Deception in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  Hepzie had never had puppies. Thea had her spayed at a year old, almost without thought. She had never been especially interested in breeding. There was enough life in the world already – more than enough, in her view. She felt no great urge to add to it. She had produced one child, because Carl had wanted it and she had no real objections. It was what you did, a year or two after getting married. And it got her out of having to go to work, which was a very considerable perk. She deeply pitied her contemporaries who struggled to juggle two full-time sets of responsibilities, with little sign of fulfilment. Carl had willingly taken on the role of provider, on condition that they lived frugally in their small cottage. She had been more than happy to cooperate, although never really immersing herself in self-sufficiency the way Drew’s Karen seemed to have done before she was injured. Now all that early family life seemed a century ago. Jessica was grown up with a boyfriend and a career, and Thea hoped she wouldn’t even think of maternity for at least another ten years. If ever. She had no desire for grandchildren, much as she enjoyed the company of little people. Her sister Jocelyn had produced five, who were great fun to visit once in a while. There were nine in Jessica’s generation – the family seemed set to proliferate whatever Thea’s little branch of the tree chose to do.

  Hunger pangs sent her into the kitchen at seven o’clock to rustle up some kind of meal. There wasn’t very much available, she discovered, so contented herself with a large sandwich stuffed with lettuce, cucumber, sliced cheese and mayonnaise. It was delicious.

  Then she checked the geckoes, having learnt over the past days that they became more active as the daylight faded. One by one she peered into their tanks, where they would hide all day under leaves or inside the various tubes Harriet had provided for them. She found one large individual sitting in full view, its grey skin decorated with delicate patterns that were almost too subtle to see. The bulbous fingers and intelligent eyes gave it a genuine appeal, and Thea watched for some time, trying to imagine existence from a gecko’s point of view.

  The eggs looked exactly as usual. Twelve of them were ranged neatly in their incubator, much the same as birds’ eggs in appearance. Harriet had given her a brief exposition of the life cycle of the creatures – the females laying two eggs a month, and the eggs taking a very unpredictable length of time to hatch. The survival rate was abysmal in the wild, apparently, with adults eating the hatchlings with appalling frequency. But somehow they grew up in sufficient numbers to ensure a healthy species, as everything did, most of the time – even those wretched little turtles being gobbled by voracious gulls in their first hour of life.

  Breeding again, Thea realised, with a little shock. Was she being unusually influenced by hormones – being at the age where the final chance of pregnancy was upon her? Did her body crave a late baby, while her mind considered any such thing completely out of the question? She had never for a moment contemplated having a baby with Phil Hollis. After the first inescapable exchange of information regarding each other’s fertility, the topic had never again been mentioned.

  Giving herself a shake, she left the cellar and wandered into the well-proportioned living room. It really was a beautiful space, which Harriet had successfully rendered comfortable as well as pleasing to the eye. She – or perhaps a designer she had employed – had really got to grips with the whole ethos of the Arts and Crafts movement. Earthy natural colours, warm welcoming surfaces, big botanical patterns on the rugs and cushions. It was a world away from stiff Georgian elegance, or cluttered Victorian busyness. There were no nasty little china knick-knacks or groups of elaborately framed photographs – just a large earthenware bowl overflowing with fragrant potpourri, which Thea always stirred when passing; a pair of pewter candlesticks holding chunky cream-coloured candles; a bronze of a young woman with flowing hair. Everything was perfectly in proportion, from the room itself to the long-piled rug in front of the fireplace.

  But there was nothing to do in the room other than watch the television that stood defiantly in one corner, as if to proclaim that William Morris would have had no problem with it, had it existed in his day. And Thea wasn’t in the mood for random murder dramas or wholesome documentaries about dolphins. She almost unconsciously opened the door to the stairway and climbed up to the gallery through which she had led Drew earlier in the day. Again, the proportions were impeccable, the furniture and decorations a delight. It would be a perfect spot for playing card games whilst listening to music, or sitting with some wine debating the politics of the day. As perfect in the twenty-first century as it must have been in the nineteenth, in fact. The thing about Hollywell Manor, Thea decided, was that it remained as fit for the daily pleasures and purposes of life now as it had been from the outset.

  Although the computer and filing cabinet and boxes of books in the maid’s room overhead would have seemed extremely strange to the first occupants of the house. As would the strange reptiles in the cellar, in all probability, despite the Victorian tendency to odd hobbies and amateur scientific pursuits. Harriet Young was a modern businesswoman, with an eye to the quirks and fears of contemporary society, quietly exploiting them in the less visible parts of her mansion.

  Slowly, Thea mounted the second flight of stairs, and collected a copy of Harriet’s book, Drew having taken his away with him. Glancing around the room, again noting its efficiency, she went back to the living room, where the light was rapidly fading. She chose an armchair with a reading lamp provided at the shoulder, and opened the book with a slight sense of transgression.

