a combined party to Spain, returning by air at the end of August when I would fly down for a short break before bringing them back. Four children in the back is rather a squeeze, but at least my aunt could cope with any contingencies of the sort Mrs. Runton has just experienced” - with a nod at the car in front of them. “Grandmother is amazingly energetic for her age, but I’m not happy about her making the journey on her own, which is what she intended before my aunt put up her plan.”
“How far is it?” asked Imelda.
“Roughly nine hundred miles from Calais to Barcelona where they catch the boat to Menorca. Most of the island’s summer visitors get there by air, of course. But in the circumstances, neither Grandmother or the children are too keen on flying.”
“No, naturally not,” she
said gravely. “But you spoke of flying there yourself.”
Charles shrugged. “The chance of another member of the family being involved in an air crash is negligible.” A pause. “The accident didn’t have the same emotional impact on me as on the others.”
Glancing at him, she saw the frown which had accompanied the last remark. But even as she looked at him it cleared and, obviously wishing to change the subject, he said, “I gather you’ve had no joy with regard to finding a birthday present?”
“Not yet, I’m afraid.”
A few minutes later he dropped her outside the shop. It was shortly before closing time when his aunt called at Victoriana. She was a tall woman with gingery colouring and a no-nonsense manner. Although she did not look more than fifty, she had none of her mother’s charm. Even in her seventies, Mrs. Wingfield was an attractive person, still capable of inspiring affection and probably offers of marriage. But Margaret Letheringham - as she introduced herself - had the look of a woman who, given the choice, would have preferred to be a man. Her clothes were good and serviceable, but lacked any sense of style. Her hair was the standardised result of a weekly visit by an unexacting customer to a mediocre hairdresser. Her hands were those of someone who does not bother with rubber gloves, cream or nail polish. How such a woman could have grown up under Mrs. Wingfield’s aegis, it was hard to understand.
“My mother tells me that you’re rather more knowledgeable than many of the people who call themselves antique dealers nowadays,” remarked Mrs. Letheringham briskly. “I assume therefore that I need not explain to you what treen is?”
“Would ‘useful objects made of wood’ be a satisfactory definition?” asked Imelda. “But I haven’t much to offer you,” she added. “This smoker’s compendium, and the saltbox and the pocket spice-grater are all I have at the moment.”
Her customer inspected the grate critically, and decided to have it - “less the usual ten per cent, of course.”
“You’re not in the trade, are you?” Imelda asked politely.
Mrs. Letheringham snorted. “Certainly not! But my mother says you always give her a discount.”
“Mrs. Wingfield is one of my best private customers.”
“I daresay I shall buy from you quite frequently - if you have suitable pieces to offer me, and if you stay open.”
“I hope so. But I’m afraid I can’t reduce the price of the grater,” said Imelda, who thought it bad form to haggle the first time one bought at a shop. She had never done so as a collector, and was antagonised by it now that she was a dealer.
“Oh, come now, surely as Charles’ aunt I rate some preferential treatment,” said Mrs. Letheringham, becoming jovial. “You certainly enjoy his esteem. He speaks very favourably of you, which is more than can be said of several extremely nice girls to whom I’ve introduced him. No doubt you share his taste for books and history, and all that sort of thing.”
“I’m interested in them - yes. But my acquaintance with your nephew is very slight.”
“Really? That’s not the impression I had formed from him.”
At this point, someone else came into the shop, and evidently Mrs. Letheringham did not care to press the matter of a discount in the presence of another customer. She said, rather irritably, that she would take the grater.
When she had gone, and while the other customer was browsing through a box of old sepia carte de visite photographs, Imelda wondered if Charles had talked about her, or if that was merely a ploy by which Mrs. Letheringham had hoped to gain her discount.
The shop was empty, and she was about to lock up, when the telephone rang.
“Elizabeth Wingfield here. Has my daughter been to see you?”
“Yes, she has. She bought a spice-grater.”
“And haggled furiously about the price, no doubt,” said Mrs. Wingfield, with a chuckle. “Margaret is an incurable bargain-hunter. I rang up to ask if you would care to come to a dinner party we’re having at the end of next week, Imelda? Most of the guests will be a good deal older than you are, but I think you might enjoy it nevertheless.”
“I should love to come, Mrs. Wingfield. How very kind of you to ask me. Which day next week, and what time?”
Mrs. Wingfield told her, and added that she need not worry about how to get to the Hall as Charles would fetch her and take her home.
Walking home for supper, Imelda realised that she had forgotten to ask Charles what he meant when he had said
that Sam was “about as disreputable as they come.” But the thought of Sam flitted only briefly through her mind. Her chief preoccupation was what to wear to dine at the Hall. She had never been to a large private dinner party before, and there was nothing in her wardrobe appropriate to such an occasion. Nor was there time to make a dress. Her only recourse seemed to go to Norwich and buy one, assuming she could find something she liked and could afford. An enthusiastic home-dressmaker, she grudged spending money on mass-produced garments when, for half the price, she could produce a more meticulously finished “original”. What she would have liked to wear at the dinner party was an Edwardian skirt of stiff silk, a wide velvet belt, and a blouse with leg-o’-mutton sleeves. But to make such a combination in ten days, without the aid of her mother’s sewing machine, was an impossibility.