  Not only had she borrowed a pristine copy intended for sale, but the subject matter itself carried hints of taboo. Of course, sooner or later almost everybody had to arrange a funeral. They had to make quick decisions about burial or cremation; whether to have hymns, and if so which; the quantity and ultimate destination of flowers – but already she understood that Harriet was not concerned with these universal choices, routinely presented by the undertaker who ticked a preprinted box according to the response. Harriet went much deeper, and was considerably more transparent about the implications than any undertaker Thea had ever met.

  There were tables of costs, showing the percentage mark-up made by the funeral director. There were statistics about nursing homes and their loyalty to one particular local business, which could sometimes overrule the wishes of the family. There were quotes from suppliers of willow or cardboard coffins in which they refused to deal directly with members of the public. And, a few chapters into the book, there was a long diversion examining the Victorian origins of modern funeral practices. Harriet seemed to be saying that when people lost many of their children, and life expectancy was barely fifty, the attitude towards death and the disposal of bodies was a lot more wholesome. She made reference to rituals in which young children were taken to kiss the dead body of their relative, and how that rapidly swung to the opposite extreme, in which a child was not even informed that its mother or father had died. She quoted from novels and newspaper reports and diary entries, creating a dense forest of opinion and figures from which Thea found it hard to extract a central message. Skipping on, she arrived at the section on the present day, in which alternative undertakers were bravely swimming against the tide, making very little headway in twenty or thirty years.

  None of it shed any light at all onto the death of Donny Davis. Increasingly, Thea suspected that he knew nothing about the book. Surely he would have mentioned it during one of their teatime chats, if he had read it. Instead, he had seized upon Thea as a lifeline, somebody it was at last safe to ask about funerals. He had wanted to meet with Drew. If Harriet had been involved, who better to talk him through the options and help him to make the arrangements? It seemed logical, then, to assume that Harriet had been on Jemima’s side – had even perhaps been ordered to stay off the subject at all costs. The only person who had managed to talk about it with him was Edwina, and she had promised to assist him to die when he finally felt the time had come.

  But then
she found herself on the final chapter, having flipped through much of the book barely skimming the contents. ‘The Future for Funerals’ it was headed, and began with the sentence, ‘And so this whole huge issue stands at a crossroads. Burial space in churchyards is almost full, cremations are increasingly seen as sterile and unsatisfying, while the cost of a grave in a municipal cemetery is spiralling higher by the week. To choose an alternative to these conventional means of disposal is to be catapulted into a hasty frustrating process, which is far from sure to succeed. Only with considerable advance planning can there be much realistic hope of having precisely what you want. And to plan your own funeral requires the courage to confront your own mortality. A major change in attitude is called for, in which it becomes standard practice to select the corner of your appointed field, the container in which you’re to lie there, and the words to be said as the final farewell from those who love you. And, ultimately, we are all going to demand even greater control – we are going to want to choose the very moment at which we die.’

  The rest of the chapter gave names and descriptions of organisations intent on achieving this glorious state of affairs. The tone was a clever mix of good sense and powerful polemic. There was no space for objections or arguments in favour of letting nature take its course, or having the courage to endure the final months of helplessness, as another part of the wheel of fortune, bringing you full circle from the dependent days of infancy. Nothing about the skills of doctors and nurses in palliative care, or the small insights to be gleaned from the final stages of life. Thea herself only recalled these factors when she put the book down and let its message sink in. It was past ten o’clock, the sky outside finally dark, the evening birds gone quiet. She let her thoughts wander unchecked, the unanswered questions rising insistently as she went over her brief acquaintance with Donny, the facts of her own father’s death, the probable reactions to the book of all the people she knew.

  She had few, if any, firm conclusions to draw, other than that she knew Harriet had omitted a major dimension from the pages of her book – and that a vulnerable reader might well be persuaded to act impulsively and contrary to their own interests. What, she asked herself insistently, would Donny have made of it, if he had read it?

  Saturday came with a sense of relief, as the halfway stage of her commission. While still in bed, she asked herself whether this meant she was not enjoying Hollywell and Cranham. Was she impatient to return to her Witney cottage, and the dusty neglected possessions she kept there?

  In a vague attempt to summarise the previous week to herself, she reran the scratchy conversation she had had with Thyrza Hastings, and the warning to mind her own business. Such warnings traditionally betrayed guilt, but in this instance, it had not felt like that. If anything, the woman had been protecting her sister, rather to her own credit. Thea went back further, to the visit from Edwina and Toby, curtailed as it had been by the burning pie. They had come with a view to arranging Donny’s funeral with Drew, only to go cold on the idea when they realised where his burial ground was. But what made them think they had any control over the funeral anyway? That was surely Jemima’s role.

  Her summary amounted to a lot less than she had anticipated. She had spent very little time with any of the people of Cranham. An hour and a half with Donny, the sum of two encounters, with the sort of high-quality conversation she was good at, and which ordinary people seldom engaged in. A similar period with Jemima, perhaps, all added together. Much less with Edwina, Thyrza, Philippe and Toby. She could not possibly expect to understand them on the basis of such brief acquaintance. Better by far to let everything take its course without any more intervention from her.