She was pondering the problem afresh at the shop the next day when a middle-aged woman with a suitcase came in, and said doubtfully, “I don’t suppose you buy clothes, do you? Old clothes, I mean?”
“It depends how old,” said Imelda. “You’d better come through to the back room. There’s more space there.”
The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Hockwold, the chairman of a church working party in a village a few miles away.
“We’ve just held a jumble sale to raise money to buy the canvas and wools for a special set of kneelers,” she explained as she snapped open the suitcase. “These clothes were a contribution which, unfortunately, no one wanted to buy. Then suddenly I thought that perhaps you might be interested. There are one or two moth holes here and there, but everything is perfectly clean.”
Most of the garments in the case were relics of the Twenties and Thirties, but at the very bottom was a black silk bodice and skirt of a much earlier period.
As soon as Mrs. Hockwold had departed with her now empty suitcase, Imelda wondered if it had been madness to buy the Victorian dress to wear at the Wingfields’ dinner party. Supposing it had been given to the jumble sale by one of the other guests? She did not even know if it would fit her. It might have been made for a girl with a seventeen-inch waist
On Monday morning, Imelda went to Norwich to take her driving test. In the afternoon she had her first solo drive in the second-hand car which, on Sam’s advice, she had bought from a retired schoolmistress whose failing eyesight had forced her to sell it after less than a year of careful use. In the evening, Imelda wrote a note to Mrs. Wingfield in which she explained that it would not be necessary to put Charles to the trouble of fetching her. At the back of her mind, she hoped that he would telephone the shop and insist upon fetching her.
The day before the dinner party, she arrived at the shop to find a letter from her mother on the mat, and another envelope addressed in a shaky handwriting which she did not recognise. The letter inside was written on a leaf torn from a notebook. It was signed Rosanna Titchwell (Mrs.), and it said that the writer had some articles for sale if Imelda cared to call and see them.
During the morning, Mrs. Walsham looked in on her way home from the butcher’s shop, and she agreed to take charge for an hour while Imelda called on Mrs. Titchwell.
The old lady lived at one end of a row of red brick, slate-roofed cottages. Even to Imelda’s London-bred eyes, it was obvious that the front door and brocatelle curtained “front room” were seldom used, if at all. She made her way round to the back of the building.
A faint voice from within answered her knock on a door at right angles to a window through which, a few moments later, she glimpsed someone be
ckoning to her. Opening the door, she passed through an old-fashioned scullery into the room where, although it was a warm, sunny morning, Mrs. Titchwell was sitting close to a small coal fire.
The objects the old lady wanted to sell filled a cardboard carton. As she went through them, Imelda’s heart sank, for most of the contents were either of little interest to her, or damaged.
“How much do you want for these things, Mrs. Titchwell?” she asked, looking through the 1892 edition of Mrs. Molesworth’s Robin Redbreast which would have been worth buying had it not been so badly damp-stained.
“Oh, I’ve no idea what they’re worth. You’ll have to tell me that, my dear. But my home help says all these old things are worth quite a bit of money nowadays. There’s a programme she sees on the television. I forget what she said it was called, but I expect you know the one. Mrs. Harpley is always talking about it, and that’s what gave me the idea of selling some of my old things. Will you have a cup of tea, dear?” - tapping the vacuum flask on the table by her chair. “My neighbour brings it in twice a day. They’ve stopped me keeping a kettle on the fire. They think I may have an accident.”
Imelda sipped a cup of the dark, sweet tea, and chatted, inwardly torn between her wish to offer the old lady several much-needed pounds, and her knowledge that the things in the carton were not worth more than a few pence.
“You haven’t any old sewing tools? Pincushions, needle-cases, that sort of thing?” she enquired.
“I don’t think so. You can look in the basket, if you like. It’s in the cupboard over there. I haven’t used it for a long time,” said Mrs. Titchwell.
The basket contained a tangle of darning wool, old suspenders, a much-mended grey lisle stocking and a crepe bandage mixed up with cards of linen buttons and black hooks and eyes. At first, when Imelda spotted the walnut, she thought it must be an ordinary one. Then she saw the tiny hinge and knew that, incredibly, she had come upon a real treasure. With fingers suddenly unsteady, she opened the walnut. One half of the shell was hollow, lined with rose-coloured silk. The other half was covered with a piece of gilt metal in which were slots and sockets containing a tiny pair of scissors, a miniature bodkin, an embroidery stiletto, a thimble and a half-inch bottle of scent.