  But at ten o’clock, just as she was wondering about an extended shopping expedition to Stroud, she heard footsteps approaching the house. The spaniel yapped, several seconds after Thea already knew they had a visitor, eliciting Thea’s usual comment about her uselessness as a guard dog.

  She went to the open door, to be met by the ginger-headed Toby, looking tousled and bleary.

  ‘Goodness! Are you all right?’ she burst out. ‘Has something else happened?’

  He rubbed his head. ‘What? No, I don’t think so. What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that you look – well, dishevelled. Sorry. How rude of me. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Is Mimm here? She said to meet her at the Lodge and there’s no sign of her.’

  A cold hand squeezed Thea’s heart. Surely history couldn’t be about to repeat itself? ‘Is her car there?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘So she’s probably just late, then. It’s Saturday. She’ll have her kids at home. Did she say a time?’

  He rubbed his head again. ‘I’m not sure. I think she said early.’

  ‘Come in and have some coffee. Where’s your car?’

  ‘Outside the Lodge. I walked up here.’ He seemed to be finding it difficult to construct whole thoughts, his brain muffled by sleeplessness or a bad hangover. He followed her into the house and through the hall into the kitchen.

  ‘Where do you live?’ she asked him, aware of this as a gap in her knowledge.

  ‘Gloucester. I’m renting a flat.’

  She looked searchingly at him. Something over forty, slight, awkward, he was the sort of man you overlooked in a group. And yet he had suffered the torment of losing his young wife, only a year previously. ‘You must be terribly upset about Donny,’ she ventured.

  ‘Yeah.’ He frowned. ‘He was good to me. When Cissie was in hospital all the time, he was great. Paid for stuff. Sat with her when I was working.’

  For the first time, Thea began to imagine how it might be to have a long-term relationship with a hospital when you had something as monumentally serious as a heart transplant. The place would become like a second home, the staff increasingly familiar, with emotional ups and downs as tests were run, results announced, predictions made. And the costs involved must be substantial. Never before had that occurred to her. ‘What work do you do?’ she asked.

  He gave a twisted smile. ‘I was a college lecturer,’ he said. ‘That’s how I met Cissie, when she was a student. But I had to give it up when she was having her operation. I wasn’t coping too well.’

  ‘What subject did you teach?’

  ‘Marketing.’

  ‘Was Cecilia one of your students?’

  ‘No, she was doing fine art. She fainted in the refectory one lunchtime and I caught her. I just happened to be standing right in front of her when she keeled over.’

  How romantic, she wanted to say, but stopped herself. It didn’t look as if Toby found it romantic at all. It looked as if he had come to the limits of his endurance. ‘So what did you and Jemima have planned?’

  He looked at her in bewilderment. ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, why were you meeting her?’

  ‘Oh! She wants to give me his clothes. Should fit me, most of it.’ His face crumpled fleetingly, which Thea took to be the natural resistance to wearing a dead man’s things. But some people found it comforting, rather than morbid. She remembered her grandmother wearing a big Aran sweater that had belonged to her grandad, for years after he died.

  ‘Well, she’ll come and find you, I expect, when she sees the car.’ He nodded dumbly, and she went on, ‘Do you know Harriet at all?’

  ‘Oh yes. I bought a couple of her geckoes. Dempsey and Makepeace. I’ve got them in the flat, even though you’re not meant to have pets.’

  ‘I imagine geckoes don’t really count.’

  ‘Right. Are you in charge of the eggs, then? How many are there now?’

  He seemed more animated by this turn of the conversation, which she supposed made some kind of sense. ‘Dozens. I just hope nothing hatches out before she gets back.’

  ‘Why? It’s fantastic when they do. You can’t believe it could ever have fitted inside the shell, when they uncurl. I was here once when it happened. Magic.’ He sighed. ‘Not that mine’ll ever work. I can’t get
them warm enough.’

  Thea wondered about his financial situation, without a job and living in what sounded like a fairly basic flat. ‘Will you go back to work soon?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Have to, won’t I? They stop the benefits if they think you’re fit enough. The trouble is, I don’t think I’ll ever manage to face it again.’

  ‘Oh? Not even in a different place? A different sort of teaching, maybe? You must be very employable. They always want teachers, don’t they?’

  He looked at her despairingly. ‘You don’t know much about it, do you? It’s all pressure and people ordering you about and everyone scared of getting it wrong. It’s too much. I can’t do it any more. I never was much good, anyhow,’ he admitted with a grimace. ‘I never could manage to engage their interest.’

  ‘Perhaps you should do nurse training, then – after all your experience.’

  It was completely the wrong thing to say. Toby’s eyes bulged and he put a hand over his mouth as if to hide a snarl. ‘I don’t think so,’ he grated. ‘If you stopped for a minute, you’d realise what a mad idea that is.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was only …’ Trying to help? That wasn’t really true. She had, in fact, been flippant at precisely the wrong moment. Anybody less like a nurse than this man would be difficult to find. ‘I expect you’ve had more than enough nursing already, with your wife, and then Donny.’

  ‘I didn’t nurse them,’ he corrected her. ‘I watched other people messing them about – Cissie, anyway. Donny quite rightly kept well out of their clutches.’